In the steerer of that little schooner he had seen the sister of the woman to whom he had once been affianced, who had discarded him for another man, who had driven him from a sedate English life to be a wanderer and a vagabond upon the face of the earth. His roamings had begun and continued only because the image of this one woman had refused to leave his thoughts; and the half-sarcastic nickname of “The Great Traveler” had been gained without any seeking on his part.
Five long desperate years had passed since the blow fell upon him, and time was doing its work. He had begun to forget her; to promise himself that, this present enterprise accomplished, he would eliminate the past, and lead a different and cleaner life; and yet, here, on the most unlikely corner of God’s earth, her sister passed like a stage figure before his eyes—the sister from whom she was never parted.
The shock came upon him as a thunderbolt from a blue sky. He had fancied her to be in England, Europe, Australia—anywhere but here. In his weak state the surprise was too great. Again the gush of the waters thundered in his ear; again the light faded from his eyes; and this time he dived into blank unconsciousness.
CHAPTER XIV.
A PIRATES’ HARBOR.
Windless swell and a burning sky. Ahead, broken palings of mop-headed tree-trunks growing straight across the sea; on one beam, scattered patches of white, where the surf crumbled over hidden coral reef; on the other, the bright blue water of the Mexican Gulf, with its yellow floating tangles of weed. A steamer lunging through the rollers at a small six knots.
On her decks was visible one man, and one alone, and he was on the upper bridge, with his fists on the spokes of the steam steering-wheel. He was swaying with weariness, his eyes were dull and leaden, his cheeks were of an unwholesome yellow, because the tan would not let them turn pale white. Yet his task was one which put to the strain every piece of his alertness. He was taking a steamer drawing nineteen feet through a channel of whose very existence no man on earth besides himself had ever guessed; and already he was deep in sea-territory which the charts of 1893 still mark as “unsurveyed.” He had vaguely found the channel some months before in an open boat, and written cross compass-bearings on the back of a crumpled envelope. These he carried in his head now, and used as the sea-marks closed; but they were a frail reed for much dependence.
For such work a leadsman is an absolute necessity; and on board the Port Edes a leadsman was an absolute impossibility. The remaining two of her manning were working as ten men to keep up any head of steam for her engines. And so Patrick Onslow took his soundings with eye and nostrils, as do some of the more ancient of the coaster folk; and instinct did not, upon the whole, serve him badly. Twice he scoured the steamer’s bottom plates over branching coral plants, which broke away with clattering jars, and let her through to deeper water ahead; and once he ran upon a tail of white sand, which pinned her just forward of ’midships. But he rang off the engines, waited till the scream of the escape-pipe showed a full head of steam, and then on a flowing tide put her full speed astern, and slid clear.
The skipper in the stokehold below waxed blasphemous at the man who had “got the shore on board;” but he did not cease from shoveling coals; neither did the big donkeyman, save at those moments when the clang of the telegraph-bell called him to stand by the throttle or reversing gear in the engine-room.