WE FIND A SHIP
Partly from the diary of Robert Wallace and partly from the lips of his
daughter I gathered the story set down in the two preceding chapters.
If I have given it with some detail, believe me, it is not because I
care to linger over the shadow of tragedy that from the first hung about
the ill-gathered treasure, but rather that you may understand clearly
the issue facing us.
Some men would have turned their back upon the adventure and voted the
gold well lost. I wanted to see the thing out to a finish.
I shall never deny that the personality of her who was to be my partner
in the enterprise had something to do with the decision to which I came.
The low, sweet voice of the Southland, the gay, friendly eyes, the
piquant face, all young, all irresistibly eager and buoyant, would have
won a less emotional man than Jack Sedgwick.
But why make apologies? After all, every man that lives has his great
adventure, whether it come garbed in drab or radiant with the glow of
the sunrise. A prosaic, money-grubbing age we call this, but by the
gods! romance hammers once in a lifetime at the door of every mother's
son of us. There be those too niggardly to let her in, there be those to
whom the knock comes faintly; and there be a happy few who fling wide
the door and embrace her like a lover.
For me, I am Irish, as I have said. I cried "Aye!" and shook hands on
the bargain. We would show Captain Boris Bothwell a thing or two. It
would be odds but we would beat him to those chests hidden in the sand.
This was all very well, but one cannot charter and outfit a ship for a
long cruise upon day-dreams. The moneyed men that I approached smiled
and shook their wise gray heads. To them the whole story was no more
than a castle in Spain. For two days I tramped the streets of San
Francisco and haunted the offices of capitalists without profit to our
enterprise.
On the afternoon of the third I retired, temporarily defeated, to my
club, the Golden Gate. On my salary I had no business belonging to so
expensive a club, but I had inherited from my college days a taste for
good society and I gratified it at the expense of other desires.
In the billiard-room I ran across an acquaintance I had met for the
first time on the Valdez trail some years earlier. His name was Samuel
Blythe. By birth he was English, by choice cosmopolitan. Possessed of
more money than he knew what to do with, he spent a great deal of time
exploring unknown corners of the earth. He was as well known at
Hong-Kong and Simla as in Paris and Vienna. Within the week he had
returned to San Francisco, from an attempt to reach the summit of Mount
McKinley.
He was knocking balls about aimlessly.
"Shoot you a game of pool, Sedgwick," he proposed.
Then I had an inspiration.
"I can give you more fun for your money another way. Come into the
library, Blythe."
There I told him the whole story. He heard me out without a smile. For
that alone I could have thanked him. When I had finished he looked for a
minute out of the window with a far-away expression in his eyes.
"It's a queer yarn," he said at last.
"And of course you don't believe a word of it?" I challenged.
"Don't I? Let me tell you this, old man. There are a number of rum
things in this old world. I've bucked up against two or three of them.
Let me see your map."
I had made another copy of it, with the latitude and longitude omitted.
This I handed to him.
While he examined it his eyes shone.
"By Jove, this _is_ a lark. You can have the old tub if you want it."
He was referring to his splendid steam yacht the _Argos_, in which he
had made the trip to Alaska.
"I haven't the price to outfit her and pay your crew," I explained.
"I have. You'll have to let me be your bank. But I say, Sedgwick, you'll
need a sailing master. You're not a seaman."
Our eyes met.
"Could Sam Blythe be persuaded to take the place?"
"Could I?" He got up and wrung my hand. "That's what I wanted you to
say. Of course I'll go--jump at the chance."
"There's the chance of a nasty row. We're likely to meet Bothwell in
that vicinity. If we do, there will be trouble."
"So I gather from your description of the gentleman."
I was delighted. Blythe was not only a good navigator; he was a tried
companion, true as steel, an interesting fellow who had passed through
strange experiences but never used them to impress upon others a sense
of his importance.
He had served through the Boer and the Spanish-American wars with
distinction. As I looked at him--a spare tall man with a bronzed face of
power, well-shouldered, clear-eyed, and light-footed--I felt he was the
one out of ten thousand for my purpose.
"Too bad I didn't know a week ago. I've let my crew go. But we can pick
up another. My sailing master Mott is a thoroughly reliable man. He'll
look after the details. My opinion is that we ought to get under way as
soon as possible. That fellow Bothwell is going to crowd on all sail in
his preparations. I take it as a sure thing that he means to have a try
for the treasure."
"My notion too. He struck me as a man of resource and determination."
"So much the better. He'll give us a run for our money. My dear fellow,
you've saved my life. I was beginning to get bored to extinction. This
will be a bully picnic."
"How long will it take you to get the yacht ready?"
"Give me a week to pick a crew and get supplies aboard. I'll offer a
bonus to get things pushed."
To see the enthusiasm he put into the adventure did me good after the
three days of disappointment I had endured. I was eager to have him and
Miss Wallace meet, and I got her at once on the telephone and made
arrangements to bring him up after dinner to the private hotel where she
and her aunt were stopping.
They took to each other at once. Inside of ten minutes we were all
talking about our equipment for the trip.
"If we have a good run and the proper luck we'll be back to you with the
treasure inside of a month, Miss Wallace," Blythe promised as he rose to
leave.
"Back to me!" She looked first at him and then at me. "You don't think
that I'm not going, too, do you?"
It is odd that the point had not come up before, but I had taken it for
granted she would wait in 'Frisco for us.
"It's hardly a lady's job, I should say," was my smiling answer.
"Nonsense! Of course I am going." Sharp decision rang in her voice.
"It may be dangerous."
"Fiddlesticks! Panama is a tourist point of travel these days. Half of
my schoolgirl chums have been there. It's as safe as--Atlantic City."
"Atlantic City isn't safe if one ventures too far out in the surf," I
reminded her.
"I'll stick close to the life line," she promised.
Both Blythe and I were embarrassed. It was of course her right to go if
she insisted. I appealed to her aunt, a plump, amiable lady nearer fifty
than forty.
"Don't you think, Miss Berry, that it would be better to wait here for
us? There would be discomforts to which you are not used."
"That is just what Boris told us," Evelyn put in mischievously.
Miss Berry gave a little shrug of her shoulders.
"Oh, I'd as soon stay here, but Evie will have her way." Her pleasant
smile took from the words any sting they might otherwise have held.
"Of course I shall. This is a matter of business," Miss Wallace
triumphantly insisted.
Excitement danced in her eyes. She might put it on commercial grounds if
she liked, but the truth is that the romance of the quest had taken hold
of her even as it had of us. One could not blame her for wanting to go.
I consulted Sam with my eyes.
"I suppose there is no absolute bar to letting the ladies go. There is
room enough on the _Argos_."
"There's plenty of room," he admitted.
After all it was fanciful to suppose that we should run across Bothwell
on the face of the broad Pacific. Why shouldn't they have the pleasure
of a month's yachting? Certainly their presence would make the voyage a
more pleasant one for us.
"All right. Go if you must, but don't blame me if it turns out to be no
picnic."
"Thank you, Mr. Sedgwick. That's just what it is going to be--a nice
long picnic," the girl beamed.
"Wish I had your beautiful confidence. Have you forgotten Captain
Bothwell? Shall we take him along, too?" I asked with a laugh.
"I'm afraid he would want all the cake. No, we'll not ask him to our
picnic. He may stay at home."
"Let's hope he will," Miss Berry contributed cheerfully.
I don't think she gave the least weight to our fears of Bothwell. In
fact he was rather a favorite of hers.
"If he comes he'll have to take what is left. He understands he's not
invited," Miss Wallace nodded gaily.
Blythe was fortunately able to secure his sailing master, Mott, and one
of the crew that had sailed with him before, a man named Williams. The
Englishman's valet, Morgan, went as steward. For the rest, we had to be
content with such men as we could get hurriedly together.
Two brothers named Fleming were secured as engineers, a little cockney
as fat as a prize pig for cook. He answered to the cognomen of 'Arry
'Iggins, though on the ship's register the letter H was the first
initial of both his names. Caine, the boatswain, was a sinister-looking
fellow, but he knew his business. Taken as a whole, the crew appeared to
average well enough.
From long practice Blythe was an adept at outfitting a yacht for a
cruise. Without going into details I'll only say that we carried very
little that was superfluous and lacked nothing that would tend to
increase our comfort.
I am no sailor, but it did not take a professional eye to see that the
_Argos_ was a jewel of a boat. Of her seagoing qualities I knew nothing
except by repute, but her equipment throughout was of the best. She was
a three-masted schooner with two funnels, fitted with turbines and
Yarrow boilers. To get eighteen knots out of her was easy, and I have
seen her do twenty in a brisk wind.
In addition to her main deck the _Argos_ carried a topgallant forecastle
and a bridge, the latter extended on stanchions from the main deck to
the sides of the ship so as to give plenty of space for games or
promenades. The bridge contained a reception and a tea room, which were
connected by a carved stairway with the deck below.
The rooms of the commander, the cook, and other servants lay well
forward under the bridge. Abaft of these were the kitchen and the
pantry, the dining room, the saloon, and the rooms of the owner and his
guests.
The conventional phrase "a floating palace" will do well enough to
describe the interior of this turbine yacht. No reasonable man could
have asked more of luxury than was to be found in the well-designed bath
rooms, in the padded library with its shelves of books, its piano and
music rack, and in the smoking room arranged to satisfy the demands of
the most fastidious.
I had resigned my place with Kester & Wilcox to help push the
preparation for our departure, but I was still spending a good deal of
my time in the office cleaning up some matters upon which I had been
working. Much of the time I was down at the docks, and when I could not
be there my thoughts were full of the _Argos_ and her voyage.
Since I was giving my time to the firm without pay I took the liberty of
using the boy Jimmie to run errands for me. Journeying back and forth to
the wharf with messages and packages, he naturally worked up a feverish
interest in our cruise, even though he did not know the object of it.
When he came out point-blank one morning with a request to go with us as
cabin boy I was not surprised. I sympathized with Master Jimmie's
desire, but I very promptly put the lid on his hopes.
"Nothing doing, Mr. James A. Garfield Welch."
"You've gotter have a kid to run errands for youse, Mr. Sedgwick," he
pleaded.
"No use talking, Jimmie. You're not going."
"All right," he acquiesced meekly.
Too meekly, it occurred to me later.