THEY had left Cancer far behind, they had rejected Hank’s first idea of steering out towards Honolulu and then making aboard for ’Frisco, they were taking the shortest way possible home, shaving the Channel Islands and almost careless about being stopped. They wanted to finish the voyage as quickly as possible. Candon there in the foc’sle made his presence felt right through the ship. It was as though he had died and his ghost were haunting them. He never spoke unless in reply to orders. He seemed living in a world of his own, a silent secretive world where emotions were not. They began to appreciate the fact that they had shipped in San Francisco, not an ordinary sailor man with blue eyes, but a personality absolutely outside the ambit of ordinary experience.
“It’s getting on my spine,” said Hank one day, as he sat in the fusty cabin smoking with George. “The man seems gone dead, no shame or nothing, just as if he’d never seen us before; unless he gets an order, and then he jumps to it.”
“It’s got on T. C.’s spine, too,” said George. “Damn him, she’s not the same. I see her staring in front of her sometimes as if she was looking at ghosts. She never laughs and she’s off her feed.”
“He’s worse than a cargo of skeletons,” said Hank, “and I’ve noticed T. C. I’m not thinking any more of her, Bud, in that way, but it gets me to see her crumpled. What are women made of, anyhow? Seems to me if they once get gone on a man they go clean mushy for good—and such a man! Why, I heard Jake joshing him in the foc’sle only yesterday—Jake—and he took it like a lamb. Gets me.”
He got up and took some little photographs from a locker. They had salved George’s kodak and developer from the Wear Jack, and Hank, just before starting, had taken half a dozen snaps of the Jack lying piled on the rocks. He had done this for no sentimental reasons, but as evidence whereby Tyrebuck could collect his insurance money. He looked at them now with glowing satisfaction. They were the only bright spots in this new business.
“Well,” said he, “there’s one thing. I won’t have to pay Tyrebuck his ten thousand. Luck’s been playing pretty dirty tricks on us, but she’s let up for once, unless she piles us same as she did the Jack.”
Keeping as they were, well to outward of the longitude of Guadeloupe, there was little fear of them hitting anything except a derelict. They passed and were passed by vessels, tanks and great four-masters, battered by Cape Horn or making south to meet him. The traffic has increased now-a-days in the waters between Panama and San Francisco; it has decreased between Panama and the Horn, and is decreasing. The Horn, that frightful criminal standing there facing the ceaseless march of the mountainous waves, and countered by the canal, has come to recognise the hatred of man. Day by day the ships that pass him grow fewer, till a day may come when they cease, leaving him in loneliness forever.
On the day that they passed the latitude of Santa Catalina Island out of sight far to starboard, an incident occurred.
Hank had already noticed the attitude of Jake towards Candon. Jake had evidently been putting two and two together, and arriving at conclusions not far wrong. The attitude of the after-guard towards B. C. completed the matter.