Part 9

"I don't like that man," Noll said. "He's too thick with Mauger for me. Mauger'll stick a knife in me, some night.... He will, Faith."

Faith shook her head. "Don't be foolish, Noll. Mauger's not worth being afraid of."

Noll laughed mirthlessly. "I tell you, there's murder in that man," he protested. "And Brander's with him.... I've a mind...."

"It's your crib," said Faith, and played a card. "Three."

Noll mechanically took up the game; but Faith, watching, saw that his eyes were furtively alert for half an hour thereafter.

* * * * *

On the twenty-fifth day after the death of Mr. Ham, at about ten o'clock on a warm and lazy morning, the man at the foremast head gave tongue to the long hail of the whale-fisheries....

"Blo-o-o-o-w! Ah-h-h-h-h blo-o-o-o-o-o-w!"

The droning cry swept down through the singing rigging, swept the decks of the _Sally_, penetrated into the fo'c's'le, dropped into the cabin and brought Dan'l Tobey and Noll Wing from sleep there to the deck. Faith was already there, sewing in her rocking chair aft by the wheel. When Dan'l reached the deck, he saw her standing with her sewing gathered in her hands, the gold thimble gleaming on her middle finger, watching Brander. Brander was half way up the main rigging, glass leveled to the southward.

Noll Wing bellowed to the masthead man: "Where away?..." And the man swept a hand to point. Noll climbed up toward Brander, shouting to Mr. Tobey to bring the _Sally_ around toward where the whale had been sighted. The men from the mastheads and the fo'c's'le and all about the deck jumped to their places at the boats to wait the command to lower. Brander took the glass from his eye as Noll's weight pulled at the rigging below him, and looked down at the captain, and started to speak; then he changed his mind and waited, glass in hand, while Noll scrutinized the far horizon....

Noll saw a black speck there, and focused his glass, and stared.... He watched for a spout, watched for minutes on end. None came.... The black speck seemed to rise a little, sluggishly, with the swell.... He looked up to Brander.

"D'you make a spout?" he asked.

Brander shook his head. "No, sir."

Noll looked again, and Brander leveled his glass once more. The _Sally_ was making that way, now; the speck was almost dead ahead of them, far on the sea. Tiny bits of white were stirring over the black thing, like bits of paper in the wind.... Noll asked at last: "What do you make of it, Mr. Brander? A boat.... Or a derelict...."

"I make it a dead whale," said Brander.

"No whale," Noll argued. "Rides too high."

"It will be rotten," Brander insisted. "Swollen.... Full of putrid gas."

They watched a while longer, neither speaking. The light wind that urged them on was failing; the _Sally_ slackened her pace, bit by bit; but her own momentum and some casual drift of the surface water still sent her toward the floating speck. It bulked larger in their glasses.

They were within a mile of it before Noll Wing shut his glass. "Aye, dead whale," he said disgustedly, and began to descend from the rigging. Brander dropped lightly after him. Noll stumped past the men at their stations by the boats till he came to Dan'l Tobey. "Dead whale," he told Dan'l. "Let it be."

Brander, at Noll's heels, asked: "Do we lower?"

Noll shook his head. "No," he said sharply. The disappointment, coming on the heels of the hope that had been roused, had made him fretful and angry. Brander said:

"I was thinking...."

Noll turned on him querulously. "Some ships have truck with carrion and dog meat," he snarled. "Not the _Sally_. I'll not play buzzard."

Brander smiled. "It's not pleasant, I know.... But, aboard the _Thomas Morgan_, we got a bit of ambergris out of such a whale.... This one was lean, you saw.... It died of a sickness. That's the kind...."

Dan'l Tobey said, with a grin: "A man'd think you like the smell of it, Brander."

"Ambergris is fool's talk," Noll growled. "I've heard tell of it for thirty year, and never saw a lump bigger than a man's thumb. Fool's talk, Mr. Brander. Let be...."

He turned away; and Brander and Dan'l stood together, watching as the _Sally_ drifted nearer and nearer the dead whale. They could see the feasting sea birds hovering; they caught once or twice the flash of a leaping body as sharks tore at the carcass. Here and there the blubber showed white where great chunks had been ripped away. They watched, and drifted nearer; and so there came to them presently the smell of it. An unspeakable smell....

The men caught it first, in the bow; Dan'l and Brander heard their first cries of disgust before the slowly drifting air brought them the odor. But five minutes later, it had engulfed the ship, penetrated even into the cabin. Noll got it; he stuck his head up out of the companion and bellowed:

"Mr. Tobey, get the _Sally_ out o' range of that."

Dan'l said: "Not a breath of wind, sir." He went toward the companion, as Noll stepped out on deck; and he grinned with malicious inspiration, "Mr. Brander likes the smell of it, sir.... Why not send him off to tow it out of range?"

Noll nodded fretfully. "All right, all right. Send him...."

Dan'l gave the order. Brander assented briskly. "I'll take a boarding knife with me, if you don't object, sir," he said.

Dan'l chuckled. He was enjoying himself. "I'd suggest a clothespin, Mr. Brander," he said; and he stood aft and watched Brander and his men drop their boat and put away and row toward the lean carcass of the dead whale, a quarter mile away. The jeers of the seamen forward pursued them.

Dan'l got his glass to enjoy watching Brander and his crew tow the whale out of the _Sally's_ neighborhood. The men worked hard; and Dan'l said to Cap'n Wing: "They're in haste to be through, you'll see, sir." Once the tow was under way, it moved swiftly. Men on the _Sally_ breathed again....

They saw, after a time, that Brander and his men had stopped rowing and brought their boat alongside the whale; and Dan'l's glass revealed Brander digging and hacking at the carcass with the boarding knife....

Brander came back alongside in due time; and long before he reached the _Sally_, Dan'l could see the exultation in the fourth mate's eyes. As they slid past the bow, Brander's men taunted those who had jeered at them. They were like men who have turned the tables on their enemies....

Dan'l was uneasy.... The boat slid into position, the men hooked on the tackles, then climbed aboard.... They swung on the falls, the boat rose into its cradle.... And Brander turned to Dan'l and said pleasantly:

"It was worth the smell, Mr. Tobey."

He pointed into the boat; and Dan'l looked and saw three huge chunks of black and waxy stuff--black, with yellowish tints showing through--and he smelled a faint and musky fragrance. And he looked at Brander. "What is it?" he asked. "What do you think you've found?"

"Ambergris," said Brander. "Three big chunks, four little ones. Close to three hundred pounds...."

One-eyed Mauger chuckled at Brander's back. "And worth three hundred a pound," he cackled. "Worth the smell, Mr. Tobey!"

XV

Brander's find, laid tenderly upon the deck, studied by Noll Wing and the officers on their knees, set the _Sally_ buzzing with the clack of tongues.

There was a romance in the stuff itself that caught attention. It came from the rotting carcass of the greatest thing that lives; it came from the heart of a vast stench.... Yet itself smelled faintly and fragrantly of musk, and had the power of multiplying any other perfume a thousand fold. Not a man on the _Sally_ had ever seen a bit larger than a cartridge, before; they studied it, handled it, marveled at it.

Cap'n Wing stood up stiffly from bending over the stuff at last; he looked at Brander. "It's ugly enough," he said. "You're sure it's the stuff you think?"

Brander nodded. "Yes, sir, quite sure."

"What's it worth?" Cap'n Wing asked.

"Hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars a pound--price changes."

Noll looked at the waxy stuff again. "It don't look it," he said. "How much is there of it?"

"Close to three hundred pounds...."

Noll's lips moved with the computation. He said, in a voice that was hushed in spite of himself: "Close to ninety thousand dollars...."

Brander smiled. "That's the maximum, of course."

Dan'l Tobey said: "You've done the rest of us a service, Mr. Brander."

Brander looked at him; and an imp of mischief gleamed in his eye. He said quietly: "The rest of you. I was sent out to remove the carcass, not to dissect it. The digging for this was my private enterprise, Mr. Tobey."

Old James Tichel gasped under his breath. Dan'l started to speak, then looked to Noll. They all looked toward Cap'n Noll Wing.... It was for him to deal with Brander's claim.... They looked to Noll; and big Noll stared at the precious stuff on the deck, and at Brander.... And he said nothing.

Brander smiled. He called Mauger to come aft and help him, and he proceeded with the utmost care to clean the lumps of ambergris of the filth that clung to them. He paid no further heed to the men about him. Noll went below; and Faith, who had listened without speaking, followed him. Dan'l and old Tichel got together by the after rail and talked in whispers. Willis Cox stood, watching.... The young man's eyes were wide and his cheeks were white. These seven ugly lumps of something like hard, dirty yellow soap were worth more than the whole cruise of the _Sally_ might be expected to pay.... They caught Willis's imagination; he could not take his eyes from them.

Brander had Mauger fetch whale oil; he washed the lumps in this as tenderly as a mother bathes a child. The black washed away, they became an even, dull yellow in his hands.... Here and there, bits of white stuff like bones showed in them.... Bits of the bones of the gigantic squid on which the cachalot feeds. Their faint, persistent odor spread around them....

When the cleaning was done, Mauger fetched steelyards and they weighed the lumps, slinging each with care.... The larger ones were so heavy that they had to make the scales fast to the rigging.... The largest weighed seventy-four pounds and a fraction; the next was sixty-one; the third, forty-eight. The four smaller lumps, weighed together, tipped the beam at nineteen pounds.... The seven totaled two hundred and two pounds....

Mauger was disappointed at that; he complained: "I took 'em to weigh three hundred, anyways...."

Brander looked at Willis. "Two hundred isn't to be laughed at! Eh, Mr. Cox?"

Willis said hoarsely: "That must be the biggest find of ambergris ever was."

Brander shook his head. "The _Watchman_, out o' Nantucket, brought back eight hundred pounds, in '58. I've heard so, anyways."

Willis had nothing to say to that; he went aft to join Tichel and Dan'l Tobey and tell them the weight of the stuff.... Brander sent for Eph Hitch, the cooper.... He showed him the ambergris....

"Fix me up a cask," he said. "Big enough to hold all that.... We'll stow it dry...."

Eph scratched his head. He spat over the rail. "Fix you up a cask?" he repeated. "Oh, aye." He emphasized the pronoun; and Brander's eyes twinkled.

They packed the ambergris away in the captain's storeroom; the compartment at the bottom of the _Sally_, under the cabin, in the very stern. It rested there among the barrels and casks of food and the general supplies.... There was no access to this place save through the cabin itself; it was not connected with the after hold where water and general stores and gear were stowed away. Brander suggested putting it there; he came to Noll Wing with his request, and because Dan'l Tobey was with Noll, Brander framed his question in a personal form.

"I'd like to stow this below us here," he said. "Best it be out of reach of the men."

Dan'l scowled; Noll looked up heavily, met Brander's eyes. In the end, he nodded. "Where you like," he said sulkily. "Don't bother me."

Brander smiled; and the cask was hidden away below....

But it was not forgotten; it could not be forgotten. From its hiding place, the ambergris made its influence felt all over the vessel. It was like dynamite in its potentialities for mischief. The mates could not forget it; the boat-steerers in the steerage discussed it over and over; the men forward in the fo'c's'le argued about it endlessly.

It was a rich treasure, worth as much as the whole cruise was like to be worth in oil; and it was all in one lump.... That is to say, it was no more than a heavy burden for a strong man. Two men could have carried it....

A thousand acres of well-tilled farm land are worth a great deal of money; but this form of riches is not one to catch the imagination. Wealth becomes more fascinating as it becomes more compact. Coal is more treasured than an equal value of earth; lead is more treasured than coal; and men will die for a nugget of gold that is worth no more than the unconsidered riches which lie all about them. Great value in small compass sets men by the ears....

Every man aboard the _Sally_ had a direct and personal interest in Brander's find of ambergris. And the matter of their debate was this: was the ambergris the property of the _Sally_, a fruit of the voyage; or was it Brander's? If it was a part of the profits of the cruise, they would all share in it. If it was Brander's, they would not....

Brander--and this word had gone around the ship--had spoken of it as his own. For which some condemned and hated him; some praised and chose to flatter him. If the worth of the stuff was divided between them all, Noll Wing and Dan'l Tobey would have the lion's share, and the men forward would have no more than the price of a debauch. If it were Brander's alone, they might beg or steal a larger share from him. Or--and not a few had this thought--they might seize the whole treasure and make off with it....

The possibilities were infinite; the potentialities for trouble were enormous.

This new tension aboard the _Sally_ came to a head in the cabin; the very air there was charged with it. Dan'l and old Tichel were against Brander from the first; Cox was inclined to support him. Dan'l sought to sound Noll Wing and learn his attitude....

He said to Noll casually, one day: "The 'gris will make this a fat cruise, sir."

Noll nodded. "Oh, aye.... No doubt!"

Dan'l looked away. "Of course, Brander doesn't intend to claim it all.... To push his claim...."

"Ye think not?" Noll asked anxiously.

"No," said Dan'l. "He knows he can't.... It's a part of the takings of the _Sally_...."

Noll wagged his head dolefully: "Aye, but will the man see it that way?"

"He'll have to."

The captain looked up at Dan'l cautiously. "Did you mark the greed in the one eye of Mauger when they came aboard?" he asked. "Mauger sets store by the stuff...."

Dan'l snorted. "Mauger! Pshaw!"

Noll shifted uneasily in his chair. "Just the same," he said, "Mauger holds a grudge against me.... He but waits his chance for a knife in my back.... And Brander is his friend, you'll mind."

"You're not afraid of the two of them.... There's no need. I'll undertake to see to that...."

"You're a strong man, Dan'l," said old Noll. "A strong, youthful man.... But I'm getting old. Eh, Dan'l...." His voice broke with his pity of himself. "Eh, Dan'l, I've sailed the sea too long...."

Dan'l said, with some scorn in his tone: "Nevertheless, you're not afraid...."

Then Faith opened the door from the after cabin; and Dan'l checked his word. Faith looked from Dan'l to her husband, and her eyes hardened as she looked to Dan'l again. "You'll not be saying Noll Wing is afraid of--anything, Dan'l," she said mildly.

"I'm telling him," said Dan'l, "that he should not permit Brander to claim the ambergris for himself."

Faith smiled a little. "You think Brander means to do that?"

"He has done it," said Dan'l stubbornly. "He claimed it in the beginning; he speaks of what he will do with it.... He speaks of it as his own."

"I think," said Faith, "that something has robbed you of discernment, Dan'l. Why do you hate Brander? Is he not a good officer?... A man?"

Dan'l might have spoken, but Brander himself dropped down the ladder from the deck just then; and Dan'l stood silently for a moment, watching....

Brander looked at Faith, and spoke to her, and to the others. Then he went into his own cabin and closed the door. They all knew the thinness of the cabin walls; what they might say, Brander could hear distinctly. Dan'l turned without a word, and went on deck.

He met Tichel there, and told him what had passed. Tichel grinned angrily.... "Aye," said the old man. "He comes and Jonahs us, so we sight no whale for a month on end.... And then is wishful to hold the prize that the _Sally's_ boat found." His teeth set; his fist rose.... And Dan'l nodded his agreement.

"We'll see that he does not, in the end," he said.

"Aye," said Tichel. "Aye, we'll see t'that."

Roy Kilcup was a partisan of Dan'l's, in this as in all things; and Roy alone faced Brander on the matter. He asked the fourth mate straightforwardly: "Look here, do you claim that ambergris is yours?"

Brander smiled at the boy. "Why, youngster?" he asked.

"Because I want to know," said Roy. "That's why!"

"Well," Brander chuckled, "others want to know. They're not sleeping well of nights, for wanting...."

"Do you, or don't you?" Roy insisted.

Brander leaned toward him and whispered amiably: "I'll tell you, the day we touch at home," he promised. "Now--run along."

* * * * *

Thus they were all concerned; but Noll Wing took the matter harder than any, because Mauger, whom he feared, was concerned in it. His worry over it gave him one sleepless night; he rose in that night and found the whiskey.... And for the first time in all his life, Noll Wing drank himself into a stupor.

He had always been a steady drinker; he had often been inflamed with liquor. But his stomach was strong; he could carry it; he had never debauched himself.

This time, he became like a log, and Faith found him, when she woke in the morning, unclean with his own vomitings, sodden and helpless as a snoring log. He lay thus two days.... And he woke at last with a scream of fright, and swore that Mauger was at him with a knife, so that Dan'l and Willis Cox had to hold the man quiet till the hallucination passed.

XVI

Faith and Brander had not, in this time, spoken a word together since they met Mr. Ham upon the beach after Brander joined Faith by the island pool. In the beginning, Brander was forward, and a gulf separated them.... Not to mention forty feet of deck. Faith stayed aft; Brander stayed forward. Afterward, when Brander came into the cabin, there was still a gulf.... They met at table; they encountered each other, now and then, in the cabin or on deck. But Brander had his work to do, and did it; and Faith was much with Noll.

In the bush, by the pool, Faith had forgotten Noll Wing for a little space; and in the forgetting, she and Brander had become friends very quickly.... His question, as they reached the beach, made her remember Noll; and her answer to that question, when she told him she was Noll's wife, had reared a wall between them. Brander was a man; too much of a man to forget that she was Noll's wife.... He did not forget.

In the _Sally_, after Brander came aft, Faith was toward him as she was toward the other mates.... With this difference. She had known them since the beginning of the voyage; she had known two of them--Dan'l and Willis Cox--since they were boys. They were ticketed in her thoughts; they were old friends, but they could never be anything more. Therefore she talked often with them, as she did with Tichel, and as she had done with Mr. Ham. She forgot they were men, remembering only that they were friends....

Brander, on the other hand, was a newcomer, a stranger.... When a woman meets a strange man, or when a man meets a strange woman, there is an instant and usually unconscious testing and questioning. This is more lively in the woman than in the man; she is more apt to put it into words in her thoughts, more apt to ask herself: "Could I love him?" For a man does not ask this question at all until he has begun to love; a woman, consciously or unconsciously, asks it at once.... And until this question is answered; until the inner thing that is sex has made decision, a woman is reticent and slow to accept the communion of even casual conversation....

Faith, almost unconsciously, avoided Brander. She spoke with him; but there was a bar in her words. She saw him; but her eyes put a wall between them. She thought of him; but she hid her thoughts from herself. And Brander felt this, and respected it.... There was between them an unspoken conspiracy of silence; an unspoken agreement that held them apart....

This agreement was broken, and broken by Faith, on an afternoon some ten days after the finding of the ambergris. The day was fair; the wind was no more than normal.... No whales had yet been sighted by the _Sally_, and her decks were clear of oil. Mr. Tichel's watch had the ship; but Tichel himself, old man that he was, had stayed below and was asleep in his cabin. Dan'l was asleep there, also; and Noll Wing dozed in the after cabin. Willis Cox was reading, under the boathouse; and two of the harpooners played idly at some game of cards in the lee of the rail beside him. Brander and the man at the wheel had the after deck to themselves when Faith came up from the cabin....

Roy was with her; but the boy went forward at once and climbed the rigging to the masthead, to stand watch with the men there. He loved to perch high above the decks, with the sea spread out like a blue saucer below him. He teased Faith to go with him; but Faith shook her head. There was always a certain physical indolence about Faith that contrasted with the vigor of her habits of thought and speech; she liked to sit quietly and read, or sew, or think, and she cared nothing at all for such riotous exertion as Roy liked.

"No, Roy," she told her brother. "You go if you like. I'll stay down here."

"Come on, Sis," he teased. "I guess you're afraid.... You never could even climb a tree without squealing.... Come on."

She laughed softly. "No. I don't like to do hard things--like that."

"I won't let you fall," he promised.

"Some day, maybe.... Run along, Roy."

The boy went away resentfully; a little more resentfully because Brander had heard her refusal. He looked back from the fore rigging, and saw Faith standing near Brander.... And for a moment he was minded to go back and join them; but the dwindling line of the ropes above him lured him on. He climbed, lost himself among the great bosoms of the sails, stopped to ride a yard like a horse and exult when it pitched and rolled.... Climbed, at last, to the masthead perch where the lookouts stood in their hoops with their eyes sweeping the wide circle of the seas....

And Faith and Brander were together. Save for the man at the wheel, whom neither of them heeded, they were alone. Brander was at the after rail when she appeared; he nodded to her, and smiled. She stood near him, hands on the rail, looking out across the sea astern. The wind tugged at her, played with the soft hair about her brow, whipped her cheeks to fire....

She did not look at Brander, but Brander looked at her. The man liked what he saw; he liked not so much the beauty of her, as the strength and poise that lay in her face. Her broad, low brow.... Her straight, fine nose.... Her sweetly molded lips, and rounding chin.... Strength there, and calm, and power.... Beauty, too; more than one woman's measure of beauty, perhaps. But above all, strength. That was what Brander saw.