A Republic Without a President, and Other Stories

by Herbert D. Ward

The colonel, as we will still call him, was, from his earliest memory, sternly brought up under an atmosphere of uncanniness and secrecy, nor did he leave his fertile island, except, as we shall mention, until his father died and made him sole proprietor of land, slaves and family traditions. Fully two hundred acres were under cotton cultivation. The insignificant remainder was unentangled marsh.

Colonel Oddminton's father died in eighteen hundred and sixty-one. Then the colonel began to expand. He had two hobbies that consumed his imagination by day and agitated his visions by night. The one had been shared by his deceased parent, namely, an inordinate desire to be rich; not as wealthy as the richest family in Charleston, but as rich as all the merchants in the "City by the Sea" put together. Cotton had always given a comfortable living, but cotton was declining. It became unsatisfactory. It was not enough.

Colonel Oddminton's other hobby was a fast boat. He had always been a more than enthusiastic sailor. When the boy was only eighteen, his father had given him a ten-ton sloop and allowed him to go anywhere, provided he did not touch the mainland. This order was in accordance with the old man's peculiarities, but was strictly obeyed. With his black sailors the boy had cruised in every bay and inlet for a hundred miles about. Though no one else knew it, he was the best pilot those waters ever saw. During the war, when he was master, he never left his island except to put his own cotton aboard English blockade runners. In these hazardous attempts he never failed. This experience cultivated his native qualities of courage and of self-possession.

On this island of his there was a bay that afforded fine anchorage for two large boats. It abutted on the marsh. It was there he had built a small camphouse. Neither the cove nor the house could be seen from the open sea. The former could only be entered through an intricate channel, and that when the wind and tide were favorable. The latter was approached through heavy underbrush by a winding passage that was known only to a few.

Colonel Oddminton was a tall, fine-looking man. He wore a long flowing beard that had never seen the razor. His build was massive; his height was manly.

About the time of which we are writing—this was in—but the reader remembers—his new schooner, which he had dignified by the name of yacht, much to the amusement of a few acquaintances, had been easily beaten by a trim stranger, that ploughed its way to windward as if it had been a knife eating into the teeth of the gale. He had followed this new craft to harbor and found her to be a Herreshoff model. That night, for the colonel's schooner was really an able and fast one, the disappointed man was sadder than when he saw his only friend, his father, die. He was proud of his schooner. He had cruised in her from Baltimore to the St. John's river, and had never been so disgracefully out-pointed and outfooted by any boat of her size before.

It was at this time that he fell into a revery that lasted a month. It was the longest month in his life, the only one he had ever spent upon the mainland. People pronounced him "daft," decidedly cracked, but "harmless, you know." His tall figure flitted from the lobby of the Charleston Hotel to the great cotton wharves, and then back again. At last he awoke, and this was the outcome of his supposed aberration.

"I don't care if it costs me my last cent, I'll have the fastest boat in the world, and no one shall beat me again, by gum!"

To make a long story short, he sold to an eager syndicate of English capitalists his island for an asparagus farm, reserving for himself the odd acres of marsh, his camp house and bay with its two moorings. On this sale he realized a hundred thousand cash down. He then turned his father's savings, fifty thousand dollars' worth of London consols, into ready money. He now had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. With this he and his boat disappeared. No note was taken of his absence either on his former property or in Charleston, the only other place that really knew him, so frequent were his vagaries, so infrequent his presence.

Let us follow the Colonel in his unostentatious wanderings. He first sailed with his son and his two trusty men direct to Washington city. He took in the sights of the Capital for a few weeks, and then, leaving his boat behind, pushed on by train to New York, that wonderful metropolis that obliterates or worships men with an idea. He took lodgings with his son in a modest boarding-house, and there met a Swedish sailor, a man who had been captain of a steam yacht during the summer, and now happened to be out of employment. Nautical people do not take a long time to become acquainted. Colonel Oddminton at the end of a week had engaged Hans Christian on the strength of his name, without further references, at a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, with the proviso that his new captain should hold his tongue and obey orders. This was about the first of November. During the last week of the same month the yachting world, and indeed the whole maritime contingency, were interested in the following paragraph, which was duly copied and commented upon by the national and foreign press: