CHAPTER XV
THE BEACH
For a fortnight after they reached Vancouver Wyllard and Dampier were very busy. They had various difficulties to contend with, for while they would have preferred to slip away to sea as quietly as possible a British vessel’s movements are fenced about with many formalities, and they did not wish to ship a white man who could be dispensed with. Wyllard knew there were sailors and sealers in Vancouver and down Puget Sound who would have gone with him, but there was a certain probability of their discussing their exploits afterwards in the saloons ashore, which was about the last thing that he desired. It was essential that he should avoid notoriety as much as possible.
He had further trouble about obtaining provisions and general necessaries, for considerably more attention than the free-lance sealers cared about was being bestowed upon the North, and he did not desire to arouse the curiosity of the dealers as to why he was filling his lazaret up with Arctic stores. He obviated that difficulty by dividing his orders among all of them, and buying as little as possible. Dampier proved an adept at the difficult business, and eventually the schooner Selache, painted a pale green, crept out from the Narrows, at dusk one evening, under all plain sail, with her big main-boom making at least a fathom beyond her taffrail. On board were Wyllard, Dampier, and two other white men. A week later the Selache sailed into a deep, rock-walled inlet on the western coast of Vancouver Island. At the settlement the storekeeper made no difficulty about selling Wyllard all his flour and canned goods at higher figures than there was any probability of obtaining from the local ranchers.
The Selache slid down the inlet again, and lay for several days in a forest-shrouded arm near the mouth of it. When she once more dropped her anchor off a Siwash rancherie far up on the wild west coast, she was painted a dingy gray, and her sawn-off boom just topped her stern. One does not want a great main-boom in the northern seas, and a big mainsail needs men to handle it. Wyllard, however, shipped several sea-bred Indians who had made perilous voyages on the trail of the seal and halibut in open canoes. All of them had also sailed in sealing schooners. Their comrades sold him furs, and filled part of the hold with redwood billets and bark for the stove, for he had not considered it advisable to load too much Wellington coal.
Wyllard pushed out into the waste Pacific, and once when a beautiful big white mail boat reeled by him, driving with streaming bows into an easterly gale, he sent back a message to his friends upon the prairie. It duly reached them, for three weeks afterward Allen Hastings, opening The Colonist, which he had ordered from Victoria as soon as Wyllard sailed, read to his wife and Agatha a paragraph in the shipping news:
“Empress of India, from Yokohama, reports having passed small gray British schooner, flying——” There followed several code letters, the latitude and longitude, and a line apparently by the water-front reporter: “No schooner belonging to this city allotted the signal in question.”
Hastings smiled as he laid down the paper. “No,” he observed, “that signal is Wyllard’s private code. Agatha, won’t you reach me down my map of the Pacific? It’s just behind you.”
As he looked around he noticed the significant expression on his wife’s face, for the girl already had turned towards the shelf where he kept the lately purchased map.