Mr. Trunnell, page 129 by T. Jenkins Hains
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her gentle eyes looked straight into mine.
"I knew she would come," she said. "I've prayed all the morning."
In twenty minutes, spent anxiously watching her, the ship raised her topsails slowly above the line of blue, and then we saw she really was jammed on the wind and reaching along toward us rapidly.
"'Tis the Pirit, an' no mistake!" cried the carpenter. "Look at them r'yals! No one but th' bit av a mate, Trunnell, iver mastheaded a yard like that."
"The Pirate!" yelled Johnson, from forward.
And so, indeed, it really was.
I looked at her and then at the sweet face at my side. All the hard lines of suffering and fright had left it. The eyes now had the same gentle, trusting look of innocence I had seen the first morning we had taken off the _Sovereign's_ crew. The reaction was too much for me. I was little more than a boy in years, so I reached for the girl's hand and kissed it.
When I looked up I caught the clew of Jenks' eye, but the rest were looking at the rapidly approaching ship.
XVIII
When the Pirate neared us, we could make out a man coming down the ratlines from the foretop, showing that she had evidently sighted us even before we had her. As she drew nearer still, we could see Trunnell standing on the weather side of the poop, holding to a backstay and gazing aloft at his canvas, evidently giving orders for the watch to bear a hand and lay aft to the braces. He would lay his mainyards aback and heave her to. Along the high topgallant rail could be seen faces, and on the quarter-deck Mrs. Sackett stood with our friend Thompson, better known in the Antipodes as Jackwell, the burglar. As I watched him standing there pointing to us, I thought of poor Jim.
"Wheel down," I heard Trunnell bawl as the ship came within fifty fathom. "Slack away that lee brace; steady your wheel."
Before the ship's headway had slackened we had out the oars and were rowing for her. In a moment a sailor had flung us a line, an