“Salt mines.”
Mr. Harman meditated for a moment. “Well,” said he at last, “I reckon I’ll take my chance on the Kanakas.”
The Douro had nothing about her of any use for navigation but the rudder and the compass in the binnacle and the tell-tale compass fixed in the roof of the saloon. Pereira, when he had baited her as a trap for the unfortunates to run away with, had left nothing of value. He and the beauties working with him reckoned to get her back, no doubt, as Davis had indicated, but they knew that the fox sometimes manages to escape, carrying the trap with him, so they left nothing to grieve about except the hull, sticks, strings, canvas, bunk bedding and a few tin plates and cooking implements.
So she was sailing pretty blind with nothing to smell at but the North Pole, to use Davis’ words as he spat over the side at the leaping blue sea, while Harman, leaning beside him on the rail, concurred.
The one bright spot in the whole position was the seventeen hundred dollars or so of the Araya’s ship money still safe in Davis’ pocket.
It proved its worth some six days later when, close on the San Francisco-Montevideo mail line, they flagged a big freighter and got provisions enough to last them for a month, then, “more feeling than feet under them,” to use Harman’s expression, they pushed along, protected by the gods of Marco Polo, and the early navigators, untrusting in a compass that might be untrustable through blazing days and nights of stars, smoking—they had got tobacco from the freighter—yarning, lazing and putting their faith in luck.
“Anyhow,” said the philosophic Harman, “we ain’t got no dam chronometer to be slippin’ cogs or goin’ wrong, nor no glass to be floppin’ about and frightenin’ a chap’s gizzard out of him with indications of cyclones and such, nor no charts to be thumbin’, nor no sextan’ to be squintin’ at the sun with. I tell you, Bud, I ain’t never felt freer than this. I reckon it’s the same with money. Come to think of it, money’s no catch, when all’s said and done with, what between banks bustin’ and sharks laying for a chap, not to speak of women and sich, and sore heads an’ brown tongues in the morning. Money buys trouble, that’s all I’ve ever seen of it, and it’s the same all through.”
“Well, that wasn’t your song on the beach at Papaleete,” said Davis, “and seems to me you weren’t backward in making a grab for that gold at Buenodiaz.”
“Maybe I wasn’t,” replied the other, and the conversation wilted while on the tepid wind from the dark-blue sea came the sound of the bow wash answered by the lazy creak of block and cordage.
No longer steering west, but northward towards the line, the Douro brought them nights of more velvety darkness and more tremendous stars, seas more impossibly blue, till, one dawn that looked like a flock of red flamingoes escaping across an horizon of boiling gold, Bud, on the look-out, cried “Land!” and the great sun leaping up astern stripped the curtain away with a laugh and showed them coco-nut trees beyond a broken sea, and beyond the coco-nut trees a misty blue stillness incredibly wonderful and beautiful, till, in a flash, vagueness vanishing, a great lagoon blazed out, with the gulls circling above it, gold and rose and marble-flake white.