And they did. The result of which was that at the end of a week's tossing and seasickness, Elijah Curtis was landed at Santa Barbara, pale, thin, but self-contained and resolute. And having found favor in the eyes of the skipper of the Kitty Hawk, general trader, lumber-dealer, and ranch-man, a week later he was located on the skipper's land and installed in the skipper's service. And from that day, for five years Sidon and Tasajara knew him no more. CHAPER IV. It was part of the functions of John Milton Harkutt to take down the early morning shutters and sweep out the store for his father each day before going to school. It was a peculiarity of this performance that he was apt to linger over it, partly from the fact that it put off the evil hour of lessons, partly that he imparted into the process a purely imaginative and romantic element gathered from his latest novel-reading. In this he was usually assisted by one or two school-fellows on their way to school, who always envied him his superior menial occupation. To go to school, it was felt, was a common calamity of boyhood that called into play only the simplest forms of evasion, whereas to take down actual shutters in a bona fide store, and wield a real broom that raised a palpable cloud of dust, was something that really taxed the noblest exertions. And it was the morning after the arrival of the strangers that John Milton stood on the veranda of the store ostentatiously examining the horizon, with his hand shading his eyes, as one of his companions appeared. “Hollo, Milt! wot yer doin'?” John Milton started dramatically, and then violently dashed at one of the shutters and began to detach it. “Ha!” he said hoarsely. “Clear the ship for action! Open the ports! On deck there! Steady, you lubbers!” In an instant his enthusiastic school-fellow was at his side attacking another shutter. “A long, low schooner bearing down upon us! Lively, lads, lively!” continued John Milton, desisting a moment to take another dramatic look at the distant plain. “How does she head now?” he demanded fiercely. “Sou' by sou'east, sir,” responded the other boy, frantically dancing before the window. “But she'll weather it.”