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Updated: May 4, 2025
Millner paused, as if in search of an appropriate formula. But after a moment he gave up the search, and pulled from his pocket an envelope which he held out to his employer. "I merely want to give this back." The hand which Mr. Spence had extended dropped to his side, and his sand-coloured face grew chalky. "Give it back?" His voice was as thick as Millner's. "What's happened?
The boy's words did not sound like a mere civility Millner felt in them an homage to his power. "Oh, yes: I was sure," young Draper repeated. "Sure as soon as I saw you, I mean." Millner tingled again with this tribute to his physical straightness and bloom. Yes, he looked his part, hang it he looked it! But his companion still lingered, a shy sociability in his eye.
For a moment he seemed to be gaining upon his quarry, but with a cunning sense of his approach it suddenly turned and hobbled across the frozen grass-plot adjoining a shuttered house. Against the wall at the back of the plot it cowered down in a dirty snow-drift, as if disheartened by the struggle. Millner stood outside the railings and looked at it.
Spence turned back to his son. "Better men than either of us have been satisfied with that creed, my son." Draper was silent, and Mr. Spence once more addressed himself to his secretary. "Millner, you're a reader: I've caught you at it. And I know this boy talks to you. What have you got to say? Do you suppose a Bible Class ever hurt anybody?"
The newcomer saw that they were evidently old friends and inferred that she was a resident of the town. From scraps of their talk that reached his ears he learned that her name was Annie Millner, and that she was a physician's daughter. The young man inscribed his name on the hotel register, "Robert Ellison, Worcester, Mass.," and then sauntered out to take a look at the town.
In what strange venture was he now to be involved, toward what unknown vortex was this new current setting, this current that had so suddenly snatched him from the solid ground of his accustomed life? He told himself grimly that he was to have a free cruise up the bay, perhaps as far as Alviso; perhaps the "Bertha Millner" would even make the circuit of the bay before returning to San Francisco.
There's the point." Millner had never before heard his young friend put a case with such unadorned precision. His language was like that of Mr. Spence making a statement to a committee meeting; and the resemblance to his father flashed out with ironic incongruity. "You see why I've brought this letter to you I couldn't go to him with it!"
Again the "Bertha Millner" lifted and sank, the tubs sliding on the deck, the masts quivering like reeds, the timbers groaning aloud with the strain. In the stern something cracked and smashed. Then the trouble died away, the ripples faded into the ocean, and the schooner settled to her keel, quite motionless. "Look," said Moran, her face toward the "Bertha's" stern.
Spence's service had produced too many contradictory impressions to be fitted into any definite pattern; and the chief lesson Millner had learned from them was that life was less of an exact science, and character a more incalculable element, than he had been taught in the schools.
Wilbur felt that his advent on the "Bertha Millner" was by its very nature an extraordinary event; but the absolute indifference of these brown-suited Mongols, the blankness of their flat, fat faces, the dulness of their slanting, fishlike eyes that never met his own or even wandered in his direction, was uncanny, disquieting.
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