You keep your mouth shut, an' wink the other eye, an' leave it to me to give you the chanst of your life--eh, wot ?" Philip Hozier did not strive to extract the precise meaning of the skipper's words.

The process would have been difficult, since Coke himself could not have supplied any reasonable analysis.

Somehow, to the commander's thinking, the presence of the girl seemed to make easier the casting away of the ship--exactly how, or what bearing her strangely-begun voyage might have on subsequent events, he was not yet in a position to say.

But when the second officer left him, and he was steeped once more in the fresh breeze and the sunshine, with his shoulders braced against the chart-house, he looked at a smoke trail on the horizon far away to the west.
"Queenstown!" he chuckled.

"Not this journey--not if my name's Jimmie Coke, the man 'oo is stannin' on all that is left of 'is 'ard-earned savin's.