About ten days before the morning set for their departure I went over to
the Oakland Basin to see how the Three Black Crows were getting on.
Hardenberg welcomed me as my boat bumped alongside, and extending a
great tarry paw, hauled me over the rail. The schooner was a wilderness
of confusion, with the sails covering, apparently, nine-tenths of the
decks, the remaining tenth encumbered by spars, cordage, tangled
rigging, chains, cables and the like, all helter-skeltered together in
such a haze of entanglements that my heart misgave me as I looked on it.
Surely order would not issue from this chaos in four days' time with
only three men to speed the work.
But Hardenberg was reassuring, and little Ally Bazan, the colonial, told
me they would "snatch her shipshape in the shorter end o' two days, if
so be they must."
I stayed with the Three Crows all that day and shared their dinner with
them on the quarterdeck when, wearied to death with the strain of
wrestling with the slatting canvas and ponderous boom, they at last
threw themselves upon the hamper of "cold snack" I had brought off with
me and pledged the success of the venture in tin dippers full of
Pilsener.
"And I'm thinking," said Ally Bazan, "as 'ow ye might as well turn in
along o' us on board 'ere, instead o' hykin' back to town to-night.
There's a fairish set o' currents up and daown 'ere about this time o'
dye, and ye'd find it a stiff bit o' rowing."
"We'll sling a hammick for you on the quarterdeck, m'son," urged
Hardenberg.
And so it happened that I passed my first night aboard the _Idaho Lass_.
We turned in early. The Three Crows were very tired, and only Ally Bazan
and I were left awake at the time when we saw the 8:30 ferryboat
negotiating for her slip on the Oakland side. Then we also went to bed.
And now it becomes necessary, for a better understanding of what is to
follow, to mention with some degree of particularization the places and
manners in which my three friends elected to take their sleep, as well
as the condition and berth of the schooner _Idaho Lass_.
Hardenberg slept upon the quarterdeck, rolled up in an army blanket and
a tarpaulin. Strokher turned in below in the cabin upon the fixed lounge
by the dining-table, while Ally Bazan stretched himself in one of the
bunks in the fo'c's'le.
As for the location of the schooner, she lay out in the stream, some
three or four cables' length off the yards and docks of a ship-building
concern. No other ship or boat of any description was anchored nearer
than at least 300 yards. She was a fine, roomy vessel, three-masted,
about 150 feet in length overall. She lay head up stream, and from where
I lay by Hardenberg on the quarterdeck I could see her tops sharply
outlined against the sky above the Golden Gate before I went to sleep.
I suppose it was very early in the morning--nearer two than three--when
I awoke. Some movement on the part of Hardenberg--as I afterward found
out--had aroused me. But I lay inert for a long minute trying to find
out why I was not in my own bed, in my own home, and to account for the
rushing, rippling sound of the tide eddies sucking and chuckling around
the _Lass's_ rudder-post.
Then I became aware that Hardenberg was awake. I lay in my hammock,
facing the stern of the schooner, and as Hardenberg had made up his bed
between me and the wheel he was directly in my line of vision when I
opened my eyes, and I could see him without any other movement than that
of raising the eyelids. Just now, as I drifted more and more into
wakefulness, I grew proportionately puzzled and perplexed to account for
a singularly strange demeanour and conduct on the part of my friend.
He was sitting up in his place, his knees drawn up under the blanket,
one arm thrown around both, the hand of the other arm resting on the
neck and supporting the weight of his body. He was broad awake. I could
see the green shine of our riding lantern in his wide-open eyes, and
from time to time I could hear him muttering to himself, "What is it?
What is it? What the devil is it, anyhow?" But it was not his attitude,
nor the fact of his being so broad awake at the unseasonable hour, nor
yet his unaccountable words, that puzzled me the most. It was the man's
eyes and the direction in which they looked that startled me.
His gaze was directed not upon anything on the deck of the boat, nor
upon the surface of the water near it, but upon something behind me and
at a great height in the air. I was not long in getting myself broad
awake.