“Well, Joey, she looked at me and she knew the stuff was all off. She'd married the duke; I had the license to prove it, and of course she realized her breach of promise suit and claim for a million dollars' worth of heart balm would be laughed out of court if she had the crust to present it. So she did the next best thing. She abused me like a pickpocket and ended up by getting hysterical when I told her how I'd swindled her. When she got through crying I lectured her on the error of her ways and suggested that inasmuch as she had had one divorce already, another wouldn't be much of a strain on her, and I'd foot the bill for separating her legally from John Doe, alias the duke, on a charge of desertion. Then I offered her a thousand dollars and a ticket back to New York for the surrender of all your letters to her and that infernal cablegram and a release of all claims against you. I guess she was broke for she grabbed it in a hurry, Joey. The atmosphere is now clear, my son, and nothing further remains to be done in the premises, save settle the bill of expense. Fortunately the Tyee made money on that fast voyage under your command, but the cost of bringing the yacht round from New York, doing over the cabin, buying the new dishes with the crest, and settling with the lady should rightfully be borne by you. As I say, the duke was expensive, for the rascal certainly rolled 'em high. Skinner has made me up a statement of the total cost, with interest at six per cent to date, and it appears, Joey, that you owe your godfather $12,143.18. On the day you come into your inheritance, add six per cent to that sum and send me a check.”
“But the twenty-five thousand dollars I won from you—” Joey began, but Cappy held up a rigid finger, enjoining silence.
“I am going to stick your dub of a father for that, as a penance for his sins of omission, Joey; for by the Holy Pink-Toed Prophet, if ever a boy won a bet and was entitled to it, you're that young man. In-fer-nal young scoundrel! Keep it and split fifty-fifty with your wife. You won a straight bet from a crooked gambler, and if I haven't had a million dollars' worth of fun out of this transaction I hope I may marry a hula-hula woman—and I've passed my three score and ten and ought to know better!”
“But about this man MacGregor—”
“Don't worry about him. The Scotch are a hardy race and Mac is a sailor. Joey, I know sailors. The scoundrels have a wife in every port!”
CHAPTER XXXIII
During the period when Joey Gurney was busy doing all that Cappy Ricks desired him to do and some things that were slightly off Cappy's program, the president emeritus of the Blue Star Navigation Company and allied interests was discovering that it is one thing to declare for the simple life and quite another to live it. The Great War challenged so much of the Ricks interest that he could not bear to live far from morning and evening editions—and he wanted them red hot off the presses. Things were doing in the shipping world. The most inconceivable trades were being consummated daily, freights were soaring, lumber prices had reached an unprecedentedly high level and promised to go higher; there was something doing every minute and not enough minutes in a working day to accommodate half of these somethings. What more natural, therefore, than that Cappy presently should find himself caught in the maelstrom, even though he told himself daily that, come what might he would keep out of it.
The first indefinite evidence that he was about to be engulfed came in the form of a newspaper story, ex the steamer Timaru, from Sydney, via Tahiti. There it was, as big as a church—a paragraph of it, tucked away in a column-and-a-half story of the bombardment of Papeete by the German Pacific fleet early in September of 1914: