“I couldn’t stand that. I’d had a touch of fever in Durban, and I was weak with hunger anyway, and the first thing I knew I was tumbling in a heap on the coal. Somebody threw a bucket of water over me, but it was no use. I couldn’t stagger, and they took me up and made a deck-hand of me.
“This suited me all right, and the fresh air soon fixed me up. I wouldn’t have minded the job at all, but for the mate. The crew were afraid of him as death. His name was Burke, Jim Burke; he was a big Irishman, with a fist like a ham, and he made that ship a hell. He nearly killed a man the first night I was on deck, and I’ve got some of his marks on me yet. The captain wasn’t so bad, but I didn’t see so much of him. I was in the mate’s watch,—worse luck!
“But all this time I didn’t forget that gold below, and I was trying to see through the mystery. But I couldn’t make any sense of it till I saw the passengers we had.
“There were four of them that I saw. Three of them I spotted at once as from Pretoria. I’d seen the office-holding Boer often enough to recognize him, and they always talked among themselves in the Taal. Two of them were native Boers, I was sure, but the third looked like some sort of German. Besides these fellows, there was a middle-aged Englishman that looked like a missionary, and I heard something of another man who never showed himself, but I didn’t pay any attention to any one but the Boers.
“Because when I saw them, I saw through the whole thing. The war was going well for the Boers just then, but there were plenty of them wise enough to see that they couldn’t fight England to a finish, and crooked enough to try to feather their nests while they had a chance. Pretoria was all disorganized with the war-fever; half the government was at the front, and I’d heard of the careless ways they handled the treasury at the best of times.”
“You were right,” said Elliott. “I happen to know something about it.” And he imparted to Bennett the story of the official plundering which the mine superintendent in the Rand had written to him.
“Well, I thought that must have been it,” went on Bennett. “I wondered if the officers of the steamer knew the gold was there, but I didn’t think so. I was sure they didn’t,—not if the Boer was as ‘slim’ as he ought to be. I wouldn’t have trusted a box of cigars to that crowd.
“But all this detective work didn’t put me any forwarder, and the mate kept me from meditating too much. The boat was the worst old scow I ever saw. Twelve knots was about her best speed, and then we always expected the propeller to drop off, and she rolled like an empty barrel when there was the slightest sea. I’m no sailor, and that was the first time I’d ever bunked with the crew, but I could see easy enough that she was rotten.
“For the first few days the weather was pretty fair, but on the fourth after I came on deck it turned rougher. There wasn’t very much wind, but a heavy swell, as if there was a big gale somewhere out in the Indian Ocean. It was the sixth day from port, and I reckoned that we must be getting pretty well through the Mozambique Channel.
“It came on cloudy that evening, and when I came on deck it was dark as pitch and raining hard. There was a light, cool south wind with a tremendous black swell. The big oily rollers hoisted her so that the screw was racing half the time, and every little while she’d take it green, with an awful crash. Everybody was in oilskins but me, and I hadn’t any.