THEY TURN THE CORNER
They had given Tommie the after cabin, but this hot weather the three
of them kept the deck at night so that she might have her door open,
and to-night, just before dawn when the _Wear Jack_ was right on to
Cape St. Lucas, Candon and George were keeping watch and listening to
Hank. Hank was lying on the deck with a pillow under his head, snoring.
The engine had been shut off to save gasoline, and the _Wear Jack_,
with a Chink at the wheel and the main boom guyed out, was sailing dead
before the wind, under a million stars, through a silence broken only
by the bow wash and the snores of Hank.
Candon, pacing the deck with George, was in a reflective mood.
“Wonder what that Chink’s thinking about?” said he. “Home mostlike.
They say every Chinaman carries China about with him in his box and
unpacks it when he lights his opium pipe. Well, it’s a good thing to
have a home. Lord! what’s the good of anything else, what’s the good
of working for money to spend in Chicago or N’ York? I reckon there’s
many a millionaire in the cities, living all day in his office on pills
an’ pepsin, would swop his dollars for the old home if he could get it
back, the old shanty near where the cows used to graze in the meadows
and the fish jump in the stream, with his old dad and his mother
sitting by the fire and his sister Sue playin’ on the step.”
“Where was your home?” asked George.
“Never had one,” said Candon, “and never will.”
“Oh, yes, you will.”
“Don’t see it. Don’t see where it’s to come from, even if I had the
dollars. I’m a lone man. Reckon there’s bucks in every herd same as me.
Look at me, getting on for forty and the nearest thing to a home is a
penitentiary. That’s so.”
“Now look here, B. C.,” said George,—then he stopped dead. A sudden
great uplift had come in his mind. Perhaps it was the night of stars
through which they were driving or some waft from old Harley du Cane,
the railway wrecker, who, still, always had his hand in his pocket for
any unfortunate; perhaps he had long and sub-consciously been debating
in his mind the case of Candon: who knows?
“You were going to say—?” said Candon.
“Just this,” said George. “Close up on the penitentiary business.
There’s worse men than you in the church, B. C., or I’m a nigger.
You’re going to have a home yet and a jolly good one. I’ve got it for
you.”
“Where?”
“In my pocket. Fruit farming, that’s your line, and a partner that can
put up the dollars—that’s me.”
Candon was silent for a moment.
“It’s good of you,” said he at last, “damn good of you. I reckon I
could make a business pay if it came to that, but there’s more than
dollars, Bud. I reckon I was born a wild duck. I’ve no anchor on board
that wouldn’t pull out of the mud first bit of wind that’d make me want
to go wandering.”
“I’ll fix you up with an anchor,” said Bud, “somehow or other. You
leave things to me and trust your uncle Bud.”
He was thinking of getting Candon married, somehow, to some girl. He
could almost visualize her: a big, healthy, honest American girl,
businesslike, with a heart the size of a cauliflower—some anchor.
“Sun’s coming,” said George, turning and stirring Hank awake with the
point of his toe. Hank sat up yawning.
Away on the port bow, against a watery blue window of sky, Cape St.
Lucas showed, its light-house winking at the dawn. Then came the
clang of gulls, starting for the fishing, and moment by moment as
they watched, the sea beyond the cape showed sharper, steel-blue and
desolate beyond words. The north could show nothing colder, till, all
at once, over the hills came colour on a suddenly materialised reef of
cloud.
They held their course whilst the day grew broader and the cape fell
astern; then, shifting the helm, they steered right into the eye of the
sun for the coast of Mexico.
They had turned the tip of Lower California.