FOUR BELLS

A Tale of the Caribbean

BY

RALPH D. PAINE

Author of “The Call of the Offshore Wind”

“First Down, Kentucky!” “Roads of Adventure,” etc.

WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY

FRANK E. SCHOONOVER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY STREET & SMITH CORPORATION

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY RALPH D. PAINE

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

Four Bells: A Tale of the Caribbean

CHAPTER I

THE VOICE OF THE SPANISH MAIN

The romance of the sea! Damned rubbish, he called it. The trade of seafaring was one way to earn a living. This was about all you could say for it. He had been lured into the merchant service as the aftermath of an enlistment in the Naval Reserve for the duration of the war. There was a great hurrah, as you will recall, over the mighty fleet of new cargo ships which were to restore the Stars and Stripes to blue water—Columbia’s return to the ocean, and all that—a splendid revival of the days of Yankee ships and sailors of long ago—a career for ambitious, adventurous American youth.

This was true enough until the bubble broke. The painful malady of deflation suddenly afflicted the world’s commerce. Much of Columbia’s mighty fleet rusted at its moorings. Ambitious American youth walked the streets in quest of jobs afloat or relinquished the sea to the Briton and the Scandinavian. It could not be said that the nation was deeply stirred by this calamity. In a manner of speaking, it had long since turned its back to the coast and could not be persuaded to face about.

This Richard Cary was one of the young men who had not been cast high and dry by the ebb tide of maritime affairs. No auspicious slant of fortune favored him. He earned what came to him in the way of employment and promotion. All he knew was the hard schooling of North Atlantic voyages in bull-nosed brutes of war-built freighters that would neither steam nor steer.

During the period of booming prosperity, the supply of competent officers fell far short of the demand. Any ancient mariner with a master’s license and fairly sound legs could get a ship. Foreign skippers were given “red ink tickets” and shoved aboard big American steamers.

The iron discipline and austere traditions of the sea were jeered at by motley crews, alien and native-born, who had easier work and better treatment than sailormen had ever known. Mutiny ceased to be sensational. Noisy Slavs preached Bolshevism in the forecastle. Every dirty loafer had a grievance. Ships limped into port with drunken stokers who refused to ply shovel and slice-bar unless they happened to feel like it. Wise gentlemen ashore diagnosed it as the poison of social unrest.

Amid these turbulent conditions, such an officer as Richard Cary was worth his weight in gold. For one thing, the Navy had hammered into his soul certain ideas which he declined to regard as obsolete. These pertained to order, fidelity, and obedience as essential to the conduct of a ship. He was a young man unvexed by complex emotions. Life consisted in doing the day’s work well, and the Lord help the subordinate who held opinions to the contrary.

It was a doctrine which had vouchsafed its own rewards. At twenty-five years of age he was chief officer of a ten-thousand-ton steamer of the Shipping Board fleet. There was something more to this rapid advancement than the old-fashioned virtues referred to. A natural aptitude for the sea was a large factor. Linked with this was a strong serenity of temper that few besetments could ruffle. Chief Officer Richard Cary moved on his appointed way with a certain ponderous momentum of mind and body.

He was sprung from that undiluted pioneer stock which is still to be found in the rural New England that is remote from the wash of later immigration. It was the English strain, fair-haired and blue of eye, that throws back to the Saxon blood. There had been men of rare height and bulk among his ancestors. This was his goodly inheritance, that his head should brush the ceiling beams of his cabin on shipboard and his shoulders fill the width of the doorway. Mutinous or sulky sailors ceased to bluster about their rights when this imperturbable young man laid hands on them. This was not often necessary. What he called moral suasion was enough to quell a very pretty riot. He had this uncommon gift of leadership, of mastering men and circumstances, when he was compelled to display it.

There was lacking, however, the driving power of ambition, the keen-edged ardor that cuts its way through obstacles to reach a destined goal. This large placidity of outlook betokened a dormant imagination, a sort of spiritual inertia. There was no riddle of existence, so far as he was concerned. The romance and mystery of the sea? Silly yarns written by lubbers for landsmen to read! They ought to jam across the Western Ocean in the dead of winter with a doddering old fool of a skipper on the bridge and a crew of rotten scoundrels who deserved to be hung.

While enthusiastic crusaders were proclaiming the glorious resurgence of the American merchant marine, surplus tonnage began to pile up in every port. Richard Cary’s huge scow of a freighter could find no cargo and was condemned to idleness with a melancholy squadron of her sister craft. The chief officer decided to look around a bit before seeking another berth. One or two offers came from shipping men who knew him by reputation. Already he stood out from the crowd. Waterfront gossip had passed along various tales of the reign of law and order upon the decks which big Dick Cary trod. He was no cursing, bullying bucko mate, mind you. Six and a half feet of soothing influence is a fairer phrase.

Home he went to the New Hampshire farm for a respite from the hard toil of the sea. In February it was, and the bleak hills wore their deep blankets of snow. His younger brother drove him in a pung to the white house snuggled close to the ground which had sheltered six generations of Carys. It made his back ache merely to look at the miles of stone wall which, as a clumsy young giant, he had helped to keep in repair.

“I guess going to sea is easier than this,” said brother Bill. “You seem to have done mighty well for yourself, I’ll tell the world. Any chance for me?”

“Not a chance,” replied the deep, leisurely accents of brother Dick. “Seafaring is all shot to pieces. You stand by your mother and look after the farm till you are ready to go to the agricultural college. I’ll pay for it.”

“Plenty of excitin’ stories to tell us, I s’pose. Your picture was in the papers, Dick, after your ship came into New York with four men in irons. It said you subdued ’em. What with, I want to know.”

“I read poetry to ’em, Bill, and distributed bouquets of cut flowers. They seemed grateful. So mother is as spry as ever and working her head off because she likes it.”

“Yep, she sure does make me snap out, Dick. And I bet she takes no back talk from you.”

“I’m scared already,” grinned the herculean mariner. “Watch her start a rough house if I track in any snow.”

He strode up the path to the granite doorstep and whisked up the wiry little woman who wore a best black gown and a white apron. Into the house he carried this trifling burden and set her down in a rush-bottomed chair by the fireplace.

“Bless me, Richard,” she cried, “that’s a trick you learned from your father that’s dead and gone! I used to tell him it was dreadful undignified. Of course he didn’t have your heft, but there was no ruggeder man in the village. Do you realize it’s been a whole year since you came home last?”

“Couldn’t break away, mother. A mate has to drive like a nigger when a ship is in port. Has Bill been taking good care of you? Any complaints and I’ll wallop the kid.”

“William is a quick and willing boy,” was the maternal verdict—“not so easy and good-natured as you—more inclined to be fretty when things go wrong.”

“You always called me lazy,” laughed the elder son, “and a nuisance under foot.”

“I dunno as I was far wrong, Richard,” was the severe rejoinder, “but we all have our failings. You have been a generous boy to your widowed mother. My land, you must have sent me ’most all your pay. I’ve been as careful as I could with it, and the account in the savings bank makes me feel real rich. Of course it belongs to you.”

“Forget it,” Richard growled amiably, waving a careless hand of imposing dimensions. “I’ll eat you out of house and home in the next fortnight. What about a whole pie right now?”

“Too much pie is bad for you between meals,” she firmly announced. “I’ll go cut you a reasonable piece. And don’t you let me hear you make a fuss about it.”

“Not me,” he sighed. “I know better.”

Contentedly he submitted to this fond tyranny. After all, home was the only place where folks cared whether a man lived or died. He was in every respect so unlike this high-strung, unflagging wisp of a mother of his that the contrast amused him. She was a Chichester and ran true to type. Most of the women wore themselves out in middle age. Her energy burned like a flame. Idleness was a sin.

In her turn she was perplexed by this strapping son of hers. He was rated as a highly successful young man, and yet, in her opinion, he lacked both zeal and industry—cardinal tenets of her New England creed. Sprawled upon the cushioned settle, he would drowsily stare at the fire for hours on end. He read very little and was not a loquacious person. An excellent listener, however, his mother’s eager chatter about little things broke against his massive composure like ripples upon a rock.

Now and then, in oddly silent moments, she studied him intently. Rugged, like his father, but there resemblance strangely halted. Matthew Cary’s frame had been gaunt, his features harsh and shrewd with the enduring imprint of the Puritan tradition. Richard, the son, might have belonged to another race of men. The fair skin, the ruddy cheek roughened by strong winds and salt spray, the hair like minted gold, were unfamiliar among the recent generations of Carys and Chichesters.

Handsome as a picture and as big as all outdoors, reflected the canny mother with a thrill of pride, but she actually felt like boxing his ears to wake him up. There was no soft streak in him, no weak fiber. This much she knew. His record at sea confirmed it. To call him hulking was absurd. There was courage in the level, tranquil gaze, and resolution was conveyed by the firm lips that smiled so readily.

“What in the world do you think about when you sit there like a bump on a log?” impatiently exclaimed the mother. “Is it a girl? William has suffered from those moon-struck spells now and then, but at his age it’s no more serious than chicken-pox.”

“There’s never been a girl that I thought of very long,” dutifully answered Richard, his pipe between his teeth. “I’m not so anxious to meet the right one. Going to sea is poor stuff for a married man. They mean well enough, but I have seen too many lonely skippers and mates raising hell ashore.”

“Don’t you swear in this house, Richard. And I advise you to beware of low company. Sailors who have been properly brought up are true to their sweethearts and wives, like all decent folks.”

“Yes’m,” murmured her worldly young giant. “If Bill ground the axe, as I told him to, I guess I’ll go and cut two or three cords of that pine growth. I need to limber up.”

“Then please stop at the gate and get the mail, Richard. It must be in the box by this time. And don’t you let that axe slip and cut your foot. I know you’re a wonderful chopper, just like your father, but I always fret—”

“Aye, mother. You never saw a man so careful of his own skin. At sea, now, I run no risks at all.”

“Richard, you are joking. Please don’t cross the pond. The ice is melted thin and rotten with this February thaw. You might fall in and catch your death o’ cold.”

Chief Officer Cary, veteran of the North Atlantic trade, promised to avoid getting wet in the pond. Axe on his shoulder, he passed through the lane to the highway. In the box nailed to a gatepost he found a letter from a seafaring friend in New York. It appeared to interest him. After a hasty glance, he read it with more care. What it said was this:

My dear Dick:

I don’t know what your plans are. If you have a job already cinched you are a lucky stiff. You can’t throw a brick in this port without hitting an idle shipmaster. So far I haven’t been chucked on the beach. The port captain of the Union Fruit Company is an old friend of mine. I told him about you yesterday. He needs a second officer in a passenger boat, the Tarragona, on the run to Kingston, Cartagena, and so on. Fine people to work for. None better. You may turn up your nose at the notion of going second mate, but they can’t keep a good man down. The Tarragona sails next Wednesday. Wire me if you care to run down and size it up. Better come early and avoid the rush. The Spanish Main ahoy!

Faithfully yours

L. J. P.

Richard Cary let the axe rest against the gate while he pondered in his deliberate fashion. At first it had annoyed him to think of stepping down a peg. He had been looking forward to command in two or three years more. But times were hard and the tenure of employment in cargo steamers uncertain. He might be shifting about, from one company to another, and if freight rates dropped much lower he would be likely to join the luckless mob of stranded officers.

There was a prospect of advancement in the Union Fruit Company’s service. A second mate’s pay would meet his modest needs, with a surplus to send home. An easier life, decent men to handle, a smart, efficient ship—these were arguments not to be tossed aside. So much for the practical aspect of it. This was overshadowed, however, by the desire to make the southern run. It was more like an urgent impulse. Until now, voyaging in the tropic zones had never appealed to him. He had a Western Ocean sailor’s pride in fighting bitter gales and pounding seas.

Rather puzzled by his quick surrender to this summons, he turned back to the house and forgot to pick up the axe. He walked briskly, chin up, a man astir and efficient. Queer how a few lines of that letter had thrilled his matter-of-fact mind! He liked the sound of Cartagena and the Spanish Main. Where the devil was Cartagena? He knew there was a port of that name on the coast of Spain. This other one was somewhere in the Caribbean, down Colombia way, as he vaguely recalled.

Into the kitchen swung Richard Cary and demanded to know where the atlas was kept. His mother wiped the flour from her hands and exclaimed:

“First time I ever saw you in a hurry about anything except your meals. What under the sun ails you?”

“Outward bound—the night train for New York. I want to find out where I go from there.” His mellow voice rang through the low-studded rooms. His mother was dismayed. The sea had called her towering son and he was a different being. Almost timidly she said:

“But you expected to make a longer visit, Richard. Why, you aren’t really rested up. You sat around here—”

“And enjoyed every minute of it,” he broke in, with a boyish laugh. “Now I’m going south in a banana boat, where the flying fishes play. Do I have to pull this house down to break out the atlas?”

“Mercy sakes, no! It’s under the Bible on the parlor table where it has set for years. There’s yellow fever and snakes down there, and how are you off for summer underwear?”

With his chin in his hand he pored over the map of the Caribbean and the sailing tracks across that storied sea. Jamaica and the Isthmus of Panama! Thence his finger moved along the coast to Cartagena and Santa Marta and La Guayra. His kindled fancy played around the words. They were like haunting melody. It was an emotion curiously novel. To find anything like it, he had to hark back to the fairy tales of childhood.

The feeling passed. His mother’s anxious accents recalled him to himself.

“But is it necessary, Richard, for you to rush off and take a second officer’s position? Why don’t you wait for something better? It’s not a mite like you to fly off at a tangent like this. Common sense was always your strongest point.”

“This is just the berth I want, I tell you,” said he. “It sounds new and interesting. Now if you will help me get my dunnage together—clean clothes and so on—where’s Bill?”

“Gone to the village on an errand, Richard,” was the meek answer. “He will be back in plenty of time to drive you to the train. Well, I’ve seen you wake up for once. Is this the way you boss men around on a ship?”

“For Heaven’s sake, I didn’t mean to sound rough, mother dear. I can move lively when something has to be done. And I don’t want to lose the chance of sailing in this Tarragona.”

The details of departure arranged, he resumed his wonted humor, care-free and easy. His mother wept a little when the sound of sleigh-bells heralded the approach of William in the pung. There had been other partings like this, however, and she briskly waved a handkerchief from a window as he rode away. She still had her qualms about those outlandish ports, but he had solemnly sworn to shake the scorpions out of his shoes before putting them on, and this gave her some small comfort.

Young William fired a volley of questions on the road to the station, but his big brother had little to say. The spell of the Caribbean had faded. It was merely another job in a different ship. This lazy reticence irritated William who burst out:

“Sometimes you act as if you were dead from the neck up, Dick. You go to sleep in your tracks like a regular dumb-bell. Where’s your pep and punch if you’re such a blamed good officer? I’m entitled to talk plain, seeing as it’s all in the family. Don’t you ever get mad?”

“Quite peevish at times, Bill. There was a cabin steward last voyage who brought me cold water to shave with, two days running. I hated to do it, but I had to beat him to death with a hairbrush and throw his body overboard. He left a wife and seven children in Sweden and begged piteously for his life. Discipline, Bill! You have simply got to enforce it.”

William snorted with disgust. He was off this big lump of a brother, he said to himself, who treated him like a silly kid. The train was late, and while they waited at the station a stray dog wandered along the platform. It was no vagrant cur, but a handsome collie which had somehow lost its master and was earnestly trying to find him. The plight was enough to inspire sympathy in the heart of any man that loved a good dog.

“Take him home and keep him until you can ’phone around and stick up a notice in the post-office, Bill,” said Richard Cary.

Before William could catch the collie, the express train came thundering down. One of the loungers on the platform emitted a loud guffaw and tossed a bit of stick between the rails of the track. The collie rushed to retrieve it. Richard Cary cursed the man and yelled at the dog which bravely snatched the stick and fled to safety, escaping destruction by no more than the length of its plumed tail. It stood quivering in every nerve, nuzzling Richard’s hand.

“Put my bags aboard, Bill,” said the mariner. “I have a little business to attend to. It will take only a minute.”

William concluded to hover within sight and sound. His brother’s face was white as he moved closer to the man who had attempted to slay a dog in wanton sport. The offender was heavily built, with a truculent air, a stranger to the village. His coarse visage reflected alarm, but before he could fight or retreat his right arm was caught and twisted back in a grip that made him scream with pain.

A bone snapped. It would be some time before he could throw sticks with that right arm. Beside himself with rage and anguish, he bellowed foul abuse.

“Shut your dirty mouth,” commanded Richard Cary. “You are getting off easy.”

The tortured blackguard was given time to utter one more obscene insult. An open palm smote his face. It was a buffet so tremendous that the victim was fairly lifted from his feet. He pitched into the snow at the edge of the platform and lay huddled without motion.

“Good God-amighty, Dick, you busted that guy’s neck,” gasped William as he tugged at his brother’s sleeve. “And all you did was slap him. If you want to hop this train, you’d better hustle.”

“Broke his neck? No such luck,” growled Richard. “If he wants to see me again, tell him to wait till I come back. All right, Bill. Let’s go.”

He stooped to pat the head of the affectionate collie and ran to swing on board of the moving train. William had a farewell glimpse of his face at the window. Again it was ruddy and good-humored. The smile was a little wistful, almost like that of a boy leaving home for the first time. The younger brother stood staring after the train. His thoughts were confused. Presently he said to himself:

“Looks to me like there is a good deal for us to learn about Dick. You don’t catch me sassin’ him again. I certainly did run an awful risk when I called him a dumb-bell. Come on, pup. He told me to lug you home and I feel darn particular about obeyin’ orders.”

CHAPTER II

THE SEA DOGS OF DEVON

The Tarragona, of the Union Fruit Company’s fleet, was steaming to the southward, away from harsh winds and ice-fettered harbors. It was sheer magic, this sea change that brought the sweet airs of the tropics to caress the white ship when she was no more than three days out from Sandy Hook. Passengers whose only business was to seek amusement loafed on the immaculate decks or besought the nimble bartender to mix one more round of planter’s punches. The three-mile limit was another discomfort which had been left far astern.

To the second officer, Richard Cary, it was like a yachting cruise. He was adjusting himself to this unfamiliar kind of sailoring. In a uniform of snowy duck he stood his watches on the bridge or occupied himself with the tasks of keeping the ship as smart and clean as eternal vigilance could make her. It resembled dining in a gayly crowded hotel to take his seat at one of the small tables in the saloon and listen, with an ingenuous interest, to the chatter of these voyagers who had embarked for an idle holiday on the blue Caribbean. Among them were girls, adept at flirtation and not at all coy, who regarded this big, fair-haired second officer with glances frankly admiring. He was by all odds the most intriguing young man aboard the Tarragona.

His lazy indifference was provoking. When asked a question on deck he replied with a boyish smile and a courteous word or two, but could not be persuaded to linger. In his own opinion he was not hired to entertain the passengers. Leave that nonsense to the skipper. He had all the time in the world and seemed to enjoy making a favorite of himself.

Captain Jordan Sterry was a man past fifty years old, but reluctant to admit it. A competent seaman of long service in the company’s employ, he had a sociable disposition and could tell a good story. Sturdy and erect, his grayish hair and mustache close-cropped, he looked the part of the veteran shipmaster. He had one weakness, not unknown among men of his years. He preferred the society of women very much younger than himself. This expressed itself in a manner gallantly attentive to the bored young person who could find nobody else on board to play with, or to the audacious flapper who liked them well seasoned by experience and felt immensely flattered at attracting the notice of the spruce master of the Tarragona.

His attitude was nicely paternal. He deluded himself into believing that onlookers accepted it as such. In this respect Captain Jordan Sterry was not unique.

Richard Cary had an observant eye and a sense of humor. When he appeared sluggish, it was merely the sensible avoidance of waste motion of mind and body. He read the philandering skipper through and through and felt a healthy contempt for the soft streak in him, harmless enough, perhaps, but proof that there is no fool like an old fool. The man had been young once. Presumably he had had his fling. Why try to clutch at something that was gone, that had vanished as utterly as the froth of a wave? It was more than absurd. To Richard Cary, secure in the splendid twenties, unable to imagine himself as ever growing old, the skipper’s rebellion against the inevitable was almost grotesque.

Professionally no flaws could be found in Captain Sterry’s conduct. He ruled his ship with a firm hand, dealt justly with his officers, and was quick to note inefficiency. In all ways the Tarragona was a crack ship. It was to Richard Cary’s credit that the captain already approved of him. In fact, he was as cordial as the difference in rank permitted.

The chief officer was a sun-dried, silent down-easter who had found it slow climbing the ladder of promotion. He was always hoping for a command, yet somehow missing it. Dependable, incredibly industrious, he lacked the spark of initiative, the essential quality of leadership. Disappointment had soured him. He nursed his grievances and wished he were fitted for a decent job ashore.

After trying in vain to break through his crust, Richard Cary sought companionship elsewhere. He found it in the chief engineer, an extraordinary Englishman named McClement whose cabin was filled with books: history, philosophy, poetry; fiction translated from the French and Russian. There he sat and read by the hour, shirt stripped off, electric fan purring, a cold bottle of beer at his elbow. Half a dozen assistant engineers stood their watches down where the oil burners roared in the furnaces and the huge piston rods whirled the gleaming crank shafts. If anything went wrong, the chief engineer appeared swiftly, clad in disreputable overalls, and his speech was rugged Anglo-Saxon, of a quality requiring expurgation.

Now and then he strolled on deck of an evening, a lean, abstracted figure in spotless white clothes, hands clasped behind him, eyeing the capers of frivolous humankind with a certain cynical tolerance. They were as God had made them, but it was a bungled job. He ate most of his meals in his room, a book propped behind the tray. In this manner he evaded the affliction of mingling with tired business men and vivacious ladies eager to visit the engine room.

Richard Cary drifted into this McClement’s quarters by invitation, found a chair strong enough to hold him, and filled a blackened pipe from a jar on the desk. As usual he had not a great deal to say, but was amiability itself. He was content to sit and smoke and speak when spoken to. This pleased his host who read aloud choice bits of things and made pungent comments. The visitor borrowed a book and came again. They got on famously together because in temperament they were so curiously unlike.

On a clear day the ship sighted the lofty mountain range of Jamaica and steered to make her landfall for the harbor of Kingston. She drew near to the coast in the late afternoon. The breeze brought the heavy scents of the tropical verdure, of lush mountain vales, and the wet jungle. Richard Cary was on watch. Instead of standing at the bridge railing, with his calm and solid composure, he walked to and fro in a mood oddly restless. Intently he stared at the lofty slopes all clothed in living green, the tiny waterfalls bedecking them like flashes of silver lace.

He snuffed the air, so very different from the sea winds. The tropic island of Jamaica was strange to him, and yet it seemed vaguely, elusively familiar, as though he had beheld it while asleep and dreaming. The chief officer relieved him, but he lingered on the boat deck to see the black pilot come aboard from a dugout canoe. The steamer forged ahead again and passed into the harbor. The mountains loomed beyond the huddled roofs of Kingston. On the starboard side was a low, sandy point upon which were the trim, red-tiled bungalows of the quarantine station. The Tarragona paused again, to wait for the British health officer.

McClement, the chief engineer, climbed to the boat deck and said, as he joined Richard Cary:

“Port Royal yonder! No more than a sandbank now. The old town was sunk by an earthquake long ago. If you poke about in a small boat, they say you can see the stone walls of the houses down under the clear water. It was a famous resort of pirates and such gentry in the roaring days of the Spanish Main. Rum and loot, women and sin! All that made life worth living.”

“Port Royal?” exclaimed Cary. “I’m sure I have heard something about Port Royal. All gone, eh, Mac? Scuppered for their crimes. Served ’em right. A bad lot.”

“Very rotten, Dick, but they had certain virtues which the modern buccaneers of industry lack. We have two or three of these aboard. They never risked their skins to bag their plunder.”

Second Officer Cary muttered something and walked to the edge of the deck to peer down into the bright green water as if expecting to see the flickering phantoms of the wild sea rovers of the lost Port Royal. His blue eyes were bright with an ardent interest. McClement remarked, with a quizzical grin:

“I haven’t seen you really awake before now. What touched you off? Pirate yarns you read when you were a kid?”

“Perhaps so, Mac. I had this feeling once before. It was when I got word from a pal in New York, telling me about this job, that it was on the run to Cartagena. What is Cartagena like?”

“Wait and see it, my boy. Cartagena is a vision of vanished adventures, a gorgeous old Spanish treasure town preserved, by a sort of miracle, through three hundred years. Romance, color, tradition? It makes the days of the tall galleons and the bold sea dogs live again.”

“Tell me more about it,” demanded Richard Cary. His voice rolled out in a deep and masterful note.

“Come down to my room after the ship docks and I’ll give you some books to read, Kingsley’s ‘Westward Ho,’ Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ and Captain Burney’s ‘History of the Buccaneers of America.’ ”

Some small sound in the engine-room far below them diverted McClement’s attention. His perception of such things was uncannily acute. He vanished instantly down the nearest stairway. Richard Cary also found work to do. This broke the spell of his day-dreaming. It did not recur to him during the Tarragona’s brief stay at Kingston. In the evening he was on duty at the cargo hatches while the passengers swarmed ashore to find entertainment at the excessively modern and luxurious hotel.

He had leisure to saunter a little way from the wharf, but felt no desire to explore Kingston. It was quite common-place, the streets noisy with electric cars and automobiles, the brick and wooden buildings as cheap and unlovely as those of any American town. Several charming young passengers failed to persuade him to join a party at the hotel where an orchestra was jazzing it, and he also declined, with due caution, the hospitality of thirsty voyagers who were making a night of it.

Returning to the ship, he went to his room at midnight and picked up the chief engineer’s books instead of turning in. Presently he found himself fascinated. For the sake of comfort he shifted into pajamas and lay stretched in the bunk. The ship’s bell tolled one half-hour after another and he was still reading. These printed pages were a key that unlocked the gates of enchantment. Now and then he lost himself in absorbed reverie.

These chronicles of hazards and escapes and hard fighting in the waters that washed the Spanish Main had been derived from documents, from the robust memoirs of men whose bones had crumbled in a century now dim and dead. The rich ports whose walls they had stormed with a bravado that defied all odds were no more than fragments of ruined masonry submerged in the jungle growth, Nombre de Dios, Porto Bello, and old Panama, names that still reëcho like the brazen blare of trumpets.

All gone save Cartagena, reflected Richard Cary. Cartagena still basking by the sea to recall that day when Francis Drake and his Devon lads had stormed it with the naked sword.

At length this brawny second mate of the Tarragona laid the books aside. Dawn was brightening the windows of his room. He thrust his bare feet into straw slippers and went on deck to loaf in the fresh morning air. His head was buzzing. He felt fatigued, although as a mariner he was hardened to wakeful nights.

In fancy he had been sailing, fighting, and carousing with those ferocious freebooters of the Caribbean. They seemed as real to him as the plodding, slow-spoken farmers of the New Hampshire soil on which he had been raised. Those clumsy, high-pooped ships with the bellying sails and gaudy pennants were as clearly etched in his mind as the stone walls, the square white houses, and the dark woodlands of his native countryside.

Confound the chief engineer’s books, he said to himself. They had turned his brain all topsy-turvy.

These impressions slowly faded until the Tarragona had sailed from Kingston and was steaming across that wide waste of sea that rolls between Jamaica and the Spanish Main. Strong winds were almost always blowing there, whistling through a ship’s stays, whipping the blue surface into foaming surges, with clear skies and hot sunshine. The Tarragona reeled to the swing of these restless seas, and the spray pelted her decks in sparkling showers. The passengers disliked it. Some of them uttered low moans and retired to their rooms. There were vacant chairs in the dining-saloon, regrets at having left the dry land of home, no matter how dry it was.

Richard Cary enjoyed it. He was amazed that he had ever regarded going to sea as drudgery. This part of the voyage appealed to him with a peculiar zest. For the first time he loved the ocean. This boisterous wind that blew beneath a hard bright sky, a cool tang to it that tempered the tropic heat—he drew it deep into his lungs, standing with arms folded across his mighty chest.

The astute chief engineer found something to interest him in the behavior of his herculean young shipmate. They were walking the deck together when McClement said, with his dry chuckle:

“Until we sighted Jamaica, Dick, you were majestic and quiet, like the everlasting hills. I welcomed you as a benign influence in a world of guff and jazz and nervous twitters. Now you fairly talk my head off. It doesn’t bore me, mind you, but I find myself perplexed to account for this flow of language. Were you bottled up all those years, and has the cork just blown out?”

“Something like that, Mac,” rather sheepishly admitted Richard Cary. “I can’t seem to help talking to you about the Spanish Main and the hard-boiled lads that put it on the map. You know all that stuff by heart, and I fairly eat it up.”

“Aye, Dick, you lick your chops over it. You have read every bally book I could dig up. It is like a craving for strong drink.”

Cary did not appear to be listening. The wind was blowing against his cheek. The deck was unsteady beneath his feet. Against the ship’s side the crested waves crashed and broke.

“Can’t you see them, Mac?” was his resonant exclamation. “Lubberly little vessels, as round as an apple, leaking like baskets, rotten with fever—wallowing off to leeward when the wind drew ahead? It was this same wind that blew them across this stretch of sea to the Isthmus of Darien and Cartagena, that made it possible for them to fetch the mainland. They had it on the beam, there and back. It served the Spanish galleons as well as the Englishmen that hunted them. Why, Mac, old man, the feel of this wind, now don’t laugh at me, is enough to tell me more stories than I found in all your musty old books.”

The chief engineer halted in his tracks. With a keener scrutiny than usual he studied the candid, engaging features of Richard Cary, the fearless vision, the resolute chin, the ruddy color, and the thatch of yellow hair. Cary was conscious of this deliberate appraisal. He flushed under it. McClement took another turn along the deck before halting to ask a question:

“Do you resemble the rest of the family, Dick?”

“Absolutely not. My dad used to say I was a throwback, and a long throw at that.”

“Precisely. That is what I am driving at. New England rural stock, you told me. English on both sides, I presume. Where did your forbears come from?”

“Devonshire, all of them,” answered Cary. “My mother’s folks came over from Plymouth a couple of hundred years ago and settled near where they live now. My father’s ancestors came later, just before the Revolution. They hailed from a little village near Bideford, so I used to hear him say.”

“From Devon?” exclaimed McClement, who did not appear greatly surprised. “The Carys of Devon! And your mother was—”

“A Chichester,” said Richard.

“Carys and Chichesters, of course, Dick. And you are the living image of Amyas Leigh in ‘Westward Ho’! He must have been about your build and bulk. The kind of lad they bred in Devon when the world was young!”

“Carys and Chichesters sailed with Drake and Hawkins,” broke in Richard, “in these same seas, and they fought the Spanish Armada along with Walter Raleigh and Martin Frobisher. I found the names in one of your books.”

“Aye, they did all of that and more too,” agreed the chief engineer. “I am too hard-headed to take stock in any fantastic theory of buried memories and such tosh as that. I’ll have to admit, though, that you are a bit startling, Dick. It’s out of the question, of course, that certain impressions and associations could have been handed down through your race, to come to life in you.”

Inherited memories of the Spanish Main? Such a notion had not occurred to Richard Cary. Fantastic enough, but his quickened imagination laid hold of it.

“There must have been a Cary in one of the expeditions against Cartagena, don’t you think, Mac?”

“My word, yes. You can bet your last dollar on that. Those stout Devon lads were all over the shop, wherever there was a chance to singe the beard of the king of Spain.”

“Then wouldn’t that account for the queer feeling that I have been in these waters before? Why, the idea of sailing for Cartagena made me tingle right down to my heels when I first heard of it.”

“Here, you can’t coax me into discussing anything like that, you fine big brute,” protested McClement. “It won’t do at all. Do you think you are a blooming reincarnation? Better come to my room and have a drink and forget it.”

“Then how do you explain it?” was the stubborn question. “On the level, I am getting worried about myself.”

“No occasion for it, Dick. You are a coincidence, in a way, and a vastly interesting one. What ails you, however, is the spirit of romance and adventure. You didn’t know you had it in you. Youth often finds it in a first voyage to the tropics. I was that way myself. And the Spanish Main has a beguiling magic of its own. Most of these wild tales were fresh to you. Unconsciously you identified yourself with them because you knew you were bred from that same strain of Elizabethan seamen.”

“Have it your own way,” rather sulkily agreed Richard Cary, “but there is more to this than you can figure out, as wise as you are.”

McClement had implanted a suggestion which oddly lingered in Cary’s thoughts and colored them with strange conjectures. Who or what was the real Richard Cary? The brawny rover of Devon who had diced with the devil and the deep sea, or the prosaic son of New Hampshire farming folk who had viewed seafaring as a means of earning his bread?

“Two Richard Carys,” reflected this second officer of the Tarragona. “All my life I may have been a mixture of both and didn’t know it. When I got sore at something and cleared for action, like wading into that bunch of fo’castle outlaws on the last Western Ocean voyage, I must have been the big Dick Cary of Devon that found his fun in walloping the Spaniards.”

His meditations trailed off into nebulous realms, into a haze of conjectures and dreams and anticipations. Instead of taking each day as it came, he found himself looking forward to something. It seemed to be beckoning him. Somewhere in these romantic seas, adventure awaited him. The chief engineer read aloud a poem that matched this new mood. Richard Cary listened with a smile on his face.

“Could man be drunk forever

With liquor, love or fights,

Lief should I rouse at morning

And lief lie down of nights.

“But men at whiles are sober

And think by fits and starts,

And if they think, they fasten

Their hands upon their hearts.”

CHAPTER III

A GREAT GALLEON

Señorita Teresa Fernandez was the stewardess of the Tarragona. A dark, handsome young woman, she wore a cap and uniform of white, severely plain, that were singularly becoming. They also conveyed the impression that she had no time for sentiment or frivolity. She talked easily, with a flash of white teeth, a sparkling eye, and graceful gestures. The ladies were apt to confide their affairs to her when she carried the breakfast trays to their rooms.

In return she told them various things about herself. She had been left motherless when a child. Her father, a South American merchant who had traveled much and visited many countries of Europe, had taken her with him and she had learned to know the sea and to speak French and Italian and English. He had died after very sad business troubles and there had been no relatives to look after her except an uncle, a very eccentric and disagreeable old gentleman to get along with.

She had preferred making her own way in the world to seeking shelter under her uncle’s roof. She was very young for a stewardess? Yes, but her father had been a friend of certain officials of the Fruit Company, and she had been given a trial. It was enough for her to say that she had been kept in the service. For one whose family was very old and dignified, with an honored name, it was unusual, in a way; but what would you? If Teresa Fernandez was not ashamed to be earning an honest living, why pay attention to what others might say?

When off duty she liked to sit in a wicker chair near the saloon staircase of the Tarragona. It was a cool, breezy place. She was close enough to the electric bells to respond to any summons. It was convenient for chatting with her friends as they passed, the second steward, the wireless operators, the purser, or the doctor. They agreed that Señorita Fernandez was a good scout.

Now and then Richard Cary had stopped for a bit of gossip. He liked this cheerful, good-looking young stewardess who always had a smile for him and a gay word of greeting. She offered to darn his socks and overhaul his shirts for missing buttons, and refused payment for it. This was out of the ordinary. She was a thrifty soul who overlooked no opportunities to add to her income.

From his seat in the dining-saloon, Cary often caught her looking at him when she was resting in the wicker chair near the landing. And when their eyes met, the tint in the olive cheek of Teresa Fernandez was likely to deepen. It was to be surmised that she was a woman of feelings as well as a very competent stewardess.

During the run from Jamaica to the Spanish Main, Dick Cary paused oftener and stayed longer beside the wicker chair. He had lost that air of serene indifference to the feminine equation. This Teresa Fernandez strongly attracted him. She knew ships and the sea and the ports of many climes. She made conversation delightfully easy.

One evening he found her standing on the lower deck, in a corner sheltered from the wind. A scarf of Spanish lace was thrown over her ebon, lustrous hair. She was alluring, exotic, a woman in another role than that of the efficient, industrious stewardess of the Tarragona.

“What are you, Spanish or Portuguese?” asked Richard Cary, gazing down at her from his commanding height.

“Oh, Spanish, ’most all of it,” laughed Teresa Fernandez, with a tilt of her shapely head. “Where do you think I come from, Don Ricardo Cary?”

“From Spain? Vigo? Santander? Bilbao? I know that coast. Fine women in those ports. They were easy to look at.”

“Gracias, señor. Is it a compliment?” she archly replied. “But I am not a fine woman—just a stewardess in funny clothes like a nurse or something. Ah, yes, I know Spain. I have been there in ships, but my home is not there. I am a Colombian, from Cartagena. Yes, my dear mother and father they died in Cartagena, and my uncle he lives there now.”

“Cartagena?” echoed Richard Cary, his pulse beating faster. “Did you really come from that old town? And you know it well?”

“Better than any other place, you bet,” cried Teresa Fernandez, her rounded shoulder touching Cary’s arm. “This Cartagena—poof! she is too old and dead, you understand. Plenty of big walls and forts and plazas for the tourists to see, but it is not up-to-date, not one little bit. Hot and stupid! Lots of people there, but they are too slow. Nothing doing, thank you.”

“I could tell you some things about Cartagena,” said Richard Cary, “but they might not interest you. I have been reading and dreaming about it until I know the whole story by heart.”

“The history, you mean, Don Ricardo?” she exclaimed, with a disdainful shrug. “The books you have been reading so hard? My gracious, I can tell you better stories than that. Look at me! I am what you call a chapter of the old history of Cartagena. Is it not much nicer to study me?”

“Very much nicer,” warmly agreed the yellow-haired giant of a sailor. He dared to let his arm steal around her trim waist and to press her close.

Teresa Fernandez laughed softly nor drew herself away. It was necessary, however, for her to explain:

“You must not think I am this way with the other boys in the ship. No, I am never this way at all. You ask them if you want to. They will say Señorita Fernandez is very proper—she minds her own business all the time. My goodness, Don Ricardo, what can I do with you? You are so strong, so terrible. I never saw such a man in my life. Will you not have some mercy on poor Teresa?”

True it was that she had never met such a man as this. Her heart might flutter, however, but it was not so easy to turn her head. An episode, this? Perhaps, but it was not to be resisted.

“A chapter of history, are you, Teresa?” smiled he. “Then you are all I want to read from now on. I was surely wasting my good time on books.”

“You were pretty thick, it seemed so,” said she. “Always talk, talk with that chief engineer. Listen! Now let me tell you something. My great-great—I don’t know how many times—grandfather was the capitan of the great galleon Nuestra Señora del Rosario. His name it was Don Juan Diego Fernandez, a man very proud—what you call noble blood. There was his galleon, four hundred sailors and soldiers and maybe a hundred cannon, in Cartagena harbor. When we go into port, you will see just where she was anchored that time. My brave ancestor, this Don Juan Diego Fernandez, he was all ready to make the voyage to Spain with his galleon full of gold and silver bars from the mines of Peru, eh? The treasure it was brought across the Isthmus of Panama on the backs of mules. You know. It was the plate fleet that sailed once a year for Cadiz. This my old Don Juan Diego Fernandez he waited for the other galleons.

“Valgame Dios! Right into the harbor of Cartagena sailed the Englishmen, the piraticos. The forts bang at them plenty. They give those forts the merry laugh. Two little ships! My old grandfather, so proud in his gold armor, he was not scared at all. He would sink these crazy little ships and send the English heretics to the Holy Inquisition in Cartagena. Now listen to this! What do you suppose? Mother of God, they gave Don Juan Diego Fernandez no show at all to fire his hundred cannon and shoot the muskets of his four hundred sailors and soldiers. Did he get a run for his money? I guess not! First thing you know, one little English ship is tied fast on the starboard side of the tremendous big galleon Nuestra Señora del Rosario, and the other little ship on the port side.

“Carramba! These crazy Englishmen they climb to the decks of that galleon just like monkeys. These four hundred Spanish sailors and soldiers are all chopped to pieces. The tall galleon she is on fire and blazes all up. And these English piraticos dump the gold and silver bars through the ports, into their two little ships, just like you shovel coal.

“Whew! My old grandfather in his shiny armor, all so grand and brave, has to give up his sword to the English capitan. He is treated very nice as a prisoner, but he has to get ransom for himself in Cartagena, four thousand pieces of eight. Some money, to buy old Don Juan Diego Fernandez with! Maybe if those wicked Englishmen had not captured the Nuestra Señora del Rosario, I will be a rich woman now and not have to go to sea.”

“Yes, the old boy was out of luck,” heartily agreed Richard Cary. “Of course I feel more like cheering the Englishmen. Do you happen to know the names of their ships?”

“Yes. It is written down in Spanish, in the library of the Bishop of Cartagena. My father made a copy one time. The ships were named the Bonaventure and the Rose of Plymouth.”

Richard Cary seemed to forget the allurement of Teresa Fernandez. He folded his arms and stood detached and erect, staring out at the darkened sea. It was thus he stood whenever these misty, fleeting emotions came to disquiet him. McClement was right, no doubt. It was nothing more than the voice of romance to which hitherto he had been deaf. He brushed a hand across his eyes. His massive body relaxed. He laughed awkwardly, patted Teresa’s soft cheek, and muttered:

“You described it so well that I seemed to see the thing just as it happened.”

“Please do not look like that again,” said Teresa, her accents slightly tremulous. “You scare me. It was just like the ghost of one of those mad Englishmen in the little ships. I was going to tell you some more, but you must be nice and gentle. The ship’s bell from the galleon Nuestra Señora del Rosario was saved by a Spanish officer from a fort when the hulk drifted ashore. This one he gave the bell to my old ancestor, Don Juan Diego Fernandez, and it stayed always in Cartagena. I give you my word, Ricardo, it is hanging right now in the patio of my uncle’s house, close to the Plaza de la Independencia. There is the bronze bell, very beautiful, and it hangs from an oak timber that was in the galleon. If you go ashore with me, I will show you the bell in my uncle’s patio. We can sit there, and my uncle he will amuse you. He is a very funny old guy.”

“The bell of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario,” Richard Cary mused aloud. “Yes, I shall want to see it, Teresa.”

“Hum-m, in Cartagena you will be admired, let me tell you that, Ricardo,” said she, with a flash of asperity. “A girl in every port? And you have made a fool of Teresa Fernandez. It does not happen every day. I swear by the blessed Santa Marta.”

“I’ll swear it never happened to me before—to find a girl like you and fall in love with her,” was his ardent declaration.

“Do you truly love me, Ricardo? Such a man as you?” Her sigh was both wistful and happy. “I was hoping—I thought I saw it in your eyes, in your smile, but—”

For answer he kissed her on the lips, clinging lips that returned the caress. Responsively she surrendered to his masterful sway. In her heart was the faith to believe that he could never be fickle or inconstant, once his love was pledged. A girl in every port? She had spoken in jest.

It was time for them to part. On watch, later in the night, he found himself repeating:

“Could man be drunk forever

With liquor, love or fights,

Lief should I rouse at morning

And lief lie down of nights.”

He stood alone with the wind and the clamorous sea and the stars in the velvet sky. Gazing forward from the bridge, the ship’s derrick booms and cargo winches were obscurely shadowed. The forecastle deck and lofty prow lifted against the curtain of night. The spray broke over them and beat like gusts of rain. It was possible to forget that this was a modern steamer, infinitely complex and cunningly contrived, a steel trough driven by tireless engines. To Richard Cary she was a ship steering across the Caribbean as ships had steered in bygone centuries. Never had his heart beat so high nor had he been conscious of such a keen-edged joy in living.

Teresa Fernandez, the blood in whose veins ran back to Don Juan Diego Fernandez, commander of the shattered treasure galleon! It pleased Richard Cary’s awakened fancy to picture such a girl as this in the Cartagena of long ago, a scarf of Spanish lace thrown over her lustrous hair, and a tall, fair Devon lad to woo her when the seamen of the Bonaventure had landed on the beach to parley for ransom.

At breakfast next morning, Cary could see the competent stewardess, graceful, light of foot, flitting to and fro on this errand or that, with a shrewd eye to the main chance. No nonsense, her aspect seemed to say. She was the “good scout,” the unsentimental friend of the second steward, the wireless operators, the purser, and the doctor. She colored divinely, however, when her sailor lover smiled a greeting from his table. A little later, when he passed her on the staircase, and they were unobserved, her fingers lightly brushed the sleeve of his coat.

The Tarragona was approaching the Colombian coast. In the afternoon a trifling incident occurred. It was destined, however, to affect the fortunes of Richard Cary in a manner unforeseen. Captain Jordan Sterry, that vigorous figure of a middle-aged shipmaster, had displayed a fatherly interest in a pert young creature with bobbed hair who seemed to enjoy it, for lack of a better game to play. He had invited her to visit the bridge. It was a courtesy often shown favored passengers.

The second officer was on duty. He happened to overhear some chance remark of the skipper, a rather silly thing to say, fatuous in a man old enough to be the bobbed one’s father. Most unluckily Richard Cary chuckled aloud. A lively sense of the ridiculous was too much for him. The infatuated Captain Sterry turned and glared. Cary was fairly caught. His face betrayed him. It mirrored the merciless verdict of youth. Words could have put it no more bitingly.

Captain Sterry turned red. He bit his lip. His second mate thought him absurd. To be laughed at was degrading, intolerable. It penetrated his vanity and seared his soul like acid.

A fleeting tableau, but Cary had made an enemy who both hated and feared him. His offense was beyond all forgiveness. He stepped to a wheel-house window and took the binocular from the rack. It occupied him to watch a distant steamer almost hull down. He felt rather sorry for what he had done. It was uncomfortable to think of the look in the skipper’s eyes, not so much anger as profound humiliation. Never again would these twain be happy in the same ship together.

It meant that Richard Cary might have to leave the Tarragona and find another berth. This was his regretful conclusion. He liked the ship nor could he imagine himself as forsaking the Caribbean Sea to return to the Western Ocean trade.

CHAPTER IV

THE ANGER OF COLONEL FAJARDO

The steamer sighted Cartagena in the rosy mists of dawn. It seemed to rise from the sea and float like a mirage. It was a mass of towers, domes, and battlements, of stone houses tinted pink and yellow with tiled roofs that gleamed and wavered. The surf broke against the wall of enduring masonry which marched around this ancient city of the conquistadores, a mighty wall broken here and there by massive gateways and bastions.

Defiantly facing the sea, secure of itself, this proud stronghold of Cartagena de Indias had been increasingly fortified until it had become impregnable to the foes who, in the very early days, had harried and plundered it. These walls and escarpments, the flanking towers and the guardian forts looming from the nearby hills and forelands, had cost the kings of Spain untold millions drained from the fabulous mines of Potosi. They had been determined to make this Caribbean seaport the Gibraltar of the New World.

The Tarragona changed her course and moved to the southward of the city, past the tall palms clustered on the hot, white beaches. What appeared to be a wide entrance to the harbor was soon revealed, but the breakers frothed against a barrier that ran athwart it like a reef. On the chart this reef was a curiously straight line, as if laid down with a ruler. Richard Cary was shading his eyes with his hand when the chief officer remarked:

“If the Colombians had any get-up and gumption they would blow a hole in that submerged wall and open the old ship channel. It was built across there, God knows how long ago, to keep the buccaneers out. Some building job, that! There must be almost a mile of it.”

“Yes, it was put there after the Englishmen sailed in past the forts and sacked the town,” quickly exclaimed Cary. “It wasn’t there when Drake took Cartagena. He used this Boca Grande.”

It was necessary for the Tarragona to proceed seven miles to the southward and enter the narrow passage of the Boca Chica, tortuous and difficult, and then to make her way through the reaches of a blue lagoon. She passed between the outermost forts, gray and grass-grown, but still resisting the slow processes of decay. On the port side was the Castillo de San Fernando with its crenelated walls and deep embrasures in which rested dismounted brass carronades. In the lee of the lofty water-gate rode a Colombian trading schooner. A few Indian canoes were drawn up on the beach.

On the starboard side, the Castillo de San Juan jutted from the sea like a huge rock. Patches of verdure had found root in the crumbling counterscarps. Flowering vines wreathed the round sentry boxes.

Steaming slowly through the placid lagoon, the Tarragona found a circuitous path to Cartagena. The wharf, the corrugated iron cargo sheds, the railway tracks, were ugly and modern. Looking away from them, however, one saw only the stately seaport of the vanished centuries. Behind its ramparts the galleried streets and shaded plazas drowsed through the heat of the day until the breeze came sweeping from the sea with the setting sun.

The Tarragona had much freight to discharge before resuming the voyage to Santa Marta and filling her holds with bananas. Richard Cary had to be an efficient second mate with his mind on the job while the clattering winches plucked the rope slings filled with cases, bales, and casks from the open hatches. At the noon hour he found leisure to loaf under an awning.

Teresa Fernandez found him there. She had something to say. One of her swift and supple gestures indicated a swarthy Colombian in a handsome military uniform who reclined in a steamer chair on the promenade deck. He was gaunt, grizzled, and harsh-featured. Just now his eyes were closed. His hands were comfortably clasped across his belt. He was enjoying a brief siesta after a bountiful luncheon in the saloon as the guest of the ship.

“You see that fellow?” exclaimed Teresa, with a shrug that betokened disfavor. “All his brass buttons and medals? He is the Comandante of the Port, Colonel Fajardo. The boss of the custom-house police and things like that. What do you think of him?”

“Is he a friend of yours?” Dick Cary cautiously parried.

“Last voyage that Colonel Fajardo asked me to marry him,” candidly answered Teresa. “Yes, that fellow told me he was in love with me. He is not as old as he looks, unless he is a big liar. Forty-two years old he says.”

Cary glowered at the somnolent Comandante of the Port. In a way, this was startling news. Next he fixed a questioning eye on the charming Teresa whose demeanor hinted that, as a suitor, the colonel had not been finally disposed of on that last voyage. She flashed a brilliant smile, furtively caressed Cary’s hand, and deigned to explain:

“It was just like this, Ricardo. This Colonel Fajardo is a very important man in Cartagena. The Fruit Company must treat him nice and pat him on the back or he will make trouble for the ships. He can find something wrong with the papers and delay the sailings or maybe a poor sailor is caught smuggling some cigarettes ashore. You see, I am in the Company’s employ and I must not make this Colonel Fajardo mad with me. It is best to be diplomatique, to jolly him along, you understand?”

“It sounds well enough,” growled Richard Cary, by no means appeased, “but what about this voyage? Has that buzzard proposed to you again?”

“Oh, yes, as soon as he came aboard this morning. He was waiting, very impatient. He had told me he had plenty of money and a very good house. His pay is not much, you know, except what he can steal. I asked my uncle in Cartagena to find out about this Colonel Fajardo. My uncle he cannot come down to the ship to-day, but he sends me a letter. This fine Comandante is a false alarm, Ricardo. He has spent all his money on women and his house is mortgaged up to the neck. He is no good at all. Bah! Why should I marry that fellow, even if I am a poor girl that has to go to sea and work very hard?”

“Have you told him so?” sternly demanded Dick Cary. Her nonchalance rather staggered him.

“Yea, I could not string him along any more,” serenely confessed Teresa Fernandez.

“But if he had all kinds of money, what then?”

“Never, Ricardo. He disgusts me. That last voyage, when I told him to wait, you had not kissed me then.”

“You are my sweetheart,” he passionately exclaimed. “And I’ll take care of that Colombian blackguard if he pesters you again.”

“You would kill him, Ricardo, because you love me?” happily sighed Teresa Fernandez. “But, listen, don’t you go making trouble with that man if he acts jealous. I will be glad when the ship sails for Santa Marta to-morrow.”

Richard Cary’s laugh was lightly scornful. He held the amorous Colonel Fajardo in very small esteem. By this time the latter gentleman had awakened from his siesta. He yawned and blinked at the harbor upon whose oily surface a small sailing vessel drifted becalmed in the blistering heat. Then his gaunt frame uprose from the steamer chair and he stiffly straightened himself in the frogged white uniform with the ornate gold shoulder-straps.

He was not a man to be dismissed with a careless laugh. A visage tanned to the hue of brown leather was bitten deep with the lines of a hard and cruel temper. The thin lips and jutting nose were predatory. One thought of him as perhaps a soldier who had seen more arduous service than this lazy billet of Comandante of the Port. He had the air of command, but sloth and dissipation were corroding him as rust destroys a good weapon.

Yawning, Colonel Fajardo lighted a cigarette and smoothed the wrinkles from his tunic. Then he twisted the ends of a mustache that was prematurely flecked with gray. He sauntered forward, to the gangway, and swore viciously at two of his custom-house guards who had retreated to the shade of a deck-house. One of them he kicked by way of emphasis. From this part of the ship he caught sight of Teresa Fernandez under the awning with the huge, yellow-haired young second mate of the Tarragona.

At a glance it was easy to perceive that they found this dalliance agreeable. Excessively and infernally agreeable, in the opinion of this interested Colonel Fajardo. It was a mordant sight for him to behold. He felt suddenly feverish. It was, indeed, like a touch of calentura.

A certain thing was revealed to him. It displayed itself beyond a shadow of doubt. Teresa Fernandez had considered his offer of marriage. Yes, she had been favorable, his vanity led him to believe, delaying the answer until the ship had returned to Cartagena.

Now she had rejected him; the humble stewardess of the Tarragona rejecting the renowned Colonel Fajardo, Comandante of the Port, who might have had so many other young and beautiful women. It was because she had found a Yankee lover. Little devil, would she so wantonly flaunt this great, stupid beast of a sailor before the eyes of Colonel Fajardo? It was amusement for those two.

The Colonel’s lean fingers quivered as he lighted a fresh cigarette. The thin lips twitched beneath the martial mustache. He turned on his heel and strolled aft to the smoking-room. There he slumped upon a cushioned settle and rested his elbows upon the table. He ordered a whiskey and soda and drank it very slowly. Another Colombian official joined him, a loquacious person who babbled about various matters and was indifferent to the brooding, ungracious demeanor of Colonel Fajardo. After a while this acquaintance departed.

The colonel continued to drink, steadily and alone, until the chief engineer drifted in for a cold bottle of beer. He was sweaty and dirty and his legs ached. For sociability’s sake he sat down at the table with the Comandante of the Port. It was an error, as he presently discovered. The morose gentleman of the gold shoulder-straps contributed no more than an occasional grunt or a bored, “Si, señor.”

His eyes were slightly bloodshot and failed to focus. Otherwise his sobriety could not be challenged. He brightened only when about to plunge his predatory beak into another whiskey and soda. Having prudently slaked his own thirst, the chief engineer betook himself back to the task of tinkering with a balky condenser in a temperature that would have made Hades seem frigid. Later in the afternoon, when he emerged on deck for air, he accosted Richard Cary.

“Hearken to me, shipmate. If you insist on sparking the beautiful stewardess, I suggest that you suspend operations until Cartagena is in the offing. What I mean to say is, a little discretion wouldn’t be half bad.”

“Thanks, Mac, but if you had just as soon mind your own damn business,” was the discourteous retort, “I can hearken a lot easier. How did you get this way?”

“By using a normal intelligence and powers of observation in which you are so colossally lacking,” was the unruffled reply. “You have already driven Colonel Fajardo to drink. He has been at it ever since luncheon, according to Jimmy, the barkeep. No, he isn’t drunk, but, my word, his disposition is ruined. He may be chewing glass by this time.”

“Humph! You read too many novels, Mac. Trying to stage a melodrama?”

“This from you, Dick Cary? You wild ass! After boring me with your fantastic nonsense about buried memories of the Spanish Main? Accuse me of being stagey when I offer a friendly bit of common sense? Oh, very well, if you get a knife in your ribs or a bullet in your back, you needn’t expect me to hold your hand and listen to your last words. I have heard gossip in Cartagena, that this Colonel Fajardo has bumped off one or two sprightly young caballeros who got in his way.”

“And you listen to such rot?” scoffed Dick Cary. “The drunken counterfeit! Somebody ought to call his bluff. I wish he would give me a chance.”

“The Devon lad? Spaniards are good hunting,” quizzed McClement. “Up, my hearties, and at ’em.”

Instead of dining at his favorite café in Cartagena, Colonel Fajardo remained on board the Tarragona. He swayed just a trifle as he walked into the saloon, but his bearing was haughty and sedate. He held his liquor well, did this seasoned soldier of the tropics. A man of blood and iron! More accurate, perhaps, to say that he had a copper lining. Whatever emotions may have tormented him, his appetite for food was not blighted. He ate enormously and gulped down cup after cup of black coffee.

This treatment was sobering. The colonel’s eyes were again in focus. They expressed an intelligence alert and sinister. His gait was normal when he returned to the promenade deck. He posted himself where he could observe the gangway steps that led down to the wharf. It was not long before Teresa Fernandez appeared. As he suspected, she had been warily avoiding him. Just now she failed to see him because she was looking elsewhere, forward, where the stairs led down from the officers’ quarters on the boat deck.

This was a woman of a very different aspect from the industrious stewardess of the Tarragona in her white garb so severely trim and plain. The wide black hat framed a face girlish and piquant. The gown was of some gray stuff, thin and shimmering. It revealed the soft contours of her shoulders, of her slenderly modeled arms. The ancestry which could boast of a Don Juan de Fernandez, captain of the great galleon of the plate fleet, had survived in Teresa’s small-boned wrists, in the curves of her slim silken-clad ankles. Greedily did the lustful Colonel Fajardo gaze at her. Damnation! Never had he so greatly desired to possess a woman. In proof of this he had been even willing to marry her.

She gayly waved a hand, but not at him. The second officer of the ship was hastening to join her, the great, insolent ox of a Yankee sailor. He, too, was in shore-going clothes, a jaunty Panama with a crimson band, cream-colored suit of pongee, a bamboo stick crooked on his arm. He was so flagrantly the happy lover off for a holiday hour ashore that Colonel Fajardo muttered blasphemies the most picturesque. The intention was to annoy him, to make him beside himself. It was odious.

The perfidious Teresa Fernandez hung on the arm of Richard Cary as they descended to the wharf and walked to the custom-house gate beyond which waited a group of little open carriages, plying for hire. The drivers raised their voices in clamorous persuasion, naming extortionate prices. Teresa scolded them in voluble Spanish as piraticos and children of the Evil One. They meekly subsided. The carriage with the least bony and languorous nag rattled over the cobblestones in the direction of the nearest gateway through the city wall.

Colonel Fajardo moved to the gangway. He halted to think. His hard, worn face was not so angry as perplexed. It was to be surmised that things had taken a disappointing turn. Possibly it would have pleased him more had the second officer gone ashore alone. The fact that Teresa Fernandez had accompanied him intruded a certain awkwardness. In a way, it was unforeseen. In previous voyages she had declined to leave the ship after dark.

Colonel Fajardo absently fingered a scar on his chin. The circumstances were regrettable, but he was not one to neglect a matter of importance so long as there was the remotest chance of success. Immediately he made his way down to the wharf and strode as far as the office of the customs. He entered this small building, locked the door, and talked softly into the telephone. The conference was brief. His language was so guarded that it could mean nothing at all if overheard. The message was a masterpiece of circumlocution. It was understood, however, by a certain sallow young man who had been playing a guitar in a café of shady repute in a dingy street of Cartagena.

He had been waiting for a message. In the afternoon a dusty urchin had come from the wharf with a few unsigned words scrawled on a bit of paper advising him to hold himself in readiness for orders.

In employing the telephone, Colonel Fajardo displayed the modern spirit. In certain aspects of his private affairs he harked back to earlier centuries. From the wharf he returned to the ship and sought the smoking-room. With a mien of somber abstraction he applied himself to a whiskey and soda.

Meanwhile the shabby open carriage had rattled through a cavern of a gateway in the wall. Cartagena by moonlight! Richard Cary was glad he had waited until night. All traces of garish modernity were banished by the sorcery of the silver moon. In the shadows of the winding streets, gallants whispered at grated windows. The tall houses with overhanging balconies that almost met across these narrow streets were gravely beautiful. In the stones above their doors were chiseled the crests of conquering hidalgos whose bones had been dust these hundreds of years.

There was almost no traffic. Strollers loitered in the grateful breeze, a group was singing as it passed. There was the hum of voices from the balconies, the distant music of a band in a plaza. To Richard Cary it was like the ghost of a city, untouched by change or dissolution, which dwelt with memories great and tumultuous. He gave himself over to its spell.

Teresa Fernandez also was silent. When she spoke, it was to say, with deep emotion:

“It is so wonderful to be with you, Ricardo, away from the ship and all those noisy people. To-night we seem to belong right here in my old Cartagena, you and I. This is like a beautiful dream, but, ah, dreams never last very long. Will you love me for more than a little while?”

“Aye, Teresa mine; forever and ever. McClement calls me crazy, but I feel as though I had loved you in Cartagena long ago.”

“Santa Maria, do I look as old as that?” she rippled. “And I thought I had made myself muy dulce for you. If you will stay crazy about me, I don’t care how crazy that old chief engineer thinks you are.”

When deeply stirred, Ricardo was not one to turn a ready compliment. She was satisfied, however, with his smile of fond approval, with his manifest pride in her slender and elegant beauty. One thought made them wistful. To forsake the open carriage and wander at their will, to a stone bench in the shadows of the Plaza Fernandez de Madrid, or to the murmuring beach, this was their desire. But they could not remain long away from the ship.

Teresa had petulantly explained that there was no evading a call at the house of her uncle, Señor Ramon Bazán. It was a promise, made last voyage, and she was a woman of her word. Besides, this funny old guy of an uncle, said she, had vowed to leave her all his money when he was dead. It was necessary to be nice to him while he was alive. Ha, not one dollar would he give her until he was dead, not if she begged him on her knees. A terrible tightwad was the Señor Ramon Bazán.

Richard Cary made no comment. He felt sorry for the girl who had been compelled to travel rough roads of life, courageously battling for survival. She was not sordid, but anxious. Money was a weapon of self-defense. She had been compelled to think too much of it.

The carriage halted in front of the frowning residence of Uncle Ramon Bazán. The iron-studded door was stout enough to have stopped a volley of musket balls. It was swung open by a barefooted Indian lad in ragged shirt and trousers. Teresa brushed him aside and led the way into the patio, open to the sky, where a fountain tinkled and flamboyant flowers bloomed. A little brown monkey scampered up a trellis and swung by its tail. A green parrot screeched impolite Spanish epithets from a cage on the wall.

The Indian youth shuffled into the patio and timidly informed the señorita that her uncle had gone out on an errand and would soon return.

“I hope he forgets to come back, Ricardo,” said Teresa. “Now we can sit down by the oleander tree and I will show you the bell of the old galleon Nuestra Señora del Rosario.”

They crossed the moonlit square of the patio. Cary saw a heavy framework of Spanish oak timbers, more durable than iron. From the cross-piece was suspended the massy bell whose elaborately chased surface was green with time and weather. By the flare of a match, Cary discovered a royal coat of arms in high relief and the blurred letters of an inscription, presumably the name of the galleon and of the port whence she had hailed.

Teresa Fernandez groped for the clapper and let it swing against the flaring rim. The bell responded with a note sonorous and musical. Lingeringly vibrant, the sound filled the patio. With more vigor Richard Cary swung the clapper. The voice of the galleon’s bell swelled in volume. The air fairly quivered and hummed. It was unlike any ship’s bell that Richard Cary had ever heard at sea or in port. And yet its timbre thrilled some responsive chord in the dim recesses of his soul. It was such a bell as had flung its mellow echoes against the walls of Cartagena, of Porto Bello, of Nombre de Dios when the tall galleons of the plate fleet had ridden to their hempen cables.

The sound of the bell had died to a murmur when Teresa spoke. The quality of her voice was attuned in harmony with it, or so it seemed to the listening Richard Cary.

“When I was a little girl,” said she, “I liked to come and play with the old bell. I had to stand up on my toes and push the clapper with my two hands. Dong! Dong! It sang songs to me. They made me feel like you say you do when you hear the wind in the palm trees, Ricardo. There is something about this bell—very queer, but just as true as true can be. You will not laugh, like the other Americanos. If anything very bad is going to happen to the one it belongs to, this bell of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario it strikes four times. Dong! dong!—Dong! dong! Four bells, like on board a ship. When there is going to be death or some terrible bad luck! It has always been like that, ’way, ’way back to my ancestor Don Juan Diego Fernandez.”

Richard Cary nodded assent. It was not for him to find fault with a legend such as this. Teresa, encouraged by his sympathy, went on to say:

“Yes, it was heard the night before the two little English ships, the Bonaventure and the Rose of Plymouth, came sailing into Cartagena harbor. Dong! dong!—Dong! dong! There was no Spanish sailor near at all on deck when it struck four bells. A hundred years ago there was a General Fernandez who fought with Bolivar in the revolution against Spain. His wife she sits right here in this patio and waits for news from her brave husband. One night it is very quiet and everybody is asleep. She is waked up. What does she hear? Not so loud, but very sad and clear. Dong! dong!—Dong! dong! Four bells!

“This poor woman knows her husband must be dead in some battle for the flag of Bolivar. Pretty soon a soldier comes from the Magdalena with a message, but she has had her message already. Another time, my Ricardo, it was a Fernandez that got drowned in a ship. It went down in a hurricane off Martinique. The bell told his mother. Now I have told you enough gloomy stuff, Ricardo. Maybe that old bell will belong to me some day. I think I will throw it in the harbor. It is a Jonah.”

CHAPTER V

RICHARD CARY STROLLS ALONE

A wisp of an elderly man appeared in the moonlit patio, with no more sound than the rustle of a dry leaf. He seemed to move with an habitual air of stealth. Bent and meager, his linen clothes flapped on him. He peered this way and that. The little brown monkey came dancing down from the trellis and perched, chattering, upon his shoulder. He stood fanning himself with a dingy straw hat. He was short of breath, wheezing audibly. No matter how trifling his errands, it was to be conjectured that he always flitted to and fro in a hurried, secretive manner.

Teresa moved out of the shadows. He jumped back, easily startled. His niece called out some affectionate Spanish phrase and dutifully advanced to embrace him. Señor Ramon Bazán pecked at her cheek, cackled a welcome, and wriggled clear. He was fascinated by the formidable size of the stranger who hovered between the galleon bell and the oleander tree. It was a phenomenon that provoked excited curiosity.

Uncle Ramon Bazán sputtered questions. Teresa proudly presented the second officer of the Tarragona who felt baffled because he could talk no Spanish. This failed to check the wordy welcome of the uncle of Teresa. He was impressed and amused. On tiptoe he patted Cary’s mighty shoulder and measured his height. It was like a terrier making friends with a Saint Bernard.

“He says you are as big as the hill of La Popa,” swiftly interpreted Teresa. “You do his poor house an honor. Everything in it is yours. You have made a delicious hit with him, Ricardo. He does not like many people.”

Cary bowed and conveyed his thanks. Uncle Ramon chuckled like the squeak of a rusty hinge. He had made a joke, explained Teresa. Why offer the house to this Señor Cary when he could easily carry it off on his back if he felt so disposed? They found chairs near the fountain. The Indian muchacho brought glasses of iced lemonade. Cary smoked his pipe and idly listened. To hear Teresa’s voice, flowing, musical, talking in the language of her native Cartagena, was a new delight.

Presently the wee brown monkey clambered to his knee and sat there. The wrinkled visage bore an odd resemblance to that of Señor Ramon Bazán. Richard Cary knocked the ashes from his briar pipe and laid it on the bench beside him. The monkey noted the procedure, with a grave scrutiny. Then it picked up the pipe, carefully rapped the bowl against Cary’s knee, and inserted the stem between its teeth. Cary courteously offered his match-box and tobacco-pouch. Uncle Ramon’s shrill mirth was so violent that a coughing fit was nearly the death of him. Teresa was gleeful because to win the monkey’s favor was a signal distinction. In her uncle’s sight, it was the final seal of approval.

Soon it was time to go back to the ship. The host escorted them to the street and sent the Indian lad in quest of a carriage. He warmly urged Richard Cary to make the house his home whenever he was in port. It was expressed with gusto. They left him in the doorway, a bizarre figure, the monkey tucked under one arm.

“Never have I seen my uncle like this,” said Teresa as they drove away. “He hates ’most everybody. You are his big pet, Ricardo. Any favor you ask, he will tumble over himself to do it.”

“I was sorry I couldn’t have a chat with him, he seemed so cordial. A comical old chap.”

“Pooh, he can talk English when he wants to. He lived in Washington one time, for the government at Bogotá. He is funny. To-night it was a trick, his talking only Spanish. Maybe you would say something about him to me, eh? He was sizing you up. He is just as sly as that little monkey. But I must not speak so horrid of my uncle. He is a very old man—cracked—some bats in the cabeza. How old do you think he is?”