THE TREASURE-SEEKER
It was a starlit night while we still lingered off the coast of Sumatra for
water and fresh vegetables. The land was low and black against the steely
green of the sky, and a young moon like a silver thread shone in the west.
Blodgett, the new man in our watch, was the centre of a little group on the
forecastle.
He was small and wrinkled and very wise. The more I saw and heard of him,
the more I marveled that he had not attracted my attention before; but up
to this point in the voyage it was only by night that he had appeared
different from other men, and I thought of him only as a prowler in the
dark.
In some ways he was like a cat. By day he would sit in corners in the sun
when opportunity offered, or lurk around the galley, shirking so brazenly,
that the men were amused rather than angry. Even at work he was as slow and
drowsy as an old cat, half opening his sleepy eyes when the officers called
him to account, and receiving an occasional kick or cuff with the same mild
surprise that a favorite cat might show. But once darkness had fallen,
Blodgett was a different man. He became nervously wakeful. His eyes
distended and his face lighted with strange animation. He walked hither and
yon. He fairly arched his neck. And sometimes, when some ordinary incident
struck his peculiar humor, he would throw back his head, open his great
mouth, and utter a screech of wild laughter for all the world like the yowl
of a tom-cat.
On that particular night he walked the forecastle, keeping close to the
bulwarks, till the rest of us assembled by the rigging and watched him with
a kind of fascination. After a time he saw us gathered there and came over
to where we were. His eyes were large and his wrinkled features twitched
with eagerness. He seemed very old; he had traveled to the farthest lands.
"Men," he cried in his thin, windy voice, "yonder's the moon."
The moon indeed was there. There was no reason to gainsay him. He stood
with it over his left shoulder and extended his arms before him, one
pointing somewhat to the right, the other to the left. "The right hand is
the right way," he cried, "but the left we'll never leave."
We stared at the man and wondered if he were mad.
"No," he said, smiling at our puzzled glances, "we'll never leave the
left."
"Belay that talk," said one of the men sharply. "Ye'll have to steer a
clearer course than that if you want us to follow you."
Blodgett smiled. "The course is clear," he replied. "Yonder"--he waved his
right hand--"is Singapore and the Chinese Sea and Whampoa. It's the right
course. Our orders is for that course. Our cargo is for that course. It's
the course that will make money for the owners. It's the right--you
understand?--my right hand and the right course according to orders. But
yonder"--this time he waved his left hand--"is the course that won't be
left. And yet it's the left you know--my left hand."
He explained his feeble little joke with an air of pride.
"Why won't it be left?" the gruff seaman demanded.
"Because," said Blodgett, "we ain't going to leave it. There's gold there
and no end of treasure. Do you suppose Captain Falk is going to leave it
all for some one else to get? He's going to sail through Malacca Strait and
across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta. That's what he's going to do. I've
been in India myself and seen the heaps of gold lying on the ground by the
money-changer's door and no body watching it but a sleepy Gentoo."
"But what's this treasure you're talking about," some one asked.
"Sure," said Blodgett in a husky whisper, "it's a treasure such as never
was heard of before. There's barrels and barrels of gold and diamonds and
emeralds and rubies and no end of such gear. There's idols with crowns of
precious stones, and eyes in their carved heads that would pay a king's
ransom. There's money enough in gold mohurs and rupees to buy the Bank of
England."
It was a cock-and-bull story that the little old man told us; but, absurd
though it was, he had an air of impressive sincerity; and although every
one of us would have laughed the yarn out of meeting had it been told of
Captain Whidden, affairs had changed in the last days aboard ship.
Certainly we did not trust Captain Falk. I thought of the cook's dark
words, "A little roun' hole in the back of his head--he was shot f'om
behine!" As we followed the direction of Blodgett's two hands,--the right
to the northeast and the Chinese shore, the left to the northwest and the
dim lowlands of Sumatra that lay along the road to Burma,--anything seemed
possible. Moon-madness was upon us, and we were carried away by the mystery
of the night.
Such madness is not uncommon. Of tales in the fore-castle during a long
voyage there is no end. Extraordinary significance is attributed to trivial
happenings in the daily life of the crew, and the wonders of the sea and
the land are overshadowed completely by simple incidents that superstitious
shipmates are sure to exaggerate and to dwell upon.
After a time, though, as Blodgett walked back and forth along the bulwark,
like a cat that will not go into the open, my sanity came back to me.
"That's all nonsense," I said--perhaps too sharply; "Mr. Falk is an honest
seaman. His whole future would be ruined if he attempted any such thing as
that."
"Ay, hear the boy," Blodgett muttered sarcastically. "What does the boy
think a man rich enough to buy all the ships in the king's navy will care
for such a future as Captain Falk has in front of him? Hgh! A boy that
don't know enough to call his captain by his proper title!"
Blodgett fairly bristled in his indignation, and I said no more, although I
knew well enough--or thought I did--that such a scheme was quite too wild
to be plausible. Captain Falk might play a double game, but not such a
silly double game as that.
"No," said Bill Hayden solemnly, as if voicing my own thought, "the captain
ain't going to spoil his good name like that." Poor, stupid old Bill!
Blodgett snorted angrily, but the others laughed at Bill--silly old butt of
the forecastle, daft about his little girl!--and after speculating at
length concerning the treasure that Blodgett had described so vaguely, fell
at last into a hot argument about how far a skipper could disobey the
orders of his owners without committing piracy.
Thus began the rumor that revealed the scatterwitted convictions so
characteristic of the strange, cat-like Blodgett, which later were to lead
almost to death certain simple members of the crew; which served, by a
freak of chance, to involve poor Bill Hayden in an affair that came to a
tragic end; and which, by a whim of fortune almost as remote, though
happier, placed me in closer touch with Roger Hamlin than I had been since
the Island Princess sailed from Salem harbor.
An hour later I saw the cook standing silently by his galley. He gave me
neither look nor word, although he must have known that I was watching him,
but only puffed at his rank old pipe and stared at the stars and the hills.
I wondered if the jungle growth reminded him of his own African tropics; if
behind his grim, seamed face an unsuspected sense of poetry lurked, a sort
of half-beast, half-human imagination.
Never glancing at me, never indicating by so much as a quiver of his black
features that he had perceived my presence, he sighed deeply, walked to the
rail and knocked the dead ashes from his pipe into the water. He then
turned and went into the galley and barricaded himself against intruders,
there to stay until, some time in the night, he should seek his berth in
the steerage for the few hours of deep sleep that were all his great body
required. But as he passed me I heard him murmuring to himself, "Dat Bill
Hayden, he betteh look out, yass, sah. He say Mistah Captain Falk don't
want to go to spoil his good name. Dat Hay den he betteh look out."
With a bang of his plank door the old darky shut himself away from all of
us in the darkness of his little kingdom of pots and pans.
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III
WHICH APPROACHES A CRISIS
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