“For the wind had fallen a dead ca’m, and right to Catalina and over to San Clemente the sea lay like plate glass, with the _Kuro Shiwo_ flowin’ under like a blue satin snake.
“She bit on her lip, but she was all sand, that girl--Culpepper were her name--and not a word did she say for a minit. Then she says, aimin’ to be cheerful: ‘Well, I suppose,’ says she, ‘we’ll just have to stay at anchor here till they fetch me or the wind comes.’
“‘Anchor!’ said I. ‘Why, Lord bless you, there’s a mile-deep water under us! We’re driftin’.’
“‘Driftin’!’ she cries. ‘And where are we driftin’ to?’
“That fetched me, and I was hangin’ in irons when Blood chipped in and cheered her up with lies and told me to stay with her whiles he went down below and got some breakfast ready, and then I was left alone with her, trustin’ in Providence she wouldn’t ask no more questions as to where we were driftin’ to.
“She sat on the cargo hatch whiles I filled a pipe, lookin’ round about her like a cat in a new house, and then she got mighty chummy. I don’t know how she worked it, but in ten minits she’d got all about myself out of me and all about Ginnell and Blood and the _Yan-Shan_ and the dollars we’d missed; she’d learned that I never was married and who was me father and why I went to sea at first start. Right down to the colour of me first pair of pants she had it all out of me. She was a sure-enough lady, but I reckon she missed her vocation in not bein’ a bilge pump. Then she heaves a sigh at the sound of ham frying down below, and hoped that breakfast was near ready, and right on her words Blood hailed us from below.
“He’d opened the skylight wide and knocked the stuffiness out of the cabin, and down we sat at the table with fried ham and ship’s bread and coffee before us.
“I’d never set at table with the likes of her before, but if every real lady’s cut on her bias, I wouldn’t mind settin’ at table with one every day in me life. There was only two knives left whole after our practice on the hatch with them. Blood and she had the whole ones, and I made out with a stump, but she didn’t mind nor take notice. She was talkin’ away all the time she was stuffin’ herself, pitchin’ into Cap Ginnell just like one of us. Oh, I guess if she’d been a man she’d have swore worth listenin’ to; she had the turn of the tongue for the work, and what she said about Ginnell might have been said in chapel without makin’ parties raise a hair, but I reckon it’d have raised blisters on the soul of Pat Ginnell if he’d been by to hear and if he’d a soul to blister, which he hasn’t.”