“Well,” said Davis, “you needn’t shout it. You were in it as well as me. I guess we were both fools, but we haven’t come off empty-handed—we’ve got a ship under our feet, though we’re in a bad way, I’ll admit. Can’t you see the game that’s been played on us? This hooker is worth four thousand dollars any day in the week; they’ve let us run off with her, they set her as a trap for us, but they’ll want her back. If we put into any Chile port, we’ll be nabbed and put to work in the salt mines while these blighters will get their ship back.”
“Sure,” said Harman, “but we ain’t goin’ to.”
“How d’ye mean?”
“We ain’t goin’ to put into no Chile port.” Davis sighed, rose, went below and fetched up the top of one of the gold-boxes, then with a stump of pencil he drew a rough map of South America, indicating the appalling coast-line of Chile while the ingenuous Harman looked on open-mouthed and open-eyed.
“There you are,” said the map-maker, “a hundred thousand miles long and nothing but seaboard and there we are—nothing but the Horn to the south and Bolivia to the north, and the Bolivians are hand in fist with the Chilians, and, moreover, there’s sure to be gunboats out to look for us. That’s why I’m holding on west. We’ve got to get to sea and trust in Providence.”
“Well,” said the disgusted Harman, “I reckon if Providence is our stand-by and if it made Chile same’s your map shows her, we’re done for. There ain’t no sense in it; no, sir, there ain’t no sense in a country all foreshore stringed out like that, with scarce room for a bathin’ machine, and them yellow-bellied Bolivians at one end of it and the Horn at the other. It ain’t playin’ it fair on a man, it ain’t more nor less than a trap, that’s what I call it, it ain’t more nor less than——”
“Oh, shut up,” said Davis, “wasting your wind. We’re in it and we’ve got to get out. Now I’ve just given you our position: we’re running near due west into open sea, with only ten days’ grub, nothing to strike but Easter Island and the mail line from ’Frisco to Montevideo. We’ve the chance to pick up grub from a ship; failing that, either we’ll eat the Kanakas or the Kanakas will eat us. I’m not being funny. How do you take it? Shall us hold on or push down to Valparaiso and take our gruel?”
“What did you say those mines were?” asked Harman.
“Which mines?”
“Those mines the Chile blighters put chaps like us to work in.”