"He made a dozen winnings. And I've helped him to a job as warehouse clerk at Samarai when he wore no shirt under his coat, and gunny bags for trousies. That's what the cap'n here means by his luck, I fancy, because you couldn't keep him down. Capitalist, miner, politician, stevedore—it was all one to Jimmie. Look how he brought up the Creswick that nobody else would touch when she went ashore on Turn-again Island, cleared two thou' off her by the nerviest kind of work and dropped it all on the next Melbourne Cup. Little he cared. He was havin' his own way with life—as you say, Cap'n Bartlet."
But Jeckol frowned and pursed his thin lips.
"He never saw the game that was too big for him," said Harris, "nor held back his smile nor his fist."
"Darlinghurst jail is full of the same sort," observed Jeckol dryly.
"You ask what he was like?" Cap'n Bartlet swung around beside the wheel. "I'll tell you. I'm married to a girl that was pretty chief with Jim Albro once. There's no living man dare stand and say a word agen my wife—the finest in Queensland, sir—but I knew all the talk when I married her. And yet you see me here."
"Ah? With an entirely friendly purpose?" queried Jeckol, peering at him. "Or to make sure he won't come back?"
I saw the color flood to Bartlet's rugged cheek and ebb again.
"In friendship," he answered simply.
Jeckol made a gesture like a salute, with a hint of mockery perhaps, but he said no more. And we others said rather less. Bartlet brought the schooner smartly about on her heel and laid her square through the gap and we turned again to that sinister bay, opening before us like the painted depth of a stage set, whereon we were now to discover and reconstruct our obscure tragedy.
We drew a quick curtain on it. Scarcely had we come abreast the near headland when one of the brown, breech-clouted sailors leaped up forward with a yell, and each startled eye swept past his darting finger to the wreck of the Timothy S. There could be no manner of doubt—a green hull with a black water line, bedded low and on her side, hatches awash, just behind a shallow jag of the shore well away to leeward. We needed no glasses to pick her name or to see that nothing remained of life or value about the battered shell. She lay in her last berth, in the final stage of naval decay, stripped to the shreds of rigging, her masts broken short and bare as bleached bones; and from her whitened rail rose up a flight of boobies that cried like shrill, mournful ghosts and vanished....