Two swallows in flight on a shoulder blade

Two swallows came aboard off the Scillies the week before old Harrow lost his wife to the fever in Valparaiso. Nobody knew that yet. They dropped onto the rail like a pair of thrown knives and would not be shifted. Harrow swore they were hers, come to see he ate properly.

He kept them fed on crumbs from the biscuit tin, and they kept to the galley hatch, dipping in and out of the steam. When the wind went round and the sea turned the colour of wet slate, they flew ahead of the bows, low over the swell, then circled back and waited on the rail as if counting heads. Men said a swallow in the rigging meant a sailor come safe through, and two meant a pair who would make port together. Harrow never believed a word of it, but he took his cap off every time he looked up.

The night we rounded the Horn the lamp swung loose and the cabin flooded, and I found him crouched at the hatch with a tin cup of water on the sill. The swallows lay on the deck, dead, and not a mark on either of them. He had been talking to them low, the way you'd talk to a horse. I asked what he had said. He only told me he'd been counting, and they had kept their end of it.

We buried them at sea with crumbs still in their beaks. Next morning there were two more circling the mizzen, though not one of us had called them.