A dipsy-chanty, if you please; of sailormen in jerseys and tarry caps, of rolling gaits, strong tobacco and diverse profanity; of cutters, and blunt-nosed schooners, and tramps, canvas and steam, some of them honest, some of them shady, and some of them pirates of the first water who did not find it necessary to hoist aloft the skull and bones. The seas are dotted with them. They remind you of the once prosperous merchant, run down at the heel, who slinks along the side streets, ashamed to meet those he knew in the past. You never hear them mentioned in the maritime news, which is the society column of the ships; you know of their existence only by the bleached bones of them, strewn along the coast.
You who crave adventures on high seas, you purchase a ticket, a steamer chair, and a couple of popular novels, go on board to the blare of a very indifferent brass band, and believe you are adventuring; when, as a matter of fact, you are about to spend a dull week or a fortnight on a water hotel, where the most exciting thing is the bugle's call to meals or the discovery of a card sharp in the smoking-room. Take a real ship, go as supercargo, to the South Seas; take the side streets of the ocean, and learn what it can do with hurricanes, typhoons, blistering calms, and men's souls. There will be adventure enough then. If you are a weakling, either you are made strong, or you die.
An honest ship, but run down at the heel, rode at anchor in the sound, a fourth-rater of the hooker breed; that is, her principal line of business was hauling barges up and down the coast. When she could not pick up enough barges to make it pay, why she'd go gallivanting down to Cuba for bales of tobacco or even to the Bermudas for the heaven-smelling onion. To-day she was an onion ship; which precludes any idea of adventure. She was about four thousand tons, and her engines were sternward and not amidship. She carried two masts and a half-dozen hoist booms, and the only visible sign of anything new on her was her bowsprit. This was new doubtless because she had poked her nose too far into her last slip.
Her crew was orderly and tractable. There were shore drunks, to be sure, because they were sailors; but they were at work. They moved about briskly, for they were on the point of sailing for the Bahamas—perhaps for more onions. Presently the windlass creaked and shrilled, and the blobby links, much in need of tar paint, red as fish gills, clattered down into the bow. Sometimes they painted the chain as it came over; but paint was costly, and this was done only when the anchor threatened to stay on the bottom.
There was a sailor among this crew, and he went by the name of Steve Blossom; and he was one of his kind. A grimy dime novel protruded rakishly from his hip pocket, and his right cheek was swollen as with the toothache, due, probably, to a generous "chaw" of Seaman's Delight. He was a real tobacco chewer, for he rarely spat. He was as peaceful as a backwater bay in summer; non-argumentative and passive, he stood his watch in fair weather and foul.
No one gave the anchor any more attention after it came to rest. The great city over the way was fairy-like in its haziness and softened lines. It was the poetry of angles, of shafts and spars of stone; and Steve Blossom, having a moment to himself, leaned against the rail and stared regretfully. He had been generously drunk the night before, and it was a pleasant recollection. Chance led his glance to trail down the cutwater. His neck stretched from his collar like a turtle's from its shell.
"Well, I'll be hornswoggled!" he murmured, shifting his cud from starboard to port.
Caught on the fluke of the anchor was the strangest looking box he had ever laid eyes on. There were leather and steel bands and diamond-shaped ivory and mother of pearl, and it hung jauntily on the point of the rusty fluke. Anybody would be hornswoggled to glimpse such a droll jest of fate. On the fluke of the old mudhook, by a hair, you might say. In all the wild sea yarns he had ever read or heard there was nothing to match this.
Treasure!
And Steve was destined never to be passive again. His first impulse was to call his companions; his second impulse was to say nothing at all, and wait for an opportunity to get the box to his bunk without being detected. Treasure! Diamonds and rubies and pearls and old Spanish gold; and all hanging to the fluke of the anchor.