OUT
Candon handed the wheel over to Hank. “Well, we’re out,” said he. “Keep
her as she goes, the coast’s a straight line down to Point San Pedro,
and I don’t want to clear it by more than ten miles.” He lit a pipe and
walked to the port rail, where he stood with the pipe in his mouth and
his hands on the rail looking at the land.
George stood beside him. The crew had vanished to the foc’sle, now that
everything was comfortable, leaving the deck to the three white men; no
watches had been picked nor was there a look-out. George remarked on
the fact and Candon laughed.
“I’d just as soon leave the Chinks below,” said he, “and run her
ourselves for the rest of the watch. Half a man could handle her as
the wind is, and as for a look-out, why I reckon nothing could sink us
to-night. Boys, I’m sure bughouse, I never took a ship out of ’Frisco
bay before two hours ago.”
“You what!” said George.
“What I’m telling you. It came on me to do it and I did it. I’ve been
in and out often enough, but never at the wheel nor navigating. I had
the lay of the place in my head but it was a near touch.”
Hank at the wheel gave a laugh that sounded like a cough.
“I felt it in my bones,” said Hank.
“What?” asked Candon.
“Why that you were driving out half blind; as near as paint you had us
on to Alcatraz and you all but rammed the Presidio. I was standing on
my toes wanting to yell ‘Put your helm over,’ but I kept my head shut,
didn’t want to rattle you.”
“Bughouse, clean bughouse,” said Candon. “Makes me sweat in the palms
of my hands now I’ve done it, but I tell you boys, I couldn’t have
missed. Going by night like that one can’t judge distance and as for
the lights, they’d better have been away, but I couldn’t have missed, I
was so certain sure of myself. It comes on me like that at times, I get
lifted above myself, somehow or another.”
“I’m the same way myself,” said Hank, “it comes on me as if I got
light-headed and I’m never far wrong if I let myself go. Bud here
will tell you I rushed this expedition through more by instinct than
anything else—didn’t I, Bud?”
Bud assented, unenthusiastically.
George Harley du Cane, out and away now with the Pacific beneath him
and his eyes fixed on the far-off loom of the land, was thinking.
He had recognized, even before starting, that Hank and Candon were,
temperamentally, pretty much birds of the same feather. Not only had
their discussions as to socialism and so forth seemed to him pretty
equally crazy, but he had recognized, in a dim sort of manner, that
they infected one another and that their “bughouse” qualities were
not diminished by juxtaposition. However, safe in port, the sanity
or insanity of his companions, expressed only in conversation about
abstract and uninteresting affairs, did not seem to matter. Out here it
was different, somehow, especially after the exhibition Candon had just
given them of daring carried to the limits of craziness. And who was
Candon, anyhow? A likable man, sure enough, but the confessed associate
of more than shady characters, and they had accepted this man on his
face value, as a pilot in an adventure that was sure to be dangerous,
considering the character of the man they were out to hunt.
Well, there was not a bit of use bothering. He had gone into the
business with his eyes open. There he was, wealthy, at ease with all
the world, talking to those men in the club, when in came Hank with
his lunacy, saying he was going to catch Vanderdecken. He had followed
the Rat Trap Inventor out, taken his arm and insisted on becoming part
and parcel of his plans. Why? He could not tell why. And now he was
tied up in a venture with Chinks and two cranks; a venture which, if
it failed, would make him ridiculous, if it succeeded might make him a
corpse. He might now have been respectably shooting in the Rockies only
for his own stupidity.
Then, all of a sudden, came a question to his mind, “Would you sooner
be respectably shooting in the Rockies or here?” Followed by the
surprising and immediate answer, “Here.” Bughouse—clean bughouse—but
the fact remained.
It was now getting on for two in the morning, and he went below,
leaving the deck to the others. They intended carrying on till four,
and then rousing the crew up for the morning watch.
They told him they would call him when they wanted him and he turned
in, dropping to sleep the instant his head touched the pillow. When
he awoke it was daylight, water dazzles were at play on the Venesta
panellings, as the early sunlight through the portholes shifted to the
lift of the swell, snores from the two other occupied bunks seemed
to keep time to the movement of the _Wear Jack_ and from the topmost
starboard bunk, Hank’s pyjama-clad leg hung like the leg of a dead man.
The whole of the after-guard had turned in, leaving apparently the
schooner to run herself. He turned out and without stopping to wake the
others came hurriedly up the companion way on deck.