_Simoom_ and the master of the _Palembang_. And it being the fashion
of the sailorman, or, for that matter, of human-kind in general, to
decide matters that admit of doubt according to personal prejudice
and ancient opinion, there were more on Spiller's side than on
Banks's. For one thing, it is the perpetual ambition of all true
sons of the ocean to discover something new and have his ship's name
tagged on to it, and every one was jealous of Banks. When the
_Amphion_ looked for the rocks without success, they threw out dark
hints about a dead whale or a tree stump having been seen, and some
said "Rum," just as others said "Rats," contemptuously.
Others, with a very fine contempt for the Navy, were of opinion that
Captain Melville of H.M.S. _Amphion_ considered he owned half the
Indian Ocean and all the Arabian Sea, and would be as much put out at
finding an unmarked rock or shoal in either as if he slipped upon an
old chew on his own quarterdeck. These were on Banks's side, of
course. And some who disliked Spiller said they believed in this new
set of rocks to annoy him, ending very naturally in holding the
opinion they argued for.
When old Banks got on the high horse and swore he would not speak
again to the disbeliever in the vigia, he meant it, and added details
to his statement.
"Not if I found him in a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean," he
swore excitedly.
The quarrel was as bitter as polemic theology. Spiller was a rank
atheist, a scorner, a scoffer, a pagan, a heathen. If Banks had
written a new creed, he would have begun it: "I believe in the
_Simoom_ Rocks to the west of the Maldivhs." He clung to their
existence pathetically, and when an impecunious skipper of a
storm-disgruntled tramp wanted to borrow a couple of hundred rupees
from him, and remarked incidentally that he had seen broken water in
the supposed position of the discredited reef, Banks forked out with
enthusiasm and took down a lying statement joyfully.
But when the _Simoom_ was ready for sea again, that same tramp
skipper, who was a wild disgrace to the respectable mystery of the
sea, executed a few manoeuvres which let the _Palembang_ get ahead of
her. For the tramp (_Julius Cæsar_ was her name) had engines of an
obstinate and eccentric character. Sometimes they worked, and
sometimes they didn't, and on this particular occasion they refused
to be reversed at any price. As the _Julius Cæsar_ wouldn't go
astern, her captain shoved her at the crowded shipping ahead and put
her through, whooping on the bridge like a maniac. He grazed three
other steamers, took a bumpkin off a sailing vessel, slipped between
two others, and in one last complicated evolution smashed the jibboom
of the _Simoom_, brought down her fore-topgall'n'-mast, and escaped
to sea in a cyclone of curses of which the calm centre was the
_Palembang_.
"I'll report you," said Spiller to Banks, when he left Bombay.
"Go to hell," cried Banks, who rarely swore save in a gale of wind.
"After you," said Spiller, with what is popularly known as truly
Oriental politeness; and as a parting taunt he sang out, "What about
them rocks?"
"You're an ungrammatical, uneducated man," screamed Banks, dancing
furiously.
But Green and Wilson waved their caps to each other. For all their
way of passing compliments when one gave the other a Western Ocean
relief at midnight, they were good friends.
The _Simoom_ got to sea inside of forty-eight hours, for Banks lost
no time. He had made up his mind to waste some on the next chance he
had of looking for his blessed rocks, unless the monsoon blew too
hard.
They had a fairly decent show running down the coast on the inside of
the Laccadivhs, and, taking the usual circumbendibus to the eastward
between Keeling and the Chagos Archipelago, picked up beautiful
"passage" winds and south-east trades, and went home booming. Green
found Banks a first-class "old man," and the _Simoom_ as comfortable
as a good bar parlour, compared with the sorry old bug-haunted
_Palembang_, where a man's toes got sore with the pedicuring work of
cockroaches. He made up his mind to stick to her, as he evidently
suited Banks. They both got cracked a little on the _Simoom_ Rocks,
and gradually talked themselves into the belief of a shark's-tooth
reef a mile long with one special fang that rivalled a young peak of
Teneriffe.
The _Palembang_ came into Liverpool River about three weeks after the
_Simoom_, and Green, back at work after ten days at home, had a high
time with Wilson. But the skippers passed each other with their
noses in the air as high as squirrels' tails, and never swopped a
word in a fortnight.
As luck would have it, they were both for Bombay again, only to give
Spiller a chance of getting there first, the _Simoom_ was to call at
the Cape. Just before the _Palembang_ cleared, Banks and Spiller
fell up against each other on the landing stage, and as Spiller was
full up to his back-teeth and uvula, he broke silence and went for
the upholder of the vigia in high style. He could have taken a
first-class in bad language at any Australian back-blocks academy of
cursing--and what they don't know in blasphemy there can only be
learnt from a low-class Spaniard. So the air was blue from Liverpool
to Manchester, and to the Isle of Man, and Banks got up and left.
For when he was ashore he was very religious. Even at sea he carried
a prayer-book and an odd volume of virulent sermons, of the kind
which indicate that no man need forgive any enemy who is not of the
same persuasion. But to tell the truth, Banks could have forgiven
anything but an insult to his beloved rocks.
"Such a man oughtn't to live," he cried angrily, as he went off in a
tremulous rage. "He's predestined to the pit!"
And he trusted that Providence might one day yield him a chance of
getting even. His prayers were fervent towards that end, and if
Providence works, as it sometimes appears to do, through rum and
ignorance and a good conceit in a man, there was a chance of his
appeals being attended to.
On the passage out to the Cape they saw nothing of the _Palembang_.
But there she was heard of as having being seen somewhere in the
neighbourhood of the Agulhas Bank, having a real good time in that
native home of the god of the winds, where fifty per cent. of all the
breezes that do blow are gales that dance in and out and about like a
cooper round a cask.
But the _Simoom_ had luck, and slipped through as if Æolus never
spotted her. And old Banks chortled happily, and sang an extra hymn
on Sunday, compensating the men (otherwise disposed to growl at the
innovation) with an extra lot of grog. For your true sailorman is
the real conservative, and things that don't happen in the first week
of a new ship have no business to happen afterwards--which is a hint
some young second mates may find handy to remember. And remembering
this will enable you to see why no true old shellback will ship in a
steamboat, any more than the guard of a coach would let himself to
any beastly new railroad.
The south-west monsoon had backed down to the Line about the time
they crossed it; and the _Simoom_ sweated up to the Maldivhs very
comfortably.
"We've made a good passage--a ripping good passage," said old Banks,
rubbing his hands, "and I'm condemned if I don't shape a course for
my rocks, Mr. Green."
As he had been shaping for them ever since he had deliberately gone
out of his way to take the route east of Madagascar, instead of the
Inner or Mozambique route, Green winked the other eye and said
nothing. To tell the truth, he himself had a hankering to set his
mind at rest on the subject, for he felt his credit involved with the
skipper's.
The man at the wheel overheard what Banks said, and when he stumped
for'ard the whole crew knew that the _Simoom_ was looking for a
needle in the Indian Ocean.
"A life's job, my bullies," said their informant. "We'll be like the
crew of the _Flying Dutchman_ yet."
"I'm wondering whether Spiller came up this way, now," said old Banks
presently, with an interrogative cock of his head.
"And not by the channel?" asked Green.
Banks turned about.
"Mr. Green, may the Lord forgive me, but I just hate that Spiller
with an unholy hatred. Every time he gets a show he brags he's run
right over where I located my rocks, and not only that, but
criss-cross in the latitude where they might be. And he set about
that he'd herring-boned a course on the chart on the longitude, going
back and forth on it like a dog in a turnip field. So now he'll be
up here again to have another shy for it. If he saw 'em, he'd swear
he never. And why he hates me so I can't tell, unless it was I did
my duty once, and let him know what a God-fearing man thought of a
blasphemer."
Green nodded.
"That's likely it, sir."
"So it is, so it is," cried Banks pensively; "he has no grace in him,
and he set it about, I know, that I soak at sea if I'm sober ashore.
He said my rocks were delirium tremens; and I'm a discredited man,
wounded in a tender spot."
It was just four bells in the forenoon watch then, and soon after
they snugged her down, as the wind was very heavy in puffs and the
sky low and dark. Just before eight bells Green spotted a vessel on
the starboard bow, and called the old man. He came on deck like a
whiteheaded Jack-in-the-Box.
"Keep her away," he cried. "I'll bet she's the _Palembang_. Shake
out them reefs and hoist the main-t'gall'n's'l again."
His grammar failed in excitement.
"We're overhauling her hand over hand, anyhow," suggested Green.
"If I can pass him going two foot for his one, I'd run the _Simoom_
under," screamed the skipper. "And when we come up with him, if my
voice in a trumpet can carry, I'll tell him what I think of him. He
thinks I'm soft because I sing hymns on Sunday. I'll let him know
before I sang hymns I was the biggest tough on the Australian coast.
God's truth I was! And I wish I was now--oh, how I wish it, and him
ashore with me!"
And Green believed it, because he had to! There was something in the
old man's eye as he walked to and fro, an unregenerate blood-thirsty
snap, that was very convincing. So the reefs were shaken out of the
topsails, and even that did not satisfy the skipper.
"I'll let him know that a saved and repentant Christian isn't
necessary a worm," said Banks. "Mr. Green, set the mainsail!"
The _Simoom_ was snoring through it now, and Green stared.
"What she can't carry she may drag," said the skipper, with flashing
eyes.
And the _Simoom_ lost her courtesy with the sea under the influence
of the mainsail, for the monsoon was a stiff one. She shouldered the
Indian Ocean aside like a policeman shoving through a crowd; she
scooped up tons of it as a scraper team scoops sand, and ran at any
extra sea like a bull at a hedge. The men were under the break of
the t'gallant foc'sle, sheltering from the cataract. They knew the
_Palembang_ was ahead, and were as eager as the skipper to overhaul
her. Through the bos'on and his mate it had leaked out that the old
man was keen for a palaver with Spiller.
"He's like a bull whale in a flurry," said one who had been whaling.
"Now my notion is that the skipper kin blaspheme if he wants to."
The _Palembang_ was visibly herself and no other vessel by this time,
and she carried all she could stand.
"I've half a notion to have the t'gall'n-sails set," said Banks,
looking up aloft. "And if we weren't overhauling her twenty-three to
the dozen, damme, but I would!"
For the _Palembang_ showed nothing above her reefed topsails, and the
foresail had a reef in it, and the _Simoom_ came after her like the
inside edge of a cyclone.
"Gimme my trumpet," cried Banks. "Mr. Green, take the wheel, and run
her as close as maybe."
And the second mate stood at the main-topsail halliards.
"_Palembang_ ahoy!" yelled Banks through his trumpet as he came
tearing up on the weather side of his enemy's ship.
"Where the blue blazes are you coming to?" shrieked Spiller, who was
both drunk and angry.
"Passing you as if you was standing still, you low, uneducated
swine," said Banks. "And I could do it under jury rig."
"What about them rocks?" jeered Spiller through his trumpet. "What's
the price of vigias, you notorious old liar, you disgrace to the
perfession?"
They were close alongside now, not half a cable's length apart; a
good cricketer could have shied a cricket ball the distance easily.
"Leggo the main-topsail halliards," said Banks, and then to the
surprise of his crew and the utter astonishment of Spiller he poured
out a torrent of the most blood-curdling abuse which had ever defiled
the Indian or any other ocean.
"You think I'm soft, you dog," he boomed through his spurt of
blasphemy, "and reckon because I've got notions of decency I'm to be
trod on. Run on my rocks and sink and burn."
His voice rose to a scream and cracked. He tried to speak, but tried
in vain.
"Mr. Green, here," he whispered, and leaving the wheel to the man he
had displaced, the mate jumped to the lee poop rail.
"Tell him he's no sailor; my voice is gone. Say he's a--oh, tell him
anything you feel."
Green did so, and satisfied himself and Banks and the entire crew.
And then, seeing Wilson, he gave him a friendly bellow.
"What cheer, Wilson!"
And hoisting the topsails, they ran on, leaving Spiller choking with
helpless rage.
As it grew darker and they dropped the _Palembang_ they picked up the
mainsail, and shortened down for the night.
"We ain't in no hurry," whispered Banks, "and to-morrow we'll be up
with my rocks, if I've hit it off right."
He was now sombre and dignified, and spoke with particular
grammatical and moral accuracy. Not the ghost of a damn issued from
his lips. He reproved Green for swearing, and held a service in the
cabin, much to the disgust of the entire ship, as it wasn't Sunday.
Perhaps to punish himself, for he always liked to stand well with the
crowd, he gave them no grog after it.
In the morning he sent a man on the fore-topgallant-yard looking for
his rocks, and as he gave notice that any one who sighted them first
should have five pounds, the entire watch, which should have been
below snoring, sat like crows up aloft and strained their eyes all
round the horizon.
At ten Banks was jovial and got his voice back. At noon he was
anxious. By four o'clock he shortened sail again.
"We've overrun 'em," he said sadly. "If they're still about, we're
to the west of 'em. Mr. Green, during the night we'll stand under
easy sail to the eastward. I'm set on seeing those rocks again, if I
lose a week."
And the night fell darkly.
No matter whose watch it was, mate's or second mate's, the
white-whiskered skipper was on deck every ten minutes, peering into
the black darkness with his glasses. The old chap's nerves were on
edge; his imagination flamed; he saw reefs and pinnacles of islands
every moment, and heard the boom of breakers.
When Green relieved his subordinate at midnight, the second mate
whispered to him:
"The old man's as nervous as a cat. To hear him jaw you'd think the
bottom of the sea was rising up. Mind you ain't high and dry on a
new continent by daylight."
"We'll whack it out fair among the lot of us," said Green.
"Jeewhillikins, what's that?"
He spoke suddenly, in an altered voice, and Milton jumped.
"What?"
"I thought I saw a flare to the southward."
"Lordy, you've got them too," said Milton. "Let's go ashore, and
have a walk on the Apollo Bunda."
"Stow it," cried Green, and holding on to the mizzen-topgallant
backstay, he jumped upon the rail.
"Look, look!" he cried, and Milton, looking, saw a faint glow to the
southward--or fancied he saw it.
"Call the old man," said Green, and in two and three-fifths seconds
by any man's chronometer, Banks was on deck, and saw nothing.
"But did ye see it, man?" he yelled; "and if so, what's it mean?"
"Some one struck a match in Colombo," said the second mate
irreverently. For he had sailed with Banks for years, and at times
took liberties.
"I only trust to Providence that it isn't that wicked man's ship in
any trouble," said the skipper viciously. "Mr. Green, we'll stand to
the south'ard for a while."
"Lay aft the watch," sang out Milton, and they braced her up to
within two points of the wind.
Both watches stayed on deck in the little excitement, and in the
course of the next hour they reported all kinds of non-existent
things. "Rocks on the starboard bow" were varied by "A vessel on the
port bow," and a planet low down in a break of cloud was "A steamer's
head-light, sir."
"Collision with Venus," cried Milton.
But just in the 'twixt and 'tween of earliest dawn, when the grey
ghost of day walked in the east, a man up aloft sang out with
startling energy:
"Two dark rocks right ahead, sir."
The main-deck hummed suddenly, and a patter of bare feet told that
the entire crew had run for the foc'sle head. The skipper nipped
into the mizzen rigging quick as a chipmunk.
"Keep her away a point or two," he cried.
"Away a point or two, sir," echoed the helmsman.
"I see 'em, Mr. Green," yelled the old chap; "and just where I
figured them out to be. There'll be three, there'll be three."
He paused and looked down on Green.
"But--but two will do me," he added cautiously. "I never pinned my
faith to three."
Green climbed alongside him, and even a bit higher.
"Lord, sir, they're boats," he cried.
"No, rocks," said the skipper.
"Boats," repeated the mate, obstinately.
"So they are! Damn!" cried the skipper.
And then the same verdict came from aloft, and was confirmed by the
entire sea jury.
The disappointed captain dropped back on deck.
"Now, if they were the _Palembang's_ boats," suggested Green.
"No such luck," said the skipper. "Is there any one in 'em, and do
they see us?"
"By the same token they see us now!" shouted Green, and in a quarter
of an hour the boats were alongside, and the _Simoom_ lay to.
"What boats are those?" squealed Banks.
"The _Palembang's_," replied a voice from the tumbling cockleshells.
The skipper and the mates said "Whew!" and Banks was fairly dancing.
"And where's your ship?"
"Bottom of the Indian Ocean," said a voice that Banks recognised as
Spiller's.
"Is that you, Captain Spiller?" he inquired, with much exaggerated
courtesy.
"It is," growled Spiller.
"Did you by any chance come across my rocks as you sailed along so
pleasant?"
Spiller swore in a muffled voice.
"Not by your description of 'em: far from it," he replied at last.
"We'll see about that," said Banks. "Now then, come under the lee
quarter, and we'll have some of you aboard; the captain of the
_Palembang_ last."
"Whad yer mean?" cried Spiller sulkily.
"What I say," said Banks softly.
And when every one was out of the boats but Spiller, he stood by the
line.
"Now, captain, were they my rocks or not?"
"No," said Spiller.
"Then stay in your damned boat," cried Banks. "Cast that line off,
Spiller. You won't? Then cut it, Mr. Green."
Green smiled but didn't move. The skipper borrowed a knife from the
nearest seaman by taking it out of its sheath.
"Now, was they or not?"
"No," cried Spiller.
"One, two, and at three I cut," said Banks. "One--two----"
"Very well, they was, then," shrieked Spiller; and the next minute he
was on deck.
"I'll have you sign a paper to that effect," said Banks, "and if you
don't, the whole of your crew will, including your mate."
Wilson, who was standing by Green, said that he would willingly, and
when Spiller scowled, he scowled back.
"And now, Mr. Green," cried Banks cheerfully, "since we know where
they are, and can find 'em any time, you may put her on her course
again. And we'll have a little thanksgiving service for all this."
He did not explain whether the service was for the established
character of the Simoom Rocks, or for the rescue of the shipwrecked
crew, but when he got them all below he handed round hymn books.
"First of all we will sing hymn No. 184 of Hymns Ancient and Modern,"
he said softly, and when Spiller looked it up he was very much
annoyed.
THREE IN A GAME.
Things were quiet in San Francisco--that is to say, though the usual
blackguards spouted on the Sand-Lot on Sundays, there was no great
political row on. The President of the United States had still three
years to run before any chance of a second term, and local politics
had quietened. The Governor of the State, though an angel to one
side and a devil to the other, had been "let up on" at last, and the
reporters for the daily papers had to invent "stories" to keep
themselves going. That only kept their hand in. It was a blessing
to them without any disguise when the rivalry between young Jack Hunt
and Sibley Gawthrop for the hand and the money and the affections of
Edith Atherton became public property. It was most of all a blessing
to Gardiner, the smartest new man on the San Francisco _Chronicle_,
who knew both of the boys well.
For how could any "story" fail to pay dividends when two of the
swagger "Anglo-Franco-Californians," the most beautiful girl on the
coast, and Shanghai Smith, the most scoundrelly boarding-house keeper
on the Pacific, played leading parts in the drama? And when one
reflects that San Francisco, the Pacific itself and the Atlantic, and
the Sailors' Home in Well Street, London, came into the newspaper
play quite naturally, it seems obvious there was meat for any
reporter's teeth.
Gardiner, of course, was not in the high-toned gang to which Hunt and
Gawthrop belonged, but he knew them both very well, although he had
only been in California a short year. He knew every one in San
Francisco, from the biggest toughs on Telegraph Hill, and the
political bosses, to the big pots and their womankind. He knew Miss
Atherton too. He wanted to know her better. Though he was on the
staff of the _Chronicle_, it was his own fault. If he could have
only got on with his father in New York, he might have been as rich
as Hunt himself. But the boy who cannot differ on vital points with
his father before he is sixteen is no true American, and Gardiner was
U.S. to his fingertips.
"I'll get there yet," said Gardiner. His chance was coming. There
are more ways of succeeding than one.
"How is it you bow to a reporter on the _Chronicle_, my dear?" asked
a friend of Edith Atherton's. "I understand that is what he is."
"I do it because he might have been my brother," said Edith Atherton.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that his father nearly married my mother," said Edith; "but
he was too autocratic, and he married an Englishwoman. I don't
wonder George Gardiner could not hit it off with him. Poor boy! I
wish he could."
Certainly he was far finer-looking than either Hunt or Gawthrop--that
is the way her friend interpreted the girl's sigh.
"And he's cleverer too," said the older woman acutely,
"nevertheless----"
And "nevertheless" was very easy to interpret.
"Which will it be, I wonder?" said her friend.
The solution lay on the knees of the gods, and in the hands of
Shanghai Smith.
That night Hunt met Gardiner at the club by chance, and stayed with
him all the evening.
"What are you looking so down about?" asked the newspaper man. "You
are drinking too much. Ease up on it."
Indeed, Hunt was drinking too much. He drank enough to loosen his
tongue.
"Damn that Gawthrop," he said.
"Ah, I see," cried Gardiner; "is that it?"
And Hunt nodded sulkily. Then he wept.
"If he was only out of the way," he moaned, "I believe I could work
the racket with her."
Gardiner shrugged his shoulders.
"Ah, well, buck up. Come on. I'm going to the office."
They walked into Kearney Street and turned east towards the
_Chronicle_ offices. As they passed Bush Street a very hard-looking
citizen nodded to Gardiner.
"Who's that?" asked Hunt.
"Don't you know him? That's Shanghai Smith, the biggest scoundrel
unhung. He's a sailors' crimp, and a daylight robber, and a man with
a 'pull.'"
Certainly Smith had some political power. In the United States it is
impossible to avoid politics and the police at the same time, except
by lavish bribery.
"And why do they call him 'Shanghai'?" asked Hunt.
"Because he 'shanghais' men," answered Gardiner, "and nowadays that
means drugging a man and putting him aboard some ship. Oh, he's a
daisy. He'd ship your dad to New York round the Horn if there was
money in it. When a man disappears in this city we look first in the
morgue, and then make inquiries at Smith's."
"I wish Gawthrop was in the morgue, I do," said Hunt "And here I'll
say good-night. You're a good chap, Gardiner, if you are a newspaper
man, and it's been a relief to talk to you, so it has."
They shook hands and parted, but Gardiner had not walked ten yards
before he turned and came back. His eyes glittered curiously.
Hunt's were blurred and fishy. He had certainly taken a little too
much. Gardiner wondered if he had taken too much to remember in the
morning what happened now.