It was as poor a specimen of the outdoor picture as any amateur ever
made on a sunny Sunday. It represented a bareheaded girl in tennis
costume, her hair considerably tousled as if she had just finished a
set; but as the picture had been taken against the sun the face was so
dark as to be scarcely discernible. Just an ordinary outdoor girl,
apparently, as ordinary as the photograph.
“That’s the reason for this trip,” said George, carefully returning
the picture to its place. “She isn’t anybody you know or have heard
of. She’s nobody. She’s just a common doctor’s daughter from a little
town in the Middle West, and I want to marry her, Gardy, and by
Jove—she wouldn’t have me!”
He was started now, and there was no opportunity to stop him had I so
wished. I listened in humble resignation. I was Chanler’s hired man. I
was engaged as his literary secretary, but probably he counted me paid
for listening to him while he poured out his amazement and despair at
having been refused.
“She wouldn’t have me, Gardy,” he repeated over and over again; and,
considering how many girls had fished for Chanler’s name and money, I
wondered what sort of a girl this could be.
“I met her down at Aiken last Winter. She was visiting some folks—but
that didn’t count. I met her at the tennis court. By Jove!” A new
light came into his cynical eyes, a clean light, and for the time
being his face was almost fine. “Can’t stand athletic girls as a usual
thing, you know that, Gardy; but she—she was different.”
They had danced together that night at the club ball. If she had been
stunning on the courts, she was overwhelming in evening dress. He
scarcely had dared to touch her.
They had spent a great part of the next day rolling slowly about
country roads in one of his roadsters. Sometimes they had stopped at
convenient points along the road and had sat silent and looked at each
other. Again they had halted and picked flowers along the roadside.
And between times they had rolled along at six miles an hour
and—talked.
“Oh, hang it, Gardy. For the first time in my life I wished I was
clever like you and had done something. It ain’t fair. Nobody ever
made me do a thing; what chance have I had to amount to anything? And
then a fellow meets a girl like this, who likes you from the start and
when she asks you what you’re doing, or have done, or are going to do,
and you say nothin’, she looks at you in a certain way as if to say:
‘Why, what excuse do you make to yourself for cumbering the earth?’
No, by George, it ain’t fair; is it, Gardy?
“I told her I had money, and she laughed and said she didn’t
understand how a man could be satisfied to have money and nothing
else, and money that his father had earned at that. Then I asked her
to marry me, so I would have something besides money. Hang it, old
man, she cried. Yes, she did, just for a little while. Then she looked
up and laughed at me, and said: ‘George, I’ve known you less than two
days, and I’ve learned to like you so much that I wish I dared like
you more. But if I liked you any more,’ she says, ‘I’m afraid I’d want
to marry you, and have to depend upon you for my future happiness, and
to be the father of my children,’ and says she, ‘you haven’t the right
to ask that, George, so long as you play around like a thoughtless
boy, and do nothing that a man should do.’
“Jove! That was enough to make a fellow pull up and think, wasn’t it?
I said to myself right there: ‘I’m going to do something.’ And I am. I
ain’t clever like you, Gardy, and I haven’t got business experience
like some fellows, but—” he smiled with self-satisfaction—“I have got
money.”
It all ended there. He had money; he need have nothing else. The new
look vanished from his eyes and they became cynical and supercilious
again. His underlip protruded cunningly.
“Science is a great help if you know how to use it, Gardy,” he
chuckled. “What’s your opinion of our little expedition now?”
“I don’t see any reason why what you have told me should alter my
opinion of the expedition.”
“Ha! I thought maybe that old conscientious streak in you would get
troublesome. You don’t quibble about motives then, Gardy?”
“Why should I? I am your hired writing man——”
“Oh, hang it, Gardy! Don’t put it that way. Don’t be so precise. As
one chap to another, you know—what do you think?”
“I see nothing wrong with your motive, Chanler. In fact, I think it
rather fine. As I understand it you are undertaking this expedition
because you wish to prove to this girl that you can and will do
something useful.”
“Right-o. That’s why I undertook it—in the first place.”
“That surely established an excellent motive, for a man in your
sentimental frame of mind, at least.”
“Yes,” he said with a hollow laugh, “there’s nothing wrong with that,
is there?”
“And if the expedition is successful the results will be a credit to
you—a genuine success—irrespective of what your motives might be.”
“Now you’re shouting, Gardy!” he cried vehemently, striking the desk.
“The results, that’s what counts. Not the motive or the means. Who
asks a winner why or how? Win out! Get what you want! That’s the idea.
And, by Jove! What I want I get; and I want Betty Baldwin to be my
wife!”
X
The _Wanderer_ wallowed her faltering way northward, a new atmosphere
of sinister suggestion about her spray-damped decks. Yet even now,
with Chanler’s sudden confession ringing in my ears, I thought, not of
him and his plans, not of the owner’s empty stateroom furnished for a
woman, not of the Miss Baldwin mentioned, but of Brack. Brack was the
great force on board. Chanler might plan well or evil; but it would be
Brack’s will that would determine the fate of these plans, and of any
one who came aboard. And I had not gaged Brack. Though by this time I
was ready to credit him with Machiavellian cunning and power, my
estimate of the man failed to do him full justice.
It was on the fourth day out that this conclusion was forced upon me.
As Wilson had predicted, the weather remained rough and raw, and the
_Wanderer_ lifted and rolled leisurely through a smother of fog and
spray from the long, slow North Pacific rollers.
In the middle of the afternoon the sun broke through for a period, the
fog disappeared, and I climbed to the wireless deck to enjoy the
cheeriness of unwonted sunshine and Pierce’s company combined. I found
Pierce squatted on the starboard edge of the cabin roof, absorbed in
watching the deck below. At the sound of my footsteps he looked up,
grinned and crooked his finger for me to come to his side.
“Garvin’s out again,” he whispered. “He’s just come up from the aft on
the starboard side. Brack’s forward just now, but he’s been hiking the
starboard promenade for the last five minutes. He’s in a sweat again
about our running half speed, and if Garvin doesn’t see him and duck
they’re going to meet.”
I looked aft and saw Garvin, the pugilist, standing bareheaded in the
sunlight, steadying himself easily to the pitch and rise of the
_Wanderer’s_ deck.
Surprise and relief came to me as I saw him look around, blinking
against the sun. I had feared to hear that he had been blinded, or
that he had been scalded so fearfully that he might succumb, or lie
helpless for weeks. Yet here he was, save for the bandages that
covered most of his face, apparently in better physical condition than
when he had come aboard. In reality this was true. Two days of medical
treatment and rest had given his splendid vitality that opportunity to
throw off the load of alcoholic poison with which it had been
surcharged. His bony face, hardened by training and blows, had
withstood without serious damage the stream of boiling water that
would have blinded, probably killed, a normal man.
As he moved slowly forward along the port rail in the bright sunlight
there was none of the weakened, defeated look of a badly injured man
about him. With his head and shoulders thrust forward, the short neck
completely hidden, the long arms hanging easily, and moving with the
sure step of the man whose muscular feet grip the ground, he was
formidable to look at, a fighting animal, unafraid and undefeated.
“One bad, tough guy!” whispered Pierce in admiration. “Say, Brains,
even money that he takes a swing at Brack before the cruise is over.”
Brack had made a swift, impatient turn near the bow and was coming aft
along the starboard rail. He was wearing his rough sea-clothes and he
walked with his eyes on the deck, chewing tobacco viciously.
From the aft Garvin advanced slowly, and from the bow came Brack. And
as I looked from one to the other now I was shocked with the
impression that they were much alike. The same thickness about the
neck and shoulders, the same sense of force about them both. But in
Garvin it was a blind force, stupid and unenlightened as the force of
a thick-necked bull, while in Brack the force was directed by one of
the most efficient minds it had been my fortune to come in contact
with.
“Pipe ’em off, pipe ’em off!” whispered Pierce excitedly. “They’re
going to meet face to face in the companionway. Brains, a dollar says
there’ll be something doing when Garvin looks up and sees himself
alone with the guy who cooked him.”
“Hush!” I warned.
A sudden stillness and tension seemed to have settled down on the
yacht. Above a hatchway aft I saw the heads of a pair of the crew
eagerly watching Garvin as his steps carried him toward Brack. In the
bow the cook and Simmons followed the captain with their eyes; and
from the bridge, Wilson, the mate, erect and stanch, looked down with
his calm, serious expression unchanged.
And then they met. It was almost directly beneath where Pierce and I
sat. They stopped and looked at one another. I had the sensation of a
calm before a storm. And then——
“Hello, cap,” said Garvin in a low voice, and I could see in spite of
his bandages that he winked. “How’s tricks?”
Brack smiled.
“All right, Garvin. How are you coming on?”
“Oh, I’m all right.” Garvin stepped to one side. “Little thing like
that don’t bother me.”
“Good!” Brack actually patted him on the shoulder. “You’re the kind of
man I want. I suppose you’ve taken worse beatings than that when it’s
paid you to throw a fight?”
“——! That wasn’t even a knock-out. Just a little hot water. I’d take
more’n that to be let in on a job like this.”
“That’s the way to talk,” said the captain heartily. “And this will
bring you more than any fight you ever won or lost.”
That was all. They passed on, Brack toward the aft, Garvin toward the
bow.