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Title: Moran of the Lady Letty

Author: Frank Norris

Release date: July 9, 2008 [eBook #321]
                Most recently updated: June 3, 2013

Language: English

Credits: Produced by John Hamm, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORAN OF THE LADY LETTY ***




Produced by John Hamm





MORAN OF THE LADY LETTY

by Frank Norris



          DEDICATED TO
          Captain Joseph Hodgson
          UNITED STATES LIFE SAVING SERVICE





I. SHANGHAIED


This is to be a story of a battle, at least one murder, and several
sudden deaths. For that reason it begins with a pink tea and among the
mingled odors of many delicate perfumes and the hale, frank smell of
Caroline Testout roses.

There had been a great number of debutantes "coming out" that season in
San Francisco by means of afternoon teas, pink, lavender, and otherwise.
This particular tea was intended to celebrate the fact that Josie
Herrick had arrived at that time of her life when she was to wear her
hair high and her gowns long, and to have a "day" of her own quite
distinct from that of her mother.

Ross Wilbur presented himself at the Herrick house on Pacific Avenue
much too early upon the afternoon of Miss Herrick's tea. As he made,
his way up the canvased stairs he was aware of a terrifying array of
millinery and a disquieting staccato chatter of feminine voices in the
parlors and reception-rooms on either side of the hallway. A single high
hat in the room that had been set apart for the men's use confirmed him
in his suspicions.

"Might have known it would be a hen party till six, anyhow," he
muttered, swinging out of his overcoat. "Bet I don't know one girl in
twenty down there now--all mamma's friends at this hour, and
papa's maiden sisters, and Jo's school-teachers and governesses and
music-teachers, and I don't know what all."

When he went down he found it precisely as he expected. He went up to
Miss Herrick, where she stood receiving with her mother and two of the
other girls, and allowed them to chaff him on his forlornness.

"Maybe I seem at my ease," said Ross Wilbur to them, "but really I am
very much frightened. I'm going to run away as soon as it is decently
possible, even before, unless you feed me."

"I believe you had luncheon not two hours ago," said Miss Herrick. "Come
along, though, and I'll give you some chocolate, and perhaps, if you're
good, a stuffed olive. I got them just because I knew you liked them. I
ought to stay here and receive, so I can't look after you for long."

The two fought their way through the crowded rooms to the
luncheon-table, and Miss Herrick got Wilbur his chocolate and his
stuffed olives. They sat down and talked in a window recess for a
moment, Wilbur toeing-in in absurd fashion as he tried to make a lap for
his plate.

"I thought," said Miss Herrick, "that you were going on the Ridgeways'
yachting party this afternoon. Mrs. Ridgeway said she was counting on
you. They are going out with the 'Petrel.'"

"She didn't count above a hundred, though," answered Wilbur. "I got
your bid first, so I regretted the yachting party; and I guess I'd have
regretted it anyhow," and he grinned at her over his cup.

"Nice man," she said--adding on the instant, "I must go now, Ross."

"Wait till I eat the sugar out of my cup," complained Wilbur. "Tell
me," he added, scraping vigorously at the bottom of the cup with the
inadequate spoon; "tell me, you're going to the hoe-down to-night?"

"If you mean the Assembly, yes, I am."

"Will you give me the first and last?"

"I'll give you the first, and you can ask for the last then."

"Let's put it down; I know you'll forget it." Wilbur drew a couple of
cards from his case.

"Programmes are not good form any more," said Miss Herrick.

"Forgetting a dance is worse."

He made out the cards, writing on the one he kept for himself, "First
waltz--Jo."

"I must go back now," said Miss Herrick, getting up.

"In that case I shall run--I'm afraid of girls."

"It's a pity about you."

"I am; one girl, I don't say, but girl in the aggregate like this," and
he pointed his chin toward the thronged parlors. "It un-mans me."

"Good-by, then."

"Good-by, until to-night, about--?"

"About nine."

"About nine, then."

Ross Wilbur made his adieu to Mrs. Herrick and the girls who were
receiving, and took himself away. As he came out of the house and stood
for a moment on the steps, settling his hat gingerly upon his hair so as
not to disturb the parting, he was not by any means an ill-looking chap.
His good height was helped out by his long coat and his high silk hat,
and there was plenty of jaw in the lower part of his face. Nor was his
tailor altogether answerable for his shoulders. Three years before this
time Ross Wilbur had pulled at No. 5 in his varsity boat in an Eastern
college that was not accustomed to athletic discomfiture.

"I wonder what I'm going to do with myself until supper time," he
muttered, as he came down the steps, feeling for the middle of his
stick. He found no immediate answer to his question. But the afternoon
was fine, and he set off to walk in the direction of the town, with a
half-formed idea of looking in at his club.

At his club he found a letter in his box from his particular chum, who
had been spending the month shooting elk in Oregon.


  "Dear Old Man," it said, "will be back on the afternoon you
  receive this. Will hit the town on the three o'clock boat. Get
  seats for the best show going--my treat--and arrange to assimilate
  nutriment at the Poodle Dog--also mine. I've got miles of talk in
  me that I've got to reel off before midnight. Yours.
                    "JERRY."


"I've got a stand of horns for you, Ross, that are Glory Hallelujah."


"Well, I can't go," murmured Wilbur, as he remembered the Assembly that
was to come off that night and his engaged dance with Jo Herrick. He
decided that it would be best to meet Jerry as he came off the boat and
tell him how matters stood. Then he resolved, since no one that he
knew was in the club, and the instalment of the Paris weeklies had not
arrived, that it would be amusing to go down to the water-front and loaf
among the shipping until it was time for Jerry's boat.

Wilbur spent an hour along the wharves, watching the great grain ships
consigned to "Cork for orders" slowly gorging themselves with whole
harvests of wheat from the San Joaquin Valley; lumber vessels for Durban
and South African ports settling lower and lower to the water's level as
forests of pine and redwood stratified themselves along their decks and
in their holds; coal barges discharging from Nanaimo; busy little tugs
coughing and nuzzling at the flanks of the deep-sea tramps, while hay
barges and Italian whitehalls came and went at every turn. A Stockton
River boat went by, her stern wheel churning along behind, like a
huge net-reel; a tiny maelstrom of activity centred about an Alaska
Commercial Company's steamboat that would clear for Dawson in the
morning.

No quarter of one of the most picturesque cities in the world had more
interest for Wilbur than the water-front. In the mile or so of shipping
that stretched from the docks where the China steamships landed, down
past the ferry slips and on to Meiggs's Wharf, every maritime nation
in the world was represented. More than once Wilbur had talked to
the loungers of the wharves, stevedores out of work, sailors
between voyages, caulkers and ship chandlers' men looking--not too
earnestly--for jobs; so that on this occasion, when a little, undersized
fellow in dirty brown sweater and clothes of Barbary coast cut asked
him for a match to light his pipe, Wilbur offered a cigar and passed
the time of day with him. Wilbur had not forgotten that he himself was
dressed for an afternoon function. But the incongruity of the business
was precisely what most amused him.

After a time the fellow suggested drinks. Wilbur hesitated for a moment.
It would be something to tell about, however, so, "All right, I'll drink
with you," he said.

The brown sweater led the way to a sailors' boarding-house hard by. The
rear of the place was built upon piles over the water. But in front, on
the ground floor, was a barroom.

"Rum an' gum," announced the brown sweater, as the two came in and took
their places at the bar.

"Rum an' gum, Tuck; wattle you have, sir?"

"Oh--I don't know," hesitated Wilbur; "give me a mild Manhattan."

While the drinks were being mixed the brown sweater called Wilbur's
attention to a fighting head-dress from the Marquesas that was hung on
the wall over the free-lunch counter and opposite the bar. Wilbur turned
about to look at it, and remained so, his back to the barkeeper, till
the latter told them their drinks were ready.

"Well, mate, here's big blocks an' taut hawse-pipes," said the brown
sweater cordially.

"Your very good health," returned Wilbur.

The brown sweater wiped a thin mustache in the hollow of his palm, and
wiped that palm upon his trouser leg.

"Yessir," he continued, once more facing the Marquesas head-dress.
"Yessir, they're queer game down there."

"In the Marquesas Islands, you mean?" said Wilbur.

"Yessir, they're queer game. When they ain't tattoin' theirselves with
Scripture tex's they git from the missionaries, they're pullin' out
the hairs all over their bodies with two clam-shells. Hair by hair, y'
understan'?"

"Pull'n out 'er hair?" said Wilbur, wondering what was the matter with
his tongue.

"They think it's clever--think the women folk like it."

Wilbur had fancied that the little man had worn a brown sweater when
they first met. But now, strangely enough, he was not in the least
surprised to see it iridescent like a pigeon's breast.

"Y' ever been down that way?" inquired the little man next.

Wilbur heard the words distinctly enough, but somehow they refused to
fit into the right places in his brain. He pulled himself together,
frowning heavily.

"What--did--you--say?" he asked with great deliberation, biting off his
words. Then he noticed that he and his companion were no longer in
the barroom, but in a little room back of it. His personality divided
itself. There was one Ross Wilbur--who could not make his hands go where
he wanted them, who said one word when he thought another, and whose
legs below the knee were made of solid lead. Then there was another Ross
Wilbur--Ross Wilbur, the alert, who was perfectly clear-headed, and who
stood off to one side and watched his twin brother making a monkey of
himself, without power and without even the desire of helping him.

This latter Wilbur heard the iridescent sweater say:

"Bust me, if y' a'n't squiffy, old man. Stand by a bit an' we'll have a
ball."

"Can't have got--return--exceptionally--and the round table--pull out
hairs wi' tu clamsh'ls," gabbled Wilbur's stupefied double; and Wilbur
the alert said to himself: "You're not drunk, Ross Wilbur, that's
certain; what could they have put in your cocktail?"

The iridescent sweater stamped twice upon the floor and a trap-door fell
away beneath Wilbur's feet like the drop of a gallows. With the eyes of
his undrugged self Wilbur had a glimpse of water below. His elbow struck
the floor as he went down, and he fell feet first into a Whitehall boat.
He had time to observe two men at the oars and to look between the piles
that supported the house above him and catch a glimpse of the bay and
a glint of the Contra Costa shore. He was not in the least surprised at
what had happened, and made up his mind that it would be a good idea to
lie down in the boat and go to sleep.

Suddenly--but how long after his advent into the boat he could not
tell--his wits began to return and settle themselves, like wild birds
flocking again after a scare. Swiftly he took in the scene. The blue
waters of the bay around him, the deck of a schooner on which he stood,
the Whitehall boat alongside, and an enormous man with a face like
a setting moon wrangling with his friend in the sweater--no longer
iridescent.

"What do you call it?" shouted the red man. "I want able seamen--I don't
figger on working this boat with dancing masters, do I? We ain't exactly
doing quadrilles on my quarterdeck. If we don't look out we'll step on
this thing and break it. It ain't ought to be let around loose without
its ma."

"Rot that," vociferated the brown sweater. "I tell you he's one of the
best sailor men on the front. If he ain't we'll forfeit the money. Come
on, Captain Kitchell, we made show enough gettin' away as it was, and
this daytime business ain't our line. D'you sign or not? Here's the
advance note. I got to duck my nut or I'll have the patrol boat after
me."

"I'll sign this once," growled the other, scrawling his name on the
note; "but if this swab ain't up to sample, he'll come back by freight,
an' I'll drop in on mee dear friend Jim when we come back and give him a
reel nice time, an' you can lay to that, Billy Trim." The brown sweater
pocketed the note, went over the side, and rowed off.

Wilbur stood in the waist of a schooner anchored in the stream well off
Fisherman's wharf. In the forward part of the schooner a Chinaman in
brown duck was mixing paint. Wilbur was conscious that he still wore his
high hat and long coat, but his stick was gone and one gray glove was
slit to the button. In front of him towered the enormous red-faced man.
A pungent reek of some kind of rancid fat or oil assailed his nostrils.
Over by Alcatraz a ferry-boat whistled for its slip as it elbowed its
way through the water.

Wilbur had himself fairly in hand by now. His wits were all about him;
but the situation was beyond him as yet.

"Git for'd," commanded the big man.

Wilbur drew himself up, angry in an instant. "Look here," he began,
"what's the meaning of this business? I know I've been drugged and
mishandled. I demand to be put ashore. Do you understand that?"

"Angel child," whimpered the big man. "Oh, you lilee of the vallee, you
bright an' mornin' star. I'm reely pained y'know, that your vally can't
come along, but we'll have your piano set up in the lazarette. It gives
me genuine grief, it do, to see you bein' obliged to put your lilee
white feet on this here vulgar an' dirtee deck. We'll have the Wilton
carpet down by to-morrer, so we will, my dear. Yah-h!" he suddenly broke
out, as his rage boiled over. "Git for'd, d'ye hear! I'm captain of this
here bathtub, an' that's all you need to know for a good while to come.
I ain't generally got to tell that to a man but once; but I'll stretch
the point just for love of you, angel child. Now, then, move!"

Wilbur stood motionless--puzzled beyond expression. No experience he had
ever been through helped in this situation.

"Look here," he began, "I--"

The captain knocked him down with a blow of one enormous fist upon the
mouth, and while he was yet stretched upon the deck kicked him savagely
in the stomach. Then he allowed him to rise, caught him by the neck and
the slack of his overcoat, and ran him forward to where a hatchway, not
two feet across, opened in the deck. Without ado, he flung him down into
the darkness below; and while Wilbur, dizzied by the fall, sat on the
floor at the foot of the vertical companion-ladder, gazing about him
with distended eyes, there rained down upon his head, first an oilskin
coat, then a sou'wester, a pair of oilskin breeches, woolen socks, and
a plug of tobacco. Above him, down the contracted square of the hatch,
came the bellowing of the Captain's voice:

"There's your fit-out, Mister Lilee of the Vallee, which the same our
dear friend Jim makes a present of and no charge, because he loves you
so. You're allowed two minutes to change, an' it is to be hoped as how
you won't force me to come for to assist."

It would have been interesting to have followed, step by step, the
mental process that now took place in Ross Wilbur's brain. The Captain
had given him two minutes in which to change. The time was short enough,
but even at that Wilbur changed more than his clothes during the two
minutes he was left to himself in the reekind dark of the schooner's
fo'castle. It was more than a change--it was a revolution. What he made
up his mind to do--precisely what mental attitude he decided to adopt,
just what new niche he elected wherein to set his feet, it is difficult
to say. Only by results could the change be guessed at. He went down
the forward hatch at the toe of Kitchell's boot--silk-hatted,
melton-overcoated, patent-booted, and gloved in suedes. Two minutes
later there emerged upon the deck a figure in oilskins and a sou'wester.
There was blood upon the face of him and the grime of an unclean ship
upon his bare hands. It was Wilbur, and yet not Wilbur. In two minutes
he had been, in a way, born again. The only traces of his former self
were the patent-leather boots, still persistent in their gloss and
shine, that showed grim incongruity below the vast compass of the
oilskin breeches.

As Wilbur came on deck he saw the crew of the schooner hurrying forward,
six of them, Chinamen every one, in brown jeans and black felt hats. On
the quarterdeck stood the Captain, barking his orders.

"Consider the Lilee of the Vallee," bellowed the latter, as his eye fell
upon Wilbur the Transformed. "Clap on to that starboard windlass brake,
sonny."

Wilbur saw the Chinamen ranging themselves about what he guessed was
the windlass in the schooner's bow. He followed and took his place among
them, grasping one of the bars.

"Break down!" came the next order. Wilbur and the Chinamen obeyed,
bearing up and down upon the bars till the slack of the anchor-chain
came home and stretched taut and dripping from the hawse-holes.

"'Vast heavin'!"

And then as Wilbur released the brake and turned about for the next
order, he cast his glance out upon the bay, and there, not a hundred
and fifty yards away, her spotless sails tense, her cordage humming, her
immaculate flanks slipping easily through the waves, the water
hissing and churning under her forefoot, clean, gleaming, dainty, and
aristocratic, the Ridgeways' yacht "Petrel" passed like a thing of life.
Wilbur saw Nat Ridgeway himself at the wheel. Girls in smart gowns
and young fellows in white ducks and yachting caps--all friends of
his--crowded the decks. A little orchestra of musicians were reeling off
a quickstep.

The popping of a cork and a gale of talk and laughter came to his
ears. Wilbur stared at the picture, his face devoid of expression. The
"Petrel" came on--drew nearer--was not a hundred feet away from the
schooner's stern. A strong swimmer, such as Wilbur, could cover the
distance in a few strides. Two minutes ago Wilbur might have--

"Set your mains'l," came the bellow of Captain Kitchell. "Clap on to
your throat and peak halyards."

The Chinamen hurried aft.

Wilbur followed.




II. A NAUTICAL EDUCATION.


In the course of the next few moments, while the little vessel was being
got under way, and while the Ridgeways' "Petrel" gleamed off into the
blue distance, Wilbur made certain observations.

The name of the boat on which he found himself was the "Bertha Millner."
She was a two-topmast, 28-ton keel schooner, 40 feet long, carrying
a large spread of sail--mainsail, foresail, jib, flying-jib, two
gaff-topsails, and a staysail. She was very dirty and smelt abominably
of some kind of rancid oil. Her crew were Chinamen; there was no mate.
But the cook--himself a Chinaman--who appeared from time to time at the
door of the galley, a potato-masher in his hand, seemed to have some
sort of authority over the hands. He acted in a manner as a go-between
for the Captain and the crew, sometimes interpreting the former's
orders, and occasionally giving one of his own.

Wilbur heard the Captain address him as Charlie. He spoke pigeon English
fairly. Of the balance of the crew--the five Chinamen--Wilbur could make
nothing. They never spoke, neither to Captain Kitchell, to Charlie,
nor to each other; and for all the notice they took of Wilbur he might
easily have been a sack of sand. Wilbur felt that his advent on the
"Bertha Millner" was by its very nature an extraordinary event; but the
absolute indifference of these brown-suited Mongols, the blankness of
their flat, fat faces, the dulness of their slanting, fishlike eyes
that never met his own or even wandered in his direction, was uncanny,
disquieting. In what strange venture was he now to be involved, toward
what unknown vortex was this new current setting, this current that had
so suddenly snatched him from the solid ground of his accustomed life?

He told himself grimly that he was to have a free cruise up the bay,
perhaps as far as Alviso; perhaps the "Bertha Millner" would even make
the circuit of the bay before returning to San Francisco. He might
be gone a week. Wilbur could already see the scare-heads of the daily
papers the next morning, chronicling the disappearance of "One of
Society's Most Popular Members."

"That's well, y'r throat halyards. Here, Lilee of the Vallee, give a
couple of pulls on y'r peak halyard purchase."

Wilbur stared at the Captain helplessly.

"No can tell, hey?" inquired Charlie from the galley. "Pullum disa lope,
sabe?"

Wilbur tugged at the rope the cook indicated.

"That's well, y'r peak halyard purchase," chanted Captain Kitchell.

Wilbur made the rope fast. The mainsail was set, and hung slatting and
flapping in the wind. Next the for'sail was set in much the same manner,
and Wilbur was ordered to "lay out on the ji'boom and cast the gaskets
off the jib." He "lay out" as best he could and cast off the gaskets--he
knew barely enough of yachting to understand an order here and
there--and by the time he was back on the fo'c'sle head the Chinamen
were at the jib halyard and hoisting away.

"That's well, y'r jib halyards."

The "Bertha Millner" veered round and played off to the wind, tugging at
her anchor.

"Man y'r windlass."

Wilbur and the crew jumped once more to the brakes.

"Brake down, heave y'r anchor to the cathead."

The anchor-chain, already taut, vibrated and then cranked through the
hawse-holes as the hands rose and fell at the brakes. The anchor came
home, dripping gray slime. A nor'west wind filled the schooner's sails,
a strong ebb tide caught her underfoot.

"We're off," muttered Wilbur, as the "Bertha Millner" heeled to the
first gust.

But evidently the schooner was not bound up the bay.

"Must be Vallejo or Benicia, then," hazarded Wilbur, as the sails grew
tenser and the water rippled ever louder under the schooner's forefoot.
"Maybe they're going after hay or wheat."

The schooner was tacking, headed directly for Meiggs's wharf. She came
in closer and closer, so close that Wilbur could hear the talk of the
fishermen sitting on the stringpieces. He had just made up his mind that
they were to make a landing there, when--

"Stand by for stays," came the raucous bark of the Captain, who had
taken on the heel. The sails slatted furiously as the schooner came
about. Then the "Bertha Millner" caught the wind again and lay over
quietly and contentedly to her work. The next tack brought the schooner
close under Alcatraz. The sea became heavier, the breeze grew stiff and
smelled of the outside ocean. Out beyond them to westward opened
the Golden Gate, a bleak vista of gray-green water roughened with
white-caps.

"Stand by for stays."

Once again as the rudder went hard over, the "Bertha Millner" fretted
and danced and shook her sails, calling impatiently for the wind,
chafing at its absence like a child reft of a toy. Then again she
scooped the nor'wester in the hollow palms of her tense canvases and
settled quietly down on the new tack, her bowsprit pointing straight
toward the Presidio.

"We'll come about again soon," Wilbur told himself, "and stand over
toward the Contra Costa shore."

A fine huge breath of wind passed over the schooner. She heeled it
on the instant, the water roaring along her quarter, but she kept her
course. Wilbur fell thoughtful again, never more keenly observant.

"She must come about soon," he muttered uneasily, "if she's going to
stand up toward Vallejo." His heart sank with a sudden apprehension. A
nervousness he could not overcome seized upon him. The "Bertha Millner"
held tenaciously to the tack. Within fifty yards of the Presidio came
the command again:

"Stand by for stays."

Once more, her bows dancing, her cordage rattling, her sails flapping
noisily, the schooner came about. Anxiously Wilbur observed the bowsprit
as it circled like a hand on a dial, watching where now it would point.
It wavered, fluctuated, rose, fell, then settled easily, pointing toward
Lime Point. Wilbur felt a sudden coldness at his heart.

"This isn't going to be so much fun," he muttered between his teeth. The
schooner was not bound up the bay for Alviso nor to Vallejo for grain.
The track toward Lime Point could mean but one thing. The wind was
freshening from the nor'west, the ebb tide rushing out to meet the ocean
like a mill-race, at every moment the Golden Gate opened out wider, and
within two minutes after the time of the last tack the "Bertha Millner"
heeled to a great gust that had come booming in between the heads,
straight from the open Pacific.

"Stand by for stays."

As before, one of the Chinese hands stood by the sail rope of the jib.

"Draw y'r jib."

The jib filled. The schooner came about on the port tack; Lime Point
fell away over the stern rail. The huge ground swells began to come
in, and as she rose and bowed to the first of these it was precisely as
though the "Bertha Millner" were making her courtesy to the great gray
ocean, now for the first time in full sight on her starboard quarter.

The schooner was beating out to sea through the Middle Channel. Once
clear of the Golden Gate, she stood over toward the Cliff House, then on
the next tack cleared Point Bonita. The sea began building up in deadly
earnest--they were about to cross the bar. Everything was battened down,
the scuppers were awash, and the hawse-holes spouted like fountains
after every plunge. Once the Captain ordered all men aloft, just in time
to escape a gigantic dull green roller that broke like a Niagara over
the schooner's bows, smothering the decks knee-deep in a twinkling.

The wind blew violent and cold, the spray was flying like icy
small-shot. Without intermission the "Bertha Millner" rolled and plunged
and heaved and sank. Wilbur was drenched to the skin and sore in every
joint, from being shunted from rail to mast and from mast to rail again.
The cordage sang like harp-strings, the schooner's forefoot crushed
down into the heaving water with a hissing like that of steam, blocks
rattled, the Captain bellowed his orders, rope-ends flogged the hollow
deck till it reverberated like a drum-head. The crossing of the bar was
one long half-hour of confusion and discordant sound.

When they were across the bar the Captain ordered the cook to give the
men their food.

"Git for'rd, sonny," he added, fixing Wilbur with his eye. "Git for'rd,
this is tawble dee hote, savvy?"

Wilbur crawled forward on the reeling deck, holding on now to a mast,
now to a belaying-pin, now to a stay, watching his chance and going on
between the inebriated plunges of the schooner.

He descended the fo'c'sle hatch. The Chinamen were already there,
sitting on the edges of their bunks. On the floor, at the bottom of the
ladder, punk-sticks were burning in an old tomato-can.

Charlie brought in supper--stewed beef and pork in a bread-pan and a
wooden kit--and the Chinamen ate in silence with their sheath-knives and
from tin plates. A liquid that bore a distant resemblance to coffee was
served. Wilbur learned afterward to know the stuff as Black Jack, and
to be aware that it was made from bud barley and was sweetened with
molasses. A single reeking lamp swung with the swinging of the schooner
over the centre of the group, and long after Wilbur could remember the
grisly scene--the punk-sticks, the bread-pan full of hunks of meat,
the horrid close and oily smell, and the circle of silent, preoccupied
Chinese, each sitting on his bunk-ledge, devouring stewed pork and
holding his pannikin of Black Jack between his feet against the rolling
of the boat.

Wilbur looked fearfully at the mess in the pan, recalling the chocolate
and stuffed olives that had been his last luncheon.

"Well," he muttered, clinching his teeth, "I've got to come to it sooner
or later." His penknife was in the pocket of his waist-coat, underneath
his oilskin coat. He opened the big blade, harpooned a cube of pork,
and deposited it on his tin plate. He ate it slowly and with savage
determination. But the Black Jack was more than he could bear.

"I'm not hungry enough for that just now," he told himself. "Say, Jim,"
he said, turning to the Chinaman next him on the bunk-ledge, "say, what
kind of boat is this? What you do--where you go?"

The other moved away impatiently.

"No sabe, no sabe," he answered, shaking his head and frowning.
Throughout the whole of that strange meal these were the only words
spoken.

When Wilbur came on deck again he noted that the "Bertha Millner" had
already left the whistling-buoy astern. Off to the east, her sails
just showing above the waves, was a pilot-boat with the number 7 on her
mainsail. The evening was closing in; the Farallones were in plain sight
dead ahead. Far behind, in a mass of shadow just bluer than the sky, he
could make out a few twinkling lights--San Francisco.

Half an hour later Kitchell came on deck from his supper in the cabin
aft. He glanced in the direction of the mainland, now almost out of
sight, then took the wheel from one of the Chinamen and commanded, "Ease
off y'r fore an' main sheets." The hands eased away and the schooner
played off before the wind.

The staysail was set. The "Bertha Millner" headed to southwest, bowling
easily ahead of a good eight-knot breeze.

Next came the order "All hands aft!" and Wilbur and his mates betook
themselves to the quarterdeck. Charlie took the wheel, and he and
Kitchell began to choose the men for their watches, just as Wilbur
remembered to have chosen sides for baseball during his school days.

"Sonny, I'll choose you; you're on my watch," said the Captain to
Wilbur, "and I will assoom the ree-sponsibility of your nautical
eddoocation."

"I may as well tell you at once," began Wilbur, "that I'm no sailor."

"But you will be, soon," answered the Captain, at once soothing and
threatening; "you will be, Mister Lilee of the Vallee, you kin lay to
it as how you will be one of the best sailormen along the front, as our
dear friend Jim says. Before I git throo with you, you'll be a sailorman
or shark-bait, I can promise you. You're on my watch; step over here,
son."

The watches were divided, Charlie and three other Chinamen on the port,
Kitchell, Wilbur, and two Chinamen on the starboard. The men trooped
forward again.

The tiny world of the schooner had lapsed to quiet. The "Bertha Millner"
was now clear of the land, that lay like a blur of faintest purple
smoke--ever growing fainter--low in the east. The Farallones showed but
their shoulders above the horizon. The schooner was standing well
out from shore--even beyond the track of the coasters and passenger
steamers--to catch the Trades from the northwest. The sun was setting
royally, and the floor of the ocean shimmered like mosaic. The sea
had gone down and the fury of the bar was a thing forgotten. It was
perceptibly warmer.

On board, the two watches mingled forward, smoking opium and playing
a game that looked like checkers. Three of them were washing down the
decks with kaiar brooms. For the first time since he had come on board
Wilbur heard the sound of their voices.

The evening was magnificent. Never to Wilbur's eyes had the Pacific
appeared so vast, so radiant, so divinely beautiful. A star or two
burned slowly through that part of the sky where the pink began to fade
into the blue. Charlie went forward and set the side lights--red on
the port rigging, green on the starboard. As he passed Wilbur, who was
leaning over the rail and watching the phosphorus flashing just under
the surface, he said:

"Hey, you go talkee-talk one-piecey Boss, savvy Boss--chin-chin."

Wilbur went aft and came up on the poop, where Kitchell stood at the
wheel, smoking an inverted "Tarrier's Delight."

"Now, son," began Kitchell, "I natch'ly love you so that I'm goin' to
do you a reel favor, do you twig? I'm goin' to allow you to berth aft in
the cabin, 'long o' me an' Charlie, an' beesides you can make free of
my quarterdeck. Mebbee you ain't used to the ways of sailormen just
yet, but you can lay to it that those two are reel concessions, savvy?
I ain't a mush-head, like mee dear friend Jim. You ain't no water-front
swine, I can guess that with one hand tied beehind me. You're a toff,
that's what you are, and your lines has been laid for toffs. I ain't
askin' you no questions, but you got brains, an' I figger on gettin'
more outa you by lettin' you have y'r head a bit. But mind, now, you get
gay once, sonny, or try to flimflam me, or forget that I'm the boss of
the bathtub, an' strike me blind, I'll cut you open, an' you can lay to
that, son. Now, then, here's the game: You work this boat 'long with
the coolies, an' take my orders, an' walk chalk, an' I'll teach you
navigation, an' make this cruise as easy as how-do-you-do. You don't,
an' I'll manhandle you till y'r bones come throo y'r hide."

"I've no choice in the matter," said Wilbur. "I've got to make the best
of a bad situation."

"I ree-marked as how you had brains," muttered the Captain.

"But there's one thing," continued Wilbur; "if I'm to have my head a
little, as you say, you'll find we can get along better if you put me
to rights about this whole business. Why was I brought aboard, why are
there only Chinese along, where are we going, what are we going to do,
and how long are we going to be gone?"

Kitchell spat over the side, and then sucked the nicotine from his
mustache.

"Well," he said, resuming his pipe, "it's like this, son. This ship
belongs to one of the Six Chinese Companies of Chinatown in Frisco.
Charlie, here, is one of the shareholders in the business. We go down
here twice a year off Cape Sain' Lucas, Lower California, an' fish for
blue sharks, or white, if we kin ketch 'em. We get the livers of these
an' try out the oil, an' we bring back that same oil, an' the Chinamen
sell it all over San Francisco as simon-pure cod-liver oil, savvy?
An' it pays like a nitrate bed. I come in because it's a Custom-house
regulation that no coolie can take a boat out of Frisco."

"And how do I come in?" asked Wilbur.

"Mee dear friend Jim put a knock-me-out drop into your Manhattan
cocktail. It's a capsule filled with a drug. You were shanghaied, son,"
said the Captain, blandly.

*****

About an hour later Wilbur turned in. Kitchell showed him his bunk with
its "donkey's breakfast" and single ill-smelling blanket. It was located
under the companionway that led down into the cabin. Kitchell bunked
on one side, Charlie on the other. A hacked deal table, covered with
oilcloth and ironed to the floor, a swinging-lamp, two chairs, a rack of
books, a chest or two, and a flaring picture cut from the advertisement
of a ballet, was the room's inventory in the matter of furniture and
ornament.

Wilbur sat on the edge of his bunk before undressing, reviewing the
extraordinary events of the day. In a moment he was aware of a movement
in one of the other two bunks, and presently made out Charlie lying on
his side and holding in the flame of an alcohol lamp a skewer on which
some brown and sticky stuff boiled and sizzled. He transformed the stuff
to the bowl of a huge pipe and drew on it noisily once or twice. In
another moment he had sunk back in his bunk, nearly senseless, but with
a long breath of an almost blissful contentment.

"Beast!" muttered Wilbur, with profound disgust.

He threw off his oilskin coat and felt in the pocket of his waistcoat
(which he had retained when he had changed his clothes in the fo'c'sle)
for his watch. He drew it out. It was just nine o'clock. All at once an
idea occurred to him. He fumbled in another pocket of the waistcoat and
brought out one of his calling-cards.

For a moment Wilbur remained motionless, seated on the bunk-ledge,
smiling grimly, while his glance wandered now to the sordid cabin of the
"Bertha Millner" and the opium-drugged coolie sprawled on the "donkey's
breakfast," and now to the card in his hand on which a few hours ago he
had written:

"First waltz--Jo."




III. THE LADY LETTY


Another day passed, then two. Before Wilbur knew it he had settled
himself to his new life, and woke one morning to the realization that
he was positively enjoying himself. Daily the weather grew warmer. The
fifth day out from San Francisco it was actually hot. The pitch grew
soft in the "Bertha Millner's" deck seams, the masts sweated resin.
The Chinamen went about the decks wearing but their jeans and blouses.
Kitchell had long since abandoned his coat and vest. Wilbur's oilskins
became intolerable, and he was at last constrained to trade his
pocket-knife to Charlie for a suit of jeans and wicker sandals, such as
the coolies wore--and odd enough he looked in them.

The Captain instructed him in steering, and even promised to show him
the use of the sextant and how to take an observation in the fake short
and easy coasting style of navigation. Furthermore, he showed him how to
read the log and the manner of keeping the dead reckoning.

During most of his watches Wilbur was engaged in painting the inside
of the cabin, door panels, lintels, and the few scattered moldings; and
toward the middle of the first week out, when the "Bertha Millner"
was in the latitude of Point Conception, he and three Chinamen, under
Kitchell's directions, ratlined down the forerigging and affixed the
crow's nest upon the for'mast. The next morning, during Charlie's watch
on deck, a Chinaman was sent up into the crow's nest, and from that time
on there was always a lookout maintained from the masthead.

More than once Wilbur looked around him at the empty coruscating indigo
of the ocean floor, wondering at the necessity of the lookout, and
finally expressed his curiosity to Kitchell. The Captain had now taken
not a little to Wilbur; at first for the sake of a white man's company,
and afterward because he began to place a certain vague reliance upon
Wilbur's judgment. Kitchell had reemarked as how he had brains.

"Well, you see, son," Kitchell had explained to Wilbur, "os-tensiblee
we are after shark-liver oil--and so we are; but also we are on any lay
that turns up; ready for any game, from wrecking to barratry. Strike
me, if I haven't thought of scuttling the dough-dish for her insoorance.
There's regular trade, son, to be done in ships, and then there's
pickin's an' pickin's an' pickin's. Lord, the ocean's rich with
pickin's. Do you know there's millions made out of the day-bree and
refuse of a big city? How about an ocean's day-bree, just chew on that
notion a turn; an' as fur a lookout, lemmee tell you, son, cast your
eye out yon," and he swept the sea with a forearm; "nothin', hey, so it
looks, but lemmee tell you, son, there ain't no manner of place on
the ball of dirt where you're likely to run up afoul of so many
things--unexpected things--as at sea. When you're clear o' land lay to
this here pree-cep', 'A million to one on the unexpected.'"

The next day fell almost dead calm. The hale, lusty-lunged nor'wester
that had snorted them forth from the Golden Gate had lapsed to a zephyr,
the schooner rolled lazily southward with the leisurely nonchalance of
a grazing ox. At noon, just after dinner, a few cat's-paws curdled the
milky-blue whiteness of the glassy surface, and the water once more
began to talk beneath the bow-sprit. It was very hot. The sun spun
silently like a spinning brass discus over the mainmast. On the fo'c'sle
head the Chinamen were asleep or smoking opium. It was Charlie's watch.
Kitchell dozed in his hammock in the shadow of the mainsheet. Wilbur was
below tinkering with his paint-pot about the cabin. The stillness was
profound. It was the stillness of the summer sea at high noon.

The lookout in the crow's nest broke the quiet.

"Hy-yah, hy-yah!" he cried, leaning from the barrel and calling through
an arched palm. "Hy-yah, one two, plenty, many tortle, topside, wattah;
hy-yah, all-same tortle."

"Hello, hello!" cried the Captain, rolling from his hammock. "Turtle?
Where-away?"

"I tink-um 'bout quallah mile, mebbee, four-piecee tortle all-same
weatha bow."

"Turtle, hey? Down y'r wheel, Jim, haul y'r jib to win'ward," he
commanded the man at the wheel; then to the men forward: "Get the dory
overboard. Son, Charlie, and you, Wing, tumble in. Wake up now and see
you stay so."

The dory was swung over the side, and the men dropped into her and
took their places at the oars. "Give way," cried the Captain, settling
himself in the bow with the gaff in his hand. "Hey, Jim!" he shouted to
the lookout far above, "hey, lay our course for us." The lookout nodded,
the oars fell, and the dory shot forward in the direction indicated by
the lookout.

"Kin you row, son? asked Kitchell, with sudden suspicion. Wilbur smiled.

"You ask Charlie and Wing to ship their oars and give me a pair." The
Captain complied, hesitating.

"Now, what," he said grimly, "now, what do you think you're going to do,
sonny?"

"I'm going to show you the Bob Cook stroke we used in our boat in '95,
when we beat Harvard," answered Wilbur.

Kitchell gazed doubtfully at the first few strokes, then with growing
interest watched the tremendous reach, the powerful knee-drive, the
swing, the easy catch, and the perfect recover. The dory was cutting the
water like a gasoline launch, and between strokes there was the least
possible diminishing of the speed.

"I'm a bit out of form just now," remarked Wilbur, "and I'm used to
the sliding seat; but I guess it'll do." Kitchell glanced at the human
machine that once was No. 5 in the Yale boat and then at the water
hissing from the dory's bows. "My Gawd!" he said, under his breath.
He spat over the bows and sucked the nicotine from his mustache,
thoughtfully.

"I ree-marked," he observed, "as how you had brains, my son."

A few minutes later the Captain, who was standing in the dory's bow and
alternately conning the ocean's surface and looking back to the Chinaman
standing on the schooner's masthead, uttered an exclamation:

"Steady, ship your oars, quiet now, quiet, you damn fools! We're right
on 'em--four, by Gawd, an' big as dinin' tables!"

The oars were shipped. The dory's speed dwindled. "Out your paddles, sit
on the gun'l, and paddle ee-asy." The hands obeyed. The Captain's voice
dropped to a whisper. His back was toward them and he gestured with one
free hand. Looking out over the water from his seat on the gun'l, Wilbur
could make out a round, greenish mass like a patch of floating seaweed,
just under the surface, some sixty yards ahead.

"Easy sta'board," whispered the Captain under his elbow. "Go ahead,
port; e-e-easy all, steady, steady."

The affair began to assume the intensity of a little drama--a little
drama of midocean. In spite of himself, Wilbur was excited. He even
found occasion to observe that the life was not so bad, after all. This
was as good fun as stalking deer. The dory moved forward by inches.
Kitchell's whisper was as faint as a dying infant's: "Steady all,
s-stead-ee, sh-stead--"

He lunged forward sharply with the gaff, and shouted aloud: "I got
him--grab holt his tail flippers, you fool swabs; grab holt quick--don't
you leggo--got him there, Charlie? If he gets away, you swine, I'll rip
y' open with the gaff--heave now--heave--there--there--soh, stand clear
his nippers. Strike me! he's a whacker. I thought he was going to get
away. Saw me just as I swung the gaff, an' ducked his nut."

Over the side, bundled without ceremony into the boat, clawing,
thrashing, clattering, and blowing like the exhaust of a donkey-engine,
tumbled the great green turtle, his wet, green shield of shell three
feet from edge to edge, the gaff firmly transfixed in his body, just
under the fore-flipper. From under his shell protruded his snake-like
head and neck, withered like that of an old man. He was waving his head
from side to side, the jaws snapping like a snapped silk handkerchief.
Kitchell thrust him away with a paddle. The turtle craned his neck, and
catching the bit of wood in his jaw, bit it in two in a single grip.

"I tol' you so, I tol' you to stand clear his snapper. If that had been
your shin now, eh? Hello, what's that?"

Faintly across the water came a prolonged hallooing from the schooner.
Kitchell stood up in the dory, shading his eyes with his hat.

"What's biting 'em now?" he muttered, with the uneasiness of a captain
away from his ship. "Oughta left Charlie on board--or you, son. Who's
doin' that yellin', I can't make out."

"Up in the crow's nest," exclaimed Wilbur. "It's Jim, see, he's waving
his arms."

"Well, whaduz he wave his dam' fool arms for?" growled Kitchell, angry
because something was going forward he did not understand.

"There, he's shouting again. Listen--I can't make out what he's
yelling."

"He'll yell to a different pipe when I get my grip of him. I'll twist
the head of that swab till he'll have to walk back'ard to see where
he's goin'. Whaduz he wave his arms for--whaduz he yell like a dam'
philly-loo bird for? What's him say, Charlie?"

"Jim heap sing, no can tell. Mebbee--tinkum sing, come back chop-chop."

"We'll see. Oars out, men, give way. Now, son, put a little o' that Yale
stingo in the stroke."

In the crow's nest Jim still yelled and waved like one distraught, while
the dory returned at a smart clip toward the schooner. Kitchell lathered
with fury.

"Oh-h," he murmured softly through his gritted teeth. "Jess lemmee lay
mee two hands afoul of you wunst, you gibbering, yellow philly-loo
bird, believe me, you'll dance. Shut up!" he roared; "shut up, you crazy
do-do, ain't we coming fast as we can?"

The dory bumped alongside, and the Captain was over the rail like
quicksilver. The hands were all in the bow, looking and pointing to the
west. Jim slid down the ratlines, bubbling over with suppressed news.
Before his feet had touched the deck Kitchell had kicked him into the
stays again, fulminating blasphemies.

"Sing!" he shouted, as the Chinaman clambered away like a bewildered
ape; "sing a little more. I would if I were you. Why don't you sing and
wave, you dam' fool philly-loo bird?"

"Yas, sah," answered the coolie.

"What you yell for? Charlie, ask him whaffo him sing."

"I tink-um ship," answered Charlie calmly, looking out over the
starboard quarter.

"Ship!"

"Him velly sick," hazarded the Chinaman from the ratlines, adding a
sentence in Chinese to Charlie.

"He says he tink-um ship sick, all same; ask um something--ship velly
sick."

By this time the Captain, Wilbur, and all on board could plainly
make out a sail some eight miles off the starboard bow. Even at that
distance, and to eyes so inexperienced as those of Wilbur, it needed but
a glance to know that something was wrong with her. It was not that she
failed to ride the waves with even keel, it was not that her rigging was
in disarray, nor that her sails were disordered. Her distance was too
great to make out such details. But in precisely the same manner as a
trained physician glances at a doomed patient, and from that indefinable
look in the face of him and the eyes of him pronounces the verdict
"death," so Kitchell took in the stranger with a single comprehensive
glance, and exclaimed:

"Wreck!"

"Yas, sah. I tink-um velly sick."

"Oh, go to 'll, or go below and fetch up my glass--hustle!"

The glass was brought. "Son," exclaimed Kitchell--"where is that man
with the brains? Son, come aloft here with me." The two clambered up the
ratlines to the crow's nest. Kitchell adjusted the glass.

"She's a bark," he muttered, "iron built--about seven hundred tons,
I guess--in distress. There's her ensign upside down at the
mizz'nhead--looks like Norway--an' her distress signals on the spanker
gaff. Take a blink at her, son--what do you make her out? Lord, she's
ridin' high."

Wilbur took the glass, catching the stranger after several clumsy
attempts. She was, as Captain Kitchell had announced, a bark, and, to
judge by her flag, evidently Norwegian.

"How she rolls!" muttered Wilbur.

"That's what I can't make out," answered Kitchell. "A bark such as she
ain't ought to roll thata way; her ballast'd steady her."

"What's the flags on that boom aft--one's red and white and
square-shaped, and the other's the same color, only swallow-tail in
shape?"

"That's H. B., meanin: 'I am in need of assistance.'"

"Well, where's the crew? I don't see anybody on board."

"Oh, they're there right enough."

"Then they're pretty well concealed about the premises," turned Wilbur,
as he passed the glass to the Captain.

"She does seem kinda empty," said the Captain in a moment, with a sudden
show of interest that Wilbur failed to understand.

"An' where's her boats?" continued Kitchell. "I don't just quite make
out any boats at all." There was a long silence.

"Seems to be a sort of haze over her," observed Wilbur.

"I noticed that, air kinda quivers oily-like. No boats, no boats--an'
I can't see anybody aboard." Suddenly Kitchell lowered the glass and
turned to Wilbur. He was a different man. There was a new shine in
his eyes, a wicked line appeared over the nose, the jaw grew salient,
prognathous.

"Son," he exclaimed, gimleting Wilbur with his contracted eyes; "I have
reemarked as how you had brains. I kin fool the coolies, but I can't
fool you. It looks to me as if that bark yonder was a derelict; an' do
you know what that means to us? Chaw on it a turn."

"A derelict?"

"If there's a crew on board they're concealed from the public gaze--an'
where are the boats then? I figger she's an abandoned derelict. Do you
know what that means for us--for you and I? It means," and gripping
Wilbur by the shoulders, he spoke the word into his face with a savage
intensity. "It means salvage, do you savvy?--salvage, salvage. Do you
figger what salvage on a seven-hundred-tonner would come to? Well, just
lemmee drop it into your think tank, an' lay to what I say. It's all the
ways from fifty to seventy thousand dollars, whatever her cargo is; call
it sixty thousand--thirty thou' apiece. Oh, I don't know!" he exclaimed,
lapsing to landman's slang. "Wha'd I say about a million to one on the
unexpected at sea?"

"Thirty thousand!" exclaimed Wilbur, without thought as yet.

"Now y'r singin' songs," cried the Captain. "Listen to me, son," he went
on, rapidly shutting up the glass and thrusting it back in the case;
"my name's Kitchell, and I'm hog right through." He emphasized the words
with a leveled forefinger, his eyes flashing. "H--O--G spells very truly
yours, Alvinza Kitchell--ninety-nine swine an' me make a hundred swine.
I'm a shoat with both feet in the trough, first, last, an' always.
If that bark's abandoned, an' I says she is, she's ours. I'm out for
anything that there's stuff in. I guess I'm more of a beach-comber by
nature than anything else. If she's abandoned she belongs to us. To 'll
with this coolie game. We'll go beach-combin', you and I. We'll board
that bark and work her into the nearest port--San Diego, I guess--and
get the salvage on her if we have to swim in her. Are you with me?" he
held out his hand. The man was positively trembling from head to
heel. It was impossible to resist the excitement of the situation, its
novelty--the high crow's nest of the schooner, the keen salt air, the
Chinamen grouped far below, the indigo of the warm ocean, and out yonder
the forsaken derelict, rolling her light hull till the garboard streak
flashed in the sun.

"Well, of course, I'm with you, Cap," exclaimed Wilbur, gripping
Kitchell's hand. "When there's thirty thousand to be had for the asking
I guess I'm a 'na'chel bawn' beach-comber myself."

"Now, nothing about this to the coolies."

"But how will you make out with your owners, the Six Companies? Aren't
you bound to bring the 'Bertha' in?"

"Rot my owners!" exclaimed Kitchell. "I ain't a skipper of no oil-boat
any longer. I'm a beach-comber." He fixed the wallowing bark with
glistening eyes. "Gawd strike me," he murmured, "ain't she a daisy? It's
a little Klondike. Come on, son."

The two went down the ratlines, and Kitchell ordered a couple of the
hands into the dory that had been rowing astern. He and Wilbur followed.
Charlie was left on board, with directions to lay the schooner to. The
dory flew over the water, Wilbur setting the stroke. In a few moments
she was well up with the bark. Though a larger boat than the "Bertha
Millner," she was rolling in lamentable fashion, and every laboring
heave showed her bottom incrusted with barnacles and seaweed.

Her fore and main tops'ls and to'gallants'ls were set, as also were her
lower stays'ls and royals. But the braces seemed to have parted, and
the yards were swinging back and forth in their ties. The spanker was
brailed up, and the spanker boom thrashed idly over the poop as the bark
rolled and rolled and rolled. The mainmast was working in its shoe,
the rigging and backstays sagged. An air of abandonment, of unspeakable
loneliness, of abomination hung about her. Never had Wilbur seen
anything more utterly alone. Within three lengths the Captain rose in
his place and shouted:

"Bark ahoy!" There was no answer. Thrice he repeated the call, and
thrice the dismal thrashing of the spanker boom and the flapping of
the sails was the only answer. Kitchell turned to Wilbur in triumph. "I
guess she's ours," he whispered. They were now close enough to make out
the bark's name upon her counter, "Lady Letty," and Wilbur was in
the act of reading it aloud, when a huge brown dorsal fin, like the
triangular sail of a lugger, cut the water between the dory and the
bark.

"Shark!" said Kitchell; "and there's another!" he exclaimed in the next
instant, "and another! Strike me, the water's alive with 'em'! There's
a stiff on the bark, you can lay to that"; and at that, acting on some
strange impulse, he called again, "Bark ahoy!" There was no response.

The dory was now well up to the derelict, and pretty soon a prolonged
and vibratory hissing noise, strident, insistent, smote upon their ears.

"What's that?" exclaimed Wilbur, perplexed. The Captain shook his
head, and just then, as the bark rolled almost to her scuppers in their
direction, a glimpse of the deck was presented to their view. It was
only a glimpse, gone on the instant, as the bark rolled back to port,
but it was time enough for Wilbur and the Captain to note the parted
and open seams and the deck bulging, and in one corner blown up and
splintered.

The captain smote a thigh.

"Coal!" he cried. "Anthracite coal. The coal he't up and generated gas,
of course--no fire, y'understand, just gas--gas blew up the deck--no way
of stopping combustion. Naturally they had to cut for it. Smell the gas,
can't you? No wonder she's hissing--no wonder she rolled--cargo goes
off in gas--and what's to weigh her down? I was wondering what could 'a'
wrecked her in this weather. Lord, it's as plain as Billy-b'damn."

The dory was alongside. Kitchell watched his chance, and as the bark
rolled down caught the mainyard-brace hanging in a bight over the
rail and swung himself to the deck. "Look sharp!" he called, as Wilbur
followed. "It won't do for you to fall among them shark, son. Just look
at the hundreds of 'em. There's a stiff on board, sure."

Wilbur steadied himself on the swaying broken deck, choking against the
reek of coal-gas that hissed upward on every hand. The heat was almost
like a furnace. Everything metal was intolerable to the touch.

"She's abandoned, sure," muttered the Captain. "Look," and he pointed
to the empty chocks on the house and the severed lashings. "Oh, it's
a haul, son; it's a haul, an' you can lay to that. Now, then, cabin
first," and he started aft.

But it was impossible to go into the cabin. The moment the door was
opened suffocating billows of gas rushed out and beat them back. On the
third trial the Captain staggered out, almost overcome with its volume.

"Can't get in there for a while yet," he gasped, "but I saw the stiff
on the floor by the table; looks like the old man. He's spit his false
teeth out. I knew there was a stiff aboard."

"Then there's more than one," said Wilbur. "See there!" From behind
the wheel-box in the stern protruded a hand and forearm in an oilskin
sleeve.

Wilbur ran up, peered over the little space between the wheel and the
wheel-box, and looked straight into a pair of eyes--eyes that were
alive. Kitchell came up.

"One left, anyhow," he muttered, looking over Wilbur's shoulder; "sailor
man, though; can't interfere with our salvage. The bark's derelict,
right enough. Shake him out of there, son; can't you see the lad's dotty
with the gas?"

Cramped into the narrow space of the wheel-box like a terrified hare in
a blind burrow was the figure of a young boy. So firmly was he wedged
into the corner that Kitchell had to kick down the box before he could
be reached. The boy spoke no word. Stupefied with the gas, he watched
them with vacant eyes.

Wilbur put a hand under the lad's arm and got him to his feet. He was
a tall, well-made fellow, with ruddy complexion and milk-blue eyes, and
was dressed, as if for heavy weather, in oilskins.

"Well, sonny, you've had a fine mess aboard here," said Kitchell. The
boy--he might have been two and twenty--stared and frowned.

"Clean loco from the gas. Get him into the dory, son. I'll try this
bloody cabin again."

Kitchell turned back and descended from the poop, and Wilbur, his arm
around the boy, followed. Kitchell was already out of hearing, and
Wilbur was bracing himself upon the rolling deck, steadying the young
fellow at his side, when the latter heaved a deep breath. His throat and
breast swelled. Wilbur stared sharply, with a muttered exclamation:

"My God, it's a girl!" he said.




IV. MORAN


Meanwhile Charlie had brought the "Bertha Millner" up to within hailing
distance of the bark, and had hove her to. Kitchell ordered Wilbur to
return to the schooner and bring over a couple of axes.

"We'll have to knock holes all through the house, and break in the
skylights and let the gas escape before we can do anything. Take the kid
over and give him whiskey; then come along back and bear a hand."

Wilbur had considerable difficulty in getting into the dory from the
deck of the plunging derelict with his dazed and almost helpless charge.
Even as he slid down the rope into the little boat and helped the girl
to follow, he was aware of two dull, brownish-green shadows moving just
beneath the water's surface not ten feet away, and he knew that he was
being stealthily watched. The Chinamen at the oars of the dory, with
that extraordinary absence of curiosity which is the mark of the race,
did not glance a second time at the survivor of the "Lady Letty's"
misadventure. To them it was evident she was but a for'mast hand.
However, Wilbur examined her with extraordinary interest as she sat in
the sternsheets, sullen, half-defiant, half-bewildered, and bereft of
speech.

She was not pretty--she was too tall for that--quite as tall as Wilbur
himself, and her skeleton was too massive. Her face was red, and the
glint of blue ice was in her eyes. Her eyelashes and eyebrows, as well
as the almost imperceptible down that edged her cheek when she turned
against the light, were blond almost to whiteness. What beauty she had
was of the fine, hardy Norse type. Her hands were red and hard, and even
beneath the coarse sleeve of the oilskin coat one could infer that the
biceps and deltoids were large and powerful. She was coarse-fibred, no
doubt, mentally as well as physically, but her coarseness, so Wilbur
guessed, would prove to be the coarseness of a primitive rather than of
a degenerate character.

One thing he saw clearly during the few moments of the dory's trip
between bark and schooner--the fact that his charge was a woman must
be kept from Captain Kitchell. Wilbur knew his man by now. It could be
done. Kitchell and he would take the "Lady Letty" into the nearest port
as soon as possible. The deception would have to be maintained only for
a day or two.

He left the girl on board the schooner and returned to the derelict with
the axes. He found Kitchell on the house, just returned from a hasty
survey of the prize.

"She's a daisy," vociferated the Captain, as Wilbur came aboard.
"I've been havin' a look 'round. She's brand-new. See the date on the
capst'n-head? Christiania is her hailin' port--built there; but it's her
papers I'm after. Then we'll know where we're at. How's the kid?"

"She's all right," answered Wilbur, before he could collect his
thoughts. But the Captain thought he had reference to the "Bertha."

"I mean the kid we found in the wheel-box. He doesn't count in our
salvage. The bark's been abandoned as plain as paint. If I thought he
stood in our way," and Kitchell's jaw grew salient. "I'd shut him in
the cabin with the old man a spell, till he'd copped off. Now then, son,
first thing to do is to chop vents in this yere house."

"Hold up--we can do better than that," said Wilbur, restraining
Kitchell's fury of impatience. "Slide the big skylight off--it's loose
already."

A couple of the schooner's hands were ordered aboard the "Lady Letty,"
and the skylight removed. At first the pour of gas was terrific, but by
degrees it abated, and at the end of half an hour Kitchell could keep
back no longer.

"Come on!" he cried, catching up an axe; "rot the difference." All
the plundering instincts of the man were aroused and clamoring. He had
become a very wolf within scent of its prey--a veritable hyena nuzzling
about its carrion.

"Lord!" he gasped, "t' think that everything we see, everything we find,
is ours!"

Wilbur himself was not far behind him in eagerness. Somewhere deep down
in the heart of every Anglo-Saxon lies the predatory instinct of his
Viking ancestors--an instinct that a thousand years of respectability
and taxpaying have not quite succeeded in eliminating.

A flight of six steps, brass-bound and bearing the double L of the
bark's monogram, led them down into a sort of vestibule. From the
vestibule a door opened directly into the main cabin. They entered.

The cabin was some twenty feet long and unusually spacious. Fresh from
his recollection of the grime and reek of the schooner, it struck Wilbur
as particularly dainty. It was painted white with stripes of blue, gold
and pea-green. On either side three doors opened off into staterooms and
private cabins, and with each roll of the derelict these doors banged
like an irregular discharge of revolvers. In the centre was the
dining-table, covered with a red cloth, very much awry. On each side of
the table were four arm chairs, screwed to the deck, one somewhat larger
at the head. Overhead, in swinging racks, were glasses and decanters of
whiskey and some kind of white wine. But for one feature the sight of
the "Letty's" cabin was charming. However, on the floor by the sliding
door in the forward bulkhead lay a body, face upward.

The body was that of a middle-aged, fine-looking man, his head covered
with the fur, ear-lapped cap that Norwegians affect, even in the
tropics. The eyes were wide open, the face discolored. In the last gasp
of suffocation the set of false teeth had been forced half-way out
of his mouth, distorting the countenance with a hideous simian grin.
Instantly Kitchell's eye was caught by the glint of the gold in which
these teeth were set.

"Here's about $100 to begin with," he exclaimed, and picking up the
teeth, dropped them into his pocket with a wink at Wilbur. The body of
the dead Captain was passed up through the skylight and slid out on the
deck, and Wilbur and Kitchell turned their attention to what had been
his stateroom.

The Captain's room was the largest one of the six staterooms opening
from the main cabin.

"Here we are!" exclaimed Kitchell as he and Wilbur entered. "The old
man's room, and no mistake."

Besides the bunk, the stateroom was fitted up with a lounge of red plush
screwed to the bulkhead. A roll of charts leaned in one corner, an alarm
clock, stopped at 1:15, stood on a shelf in the company of some dozen
paper-covered novels and a drinking-glass full of cigars. Over the
lounge, however, was the rack of instruments, sextant, barometer,
chronometer, glass, and the like, securely screwed down, while against
the wall, in front of a swivel leather chair that was ironed to the
deck, was the locked secretary.

"Look at 'em, just look at 'em, will you!" said Kitchell, running his
fingers lovingly over the polished brass of the instruments. "There's
a thousand dollars of stuff right here. The chronometer's worth five
hundred alone, Bennett & Sons' own make." He turned to the secretary.

"Now!" he exclaimed with a long breath.

What followed thrilled Wilbur with alternate excitement, curiosity, and
a vivid sense of desecration and sacrilege. For the life of him he
could not make the thing seem right or legal in his eyes, and yet he had
neither the wish nor the power to stay his hand or interfere with what
Kitchell was doing.

The Captain put the blade of the axe in the chink of the secretary's
door and wrenched it free. It opened down to form a sort of desk, and
disclosed an array of cubby-holes and two small doors, both locked.
These latter Kitchell smashed in with the axe-head. Then he seated
himself in the swivel chair and began to rifle their contents
systematically, Wilbur leaning over his shoulder.

The heat from the coal below them was almost unbearable. In the cabin
the six doors kept up a continuous ear-shocking fusillade, as though
half a dozen men were fighting with revolvers; from without, down the
open skylight, came the sing-song talk of the Chinamen and the wash
and ripple of the two vessels, now side by side. The air, foul beyond
expression, tasted of brass, their heads swam and ached to bursting, but
absorbed in their work they had no thought of the lapse of time nor the
discomfort of their surroundings. Twice during the examination of the
bark's papers, Kitchell sent Wilbur out into the cabin for the whiskey
decanter in the swinging racks.

"Here's the charter papers," said Kitchell, unfolding and spreading them
out one by one; "and here's the clearing papers from Blyth in England.
This yere's the insoorance, and here, this is--rot that, nothin' but the
articles for the crew--no use to us."

In a separate envelope, carefully sealed and bound, they came upon the
Captain's private papers. A marriage certificate setting forth the union
between Eilert Sternersen, of Fruholmen, Norway, and Sarah Moran, of
some seaport town (the name was indecipherable) of the North of
England. Next came a birth certificate of a daughter named Moran, dated
twenty-two years back, and a bill of sale of the bark "Lady Letty,"
whereby a two-thirds interest was conveyed from the previous owners (a
shipbuilding firm of Christiania) to Capt. Eilert Sternersen.

"The old man was his own boss," commented Kitchell. "Hello!" he
remarked, "look here"; a yellowed photograph was in his hand the picture
of a stout, fair-haired woman of about forty, wearing enormous pendant
earrings in the style of the early sixties. Below was written: "S. Moran
Sternersen, ob. 1867."

"Old woman copped off," said Kitchell, "so much the better for us; no
heirs to put in their gab; an'--hold hard--steady all--here's the will,
s'help me."

The only items of importance in the will were the confirmation of the
wife's death and the expressly stated bequest of "the bark known as
and sailing under the name of the 'Lady Letty' to my only and beloved
daughter, Moran."

"Well," said Wilbur.

The Captain sucked his mustache, then furiously, striking the desk with
his fist:

"The bark's ours!" there was a certain ring of defiance in his voice.
"Damn the will! I ain't so cock-sure about the law, but I'll make sure."

"As how?" said Wilbur.

Kitchell slung the will out of the open port into the sea.

"That's how," he remarked. "I'm the heir. I found the bark; mine she is,
an' mine she stays--yours an' mine, that is."

But Wilbur had not even time to thoroughly enjoy the satisfaction that
the Captain's words conveyed, before an idea suddenly presented
itself to him. The girl he had found on board of the bark, the ruddy,
fair-haired girl of the fine and hardy Norse type--that was the
daughter, of course; that was "Moran." Instantly the situation adjusted
itself in his imagination. The two inseparables father and daughter,
sailors both, their lives passed together on ship board, and the "Lady
Letty" their dream, their ambition, a vessel that at last they could
call their own.

Then this disastrous voyage--perhaps the first in their new craft--the
combustion in the coal--the panic terror of the crew and their desertion
of the bark, and the sturdy resolution of the father and daughter to
bring the "Letty" in--to work her into port alone. They had failed; the
father had died from gas; the girl, at least for the moment, was crazed
from its effects. But the bark had not been abandoned. The owner was on
board. Kitchell was wrong; she was no derelict; not one penny could they
gain by her salvage.

For an instant a wave of bitterest disappointment passed over Wilbur
as he saw his $30,000 dwindling to nothing. Then the instincts of
habit reasserted themselves. The taxpayer in him was stronger than the
freebooter, after all. He felt that it was his duty to see to it
that the girl had her rights. Kitchell must be made aware of the
situation--must be told that Moran, the daughter, the Captain's heir,
was on board the schooner; that the "kid" found in the wheel-box was a
girl. But on second thought that would never do. Above all things, the
brute Kitchell must not be shown that a girl was aboard the schooner on
which he had absolute command, nor, setting the question of Moran's sex
aside, must Kitchell know her even as the dead Captain's heir. There was
a difference in the men here, and Wilbur appreciated it. Kitchell, the
law-abiding taxpayer, was a weakling in comparison with Kitchell, the
free-booter and beach-comber in sight of his prize.

"Son," said the Captain, making a bundle of all the papers, "take these
over to my bunk and hide 'em under the donkey's breakfast. Stop a bit,"
he added, as Wilbur started away. "I'll go with you. We'll have to bury
the old man."

Throughout all the afternoon the Captain had been drinking the whiskey
from the decanter found in the cabin; now he stood up unsteadily, and,
raising his glass, exclaimed:

"Sonny, here's to Kitchell, Wilbur & Co., beach-combers, unlimited. What
do you say, hey?"

"I only want to be sure that we've a right to the bark," answered
Wilbur.

"Right to her--ri-hight to 'er," hiccoughed the Captain. "Strike me
blind, I'd like to see any one try'n take her away from Alvinza Kitchell
now," and he thrust out his chin at Wilbur.

"Well, so much the better, then," said Wilbur, pocketing the papers. The
pair ascended to the deck.

The burial of Captain Sternersen was a dreadful business. Kitchell, far
gone in whiskey, stood on the house issuing his orders, drinking from
one of the decanters he had brought up with him. He had already rifled
the dead man's pockets, and had even taken away the boots and fur-lined
cap. Cloths were cut from the spanker and rolled around the body. Then
Kitchell ordered the peak halyards unrove and used as lashings to tie
the canvas around the corpse. The red and white flags (the distress
signals) were still bound on the halyards.

"Leave 'em on. Leave 'em on," commanded Kitchell. "Use 'm as a shrou'.
All ready now, stan' by to let her go."

Wilbur looked over at the schooner and noted with immense relief that
Moran was not in sight. Suddenly an abrupt reaction took place in the
Captain's addled brain.

"Can't bury 'um 'ithout 'is teeth," he gabbled solemnly. He laid back
the canvas and replaced the set. "Ole man'd ha'nt me 'f I kep' 's teeth.
Strike! look a' that, I put 'em in upside down. Nev' min', upsi' down,
downsi' up, whaz odds, all same with ole Bill, hey, ole Bill, all same
with you, hey?" Suddenly he began to howl with laughter "T' think a
bein' buried with y'r teeth upsi' down. Oh, mee, but that's a good
grind. Stan' by to heave ole Uncle Bill over--ready, heave, an' away she
goes." He ran to the side, waving his hat and looking over. "Goo'-by,
ole Bill, by-by. There you go, an' the signal o' distress roun' you, H.
B. 'I'm in need of assistance.' Lord, here comes the sharks--look! look!
look at um fight! look at um takin' ole Bill! I'm in need of assistance.
I sh'd say you were, ole Bill."

Wilbur looked once over the side in the churning, lashing water, then
drew back, sick to vomiting. But in less than thirty seconds the water
was quiet. Not a shark was in sight.

"Get over t' the 'Bertha' with those papers, son," ordered Kitchell;
"I'll bide here and dig up sh' mor' loot. I'll gut this ole pill-box
from stern to stem-post 'fore I'll leave. I won't leave a copper rivet
in 'er, notta co'er rivet, dyhear?" he shouted, his face purple with
unnecessary rage.

Wilbur returned to the schooner with the two Chinamen, leaving Kitchell
alone on the bark. He found the girl sitting by the rudderhead almost as
he had left her, looking about her with vague, unseeing eyes.

"Your name is Moran, isn't it?" he asked. "Moran Sternersen."

"Yes," she said, after a pause, then looked curiously at a bit of tarred
rope on the deck. Nothing more could be got out of her. Wilbur talked
to her at length, and tried to make her understand the situation, but it
was evident she did not follow. However, at each mention of her name she
would answer:

"Yes, yes, I'm Moran."

Wilbur turned away from her, biting his nether lip in perplexity.

"Now, what am I going to do?" he muttered. "What a situation! If I tell
the Captain, it's all up with the girl. If he didn't kill her, he'd do
worse--might do both. If I don't tell him, there goes her birthright,
$60,000, and she alone in the world. It's begun to go already," he
added, listening to the sounds that came from the bark. Kitchell was
raging to and fro in the cabin in a frenzy of drink, axe in hand,
smashing glassware, hacking into the wood-work, singing the while at the
top of his voice:


     "As through the drop I go, drop I go,
      As through the drop I go, drop I go,
      As through the drop I go,
      Down to hell that yawns below,
      Twenty stiffs all in a row
       Damn your eyes"


"That's the kind of man I have to deal with," muttered Wilbur. "It's
encouraging, and there's no one to talk to. Not much help in a Chinaman
and a crazy girl in a man's oilskins. It's about the biggest situation
you ever faced, Ross Wilbur, and you're all alone. What the devil are
you going to do?"

He acknowledged with considerable humiliation that he could not get the
better of Kitchell, either physically or mentally. Kitchell was a more
powerful man than he, and cleverer. The Captain was in his element now,
and he was the commander. On shore it would have been vastly different.
The city-bred fellow, with a policeman always in call, would have known
how to act.

"I simply can't stand by and see that hog plundering everything she's
got. What's to be done?"

And suddenly, while the words were yet in his mouth, the sun was wiped
from the sky like writing from a slate, the horizon blackened, vanished,
a long white line of froth whipped across the sea and came on hissing. A
hollow note boomed out, boomed, swelled, and grew rapidly to a roar.

An icy chill stabbed the air. Then the squall swooped and struck, and
the sky shut down over the troubled ocean like a pot-lid over a boiling
pot. The schooner's fore and main sheets, that had not been made fast,
unrove at the first gust and began to slat wildly in the wind. The
Chinamen cowered to the decks, grasping at cleats, stays, and masts.
They were helpless--paralyzed with fear. Charlie clung to a stay, one
arm over his head, as though dodging a blow. Wilbur gripped the rail
with his hands where he stood, his teeth set, his eyes wide, waiting
for the foundering of the schooner, his only thought being that the end
could not be far. He had heard of the suddenness of tropical squalls,
but this had come with the abruptness of a scene-shift at a play. The
schooner veered broad-on to the waves. It was the beginning of the
end--another roll to the leeward like the last and the Pacific would
come aboard.

"And you call yourselves sailor men! Are you going to drown like rats
on a plank?" A voice that Wilbur did not know went ringing through that
horrid shouting of wind and sea like the call of a bugle. He turned
to see Moran, the girl of the "Lady Letty," standing erect upon the
quarterdeck, holding down the schooner's wheel. The confusion of that
dreadful moment, that had paralyzed the crew's senses, had brought back
hers. She was herself again, savage, splendid, dominant, superb, in her
wrath at their weakness, their cowardice.

Her heavy brows were knotted over her flaming eyes, her hat was gone,
and her thick bands of yellow hair whipped across her face and streamed
out in the wind like streamers of the northern lights. As she shouted,
gesturing furiously to the men, the loose sleeve of the oilskin coat
fell back, and showed her forearm, strong, round, and white as scud,
the hand and wrist so tanned as to look almost like a glove. And all the
while she shouted aloud, furious with indignation, raging against the
supineness of the "Bertha's" crew.

"Stand by, men! stand by! Look alive, now! Make fast the stays'l
halyards to the dory's warp! Now, then, unreeve y'r halyards! all clear
there! pass the end for'd outside the rigging! outside! you fools! Make
fast to the bits for'ard--let go y'r line--that'll do. Soh--soh. There,
she's coming up."

The dory had been towing astern, and the seas combing over her had
swamped her. Moran had been inspired to use the swamped boat as a
sea-anchor, fastening her to the schooner's bow instead of to the stern.
The "Bertha's" bow, answering to the drag, veered around. The "Bertha"
stood head to the seas, riding out the squall. It was a masterpiece of
seamanship, conceived and executed in the very thick of peril, and it
saved the schooner.

But there was little time to think of themselves. On board the bark the
sails were still set. The squall struck the "Lady Letty" squarely aback.
She heeled over upon the instant; then as the top hamper carried away
with a crash, eased back a moment upon an even keel. But her cargo had
shifted. The bark was doomed. Through the flying spray and scud and rain
Wilbur had a momentary glimpse of Kitchell, hacking at the lanyards with
his axe. Then the "Lady Letty" capsized, going over till her masts
were flat with the water, and in another second rolled bottom up. For
a moment her keel and red iron bottom were visible through the mist of
driving spoon-drift. Suddenly they sank from sight. She was gone.

And then, like the rolling up of a scroll, the squall passed, the sun
returned, the sky burned back to blue, the ruggedness was smoothed
from the ocean, and the warmth of the tropics closed around the "Bertha
Millner," once more rolling easily on the swell of the ocean.

Of the "Lady Letty" and the drunken beach-combing Captain not a trace
remained. Kitchell had gone down with his prize. The "Bertha Millner's"
Chinese crew huddled forward, talking wildly, pointing and looking in a
bewildered fashion over the sides.

Wilbur and Moran were left alone on the open Pacific.




V. A Girl Captain


When Wilbur came on deck the morning after the sinking of the bark he
was surprised to find the schooner under way again. Wilbur and Charlie
had berthed forward during that night--Charlie with the hands, Wilbur in
the Captain's hammock. The reason for this change of quarters had
been found in a peremptory order from Moran during the dog-watch the
preceding evening.

She had looked squarely at Wilbur from under her scowl, and had said
briefly and in a fine contralto voice, that he had for the first
time noted: "I berth aft, in the cabin; you and the Chinaman forward.
Understand?"

Moran had only forestalled Wilbur's intention; while after her almost
miraculous piece of seamanship in the rescue of the schooner,
Charlie and the Chinese crew accorded her a respect that was almost
superstitious.

Wilbur met her again at breakfast. She was still wearing men's
clothing--part of Kitchell's outfit--and was booted to the knee; but now
she wore no hat, and her enormous mane of rye-colored hair was braided
into long strands near to the thickness of a man's arm. The redness of
her face gave a startling effect to her pale blue eyes and sandy, heavy
eyebrows, that easily lowered to a frown. She ate with her knife, and
after pushing away her plate Wilbur observed that she drank half a
tumbler of whiskey and water.

The conversation between the two was tame enough. There was no common
ground upon which they could meet. To her father's death--no doubt an
old matter even before her rescue--she made no allusion. Her attitude
toward Wilbur was one of defiance and suspicion. Only once did she
relax:

"How did you come to be aboard here with these rat-eaters--you're no
sailor?" she said abruptly.

"Huh!" laughed Wilbur, mirthlessly; "huh! I was shanghaied."

Moran smote the table with a red fist, and shouted with sonorous,
bell-toned laughter.

"Shanghaied?--you? Now, that is really good. And what are you going to
do now?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Signal the first home-bound vessel and be taken into Frisco. I've my
insurance to collect (Wilbur had given her the 'Letty's' papers) and the
disaster to report."

"Well, I'm not keen on shark-hunting myself," said Wilbur. But Moran
showed no interest in his plans.

However, they soon found that they were not to be permitted to signal.
At noon the same day the schooner sighted a steamship's smoke on the
horizon, and began to raise her rapidly. Moran immediately bound on the
ensign, union down, and broke it out at the peak.

Charlie, who was at the wheel, spoke a sentence in Chinese, and one of
the hands drew his knife across the halyards and brought the distress
signal to the deck. Moran turned upon Charlie with an oath, her brows
knitted.

"No! No!" sang Charlie, closing his eyes and wagging his head. "No!
Too muchee los' time; no can stop. You come downside cabin; you an'
one-piece boss number two (this was Wilbur) have um chin-chin."

The odd conclave assembled about Kitchell's table--the club-man, the
half-masculine girl in men's clothes, and the Chinaman. The conference
was an angry one, Wilbur and Moran insisting that they be put aboard the
steamship, Charlie refusing with calm obstinacy.

"I have um chin-chin with China boys las' nigh'. China boy heap flaid,
no can stop um steamship. Heap flaid too much talkee-talkee. No stop; go
fish now; go fish chop-chop. Los' heap time; go fish. I no savvy sail
um boat, China boy no savvy sail um boat. I tink um you savvy (and he
pointed to Moran). I tink um you savvy plenty heap much disa bay. Boss
number two, him no savvy sail um boat, but him savvy plenty many all
same.'

"And we're to stop on board your dough-dish and navigate her for you?"
shouted Moran, her face blazing.

Charlie nodded blandly: "I tink um yass."

"And when we get back to port," exclaimed Wilbur, "you think, perhaps
I--we won't make it interesting for you?"

Charlie smiled.

"I tink um Six Company heap rich."

"Well, get along," ordered Moran, as though the schooner was her
property, "and we'll talk it over."

"China boy like you heap pretty big," said Charlie to Moran, as he went
out. "You savvy sail um boat all light; wanta you fo' captain. But," he
added, suddenly dropping his bland passivity as though he wore a mask,
and for an instant allowing the wicked malevolent Cantonese to come to
the surface, "China boy no likee funnee business, savvy?" Then with a
smile of a Talleyrand he disappeared.

Moran and Wilbur were helpless for the present. They were but two
against seven Chinamen. They must stay on board, if the coolies wished
it; and if they were to stay it was a matter of their own personal
safety that the "Bertha Millner" should be properly navigated.

"I'll captain her," concluded Moran, sullenly, at the end of their talk.
"You must act as mate, Mr. Wilbur. And don't get any mistaken idea into
your head that, because I'm a young girl and alone, you are going to run
things your way. I don't like funny business any better than Charlie."

"Look here," said Wilbur, complaining, "don't think I'm altogether a
villain. I think you're a ripping fine girl. You're different from any
kind of girl I ever met, of course, but you, by jingo, you're--you're
splendid. There in the squall last evening, when you stood at the wheel,
with your hair--"

"Oh, drop that!" said the girl, contemptuously, and went up on deck.
Wilbur followed, scratching an ear.

Charlie was called aft and their decision announced. Moran would
navigate the "Bertha Millner," Wilbur and she taking the watches.
Charlie promised that he would answer for the obedience of the men.

Their first concern now was to shape their course for Magdalena Bay.
Moran and Wilbur looked over Kitchell's charts and log-book, but the
girl flung them aside disdainfully.

"He's been sailing by the dead reckoning, and his navigation is drivel.
Why, a cabin-boy would know better; and, to end with, the chronometer
is run down. I'll have to get Green'ich time by taking the altitude of
a star to-night, and figure out our longitude. Did you bring off our
sextant?"

Wilbur shook his head. "Only the papers," he said.

"There's only an old ebony quadrant here," said Moran, "but it will have
to do."

That night, lying flat on her back on the deck with a quadrant to her
eye, she "got a star and brought it down to the horizon," and sat up
under the reeking lamp in the cabin nearly the whole night ciphering and
ciphering till she had filled up the four sides of the log-slate with
her calculations. However, by daylight she had obtained the correct
Greenwich time and worked the schooner's longitude.

Two days passed, then a third. Moran set the schooner's course. She kept
almost entirely to herself, and when not at the wheel or taking the sun
or writing up the log, gloomed over the after-rail into the schooner's
wake. Wilbur knew not what to think of her. Never in his life had he
met with any girl like this. So accustomed had she been to the rough,
give-and-take, direct associations of a seafaring life that she
misinterpreted well-meant politeness--the only respect he knew how
to pay her--to mean insidious advances. She was suspicious of
him--distrusted him utterly, and openly ridiculed his abortive
seamanship. Pretty she was not, but she soon began to have a certain
amount of attraction for Wilbur. He liked her splendid ropes of hair,
her heavy contralto voice, her fine animal strength of bone and muscle
(admittedly greater than his own); he admired her indomitable courage
and self-reliance, while her positive genius in the matters of
seamanship and navigation filled him with speechless wonder. The girls
he had been used to were clever only in their knowledge of the amenities
of an afternoon call or the formalities of a paper german. A girl of
two-and-twenty who could calculate longitude from the altitude of a
star was outside his experience. The more he saw of her the more he
knew himself to have been right in his first estimate. She drank
whiskey after her meals, and when angry, which was often, swore like a
buccaneer. As yet she was almost, as one might say, without sex--savage,
unconquered, untamed, glorying in her own independence, her sullen
isolation. Her neck was thick, strong, and very white, her hands
roughened and calloused. In her men's clothes she looked tall, vigorous,
and unrestrained, and on more than one occasion, as Wilbur passed
close to her, he was made aware that her hair, her neck, her entire
personality exhaled a fine, sweet, natural redolence that savored of the
ocean and great winds.

One day, as he saw her handling a huge water-barrel by the chines only,
with a strength he knew to be greater than his own, her brows contracted
with the effort, her hair curling about her thick neck, her large, round
arms bare to the elbow, a sudden thrill of enthusiasm smote through him,
and between his teeth he exclaimed to himself:

"By Jove, you're a woman!"

The "Bertha Millner" continued to the southward, gliding quietly over
the oil-smoothness of the ocean under airs so light as hardly to ruffle
the surface. Sometimes at high noon the shimmer of the ocean floor
blended into the shimmer of the sky at the horizon, and then it was no
longer water and blue heavens; the little craft seemed to be poised in
a vast crystalline sphere, where there was neither height nor
depth--poised motionless in warm, coruscating, opalescent space, alone
with the sun.

At length one morning the schooner, which for the preceding twenty-four
hours had been heading eastward, raised the land, and by the middle
of the afternoon had come up to within a mile of a low, sandy shore,
quivering with heat, and had tied up to the kelp in Magdalena Bay.

Charlie now took over entire charge of operations. For two days previous
the Chinese hands had been getting out the deck-tubs, tackles, gaffs,
spades, and the other shark-fishing gear that had been stowed
forward. The sails were lowered and gasketed, the decks cleared of all
impedimenta, hogsheads and huge vats stood ready in the waist, and the
lazy indolence of the previous week was replaced by an extraordinary
activity.

The day after their arrival in the bay was occupied by all hands in
catching bait. This bait was a kind of rock-fish, of a beautiful red
gold color, and about the size of an ordinary cod. They bit readily
enough, but out of every ten hooked three were taken off the lines by
the sharks before they could be brought aboard. Another difficulty lay
in the fact that, either because of the excessive heat in the air or the
percentage of alkali in the water, they spoiled almost immediately if
left in the air.

Turtle were everywhere--floating gray-green disks just under the
surface. Sea-birds in clouds clamored all day long about the shore and
sand-pits. At long intervals flying-fish skittered over the water like
skipping-stones. Shoals of porpoises came in from outside, leaping
clumsily along the edges of the kelp. Bewildered land-birds perched on
the schooner's rigging, and in the early morning the whistling of quail
could be heard on shore near where a little fresh-water stream ran down
to meet the ocean.

It was Wilbur who caught the first shark on the second morning of
the "Bertha's" advent in Magdalena Bay. A store of bait had been
accumulated, split and halved into chunks for the shark-hooks, and
Wilbur, baiting one of the huge lines that had been brought up on deck
the evening before, flung it overboard, and watched the glimmer of the
white fish-meat turning to a silvery green as it sank down among the
kelp. Almost instantly a long moving shadow, just darker than the
blue-green mass of the water, identified itself at a little distance.

Enormous flukes proceeded from either side, an erect dorsal fin, like
an enormous cock's crest, rose from the back, while immediately over the
head swam the two pilot-fish, following so closely the movement of the
shark as to give the impression of actually adhering to his body. Twice
and three times the great man-eater twelve feet from snout to tail-tip,
circled slowly about the bait, the flukes moving fan-like through the
water. Once he came up, touched the bait with his nose, and backed
easily away. He disappeared, returned, and poised himself motionless in
the schooner's shadow, feeling the water with his flukes.

Moran was looking over Wilbur's shoulder. "He's as good as caught," she
muttered; "once let them get sight of meat, and--Steady now!" The shark
moved forward. Suddenly, with a long, easy roll, he turned completely
upon his back. His white belly flashed like silver in the water--the
bait disappeared.

"You've got him!" shouted Moran.

The rope slid through Wilbur's palms, burning the skin as the huge
sea-wolf sounded. Moran laid hold. The heavy, sullen wrenching from
below twitched and swayed their bodies and threw them against each
other. Her bare, cool arm was pressed close over his knuckles.

"Heave!" she cried, laughing with the excitement of the moment. "Heave
all!"--she began the chant of sailors hauling at the ropes. Together,
and bracing their feet against the schooner's rail, they fought out the
fight with the great fish. In a swirl of lather the head and shoulders
came above the surface, the flukes churning the water till it boiled
like the wake of a screw steamship. But as soon as these great fins were
clear of the surface the shark fell quiet and helpless.

Charlie came up with the cutting-in spade, and as the fish hung still
over the side, cut him open from neck to belly with a single movement.
Another Chinaman stood by with a long-handled gaff, hooked out the
purple-black liver, brought it over the side, and dropped it into one of
the deck-tubs. The shark thrashed and writhed, his flukes quivering and
his gills distended. Wilbur could not restrain an exclamation.

"Brutal business!" he muttered.

"Hoh!" exclaimed Moran, scornfully, "cutting-in is too good for him.
Sailor-folk are no friends of such carrion as that."

Other lines were baited and dropped overboard, and the hands settled
themselves to the real business of the expedition. There was no skill
in the matter. The sharks bit ravenously, and soon swarmed about the
schooner in hundreds. Hardly a half minute passed that one of the four
Chinamen that were fishing did not signal a catch, and Charlie and Jim
were kept busy with spade and gaff. By noon the deck-tubs were full. The
lines were hauled in, and the hands set the tubs in the sun to try out
the oil. Under the tropical heat the shark livers almost visibly melted
away, and by four o'clock in the afternoon the tubs were full of a
thick, yellow oil, the reek of which instantly recalled to Wilbur's
mind the rancid smell of the schooner on the day when he had first come
aboard of her. The deck-tubs were emptied into the hogsheads and vats
that stood in the waist of the "Bertha," the tubs scoured, and the lines
and bent shark-hooks overhauled. Charlie disappeared in the galley,
supper was cooked, and eaten upon deck under the conflagration of the
sunset; the lights were set, the Chinamen foregathered in the fo'c'stle
head, smoking opium, and by eight o'clock the routine of the day was at
an end.

So the time passed. In a short time Wilbur could not have said whether
the day was Wednesday or Sunday. He soon tired of the unsportsmanlike
work of killing the sluggish brutes, and turned shoreward to relieve the
monotony of the succeeding days. He and Moran were left a good deal to
their own devices. Charlie was the master of the men now. "Mate," said
Moran to Wilbur one day, after a dinner of turtle steaks and fish, eaten
in the open air on the quarterdeck; "mate, this is slow work, and the
schooner smells terribly foul. We'll have the dory out and go ashore. We
can tumble a cask into her and get some water. The butt's three-quarters
empty. Let's see how it feels to be in Mexico."

"Mexico?" said Wilbur. "That's so--Lower California is Mexico. I'd
forgotten that!"

They went ashore and spent the afternoon in filling the water-cask from
the fresh-water stream and in gathering abalones, which Moran declared
were delicious eating, from the rocks left bare by the tide. But
nothing could have exceeded the loneliness of that shore and backland,
palpitating under the flogging of a tropical sun. Low hills of sand,
covered with brush, stretched back from the shore. On the eastern
horizon, leagues distant, blue masses of mountain striated with mirages
swam in the scorching air.

The sand was like fire to the touch. Far out in the bay the schooner
hung motionless under bare sticks, resting apparently upon her inverted
shadow only. And that was all--the flat, heat-ridden land, the sheen of
the open Pacific, and the lonely schooner.

"Quiet enough," said Wilbur, in a low voice, wondering if there was such
a place as San Francisco, with its paved streets and cable cars, and if
people who had been his friends there had ever had any real existence.

"Do you like it?" asked Moran quickly, facing him, her thumbs in her
belt.

"It's good fun--how about you?"

"It's no different than the only life I've known. I suppose you think
it s a queer kind of life for a girl. I've lived by doing things, not
by thinking things, or reading about what other people have done or
thought; and I guess it's what you do that counts, rather than what you
think or read about. Where's that pinch-bar? We'll get a couple more
abalones for supper, and then put off."

That was the only talk of moment they had during the afternoon. All the
rest of their conversation had been of those things that immediately
occupied their attention.

They regained the schooner toward five o'clock, to find the Chinamen
perplexed and mystified. No explanation was forthcoming, and Charlie
gave them supper in preoccupied silence. As they were eating the
abalones, which Moran had fried in batter, Charlie said:

"Shark all gone! No more catch um--him all gone."

"Gone--why?"

"No savvy," said Charlie. "No likee, no likee. China boy tink um heap
funny, too much heap funny."

It was true. During all the next day not a shark was in sight, and
though the crew fished assiduously till dark, they were rewarded by not
so much as a bite. No one could offer any explanation.

"'Tis strange," said Moran. "Never heard of shark leaving this feed
before. And you can see with half an eye that the hands don't like
the looks of it. Superstitious beggars! they need to be clumped in the
head."

That same night Wilbur woke in his hammock on the fo'c'stle head about
half-past two. The moon was down, the sky one powder of stars. There was
not a breath of wind. It was so still that he could hear some large
fish playing and breaking off toward the shore. Then, without the least
warning, he felt the schooner begin to lift under him. He rolled out of
his hammock and stood on the deck. There could be no doubt of it--the
whole forepart was rising beneath him. He could see the bowsprit moving
upward from star to star. Still the schooner lifted; objects on deck
began to slide aft; the oil in the deck-tubs washed over; then, as there
came a wild scrambling of the Chinese crew up the fo'c'stle hatch, she
settled again gradually at first, then, with an abrupt lurch that almost
threw him from his feet, regained her level. Moran met him in the waist.
Charlie came running aft.

"What was that? Are we grounding? Has she struck?"

"No, no; we're still fast to the kelp. Was it a tidal wave?"

"Nonsense. It wouldn't have handled us that way."

"Well, what was it? Listen! For God's sake keep quiet there forward!"

Wilbur looked over the side into the water. The ripples were still
chasing themselves away from the schooner. There was nothing else. The
stillness shut down again. There was not a sound.




VI. A SEA MYSTERY


In spite of his best efforts at self-control, Wilbur felt a slow, cold
clutch at his heart. That sickening, uncanny lifting of the schooner out
of the glassy water, at a time when there was not enough wind to so
much as wrinkle the surface, sent a creep of something very like horror
through all his flesh.

Again he peered over the side, down into the kelp-thickened sea.
Nothing--not a breath of air was stirring. The gray light that flooded
down from the stars showed not a break upon the surface of Magdalena
Bay. On shore, nothing moved.

"Quiet there, forward," called Moran to the shrill-voiced coolies.

The succeeding stillness was profound. All on board listened intently.
The water dripped like the ticking of a clock from the "Bertha
Millner's" stern, which with the rising of the bow had sunk almost to
the rail. There was no other sound.

"Strange," muttered Moran, her brows contracting.

Charlie broke the silence with a wail: "No likee, no likee!" he cried at
top voice.

The man had gone suddenly green; Wilbur could see the shine of his eyes
distended like those of a harassed cat. As he, Moran, and Wilbur stood
in the schooner's waist, staring at each other, the smell of punk came
to their nostrils. Forward, the coolies were already burning joss-sticks
on the fo'castle head, kowtowing their foreheads to the deck.

Moran went forward and kicked them to their feet and hurled their
joss-sticks into the sea.

"Feng shui! Feng shui!" they exclaimed with bated breaths. "The Feng
shui no likee we."

Low in the east the horizon began to blacken against the sky. It was
early morning. A watch was set, the Chinamen sent below, and until
daybreak, when Charlie began to make a clattering of tins in the galley
as he set about preparing breakfast, Wilbur paced the rounds of
the schooner, looking, listening, and waiting again for that slow,
horrifying lift. But the rest of the night was without incident.

After breakfast, the strangely assorted trio--Charlie, Moran, and
Wilbur--held another conference in the cabin. It was decided to move the
schooner to the other side of the bay.

"Feng shui in disa place, no likee we," announced Charlie.

"Feng shui, who are they?"

Charlie promptly became incoherent on this subject, and Moran and Wilbur
could only guess that the Feng shui were the tutelary deities that
presided over that portion of Magdalena Bay. At any rate, there were
evidently no more shark to be caught in that fishing-ground; so sail
was made, and by noon the "Bertha Millner" tied up to the kelp on the
opposite side of the inlet, about half a mile from the shore.

The shark were plentiful here and the fishing went forward again as
before. Certain of these shark were hauled aboard, stunned by a blow on
the nose, and their fins cut off. The Chinamen packed these fins away in
separate kegs. Eventually they would be sent to China.

Two or three days passed. The hands kept steadily at their work.
Nothing more occurred to disturb the monotony of the scorching days and
soundless nights; the schooner sat as easily on the unbroken water
as though built to the bottom. Soon the night watch was discontinued.
During these days the three officers lived high. Turtle were plentiful,
and what with their steaks and soups, the fried abalones, the sea-fish,
the really delicious shark-fins, and the quail that Charlie and Wilbur
trapped along the shore, the trio had nothing to wish for in the way of
table luxuries.

The shore was absolutely deserted, as well as the back country--an
unbroken wilderness of sand and sage. Half a dozen times, Wilbur,
wearying of his inaction aboard the schooner, made the entire circuit of
the bay from point to point. Standing on one of the latter projections
and looking out to the west, the Pacific appeared as empty of life as
the land. Never a keel cut those waters, never a sail broke the edge of
the horizon, never a feather of smoke spotted the sky where it
whitened to meet the sea. Everything was empty--vast, unspeakably
desolate--palpitating with heat.

Another week passed. Charlie began to complain that the shark were
growing scarce again.

"I think bime-by him go away, once a mo'."

That same night, Wilbur, lying in his hammock, was awakened by a touch
on his arm. He woke to see Moran beside him on the deck.

"Did you hear anything?" she said in a low voice, looking at him under
her scowl.

"No! no!" he exclaimed, getting up, reaching for his wicker sandals.
"Did you?"

"I thought so--something. Did you feel anything?"

"I've been asleep, I haven't noticed anything. Is it beginning again?"

"The schooner lifted again, just now, very gently. I happened to be
awake or I wouldn't have noticed it." They were talking in low voices,
as is the custom of people speaking in the dark.

"There, what's that?" exclaimed Wilbur under his breath. A gentle
vibration, barely perceptible, thrilled through the schooner. Under
his hand, that was clasped upon the rail, Wilbur could feel a faint
trembling in her frame. It stopped, began again, and died slowly away.

"Well, what the devil IS it?" he muttered impatiently, trying to master
the returning creep of dread.

Moran shook her head, biting her lip.

"It's beyond me," she said, frowning. "Can you see anything?" The sky,
sea, and land were unbroken reaches of solitude. There was no breath of
wind.

"Listen," said Moran. Far off to landward came the faint, sleepy
clucking of a quail, and the stridulating of unnumbered crickets; a
long ripple licked the slope of the beach and slid back into the ocean.
Wilbur shook his head.

"Don't hear anything," he whispered. "Sh--there--she's trembling again."

Once more a prolonged but faint quivering ran through the "Bertha
Millner" from stem to stern, and from keel to masthead. There was a
barely audible creaking of joints and panels. The oil in the deck-tubs
trembled. The vibration was so fine and rapid that it tickled the soles
of Wilbur's feet as he stood on the deck.

"I'd give two fingers to know what it all means," murmured Moran in
a low voice. "I've been to sea for--" Then suddenly she cried aloud:
"Steady all, she's lifting again!"

The schooner heaved slowly under them, this time by the stern. Up she
went, up and up, while Wilbur gripped at a stay to keep his place, and
tried to choke down his heart, that seemed to beat against his palate.

"God!" ejaculated Moran, her eyes blazing. "This thing is--" The
"Bertha" came suddenly down to an easy keel, rocking in that glassy sea
as if in a tide rip. The deck was awash with oil. Far out in the bay the
ripples widening from the schooner blurred the reflections of the stars.
The Chinamen swarmed up the hatch-way, voluble and shrill. Again the
"Bertha Millner" lifted and sank, the tubs sliding on the deck, the
masts quivering like reeds, the timbers groaning aloud with the strain.
In the stern something cracked and smashed. Then the trouble died away,
the ripples faded into the ocean, and the schooner settled to her keel,
quite motionless.

"Look," said Moran, her face toward the "Bertha's" stern. "The rudder
is out of the gudgeons." It was true--the "Bertha Millner's" helm was
unshipped.

There was no more sleep for any one on board that night. Wilbur tramped
the quarterdeck, sick with a feeling he dared not put a name to. Moran
sat by the wrecked rudder-head, a useless pistol in her hand, swearing
under her breath from time to time. Charlie appeared on the quarterdeck
at intervals, looked at Wilbur and Moran with wide-open eyes, and then
took himself away. On the forward deck the coolies pasted strips of red
paper inscribed with mottoes upon the mast, and filled the air with the
reek of their joss-sticks.

"If one could only SEE what it was," growled Moran between her clinched
teeth. "But this--this damned heaving and trembling, it--it's queer."

"That's it, that's it," said Wilbur quickly, facing her. "What are we
going to do, Moran?"

"STICK IT OUT!" she exclaimed, striking her knee with her fist.
"We can't leave the schooner--I WON'T leave her. I'll stay by this
dough-dish as long as two planks in her hold together. Were you thinking
of cutting away?" She fixed him with her frown.

Wilbur looked at her, sitting erect by the disabled rudder, her head
bare, her braids of yellow hair hanging over her breast, sitting there
in man's clothes and man's boots, the pistol at her side. He shook his
head.

"I'm not leaving the 'Bertha' till you do," he answered; adding: "I'll
stand by you, mate, until we--"

"Feel that?" said Moran, holding up a hand.

A fine, quivering tremble was thrilling through every beam of the
schooner, vibrating each rope like a harp-string. It passed away; but
before either Wilbur or Moran could comment upon it recommenced, this
time much more perceptibly. Charlie dashed aft, his queue flying.

"W'at makum heap shake?" he shouted; "w'at for him shake? No savvy, no
likee, pretty much heap flaid; aie-yah, aie-yah!"

Slowly the schooner heaved up as though upon the crest of some huge
wave, slowly it settled, and again gradually lifted till Wilbur had
to catch at the rail to steady his footing. The quivering sensation
increased so that their very teeth chattered with it. Below in the cabin
they could hear small objects falling from the shelves and table. Then
with a sudden drop the "Bertha" fell back to her keel again, the spilled
oil spouting from her scuppers, the masts rocking, the water churning
and splashing from her sides.

And that was all. There was no sound--nothing was in sight. There was
only the frightened trembling of the little schooner and that long, slow
heave and lift.

Morning came, and breakfast was had in silence and grim perplexity. It
was too late to think of getting away, now that the rudder was disabled.
The "Bertha Millner" must bide where she was.

"And a little more of this dancing," exclaimed Moran, "and we'll have
the planks springing off the stern-post."

Charlie nodded solemnly. He said nothing--his gravity had returned. Now
in the glare of the tropical day, with the "Bertha Millner" sitting the
sea as placidly as a brooding gull, he was Talleyrand again.

"I tinkum yas," he said vaguely.

"Well, I think we had better try and fix the rudder and put back to
Frisco," said Moran. "You're making no money this way. There are no
shark to be caught. SOMETHING'S wrong. They're gone away somewhere. The
crew are eating their heads off and not earning enough money to pay for
their keep. What do you think?"

"I tinkum yas."

"Then we'll go home. Is that it?"

"I tinkum yas--to-molla."

"To-morrow?"

"Yas."

"That's settled then," persisted Moran, surprised at his ready
acquiescence; "we start home to-morrow?" Charlie nodded.

"To-molla," he said.

The rudder was not so badly damaged as they had at first supposed; the
break was easily mended, but it was found necessary for one of the men
to go over the side.

"Get over the side here, Jim," commanded Moran. "Charlie, tell him
what's wanted; we can't work the pintle in from the deck."

But Charlie shook his head.

"Him no likee go; him plenty much flaid."

Moran ripped out an oath.

"What do I care if he's afraid! I want him to shove the pintle into
the lower gudgeon. My God," she exclaimed, with immense contempt, "what
carrion! I'd sooner work a boat with she-monkeys. Mr. Wilbur, I shall
have to ask you to go over. I thought I was captain here, but it all
depends on whether these rats are afraid or not."

"Plenty many shark," expostulated Charlie. "Him flaid shark come back,
catchum chop-chop."

"Stand by here with a couple of cutting-in spades," cried Moran, "and
fend off if you see any shark; now, then, are you ready, mate?"

Wilbur took his determination in both hands, threw off his coat and
sandals, and went over the stern rail.

"Put your ear to the water," called Moran from above; "sometimes you can
hear their flukes."

It took but a minute to adjust the pintle, and Wilbur regained the deck
again, dripping and a little pale. He knew not what horrid form of death
might have been lurking for him down below there underneath the kelp.
As he started forward for dry clothes he was surprised to observe that
Moran was smiling at him, holding out her hand.

"That was well done," she said, "and thank you. I've seen older
sailor-men than you who wouldn't have taken the risk." Never before
had she appeared more splendid in his eyes than at this moment. After
changing his clothes in the fo'castle, he sat for a long time, his chin
in his hands, very thoughtful. Then at length, as though voicing the
conclusion of his reflections, said aloud, as he rose to his feet:

"But, of course, THAT is out of the question."

He remembered that they were going home on the next day. Within
a fortnight he would be in San Francisco again--a taxpayer, a
police-protected citizen once more. It had been good fun, after all,
this three weeks' life on the "Bertha Millner," a strange episode cut
out from the normal circle of his conventional life. He ran over the
incidents of the cruise--Kitchell, the turtle hunt, the finding of
the derelict, the dead captain, the squall, and the awful sight of
the sinking bark, Moran at the wheel, the grewsome business of the
shark-fishing, and last of all that inexplicable lifting and quivering
of the schooner. He told himself that now he would probably never know
the explanation of that mystery.

The day passed in preparations to put to sea again. The deck-tubs and
hogsheads were stowed below and the tackle cleared away. By evening all
was ready; they would be under way by daybreak the next morning. There
was a possibility of their being forced to tow the schooner out by
means of the dory, so light were the airs inside. Once beyond the heads,
however, they were sure of a breeze.

About ten o'clock that night, the same uncanny trembling ran through the
schooner again, and about half an hour later she lifted gently once or
twice. But after that she was undisturbed.

Later on in the night--or rather early in the morning--Wilbur woke
suddenly in his hammock without knowing why, and got up and stood
listening. The "Bertha Millner" was absolutely quiet. The night was hot
and still; the new moon, canted over like a sinking galleon, was low
over the horizon. Wilbur listened intently, for now at last he heard
something.

Between the schooner and the shore a gentle sound of splashing came
to his ears, and an occasional crack as of oars in their locks. Was it
possible that a boat was there between the schooner and the land? What
boat, and manned by whom?

The creaking of oarlocks and the dip of paddles was unmistakable.

Suddenly Wilbur raised his voice in a great shout:

"Boat ahoy!"

There was no answer; the noise of oars grew fainter. Moran came running
out of her cabin, swinging into her coat as she ran.

"What is it--what is it?"

"A boat, I think, right off the schooner here. Hark--there--did you hear
the oars?"

"You're right; call the hands, get the dory over, we'll follow that boat
right up. Hello, forward there, Charlie, all hands, tumble out!"

Then Wilbur and Moran caught themselves looking into each other's eyes.
At once something--perhaps the latent silence of the schooner--told them
there was to be no answer. The two ran for-ward: Moran swung herself
into the fo'castle hatch, and without using the ladder dropped to the
deck below. In an instant her voice came up the hatch:

"The bunks are empty--they're gone--abandoned us." She came up the
ladder again.

"Look," said Wilbur, as she regained the deck. "The dory's gone; they've
taken it. It was our only boat; we can't get ashore."

"Cowardly, superstitious rats, I should have expected this. They
would be chopped in bits before they would stay longer on board this
boat--they and their-Feng shui."

When morning came the deserters could be made out camped on the shore,
near to the beached dory. What their intentions were could not be
conjectured. Ridden with all manner of nameless Oriental superstitions,
it was evident that the Chinamen preferred any hazard of fortune to
remaining longer upon the schooner.

"Well, can we get along without them?" said Wilbur. "Can we two work the
schooner back to port ourselves?"

"We'll try it on, anyhow, mate," said Moran; "we might get her into San
Diego, anyhow."

The Chinamen had left plenty of provisions on board, and Moran cooked
breakfast. Fortunately, by eight o'clock a very light westerly breeze
came up. Moran and Wilbur cast off the gaskets and set the fore and main
sails.

Wilbur was busy at the forward bitts preparing to cast loose from the
kelp, and Moran had taken up her position at the wheel when suddenly she
exclaimed:

"Sail ho!--and in God's name what kind of a sail do you call it?"

In fact a strange-looking craft had just made her appearance at the
entrance of Magdalena Bay.




VII. BEACH-COMBERS


Wilbur returned aft and joined Moran on the quarterdeck. She was already
studying the stranger through the glass.

"That's a new build of boat to me," she muttered, giving Wilbur the
glass. Wilbur looked long and carefully. The newcomer was of the size
and much the same shape as a caravel of the fifteenth century--high as
to bow and stern, and to all appearances as seaworthy as a soup-tureen.
Never but in the old prints had Wilbur seen such an extraordinary
boat. She carried a single mast, which listed forward; her lugsail was
stretched upon dozens of bamboo yards; she drew hardly any water. Two
enormous red eyes were painted upon either side of her high, blunt bow,
while just abaft the waist projected an enormous oar, or sweep, full
forty feet in length--longer, in fact, than the vessel herself. It acted
partly as a propeller, partly as a rudder.

"They're heading for us," commented Wilbur as Moran took the glass
again.

"Right," she answered; adding upon the moment: "Huh! more Chinamen; the
thing is alive with coolies; she's a junk."

"Oh!" exclaimed Wilbur, recollecting some talk of Charlie's he had
overheard. "I know."

"You know?"

"Yes; these are real beach-combers. I've heard of them along this
coast--heard our Chinamen speak of them. They beach that junk every
night and camp on shore. They're scavengers, as you might say--pick
up what they can find or plunder along shore--abalones, shark-fins,
pickings of wrecks, old brass and copper, seals perhaps, turtle and
shell. Between whiles they fish for shrimp, and I've heard Kitchell
tell how they make pearls by dropping bird-shot into oysters. They are
Kai-gingh to a man, and, according to Kitchell, the wickedest breed of
cats that ever cut teeth."

The junk bore slowly down upon the schooner. In a few moments she had
hove to alongside. But for the enormous red eyes upon her bow she was
innocent of paint. She was grimed and shellacked with dirt and grease,
and smelled abominably. Her crew were Chinamen; but such Chinamen! The
coolies of the "Bertha Millner" were pampered and effete in comparison.
The beach-combers, thirteen in number, were a smaller class of men,
their faces almost black with tan and dirt. Though they still wore the
queue, their heads were not shaven, and mats and mops of stiff black
hair fell over their eyes from under their broad, basket-shaped hats.

They were barefoot. None of them wore more than two garments--the jeans
and the blouse. They were the lowest type of men Wilbur had ever seen.
The faces were those of a higher order of anthropoid apes: the lower
portion--jaws, lips, and teeth--salient; the nostrils opening at
almost right angles, the eyes tiny and bright, the forehead seamed
and wrinkled--unnaturally old. Their general expression was of simian
cunning and a ferocity that was utterly devoid of courage.

"Aye!" exclaimed Moran between her teeth, "if the devil were a shepherd,
here are his sheep. You don't come aboard this schooner, my friends! I
want to live as long as I can, and die when I can't help it. Boat ahoy!"
she called.

An answer in Cantonese sing-song came back from the junk, and the
speaker gestured toward the outside ocean.

Then a long parleying began. For upward of half an hour Moran and
Wilbur listened to a proposition in broken pigeon English made by
the beach-combers again and again and yet again, and were in no way
enlightened. It was impossible to understand. Then at last they made out
that there was question of a whale. Next it appeared the whale was dead;
and finally, after a prolonged pantomime of gesturing and pointing,
Moran guessed that the beach-combers wanted the use of the "Bertha
Millner" to trice up the dead leviathan while the oil and whalebone were
extracted.

"That must be it," she said to Wilbur. "That's what they mean by
pointing to our masts and tackle. You see, they couldn't manage with
that stick of theirs, and they say they'll give us a third of the loot.
We'll do it, mate, and I'll tell you why. The wind has fallen, and they
can tow us out. If it's a sperm-whale they've found, there ought to be
thirty or forty barrels of oil in him, let alone the blubber and bone.
Oil is at $50 now, and spermaceti will always bring $100. We'll take it
on, mate, but we'll keep our eyes on the rats all the time. I don't want
them aboard at all. Look at their belts. Not three out of the dozen who
aren't carrying those filthy little hatchets. Faugh!" she exclaimed,
with a shudder of disgust. "Such vipers!"

What followed proved that Moran had guessed correctly. A rope was passed
to the "Bertha Millner," the junk put out its sweeps, and to a wailing,
eldrich chanting the schooner was towed out of the bay.

"I wonder what Charlie and our China boys will think of this?" said
Wilbur, looking shoreward, where the deserters could be seen gathered
together in a silent, observing group.

"We're well shut of them," growled Moran, her thumbs in her belt. "Only,
now we'll never know what was the matter with the schooner these last
few nights. Hah!" she exclaimed under her breath, her scowl thickening,
"sometimes I don't wonder the beasts cut."

The dead whale was lying four miles out of the entrance of Magdalena
Bay, and as the junk and the schooner drew near seemed like a huge
black boat floating bottom up. Over it and upon it swarmed and clambered
thousands of sea-birds, while all around and below the water was thick
with gorging sharks. A dreadful, strangling decay fouled all the air.

The whale was a sperm-whale, and fully twice the length of the "Bertha
Millner." The work of tricing him up occupied the beach-combers
throughout the entire day. It was out of the question to keep them off
the schooner, and Wilbur and Moran were too wise to try. They swarmed
the forward deck and rigging like a plague of unclean monkeys, climbing
with an agility and nimbleness that made Wilbur sick to his stomach.
They were unlike any Chinamen he had ever seen--hideous to a degree that
he had imagined impossible in a human being. On two occasions a fight
developed, and in an instant the little hatchets were flashing like the
flash of a snake's fangs. Toward the end of the day one of them returned
to the junk, screaming like a stuck pig, a bit of his chin bitten off.

Moran and Wilbur kept to the quarter-deck, always within reach of the
huge cutting-in spades, but the Chinese beach-combers were too elated
over their prize to pay them much attention.

And indeed the dead monster proved a veritable treasure-trove. By the
end of the day he had been triced up to the foremast, and all hands
straining at the windlass had raised the mighty head out of the water.
The Chinamen descended upon the smooth, black body, their bare feet
sliding and slipping at every step. They held on by jabbing their knives
into the hide as glacier-climbers do their ice-picks. The head yielded
barrel after barrel of oil and a fair quantity of bone. The blubber was
taken aboard the junk, minced up with hatchets, and run into casks.

Last of all, a Chinaman cut a hole through the "case," and, actually
descending into the inside of the head, stripped away the spermaceti
(clear as crystal), and packed it into buckets, which were hauled up on
the junk's deck. The work occupied some two or three days. During this
time the "Bertha Millner" was keeled over to nearly twenty degrees by
the weight of the dead monster. However, neither Wilbur nor Moran
made protest. The Chinamen would do as they pleased; that was said and
signed. And they did not release the schooner until the whale had been
emptied of oil and blubber, spermaceti and bone.

At length, on the afternoon of the third day, the captain of the junk,
whose name was Hoang, presented himself upon the quarter-deck. He was
naked to the waist, and his bare brown torso was gleaming with oil and
sweat. His queue was coiled like a snake around his neck, his hatchet
thrust into his belt.

"Well?" said Moran, coming up.

Wilbur caught his breath as the two stood there facing each other,
so sharp was the contrast. The man, the Mongolian, small, weazened,
leather-colored, secretive--a strange, complex creature, steeped in all
the obscure mystery of the East, nervous, ill at ease; and the girl, the
Anglo-Saxon, daughter of the Northmen, huge, blond, big-boned, frank,
outspoken, simple of composition, open as the day, bareheaded, her great
ropes of sandy hair falling over her breast and almost to the top of her
knee-boots. As he looked at the two, Wilbur asked himself where else but
in California could such abrupt contrasts occur.

"All light," announced Hoang; "catchum all oil, catchum all bone,
catchum all same plenty many. You help catchum, now you catchum pay.
Sabe?"

The three principals came to a settlement with unprecedented directness.
Like all Chinamen, Hoang was true to his promises, and he had already
set apart three and a half barrels of spermaceti, ten barrels of
oil, and some twenty pounds of bone as the schooner's share in the
transaction. There was no discussion over the matter. He called their
attention to the discharge of his obligations, and hurried away to
summon his men aboard and get the junk under way again.

The beach-combers returned to their junk, and Wilbur and Moran set about
cutting the carcass of the whale adrift. They found it would be easier
to cut away the hide from around the hooks and loops of the tackle than
to unfasten the tackle itself.

"The knots are jammed hard as steel," declared Moran. "Hand up that
cutting-in spade; stand by with the other and cut loose at the same time
as I do, so we can ease off the strain on these lines at the same time.
Ready there, cut!" Moran set free the hook in the loop of black skin in
a couple of strokes, but Wilbur was more clumsy; the skin resisted. He
struck at it sharply with the heavy spade; the blade hit the iron hook,
glanced off, and opened a large slit in the carcass below the head.
A gush of entrails started from the slit, and Moran swore under her
breath.

"Ease away, quick there! You'll have the mast out of her next--steady!
Hold your spade--what's that?"

Wilbur had nerved himself against the dreadful stench he expected would
issue from the putrid monster, but he was surprised to note a pungent,
sweet, and spicy odor that all at once made thick the air about him. It
was an aromatic smell, stronger than that of the salt ocean, stronger
even than the reek of oil and blubber from the schooner's waist--sweet
as incense, penetrating as attar, delicious as a summer breeze.

"It smells pretty good, whatever it is," he answered. Moran came up
to where he stood, and looked at the slit he had made in the whale's
carcass. Out of it was bulging some kind of dull white matter marbled
with gray. It was a hard lump of irregular shape and about as big as a
hogshead.

Moran glanced over to the junk, some forty feet distant. The
beach-combers were hoisting the lug-sail. Hoang was at the steering oar.

"Get that stuff aboard," she commanded quietly.

"That!" exclaimed Wilbur, pointing to the lump.

Moran's blue eyes were beginning to gleam.

"Yes, and do it before the Chinamen see you."

"But--but I don't understand."

Moran stepped to the quarterdeck, unslung the hammock in which Wilbur
slept, and tossed it to him.

"Reeve it up in that; I'll pass you a line, and we'll haul it aboard.
Godsend, those vermin yonder have got smells enough of their own without
noticing this. Hurry, mate, I'll talk afterward."

Wilbur went over the side, and standing as best he could upon the
slippery carcass, dug out the lump and bound it up in the hammock.

"Hoh!" exclaimed Moran, with sudden exultation. "There's a lot of
it. That's the biggest lump yet, I'll be bound. Is that all there is,
mate?--look carefully." Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

"Yes, yes; that's all. Careful now when you haul up--Hoang has got his
eye on you, and so have the rest of them. What do you call it, anyhow?
Why are you so particular about it? Is it worth anything?"

"I don't know--perhaps. We'll have a look at it, anyway."

Moran hauled the stuff aboard, and Wilbur followed.

"Whew!" he exclaimed with half-closed eyes. "It's like the story of
Samson and the dead lion--the sweet coming forth from the strong."

The schooner seemed to swim in a bath of perfumed air; the membrane of
the nostrils fairly prinkled with the sensation. Moran unleashed the
hammock, and going down upon one knee examined the lump attentively.

"It didn't seem possible," Wilbur heard her saying to herself; "but
there can't be any mistake. It's the stuff, right enough. I've heard of
such things, but this--but this--" She rose to her feet, tossing back
her hair.

"Well," said Wilbur, "what do you call it?"

"The thing to do now," returned Moran, "is to get clear of here as
quietly and as quickly as we can, and take this stuff with us. I can't
stop to explain now, but it's big--it's big. Mate, it's big as the Bank
of England."

"Those beach-combers are right on to the game, I'm afraid," said Wilbur.
"Look, they're watching us. This stuff would smell across the ocean."

"Rot the beach-combers! There's a bit of wind, thank God, and we can do
four knots to their one, just let us get clear once."

Moran dragged the hammock back into the cabin, and, returning upon deck,
helped Wilbur to cut away the last tricing tackle. The schooner righted
slowly to an even keel. Meanwhile the junk had set its one lug-sail
and its crew had run out the sweeps. Hoang took the steering sweep and
worked the junk to a position right across the "Bertha's" bows, some
fifty feet ahead.

"They're watching us, right enough," said Wilbur.

"Up your mains'l," ordered Moran. The pair set the fore and main sails
with great difficulty. Moran took the wheel and Wilbur went forward to
cast off the line by which the schooner had been tied up to one of the
whale's flukes.

"Cut it!" cried the girl. "Don't stop to cast off."

There was a hail from the beach-combers; the port sweeps dipped and the
junk bore up nearer.

"Hurry!" shouted Moran, "don't mind them. Are we clear for'ard--what's
the trouble? Something's holding her." The schooner listed slowly to
starboard and settled by the head.

"All clear!" cried Wilbur.

"There's something wrong!" exclaimed Moran; "she's settling for'ard."
Hoang hailed the schooner a second time.

"We're still settling," called Wilbur from the bows, "what's the
matter?"

"Matter that she's taking water," answered Moran wrathfully. "She's
started something below, what with all that lifting and dancing and
tricing up."

Wilbur ran back to the quarterdeck.

"This is a bad fix," he said to Moran. "Those chaps are coming aboard
again. They're on to something, and, of course, at just this moment she
begins to leak."

"They are after that ambergris," said Moran between her teeth. "Smelled
it, of course--the swine!"

"Ambergris?"

"The stuff we found in the whale. That's ambergris."

"Well?"

"Well!" shouted Moran, exasperated. "Do you know that we have found a
lump that will weigh close to 250 pounds, and do you know that ambergris
is selling in San Francisco at $40 an ounce? Do you know that we have
picked up nearly $150,000 right out here in the ocean and are in a fair
way to lose it all?"

"Can't we run for it?"

"Run for it in a boat that's taking water like a sack! Our dory's gone.
Suppose we get clear of the junk, and the 'Bertha' sank? Then what? If
we only had our crew aboard; if we were only ten to their dozen--if we
were only six--by Jupiter! I'd fight them for it."

The two enormous red eyes of the junk loomed alongside and stared
over into the "Bertha's" waist. Hoang and seven of the coolies swarmed
aboard.

"What now?" shouted Moran, coming forward to meet them, her scowl
knotting her flashing eyes together. "Is this ship yours or mine? We've
done your dirty work for you. I want you clear of my deck." Wilbur stood
at her side, uncertain what to do, but ready for anything she should
attempt.

"I tink you catchum someting, smellum pretty big," said Hoang, his
ferret glance twinkling about the schooner.

"I catchum nothing--nothing but plenty bad stink," said Moran. "No, you
don't!" she exclaimed, putting herself in Hoang's way as he made for the
cabin. The other beach-combers came crowding up; Wilbur even thought he
saw one of them loosening his hatchet in his belt.

"This ship's mine," cried Moran, backing to the cabin door. Wilbur
followed her, and the Chinamen closed down upon the pair.

"It's not much use, Moran," he muttered. "They'll rush us in a minute."

"But the ambergris is mine--is mine," she answered, never taking her
eyes from the confronting coolies.

"We findum w'ale," said Hoang; "you no find w'ale; him b'long to
we--eve'yt'ing in um w'ale b'long to we, savvy?"

"No, you promised us a third of everything you found."

Even in the confusion of the moment it occurred to Wilbur that it was
quite possible that at least two-thirds of the ambergris did belong
to the beach-combers by right of discovery. After all, it was the
beach-combers who had found the whale. He could never remember afterward
whether or no he said as much to Moran at the time. If he did, she had
been deaf to it. A fury of wrath and desperation suddenly blazed in her
blue eyes. Standing at her side, Wilbur could hear her teeth grinding
upon each other. She was blind to all danger, animated only by a sense
of injustice and imposition.

Hoang uttered a sentence in Cantonese. One of the coolies jumped
forward, and Moran's fist met him in the face and brought him to his
knees. Then came the rush Wilbur had foreseen. He had just time to catch
a sight of Moran at grapples with Hoang when a little hatchet glinted
over his head. He struck out savagely into the thick of the group--and
then opened his eyes to find Moran washing the blood from his hair as he
lay on the deck with his head in the hollow of her arm. Everything was
quiet. The beach-combers were gone.

"Hello, what--what--what is it?" he asked, springing to his feet, his
head swimming and smarting. "We had a row, didn't we? Did they hurt you?
Oh, I remember; I got a cut over the head--one of their hatchet men. Did
they hurt you?"

"They got the loot," she growled. "Filthy vermin! And just to make
everything pleasant, the schooner's sinking."




VIII. A RUN FOR LAND


"SINKING!" exclaimed Wilbur.

Moran was already on her feet. "We'll have to beach her," she cried,
"and we're six miles out. Up y'r jib, mate!" The two set the jib,
flying-jib, and staysails.

The fore and main sails were already drawing, and under all the spread
of her canvas the "Bertha" raced back toward the shore.

But by the time she was within the head of the bay her stern had settled
to such an extent that the forefoot was clear of the water, the bowsprit
pointing high into the heavens. Moran was at the wheel, her scowl
thicker than ever, her eyes measuring the stretch of water that lay
between the schooner and the shore.

"She'll never make it in God's world," she muttered as she listened to
the wash of the water in the cabin under her feet. In the hold, empty
barrels were afloat, knocking hollowly against each other. "We're in a
bad way, mate."

"If it comes to that," returned Wilbur, surprised to see her thus easily
downcast, who was usually so indomitable--"if it comes to that, we can
swim for it--a couple of planks--"

"Swim?" she echoed; "I'm not thinking of that; of course we could swim."

"What then?"

"The sharks!"

Wilbur's teeth clicked sharply together. He could think of nothing to
say.

As the water gained between decks the schooner's speed dwindled, and
at the same time as she approached the shore the wind, shut off by the
land, fell away. By this time the ocean was not four inches below the
stern-rail. Two miles away was the nearest sand-spit. Wilbur broke out
a distress signal on the foremast, in the hope that Charlie and the
deserters might send off the dory to their assistance. But the deserters
were nowhere in sight.

"What became of the junk?" he demanded suddenly of Moran. She motioned
to the westward with her head. "Still lying out-side."

Twenty minutes passed. Once only Moran spoke.

"When she begins to go," she said, "she'll go with a rush. Jump pretty
wide, or you'll get caught in the suction."

The two had given up all hope. Moran held grimly to the wheel as a mere
matter of form. Wilbur stood at her side, his clinched fists thrust
into his pockets. The eyes of both were fixed on the yellow line of the
distant beach. By and by Moran turned to him with an odd smile.

"We're a strange pair to die together," she said. Wilbur met her eyes
an instant, but finding no reply, put his chin in the air as though he
would have told her she might well say that.

"A strange pair to die together," Moran repeated; "but we can do that
better than we could have"--she looked away from him--"could have LIVED
together," she finished, and smiled again.

"And yet," said Wilbur, "these last few weeks here on board the
schooner, we have been through a good deal--together. I don't know," he
went on clumsily, "I don't know when I've been--when I've had--I've been
happier than these last weeks. It is queer, isn't it? I know, of course,
what you'll say. I've said it to myself often of late. I belong to the
city and to my life there, and you--you belong to the ocean. I never
knew a girl like you--never knew a girl COULD be like you. You don't
know how extraordinary it all seems to me. You swear like a man, and you
dress like a man, and I don't suppose you've ever been associated with
other women; and you're strong--I know you are as strong as I am. You
have no idea how different you are to the kind of girl I've known.
Imagine my kind of girl standing up before Hoang and those cutthroat
beach-combers with their knives and hatchets. Maybe it's because you are
so unlike my kind of girl that--that things are as they are with me. I
don't know. It's a queer situation. A month or so ago I was at a tea in
San Francisco, and now I'm aboard a shark-fishing schooner sinking in
Magdalena Bay; and I'm with a girl that--that--that I--well, I'm with
you, and, well, you know how it is--I might as well say it--I love you
more than I imagined I ever could love a girl."

Moran's frown came back to her forehead.

"I don't like that kind of talk," she said; "I am not used to it, and
I don't know how to take it. Believe me," she said with a half laugh,
"it's all wasted. I never could love a man. I'm not made for men."

"No," said Wilbur, "nor for other women either."

"Nor for other women either."

Wilbur fell silent. In that instant he had a distinct vision of Moran's
life and character, shunning men and shunned of women, a strange, lonely
creature, solitary as the ocean whereon she lived, beautiful after her
fashion; as yet without sex, proud, untamed, splendid in her savage,
primal independence--a thing untouched and unsullied by civilization.
She seemed to him some Bradamante, some mythical Brunhilde, some
Valkyrie of the legends, born out of season, lost and unfamiliar in this
end-of-the-century time. Her purity was the purity of primeval glaciers.
He could easily see how to such a girl the love of a man would appear
only in the light of a humiliation--a degradation. And yet she COULD
love, else how had HE been able to love her? Wilbur found himself--even
at that moment--wondering how the thing could be done--wondering to
just what note the untouched cords would vibrate. Just how she should
be awakened one morning to find that she--Moran, sea-rover, virgin
unconquered, without law, without land, without sex--was, after all, a
woman.

"By God, mate!" she exclaimed of a sudden. "The barrels are keeping us
up--the empty barrels in the hold. Hoh! we'll make land yet."

It was true. The empty hogsheads, destined for the storage of oil, had
been forced up by the influx of the water to the roof of the hold, and
were acting as so many buoys--the schooner could sink no lower. An hour
later, the quarterdeck all awash, her bow thrown high into the air,
listing horribly to starboard, the "Bertha Millner" took ground on the
shore of Magdalena Bay at about the turn of the tide.

Moran swung herself over the side, hip deep in the water, and, wading
ashore with a line, made fast to the huge skull of a whale half buried
in the sand at that point.

Wilbur followed. The schooner had grounded upon the southern horn of the
bay and lay easily on a spit of sand. They could not examine the nature
of the leak until low water the next morning.

"Well, here we are," said Moran, her thumbs in her belt. "What next? We
may be here for two days, we MAY be here for two years. It all depends
upon how bad a hole she has. Have we 'put in for repairs,' or have
we been cast away? Can't tell till to-morrow morning. Meanwhile, I'm
hungry."

Half of the stores of the schooner were water-soaked, but upon
examination Wilbur found that enough remained intact to put them beyond
all fear for the present.

"There's plenty of water up the creek," he said, "and we can snare all
the quail we want; and then there's the fish and abalone. Even if the
stores were gone we could make out very well."

The schooner's cabin was full of water and Wilbur's hammock was gone,
so the pair decided to camp on shore. In that torrid weather to sleep in
the open air was a luxury.

In great good spirits the two sat down to their first meal on land.
Moran cooked a supper that, barring the absence of coffee, was
delicious. The whiskey was had from aboard, and they pledged each other,
standing up, in something over two stiff fingers.

"Moran," said Wilbur, "you ought to have been born a man."

"At all events, mate," she said--"at all events, I'm not a girl."

"NO!" exclaimed Wilbur, as he filled his pipe. "NO, you're just Moran,
Moran of the 'Lady Letty.'"

"And I'll stay that, too," she said decisively.

Never had an evening been more beautiful in Wilbur's eyes. There was not
a breath of air. The stillness was so profound that the faint murmur of
the blood behind the ear-drums became an oppression. The ocean tiptoed
toward the land with tiny rustling steps. The west was one gigantic
stained window, the ocean floor a solid shimmer of opalescence. Behind
them, sullen purples marked the horizon, hooded with mountain crests,
and after a long while the moon shrugged a gleaming shoulder into view.

Wilbur, dressed in Chinese jeans and blouse, with Chinese wicker sandals
on his bare feet, sat with his back against the whale's skull, smoking
quietly. For a long time there was no conversation; then at last:

"No," said Moran in a low voice. "This is the life I'm made for. In six
years I've not spent three consecutive weeks on land. Now that Eilert"
(she always spoke of her father by his first name), "now that Eilert
is dead, I've not a tie, not a relative, not even a friend, and I don't
wish it."

"But the loneliness of the life, the solitude," said Wilbur, "that's
what I don't understand. Did it ever occur to you that the best
happiness is the happiness that one shares?"

Moran clasped a knee in both hands and looked out to sea. She never wore
a hat, and the red light of the afterglow was turning her rye-hued hair
to saffron.

"Hoh!" she exclaimed, her heavy voice pitched even lower than usual.
"Who could understand or share any of my pleasures, or be happy when I'm
happy? And, besides, I'm happiest when I'm alone--I don't want any one."

"But," hesitated Wilbur, "one is not always alone. After all, you're a
girl, and men, sailormen especially, are beasts when it's a question of
a woman--an unprotected woman."

"I'm stronger than most men," said Moran simply. "If you, for instance,
had been like some men, I should have fought you. It wouldn't have been
the first time," she added, smoothing one huge braid between her palms.

Wilbur looked at her with intent curiosity--noted again, as if for the
first time, the rough, blue overalls thrust into the shoes; the coarse
flannel shirt open at the throat; the belt with its sheath-knife; her
arms big and white and tattooed in sailor fashion; her thick, muscular
neck; her red face, with its pale blue eyes and almost massive jaw; and
her hair, her heavy, yellow, fragrant hair, that lay over her shoulder
and breast, coiling and looping in her lap.

"No," he said, with a long breath, "I don't make it out. I knew you were
out of my experience, but I begin to think now that you are out of even
my imagination. You are right, you SHOULD keep to yourself. You should
be alone--your mate isn't made yet. You are splendid just as you are,"
while under his breath he added, his teeth clinching, "and God! but I
love you."

It was growing late, the stars were all out, the moon riding high. Moran
yawned:

"Mate, I think I'll turn in. We'll have to be at that schooner early in
the morning, and I make no doubt she'll give us plenty to do." Wilbur
hesitated to reply, waiting to take his cue from what next she should
say. "It's hot enough to sleep where we are," she added, "without going
aboard the 'Bertha,' though we might have a couple of blankets off to
lie on. This sand's as hard as a plank."

Without answering, Wilbur showed her a couple of blanket-rolls he had
brought off while he was unloading part of the stores that afternoon.
They took one apiece and spread them on the sand by the bleached whale's
skull. Moran pulled off her boots and stretched herself upon her blanket
with absolute unconcern, her hands clasped under her head. Wilbur rolled
up his coat for a pillow and settled himself for the night with an
assumed self-possession. There was a long silence. Moran yawned again.

"I pulled the heel off my boot this morning," she said lazily, "and I've
been limping all day."

"I noticed it," answered Wilbur. "Kitchell had a new pair aboard
somewhere, if they're not spoiled by the water now."

"Yes?" she said indifferently; "we'll look them up in the morning."

Again there was silence.

"I wonder," she began again, staring up into the dark, "if Charlie took
that frying-pan off with him when he went?"

"I don't know. He probably did."

"It was the only thing we had to cook abalones in. Make me think to look
into the galley to-morrow....This ground's as hard as nails, for all
your blankets....Well, good-night, mate; I'm going to sleep."

"Good-night, Moran."

Three hours later Wilbur, who had not closed his eyes, sat up and looked
at Moran, sleeping quietly, her head in a pale glory of hair; looked at
her, and then around him at the silent, deserted land.

"I don't know," he said to himself. "Am I a right-minded man and a
thoroughbred, or a mush-head, or merely a prudent, sensible sort of chap
that values his skin and bones? I'd be glad to put a name to myself."
Then, more earnestly he added: "Do I love her too much, or not enough,
or love her the wrong way, or how?" He leaned toward her, so close that
he could catch the savor of her breath and the smell of her neck, warm
with sleep. The sleeve of the coarse blue shirt was drawn up, and it
seemed to him as if her bare arm, flung out at full length, had some
sweet aroma of its own. Wilbur drew softly back.

"No," he said to himself decisively; "no, I guess I am a thoroughbred
after all." It was only then that he went to sleep.

When he awoke the sea was pink with the sunrise, and one of the bay
heads was all distorted and stratified by a mirage. It was hot already.
Moran was sitting a few paces from him, braiding her hair.

"Hello, Moran!" he said, rousing up; "how long have you been up?"

"Since before sunrise," she said; "I've had a bath in the cove where the
creek runs down. I saw a jack-rabbit."

"Seen anything of Charlie and the others?"

"They've camped on the other side of the bay. But look yonder," she
added.

The junk had come in overnight, and was about a mile and a half from
shore.

"The deuce!" exclaimed Wilbur. "What are they after?"

"Fresh water, I guess," said Moran, knotting the end of a braid. "We'd
better have breakfast in a hurry, and turn to on the 'Bertha.' The tide
is going out fast."

While they breakfasted they kept an eye on the schooner, watching her
sides and flanks as the water fell slowly away.

"Don't see anything very bad yet," said Wilbur.

"It's somewhere in her stern," remarked Moran.

In an hour's time the "Bertha Millner" was high and dry, and they could
examine her at their leisure. It was Moran who found the leak.

"Pshaw!" she exclaimed, with a half-laugh, "we can stick that up in half
an hour."

A single plank had started away from the stern-post; that was all.
Otherwise the schooner was as sound as the day she left San Francisco.
Moran and Wilbur had the damage repaired by noon, nailing the plank into
its place and caulking the seams with lamp-wick. Nor could their most
careful search discover any further injury.

"We're ready to go," said Moran, "so soon as she'll float. We can dig
away around the bows here, make fast a line to that rock out yonder, and
warp her off at next high tide. Hello! who's this?"

It was Charlie. While the two had been at work, he had come around the
shore unobserved, and now stood at some little distance, smiling at them
calmly.

"Well, what do you want?" cried Moran angrily. "If you had your rights,
my friend, you'd be keelhauled."

"I tink um velly hot day."

"You didn't come here to say that. What do you want?"

"I come hab talkee-talk."

"We don't want to have any talkee-talk with such vermin as you. Get
out!"

Charlie sat down on the beach and wiped his forehead.

"I come buy one-piecee bacon. China boy no hab got."

"We aren't selling bacon to deserters," cried Moran; "and I'll tell you
this, you filthy little monkey: Mr. Wilbur and I are going home--back
to 'Frisco--this afternoon; and we're going to leave you and the rest of
your vipers to rot on this beach, or to be murdered by beach-combers,"
and she pointed out toward the junk. Charlie did not even follow the
direction of her gesture, and from this very indifference Wilbur
guessed that it was precisely because of the beach-combers that the
Machiavellian Chinaman had wished to treat with his old officers.

"No hab got bacon?" he queried, lifting his eyebrows in surprise.

"Plenty; but not for you."

Charlie took a buckskin bag from his blouse and counted out a handful of
silver and gold.

"I buy um nisi two-piecee tobacco."

"Look here," said Wilbur deliberately; "don't you try to flim-flam us,
Charlie. We know you too well. You don't want bacon and you don't want
tobacco."

"China boy heap plenty much sick. Two boy velly sick. I tink um die
pretty soon to-molla. You catch um slop-chest; you gib me five, seven
liver pill. Sabe?"

"I'll tell you what you want," cried Moran, aiming a forefinger at
him, pistol fashion; "you've got a blue funk because those Kai-gingh
beach-combers have come into the bay, and you're more frightened of them
than you are of the schooner; and now you want us to take you home."

"How muchee?"

"A thousand dollars."

Wilbur looked at her in surprise. He had expected a refusal.

"You no hab got liver pill?" inquired Charlie blandly.

Moran turned her back on him. She and Wilbur conferred in a low voice.

"We'd better take them back, if we decently can," said Moran. "The
schooner is known, of course, in 'Frisco. She went out with Kitchell and
a crew of coolies, and she comes back with you and I aboard, and if we
tell the truth about it, it will sound like a lie, and we'll have no end
of trouble. Then again, can just you and I work the 'Bertha' into
port? In these kind of airs it's plain work, but suppose we have dirty
weather? I'm not so sure."

"I gib you ten dollah fo' ten liver pill," said Charlie.

"Will you give us a thousand dollars to set you down in San Francisco?"

Charlie rose. "I go back. I tell um China boy what you say 'bout liver
pill. Bime-by I come back."

"That means he'll take our offer back to his friends," said Wilbur, in
a low voice. "You best hurry chop-chop," he called after Charlie; "we go
home pretty soon!"

"He knows very well we can't get away before high tide to-morrow," said
Moran. "He'll take his time."

Later on in the afternoon Moran and Wilbur saw a small boat put off from
the junk and make a landing by the creek. The beach-combers were
taking on water. The boat made three trips before evening, but the
beach-combers made no show of molesting the undefended schooner, or in
any way interfering with Charlie's camp on the other side of the bay.

"No!" exclaimed Moran between her teeth, as she and Wilbur were cooking
supper; "no, they don't need to; they've got about a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars of loot on board--OUR loot, too! Good God! it goes
against the grain!"

The moon rose considerably earlier that night, and by twelve o'clock the
bay was flooded with its electrical whiteness. Wilbur and Moran could
plainly make out the junk tied up to the kelp off-shore. But toward one
o'clock Wilbur was awakened by Moran shaking his arm.

"There's something wrong out there," she whispered; "something wrong
with the junk. Hear 'em squealing? Look! look! look!" she cried of a
sudden; "it's their turn now!"

Wilbur could see the crank junk, with its staring red eyes, high stern
and prow, as distinctly as though at noonday. As he watched, it seemed
as if a great wave caught her suddenly underfoot. She heaved up bodily
out of the water, dropped again with a splash, rose again, and again
fell back into her own ripples, that, widening from her sides, broke
crisply on the sand at Wilbur's feet.

Then the commotion ceased abruptly. The bay was quiet again. An hour
passed, then two. The moon began to set. Moran and Wilbur, wearied of
watching, had turned in again, when they were startled to wakefulness by
the creak of oarlocks and the sound of a boat grounding in the sand.

The coolies--the deserters from the "Bertha Millner"--were there.
Charlie came forward.

"Ge' lup! Ge' lup!" he said. "Junk all smash! Kai-gingh come ashore. I
tink him want catch um schooner."




IX, THE CAPTURE OF HOANG


"What smashed the junk? What wrecked her?" demanded Moran.

The deserting Chinamen huddled around Charlie, drawing close, as if
finding comfort in the feel of each other's elbows.

"No can tell," answered Charlie. "Him shake, then lif' up all the same
as we. Bime-by too much lif' up; him smash all to--Four-piecee Chinamen
dlown."

"Drown! Did any of them drown?" exclaimed Moran.

"Four-piecee dlown," reiterated Charlie calmly. "One, thlee, five, nine,
come asho'. Him other no come."

"Where are the ones that came ashore?" asked Wilbur.

Charlie waved a hand back into the night. "Him make um camp topside ole
house."

"That old whaling-camp," prompted Moran. Then to Wilbur: "You
remember--about a hundred yards north the creek?"

Wilbur, Moran and Charlie had drawn off a little from the "Bertha
Millner's" crew. The latter squatted in a line along the shore--silent,
reserved, looking vaguely seaward through the night. Moran spoke again,
her scowl thickening:

"What makes you think the beach-combers want our schooner?"

"Him catch um schooner sure! Him want um boat to go home. No can get."

"Let's put off to-night--right away," said Wilbur.

"Low tide," answered Moran; "and besides--Charlie, did you see them
close? Were you near them?"

"No go muchee close."

"Did they have something with them, reeved up in a hammock--something
that smelled sweet?"

"Like a joss-stick, for instance?"

"No savvy; no can tell. Him try catch um schooner sure. Him velly bad
China boy. See Yup China boy, velly bad. I b'long Sam Yup. Savvy?'!

"Ah! the Tongs?"

"Yas. I Sam Yup. Him," and he pointed to the "Bertha's" crew, "Sam Yup.
All we Sam Yup; nisi him," and he waved a hand toward the beach-combers'
camp; "him See Yup. Savvy?"

"It's a Tong row," said Wilbur. "They're blood enemies, the See Yups and
Sam Yups."

Moran fell thoughtful, digging her boot-heel into the sand, her thumbs
hooked into her belt, her forehead gathered into a heavy frown. There
was a silence.

"One thing," she said, at last; "we can't give up the schooner. They
would take our stores as well, and then where are we? Marooned, by Jove!
How far do you suppose we are from the nearest town? Three hundred miles
wouldn't be a bad guess, and they've got the loot--our ambergris--I'll
swear to that. They didn't leave that aboard when the junk sank."

"Look here, Charlie," she said, turning to the Chinaman. "If the
beach-combers take the schooner--the 'Bertha Millner'--from us we'll be
left to starve on this beach."

"I tink um yass."

"How are we going to get home? Are you going to let them do it? Are you
going to let them have our schooner?"

"I tink no can have."

"Look here," she went on, with sudden energy. "There are only nine of
them now, to our eight. We're about even. We can fight those swine. I
know we can. If we jumped their camp and rushed them hard, believe
me, we could run them into the sea. Mate," she cried, suddenly facing
Wilbur, "are you game? Have you got blood in you? Those beach-comberes
are going to attack us to-morrow, before high tide--that's flat. There's
going to be a fight anyway. We can't let them have the schooner. It's
starvation for us if we do.

"They mean to make a dash for the 'Bertha,' and we've got to fight them
off. If there's any attacking to be done I propose to do it! I propose
we jump their camp before it gets light--now--to-night--right away--run
in on them there, take them by surprise, do for one or two of them if we
have to, and get that ambergris. Then cut back to the schooner, up our
sails, and wait for the tide to float us off. We can do it--I know we
can. Mate, will you back me up?"

"Back you up? You bet I'll back you up, Moran. But--" Wilbur hesitated.
"We could fight them so much more to advantage from the deck of the
schooner. Why not wait for them aboard? We could have our sails up,
anyhow, and we could keep the beach-combers off till the tide rose high
enough to drive them back. Why not do that?"

"I tink bes' wait topside boat," assented Charlie.

"Yes; why not, Moran?"

"Because," shouted the girl, "they've got our loot. I don't propose to
be plundered of $150,000 if I can help it."

"Wassa dat?" demanded Charlie. "Hunder fiftee tlousand you hab got?"

"I did have it--we had it, the mate and I. We triced a sperm whale for
the beach-combers, and when they thought they had everything out of him
we found a lump of ambergris in him that will weigh close to two hundred
pounds. Now look here, Charlie. The beach-combers have got the stuff.
It's mine--I'm going to have it back. Here's the lay. Your men can
fight--you can fight yourself. We'll make it a business proposition.
Help me to get that ambergris, and if we get it I'll give each one of
the men $1,000, and I'll give you $1,500. You can take that up and be
independent rich the rest of your life. You can chuck it and rot on this
beach, for it's fight or lose the schooner; you know that as well as I
do. If you've got to fight anyhow, why not fight where it's going to pay
the most?"

Charlie hesitated, pursing his lips.

"How about this, Moran?" Wilbur broke forth now, unheard by Charlie.
"I've just been thinking; have we got a right to this ambergris, after
all? The beach-combers found the whale. It was theirs. How have we the
right to take the ambergris away from them any more than the sperm and
the oil and the bone? It's theirs, if you come to that. I don't know as
we've the right to it."

"Darn you!" shouted Moran in a blaze of fury, "right to it, right to
it! If I haven't, who has? Who found it? Those dirty monkeys might have
stood some show to a claim if they'd held to the one-third bargain, and
offered to divvy with us when they got me where I couldn't help myself.
I don't say I'd give in now if they had--give in to let 'em walk off
with a hundred thousand dollars that I've got as good a claim to as they
have! But they've saved me the trouble of arguing the question. They've
taken it all, all! And there's no bargain in the game at all now. Now
the stuff belongs to the strongest of us, and I'm glad of it. They
thought they were the strongest and now they're going to find out. We're
dumped down here on this God-forsaken sand, and there's no law and no
policemen. The strongest of us are going to live and the weakest are
going to die. I'm going to live and I'm going to have my loot, too, and
I'm not going to split fine hairs with these robbers at this time of
day. I'm going to have it all, and that's the law you're under in this
case, my righteous friend!"

She turned her back upon him, spinning around upon her heel, and Wilbur
felt ashamed of himself and proud of her.

"I go talkee-talk to China boy," said Charlie, coming up.

For about five minutes the Chinamen conferred together, squatting in
a circle on the beach. Moran paced up and down by the stranded dory.
Wilbur leaned against the bleached whale-skull, his hands in his
pockets. Once he looked at his watch. It was nearly one o'clock.

"All light," said Charlie, coming up from the group at last; "him fight
plenty."

"Now," exclaimed Moran, "we've no time to waste. What arms have we got?"

"We've got the cutting-in spades," said Wilbur; "there's five of them.
They're nearly ten feet long, and the blades are as sharp as razors; you
couldn't want better pikes."

"That's an idea," returned Moran, evidently willing to forget her
outburst of a moment before, perhaps already sorry for it. The party
took stock of their weapons, and five huge cutting-in spades, a heavy
knife from the galley, and a revolver of doubtful effectiveness were
divided among them. The crew took the spades, Charlie the knife, and
Wilbur the revolver. Moran had her own knife, a haftless dirk, such as
is affected by all Norwegians, whether landsmen or sailors. They were
examining this armament and Moran was suggesting a plan of attack, when
Hoang, the leader of the beach-combers, and one other Chinaman appeared
some little distance below them on the beach. The moon was low and there
was no great light, but the two beach-combers caught the flash of the
points of the spades. They halted and glanced narrowly and suspiciously
at the group.

"Beasts!" muttered Moran. "They are up to the game--there's no
surprising them now. Talk to him, Charlie; see what he wants."

Moran, Wilbur, and Charlie came part of the way toward Hoang and his
fellow, and paused some fifteen feet distant, and a long colloquy
ensued. It soon became evident, however, that in reality Hoang
wanted nothing of them, though with great earnestness he asserted his
willingness to charter the "Bertha Millner" back to San Francisco.

"That's not his game at all," said Moran to Wilbur, in a low tone, her
eyes never leaving those of the beach-comber. "He's pretty sure he could
seize the 'Bertha' and never pay us a stiver. They've come down to spy
on us, and they're doing it, too. There's no good trying to rush that
camp now. They'll go back and tell the crew that we know their lay."

It was still very dark. Near the hulk of the beached "Bertha Millner"
were grouped her crew, each armed with a long and lance-like cutting-in
spade, watching and listening to the conference of the chiefs. The moon,
almost down, had flushed blood-red, violently streaking the gray, smooth
surface of the bay with her reflection. The tide was far out, rippling
quietly along the reaches of wet sand. In the pauses of the conference
the vast, muffling silence shut down with the abruptness of a valve
suddenly closed.

How it happened, just who made the first move, in precisely what manner
the action had been planned, or what led up to it, Wilbur could
not afterward satisfactorily explain. There was a rush forward--he
remembered that much--a dull thudding of feet over the resounding beach
surface, a moment's writhing struggle with a half-naked brown figure
that used knife and nail and tooth, and then the muffling silence again,
broken only by the sound of their own panting. In that whirl of swift
action Wilbur could reconstruct but two brief pictures: the Chinaman,
Hoang's companion, flying like one possessed along the shore; Hoang
himself flung headlong into the arms of the "Bertha's" coolies, and
Moran, her eyes blazing, her thick braids flying, brandishing her fist
as she shouted at the top of her deep voice, "We've got you, anyhow!"

They had taken Hoang prisoner, whether by treachery or not, Wilbur did
not exactly know; and, even if unfair means had been used, he could not
repress a feeling of delight and satisfaction as he told himself that in
the very beginning of the fight that was to follow he and his mates had
gained the first advantage.

As the action of that night's events became more and more accelerated,
Wilbur could not but notice the change in Moran. It was very evident
that the old Norse fighting blood of her was all astir; brutal,
merciless, savage beyond all control. A sort of obsession seized upon
her at the near approach of battle, a frenzy of action that was checked
by nothing--that was insensible to all restraint. At times it was
impossible for him to make her hear him, or when she heard to understand
what he was saying. Her vision contracted. It was evident that she could
not see distinctly. Wilbur could no longer conceive of her as a woman
of the days of civilization. She was lapsing back to the eighth century
again--to the Vikings, the sea-wolves, the Berserkers.

"Now you're going to talk," she cried to Hoang, as the bound Chinaman
sat upon the beach, leaning his back against the great skull. "Charlie,
ask him if they saved the ambergris when the junk went down--if they've
got it now?" Charlie put the question in Chinese, but the beach-comber
only twinkled his vicious eyes upon them and held his peace. With the
full sweep of her arm, her fist clinched till the knuckles whitened,
Moran struck him in the face.

"Now will you talk?" she cried. Hoang wiped the blood from his face upon
his shoulder and set his jaws. He did not answer.

"You will talk before I'm done with you, my friend; don't get any wrong
notions in your head about that," Moran continued, her teeth clinched.
"Charlie," she added, "is there a file aboard the schooner?"

"I tink um yass, boss hab got file."

"In the tool-chest, isn't it?" Charlie nodded, and Moran ordered it to
be fetched.

"If we're to fight that crowd," she said, speaking to herself and in a
rapid voice, thick from excitement and passion, "we've got to know where
they've hid the loot, and what weapons they've got. If they have a rifle
or a shotgun with them, it's going to make a big difference for us. The
other fellow escaped and has gone back to warn the rest. It's fight now,
and no mistake."

The Chinaman who had been sent aboard the schooner returned, carrying a
long, rather coarse-grained file. Moran took it from him.

"Now," she said, standing in front of Hoang, "I'll give you one more
chance. Answer me. Did you bring off the ambergris, you beast, when your
junk sank? Where is it now? How many men have you? What arms have you
got? Have your men got a rifle?--Charlie, put that all to him in your
lingo, so as to make sure that he understands. Tell him if he don't talk
I'm going to make him very sick."

Charlie put the questions in Chinese, pausing after each one. Hoang held
his peace.

"I gave you fair warning," shouted Moran angrily, pointing at him with
the file. "Will you answer?"

"Him no tell nuttin," observed Charlie.

"Fetch a cord here," commanded Moran. The cord was brought, and despite
Hoang's struggles and writhings the file was thrust end-ways into his
mouth and his jaws bound tightly together upon it by means of the cord
passed over his head and under his chin. Some four inches of the file
portruded from his lips. Moran took this end and drew it out between the
beach-comber's teeth, then pushed it back slowly.

The hideous rasp of the operation turned Wilbur's blood cold within him.
He looked away--out to sea, down the beach--anywhere, so that he might
not see what was going forward. But the persistent grind and scrape
still assaulted his ears. He turned about sharply.

"I--I--I'll go down the beach here a ways," he said quickly. "I can't
stand--I'll keep watch to see if the beach-combers come up."

A few minutes later he heard Charlie hailing him.

"Chin-chin heap plenty now," said he, with a grin, as Wilbur came up.

Hoang sat on the sand in the midst of the circle. The file and coil
of rope lay on the ground near by. The beach-comber was talking in a
high-keyed sing-song, but with a lisp. He told them partly in pigeon
English and partly in Cantonese, which Charlie translated, that their
men were eight in number, and that they had intended to seize the
schooner that night, but that probably his own capture had delayed their
plans. They had no rifle. A shotgun had been on board, but had gone down
with the sinking of the junk. The ambergris had been cut into two lumps,
and would be found in a couple of old flour-sacks in the stern of the
boat in which he and his men had come ashore. They were all armed with
their little hatchets. He thought two of the men carried knives as well.
There was neither pistol nor revolver among them.

"It seems to me," said Wilbur, "that we've got the long end."

"We catch um boss, too!" said Charlie, pointing to Hoang.

"And we are better armed," assented Moran. "We've got the cutting-in
spades."

"And the revolver, if it will shoot any further than it will kick."

"They'll give us all the fight we want," declared Moran.

"Oh, him Kai-gingh, him fight all same devil."

"Give the men brandy, Charlie," commanded Moran. "We'll rush that camp
right away."

The demijohn of spirits was brought down from the "Bertha" and passed
around, Wilbur and Moran drinking from the tin cup, the coolies from the
bottle. Hoang was fettered and locked in the "Bertha's" cabin.

"Now, then, are we ready?" cried Moran.

"I tink all light," answered Charlie.

The party set off down the beach. The moon had long since gone down,
and the dawn was whitening over the eastern horizon. Landward, ragged
blankets of morning mist lay close in the hollows here and there. It was
profoundly still. The stars were still out. The surface of Magdalena Bay
was smooth as a sheet of gray silk.

Twenty minutes passed, half an hour, an hour. The party tramped steadily
forward, Moran, Wilbur, and Charlie leading, the coolies close behind
carrying the cutting-in spades over their shoulders. Slowly and in
silence they made the half circuit of the bay. The "Bertha Millner" was
far behind them by now, a vague gray mass in the early morning light.

"Did you ever fight before?" Moran suddenly demanded of Charlie.

"One time I fight plenty much in San Flancisco in Washington stleet.
Fight um See Yups."

Another half-hour passed. At times when they halted they began to hear
the faint murmur of the creek, just beyond which was the broken and
crumbling shanty, relic of an old Portuguese whaling-camp, where the
beach-combers were camped. At Charlie's suggestion the party made a
circuit, describing a half moon, to landward, so as to come out upon the
enemy sheltered by the sand-dunes. Twenty minutes later they crossed the
creek about four hundred yards from the shore. Here they spread out into
a long line, and, keeping an interval of about fifteen feet between each
of them, moved cautiously forward. The unevenness of the sand-breaks hid
the shore from view, but Moran, Wilbur, and Charlie knew that by keeping
the creek upon their left they would come out directly upon the house.

A few moments later Charlie held up his hand, and the men halted. The
noise of the creek chattering into the tidewater of the bay was plainly
audible just beyond; a ridge of sand, covered thinly with sage-brush,
and a faint column of smoke rose into the air over the ridge itself.
They were close in. The coolies were halted, and dropping upon their
hands and knees, the three leaders crawled to the top of the break.
Sheltered by a couple of sage-bushes and lying flat to the ground,
Wilbur looked over and down upon the beach. The first object he made out
was a crazy, roofless house, built of driftwood, the chinks plastered
with 'dobe mud, the door fallen in.

Beyond, on the beach, was a flat-bottomed dingy, unpainted and foul with
dirt. But all around the house the sand had been scooped and piled
to form a low barricade, and behind this barricade Wilbur saw the
beach-combers. There were eight of them. They were alert and ready,
their hatchets in their hands. The gaze of each of them was fixed
directly upon the sand-break which sheltered the "Bertha Millner's"
officers and crew. They seemed to Wilbur to look him straight in the
eye. They neither moved nor spoke. The silence and absolute lack of
motion on the part of these small, half-naked Chinamen, with their
ape-like muzzles and twinkling eyes, was ominous.

There could be no longer any doubts that the beach-combers had known
of their enemies' movements and were perfectly aware of their presence
behind the sand-break. Moran rose to her feet, and Wilbur and Charlie
followed her example.

"There's no use hiding," she said; "they know we're here."

Charlie called up the crew. The two parties were ranged face to face.
Over the eastern rim of the Pacific the blue whiteness of the early
dawn was turning to a dull, roseate gold at the core of the sunrise. The
headlands of Magdalena Bay stood black against the pale glow; overhead,
the greater stars still shone. The monotonous, faint ripple of the creek
was the only sound. It was about 3:30 o'clock.




X. A BATTLE


Wilbur had imagined that the fight would be hardly more than a wild rush
down the slope of the beach, a dash over the beach-combers' breastworks
of sand, and a brief hand-to-hand scrimmage around the old cabin. In
all accounts he had ever read of such affairs, and in all ideas he
had entertained on the subject, this had always been the case. The two
bodies had shocked together like a college rush, there had been five
minutes' play of knife and club and gun, a confused whirl of dust
and smoke, and all was over before one had time either to think or be
afraid. But nothing of the kind happened that morning.

The "Bertha Millner's" crew, in a long line, Moran at one end, Wilbur at
the other, and Charlie in the centre, came on toward the beach-combers,
step by step. There was little outcry. Each contestant singled out
his enemy, and made slowly for him with eyes fixed and weapon ready,
regardless of the movements of his mates.

"See any rifles among them, Charlie?" shouted Moran, suddenly breaking
the silence.

"No, I tink no hab got," answered Charlie.

Wilbur took another step forward and cocked his revolver. One of the
beach-combers shouted out something in angry vernacular, and Charlie
instantly responded. All this time the line had been slowly advancing
upon the enemy, and Wilbur began to wonder how long that heartbreaking
suspense was to continue. This was not at all what he had imagined.
Already he was within twenty feet of his man, could see the evil glint
of his slant, small eye, and the shine of his yellow body, naked to the
belt. Still foot by foot the forward movement continued. The Chinese
on either side had begun exchanging insults; the still, hot air of the
tropic dawn was vibrant with the Cantonese monosyllables tossed back
and forth like tennis-balls over the low sand rampart. The thing was
degenerating into a farce--the "Bertha's" Chinamen would not fight.

Back there, under the shelter of the schooner, it was all very well to
talk, and they had been very brave when they had all flung themselves
upon Hoang. Here, face to face with the enemy, the sun striking off
heliograph flashes from their knives and spades, it was a vastly
different matter. The thing, to Wilbur's mind, should have been done
suddenly if it was to be done at all. The best course now was to return
to camp and try some other plan. Charlie shouted a direction to him in
pigeon English that he did not understand, but he answered all right,
and moved forward another step so as to be in line with the coolie at
his left.

The liquor that he had drunk before starting began suddenly to affect
him, yet he knew that his head was yet clear. He could not bring himself
to run away before them all, but he would have given much to have
discovered a good reason for postponing the fight--if fight there was to
be.

He remembered the cocked revolver in his hand, and, suddenly raising it,
fired point-blank at his man, not fifteen feet away. The hammer snapped
on the nipple, but the cartridge did not explode. Wilbur turned to the
Chinaman next him in line, exclaiming excitedly:

"Here, say, have you got a knife--something I can fight with? This gun's
no good."

There was a shout from Moran:

"Look out, here they come!"

Two of the beach-combers suddenly sprang over the sand breastworks and
ran toward Charlie, their knives held low in front of them, ready to
rip.

"Shoot! shoot! shoot!" shouted Moran rapidly.

Wilbur's revolver was a self-cocker. He raised it again, drawing hard on
the trigger as he did so. It roared and leaped in his hand, and a whiff
of burned powder came to his nostrils. Then Wilbur was astonished to
hear himself shout at the top of his voice:

"Come on now, get into them--get into them now, everybody!"

The "Bertha's" Chinamen were all running forward, three of them well
in advance of the others. In the rear Charlie was at grapples with a
beach-comber who fought with a knife in each hand, and Wilbur had a
sudden glimpse of another sitting on the sand with his hand to his
mouth, the blood spurting between his fingers.

Wilbur suddenly realized that he held a knife, and that he was directly
abreast the sand rampart. How he got the knife he could not tell, though
he afterward distinctly remembered throwing away his revolver, loaded as
it was. He had leaped the breastworks, he knew that, and between him
and the vast bright blur of the ocean he saw one of the beach-combers
backing away and watching him intently, his hatchet in his hand. Wilbur
had only time to think that he himself would no doubt be killed within
the next few moments, when this latter halted abruptly, took a step
forward, and, instead of striking downward, as Wilbur had anticipated,
dropped upon his knee and struck with all his might at the calf of
Wilbur's leg. It was only the thickness of his boots that saved Wilbur
from being hamstrung where he stood. As it was, he felt the blade bite
almost to the bone, and heard the blood squelch in the sole of his boot,
as he staggered for the moment, almost tripping over the man in front of
him.

The Chinaman sprang to his feet again, but Wilbur was at him in an
instant, feeling instinctively that his chance was to close with his
man, and so bring his own superior weight and strength to bear. Again
and again he tried to run in and grip the slim yellow body, but the
other dodged and backed away, as hard to hold as any fish. All around
and back of him now Wilbur heard the hideous sound of stamping and
struggling, and the noise of hoarse, quick shouts and the rebound of
bodies falling and rolling upon the hard, smooth beach. The thing had
not been a farce, after all. This was fighting at last, and there within
arm's length were men grappling and gripping and hitting one another,
each honestly striving to kill his fellow--Chinamen all, fighting
in barbarous Oriental fashion with nails and teeth when the knife or
hatchet failed. What did he, clubman and college man, in that hideous
trouble that wrought itself out there on that heat-stricken tropic beach
under that morning's sun?

Suddenly there was a flash of red flame, and a billow of thick, yellow
smoke filled all the air. The cabin was afire. The hatchet-man with whom
Wilbur was fighting had been backing in this direction. He was close
in when the fire began to leap from the one window; now he could go no
further. He turned to run sidewise between his enemy and the burning
cabin. Wilbur thrust his foot sharply forward; the beach-comber tripped,
staggered, and before he had reached the ground Wilbur had driven home
the knife.

Then suddenly, at the sight of his smitten enemy rolling on the ground
at his feet, the primitive man, the half-brute of the stone age,
leaped to life in Wilbur's breast--he felt his muscles thrilling with
a strength they had not known before. His nerves, stretched tense as
harp-strings, were vibrating to a new tune. His blood spun through his
veins till his ears roared with the rush of it. Never had he conceived
of such savage exultation as that which mastered him at that instant.
The knowledge that he could kill filled him with a sense of power
that was veritably royal. He felt physically larger. It was the joy of
battle, the horrid exhilaration of killing, the animal of the race, the
human brute suddenly aroused and dominating every instinct and tradition
of centuries of civilization. The fight still was going forward.

Wilbur could hear the sounds of it, though from where he stood all sight
was shut off by the smoke of the burning house. As he turned about,
knife in hand, debating what next he should do, a figure burst down upon
him, shadowy and distorted through the haze.

It was Moran, but Moran as Wilbur had never seen her before. Her eyes
were blazing under her thick frown like fire under a bush. Her arms were
bared to the elbow, her heavy ropes of hair flying and coiling from her
in all directions, while with a voice hoarse from shouting she sang,
or rather chanted, in her long-forgotten Norse tongue, fragments of old
sagas, words, and sentences, meaningless even to herself. The fury of
battle had exalted her to a sort of frenzy. She was beside herself with
excitement. Once more she had lapsed back to the Vikings and sea-rovers
of the tenth century--she was Brunhilde again, a shield-maiden, a
Valkyrie, a Berserker and the daughter of Berserkers, and like them she
fought in a veritable frenzy, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, every
sense exalted, every force doubled, insensible to pain, deaf to all
reason.

Her dirk uplifted, she rushed upon Wilbur, never once pausing in her
chant. Wilbur shouted a warning to her as she came on, puzzled beyond
words, startled back to a consciousness of himself again by this
insensate attack.

"Moran! Moran!" he called. "What is it--you're wrong! It-s I. It's
Wilbur--your mate, can't you see?"

Moran could not see--blind to friend or foe, as she was deaf to reason,
she struck at him with all the strength of her arm. But there was no
skill in her fighting now. Wilbur dropped his own knife and gripped
her right wrist. She closed with him upon the instant, clutching at his
throat with her one free hand; and as he felt her strength--doubled and
tripled in the fury of her madness--Wilbur knew that, however easily he
had overcome his enemy of a moment before, he was now fighting for his
very life.

At first, Wilbur merely struggled to keep her from him--to prevent her
using her dirk. He tried not to hurt her. But what with the spirits
he had drunk before the attack, what with the excitement of the attack
itself and the sudden unleashing of the brute in him an instant before,
the whole affair grew dim and hazy in his mind. He ceased to see things
in their proportion. His new-found strength gloried in matching itself
with another strength that was its equal. He fought with Moran--not as
he would fight with either woman or man, or with anything human, for the
matter of that. He fought with her as against some impersonal force that
it was incumbent upon him to conquer--that it was imperative he should
conquer if he wished to live. When she struck, he struck blow for blow,
force for force, his strength against hers, glorying in that strange
contest, though he never once forgot that this last enemy was the
girl he loved. It was not Moran whom he fought; it was her force, her
determination, her will, her splendid independence, that he set himself
to conquer.

Already she had dropped or flung away the dirk, and their battle had
become an issue of sheer physical strength between them. It was a
question now as to who should master the other. Twice she had fought
Wilbur to his knees, the heel of her hand upon his face, his head thrust
back between his shoulders, and twice he had wrenched away, rising to
his feet again, panting, bleeding even, but with his teeth set and
all his resolution at the sticking-point. Once he saw his chance, and
planted his knuckles squarely between her eyes where her frown was
knotted hard, hoping to stun her and end the fight once and for all. But
the blow did not seem to affect her in the least. By this time he saw
that her Berserker rage had worked itself clear as fermenting wine
clears itself, and that she knew now with whom she was fighting; and he
seemed now to understand the incomprehensible, and to sympathize with
her joy in measuring her strength against his; and yet he knew that the
combat was deadly serious, and that more than life was at stake. Moran
despised a weakling.

For an instant, as they fell apart, she stood off, breathing hard and
rolling up her sleeve; then, as she started forward again, Wilbur met
her half-way, caught her round the neck and under the arm, gripping her
left wrist with his right hand behind her; then, exerting every ounce
of strength he yet retained, he thrust her down and from him, until at
length, using his hip as a pivot, he swung her off her feet, threw her
fairly on her back, and held her so, one knee upon her chest, his hands
closed vise-like on her wrists.

Then suddenly Moran gave up, relaxing in his grasp all in a second, and,
to his great surprise, suddenly smiled.

"Ho! mate," she exclaimed; "that was a tough one; but I'm beaten--you're
stronger than I thought for."

Wilbur released her and rose to his feet.

"Here," she continued, "give me your hand. I'm as weak as a kitten." As
Wilbur helped her to her feet, she put her hand to her forehead,
where his knuckles had left their mark, and frowned at him, but not
ill-naturedly.

"Next time you do that," she said, "use a rock or a belaying-pin, or
something that won't hurt--not your fist, mate." She looked at him
admiringly. "What a two-fisted, brawny dray-horse it is! I told you I
was stronger than most men, didn't I? But I'm the weaker of us two, and
that's a fact. You've beaten, mate--I admit it; you've conquered
me, and," she continued, smiling again and shaking him by the
shoulder--"and, mate, do you know, I love you for it."




XI. A CHANGE IN LEADERS


"Well," exclaimed Wilbur at length, the excitement of the fight
returning upon him. "We have plenty to do yet. Come on, Moran."

It was no longer Moran who took the initiative--who was the leader. The
brief fight upon the shore had changed all that. It was Wilbur who was
now the master, it was Wilbur who was aggressive. He had known what
it meant to kill. He was no longer afraid of anything, no longer
hesitating. He had felt a sudden quadrupling of all his strength, moral
and physical.

All that was strong and virile and brutal in him seemed to harden and
stiffen in the moment after he had seen the beach-comber collapse limply
on the sand under the last strong knife-blow; and a sense of triumph, of
boundless self-confidence, leaped within him, so that he shouted aloud
in a very excess of exhilaration; and snatching up a heavy cutting-in
spade, that had been dropped in the fight near the burning cabin,
tossed it high into the air, catching it again as it descended, like any
exultant savage.

"Come on!" he cried to Moran; "where are the beach-combers gone? I'm
going to get one more before the show is over."

The two passed out of the zone of smoke, and reached the other side
of the burning cabin just in time to see the last of the struggle. The
whole affair had not taken more than a quarter of an hour. In the end
the beach-combers had been beaten. Four had fled into the waste of sand
and sage that lay back of the shore, and had not been pursued. A fifth
had been almost hamstrung by one of the "Bertha's" coolies, and had
given himself up. A sixth, squealing and shrieking like a tiger-cat, had
been made prisoner; and Wilbur himself had accounted for the seventh.

As Wilbur and Moran came around the cabin they saw the "Bertha
Millner's" Chinamen in a group, not far from the water's edge,
reassembled after the fight--panting and bloody, some of them bare
to the belt, their weapons still in their hands. Here and there was
a bandaged arm or head; but their number was complete--or no, was it
complete?

"Ought to be one more," said Wilbur, anxiously hastening for-ward.

As the two came up the coolies parted, and Wilbur saw one of them,
his head propped upon a rolled-up blouse, lying ominously still on the
trampled sand.

"It's Charlie!" exclaimed Moran.

"Where's he hurt?" cried Wilbur to the group of coolies. "Jim!--where's
Jim? Where's he hurt, Jim?"

Jim, the only member of the crew besides Charlie who could understand or
speak English, answered:

"Kai-gingh him fin' pistol, you' pistol; Charlie him fight plenty;
bime-by, when he no see, one-piecee Kai-gingh he come up behin', shoot
um Charlie in side--savvy?"

"Did he kill him? Is he dead?"

"No, I tinkum die plenty soon; him no savvy nuttin' now, him all-same
sleep. Plenty soon bime-by him sleep for good, I tink."

There was little blood to be seen when Wilbur gently unwrapped the
torn sleeve of a blouse that had been used as a bandage. Just under the
armpit was the mark of the bullet--a small puncture already closed, half
hidden under a clot or two of blood. The coolie lay quite unconscious,
his eyes wide open, drawing a faint, quick breath at irregular
intervals.

"What do you think, mate?" asked Moran in a low voice.

"I think he's got it through the lungs," answered Wilbur, frowning in
distress and perplexity. "Poor old Charlie!"

Moran went down on a knee, and put a finger on the slim, corded wrist,
yellow as old ivory.

"Charlie," she called--"Charlie, here, don't you know me? Wake up, old
chap! It's Moran. You're not hurt so very bad, are you?"

Charlie's eyes closed and opened a couple of times.

"No can tell," he answered feebly; "hurt plenty big"; then he began to
cough.

Wilbur drew a sigh of relief. "He's all right!" he exclaimed.

"Yes, I think he's all right," assented Moran.

"First thing to do now is to get him aboard the schooner," said Wilbur.
"We'll take him right across in the beach-combers' dory here. By Jove!"
he exclaimed on a sudden. "The ambergris--I'd forgotten all about it."
His heart sank. In the hideous confusion of that morning's work, all
thought of the loot had been forgotten. Had the battle been for nothing,
after all? The moment the beach-combers had been made aware of the
meditated attack, it would have been an easy matter for them to have
hidden the ambergris--destroyed it even.

In two strides Wilbur had reached the beach-combers' dory and was
groping in the forward cuddy. Then he uttered a great shout of
satisfaction. The "stuff" was there, all of it, though the mass had been
cut into quarters, three parts of it stowed in tea-flails, the fourth
still reeved up in the hammock netting.

"We've got it!" he cried to Moran, who had followed him. "We've got it,
Moran! Over $100,000. We're rich--rich as boodlers, you and I. Oh,
it was worth fighting for, after all, wasn't it? Now we'll get out of
here--now we'll cut for home."

"It's only Charlie I'm thinking about," answered Moran, hesitating. "If
it wasn't for that we'd be all right. I don't know whether we did right,
after all, in jumping the camp here. I wouldn't like to feel that I'd
got Charlie into our quarrel only to have him killed."

Wilbur stared at this new Moran in no little amazement. Where was the
reckless, untamed girl of the previous night, who had sworn at him and
denounced his niggling misgivings as to right and wrong?

"Hoh!" he retorted impatiently, "Charlie's right enough. And, besides, I
didn't force him to anything. I--we, that is--took the same chances. If
I hadn't done for my man there behind the cabin, he would have done for
me. At all events, we carried our point. We got the loot. They took it
from us, and we were strong enough to get it back."

Moran merely nodded, as though satisfied with his decision, and added:

"Well, what next, mate?"

"We'll get back to the 'Bertha' now and put to sea as soon as we can
catch the tide. I'll send Jim and two of the other men across in the
dory with Charlie. The rest of us will go around by the shore. We've got
to have a chin-chin with Hoang, if he don't get loose aboard there
and fire the boat before we can get back. I don't propose taking these
beach-combers back to 'Frisco with us."

"What will we do with the two prisoners?" she asked.

"Let them go; we've got their arms."

The positions of the two were reversed. It was Wilbur who assumed
control and direction of what went forward, Moran taking his advice and
relying upon his judgment.

In accordance with Wilbur's orders, Charlie was carried aboard the dory;
which, with two Chinamen at the oars, and the ambergris stowed again
into the cuddy, at once set off for the schooner. Wilbur himself cut the
ropes on the two prisoners, and bade them shift for themselves. The rest
of the party returned to the "Bertha Millner" around the wide sweep of
the beach.

It was only by high noon, under the flogging of a merciless sun, that
the entire crew of the little schooner once more reassembled under the
shadow of her stranded hulk. They were quite worn out; and as soon as
Charlie was lifted aboard, and the ambergris--or, as they spoke of it
now, the "loot"--was safely stowed in the cabin, Wilbur allowed the
Chinamen three or four hours' rest. They had had neither breakfast nor
dinner; but their exhaustion was greater than their hunger, and in a few
moments the entire half-dozen were stretched out asleep on the forward
deck in the shadow of the foresail raised for the purpose of sheltering
them. However, Wilbur and Moran sought out Hoang, whom they found as
they had left him--bound upon the floor of the cabin.

"Now we have a talk--savvy?" Wilbur told him as he loosed the ropes
about his wrists and ankles. "We got our loot back from you, old man,
and we got one of your men into the bargain. You woke up the wrong
crowd, Hoang, when you went up against this outfit. You're in a bad way,
my friend. Your junk is wrecked; all your oil and blubber from the whale
is lost; four of your men have run away, one is killed, another one we
caught and let go, another one has been hamstrung; and you yourself are
our prisoner, with your teeth filed down to your gums. Now," continued
Wilbur, with the profoundest gravity, "I hope this will be a lesson to
you. Don't try and get too much the next time. Just be content with what
is yours by right, or what you are strong enough to keep, and don't try
to fight with white people. Other coolies, I don't say. But when you try
to get the better of white people you are out of your class."

The little beach-comber (he was scarcely above five feet) rubbed his
chafed wrists, and fixed Wilbur with his tiny, twinkling eyes.

"What you do now?"

"We go home. I'm going to maroon you and your people here on this beach.
You deserve that I should let you eat your fists by way of table-board;
but I'm no such dirt as you. When our men left the schooner they brought
off with them a good share of our provisions. I'll leave them here
for you--and there's plenty of turtle and abalone to be had for the
catching. Some of the American men-of-war, I believe, come down to this
bay for target-practice twice a year, and if we speak any on the way up
we'll ask them to call here for castaways. That's what I'll do for you,
and that's all! If you don't like it, you can set out to march up the
coast till you hit a town; but I wouldn't advise you to try it. Now what
have you got to say?"

Hoang was silent. His queue had become unbound for half its length, and
he plaited it anew, winking his eyes thoughtfully.

"Well, what do you say?" said Moran.

"I lose face," answered Hoang at length, calmly.

"You lose face? What do you mean?"

"I lose face," he insisted; then added: "I heap 'shamed. You fightee my
China boy, you catchee me. My boy no mo' hab me fo' boss--savvy? I go
back, him no likee me. Mebbe all same killee me. I lose face--no mo'
boss."

"What a herd of wild cattle!" muttered Wilbur.

"There's something in what he says, don't you think, mate?" observed
Moran, bringing a braid over each shoulder and stroking it according to
her habit.

"We'll ask Jim about it," decided Wilbur.

But Jim at once confirmed Hoang's statement. "Oh, Kai-gingh killum
no-good boss, fo' sure," he declared.

"Don't you think, mate," said Moran, "we'd better take him up to 'Frisco
with us? We've had enough fighting and killing."

So it was arranged that the defeated beach-comber, the whipped
buccaneer, who had "lost face" and no longer dared look his men in the
eye, should be taken aboard.

By four o'clock next morning Wilbur had the hands at work digging the
sand from around the "Bertha Millner's" bow. The line by which she was
to be warped off was run out to the ledge of the rock; fresh water was
taken on; provisions for the marooned beach-combers were cached upon
the beach; the dory was taken aboard, gaskets were cast off, and hatches
battened down.

At high tide, all hands straining upon the warp, the schooner
was floated off, and under touch of the lightest airs drew almost
imperceptibly away from the land. They were quite an hour crawling out
to the heads of the bay. But here the breeze was freshening. Moran
took the wheel; the flying-jib and staysail were set; the wake began to
whiten under the schooner's stern, the forefoot sang; the Pacific opened
out more and more; and by 12:30 o'clock Moran put the wheel over, and,
as the schooner's bow swung to the northward, cried to Wilbur:

"Mate, look your last of Magdalena Bay!"

Standing at her side, Wilbur turned and swept the curve of the coast
with a single glance. The vast, heat-scourged hoop of yellow sand, the
still, smooth shield of indigo water, with its beds of kelp, had become
insensibly dear to him. It was all familiar, friendly, and hospitable.
Hardly an acre of that sweep of beach that did not hold the impress of
his foot. There was the point near by the creek where he and Moran first
landed to fill the water-casks and to gather abalones; the creek itself,
where he had snared quail; the sand spit with its whitened whale's
skull, where he and Moran had beached the schooner; and there, last
of all, that spot of black over which still hung a haze of brown-gray
smoke, the charred ruins of the old Portuguese whaling-cabin, where they
had outfought the beach-combers.

For a moment Wilbur and Moran looked back without speaking. They stood
on the quarter-deck; in the shadow of the main-sail, shut off from the
sight of the schooner's crew, and for the instant quite alone.

"Well, Moran, it's good-by to the old places, isn't it?" said Wilbur at
length.

"Yes," she said, her deep voice pitched even deeper than usual. "Mate,
great things have happened there."

"It doesn't look like a place for a Tong row with Chinese pirates,
though, does it?" he said; but even as he spoke the words, he guessed
that that was not what he meant.

"Oh, what did that amount to?" she said, with an impatient movement of
her head. "It was there that I first knew myself; and knew that, after
all, you were a man and I was a woman; and that there was just us--you
and I--in the world; and that you loved me and I loved you, and that
nothing else was worth thinking of."

Wilbur shut his hand down over hers as it gripped a spoke of the wheel.

"Moran, I knew that long since," he said. "Such a month as this has
been! Why, I feel as though I had only begun to live since I began to
love you."

"And you do, mate?" she answered--"you do love me, and always will? Oh,
you don't know," she went on, interrupting his answer, "you haven't a
guess, how the last two days have changed me. Something has happened
here"--and she put both her hands over her breast. "I'm all different
here, mate. It's all you inside here--all you! And it hurts, and I'm
proud that it does hurt. Oh!" she cried, of a sudden, "I don't know how
to love yet, and I do it very badly, and I can't tell you how I feel,
because I can't even tell it to myself. But you must be good to me now."
The deep voice trembled a little. "Good to me, mate, and true to me,
mate, because I've only you, and all of me is yours. Mate, be good to
me, and always be kind to me. I'm not Moran any more. I'm not proud and
strong and independent, and I don't want to be lonely. I want you--I
want you always with me. I'm just a woman now, dear--just a woman that
loves you with a heart she's just found."

Wilbur could find no words to answer. There was something so pathetic
and at the same time so noble in Moran's complete surrender of herself,
and her dependence upon him, her unquestioned trust in him and his
goodness, that he was suddenly smitten with awe at the sacredness of the
obligation thus imposed on him. She was his now, to have and to hold,
to keep, to protect, and to defend--she who was once so glorious of her
strength, of her savage isolation, her inviolate, pristine maidenhood.
All words seemed futile and inadequate to him.

She came close to him, and put her hands upon his shoulders, and,
looking him squarely in the eye, said:

"You do love me, mate, and you always will?"

"Always, Moran," said Wilbur, simply. He took her in his arms, and she
laid her cheek against his for a moment, then took his head between her
hands and kissed him.

Two days passed. The "Bertha Millner" held steadily to her northward
course, Moran keeping her well in toward the land. Wilbur maintained a
lookout from the crow's-nest in the hope of sighting some white cruiser
or battleship on her way south for target-practice. In the cache of
provisions he had left for the beach-combers he had inserted a message,
written by Hoang, to the effect that they might expect to be taken off
by a United States man-of-war within the month.

Hoang did not readily recover his "loss of face." The "Bertha's"
Chinamen would have nothing to do with this member of a hostile Tong;
and the humiliated beach-comber kept almost entirely to himself, sitting
on the forecastle-head all day long, smoking his sui-yen-hu and brooding
silently to himself.

Moran had taken the lump of ambergris from out Kitchell's old hammock,
and had slung the hammock itself in the schooner's waist, and Charlie
was made as comfortable as possible therein. They could do but little
for him, however; and he was taken from time to time with spells of
coughing that racked him with a dreadful agony. At length one noon, just
after Moran had taken the sun and had calculated that the "Bertha" was
some eight miles to the southwest of San Diego, she was surprised to
hear Wilbur calling her sharply. She ran to him, and found him standing
in the waist by Charlie's hammock.

The Chinaman was dying, and knew it. He was talking in a faint and
feeble voice to Wilbur as she came up, and was trying to explain to him
that he was sorry he had deserted the schooner during the scare in the
bay.

"Planty muchee solly," he said; "China boy, him heap flaid of Feng-shui.
When Feng-shui no likee, we then must go chop-chop. Plenty much solly I
leave-um schooner that night; solly plenty--savvy?"

"Of course we savvy, Charlie," said Moran. "You weren't afraid when it
came to fighting."

"I die pletty soon," said Charlie calmly. "You say you gib me fifteen
hundled dollah?"

"Yes, yes; that was our promise. What do you want done with it,
Charlie?"

"I want plenty fine funeral in Chinatown in San Francisco. Oh, heap
fine! You buy um first-chop coffin--savvy? Silver heap much--costum
big money. You gib my money to Hop Sing Association, topside Ming Yen
temple. You savvy Hop Sing?--one Six Companies."

"Yes, yes."

"Tellum Hop Sing I want funeral--four-piecee horse. You no flogettee
horse?" he added apprehensively.

"No, I'll not forget the horses Charlie. You shall have four."

"Want six-piecee band musicians--China music--heap plenty gong. You no
flogettee? Two piecee priest, all dressum white--savvy? You mus' buyum
coffin yo'self. Velly fine coffin, heap much silver, an' four-piecee
horse. You catchum fireclacker--one, five, seven hundled fireclacker,
makeum big noise; an' loast pig, an' plenty lice an' China blandy.
Heap fine funeral, costum fifteen hundled dollah. I be bury all same
Mandarin--all same Little Pete. You plomise, sure?"

"I promise you, Charlie. You shall have a funeral finer than little
Pete's."

Charlie nodded his head contentedly, drawing a breath of satisfaction.

"Bimeby Hop Sing sendum body back China." He closed his eyes and lay
for a long time, worn out with the effort of speaking, as if asleep.
Suddenly he opened his eyes wide. "You no flogettee horse?"

"Four horses, Charlie. I'll remember."

He drooped once more, only to rouse again at the end of a few minutes
with:

"First-chop coffin, plenty much silver"; and again, a little later
and very feebly: "Six-piecee--band music--China music--four-piecee
gong--four."

"I promise you, Charlie," said Wilbur.

"Now," answered Charlie--"now I die."

And the low-caste Cantonese coolie, with all the dignity and calmness of
a Cicero, composed himself for death.

An hour later Wilbur and Moran knew that he was dead. Yet, though they
had never left the hammock, they could not have told at just what moment
he died.

Later, on that same afternoon, Wilbur, from the crow's-nest, saw the
lighthouse on Point Loma and the huge rambling bulk of the Coronado
Hotel spreading out and along the beach.

It was the outpost of civilization. They were getting back to the world
again. Within an hour's ride of the hotel were San Diego, railroads,
newspapers, and policemen. Just off the hotel, however, Wilbur could
discern the gleaming white hull of a United States man-of-war. With the
glass he could make her out to be one of the monitors--the "Monterey" in
all probability.

After advising with Moran, it was decided to put in to land. The report
as to the castaways could be made to the "Monterey," and Charlie's body
forwarded to his Tong in San Francisco.

In two hours' time the schooner was well up, and Wilbur stood by Moran's
side at the wheel, watching and studying the familiar aspect of Coronado
Beach.

"It's a great winter resort," he told her. "I was down here with a party
two years ago. Nothing has changed. You see that big sort of round wing,
Moran, all full of windows? That's the dining-room. And there's the
bathhouse and the bowling-alley. See the people on the beach, and the
girls in white duck skirts; and look up there by the veranda--let me
take the glass--yes, there's a tally-ho coach. Isn't it queer to get
back to this sort of thing after Magdalena Bay and the beach-combers?"

Moran spun the wheel without reply, and gave an order to Jim to ease off
the foresheet.




XII. NEW CONDITIONS


The winter season at the Hotel del Coronado had been unusually gay that
year, and the young lady who wrote the society news in diary form for
one of the San Francisco weekly papers had held forth at much length
upon the hotel's "unbroken succession of festivities." She had also
noted that "prominent among the newest arrivals" had been Mr. Nat
Ridgeway, of San Francisco, who had brought down from the city, aboard
his elegant and sumptuously fitted yacht "Petrel," a jolly party,
composed largely of the season's debutantes. To be mentioned in the
latter category was Miss Josie Herrick, whose lavender coming-out tea
at the beginning of the season was still a subject of comment among the
gossips--and all the rest of it.

The "Petrel" had been in the harbor but a few days, and on this evening
a dance was given at the hotel in honor of her arrival. It was to be a
cotillon, and Nat Ridgeway was going to lead with Josie Herrick. There
had been a coaching party to Tia Juana that day, and Miss Herrick had
returned to the hotel only in time to dress. By 9:30 she emerged from
the process--which had involved her mother, her younger sister, her
maid, and one of the hotel chambermaids--a dainty, firm-corseted little
body, all tulle, white satin, and high-piled hair. She carried Marechal
Niel roses, ordered by wire from Monterey; and about an hour later, when
Ridgeway gave the nod to the waiting musicians, and swung her off to the
beat of a two-step, there was not a more graceful little figure upon the
floor of the incomparable round ballroom of the Coronado Hotel.

The cotillon was a great success. The ensigns and younger officers of
the monitor--at that time anchored off the hotel--attended in uniform;
and enough of the members of what was known in San Francisco as the
"dancing set" were present to give the affair the necessary entrain.
Even Jerry Haight, who belonged more distinctly to the "country-club
set," and who had spent the early part of that winter shooting elk in
Oregon, was among the ranks of the "rovers," who grouped themselves
about the draughty doorways, and endeavored to appear unconscious each
time Ridgeway gave the signal for a "break."

The figures had gone round the hall once. The "first set" was out again,
and as Ridgeway guided Miss Herrick by the "rovers" she looked over the
array of shirt-fronts, searching for Jerry Haight.

"Do you see Mr. Haight?" she asked of Ridgeway. "I wanted to favor
him this break. I owe him two already, and he'll never forgive me if I
overlook him now."

Jerry Haight had gone to the hotel office for a few moments' rest and
a cigarette, and was nowhere in sight. But when the set broke, and
Miss Herrick, despairing of Jerry, had started out to favor one of
the younger ensigns, she suddenly jostled against him, pushing his way
eagerly across the floor in the direction of the musicians' platform.

"Oh!" she cried, "Mr. Haight, you've missed your chance--I've been
looking for you."

But Jerry did not hear--he seemed very excited. He crossed the floor,
almost running, and went up on the platform where the musicians were
meandering softly through the mazes of "La Paloma," and brought them to
an abrupt silence.

"Here, I say, Haight!" exclaimed Ridgeway, who was near by, "you can't
break up my figure like that."

"Gi' me a call there on the bugle," said Haight rapidly to the
cornetist. "Anything to make 'em keep quiet a moment."

The cornetist sounded a couple of notes, and the cotillon paused in
the very act of the break. The shuffling of feet grew still, and the
conversation ceased. A diamond brooch had been found, no doubt, or some
supper announcement was to be made. But Jerry Haight, with a great sweep
of his arm, the forgotten cigarette between his fingers, shouted out
breathlessly:

"Ross Wilbur is out in the office of the hotel!"

There was an instant's silence, and then a great shout. Wilbur found!
Ross Wilbur come back from the dead! Ross Wilbur, hunted for and
bootlessly traced from Buenos Ayres in the south to the Aleutian Islands
in the north. Ross Wilbur, the puzzle of every detective bureau on the
coast; the subject of a thousand theories; whose name had figured in the
scareheads of every newspaper west of the Mississippi. Ross Wilbur, seen
at a fashionable tea and his club of an afternoon, then suddenly blotted
out from the world of men; swallowed up and engulfed by the unknown,
with not so much as a button left behind. Ross Wilbur the suicide; Ross
Wilbur, the murdered; Ross Wilbur, victim of a band of kidnappers, the
hero of some dreadful story that was never to be told, the mystery, the
legend--behold he was there! Back from the unknown, dropped from the
clouds, spewed up again from the bowels of the earth--a veritable god
from the machine who in a single instant was to disentangle all the
unexplained complications of those past winter months.

"Here he comes!" shouted Jerry, his eyes caught by a group of men
in full dress and gold lace who came tramping down the hall to the
ballroom, bearing a nondescript figure on their shoulders. "Here he
comes--the boys are bringing him in here! Oh!" he cried, turning to
the musicians, "can't you play something?--any-thing! Hit it up for all
you're worth! Ridgeway--Nat, look here! Ross was Yale, y' know--Yale
'95; ain't we enough Yale men here to give him the yell?"

Out of all time and tune, but with a vigor that made up for both, the
musicians banged into a patriotic air. Jerry, standing on a chair that
itself was standing on the platform, led half a dozen frantic men in the
long thunder of the "Brek-kek-kek-kek, co-ex, co-ex."

Around the edges of the hall excited girls, and chaperons themselves no
less agitated, were standing up on chairs and benches, splitting their
gloves and breaking their fans in their enthusiasm; while every male
dancer on the floor--ensigns in their gold-faced uniforms and "rovers"
in starched and immaculate shirt-bosoms--cheered and cheered and
struggled with one another to shake hands with a man whom two of their
number old Yale grads, with memories of athletic triumphs yet in their
minds--carried into that ball-room, borne high upon their shoulders.

And the hero of the occasion, the centre of all this enthusiasm--thus
carried as if in triumph into this assembly in evening dress, in white
tulle and whiter kid, odorous of delicate sachets and scarce-perceptible
perfumes--was a figure unhandsome and unkempt beyond description. His
hair was long, and hanging over his eyes. A thick, uncared-for beard
concealed the mouth and chin. He was dressed in a Chinaman's blouse and
jeans--the latter thrust into slashed and tattered boots. The tan and
weatherbeatings of nearly half a year of the tropics were spread over
his face; a partly healed scar disfigured one temple and cheek-bone;
the hands, to the very finger-nails, were gray with grime; the jeans and
blouse and boots were fouled with grease, with oil, with pitch, and all
manner of the dirt of an uncared-for ship. And as the dancers of the
cotillon pressed about, and a hundred kid-gloved hands stretched toward
his own palms, there fell from Wilbur's belt upon the waxed floor of the
ballroom the knife he had so grimly used in the fight upon the beach,
the ugly stains still blackening on the haft.

There was no more cotillon that night. They put him down at last; and
in half a dozen sentences Wilbur told them of how he had been
shanghaied--told them of Magdalena Bay, his fortune in the ambergris,
and the fight with the beach-combers.

"You people are going down there for target-practice, aren't you?" he
said, turning to one of the "Monterey's" officers in the crowd about
him. "Yes? Well, you'll find the coolies there, on the beach, waiting
for you. All but one," he added, grimly.

"We marooned six of them, but the seventh didn't need to be marooned.
They tried to plunder us of our boat, but, by -----, we made it
interesting for 'em!"

"I say, steady, old man!" exclaimed Nat Ridgeway, glancing nervously
toward the girls in the surrounding group. "This isn't Magdalena Bay,
you know."

And for the first time Wilbur felt a genuine pang of disappointment and
regret as he realized that it was not.

Half an hour later, Ridgeway drew him aside. "I say, Ross, let's get
out of here. You can't stand here talking all night. Jerry and you and
I will go up to my rooms, and we can talk there in peace. I'll order up
three quarts of fizz, and--"

"Oh, rot your fizz!" declared Wilbur. "If you love me, give me Christian
tobacco."

As they were going out of the ballroom, Wilbur caught sight of Josie
Herrick, and, breaking away from the others, ran over to her.

"Oh!" she cried, breathless. "To think and to think of your coming
back after all! No, I don't realize it--I can't. It will take me until
morning to find out that you've really come back. I just know now that
I'm happier than I ever was in my life before. Oh!" she cried, "do I
need to tell you how glad I am? It's just too splendid for words. Do you
know, I was thought to be the last person you had ever spoken to while
alive, and the reporters and all--oh, but we must have such a talk when
all is quiet again! And our dance--we've never had our dance. I've got
your card yet. Remember the one you wrote for me at the tea--a facsimile
of it was published in all the papers. You are going to be a hero when
you get back to San Francisco. Oh, Ross! Ross!" she cried, the tears
starting to her eyes, "you've really come back, and you are just as glad
as I am, aren't you--glad that you've come back--come back to me?"

Later on, in Ridgeway's room, Wilbur told his story again more in detail
to Ridgeway and Jerry. All but one portion of it. He could not make
up his mind to speak to them--these society fellows, clubmen and city
bred--of Moran. How he was going to order his life henceforward--his
life, that he felt to be void of interest without her--he did not know.
That was a question for later consideration.

"We'll give another cotillon!" exclaimed Ridgeway, "up in the city--give
it for you, Ross, and you'll lead. It'll be the event of the season!"

Wilbur uttered an exclamation of contempt. "I've done with that sort of
foolery," he answered.

"Nonsense; why, think, we'll have it in your honor. Every smart girl in
town will come, and you'll be the lion of--"

"You don't seem to understand!" cried Wilbur impatiently. "Do you think
there's any fun in that for me now? Why, man, I've fought--fought with a
naked dirk, fought with a coolie who snapped at me like an ape--and you
talk to me of dancing and functions and german favors! It wouldn't do
some of you people a bit of harm if you were shanghaied yourselves.
That sort of life, if it don't do anything else, knocks a big bit of
seriousness into you. You fellows make me sick," he went on vehemently.
"As though there wasn't anything else to do but lead cotillons and get
up new figures!"

"Well, what do you propose to do?" asked Nat Ridgeway. "Where are you
going now--back to Magdalena Bay?"

"No."

"Where, then?"

Wilbur smote the table with his fist.

"Cuba!" he cried. "I've got a crack little schooner out in the bay here,
and I've got a hundred thousand dollars' worth of loot aboard of her.
I've tried beach-combing for a while, and now I'll try filibustering.
It may be a crazy idea, but it's better than dancing. I'd rather lead an
expedition than a german, and you can chew on that, Nathaniel Ridgeway."

Jerry looked at him as he stood there before them in the filthy, reeking
blouse and jeans, the ragged boots, and the mane of hair and tangled
beard, and remembered the Wilbur he used to know--the Wilbur of the
carefully creased trousers, the satin scarfs and fancy waistcoats.

"You're a different sort than when you went away, Ross," said Jerry.

"Right you are," answered Wilbur.

"But I will venture a prophecy," continued Jerry, looking keenly at him.

"Ross, you are a born-and-bred city man. It's in the blood of you and
the bones of you. I'll give you three years for this new notion of yours
to wear itself out. You think just now you're going to spend the rest
of your life as an amateur buccaneer. In three years, at the outside,
you'll be using your 'loot,' as you call it, or the interest of it, to
pay your taxes and your tailor, your pew rent and your club dues,
and you'll be what the biographers call 'a respectable member of the
community.'"

"Did you ever kill a man, Jerry?" asked Wilbur. "No? Well, you kill one
some day--kill him in a fair give-and-take fight--and see how it makes
you feel, and what influence it has on you, and then come back and talk
to me."

It was long after midnight. Wilbur rose.

"We'll ring for a boy," said Ridgeway, "and get you a room. I can fix
you out with clothes enough in the morning."

Wilbur stared in some surprise, and then said:

"Why, I've got the schooner to look after. I can't leave those coolies
alone all night."

"You don't mean to say you're going on board at this time in the
morning?"

"Of course!"

"Why--but--but you'll catch your death of cold."

Wilbur stared at Ridgeway, then nodded helplessly, and, scratching his
head, said, half aloud:

"No, what's the use; I can't make 'em understand. Good-night I'll see
you in the morning."

"We'll all come out and visit you on your yacht," Ridgeway called after
him; but Wilbur did not hear.

In answer to Wilbur's whistle, Jim came in with the dory and took him
off to the schooner. Moran met him as he came over the side.

"I took the watch myself to-night and let the boy turn in," she said.
"How is it ashore, mate?"

"We've come back to the world of little things, Moran," said Wilbur.
"But we'll pull out of here in the morning and get back to the places
where things are real."

"And that's a good hearing, mate."

"Let's get up here on the quarterdeck," added Wilbur. "I've something to
propose to you."

Moran laid an arm across his shoulder, and the two walked aft. For
half an hour Wilbur talked to her earnestly about his new idea of
filibustering; and as he told her of the war he warmed to the subject,
his face glowing, his eyes sparkling. Suddenly, however, he broke off.

"But no!" he exclaimed. "You don't understand, Moran. How can
you--you're foreign-born. It's no affair of yours!"

"Mate! mate!" cried Moran, her hands upon his shoulders. "It's you who
don't understand--don't understand me. Don't you know--can't you see?
Your people are mine now. I'm happy only in your happiness. You were
right--the best happiness is the happiness one shares. And your sorrows
belong to me, just as I belong to you, dear. Your enemies are mine, and
your quarrels are my quarrels." She drew his head quickly toward her and
kissed him.

In the morning the two had made up their minds to a certain vague course
of action. To get away--anywhere--was their one aim. Moran was by nature
a creature unfit for civilization, and the love of adventure and the
desire for action had suddenly leaped to life in Wilbur's blood and was
not to be resisted. They would get up to San Francisco, dispose of their
"loot," outfit the "Bertha Millner" as a filibuster, and put to sea
again. They had discussed the advisability of rounding the Horn in so
small a ship as the "Bertha Millner," but Moran had settled that at
once.

"I've got to know her pretty well," she told Wilbur. "She's sound as a
nut. Only let's get away from this place."

But toward ten o'clock on the morning after their arrival off Coronado,
and just as they were preparing to get under way, Hoang touched Wilbur's
elbow.

"Seeum lil one-piece smoke-boat; him come chop-chop."

In fact, a little steam-launch was rapidly approaching the schooner. In
another instant she was alongside. Jerry, Nat Ridgeway, Josie Herrick,
and an elderly woman, whom Wilbur barely knew as Miss Herrick's married
sister, were aboard.

"We've come off to see your yacht!" cried Miss Herrick to Wilbur as the
launch bumped along the schooner's counter. "Can we come aboard?" She
looked very pretty in her crisp pink shirt-waist her white duck skirt,
and white kid shoes, her sailor hat tilted at a barely perceptible
angle. The men were in white flannels and smart yachting suits. "Can we
come aboard?" she repeated.

Wilbur gasped and stared. "Good Lord!" he muttered. "Oh, come along," he
added, desperately.

The party came over the side.

"Oh, my!" said Miss Herrick blankly, stopping short.

The decks, masts, and rails of the schooner were shiny with a black
coating of dirt and grease; the sails were gray with grime; a strangling
odor of oil and tar, of cooking and of opium, of Chinese punk and drying
fish, pervaded all the air. In the waist, Hoang and Jim, bare to the
belt, their queues looped around their necks to be out of the way,
were stowing the dory and exchanging high-pitched monosyllables.
Miss Herrick's sister had not come aboard. The three visitors--Jerry,
Ridgeway, and Josie--stood nervously huddled together, their elbows
close in, as if to avoid contact with the prevailing filth, their
immaculate white outing-clothes detaching themselves violently against
the squalor and sordid grime of the schooner's background.

"Oh, my!" repeated Miss Herrick in dismay, half closing her eyes. "To
think of what you must have been through! I thought you had some kind of
a yacht. I had no idea it would be like this." And as she spoke, Moran
came suddenly upon the group from behind the foresail, and paused in
abrupt surprise, her thumbs in her belt.

She still wore men's clothes and was booted to the knee. The heavy blue
woolen shirt was open at the throat, the sleeves rolled half-way up
her large white arms. In her belt she carried her haftless Scandinavian
dirk. She was hatless as ever, and her heavy, fragrant cables of
rye-hued hair fell over her shoulders and breast to far below her belt.

Miss Herrick started sharply, and Moran turned an inquiring glance upon
Wilbur. Wilbur took his resolution in both hands.

"Miss Herrick," he said, "this is Moran--Moran Sternersen."

Moran took a step forward, holding out her hand. Josie, all bewildered,
put her tight-gloved fingers into the calloused palm, looking up
nervously into Moran's face.

"I'm sure," she said feebly, almost breathlessly, "I--I'm sure I'm very
pleased to meet Miss Sternersen."

It was long before the picture left Wilbur's imagination. Josie Herrick,
petite, gowned in white, crisp from her maid's grooming; and Moran,
sea-rover and daughter of a hundred Vikings, towering above her, booted
and belted, gravely clasping Josie's hand in her own huge fist.




XIII. MORAN STERNERSEN


San Francisco once more! For two days the "Bertha Millner" had been
beating up the coast, fighting her way against northerly winds, butting
into head seas.

The warmth, the stillness, the placid, drowsing quiet of Magdalena
Bay, steaming under the golden eye of a tropic heaven, the white, baked
beach, the bay-heads, striated with the mirage in the morning, the
coruscating sunset, the enchanted mystery of the purple night, with
its sheen of stars and riding moon, were now replaced by the hale and
vigorous snorting of the Trades, the roll of breakers to landward, and
the unremitting gallop of the unnumbered multitudes of gray-green seas,
careering silently past the schooner, their crests occasionally hissing
into brusque eruptions of white froth, or smiting broad on under her
counter, showering her decks with a sprout of icy spray. It was cold;
at times thick fogs cloaked all the world of water. To the east a
procession of bleak hills defiled slowly southward; lighthouses were
passed; streamers of smoke on the western horizon marked the passage of
steamships; and once they met and passed close by a huge Cape Horner,
a great deep-sea tramp, all sails set and drawing, rolling slowly and
leisurely in seas that made the schooner dance.

At last the Farallones looked over the ocean's edge to the north; then
came the whistling-buoy, the Seal Rocks, the Heads, Point Reyes, the
Golden Gate flanked with the old red Presidio, Lime Point with its
watching cannon; and by noon of a gray and boisterous day, under a lusty
wind and a slant of rain, just five months after her departure, the
"Bertha Millner" let go her anchor in San Francisco Bay some few hundred
yards off the Lifeboat Station.

In this berth the schooner was still three or four miles from the
city and the water-front. But Moran detested any nearer approach to
civilization, and Wilbur himself was willing to avoid, at least for one
day, the publicity which he believed the "Bertha's" reappearance was
sure to attract. He remembered, too, that the little boat carried with
her a fortune of $100,000, and decided that until it could be safely
landed and stored it was not desirable that its existence should be
known along "the Front."

For days, weeks even, Wilbur had looked eagerly forward to this return
to his home. He had seen himself again in his former haunts, in his
club, and in the houses along Pacific avenue where he was received;
but no sooner had the anchor-chain ceased rattling in the "Bertha's"
hawse-pipe than a strange revulsion came upon him. The new man that
seemed to have so suddenly sprung to life within him, the Wilbur who
was the mate of the "Bertha Millner," the Wilbur who belonged to Moran,
believed that he could see nothing to be desired in city life. For
him was the unsteady deck of a schooner, and the great winds and the
tremendous wheel of the ocean's rim, and the horizon that ever fled
before his following prow; so he told himself, so he believed. What
attractions could the city offer him? What amusements? what excitements?
He had been flung off the smoothly spinning circumference of
well-ordered life out into the void.

He had known romance, and the spell of the great, simple, and primitive
emotions; he had sat down to eat with buccaneers; he had seen the
fierce, quick leap of unleashed passions, and had felt death swoop close
at his nape and pass like a swift spurt of cold air. City life, his old
life, had no charm for him now. Wilbur honestly believed that he
was changed to his heart's core. He thought that, like Moran, he was
henceforth to be a sailor of the sea, a rover, and he saw the rest of
his existence passed with her, aboard their faithful little schooner.
They would have the whole round world as their playground; they held the
earth and the great seas in fief; there was no one to let or to hinder.
They two belonged to each other. Once outside the Heads again, and they
swept the land of cities and of little things behind them, and they two
were left alone once more; alone in the great world of romance.

About an hour after her arrival off the station, while Hoang and the
hands were furling the jib and foresail and getting the dory over the
side, Moran remarked to Wilbur:

"It's good we came in when we did, mate; the glass is going down fast,
and the wind's breezing up from the west; we're going to have a blow;
the tide will be going out in a little while, and we never could have
come in against wind and tide."

"Moran," said Wilbur, "I'm going ashore--into the station here; there's
a telephone line there; see the wires? I can't so much as turn my hand
over before I have some shore-going clothes. What do you suppose they
would do to me if I appeared on Kearney Street in this outfit? I'll ring
up Langley & Michaels--they are the wholesale chemists in town--and have
their agent come out here and talk business to us about our ambergris.
We've got to pay the men their prize-money; then as soon as we get
our own money in hand we can talk about overhauling and outfitting the
'Bertha.'"

Moran refused to accompany him ashore and into the Lifeboat Station.
Roofed houses were an object of suspicion to her. Already she had begun
to be uneasy at the distant sight of the city of San Francisco, Nob,
Telegraph, Russian, and Rincon hills, all swarming with buildings and
grooved with streets; even the land-locked harbor fretted her. Wilbur
could see she felt imprisoned, confined. When he had pointed out the
Palace Hotel to her--a vast gray cube in the distance, overtopping the
surrounding roofs--she had sworn under her breath.

"And people can live there, good heavens! Why not rabbit-burrows, and
be done with it? Mate, how soon can we be out to sea again? I hate this
place."

Wilbur found the captain of the Lifeboat Station in the act of sitting
down to a dinner of boiled beef and cabbage. He was a strongly built
well-looking man, with the air more of a soldier than a sailor. He had
already been studying the schooner through his front window and had
recognized her, and at once asked Wilbur news of Captain Kitchell.
Wilbur told him as much of his story as was necessary, but from the
captain's talk he gathered that the news of his return had long since
been wired from Coronado, and that it would be impossible to avoid a
nine days' notoriety. The captain of the station (his name was Hodgson)
made Wilbur royally welcome, insisted upon his dining with him, and
himself called up Langley & Michaels as soon as the meal was over.

It was he who offered the only plausible solution of the mystery of the
lifting and shaking of the schooner and the wrecking of the junk. Though
Wilbur was not satisfied with Hodgson's explanation, it was the only one
he ever heard.

When he had spoken of the matter, Hodgson had nodded his head.
"Sulphur-bottoms," he said.

"Sulphur-bottoms?"

"Yes; they're a kind of right-whale; they get barnacles and a kind of
marine lice on their backs, and come up and scratch them selves against
a ship's keel, just like a hog under a fence."

When Wilbur's business was done, and he was making ready to return to
the schooner, Hodgson remarked suddenly: "Hear you've got a strapping
fine girl aboard with you. Where did you fall in with her?" and he
winked and grinned.

Wilbur started as though struck, and took himself hurriedly away;
but the man's words had touched off in his brain a veritable mine of
conjecture. Moran in Magdalena Bay was consistent, congruous, and fitted
into her environment. But how--how was Wilbur to explain her to San
Francisco, and how could his behavior seem else than ridiculous to the
men of his club and to the women whose dinner invitations he was wont to
receive? They could not understand the change that had been wrought
in him; they did not know Moran, the savage, half-tamed Valkyrie so
suddenly become a woman. Hurry as he would, the schooner could not be
put to sea again within a fortnight. Even though he elected to live
aboard in the meanwhile, the very business of her preparation would call
him to the city again and again. Moran could not be kept a secret. As it
was, all the world knew of her by now. On the other hand he could easily
understand her position; to her it seemed simplicity itself that they
two who loved each other should sail away and pass their lives together
upon the sea, as she and her father had done before.

Like most men, Wilbur had to walk when he was thinking hard. He sent the
dory back to the schooner with word to Moran that he would take a walk
around the beach and return in an hour or two. He set off along the
shore in the direction of Fort Mason, the old red-brick fort at the
entrance to the Golden Gate. At this point in the Presidio Government
reservation the land is solitary. Wilbur followed the line of the beach
to the old fort; and there, on the very threshold of the Western
world, at the very outpost of civilization, sat down in the lee of the
crumbling fortification, and scene by scene reviewed the extraordinary
events of the past six months.

In front of him ran the narrow channel of the Golden Gate; to his right
was the bay and the city; at his left the open Pacific.

He saw himself the day of his advent aboard the "Bertha" in his top hat
and frock coat; saw himself later "braking down" at the windlass, the
"Petrel" within hailing distance.

Then the pictures began to thicken fast: the derelict bark "Lady
Letty" rolling to her scuppers, abandoned and lonely; the "boy" in the
wheel-box; Kitchell wrenching open the desk in the captain's stateroom;
Captain Sternersen buried at sea, his false teeth upside down; the black
fury of the squall, and Moran at the wheel; Moran lying at full
length on the deck, getting the altitude of a star; Magdalena Bay; the
shark-fishing; the mysterious lifting and shuddering of the schooner;
the beach-combers' junk, with its staring red eyes; Hoang, naked to the
waist, gleaming with sweat and whale-oil; the ambergris; the race to
beach the sinking schooner; the never-to-be-forgotten night when he and
Moran had camped together on the beach; Hoang taken prisoner, and the
hideous filing of his teeth; the beach-combers, silent and watchful
behind their sand breastworks; the Chinaman he had killed twitching and
hic-coughing at his feet; Moran turned Berserker, bursting down upon
him through a haze of smoke; Charlie dying in the hammock aboard the
schooner, ordering his funeral with its "four-piecee horse"; Coronado;
the incongruous scene in the ballroom; and, last of all, Josie Herrick
in white duck and kid shoes, giving her hand to Moran in her boots and
belt, hatless as ever, her sleeves rolled up to above the elbows, her
white, strong arm extended, her ruddy face, and pale, milk-blue eyes
gravely observant, her heavy braids, yellow as ripening rye, hanging
over her shoulder and breast.

A sudden explosion of cold wind, striking down blanket-wise and
bewildering from out the west, made Wilbur look up quickly. The gray sky
seemed scudding along close overhead. The bay, the narrow channel of the
Golden Gate, the outside ocean, were all whitening with crests of waves.
At his feet the huge green ground-swells thundered to the attack of the
fort's granite foundations. Through the Gate, the bay seemed rushing out
to the Pacific. A bewildered gull shot by, tacking and slanting against
the gusts that would drive it out to sea. Evidently the storm was not
far off. Wilbur rose to his feet, and saw the "Bertha Millner," close
in, unbridled and free as a runaway horse, headed directly for the open
sea, and rushing on with all the impetus of wind and tide!




XIV. THE OCEAN IS CALLING FOR YOU


A little while after Wilbur had set off for the station, while Moran
was making the last entries in the log-book, seated at the table in the
cabin, Jim appeared at the door.

"Well," she said, looking up.

"China boy him want go asho' plenty big, seeum flen up Chinatown in um
city."

"Shore leave, is it?" said Moran. "You deserted once before without
even saying good-by; and my hand in the fire, you'll come back this time
dotty with opium. Get away with you. We'll have men aboard here in a few
days."

"Can go?" inquired Jim suavely.

"I said so. Report our arrival to your Six Companies."

Hoang rowed Jim and the coolies ashore, and then returned to the
schooner with the dory and streamed her astern. As he passed the cabin
door on his way forward, Moran hailed him.

"I thought you went ashore?" she cried.

"Heap flaid," he answered. "Him other boy go up Chinatown; him tell Sam
Yup; I tink Sam Yup alla same killee me. I no leaveum ship two, thlee
day; bimeby I go Olegon. I stay topside ship. You wantum cook. I cook
plenty fine; standum watch for you."

Indeed, ever since leaving Coronado the ex-beach-comber had made himself
very useful about the schooner; had been, in fact, obsequiousness
itself, and seemed to be particularly desirous of gaining the good-will
of the "Bertha's" officers. He understood pigeon English better than
Jim, and spoke it even better than Charlie had done. He acted the part
of interpreter between Wilbur and the hands; even turned to in the
galley upon occasion; and of his own accord offered to give the vessel
a coat of paint above the water-line. Moran turned back to her log, and
Hoang went forward. Standing on the forward deck, he looked after the
"Bertha's" coolies until they disappeared behind a row of pine-trees on
the Presidio Reservation, going cityward. Wilbur was nowhere in sight.
For a longtime Hoang studied the Lifeboat Station narrowly, while he
made a great show of coiling a length of rope. The station was just out
of hailing distance. Nobody seemed stirring. The whole shore and back
land thereabout was deserted; the edge of the city was four miles
distant. Hoang returned to the forecastle-hatch and went below, groping
under his bunk in his ditty-box.

"Well, what is it?" exclaimed Moran a moment later, as the beach-comber
entered the cabin, and shut the door behind him.

Hoang did not answer; but she did not need to repeat the question. In an
instant Moran knew very well what he had come for.

"God!" she exclaimed under her breath, springing to her feet. "Why
didn't we think of this!"

Hoang slipped his knife from the sleeve of his blouse. For an instant
the old imperiousness, the old savage pride and anger, leaped again in
Moran's breast--then died away forever. She was no longer the same Moran
of that first fight on board the schooner, when the beach-combers had
plundered her of her "loot." Only a few weeks ago, and she would have
fought with Hoang without hesitation and without mercy; would have
wrenched a leg from the table and brained him where he stood. But she
had learned since to know what it meant to be dependent; to rely
for protection upon some one who was stronger than she; to know her
weakness; to know that she was at last a woman, and to be proud of it.

She did not fight; she had no thought of fighting. Instinctively she
cried aloud, "Mate--mate!--Oh, mate, where are you? Help me!" and
Hoang's knife nailed the words within her throat.

The "loot" was in a brass-bound chest under one of the cabin's bunks,
stowed in two gunny-bags. Hoang drew them out, knotted the two together,
and, slinging them over his shoulder, regained the deck.

He looked carefully at the angry sky and swelling seas, noting the
direction of the wind and set of the tide; then went forward and cast
the anchor-chains from the windlass in such a manner that the schooner
must inevitably wrench free with the first heavy strain. The dory was
still tugging at the line astern. Hoang dropped the sacks in the boat,
swung himself over the side, and rowed calmly toward the station's
wharf. If any notion of putting to sea with the schooner had entered the
obscure, perverted cunning of his mind, he had almost instantly rejected
it. Chinatown was his aim; once there and under the protection of his
Tong, Hoang knew that he was safe. He knew the hiding-places that the
See Yup Association provided for its members--hiding places whose very
existence was unknown to the police of the White Devil.

No one interrupted--no one even noticed--his passage to the station. At
best, it was nothing more than a coolie carrying a couple of gunny-sacks
across his shoulder. Two hours later, Hoang was lost in San Francisco's
Chinatown.

*****

At the sight of the schooner sweeping out to sea, Wilbur was for an
instant smitten rigid. What had happened? Where was Moran? Why was there
nobody on board? A swift, sharp sense of some unnamed calamity leaped
suddenly at his throat. Then he was aware of a crattering of hoofs along
the road that led to the fort. Hodgson threw himself from one of the
horses that were used in handling the surf-boat, and ran to him hatless
and panting.

"My God!" he shouted. "Look, your schooner, do you see her? She broke
away after I'd started to tell you--to tell you--to tell you--your girl
there on board--It was horrible!"

"Is she all right?" cried Wilbur, at top voice, for the clamor of the
gale was increasing every second.

"All right! No; they've killed her--somebody--the coolies, I
think--knifed her! I went out to ask you people to come into the station
to have supper with me--"

"Killed her--killed her! Who? I don't believe you--"

"Wait--to have supper with me, and I found her there on the cabin floor.
She was still breathing. I carried her up on deck--there was nobody else
aboard. I carried her up and laid her on the deck--and she died there.
Just now I came after you to tell you, and--"

"Good God Almighty, man! who killed her? Where is she? Oh--but of course
it isn't true! How did you know? Moran killed! Moran killed!"

"And the schooner broke away after I started!"

"Moran killed! But--but--she's not dead yet; we'll have to see--"

"She died on the deck; I brought her up and laid her on--"

"How do you know she's dead? Where is she? Come on, we'll go right back
to her--to the station!"

"She's on board--out there!"

"Where--where is she? My God, man, tell me where she is!"

"Out there aboard the schooner. I brought her up on deck--I left her on
the schooner--on the deck--she was stabbed in the throat--and then came
after you to tell you. Then the schooner broke away while I was coming;
she's drifting out to sea now!"

"Where is she? Where is she?"

"Who--the girl--the schooner--which one? The girl is on the
schooner--and the schooner--that's her, right there--she's drifting out
to sea!"

Wilbur put both hands to his temples, closing his eyes.

"I'll go back!" exclaimed Hodgson. "We'll have the surf-boat out and get
after her; we'll bring the body back!"

"No, no!" cried Wilbur, "it's better--this way. Leave her, let her
go--she's going out to sea again!"

"But the schooner won't live two hours outside in this weather; she'll
go down!"

"It's better--that way--let her go. I want it so!"

"I can't stay!" cried the other again. "If the patrol should sig-storm
coming up, and I've got to be at my station."

Wilbur did not answer; he was watching the schooner.

"I can't stay!" cried the other again. "If the patrol should signal--I
can't stop here, I must be on duty. Come back, you can't do anything!"

"No!"

"I have got to go!" Hodgson ran back, swung himself on the horse, and
rode away at a furious gallop, inclining his head against the gusts.

And the schooner in a world of flying spray, white scud, and driving
spoondrift, her cordage humming, her forefoot churning, the flag at her
peak straining stiff in the gale, came up into the narrow passage of the
Golden Gate, riding high upon the outgoing tide. On she came, swinging
from crest to crest of the waves that kept her company and that ran to
meet the ocean, shouting and calling out beyond there under the low,
scudding clouds.

Wilbur had climbed to the top of the old fort. Erect upon its granite
ledge he stood, and watched and waited.

Not once did the "Bertha Millner" falter in her race. Like an unbitted
horse, all restraint shaken off, she ran free toward the ocean as to her
pasture-land. She came nearer, nearer, rising and rolling with the seas,
her bowsprit held due west, pointing like a finger out to sea, to the
west--out to the world of romance. And then at last, as the little
vessel drew opposite the old fort and passed not one hundred yards away,
Wilbur, watching from the rampart, saw Moran lying upon the deck with
outstretched arms and calm, upturned face; lying upon the deck of that
lonely fleeing schooner as upon a bed of honor, still and calm, her
great braids smooth upon her breast, her arms wide; alone with the sea;
alone in death as she had been in life. She passed out of his life as
she had come into it--alone, upon a derelict ship, abandoned to the sea.
She went out with the tide, out with the storms; out, out, out to the
great gray Pacific that knew her and loved her, and that shouted and
called for her, and thundered in the joy of her as she came to meet him
like a bride to meet a bridegroom.

"Good-by, Moran!" shouted Wilbur as she passed. "Good-by, good-by,
Moran! You were not for me--not for me! The ocean is calling for
you, dear; don't you hear him? Don't you hear him? Good-by, good-by,
good-by!"

The schooner swept by, shot like an arrow through the swirling currents
of the Golden Gate, and dipped and bowed and courtesied to the Pacific
that reached toward her his myriad curling fingers. They infolded her,
held her close, and drew her swiftly, swiftly out to the great heaving
bosom, tumultuous and beating in its mighty joy, its savage exultation
of possession.

Wilbur stood watching. The little schooner lessened in the
distance--became a shadow in mist and flying spray--a shadow moving
upon the face of the great waste of water. Fainter and fainter she grew,
vanished, reappeared, was heaved up again--a mere speck upon the western
sky--a speck that dwindled and dwindled, then slowly melted away into
the gray of the horizon.







*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORAN OF THE LADY LETTY ***


    

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