They came skipping on at a great clip for an open boat. They were running her to a long main-sheet, but keeping a tight hand on the sheet.
The strangers out with revolvers, back my men into the fo'c's'le, and lock them in.
As they drew nearer I see she was white-painted, and pretty soon I see she was too big to be anything but a navy sailing cutter, and soon again I made out that they were a crew of American naval officers and bluejackets.
They went out of their way some to sweep under the stern of the bark, and I noticed they all took a look up at her and back at her, wondering, as I thought, how she came to go ashore. They held on for the inside of the bay and ran straight up onto a little reach of pebbly beach; and no sooner grounded than most of them went tearing across the spit with rifles and shotguns. I see what they were now—it was a hunting party.
Without wasting a second they began to blaze away at the wild ducks as they came swooping down from the west. In that country the wild game don't know what a man looks like, and as it was late in the afternoon, with the ducks coming back for the night from the west'ard, the shooting was good. Swooping along the shore they came, across the mouth of the bay, flock after flock so close-set and low-lying that they didn't need guns. They could have sat on the beach and hove up stones or drift-wood and killed 'em as they went kiting by, sixty miles or more an hour to the east'ard.
After twenty minutes or so they must have thought that kind of shooting was too easy, for part of them went off into the brush and the others came back to the spit of beach and, with some kindlings from their boat and some drift-wood and brush, started a fire. It was a north wind, and I could smell the ducks cooking and the coffee making, and I couldn't hold off any longer. I rowed myself over in our second boat. The senior line officer of the party, a lieutenant, invited me to join them, which I did, and pretty soon I was eating broiled duck and drinking real American coffee, with bacon and eggs, and forgetting my troubles.
After supper we sat around and talked, and they told me what had happened to the lumber bark. She had been lured inshore by false lights the night before and boarded by a gang under Red Dick, who had cleaned her out of stores and what money they had, and had driven the crew off in the morning after beating up most of them by way of diverting himself. Then the bark's captain and his crew rowed across the Straits of Punta Arenas in their quarter-boat, looking for satisfaction. Nobody there could do anything for them, because nothing less than a war-ship could have overcome Red Dick, and there was no Chilean war-ship nearer than Valparaiso, and that was six days' steaming away.
"But how did that lumber captain know it was Red Dick?" I asked at this point.