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Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts.
Seated on low benches along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny parts of the watch's anatomy that was their particular specialty. Each wore a jeweller's glass in one eye.
The trail ended here, for it was not needed where a sled could go anywhere over the clearing. "Come, dear boy. Come, dear old horse," she urged. "Five minutes more will take us there." The watch's cruel face told the hour to be twelve minutes past twelve, but Sydney did not feel so keen a pang as when she looked last, although it was later than the fatal hour.
Shortly after passing the Bishop's Rock lighthouse, which we did some few minutes before "Billy," the ship's boy, came out of the forecastle and struck "six bells," eleven o'clock, near the end of the port watch's spell on deck, the wind, which had freshened considerably since sunset, began to blow with greater force, veering, or "backing" as sailors say, more and more round to the north; so that, although our yards were braced up to the full and the vessel was sailing almost close-hauled, we had to drop off a point or two within the next half-hour from our true western course.
Watch's dereliction was manifest; but not a word was said commendatory of my labor; it was feared I might take "airs," or covet a further increase of wages. I only missed Watch's hugh pearl, and heard that he had been discharged, and was myself taken from the drudgery of the scissors, and made a reporter.
The other had halted in an incipient charge to take note of the odd proposition. He blinked at the flash of the watch's battered gold case in the sunshine. For the first time, he seemed a trifle irresolute. This eel-like antagonist, with such eccentric ideas as to sport, was something outside the beach-comber's experience. Puzzled, he stood scowling. "How about it?" queried Brice.
And inside the watches were engraved after the name of the watch's new owner: "From the Directors of the Northern and Southern Railway in grateful recognition of the courageous and prompt action which averted an accident on 1905." The watches were the most beautiful you can possibly imagine, and each one had a blue leather case to live in when it was at home.
By altitudes taken for the time-keeper, since we had been here, we found its error to be 1° 31' easterly, and Brockbank's watch erred 3° 01' easterly also; from which I conjecture, that the very cold weather which we experienced some time before we reached, and for a considerable time after we passed, Cape Horn, had affected the watch's going: when we made Terra del Fuego, it appeared to be about 1° 00' to the eastward.
The shops of Geneva are very tempting to a traveller, being full of such little knick-knacks as he would be glad to carry away in memory of the place: wonderful carvings in wood and ivory, done with exquisite taste and skill; jewelry that seems very cheap, but is doubtless dear enough, if you estimate it by the solid gold that goes into its manufacture; watches, above all things else, for a third or a quarter of the price that one pays in England, looking just as well, too, and probably performing the whole of a watch's duty as uncriticisably.
So he ventured into my bailiwick, hoping, I suppose, that the open support of Boston and Blackie, his size, which matched my own, and his newly got reputation as a bad man with a knife, would bluff me. It didn't. This wasn't as high-handed as it sounds, for Cockney had the gall one afternoon to leave the deck during his watch out, and break into my watch's rest with his obscene gabble.
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