Transcriber’s Notes:-
The spelling, hyphenation and punctuation is as the original, with the
exception of apparent typographical errors which have been corrected.
Italic text is denoted _thus_.
The transcriber has added a table of contents.
VANDERDECKEN
_Vanderdecken_
_By_
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
AUTHOR OF “SATAN,” “THE BLUE LAGOON,”
“THE BEACH OF DREAMS”, ETC.
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & COMPANY
1922
Copyright, 1922, by
ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.
_Printed in the
United States of America_
Published, 1922
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
II THE PROPOSITION
III THE PLAN
IV TYREBUCK
V JAKE
VI JOE BARRETT
VII THE FIRING OF JAKE
VIII PUBLICITY
IX CANDON
X THE RED BEARDED ONE
XI NIGHT
XII OUT
XIII THE BAY OF WHALES
XIV ST. NICOLAS
XV WHAT THE CHINKS WERE DOING
XVI EVIDENCE OF CONTRABAND
XVII THE SURPRISE
XVIII THE ATTACK
XIX A SEA FIGHT
XX DOWN BELOW
XXI TOMMIE
XXII A PROBLEM IN PSYCHOLOGY
XXIII THE NEW CHUM
XXIV THE FREIGHTER
XXV THEY TURN THE CORNER
XXVI THE BAY OF WHALES
XXVII THE CONFESSION
XXVIII HANK
XXIX THE SAND
XXX STRANGERS ON THE BEACH
XXXI “TOMMIE’S GONE!”
XXXII THE RETURN OF CANDON
XXXIII GONE!
XXXIV JAKE
XXXV SANTANDER ROCK
XXXVI “CANDON”
XXXVII JAKE IS FIRED AGAIN
XXXVIII THE ANCHOR TAKES THE MUD
XXXIX VANDERDECKEN
VANDERDECKEN
CHAPTER I
THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
George du Cane was writing a letter in the smoking room of the Bohemian
Club, San Francisco.
George was an orphan with guardians. Twenty-four years and five months
of age, his property would not be decontrolled for another seven months
when, on his twenty-fifth birthday, he would find himself the actual
possessor of something over two million, five hundred thousand dollars.
Old Harley du Cane, George’s father, had made his money speculating.
He had no healthy business to leave to his son and no very healthy
reputation. He had ruined thousands of men whom he had never seen and
never heard of, he had escaped ruin countless times by the skin of his
teeth, he had wrecked railways; his life was, if logic counts, a long
disgrace, and in a perfect civilization he would have been hanged.
All the same he was a most lovable old man, generous, warm-hearted,
hot-tempered, high-coloured, beautifully dressed; always with a cigar
in his mouth and a flower in his buttonhole, his hat tilted on one
side and his hand in his pocket for any unfortunate.
Only for his great battle with Jay Gould, he might have died worth ten
million. He reckoned that he died poor, and, dying, he tied up his
property in the hands of two trustees, as I have hinted. “To keep you
from the sharks, George.”
George didn’t bother. Wannamaker and Thelusson, the two trustees, gave
him all the money he wanted and the world all the fun. A juvenile
replica of old Harley on the outside, he was not unlike him on the in;
he had something better than wealth, than good looks, even than health,
a radium quality inherited from his father that kept him far younger
than his years. When Harley du Cane died at the age of seventy-six from
a surfeit of ice cream following the excitement of a base-ball match,
Cazenove, the broker, reading out the news to his family said the
reporters had got the age wrong, for Harley wasn’t more than nine; and
he was right. The Great Bear, to give him his name in the Stock Market,
in many respects wasn’t more than nine.
George, having finished his letter, touched an electric bell. A waiter
approached.
“Waiter,” said George, “bring me an—Oh, damn it!” Egg flip had been on
his tongue and prohibition had risen in his mind. The waiter waited. He
was used to orders like this of late. “Lemonade,” said George.
He got up and moved to where some men were seated near one of the
windows. Cyrus Reid, the poet; Carolus, the musician; Abrahams, the
artist. A few months ago these three would have been fighting, no
doubt, over the merits of Henri, Matisse or the possibilities of Cubist
music. Today they were just talking about how dry they were and of the
great drought that had struck San Francisco. Reid was mostly a coffee
drinker, an occasional glass of beer satisfied Carolus, and Abrahams
was all but teetotal, yet they were filled with discontent. George sat
down with them and listened to them and drank his lemonade and absorbed
their gloom. Prohibition may be good or it may be bad, but there is one
undoubted fact about it, it doesn’t improve the social life of a club.
Whilst they were talking, Hank Fisher came in. Hank was twenty-three or
so; thin, tanned, hollow-cheeked, he looked like the mixture of a red
Indian and an East coast Yankee.
He had been born in New Hampshire, served in a whaler, driven an
engine, waited in a café, hoboed, stoked a Stockton river boat, canned
in a cannery. He had educated himself, in a wild sort of way that
produced flowers of the mind in an extraordinary pattern; he was both
a Socialist and an individualist. There was nothing that the hands of
men could do that the hands of Hank couldn’t. He could make boots or a
fishing-net or mend a watch, he had invented and patented a rat trap
that brought him in a small income, and he had the specifications in
hand of a clock that would go for forty-eight years without winding.
He had, also, in the last year or two, made quite a sum of money
speculating in real estate. But the crowning point of Hank, and the
thing that had secured his entry to the Bohemian Club and endeared him
to all imaginative people, was the fact that he was a little bit mad.
Not crazy mad, but pleasantly mad. A madness so mixed with cold sanity
and streaks of genius that you could scarcely call it madness.
“You can’t tell what he’ll do next,” was the best description of him,
given by Cedarquist, barring Reid’s “He’s an opal.”
The opal sat down with scarcely a word and listened to Abrahams, who
was holding forth. Said Abrahams:
“Yes, sir, you may talk and talk, but you haven’t got to the bed-rock
of the subject. The fact is the world never struck universal unrest
till it struck universal lime-juice. If you could dig up the Czar and
make him talk, I’ll bet he’d back me. Talk of crime waves, when has
crime ever waved before as it’s waving now? Look at the hold-ups, look
at New York, look at Chicago, look at this town. Look at the things
that are done in the broad light of day. Milligan’s raided yesterday by
two gunmen and the place cleared of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of
stuff in fifteen minutes. Look at this chap Vanderdecken.”
“What’s he been doing?” asked Carolus.
“Doing! Don’t you read the papers?”
“No,” said Carolus.
“Doing. Why this chap’s been on the job for the last six months and
there’s twenty-five thousand dollars reward out for him. Yacht raiding,
that’s what he’s been doing, down the coast. Holding up pleasure
yachts, comes along in a high power motor boat sometimes and sometimes
he uses a fishing boat and no one knows where he changes ship or how he
does it or how many are working with him.”
“Oh,” said Carolus. “Well he’s doing nothing new. If you were as old
as I am, you’d remember Mullins, away back in the middle ’nineties, he
used to do the same thing. Got caught and I forget what they gave him.
There’s nothing new under the sun.”
“Well, they hadn’t wireless in the middle ’nineties,” said Abrahams,
“and wireless doesn’t hold Vanderdecken, he skips over it or gets under
it. Dutch Pete is his real name, they say, but someone labeled him
Vanderdecken from the ‘Flying Dutchman’.”
“I know all about the fellow,” cut in Hank Fisher, “know him from his
toe-nails up. He’s precious small potatoes, too. Lord, what a lot of
misinformation manages to get about. Dutch Pete wasn’t his name to
start with, either. Amsterdam Joe was his name. He came from Hamburg
and started here loading grain at Brookland Creek, then he got loose
on the front—in with McKay and that lot—managed a whisky joint and
got in trouble over something or other, and squared it and got into
the Fish Patrol and got fired for colluding with the Greeks in setting
Chinese sturgeon lines. Then, after the war, he managed to get some
sort of an old boat and cleared out of here. He’s down south and I
could put my finger on him if I wanted to. Shark fishing is what he
started on and he’s held up a two cent yacht or two, there’s no doubt
about that, but as for motor boats and Flying Dutchmen, that’s all the
newspaper talk. They’ve embroidered on him till he looks like a king.
Dutch Pete was a different chap altogether, but he’s not about now. I
saw him shot. It was in a dust-up at San Leandro.”
“Have you seen the papers this morning?” asked Abrahams.
“Nope.”
“Well, Vanderdecken, or Amsterdam Joe, or whatever you call him, has
held up the _Satanita_ as she was coming up from Avalon. She’s no two
cent yacht, she’s all of eight hundred tons. He went through her and
skipped with ten thousand dollars’ worth of stuff.”
“Give us the yarn,” said Hank.
“Oh, it was as easy as pie. Connart was coming up in the
_Satanita_—got his wife with him too—and somewhere off St. Luis
Obispo they sighted a yawl. She wasn’t more than forty or fifty tons
and was lying hove to with her flag half masted. They stopped the
engines, like fools, and the yawl sent a boat on board. Two fellows
came over the side. One fellow put an automatic pistol to Connart’s
head and the other man with another automatic covered the officer
on the bridge. There was nothing on board the _Satanita_ but a deck
gun and a nickel plated revolver, so she was helpless. Then two more
fellows came on board from the boat and went through her. They smashed
up the wireless first. Then they skipped and that old broken-down
looking yawl went off to the south under an auxiliary engine.”
“And why the blazes didn’t they chase and ram her?” asked Hank.
“Couldn’t. The rudder was jammed. The fellows in the boat had done some
tinkering work to it. It took them two days to get it right, and they
can’t even give a full description of the men, for they wore caps with
slits in them. Pulled the caps over their faces as they came aboard and
looked through the slits.”
“I expect the Navy will take it in hand,” said George du Cane. “A
couple of destroyers will soon run them down wherever they are hidden.”
Hank Fisher laughed. “You might as well go hunting for an honest
man in Market Street with a couple of rat terriers,” said Hank.
“First, you wouldn’t find him, second he wouldn’t be a rat. Why,
that auxiliary yawl is either at the bottom by now, or converted
into something else—and the guys on board her, do you think they’re
traveling about the Pacific with their slit caps over their faces
waiting for a destroyer to fetch them home? What did you say the reward
was—twenty-five thousand? You wait one minute.”
He rose up and left the room.
“What’s the matter with Hank now?” asked George.
“Search me,” replied Abrahams, “unless he’s gone off to ’phone the
police all about Vanderdecken being Amsterdam Joe and his description.”
“He’d never do that,” said Carolus. “He’s too chivalrous; you fellows
don’t know Hank. I don’t rightly know him myself. He’s a contradiction,
something as new as wireless and as old as Don Quixote, but the Don’s
there all the time. I saw him giving his arm to an old woman in Market
Street the other day; looked like a washerwoman. She’d tumbled down and
hurt her leg or something and there was Hank handing her like a duchess
on to a car. He believes in the sanctity of womanhood—told me so once.”
“And he believes in the rights of man,” said Abrahams, “but he’d beat
you out of your back teeth in one of his infernal land speculations.”
“And then buy you a new set,” said Carolus, “and swindle the dentist
out of a commission on the deal. Not that he cares for money.”
“Oh, no, he doesn’t care for money,” said Abrahams. “I’ll admit that,
but he’s a pirate all the same. It’s his romantic temperament, maybe,
mixed up with his New England ancestry. Here he is.”
“Boys,” said Hank, as he approached the group, “it’s true enough, I’ve
been on the ’phone; there’s twenty-five thousand dollars reward out for
the Dutchman, half put up by the Yacht Clubs. I’m out.”
“What do you mean?” asked Abrahams.
“To catch him,” said Hank.