The sleek little seal was aweary, aweary. The house was so empty, so still, and there was such a void in that aching baby heart! She went into papa's room and cried on his bed. He would be drowned in the strait; savage old Karaitch would shoot him with a gun; he would be blown out to sea like Mr. Pettibone the beach-comber. The hot tears scalded her cheeks. She had always liked Mr. Pettibone. Papa called him a proff--proff--proff something, but he had always been so jolly, and his red face and funny little blue eyes rose before her out of the mist. She cried over the lost Pettibone; over Tansy the cat, that had died from eating a lizard; over Nosey, her pet chicken, that Nantok had killed by mistake one night for supper; cried over papa and mamma, far away in the whaler--totaled up all the little sadnesses of her little life, meting out tears to every one. And then, feeling greatly refreshed, she went out on the front porch, and wondered what she should do next.
Down the shore, about a mile away, there were others who found time less heavy on their hands. At the Land We Live In, a one-roomed saloon which catered for a permanent white population of thirteen, and a transient one that varied from a cutter to a full-rigged ship--at the Land We Live In Christmas was being celebrated in a rousing fashion. To begin with, there were the mutineers of the _Lord Dundonald_, twenty-two strong, with plenty of money still to spend. Their revolt against authority had not been without some redeeming features, and an unbiased critic would have found it hard to blame them. After twenty-seven days and nights at the pumps of a four-masted sieve, the Lords had struck in a body, and forced the captain to abandon the ship and set out in three boats for Apiang. Here they double-dyed their crime by compelling the wrathful master to pay them their wages to date, from six hundred and thirty-nine pounds he had taken with him from a vessel he had fondly hoped to pump to China. Captain Latimer, with the three mates, the carpenter, and one of the hands, had sailed away south in the longboat, vowing yardarms and a man-of-war, and when last seen was sinking over the horizon in the direction of the Fiji Islands.