little vessel
which the Rackbirds had left rudderless, mastless, and useless, and make
kindling-wood of it.

But this was not necessary. He had barely finished his work on the
lighter, when, one evening, he saw against the sun-lighted sky the
topmasts of a vessel, and the next morning the _Finland_ lay anchored off
the cove, and two boats came ashore, out of one of which Maka was the
first to jump.

In five hours the guano had been transferred to the ship, and, twenty
minutes later, the _Finland_, with Captain Horn on board, had set sail
for Acapulco. The captain might have been better pleased if his
destination had been San Francisco, but, after all, it is doubtful if
there could have been a man who was better pleased. He walked the deck of
a good ship with a fellow-mariner with whom he could talk as much as he
pleased, and under his feet were the bags containing the thousands of
little bars for which he had worked so hard.

CHAPTER XXV

AT THE PALMETTO HOTEL

For about four months the persons who made up what might be considered as
Captain Horn's adopted family had resided in the Palmetto Hotel, in San
Francisco. At the time we look upon them, however, Mrs. Cliff was not
with them, having left San Francisco some weeks previously.

Edna was now a very different being from the young woman she had been.
Her face was smoother and fuller, and her eyes seemed to have gained a
richer brown. The dark masses of her hair appeared to have wonderfully
grown and thickened, but this was due to the loose fashion in which it
was coiled upon her head, and it would have been impossible for any one
who had known her before not to perceive that she was greatly changed.
The lines upon her forehead, which had come, not from age, but from
earnest purpose and necessity of action, together with a certain
intensity of expression which would naturally come to a young woman who
had to make her way in the world, not only for herself, but for her young
brother, and a seriousness born of some doubts, some anxieties, and some
ambiguous hopes, had all entirely disappeared as if they had been
morning mists rolling away from a summer landscape. Under the rays of a
sun of fortune, shining, indeed, but mildly, she had ripened into a
physical beauty which was her own by right of birth, but of which a few
more years of struggling responsibility would have forever deprived her.

After the receipt of her second remittance, Edna and her party