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.
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