PART II THE “HEART OF IRELAND

* * * * *

THE “HEART OF IRELAND”

I THE CAPTAIN GETS A SHIP

After the _Penguin_ job, Captain Blood and Billy Harman, that simple sailorman, had come back to Frisco, the very port of all others one might fancy they would have avoided, but Billy had been a power in Frisco, and, reckoning on his power, he had taken the Captain back with him.

“There’s no call to be afraid,” said Billy; “there was more in that job than the likes of us. Why, they’d pay us money to tuck us away. Whatser use freezin’ round N’ York or Boston? There’s nothin’ to be done on the Eastern side. Frisco’s warm.”

“Damn warm!” put in the Captain.

“Maybe; but there’s ropes there I can pull an’ make bells ring. Clancy and Rafferty and all that crowd are with me, and we’ve done nothin’. Why, we’re plaster saints to the chaps that are walkin’ round in Frisco with cable watch chains across their weskits.”

They came back, and Billy Harman proved to be right. No one molested them. San Francisco was heaving in the throes of an election, and people had no time to bother about such small fry as the Captain and his companion, while, owing to the good offices of the Clancys and Raffertys, Billy managed to pick up a little money here and there and to assist his friend in doing likewise.

Then things began to get slack, and to-day, as bright a morning as ever broke on the Pacific coast, the Captain, down on his luck and without even the price of a drink, was hanging about a wharf near the China docks waiting for his companion.

He took his seat on a mooring bitt, and, lighting a pipe, began to review the situation. Gulls were flitting across the blue water, whipped by the westerly wind blowing in from the Golden Gate, a Chinese shrimp boat with huge lugsail bellying to the breeze was blundering along for the upper bay, crossing the bows of a Stockton river boat and threatening it with destruction; pleasure yachts, burly tugs, and a great four-master just coming in with the salt of Cape Horn on her sun-blistered sides--all these made a picture bright and moving as the morning.

It depressed the Captain.

Business and pleasure have little appeal to a man who has no business and no money for pleasure. We all have our haunting terrors, and the Captain, who feared nothing in an ordinary way, had his. When in extremely low water, he was always haunted by the dread of dying without a penny in his pocket. To be found dead with empty pockets was the last indignity. His Irish pride revolted at the thought, and he was turning it over in his mind now as he sat watching the shipping.

Then he caught a glimpse of a figure advancing toward him along the quay side.

It was Mr. Harman.

“So there you are,” said he, as he drew up to the Captain. “I been lookin’ for you all along the wharf.”

“Any news?” asked the Captain.

Mr. Harman took a pipe from his pocket, and explored the empty bowl with his little finger; then, leaning against the mooring bitt, he cut some tobacco up, filled the pipe, and lit it. Only when the pipe was alight did he seem to hear the Captain’s question.

“That depends,” said he. “I don’t know how you’re feelin’, but my feelin’ is to get out of here, and get out quick.”

“There’s not much news in that,” said Blood. “I’ve had it in my head for days. What’s the use of talking? There’s only one way out of Frisco for you or me, and that’s by way of a fo’c’s’le, and that’s a way I’m not going to take.”

“Maybe,” said Harman, “you’ll let me say my say before putting your hoof in my mouth. News--I should think I had news. Now, by any chance did you ever sight the Channel Islands down the coast there lying off Santa Barbara? First you come to the San Lucas Islands, then you come to Santa Catalina, a big brute of an island she is, same longitude as Los Angeles; then away out from Santa Catalina you have San Nicolas.”

“No, I’ve never struck them,” replied Blood. “What’s the matter with them?”

“The Chinese go there huntin’ for abalone shells,” went on Harman, disregarding the question. “I’m aimin’ at a teeny yellow bit of an island away to the north of the San Lucas, a place you could cover with your hat, a place no one ever goes to.”

“Well?”

“Well, there’s twenty thousand dollars in gold coin lyin’ there ready to be took away. Only this morning news came in that one of the See-Yup-See liners--you know them rotten old tubs, China owned, out of Canton, in the chow an’ coffin trade--well, one of them things is gone ashore on San Juan, that’s the name of the island. Swept clean, she was, and hove on the rocks, and every man drowned but two Chinee who got away on a raf’. I had the news from Clancy. The wreck’s to be sold, and Clancy says the opinion is she’s not worth two dollars, seein’ the chances are the sea’s broke her up by this. Well, now look here, I know San Juan, intimate, and I know a vessel, once ashore there, won’t break up to the sea in a hurry by the nature of the coast. There’s some coasts will spew a wreck off in ten minutes, and some’ll stick to their goods till there’s nuthin’ left but the starnpost and the ribs. It’s shelvin’ water there and rocks that hold like shark’s teeth. The _Yan-Shan_--that’s her name--will hold till the last trumpet if she’s hove up proper, which, by all accounts, she is, and there’s twenty thousand dollars aboard her.”

“Well?” said Blood.

“Well, if we could crawl down there--you an’ me--we’d put our claws on that twenty thousand.”

“How in the nation are you going to rig out a wrecking expedition on two cents, and suppose you could buy the wreck for two dollars--where’s your two dollars?”

“I’m not goin’ to buy no wrecks,” replied Harman, “nor fit out no wreckin’ expeditions. What I want is something small and easy handled--no steam, get her out and blow down on the northwest trades, raise San Juan and the _Yan-Shan_, lift the dollars, and blow off with them. Why, it’s as easy as walkin’ about in your slippers!”

The Captain sighed.

“As easy as getting into the penitentiary,” said he. “First of all, you’d have to steal a boat, and Frisco is no port to steal boats in; second, there’s such things as telegraphs and cables. You ought to know that after the _Penguin_ job. Then if we were caught, as we would be, you’d have the old _Penguin_ rising like a hurricane on us. She’s forgotten now, I know, but once a chap gets in trouble everything that’s forgotten wakes up and shouts.”

“Maybe,” said Harman, “and maybe I’d be such a fool as to go stealin’ boats. I’m not goin’ to steal no boats. But I’m goin’ to do this thing _somehow_, and once I set my mind on a job I does it. You mark me. I’m fair drove crazy to get out of here and be after somethin’ with money on the end of it, and once I’m like that and sets my think tank boilin’, there’s fish to fry. You leave it to me. I ain’t no fool to be gettin’ into penitentiaries. Well, let’s get a move on; there’s nothin’ like movin’ about to keep one’s ideas jumpin’.”

They walked along the wharf, stepping over mooring hawsers, and pausing now and then to inspect the shipping. There is no port in the world to equal San Francisco in variety and charm. Here, above all other places, the truth is borne in on one that trade, that much abused and seemingly prosaic word, is in reality another name for romance. Here at Frisco all the winds of the world blow in ships whose voyages are stories. Freighters with China mud still clinging to their anchor flukes, junks calling up the lights and gongs of the Canton River, schooners from the islands, whalers from the sulphur-bottom grounds, grain ships from half the world away, the spirit of trade hauls them all in through the Golden Gate, and, over and beyond these, the bay itself has its romance in the ships that never leave it--junks and shrimp boats, the boats of Greek fishermen, yachts, and all sorts of steam craft engaged on a hundred businesses from Suisun Bay to the Guadeloupe River.

Wandering along, Blood and his companion came to Rafferty’s Wharf. Rafferty’s Wharf is a bit of the past, a mooring place for old ships condemned and waiting the breaking yards. It has escaped harbour boards and fires and earthquakes, healthy trade never comes there, and very strange deals have been completed in its dubious precincts over ships passed as seaworthy yet held together, as Harman was explaining now to Blood, “by the pitch in their seams mostly.”

As they came along a man who was crossing the gangway from the tank saw Harman and hailed him.

“It’s Jack Bone,” said Harman to Blood. “Walk along and I’ll meet you in a minute.”

Blood did as he was directed, and Harman halted at the gangway.

“You’re the man I want,” said Bone. “Who’s your friend?”

“Oh, just a chap,” replied Harman. “What’s up now?”

Bone took him by the arm, and led him along in an opposite direction to that in which Blood was going. Bone was the landlord of the Fore and Aft Tavern, half tavern, half sailors’ boarding house, situated right on Rafferty’s Wharf and with a stairway down to the water from the back premises. His face, to use Harman’s description of it, was one grog blossom, and what he did not know of wicked wharfside ways could scarcely be called knowledge.

“Ginnell is layin’ about, lookin’ for two hands,” said Bone. “He’s due out this evenin’, and it’s five dollars apiece for you if you can lay your claws on what he wants. Whites, they must be whites; you know Ginnell.”

Harman did.

Ginnell owned a fifty-foot schooner engaged sometimes in the shark-fishing trade, sometimes in other businesses of a more shady description. He had a Chinese crew, and, though the customhouse laws of San Francisco demanded only one white officer on a Chinese-manned boat, Ginnell always made a point of carrying two men of his own colour with him.

Being known as a hard man all along the wharfside, he sometimes found a difficulty in supplying himself with hands.

“Yes, I know Ginnell,” replied Harman. “Him and his old shark boat by repitation. I’ve stood near the chap in bars now and again, but I don’t call to mind speakin’ to him. His repitation is pretty noisy.”

“Well, I can’t help that,” said Bone. “I didn’t make the chap nor his repitation; if he had a better one, I guess ten dollars wouldn’t be lyin’ your way.”

“Nor twenty dollars yours,” laughed Harman.

“That’s my business,” said Bone. “The question is, do you take on the job? I’d do it all myself only there’s such a want of sailormen on the front. It’s those durned Bands of Hope and Sailors’ Rests that sucks ’em in, fills ’em with bilge in the way of tracks and ginger beer, and turns ’em out onfit for any job onless it’s got a silver-plated handle to it. Mouth organs an’ the New Jerusalem is all they cares for onct them wharf missionaries gets a holt on them. I tell you, Billy Harman, if they don’t get up some by-law to stop these chaps propagatin’ their gospels and spoilin’ trade, the likes of me and you will be ruined--that’s a fac’. Well, what do you say?”

All the time Mr. Bone was holding forth, Harman, who had struck an idea, was deep in meditation. The question roused him.

“If Ginnell wants two chaps,” said he, “I believe I can fit him with them. Anyhow, where’s he to be found?”

“He’ll be at my place at three o’clock,” said Bone, “and I’ve promised to find the goods for him by that.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Harman, “I’ll find the chaps and have them at your place haff past three or so; you can leave it safe in my hands.”

“You speak as if you was certain.”

“And certain I am. I’ve got the chaps you want.”

“Now look here,” said Bone, “don’t you take on the job unless you’re more than sure. Ginnell isn’t no boob to play up and down with; he’d set in, mostlike, to wreck the bar if he thought I was playin’ cross with him.”

“Don’t fret,” said Harman. “I’ll be there, and now fork out a dollar advance, for I’ll have some treatin’ to do.”

Bone produced the money. It changed hands, and he departed, while Harman pursued his way along the wharf toward his friend.

Blood was sitting on an empty crate.

“Well,” said he, as the other drew up, “what business?”

Harman told every word of his conversation with Bone, and, without any addition to it, waited for the other to speak.

“Well, you’ve got the dollar,” said Blood at last, “and there’s some satisfaction in that. I’m not the chap to take five cents off a chap by false pretenses same’s you’ve done with Bone, but Bone’s not a man by all accounts; he’s a crimp in man’s clothes, and if all the old whalemen he’s filled with balloon juice and sent to perdition could rise up and shout, I reckon his name’d be known in two hemispheres.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Harman. “What was that you were saying about false pretenses? I haven’t used no false pretenses. They ain’t things I’m in the habit of usin’ between man and man.”

“Well, what have you been using? You told me a moment ago you’d agreed to furnish two hands to this chap’s order for five dollars apiece and a dollar advance.”

“So I have.”

“And where’s your hands?”

“I’ve got them.”

“In your pocket?”

“Oh, close up!” said Harman. “I never did see such a chap as you for wearin’ blinkers; can’t you see the end of your nose in front of you? Well, if you can’t, I can. However, I’ll tell you the whole of the business later when I’ve turned it round some more in my head. What I’m after now is grub. Here’s a dollar, and I’m off to Billy Sheehan’s; you come along with me--a dollar’s enough for two--and you can raise your objections after you’ve got a beefsteak inside of you. Maybe you’ll see clearer then.”

The Captain said no more, but followed Harman. Far better educated than the latter, he had come to recognise that Harman, despite his real and childlike simplicity in various ways, had a mind quicker than most men’s. He would often have gone without a meal during that wandering partnership which had lasted for nearly a year but for Harman’s ingenuity and power of resource.

At Sheehan’s they had good beefsteak and real coffee.

“Now,” said Harman, when they had finished, “if you’re ready to listen to reason, I’ll tell you the lay I’m on. Ginnell wants two hands. I’m goin’ to offer myself for one, and you are goin’ to be the other.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Blood. “You mean to say I’m to sign on in that chap’s shark boat. Is that your meaning?”

“I said nuthin’ about signin’ on in shark boats. I said we two has got to get out of here in Ginnell’s tub. Once outside the Gate we’re all right.”

“I see,” said Blood. “We’re to scupper Ginnell and take the boat--and how about the penitentiary?”

“I’m blest if you haven’t got penitentiaries on the brain,” said Harman. “If you leave this thing to me, I’ll fix it so that there’ll be no penitentiaries in the business. Of course if we were to go into such a fool’s job as you’re thinkin’ about, we’d lay ourselves under the law right smart. No, the game I’m after is deeper than that, and it’s Ginnell I’m goin’ to lay under the law. Now I’ve got to run about and do things an’ see people. I’ll leave you here, and here’s a quarter, and don’t you spend it till the time comes. Now you listen to me. Wait about till haff past three, and at haff past three punctual you turn into the Fore and Aft and walk up to the bar and lay your quarter down and call for a drink. You’ll see me there, and if I nod to you, you just nod to me. Then I’ll have a word in private with you.”

“Is that all?” said the Captain.

“That’s all for the present,” said Harman, rising up. “You’ll be there?”

“Yes, I’ll be there,” said Blood, “though I’m blest if I can see your meaning.”

“You will soon,” replied the other, and, paying the score, off he went.

He turned from the wharves up an alley, and then into a fairly respectable street of small houses. Pausing before one of these, he knocked at the door, which was opened almost immediately by a big, blue-eyed, sun-burned, good-natured-looking man some thirty years of age and attired as to the upper part of him in a blue woollen jersey.

This was Captain Mike, of the Fish Patrol.

“Billy Harman!” said Captain Mike. “Come in.”

“No time,” said Harman. “I’ve just called to say a word. I wants you to do me a favour.”

“And what’s the favour?” asked the Captain.

“Oh, nothin’ much. D’you know Ginnell?”

“Pat Ginnell?”

“That’s him.”

“Well, I should think I did know the swab. Why, he’s in with all the Greeks, and there’s not a dog’s trick played in the bay he hasn’t his thumb in. Him and his old shark boat. Whatcher want me to do with him?”

“Nothin’,” replied Harman, “and maybe a lot. I want you just to drop into the Fore and Aft and sit and smoke your pipe at haff past three. Then when I give you the wink you’ll pretend to fall asleep. I just wants you as a witness.”

“What’s the game?” asked Captain Mike.

Harman told.

Had you been watching the two men from a distance, you might have fancied that there was a great joke between them from the laughter of Captain Mike and the way in which Harman was slapping his thigh. Then the door closed, and Harman went off, steering north through a maze of streets till he reached his lodgings.

Here he packed a few things in a bundle and had an interview with his landlady, a motherly woman whose income was derived from a washtub and two furnished bedrooms.

Among the other belongings which he took with him was a box of quinine tabloids. These he placed in the pocket of his coat, and, with the bundle under his arm, departed.

It was five minutes past three when he entered the dirty doggery misnamed the Fore and Aft, and there before the bar behind which Bone was serving drinks stood Ginnell.

Pat Ginnell, to give him his full name, was an Irishman of the sure-fwhat type, who might have been a bricklayer but for his decent clothes and sea air and the big blue anchor tattooed on the back of his left hand. There was no one else in the bar.

“Here’s the gentleman,” said Bone, when he sighted Harman. “Up to time and with the goods to deliver, I dare say. Harman, this is the Captain; where’s the hands?”

“Well,” said Harman, leaning his elbows on the bar, “I believe I’ve got them. One of them’s meself.”

“D’you mean to say you’re up to sign on with me?” asked Ginnell.

“That’s my meanin’,” said Harman.

Ginnell looked at Bone. Then he spoke.

“It won’t do,” said he. “I know you be name, Mr. Harman; you’re in with Clancy and that crowd, and my boat’s too rough for the likes of you.”

“You needn’t fear about that,” said Harman. “I’ve done with Clancy. What I’ve got to do is get out of Frisco and get out quick. The cops are after me; there you have it. I’ve got to get out of here before night--do you take me--and I’m so pressed to get out sudden I’ll take your word for ten dollars a month without any signin’.”

Ginnell’s brow cleared.

“What are you havin’?” said he.

“I’ll take a drink of whisky,” replied Harman.

The bargain was concluded.

“And how,” said Ginnell, “what about the other chap?”

Harman wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I’ve made an arrangement with a chap to meet me here,” said he. “He’ll be in in a minute.”

“What’s he like?” asked Ginnell.

“Like? Why, I’ll tell you what he’s like; he wouldn’t sign on in your tub for a hundred dollars a month.”

“Faith and you’re a nice sort of chap,” said Ginnell. “Is it playin’ the fool with me you are?”

By way of reply Harman took the box of quinine tabloids from his pocket, opened it, showed the contents, and winked.

Bone and Ginnell understood at once.

“One of those in his drink will lay him out for an hour,” said Harman, “without hurtin’ him. Put one in your weskit pocket, Bone--and how about your boat?”

“She’s down below at the stairs,” replied the landlord, putting the tabloid in his waistcoat pocket. “I’ll go and call Jim to get her ready--a moment, gentlemen.” He vanished into a back room, and they heard him shouting orders to Jim; then he returned, and as he passed behind the bar who should enter but Captain Mike!

The Captain walked to the bar, called for a drink, and without as much as a glance at the others took it to a seat in a far corner, where he lit a pipe. Several wharf habitués loafed in, and soon the place became hazy with tobacco smoke and horrible with the smell of rank cigars.

“Well,” said Ginnell, “where’s your man? I’m thinkin’ he’s given you the slip, and be the powers, Mr. Harman, if he has, it’ll be the worst for you.”

The brute in Ginnell spoke in his growl, and Harman was turning over in his mind the fate of any unfortunate who had Ginnell for boss when the swing door opened and Blood appeared.

“That’s him,” said Harman. “You leave him to me.”

Blood was not the sort of man to frequent a hole like the Fore and Aft, and he frankly spat when he came in. He was in a temper, or rather the beginning of a temper, and Harman seemed to have some difficulty in soothing him. They had a confabulation together near the corner where Captain Mike, his glass and pipe on the table before him, was sitting, evidently asleep, and then Blood, seeming to agree with some matter under discussion, allowed himself to be led to the bar.

“This is me friend, Captain Ginnell,” said Harman. “Captain, this is me friend, Michael Blood. Looking for a ship he is.”

“I can’t offer him a ship,” said Ginnell, “but I can offer him a drink. What are you takin’, sir?”

Blood called for a whisky.

The quinine tabloid popped into the bottom of the glass by Bone dissolved almost immediately, nor did Blood show that he detected the presence in his drink. He loathed quinine, and this forced dose added to the flood of his steadily rising temper without, however, interfering with his powers of self-control.

He was a good actor, and the way he clutched at the bar ledge shortly after he had finished his drink left nothing to be desired.

“Let him lay down,” said Harman.

“I can’t leave the bar,” said Bone, “but if the gentleman cares to lay down in my back room he’s welcome.”

Blood, allowing himself to be conducted to this resting place, Ginnell followed without drawing the attention of the others in the bar.

Arrived in the back room, Blood collapsed on an old couch by the window, and, lying there with his eyes shut, he heard the rest.

He heard the whispered consultation between Harman and the other, the trapdoor being opened, Jim, the boatman, being called. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder and Ginnell’s voice adjuring him to rouse up a bit and come along for a sail.

Helped on either side by the conspirators, he allowed himself to be led to the trapdoor.

“We’ll never get him down them steps,” said Harman, alluding to the stairs leading down to where the boat was swaying on the green water that was swishing and swashing against the rotten piles of the wharf.

“This is the way it’s done,” said Ginnell, and, twitching Blood’s feet from under him, he sent him down the stairway like a bag of meal to where Jim was waiting to receive him.

* * * * *

At half past six o’clock that day the _Heart of Ireland_--that was the name of Ginnell’s boat--passed the tumble of the bar and took the swell of the Pacific like a duck.

Ginnell, giving the wheel over to one of the Chinese crew, glanced to windward, glanced back at the coast, where Tamalpais stood cloud-wrapped and gilded by the evening sun, and then turned to the companionway leading down to the hole of a cabin where they had deposited their shanghaied man.

“I’m goin’ to rouse that swab up,” he said; “he ought to be recovered by this.”

“Go easy with him,” said Harman.

“I’ll be as gentle with him as a mother,” replied the skipper of the _Heart of Ireland_, with a ferocious grin.

Harman watched the unfortunate man descending. He had got shoulder deep down the ladder when he suddenly vanished as if snatched below, and his shout of astonishment and the crash of his fall came up simultaneously to the listener at the hatch.

Then came the sounds of the fight. Harman had seen Blood fighting once, and he had no fear at all for him. If he feared for any one, it was Ginnell, who was crying now for mercy and apparently receiving none. Then of a sudden came silence, and Harman slipped down the ladder.

Blood, during his incarceration, had ransacked the cabin and secured the Captain’s revolver. He was seated now, revolver in hand, on Ginnell’s chest, and Ginnell was lying on the cabin floor without a kick or an ounce of fight in him.

“You haven’t killed him?” asked Harman.

“I don’t know,” replied Blood. “Speak up, you swab, and answer! Are you dead or not?”

“Faith, I don’t know,” groaned the unfortunate. “I’m near done. What are you up to? What game is this you’re playin’ on me? Is it murder or what?”

“Let me talk to him,” said Harman. “Pat Ginnell, you’ve doped and shanghaied a man--meanin’ my friend, Captain Blood--and I’ve got all the evidence and witnesses. Captain Mike, of the Fish Patrol, is one; he came to the Fore and Aft be request and saw the whole game. That means the penitentiary for you if we split. You’ll say I provided the dope. Who’s to prove it? When I told you the cops were after me I told a lie. Who’s to prove it? I wanted you and your old tub, and I’ve got ’em. Say a word against me and see what Clancy will do to you. You shanghaied me friend, and now you’re shanghaied yourself in your own ship, and you’ll never dare to have the law on us because, d’you see, we’ve got the law on you. The Captain there has got your revolver, the coolies on deck don’t care, they never even turned a hair when they heard you shoutin’. Now my question is, do you intend to take it quiet, or would you sooner be hove overboard?”

“Faith and there’s no use in kicking,” replied the owner of the _Heart of Ireland_. “I gives in.”

“Then up on your feet!” said Blood, rising and putting the revolver in his pocket. “And up on deck with you! You’re one of the hands now, and if you ever want to see Frisco again, you’ll take my orders and take them smart. You’ll berth aft with us, but your rating is cabin boy, and your pay. Up with you!”

Ginnell went up the ladder, and the others followed.

Ginnell showed to the light of day two black eyes and the marks on his chin of the frightful uppercut that had closed the fight.

He looked like a beaten dog as Blood called the crew, in order to pick watches with Harman.

“I take the chap that’s steering,” said Blood.

“And I takes Pat Ginnell,” said Harman.

They finished the business, and dismissed the hands, who seemed to see nothing strange in the recent occurrence among the whites, and who were thronging now to the fo’c’s’le for their supper, their faces all wearing the same Chinese expression, the expression of men who know everything, of men who know nothing.

Then, having set a course for the San Lucas Islands, and while Ginnell was washing himself below, Blood, with his companion, leaned on the rail and looked at the far-away coast dying out in the dusk.

“Seems strange it was only this mornin’ I projected gettin’ out like this,” said Harman, “and here we are out, with twenty thousand dollars ahead of us, if the _Yan-Shan_ hasn’t broke up, which she hasn’t. ’Pears to me it was worth a dose of quinine to do the job so neat with no bones broke and no fear of the law at the end of it.”

“Maybe,” said the Captain.

He whistled softly to the accompaniment of the slashing of the bow wash, looking over toward the almost vanished coast, above which, in the pansy blue of the evening sky, stars were now showing like points of silver.

II THE “YAN-SHAN”

I

The _Heart of Ireland_ was spreading her wings to the northwest trades, making a good seven knots with the coast of California a vague line on the horizon to port and all the blue Pacific before her.

Captain Blood was aft with his mate, leaning on the rail and watching the foam boosting away from the stern and flowing off in Parian-Marbaline lines on the swirl of the wake. Ginnell was forward on the lookout, and one of the coolie crew was at the wheel.

“I’m not given to meeting trouble halfway,” said Blood, shifting his position and leaning with his left arm on the rail, “but it ’pears to me Pat Ginnell is taking his set-down a mighty sight too easy. He’s got something up his sleeve.”

“So’ve we,” replied Harman. “What can he do? He laid out to shanghai you, and, by gum, he did it. I don’t say I didn’t let him down crool, playin’ into his hands and pretendin’ to help and gettin’ Captain Mike as a witness, but the fac’ remains he got you aboard this hooker by foul play, shanghaied you were, and then you turns the tables on him, knocks the stuffin’ out of him, and turns him into a deck hand. How’s he to complain? I’d start back to Frisco now and dare him to come ashore with his complaints. We’ve got his ship--well, that’s his fault. He’s no legs to stand on, that’s truth.

“Leavin’ aside this little bisness, he’s known as a crook from Benicia right to San José. The bay reeks with him and his doin’s; settin’ Chinese sturgeon lines, Captain Mike said he was, and all but cocht, smugglin’ and playin’ up to the Greeks, and worse. The bay side’s hungry to catch him an’ stuff him in the penitentiary, and he hasn’t no friends. I’m no saint, I owns it, but I’m a plaster Madonna to Ginnell, and I’ve got friends, so have you. Well, what are you bothering about?”

“Oh, I’m not bothering about the law,” said Blood; “only about him. I’m going to keep my eye open and not be put asleep by his quiet ways--and I’d advise you to do the same.”

“Trust me,” said Harman, “and more especial when we come to ’longsides with the _Yan-Shan_.”

Now the _Yan-Shan_ had started in life somewhere early in the nineties as a twelve-hundred-ton cargo boat in the Bullmer line; she had been christened the _Robert Bullmer_, and her first act when the dogshores had been knocked away was a bull charge down the launching slip, resulting in the bursting of a hawser, the washing over of a boat, and the drowning of two innocent spectators; her next was an attempt to butt the Eddystone over in a fog, and, being unbreakable, she might have succeeded only that she was going dead slow. She drifted out of the Bullmer line on the wash of a lawsuit owing to the ramming by her of a Cape boat in Las Palmas harbour; engaged herself in the fruit trade in the service of the Corona Capuella Syndicate, and got on to the Swimmer Rocks with a cargo of Jamaica oranges, a broken screw shaft, and a blown-off cylinder cover. The ruined cargo, salvage, and tow ruined the syndicate, and the _Robert Bullmer_ found new occupations till the See-Yup-See Company, of Canton, picked her up, and, rechristening, used her for conveying coffins and coolies to the American seaboard. They had sent her to Valdivia on some business, and on the return from the southern port to Frisco she had, true to her instincts and helped by a gale, run on San Juan, a scrap of an island north of the Channel Islands off the California coast. Every soul had been lost with the exception of two Chinese coolies, who, drifting on a raft, had been picked up and brought to San Francisco.

She had a general cargo and twenty thousand dollars in gold coin on board, but the coolies had declared her to be a total wreck; said when they had last sighted her she was going to pieces.

That was the yarn Harman heard through Clancy, with the intimation that the wreck was not worth two dollars, let alone the expenses of a salvage ship.

The story had eaten into Harman’s mind; he knew San Juan better than any man in Frisco, and he considered that a ship once ashore there would stick; then Ginnell turned up, and the luminous idea of inducing Ginnell to shanghai Blood so that Blood might, with his--Harman’s--assistance, shanghai Ginnell and use the _Heart of Ireland_ for the picking of the _Yan-Shan’s_ pocket entered his mind.

“It’s just when we come alongside the _Yan-Shan_ we may find our worse bother,” said Blood.

“Which way?” asked Harman.

“Well, they’re pretty sure to send some sort of a wrecking expedition to try and salve some of the cargo, let alone those dollars.”

“See here,” said Harman, “I had the news from Clancy that morning, and it had only just come to Frisco; it wasn’t an hour old. We put the cap on Ginnell, and were out of the Golden Gate before sundown same day. A wrecking ship would take all of two days to get her legs under her, supposing any one bought the wreck, so we have two days’ start. We’ve been makin’ seven knots and maybe a bit over; they won’t make more. So we have two days to our good when we get there.”

“They may start a steamer out on the job,” said Blood.

“Well, now, there’s where my knowledge comes in,” said Harman. “There’s only two salvage ships at present in Frisco, and rotten tubs they are. One’s the _Maryland_. She’s most a divin’ and dredgin’ ship; ain’t no good for this sort of work; sea-bottom scrapin’ is all she’s good for, and little she makes at it. The other’s the _Port of Amsterdam_, owned by Gunderman. She’s the ship they’d use. She’s got steam winches and derricks ’nough to discharge the Ark, and stowage room to hold the cargo down to the last flea, _but_ she’s no good for more than eight knots; she steams like as if she’s a drogue behind her, because why? She’s got beam engines--she’s that old, she’s got beam engines in her. I’m not denyin’ there’s somethin’ to be said for them, but there you are--there’s no speed in them.”

“Well, beam engines or no beam engines, we’ll have a pretty rough time if she comes down and catches us within a cable’s length of the _Yan-Shan_,” said Blood. “However, there’s no use in fetching trouble. Let’s go and have a look at the lazaret; I want to see how we stand for grub.”

Chopstick Charlie was the name Blood had christened the coolie who acted as steward and cabin hand. He called him now, and out of the opium-tinctured gloom of the fo’c’s’le Charlie appeared, received his orders, and led them to the lazaret.

None of the crew had shown the slightest emotion on seeing Blood take over command of the schooner and Ginnell swabbing decks. The fight that had made Blood master of the _Heart of Ireland_ and Ginnell’s revolver had occurred in the cabin and out of sight of the coolies, but even had it been conducted in full view of them it is doubtful whether they would have shown any feeling or lifted a hand in the matter.

As long as their little privileges were regarded, as long as opium bubbled in the evening pipe, and pork, rice, and potatoes were served out one white skipper was the same as another to them.

The overhaul of the stores took half an hour, and was fairly satisfactory. When they came on deck, Blood, telling Charlie to take Ginnell’s place as look-out, called the latter down into the cabin.

“We want to have a word with you,” said Blood, as Harman took his seat on a bunk edge opposite him. “It’s time you knew our minds and what we intend doing with the schooner and yourself.”

“Faith,” said Ginnell, “I think it is.”

“I’m glad you agree. Well, when you shanghaied me on board this old shark boat of yours, there’s little doubt as to what you intended doing with _me_. Harman will tell you, for we’ve talked on the matter.”

“He’d ’a’ worked you crool hard, fed you crool bad, and landed you, after a six months’ cruise, doped or drunk, with two cents in your pocket and an affidavit up his sleeve that you’d tried to fire his ship,” said Harman. “I know the swab.”

Ginnell said nothing for a moment in answer to this soft impeachment; he was cutting himself a chew of tobacco. Then at last he spoke.

“I don’t want no certifikit of character from either the pair of you,” said he. “You’ve boned me ship, and you’ve blacked me eye, and you’ve near stove me ribs in sittin’ on me chest and wavin’ me revolver in me face. What I wants to know is your game. Where’s your profits to come from on this job?”

“I’ll tell you,” replied Blood. “There’s a hooker called the _Yan-Shan_ piled on the rocks down the coast, and we’re going to leave our cards on her--savvy?”

“O Lord!” said Ginnell.

“What’s the matter now?” asked Harman.

“What’s the matter, d’you say?” cried Ginnell. “Why, it’s the _Yan-Shan_ I was after meself.”

Blood stared at the owner of the _Heart of Ireland_ for a moment, then he broke into a roar of laughter.

“You don’t mean to say you bought the wreck?” he asked.

“Not me,” replied Ginnell. “Sure, where d’you think I’d be findin’ the money to buy wrecks with? I had news that mornin’ she was lyin’ there derelick, and I was just slippin’ down the coast to have a look at her when you two spoiled me lay by takin’ me ship.”

It was now that Harman began to laugh.

“Well, if that don’t beat all!” said he. “And maybe, since you were so keen on havin’ a look at her, you’ve brought wreckin’ tools with you in case they might come in handy?”

“That’s as may be,” replied Ginnell. “What you have got to worry about isn’t wreckin’ tools, but how to get rid of the boodle if it’s there. Twenty thousand dollars, that’s the figure.”

“So you know of the dollars,” said Blood.

“Sure, what do you take me for?” asked Ginnell. “D’you think I’d have bothered about the job only for the dollars? What’s the use of general cargo to the like of me? Now what I’m thinkin’ is this, you want a fence to help you to get rid of the stuff. Supposin’ you find it, how are you to cart this stuff ashore and bank it? You’ll be had, sure, but not if I’m at your back. Now, gents, I’m willin’ to wipe out all differences and help in the salvin’ on shares, and I’ll make it easy for you. You’ll each take seven thousand, and I’ll take the balance, and I won’t charge nuthin’ for the loan you’ve took of the _Heart of Ireland_. It’s a losin’ game for me, but it’s better than bein’ done out entirely.”

Blood looked at Harman, and Harman looked at Blood. Then telling Ginnell that they would consider the matter, they went on deck to talk it over.

There was truth in what Ginnell said. They would want help in getting the coin ashore in safety, and, unless they marooned or murdered Ginnell, he, if left out, would always be a witness to make trouble. Besides, though engaged on a somewhat shady business, neither Blood nor Harman was a scoundrel. Ginnell up to this had been paid out in his own coin, the slate was clean, and it pleased neither of them to take profit from this blackguard beyond what they considered their due.

It was just this touch of finer feeling that excluded them from the category of rogues and made their persons worth considering and their doings worth recounting.

“We’ll give him what he asks,” said Blood, when the consultation was over, “and, mind you, I don’t like giving it him one little bit, not on account of the money, but because it seems to make us partners with that swab. I tell you this, Billy Harman, I’d give half as much again if an honest man was dealing with us in this matter instead of Pat Ginnell.”

“And what honest man would deal with us?” asked the ingenuous Harman. “Lord! One might think the job we was on was tryin’ to sell a laundry. It’s _safe_ enough, for who can say we didn’t hit the wreck cruisin’ round promiscuous, but it won’t hold no frills in the way of honesty and such. Down with you, and close the bargain with that chap and tip him the wink that, though we’re mugs enough to give him six thousand dollars for the loan of his old shark boat, we’re men enough to put a pistol bullet in his gizzard if he tries any games with us. Down you go.”

Blood went.

II

Next morning, an hour after sunrise, through the blaze of light striking the Pacific across the far-off Californian coast, San Juan showed like a flake of spar on the horizon to southward.

The sea there was all of an impossible blueness, the Pacific blue deepened by the Kuro Shiwo current, that mysterious river of the sea which floods up the coast of Japan, crosses the Pacific toward Alaska, and sweeps down the West American seaboard to fan out and lose itself away down somewhere off Chile.

Harman judged the island to be twenty miles away, and as they were making six and a half knots, he reckoned to hit it in three hours if the wind held.

They went down and had breakfast, and after the meal Ginnell, going to the locker where he had stowed the wrecking tools, fetched them out and laid them on deck. There were two crowbars and a jimmy, not to mention a flogging hammer, a rip saw, some monstrous big chisels, and a shipwright’s mallet. They looked like a collection of burglar’s implements from the land of Brobdignag.

“There you are,” said Ginnell. “You never know what you may want on a job like this, with bulkheads maybe to be cut through and chests broke open. Get a spare sail, Misther Harman, and rowl the lot up in it so’s they’ll be aisier for thransport.”

He was excited, and the Irish in him came out when he was like that; also, as the most knowledgable man in the business, he was taking the lead. You never could have fancied, from his cheerful manner and his appearance of boss, that Blood was the real master of the situation, or that Blood, only a few days ago, had nearly pounded the life out of him, captured his revolver, and taken possession of the _Heart of Ireland_.

The schooner carried a whaleboat, and this was now got in readiness for lowering, with provisions and water for the landing party, and, when that was done, the island, now only four miles distant, showed up fine, a sheer splinter of volcanic rock standing up from the sea and creamed about with foam.

Not a sign of a wreck was to be seen, though Ginnell’s glasses were powerful enough to show up every detail from the rock fissures to the roosting gulls.

Gloom fell upon the party, with the exception of Harman.

“It’ll be on the other side if it’s there at all,” said he. “She’d have been coming up from the s’uth’ard, and if the gale was behind her, it would have taken her right on to the rocks; she couldn’t be on this side, anyhow, because why? There’s nuthin’ to hold her. It’s a mile-deep water off them cliffs, but on the other side it shoals gradual from tide marks to ten-fathom water, which holds for a quarter of a mile. Keep her as she is; you could scrape them cliffs with a battleship without danger of groundin’.”

After a minute or two, he took the wheel himself, and steered her, while the fellows stood by the halyards, ready to let go at a moment’s notice.

It was an impressive place, this north side of the island of San Juan. The heavy swell came up, smacking right on to the sheer cliff wall, jetting green water and foam yards high to the snore and boom of caves and cut-outs in the rock. Gulls haunted the place. The black petrel, the Western gull, and the black-footed albatross all were to be found here. Long lines of white gulls marked the cliff edges, and, far above, in the dazzling azure of the sky, a Farallon cormorant circled like the spirit of the place, challenging the newcomers with its cry.

Harman shifted his helm, and the _Heart of Ireland_, with main boom swinging to port, came gliding past the western rocks and opening the sea to southward, where, far on the horizon, lovely in the morning light like vast ships under press of sail, the San Lucas Islands lay remote in the morning splendour.

Away to port the line of the Californian coast showed beyond the heave of the sea from Point Arguello to Point Concepcion, and to starboard and west of the San Lucas a dot in the sun dazzle marked the peaks of the island of San Nicolas.

Then, as the _Heart of Ireland_ came round and the full view of the south of San Juan burst upon them, the wreck piled on the rocks came in sight, and anchored quarter of a mile off the shore--a Chinese junk!

Harman swore.

Ginnell, seizing his glasses, rushed forward and looked through them at the wreck.

“It’s swarmin’ with chows,” cried he, coming aft “They seem to have only just landed be the look of them. Keep her as she goes, and be ready with the anchor there forrard; we’ll scupper them yet. Mr. Harman, be plazed to fetch up that lin’th of lead pipe you’ll find on the cabin flure be the door. Capt’in, will you see with Charlie here to the boat while I get the anchor ready for droppin’? Them coolies is all thumbs.”

He went forward, and the _Heart of Ireland_, with the wind spilling out of her mainsail, came along over the heaving blue swell, satin-smooth here in the shelter of the island.

Truly the _Yun-Shan_, late _Robert Bullmer_, had made a masterpiece of her last business. She had come stem on, lifted by the piling sea, and had hit the rocks, smashing every bow plate from the keel to within a yard or two of the gunwale, then a wave had taken her under the stern and lifted her and flung her broadside on, just as she now lay, pinned to her position by the rock horns that had gored her side, and showing a space of her rust-red bottom to the sun.

The water was squattering among the rocks right up to her, the phosphor-bronze propeller showed a single blade cocked crookedly at the end of the broken screw shaft; rudder there was none, the funnel was gone, spar deck and bridge were in wreck and ruin, while the cowl of a bent ventilator turned seaward seemed contemplating with a languid air the beauty of the morning and the view of the far-distant San Lucas Islands.

The _Heart of Ireland_ picked up a berth inside the junk, and as the rasp and rattle of the anchor chain came back in faint echoes from the cliff, a gong on the junk woke to life and began to snarl and roar its warning to the fellows on the wreck.

“Down with the boat!” cried Ginnell. With the “lin’th of lead pipe,” a most formidable weapon, sticking from his pocket, he ran to help with the falls. The whaleboat smacked the water, the crew tumbled in, and with Ginnell in the bow, it started for the shore.

The gong had done its work. The fellows who had been crawling like ants over the dead body of the _Yan-Shan_ came slithering down on ropes, appeared running and stumbling over the rocks abaft the stern, some hauling along sacks of loot, others brandishing sticks or bits of timber, and all shouting and clamouring with a noise like gulls whose nests are being raided.

There was a small scrap of shingly beach off which the Chinamen’s scow was lying anchored with a stone and with a China boy for anchor watch. The whaleboat passed the scow, dashed nose end up the shelving beach, and the next moment Ginnell and his lin’th of lead pipe was among the Chinamen, while Blood, following him, was firing his revolver over their heads. Harman, with a crowbar carried at the level, was aiming straight at the belly of the biggest of the foe when they parted right and left, dropping everything, beaten before they were touched, and making for the water over the rocks.

Swimming like rats, they made for the scow, scrambled on board her, howked up the anchor stone, and shot out the oars.

“They’re off for the junk,” cried Ginnell. “Faith, that was a clane bit of work! Look at thim rowin’ as if the divil was after thim.”

They were literally, and now on board the junk they were hauling the boat in, shaking out the lateen sail, and dragging up the anchor as though a hundred pair of hands were at work instead of twenty.

Then as the huge sail bellied gently to the wind, and the junk broke the violet breeze shadow beyond the calm of the sheltered water, a voice came over the sea, a voice like the clamour of a hundred gulls, thin, rending, fierce as the sound of tearing calico.

“Shout away, me boys!” said Ginnell. “You’ve got the shout and we’ve got the boodle, and good day to ye!”

III

He turned with the others to examine the contents of the sacks dropped by the vanquished ones and lying among the rocks. They were old gunny bags, and they were stuffed with all sorts of rubbish and valuables--musical instruments, bits of old metal, cabin curtains, and even cans of bully beef; there was no sign of dollars.

“The fools were so busy picking up everything they could find lying about they hadn’t time to search for the real stuff,” said Blood. “Didn’t know of it.”

“Well,” said Ginnell, “stick the ould truck back in the bags with the insthruments; we’ll sort it out when we get aboard, and fling the rubbish over and keep what’s worth keepin’.”

Helped by the coolies, they refilled the bags, and left them in position for carrying off, and then, led by Ginnell, they made round the stern of the wreck to the port side.

Now on the sea side the _Yan-Shan_ presented a bad enough picture of desolation and destruction, but here on the land side the sight was terrific.

The great yellow funnel had crashed over onto the rocks, and lay with lengths of the guys still adhering to it; a quarter boat, with bottom half out, had gone the way of the funnel; crabs were crawling over all sorts of raffle--broken spars, canvas from the bridge screen, and woodwork of the chart house, while all forward of amidships, the plates, beaten and twisted and ripped apart, showed cargo, held, or in the act of escaping. One big packing case, free of the ship, had resolved itself into staves round its once contents, a piano that appeared perfectly uninjured.

A rope ladder hung from the bulwarks amidships, and up it Ginnell went followed by the others, reaching a roofless passage that had once been the port alleyway.

Here on the slanting deck one got a full picture of the ruin that had come on the ship. The masts were gone as well as the funnel, boats, ventilators--with the exception of the twisted cowl looking seaward--bridge, chart house, all had vanished wholly or in part, a picture made more impressive by the calm blue sky overhead and the brilliancy of the sunlight.

The locking bars had been removed from the cover of the fore hatch, and the hatch opened evidently by the Chinese in search of plunder. Ginnell scarcely turned an eye on it before he made aft, followed by the others, reached the saloon companionway, and dived down it.

If the confusion on deck was bad, it was worse below. The cabin doors on either side were either open or off their hinges, bunk bedding, mattresses, an open and rifled valise, some women’s clothes, an empty cigar box, and a cage with a dead canary in it lay on the floor.

The place looked as if an army of pillagers had been at work for days, and the sight struck a chill to the hearts of the beholders.

“We’re dished,” said Ginnell. “Quick, boys, if the stuffs anywhere, it’ll be in the old man’s cabin; there’s no mail room in a packet like this. If it’s not there, we’re done.”

They found the Captain’s cabin; they found his papers tossed about, his cash box open and empty, and a strong box clamped to the deck by the bunk in the same condition. They found, to complete the business, an English sovereign on the floor in a corner.

Ginnell sat down on the edge of the bunk.

“They’ve got the dollars,” said he. “That’s why they legged it so quick, and--we let them go. Twenty thousand dollars in gold coin, and we let them go. Tear an ages! Afther them!” He sprang from the bunk, and dashed through the saloon, followed by the others. On deck, they strained their eyes seaward, toward a brown spot on the blue far, far away to the sou’west. It was the junk making a soldier’s wind of it, every inch of sail spread. Judging by the distance she had covered, she must have been making at least eight knots, and the _Heart of Ireland_ under similar wind conditions was incapable of more than seven.

“No good chasing her,” said Blood.

“Not a happorth,” replied Ginnell. Then the quarrel began.

“If you hadn’t held us pokin’ over them old sacks on the rocks there, we’d maybe have had a chance of overhaulin’ her,” said Ginnell.

“Sacks!” cried Blood. “What are you talking about? It was you who let them go, shouting good day to them and telling them we’d got the boodle!”

“Boodle!” cried Ginnell. “You’re a nice chap to talk about boodle. You did me up an’ collared me boat, and now you’re let down proper, and serve you right.”

Blood was about to reply in kind, when the dispute was cut short by a loud yell from the engine-room hatch.

Harman, having satisfied himself with a glance that all was up with the junk, had gone poking about, and entered the engine-room hatchway. He now appeared, shouting like a maniac.

“The dollars!” he cried. “Two dead chinkies an’ the dollars!”

He vanished again with a shout. They rushed to the hatch, and there, on the steel grating leading to the ladder, curled together like two cats that had died in battle, lay the Chinamen. Harman, kneeling beside them, his hands at work on the neck of a tied sack that clinked as he shook it with the glorious, rich, mellow sound that gold in bulk and gold in specie alone can give.

The lanyard came away, and Harman, plunging his big hand in, produced it filled with British sovereigns.

Not one of them moved or said a word for a moment; then Ginnell suddenly squatted down on the grating beside Harman, and, taking a sovereign between finger and thumb gingerly, as though he feared it might burn him, examined it with a laugh. Then he bit it, spun it in the air, caught it in his left hand, and brought his great right palm down on it with a bang.

“Hids or tails!” cried Ginnell. “Hids I win, tails you lose!” He gave a coarse laugh as he opened his palm where the coin lay tail up.

“Hids it is,” he cried; then he tossed it back into the bag and rose to his feet.

“Come on, boys,” said he, “let’s bring the stuff down to the saloon and count it.”

“Better get it aboard,” said Blood.

Harman looked up. The grin on his face stamped by the finding of the gold was still there, and in the light coming through the hatch his forehead showed, beaded with sweat.

“I’m with Ginnell,” said he. “Let’s get down to the saloon for an overhaul. I can’t wait whiles we row off to the schooner. I wants to feel the stuff, and I wants to divide it right off and now. Boys, we’re rich; we sure are. It’s the stroke of my life, and I can’t wait for no rowin’ on board no schooners before we divide up.”

“Come on, then,” said Blood.

The sack was much bigger than its contents, so there was plenty of grip for him as he seized one corner. Then, Harman grasping it by the neck, they lugged it out and along the deck and down the saloon companionway, Ginnell following.

The Chinese had opened nearly all the cabin portholes for the sake of light to assist them in their plundering, and now, as Blood and Harman placed the sack on the slanting saloon table, the crying of gulls came clearly and derisively from the cliffs outside, mixed with the hush of the sea and the boost of the swell as it broke, creaming and squattering amid the rocks. The lackadaisical ventilator cowl, which took an occasional movement from stray puffs of air, added its voice now and then, whining and complaining like some lost yet inconsiderable soul.

No other sound could be heard as the three men ranged themselves, Ginnell on the starboard, and Blood and Harman on the port side of the table.

The swivel seats, though all aslant, were practicable, and Harman was in the act of taking his place in the seat he had chosen when Ginnell interposed.

“One moment, Mr. Harman,” said the owner of the _Heart of Ireland_, “I’ve a word to say to you and Mr. Blood--sure, I beg your pardon--I mane Capt’in Blood.”

“Well,” said Blood, grasping a chair back, “what have you to say?”

“Only this,” replied Ginnell, with a grin. “I’ve got back me revolver.”

Blood clapped his hand to his pocket. It was empty.

“I picked your pocket of it,” said Ginnell, producing the weapon, “two minits back. You fired three shots over the heads of them chows, and there’s three ca’tridges left in her. I can hit a dollar at twinty long paces. Move an inch, either the one or other of you, and I’ll lay your brains on the table forenint you.”

They did not move, for they knew that he was in earnest. They knew that if they moved he would begin to shoot, and if he began to shoot, he would finish the job, leave their corpses on the floor, and sail off with the dollars and his Chinese crew in perfect safety. There were no witnesses.

“Now,” said Ginnell, “what the pair of you has to do is this: Misther Harman, you’ll go into that cabin behind you, climb on the upper bunk, stick your head through the porthole, and shout to the coolies down below there with the boat to come up. It’ll take two men to get them dollars on deck and down to the wather side. When you’ve done that, the pair of you will walk into the ould man’s cabin an’ say your prayers, thanking the saints you’ve got off so easy, whiles I puts the bolt on you till the dollars are away. And remimber this, one word or kick from you and I shoot; the Chinamen will never tell.”

“See here!” said Harman.

“One word!” shouted Ginnell, suddenly dropping the mask of urbanity and leveling the pistol.

It was as though the tiger cat in his grimy soul had suddenly burst bonds and mastered him. His finger pressed on the trigger, and the next moment Harman’s brains, or what he had of them, might have been literally “forenint” him on the table, when suddenly, tremendous as the last trumpet, paralyzing as the inrush of a body of armed men, booing and bellowing back from the cliffs in a hundred echoes came a voice--the blast of a ship’s siren:

“Huroop! Hirrip! Hurop! Haar--haar--haar!”

Ginnell’s arm fell. Harman, forgetting everything, turned, dashed into the cabin behind him, climbed on the upper bunk, and stuck his head through the porthole.

Then he dashed back into the saloon.

“It’s the _Port of Amsterdam_,” cried Harman. “It’s the salvage ship; she’s there droppin’ her anchor. We’re done, we’re dished--and we foolin’ like this and they crawlin’ up on us.”

“And you said she’d only do eight knots!” cried Blood.

Ginnell flung the revolver on the floor. Every trace of the recent occurrence had vanished, and the three men thought no more of one another than a man thinks of petty matters in the face of dissolution. Gunderman was outside; that was enough for them.

“Boys,” said Ginnell, “ain’t there no way out with them dollars? S’pose we howk them ashore?”

“Cliffs two hundred foot high!” said Harman. “Not a chanst. We’re dished.”

Said Blood: “There’s only one thing left. We’ll walk the dollars down to the boat and row off with them. Of course we’ll be stopped, still there’s the chance that Gunderman may be drunk or something. It’s one chance in a hundred billion; it’s the only one.”

But Gunderman was not drunk, nor were his boat party, and the court-martial he held on the beach in broken English and with the sack of coin beside him as chief witness would form a bright page of literature had one time to record it.

Ginnell, as owner of the _Heart of Ireland_, received the whole brunt of the storm--there was no hearing for him when, true to himself, he tried to cast the onus of the business on Blood and Harman. He was told to get out and be thankful he was not brought back to Frisco in irons, and he obeyed instructions, rowing off to the schooner, he and Harman and Blood, a melancholy party with the exception of Blood, who was talking to Harman with extreme animation on the subject of beam engines.

On deck, it was Blood who gave orders for hauling up the anchor and setting sail. He had recaptured the revolver.

III A CARGO OF CHAMPAGNE

I

Billy Meersam, an old sailor friend in Frisco, told me this story as I was sitting one day on Rafferty’s wharf, contemplating the green water, and smoking. Billy chewed and spat between paragraphs. We were discussing Captain Pat Ginnell and his ways; and Billy, who had served his time on hard ships, and, as a young man, on the _Three Brothers_, that tragedy of the sea which now lies a coal hulk in Gibraltar harbour, had quite a lot to say on hazing captains in general and Captain Pat Ginnell in particular.

“I had one trip with him,” said Billy, “shark catchin’ down the coast in that old dough dish of his, the _Heart of Ireland_. Treated me crool bad, he did; crool bad he treated me from first to last; his beef was as hard as his fist, and bud barley he served out for coffee. He was known all along the shore side, but he got his gruel at last, and got it good. Now, by any chance did you ever hear of a Captain Mike Blood and his mate, Billy Harman? Knew the parties, did you? Well, now, I’ll tell you. Blood it were put the hood on Ginnell. Ginnell laid out to get the better of Blood, and Blood, he got the better of Ginnell. He and Harman signed on for a cruise in the _Heart of Ireland_; then they rose on Ginnell, and took the ship and made him deck hand. They did that. They made a line for a wreck they knew of on a rock be name of San Juan, off the San Lucas Islands, and the three of them were peeling that wreck, and they were just gettin’ twenty thousand dollars in gold coin off her, when the party who’d bought the wreck, and his name was Gunderman, lit down on them and collared the boodle and kicked them back into their schooner, givin’ them the choice of makin’ an offing or takin’ a free voyage back to Frisco, with a front seat in the penitentiary thrown in.

“It was a crool setback for them, the dollars hot in their hands one minit and took away the next, you may say, but they didn’t quarrel over it; they set out on a new lay, and this is what happened with Cap’ Ginnell.”

But, with Mr. Meersam’s leave, I will take the story from his mouth and tell it in my own way, with additions gathered from the chief protagonists and from other sources.

When the three adventurers, dismissed with a caution by Gunderman, got sail on the _Heart of Ireland_, they steered a sou’westerly course, till San Juan was a speck to northward and the San Lucas Islands were riding high on the sea on the port quarter.

Then Blood hove the schooner to for a council of war, and Ginnell, though reduced again to deck hand, was called into it.

“Well,” said Blood, “that’s over and done with, and there’s no use calling names. Question is what we’re to do now. We’ve missed twenty thousand dollars through fooling and delaying, and we’ve got to make good somehow, even on something small. If I had ten cents in my pocket, Pat Ginnell, I’d leave you and your old shark boat for the nearest point of land and hoof it back to Frisco; but I haven’t--worse luck.”

“There’s no use in carryin’ on like that,” said Harman. “Frisco’s no use to you or me, and your boots would be pretty well wore out before you got there. What I say is this: We’ve got a schooner that’s rigged out for shark fishin’. Well, let’s go on that lay; we’ll give Ginnell a third share, and he’ll share with us in payin’ the coolies. Shark oil’s fetchin’ big prices now in Frisco. It’s not twenty thousand dollars, but it’s somethin’.”

Ginnell, leaning against the after rail and cutting himself a fill of tobacco, laughed in a mirthless way. Then he spoke: “Shark fishin’, begob; well, there’s a word to be said be me on that. You two thought yourselves mighty clever, collarin’ me boat and makin’ yourselves masthers of it. I don’t say you didn’t thrump me ace, I don’t say you didn’t work it so that I can’t have the law on you, but I’ll say this, Misther Harman, if you want to go shark fishin’, you can work the business yourself, and a nice hand you’ll make of it. Why, you don’t know the grounds, let alone the work. A third share, and me the rightful owner of this tub! I’ll see you ham-strung before I put a hand to it.”

“Then get forrard,” said Harman. “Don’t know the grounds? Maybe I don’t know the grounds you used to work farther north, but I know every foot of the grounds here-a-way, right from the big kelp beds to the coast. Why, I been on the fish-commission ship and worked with ’em all through this part, takin’ soundin’s and specimens--rock, weed, an’ fish. Know the bottom here as well as I know the pa’m of me hand.”

“Well, if you know it so well, you’ve no need of me. Lay her on the grounds yourself,” said Ginnell.

He went forward.

“Black sullen,” said Harman, looking after him. “He ain’t no use to lead or drive. Well, let’s get her before the wind an’ crowd down closer to Santa Catalina. I’m not sayin’ this is a good shark ground, the sea’s too much of a blame’ fish circus just here--but it’s better than nothin’.”

They got the _Heart_ before the wind, which had died down to a three-knot breeze, Blood steering and Harman forward, on the lookout.

Harman was right, the sea round these coasts is a fish circus, to give it no better name.

The San Lucas Islands and Santa Catalina seem the rendezvous of most of the big fish inhabiting the Pacific. Beginning with San Miguel, the islands run almost parallel to the California coast in a sou’westerly direction, and, seen now from the schooner’s deck, they might have been likened to vast ships under press of sail, so tall were they above the sea shimmer and so white in the sunshine their fog-filled cañons.

Away south, miles and miles away across the blue water, the peaks of Santa Catalina Island showed a dream of vague rose and gold.

It was for Santa Catalina that Harman was making now.

To tell the whole truth, bravely as he had talked of his knowledge of these waters, he was not at all sure in his mind as to their shark-bearing capacity. He did not know that for a boat whose business was shark-liver oil, this bit of sea was not the happiest hunting ground.

Nothing is more mysterious than the way fish make streets in the sea and keep to them; make cities, so to say, and inhabit them at certain seasons; make playgrounds, and play in them.

Off the north of Santa Catalina Island you will find Yellow Fin. Cruise down on the seaward side and you will find a spot where the Yellow Fin vanish and the Yellow Tail take their place; farther south you strike the street of the White Sea Bass, which opens on to Halibut Square, which, in turn, gives upon a vast area, where the Black Sea Bass, the Swordfish, the Albacore, and the Whitefish are at home.

Steer round the south of the island and you hit the suburbs of the great fish city of the Santa Catalina Channel. The Grouper Banks are its purlieus, and the Sunfish keeps guard of its southern gate. You pass Barracuda Street and Bonito Street, till the roar of the Sea Lions from their rocks tells you that you are approaching the Washington Square of undersea things--the great Tuna grounds.

Skirting the Tuna grounds, and right down the Santa Catalina Channel, runs a Broadway which is also a Wall Street, where much business is done in the way of locomotion and destruction. Here are the Killer Whales and the Sulphur-bottom Whales and the Grey Whales, and the Porpoises, Dolphins, Skipjacks, and Sand Dabs.

Sharks you will find nearly everywhere, _but_, and this was a fact unknown to Harman, the sharks, as compared to the other big fish, are few and far between.

It was getting toward sundown, when the schooner, under a freshening wind, came along the seaward side of Santa Catalina Island. The island on this side shows two large bays, separated by a rounded promontory. In the northernmost of these bays they dropped anchor close in shore, in fifteen-fathom water.

II

At dawn next morning they got the gear ready. The Chinese crew, during the night, had caught a plentiful supply of fish for bait, and, as the sun was looking over the coast hills, they hauled up the anchor and put out for the kelp beds.

There are two great kelp beds off the seaward coast of Santa Catalina, an inner and an outer. Two great submarine forests more thickly populated than any forest on land. This is the haunt of the Black Sea Bass that run in weight up to four hundred pounds, the Ribbon Fish, the Frogfish, and the Kelpfish, that builds its nest just as a bird builds, crabs innumerable, and sea creatures that have never yet been classified or counted.

They tied up to the kelp, and the fishing began, while the sun blazed stronger upon the water and the morning mists died out of the cañons of the island.

The shark hooks baited and lowered were relieved of their bait, but not by sharks; all sorts of bait snatchers inhabit these waters, and they were now simply chewing the fish off the big shark hooks.

Getting on for eleven o’clock, Blood, who had been keeping a restless eye seaward, left his line and went forward with Ginnell’s glass, which he levelled at the horizon.

A sail on the sea line to the northwest had attracted his attention an hour ago, and the fact that it had scarcely altered its position, although there was a six-knot breeze blowing, had roused his curiosity.

“What is it?” asked Harman.

“Schooner hove to,” said Blood. “No, b’gosh, she’s not; she’s abandoned.”

At the word “abandoned,” Ginnell, who had been fishing for want of something better to do, raised his head like a bird of prey.

He also left his line, and came forward. Blood handed him the glass.

“Faith, you’re right,” said Ginnell; “she’s a derelick. Boys, up with them tomfool shark lines; here’s a chanst of somethin’ decent.”

For once Blood and Harman were completely with him; the lines were hauled in, the kelp connections broken, mainsail and jib set, and in a moment, as it were, the _Heart of Ireland_ was bounding on the swell, topsail and foresail shaking out now and bellying against the blue till she heeled almost gunwale under to the merry wind, boosting the green water from her bow, and sending the foam flooding in sheets to starboard.

It was as though the thought of plunder had put new heart and life into her, as it certainly had into her owner, Pat Ginnell.

As they drew nearer, they saw the condition of the schooner more clearly. Derelict and deserted, yet with mainsail set, she hung there, clawing at the wind and thrashing about in the mad manner of a vessel commanded only by her tiller.

Now the mainsail would fill and burst out, the boom swaying over to the rattle of block and cordage. For a moment she would give an exhibition of just how a ship ought to sail herself, and then, with a shudder, the air would spill from the sail, and, like a daft woman in a blowing wind, she would reel about with swinging gaff and boom to the tune of the straining rigging, the pitter-patter of the reef points, and the whine of the rudder nearly torn from its pintles.

A couple of cable lengths away the _Heart of Ireland_ hove to, the whaleboat was lowered, and Blood, Ginnell, and Harman, leaving Chopstick Charlie in charge of the _Heart_, started for the derelict. They came round the stern of the stranger, and read her name, _Tamalpais_, done in letters that had been white, but were now a dingy yellow.

Then they came along the port side and hooked on to the fore channels, while Blood and the others scrambled on deck.

The deck was clean as a ballroom floor and sparkling with salt from the dried spray; there was no raffle or disorder of any sort. Every boat was gone, and the falls, swinging at full length from the davits, proclaimed the fact that the crew had left the vessel in an orderly manner, though hurriedly enough, no doubt; had abandoned her, leaving the falls swinging and the rudder playing loose and the winds to do what they willed with her.

There was no sign of fire, no disorder that spoke of mutiny, though in cargo and with a low freeboard, she rode free of water, one could tell that by the movement of her underfoot. Fire, leak, mutiny, those are the three reasons for the abandonment of a ship at sea, and there was no sign of any one of them.

Blood led the way aft, the saloon hatch was open, and they came down into the tiny saloon. The sunlight through the starboard portholes was spilling about in water shimmers on the pitch-pine panelling; everything was in order, and a meal was set out on the table, which showed a Maconochie jam tin, some boiled pork, and a basket of bread; plates were laid for two, and the plates had been used.

“Beats all,” said Harman, looking round. “Boys, this is a find as good as the dollars. Derelict and not a cat on board, and she’s all of ninety tons. Then there’s the cargo. B’ Jiminy, but we’re in luck!”

“Let’s roust out the cabins,” said Ginnell.

They found the Captain’s cabin, easily marked by its size and its furniture.

Some oilskins and old clothes were hanging up by the bunk, a sea chest stood open. It had evidently been rifled of its most precious contents; there was nothing much left in it but some clothes, a pair of sea boots, and some worthless odds and ends. In a locker they found the ship’s papers. Blood plunged into these, and announced his discoveries to the others, crowding behind him and peeping over his shoulders.

“Captain Keene, master--bound from Frisco to Sydney with cargo of champagne----. And what in thunder is she doing down here? Never mind--we’re the finders.” He tossed the papers back in the locker and turned to the others. “No sign of the log. Most likely he’s taken it off with him. What I want to see now is the cargo. If it’s champagne, and not bottled bilge water, we’re made. Come along, boys.”

He led the way on deck, and between them they got the tarpaulin cover off the cargo hatch, undid the locking bars, and opened the hatch.

The cargo was perfectly stowed, the cases of California champagne ranged side by side, within touching distance of the hatch opening, and the brands on the boxes answering to the wording of the manifest.

Before doing anything more, Blood got the sail off the schooner, and then, having cast an eye round the horizon, more for weather than shipping, he came to the hatch edge and took his seat, with his feet dangling and his toes touching the cases. The others stood while he talked to them.

“There’s some chaps,” said Blood, “who’d be for running crooked on this game, taking the schooner off to some easy port and selling her and the cargo, but I’m not going to go in for any such mug’s business as that. Frisco and salvage money is my idea.”

“And what about the _Yan-Shan_?” asked Ginnell. “Frisco will be reekin’ with the story of how Gunderman found us pickin’ her bones and how he caught us with the dollars in our hands. Don’t you think the underwriters will put that up against us? Maybe they won’t say we’ve murdered the crew of this hooker for the sake of the salvage! Our characters are none too bright to be goin’ about with schooners and cargoes of fizz, askin’ for salvage money.”

“_Your_ character ain’t,” said Harman. “Speak for yourself when you’re talkin’ of characters, and leave us out. I’m with Blood. I’ve had enough of this shady business, and I ain’t goin’ to run crooked no more. Frisco and salvage moneys--my game, b’sides, you needn’t come into Frisco harbour. Lend us a couple of your hands to take her in, and we’ll do the business and share equal with you in the takin’s. I ain’t a man to go back on a pal for a few dirty dollars, and my word’s as good as my bond all along the water side with pals. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about owners or companies; I say with pals, and you’ll find your share banked for you in the Bank of California, safe as if you’d put it there yourself.”

Ginnell for a moment seemed about to dissent violently from this proposition; then, of a sudden, he fell calm.

“Well,” said he, “maybe I’m wrong and maybe you’re right, but I ain’t goin’ to hang behind. If you’ve fixed on taking her into Frisco, I’ll follow you in and help in the swearin’. You two chaps can navigate her with a couple of the coolies I’ll lend you, and, mind you, it’s equal shares I’m askin’.”

“Right,” said Harman. “What do you say, Blood?”

“I’m agreeable,” said Blood; “though it’s more than he deserves, considering all things.”

“Well, I’m not goin’ to put up no arguments,” said Ginnell. “I states me terms, and, now that’s fixed, I proposes we takes stock of the cargo. Rig a tackle and get one of them cases on deck and let’s see if the manifest holds when the wrappin’s is off.”

The others agreed. With the help of a couple of the Chinamen from the boat alongside, they rigged a tackle and got out a case. Harman, poking about, produced a chisel and mallet from the hole where the schooner’s carpenter had kept his tools, a strip of boarding was removed from the top of the case, and next moment a champagne bottle, in its straw jacket, was in the hands of Ginnell.

“Packed careful,” said he.

He removed the jacket and the pink tissue paper from the bottle, whose gold capsule glittered delightfully in the sunlight.

Then he knocked the bottle’s head off, and the amber wine creamed out over his hands and onto the deck.

Harman ran to the galley and fetched a pannikin, and they sampled the stuff, and then Blood, taking the half-empty bottle, threw it overboard.

“We don’t want any drinking,” said he; “and we’ll have to account for every bottle. Now, then, get the lid fixed again and the case back in the hold, and let’s see what’s in the lazaret in the way of provisions.”

They got the case back, closed the hatch, and then started on an inspection of the stores, finding plenty of stuff in the way of pork and rice and flour, but no delicacies. There was not an ounce of tea or coffee, no sugar, no tobacco.

“They must have took it all with them when they made off,” said Harman.

“That’s easy mended,” replied Ginnell. “We can get some stores from the _Heart_; s’pose I go off to her and fetch what’s wanted and leave you two chaps here?”

“Not on your life,” said Blood; “we all stick together, Pat Ginnell, and so there’ll be no monkey tricks played. That’s straight. Get your fellers into the boat and let’s shove off, then Harman and I can come back with the stores and the hands you can lend us to work her.”

“Faith, you’re all suspicious,” said Ginnell, with a grin. “Well, over with you, and we’ll all go back together. I’m gettin’ to feel as if I was married to you two chaps. However, there’s no use in grumblin’.”

“Not a bit,” said Blood.

He followed Ginnell into the whaleboat, and, leaving the _Tamalpais_ to rock alone on the swell, they made back for the _Heart of Ireland_.

Now, Ginnell, although he had agreed to go back to Frisco, had no inclination to do so, the fact of the matter being that the place had become too hot for him.

He had played with smuggling, and had been friendly with the Greeks of the Upper Bay and the Chinese of Petaluma. He had fished with Chinese sturgeon lines, foul inventions of Satan, as all Chinese sporting, hunting, and fishing contraptions are, and had fallen foul of the patrol men; he had lit his path with blazing drunks as with bonfires, mishandled his fellow creatures, robbed them, cheated them, and lied to them. He had talked big in bars, and the wharf side of San Francisco was sick of him; so, if you understand the strength of the wharf-side stomach, you can form some estimate of the character of Captain Ginnell. He knew quite well the feeling of the harbour side against him, and he knew quite well how that feeling would be inflated at the sight of him coming back triumphant, with a salved schooner in tow. Then there was Gunderman. He feared Gunderman more than he feared the devil, and he feared the story that Gunderman would have to tell even more than he feared Gunderman.

No, he had done with Frisco; he never would go back there again; he had done with the _Heart of Ireland_. He would strike out again in life with a new name and a new schooner and a cargo of champagne, sell schooner and cargo, and make another start with still another name.

Revolving this decision in his mind, he winked at the backs of Blood and Harman as they went up the little companion ladder before him and gained the deck of the _Heart of Ireland_.

Blood led the way down to the cabin. The lazaret was situated under the cabin floor, and, while Harman opened it, Blood, with a pencil and a bit of paper, figured out their requirements.

“We want a couple of tins of coffee,” said he, “and half a dozen of condensed milk--sugar, biscuits--tobacco--beef.”

“It’s sorry I am I haven’t any cigars to offer you,” said Ginnell, with a half laugh, “but there’s some tins of sardines; be sure an’ take the sardines, Mr. Harman, for me heart wouldn’t be aisy if I didn’t think you were well supplied with comforts.”

“I can’t find any sardines,” said the delving Harman, “but here’s baccy enough, and eight tins of beef will be more than enough to get us to Frisco.”

“Take a dozen,” said Ginnell; “there ain’t more than a dozen all told; but, sure, I’ll manage to do without, and never grumble so long as you’re well supplied.”

Blood glanced at him with an angry spark in his eye.

“We’ve no wish to crowd you, Pat Ginnell,” said he, “and what we take we pay for, or we will pay for it when we get to port. You’ll please remember you’re talking to an Irishman.”

“Irishman!” cried Ginnell. “You’ll be plazed to remember I’m an Irishman, too.”

“Well I know it,” replied the other.

This remark, for some unaccountable reason, seemed to incense Ginnell. He clenched his fists, stuck out his jaw, glanced Blood up and down, and then, as if remembering something, brought himself under control with a mighty effort.

“There’s no use in talk,” said he; “we’d better be gettin’ on with our business. You’ll want somethin’ in the way of a sack to cart all that stuff off to the schooner. I’ll fetch you one.”

He turned to the companion ladder and climbed it in a leisurely fashion. On deck he took a deep breath and stood for a moment scanning the horizon from north to south. Then he turned and cast his eyes over Santa Catalina and the distant coast line.

Not a sail was visible, nor the faintest indication of smoke in all that stainless blue, sweeping in a great arc from the northern to the southern limits of visibility.

No one was present to watch Ginnell and what he was about to do. No one save God and the sea gulls--for Chinese don’t count.

He stepped to the cabin hatch.

“Misther Harman!” cried he.

“Hello!” answered Harman, from below. “Whacher want?”

“It’s about the Bank of California I want to speak to you,” replied Ginnell.

Harman’s round and astonished face appeared at the foot of the ladder.

“Bank of California?” said he. “What the blazes do you mean, Pat Ginnell?”

“Why, you said you’d put me share of the salvage in the Bank of California, didn’t you?” replied Ginnell. “Well, I just want to say I’m agreeable to your proposal--and will you be plazed to give the manager me love when you see him?”

With that he shut the hatch, fastening it securely and prisoning the two men below, whose voices came now bearing indications of language enough, one might fancy, to lift the deck. He knew it would take them a day’s hard work to break out, and maybe two. Bad as Ginnell might be, he was not a murderer, and he reckoned their chances were excellent considering the provisions and water they had, their own energies, and the drift of the current, which would take them close up to Santa Catalina.

He also reckoned that they would give him no trouble in the way of pursuit, for he had literally made them a present of the _Heart of Ireland_.

Having satisfied himself that they were well and securely held, he sent the whaleboat off to the _Tamalpais_, laden with the crew’s belongings, consisting of all sorts of quaint boxes and mats. This was managed in one journey; the boat came back for him, and, in less than an hour from the start of the business, he found himself standing on the deck of the _Tamalpais_, all the crew transferred, the fellows hauling on the halyards, Chopstick Charlie at the helm, and a good schooner, with a cargo worth many thousands of dollars, underfoot.

He turned to have a look at the compass and a word with the steersman before going below.

Down below he had a complete turnout of the Captain’s cabin, and found the log for which Harman had hunted in vain; it had got down between the bunk bedding and the panelling, and he brought it into the main cabin, and there, seated at the table, he pored over it, breathing hard and following the passages with his horny thumb.

The thing had been faked most obviously, and the faking had begun two days out from Frisco. A gale that had never blown had driven the _Tamalpais_ out of her course, et cetera; and Ginnell, with the eye of a sailor and with his knowledge of the condition of the _Tamalpais_ when found, saw at once that there was something here darker even than the darkness that Blood and Harman had perceived. Why had the log been faked? Why had the schooner been abandoned? If it were a question of insurance, Captain Keene would have scuttled her or fired her.

Then, again, everything spoke of haste amounting to panic. Why should a vessel, in perfect condition and in good weather, be deserted as though some visible plague had suddenly appeared on board of her?

Ginnell closed the book and tossed it back in the bunk.

“What’s the meaning of it?”

Unhappy man, he was soon to find out.

At eight o’clock next morning, in perfect weather, Ginnell, standing by the steersman and casting his eyes around, saw across the heaving blueness of the sea a smudge of smoke on the western horizon. A few minutes later, as the smoke cleared, he made out the form of the vessel that had been firing up.

Captain Keene had left an old pair of binoculars among the other truck in his cabin. Ginnell went down and fetched them on deck, then he looked.

The stranger was a torpedo boat; she was making due south, and, like all torpedo boats, she seemed in a hurry.

Then, all at once, and even as he looked, her form began to alter, she shortened mysteriously, and her two funnels became gradually one.

She had altered her course; she had evidently sighted, and was making direct for, the _Tamalpais_. Not exactly direct, perhaps, but directly enough to make Ginnell’s lips dry as sandstone.

“Bad cess to her,” said Ginnell to himself; “there’s no use in doin’ anythin’ but pretendin’ to be deaf and dumb. And, sure, aren’t I an honest trader, with all me credentials, Capt’in Keene, of Frisco, blown out of me course, me mate washed overboard? Let her come.”

She came without any letting. Shearing along through the water, across which the hubbub of her engines could be distinctly heard, and within signalling distance, now, she let fly a string of bunting to the breeze, an order to heave to, which the _Tamalpais_, that honest trader, disregarded.

Then came a puff of white smoke, the boom of a gun, and a practice shell that raised a plume of spray a cable length in front of the schooner, and went off, making ducks and drakes for miles across the blue sea.

Ginnell rushed to the halyards himself. Chopstick Charlie, at the wheel, required no orders, and the _Tamalpais_ came round, with all her canvas spilling the wind and slatting, while the warship, stealing along now with just a ripple at her stern, came gliding past the stem of the schooner.

They were taking her name, just as a policeman takes the number of a motor car.

It was a ghastly business. No cheery voice, with the inquiry: “What’s your name and where are you bound for?” Just a silent inspection, and then a dropped boat.

Next moment a lieutenant of the American navy was coming over the side of the _Tamalpais_, to be received by Ginnell.

“Captain Keene?” asked the lieutenant.

“That’s me name,” answered the unfortunate, who had determined on the rôle of the blustering innocent; “and who are you, to be boardin’ me like this and firing guns at me?”

“Well, of all the----cheek!” said the other, with a laugh. “A nice dance you’ve led us since we lost you in that fog.”

“Which fog?” asked the astonished Ginnell. “Fog! It’s some other ship you’re after, for I haven’t sighted a fog since leavin’ port.”

“Oh, close up!” said the other.

His men, who had come on board, were busy with the covering of the main hatch, and he walked forward, to superintend.

The hatch cover off, they rigged a tackle and hauled out a case of champagne; four cases of champagne they brought on deck, and then, attacking the next layer, they brought out a case of a different description. It contained a machine gun.

Under the champagne layer, the _Tamalpais_ was crammed right down to the garboard strakes with contraband of war in the form of arms and ammunition for the small South American republic that was just then kicking up a dust around its murdered president.

Ginnell saw his own position at a glance. The _Heart of Ireland_ given away to Blood and Harman for the captaincy of a gun runner, and a seized gun runner at that.

He saw now why Keene and his crew had deserted in a hurry. Chased by the warship, and running into a fog, they had slipped away in the boats, making for the coast, while the pursuer had made a dead-west run of it to clear herself of the dangerous coast waters and their rocks and shoals.

That was plain enough to Ginnell, but the prospect ahead of him was not clear at all.

He could never confess the truth about the _Heart of Ireland_, and, when they took him back to Frisco, it would at once be discovered that he was not Keene, but Ginnell. What would happen to him?

What did happen to him? I don’t know. Billy Meersam could throw no light on the matter. He said that he believed the thing was “hushed up somehow or ’nother,” finishing with the opinion that a good many things are hushed up somehow or ’nother in Frisco.

IV AVALON BAY

I

Avalon Bay, on the east of Santa Catalina Island, clips between its two horns a little seaside town unique of its kind. Billy Harman had described it to Captain Blood as a place where you saw girls bathing in Paris hats. However that may be, you see stranger things than this at Avalon.

It is the head centre of the big-game fisheries of the California coast. Men come here from all parts of America and Europe to kill tarpon and yellow-tail and black sea bass, to say nothing of shark, which is reckoned now as a game fish. Trippers come from Los Angeles to go round in glass-bottomed boats and inspect the sea gardens, and bank presidents, Steel Trust men, and millionaires of every brand come for their health.

You will see monstrous shark gallowsed on the beach and three-hundred-pound bass being photographed side by side with their captors, and you will have the fact borne in on you that the biggest fish that haunt the sea can be caught and held and brought to gaff with a rod weighing only a few ounces and a twenty-strand line that a child could snap.

Every one talks fish at Avalon, from the boatmen who run the gasoline launches to the latest-arrived man with a nerve breakdown who has come from the wheat pit or Wall Street to rest himself by killing sharks or fighting tuna, every one. Here you are estimated not by the size of your bank balance, but by the size of your catch. Not by your social position, but by your position in sport, and here the magic blue or red button of the Tuna Club is a decoration more prized than any foreign order done in diamonds.

Colonel Culpepper and his daughter, Rose, were staying at Avalon just at the time the _Yan-Shan_ business occurred on San Juan. The colonel hailed from the Middle West and had a wide reputation on account of his luck and his millions. Rose had a reputation of her own; she was reckoned the prettiest girl wherever she went, and just now she was the prettiest girl in Avalon.

This morning, just after dawn, Miss Culpepper was standing on the veranda of the Metropole Hotel, where the darkies were dusting mats and putting the cane chairs in order. Avalon was still half in shadows, but a gorgeous morning hinted of itself in the blue sky overhead and the touch of dusk-blue sea visible from the veranda. The girl had come down undecided as to whether she would go on the water or for a ramble inland, but the peep of blue sea decided her. It was irresistible, and, leaving the hotel, she came toward the beach.

No one was out yet. In half an hour or less the place would be alive with boatmen, but in this moment of enchantment not a soul was to be seen either on the premises of the Tuna Club or on the little _plage_ or on the shingle, where the small waves were breaking, crystal clear, in the first rays of the sun.

She came to a balk of timber lying close to the water’s edge, stood by it for a moment, and then sat down, nursing her knees and contemplating the scene before her--the sun-smitten sea looking fresh, as though this were the first morning that had ever shone on the world, the white gulls flying against the blue of the sky, the gasoline launches and sailing boats anchored out from the shore and only waiting the boatmen, the gaffers, the men with rods, and the resumption of the eternal business--Fish.

The sight of them raised no desire in the mind of the gazer; she was tired of fish. A lover of the sea, a fearless sailor and able to handle a boat as well as a man, she was still weary of the eternal subject of weights and measures; she had lived in an atmosphere of fish for a month, and, not being much of a fisherwoman, she was beginning to want a change, or, at all events, some new excitement. She was to get it.

A crunching of the shingle behind her made her turn. It was Aransas Joe, the first boatman out that morning, moving like a seal to the sea and laden with a huge can of bait, a spare spar, two sculls, and a gaff.

Anything more unlovely than Aransas Joe in contrast with the fair morning and the fresh figure of the girl, it would be hard to imagine. Wall-eyed, weather-stained, fish-scaled, and moving like a plantigrade, he was a living epitome of longshore life and an object lesson in what it can do for a man.

Joe never went fishing; the beach was his home, and sculling fishermen to their yawls his business. The Culpeppers were well known to him.

“Joe,” said the girl, “you’re just the person I want. Come and row me out to our yawl.”

“Where’s your gaffer an’ your engine man?” asked Joe.

“I don’t want them. I can look after the engine myself. I’m not going fishing.”

“Not goin’ fishin’,” said Joe, putting down his can of bait and shifting the spar to his left shoulder; “not goin’ fishin’! Then what d’you want doin’ with the yawl?”

“I want to go for a sail--I mean a spin. Go on, hurry up and get the dinghy down.”

Joe relieved himself of the spar, dropped the gaff by the bait tin, and scratched his head. It was his method of thinking.

Unable to scratch up any formulable objection to the idea of a person taking a fishing yawl out for pleasure and not for fish, yet realising the absurdity of it, he was dumb. Then, with the sculls under his arm, he made for a dinghy beached near the water edge, threw the sculls in, and dragged the little boat down till she was half afloat. The girl got in, and he pushed off.

The _Sunfish_ was the name of the Culpeppers’ yawl, a handy little craft rigged with a Buffalo engine so fixed that one could attend to it and steer at the same time.

“Mind you, and keep clear of the kelp,” said Joe, as the girl stepped from the dinghy to the larger craft, “if you don’t want your propeller tangled up.” He helped her to haul the anchor in, got into the dinghy, and shoved off.

“I’ll be back about eight or nine,” she called after him.

“I’ll be on the lookout for you,” replied he.

Then Miss Culpepper found herself in the delightful position of being absolutely alone and her own mistress, captain and crew of a craft that moved at the turning of a lever, and able to go where she pleased. She had often been out with her father, but never alone like this, and the responsible-irresponsible sensation was a new delight in life which, until now, she had never even imagined.

She started the engine, and the _Sunfish_ began to glide ahead, clearing the fleet of little boats anchored out and rocking them with her wash; then, in a grand curve, she came round the south horn of the bay opening the coast of the island and the southern sea blue as lazulite and speckless to the far horizon.

“This is good,” said Miss Culpepper to herself; “almost as good as being a sea gull.”

Sea gulls raced her, jeered at her, showed themselves to her, now honey yellow against the sun, now snowflake white with the sun against them, and then left her, quarrelling away down the wind in search of something more profitable.

She passed little bays where the sea sang on beaches of pebble, and deep-cut cañons rose-tinted and showing the green of fern and the ash green of snake cactus and prickly pear. Sea lions sunning themselves on a rock held her eye for a moment, and then, rounding the south end of the island, a puff of westerly wind all the way from China blew in her face, and the vision of the great Pacific opened before her, with the peaks of San Clemente showing on the horizon twenty-four miles away to the southwest.

Not a ship was to be seen, with the exception of a little schooner to southward. She showed bare sticks, and Miss Culpepper, not knowing the depth of the water just there, judged her to be at anchor.

Here, clear of the island barrier, the vast and endless swell of the Pacific made itself felt, lifting the _Sunfish_ with a buoyant and balloonlike motion. Steering the swift-running boat across these gentle vales and meadows of ocean was yet another delight, and the flying fish, bright like frosted silver, with black, sightless eyes, chased her now, flittering into the water ahead of the boat like shaftless arrowheads shot after her by some invisible marksman.

The great kelp beds oiled the sea to the northward, and, remembering Joe’s advice, but not wishing to return yet a while, the girl shifted the helm slightly, heading more for the southward and making a beam sea of the swell. This brought the schooner in sight.

It was now a little after seven, and the appetite that waits upon good digestion, youth, and perfect health began to remind Miss Culpepper of the breakfast room at the Metropole, the snow-white tables, the attentive waiters. She glanced at her gold wrist watch, glanced round at Santa Catalina, that seemed a tremendous distance away, and put the helm hard astarboard.

She had not noticed during the last half minute or so that the engine seemed tired and irritable. The sudden shift of helm seemed to upset its temper still more, and then, all of a sudden, its noise stopped and the propeller ceased to revolve.

Miss Culpepper, perhaps for the first time in her life, knew the meaning of the word “silence.” The silence that spreads from the Horn to the Yukon, from Mexico to Hongkong, held off up to this by the beat of the propeller and the purr of the engine, closed in on her, broken only by the faint ripple of the bow wash as the way fell off the boat.

She guessed at once what was the matter, and confirmed her suspicions by examining the gasoline gauge. The tank was empty. Aransas Joe, whose duty it was, had forgotten to fill it up the night before.

Of all breakdowns this was the worst, but she did not grumble; the spirit that had raised Million Dollar Culpepper from nothing to affluence was not wanting in his daughter.

She said, “Bother!” glanced at Santa Catalina, glanced at the schooner, and then, stepping the mast of the yawl, shook out her sail to the wind. She was steering for the schooner. It was near, the island was far, and she reckoned on getting something to eat to stay her on the long sail back; also, somehow, the sudden longing for the sight of a human face and the sound of a human voice in that awful loneliness on whose fringe she had intruded had fallen upon her. There were sure to be sailormen of some sort upon the schooner, and where there were sailormen there was sure to be food of some sort.

But there was no one to be seen upon the deck, and, as she drew closer, the atmosphere of forsakenness around the little craft became ever apparent. As she drew closer still she let go the sheet and furled the sail. So cleverly had she judged the distance that the boat had just way enough on to bring it rubbing against the schooner’s starboard side. She had cast out the port fenders, and, standing at the bow with the boat hook, she clutched onto the after channels, tied up, and then, standing on the yawl’s gunwale, and, with an agility none the less marked because nobody was looking, scrambled on board. She had not time to more than glance at the empty and desolate deck, for scarcely had her foot touched the planking when noises came from below. There were people evidently in the cabin and they were shouting.

Then she saw that the cabin hatch was closed, and, not pausing to consider what she might be letting out, the girl mastered the working of the hatch fastening, undid it, and stepped aside.

The fore end of a sailorman emerged, a broad-faced, blue-eyed individual blinking against the sunlight. He scrambled on deck, and was followed by another, dark, better looking, and younger.

Not a word did these people utter as they stood taking in everything round them from the horizon to the girl.

Then the first described brought his eyes to rest on the girl.

“Well, I’m darned!” said he.

II

Let me interpolate now Mr. Harman’s part of the story in his own words.

“When Cap Ginnell bottled me and Blood in the cabin of the _Heart of Ireland_,” said he, “we did a bit of shoutin’ and then fell quiet. There ain’t no use in shoutin’ against a two-inch thick cabin hatch overlaid with iron platin’. He’d made that hatch on purpose for the bottling of parties; must have, by the way it worked and by the armamints on it.

“You may say we were mugs to let ourselves be bottled like that. We were. Y’ see, we hadn’t thought it over. We hadn’t thought it would pay Ginnell to abandon the _Heart_ for a derelick schooner better found and up to her hatches with a cargo of champagne, or we wouldn’t have let him fool us down into the cabin like we did and then clap the hatch on us. Leavin’ alone the better exchange, we hadn’t thought it would be nuts to him to do us in the eye. Mugs we were, and mugs we found ourselves, sittin’ on the cabin table and listenin’ to the blighter clearin’ the crew off. There weren’t no chance of any help from them. Chows they were, carin’ for nothin’ s’long as their chests an’ opium pipes was safe.

“The skylight overhead was no use for more’n a cat to crawl through, if it’d been open, which it wasn’t, more’n an inch, and fastened from the deck side. Portholes! God bless you, them scuttles wasn’t big enough for a cat’s face to fit in.

“I says to Blood: ‘Listen to the blighters! Oh, say, can’t we do nuthin’, sittin’ here on our beam ends? Ain’t you got nuthin’ in your head? Ain’t you got a match in your pocket to fire the tub and be done with it?’

“‘It’ll be lucky for us,’ says Blood, ‘if Cap Ginnell doesn’t fire her before he leaves her.’ With that, I didn’t think anythin’ more about matches. No, sir! For ha’f an hour after the last boatload of Chows and their dunnage was off the ship and away I was sniffin’ like a dog at the hatch cover for the smell of smoke, and prayin’ to the A’mighty between sniffs.

“After that we rousted round to see how we were fixed up for provisions and water. We found grub enough for a month, and in one of the bunks a breaker ha’f filled with water. Now that breaker must have been put there for us by Ginnell before we left the _Heart_ to ’xamine the derelick schooner. He must have fixed in his mind to do us in and change ship right from the first. I remarks on this to Blood, and then we starts a hunt for tools to cut our way out of there, findin’ nuthin’ serviceable but cutlery ware an’ a corkscrew. Two prong forks and knives wore thin with usin’ weren’t what we were searchin’ for; a burglar’s jimmy, blastin’ powder, and a drill was more in our line, but there weren’t any, so we just set to with the knives, cuttin’ and scrubbin’ at the tender parts of the hatch, more like tryin’ to tickle a girl with iron stays on her than any useful work, for the plates on that hatch would ’a’ given sniff to the plates on a battleship, till I give over and just sat down on the floor cursin’ Schwab and the Steel Trusts and Carnegie and Ginnell and the chap that had forged them plates from the tip of his hammer to the toe of his boots. ‘Oh, why the blazes,’ says I, ‘weren’t we born rats! There’s some sense in rats; rats would be out and on deck, while here’s two chaps with five fingers on each fist and men’s brains in their heads bottled and done for, scratchin’ like blind kittens shet up in a box, and all along of puttin’ their trust in a swab they ought to have scragged when they had the chanst.’

“‘Oh, shet your head!’ says Blood.

“‘Shet yours,’ says I. ‘I’m speakin’ for both of us; it’s joining in with that skrimshanker’s done us. Bad comp’ny, neither more nor neither less, and I’m blowed if I don’t quit such and their likes and turn Baptis’ minister if I ever lay leg ashore again.’ Yes, that’s what I says to Cap Blood; I was that het up I laid for everythin’ in sight. Then I goes on at him for the little we’d done, forgettin’ it was the tools were at fault. ‘What’s the use,’ says I, ‘tinkerin’ away at that hatch? You might as well be puttin’ a blister on a bald head, hopin’ to raise hair. Here we are, and here we stick,’ I says, ‘till Providence lets us out.’

“The words were scarce out of my head when he whips out Ginnell’s gun, which he was carryin’ in his pocket and hadn’t remembered till then. I thought he was goin’ to lay for me, till he points the mouth of it at the hatch and lets blaze. There were three ca’tridges in the thing, and he fires the three, and when I’d got back my hearing and the smoke had cleared a bit there was the hatch starin’ at us unrattled, with three spelters of lead markin’ it like beauty spots over the three dimples left by the bullets.

“All the same, the firin’ done us good--sort of cleared the air like a thunder-storm--and I began to remember I’d got a mouth on me and a pipe in my pocket. We lit up and sat down, him on the last step of the companionway and me on the table side, and then we began to figure on what hand Providence was like to take in the business.

“I says to him: ‘There’s nothin’ _but_ Providence left, barrin’ them old knives and that corkscrew, and they’re out of count. We’re driftin’ on the _Kuro Shiwo_ current, aimin’ right for the Horn, you may say, but there’s the kelp beds, and they’re pretty sure to hold us a bit. They’re south of us, and Santa Catalina’s east of them, with lots of fishin’ boats sure to be out, and it’s on the cards that some of them jays will spot us. “Derelick” is writ all over us--bare sticks and nothin’ on deck, and sluin’ about to the current like a drunk goin’ home in the mornin’.’

“The Cap he cocks his eye up at the telltale compass fixed on the beam overhead of him. It cheered him up a bit with its deviations, and he allowed there might be somethin’ in the Providence business if the kelp beds only held good.

“‘Failin’ them,’ he says, ‘it’s the Horn and a clear sea all the way to it, with the chance of bein’ passed be day or rammed at night by some rotten freighter. I don’t know much about Providence,’ he says, ‘but if you give me the choice between the two, I’ll take the kelp beds.’

“Blood hadn’t no more feelin’s for religion in him than a turkey. He was a book-read man, and I’ve took notice that nothin’ shakes a sailorman in his foundations s’ much as messin’ with books.

“I don’t say my own religious feelin’s run equal, but they gets me by the scruff after a jag and rubs me nose in it, and they lays for me when I’m lonely, times, with no money or the chanst of it in sight; times, they’ve near caught me and made good on the clutch, so’s that if I’m not bangin’ a drum in the Sa’vation Army at this present minit it’s only be the mercy of Providence. I’ve had close shaves, bein’ a man of natural feelin’s, of all the traps laid for such, but Blood he held his own course, and not bein’ able to see that the kelp beds might have been put there by Providence to hold us a bit--which they were--and give us a chanst of bein’ overhauled before makin’ a long board for the Horn and sure damnation, I didn’t set out to ’lighten him.

“Well, folks, that day passed somehow or nuther, us takin’ spells at the hatch to put in the time. Blood he found a spare ca’tridge of Ginnell’s, and the thought came to him to scrape a hole at the foot of the hatch cover and use the ca’tridge for a blastin’ charge. The corkscrew came in handy for this, and toward night he’d got the thing fixed. ‘Now,’ says he, ‘you’ll see somethin’!’ And he up with the revolver and hit the ca’tridge a belt with the butt end, and the durned thing backfires and near blew his head off.

“After that we lit the cabin lamp and had supper and went asleep, and early next mornin’ I was woke by the noise of a boat comin’ alongside. I sat up and shook Blood, and we listened.

“Then we began to shout and bang on the hatch, and all at once the fastening went, and all at once the sun blazed on us, and next minit I was on deck, with Blood after me. Now what d’you think had let us out? I’ll give you twenty shots and lay you a dollar you don’t hit the bull’s-eye. A girl! That’s what had let us out. Dressed in white, she were, with a panama on her head and a gold watch on her wrist and white shoes on her feet and a smile on her face like the sun dazzle on water. And pretty! Well, I guess I’m no beauty-show judge, and my eyes had lit on nothin’ prettier than Ginnell since leavin’ Frisco, so I may have been out of my reckonin’ on points of beauty, but she were pretty. Lord love me, I never want to see nothin’ prettier! I let out an oath, I was that shook up at the sight of her, and Blood he hit me a drive in the back that nigh sent me into her arms, and then we settled down and explained matters.

“She was out from Avalon in a motor boat, and she’d run short of spirit and sailed up to us, thinkin’ we were at anchor. Providence! I should think so! Providence and the kelp beds, for only for them we’d have been twenty miles to the s’uth’ard, driftin’ to Hades like hutched badgers on a mill stream. We told her how Ginnell had fixed us, and she told us how the gasoline had fixed her. ‘And now,’ says she, ‘will you give me a biskit, for I’m hungry and I wants to get back to Avalon, where my poppa is waitin’ for me, and he’ll be gettin’ narvous,’ she says.

“‘Lord love you,’ says I, ‘and how do you propose to get back?’

“For the wind had fallen a dead ca’m, and right to Catalina and over to San Clemente the sea lay like plate glass, with the _Kuro Shiwo_ flowin’ under like a blue satin snake.

“She bit on her lip, but she was all sand, that girl--Culpepper were her name--and not a word did she say for a minit. Then she says, aimin’ to be cheerful: ‘Well, I suppose,’ says she, ‘we’ll just have to stay at anchor here till they fetch me or the wind comes.’

“‘Anchor!’ said I. ‘Why, Lord bless you, there’s a mile-deep water under us! We’re driftin’.’

“‘Driftin’!’ she cries. ‘And where are we driftin’ to?’

“That fetched me, and I was hangin’ in irons when Blood chipped in and cheered her up with lies and told me to stay with her whiles he went down below and got some breakfast ready, and then I was left alone with her, trustin’ in Providence she wouldn’t ask no more questions as to where we were driftin’ to.

“She sat on the cargo hatch whiles I filled a pipe, lookin’ round about her like a cat in a new house, and then she got mighty chummy. I don’t know how she worked it, but in ten minits she’d got all about myself out of me and all about Ginnell and Blood and the _Yan-Shan_ and the dollars we’d missed; she’d learned that I never was married and who was me father and why I went to sea at first start. Right down to the colour of me first pair of pants she had it all out of me. She was a sure-enough lady, but I reckon she missed her vocation in not bein’ a bilge pump. Then she heaves a sigh at the sound of ham frying down below, and hoped that breakfast was near ready, and right on her words Blood hailed us from below.

“He’d opened the skylight wide and knocked the stuffiness out of the cabin, and down we sat at the table with fried ham and ship’s bread and coffee before us.

“I’d never set at table with the likes of her before, but if every real lady’s cut on her bias, I wouldn’t mind settin’ at table with one every day in me life. There was only two knives left whole after our practice on the hatch with them. Blood and she had the whole ones, and I made out with a stump, but she didn’t mind nor take notice. She was talkin’ away all the time she was stuffin’ herself, pitchin’ into Cap Ginnell just like one of us. Oh, I guess if she’d been a man she’d have swore worth listenin’ to; she had the turn of the tongue for the work, and what she said about Ginnell might have been said in chapel without makin’ parties raise a hair, but I reckon it’d have raised blisters on the soul of Pat Ginnell if he’d been by to hear and if he’d a soul to blister, which he hasn’t.”

Mr. Harman relit his pipe, and seemed for a moment absorbed in contemplation of Miss Culpepper and her possibilities as a plain speaker; then he resumed:

“She made us tell her all over again about the _Yan-Shan_ business and the dollars, and she allowed we were down on our luck, and she put her finger on the spot. Said she: ‘You fell through by not goin’ on treatin’ Ginnell as you begun treatin’ him. If he was bad enough to be used that way, he wasn’t even good enough for you to make friends with.’ Them wasn’t her words, but it was her meanin’.

“Then we left her to make her t’ilet with Blood’s comb and brush, tellin’ her she could have the cabin to herself as long as she was aboard, and, ten minutes after, she was on deck again, bright as a new pin, and scarce had she stuck her head into the sun than Blood, who was aft, dealin’ with some old truck, shouts: ‘Here’s the wind!’

“It was coming up from s’uth’ard like a field of blue barley, and I took the wheel, and Blood and her ran to the halyards. She hauled like a good un, and the old _Heart_ sniffed and shook at the breeze, and I tell you it livened me up again to feel the kick of the wheel. We’d got the motor boat streamed astern on a line, and then I gave the old _Heart_ the helm, and round she came, so that in a minit we were headin’ for Santa Catalina hull down on the horizon and only her spars showin’, so to speak. I thought that girl would ’a’ gone mad. Not at the chanst of gettin’ back, but just from the pleasure of feelin’ herself on a live ship and helpin’ to handle her. I let her have the wheel, and she steered good, and all the time Santa Catalina was liftin’, and now we could see with the glass that the water all round the south end was thick with boats.

“‘They’re huntin’ for me,’ said she. ‘I guess poppa is in one of them boats,’ she says, ‘and won’t he be surprised when he finds I ain’t drowned? Your fortunes is made,’ says she, ‘for pop owns the ha’f of Minneapolis, and I guess he’ll give you ha’f of what he owns. _You_ wait till you hear the yarn I’ll sling him----. Here they come!’

“They sighted us, and ha’f a hundred gasoline launches were nose end on for us, fanning out like a regatta, and in the leadin’ launch sat an old chap with white whiskers and a fifty-dollar panama on his head.

“‘That’s pop,’ she said.

“He were, and we hove to, whiles he came climbin’ on board like a turtle, one leg over the bulwarks and one arm round her neck, and then up went a hallelujah chorus from that crowd of craft round us, women wavin’ handkerchiefs and blowin’ their noses and blubbing nuff to make a camel sick.

“Then he and she went down to the cabin to make explanashions, and the parties in the boats tried to board us, till I threatened them with a boat hook and made them fend off while we got way on the _Heart_.

“When we were near into Avalon Bay, the Culps came on deck, and old man Culpepper took off his hat to me and Blood and made us a speech, sayin’ we’d lifted weights off his heart, and all such.

“‘Never mind,’ says Blood, ‘we haven’t done nuthin’. Put it all down to Providence,’ says he, ‘for if we saved her she saved us, and I ain’t used to bein’ thanked for nothin’.’

“But, Lord bless you, you might as well have tried to stop the Mississippi in flood as that old party when he’d got his thank gates up. He said we were an honour to merchant seamen, which we weren’t, and the great American nation--and Blood black Irish and me Welsh, with an uncle that was a Dutchman--and then I’m blest if he didn’t burst into po’try about the flag that waves over us all.

“It began to look like ten thousand dollars in gold coin for each of us, and more than like it when we’d dropped anchor in the bay and he told us to come ashore with him.

“Now I don’t know how longshore folk[1] have such sharp noses, but I do know them longshore boatmen on Avalon Beach seemed to know by the cut of the _Heart_ and us we weren’t no simple seamen, with flags wavin’ over us and an honour to our what-you-call-it navy. They sniffed at us by some instinct or other, more special a wall-eyed kangaroo by the name of Aransas Jim, I think it were.

“Said nothin’ much, seein’ old man Culp was disembarkin’ us with an arm round each of our necks, so to say, but we took up their looks, and I’d to lay pretty strong holts on myself or I’d have biffed the blighters, lot o’ screw-neck mongrels, so’s their mothers wouldn’t have known which was which when sortin’ the manglin’.

“Now you listen to what happened then. Culp he took us up to a big hotel, where niggers served us with a feed in a room by ourselves. Champagne they give us, and all sorts of truck _I’d_ never set eyes on before. And when it was over in came old man Culp with an envelope in his hand, which he gives to Blood.

“‘Just a few dollars for you and your mate,’ says he, ‘and you have my regards always.’

“The girl she came in and near kissed us, and off we went with big cigars in our mouths, feelin’ we were made men. The longshoremen were still on the beach scratchin’ the fleas off themselves and talkin’, I expec’, of the next millionaire they could rob by pretendin’ to be fishermen. Blood he picked up a pebble on the shingle and put it in his pocket, and when the longshore louts saw us comin’, smokin’ cigars and walkin’ arrogant, they made sure old man Culp had given us ha’f a million, and they looked it. All them noses of theirs weren’t turned up just now. They saw dollars comin’ and hoped for a share.

“‘Here, you chap,’ says Blood to Aransas Jim or Aransas Joe or whichever was his name, ‘help us to push our boat off and I’ll make it worth your while.’ The chap does, and wades after us, when we were afloat, for his dues. He held out his hand, and Blood he clapped the pebble into it, and off we shot with them helaballoing after us.

“Much we cared.

“On board the _Heart_, we tumbled down to the cabin to ’xamine our luck. Blood takes the envelope from his pocket, slits it open, and takes out a little check that was in it. How much for, d’you think? Five thousand dollars? No, it weren’t.

“Twenty dollars was writ on it. Twenty dollars, no cents.

“‘Say, Blood,’ says I to him, ‘you’ve got the pebble this time.’

“Blood he folded the check up and lit his pipe with it. Then he says, talkin’ in a satisfied manner ’s if to himself:

“‘It were worth it.’

“That’s all he said. And, comin’ to think of it now meself, it were.”

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Allow me to assure the “longshore boatmen” on Avalon Beach that my opinion of them is not that expressed hereafter by Mr. Harman.--AUTHOR.

V THE BIG HAUL

I

Captain Michael Blood and Billy Harman, having received ten thousand dollars for services rendered to Henry Clay Armbruster, and having cashed the check, held a consultation as to what they should do with it.

Harman was for filling up their schooner, the _Heart of Ireland_, with trade and starting off for the islands in search of copra. Blood, tired of the sea, for a while demurred. He said he wanted to enjoy life a bit.

“And who’s to stop you?” replied the open-minded Harman. “A thousand dollars is all we want for a bust, and a week to do it in. I’ve took notice that the heart is mostly out of a bust by the end of a week, after that it’s a fair wind and followin’ sea for the jimjams with an empty hold when you fetches them. Let’s lay our plans and work cautious, for, when all’s said and done, it’s no great shakes to wake jailed with empty pockets, robbed of your boots by the bar drummers you’ve been fillin’ with booze.

“Booze ain’t no use,” continued Mr. Harman, finishing his glass--they were celebrating the occasion in a bar near the China docks. “Look at the chaps that sell it, and look at the chaps that swallow it--one lot covered with di’monds and the other lot with their toes stickin’ out of their boots. We’ve got to work cautious and keep takin’ soundings all the time, for riches is rocks, as I heard a chap once sayin’ in a temp’rance meetin’ on the Sand Lot. Twenty year ago it was, but the sayin’ stuck in my head--have another?”

They failed to “work cautious” that night. Flushed with prosperity and unaccustomed drinks, they found themselves playing cards with professional gamblers, who relieved them of five thousand dollars in an hour and twenty-five minutes.

“Riches is rocks.” There was never a truer saying; and next morning, not being altogether fools, they determined to thank God the whole of their little fortune was not gone and to set to work to retrieve their losses.

Now, it had become known all about the waterside that the _Heart of Ireland_ was back. The fate of Ginnell, her original owner, who had been jugged for gun running, was still fresh and pleasant in the mind of the public; and the authorities, who boarded the _Heart_ on the morning after the gambling adventures of Blood and Harman, would have had a lot of things to say to those two had not Harman already made things straight with the “Clancy crowd,” that amiable political ring whose freemasonic friendship and protection was never invoked in vain by even the least of its members. So it came about that after friendly conversation and cigars the authorities rowed off, and scarcely had they gone when a boat with a big, fat man in the stern came sculling up.

“That’s Mike Rafferty,” said Harman to his companion. “He’s a cousin of Ginnell’s. Now what in the nation does he want with us?”

Rafferty hailed Harman by name and came aboard. Rafferty knew everything about them, from the fact that they were flush of coin to the fact that they were in a kind of lawful-unlawful possession of his cousin’s schooner.

He talked quite openly on these matters, but of the fate of his Cousin Ginnell he said nothing, with the exception of a dark hint that wires were being pulled in his favour.

Harman was equally explicit.

“He jugged us in the cabin of this ship,” said Harman, “and made off on the derelick we struck down the coast there; he gave us a present of her. That we stick to, and if I ever lay hands on Pat Ginnell I’ll give him a present that’ll stick to him for the rest of his nacheral.”

“Aisy, now,” said Rafferty; “don’t be losin’ your hair. I know the swab, and, though I’m workin’ in his favour, bein’ cousins, I’ve me own down on him. He sold me a pup over the last cargo of oil he brought in, and if it wasn’t for the disgrace of the family I’d l’ave him lie without raisin’ a finger to better him. What I’ve come about is bizness. I hear you’ve been talkin’ of copra.”

Harman had, in various bars, and he made no trouble about admitting the soft impeachment.

“Well,” said Rafferty, “it’s become a poor business, what with them Germans and missionaries and such. You go to any of the islands with trade, and see what you’ll get. I’ve worked the Pacific since I was a boy the height of me knee, and I know it. There’s not an island, nearly, I’m not acqueented with, not a reef, begob; you ask any one, and they’ll tell you.”

Harman knew this to be a fact. Rafferty, who was no good age, had been engaged in blackbirding, in copra, in opium smuggling, in all the in-and-out ways of life that the blue Pacific held or holds open to man.

“Heave ahead,” said he.

“Well,” said Rafferty, “this is me bizness with you. Pay me fifty dollars down and ten per cent of the takin’s, and I’ll put you on to an island where you’ll fill up with copra for a few old beads and baccy pipes. It’s a vargin island out of trade tracks; you won’t find any Dutchman there, and the Kanaka girls come dancin’ round you with nuthin’ on them but flowers. You won’t find any Bibles nor crinolines sp’ilin’ the people there. I marked it down last year when I was comin’ up from south of the line, with a never-mind cargo. But I left the sea last spring, as maybe you know, else I’d have taken a ship down there meself. Fifty dollars down and ten per cint on the takin’s, and I’ll put you on the spot.”

Harman begged time to consider the matter, and Rafferty, after drinks and conversation of a political nature, took his departure, leaving his address behind.

“Now, you see how crookedness don’t pay,” said Harman, as he watched the boat row off. “Pat Ginnell was so good at bestin’ he bested his own relations. I remember that bizness about the shark oil; Rafferty was givin’ Ginnell his name over it in every bar in Frisco, and now Rafferty’s spoilin’ to get his own back by usin’ the _Heart_. Funny them Irish are, for he’s tryin’ with the other hand to get him clear of jail for the sake of the family. Jail’s hell to an Irishman. I’ve always took notice of that--no offence to you.”

Blood looked away over the blue waters of the bay. “It is,” said he, “and, bad as I hate Ginnell, if I could turn the lock to let him out, I’d do it to-morrow--and scrag him the moment after. Jail’s not natural to a man. If a man’s not fit to live loose, kill him, if you want to; if you want to make him afraid of the law, cut the skin off him with a cat-o’-nine-tails, but to stick him in a cage--and what’s jail but a cage?--is to turn him into a brute beast. And it never betters him.”

Harman concurred. Sailors have a way of getting at the truth of things because they are always so close to them; and these two, discussing penal matters on the deck of the _Heart of Ireland_, might have been listened to with advantage by some of the law officers of the nations.

Then they had drinks, and later in the day they called on Rafferty at his office in Ginnis Street.

They had come to the decision to take his offer. A soft island was well worth paying for. Cayzer, the owner of the great Clan line of steamers, made his fortune by knowing where to send his ships for cargo, and, though Harman knew nothing of the owner of the Clan line, he was keenly alive to the truth of this matter.

“So you’ve come to agree with me,” said Rafferty. “Well, you won’t be sorry. Now, how will you take it--fifty dollars down and a ten-per-cent royalty to me on the takin’s, or would you sooner make a clean deal and pay me a hundred and fifty down and no royalties? For between you and me there’s a lot of sea chances to be taken and the old _Heart_ is not as young as she used to be.”

Blood and Harman took a walk outside to consult, and determined to make a “clean deal.”

“I don’t want to be payin’ no royalties,” said Harman; “let’s cut clear of the chap and pay him a hundred down; he’ll take it.”

He did, after an hour’s bargaining and wrangling and calling the saints to observe how he was being cheated.

Then, the hundred dollars haring been paid, he gave them the location of the island on the chart which Harman had brought.

To be almost precise, the island was situated in the great quadrilateral of empty sea southwest of Honolulu, bounded by the International Date Line to westward, latitude 10° north to southward, longitude 165° to eastward, and the Tropic of Cancer to northward.

Having paid a hundred dollars for the information, Blood and Harman left Rafferty’s office and that very afternoon began to purchase the trade for their new venture.

II

A fortnight later, with a full Chinese crew and Harman at the helm, the _Heart_ shook out her old sails, and, picking her anchor out of the mud, lay over on a tack that would take her midway between Alcatras and Bird Rock. It was a bright and lovely morning, with a west wind blowing, and Harman whistled softly to himself as he shifted the helm under Alcatras and the slatting sails filled on the tack for Black Point. She was catching the full breath of the sea here and heeled with the green water a foot from the starboard gunwale as she made the reach for Lime Point, then on the port tack she felt the first Pacific sea, taking the middle channel.

After fighting the tumble of the thirty-six-foot water of the bar, Harman, having set their course, relinquished the wheel to one of the Chinamen and joined Blood.

In buying the trade, they had received some tips from Rafferty. “Now,” said that gentleman, “there’s no use in takin’ hats to Paris or coals to Newcastle. If you’re going to trade with a place, you must take the things that’s wanted there. I was sayin’ you could get all the copra you wanted for baccy pipes and beads--that was only me figure of speech. Them chaps on Matao--the name of the island--want stuff different from that, I took note when I was there, thinkin’ to trade some time with them. They’re no end keen on diggin’ the land and growin’ things, and they traded me a lot of fish and shells for a packet of onion seed. They want stuff that’s not grown there natural--onions, potatoes, and garden seed in general. You might take some spades and wheelbarras and not be amiss; and tinware, pots, and pans, and so on.”

Harman took this useful tip, and the _Heart_ was well provisioned with things useful in the way of agriculture. He was talking now with Blood on the stowage; the wheelbarrows were exercising his mind, for there is nothing more awkward to stow, or, in its way, more likely to be damaged, and they had seven of them. It was a feature of Harman’s make-up that he sometimes didn’t begin to bother about things till it was impossible to put them right, and Blood hinted so in plain language.

“What’s the good of talkin’ about it now?” said he. “We worked the thing out ashore, and what’s done is done. You got them cheap, and if the Kanakas don’t take to them they’ll always fetch their price in any port.”

“That’s what’s bothering me,” said Harman; “for if the Kanakas don’t want them and we fill up with copra, we’ll have to dump the durned things, for we won’t have stowage room for them.”

“Wait till we’ve got the copra,” replied Blood.

Then they stood watching the Californian coast getting low down on the port quarter and a big tank steamer pounding along half a mile away making to enter the gates.

“Wheelbarrows or no wheelbarrows, you may thank your God you’re not second mate on _that_,” said Blood.

Harman concurred.

III

They had favourable winds to south of Bird Island, which is situated north of Nilihau and Kaula in the Hawaiian group, then came a calm that lasted three days, leaving the old _Heart_ groaning and whining to the lift of the swell and the grumbling of Harman, hungry for copra.

“There’s somethin’ about this tub that gets me,” said he. “Somethin’ always happens just as we’re about to make good. I believe Pat Ginnell’s put a curse on her.”

“Oh, close up!” said Blood. “How about Armbruster? I reckon she’s lucky enough; it’s the fools that are in her that have brought any bad luck there’s been going.”

“Well, we’ll see,” replied the other.

As if to disprove his words, an hour later the wind came; and three days later, nosing through the great desolation of blue water between Sejetman Reef and Johnston Island, the _Heart of Ireland_ raised the island. It was midday when the sea-birdlike cry of one of the Chinamen on the lookout brought Blood and Harman tumbling up from the cabin. Yes, it was the island, right enough, and Harman through his glass could make out the tops of palm trees where the sea shimmered.

He held the glass glued to his eye for a moment, and then handed it to Harman.

“I reckon,” said he, “the pa’ms is as plentiful there as the hairs on a bald man’s head. Why, there ain’t any pa’ms!”

Blood swore and closed the glass with a snap.

Even at that distance the poverty of the place in copra shouted across the sea, but it was not till they had drawn in within sound of the reefs that the true desolation of this fortunate island became apparent.

The place was horrible. A mile and a half, or maybe two miles, long by a mile broad, protected by broken reefs, the island showed just one grove of maybe a hundred trees; the rest was scrub vegetation and sea birds.

Strangest and perhaps most desolate of all the features was a line of shanties, half protected by the trees, shanties that seemed gone to decay.

Then, as the _Heart_ hove to and lay sniffing at the place, appeared a figure. A man was coming down the little strip of beach leading from the shanties to the lagoon.

“Look!” said Harman. “He’s pushin’ off to us in a boat. Say, Blood, d’you see any naked Kanaka girls crowned with flowers waitin’ to dance round us?”

“Rafferty’s sold us a pup,” said Blood.

“It’s easy to be seen. We’ll wait. Let’s see.”

The boat, a small one, was clearing the reef, opening and making toward them, the man sculling her looking over his shoulder now and then to correct his course.

Close up, she revealed herself as an old fishing dinghy, battered with wear.

Alongside, the man in her laid in his oars, caught the rope flung to him by Harman, and made fast.

He was a pale-faced, lantern-jawed, dyspeptic-looking person, and he was chewing, for the first thing he did after scrambling on deck was to spit overboard. The next was to ask a question.

“What’s your name?” said he, saluting the afterguard with a nod, and sweeping the deck with his eyes--eyes like the wine-coloured, large, soulless eyes of a hare.

“_Heart of Ireland_, out of Frisco--what’s yours?” replied Harman.

“Gadgett,” replied the hare-eyed man. “I came out thinking maybe you were bringing news of my schooner, the _Bertha Mason_. She’s overdue from Sydney. I’m owner here. This island’s mine, leased from the Australian government.” Then, with another look round the deck: “What in the nation are you doing down here anyway?”

“Makin’ fools of ourselves,” replied Harman, “unless we’ve mistook your place for a big copra island that ought to lay in your position. You haven’t heard tell of such an island hereabouts?”

“Look at your charts,” said Gadgett. “This place is only marked on the last British Admiralty charts. There’s nothing round here but water from the Change Time Line to Johnston Island. You’ve come a thousand miles out for copra.”

“What’s your venture here, may I ask?” put in Blood.

“Shell,” replied Gadgett, leaning now against the starboard rail and cutting himself a new plug of tobacco. “I’ve been working this island six years, and had her nearly stripped of shell last spring, but I’ve hung on to clear the last of it. There isn’t much, but I thought I’d take the last squeeze. My schooner is overdue, and when it comes I’m going to clear out for good.”

“Say,” said Harman, “did a chap called Rafferty call here last spring?”

Gadgett turned his eyes to Harman.

“Yes, a chap by that name was here in a schooner. I’ve forgot her name. Blown out of his course by weather, he was, and called for water.”

“Well, now, listen,” said Harman. Then he told the whole story we know.

Gadgett was a good listener. You could feel him putting his hands into the pockets of the yarn, so to speak, and weighing the contents, nodding his head the while, but not saying a word. When it was finished, he took from his pocket the knife with which he had cut the tobacco, opened it, and began cutting gently at his left thumb nail.

“Well,” said he, “it’s pretty clear you two gentlemen have been sold. Brought wheelbarrows here and onion seed and pots and pans; might as well have brought an empty hold for all the trade to be done in this place, for when I’m gone, with the few Kanakas I have with me--they are fishing over on the other side just now--there’ll be nobody here but sea gulls. Rafferty--I see him clear--a big-featured man he was, a questioning chap, too. Well, there’s no doubt about it; he slung you a yarn. But what made him do it?”

“What made him do it!” said Blood. “Why, to guy us all over Frisco and to get right with us over a deal we had with a cousin of his by the name of Pat Ginnell. I’m Irish myself, and I ought to have known how they stick together. No matter, there’s no use in crying over spilt milk. Can we come into your lagoon for a brush-up?”

Gadgett assented. There was a broad fairway, and he steered the _Heart_ himself, the boat following streamed on a line. When the anchor was down, he asked them ashore, and as they were rowing across to the beach said Gadgett: “Do you gentlemen know anything of oyster fishing--shell?”

“No,” said Harman.

“That’s a pity,” said Gadgett, “for if you’d been disposed and knew the business you might have cared to stick here. I put down spat this spring on the whole floor of this lagoon, and the place will be thick with oysters by Christmas. I’d have sold you the remains of the lease--over forty years to run--for a trifle. There’s money to be made here--if you cared to take the thing on.”

“No,” said Harman, rather shortly. “We’re not open to any trade of that sort.”

“Well, there was no harm in mentioning it,” said Gadgett.

He took them up to the frame house in the cocoanut grove, where he lived, and stood drinks. Then he showed them the godown where shell was stored and the Kanakas’ shanties.

Then Blood and Harman went off for a walk by themselves to explore the horrible desolation of the place.

Said Harman, when they were alone: “Skunk--he’s been tryin’ to do us, him and his spat! I know all about oysters, shell and pearl. Why, this place won’t be no use for another fifty years after the way he’s scraped it. He looks on us as a pair of mugs, wanderin’ about with a cargo of wheelbarrows--which we are. But we ain’t such mugs as to pay him good money for lyin’ yarns.”

They walked to the only eminence on the island, a rise of ground some hundred feet above the sea level, and there they stood breathing the sea air and watching the gulls and listening to the eternal song of the surf on the reef.

Then they came back to the beach and hailed the schooner for a boat, which presently put off and took them on board.

Once on deck, Mr. Harman made a dive below into the cabin, and Blood, following him, found him in the act of uncorking a bottle of whisky.

“I’m fair let down,” said Harman, mixing his drink. “It’s not Rafferty, nor the dog’s trick he’s played us, nor the sight of this blasted place that’s enough to give a dromedary the collywobbles. It’s that chap with the yalla eyes. I heard him laffin’ to himself when he went into the house, laffin’ at us. I’ve never been laffed at like that, but it’s not so much that as the chap. He’s onnatural.”

“I want to get back to Frisco and scrag Rafferty,” said Blood, taking hold of the bottle. “That’s all _I_ want.”

“You’ll have to scrag the whole of Frisco, then,” said Harman, “for the place is rockin’ with laughter now, from the China docks to Meiggs’. It’s the wheelbarrows that have done us; they’ll be had against us everywhere, and not a bar you’ll go into but you’ll be asked: Is your wheelbarrow outside? I don’t want to go back to Frisco, I tell you I don’t. I want to get to some place where I can sit down and cuss quiet. Lord, but that chap has had us lively!”

There was no doubt of that fact. Rafferty, with that fatal sense of humour for which he had a reputation of a sort, had well avenged his kinsman, Ginnell, put a hundred dollars into his own pocket, and made Blood and Harman forever ridiculous to a certain order of minds. And his whole working material had been just the recollection of this forsaken island--nothing more than that.

IV

Gadgett’s schooner, the _Bertha Mason_, came into the lagoon that night under a full moon lifting in the east. Blood and Harman had not gone to bed, and they were treated to a lovely sight which left them unimpressed.

Nothing could be more perfect in the way of a sea picture than the schooner fresh from the sea spilling her amber light on her water shadows to the slatting of curves and the sounds of block and cordage, moving like a vision with just way enough on her to take her to her anchorage.

Then the lagoon surface reeled to the splash of the anchor, the shore echoes answered to the rumble-tum-tum-tum of the chain, and the _Bertha Mason_ swung to her moorings, presenting her bow to the outward-going current and her broadside to that of the _Heart_.

“Blast the blighters!” said Harman. Then the two went below to their bunks.

Next morning there were salutations across the water from one schooner to the other. The fellows on the _Bertha Mason_ were at work early getting the shell on board, and the Chinese crew of the _Heart_ were busy fishing. During the day there was little communication between the two vessels, and at night there was no offer of the Bertha Masonites to come aboard, yet it was their duty to pay first call as the _Heart_ was a visitor.

“They’re a stand-off lot,” said Harman. “They’re turnin’ up their noses. I s’pose, because we have a crew of chinkies. Well, they can keep to themselves, for all I care. When’re we goin’ to put out?”

“I don’t want to leave before them,” said Blood. “Besides, there are repairs to be done, and we want to fill up with water. They won’t keep us long.”

Harman said nothing. He wanted to be off, but he felt as Blood did; his enmity against the Gadgett crowd made him want to hold on, pretending to care nothing, and that enmity was increased next morning. The _Bertha Mason_, dragging her anchor a bit on the strong incoming current, came near to foul the _Heart_. Hartman used language to which came a polite inquiry as to how he was off for wheelbarrows.

“Gadgett’s told,” said he to Blood, after making suitable answer to the query. “They’re laffin at us. The yarn will be all over Sydney now; they’ll be tellin’ it in N’ York before they’ve done with it. We’ll have to change our names and sink the _Heart_ to clear ourselves. Well, I’m goin’ off fishin’. Gadgett said there was good fishin’ from the rocks on the other side of the island. I can’t stick here doin’ nuthin’. The deck’s burnin’ my feet.”

He rowed ashore with lines and fish that the Chinese had caught for bait. It was five o’clock in the evening, and the _Bertha Mason_, her cargo stowed, was preparing to leave when he returned.

Blood was down below when Harman came tumbling down the companionway. He was flushed, and looked as though he had been drinking, though his legs were steady enough, and there was no smell of alcohol.

“Blood!” shouted Harman. “We’re made! Where’s your pocketbook? Gimme it! Come on, haste yourself; come with me and try to look like a fool. Gimme the pocketbook, I tell you, and don’t ask no questions; I’m fit to burst, and there’s no time. They’re handlin’ the sails on that bathtub. Up with you and after me!”

He seized the pocketbook, which had fifteen hundred dollars in it, the remains of their money, and rushed on deck, followed by Blood.

The boat was still by the side, with two Chinamen in her. They got in and rowed to the _Bertha Mason_.

Next moment they were on the deck of the _Bertha_, facing Gadgett.

“Mr. Gadgett,” said Harman, “when you talked of having put down oyster spat in the lagoon, did you mean pearl-oyster spat?”

“Of course,” said Gadgett, scenting vaguely what was coming.

“And will them oysters have pearls in them by next Christmas?”

“Of course they will,” replied the other. “Not every oyster, but most of them will.”

“You talked of selling the remains of the lease of the place,” said Harman. “Well, we’ve come to buy. What would you want for it?”

“Two thousand dollars,” said Gadgett. They went below to bargain, and in five minutes, anxious to be done with the fools and get away, Gadgett came down to five hundred dollars.

He knew well that not only was the place stripped by him, but that lately it had been giving out. Oysters are among the most mysterious denizens of the sea, and shell lagoons “give out” for no known reason. The oysters cease to breed--that is all. Gadgett would have sold the remains of his lease for five dollars, for five cents, for a cent. He would have given it away--to an enemy.

He got five hundred dollars for it and reckoned that he had crowned his luck.

Harman went below and examined the lease. It included all rights on the island above and underground, and all rights to sea approaches and reefs.

Gadgett had a government stamp for the new contract. He was a man who always foresaw, and in five minutes Harman and Blood found themselves in possession of Matao for a term of forty-four years, with an option of renewal for another twenty years on a year’s notice.

Then Harman, with this in his pocket, came on deck, followed by Blood, and as they stood saying good-bye to Gadgett the fellow in command began giving the order to handle the throat and peak halyards.

As they rowed off, the jib was being set, and when they reached the _Heart_, the sound of the windlass pawls reached them, and the rasp of the anchor chain being hove short.

“What is it?” said Blood, who knew Harman too well to doubt that they had got the weather gauge on Gadgett.

“Wait till they’ve cleared the lagoon--wait till they’ve cleared the lagoon!” said the other. “I’m afraid of thinkin’ of it lest that chap should smell the idea and come back and murder us. Oh, Lord, oh, Lord! Will they never get out?”

The anchor of the _Bertha Mason_ was now rising to the catheads; she was moving. As she passed the reef opening, she ran up her flag and dipped it, then the Pacific took her.

“Come down below,” said Harman.

Down below, not a word would he say till he had poured out two whiskies, one for himself and one for Blood.

Then he burst out:

“It’s a guano island. Yesterday, when I went fishin’, I took notice of signs, then I prospected. All the top part is one solid block of guano--nuff to manure the continent of the States. That chap has been sittin’ five years on millions of dollars and playin’ with oyster shells. Oh, think of Rafferty--and the wheelbarrows! Think of his long, yellow face when he knows!”

“Are you sure?” said Blood.

“Sure--why, I’ve a workin’ knowledge of guano. Sure--o’ course I’m sure! Come ashore with me, and I’ll show you.”

They went ashore, and before sunset Harman had demonstrated that even on this side, where the deposit was thinnest, the store was vast.

“Think of the size of the place,” said he, “and remember from this to the other side it gets thicker. Fifty years won’t empty it.”

The sea gulls of a thousand years had presented them with a fortune beyond estimation, and Blood for the first time in his life saw himself a rich man--honestly rich.

Their joy was so great that the first thing they did on returning to the _Heart_ was to fling the whisky bottle into the lagoon.

“We don’t want any more of that hell stuff ever,” said Blood. “I want to enjoy life, and that spoils everything.”

“I’m with you,” said Harman, “not to say I’m goin’ to turn teetotal, for I’ve took notice that them mugs gets so full of themselves they haven’t cargo room for nuthin’ else. But I don’t want no more drunks--not me.”

During the next fortnight, with the help of the wheelbarrows and agricultural implements, they took in a cargo of guano. Then they sailed for Frisco.

I never heard exactly the amount of money they made over their last sea adventure, but I do know for a fact that Rafferty nearly died from “mortification” and that Blood and Harman are exceedingly rich men.

Blood turned gentleman and married; but Billy Harman is just the same, preferring sailormen as company and taking voyages to his island to sniff the source of his wealth and for the good of his health.

Billy is the only man I have ever known unspoiled by money.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

The one footnote has been moved to the end of its chapter and relabeled.

Punctuation has been made consistent.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

The following change was made:

p. 43: Sime changed to Lime (passed Lime Point)

p. 292: Line changed to Lime (for Lime Point)