erhead docks as I had for years.

The story seemed conclusive. I had never for a moment believed that my
father had wickedly made way with himself. But that he was alive--that
he had gone out into the world, possibly with the hope of finding a
fortune and sometime coming back to mother and me with a pocketful of
money--Yes! I could believe that, and I _did_ believe it with all my
heart!

CHAPTER XIV

IN WHICH I HEAR FOR THE FIRST TIME THE WHALER'S BATTLE-CRY

So impressed was I by the imaginings suggested by Tom Anderly's story,
that I opened my letter to old Ham Mayberry and asked him if he had ever
heard of a man named Carver who had gone through the experiences Tom had
related of the man who had swum to the Sally Smith from the direction of
Bolderhead Neck?

It was the very next day, and a fortnight after I had boarded the
whaling bark, that I got a chance to send off the letters. The wind
lulled and we crossed the course of a steamship hailing from Baltimore
and touching on the West Coast of Africa; Captain Rogers sent the
letters aboard the steamship. There was no use in my trying to get
passage on her, however; I would have gained nothing by such a move.

"Now your letters will be picked up by a London, or Lisbon-bound steamer
and it won't be two months before your folks will know all about you,"
Ben Gibson said. "If you'd had to depend upon the post-box in the Straits
of Magellan, for instance, it might be six months before Bolderhead folk
would ever know what had become of you."

I must confess that every day I was becoming more and more enamored of
this life at sea. We had had little fair weather and were kept busy
making sail and then reefing again, or repairing the small damages made
by the gale. Captain Rogers was not the man to lay hove to in any fair
breeze. We outran the bad weather before we crossed the line and then
the lookout went to the masthead and from that time on, as long as I was
with the Scarboro, the crowsnest was never empty by day.

For we had come into those regions of the South Atlantic where schools
of the big mammals for which we hunted might be at any time come upon,
especially at this season of the year. The gale having left us, the
weather was charming. While winter was threatening New England we were
in the latitude of perpetual summer, and as long as the trade wind blew
we did not suffer from the heat.

The Scarboro carried crew enough to put out six boats at a tim