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Some of his neighbors, including my husband, would have sown a little less and held a reserve in hand." Agatha remembered what Wyllard had told her one night on board the Scarrowmania, and smiled, for she fancied that she understood the man. He was not one to hedge, as she had heard it called, or cautiously hold his hand.
"That," she said, "is a subject I'm not well posted on, but it seems to me that if other folks only adopted Harry Wyllard's simple plan, there would be considerably less need for organized charity." During the next two days before a moderate gale the Scarrowmania shouldered her way westwards through the big, white-topped combers that rolled down upon her under a lowering sky.
At the head of the gangway stood the steamboat doctors, for the Scarrowmania was taking out an unusual number of passengers, and there were two of them. They were immaculate in blue uniform, and looked very clean and English by contrast with the mass of frowsy aliens.
It was after dinner when she next met him, and, for the wind had changed, the Scarrowmania was steaming head-on into a glorious north-west breeze. The shrouds sang; chain-guy, and stanchion, and whatever caught the wind, set up a deep-toned throbbing; and ranks of little, white-topped seas rolled out of the night ahead.
The Scarrowmania had plunged along, bows under, against fresh northwesterly gales most of the way across the Atlantic, and there is very little comfort on board a small, deeply-loaded steamer when she rolls her rails in, and lurches with thudding screw swung clear over big, steep-sided combers. Moreover, Agatha had scarcely slept during the few days and nights that she had spent in the train.
A breeze came out of the northwest, with the sting of the ice in it, but the fog did not lift, and the Scarrowmania plunged on through it with spray-wet decks and the gray seas smashing about her bows. It was bitterly cold and the raw wind pierced to the bone, but the voyage was rapidly shortening. One evening Agatha paced the deck with Wyllard. The girl was in a strangely unsettled mood.
She added, with a little whimsical sigh, "He had a bonanza harvest last fall, anyway." They moved aft soon afterwards, and the Scarrowmania was smoothly sliding seawards with the first of the ebb when Agatha met Wyllard.
A red sun hung over the tumbling seas that ran into the hazy east astern. The waves rolled up in crested phalanxes that gleamed green and incandescent white ahead. The Scarrowmania plunged through them with a spray cloud flying about her dipping bows. She was a small, old-fashioned boat, and because she carried 3,000 tons of railway iron she rolled distressfully.
Agatha remembered what Wyllard had told her one night on board the Scarrowmania, and smiled, for she fancied that she understood the man. He was not one to hedge, as she had heard it called, or cautiously hold his hand. He staked boldly, but she felt that this was not only for the sake of the dollars that he might stand to gain.
One wondered, from the look of them, how they had raised their passage money, and how many years' bitter self-denial it had cost them to provide for their transit to the land of promise. At the head of the gangway stood the steamboat doctors, for the Scarrowmania was taking out an unusual number of passengers, and there were two of them.
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