INKSPOT HAS A DREAM OF HEAVEN
The next day the work of loading the _Arato_ with the bags of gold was
begun, and it was a much slower and more difficult business than the
unloading of the _Miranda_, for the schooner lay much farther out from
the beach. But there were two men more than on the former occasion, and
the captain did not push the work. There was no need now for
extraordinary haste, and although they all labored steadily, regular
hours of work and rest were adhered to. The men had carried so many bags
filled with hard and uneven lumps that the shoulders of some of them were
tender, and they had to use cushions of canvas under their loads. But the
boats went backward and forward, and the bags were hoisted on board and
lowered into the hold, and the wall of gold grew smaller and smaller.
"Captain," said Burke, one day, as they were standing by a pile of bags
waiting for the boat to come ashore, "do you think it is worth it! By
George! we have loaded and unloaded these blessed bags all down the
western coast of South America, and if we've got to unload and load them
all up the east coast, I say, let's take what we really need, and leave
the rest."
"I've been at the business a good deal longer than you have," said the
captain, "and I'm not tired of it yet. When I took away my first cargo,
you must remember that I carried each bag on my own shoulders, and it
took me more than a month to do it, and even all that is only a drop in
the bucket compared to what most men who call themselves rich have to do
before they make their money."
"All right," said Burke, "I'll stop growling. But look here, captain.
How much do you suppose one of these bags is worth, and how many are
there in all? I don't want to be inquisitive, but it would be a sort of
comfort to know."
"No, it wouldn't," said the captain, quickly. "It would be anything else
but a comfort. I know how many bags there are, but as to what they are
worth, I don't know, and I don't want to know. I once set about
calculating it, but I didn't get very far with the figures. I need all my
wits to get through with this business, and I don't think anything would
be more likely to scatter them than calculating what this gold is worth.
It would be a good deal better for you--and for me, too--to consider, as
Shirley does, that these bags are all filled with good, clean, anthracite
coal. That won't keep us from sleeping."
"Shirley be hanged!" said Burke, "He and you may be able to do that, but
I can't. I've got a pretty strong mind, and if you were to tell me that
when we get to port, and you discharge this crew, I can walk off with all
the gold eagles or twenty-franc pieces I can carry, I think I could stand
it without losing my mind."
"All right," said the captain, "If we get this vessel safely to France,
I will give you a good chance to try your nerves."
Day by day the work went on, and at last the _Arato_ took the place of
the _Miranda_ as a modern _Argo_.
During the reëmbarkation of the treasure, the captain, as well as Shirley
and Burke, had kept a sharp eye on Garta. The two mates were afraid he
might run away, but, had he done so, the captain would not have regretted
it very much. He would gladly have parted with one of the bags in order
to get rid of this encumbrance. But the prisoner had no idea of running
away. He knew that the bags were filled with treasure, but as he could
now do nothing with any of it that he might steal, he did not try to
steal any. If he had thoughts of the kind, he knew this was no time for
dishonest operation. He had always been a hardworking sailor, with a good
appetite, and he worked hard now, and ate well.
The _Miranda's_ stores had not been injured by water, and when they had
been put on board, the _Arato_ was well fitted out for a long voyage.
Leaving the _Miranda_ on the beach, with nothing in her of much value,
the _Arato_, which had cleared for Callao, and afterwards set out on a
wild piratical cruise, now made a third start, and set sail for a voyage
to France. They had good weather and tolerably fair winds, and before
they entered the Straits of Magellan the captain had formulated a plan
for the disposition of Garta.
"I don't know anything better to do with him," said he to Shirley and
Burke, "than to put him ashore at the Falkland Islands. We don't want to
take him to France, for we would not know what to do with him after we
got him there, and, as likely as not, he would swear a lot of lies
against us as soon as he got on shore. We can run within a league of
Stanley harbor, and then, if the weather is good enough, we can put him
in a boat, with something to eat and drink, and let him row himself into
port. We can give him money enough to support himself until he can
procure work."
"But suppose there is a man-of-war in there," said Shirley, "he might say
things that would send her after us. He might not know where to say we
got our treasure, but he could say we had stolen a Chilian vessel."
"I had thought of that," said the captain, "but nothing such a vagrant as
he is could say ought to give any cruiser the right to interfere with us
when we are sailing under the American flag. And when I go to France,
nobody shall say that I stole a vessel, for, if the owners of the _Arato_
can be found, they shall be well paid for what use we have made of their
schooner. I'll send her back to Valparaiso and let her be claimed."
"It is a ticklish business," said Burke, "but I don't know what else can
be done. It is a great pity I didn't know he was going to surrender when
we had that fight."
They had been in the Straits less than a week when Inkspot dreamed he
was in heaven. His ecstatic visions became so strong and vivid that they
awakened him, when he was not long in discovering the cause which had
produced them. The dimly lighted and quiet forecastle was permeated by a
delightful smell of spirituous liquor. Turning his eyes from right to
left, in his endeavors to understand this unusual odor of luxury,
Inkspot perceived the man Garta standing on the other side of the
forecastle, with a bottle in one hand and a cork in the other, and, as
he looked, Garta raised the bottle to his mouth, threw back his head,
and drank.
Inkspot greatly disliked this man. He had been one of the fellows who had
ill-treated him when the _Arato_ sailed under Cardatas, and he fully
agreed with his fellow-blacks that the scoundrel should have been shot.
But now his feelings began to undergo a change. A man with a bottle of
spirits might prove to be an angel of mercy, a being of beneficence, and
if he would share with a craving fellow-being his rare good fortune, why
should not all feelings of disapprobation be set aside? Inkspot could see
no reason why they should not be, and softly slipping from his hammock,
he approached Garta.
"Give me. Give me, just little," he whispered.
Garta turned with a half-suppressed oath, and seeing who the suppliant
was, he seized the bottle in his left hand, and with his right struck
poor Inkspot a blow in the face. Without a word the negro stepped back,
and then Garta put the bottle into a high, narrow opening in the side of
the forecastle, and closed a little door upon it, which fastened with a
snap. This little locker, just large enough to hold one bottle, had been
made by one of the former crew of the _Arato_ solely for the purpose of
concealing spirits, and was very ingeniously contrived. Its door was a
portion of the side of the forecastle, and a keyhole was concealed behind
a removable knot. Garta had not opened the locker before, for the reason
that he had been unable to find the key. He knew it had been concealed
in the forecastle, but it had taken him a long time to find it. Now his
secret was discovered, and he was enraged. Going over to the hammock,
where Inkspot had again ensconced himself, he leaned over the negro and
whispered:
"If you ever say a word of that bottle to anybody, I'll put a knife into
you! No matter what they do to me, I'll settle with you."
Inkspot did not understand all this, but he knew it was a threat, and he
well understood the language of a blow in the face. After a while he went
to sleep, but, if he smelt again the odor of the contents of the bottle,
he had no more heavenly dreams.
The next day Captain Horn found himself off the convict settlement of
Punta Arenas, belonging to the Chilian government. This was the first
port he had approached since he had taken command of the _Arato_, but he
felt no desire nor need to touch at it. In fact, the vicinity of Punta
Arenas seemed of no importance whatever, until Shirley came to him and
reported that the man Garta was nowhere to be found. Captain Horn
immediately ordered a search and inquiry to be made, but no traces of the
prisoner could be discovered, nor could anybody tell anything about him.
Burke and Inkspot had been on watch with him from four to eight, but they
could give no information whatever concerning him. No splash nor cries
for help had been heard, so that he could not have fallen overboard, and
it was generally believed that, when he knew himself to be in the
vicinity of a settlement, he had quietly slipped into the water and had
swum for Punta Arenas. Burke suggested that most likely he had formerly
been a resident of the place, and liked it better than being taken off
to unknown regions in the schooner. And Shirley considered this very
probable, for he said the man had always looked like a convict to him.
At all events, Garta was gone, and there was no one to say how long he
had been gone. So, under full sail, the _Arato_ went on her way. It was a
relief to get rid of the prisoner, and the only harm which could come of
his disappearance was that he might report that his ship had been stolen
by the men who were sailing her, and that some sort of a vessel might be
sent in pursuit of the _Arato_, and, if this should be the case, the
situation would be awkward. But days passed on, the schooner sailed out
of the Straits, and no vessel was seen pursuing her.
To the northeast Captain Horn set his course. He would not stop at Rio
Janeiro, for the _Arato_ had no papers for that port. He would not lie to
off Stanley harbor, for he had now nobody to send ashore. But he would
sail boldly for France, where he would make no pretensions that his
auriferous cargo was merely ballast. He was known at Marseilles. He had
business relations with bankers in Paris. He was a Californian and an
American citizen, and he would merely be bringing to France a vessel
freighted with gold, which, by the aid of his financial advisers, would
be legitimately cared for and disposed of.
One night, before the _Arato_ reached the Falkland Islands, Maka, who was
on watch, heard a queer sound in the forecastle, and looking down the
companionway, he saw, by the dim light of the swinging lantern, a man
with a hatchet, endeavoring to force the blade of it into the side of the
vessel. Maka quickly perceived that the man was Inkspot, and as he could
not imagine what he was doing, he quietly watched him. Inkspot worked
with as little noise as possible, but he was evidently bent upon forcing
off one of the boards on the side of the forecastle. At first Maka
thought that his fellow-African was trying to sink the ship by opening a
seam, but he soon realized that this notion was absurd, and so he let
Inkspot go on, being very curious to know what he was doing. In a few
minutes he knew. With a slight noise, not enough to waken a sound
sleeper, a little door flew open, and almost immediately Inkspot held a
bottle in his hand.
Maka slipped swiftly and softly to the side of the big negro, but he was
not quick enough. Inkspot had the neck of the bottle in his mouth and the
bottom raised high in the air. But, before Maka could seize him by the
arm, the bottle had come down from its elevated position, and a doleful
expression crept over the face of Inkspot. There had been scarcely a
teaspoonful of liquor left in the bottle. Inkspot looked at Maka, and
Maka looked at him. In an African whisper, the former now ordered the
disappointed negro to put the bottle back, to shut up the locker, and
then to get into his hammock and go to sleep as quickly as he could, for
if Mr. Shirley, who was on watch on deck, found out what he had been
doing, Inkspot would wish he had never been born.
The next day, when they had an opportunity for an African conversation,
Inkspot assured his countryman that he had discovered the little locker
by smelling the whiskey through the boards, and that, having no key, he
had determined to force it open with a hatchet. Maka could not help
thinking that Inkspot had a wonderful nose for an empty bottle, and
could scarcely restrain from a shudder at the thought of what might
have happened had the bottle been full. But he did not report the
occurrence. Inkspot was a fellow-African, and he had barely escaped
punishment for his former misdeed. It would be better to keep his mouth
shut, and he did.
Against the north winds, before the south winds, and on the winds from
the east and the west, through fair weather and through foul, the _Arato_
sailed up the South Atlantic. It was a long, long voyage, but the
schooner was skilfully navigated and sailed well. Sometimes she sighted
great merchant-steamers plying between Europe and South America,
freighted with rich cargoes, and proudly steaming away from the little
schooner, whose dark-green hull could scarcely be distinguished from the
color of the waves. And why should not the captain of this humble little
vessel sometimes have said to himself, as he passed a big three-master or
a steamer:
"What would they think if they knew that, if I chose to do it, I could
buy every ship, and its cargo, that I shall meet between here and
Gibraltar!"
"Captain," said Shirley, one day, "what do you think about the right and
wrong of this?"
"What do you mean?" asked Captain Horn.
"I mean," replied Shirley, "taking away the gold we have on board. We've
had pretty easy times lately, and I've been doing a good deal of
thinking, and sometimes I have wondered where we got the right to clap
all this treasure into bags and sail away with it."
"So you have stopped thinking the bags are all filled with anthracite
coal," said the captain.
"Yes," said the other. "We are getting on toward the end of this voyage,
and it is about time to give up that fancy. I always imagine, when I am
near the end of a voyage, what I am going to do when I go ashore, and if
I have any real right to some of the gold down under our decks, I shall
do something very different from anything I ever did before."
"I hope you don't mean going on a spree," said Burke, who was standing
near. "That would be something entirely different."
"I thought," said the captain, "that you both understood this business,
but I don't mind going over it again. There is no doubt in my mind that
this gold originally belonged to the Incas, who then owned Peru, and they
put it into that mound to keep it from the Spaniards, whose descendants
now own Peru, and who rule it without much regard to the descendants of
the ancient Peruvians. Now, when I discovered the gold, and began to have
an idea of how valuable the find was, I knew that the first thing to do
was to get it out of that place and away from the country. Whatever is to
be done in the way of fair play and fair division must be done somewhere
else, and not there. If I had informed the government of what I had
found, this gold would have gone directly into the hands of the
descendants of the people from whom its original owners did their very
best to keep it, and nobody else would have had a dollar's worth of it.
If we had stood up for our rights to a reward for finding it, ten to one
we would all have been clapped into prison."
"I suppose by that," said Burke, "that you looked upon the stone mound in
the cave as a sort of will left by those old Peruvians, and you made
yourself an executor to carry out the intentions of the testators, as
the lawyers say."
"But we can set it down as dead certain," interrupted Shirley, "that the
testators didn't mean us to have it."
"No," said the captain, "nor do I mean that we shall have all of it. I
intend to have the question of the ownership of this gold decided by
people who are able and competent to decide such a question, and who will
be fair and honest to all parties. But whatever is agreed upon, and
whatever is done with the treasure, I intend to charge a good price--a
price which shall bear a handsome proportion to the value of the
gold--for my services, and all our services. Some of this charge I have
already taken, and I intend to have a great deal more. We have worked
hard and risked much to get this treasure--"
"Yes," thought Burke, as he remembered the trap at the bottom of the
mound. "You risked a great deal more than you ever supposed you did."
"And we are bound to be well paid for it," continued the captain. "No
matter where this gold goes, I shall have a good share of it, and this I
am going to divide among our party, according to a fair scale. How does
that strike you, Shirley?"
"If the business is going to be conducted as you say, captain," replied
the first mate, "I say it will be all fair and square, and I needn't
bother my head with any more doubts about it. But there is one thing I
wish you would tell me: how much do you think I will be likely to get out
of this cargo, when you divide?"
"Mr. Shirley," said the captain, "when I give you your share of this
cargo, you can have about four bags of anthracite coal, weighing a little
over one hundred pounds, which, at the rate of six dollars a ton, would
bring you between thirty and forty cents. Will that satisfy you? Of
course, this is only a rough guess at a division, but I want to see how
it falls in with your ideas."
Shirley laughed. "I guess you're right, captain," said he. "It will be
better for me to keep on thinking we are carrying coal. That won't
bother my head."
"That's so," said Burke. "Your brain can't stand that sort of badger. I'd
hate to go ashore with you at Marseilles with your pocket full and your
skull empty. As for me, I can stand it first-rate. I have already built
two houses on Cape Cod,--in my head, of course,--and I'll be hanged if I
know which one I am going to live in and which one I am going to put my
mother in."