“No? Is that so? you done too? Poor Luke! how sad to think your confidence should have been misplaced. It’s a treacherous world.” The captain turned to me. “Mr. Paine, I believe you are the only person who can give us precise information as to the present whereabouts of the Great Joss.”
“I?”
I stared at him amazed.
“Yes, you. I’ll tell you why I think so.”
BOOK IV.
THE JOSS.
(CAPTAIN MAX LANDER SETS FORTH THE CURIOUS ADVENTURE WHICH MARKED THE VOYAGE OF THE “FLYING SCUD.”)
CHAPTER XXV.
LUKE’S SUGGESTION.
I’ve no faith in your old wives’ tales. Not I. But the luck was against us. Everything went wrong from the first. And there’s no getting away from the fact that we sailed on a Friday.
The weather in the Bay was filthy. Our engines went wrong in the Red Sea. We lay up at Aden for a week. There was a bill as long as my arm to pay. Then when we got out into the open the weather began again. Never had such a run! It was touch and go for our lives. One night, half-way between Ceylon and Sumatra, I thought it was the end. We had more than another touch off the Philippines. By the time we reached Yokohama we were a wreck—nothing less.
The ship ought to have been overhauled before we started. But the owners wouldn’t see it. They insisted that a patch here, and a coat of paint there, would meet the case. But it didn’t. Not by a deal. As we soon found. At Aden, after all, the engines had only been tinkered. They went wrong again before we had been three days out. The weather we had would have tried the best work that ever came out of an engineer’s shop. Those nailed together pieces of rusty scrap iron worried the lives right out of us. If we had gone to the bottom they would have been to blame.