CHAPTER XXI.

TEMPTED FROM DUTY.

For a whole day the _Fish-hawk_ cruised back and forth and in great circles in the vicinity of the deserted buoy, with a man constantly at the mast-head scanning the surface of the sea for some trace of the missing dory. Then leaving the spot, she ran into the coast, from which the buoy was about twenty miles distant, and made inquiries at several of the tiny fishing villages that nestle at the heads of the deep fiords. It was all in vain. Nothing was seen, nothing had been heard, and the cause of the dory’s sudden and complete disappearance could not even be satisfactorily guessed at. The only bit of information gained from the islanders was, that on the day the dory was lost a steamer had been seen skirting the coast, on her way to the southward, which was such an unusual circumstance that it was something to be talked about and wondered over.

Finally the crew of the _Fish-hawk_ sailed sorrowfully back to the halibut grounds, convinced that their well-loved young shipmate and his black dory mate had been swallowed by the cold waters of that northern sea, and that they should never again see them in this world. Captain Coffin and old Mateo were especially distressed over what had happened, for they had loved the boy as an own son, and could not become reconciled to the fate which they supposed had overtaken him. It was the harder to bear because of its uncertainty. If they could only be sure of what had happened to him, and that he were not still drifting about, starving or perishing from thirst on that cruel sea, or stranded on some rocky islet of the inhospitable coast from which there was no escape!

With all this, the cause of the dory’s disappearance was a very simple one. Its occupants had merely been led astray, as many another has been and will be, in the pursuit of riches. They had hardly been left on their station, and begun fishing, when the negro’s quick eye detected a small lump of grayish matter floating on the water but a short distance from them. At the sight he uttered an exclamation of joy, and hastily hauling in his line, he seized the oars and began to pull towards it.

“What is the matter?” cried Breeze, who had not noticed the floating object, and would not have known what it was if he had. “Where are you going?”

“Ole Nim catch um dreckly, young cap’n, den you see. Better’n fish! better’n gole! better’n ebberyting!”

What could he mean? And when Nimbus stopped rowing, and, stretching out his arm, lifted the little gray lump, about the size of a man’s fist, from the water, Breeze was no wiser than before.

“What is it, Nimbus, and what is it good for?” he asked, in perplexity.

“Amble grease! Good for sell! Heap money! P’r’aps fin’ more!” answered the black man, smelling of his prize and patting it with his great hands, while his eyes roved over the water in search of another like it.

“Ambergris!” shouted Breeze, who had heard from old fishermen stories of this precious substance, and of its fabulous value, but had never before seen it. “You don’t mean, Nimbus, that that dirty-looking stuff is ambergris!”

“Yes, sah. Him amble grease sure ’nough,” answered the black man, who had more than once seen this most valuable of all the products of the sea on his native African coast.

“Well, if that’s ambergris, I believe there’s another bit of it over there,” said Breeze, standing up and looking eagerly in the direction from which the wind blew.

He was right; there was another bit, and beyond that they found another, and still another, until they had gathered up a number of the small floating lumps that had been strung out over several miles of water.

“What is ambergris, anyway?” asked Breeze, while Nimbus was rowing towards one of these pieces.

“Don’ know,” was the answer. “Sick whale heave um up.”

“Sick whale!” exclaimed Breeze, in a tone of disgust. “I hope you don’t expect me to believe such a yarn as that, Nimbus.”

In spite of the boy’s disbelief, the black man was right; for ambergris has been found in the intestines of sperm-whales, but only of such as were very thin and evidently diseased. It has also been thrown up by such whales in their death-struggles after being harpooned. It is valuable on account of its delightful odor, and is used in the manufacture of most of the delicious perfumes for the handkerchief that chemists devote so much time and ingenuity to preparing and naming. Nothing has ever been found to take its place, and it brings, according to the state of the market, from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars an ounce, or about five hundred dollars per pound.

Although Breeze and Nimbus had no distinct idea of the value of what they were finding, they knew enough about it to become intensely excited as they discovered piece after piece, and the little pile in the bottom of the boat began to assume very respectable proportions. In their eager search they forgot everything else, and paid no attention to where they were going, nor how far they had come. They even failed to notice the little squall of rain and fog that came whirling past them, bringing with it a change of wind. That they neglected to observe this was because, just at that moment, they sighted the great parent mass of gray stuff from which all the little pieces they had been picking up had broken off and drifted away.

If they were excited before, they were wild with excitement now, and both of them very nearly pitched into the water in their eagerness to secure their prize and get it into the dory. They estimated its weight to be nearly, if not quite, a hundred pounds; and its bulk was so great that they had hard work to squeeze it into the boat.

When at last this had been safely accomplished, they sat and gazed at it and at each other.

“I shouldn’t wonder if it was worth a thousand dollars,” said Breeze, at length.

“Mo’ like a millium!” answered Nimbus, whose ideas of the value of their prize were even more vague than those of his young dorymate.

“Well,” said Breeze, “let’s head back for the schooner; Captain Coffin will know pretty near what it is worth. I suppose we’ll have to share this find with the rest of the crew, though;” and with the shadow of covetousness creeping over his soul, the boy thought sadly of how much pleasanter it would be to divide their prospective profits between two than among fourteen.

The same thought was evidently weighing upon Nimbus, as he slowly picked up his oars and made ready to pull--where? Now for the first time since sighting the first bit of the stuff that had lured them from their post of duty they began to look for the buoy-flag, which they had been warned not to lose sight of.

“There it is!” cried Breeze, pointing to a distant speck on the water.

They pulled towards it; but, when they had approached close enough to discover its real nature, they found it to be but a bit of floating drift-wood, and though they did not know it, they had gone another half-mile in the wrong direction.

“Well,” said Breeze, “it can’t be very far off, and so long as we pull with the wind we must get near enough to it for the schooner to sight us. The ambergris drifted with the wind, and we were pulling against it, you know.”

Yes, Nimbus remembered that, and agreed that they must now go with the wind in order to retrace their course. But neither of them knew that the wind had changed.

So, for more than an hour they pulled, in what they imagined to be the right direction, and every stroke carried them farther away from the schooner.

At length they realized their true position. They were once more adrift on the open sea in a frail dory, and this time without food or water. This time, too, they had only themselves to blame; for only their own carelessness and direct disobedience of orders had brought them into this miserable plight. There was but little chance of their being picked up, for vessels were rare in these waters. As for seeking to gain the horrible, rock-bound coast of the island, the mere thought of what they had seen of it caused them to dread it almost as much as the open sea. Still, this seemed to be the only thing left for them to do, and once more the tiny compass that had already proved such a true friend to Breeze was brought into service.

Upon getting the ball open and looking at the card, they were greatly puzzled to account for its movements, and thought it must be out of order. One side of it was so drawn down, and the other so lifted up, that the ball had to be inclined at a sharp angle to get the card to move at all. Neither of them had ever heard of the dip of the magnetic needle, nor did they know that they were within about ten degrees of the magnetic north pole, or the point at which a compass-needle, if allowed to move freely in every direction, would incline directly downward. However, where they were it still worked sufficiently well to give them a course towards the land, of which they could as yet see nothing, and with heavy hearts they began to row in the direction thus indicated.

The mass of ambergris in the dory seriously interfered with their movements, and left room for only one of them to row at a time. At last, when they had rowed thus for several hours--though in this region of perpetual daylight they had no means of knowing what time it was--Breeze, tired, hungry, and discouraged, pulled in his oars, and exclaimed,

“I’ve a great mind to heave that stuff overboard, and I wish with all my heart that we’d never set eyes on it. The idea of its getting us into such a scrape!”

In saying this, Breeze was only dropping into the fault, so common to us all, of trying to lay the blame of his own wrong action upon somebody or something else; but Nimbus was wiser in this respect than his young companion.

“No, no!” he said. “De amble grease all right. He don’ do nuffin. Now we got um, we keep um. Bimeby be berry glad ob um. Now let ole Nim row.”

“I don’t care,” replied Breeze, changing places with the negro. “I’d give the whole of it this minute for a loaf of bread. I don’t believe I ever was so hungry in my life.”

“Bimeby we get um bread,” said Nimbus, encouragingly, as he took the oars, “an’ hab um amble grease too.”

For an hour or two longer the dory was urged forward by the powerful, steady strokes of the black man, who seemed never to tire or to grow impatient at their hard fate.

At length Breeze exclaimed, “There’s land, Nimbus; I see it!”

Nimbus, turning, saw it too--a long black line of coast; and beyond it, rising dimly through the mist-laden atmosphere, the huge forms of the snow Jökulls. An hour later they were close enough to it to distinguish the features of the forbidding-looking cliffs, pierced by deep fiords, and to begin to consider which of these they should enter.

As they talked the matter over in low tones, awed by the impressiveness of the scene, and the unbroken stillness that brooded over it, Nimbus suddenly raised a warning hand, and his great ears seemed to prick forward with the intentness of listening. He leaned over the side of the dory until one of his ears was close to the water, and when he again raised his head he said, “You hear um steamboat?”

“Hear a what?” exclaimed Breeze, for as yet he had heard nothing.

“Steamboat! You no hear um steamboat coming?”

“No, I’m sure I don’t, nor you either. There aren’t any steamboats in these waters. What you hear must be the surf on the rocks.”

But Nimbus insisted that he did hear a steamboat, and after a while Breeze began to think that he too heard it. In a few minutes more there could be no doubt of it. It was the regular, unmistakable throb of a screw propeller; and though they could not for some time be certain from which direction it came, it was surely approaching them, and renewed hope sprang within their breasts as they listened to it.

At length they saw a thick column of smoke rising beyond a long promontory to the north of them, and soon afterwards the low, black hull and raking masts of a steam-yacht rounded the point and bore swiftly down upon them.

For fear they would not be noticed, Breeze stood up and waved his hat. But there was no necessity for this. The yacht came as directly towards them as though their dory were the object for which it was steering, and it even began to look as though they were going to be run down. At last, when they could see the water jetting up like a fountain before her sharp prow, and could distinguish the features of the seamen, who gazed curiously at them from over her bows, she sheered a little to one side, as though about to pass them.

“Stop! Hold on!” screamed Breeze. “Don’t go off and leave us!”

“Well, by Jove! that’s odd,” said a young man who stood on the yacht’s bridge to an older one who occupied it with him, though of course those in the dory did not hear him; “I thought those fellows were native fishermen, and here they are hailing us in English.” As he spoke, he gave a brass handle in front of him a quick pull.

A gong clanged down in the engine-room, and almost instantly the motion of the screw was stopped. The momentum of the yacht was so great that she was shooting past the dory, when two more strokes of the engine-room gong set the screw to backing furiously. A single stroke stopped it again, and the yacht lay motionless.

“What’s up, and what do you fellows want?” demanded the young man, looking down into the dory from over the canvas side of the bridge.

“We are lost from an American fishing schooner,” replied Breeze, “and we are nearly starved, and we beg that you won’t go off and leave us.”

“Leave you!” exclaimed the warm-hearted young Englishman--for such he was--“leave you here on this beastly coast! Of course we won’t. Come right aboard, both of you. Mr. Marlin, be so good as to have the side-ladder lowered, and get those poor fellows on board.”

A minute later Breeze McCloud, once more rescued, in an almost miraculous manner, from a position of great peril, stood on the deck of the steel steam-yacht Saga, in which her owner was making a summer’s cruise in those far northern latitudes.

Breeze had hardly reached the deck, and was about to speak to this gentleman, who was approaching him, when the gong in the engine-room clanged, and the vessel began once more to move ahead.

Just then came a most distressed cry from the side-ladder, on the lower step of which Nimbus was still standing, holding the painter of the dory in his hand:

“Oh, de amble grease! de amble grease!”

“What does the fellow say?” asked the gentleman, in a perplexed tone, of Breeze.

“Oh, sir, won’t you have the yacht stopped again, before she swamps our dory? It’s full of ambergris,” cried Breeze, who had entirely forgotten the precious cargo of the boat he had just left.

“What! ambergris? You don’t say so! Yes, of course. Mr. Marlin, stop her at once, and get that queer-looking craft, with its cargo, on deck. Why, young man, if that stuff you’ve got in there is truly ambergris, you are carrying a small fortune about with you.”

Acting under the orders of Mr. Marlin, the sailing-master of the yacht, half a dozen of her active, trimly dressed crew sprang to one of her quarter-boats, unhooked it from the davits, and took it in on deck. Then a couple of lines were passed entirely around the dory, which beside the dainty boats of the yacht looked to be a clumsy, ill-shaped craft, and it was lifted clear of the water, and swung up to the level of the rail.

“There,” said the gentleman; “your boat and its contents will be safe enough for the present. What did you say your name was?”

“I did not say,” replied Breeze, “but it is McCloud--Breeze McCloud.”

“And mine,” said the other, “is Seabright.”

“Thank you,” said Breeze, “and I’m very grateful to you for picking us up, Mr. Seabright.”

The boy could not imagine why Lord Seabright stared at him for a moment, and then burst out laughing, at hearing himself thus addressed, for the first time in his life, as plain mister.