“A suitcase and an accordion. The skipper of the Pelorus found her settin’ there and she introduced herself. I gathered that he knew her people and was glad to meet her. She must have shipped as a passenger, because she was standin’ aft lookin’ back at the city the last I saw of the Pelorus.”
“How fast is the fastest tug or launch in the Crowley fleet?” Dan next inquired.
“Fifteen miles an hour.”
“Great! I’ll charter her. I want to overhaul the Pelorus and take that girl off.”
The man in the pilot house shook his head. “No use, sir. The Pelorus has lines like a yacht and she’s a witch in a breeze of wind. There’s a thirty mile nor’west breeze on her quarter and she’s logging fifteen knots if she’s logging an inch this minute. I cast her off at six fifteen—two hours ago. She’d be hull down on the horizon in an hour. You couldn’t hope to overhaul her, sir.”
“Thank you, friend. I dare say you’re right.” He wadded a bill into a ball and tossed it in the pilot house window, smiled wanly and returned to his car. On the way up to the office of Casson and Pritchard he formulated a plan of action, which he proceeded to place in operation the moment he found himself alone in his private office.
First he looked up the Pelorus in Lloyd’s Register and satisfied himself that she was staunch and seaworthy, or rather that she had been a year previous. She was owned in Honolulu. Well, Tamea would doubtless be safe aboard her—that is, safe from the elements, although a cold feeling swept over him as he thought of that glorious creature alone on a trading schooner, at the mercy of her captain. He hoped the man was different from the majority of his kind.
At nine o’clock he telephoned the Customs House and learned that the Pelorus had cleared for general cruising in the South Pacific, with her first port of call Tahiti. With a sinking heart Dan recalled that there was neither wireless station nor cable station at Tahiti, and a close scrutiny of the Shipping Guide disclosed the fact that the next steamer for Sidney, via Tahiti, Pago Pago and Raratonga would not sail for two weeks. Well, he would write Casson and Pritchard’s agent at Tahiti to board the Pelorus when she dropped hook in the harbor and deliver to the girl a letter and a draft on the French bank in Tahiti, to enable her to purchase a first class steamer passage back to San Francisco, where they would be married immediately. Undoubtedly the steamer would beat the Pelorus to Tahiti, even though the latter vessel should have a two weeks’ start. Even should the Pelorus beat her in, the schooner would probably lie in Tahiti harbor for a week and Tamea would go ashore and visit friends of her father’s while awaiting passage on a schooner that could drop her off at Riva. The chances for overhauling the heart-broken fugitive were excellent; the letter which would reach her, via the steamer and later by hand of Casson and Pritchard’s agent, would bring her back to him. Of that he felt assured.
However, in the event the steamer should never reach Tahiti, he essayed two other means of communicating with her, via his agent. There was a wireless station at Fanning Island and another at Noumea, so he sent a message to each, with a request that it be relayed to Tamea by the first vessels touching there and bound for Tahiti.
He had done all he could to retrieve the situation now, so he spread his long arms out on his desk, laid his face in them and suffered. He yearned for the blessed relief of tears, for at last Dan Pritchard was realizing that he did indeed love Tamea with all of the wild and passionate love of which he had dreamed. He had not believed that it would be possible for him to love any woman so. His heart ached for her. He was thoroughly wretched.