Hunter has the best eyes of any of the men. I'll get hold of him."
Jerry disappeared below, and Jack walked along the windward side. The
sea, rolling eastward in long, measured swells, reflected the sun from a
myriad of glancing ripples that gleamed and glittered in the morning
light. The sky, light blue and cloudless, looked like pale fire. On
board the schooner the brass-work, as she rose and dipped in the troughs
of the long seas, flashed and shone like burnished gold. The white
canvas caught the sunshine, while on the decks, still undried from their
recent scrubbing, the putty in the curving seams showed sharply white.
The four boats were inboard, turned bottom up and cross-lashed to the
rail.
Castleport found the four men of the watch gathered in the peak, looking
over the bows. He came up and saw that they were watching a school of
dolphins that were keeping ahead of the yacht. The big fish seemed to
vibrate. They sounded and leaped clear of the water, flashing and
dripping with sparkling drops. A thousand colors rippled along their
backs, as they turned and swayed, and they swung ahead like the very
incarnation of frolic.
The captain saw the man he wanted standing on the port side, and called
him to him.
"Hunter," he said, "go aft to Mr. Taberman; he'll give you a pair of
glasses. Go aloft and keep a sharp lookout for land. We ought to raise
it on the port bow."
The effect produced by this order was electrical. The four men whipped
around and stared at Jack and at each other.
"Land!" exclaimed one with a foolish grin. "Land!"
Hunter touched his duck hat and flew aft; Jack followed more leisurely.
In a couple of minutes Hunter was ensconced in the foretop, eagerly
scanning the eastern horizon. Castleport settled himself in the sun on
the leeward side of the cockpit, and filled his pipe. He had hardly
lighted it and taken half a dozen whiffs, when from aloft rang out the
magical cry, "Land!"
"Where away?" shouted the captain, leaping to his feet just as Tab
appeared in the companion-way.
"Have we raised it, Jack? Have we raised it?" Tab demanded excitedly.
"Not yet, Tab. Just been sighted," returned Jack, peering up at the
fore-crosstrees, and awaiting the lookout's answer to his hail.
"'Bout two points off the weather-bow," sang out Hunter from aloft.
"Just a low bank. Looks like cliffs through glasses!"
"Come along, Tab!" cried Jack. "Let's go aloft and have a look at it."
They made their way quickly along the deck, gained the weather-shrouds,
and ran up. The watch below had turned out, just as they were,
half-dressed and bareheaded. Two of the men had run out to the
bowsprit's end, and holding on to the topmast stay were looking over the
luff of the flying-jib. Old Gonzague, venerable as Vanderdecken, his
white hair stirred by the wind,--for he was as usual without a cap,--had
already gained the main-trees, where he stood shading his eyes with one
hand while he gripped the shrouds with the other.
"Where is it?" demanded Jerry, when he and Jack had reached the trees.
"There away, sir," Hunter answered, pointing as he passed the glasses to
the captain.
With the unaided eye Jack and Jerry could discern, lying low on the
eastern rim of the horizon, a faint brownish streak. With one arm about
the topmast for support, Jack looked at the land through the glasses. At
first, owing to the oscillation of the mast, he could not keep the brown
streak in the field of vision, but in a moment he overcame this
difficulty, and was able to make out a length of cliff of nearly uniform
height, although split by numerous fjord-like bays. By its varied
color--for he could see that the ribbon of shore was splashed with reds
and blues--he decided that the land-fall was in the neighborhood of Cape
St. Vincent.
"Have a look?" he asked, passing the glasses to Tab. "It's the Painted
Cape, fast enough,--or close to it."
"What country is that, please, sir?" asked Hunter, in a tone almost of
awe.
"Portugal," the captain answered. "Sou'-western point of the land. We'll
have Spain aboard before eight bells this afternoon."
"By Grab, sir! Beg pardon, sir, but do them Portigee fishermen ye see to
Boothbay an' Boston, do they come from hereaway?"
"Here or from the islands,--Cape Verde, the Canaries, or the Azores;
here for the most part. You may go below, if you want, Hunter."
The man went, frequently pausing to look over his shoulder at the coast,
glimpses of which could now be caught from the deck between the rolls.
After a brief consultation, the captain and the mate followed Hunter,
and went aft to consult the chart. As they passed along the deck, they
noted that all hands were much excited. These men, used as they were to
the sea, had been fishermen of the purely local sort, and it was
doubtful if any one of them save Gonzague had ever before been out of
sight of the high land of his native place; and here they were, in view
of a strange country where the people spoke outlandish jabber, and, for
all they knew to the contrary, went about in toggery as ridiculous as
that of the Chinese laundrymen at Green's Landing. Discussion became
all the more heated when Hunter came down and told them that the land
was one of the countless possessions belonging to the "Portigee king."
Frequent appeals were made to Gonzague, who had descended, and was the
centre of an excited group. As Tab remarked, it was a sight worth
remembering to see these self-contained New Englanders in such a state.
Down below, Jack and Tab held a brief colloquy over the chart. They
calculated, if the wind held, to make the Straits at nightfall, and run
through by the aid of the lights on Cape Spartel and Tariffa. Having
settled this point, they went on deck and had the course changed
slightly.
"By Jumbo!" cried Jerry, banging his fist on the deck as he stood in the
cockpit, "by Jumbo, I can't sleep a wink with this land in sight.
Portugal, too! By Jove, it's all very fine," he ran on, "for a _blasé_
old globe-trotter like you to keep cool, but I'm fair dry with it all."
Jack laughed, and reminded his friend of having lived in England and
France, and of having traveled not a little in northern Europe.
"Pooh!" sniffed Tab. "That's not really doing anything; everybody does
that. And to think," he burst out, "that we brought ourselves! God bless
me, Jacko, I little thought when you crammed me with navigation in
vacation days aboard the old Luna that I'd ever use it all; really, that
is, as we have used it these three weeks past."
"Well, I hope you're duly grateful," laughed Jack. "It may prove a
source of bread and butter if you're ever stranded."
All that day the Merle ran along gallantly over the bright seas,
occasionally passing ships of different nationalities bound in or out of
the Straits. At sundown, although the bold coast of Morocco was not yet
in sight, a lookout was sent aloft to watch for the light on Cape
Spartel.
At a little before nine o'clock in the evening, the breeze had so died
down that the yacht hardly had steerage-way. Jack was asleep below; Tab
had charge of the deck. What air there was was soft and warm. It had
hauled around a couple of points against the sun, and was now fragrant
with a faint tellurian odor, which would have been imperceptible to a
landsman, but which was full of meaning to those who follow the sea.
Overhead the great stars blazed in lustrous serenity. Their images kept
appearing and vanishing on the now smooth and oily surface of the
restless sea. The only sounds were those of the water and the
cordage,--the sudden spanking of a big wave under the counter as the
yacht flung her nose starward; the occasional crashing of the great
booms and traveler-blocks as she righted suddenly after a heavy roll to
port or a lurch to starboard; the pattering of the reef-points against
the canvas; and the sharp reports made by the slatting of the lazy-jacks
against the sails.
In the west, growing smaller and smaller in the distance, the receding
stern-light of an Italian steamship glimmered faintly. Taberman watched
it long after it kept sinking out of sight and again rising in the
weltering seas, and until it at last vanished as if quenched. He was
following out certain grim speculations as to the feelings of a forsaken
swimmer who should watch this star of his hope moving relentlessly away
into the west, grower fainter each time it emerged from the waves,
when--
"Light ho!" shouted the lookout from the darkness aloft.
"There's--light; 'bout--point--off--starb'd--bow!"
"What kind?" hailed Jerry from the deck, straining his eyes to where, a
dim blot against the stars, the figure of the lookout could be discerned
standing by the rigging on the cross-trees.
"Fixed white, red flash," called the man.
"All right," shouted Jerry; and added in his ordinary tone of command
to the hands on deck: "Lay along, now! Trim in main-sheet a bit--well
enough. Now then, fore and head sheets. Good. That'll do.--We want to
get what air there is," he added to himself.
Although the wind was slight, yet about the Straits is always a
strongish set of current. The surface current flows into the
Mediterranean continuously, and it kept setting the Merle steadily
ahead. When Taberman judged the light to be no more than five or six
knots away, he sent below to rouse the captain, who was asleep. When
Castleport came on deck, the bearing of the light was taken, the chart
consulted, and a slight change made in the course. It was now calm, and
the yacht, no longer steadied by the wind, rolled heavily.
"We ought to see it air up before long," remarked Jack, after a short
silence. "It's so beastly calm now. When it's calm on one side of the
Straits, it's always blowing on the other. An Italian sea captain told
me there is always just so much air about here, and however much or
little is on one side, the balance is always kicking about on the
other."
"Then we'll take the sticks out of her, once we're through the
Straits," Jerry responded with conviction.
As the schooner entered the Straits, the blue-black sky to the eastward
became dimly albescent, and shortly a blood-red moon rose slowly behind
the inky mass of Monkey Mountain. The huge pile of rock, the more
impressive though the less famous of the Pillars of Hercules, loomed
vast, mysterious, and perdurable in the soft darkness. The waves, as the
face of the moon cleared, were lit with a gray light.
Suddenly, as a long, smooth swell shouldered the yacht past the edge of
a small promontory, they opened out the lights of Tangiers on the
starboard beam. The moon as yet illuminated only the western half of the
scarped bowl in which lie the little villas which surround the town. The
scattered lights on the east side of the valley were accentuated by the
surrounding gloom.
"There's Tangiers," cried Jack. "There's old Tangiers."
"Those lights?" asked Jerry. "What sort of a place is it?"
"Jolly little hole. All white and pink in the daytime, with red tile
roofs. Hot as Tophet, though. There's Tariffa, boy! That's Tariffa over
there."
They excitedly discussed the points along their way. To Jerry it was
all new, but Jack had traveled a good deal about the Mediterranean, and
was well able to play the mentor. For an hour they talked, and the Merle
drifted with the current; but they had not passed out of the shadow of
Monkey Mountain before a faint breath of air stirred the headsails. It
came stealing down out of the upper canvas, hot and dry.
"By Jove!" cried Jack, "we'll have all the wind we want in a bit. You
can tell how hard it is blowing outside the Straits by the distances it
reaches in."
Then he raised his voice, and called to the watch,--
"Hello there! Clew up the topsails! Pass gaskets on them!"
The men, who had a dog-like trust in the captain, obeyed quickly, though
from the remarks they interchanged _sotto voce_ it was easy to see that
the order puzzled them. When everything was made snug aloft, Jack had a
reef tucked in the main and foresails, and the outer headsails stowed.
Still no wind. The schooner slowly moved along the edge of the great
shadow of the mountain, only her topmast trucks and the peak of her
mainsail silvered by the moonlight.
A dull, hoarse whisper, faint and continuous, was now audible ahead. It
grew louder by very slow degrees, and Jerry, unused as he was to
Mediterranean weather, knew it for the roar of a mighty wind. In the
moonlight ahead the waters appeared troubled, the hard-heaving seas
being strangely and almost weirdly demarked from the calm in which the
Merle rolled forward languidly. All at once, as the yacht emerged from
the obscurity of the mountain's shadow, a sudden gust of warm air struck
her without warning, and heeled her lee-rail under.
"Hard down!" roared Jack.
Jerry leaped to the wheel, and it took all the force of himself and the
helmsman to put the helm hard-a-lee. The Merle righted, and being
unusually quick, flew into the eye of the wind. From the threshing sails
came a thunderous volley of heavy boomings. The sheet-blocks were
whipped to and fro with such violence that twice Jack saw red sparks
struck from the fore-traveler guard. Then, as suddenly as it had come,
the wind left, and it was only by the way she had gathered that the
helmsman could pay the yacht off.
"We are going to catch it for fair," Jack said. "Best dowse the foresail
entirely, I fancy. Pass the word along to Gonzague to make all snug
below. Jerry, step into the cabin and make sure of the course from off
Ceuta to Port Mahon."
"Right-o," answered Jerry briskly, diving down.
"Get down the fores'l!" shouted the captain to the men.
"Helm up a bit there--steady! That's the talk! Get all the stops
on.--Now then--make fast that sheet there."
The Merle was hardly on her course again when a second squall struck
her. Her canvas having been reduced, however, the helmsman kept her
broadside to it. The yacht's strongest point was the quickness with
which she gathered way, and on this occasion, when nine tenths of her
class would simply have lain over and quivered, she rushed ahead with
the fury of an avenging goddess. When the hot flaw left her, she was at
the very last verge of the calm water.
"Stand by the main-sheet to square off when she meets it!" shouted Jack.
The men had hardly time to get to their stations before a third squall
caught the Merle and sent her tearing over the line into the full
strength of the wind. The air, hot from the desert, and laden with fine,
parching dust, sang in the shrouds and the running-rigging. It slashed
the salt spindrift in the smarting faces of the men. The seas grew
suddenly confounding in size; huge weltering masses--tons--of greenly
black water wallowed without rhythm all about the yacht, up as high as
the light-boards. To a landsman it would have seemed impossible that
thus scourged by the sirocco across these maddened seas the schooner
should escape destruction.
The sheets were started, the yacht was paid off before the wind, and
began the last stretch of her run. Tab came on deck with the course,
staggering and holding on, and shouted it into Jack's ear. Jack nodded,
and gave orders for setting it, a fresh departure being taken from the
light on the mole at Ceuta.
The Merle ran close in on the eastern side of Gibraltar. The great rock,
sheer and silver-gray in the moonlight, rose out of the raging seas
which ringed it about with a zone of roaring breakers. Grimly
self-reliant, it stood grand, silent, stupendous, unassailable in the
midst of the turmoil and uproar. As the yacht raced by, staggering under
her reefed canvas, Taberman regarded the rock, in face of which their
craft seemed a mere mote on the blast, with a feeling as near awe as it
is possible for buoyant youth to feel. He did not speak until the Merle
had swept past the rock-hewn fortress. Then he drew a deep breath and
bent over so that Jack could hear him amid the hissing of the sirocco.
"That's immense, Jack, isn't it?" he said.
Without taking his eyes from the throat of the mainsail he was watching
as a physician at a crisis watches the pulse of a patient, Jack nodded a
deep assent.
At times the Merle seemed fairly to leap like a flying fish from one
wave-crest to the next in her northeasterly flight.
[Illustration: Decoration]
Chapter Six
DINNER ASHORE
On a Thursday afternoon in the middle of July, the Merle dropped anchor
behind the inner mole of Nice. In her course northward from the Straits,
she had passed to the eastward of the Baleares, crossed the Gulf of
Lyons, and run smoothly into harbor before the same powerful wind that
had greeted her so boisterously on her entrance into the Middle Sea.
The moment when the port officer came aboard had been a nervous one, but
the dapper little official had merely glanced at the yacht's papers,
complimented the captain on his seamanship, and then gone ashore without
a sign of suspicion.
The yacht had no sooner been made trig and ship-shape, her sails stopped
with "harbor furl," the canvas covers on, the boats unlashed and swung
on the davits, the running-rigging coiled down, and the details proper
to coming into port attended to, than Jack, unable to put off going
ashore until the morrow, gave orders for the crew to turn out in their
best attire. Then with Taberman he went below to array himself for the
land. In Castleport's mind the idea of calling on Mrs. Fairhew and Miss
Marchfield, who he knew should now be in Nice, was paramount to all
else. He would see Mrs. Fairhew, he would see Katrine, and then--well,
then it would be time to consider.
Once below, Jack and Jerry began the overhauling of their wardrobes,
doing their dressing half in their staterooms and half in the cabin,
that they might go on with afternoon tea at the same time. During the
voyage they had gone about most of the time in flannel shirts and duck
trousers, the only two rules in regard to toilet having been that they
should shave regularly, and that they should not come to dinner in
oilers, no matter what the weather. The first rule had been framed by
Jack; and Tab, as author of the second, had declared that he would
rather eat hardtack in his pajamas, than a six-course dinner in his
oilers. Now, as they stood in the doors of their staterooms examining
their shore clothing,--each holding, like the Hatter at the trial of the
Knave of Hearts, a teacup in his hand,--they had the air of being almost
surprised at finding themselves in possession of so many garments, or
of not knowing exactly what to do with them.
"Got any extra duck trow-trows, Jack?" asked Jerry. "We made a great
mistake not shipping a laundress along with the other stores."
"Hanging them up on the rigging to dry doesn't give them an extra fine
polish," Jack returned. "I have two pairs I've been saving for shore,
and I suppose I can sacrifice one of them on the altar of friendship."
"That's truly noble of you," Tab said, coming over to Jack's cabin after
the clean ducks; "but it's all right. When we go ashore we'll take
Gonzague and a bag of things, and have some real washing done on land.
What's that official-looking envelope?"
From the pocket of a coat which Castleport had thrown aside in his
search for the desired garment, a long blue envelope, still sealed, had
fallen to the floor. Jack pounced upon it, with an exclamation of
dismay.
"Great guns!" he exclaimed. "It's Uncle Randolph's mail!"
"It's what?"
"Why," the captain explained, rummaging in the pocket from which the
letter had fallen and producing a couple of others, "I told you about
the boy's bringing out the letters to the Merle while she was changing
crews at North Haven."
"You mean the letters the boy brought out for the President?"
"Yes, damn it!" responded the other, regarding the letters with a
troubled brow. "This is a pretty kettle of fish. Uncle Randolph's
letters are apt to be important, and this one has a beastly official
look. It's sure to be something that couldn't wait. It's probably the
thing he was looking for when he gave orders to have his mail brought
out to him."
"'If not delivered in five days return to R. B. Tillington, 57 State
Street, Boston,'" read Jerry over his shoulder. "Tillington's the
zinc-mine man, isn't he?"
"Zinc, copper, gold,--any old thing that you can make a mining
speculation out of. I think he's a slippery old fraud, but he's hand in
glove with Uncle Randolph; or rather they have a lot of business
together. Uncle Randolph thinks Tillington wouldn't dare to play him
false, but he's an eely old beggar. Anyhow, this letter may mean the
making or the losing of a fortune for all I know. Gad! Running away with
his yacht is nothing to going off with his letters!"
"I don't suppose it would do to mail them here?" suggested Jerry.
"That would dish us all right," Jack answered. "It would give us away by
the postmark. Uncle Randolph isn't likely to think of our coming across.
He can't know we were provisioned, and he very likely thinks we are
still knocking about on the other side of the Atlantic."
"He might find out about the stores by asking at the express offices and
that sort of thing."
"Why should he, unless something puts the idea into his head?"
"I suppose he wouldn't," Jerry assented thoughtfully. "How would it do
to return this letter to Tillington?"
"Just as bad as to send it direct to Uncle Randolph. Once let them know
at home where we are, and we are done for fast enough."
"Well," Taberman said, after a brief pause in which he had apparently
been summing up the situation in his mind, "the harm's done by this
time, anyway; and I don't see that there's anything for us but to stick
to our guns, blow high, blow low. We'll mail 'em when we get ready to go
back."
Castleport regarded the letters in his hand gravely.
"I suppose there's nothing else to do," he said slowly. "The Merle is
of course registered at Lloyd's, and he'd only have to cable over to
have us nabbed anywhere along the whole coast."
"He may see the arrival in the shipping-lists as it is, I should think,"
Jerry observed rather gloomily.
"Of course; but we've got to run our chances on that. He's not very much
in the habit of studying the sailing-lists as far as I know, but he may
do it now. Anyway we've got to run for luck."
"The luck has been pretty good so far," was Jerry's consoling
observation; "and I won't begin to distrust it now."
The result of the conversation was that the letters were put carefully
away, and the two adventurers resolved not to worry about them.
Castleport admitted that the matter troubled him not a little, but he
was under the circumstances disposed to accept his comrade's very
sensible observation that after all the letters might be of no especial
importance.
"You see," Jerry said, with a laugh, as he gulped down the last of his
tea, which had had time to become thoroughly cold, "we are really
pirates, and here you go bringing the conscience of a gentleman into the
business. None of that."
Castleport laughed, and once more their attention was given to dressing
for the shore.
No one aboard understood the care and manipulation of the small
steam-launch which the President used on state occasions, so they went
ashore in the big cutter, with six men to pull and old Gonzague in
charge.