Someone on the ship had
placed the infant in an empty packing case, which had drifted into
the cave. The pilot conveyed the two waifs ashore and took them up
to Crua Breck.
The man thus rescued by my father was Carver Kinlay; the little
child was Thora.
All that I could learn from my uncle and old Colin concerning
Carver, further than this, was that he was a native of the north of
Scotland, and that he and his family were passengers on the Danish
ship, which was to have put in at the haven of Wick, in Caithness.
Careless where he settled down, however, when cast upon the shores
of Pomona, he had taken root here, like a weed in a flower garden.
He seemed to have had a store of money in the big chest which he
claimed from among the wreckage, and circumstances enabled him to
purchase the little farm of Crua Breck, together with a fishing
boat. The fishing, and a previous knowledge of the Orkney channels,
had given him some experience of local navigation; and it was upon
the strength of this experience that, having built his pilot boat,
he intended to start in opposition to my father.
The greater part of what Mansie and Colin said, as they sat in the
comfortable kitchen of Lyndardy, was entirely new to me. I felt a
strange pleasure in hearing now, for the first time, that Thora
Kinlay owed her life, in some sort, to my own father.
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