The old-fashioned Union Street cable car, with its low, comfortable
outside seats, put Blix and Condy down just inside the Presidio
Government Reservation. Condy asked a direction of a sentry nursing
his Krag-Jorgensen at the terminus of the track, and then with Blix set
off down the long board walk through the tunnel of overhanging
evergreens.
The day could not have been more desirable. It was a little after ten
of a Monday morning, Condy's weekly holiday. The air was neither cool
nor warm, effervescent merely, brisk and full of the smell of grass and
of the sea. The sky was a speckless sheen of pale blue. To their
right, and not far off, was the bay, blue as indigo. Alcatraz seemed
close at hand; beyond was the enormous green, red, and purple pyramid
of Tamalpais climbing out of the water, head and shoulders above the
little foothills, and looking out to the sea and to the west.
The Reservation itself was delightful. There were rows of the
officers' houses, all alike, drawn up in lines like an assembly of the
staff; there were huge barracks, most like college dormitories; and on
their porches enlisted men in shirt sleeves and overalls were cleaning
saddles, and polishing the brass of head-stalls and bridles, whistling
the while or smoking corn-cob pipes. Here on the parade-ground a
soldier, his coat and vest removed, was batting grounders and flies to
a half-dozen of his fellows. Over by the stables, strings of horses,
all of the same color, were being curried and cleaned. A young
lieutenant upon a bicycle spun silently past. An officer came from his
front gate, his coat unbuttoned and a briar in his teeth. The walks
and roads were flanked with lines of black-painted cannon-balls;
inverted pieces of abandoned ordnance stood at corners. From a
distance came the mellow snarling of a bugle.
Blix and Condy had planned a long walk for that day. They were to go
out through the Presidio Reservation, past the barracks and officers'
quarters, and on to the old fort at the Golden Gate. Here they would
turn and follow the shore-line for a way, then strike inland across the
hills for a short half-mile, and regain the city and the street-car
lines by way of the golf-links. Condy had insisted upon wearing his
bicycle outfit for the occasion, and, moreover, carried a little
satchel, which, he said, contained a pair of shoes.
But Blix was as sweet as a rose that morning, all in tailor-made black
but for the inevitable bands of white satin wrapped high and tight
about her neck. The St. Bernard dog-collar did duty as a belt. She
had disdained a veil, and her yellow hair was already blowing about her
smooth pink cheeks. She walked at his side, her step as firm and solid
as his own, her round, strong arms swinging, her little brown eyes
shining with good spirits and vigor, and the pure, clean animal joy of
being alive on that fine cool Western morning. She talked almost
incessantly. She was positively garrulous. She talked about the fine
day that it was, about the queer new forage caps of the soldiers, about
the bare green hills of the Reservation, about the little cemetery they
passed just beyond the limits of the barracks, about a rabbit she saw,
and about the quail they both heard whistling and calling in the
hollows under the bushes.
Condy walked at her side in silence, yet no less happy than she,
smoking his pipe and casting occasional glances at a great ship--a
four-master that was being towed out toward the Golden Gate. At every
moment and at every turn they noted things that interested them, and to
which they called each other's attention.
"Look, Blix!"
"Oh, Condy, look at that!"
They were soon out of the miniature city of the Post, and held on down
through the low reach of tules and sand-dunes that stretch between the
barracks and the old red fort.
"Look, Condy!" said Blix. "What's that building down there on the
shore of the bay--the one with the flagstaff?"
"I think that must be the lifeboat station."
"I wonder if we could go down and visit it. I think it would be good
fun."
"Idea!" exclaimed Condy.
The station was close at hand. To reach it they had but to leave the
crazy board walk that led on toward the fort, and cross a few hundred
yards of sand-dune. Condy opened the gate that broke the line of
evergreen hedge around the little two-story house, and promptly
unchained a veritable pandemonium of dogs.
Inside, the place was not without a certain charm of its own. A brick
wall, bordered with shells, led to the front of the station, which gave
directly upon the bay; a little well-kept lawn opened to right and
left, and six or eight gaily-painted old rowboats were set about, half
filled with loam in which fuchsias, geraniums, and mignonettes were
flowering. A cat or two dozed upon the window-sills in the sun. Upon
a sort of porch overhead, two of the crew paced up and down in a manner
that at once suggested the poop. Here and there was a gleam of highly
polished red copper or brass trimmings. The bay was within two steps
of the front door, while a little further down the beach was the house
where the surf-boat was kept, and the long runway leading down from it
to the water. Condy rapped loudly at the front door. It was opened by
Captain Jack.
Captain Jack, and no other; only now he wore a blue sweater and a
leather-visored cap, with the letters U. S. L. B. S. around the band.
Not an instant was given them for preparation. The thing had happened
with the abruptness of a transformation scene at a theatre. Condy's
knock had evoked a situation. Speech was stricken from their mouths.
For a moment they were bereft even of action, and stood there on the
threshold, staring open-mouthed and open-eyed at the sudden
reappearance of their "matrimonial object." Condy was literally dumb;
in the end it was Blix who tided them over the crisis.
"We were just going by--just taking a walk," she explained, "and we
thought we'd like to see the station. Is it all right? Can we look
around?"
"Why, of course," assented the Captain with great cordiality. "Come
right in. This is visitors' day. You just happened to hit it--only
it's mighty few visitors we ever have," he added.
While Condy was registering for himself and Blix, they managed to
exchange a lightning glance. It was evident the Captain did not
recognize them. The situation readjusted itself, even promised to be
of extraordinary interest. And for that matter it made little
difference whether the captain remembered them or not.
"No, we don't get many visitors," the Captain went on, as he led them
out of the station and down the small gravel walk to the house where
the surf-boat was kept. "This is a quiet station. People don't fetch
out this way very often, and we're not called out very often, either.
We're an inside post, you see, and usually we don't get a call unless
the sea's so high that the Cliff House station can't launch their boat.
So, you see, we don't go out much, but when we DO, it means business
with a great big B. Now, this here, you see," continued the Captain,
rolling back the sliding doors of the house, "is the surf-boat. By the
way, let's see; I ain't just caught your names yet."
"Well, my name's Rivers," said Condy, "and this is Miss Bessemer.
We're both from the city."
"Happy to know you, sir; happy to know you, miss," he returned, pulling
off his cap. "My name's Hoskins, but you can just call me Captain
Jack. I'm so used to it that I don't kind of answer to the other.
Well, now, Miss Bessemer, this here's the surf-boat; she's
self-rightin', self-bailin', she can't capsize, and if I was to tell
you how many thousands of dollars she cost, you wouldn't believe me."
Condy and Blix spent a delightful half-hour in the boat-house while
Captain Jack explained and illustrated, and told them anecdotes of
wrecks, escapes, and rescues till they held their breaths like
ten-year-olds.
It did not take Condy long to know that he had discovered what the
story-teller so often tells of but so seldom finds, and what, for want
of a better name, he elects to call "a character."
Captain Jack had been everywhere, had seen everything, and had done
most of the things worth doing, including a great many things that he
had far better have left undone. But on this latter point the Captain
seemed to be innocently and completely devoid of a moral sense of right
and wrong. It was quite evident that he saw no matter for conscience
in the smuggling of Chinamen across the Canadian border at thirty
dollars a head--a venture in which he had had the assistance of the
prodigal son of an American divine of international renown. The trade
to Peruvian insurgents of condemned rifles was to be regretted only
because the ring manipulating it was broken up. The appropriation of a
schooner in the harbor of Callao was a story in itself; while the
robbery of thirty thousand dollars' worth of sea-otter skins from a
Russian trading-post in Alaska, accomplished chiefly through the agency
of a barrel of rum manufactured from sugar-cane, was a veritable
achievement.
He had been born, so he told them, in Winchester, in England, and--
Heaven save the mark!--had been brought up with a view of taking
orders. For some time he was a choir boy in the great Winchester
Cathedral; then, while yet a lad, had gone to sea. He had been
boat-steerer on a New Bedford whaler, and struck his first whale when
only sixteen. He had filibustered down to Chili; had acted as ice
pilot on an Arctic relief expedition; had captained a crew of Chinamen
shark-fishing in Magdalena Bay, and had been nearly murdered by his
men; had been a deep-sea diver, and had burst his ear-drums at the
business, so that now he could blow tobacco smoke out of his ears; he
had been shipwrecked in the Gilberts, fought with the Seris on the
lower California Islands, sold champagne--made from rock candy,
effervescent salts, and Reisling wine--to the Coreans, had dreamed of
"holding up" a Cunard liner, and had ridden on the Strand in a hansom
with William Ewart Gladstone. But the one thing of which he was proud,
the one picture of his life he most delighted to recall, was himself as
manager of a negro minstrel troupe, in a hired drum-major's uniform,
marching down the streets of Sacramento at the head of the brass band
in burnt cork and regimentals.
"The star of the troupe," he told them, "was the lady with the iron
jore. We busted in Stockton, and she gave me her diamonds to pawn. I
pawned 'em, and kept back something in the hand for myself and hooked
it to San Francisco. Strike me straight if she didn't follow me, that
iron-jored piece; met me one day in front of the Bush Street Theatre,
and horsewhipped me properly. Now, just think of that"--and he laughed
as though it was the best kind of a joke.
"But," hazarded Blix, "don't you find it rather dull out here--
lonesome? I should think you would want to have some one with you to
keep you company--to--to do your cooking for you?"
But Condy, ignoring her diplomacy and thinking only of possible
stories, blundered off upon another track.
"Yes," he said, "you've led such a life of action, I should think this
station would be pretty dull for you. How did you happen to choose it?"
"Well, you see," answered the Captain, leaning against the smooth white
flank of the surf-boat, his hands in his pockets, "I'm lying low just
now. I got into a scrape down at Libertad, in Mexico, that made talk,
and I'm waiting for that to die down some. You see, it was this way."
Mindful of their experience with the mate of the whaleback, Condy and
Blix were all attention in an instant. Blix sat down upon an upturned
box, her elbows on her knees, leaning forward, her little eyes fixed
and shining with interest and expectation; Condy, the story-teller all
alive and vibrant in him, stood at her elbow, smoking cigarette after
cigarette, his fingers dancing with excitement and animation as the
Captain spoke.
And then it was that Condy and Blix, in that isolated station, the bay
lapping at the shore within ear-shot, in that atmosphere redolent of
paint and oakum and of seaweed decaying upon the beach outside, first
heard the story of "In Defiance of Authority."
Captain Jack began it with his experience as a restaurant keeper during
the boom days in Seattle, Washington. He told them how he was the
cashier of a dining-saloon whose daily net profits exceeded eight
hundred dollars; how its proprietor suddenly died, and how he, Captain
Jack, continued the management of the restaurant pending a settlement
of the proprietor's affairs and an appearance of heirs; how in the
confusion and excitement of the boom no settlement was ever made; and
how, no heirs appearing, he assumed charge of the establishment
himself, paying bills, making contracts, and signing notes, until he
came to consider the business and all its enormous profits as his own;
and how at last, when the restaurant was burned, he found himself some
forty thousand dollars "ahead of the game."
Then he told them of the strange club of the place, called "The
Exiles," made up chiefly of "younger sons" of English and
British-Canadian families, every member possessed of a "past" more or
less disreputable; men who had left their country for their country's
good, and for their family's peace of mind--adventurers, wanderers,
soldiers of fortune, gentlemen-vagabonds, men of hyphenated names and
even noble birth, whose appellations were avowedly aliases. He told
them of his meeting with Billy Isham, one of the club's directors, and
of the happy-go-lucky, reckless, unpractical character of the man; of
their acquaintance, intimacy, and subsequent partnership; of how the
filibustering project was started with Captain Jack's forty thousand,
and the never-to-be-forgotten interview in San Francisco with Senora
Estrada, the agent of the insurgents; of the incident of her
calling-card--how she tore it in two and gave one-half to Isham; of
their outfitting, and the broken sextant that was to cause their
ultimate discomfiture and disaster, and of the voyage to the rendezvous
on a Panama liner.
"Strike me!" continued Captain Jack, "you should have seen Billy Isham
on that Panama dough-dish; a passenger ship she was, and Billy was the
life of her from stem to stern-post. There was a church pulpit aboard
that they were taking down to Mazatlan for some chapel or other, and
this here pulpit was lashed on deck aft. Well, Billy had been most
kinds of a fool in his life, and among others a play-actor; called
himself Gaston Maundeville, and was clean daft on his knowledge of
Shakespeare and his own power of interpretin' the hidden meanin' of the
lines. I ain't never going to forgit the day he gave us Portia's
speech. We were just under the tropic, and the day was a scorcher.
There was mostly men folk aboard, and we lay around the deck in our
pajamas, while Billy--Gaston Maundeville, dressed in striped red and
white pajamas--clum up in that bally pulpit, with the ship's
Shakespeare in his hands, an' let us have--'The quality o' mercy isn't
strained; it droppeth as the genteel dew from heavun.' Laugh, I tell
you I was sore with it. Lord, how we guyed him! An' the more we guyed
and the more we laughed, the more serious he got and the madder he
grew. He said he was interpretin' the hidden meanin' of the lines."
And so the Captain ran through that wild, fiery tale--of fighting and
loving, buccaneering and conspiring; mandolins tinkling, knives
clicking; oaths mingling with sonnets, and spilled wine with spilled
blood. He told them of Isham's knife duel with the Mexican lieutenant,
their left wrists lashed together; of the "battle of the thirty" in the
pitch dark of the Custom House cellar; of Senora Estrada's love for
Isham; and all the roll and plunge of action that make up the story of
"In Defiance of Authority."
At the end, Blix's little eyes were snapping like sparks; Condy's face
was flaming, his hands were cold, and he was shifting his weight from
foot to foot, like an excited thoroughbred horse.
"Heavens and earth, what a yarn!" he exclaimed almost in a whisper.
Blix drew a long, tremulous breath and sat back upon the upturned box,
looking around her as though she had but that moment been awakened.
"Yes, sir," said the Captain, rolling a cigarette. "Yes, sir, those
were great days. Get down there around the line in those little,
out-o'-the-way republics along the South American coast, and things
happen to you. You hold a man's life in the crook of your forefinger,
an' nothing's done by halves. If you hate a man, you lay awake nights
biting your mattress, just thinking how you hate him; an' if you love a
woman--good Lord, how you do LOVE her!"
"But--but!" exclaimed Condy, "I don't see how you can want to do
anything else. Why, you're living sixty to the minute when you're
playing a game like that!"
"Oh, I ain't dead yet!" answered the Captain. "I got a few schemes
left that I could get fun out of."
"How can you wait a minute!" exclaimed Blix breathlessly. "Why don't
you get a ship right away--to-morrow--and go right off on some other
adventure?"
"Well, I can't just now," returned the Captain, blowing the smoke from
his cigarette through his ears. "There's a good many reasons; one of
'em is that I've just been married."