CONTENTS
| PART I The Buccaneers | ||
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I | The Captain | [9] |
| II | The “Penguin” | [27] |
| III | The Top Seat at the Table | [34] |
| IV | The Sailing of the “Penguin” | [42] |
| V | The Cable Message | [52] |
| VI | The Crew’s Share of the Spoils | [84] |
| VII | Christobal | [92] |
| VIII | Sprengel | [99] |
| IX | The “Minerva” | [115] |
| X | The Last of the “Penguin” | [143] |
| PART II The “Heart of Ireland” | ||
| I | The Captain Gets a Ship | [159] |
| II | The “Yan-Shan” | [188] |
| III | A Cargo of Champagne | [221] |
| IV | Avalon Bay | [252] |
| V | The Big Haul | [283] |
PART I
THE BUCCANEERS
THE BUCCANEERS
I
THE CAPTAIN
Captain Blood used to come down to McGinnis’ wharf every afternoon to have a look round. The Captain was an Irishman of the black-haired, grey-eyed type from the west coast—a relic of the wreck of the Spanish Armada.
The Spanish strain in the Celtic nature makes for volcanic developments; and the Captain, from what we knew of him, formed no exception to this rule. He was known as “The Captain” tout court all along the front at San Francisco, from the China docks to Meiggs’ Wharf. He was a character. Scarcely forty years of age, he had done most things that a man could possibly do in the way of sea-and-land adventure. He had run guns in the Spanish-American War, dug for gold at Klondike with the first batch of diggers, lost two fingers of his left hand in a dust-up on the Chile coast, and two ships in a manner considered dubious by the Board of Trade. But he never had lost a friend, nor an enemy. Unlike most of his class, he had nothing of the amphibian about him. Straight and well set up, he always managed to keep a clean, well-groomed appearance even in the teeth of adversity.
The Captain was seated to-day on a mooring bitt, watching the freighters loading with grain and the tugs and Italian whitehalls passing on the blue water of the bay. He was down on his luck, had been for the last month, and was in a condition of humour with the world that would have lent him to any job from piracy to the captaining of a hay barge.
Owners had fought shy of him ever since his last deep-sea adventure. Capable and sober enough, he had earned a reputation for recklessness that was a bar to employment as fatal as a reputation for drink. There were no more Klondikes to be exploited, perfect peace reigned on the west American seaboard from Vancouver to Wellington Island, piracy was out of date, and every hay barge had its captain.
There seemed no prospect before him but either to go into the fo’c’sle or go on tramp, and as he sat on the mooring bitt, kicking his heels and watching the shipping, he was trying to decide which of these two prospects was the more hateful.
He had arrived at no decision on this point when he saw a figure approaching him. It was Billy Harman.
“Why, there you are!” said Billy. “Just the man I wanted to see. I looked into Sam Brown’s, and you weren’t there, and Sam said: ‘Try down on the wharves; the Captain is sure to be down on the wharves on the lookout for his ship.’”
“I’ll teach him to talk about me and my affairs,” said Blood. “Well, now you’ve found me, what have you got for me?”
“A ship,” replied Harman.
“Have you got it in your pocket?” said the Captain. “If so, produce it. A ship! And since what day have you turned owner?”
Mr. Harman produced a pipe and began to load it carefully and meditatively. His manner could not have been more detached had the Captain not been present.
Then, having lit the pipe and taken a draw, he seemed to remember the presence of the other.
“Yes,” said he, “it’s a sure-enough job if you wish to take it. I’d have had it myself, only I’m no hand at the deep-sea-cable business; but when the thing was spoken of to me I said: ‘I’ve got the man you want who can do any job in that way better’n any man in Frisco.’ You see, I knew you’d served two years on the Groper.”
“The Grapnel, you mean.”
“It’s all the same; she were a cable ship, weren’t she? And I said: ‘If he’ll go, I’ll go meself as second off’cer. I can do the navigatin’.’”
“When the whisky bottle is out of sight,” put in Blood.
“‘And what’s more,’ said I, ‘I’ll get you a crew that’s up to snuff and won’t make no bother nor tell no yarns. You leave the job to me,’ said I, ‘and if I can get the Captain to come along it’s fixed,’ I says.”
“Now look here, Bill Harman,” said Blood, shifting his position on the mooring bitt so as to get his informant face to face, “what are you driving at? What do you mean, anyhow? Who’s the owner of the cable boat that’s willing to ship you as first mate and me as skipper? Is this a guy you are letting off on me, or is it delirium tremens? A cable boat! Why, what cable company is going to fish round promiscuous and pick up its officers from sweepings like you and me?”
“This is no company,” replied Harman. “It’s a private venture.”
“To lay or to mend?”
“Well, if you ask me,” said Harman, “I’d say it was more like a breaking job. If you ask me, I wouldn’t swear to it being an upside business, but it’s a hundred dollars a month for the skipper and a bonus of two thousand dollars if the job’s pulled off, and half that for the mate.”
The Captain whistled.
The darkness in this business revealed by Billy Harman jumped up at him; so did the two thousand dollars bonus and the hundred a month pay.
“Who asked you to come into this?” said he.
“A chap named Shiner,” replied Harman.
“A Jew?”
“A German. I don’t know whether he is a Jew or not, but he’s got the splosh.”
“Look here,” said the Captain, half resuming his place on the mooring bitt with one leg dangling, “let’s come to common sense. To begin with, you can’t run a cable boat with a skipper and a mate and even a couple of engineers alone. You want an electrician. Where’s your electrician to come from?”
“You don’t want no electricians to cut cables with,” said Harman.
“That’s true,” said the Captain, falling into meditation.
“Yet, all the same,” went on Harman, “this chap Shiner said we would want an electrician, and that he’d come as electrician himself. Says he has a good knowledge of the work.”
“Oh, he said that, did he?”
“Yes, and I guess he told no lie. This chap Shiner is no bar bummer by a long chalk. I reckon he’s all there.”
The Captain made no reply. He was thinking. At first he had fancied this to be a simple business; some rascal person or syndicate wishing to cut a deep-sea cable and so interrupt communication between the business centres. There were only two or three Pacific cables where this piece of rascality could bring any fruitful results. That is to say, there were only two or three cables the cutting of which would not have been negatived by collateral cables or wireless, and the simple cutting of those cables could not conceivably produce a financial result worth the risk and the cost of an expedition.
But this was evidently more than a simple cutting job, since the presence of an electrician was required.
“Look here,” said he, “where is this man Shiner to be seen?”
“Why,” said Harman, “he’s to be seen easy enough in his office on Market Street.”
“Well, let’s go and have a look at him,” said the Captain, detaching himself from the mooring bitt. “He’s worth investigating. Would he be in now, think you?”
“He might,” replied Harman. “Anyhow, we can try.”
They walked away together.
Harman, unlike Blood, was a typical sailor of the tramp school, a man who knew more about steam winches and cargo handling than masts and yards. He was all right to look at, a stocky man with a not unpleasant face, a daring eye, and a fresh colour, but his certificates were not to match. Drink had been this gentleman’s ruin. Had he been a lesser man, drink would have crushed him down into the fo’c’sle. As it was, he managed to get along somehow by his wits. He had not made a voyage for two years now, but he had managed to make a living; he had been endowed by nature with a mind active as a squirrel. He was in with a number of men: ward politicians knew him as a useful man, and used him occasionally. Crimps knew him, and tavern keepers. Had he been more of a scamp and less of a dreamer, he might have risen high in life. His dream was of a big fortune to be “got sudden and easy,” and this dream, stimulated at times by alcohol, managed somehow to keep him poor.
The public life of Frisco, like a rotten cheese, supports all sorts of mites and maggots, and the wharf edge is of all cheese the most rotten part.
Harman could put his hand on men to vote at a city election, or men to man a whaler; he was under political protection, he was in with the port officers and the customs, and he could have been a very considerable person despite his lack of education but for the drink. Drink is fatal to successful scoundrelism, and the form in which it afflicted Harman is the most fatal of all, for he was not a consistent toper. He would go sober for months on end, and then, having made some money and some success, he would “fly out.”
Having reached Market Street, Harman led his companion into a big building where an elevator whisked them up to the fifth floor.
Here, at the end of a concrete passage, Harman pushed open a door inscribed with the legend “The Wolff Syndicate,” and, entering an outer office, inquired for Mr. Shiner. They were shown into a comfortably furnished room where at a roll-top desk a young man was seated busily at work with a stenographer at his side. He asked them to be seated, finished the few words he had to dictate, and then, having dismissed the stenographer, turned to Harman.
Shiner, for it was he, was a very glossy individual, immaculately dressed in a frock coat, broad-striped trousers, spats, and patent-leather shoes.
He did not look more than thirty—if that—he was good looking, and yet a frankly ugly man would have produced a more pleasing impression on the mind than Mr. Shiner. Despite his good looks, his youth, and his manner, which was intended to please, there was something inexpressibly hard and negative about this individual.
The Captain felt it at once. “Now, there’s a chap that would do you in and sit on your corpse and eat sandwiches,” said he to himself, “and smile—wonder how Harman got a hold of a chap like that? But there’s money here; the place smells of it, and the chap, too. Well, we’ll see.”
“This is the Captain,” said Harman. “Captain Blood I spoke of to you. I happened to meet him, and he’s come in to see you.”
“Very glad to see you, Captain,” said Shiner, getting up and standing with his back to the stove. “Has our friend Harman mentioned to you anything of the business I spoke of to him?”
“He told me it was cable work,” replied Blood cautiously.
“Just so,” said Shiner. “I want a skipper for some work in connection with deep-sea cables. You have experience, I suppose?”
“Two years in the Grapnel,” replied Blood.
“You were skipper?”
“No; first officer.”
“Had you much to do with the cable work?”
“Everything, as far as handling the cable. You see, in some companies and some boats they have a regular cable engineer, a chap who doesn’t touch any work but cable work; in others, the chief officer does his work and the cable work as well.”
“I know,” replied Shiner, nodding his head as though he were well acquainted with all the ins and outs of the business. “Well, in this affair of ours the skipper would be skipper and cable engineer as well. That would not interfere with his proper business, since once the cable engineer is in charge, he is the virtual captain of the ship.”
Blood nodded, wondering how this up-to-date-looking young business man had gained so much knowledge about this special branch of seamanship.
“Of course you have certificates,” went on Shiner. “You can show a clean sheet for character and ability?”
“Curse his impudence!” thought the Captain to himself; then, aloud: “A clean sheet? No, can you?”
Shiner, who had been standing on his toes and letting himself down on his heels, puffing out his chest, shooting his cuffs, and otherwise conducting himself like a man in power and on a pedestal, collapsed at this dig. He flung his right elbow into the palm of his left hand, pinched in his cheeks with his right thumb and forefinger, coughed, frowned, and then said:
“I can excuse a sailor for being short in his temper before a question that would seem to imply incapacity. We will say no more on that point. I take your word that you are an efficient navigator and a capable cable engineer.”
“You needn’t take anything of the sort,” said Blood. “I’m a bad navigator, and, as for cable engineering, I can find a cable if I have a chart of it and howk her out of the mud if I have a grapnel. I don’t say that doesn’t want doing; still that’s my limit as a cable man. And as to navigation, I can just carry on. I’ve lost two ships.”
“The Averna and the Trojan,” said Shiner.
“Now, how in the nation did you know that?” cried the outraged Blood.
“I know most things about most men in Frisco,” replied the subtle Shiner.
“Well, then, you’ll know my back,” replied Blood, rising from his chair, “and you may think yourself lucky if you don’t know my boot!” He turned to the door.
“Captain! Captain!” cried Harman, springing up. “Don’t take on so for nothing. The gentleman didn’t mean nothing. Don’t you, now, be a fool, for it’s me you’ll put out of a job as well as yourself.”
“What made him ask me those questions, then, and he knowing my record all the time?” cried Blood, around whose body Harman had flung an arm.
“He didn’t mean no harm; he didn’t mean no harm. Don’t you be carrying on so for nothing; the gentleman didn’t mean no harm. Here, now, sit you down; he didn’t mean no harm.”
Harman was not an orator, but his profound common sense prevented him from enlarging on the subject and trying to suggest innocent things that Shiner might have meant. Blood was in a condition of mind to snap at anything, but he sat down.
Shiner had said not one word.
“That’s right,” said Harman, in a soothing voice. “And now, Mr. Shiner, if I’m not wrong, it was a hundred dollars a month you were offering the Captain, with a bonus of a thousand when the job’s through. Maybe I’m not mistaken in what I say.”
“Not a bit,” said Shiner, speaking as calmly as though no unpleasant incident had occurred. “Those are the terms, with an advance of a hundred dollars should the Captain engage himself to us.”
“What about the victuals,” said the Captain, seeming to forget his late emotion, “and the drinks?”
“The food will be good,” replied Shiner, “and the best guarantee of that will be the fact that I go with you myself as electrician. I’m not the man to condemn myself to bad food for the sake of a few dollars. The food will be the best you have ever had on board ship, I suspect; but there will be no drinks.”
“No drinks?”
“Not till we are paid off. This business wants cool hands. Tea, coffee, mineral waters you will have as much as you want of; but not one drop of alcohol. I am condemning myself as well as you, so there is no room for grumbling.”
Harman heaved a sigh like the sigh of a porpoise. Blood was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Well, I don’t mind. I’m not set on alcohol. If it’s to be a teetotal ship, maybe it’s all the better; but I reckon you’ll pay wind money all the same.”
“What’s this they allow?” asked Shiner, as though he had forgotten this point.
“A shilling a day on the English ships,” said the Captain, “for the officers. Eighteen pence, some of the companies make it. I don’t know what the skipper gets. I reckon double. I’ll take half a dollar a day. That’s about fair.”
“Very well,” said Shiner. “I meet you. Anything more?”
“No,” said the Captain. “I guess that’s all.”
“When can you start?” asked Shiner.
“When you’re ready.”
“Well, that will be about this day week.”
“And the advance?”
“I will pay you that to-morrow, when you have seen over the ship. It’s just as well you should have a look at her first. Can you be here at ten o’clock to-morrow morning?”
“Yes, I can be here.”
“Very well, then. You had better come, too, Mr. Harman. I will expect you both at ten o’clock sharp. Good day to you.”
They went out.
Going down in the elevator, they said nothing.
It will have been noticed that not one of the three men had made any remark on the real nature of the forthcoming expedition. It was admittedly dark. The amount of pay and the bonus were quite enough to throw light on the edges of the affair. Blood did not want to explore farther. It wasn’t the first dark job he’d been on, and the less he knew the more easily could he swear to innocence in case of capture.
Harman seemed of this way of thinking also, for, when they turned into the street, all he said was:
“Well, come and have a drink.”
“I don’t mind,” said Blood. “I’m not a drinking man, as a rule; but that chap has made me feel dry somehow or another.”
He had taken a black dislike to Shiner.
II
THE “PENGUIN”
Near the docks where the China boats come in, there lies an old wharf gone pretty much to decay. Rafferty’s Wharf is the name it goes by. It bears about the same relationship to the modern sea front that Monterey bears to San Francisco, for its rotten piles, bored by sea weevils and waving their weeds languidly to the green water that washes them, were young in the days when grain went aboard ship by the sackful and the tank ships of the Standard Oil Company were floating only in the undreamed-of future.
If you hunt for it, you will find it very difficult to discover; and if you discover it, you will gain little by your discovery but melancholy.
The great grain elevators pouring their rivers of wheat into the holds of the great grain freighters overshadow it with their majesty, and go as often as you will, there is never a decent, live ship moored to its bitts.
The cripples of the sea are brought here for a rest, or for sale, before starting with a last kick of their propellers for the breaking-up yards; and here, on this bright morning, when Mr. Shiner and his two seafaring companions appeared on the scene, this veritable cripple home only showed two inmates—a brig and a grey-painted, single-funnelled steamship with rust runnings staining her paint, verdigris on her brasswork, no boats at her davits, and a general air of neglect, slovenliness, and disreputability beggaring description.
The Penguin had never been a beauty to look at, and she had always been a beast to roll; even rolling plates, though they had improved her a bit, had not cured her. She had only one good point—speed—and that was an accident; she had not been built for speed; she had been built to carry cable and to lay it and mend it; speed had come to her by that law which rules that to every ship built comes some quality or defect not reckoned for by the designer and builder.
Shiner & Co., having hailed the watchmen, crossed the gangplank to the desolate deck, the Captain with frank disapproval on his face, Harman sniffing and trying to look cheerful at the same time, like a salesman keeping a fair face above the rotten game he is offering for sale.
“Great Neptune!” said the Captain, glancing around him.
“She is a bit gone to neglect,” said Shiner, “but it’s all on the surface. She’s as sound as a bell where it really matters.”
“Them funnel guys,” said Harman.
“Yes, they want tightening, and the want of boats doesn’t make her look any better; but boats will be supplied according to regulation. You won’t know her when I’ve had half a dozen fellows at her for a couple of days. All that brasswork wants doing, and a lick of paint will liven her up; but she’s not a yacht, anyhow, and a sound deck under one’s feet is a long way better than a good appearance.”
He followed the Captain, who had walked forward to the bow, where the picking-up gear cumbered the deck.
This consisted of a huge drum moved by cogwheels and worked through the picking-up engine by steam from the main boilers. On it would be wound the grapnel rope used for grappling for cable over the wheel let into the bow just at the point where in ordinary ships the heel of the bowsprit is grasped by the knightheads.
The Captain inspected this machine with attention, pressing on the cogs of the driving wheel with his thumb as though they were soft and he wished to discover how much they would dent; then, standing off a bit, he looked at it with his head on one side, as a knowing purchaser might look at a horse.
“Wants a drop of lubricating oil,” said Shiner tentatively.
“Gallons,” replied the Captain. He turned to the picking-up engine and pulled the lever over. This he did several times, releasing it and then pulling it over again as if for the gloomy pleasure of feeling its defects.
“Well,” said Shiner, “what do you think of the gear and engine?”
“Oh, they’ll work,” said the Captain, “but it will be a good job if they don’t work off their bedplates.”
“They’ll hold tight enough,” said Harman, pressing his foot on the brake of the engine. “There’s nothing wrong with them on the inside. Let’s have a look at the main.”
They came aft past the electrical testing room, and passed down the companionway to the engine room.
Here things were brighter, the weather having worked no effect.
“I have had them examined by an expert,” said Shiner. “He gave them an A-1 certificate. And the boilers are sound; they have been scaled and cleaned. Let’s go and look at the saloon.”
They came on deck, and Shiner led the way down the companionway to the saloon.
It was a big place, with a table running down the middle capable of seating twenty or thirty at a crush. Cabin doors opened on either side of it; at the stern end it bayed out into a lounge and a couch upholstered in red velvet; and at the end, by the door leading to the companionway, was fixed a huge sideboard with a mirror backing.
A faint air of old festivity and an odour of must and mildew lent their melancholy to the dim, irreligious light streaming down through the dirty skylight.
The Captain sniffed. Then he peeped into the cabins on either side, noticed the cockroaches that made hussar rushes for shelter, the fact that the doors stuck in their jambs, that the bunks were destitute of bedding, and the scuttles of the portholes sealed tight with verdigris.
“You can have the starboard cabin by the door,” said Shiner. “I’ll take the port. Or you can take the chart room; there’s a bunk there. Harman can have any of the other cabins he likes. We’ll all mess here, and we won’t grumble at being tightly packed.”
“You’ll have decent bedding put in?” said the Captain.
“That will be done, all right,” replied Shiner. “You need have no fear at all that the appointments won’t be up to date. There won’t be frills on the sheets, but there will be comfort.”
“Well, comfort is all I ask,” replied the Captain. “And you propose to put out this day week?”
“This day week. May I take it, now, that everything is settled?”
The Captain scratched his head for a moment, as if dislodging a last objection. Then he said:
“I’ll come.”
III
THE TOP SEAT AT THE TABLE
It was on a Tuesday morning that they started. Blood came on board at six, and found the majority of the crew already assembled under Harman. They had come on board the night before, and, to use his own expression, they were the roughest, toughest crowd he had ever seen collected on one deck.
He was just the man to handle them, and his first act was to boot a fellow off the bridge steps where he had taken his perch, pipe in mouth, and send him flying down the alleyway forward. Then, following him, he began to talk to the hands, sending them flying this way and that, some to clean brasswork and others to clear the raffle off the decks.
Down below, the boilers were beginning to rumble, and now appeared at the engine-room hatch a new figure, with the air of a Scotch terrier poking up its head to have a look round.
It was MacBean, the chief, second, third, and fourth engineer in one.
MacBean had the honest look of a Dandie Dinmont, and something of the facial expression. He was an efficient engineer; he was on board the Penguin because he could not get another job, and that fact was not a certificate of character. There was scarcely a soul on board the Penguin, indeed, with the exception of Shiner, who would not have been somewhere else but for circumstances over which they had no control.
The Captain gave MacBean good morning, had a moment’s talk with him, and then went aft to see how things were going there.
He found that a steward had been installed, and that he was in the act of laying breakfast things at one end of the breakfast table.
The Captain sent him up for his gear which was on deck, ordered him to place it in the cabin which he had selected, and then proceeded to change from the serge suit which he wore into an old uniform dating from his last command in the Black Bird line.
As he was finishing his toilet, he heard Shiner’s voice, and when he came out of his cabin he found Shiner and Harman seated at table and the steward serving breakfast.
Shiner had gotten himself up for the sea. He looked as though he were off for some cheap trip with a brass band in attendance. Very few people can bear yachting rig, especially when it is brand-new; and brass buttons with anchors on them are as trying to a man’s gentility as mauve to a woman’s complexion.
The Captain gave the others good morning. Two things gratified him: the sight of the good breakfast spread upon the table, and the fact that the chair at the head of the table was vacant and evidently reserved for him.
He was about to take his seat when Shiner stopped him.
“Excuse me,” said he, “but that is Mr. Wolff’s place.”
“Mr. Wolff’s place?” said Blood. “And who the deuce is Mr. Wolff?”
“Our senior partner,” said Shiner. “I’m expecting him every minute.”
Then it was that the Captain noticed a cover laid beside Harman and evidently intended for him.
The temper of the man was not intended by nature to take calmly an incident like this.
The steward was listening, too.
“I’ll give you to understand right away and here, now,” said he, “that I’m the skipper of this tub, and that this is my place at the table. It’s as well to begin as we intend to go on. Steward, look alive there with the coffee.”
He took his seat at the head of the table, helped himself to eggs and bacon, and turned his conversation on Harman. Shiner flushed, hesitated, lost his balance, and subsided into his coffee cup. The Captain at a stroke had taken his position among the after guard. Wolff might own the ship, and Shiner, too, it did not matter in the least. The Captain was boss, and would remain so.
In a moment, when he had finished saying what he had to say to Harman, he turned to the other.
“Of course,” said he, “I can’t stop you bringing all the supercargoes you like on board——” He stopped, told the steward to clear out of the saloon, and then, when the man had disappeared, went on: “Considering I’ve let myself in for this thing with my eyes shut, I’ve no right to complain if you brought bears on board, to say nothing of wolves; but I’d have taken it kinder if you had let me know right off at the beginning that the whole firm was going on the cruise.”
“Look here, Captain,” said Shiner, “you have spoken truth without knowing it. Wolff is the whole firm practically. He’s the boss of this business, to all intents and purposes; he’s the money behind it all, and the brain, and he did not want to advertise the fact that he was coming on board, I suppose, for he is a man pretty well known in the States. Anyhow, there are the facts. Wolff is a man that I don’t mind playing second fiddle to; and if I don’t mind, I don’t see why you should.”
“Oh, don’t you?” said the Captain. “Well, I do. I’m captain of this tub, and captain I’ll remain. I’m risking enough for a hundred dollars a month and a bonus of a thousand if this piracy, whatever it is, of yours, comes off, without losing my status quo as well.”
“What’s that?” asked the illiterate Harman, who had laid down the knife with which he had been eating so as to attend better to the dispute.
“It’s what you’ll never have—the position of a master mariner and the top seat at the table.”
“What do you mean by that word ‘piracy’?” asked Shiner, with the air of a woman whose reputation is attacked. “There is no such thing in this business, and it would be a lot better for you to be more careful with your words. Words are dangerous weapons when flung about like that.”
“Well,” said the Captain, “call it what you like. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve signed on, and I’m not the man to go back on my word; but, as I just said, I don’t know what we are after, and I don’t much care, as long as we steer clear of the gallows.”
“Don’t be talking like that,” said Harman. “Mr. Shiner, here, ain’t such a fool as to go within smellin’ distance of any hanging matter. What we are after may be a bit off colour, but it’s a business venture in the main. I’ve asked no questions, but Mr. Shiner has given me to understand that it was business he was after, not anything that would lay us by the heels, so to speak, in any killing matter.”
“What we are after is perfectly plain,” said Shiner. “Killing! Who talked of killing? This is, just as you say, a business matter, and it’s no worse than what’s being done in Frisco every day, only it’s a bit more adventurous.”
The precious trio finished their breakfast without any more words, and then went on deck. They had scarcely reached it when across the gangplank came a stout, black-bearded individual followed by a couple of wharf rats, one bearing luggage, the other two big cases.
This was Wolff.
Shiner introduced him to the Captain, and then Wolff, followed by the luggage and the cases, disappeared below.
“He’s not a good sailor,” said Shiner, “but he’ll be all right after a day or two. Ah, here come the port authorities. I’ll have a talk with them. You are all right for starting, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said the Captain. “I’m ready to cast off when you are.”
“Right!” said Shiner.
He took the port officers down to the saloon, and when they came up again they were all smoking half-dollar perfectos and the traces of conviviality and good-fellowship were evident.
“They’ve been having drinks,” said Harman to himself. “Wouldn’t wonder if there was lush in those cases Wolff brought aboard. No tellin’.”
IV
THE SAILING OF THE “PENGUIN”
It was noon when the hawsers were cast off and Captain Blood, in all the glory of command, standing on the bridge, rang up the engines and put the telegraph to half speed ahead.
It was a glorious day, not a cloud in the sky, and scarcely a ripple of breeze on the water. The breeze, just sufficient to shake the trade flags of the shipping, brought with it the whistling of ferryboats, the hammering of boiler iron from the shipyards, and a thousand voices from the multitude of ships.
They nearly scraped the stern wheel off a Stockton river boat, and then, as if sheering off from the blasphemy of the Stocktonites, nosed round and passed the buoy that marks the shoal water west of Hennessy’s Wharf. Then down the bay they went with the sunlight on Alcatraz and the Contre Costa shore, and away ahead the Golden Gate and a vision of the blue Pacific.
They passed Lime Point and took the middle channel, where the first heave of the outer sea striding over the bar met them with a keener touch of wind to back it. The Cliff House and Point Bonita fell astern, and now, right ahead, the Farallons sketched themselves away across the lonely blue of the sea.
The Penguin, bow on to the swell, was behaving admirably, so well, indeed, that Wolff, with a cigar in his mouth, had appeared on deck and climbed onto the bridge. But now, clear of the land and with a shift of helm, the beam sea produced its effect, and her rolling capacities became evident.
Wolff descended, leaving the bridge to its lawful occupants, and even Shiner, who had taken his place on the after gratings with an account book and stylograph pen, retired after a very little while.
The Penguin was built to hold a thousand miles of cable in her fore end and after tanks, and, loaded like that, the effect of her top-hamper in the way of picking-up gear, picking-up engine, derricks, and buoys would be corrected. But she had no cable in her now, only water ballast, and she rolled after her natural bent, and rolled and rolled till cries of “Steward!” came faintly through the saloon hatch, followed by other sounds and the clinking of basins.
Blood walked the bridge with Harman, casting now and then an eye at the compass card and the fellow at the wheel, and now and then an eye at the forward deck lumbered with the gear and four or five new-painted buoys, each numbered and each with a lamp socket.
“They haven’t spared expense in fitting her out,” said Harman.
“No, they haven’t,” replied the Captain. “And why? Simply because I’ve been at Shiner all the past week with a rope’s end, so to say. I’m blessed if the blighter didn’t want to economise on buoys! ‘Two will be enough,’ says he; ‘it’s only a short job we are on, and they are three hundred dollars apiece.’ He said that right to my face. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘it’s none of my business, but if you want to drop the job, whatever it is, in the middle, and run a thousand miles to the nearest port for a ten-cent buoy, you’ll find your economy has been misplaced. You will that.’ So he caved in on the buoys. Then we had an argument over the grapnel rope. He wanted to take two miles of all hemp. I wanted five miles of wire wove. I got it, but only after a mighty tough struggle. The grapnels are good, but they went with the ship, and they’d been properly laid up in paraffin; not a speck on them. Then the Kelvin sounder was out of order. Yes, they’d have sailed with it like that only for me, and it cost them something to have it put right.”
“What I’m thinking,” said Harman, “is that this expedition is costing a good deal of money.”
“It’s costing all of five hundred dollars a day.”
“What I’m thinking,” went on Harman, “is that the profits to come out of whatever they are going to do must be huge, big profits to cover the expenses, and I’ve taken notice that when chaps are ketched going on the crooked where money is concerned, they always gets a bigger doing from the law the bigger the money is. It’s this way: if a chap nails a suit of clothes, or a ham, he don’t get as much as a chap that nicks a motor boat, shall we say, and the chap that nicks a motor boat don’t——”
“Oh, shut up!” said the Captain. “We’re in for it, whatever it is, and our only hope’s our innocence if we’re caught. We don’t know anything; we are only obeying the orders of the owners. Not that that will have much weight if we are caught, but we’re not going to be. I’ve a firm belief in that slippery eel of a Shiner, much as I dislike him; and this chap Wolff doesn’t seem a fool, either. They’re not the sort of fellows to run their skins into much danger.”
“What do you think it is?” asked Harman.
“Think what is?”
“This game of theirs.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think they are going to pick up a cable, cut it, and tap it.”
“Whatcha mean by tapping it?”
“Sucking the news out of it. Or maybe they’re going to use it for sending some lying message that’ll upset the stock markets, or grain markets, or railway people. Lord bless you, there’s a hundred things to be done if one has the business end of a real deep-sea cable with a big city like Frisco or maybe Sydney at the other end.”
“Well, maybe there is,” said Harman. “There’s a good many things to be done in Frisco off the square, without a cable, and there’s no sayin’ what mightn’t be done with one.”
“I reckon you’re a judge of that,” laughed the Captain.
“Oh, I’m pretty well up to the tricks of Frisco,” said the other complacently. “But this is a new traverse, fooling folk from the middle of the ocean, one might say. I reckon Wolff is a German, ain’t he?”
“Yes, he’s a Dutchman, all right; so’s Shiner, I reckon. German Jew. It lands me how those sort of chaps get on and make money, and the likes of us has to take their orders and their leavings. I’d like to get even with them once.”
“Well, maybe you will,” said Harman.
The Captain grunted.
There was a fellow on board named Bowers. He had been given the post of bos’n, and he knew something of navigation and could keep a watch on the bridge.
The Captain called for him now and gave the bridge over to him, as all was plain sailing with the California coast away on the port quarter, the Farallons on the starboard bow, and the whole blue Pacific Ocean right ahead.
He and Harman, leaving the bridge, sought the chart room and went in there for a smoke. It was a pleasant place, full of light, and with a couch running along one side. By the door stood a rack of rifles, eight in number, and for every rifle a cutlass.
Cable ships go armed. They never know, when they leave port to do a job, what new job may not suddenly call them to the Patagonian beaches or the fogs of the Yellow Sea. The rifles and cutlasses were part of the fixtures belonging to the Penguin and taken over by the new owners, just as fixtures are taken over with a house. To use them for their proper purpose could never have occurred to the minds of Shiner, Wolff & Co. They were not men of violence. The strange thing, indeed, about this expedition, organised and manned for lawless work on the deep sea, was the fact that the chiefs were, to use Harman’s phrase, “sure-enough city men,” and that they were even now down below dead sick with the Pacific’s first fringe of swell.
Harman took a rifle down and examined it, while Blood, extending his leg on the couch, lit a pipe.
“Say,” said Harman, “are you any good as a shot?”
“Not with a thing like that,” replied the Captain. “I can hit a man with a revolver at ten paces, and that’s all the good shooting I want. Put that thing down and don’t be fooling with it.”
“It’s not loaded,” replied Harman, who had opened the breech.
“And it’s not likely to be,” replied the other, “for there’s no ammunition on board and no need for it. If we’re caught, there must be no fighting.”
“Why, I thought you was a fighting man,” said Harman, putting the rifle back. “You have the name for it.”
“And so I am, when fighting is to be had on the square; but there’s fighting and fighting. Can’t you see, if we were caught tinkering at some cable we had no right to be meddling with, and if we were chased by some gunboat, and if we were to fight and draw blood—can’t you see we’d be hanged without benefit of clergy? No, I never fight against the law. Never have and never will.”
“Suppose a cruiser overhauled her when we was at work?” said Harman.
“Well, what’s easier to say than that we were sent to mend? We are a sure-enough cable ship, and how’s a cruiser to know whether the cable we are fishing for or tinkering with isn’t broken? Oh, no; you may make your mind easy on that. Our position is sound and safe, on the outside. Inside it’s as rotten as punk.”
V
THE CABLE MESSAGE
The Penguin, steering a sou-sou’westerly course, slipped day by day into warmer and bluer seas. Wolff, recovering from his first unpleasantness, appeared on deck, cigar in mouth; and Shiner, with nothing better to do, would be seen lounging on the after gratings with a novel in his hand.
The Captain and Harman worked the ship, and had little to do with the others, meeting them chiefly at table, where, needless to say, the Captain took the head. Wolff had given him a chart of the Pacific whereon was laid down the exact position of the cable they were going to attend to.
“This is the chart,” Wolff had said. “You will see, there is the cable. It is plainly marked. I wish you to bring us to it about here.” He made a pencil mark on the cable line. “And when you have brought us to that point, then I will explain to you the object of this expedition.”
“Right!” said the Captain.
They were steering now for the cable line through days of sapphire and nights wonderful with stars. Now and then they would raise an island, a peak with a turban of clouds, or an atoll, just a green ring of palms and breadfruits surrounded by a white ring of foam, and peak and atoll would heave in sight and sink from sight with nothing to tell of the legerdemain at work but the pounding of the screw and the throb of the engines.
Sometimes a sail would heave in sight, or the far-off smoke of a steamer hold the imagination for an hour or two, and then be painted out, leaving nothing but the sea, the sky, and the pearl-white trace of cloud draping the skirts of the warm trade wind.
There is no place in the world where grievances sprout so well and grow so rapidly as on board ship. The Captain had a grievance. It had come to his knowledge that Wolff had a private stock of Pilsener. Some had come in the cases that the wharf rat had carried after him on board, and there was more stowed away in some hole known only to Wolff and Shiner.
Those two worthies would forgather of a morning in Wolff’s cabin and drink Pilsener and then heave the bottles out of the porthole. The Captain had seen a Pilsener bottle going aft, bobbing and bowing to him in the wake, and his fury was excessive and ill contained.
Leaving aside the meanness of proclaiming the ship teetotal and then smuggling drink aboard for private consumption, there was something of cold-blooded inhospitality about the business that struck at the Irish heart.
He was very explicit about the matter to Harman:
“Swine—they and their lager beer! You wait! I’ll pay them out.”
“To think of them sitting there drinking, and we dry!” said the simple-minded Harman. “That’s what gets me. We dry and them chaps drinking. It makes me thirsty. I don’t care a dash about their sitting there and drinking, but when I think of it it makes me thirsty. That’s what gets me.”
“Well, you’ll have to think of something else,” said the Captain. “There’s no use in dwelling on things like that, and the voyage is not for long.”
“It’s long enough to be without a drink in,” said Harman.
Harman, despite his up-to-dateness on San Francisco roguery, was a most extraordinary child for all his manhood. The man part of him had grown up and grown crooked; the child part of him had remained virginal. The moment was everything to him. He could just read and write his name, and sometimes, when he was off duty, you would see him spelling over a San Francisco paper. Houses to let, governess wanted—it was all the same to him. He only read the advertisement columns. They satisfied his craving for literature, and he could understand them. The rest of the paper, from the poetry corner to the foreign-news column, was arid ground for him.
Yet this same man had made money out of ward politics and in twenty other ways in which one would have fancied education necessary to success.
They left Fanning and Christmas Island three hundred miles to starboard, passed the equator, and, entering the great, empty space of sea bounded by the Phœnix Islands on the north and the Penrhyns on the southeast, headed toward the Navigators.
One sweltering morning, the Captain, coming up to Wolff, who was seated in his pajamas under the double awning that had been rigged up, said:
“We’re just on the cable line.”
Wolff rose up, called for the steward, and, having sent for his panama, put it on and came up on the bridge.
The sea was smooth, surface smooth, but underrun by the long, endless swell of the Pacific.
“This is the spot,” said the Captain, who had been poring over the cable chart which he had brought up on the bridge. “And it’s pretty deep. All a mile.”
“Good!” said Wolff. “With this calm sea, we ought to work well and quickly. We are in luck; and now, if you will come into the chart house, we will talk for one moment.”
They went into the chart house, and Wolff shut the door.
“This is a purely business proposition,” began Wolff, “and I must tell you, to begin with, that it is not a business which a man of a certain type of mind would call on the square. But, my dear Captain, can you show me any business proposition that is truly on the square? Not one. I want the use of a cable, and I am going to take it for business purposes. That is all there is to it, you understand.”
“Look here,” said Blood, “this is all I know of the business. You want me to fish this cable up?”
“Precisely.”
“Cut it?”
“Just so.”
“Connect both ends with the electrical testing room, and let you talk through it and send messages through it from both or one of the cut ends?”
“That is exactly the position.”
“Well, after that?”
“After I have had my use of the cable, you can drop both ends overboard. We will sail away, and no one the wiser. Of course, the cable company will recognise that their cable is broken, and send a ship to mend it; but we will be far away by that time.”
“I see,” went on the Captain, “that it runs from the American coast here to the Australian coast here, but I don’t know the name of the company it belongs to; I don’t know what in the nation your game is. I am as innocent as a baa lamb on the whole affair, and I simply obey your orders, not knowing that you yourself may not own the cable and that this mayn’t be a repairing job. If we are caught, will you bear me out in that statement?—not that your evidence will be much good, I expect, but, still, it’s better than nothing.”
“If you obey our instructions,” said Wolff, “I will do as you say; and, to prove that I am playing fair with you, I will even now give you a detail of the commercial speculation that is behind all this business.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” said the Captain. “I’d much sooner remain innocent. I’m just an ordinary sailor signed on to do an ordinary job. I’ll work freer in mind if I know nothing about the inside of the affair; it’s black enough on the out.”
“Well, we will leave it at that,” said Wolff, “and we will now set to work, if you please.”
They came on to the bridge, and the Captain gave orders for the main engines to be stopped and the Kelvin sounder to be set to work. The donkey man had been allotted to this job, and presently the furious, sewing-machine whir of the sounder hauling up the lead came through the silence that had supervened on the stopping of the engines, and the result was shouted forward: “Eight hundred fathoms, coral rock.”
Blood, on this result being given to him, left the bridge and came down to the bow balks to superintend the lowering of the first buoy. He had not only to act as cable engineer, but he had also to instruct the hands in the details of this work absolutely new to them. A big, red-painted buoy was swung up against the burning blue of the sky, a rope with a mushroom anchor attached to it was fastened to the buoy; then the anchor was cast overboard, taking the rope with it, and the buoy, swung outboard, was dropped. It rode off, bobbing and ducking on the swell, and the Penguin steamed on to a point a mile ahead, where another buoy was dropped in a precisely similar manner.
The Captain had now his position and his marks laid down. Somewhere between those two buoys lay the cable, like a black snake on the floor of the sea, waiting to be grappled for.
The grapnel rope was now lowered over the clanking drum of the picking-up gear and the wheel in the bow. This business took half an hour, and then the Penguin, going dead slow, began to steam back to the first-mark buoy, dragging the grapnel after her across the floor of the sea.
Wolff and Shiner took a great deal of interest in this part of the business. They stood at the bow watching the pointer of the dynamometer, which gave the pull on the rope in hundredweights; every lump of coral, every tuft of weed travelled over by the grapnel made the pointer of the dynamometer jump and joggle; and at every jump the idea “Cable!” would leap into the minds of the speculators and show itself in their eyes.
But the Penguin passed from one mark buoy to the other without a show of the real thing; and then she turned and steamed back on an equally fruitless course.
She was making ready for a third grapple when the bell went for dinner, and Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain turned aft and went below to the saloon.
The Wolff gang were in a bad temper, and the meal had scarcely begun when a discussion broke out.
“It’s a funny thing,” said Shiner, “that we have not hit the thing yet.”
“We have been twice over the ground,” said Wolff.
“Sure you haven’t made a mistake in the spot, Captain?” said Shiner.
The Captain put down the glass of mineral water he was raising to his lips.
“Why can’t you say what you mean?” said he. “Why can’t you ask me right out if I haven’t muddled the navigation and missed the job? Well, I haven’t. Is that plain? Some men may doubt their own work, and there are some men who would be put off by suspicions flung at them and would say, ‘Maybe I am wrong,’ and pick up his buoys and move off to another ground and make fools of themselves. I’m not that sort. Can’t you see that a cable may be passed over by a grapnel half a dozen times without the grapnel catching? It may be glued down with coral.”
“Just so, just so!” said Shiner, anxious to pacify. “We never doubted your capacity, Captain.”
“Never, I’m sure,” said Wolff.
The Captain, somewhat mollified, went on with his meal, and he was raising the glass of mineral water for the second time to his lips when the dead, slow tramp of the engines ceased.
Immediately on their cessation, through the open skylight came the clanking sound of the picking-up gear, and right on that came Harman’s voice, roaring down the saloon companionway: “Below, there! We’ve got the cable!”
In a minute or less, Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain were in the bows; the Captain on the bow balks, Shiner and Wolff on the deck.
The great drum, rotating slowly, was hauling in the grapnel rope, dripping and taut; the dynamometer registered a strain of seven tons, and the strain was slowly increasing.
Nothing else could give this result but cable.
“Are you sure we have got it, Captain?” asked Wolff.
The Captain looked down at him.
“If that rope was to break under this strain,” said he, “it would mushroom out like an open umbrella and cut you to pieces. Better get up on the bridge. You’re safe there. Yes, I’m sure we’ve got cable, unless we’ve grappled a dead whale.”
Wolff and Shiner went up the ladder to the bridge, and the Captain, relieved of their presence, continued his work.
It was worth watching.
He was a true-born cable man, and they are as rare as good violinists. Knowing the depth, and the length of rope out, and its weight in sea water, and the weight of the grapnel, he could tell approximately what was going on down below; he knew that he was lifting heavier stuff than ordinary cable, and the weight could only come from coral incrustations on it. He knew that the cable must be glued down here and there, and that haste would mean a break. Sometimes he stopped the picking-gear altogether and trusted to the rise and fall of the ship on the swell to break the thing gently up from its attachments. And still the grapnel rope came in, dripping and endless, till at last the grapnel itself appeared with what seemed the bight of a sea serpent gripped in its unholy claws.
The thing was crusted here and there with coral, it is true, but it was comparatively new and sound, and a genuine, straight-going cable man would have shuddered at the sacrilege that was going on. Even the Captain felt qualms. To cut this thing was like murder; it would mean a dead loss of ten or fifteen thousand dollars to the company that owned it. An expedition would have to be fitted out to repair it, and if bad weather were to come on, it might be three months before the repairs were effected.
The Captain thought of all this even as he was ordering the stoppers to be got ready and the sling for the man who would do the cutting. He drowned remorse in the recollection that the injury would be done to a company, not to an individual. He would not have injured an individual of his own free will for worlds, but he did not mind much injuring a company. A company was a many-headed beast, and, in his experience, it always dealt hardly with its employés.
The cable was high out of the water now, in the form of an inverted V, with the grapnel at the apex. He ordered each limb of the bight to be secured with a stopper, and then, unable to trust any one else with the delicate business, he himself descended in a sling to do the cutting. Shouting his directions to the fellows who were lowering him, he came just level with the grapnel and began the business with a file. Halfway through, he ordered the grapnel to be eased away, finished the business, and left the two cable ends hanging by the stoppers.
Then he came aboard, and the starboard end of the cable was hauled in. It did not take long to connect it up with the electrical testing room, where Shiner was already installed before the mirror galvanometer.
The end they had hauled on board was the American end; the testing-room door was shut, the blinds of the windows drawn, for a subdued light is necessary to the proper working of the mirror galvanometer; and Shiner and Wolff were left alone with the American continent to work their dark schemes.
Said Harman, as he paced the deck with the Captain:
“I wonder what those two guys are doin’ now? Carryin’ out some of their malpraxises, no doubt. I ain’t a particular man, but this thing’s beginnin’ to get on my spine. It didn’t seem much at the start, just foolin’ with a cable; but now it seems somehow a durned sight worse, now that the thing’s cut. I tell you, Cap, it went to my heart to see it cut. I couldn’t ’a’ felt worse if it’d squealed and blood run out of it. I guess I wouldn’t have joined the expedition if I hadn’t been tempted. I remember my old mother warning me that if sinners tempted me, not to consent.”
“Confound you and your warnings!” said the Captain. “Who tempted me? You, and no one else. But I’m not the man to go back on you and talk about warnings. We’re in for it, and there’s no going back, and we can’t do anything but pray that a cruiser doesn’t heave in sight before we get away.”
“Amen to that!” said Harman.
They continued pacing the deck in silence, till suddenly the testing-room opened and Wolff appeared.
The black-bearded Wolff was ghastly white. He had the look of a man who had received a blow in the stomach. He held up a finger to the Captain, who came toward him.
“Come in here,” said Wolff.
Shiner was off his stool and sitting on the couch that ran along the port side of the room. His hands were in his hair, and the dot of the mirror galvanometer was spilling from side to side of the scale unnoticed. Disaster was in the air.
“What’s up?” asked the Captain.
“Up!” cried Shiner, coming out of his lair as one might fancy a cockatrice coming out of its hole. “Everything is up! Our speculation is done for! War has been declared.”
“War been declared? What war?”
“England and Germany and France,” replied Shiner.
“How did you hear it?”
“How did I hear it? Why, the first message I tapped was a Press Association special to Sydney. They began cursing me for having been held up for half an hour while we were cutting the cable. They thought we were Sydney. They don’t know the cable is cut yet. They’re still jabbering. Anyhow, there it is—war! And war spells ruin to the business we were on.”
“We must cut losses,” said Wolff, who was walking up and down. “The expedition is off. We must get to a Chile port at once—Valparaiso for choice.”
“And my bonus?” said the Captain.
“I guess you may whistle for your bonus,” said Shiner. “Can’t you see we are bust—B-U-S-T?”
“But we can do one thing,” said Wolff. “We can hit the cursed English; we can haul in twenty, forty miles of the cable and cut. The thing is cut, in any case; but a long break like that will make it the worse for them; then Sydney will have one cable the less to talk to her mother with. Yes, we can do that.”
“Curse them!” said Shiner. “Yes, we can do that.”
“So my bonus is gone?” said the Captain. “Well, may I ask one question of you: Who’s fighting who? Is it France and England against Germany?”
“It is Germany against France and England,” said Wolff.
“And you are Germans, and this is a German-owned vessel?”
“Precisely,” said Wolff. “You have touched the matter on the head.”
The Captain ruminated.
Then, said he: “Well, gentlemen, this is a serious matter for me. I lose my bonus, and I lose my pay, I expect; for if you are as badly broke as you say, when you land at Valparaiso or some southern port—and you daren’t go back to Frisco—there’ll be precious few dibs to go round unless you manage to sell the old Penguin, which isn’t very likely in war time. Well, gentlemen, I’ve thought of a plan by which I may get my bonus, and my pay, too; and if you’ll come down to the saloon with me, I’ll show you it.”
“Why not tell us here?” said Shiner.
“I cannot explain it here. Come down, gentlemen. When all’s said and done, it won’t take a minute, and there’s a lot of importance attaching to what I have to explain to you. It’s worth a minute.”
He left the testing-room, and they followed him to the saloon. He led the way into his cabin, and they followed him like lambs. He asked them to be seated on the couch opposite the bunk; then he took the key from the inside of the door and inserted it in the lock on the outside.
“What are you doing that for?” said Shiner.
“I’ll show you in one minute,” replied the Captain.
He stepped swiftly out into the saloon, banged the door to, and locked it.
It was Shiner who woke to the situation first, and it was Shiner’s voice that came now as he clung to the handle of the door and punctuated his remarks with kicks on the paneling.
The Captain waited a moment till the other gave pause. Then he said:
“There’s no use in kicking and squealing. You’re prisoners of war, that’s how you stand. The ship’s mine now, a lawful prize. What’s that you say? An Irishman? Of course I’m an Irishman. What’s that you say? I’m a traitor to my country? B’gosh, if you say that again, I’ll open the door and give you a taste of my quality. Say it again, will you! Say it again, will you!”
He shook the door handle at each invitation, but Shiner was dumb. He evidently had no desire to taste the Captain’s quality. It was Wolff’s voice that came instead, muted and murmurous:
“Make terms, make terms; there is no use in arguing. Make terms!”
“You won’t make any terms with me,” said the Captain, “but you’ll be treated well and transhipped as quick as possible.”
“But, see here, Captain!” came Shiner’s voice.
The Captain did not hear him; he had left the saloon, and next moment was on deck. He was a man of swift decision, and he had fixed in his mind that the first thing to be done was to make the crew his own, and the next to dump the cable and be gone. He could not mend it. They had no skilled artificer on board. To mend it, he would have to bring both ends on board and connect them. If you have ever examined a deep-sea cable, with its water coat of wire, its inner coat of rubber, and its core, you will quite understand the complexity of the task.
It was impossible, and he recognized the fact as he walked forward.
Harman was standing by the dynamometer, waiting for orders, and the bos’n near Harman. The Captain ordered the bos’n to pipe the whole crew on deck, and presently, like a kicked beehive, the fo’c’sle gave up its contents, the stokers off duty appeared, and even MacBean himself rose like a seal from the engine-room hatch.
“Boys,” said the Captain, addressing the dingy crowd, “is there ever a German among you?”
Dead silence for a moment, as though the hands were consulting their own hearts, and then a voice from back near the starboard alleyway: “No, there ain’t no Germans here.”
“Sam’s a Dutchman,” came another voice, and then the voice of Sam, protesting: “You lie! I vas a New Yorker.”
“Shut your mouths!” said Blood. “I’m an Englishman, or pretty near the same thing, and I’m captain of this hooker, which is owned by a German firm. In other words, it is owned by Mr. Wolff and Mr. Shiner, who are Germans. Well, my lads, news has just come over that cable we have picked up that war has been declared between England and Germany, so I have taken possession of the ship in the name of England, d’ye see? Which means that there’s lots of prize money for all of us if we can bring her safe into an English port.”
He waited for a moment after this announcement, but not a sound came from the crowd in front of them. It was filtering down through the thickness of their intelligences. It was an entirely new proposition that he had laid before them, and required time to find a response. They knew—God help them!—as little as he did of the horrible problems of international and maritime law that the Penguin was about to wind round herself as the silkworm winds a cocoon; but they knew the meaning of the word “money,” and it didn’t matter to them a rap whether it was prize money or not, as long as it could be changed for whisky and tobacco.
A little, wiry Nova Scotian was the first to respond.
“Go to it!” cried he. “Here’s to England and a pocketful of money!” He flung up his cap, and the action touched the rest off. They cheered—Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Latins, and Slavs—for such was their mixture. All joined in the shout.
MacBean alone, cautious and cool, made any question.
“Are you sure,” said he, when the shouting had ceased, “are you sure we’re in the right of this? I’m as willin’ as ony man to fight for England, but I’m no so sure about our poseetion as regards the ship.”
“Well, you will be soon,” said Blood. “This is my position: I’m not only going to take the ship, but I’m going to take anything German I come across on the high seas. Away back in the American Spanish War, I put out in a mud dredger from the Florida coast and took a mail steamer. We pretended we were a dynamite boat. There were seven thousand dollars in gold coin on board her, and we took it. Never mind where it went to——” A wild yell from the crowd. “We took it just as we are going to take any German money we come across. A chance like this doesn’t come in most lifetimes, and I’m not going to lose it.” Applause.
MacBean went back to his engine room.
“May I ax, Captain,” said one of the fellows, “what’s to become of the owners?”
“Meaning Mr. Wolff and Mr. Shiner?” replied the Captain. “Why, they are prisoners of war, and they will be treated as such without a hair of their heads being touched. But we can’t keep them on board. We’ll land them somewhere, or put them on a German ship, if we find one. Now, then, look lively and get the cable away. Mr. Harman, get it aft from the testing-room, and then cast loose the stoppers; dump both ends.”
He went on the bridge while Harman cast the cable loose; then he rang up the engines, and, giving the fellow at the wheel a sou’westerly course to steer by, put the engine telegraph to full speed ahead.
He wanted to get away from that spot in a hurry. He had not yet fixed on any point to make for—north, south, east, or west did not matter for the moment to him. He wanted to be somewhere else and to put as many long leagues as possible between the Penguin and the scene of her crime.
Harman presently joined him on the bridge.
Said Harman: “Well, this is a rum joke, ain’t it, Captain? ’Pears to me it’s the rummest joke ever I seen. We’ve took the ship, and we’ve took the owners—and how about our bonuses and pay?”
“We’ll have to take the bonuses out of the first Dutchman we can lay hands on,” said the Captain. “We’ll never get a cent from Wolff and Shiner. Their game is up. If I can lay alongside of a German trader—and there are plenty in these waters—I’ll take all she’s got.”
“And suppose they show fight?” said Harman.
“Traders don’t fight—we have eight rifles—without ammunition, but that doesn’t matter, for we’d only be spoofing. The sight of the rifles is enough. Still, I wouldn’t mind fighting if we have to.”
“I heard a chap yarning once,” said Harman. “It was at a meetin’ a fellow give me a ticket for, and this chap was sayin’ there was no use in war; he was sayin’ no one was any the better off for war, and all suchlike. Well, it ’pears to me it’s a durned good thing, for you can go and rob the chaps that’s against you, and it’s all on the square. I’ve all my life been wantin’ to rob people open,” continued Mr. Harman, “not poor people, you understand, for there wouldn’t be no fun in that, and, besides, they have nothing worth takin’—but rich folk. Them’s the chaps. My idea would be to be goin’ round Nob Hill with a hand barrow and collecting jewelry, or callin’ at the Bank of California with a cart and a shovel. I never expected in my life I’d have a chance like this.”
“It’s not all too rosy,” said the Captain. “I’m not clear what a German cruiser could do to us if they found us skinning a German ship. I’ve heard that privateering is going to be allowed in the next war—which is this—but then we haven’t a letter of marque.”
“What’s that?”
“A license to rob. But, license or no license, we can’t pick and choose. We have to make good. We’re done out of our bonuses and our salary. D’ye think I’m going back to Frisco as poor as I left it, and maybe poorer? For I’ll tell you one thing, Billy Harman: What we’ve done to that cable is a penitentiary job to start with, and if it tricks America any over this war, supposing she takes a hand in it, it may mean a hanging job.”
“I wish you’d not go on talkin’ like that,” said Harman. “What on earth’s the use of going on talkin’ like that? Who’s to catch us?”
“I don’t know,” replied the Captain. “The only one thing I do know is the bedrock fact that our position couldn’t be worse than it is, and that we may as well play for as big a figure as possible. Between you and me, it’s just this—piracy pure and simple; that’s our game, under shelter of the pretence that we’re English and doing all in our power to help our native land; then if we are caught by an English ship with our holds full of boodle and our scuppers full of gold all we have to say is: ‘Please, sir, we have been fighting the Germans for the good of our native land.’”
“And suppose we are caught by a German ship?”
“Then it will be all the worse for us; but come along into the chart room, for I have an idea, and I want your opinion on it.”
They left the bridge, and went into the chart room, where the Captain, having closed the door, brought out a chart of the Pacific, placed it on the table, and sat down before it.
“Here we are,” said he, making a pencil mark on the spot. “And here,” making another mark, “lies Christobal.”
“Why, Christoval Island lies in the Solomons,” said Harman. “I’ve been there.”
“I said Christobal, not Christoval. This is a German island, and a pretty rich one, too. I know it, and cause I have to know it, for a chap there named Sprengel let me down badly once over a deal. I hope he’s there still. It’s a rich island, lots of copra and trade. I’m going there.”
“And what are you going to do there?” asked Harman.
“Well, you see,” said the Captain, “the place is only just a trading station; it’s not armed; there are only half a dozen whites, and—I’m going to take it.”
“Take it?”
“Hoist the Union Jack there, scoop all the boodle I can find, up anchor, and bunk for Valparaiso. That’s my idea.”
“Lord, that would be lovely!” said Harman. “But suppose they show any sort of fight?”
“Not they. We’ll rig up a dummy gun, and we can arm a landing party with these blessed old rifles and cutlasses there. But the dummy guns will do them. You see, they won’t know what to make of the cut of the Penguin. They’ll never have seen a cable ship, most likely. We’ll tell them we are a volunteer cruiser. Good name, that.”
A knock came to the door, and the bos’n appeared.
“Please, Captain,” said that individual, “them guys you’ve locked up in the after cabin are tryin’ to beat the door down and threat’nin’ to fire the ship.”
“I’ll come and attend to them,” said the Captain grimly. But first he went on the bridge and gave the helmsman the course for Christobal.
VI
THE CREW’S SHARE OF THE SPOILS
Next day they sighted a bark. She was English, and, to make up for his disappointment, the Captain had the pleasure of giving her news of war, and scaring her nearly to death with the false news of German cruisers in the vicinity.
The latter trick was played out of spite, owing to her refusal to relieve him of Wolff and Shiner—still in durance vile.
He had brought the Penguin to within megaphone distance of the bark—her name was the Anne Page—and when he made his request the answer came roaring back, quite definite:
“I won’t take no German prisoners. I’m full up with pigs and copra; there ain’t standin’ room scarcely as it is, and we’re short of water and grub.”
“I’ll supply you,” cried the Penguin. “Lower a boat and you’ll have what you want.”
The Anne Page seemed to meditate a moment, and then again came the response like that of a deaf man who has failed to catch the meaning of what is said to him:
“I won’t take no German prisoners. There ain’t no room for them. Why don’t you keep ’em yourself—you’re big enough?”
On that the Captain gave his news of the German cruisers, and the Anne Page picked up her skirts and scuttled.
But next day they had better luck. They picked up a real German schooner, captained by a real Simon-pure German skipper, and eight of the scallawags of the Penguin had their first exercise under arms.
The Penguin carried a whaleboat for beach work—Wolff had strongly resented the purchase of this boat, but the Captain had stood firm—and into it were bundled Wolff and Shiner, eight malefactors armed with cutlasses and rifles, followed by Blood himself.
The schooner—the Spreewald was her name—would have escaped, but there was only a five-knot breeze blowing, and the Penguin could make ten. There was also the threat of ramming. She let herself be boarded, received the declaration of war, and then submitted to be robbed.
The whole thing was shameful, and painfully like robbing a child of the milk it is carrying home. She was but a little ship, and the booty was trifling, some five hundred dollars, some barrels of Bismarck herrings, a dozen boxes of cigars, and a gold watch and chain. That is what Blood took from her. But she relieved him of the presence of Wolff and Shiner, and he reckoned that equal to a lot of plunder.
When they steered off they got five miles away before the Spreewald had fully recovered her senses from the outrage and pulled herself together. Then they saw her spreading her canvas and altering her course.
“She was bound for one of the English islands, I expect,” said Blood, “and now she’s nosing off for some German port of call. Well, I guess this is the first blood the English have drawn in these seas. I deserve a bonus on that.”
The money he had in his pocket, also the gold watch and chain; the Bismarck herrings had gone to the lazaret, and the cigars to the saloon.
He was turning with Harman to go down and enjoy one when a little man with a red head came aft, touching his cap.
“Please, sir,” said this individual, “I was sent by the crew to ax what their share in the liftin’ is to be.”
“Oh, you were, were you?” said the Captain. “And a very natural question, too. I’ll go forward and have a talk with them.”
He found the men clustered round the picking-up gear.
“You sent to ask me what your share in the findings would be,” said he, “so I thought I’d come and tell you by word of mouth. To begin with, what do you think yourselves on board of—a pirate? You’ll just understand one thing: this ship is acting on the square; it’s under command of a Britisher—that’s me—and whatever we take rightfully belongs to the British government. But I can promise you this: Your money you signed on for will be paid when we reach Valparaiso, one-third of all pickings will be divided among you, leaving two-thirds for Mr. Harman and me; and, after we coal at Valparaiso, I intend taking the hooker down to a port I know of and selling her. Half the money she brings will be divided among her crew, the other half between Mr. Harman and me.”
“And the British government?” asked the bos’n.
“I’ll settle with the British government,” replied the Captain, with a wink.
A roar of laughter went up.
The idea of doing the Germans and the British government at the same time appealed so much to these gentlemen that they forgot to consider over the terms for the division of the spoil or dispute them.
“And may I ax are we heading for Valparaiso now?” asked the red-headed man.
“No, we are not; we are heading for a little German island named Christobal.”
“And what are we goin’ to do there?” asked another of the crowd.
“We are going to collect all the money we can find for the British government.”
Another howl of laughter.
“And suppose, when we’re landed at this here island, a German ship comes along and asks us what we are doing?” spoke up a grumbler. “What’ll us say to that?”
“Why, we’ll say we’re picking mushrooms,” replied the Captain. “Any more inquiries? Well, then, you can get to work. See here! I want half a dozen chaps to help me rig up a dummy gun on the bow balks. A stovepipe is good, but we haven’t got one, so we must just use a big spar sawed down. There’s a spare yard will do. I’ll go and speak to Mr. Harman about it.”
He turned off, and in the alleyway he met MacBean looking more serious and like a Scotch terrier than ever—an Aberdeen. He had been listening to every word.
“Mon, mon,” said MacBean, “this is an awfu’ business. Fiddlin’ with the cable was bad, but this is shoockin’, rank piracy, call it what names you will, and that I did not sign for.”
“What made you sign on at all?” cried the Captain, flashing out.
“Drink,” replied Mac. “The same that made Harman and half the crew sign on. Mon, this is an unholy ship, a drunk ship that has to keep sober, goin’ about the ocean with hell in her heart; cable smashin’ and pirating under the cover of a devastating war—and sober all the time.”
“Jolly good job for you all you have to keep sober.”
“I was not thinkin’ of the goodness or the badness of the job,” said Mac. “It’s the heepocrisy gets me.”
“Well, if the Germans don’t get you as well you’ll be lucky,” replied the other, going aft.
He found Harman in the saloon sampling the cigars, and he gave him a sketch of what he had done and said to the crew.
“A lick of grey paint and an artificial bore, which you can burn out with a hot iron, and you can’t tell a spar end from the nose of a four-inch gun,” said he in conclusion.
“From the shore?” said Harman.
“Just so,” replied the Captain. “You didn’t fancy I was going to invite the blighters aboard to inspect our armaments, did you?”
VII
CHRISTOBAL
Christobal Island lay two days’ steaming away. It was a tiny place set all alone in the wastes of the sea.
There was only one trading station there, and it was run by a German on behalf of a German firm. This person’s name was Sprengel, and, to use the words that Blood applied to him some years before the date of this story, he had everything of the Red Indian about him except the gentleman.
Sprengel was a Prussian, close-clipped, clever, hard, and persistent as the east wind that blows over East Prussia in the spring. He had managed to keep other traders away from Christobal Island. Trade was his god; he had one ideal only—money, and, with the Teutonic passion for alien slang, he declared that in Christobal he was the only pebble on the beach.
The place, though German, was free to all men, absolutely free, yet Sprengel kept it absolutely German. No one could compete with him. Other traders had tried, but their business had wilted; antagonistic influences had worked mysteriously against them.
Blood had brought a cargo of trade here once for a friend. The friend, Samson by name, had put his all into a little schooner and a cargo of all sorts of “notions”—canned salmon, gin, tobacco, prints, knives, et cetera. He had taken Blood along as skipper. Bad luck had followed them to several islands, and here at Christobal had finished them. Blood rightly had put down their failure to Sprengel, and the glorious idea of getting even with Sprengel now haunted him so that he could not sleep.
His one dread was that Sprengel, having made his pile, might have gone back to Bromberg to enjoy it.
They had finished the “gun” next day, and mounted it on the bow, with a tarpaulin over the breech as if to protect it from the weather, when the Captain, who had been superintending the operations, coming aft, discovered Harman emerging from the saloon companionway in a high state of excitement.
“I’ve found it,” said Harman. “I knew it was there. I guessed the swine couldn’t have finished the lot, so I set up a hunt for it. Come you down and see.”
The Captain followed him below, and there, on the saloon table, he saw standing three bottles of Pilsener.
“Where did you get those?” said he.
“Get them! I got them out of the locker in Wolff’s cabin; hid away they were behind some old newspapers. I guessed the pair of those chaps hadn’t finished all the lush, and I hunted and hunted—first in Shiner’s locker, then under the mattress in his lower bunk. I looked into Wolff’s locker twiced, and saw nothin’ but newspapers, and still I kep’ on. I reckon I must have smelled the stuff to make me so persistent. Anyhow, I lit on the idea that the stuff might be hid behind the newspapers, and I went again, and there they were.”
“Fetch some glasses,” said the Captain.
Harman darted off, and returned with two glasses and a corkscrew.
The Captain took the corkscrew, placed a bottle between his knees, and was on the point of inserting the screw into the cork, when he paused, stood up, and replaced the bottle and corkscrew on the table.
“What’s the matter now?” asked Harman.
“An idea has struck me,” replied the Captain.
“What’s your idea?”
“We mustn’t drink this stuff.”
“Not drink it!” cried the outraged Harman. “And what on earth do you want it for if we ain’t to drink it?”
“Bait,” replied the other.
“Bait?”
“To catch Sprengel with. This is Lion brew Pilsener, and it’s a hundred to one, if he’s still on the island, he hasn’t any of this stuff with him. There’s no German born could withstand the temptation. It beats sausages.”
“Well,” said Harman, flying out like a child, “if I’d known you was going to collar the stuff like that I’d have drunk it before I called you. It ain’t fair. Here am I with my tongue hangin’ down to my heels for a drink, and there’s the stuff and the glasses and all. I’m not given to complain, but it’s too much. I’m speakin’ my mind now. It’s too much!”
“Can’t you understand that with this stuff I may be able to get the blighter on board,” said the Captain, “and if I once get him on board and down to this saloon the whole of the rest of the thing will be easy. If we try to rush the place with him on shore there may be blood spilled. With him a prisoner here there won’t be any resistance.
“I’ll take him those three bottles as a present, and then invite him on board with the promise of a case of it—d’ye see?”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Harman. “I’ll split the difference with you. Take him two bottles as a present, and we’ll drink the other.”
The Captain considered on this a moment, and then, fearing mutiny as well as having a thirst, he gave in.
It was his first drink for a long time, and it was excellent beer; the only drawback was the quantity.
“What I can’t see,” said Harman, finishing his portion of the liquid, “is what in the nation you want treatin’ the perisher to two bottles of this stuff; two bottles is too little to take ashore with you as a present, and it’s one too many if you’re just going to offer him a drink after he’s caught.”
The Captain joined issue, and the argument went on till thirst joined with Harman, and the Captain gave in. The second bottle was opened.
And now a strange thing happened. No sooner had the contents of the second bottle vanished than the Captain himself prepared to finish the business.
It was the Irishman coming out.
“There’s no use in one bottle,” said he, “and, for the matter of that, I can get him aboard on the promise of beer. How’s he to know there is none?”
Harman actually protested—feebly enough, it is true—yet he protested, holding out his glass at the same time. There was a Scotch strain in Harman.
When they had finished, they filled the bottles with water and recorked them.
“They’re just as good like that,” said the Captain, “for Sprengel.”
VIII
SPRENGEL
At seven o’clock next morning Christobal showed up on the far horizon, and by ten o’clock the Penguin was heading for the anchorage, with the Captain on the bridge and Harman beside him.
It was a lovely island.
A broken reef protected the beach from the full force of the sea, and the cliffs showed green with foliage and flecked at one point by the eternal smoke of a torrent. Beyond the beach a white frame house with a veranda showed, and on either side native houses nestled among the cocoanut trees and breadfruits. The faint wind blowing from landward brought the perfume of vanilla and flowers, coloured birds flew in the blue sky above the trees, while the tune of the blue sea beating on the reef came like the song of sleep and summer.
A sulphur-tinted butterfly flittered across the water on the wind, as if to inspect the ship, and flittered away again. On the beach could be seen several natives standing and watching their approach, motionless and seemingly incurious.
“It’s all deep water through the break and beyond,” said the Captain. “We don’t want any pilot.”
“There’s a chap come out on the veranda of the house,” said Harman.
The Captain picked up the glass he had been using, and turned it on the figure in the veranda.
“That’s him,” said he. “That’s the chap right enough. Take a look.”
Harman put the glass to his eye, and the veranda and the man leaped within ten feet of him.
The man was short, stout, bull-necked, bullet-headed, wearing a close, clipped beard and with his hair cut to the bone.
“He ain’t a beauty,” said Harman. “Look, he’s going into the house, and here he comes out again.”
Sprengel had brought out a pair of marine glasses and was observing the ship through them.
“Wonder if he recognises me,” said the Captain.
Then he stood silent, whistling now and then, and now and then giving an order to the fellow at the wheel.
One of the hands was heaving the lead; his hard, thin voice came up to the bridge in a snarl:
“Mark four! Mark four! Quarter less four!”
The Captain rang the engines to half speed, then to dead slow. The Penguin passed the opening in the reef. The water she rode on was like blue satin billowed under by wind; then, in the glassy smooth beyond, Harman, who was forward attending to the anchor, glancing over the side, saw the coral floor beneath them clearly as though he were looking at it through air.
The Captain rang the engines off, the wheel flew to starboard, and the rumble-tumble of the anchor chain through the hawse pipe came back in moist echoes from the woods and cliffs.
Then, the ship safely berthed, the Captain had time to turn his attention to the shore.
Sprengel had vanished into the house, and the few natives on the shore were still standing about in attitudes of indifference. One had taken his seat on the sand, and though there were several canoes on the beach there was no evidence of any thought of launching them.
“It’s a good job we scoffed that Pilsener,” said Harman, who had come up on the bridge. “It wouldn’t have been no use for this chap. You won’t get this chap on board without a windlass and a derrick. No, sir! He’s one of the retirin’ kind. He won’t trade, and he won’t be civil. I reckon you’d better get that spar gun trained on the beach and some of our chaps ready for a landin’ with the rifles, scoop all the money and valuables we can find, and cut stick.”
“I’ve been thinking so myself,” said the Captain. “There’s no use wasting time enticing this chap on board. Train the gun and get the landing party ready with rifles and cutlasses.”
He came down from the bridge, and went aft to his cabin to put on his best coat. When he came up again the whaleboat was lowered and the landing party getting into her.
They certainly were a most terrific-looking lot, and when the boat’s nose touched the sand and they scrambled out and lined up under the direction of Harman, the natives looking on lost their look of indifference, turned, and bolted for the woods.
“They don’t like the look of us,” said the Captain. “Now then, you chaps, no chasing them. You follow after me, and do what Mr. Harman bids you. Let one man of you disobey orders and he’ll have to settle with me.”
He produced a navy revolver from his pocket. It was the only serviceable weapon of the expedition, barring the cutlasses; they knew it, and they knew him, and they followed like lambs as he walked toward the house on whose veranda Sprengel had reappeared.
Ten yards away he ordered the others to halt, and advanced alone, putting the revolver back in his pocket.
Sprengel was in pajamas, and he had been perspiring with the heat; he was also in a bad temper and a bit frightened, all of which conditions did not add to the beauty of his appearance.
“Mr. Sprengel, I believe,” said the Captain, opening the business.
“That is my name,” replied the other. “And who are you, may I ask, and what is your ship doing here and these men?”
“We will go into the house and talk,” said the Captain, “if you will kindly lead the way. I am the Captain of a British auxiliary cruiser come to have a few words with you.”
He followed on the heels of Sprengel, who evidently had not recognised him in the least, into a large, airy room floored with native matting and furnished with American rockers, a bamboo couch, a table, and island headdresses and spears for wall decorations.
“You did not recognise me outside,” said the Captain. “Perhaps because I had my hat on. Do you not recognise me now?”
“Not from Adam,” replied Sprengel in a violent tone. “I only know that you have landed on my beach with armed men and that you had but till just now a pistol in your hand. Also, I recognise that your ship has a gun trained on my house. Are you aware that this is a German island?”
“That’s just the point, my dear man,” said the Captain, taking a seat unasked. “Are you aware that England is at war with Germany?”
“Eh, what!” said Sprengel, turning more fully on the other. “What you say? England at war with Germany!”
“England at war with Germany. Yes. That is what I said, and I have come to take your island in the name of the British government.”
Sprengel sat down in a chair and mopped himself. Sprengel had been practically monarch of Christobal for a long time.
And now the English had come.
It was an eventuality he had always feared, always reckoned with. He knew that war was in the air. He also knew international law, and he was not so much put out as might have been expected.
Indeed, he was frankly impudent.
“Well, I did not make the war,” said he. “I am an honest trader going about my business. If Christobal is English—well, it cannot be helped—till we take it back from England. I claim the rights of international law. My property is sacred.”
“International law, what is that?” asked Blood.
“Something you would not understand, but which your peddling government fears and respects. Something which they would like to put to one side, but which they cannot.”
“Oh, can’t they? Do you mean to imply that your property can’t be touched because of international law?”
“Ab-so-lutely.”
“We’ll soon see about that,” said Blood, “for I’ve come to take away every rag you’ve got and every penny. I’ll leave you, for you ain’t very good, and you can keep the house and the good will of the business, but I want your money.”
He stood up.
So did Sprengel. Say what we may about the Prussians, they are certainly plucky enough.
Threatened with spoliation, all the latent fury of the man flamed out and centred on Blood. He stood for a moment visibly swelling; then he charged.
Had that charge gone home it would have been the worse for the Captain. Instead of meeting it, however, he stepped aside; Sprengel met the wall, nearly bringing the house down, and Harman, who had been listening on the veranda, rushed in.
He had brought some signal halyard line with an eye for eventualities, and they bound the enemy without much trouble.
“Listen to him!” said Harman. “Listen to him chatterin’ about outrages to noncombatants. What are ye yourself but an outrage, you fat Proosian! Capt’in, lend me your wipe.”
The Captain handed over his handkerchief, and Harman, with suspicious dexterity, rolled it into a gag. “That’ll stop your tongue,” said he. “And now for the plunder.”
They found the safe where the unfortunate Sprengel kept his money. There were five thousand dollars there in silver and American gold coin, and a bank book showing a huge balance at a Berlin bank. Also securities for large amounts. They respected these, as they were useless, and took only the coin.
Then they went over the house and grounds adjoining, and the total loot tabulated roughly ran to:
The amount of coin already specified.
Five thousand cigars.
A suit of new pajamas and a safety razor in case.
A case of Florida water, six bottles of eau de Cologne, all the native headdresses adorning the sitting room.
A live parrot in a cage, half a dozen chickens, and half a boatload of vegetables.
It was not much, but it was all that they could lay hands on. Harman wanted to include a native girl who had come out from among the trees with a basket of fruit on her head, not knowing what was going on, but the Captain vetoed him. He only took the fruit.
Then they pushed off, having first ungagged their victim, unbound him, and locked him in the house.
“And the funny thing is,” said the Captain when they had gained the deck and the boat was being winched on board, “he never remembered me, and he doesn’t know yet who I am.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?” said Harman.
“I thought of it, and then I held my tongue. There might be a chance of him making mischief when the war is over if he knew my name.”
“But how in the nation could he make mischief?” said the simple-minded Harman. “Germany bust or England bust, it’s all the same. What you done was in war time, and so doesn’t count.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said the Captain. “I am not at all too sure of that. All that blab of Sprengel’s about the property of nonbelligerents may have something in it. I’m not sure that it mayn’t. It seems to me I’ve heard something about it before. Blast all nonbelligerents; there’s always some thorn in the rose.
“Then, leaving the question of nonbelligerents aside, we have to think of our own position. We haven’t a letter of marque, we have no more right to go hoofing about the seas gobbling German property than you have to go down Broadway lifting folk’s watches.”
“Well, what right have we to anything at all?” cut in the exasperated Harman. “Accordin’ to you, we haven’t the right to breathe nor live.”
“Well, it’s this way,” said Blood. “We have a perfect right to breathe and live as long as we can keep our necks out of the noose.”
“D’ye mean to say they’d hang us?”
“It’s highly probable. The Germans would, anyhow.”
Harman had been attending to the unloading of the boat all through this talk. He now went and spat over the side, and then came back to his companion.
“That’s cheerful,” said he.
“They might give you the choice of shooting instead of hanging,” went on the Captain. “For myself, I prefer hanging, I think, if it’s properly done.”
“Oh, Lord, no!” said Harman. “I’ve seen three fellows hanged, and I’ve swore I would never get hanged if I could help it. Give me shootin’, but shootin’ or hangin’ there’s one thing fixed.”
“And what’s that?”
“We’ve got the boodle. I ain’t one of your clever chaps, and I’ve no education to speak of, but I’ve noticed in life that the chaps who get on are the chaps who get a thing fixed and stand on it, same as a chap stands on a scaffolding and builds from it, same as a chap builds a house and doesn’t care a durn for the future.
“Now we’ve got the boodle fixed,” Mr. Harman went on, “there’s no use in bothering whether we’re to be shot or die natural in our bunks. We’ve gone a certain distance, and what I says is, now we’ve gone so far let’s go the whole hog. Let’s rob every one we can lay hands on. That’s my idea.”
“Germans, you mean?”
“I ain’t particular about Germans,” said Mr. Harman. “Anything with money to it is good enough for me, but if it eases your mind we’ll call ’em Germans.”
The Captain whistled for a moment over this broad plan. Then he went to superintend the fellows who were making ready to get the anchor in.
There were no capstan bars on board the Penguin; a steam winch did the business. He gave the signal for steam to be turned on, and then went up on the bridge.
The rattle and rasp of the winch pawls and the links of the anchor chain as it was hauled through the hawse pipe roused echoes from the shore. The gulls fishing on the little harbour made by the protecting reef rose, clamouring and beating their wings, and, as though the sound of the anchor chain had managed to free Sprengel, he appeared, having managed to work his way out of a window.
He came running down to the beach, shaking his fist and shouting till the Captain, more for the fun of the thing than any other reason, picked up a rifle and aimed it at him.
Then he turned and vanished into the woods.
The slack of the anchor chain was now in, and now the anchor itself left the water and was hoisted, dripping, to the catheads. The Captain rang on the engines, and the Penguin began to back out. She could have turned, but it was easier to back her out, especially as the sea was so smooth.
Outside the reef, as she slued round, she let go her siren.
Three times its echoes returned from the moist-throated woods and cliffs; then, full speed ahead, she went toward the east.
IX
THE “MINERVA”
Next morning early, Harman, standing on the bridge by the Captain, pointed to a smudge on the eastern horizon. The smoke of a steamer.
The Captain glanced at the spot indicated, shading his eyes with his hand; then he took the glass from its sling.
“I can’t make her clearly out,” said he. “The wind is covering her with her own smoke.”
“She’s maybe the mail boat that runs to Samoa,” said Harman, “or maybe she’s just a tramp. What are you goin’ to do?”
“How d’you mean?”
“Well, I mean just that. Are we goin’ to let her slip through our hands?”
“Harman,” said the Captain, “when I signed on for this cruise I knew I was going in for a shady job; still, there didn’t seem much to it, anyway. I knew Shiner was going to tinker up a cable, and I judged he was clever enough to pull the business through safely and give us all a big profit. Well, that scheme is all gone, and now I’m a bloody pirate, it seems. The war with Germany started me on the road, and there’s no use in crying out and saying, or pretending, we’re privateers. We aren’t; we’re pirates. That’s the long and the short of it. We aren’t making war on Germany; we are just collecting dibbs for ourselves. I’m not proud of it, not by a long way; but we’re in for it now and may as well make the most of it. You ask me what I am going to do with this vessel? Well, I’m going to go through her.”
“Good!” said Harman. “I’m not one for runnin’ extra risks, but we’ve risked so much already it’s a pity not to risk a bit more when we have the chance. For it’s not once in a lifetime a chance comes to sailormen like this.”
“I don’t suppose it is,” said Blood. “It’s not every day that chaps like Shiner and Wolff fit out a cable-cutting party and get information of war right first thing through the cut cable. Ah, the smoke’s clearing and her hull’s coming out; let’s see what she’s like.”
He put the glass to his eye and examined the distant ship; then as he looked he began to whistle.
“Well,” said he, taking the glass from his eye, “I reckon we won’t go through her—she’s a man-o’-war.”
“Whatcha say!” cried Harman, seizing the glass. He looked. Then he said:
“I reckon you’re right; she’s a fightin’ ship sure enough. I guess we’ll let her go this time, our armaments bein’ so unequal; she’s headin’ right for us, and if you ask for my advice I’d advise a shift of helm.”
“Yes,” said Blood, “and don’t you know that the first thing she’d do if we shifted our helm without a reason would be to come smelling round us? Don’t you know that a man-o’-war has no business to do at all but to look after other folk’s businesses? She’s not due to time anywhere; she’s got no cargo to deliver, no owners to grumble at her if she’s a day late. No, her business is to keep her eye out on the watch for shady people like you and me, and of course for the enemy if it’s war time. No, I reckon we’ll keep straight on, but there’s one thing we’ll do, and that is dismantle the spar gun. I reckon a dummy gun would be a difficult thing to explain away, and that, backed by the faces of our chaps and the fact that we haven’t a yard of cable in our tanks and no log except the one I faked up and forgot to keep to date more’n a week ago. Might get us into very serious trouble.”
“Is she a Britisher, do you think?” asked Harman, still ogling the approaching vessel through the glass.
“We’ll soon see,” replied the Captain.
He came down from the bridge, and hustled the fellows round, making them remove the dummy gun and place it down below on the cable deck.
Then he came back on to the bridge.
The stranger had ceased firing up, and had cleared herself of smoke. She was a cruiser right enough, one of the modern, swift, small-tonnage cruisers that can yet sink you with a broadside or cripple you most effectually with a bow chaser and from the distance of four miles.
Blood laughed as he looked at her.
“I expect she can do her twenty-five knots,” said he. “Piracy! Who could do anything with piracy these days between wireless and things like that. Harman, I guess I’m sick of this business and the uncertainty of it. I guess if this chap passes us and leaves us alone I’ll make tracks for home—which means Frisco. We can get rid of the Penguin somehow or ’nother and crawl up home through Central America. Crawl up home, those are my sentiments now, for I’ve got a feeling down my spine that this chap is going to stop and speak to us.”
“Why should she do that?” said Harman. “Wish you wouldn’t be drawin’ bad luck by prophesying it. Why in the nation should she stop a harmless cable ship?”
“Well, if she’s a German she’d stop us to see if we are English, and then sink us, and if she’s a Britisher she’d stop us to see if we were German. I wouldn’t mind in either case only for the Spreewald and Christobal Island and Wolff and Shiner. If the Germans were to take us, and Wolff and Shiner were to get news of our capture they’d make things pretty warm for us.”
“Let’s hope she’s a Britisher,” said Harman.
A mile off the stranger, who had obviously slackened speed, ported her helm slightly to give the Penguin a view of what she was saying.
She was saying, in the language of coloured flags:
“Lay to till I board you——”
“She doesn’t ask to be invited,” said Blood. “Run up the Stars and Stripes—thank God she’s English!—but then we’re German; at least we’re owned by Wolff and Shiner, and they’re German as sausages. Of course, they may have become naturalised Americans, but a British ship is not likely to go into the family history of Shiner or Wolff. Down with you, Harman, anyway, and get the ship’s papers together and have a box of cigars on the table for the chap that is sure to come aboard. And mind, you know nothing; pretend to be a bit silly, though that doesn’t need much pretence. Keep your mouth closed and refer everything to me. I guess this situation will require some fancy work in the way of lying.”
“I’ll be mum,” said Harman.
He slid down the bridge steps, and scuttered along the deck to the saloon companionway, while Blood, alone in his glory on the bridge, and trying to assume the dignity that he did not feel, gave his orders to the crew.
He rang the engines to half speed, and then to dead slow; then he rang them off, and the Penguin, whose heart had stopped beating, one might have fancied through fright, lay moving slightly to the swell and waiting for the attentions of the Minerva, for that was the stranger’s name.
She formed a pretty picture across the blue water despite her ugly colouring and her singular lines. One knows it to be bad taste to praise enthusiastically the new engines of warfare on land or sea. All the same, a twenty-five-knot cruiser, with her teeth showing, gives one a picture of power and speed combined hard to beat in the present, and perfectly unbeaten by the past.
Blood was not thinking things like this. He was taking the measure of the six-inch guns that seemed straining their long necks to get at him; also of the little guns that showed their fangs at all sorts of loopholes and unexpected places. He had never been so close up to the business side of a warship in all his sea experience, and he noticed everything with the freshness and the vividness and the deep, deep interest that objects assume for us when they suddenly become bound up with our most vital interests and our lives.
I can fancy Charles the First quite disregarding Bishop Juxon, the crowd, and all the great considerations that must have crowded about the scaffold erected in Whitehall; disregarding all these while he fixed his eyes on the axe with its handle of good English beachwood and its blade of British iron. That axe spoke to him if anything ever spoke to him, and it said, in words as well as deed: I am the symbol of the British people.
To Blood the Minerva was saying the same thing.
Blood was a Nationalist—when he had any politics at all—and maintained a sentimental dislike for Britannia. He really did not dislike her, but he fancied he did. In reality, he admired her. He admired her as a lady whom, to use his own language, you may belt about the head as much as you like, but who is sure to give you the knock-out blow in the long, long end.
The Minerva was one of the things she hit people with, and the weapon impressed him. The incongruity of the fact that he had been robbing Germans in the name of England did not strike him at all.
There are all sorts of subtleties in the Irish character that no foreigner, be he Englishman or German or Frenchman or Scot or Welshman, can understand.
Blood, then, though he had been out of Ireland long enough to lose his brogue almost entirely, though England had “betrayed his country in the past,” and had never done much for him in the present would, had he seen an English and a German ship in action, have joined in on the side of England. He had often abused England, yet at a pinch he would have fought for her.
That is the Irish attitude, and it is unalterable. Ireland is, as a matter of fact, bound to England in wedlock. John Bull married her forcibly a great many years ago, and treated her cruelly bad after the marriage. She is always flinging the fact at his head, and she will go on doing so till doomsday, but she is his wife, and no matter what she says she is always ready, at a pinch, to go for any stranger that interferes with him.
When Blood declared war against the Germans he did so in all good faith as an ally of England. Cold reflection, however, told him that England would certainly not recognise that alliance, nor would she recognise the Penguin as one of her fighting ships, official or unofficial, that with her peculiar ideas as to the rights of belligerents and nonbelligerents she might be as bad a party to be captured by as Germany.
He knew quite well now that between the Spreewald affair and the Sprengel business, to say nothing of the original cable-cutting adventure, he would have an exceedingly bad time were this cruiser to clap the shackles on him.
He watched her now as she dropped a boat; then he leaned over and shouted to Harman, who had come on deck again, to have the companionway lowered.
Then, as the boat came alongside, he came down from the bridge to meet his fate.
A young, fresh-looking individual came up the steps—a full lieutenant by his stripes—saluted the quarter-deck in a perfunctory manner, recognised Blood at once as the skipper, and addressed him without ceremony.
“What’s the name of your ship?” asked the lieutenant.
“The Penguin,” replied Blood.
“The deuce it is! Are you sure it’s not the Sea Horse?”
“The which horse?” inquired Blood, whose temper was beginning to rise.
It was his first experience of British navy ways with merchantmen, ways which are usually decided and heralded by language which is usually abrupt.
“Sea Horse—Sea Horse—ah!” His eye had fallen on a life buoy stamped with the word “Penguin.” “You are the Penguin. You will excuse me, but we were looking after something like you—a fifteen-hundred-ton grey-painted boat. The Sea Horse. Tramp steamer gone off her head and turned pirate, looted a German vessel under pretence that war had broken out between England and Germany.”
“Well, it wasn’t us,” laughed the Captain. “Couldn’t you see we were a cable ship by the gear on deck?”
“Yes, but the message came to us by wireless with bare details. What was your last port?”
“Christobal Island, quite close here—we have only left it a few hours, and by the same token there was news there that war had broken out between Germany and England.”
“How did they get it?”
“Well, the fellow there—Sprengel is his name—has a wireless installation, and he picked up a message some days ago.”
“He picked up a lie. It has been all over the Pacific, seems to me. There’s been a sort of dust-up over a place called Agadir, but there’s no small chance of war, worse luck. The business has been settled. We had the news only yesterday.”
No news could have been more dumfounding to the unfortunate Blood than this. The cable message that had so upset Shiner and Wolff had been some lying news-agency rumour. On the strength of it he had done all he had done. More than that was the mystery of the Sea Horse. What on earth did it mean? Had another ship gone pirating on the same rumour?
He managed, however, to keep a cheerful countenance and even to speak.
“Well,” said he, “I’m right glad to hear that. War may be all right for you, but it’s no good to our business.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is,” said the lieutenant. “Well, I suppose you are all right, but just as a matter of form I’ll have a glance at your log.”
“Of course,” said Blood, with death in his heart. “If you’ll come down to the saloon I’ll have the greatest pleasure in showing it to you.”
The lieutenant followed him below.
Harman had put out the log and the cigar box on the saloon table. The lieutenant refused a cigar, but showed interest at the sight of the log. He sat down and opened it.
“Why, good heavens,” said he, “you haven’t been writing it up for days and weeks! Where’s your first officer’s log?”
“Harman doesn’t keep one,” said Blood, whose anger was beginning to rise against the situation and his visitor.
“Who’s Harman?” inquired the other, his eyes running over the entries.
“My first officer.”
“Oh, doesn’t he? H’m—h’m! Most extraordinary—what’s this? ‘Reached the Spot.’ What spot?”
“The spot on the cable we were due to work on.”
“What cable?”
“You must ask the owners that. It’s private business.”
“Who are the owners?”
“Shiner & Wolff.”
“Where are they?”
Blood did not know where the precious pair might be at that moment, but he answered:
“Frisco.”
“Are they a cable company or simple cable repairers?”
“Repairers, I think.”
“Where are the rest of the ship’s papers?”
Blood tramped off to his cabin, and returned with a bundle of all sorts of documents.
“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I can’t go through them now. I must get back and report. I’ll take these with me for reference.” He bundled log and papers together and put them under his arm.
“Look here!” said Blood. “Are you taking those off the ship?”
“Only for reference,” replied the other. “They will be quite safe, and you can have them back when I have reported.”
“Very well,” said Blood.
“And now I’d just like to have a look round. Follow me, please.”
This was a new departure. A command. Blood followed, sick at heart, but cigar still in mouth.
The lieutenant evidently knew all about cable ships.
He stopped at the after-cable tank.
“Cable tank—how much have you on board?”
“Not an inch,” replied Blood.
“H’m! But you want some spare cable for mending purposes.”
“We used it all.”
The officer passed on through the square where the forward cable tank was situated, then down to the cable deck.
Here the first thing he spotted was the infernal spar gun.
He smelled round it, and inquired its use.
“I don’t know,” said Blood. “It was on the ship when I joined—some truck left over from the last voyage, I believe.”
This suddenly recalled the inquisitor to something he had forgotten—Blood’s Board of Trade certificates.
Blood produced them, having to go back to his own cabin for them. They told their tale of long unemployment.
The lieutenant was a gentleman, and having glanced them over returned them without comment. Then he left the ship with the log and the papers under his arm, and was rowed back to the Minerva.
“What’s up?” asked Harman.
“We are,” said Blood. “There’s no war; the whole thing was a lying rumour those two guys sucked in over the cable. There was a good chance of war, but it was patched up, and it’s now peace, perfect peace, with us perched on top of it like a pair of blame fools.” He told the whole tale that we know. Then suddenly light broke upon him.
“The Sea Horse,” said he. “I see the whole thing now—when we fired those two blighters off the ship and shoved them on the Spreewald it was their interest not to give the show away. We were nose on to the Spreewald, so she couldn’t see our name. Shiner and Wolff would be the last men to give their own names, considering what they’d been doing and the latitude they were found in. They’d be sure to pose as innocents taken off some other ship by us. They’d fake up a yarn, and they’d fake up a new name for the old Penguin.”
They had gone on to the bridge again and they were talking like this with an eye always upon the Minerva, that arbiter of their destinies.
“That’s easy enough to understand,” said Harman. “What gets me is how to understand our position. What the deuce did that scuffy want, cartin’ off the log and the ship’s papers for? Ain’t there no law to protect an innocent vessel bein’ manhandled by a durned British cruiser in times of peace? What’s to become of peaceful tradin’ if such things is allowed? Where’s the rights of neutrals if a monkey on a stick like that blue-an’-gold outrage on the name of a sailor can walk on board you an’ walk off with the log book in his pocket? That’s what I want to know. I’m not a man that wants much in this here world. I only wants justice.”
“Faith, and I think you are going to get it,” said the Captain. “Bare justice, as the little boy’s mother said when she let down his pants. I’m not saying I didn’t do most of the inciting to the piracy and plundering, but whether or no we are all in the soup, and the chap with the ladle is fishing for us, and there’s no use in bothering or laying blame—we’d have shared equally in the profits.”
“Oh, I’m makin’ no remarks,” said Harman. “I’m not the man to fling back at a pal, and I guess I can take the kicks just the same as the ha’pence, but you’ve a better headpiece than me, and what I say is, be on the lookout to get the weather gauge of these jokers so be it’s possible. You can do it if any man can—get out of the soup and be a pineapple.”
“Give us a chance,” said the Captain. “I’m not going to haul my colours down without a fight for it.”
They stood watching the Minerva. Men were cleaning brasswork on board of her, a squad of sailors were doing Swedish exercises; the ship’s work was going on as unconcernedly as though she were lying in harbour, and this vision of cold method and absolute indifference to all things but duty and routine did not uplift the hearts of the gazers.
“They’re stuffed with pride, those chaps,” said the single-minded Harman. “They potter about and potter about the seas with their noses in the air, lookin’ down at the likes of us who do all the work’s to be done in the world. And what do they do? Nothin’! They never carry an ounce of grain or a hoof or hide, or mend a cable or fetch a letter, and they looks down on us that do as dirt. You saw that josser in the brass-bound coat and the way he come aboard—they’re all alike.”
“She’s moving up to us,” said the Captain, suddenly changing his position. “She’s going to speak us.”
The Minerva, with a few languid flaps of her propeller, was indeed moving up to them. When she came ranging alongside, within megaphone distance, a thing—a midshipman, Blood said—speaking through a megaphone nearly as big as itself addressed the Penguin.
“Ship ahoy! You are to follow us down to Christobal Island.”
“Good Lord!” said Harman. The Captain said nothing, merely raising his hand to signify that he had understood.
“What’s your speed?” came again the voice through the megaphone.
The Captain seized the bridge megaphone.
“Ten knots,” he answered.
“Right!” came the reply. “Follow us at full speed.”
The blue water creamed at the Minerva’s forefoot as her speed developed. She drew away rapidly, and the Penguin slowly and sulkily began to move, making a huge circle to starboard.
When she got into line the Minerva was a good two miles ahead.
Said Harman, for the Captain was speechless:
“I call this playing it pretty low down. Jumping Jeehoshophat, but we’ll be had before Sprengel! He won’t rub his hands—oh, no! I guess he won’t rub his hands! And the old Penguin is going as if she liked it. Ain’t there no gunpowder aboard to blow a hole in her skin an’ sink her? And that durned British cruiser as tight fixed to us as though she was towing us with a forty-foot hawser. I reckon if I had some poison I’d pour it out and drink it. I would that! I feel that way low down I’d pour it out and drink it.”
“Oh, shut your head!” said the Captain. “You carry on like an old woman with the stomach ache. We’re caught and we’re being lugged along by the police officer, and there’s no use in clutching at the railings or making a disturbance. The one good thing is that we haven’t any of those chaps on board us, sitting with fixed bayonets on the saloon hatch and we in the saloon. The first thing to be done is to steal as much distance out of her as we can without her kicking.”
He went to the engine-room speaking tube:
“Below there, heave any muck you think likely to make smoke in the furnaces; there’s a lot of old rubber and canvas waste on the cable deck. I’ll tell Mr. Harman to have it sent down to you. I want to ’pear as if we were doin’ more than our best—yes, we’re caught and bein’ led to port, and we mean to have a try to get loose; keep a good head of steam, and keep your eye on the engine-room telegraph. I’ll be altering the speed now and then.”
He sent Harman to do what he said; then he stood watching the distant Minerva. She was now about two and a quarter miles ahead. The two vessels were going at about equal speed, with the balance perhaps in favour of the Minerva. He ordered the engines to half speed, and kept them so for a couple of minutes, then put them on to full speed again. The result of this proceeding was an almost imperceptible gain on the part of the cruiser.
In the next two hours, by the skilful use of this device, the distance between the two ships was increased to at least three and a half miles. Blood was content with that; so gradually had the increase been made that the Minerva, suspecting nothing, stood it, but Blood instinctively felt that she would not stand any more. The man had a keen psychological sense.
He was reckoning on a change of weather.
The wind had fallen absolutely dead, and the heat was terrific, simply because the air was charged with moisture. The captain knew these latitudes.
“I don’t see what you’re after,” said Harman, coming up on the bridge. “What’s the good of stealin’ a few cable len’ths out of her? We can’t get rid of her by day, for her guns can hit us at six miles, and if we made a show to bolt she’d turn and be on us like a cat pouncin’. She can do twenty-five knots to our twelve. Then at sundown she’s sure to close with us and keep us tied tight to her tail.”
“Maybe,” said the Captain.
He said nothing more.
An hour later he had his reward.
The horizon to westward and beyond the Minerva had become slightly indistinct; the horizon to eastward and behind them was still brilliant and hard.
He knew what was happening. A slight change of temperature was stealing from the west, precipitating the moisture as it came in the form of haze.
He put his hand on the lever of the telegraph and rang the engines off.
Harman said nothing. He went to the side and spat into the sea. Then he came back and stood watching.
“There’s nothing like haze to knock gun firing on the head,” said the Captain.
Harman said nothing, but moistened his lips. A minute passed, and then the Minerva, all at once, like a person showing the faintest sign of indecision, showed the faintest change in definition. The faint haze had touched her.
At the same moment the Captain rang up the engines, and ordered the helm to be put hard astarboard. The Penguin forged ahead, and began to turn.
“They’re so busy cleaning brasswork and saluting each other that they haven’t noticed Mr. Haze,” said the Captain. “They’re new to this station and don’t know that Mr. Fog is sure coming on her heels. Ah, she’s seen us, and she’s turning.”
The Minerva, in fact, had also put her helm hard astarboard.
She was making a half circle, and as small a half circle as she possibly could, but the Penguin had got a quarter circle start on her, and while the Minerva was still going about the Penguin was off.
If hares ever chased ducks this business might be compared to a lame duck being chased by a hare. The Minerva could steam ten miles to the Penguin’s five and over; her guns even now could have sunk the Penguin with ease, though they might not have made very good shooting, owing to the haze; that elusive, delusive haze.
“Below there,” cried the Captain through the engine-room speaking tube. “Shake yourself up, MacBean! Whack the engines up—give us fifteen or burst! What’s the matter? We’re being chased by that British cruiser, and it’s the penitentiary for the lot of us if we’re caught—that’s all.”
He turned, and at that moment the Minerva spoke.
A plume of smoke showed at her bow, there came a shrill, long-drawn “whoo-oooo” like a hysterical woman “going off” somewhere in the sky, then a jet of spume and a lather of foam in the sea two cable lengths to port.
It was a practice shell, and it left the water and made another plume a mile and a half ahead and yet another a mile beyond that.
It was her first and last useful word, for now the haze had her, destroying her for war purposes as efficiently as a bursting shell in her magazine.
The haze had also taken the Penguin; everything seemed clear all around, but all distant things had nearly vanished.
Another shell came whooing and whining from the spectred Minerva before the white Pacific fog blotted her out.
A faint wind was bringing it, less a wind than a travelling chillness, a fall of temperature, moving from east to west.
The Captain, having given his instructions to the helmsman, left the bridge, and went down below.
X
THE LAST OF THE “PENGUIN”
South of Chiloe Island, on the Chile coast, there lies a little harbour which shall be nameless.
Here, six days later, the Penguin was hurriedly coaling—on the Spreewald’s dollars.
It was at eight o’clock on a glorious and summerlike morning that she put out of this place with her bunkers only half full, her stores just rushed aboard cumbering the deck, and a man swung over the stern on a board, painting her name out above the thunder and pow-wow of the screw.
Blood would never have wasted paint and time in the attempt to alter the name of his ship had it been the English he dreaded now. As a matter of fact, word had come to the chief official at the little nameless port above indicated that the Germans were out looking for a fifteen-hundred-ton cable boat named the Penguin, grey-painted and captained by a master mariner named Michael Blood.
The bleating of the infernal Spreewald had been heard all over the Pacific. Sprengel’s bad language was following it. The Minerva had communicated by wireless with the German gunboat Blitz, lying at the German island of Savaii, in the Navigators. The Blitz had spoken to the cruiser Homburg, lying at Tongatabu; from Tongatabu it had been flashed to Fiji, and from there to Sydney. From Sydney it went to San Francisco, reaching the City of the Golden Gate in time for the morning newspapers; from there it passed in dots and dashes down the west American seaboard to Valparaiso and Valdivia.
Added to all the turmoil, the cable company whose cable had been broken smelled the truth and were howling for the Penguin’s blood.
Marconi waves from Valparaiso had found the German cruiser squadron far at sea, and they had started on the hunt.
This was the news that had come to the chief official at the little Chilean port, and which, being friendly toward Blood and unfriendly toward Germany, he communicated to the former. There was also the matter of a tip, which left the coffers of the Penguin completely empty after the account for coal, provisions, and harbour dues had also been settled.
“What’s the course?” asked Harman as the coast line faded behind them.
“Straight out to sea,” replied Blood. “Due west till we cut the track from Taliti to the Horn; then southeast for the Straits of Magellan. Ramirez is going to fake them with the news that we have gone north.”
“Why not go straight for the Straits down the coast instead of puttin’ out like this?”
“They’ll be hunting the coast; sure to send a ship south. They’ll never think of us going west; the last thing they’d think of.”
“Are you sure Ramirez is safe?”
“Oh, he’s safe enough. He hates the Germans, and he has taken my money. He’ll stick to his bargain. I wish we were as safe. Good Lord, every cent gone and nothing to show for it but this old hooker which we can’t sell, and the sure and certain prospect of the penitentiary if we don’t work a miracle—and even then we are lost dogs. Frisco is closed to us. We never can show our noses in Frisco again.”
“I wouldn’t have come on this cruise if I’d known things was goin’ to pan out like this,” said the ingenuous Harman. “No, indeedy! I’d have stuck to somethin’ more honest. What I want to know is this: What’s the use of war, anyway? When it has a chance of doin’ a man a good turn the blighted thing holds off, whereas if you and me had been runnin’ a peace concern it’s chances that it’d have come on. No, blamed if I don’t turn a Methodis’ passon if I ever get out o’ this benighted job. It’s crool hard to be choused like this by a cus’t underhand trick served on one just as a chance turns up to make a bit. Why couldn’t they have fought and been done with it? What’s the good of all them guns and cannons, and all them ships? What in the nation’s the good of them ships? Seems to me the only good of them is to go snuffin’ and smellin’ round the seas, pokin’ their guns into other folk’s affairs and spoilin’ their jobs. Well, there’s an end of it. I’m a peace party man now and forever more. Blest if it ain’t enough to make a man turn a Bible Christian!”
“You’d better go and see to the stowing of the stores,” said the Captain. “There’s no use in carrying on like that. I didn’t make war, or else I guess I’d have made it more limber on its legs. Come! Hurry up!”
They stood two days to the west, and then they turned to the south coast and made their dash for the Straits.
The weather had changed. It was steadily blowing up from the westward. The sea, under a dull sky, had turned to the colour of lead, and the heavy swell told of what was coming.
They had not sighted a ship since leaving the Chilean coast, but three days after altering their course the smoke of a steamer appeared, blown high by the wind and far to westward. The wind had scarcely increased in force, but the sea was tremendous and spoke of what was coming.
The Captain, on the bridge, stood with a glass to his eye, trying to make out the stranger. He succeeded, and then, without comment, handed the glass to Harman.
Harman, steadying himself against the rolling and pitching of the ship, looked.
A waste of tempestuous water leaped at him through the glass, and then, bursting a wave top to foam with her bows, grey as the seas she rode came a ship of war.
A cruiser, with guns nosing at the sky as if sniffing after the traces of the Penguin. She was coming bow on, and now, falling a point or two, her fore funnel seemed to broaden out and break up. It was the three funnels showing, now en masse and now individually. Then, as she came to again, the three funnels became one.
“She’s a three-funnel German,” said Harman, “and she has spotted us.”
Even as he spoke the wind suddenly increased in violence.
“I’m not bothering about her much,” said the Captain. “I’m bothering about what’s in front of us.”
“Whacher mean?”
“Mean! Look at the sea and the stuff that’s coming. Could we put the ship about in this sea? No, we couldn’t. You know very well the old rolling log would turn turtle. Well, what’s before us? A lee shore. If we don’t reach the opening of the Straits of Magellan before sundown we’re dead men all. Germans! I wish I were safe in the hold of a good German ship.”
The truth of his words burst upon Harman. There are no lights at the entrance of the Magellan Straits; the entrance is not broad; to hit it in the darkness would be next door to impossible, and not to hit it would be certain death.
It was impossible to put the ship about. Harman’s extraordinary mind did not seem much upset at the discovery.
“D’ye think we’ll do it?” asked he.
“I don’t know,” said the Captain. “We may and we mayn’t. You see, we haven’t a patent log. I haven’t had a sight of the sun for two days. I can’t figure things to a nicety. But if I had ten patent logs I wouldn’t use them now. I’d be afraid to—what would be the good? Mac is whacking up the engines for all they’re worth.”
“Well, maybe we’ll do it,” said Harman, applying his eye again to the glass. Then: “She’s going about.”
The Captain took the glass.
The cruiser was turning from her prey before it was too late. It was a terrific spectacle, and once the Captain thought she was gone. The foam was bursting as high as her fighting tops and the grey water pouring in tons over her decks.
Yet she did it, and the last Blood saw of her was the kick of her propellers through sheets of foam.
At four o’clock that day they knew that they could not do it. There was no grog on board, so they were having a cup of tea in the saloon. The Captain sat at the head of the table, before the tin teapot and a plate of fancy biscuits.
The Captain and Harman were the only two men on board with a knowledge of what was coming.
“Another lump of sugar in mine,” said Harman. “I don’t hold with tea; I never did hold with tea. The only thing that can be said for it is it’s a drink. And how some of them blighters ashore lives suckin’ it day and night gets me.”
He was drinking out of his saucer.
“Oh, tea’s all right. I reckon tea’s all right,” said the Captain in an absent-minded manner.
“Maybe it is, but give me a hot whisky and you may take your tea to them that like it,” replied Harman.
He lit his pipe and went on deck. The Captain followed. They could not keep away from the fascination up above.
The bos’n was on the bridge, and they relieved him.
Not a sign of land was in sight, and the sea was running higher than ever.
“You see,” said the Captain, “we can’t make it. It’ll be sundown in an hour. We’ll strike the coast some time after dark, and God have mercy on our souls.”
“You ain’t tellin’ the hands?” said Harman.
“No use tellin’ them. I told Mac, so that he might get the best out of the engines.”
“And there’s no bit of use gettin’ out life belts,” said Harman. “I know this coast; rocks as big as churches an’ cliffs that nuthin’ but flies could crawl up; and b’sides which if a chap found himself ashore he’d either starve or be et by niggers. They’re the curiosest chaps, those blighters down here. I guess the A’mighty spoiled them in the bakin’ and shoved them down here by the Horn to hide them from sight. Wonder what Wolff and Shiner is doin’ by this?”
“God knows!” said the Captain.
The darkness fell without a sight of the land, and, leaving the bos’n on the bridge, they came down for a while to the engineroom for a warm. Mac just inquired if there was any sight of land, and said nothing more.
The engines were no longer being pressed, and they smoked and watched the projection and retraction of the piston rods, the revolution of the cranks, and all the labours of this mighty organism so soon to be pounded and ground to death on the hard rocks ahead.
It was toward midnight that the coast spoke, so that all men could hear on board the Penguin.
Its voice came through the yelling blackness of the night like the roar of a railway train in the distance.
The crew were gathered aft and in the alleyways, for all forward of the bridge the decks were swept. Harman and the Captain were on the bridge.
Mac had the word to give her every ounce of steam he could get out of the boilers, in the desperate idea that the harder she was pressed the higher she might be driven on the rocks, and the tighter she might stick.
The roaring of the breakers seemed now all around them, and the Captain and Harman were clinging to the bridge rails, bracing themselves for the coming shock, when—just as a curtain is drawn aside in a theatre—the rushing clouds drew away from the moon.
The white, placid full moon whose light showed the foam-dashed coast to either side of them, and right ahead clear water.
They had struck the Magellan Straits by some miracle, just as the bullet strikes the bull’s-eye of a target, and right to port they saw a great white ghost rising in the moonlight and falling again to the sea.
It was the foam breaking on the Westminster Hall.
It was breaking three hundred feet high, and Harman, as he was hurled along to the safety of the Straits, caught a glimpse of the great rock itself after a wave had fallen from it, glistening in the moonlight desolately, as slated roofs glisten after rain.
That was a sight which no man, having once seen, could ever forget.
I met Blood last year. He was exceedingly prosperous, or seemed so. He told me this story, and I have so mixed names and places that he himself would scarcely recognise the chief actor, much less his enemies. As to the fate of the Penguin, I could only get him to say that she “went down” somewhere south of Rio, but that all hands were saved. Harman, he said, had turned religious.
PART II
THE “HEART OF IRELAND”
THE “HEART OF IRELAND”
I
THE CAPTAIN GETS A SHIP
After the Penguin job, Captain Blood and Billy Harman, that simple sailorman, had come back to Frisco, the very port of all others one might fancy they would have avoided, but Billy had been a power in Frisco, and, reckoning on his power, he had taken the Captain back with him.
“There’s no call to be afraid,” said Billy; “there was more in that job than the likes of us. Why, they’d pay us money to tuck us away. Whatser use freezin’ round N’ York or Boston? There’s nothin’ to be done on the Eastern side. Frisco’s warm.”
“Damn warm!” put in the Captain.
“Maybe; but there’s ropes there I can pull an’ make bells ring. Clancy and Rafferty and all that crowd are with me, and we’ve done nothin’. Why, we’re plaster saints to the chaps that are walkin’ round in Frisco with cable watch chains across their weskits.”
They came back, and Billy Harman proved to be right. No one molested them. San Francisco was heaving in the throes of an election, and people had no time to bother about such small fry as the Captain and his companion, while, owing to the good offices of the Clancys and Raffertys, Billy managed to pick up a little money here and there and to assist his friend in doing likewise.
Then things began to get slack, and to-day, as bright a morning as ever broke on the Pacific coast, the Captain, down on his luck and without even the price of a drink, was hanging about a wharf near the China docks waiting for his companion.
He took his seat on a mooring bitt, and, lighting a pipe, began to review the situation. Gulls were flitting across the blue water, whipped by the westerly wind blowing in from the Golden Gate, a Chinese shrimp boat with huge lugsail bellying to the breeze was blundering along for the upper bay, crossing the bows of a Stockton river boat and threatening it with destruction; pleasure yachts, burly tugs, and a great four-master just coming in with the salt of Cape Horn on her sun-blistered sides—all these made a picture bright and moving as the morning.
It depressed the Captain.
Business and pleasure have little appeal to a man who has no business and no money for pleasure. We all have our haunting terrors, and the Captain, who feared nothing in an ordinary way, had his. When in extremely low water, he was always haunted by the dread of dying without a penny in his pocket. To be found dead with empty pockets was the last indignity. His Irish pride revolted at the thought, and he was turning it over in his mind now as he sat watching the shipping.
Then he caught a glimpse of a figure advancing toward him along the quay side.
It was Mr. Harman.
“So there you are,” said he, as he drew up to the Captain. “I been lookin’ for you all along the wharf.”
“Any news?” asked the Captain.
Mr. Harman took a pipe from his pocket, and explored the empty bowl with his little finger; then, leaning against the mooring bitt, he cut some tobacco up, filled the pipe, and lit it. Only when the pipe was alight did he seem to hear the Captain’s question.
“That depends,” said he. “I don’t know how you’re feelin’, but my feelin’ is to get out of here, and get out quick.”
“There’s not much news in that,” said Blood. “I’ve had it in my head for days. What’s the use of talking? There’s only one way out of Frisco for you or me, and that’s by way of a fo’c’s’le, and that’s a way I’m not going to take.”
“Maybe,” said Harman, “you’ll let me say my say before putting your hoof in my mouth. News—I should think I had news. Now, by any chance did you ever sight the Channel Islands down the coast there lying off Santa Barbara? First you come to the San Lucas Islands, then you come to Santa Catalina, a big brute of an island she is, same longitude as Los Angeles; then away out from Santa Catalina you have San Nicolas.”
“No, I’ve never struck them,” replied Blood. “What’s the matter with them?”
“The Chinese go there huntin’ for abalone shells,” went on Harman, disregarding the question. “I’m aimin’ at a teeny yellow bit of an island away to the north of the San Lucas, a place you could cover with your hat, a place no one ever goes to.”
“Well?”
“Well, there’s twenty thousand dollars in gold coin lyin’ there ready to be took away. Only this morning news came in that one of the See-Yup-See liners—you know them rotten old tubs, China owned, out of Canton, in the chow an’ coffin trade—well, one of them things is gone ashore on San Juan, that’s the name of the island. Swept clean, she was, and hove on the rocks, and every man drowned but two Chinee who got away on a raf’. I had the news from Clancy. The wreck’s to be sold, and Clancy says the opinion is she’s not worth two dollars, seein’ the chances are the sea’s broke her up by this. Well, now look here, I know San Juan, intimate, and I know a vessel, once ashore there, won’t break up to the sea in a hurry by the nature of the coast. There’s some coasts will spew a wreck off in ten minutes, and some’ll stick to their goods till there’s nuthin’ left but the starnpost and the ribs. It’s shelvin’ water there and rocks that hold like shark’s teeth. The Yan-Shan—that’s her name—will hold till the last trumpet if she’s hove up proper, which, by all accounts, she is, and there’s twenty thousand dollars aboard her.”
“Well?” said Blood.
“Well, if we could crawl down there—you an’ me—we’d put our claws on that twenty thousand.”
“How in the nation are you going to rig out a wrecking expedition on two cents, and suppose you could buy the wreck for two dollars—where’s your two dollars?”
“I’m not goin’ to buy no wrecks,” replied Harman, “nor fit out no wreckin’ expeditions. What I want is something small and easy handled—no steam, get her out and blow down on the northwest trades, raise San Juan and the Yan-Shan, lift the dollars, and blow off with them. Why, it’s as easy as walkin’ about in your slippers!”
The Captain sighed.
“As easy as getting into the penitentiary,” said he. “First of all, you’d have to steal a boat, and Frisco is no port to steal boats in; second, there’s such things as telegraphs and cables. You ought to know that after the Penguin job. Then if we were caught, as we would be, you’d have the old Penguin rising like a hurricane on us. She’s forgotten now, I know, but once a chap gets in trouble everything that’s forgotten wakes up and shouts.”
“Maybe,” said Harman, “and maybe I’d be such a fool as to go stealin’ boats. I’m not goin’ to steal no boats. But I’m goin’ to do this thing somehow, and once I set my mind on a job I does it. You mark me. I’m fair drove crazy to get out of here and be after somethin’ with money on the end of it, and once I’m like that and sets my think tank boilin’, there’s fish to fry. You leave it to me. I ain’t no fool to be gettin’ into penitentiaries. Well, let’s get a move on; there’s nothin’ like movin’ about to keep one’s ideas jumpin’.”
They walked along the wharf, stepping over mooring hawsers, and pausing now and then to inspect the shipping. There is no port in the world to equal San Francisco in variety and charm. Here, above all other places, the truth is borne in on one that trade, that much abused and seemingly prosaic word, is in reality another name for romance. Here at Frisco all the winds of the world blow in ships whose voyages are stories. Freighters with China mud still clinging to their anchor flukes, junks calling up the lights and gongs of the Canton River, schooners from the islands, whalers from the sulphur-bottom grounds, grain ships from half the world away, the spirit of trade hauls them all in through the Golden Gate, and, over and beyond these, the bay itself has its romance in the ships that never leave it—junks and shrimp boats, the boats of Greek fishermen, yachts, and all sorts of steam craft engaged on a hundred businesses from Suisun Bay to the Guadeloupe River.
Wandering along, Blood and his companion came to Rafferty’s Wharf. Rafferty’s Wharf is a bit of the past, a mooring place for old ships condemned and waiting the breaking yards. It has escaped harbour boards and fires and earthquakes, healthy trade never comes there, and very strange deals have been completed in its dubious precincts over ships passed as seaworthy yet held together, as Harman was explaining now to Blood, “by the pitch in their seams mostly.”
As they came along a man who was crossing the gangway from the tank saw Harman and hailed him.
“It’s Jack Bone,” said Harman to Blood. “Walk along and I’ll meet you in a minute.”
Blood did as he was directed, and Harman halted at the gangway.
“You’re the man I want,” said Bone. “Who’s your friend?”
“Oh, just a chap,” replied Harman. “What’s up now?”
Bone took him by the arm, and led him along in an opposite direction to that in which Blood was going. Bone was the landlord of the Fore and Aft Tavern, half tavern, half sailors’ boarding house, situated right on Rafferty’s Wharf and with a stairway down to the water from the back premises. His face, to use Harman’s description of it, was one grog blossom, and what he did not know of wicked wharfside ways could scarcely be called knowledge.
“Ginnell is layin’ about, lookin’ for two hands,” said Bone. “He’s due out this evenin’, and it’s five dollars apiece for you if you can lay your claws on what he wants. Whites, they must be whites; you know Ginnell.”
Harman did.
Ginnell owned a fifty-foot schooner engaged sometimes in the shark-fishing trade, sometimes in other businesses of a more shady description. He had a Chinese crew, and, though the customhouse laws of San Francisco demanded only one white officer on a Chinese-manned boat, Ginnell always made a point of carrying two men of his own colour with him.
Being known as a hard man all along the wharfside, he sometimes found a difficulty in supplying himself with hands.
“Yes, I know Ginnell,” replied Harman. “Him and his old shark boat by repitation. I’ve stood near the chap in bars now and again, but I don’t call to mind speakin’ to him. His repitation is pretty noisy.”
“Well, I can’t help that,” said Bone. “I didn’t make the chap nor his repitation; if he had a better one, I guess ten dollars wouldn’t be lyin’ your way.”
“Nor twenty dollars yours,” laughed Harman.
“That’s my business,” said Bone. “The question is, do you take on the job? I’d do it all myself only there’s such a want of sailormen on the front. It’s those durned Bands of Hope and Sailors’ Rests that sucks ’em in, fills ’em with bilge in the way of tracks and ginger beer, and turns ’em out onfit for any job onless it’s got a silver-plated handle to it. Mouth organs an’ the New Jerusalem is all they cares for onct them wharf missionaries gets a holt on them. I tell you, Billy Harman, if they don’t get up some by-law to stop these chaps propagatin’ their gospels and spoilin’ trade, the likes of me and you will be ruined—that’s a fac’. Well, what do you say?”
All the time Mr. Bone was holding forth, Harman, who had struck an idea, was deep in meditation. The question roused him.
“If Ginnell wants two chaps,” said he, “I believe I can fit him with them. Anyhow, where’s he to be found?”
“He’ll be at my place at three o’clock,” said Bone, “and I’ve promised to find the goods for him by that.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Harman, “I’ll find the chaps and have them at your place haff past three or so; you can leave it safe in my hands.”
“You speak as if you was certain.”
“And certain I am. I’ve got the chaps you want.”
“Now look here,” said Bone, “don’t you take on the job unless you’re more than sure. Ginnell isn’t no boob to play up and down with; he’d set in, mostlike, to wreck the bar if he thought I was playin’ cross with him.”
“Don’t fret,” said Harman. “I’ll be there, and now fork out a dollar advance, for I’ll have some treatin’ to do.”
Bone produced the money. It changed hands, and he departed, while Harman pursued his way along the wharf toward his friend.
Blood was sitting on an empty crate.
“Well,” said he, as the other drew up, “what business?”
Harman told every word of his conversation with Bone, and, without any addition to it, waited for the other to speak.
“Well, you’ve got the dollar,” said Blood at last, “and there’s some satisfaction in that. I’m not the chap to take five cents off a chap by false pretenses same’s you’ve done with Bone, but Bone’s not a man by all accounts; he’s a crimp in man’s clothes, and if all the old whalemen he’s filled with balloon juice and sent to perdition could rise up and shout, I reckon his name’d be known in two hemispheres.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Harman. “What was that you were saying about false pretenses? I haven’t used no false pretenses. They ain’t things I’m in the habit of usin’ between man and man.”
“Well, what have you been using? You told me a moment ago you’d agreed to furnish two hands to this chap’s order for five dollars apiece and a dollar advance.”
“So I have.”
“And where’s your hands?”
“I’ve got them.”
“In your pocket?”
“Oh, close up!” said Harman. “I never did see such a chap as you for wearin’ blinkers; can’t you see the end of your nose in front of you? Well, if you can’t, I can. However, I’ll tell you the whole of the business later when I’ve turned it round some more in my head. What I’m after now is grub. Here’s a dollar, and I’m off to Billy Sheehan’s; you come along with me—a dollar’s enough for two—and you can raise your objections after you’ve got a beefsteak inside of you. Maybe you’ll see clearer then.”
The Captain said no more, but followed Harman. Far better educated than the latter, he had come to recognise that Harman, despite his real and childlike simplicity in various ways, had a mind quicker than most men’s. He would often have gone without a meal during that wandering partnership which had lasted for nearly a year but for Harman’s ingenuity and power of resource.
At Sheehan’s they had good beefsteak and real coffee.
“Now,” said Harman, when they had finished, “if you’re ready to listen to reason, I’ll tell you the lay I’m on. Ginnell wants two hands. I’m goin’ to offer myself for one, and you are goin’ to be the other.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Blood. “You mean to say I’m to sign on in that chap’s shark boat. Is that your meaning?”
“I said nuthin’ about signin’ on in shark boats. I said we two has got to get out of here in Ginnell’s tub. Once outside the Gate we’re all right.”
“I see,” said Blood. “We’re to scupper Ginnell and take the boat—and how about the penitentiary?”
“I’m blest if you haven’t got penitentiaries on the brain,” said Harman. “If you leave this thing to me, I’ll fix it so that there’ll be no penitentiaries in the business. Of course if we were to go into such a fool’s job as you’re thinkin’ about, we’d lay ourselves under the law right smart. No, the game I’m after is deeper than that, and it’s Ginnell I’m goin’ to lay under the law. Now I’ve got to run about and do things an’ see people. I’ll leave you here, and here’s a quarter, and don’t you spend it till the time comes. Now you listen to me. Wait about till haff past three, and at haff past three punctual you turn into the Fore and Aft and walk up to the bar and lay your quarter down and call for a drink. You’ll see me there, and if I nod to you, you just nod to me. Then I’ll have a word in private with you.”
“Is that all?” said the Captain.
“That’s all for the present,” said Harman, rising up. “You’ll be there?”
“Yes, I’ll be there,” said Blood, “though I’m blest if I can see your meaning.”
“You will soon,” replied the other, and, paying the score, off he went.
He turned from the wharves up an alley, and then into a fairly respectable street of small houses. Pausing before one of these, he knocked at the door, which was opened almost immediately by a big, blue-eyed, sun-burned, good-natured-looking man some thirty years of age and attired as to the upper part of him in a blue woollen jersey.
This was Captain Mike, of the Fish Patrol.
“Billy Harman!” said Captain Mike. “Come in.”
“No time,” said Harman. “I’ve just called to say a word. I wants you to do me a favour.”
“And what’s the favour?” asked the Captain.
“Oh, nothin’ much. D’you know Ginnell?”
“Pat Ginnell?”
“That’s him.”
“Well, I should think I did know the swab. Why, he’s in with all the Greeks, and there’s not a dog’s trick played in the bay he hasn’t his thumb in. Him and his old shark boat. Whatcher want me to do with him?”
“Nothin’,” replied Harman, “and maybe a lot. I want you just to drop into the Fore and Aft and sit and smoke your pipe at haff past three. Then when I give you the wink you’ll pretend to fall asleep. I just wants you as a witness.”
“What’s the game?” asked Captain Mike.
Harman told.
Had you been watching the two men from a distance, you might have fancied that there was a great joke between them from the laughter of Captain Mike and the way in which Harman was slapping his thigh. Then the door closed, and Harman went off, steering north through a maze of streets till he reached his lodgings.
Here he packed a few things in a bundle and had an interview with his landlady, a motherly woman whose income was derived from a washtub and two furnished bedrooms.
Among the other belongings which he took with him was a box of quinine tabloids. These he placed in the pocket of his coat, and, with the bundle under his arm, departed.
It was five minutes past three when he entered the dirty doggery misnamed the Fore and Aft, and there before the bar behind which Bone was serving drinks stood Ginnell.
Pat Ginnell, to give him his full name, was an Irishman of the sure-fwhat type, who might have been a bricklayer but for his decent clothes and sea air and the big blue anchor tattooed on the back of his left hand. There was no one else in the bar.
“Here’s the gentleman,” said Bone, when he sighted Harman. “Up to time and with the goods to deliver, I dare say. Harman, this is the Captain; where’s the hands?”
“Well,” said Harman, leaning his elbows on the bar, “I believe I’ve got them. One of them’s meself.”
“D’you mean to say you’re up to sign on with me?” asked Ginnell.
“That’s my meanin’,” said Harman.
Ginnell looked at Bone. Then he spoke.
“It won’t do,” said he. “I know you be name, Mr. Harman; you’re in with Clancy and that crowd, and my boat’s too rough for the likes of you.”
“You needn’t fear about that,” said Harman. “I’ve done with Clancy. What I’ve got to do is get out of Frisco and get out quick. The cops are after me; there you have it. I’ve got to get out of here before night—do you take me—and I’m so pressed to get out sudden I’ll take your word for ten dollars a month without any signin’.”
Ginnell’s brow cleared.
“What are you havin’?” said he.
“I’ll take a drink of whisky,” replied Harman.
The bargain was concluded.
“And how,” said Ginnell, “what about the other chap?”
Harman wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I’ve made an arrangement with a chap to meet me here,” said he. “He’ll be in in a minute.”
“What’s he like?” asked Ginnell.
“Like? Why, I’ll tell you what he’s like; he wouldn’t sign on in your tub for a hundred dollars a month.”
“Faith and you’re a nice sort of chap,” said Ginnell. “Is it playin’ the fool with me you are?”
By way of reply Harman took the box of quinine tabloids from his pocket, opened it, showed the contents, and winked.
Bone and Ginnell understood at once.
“One of those in his drink will lay him out for an hour,” said Harman, “without hurtin’ him. Put one in your weskit pocket, Bone—and how about your boat?”
“She’s down below at the stairs,” replied the landlord, putting the tabloid in his waistcoat pocket. “I’ll go and call Jim to get her ready—a moment, gentlemen.” He vanished into a back room, and they heard him shouting orders to Jim; then he returned, and as he passed behind the bar who should enter but Captain Mike!
The Captain walked to the bar, called for a drink, and without as much as a glance at the others took it to a seat in a far corner, where he lit a pipe. Several wharf habitués loafed in, and soon the place became hazy with tobacco smoke and horrible with the smell of rank cigars.
“Well,” said Ginnell, “where’s your man? I’m thinkin’ he’s given you the slip, and be the powers, Mr. Harman, if he has, it’ll be the worst for you.”
The brute in Ginnell spoke in his growl, and Harman was turning over in his mind the fate of any unfortunate who had Ginnell for boss when the swing door opened and Blood appeared.
“That’s him,” said Harman. “You leave him to me.”
Blood was not the sort of man to frequent a hole like the Fore and Aft, and he frankly spat when he came in. He was in a temper, or rather the beginning of a temper, and Harman seemed to have some difficulty in soothing him. They had a confabulation together near the corner where Captain Mike, his glass and pipe on the table before him, was sitting, evidently asleep, and then Blood, seeming to agree with some matter under discussion, allowed himself to be led to the bar.
“This is me friend, Captain Ginnell,” said Harman. “Captain, this is me friend, Michael Blood. Looking for a ship he is.”
“I can’t offer him a ship,” said Ginnell, “but I can offer him a drink. What are you takin’, sir?”
Blood called for a whisky.
The quinine tabloid popped into the bottom of the glass by Bone dissolved almost immediately, nor did Blood show that he detected the presence in his drink. He loathed quinine, and this forced dose added to the flood of his steadily rising temper without, however, interfering with his powers of self-control.
He was a good actor, and the way he clutched at the bar ledge shortly after he had finished his drink left nothing to be desired.
“Let him lay down,” said Harman.
“I can’t leave the bar,” said Bone, “but if the gentleman cares to lay down in my back room he’s welcome.”
Blood, allowing himself to be conducted to this resting place, Ginnell followed without drawing the attention of the others in the bar.
Arrived in the back room, Blood collapsed on an old couch by the window, and, lying there with his eyes shut, he heard the rest.
He heard the whispered consultation between Harman and the other, the trapdoor being opened, Jim, the boatman, being called. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder and Ginnell’s voice adjuring him to rouse up a bit and come along for a sail.
Helped on either side by the conspirators, he allowed himself to be led to the trapdoor.
“We’ll never get him down them steps,” said Harman, alluding to the stairs leading down to where the boat was swaying on the green water that was swishing and swashing against the rotten piles of the wharf.
“This is the way it’s done,” said Ginnell, and, twitching Blood’s feet from under him, he sent him down the stairway like a bag of meal to where Jim was waiting to receive him.
At half past six o’clock that day the Heart of Ireland—that was the name of Ginnell’s boat—passed the tumble of the bar and took the swell of the Pacific like a duck.
Ginnell, giving the wheel over to one of the Chinese crew, glanced to windward, glanced back at the coast, where Tamalpais stood cloud-wrapped and gilded by the evening sun, and then turned to the companionway leading down to the hole of a cabin where they had deposited their shanghaied man.
“I’m goin’ to rouse that swab up,” he said; “he ought to be recovered by this.”
“Go easy with him,” said Harman.
“I’ll be as gentle with him as a mother,” replied the skipper of the Heart of Ireland, with a ferocious grin.
Harman watched the unfortunate man descending. He had got shoulder deep down the ladder when he suddenly vanished as if snatched below, and his shout of astonishment and the crash of his fall came up simultaneously to the listener at the hatch.
Then came the sounds of the fight. Harman had seen Blood fighting once, and he had no fear at all for him. If he feared for any one, it was Ginnell, who was crying now for mercy and apparently receiving none. Then of a sudden came silence, and Harman slipped down the ladder.
Blood, during his incarceration, had ransacked the cabin and secured the Captain’s revolver. He was seated now, revolver in hand, on Ginnell’s chest, and Ginnell was lying on the cabin floor without a kick or an ounce of fight in him.
“You haven’t killed him?” asked Harman.
“I don’t know,” replied Blood. “Speak up, you swab, and answer! Are you dead or not?”
“Faith, I don’t know,” groaned the unfortunate. “I’m near done. What are you up to? What game is this you’re playin’ on me? Is it murder or what?”
“Let me talk to him,” said Harman. “Pat Ginnell, you’ve doped and shanghaied a man—meanin’ my friend, Captain Blood—and I’ve got all the evidence and witnesses. Captain Mike, of the Fish Patrol, is one; he came to the Fore and Aft be request and saw the whole game. That means the penitentiary for you if we split. You’ll say I provided the dope. Who’s to prove it? When I told you the cops were after me I told a lie. Who’s to prove it? I wanted you and your old tub, and I’ve got ’em. Say a word against me and see what Clancy will do to you. You shanghaied me friend, and now you’re shanghaied yourself in your own ship, and you’ll never dare to have the law on us because, d’you see, we’ve got the law on you. The Captain there has got your revolver, the coolies on deck don’t care, they never even turned a hair when they heard you shoutin’. Now my question is, do you intend to take it quiet, or would you sooner be hove overboard?”
“Faith and there’s no use in kicking,” replied the owner of the Heart of Ireland. “I gives in.”
“Then up on your feet!” said Blood, rising and putting the revolver in his pocket. “And up on deck with you! You’re one of the hands now, and if you ever want to see Frisco again, you’ll take my orders and take them smart. You’ll berth aft with us, but your rating is cabin boy, and your pay. Up with you!”
Ginnell went up the ladder, and the others followed.
Ginnell showed to the light of day two black eyes and the marks on his chin of the frightful uppercut that had closed the fight.
He looked like a beaten dog as Blood called the crew, in order to pick watches with Harman.
“I take the chap that’s steering,” said Blood.
“And I takes Pat Ginnell,” said Harman.
They finished the business, and dismissed the hands, who seemed to see nothing strange in the recent occurrence among the whites, and who were thronging now to the fo’c’s’le for their supper, their faces all wearing the same Chinese expression, the expression of men who know everything, of men who know nothing.
Then, having set a course for the San Lucas Islands, and while Ginnell was washing himself below, Blood, with his companion, leaned on the rail and looked at the far-away coast dying out in the dusk.
“Seems strange it was only this mornin’ I projected gettin’ out like this,” said Harman, “and here we are out, with twenty thousand dollars ahead of us, if the Yan-Shan hasn’t broke up, which she hasn’t. ’Pears to me it was worth a dose of quinine to do the job so neat with no bones broke and no fear of the law at the end of it.”
“Maybe,” said the Captain.
He whistled softly to the accompaniment of the slashing of the bow wash, looking over toward the almost vanished coast, above which, in the pansy blue of the evening sky, stars were now showing like points of silver.