The adventures of Captain O'SheaPaine, Ralph Delahaye
General
The adventures of Captain O'Shea
Paine, Ralph Delahaye
Sea stories; Seafaring life -- Fiction
“Tell him to go with you, Jack.”
“Well, Captain O’Shea, I hope I’ll have the pleasure of sailing with
you again. I’ve enjoyed it,” exclaimed the soldier.
“If you need money, Jack, what I have is yours. I have a bit stowed
away for emergencies.”
“You can stake Jiminez and me to a meal-ticket in Jamaica and the price
of a little boat, sir, and I’ll pay the loan out of the first Spanish
officer I pot with the old Springfield.”
When the stately _Caronic_ steamed into the harbor of Kingston the
passengers crowded her rail to admire the verdure-clad mountains and
the lovely vales lush with palms and bananas. The excursionists planned
to spend the day ashore, and after they had disembarked, the crew of
the _Fearless_ and Colonel Calvo’s Cubans filed down the gangway. Miss
Hollister, Nora Forbes, and Gerald Van Steen were waiting to bid them
farewell and God-speed. They had lived and suffered so many things
together that it was difficult to realize that this was the journey’s
end.
Gerald Van Steen spoke awkwardly and with much feeling.
“You have been very good to us, Captain O’Shea. I shall not make an ass
of myself by offering you money. But perhaps I can help you to find
another ship, and the house of Van Steen & Van Steen will always be at
your service.”
“I have me doubts that a highly respectable banking-house will care to
back my enterprises,” replied O’Shea. “But now that Johnny Kent has
violent symptoms of mendin’ his ways there may be hope for me. You were
a good shipmate, Mr. Van Steen. If ever ye want a job, I will be glad
to sign you on as a stoker.”
“Will you dine with us at the hotel to-day?”
“Thank you, but I must look after my men.”
The farewell between Nora Forbes and Captain O’Shea had been said on
the beach in the starlight. Now their glances met.
“Good-by and God bless ye,” said he. “The voyage seems like a dream, no
doubt.”
“Perhaps it may some day, but not yet,” she told him.
“My dear friends, that voyage was the realest thing that ever
happened,” was the earnest declaration of Johnny Kent, and no dissent
was heard from that shipwrecked and marooned spinster, Miss Katharine
Hollister.
THE KING OF TRINADARO
I
Captain Michael O’Shea and Johnny Kent sat by a window of the Jolly
Mermaid tavern at Blackwall on the Thames below London. These two
leisurely drank mugs of bitter-beer and gazed with professional
interest at the crowded shipping of that great seaport thoroughfare
which sailor-folk call London River.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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