CHAPTER XII: UNCLE TOBY IS OFF FOR TREASURE.
“What happened? Where am I?�
Jack asked the questions in a bewildered voice the next morning. His head throbbed cruelly, and placing his hand to his forehead he found that it was enveloped in bandages. Then he looked about him. He lay in a neat white cot in a beautifully clean room.
A young woman whom he knew was a nurse, by her uniform, bent over him.
“Hush! Do not excite yourself. Here comes the doctor.�
A tall man, with spectacles, entered the room. He regarded Jack with satisfaction.
“Just as I said, only a flesh wound,� he said, after he had removed the bandages, “it is getting on nicely. In a few days you will be up.�
“In a few days!� gasped Jack, “but my ship will have sailed by then.�
“That is all right. Her owners have been communicated with and you will go home as a passenger on a liner owned by them. That will be after you have given your deposition against the man Alvarez, in a court of law. He is a prisoner and is also in the hospital. He was slightly hurt when the port was blown out by the force of the explosion and was found unconscious when rescuers reached the scene. He thought he was going to die and has made a full confession.�
“I don’t understand,� said Jack, in a puzzled way, “Alvarez, that’s the sailor who was going to kill Captain Briggs. I punched him.�
“Yes; and in revenge the man, with fiendish ingenuity, connected the current from your wireless key with a bomb that he placed under the wireless table. It was lucky he placed the infernal machine under the table, otherwise you might have been killed. As it is, you have got off with a flesh wound inflicted by a bit of flying metal.�
Jack lay in the hospital three days more. Then he appeared in a Rotterdam court and gave his account of the affair. The confession of Alvarez clinched the matter and the murderous Spaniard received a heavy sentence. A week later Jack found himself a passenger, “an idler,� he called it, on board the United States liner New Hampshire, bound for New York.
He struck up a friendship with the wireless man and spent most of the time in his cabin.
But he was glad when at last the shores of Staten Island slipped by as the New Hampshire came up the harbor of New York and the tall buildings and web-like fabric of the Brooklyn Bridge came into view.
Jack was no sooner ashore than he started off for the Erie Basin, where lay the old Venus, Uncle Toby Ready’s floating home. The recollection of his uncle’s strange letter was still strong in his mind. He wanted to get to Uncle Toby at once and dissuade him from rushing into any rash scheme. All the way over in the trolley car he had an odd presentiment in his mind that all was not well.
His uneasy feeling was increased when, having alighted from the car, he paced quickly along the docks. No smoke was curling from the stove pipe of the Venus’s cabin as he neared that venerable derelict. This in itself was unusual, for Uncle Toby was almost always to be found brewing his strange concoctions of herbs and plants over the small ship’s stove.
Jack hastened across the gang-plank leading on board the aged schooner that had sailed her last voyage many years before and now served as a floating home.
“Uncle Toby!� he hailed, “Uncle Toby!�
But no answer came to Jack’s loud hails. They only echoed among the other battered old derelicts lying at the rotting wharves in that part of the Erie Basin.
A sickening fear suddenly overwhelmed him as he gazed along the silent decks and at the empty window boxes which usually, at this time of the year, were abloom with tulips of Uncle Toby’s planting.
Could his uncle be dead?
But just at that moment he noticed on the door of the companionway, which led below to the living quarters, a square bit of paper. It was nailed there with enormous nails as if whoever had put it up was determined that it shouldn’t come down in a hurry.
In the hope that it might throw some light on the mystery, Jack hastened to scrutinize it. It was covered with writing in Uncle Toby’s rough and ready fist which looked as if an exploratory crab might have tumbled into some black mud and then performed various athletic feats on a sheet of paper.
The notice,—for such it was plainly intended to be, read as follows:
“To hoome it may consarn: Notice, Captain Toby Ready,—Doctor of Herbs,—has gone on a cruise fer plesure and proffit. Neffew Jack will please see Captain Dennis for partiklars.â€�
At the bottom of this strange scrawl was the following verse, Cap’n Toby being ever fond of a bit of rhyme to adorn his conversation or his literary efforts.
“My name is Toby Ready, as I sail;
My name is Toby Ready, as I sail,
I’ll get dollars manifold,
And riches unkontrold;
I’ll buy Brooklyn when it’s sold;
As I sail.�
“Great gracious,� gasped Jack, as he concluded this effort which he recognized as being Cap’n Toby’s version of the song of Captain Kidd, “my uncle must have gone crazy. Whoever heard of such a thing. Off on a treasure hunt at his age, and with a wooden leg. Well, I guess the only thing for me to do is to see Captain Dennis at once. It may not be too late to stop this insane trip, wherever it is to.�
The young wireless man was given a warm greeting at Captain Dennis’s cozy home in Greenwich Village that evening by the captain’s pretty daughter, Helen. Jack found her just as charming as ever and was not sorry when she informed him that the captain would not be back from his work on the docks for an hour or more. Helen was all sympathy about Jack’s wound, the scar of which still showed. They had read all about it in the papers, she said, with a pretty blush. It only seemed a few minutes to Jack, instead of the hour and a half it actually was, before Captain Dennis came in. He greeted Jack heartily but would not hear of discussing Uncle Toby’s strange freak till after supper. Then, when he had lit his pipe, he told Jack what he knew of the matter.
It appeared, according to what Captain Dennis knew, that soon after Jack had sailed on the Cambodian, a battered old mariner appeared at the Venus and asked for Captain Toby. This was the Captain Walters referred to in the strange letter Jack had received in Rotterdam.
Captain Walters, so it seemed, was an old whaling captain who had known Captain Toby many years before. He had been shipwrecked in the Arctic on his last voyage and after incredible hardships at last got back to America. But he was a mere shell of a man who sought out Captain Toby to see if that veteran had any remedies that would make him a well man and fit him to make up an expedition for some vague treasure he knew of in the land of ice.
But all Captain Toby’s skill proved of no avail, and Captain Walters shortly set out on his last voyage. But before he died he confided to Uncle Toby full details of the location of the treasure and other important data. Armed with this, Captain Toby had succeeded in interesting a firm of capitalists in the venture, and a week before, on a trim schooner, with a picked crew, had sailed for the Arctic regions. That was all Captain Dennis knew, but that the ancient mariner appeared beside himself with dreams of wealth, and said that when he returned he would be a millionaire.
“And there you have the story, my boy,� said Captain Dennis, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, “and a more crack-brained, crazy cruise I never heard tell of, asking your pardon, because he’s your uncle.�
Jack engaged a cheap room for the remainder of his stay in New York, but he spent much of his time at the Dennis’s. One day on the street he encountered Travis, the operator on the ship on which he had voyaged home. Travis had much to tell him. The Cambodian had arrived a week late, after a desperate mutiny, in which Captain Briggs was almost mortally wounded.
Her entire crew was under arrest. But Travis had something else to say that interested Jack a great deal.
“See here,� said Jack’s friend, “you haven’t got another berth yet.�
Jack shock his head rather disconsolately.
“No, Mr. Jukes is away on a cruise on his yacht,� he said, “and down at the offices of the company I’ve got no pull.�
“Well, see here,� said Travis, slapping him on the back, “I know of a job that would just suit a fellow with your cut of jib. My brother is wireless man on the Thespis revenue cutter. She’s just been assigned to the iceberg patrol. Jim is going to get married, though, and can get leave of absence if he can furnish a substitute of the right sort. You could make the cruise, it wouldn’t last long, and be back in time to meet old Jukes when he returns. What do you say?�
“That it would be just the job for me—if I could land it!â€� cried Jack delightedly.
“No trouble about that,� declared Travis breezily. And so it proved. Jack was placed under a rather severe examination by the commander of the Thespis. But he came through with flying colors.
Another thing that gladdened him about his new job was that it would take him into the far regions of the north whither Uncle Toby, on his hare-brained treasure quest, had gone. Jack felt that he might get a chance to come in contact with his uncle. He had a vague feeling that all was not well. He had visited the offices of the firm that had financed Uncle Toby’s venture and did not much like what he saw there. He talked to a ferret faced man who told him that Mr. Rufus Terrill, a member of the firm, had gone along on the treasure hunting echoonet, as “our representative,� but from a passing glint in the man’s eyes Jack guessed that Mr. Rufus Terrill was on board to see that he and his partners got the lion’s share.
“Still,� the boy had mused, as he left the offices in a shabby building off Wall Street, “Uncle Toby must have pretty good proofs that he was on a legitimate venture or he wouldn’t have interested such sharp folks as Terrill & Co. What a queer thing it would be if, after all, he did come back rich. Well, stranger things have happened.�
A week after he “signed on� as wireless man, for the nonce, of the Thespis, the trig revenue cutter nosed out of New York harbor bound for the frozen north, there to patrol the margin of the giant wastes of ice till the danger of icebergs for the year was over.