Still muttering protests that his tree would die, the old man crawled away. Humphrey stood looking silently at the little pine tree, so fresh and vigorous in spite of its hundred years. He took the water that had been set upon his table and drank half of it at one gulp, for he had just come below and the hot quarterdeck was a thirsty place. Then he paused a moment, the half-empty cup in his hand. “I am a soft-hearted fool,” he muttered and poured what was left on the dry earth of the porcelain pot. The days passed while the men grew weaker and more sluggish at their work, but still the breeze held and the speed of the _West Wind_ did not falter. They passed no ship from which they could obtain water, their only hope lay in the making of port. They turned northward, lost the trade winds, seemed for a terrible moment to be hanging becalmed, but a stiff breeze caught them and bore them still toward home. The old Chinaman seemed to shrivel away like a dead leaf, but he came stumbling every day to share his mouthful of water with his precious tree. Captain Reynolds himself looked more worn and haggard than did any of his men. Only the Chinaman, glancing sideways with his slanting, beady eyes at the lusty green of the little pine, seemed to suspect why. They were like the flitting ghosts of a ship’s crew that morning when the hot, glittering expanse of sea was broken by a wavering line on the horizon and the lookout’s husky call of “Land-ho” announced the low green shore of Maryland. Eighteen days from Gibraltar and all records broken at last! She came into the Susquehanna River for repairs, did the worn but triumphant _West Wind_, and Jonathan Adams came rowing out to board her, his sober face for once all wreathed in smiles. “By five days you shortened the voyage,” he said, “and I had not really hoped for more than four. I always said she was not a tub, but a real ship at last. There will be others like her, and her children’s children will dare to spread such sail that they will cross the Atlantic in half your time.” As Humphrey came up the ladder to where Miranda was waiting on the wharf, his first words were— “I left the snuffbox behind,” while she, laughing shakily, answered— “I knew you would.” The whole crew, down to the cabin boy, were hailed as heroes when they left the ship, but there was one who managed somehow to go ashore as mysteriously as he had come aboard. The old Chinaman with his treasured pine tree disappeared, no one knew whither, hiding himself, perhaps, lest some emissary from Africa should even yet seek him out and rob him. For more than a month Humphrey searched and inquired for him all up and down the shore of the bay, but no one had seen him and no one knew where he had gone.