* * * * *
THE BUCCANEERS
I THE CAPTAIN
Captain Blood used to come down to McGinnis’ wharf every afternoon to
have a look round. The Captain was an Irishman of the black-haired,
grey-eyed type from the west coast--a relic of the wreck of the Spanish
Armada.
The Spanish strain in the Celtic nature makes for volcanic
developments; and the Captain, from what we knew of him, formed no
exception to this rule. He was known as “The Captain” _tout court_
all along the front at San Francisco, from the China docks to Meiggs’
Wharf. He was a character. Scarcely forty years of age, he had done
most things that a man could possibly do in the way of sea-and-land
adventure. He had run guns in the Spanish-American War, dug for gold
at Klondike with the first batch of diggers, lost two fingers of his
left hand in a dust-up on the Chile coast, and two ships in a manner
considered dubious by the Board of Trade. But he never had lost a
friend, nor an enemy. Unlike most of his class, he had nothing of the
amphibian about him. Straight and well set up, he always managed to
keep a clean, well-groomed appearance even in the teeth of adversity.
The Captain was seated to-day on a mooring bitt, watching the
freighters loading with grain and the tugs and Italian whitehalls
passing on the blue water of the bay. He was down on his luck, had been
for the last month, and was in a condition of humour with the world
that would have lent him to any job from piracy to the captaining of a
hay barge.
Owners had fought shy of him ever since his last deep-sea adventure.
Capable and sober enough, he had earned a reputation for recklessness
that was a bar to employment as fatal as a reputation for drink. There
were no more Klondikes to be exploited, perfect peace reigned on the
west American seaboard from Vancouver to Wellington Island, piracy was
out of date, and every hay barge had its captain.
There seemed no prospect before him but either to go into the fo’c’sle
or go on tramp, and as he sat on the mooring bitt, kicking his heels
and watching the shipping, he was trying to decide which of these two
prospects was the more hateful.
He had arrived at no decision on this point when he saw a figure
approaching him. It was Billy Harman.
“Why, there you are!” said Billy. “Just the man I wanted to see. I
looked into Sam Brown’s, and you weren’t there, and Sam said: ‘Try down
on the wharves; the Captain is sure to be down on the wharves on the
lookout for his ship.’”
“I’ll teach him to talk about me and my affairs,” said Blood. “Well,
now you’ve found me, what have you got for me?”
“A ship,” replied Harman.
“Have you got it in your pocket?” said the Captain. “If so, produce it.
A ship! And since what day have you turned owner?”
Mr. Harman produced a pipe and began to load it carefully and
meditatively. His manner could not have been more detached had the
Captain not been present.
Then, having lit the pipe and taken a draw, he seemed to remember the
presence of the other.
“Yes,” said he, “it’s a sure-enough job if you wish to take it. I’d
have had it myself, only I’m no hand at the deep-sea-cable business;
but when the thing was spoken of to me I said: ‘I’ve got the man you
want who can do any job in that way better’n any man in Frisco.’ You
see, I knew you’d served two years on the _Groper_.”
“The _Grapnel_, you mean.”
“It’s all the same; she were a cable ship, weren’t she? And I said: ‘If
he’ll go, I’ll go meself as second off’cer. I can do the navigatin’.’”
“When the whisky bottle is out of sight,” put in Blood.
“‘And what’s more,’ said I, ‘I’ll get you a crew that’s up to snuff and
won’t make no bother nor tell no yarns. You leave the job to me,’ said
I, ‘and if I can get the Captain to come along it’s fixed,’ I says.”
“Now look here, Bill Harman,” said Blood, shifting his position on the
mooring bitt so as to get his informant face to face, “what are you
driving at? What do you mean, anyhow? Who’s the owner of the cable boat
that’s willing to ship you as first mate and me as skipper? Is this a
guy you are letting off on me, or is it delirium tremens? A cable boat!
Why, what cable company is going to fish round promiscuous and pick up
its officers from sweepings like you and me?”
“This is no company,” replied Harman. “It’s a private venture.”
“To lay or to mend?”
“Well, if you ask me,” said Harman, “I’d say it was more like a
breaking job. If you ask me, I wouldn’t swear to it being an upside
business, but it’s a hundred dollars a month for the skipper and a
bonus of two thousand dollars if the job’s pulled off, and half that
for the mate.”
The Captain whistled.
The darkness in this business revealed by Billy Harman jumped up at
him; so did the two thousand dollars bonus and the hundred a month pay.
“Who asked you to come into this?” said he.
“A chap named Shiner,” replied Harman.
“A Jew?”
“A German. I don’t know whether he is a Jew or not, but he’s got the
splosh.”
“Look here,” said the Captain, half resuming his place on the mooring
bitt with one leg dangling, “let’s come to common sense. To begin with,
you can’t run a cable boat with a skipper and a mate and even a couple
of engineers alone. You want an electrician. Where’s your electrician
to come from?”
“You don’t want no electricians to cut cables with,” said Harman.
“That’s true,” said the Captain, falling into meditation.
“Yet, all the same,” went on Harman, “this chap Shiner said we would
want an electrician, and that he’d come as electrician himself. Says he
has a good knowledge of the work.”
“Oh, he said that, did he?”
“Yes, and I guess he told no lie. This chap Shiner is no bar bummer by
a long chalk. I reckon he’s all there.”
The Captain made no reply. He was thinking. At first he had fancied
this to be a simple business; some rascal person or syndicate wishing
to cut a deep-sea cable and so interrupt communication between the
business centres. There were only two or three Pacific cables where
this piece of rascality could bring any fruitful results. That is to
say, there were only two or three cables the cutting of which would not
have been negatived by collateral cables or wireless, and the simple
cutting of those cables could not conceivably produce a financial
result worth the risk and the cost of an expedition.
But this was evidently more than a simple cutting job, since the
presence of an electrician was required.
“Look here,” said he, “where is this man Shiner to be seen?”
“Why,” said Harman, “he’s to be seen easy enough in his office on
Market Street.”
“Well, let’s go and have a look at him,” said the Captain, detaching
himself from the mooring bitt. “He’s worth investigating. Would he be
in now, think you?”
“He might,” replied Harman. “Anyhow, we can try.”
They walked away together.
Harman, unlike Blood, was a typical sailor of the tramp school, a man
who knew more about steam winches and cargo handling than masts and
yards. He was all right to look at, a stocky man with a not unpleasant
face, a daring eye, and a fresh colour, but his certificates were not
to match. Drink had been this gentleman’s ruin. Had he been a lesser
man, drink would have crushed him down into the fo’c’sle. As it was,
he managed to get along somehow by his wits. He had not made a voyage
for two years now, but he had managed to make a living; he had been
endowed by nature with a mind active as a squirrel. He was in with a
number of men: ward politicians knew him as a useful man, and used him
occasionally. Crimps knew him, and tavern keepers. Had he been more of
a scamp and less of a dreamer, he might have risen high in life. His
dream was of a big fortune to be “got sudden and easy,” and this dream,
stimulated at times by alcohol, managed somehow to keep him poor.
The public life of Frisco, like a rotten cheese, supports all sorts of
mites and maggots, and the wharf edge is of all cheese the most rotten
part.
Harman could put his hand on men to vote at a city election, or men
to man a whaler; he was under political protection, he was in with
the port officers and the customs, and he could have been a very
considerable person despite his lack of education but for the drink.
Drink is fatal to successful scoundrelism, and the form in which it
afflicted Harman is the most fatal of all, for he was not a consistent
toper. He would go sober for months on end, and then, having made some
money and some success, he would “fly out.”
Having reached Market Street, Harman led his companion into a big
building where an elevator whisked them up to the fifth floor.
Here, at the end of a concrete passage, Harman pushed open a door
inscribed with the legend “The Wolff Syndicate,” and, entering an outer
office, inquired for Mr. Shiner. They were shown into a comfortably
furnished room where at a roll-top desk a young man was seated busily
at work with a stenographer at his side. He asked them to be seated,
finished the few words he had to dictate, and then, having dismissed
the stenographer, turned to Harman.
Shiner, for it was he, was a very glossy individual, immaculately
dressed in a frock coat, broad-striped trousers, spats, and
patent-leather shoes.
He did not look more than thirty--if that--he was good looking, and yet
a frankly ugly man would have produced a more pleasing impression on
the mind than Mr. Shiner. Despite his good looks, his youth, and his
manner, which was intended to please, there was something inexpressibly
hard and negative about this individual.
The Captain felt it at once. “Now, there’s a chap that would do you in
and sit on your corpse and eat sandwiches,” said he to himself, “and
smile--wonder how Harman got a hold of a chap like that? But there’s
money here; the place smells of it, and the chap, too. Well, we’ll see.”
“This is the Captain,” said Harman. “Captain Blood I spoke of to you. I
happened to meet him, and he’s come in to see you.”
“Very glad to see you, Captain,” said Shiner, getting up and standing
with his back to the stove. “Has our friend Harman mentioned to you
anything of the business I spoke of to him?”
“He told me it was cable work,” replied Blood cautiously.
“Just so,” said Shiner. “I want a skipper for some work in connection
with deep-sea cables. You have experience, I suppose?”
“Two years in the _Grapnel_,” replied Blood.
“You were skipper?”
“No; first officer.”
“Had you much to do with the cable work?”
“Everything, as far as handling the cable. You see, in some companies
and some boats they have a regular cable engineer, a chap who doesn’t
touch any work but cable work; in others, the chief officer does his
work and the cable work as well.”
“I know,” replied Shiner, nodding his head as though he were well
acquainted with all the ins and outs of the business. “Well, in this
affair of ours the skipper would be skipper and cable engineer as well.
That would not interfere with his proper business, since once the
cable engineer is in charge, he is the virtual captain of the ship.”
Blood nodded, wondering how this up-to-date-looking young business man
had gained so much knowledge about this special branch of seamanship.
“Of course you have certificates,” went on Shiner. “You can show a
clean sheet for character and ability?”
“Curse his impudence!” thought the Captain to himself; then, aloud: “A
clean sheet? No, can you?”
Shiner, who had been standing on his toes and letting himself down on
his heels, puffing out his chest, shooting his cuffs, and otherwise
conducting himself like a man in power and on a pedestal, collapsed
at this dig. He flung his right elbow into the palm of his left hand,
pinched in his cheeks with his right thumb and forefinger, coughed,
frowned, and then said:
“I can excuse a sailor for being short in his temper before a question
that would seem to imply incapacity. We will say no more on that point.
I take your word that you are an efficient navigator and a capable
cable engineer.”
“You needn’t take anything of the sort,” said Blood. “I’m a bad
navigator, and, as for cable engineering, I can find a cable if I have
a chart of it and howk her out of the mud if I have a grapnel. I don’t
say that doesn’t want doing; still that’s my limit as a cable man. And
as to navigation, I can just carry on. I’ve lost two ships.”
“The _Averna_ and the _Trojan_,” said Shiner.
“Now, how in the nation did you know that?” cried the outraged Blood.
“I know most things about most men in Frisco,” replied the subtle
Shiner.
“Well, then, you’ll know my back,” replied Blood, rising from his
chair, “and you may think yourself lucky if you don’t know my boot!” He
turned to the door.
“Captain! Captain!” cried Harman, springing up. “Don’t take on so for
nothing. The gentleman didn’t mean nothing. Don’t you, now, be a fool,
for it’s me you’ll put out of a job as well as yourself.”
“What made him ask me those questions, then, and he knowing my record
all the time?” cried Blood, around whose body Harman had flung an arm.
“He didn’t mean no _harm_; he didn’t mean no _harm_. Don’t you be
carrying on so for nothing; the gentleman didn’t mean no harm. Here,
now, sit you down; he didn’t mean no harm.”
Harman was not an orator, but his profound common sense prevented him
from enlarging on the subject and trying to suggest innocent things
that Shiner might have meant. Blood was in a condition of mind to snap
at anything, but he sat down.
Shiner had said not one word.
“That’s right,” said Harman, in a soothing voice. “And now, Mr. Shiner,
if I’m not wrong, it was a hundred dollars a month you were offering
the Captain, with a bonus of a thousand when the job’s through. Maybe
I’m not mistaken in what I say.”
“Not a bit,” said Shiner, speaking as calmly as though no unpleasant
incident had occurred. “Those are the terms, with an advance of a
hundred dollars should the Captain engage himself to us.”
“What about the victuals,” said the Captain, seeming to forget his late
emotion, “and the drinks?”
“The food will be good,” replied Shiner, “and the best guarantee of
that will be the fact that I go with you myself as electrician. I’m not
the man to condemn myself to bad food for the sake of a few dollars.
The food will be the best you have ever had on board ship, I suspect;
but there will be no drinks.”
“No drinks?”
“Not till we are paid off. This business wants cool hands. Tea, coffee,
mineral waters you will have as much as you want of; but not one drop
of alcohol. I am condemning myself as well as you, so there is no room
for grumbling.”
Harman heaved a sigh like the sigh of a porpoise. Blood was silent for
a moment. Then he said: “Well, I don’t mind. I’m not set on alcohol. If
it’s to be a teetotal ship, maybe it’s all the better; but I reckon
you’ll pay wind money all the same.”
“What’s this they allow?” asked Shiner, as though he had forgotten this
point.
“A shilling a day on the English ships,” said the Captain, “for the
officers. Eighteen pence, some of the companies make it. I don’t know
what the skipper gets. I reckon double. I’ll take half a dollar a day.
That’s about fair.”
“Very well,” said Shiner. “I meet you. Anything more?”
“No,” said the Captain. “I guess that’s all.”
“When can you start?” asked Shiner.
“When you’re ready.”
“Well, that will be about this day week.”
“And the advance?”
“I will pay you that to-morrow, when you have seen over the ship. It’s
just as well you should have a look at her first. Can you be here at
ten o’clock to-morrow morning?”
“Yes, I can be here.”
“Very well, then. You had better come, too, Mr. Harman. I will expect
you both at ten o’clock sharp. Good day to you.”
They went out.
Going down in the elevator, they said nothing.
It will have been noticed that not one of the three men had made
any remark on the real nature of the forthcoming expedition. It was
admittedly dark. The amount of pay and the bonus were quite enough to
throw light on the edges of the affair. Blood did not want to explore
farther. It wasn’t the first dark job he’d been on, and the less he
knew the more easily could he swear to innocence in case of capture.
Harman seemed of this way of thinking also, for, when they turned into
the street, all he said was:
“Well, come and have a drink.”
“I don’t mind,” said Blood. “I’m not a drinking man, as a rule; but
that chap has made me feel dry somehow or another.”
He had taken a black dislike to Shiner.
II THE “PENGUIN”
Near the docks where the China boats come in, there lies an old wharf
gone pretty much to decay. Rafferty’s Wharf is the name it goes by. It
bears about the same relationship to the modern sea front that Monterey
bears to San Francisco, for its rotten piles, bored by sea weevils
and waving their weeds languidly to the green water that washes them,
were young in the days when grain went aboard ship by the sackful and
the tank ships of the Standard Oil Company were floating only in the
undreamed-of future.
If you hunt for it, you will find it very difficult to discover; and if
you discover it, you will gain little by your discovery but melancholy.
The great grain elevators pouring their rivers of wheat into the holds
of the great grain freighters overshadow it with their majesty, and go
as often as you will, there is never a decent, live ship moored to its
bitts.
The cripples of the sea are brought here for a rest, or for sale,
before starting with a last kick of their propellers for the
breaking-up yards; and here, on this bright morning, when Mr. Shiner
and his two seafaring companions appeared on the scene, this veritable
cripple home only showed two inmates--a brig and a grey-painted,
single-funnelled steamship with rust runnings staining her paint,
verdigris on her brasswork, no boats at her davits, and a general air
of neglect, slovenliness, and disreputability beggaring description.
The _Penguin_ had never been a beauty to look at, and she had always
been a beast to roll; even rolling plates, though they had improved her
a bit, had not cured her. She had only one good point--speed--and that
was an accident; she had not been built for speed; she had been built
to carry cable and to lay it and mend it; speed had come to her by that
law which rules that to every ship built comes some quality or defect
not reckoned for by the designer and builder.
Shiner & Co., having hailed the watchmen, crossed the gangplank to the
desolate deck, the Captain with frank disapproval on his face, Harman
sniffing and trying to look cheerful at the same time, like a salesman
keeping a fair face above the rotten game he is offering for sale.
“Great Neptune!” said the Captain, glancing around him.
“She is a bit gone to neglect,” said Shiner, “but it’s all on the
surface. She’s as sound as a bell where it really matters.”
“Them funnel guys,” said Harman.
“Yes, they want tightening, and the want of boats doesn’t make her look
any better; but boats will be supplied according to regulation. You
won’t know her when I’ve had half a dozen fellows at her for a couple
of days. All that brasswork wants doing, and a lick of paint will liven
her up; but she’s not a yacht, anyhow, and a sound deck under one’s
feet is a long way better than a good appearance.”
He followed the Captain, who had walked forward to the bow, where the
picking-up gear cumbered the deck.
This consisted of a huge drum moved by cogwheels and worked through
the picking-up engine by steam from the main boilers. On it would be
wound the grapnel rope used for grappling for cable over the wheel let
into the bow just at the point where in ordinary ships the heel of the
bowsprit is grasped by the knightheads.
The Captain inspected this machine with attention, pressing on the cogs
of the driving wheel with his thumb as though they were soft and he
wished to discover how much they would dent; then, standing off a bit,
he looked at it with his head on one side, as a knowing purchaser might
look at a horse.
“Wants a drop of lubricating oil,” said Shiner tentatively.
“Gallons,” replied the Captain. He turned to the picking-up engine and
pulled the lever over. This he did several times, releasing it and
then pulling it over again as if for the gloomy pleasure of feeling its
defects.
“Well,” said Shiner, “what do you think of the gear and engine?”
“Oh, they’ll work,” said the Captain, “but it will be a good job if
they don’t work off their bedplates.”
“They’ll hold tight enough,” said Harman, pressing his foot on the
brake of the engine. “There’s nothing wrong with them on the inside.
Let’s have a look at the main.”
They came aft past the electrical testing room, and passed down the
companionway to the engine room.
Here things were brighter, the weather having worked no effect.
“I have had them examined by an expert,” said Shiner. “He gave them an
A-1 certificate. And the boilers are sound; they have been scaled and
cleaned. Let’s go and look at the saloon.”
They came on deck, and Shiner led the way down the companionway to the
saloon.
It was a big place, with a table running down the middle capable of
seating twenty or thirty at a crush. Cabin doors opened on either
side of it; at the stern end it bayed out into a lounge and a couch
upholstered in red velvet; and at the end, by the door leading to the
companionway, was fixed a huge sideboard with a mirror backing.
A faint air of old festivity and an odour of must and mildew lent their
melancholy to the dim, irreligious light streaming down through the
dirty skylight.
The Captain sniffed. Then he peeped into the cabins on either side,
noticed the cockroaches that made hussar rushes for shelter, the fact
that the doors stuck in their jambs, that the bunks were destitute of
bedding, and the scuttles of the portholes sealed tight with verdigris.
“You can have the starboard cabin by the door,” said Shiner. “I’ll take
the port. Or you can take the chart room; there’s a bunk there. Harman
can have any of the other cabins he likes. We’ll all mess here, and we
won’t grumble at being tightly packed.”
“You’ll have decent bedding put in?” said the Captain.
“That will be done, all right,” replied Shiner. “You need have no fear
at all that the appointments won’t be up to date. There won’t be frills
on the sheets, but there will be comfort.”
“Well, comfort is all I ask,” replied the Captain. “And you propose to
put out this day week?”
“This day week. May I take it, now, that everything is settled?”
The Captain scratched his head for a moment, as if dislodging a last
objection. Then he said:
“I’ll come.”
III THE TOP SEAT AT THE TABLE
It was on a Tuesday morning that they started. Blood came on board
at six, and found the majority of the crew already assembled under
Harman. They had come on board the night before, and, to use his own
expression, they were the roughest, toughest crowd he had ever seen
collected on one deck.
He was just the man to handle them, and his first act was to boot a
fellow off the bridge steps where he had taken his perch, pipe in
mouth, and send him flying down the alleyway forward. Then, following
him, he began to talk to the hands, sending them flying this way and
that, some to clean brasswork and others to clear the raffle off the
decks.
Down below, the boilers were beginning to rumble, and now appeared at
the engine-room hatch a new figure, with the air of a Scotch terrier
poking up its head to have a look round.
It was MacBean, the chief, second, third, and fourth engineer in one.
MacBean had the honest look of a Dandie Dinmont, and something of the
facial expression. He was an efficient engineer; he was on board the
_Penguin_ because he could not get another job, and that fact was
not a certificate of character. There was scarcely a soul on board
the _Penguin_, indeed, with the exception of Shiner, who would not
have been somewhere else but for circumstances over which they had no
control.
The Captain gave MacBean good morning, had a moment’s talk with him,
and then went aft to see how things were going there.
He found that a steward had been installed, and that he was in the act
of laying breakfast things at one end of the breakfast table.
The Captain sent him up for his gear which was on deck, ordered him
to place it in the cabin which he had selected, and then proceeded to
change from the serge suit which he wore into an old uniform dating
from his last command in the Black Bird line.
As he was finishing his toilet, he heard Shiner’s voice, and when he
came out of his cabin he found Shiner and Harman seated at table and
the steward serving breakfast.
Shiner had gotten himself up for the sea. He looked as though he were
off for some cheap trip with a brass band in attendance. Very few
people can bear yachting rig, especially when it is brand-new; and
brass buttons with anchors on them are as trying to a man’s gentility
as mauve to a woman’s complexion.
The Captain gave the others good morning. Two things gratified him: the
sight of the good breakfast spread upon the table, and the fact that
the chair at the head of the table was vacant and evidently reserved
for him.
He was about to take his seat when Shiner stopped him.
“Excuse me,” said he, “but that is Mr. Wolff’s place.”
“Mr. Wolff’s place?” said Blood. “And who the deuce is Mr. Wolff?”
“Our senior partner,” said Shiner. “I’m expecting him every minute.”
Then it was that the Captain noticed a cover laid beside Harman and
evidently intended for him.
The temper of the man was not intended by nature to take calmly an
incident like this.
The steward was listening, too.
“I’ll give you to understand right away and here, now,” said he, “that
I’m the skipper of this tub, and that this is my place at the table.
It’s as well to begin as we intend to go on. Steward, look alive there
with the coffee.”
He took his seat at the head of the table, helped himself to eggs
and bacon, and turned his conversation on Harman. Shiner flushed,
hesitated, lost his balance, and subsided into his coffee cup. The
Captain at a stroke had taken his position among the after guard. Wolff
might own the ship, and Shiner, too, it did not matter in the least.
The Captain was boss, and would remain so.
In a moment, when he had finished saying what he had to say to Harman,
he turned to the other.
“Of course,” said he, “I can’t stop you bringing all the supercargoes
you like on board----” He stopped, told the steward to clear out of the
saloon, and then, when the man had disappeared, went on: “Considering
I’ve let myself in for this thing with my eyes shut, I’ve no right
to complain if you brought bears on board, to say nothing of wolves;
but I’d have taken it kinder if you had let me know right off at the
beginning that the whole firm was going on the cruise.”
“Look here, Captain,” said Shiner, “you have spoken truth without
knowing it. Wolff is the whole firm practically. He’s the boss of this
business, to all intents and purposes; he’s the money behind it all,
and the brain, and he did not want to advertise the fact that he was
coming on board, I suppose, for he is a man pretty well known in the
States. Anyhow, there are the facts. Wolff is a man that _I_ don’t mind
playing second fiddle to; and if I don’t mind, I don’t see why you
should.”
“Oh, don’t you?” said the Captain. “Well, I do. I’m captain of this
tub, and captain I’ll remain. I’m risking enough for a hundred dollars
a month and a bonus of a thousand if this piracy, whatever it is, of
yours, comes off, without losing my status quo as well.”
“What’s that?” asked the illiterate Harman, who had laid down the knife
with which he had been eating so as to attend better to the dispute.
“It’s what you’ll never have--the position of a master mariner and the
top seat at the table.”
“What do you mean by that word ‘piracy’?” asked Shiner, with the air of
a woman whose reputation is attacked. “There is no such thing in this
business, and it would be a lot better for you to be more careful with
your words. Words are dangerous weapons when flung about like that.”
“Well,” said the Captain, “call it what you like. I don’t know what it
is, but I’ve signed on, and I’m not the man to go back on my word; but,
as I just said, I don’t know what we are after, and I don’t much care,
as long as we steer clear of the gallows.”
“Don’t be talking like that,” said Harman. “Mr. Shiner, here, ain’t
such a fool as to go within smellin’ distance of any hanging matter.
What we are after may be a bit off colour, but it’s a business venture
in the main. I’ve asked no questions, but Mr. Shiner has given me to
understand that it was business he was after, not anything that would
lay us by the heels, so to speak, in any killing matter.”
“What we are after is perfectly plain,” said Shiner. “Killing! Who
talked of killing? This is, just as you say, a business matter, and
it’s no worse than what’s being done in Frisco every day, only it’s a
bit more adventurous.”
The precious trio finished their breakfast without any more words,
and then went on deck. They had scarcely reached it when across the
gangplank came a stout, black-bearded individual followed by a couple
of wharf rats, one bearing luggage, the other two big cases.
This was Wolff.
Shiner introduced him to the Captain, and then Wolff, followed by the
luggage and the cases, disappeared below.
“He’s not a good sailor,” said Shiner, “but he’ll be all right after a
day or two. Ah, here come the port authorities. I’ll have a talk with
them. You are all right for starting, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said the Captain. “I’m ready to cast off when you are.”
“Right!” said Shiner.
He took the port officers down to the saloon, and when they came up
again they were all smoking half-dollar perfectos and the traces of
conviviality and good-fellowship were evident.
“They’ve been having drinks,” said Harman to himself. “Wouldn’t wonder
if there was lush in those cases Wolff brought aboard. No tellin’.”
IV THE SAILING OF THE “PENGUIN”
It was noon when the hawsers were cast off and Captain Blood, in all
the glory of command, standing on the bridge, rang up the engines and
put the telegraph to half speed ahead.
It was a glorious day, not a cloud in the sky, and scarcely a ripple
of breeze on the water. The breeze, just sufficient to shake the trade
flags of the shipping, brought with it the whistling of ferryboats, the
hammering of boiler iron from the shipyards, and a thousand voices from
the multitude of ships.
They nearly scraped the stern wheel off a Stockton river boat, and
then, as if sheering off from the blasphemy of the Stocktonites, nosed
round and passed the buoy that marks the shoal water west of Hennessy’s
Wharf. Then down the bay they went with the sunlight on Alcatraz and
the Contre Costa shore, and away ahead the Golden Gate and a vision of
the blue Pacific.
They passed Lime Point and took the middle channel, where the first
heave of the outer sea striding over the bar met them with a keener
touch of wind to back it. The Cliff House and Point Bonita fell astern,
and now, right ahead, the Farallons sketched themselves away across the
lonely blue of the sea.
The _Penguin_, bow on to the swell, was behaving admirably, so well,
indeed, that Wolff, with a cigar in his mouth, had appeared on deck and
climbed onto the bridge. But now, clear of the land and with a shift
of helm, the beam sea produced its effect, and her rolling capacities
became evident.
Wolff descended, leaving the bridge to its lawful occupants, and even
Shiner, who had taken his place on the after gratings with an account
book and stylograph pen, retired after a very little while.
The _Penguin_ was built to hold a thousand miles of cable in her
fore end and after tanks, and, loaded like that, the effect of her
top-hamper in the way of picking-up gear, picking-up engine, derricks,
and buoys would be corrected. But she had no cable in her now, only
water ballast, and she rolled after her natural bent, and rolled and
rolled till cries of “Steward!” came faintly through the saloon hatch,
followed by other sounds and the clinking of basins.
Blood walked the bridge with Harman, casting now and then an eye at the
compass card and the fellow at the wheel, and now and then an eye at
the forward deck lumbered with the gear and four or five new-painted
buoys, each numbered and each with a lamp socket.
“They haven’t spared expense in fitting her out,” said Harman.
“No, they haven’t,” replied the Captain. “And why? Simply because I’ve
been at Shiner all the past week with a rope’s end, so to say. I’m
blessed if the blighter didn’t want to economise on buoys! ‘Two will be
enough,’ says he; ‘it’s only a short job we are on, and they are three
hundred dollars apiece.’ He said that right to my face. ‘Well,’ said
I, ‘it’s none of my business, but if you want to drop the job, whatever
it is, in the middle, and run a thousand miles to the nearest port for
a ten-cent buoy, you’ll find your economy has been misplaced. You will
that.’ So he caved in on the buoys. Then we had an argument over the
grapnel rope. He wanted to take two miles of all hemp. I wanted five
miles of wire wove. I got it, but only after a mighty tough struggle.
The grapnels are good, but they went with the ship, and they’d been
properly laid up in paraffin; not a speck on them. Then the Kelvin
sounder was out of order. Yes, they’d have sailed with it like that
only for me, and it cost them something to have it put right.”
“What I’m thinking,” said Harman, “is that this expedition is costing a
good deal of money.”
“It’s costing all of five hundred dollars a day.”
“What I’m thinking,” went on Harman, “is that the profits to come out
of whatever they are going to do must be huge, big profits to cover
the expenses, and I’ve taken notice that when chaps are ketched going
on the crooked where money is concerned, they always gets a bigger
doing from the law the bigger the money is. It’s this way: if a chap
nails a suit of clothes, or a ham, he don’t get as much as a chap that
nicks a motor boat, shall we say, and the chap that nicks a motor boat
don’t----”
“Oh, shut up!” said the Captain. “We’re in for it, whatever it is, and
our only hope’s our innocence if we’re caught. We don’t know anything;
we are only obeying the orders of the owners. Not that that will have
much weight if we are caught, but we’re not going to be. I’ve a firm
belief in that slippery eel of a Shiner, much as I dislike him; and
this chap Wolff doesn’t seem a fool, either. They’re not the sort of
fellows to run their skins into much danger.”
“What do you think it is?” asked Harman.
“Think what is?”
“This game of theirs.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think they are going to pick up a
cable, cut it, and tap it.”
“Whatcha mean by tapping it?”
“Sucking the news out of it. Or maybe they’re going to use it for
sending some lying message that’ll upset the stock markets, or grain
markets, or railway people. Lord bless you, there’s a hundred things to
be done if one has the business end of a real deep-sea cable with a big
city like Frisco or maybe Sydney at the other end.”
“Well, maybe there is,” said Harman. “There’s a good many things to be
done in Frisco off the square, without a cable, and there’s no sayin’
what mightn’t be done with one.”
“I reckon you’re a judge of that,” laughed the Captain.
“Oh, I’m pretty well up to the tricks of Frisco,” said the other
complacently. “But this is a new traverse, fooling folk from the middle
of the ocean, one might say. I reckon Wolff is a German, ain’t he?”
“Yes, he’s a Dutchman, all right; so’s Shiner, I reckon. German Jew. It
lands me how those sort of chaps get on and make money, and the likes
of us has to take their orders and their leavings. I’d like to get even
with them once.”
“Well, maybe you will,” said Harman.
The Captain grunted.
There was a fellow on board named Bowers. He had been given the post of
bos’n, and he knew something of navigation and could keep a watch on
the bridge.
The Captain called for him now and gave the bridge over to him, as all
was plain sailing with the California coast away on the port quarter,
the Farallons on the starboard bow, and the whole blue Pacific Ocean
right ahead.
He and Harman, leaving the bridge, sought the chart room and went in
there for a smoke. It was a pleasant place, full of light, and with a
couch running along one side. By the door stood a rack of rifles, eight
in number, and for every rifle a cutlass.
Cable ships go armed. They never know, when they leave port to do a
job, what new job may not suddenly call them to the Patagonian beaches
or the fogs of the Yellow Sea. The rifles and cutlasses were part of
the fixtures belonging to the _Penguin_ and taken over by the new
owners, just as fixtures are taken over with a house. To use them for
their proper purpose could never have occurred to the minds of Shiner,
Wolff & Co. They were not men of violence. The strange thing, indeed,
about this expedition, organised and manned for lawless work on the
deep sea, was the fact that the chiefs were, to use Harman’s phrase,
“sure-enough city men,” and that they were even now down below dead
sick with the Pacific’s first fringe of swell.
Harman took a rifle down and examined it, while Blood, extending his
leg on the couch, lit a pipe.
“Say,” said Harman, “are you any good as a shot?”
“Not with a thing like that,” replied the Captain. “I can hit a man
with a revolver at ten paces, and that’s all the good shooting I want.
Put that thing down and don’t be fooling with it.”
“It’s not loaded,” replied Harman, who had opened the breech.
“And it’s not likely to be,” replied the other, “for there’s no
ammunition on board and no need for it. If we’re caught, there must be
no fighting.”
“Why, I thought you was a fighting man,” said Harman, putting the rifle
back. “You have the name for it.”
“And so I am, when fighting is to be had on the square; but there’s
fighting and fighting. Can’t you see, if we were caught tinkering at
some cable we had no right to be meddling with, and if we were chased
by some gunboat, and if we were to fight and draw blood--can’t you see
we’d be hanged without benefit of clergy? No, I never fight against the
law. Never have and never will.”
“Suppose a cruiser overhauled her when we was at work?” said Harman.
“Well, what’s easier to say than that we were sent to mend? We are a
sure-enough cable ship, and how’s a cruiser to know whether the cable
we are fishing for or tinkering with isn’t broken? Oh, no; you may make
your mind easy on that. Our position is sound and safe, on the outside.
Inside it’s as rotten as punk.”
V THE CABLE MESSAGE
The _Penguin_, steering a sou-sou’westerly course, slipped day by
day into warmer and bluer seas. Wolff, recovering from his first
unpleasantness, appeared on deck, cigar in mouth; and Shiner, with
nothing better to do, would be seen lounging on the after gratings with
a novel in his hand.
The Captain and Harman worked the ship, and had little to do with the
others, meeting them chiefly at table, where, needless to say, the
Captain took the head. Wolff had given him a chart of the Pacific
whereon was laid down the exact position of the cable they were going
to attend to.
“This is the chart,” Wolff had said. “You will see, there is the cable.
It is plainly marked. I wish you to bring us to it about here.” He made
a pencil mark on the cable line. “And when you have brought us to that
point, then I will explain to you the object of this expedition.”
“Right!” said the Captain.
They were steering now for the cable line through days of sapphire and
nights wonderful with stars. Now and then they would raise an island, a
peak with a turban of clouds, or an atoll, just a green ring of palms
and breadfruits surrounded by a white ring of foam, and peak and atoll
would heave in sight and sink from sight with nothing to tell of the
legerdemain at work but the pounding of the screw and the throb of the
engines.
Sometimes a sail would heave in sight, or the far-off smoke of a
steamer hold the imagination for an hour or two, and then be painted
out, leaving nothing but the sea, the sky, and the pearl-white trace of
cloud draping the skirts of the warm trade wind.
There is no place in the world where grievances sprout so well and grow
so rapidly as on board ship. The Captain had a grievance. It had come
to his knowledge that Wolff had a private stock of Pilsener. Some had
come in the cases that the wharf rat had carried after him on board,
and there was more stowed away in some hole known only to Wolff and
Shiner.
Those two worthies would forgather of a morning in Wolff’s cabin and
drink Pilsener and then heave the bottles out of the porthole. The
Captain had seen a Pilsener bottle going aft, bobbing and bowing to him
in the wake, and his fury was excessive and ill contained.
Leaving aside the meanness of proclaiming the ship teetotal and then
smuggling drink aboard for private consumption, there was something of
cold-blooded inhospitality about the business that struck at the Irish
heart.
He was very explicit about the matter to Harman:
“Swine--they and their lager beer! You wait! I’ll pay them out.”
“To think of them sitting there drinking, and we dry!” said the
simple-minded Harman. “That’s what gets me. We dry and them chaps
drinking. It makes me thirsty. I don’t care a dash about their sitting
there and drinking, but when I think of it it makes me thirsty. That’s
what gets me.”
“Well, you’ll have to think of something else,” said the Captain.
“There’s no use in dwelling on things like that, and the voyage is not
for long.”
“It’s long enough to be without a drink in,” said Harman.
Harman, despite his up-to-dateness on San Francisco roguery, was a most
extraordinary child for all his manhood. The man part of him had grown
up and grown crooked; the child part of him had remained virginal. The
moment was everything to him. He could just read and write his name,
and sometimes, when he was off duty, you would see him spelling over a
San Francisco paper. Houses to let, governess wanted--it was all the
same to him. He only read the advertisement columns. They satisfied his
craving for literature, and he could understand them. The rest of the
paper, from the poetry corner to the foreign-news column, was arid
ground for him.
Yet this same man had made money out of ward politics and in twenty
other ways in which one would have fancied education necessary to
success.
They left Fanning and Christmas Island three hundred miles to
starboard, passed the equator, and, entering the great, empty space of
sea bounded by the Phœnix Islands on the north and the Penrhyns on the
southeast, headed toward the Navigators.
One sweltering morning, the Captain, coming up to Wolff, who was seated
in his pajamas under the double awning that had been rigged up, said:
“We’re just on the cable line.”
Wolff rose up, called for the steward, and, having sent for his panama,
put it on and came up on the bridge.
The sea was smooth, surface smooth, but underrun by the long, endless
swell of the Pacific.
“This is the spot,” said the Captain, who had been poring over the
cable chart which he had brought up on the bridge. “And it’s pretty
deep. All a mile.”
“Good!” said Wolff. “With this calm sea, we ought to work well and
quickly. We are in luck; and now, if you will come into the chart
house, we will talk for one moment.”
They went into the chart house, and Wolff shut the door.
“This is a purely business proposition,” began Wolff, “and I must tell
you, to begin with, that it is not a business which a man of a certain
type of mind would call on the square. But, my dear Captain, can you
show me any business proposition that is truly on the square? Not one.
I want the use of a cable, and I am going to take it for business
purposes. That is all there is to it, you understand.”
“Look here,” said Blood, “this is all I know of the business. You want
me to fish this cable up?”
“Precisely.”
“Cut it?”
“Just so.”
“Connect both ends with the electrical testing room, and let you talk
through it and send messages through it from both or one of the cut
ends?”
“That is exactly the position.”
“Well, after that?”
“After I have had my use of the cable, you can drop both ends
overboard. We will sail away, and no one the wiser. Of course, the
cable company will recognise that their cable is broken, and send a
ship to mend it; but we will be far away by that time.”
“I see,” went on the Captain, “that it runs from the American coast
here to the Australian coast here, but I don’t know the name of the
company it belongs to; I don’t know what in the nation your game is.
I am as innocent as a baa lamb on the whole affair, and I simply obey
your orders, not knowing that you yourself may not own the cable and
that this mayn’t be a repairing job. If we are caught, will you bear me
out in that statement?--not that your evidence will be much good, I
expect, but, still, it’s better than nothing.”
“If you obey our instructions,” said Wolff, “I will do as you say; and,
to prove that I am playing fair with you, I will even now give you a
detail of the commercial speculation that is behind all this business.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” said the Captain. “I’d much sooner remain
innocent. I’m just an ordinary sailor signed on to do an ordinary job.
I’ll work freer in mind if I know nothing about the inside of the
affair; it’s black enough on the out.”
“Well, we will leave it at that,” said Wolff, “and we will now set to
work, if you please.”
They came on to the bridge, and the Captain gave orders for the main
engines to be stopped and the Kelvin sounder to be set to work. The
donkey man had been allotted to this job, and presently the furious,
sewing-machine whir of the sounder hauling up the lead came through the
silence that had supervened on the stopping of the engines, and the
result was shouted forward: “Eight hundred fathoms, coral rock.”
Blood, on this result being given to him, left the bridge and came
down to the bow balks to superintend the lowering of the first buoy.
He had not only to act as cable engineer, but he had also to instruct
the hands in the details of this work absolutely new to them. A big,
red-painted buoy was swung up against the burning blue of the sky, a
rope with a mushroom anchor attached to it was fastened to the buoy;
then the anchor was cast overboard, taking the rope with it, and the
buoy, swung outboard, was dropped. It rode off, bobbing and ducking on
the swell, and the _Penguin_ steamed on to a point a mile ahead, where
another buoy was dropped in a precisely similar manner.
The Captain had now his position and his marks laid down. Somewhere
between those two buoys lay the cable, like a black snake on the floor
of the sea, waiting to be grappled for.
The grapnel rope was now lowered over the clanking drum of the
picking-up gear and the wheel in the bow. This business took half an
hour, and then the _Penguin_, going dead slow, began to steam back to
the first-mark buoy, dragging the grapnel after her across the floor of
the sea.
Wolff and Shiner took a great deal of interest in this part of
the business. They stood at the bow watching the pointer of the
dynamometer, which gave the pull on the rope in hundredweights; every
lump of coral, every tuft of weed travelled over by the grapnel made
the pointer of the dynamometer jump and joggle; and at every jump the
idea “Cable!” would leap into the minds of the speculators and show
itself in their eyes.
But the _Penguin_ passed from one mark buoy to the other without a show
of the real thing; and then she turned and steamed back on an equally
fruitless course.
She was making ready for a third grapple when the bell went for dinner,
and Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain turned aft and went below to the
saloon.
The Wolff gang were in a bad temper, and the meal had scarcely begun
when a discussion broke out.
“It’s a funny thing,” said Shiner, “that we have not hit the thing yet.”
“We have been twice over the ground,” said Wolff.
“Sure you haven’t made a mistake in the spot, Captain?” said Shiner.
The Captain put down the glass of mineral water he was raising to his
lips.
“Why can’t you say what you mean?” said he. “Why can’t you ask me right
out if I haven’t muddled the navigation and missed the job? Well, I
haven’t. Is that plain? Some men may doubt their own work, and there
are some men who would be put off by suspicions flung at them and
would say, ‘Maybe I _am_ wrong,’ and pick up his buoys and move off to
another ground and make fools of themselves. I’m not that sort. Can’t
you see that a cable may be passed over by a grapnel half a dozen times
without the grapnel catching? It may be glued down with coral.”
“Just so, just so!” said Shiner, anxious to pacify. “We never doubted
your capacity, Captain.”
“Never, I’m sure,” said Wolff.
The Captain, somewhat mollified, went on with his meal, and he was
raising the glass of mineral water for the second time to his lips when
the dead, slow tramp of the engines ceased.
Immediately on their cessation, through the open skylight came the
clanking sound of the picking-up gear, and right on that came Harman’s
voice, roaring down the saloon companionway: “Below, there! We’ve got
the cable!”
In a minute or less, Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain were in the bows;
the Captain on the bow balks, Shiner and Wolff on the deck.
The great drum, rotating slowly, was hauling in the grapnel rope,
dripping and taut; the dynamometer registered a strain of seven tons,
and the strain was slowly increasing.
Nothing else could give this result but cable.
“Are you sure we have got it, Captain?” asked Wolff.
The Captain looked down at him.
“If that rope was to break under this strain,” said he, “it would
mushroom out like an open umbrella and cut you to pieces. Better get up
on the bridge. You’re safe there. Yes, I’m sure we’ve got cable, unless
we’ve grappled a dead whale.”
Wolff and Shiner went up the ladder to the bridge, and the Captain,
relieved of their presence, continued his work.
It was worth watching.
He was a true-born cable man, and they are as rare as good violinists.
Knowing the depth, and the length of rope out, and its weight in sea
water, and the weight of the grapnel, he could tell approximately what
was going on down below; he knew that he was lifting heavier stuff than
ordinary cable, and the weight could only come from coral incrustations
on it. He knew that the cable must be glued down here and there, and
that haste would mean a break. Sometimes he stopped the picking-gear
altogether and trusted to the rise and fall of the ship on the swell to
break the thing gently up from its attachments. And still the grapnel
rope came in, dripping and endless, till at last the grapnel itself
appeared with what seemed the bight of a sea serpent gripped in its
unholy claws.
The thing was crusted here and there with coral, it is true, but it
was comparatively new and sound, and a genuine, straight-going cable
man would have shuddered at the sacrilege that was going on. Even the
Captain felt qualms. To cut this thing was like murder; it would mean a
dead loss of ten or fifteen thousand dollars to the company that owned
it. An expedition would have to be fitted out to repair it, and if bad
weather were to come on, it might be three months before the repairs
were effected.
The Captain thought of all this even as he was ordering the stoppers
to be got ready and the sling for the man who would do the cutting. He
drowned remorse in the recollection that the injury would be done to a
company, not to an individual. He would not have injured an individual
of his own free will for worlds, but he did not mind much injuring a
company. A company was a many-headed beast, and, in his experience, it
always dealt hardly with its employés.
The cable was high out of the water now, in the form of an inverted
V, with the grapnel at the apex. He ordered each limb of the bight
to be secured with a stopper, and then, unable to trust any one else
with the delicate business, he himself descended in a sling to do the
cutting. Shouting his directions to the fellows who were lowering him,
he came just level with the grapnel and began the business with a file.
Halfway through, he ordered the grapnel to be eased away, finished the
business, and left the two cable ends hanging by the stoppers.
Then he came aboard, and the starboard end of the cable was hauled in.
It did not take long to connect it up with the electrical testing room,
where Shiner was already installed before the mirror galvanometer.
The end they had hauled on board was the American end; the testing-room
door was shut, the blinds of the windows drawn, for a subdued light is
necessary to the proper working of the mirror galvanometer; and Shiner
and Wolff were left alone with the American continent to work their
dark schemes.
Said Harman, as he paced the deck with the Captain:
“I wonder what those two guys are doin’ now? Carryin’ out some of their
malpraxises, no doubt. I ain’t a particular man, but this thing’s
beginnin’ to get on my spine. It didn’t seem much at the start, just
foolin’ with a cable; but now it seems somehow a durned sight worse,
now that the thing’s cut. I tell you, Cap, it went to my heart to see
it cut. I couldn’t ’a’ felt worse if it’d squealed and blood run out
of it. I guess I wouldn’t have joined the expedition if I hadn’t been
tempted. I remember my old mother warning me that if sinners tempted
me, not to consent.”
“Confound you and your warnings!” said the Captain. “Who tempted me?
You, and no one else. But I’m not the man to go back on you and talk
about warnings. We’re in for it, and there’s no going back, and we
can’t do anything but pray that a cruiser doesn’t heave in sight before
we get away.”
“Amen to that!” said Harman.
They continued pacing the deck in silence, till suddenly the
testing-room opened and Wolff appeared.
The black-bearded Wolff was ghastly white. He had the look of a man who
had received a blow in the stomach. He held up a finger to the Captain,
who came toward him.
“Come in here,” said Wolff.
Shiner was off his stool and sitting on the couch that ran along the
port side of the room. His hands were in his hair, and the dot of
the mirror galvanometer was spilling from side to side of the scale
unnoticed. Disaster was in the air.
“What’s up?” asked the Captain.
“Up!” cried Shiner, coming out of his lair as one might fancy a
cockatrice coming out of its hole. “Everything is up! Our speculation
is done for! War has been declared.”
“War been declared? What war?”
“England and Germany and France,” replied Shiner.
“How did you hear it?”
“How did I hear it? Why, the first message I tapped was a Press
Association special to Sydney. They began cursing me for having
been held up for half an hour while we were cutting the cable. They
thought we were Sydney. They don’t know the cable is cut yet. They’re
still jabbering. Anyhow, there it is--war! And war spells ruin to the
business we were on.”
“We must cut losses,” said Wolff, who was walking up and down. “The
expedition is off. We must get to a Chile port at once--Valparaiso for
choice.”
“And my bonus?” said the Captain.
“I guess you may whistle for your bonus,” said Shiner. “Can’t you see
we are bust--B-U-S-T?”
“But we can do one thing,” said Wolff. “We can hit the cursed English;
we can haul in twenty, forty miles of the cable and cut. The thing is
cut, in any case; but a long break like that will make it the worse for
them; then Sydney will have one cable the less to talk to her mother
with. Yes, we can do that.”
“Curse them!” said Shiner. “Yes, we can do that.”
“So my bonus is gone?” said the Captain. “Well, may I ask one question
of you: Who’s fighting who? Is it France and England against Germany?”
“It is Germany against France and England,” said Wolff.
“And you are Germans, and this is a German-owned vessel?”
“Precisely,” said Wolff. “You have touched the matter on the head.”
The Captain ruminated.
Then, said he: “Well, gentlemen, this is a serious matter for me.
I lose my bonus, and I lose my pay, I expect; for if you are as
badly broke as you say, when you land at Valparaiso or some southern
port--and you daren’t go back to Frisco--there’ll be precious few dibs
to go round unless you manage to sell the old _Penguin_, which isn’t
very likely in war time. Well, gentlemen, I’ve thought of a plan by
which I may get my bonus, and my pay, too; and if you’ll come down to
the saloon with me, I’ll show you it.”
“Why not tell us here?” said Shiner.
“I cannot explain it here. Come down, gentlemen. When all’s said and
done, it won’t take a minute, and there’s a lot of importance attaching
to what I have to explain to you. It’s worth a minute.”
He left the testing-room, and they followed him to the saloon. He led
the way into his cabin, and they followed him like lambs. He asked them
to be seated on the couch opposite the bunk; then he took the key from
the inside of the door and inserted it in the lock on the outside.
“What are you doing that for?” said Shiner.
“I’ll show you in one minute,” replied the Captain.
He stepped swiftly out into the saloon, banged the door to, and locked
it.
It was Shiner who woke to the situation first, and it was Shiner’s
voice that came now as he clung to the handle of the door and
punctuated his remarks with kicks on the paneling.
The Captain waited a moment till the other gave pause. Then he said:
“There’s no use in kicking and squealing. You’re prisoners of war,
that’s how you stand. The ship’s mine now, a lawful prize. What’s that
you say? An Irishman? Of course I’m an Irishman. What’s that you say?
I’m a traitor to my country? B’gosh, if you say that again, I’ll open
the door and give you a taste of my quality. Say it again, will you!
Say it again, will you!”
He shook the door handle at each invitation, but Shiner was dumb. He
evidently had no desire to taste the Captain’s quality. It was Wolff’s
voice that came instead, muted and murmurous:
“Make terms, make terms; there is no use in arguing. Make terms!”
“You won’t make any terms with me,” said the Captain, “but you’ll be
treated well and transhipped as quick as possible.”
“But, see here, Captain!” came Shiner’s voice.
The Captain did not hear him; he had left the saloon, and next moment
was on deck. He was a man of swift decision, and he had fixed in his
mind that the first thing to be done was to make the crew his own, and
the next to dump the cable and be gone. He could not mend it. They had
no skilled artificer on board. To mend it, he would have to bring both
ends on board and connect them. If you have ever examined a deep-sea
cable, with its water coat of wire, its inner coat of rubber, and its
core, you will quite understand the complexity of the task.
It was impossible, and he recognized the fact as he walked forward.
Harman was standing by the dynamometer, waiting for orders, and the
bos’n near Harman. The Captain ordered the bos’n to pipe the whole
crew on deck, and presently, like a kicked beehive, the fo’c’sle gave
up its contents, the stokers off duty appeared, and even MacBean
himself rose like a seal from the engine-room hatch.
“Boys,” said the Captain, addressing the dingy crowd, “is there ever a
German among you?”
Dead silence for a moment, as though the hands were consulting their
own hearts, and then a voice from back near the starboard alleyway:
“No, there ain’t no Germans here.”
“Sam’s a Dutchman,” came another voice, and then the voice of Sam,
protesting: “You lie! I vas a New Yorker.”
“Shut your mouths!” said Blood. “I’m an Englishman, or pretty near the
same thing, and I’m captain of this hooker, which is owned by a German
firm. In other words, it is owned by Mr. Wolff and Mr. Shiner, who are
Germans. Well, my lads, news has just come over that cable we have
picked up that war has been declared between England and Germany, so
I have taken possession of the ship in the name of England, d’ye see?
Which means that there’s lots of prize money for all of us if we can
bring her safe into an English port.”
He waited for a moment after this announcement, but not a sound came
from the crowd in front of them. It was filtering down through the
thickness of their intelligences. It was an entirely new proposition
that he had laid before them, and required time to find a response.
They knew--God help them!--as little as he did of the horrible problems
of international and maritime law that the _Penguin_ was about to wind
round herself as the silkworm winds a cocoon; but they knew the meaning
of the word “money,” and it didn’t matter to them a rap whether it
was prize money or not, as long as it could be changed for whisky and
tobacco.
A little, wiry Nova Scotian was the first to respond.
“Go to it!” cried he. “Here’s to England and a pocketful of money!”
He flung up his cap, and the action touched the rest off. They
cheered--Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Latins, and Slavs--for such was their
mixture. All joined in the shout.
MacBean alone, cautious and cool, made any question.
“Are you sure,” said he, when the shouting had ceased, “are you sure
we’re in the right of this? I’m as willin’ as ony man to fight for
England, but I’m no so sure about our poseetion as regards the ship.”
“Well, you will be soon,” said Blood. “This is my position: I’m not
only going to take the ship, but I’m going to take anything German
I come across on the high seas. Away back in the American Spanish
War, I put out in a mud dredger from the Florida coast and took a
mail steamer. We pretended we were a dynamite boat. There were seven
thousand dollars in gold coin on board her, and we took it. Never mind
where it went to----” A wild yell from the crowd. “We took it just as
we are going to take any German money we come across. A chance like
this doesn’t come in most lifetimes, and I’m not going to lose it.”
Applause.
MacBean went back to his engine room.
“May I ax, Captain,” said one of the fellows, “what’s to become of the
owners?”
“Meaning Mr. Wolff and Mr. Shiner?” replied the Captain. “Why, they
are prisoners of war, and they will be treated as such without a hair
of their heads being touched. But we can’t keep them on board. We’ll
land them somewhere, or put them on a German ship, if we find one. Now,
then, look lively and get the cable away. Mr. Harman, get it aft from
the testing-room, and then cast loose the stoppers; dump both ends.”
He went on the bridge while Harman cast the cable loose; then he rang
up the engines, and, giving the fellow at the wheel a sou’westerly
course to steer by, put the engine telegraph to full speed ahead.
He wanted to get away from that spot in a hurry. He had not yet fixed
on any point to make for--north, south, east, or west did not matter
for the moment to him. He wanted to be somewhere else and to put as
many long leagues as possible between the _Penguin_ and the scene of
her crime.
Harman presently joined him on the bridge.
Said Harman: “Well, this is a rum joke, ain’t it, Captain? ’Pears to me
it’s the rummest joke ever I seen. We’ve took the ship, and we’ve took
the owners--and how about our bonuses and pay?”
“We’ll have to take the bonuses out of the first Dutchman we can
lay hands on,” said the Captain. “We’ll never get a cent from Wolff
and Shiner. Their game is up. If I can lay alongside of a German
trader--and there are plenty in these waters--I’ll take all she’s got.”
“And suppose they show fight?” said Harman.
“Traders don’t fight--we have eight rifles--without ammunition, but
that doesn’t matter, for we’d only be spoofing. The sight of the rifles
is enough. Still, I wouldn’t mind fighting if we have to.”
“I heard a chap yarning once,” said Harman. “It was at a meetin’ a
fellow give me a ticket for, and this chap was sayin’ there was no
use in war; he was sayin’ no one was any the better off for war, and
all suchlike. Well, it ’pears to me it’s a durned good thing, for
you can go and rob the chaps that’s against you, and it’s all on the
square. I’ve all my life been wantin’ to rob people open,” continued
Mr. Harman, “not poor people, you understand, for there wouldn’t be no
fun in that, and, besides, they have nothing worth takin’--but rich
folk. Them’s the chaps. My idea would be to be goin’ round Nob Hill
with a hand barrow and collecting jewelry, or callin’ at the Bank of
California with a cart and a shovel. I never expected in my life I’d
have a chance like this.”
“It’s not all too rosy,” said the Captain. “I’m not clear what a German
cruiser could do to us if they found us skinning a German ship. I’ve
heard that privateering is going to be allowed in the next war--which
is this--but then we haven’t a letter of marque.”
“What’s that?”
“A license to rob. But, license or no license, we can’t pick and
choose. We have to make good. We’re done out of our bonuses and our
salary. D’ye think I’m going back to Frisco as poor as I left it, and
maybe poorer? For I’ll tell you one thing, Billy Harman: What we’ve
done to that cable is a penitentiary job to start with, and if it
tricks America any over this war, supposing she takes a hand in it, it
may mean a hanging job.”
“I wish you’d not go on talkin’ like that,” said Harman. “What on
earth’s the use of going on talkin’ like that? Who’s to catch us?”
“I don’t know,” replied the Captain. “The only one thing I do know is
the bedrock fact that our position couldn’t be worse than it is, and
that we may as well play for as big a figure as possible. Between you
and me, it’s just this--piracy pure and simple; that’s our game, under
shelter of the pretence that we’re English and doing all in our power
to help our native land; then if we are caught by an English ship with
our holds full of boodle and our scuppers full of gold all we have to
say is: ‘Please, sir, we have been fighting the Germans for the good of
our native land.’”
“And suppose we are caught by a German ship?”
“Then it will be all the worse for us; but come along into the chart
room, for I have an idea, and I want your opinion on it.”
They left the bridge, and went into the chart room, where the Captain,
having closed the door, brought out a chart of the Pacific, placed it
on the table, and sat down before it.
“Here we are,” said he, making a pencil mark on the spot. “And here,”
making another mark, “lies Christobal.”
“Why, Christoval Island lies in the Solomons,” said Harman. “I’ve been
there.”
“I said Christobal, not Christoval. This is a German island, and a
pretty rich one, too. I know it, and cause I have to know it, for a
chap there named Sprengel let me down badly once over a deal. I hope
he’s there still. It’s a rich island, lots of copra and trade. I’m
going there.”
“And what are you going to do there?” asked Harman.
“Well, you see,” said the Captain, “the place is only just a trading
station; it’s not armed; there are only half a dozen whites, and--I’m
going to take it.”
“Take it?”
“Hoist the Union Jack there, scoop all the boodle I can find, up
anchor, and bunk for Valparaiso. That’s my idea.”
“Lord, that would be lovely!” said Harman. “But suppose they show any
sort of fight?”
“Not they. We’ll rig up a dummy gun, and we can arm a landing party
with these blessed old rifles and cutlasses there. But the dummy guns
will do them. You see, they won’t know what to make of the cut of the
_Penguin_. They’ll never have seen a cable ship, most likely. We’ll
tell them we are a volunteer cruiser. Good name, that.”
A knock came to the door, and the bos’n appeared.