Welsh Rarebit Tales

by Harle Oren Cummins

The trips were to last one month, the “Lawless” merely getting into mid ocean and steaming slowly down to the Gulf of Mexico, remaining there until the month was up, when the passengers, saturated with vice and steeped in corruption, were to be returned to the place of starting. The crew was cut down to as small a number as possible, and consisted mostly of the riffraff to be found about the wharves of any large seaport city.

There was nothing about the scheme which could be punished by the laws of any country, nevertheless the arrangements were kept as quiet as possible, and nothing found its way into the papers.

On the night of June 16, 1885, the “Lawless,” as the boat was very appropriately rechristened, steamed away from New York. The passengers had begun to arrive in the evening as soon as it became dark, and at 12.30 every one who had engaged passage was on board. There was no one down to the pier to speed the departing voyager, or to wish him good luck. The sinister expedition set out without as much as the wave of a handkerchief from shore. She was a little longer in getting under way than had been anticipated, but at two o’clock in the morning of the seventeenth, the “Lawless” was well out to sea, and the great hull, which up till then, save for a few lights about deck, had been kept dark, burst suddenly into light. Down in the hold a big Westinghouse generator was whirling away, and, at a word from the captain, fifteen hundred electric lights were suddenly switched into circuit and the “Lawless” was on full blast. The limit was reached, and the ship had come to her own.

There was one flaw, however, in the scheme of the Palace of Sin. That flaw was Pierre Planchette, first assistant engineer. Like most of the lower officers, he had been hired without knowing the object of the voyage, thinking that the “Lawless” was merely bound on a pleasure cruise in southern waters. He had just come from the Bellevue hospital, where he had been dangerously sick with brain fever, and he was still far from recovered, but hearing of the position and the high pay that went with it, he had left the hospital against the orders of the house physician. The man who had been originally hired for assistant having disappointed Jenifer Vass, the patient, with traces of the fever still upon him, was engaged on the very day of departure.

When, therefore, the three-mile limit was passed, and the hell up on deck broke out, Pierre Planchette turned to his chief for explanation of the sounds of revelry floating down below decks. “You don’t mean to say you don’t know the object of this ship?” asked the chief. “Why, the ‘Lawless’ is a floating hell. For the next thirty days every form of vice known to the civilized world will be going on up above there. There’s five hundred men and three hundred women in this gilded shell whose only object in life for one month will be to commit acts which on shore would be punished by fines and imprisonment.”

Without a word the assistant left the chief engineer, and seeking out the captain, demanded to be put on shore.

“You’ve signed with us for one month, and, by G—d, you’ll have to stay,” was all the answer he got from Jenifer Vass, to whom the captain sent him.

Then a strange thing happened. Into the disordered brain of the man, a short time before racked by fever, there came the thought that he had been chosen by God to be the instrument to punish the iniquity which had come to his knowledge.

He returned to the captain, and demanded a raise of fifteen dollars a month in his pay, claiming he did not know the kind of a job he was undertaking when he had signed. O, he was cunning, this fever stricken assistant engineer. He knew how to allay suspicion.

The raise of pay was granted, for Jenifer Vass did not like the look in the man’s eyes. Planchette went about his work, however, for the next few days quietly and apparently satisfied. And when by chance his duties took him up to where the painted women sang and gamed, and the drunken men made ribald jests, he only smiled strangely to himself and went on with his work. But he was busy all this time doing many things for which an assistant engineer is not usually paid to perform.