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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 46694
   :PG.Title: Under Sail
   :PG.Released: 2014-08-20
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Lincoln Colcord
   :DC.Title: Under Sail
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1922
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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UNDER SAIL
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      [Transcriber's note: The source book's idiosyncratic
      punctuation has been preserved as printed.]

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      UNDER SAIL

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      BY

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      LINCOLN COLCORD

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      LONDON
      EVELEIGH NASH & GRAYSON LTD.
      148 STRAND
      1922

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      *Copyright in the U.S.A.*
      By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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   CONTENTS

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`AN INSTRUMENT OF THE GODS`_
`THE UNCHARTED ISLE`_
`SERVANT AND MASTER`_
`RESCUE AT SEA`_
`UNDER SAIL`_
`ANJER`_

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.. _`AN INSTRUMENT OF THE GODS`:

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   AN INSTRUMENT OF THE GODS

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   AN INSTRUMENT OF THE GODS

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   I

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"The longer I live" said Nichols from the
darkness of his corner "the less of difference I see
between the East and the West.  I've been
listening closely to you fellows.  We are fond of
saying that we don't understand the Oriental;
but, let me ask you, do we fully understand our
best friends—even ourselves?  Whose fault is it?
Or, failing to understand the Oriental, is it logical
for us to consign him to a different sphere of
human nature?  Of course, it's the easiest way
to dodge the real answer...."

The old *Omega* had drifted that morning past
Green Island, dropping anchor a little later
among the fleet off Stonecutter's; and after
dinner, moved by a common impulse, we had
called our sampans and joined Nichols under
her spacious after awning.  There, with the
broad land-locked harbour of Hong Kong under
a half moon reflecting the perfect outline of the
Peak, talk had wandered lazily along the range
of our shipping activities, to reach at last, as it
always did in such company, that world-old
problem of the races of men.

"I think I know the race of Chinamen" Nichols
went on, while grunts of assent from several
quarters of the deck gave testimony to his
reputation.  "Oh, yes, I know them.  They are
made of flesh and blood, if you'll believe me;
they eat with their mouths, and think in the
recesses of their skulls, just as we do.  They
marry, beget children, and pass through life.
They love, fight, strive for gain, sin, suffer, learn
lessons, regret, make restitution, are tempted by
devils, struggle and triumph, or give up in despair,
and finally die with their years and their secrets
on their heads.  The same old conscience pursues
them.  Yes, they are eaten up, like us, by the
savage and devastating contest with self, the
flesh and the spirit striving for the mastery; and
out of the contest, like fire struck from clashing
swords, come the sparks of ideas, of aspirations,
of creative efforts, of wonder and joy, pain and
fear, of all the infinite play of this star-spangled
life of ours against the soft darkness of the
unknown sky....  You fellows have been
discussing only superficialities.  At heart, you and
the Oriental are the same.  The Chinese are
romantic, I tell you; they are heroic, they are
incorrigibly imaginative.  You think not?  Let
me tell you a tale"

Suddenly Nichols laughed, a snort that might
have been of self-derision.  "You won't be
convinced" he chuckled  "I see it already.  You'll
derive from this tale, no doubt, only further
confirmation of the unlikeness you imagine.  So be
it.  I merely warn you not to be too sure.  Strip
my friend Lee Fu Chang naked, for instance,
destroy and forget about that long silken coat of
his, embroidered so wonderfully with hills and
trees and dragons, dress him in a cowboy's suit
and locate him in the Rocky Mountain region
of fifty years ago, and the game he played with
Captain Wilbur won't seem so inappropriate.  It's
only that you won't expect a mandarin Chinaman
to play it.  You'll feel that China is too old and
civilized for what he did...."





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   II

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"Some of you fellows must remember the
notorious case of Captain Wilbur and the ship
*Speedwell*" Nichols began  "For years it was
spoken of among sailors as a classic instance of
nautical perfidy; and this was the port, you
know, where Wilbur first brought the ship after
he'd stolen her, and settled down to brazen out
his crime.  But few men have heard how he lost
her in the end, or why he disappeared for ever
from the life of the sea.

"Perhaps I'd better refresh your memories;
let's go back a matter of forty years.  Captain
Wilbur was a well-known shipmaster of those
palmy days.  He had commanded the *Speedwell*
for a decade, and possessed a reputation for
sterling seamanship and unblemished integrity.
His vessel was one of the finest moderate clippers
ever launched on the shores of New England.
But she was growing old; and Wilbur himself
had suffered serious financial reverses, although
this fact wasn't known till after the escapade
that estranged his friends and set our little world
by the ears.  He seems to have been something
of a gambler in investments, and by bad judgment
or ill luck had brought his fortune to the verge
of ruin if not of actual disgrace.  This, so far as
I know, stands as the sole explanation of his
amazing downfall.  There was nothing else the
matter with him, physically or mentally, as you
shall hear.

"Out of a clear sky, this was what he did: he
deliberately put the *Speedwell* ashore in Ombay
Pass, on a voyage home from Singapore to New
York with a light general cargo, and abandoned
her as she lay.  I say he did it deliberately; this
is the common surmise, and subsequent developments
lend point to the accusation.  It may have
been, however, that she actually drifted ashore,
and that he didn't try at the time to get her off.
Whether he planned the disaster, or whether he
succumbed to a temptation thrust in his face by
the devil of chance, makes little difference.  His
plans were deliberate enough after the event.

"Within a month after sailing for home, he
was back again in Singapore with his ship's
company in three longboats and a tale of a lost
vessel.  There he remained for three months,
cleaning up the business.  No breath of scandal
was raised against him; Ombay Pass on the turn
of the monsoon had caught many a fine vessel
before this one, and the account rendered by his
officers and crew was straightforward and
consistent.  The *Speedwell*, according to the official
record, had drifted ashore in a light breeze, before
the unmanageable currents of that region, and
had lodged on a coral reef at the top of the tide
in such a position that she couldn't be got off.
It was another case of total loss of ship and cargo;
in those days there were no steam craft in the
East to send on a mission of salvage, and the
Eastern Passages were forbidden hunting
ground.  What they caught they were allowed to
keep, with no words said and the page closed.
The insurance companies stood the strain, the
ship's affairs were settled without a hitch, and
the name of the *Speedwell* passed simultaneously
from the Maritime Register and from the books
of her owners in America.  Captain Wilbur let it
be known that he was going home, and left
Singapore.

"It was his remarkable destiny to be the
revealer of his own perfidy; he made no bones
about the job.  Instead of going home, he went
to Batavia, and there hired a schooner and crew
with the proceeds of his personal holding in the
*Speedwell*.  This schooner and crew he took
immediately to Ombay Pass.  They found the
ship still resting in the same position.  What
they did there must remain a mystery; I have the
tale only in fragmentary form from the Lascar
who was serang of Wilbur's native crew.

"He, it would seem, was overawed by the
extent of the engineering operations in which he
participated; his description partook of the colour
and extravagance of a myth.  Alone in distant
waters they had wrestled like heroes with a
monstrous task; day had followed day, while the
great ship remained motionless and the elements
paused to observe the stupendous effort.  They
had unloaded the cargo: they had sent down the
top-hamper and rafted it alongside; they had
patched and pumped, and Wilbur himself had
dived in the lower hold and under the bows to
place the stoppers in their proper position.  So
far as I can reckon, it took them a couple of
months to get her off; but, by Jove, they floated
her—a magnificent feat of sailorizing.  Then they
loaded the cargo again, and came away.

"When Captain Wilbur appeared one morning
off Batavia roadstead with the *Speedwell* under
top-gallantsails, towing the schooner, it was the
sensation of the port; a sensation that flew like
wildfire about the China Sea, as it became clear
what he intended to do with her.  For he
proposed, incredible and unaccountable as it seems,
to hold the ship and cargo as salvage; and
nothing, apparently, could be done about it.  She
was actually the property of himself and the
Lascar crew.

"The crowd alongshore, everyone interested in
shipping, of course turned violently against him;
for a time there was wild talk of extra-legal
proceedings, and Wilbur might have fared ill had
he attempted to frequent his old haunts just then.
But he snapped his fingers at them all.  He found
plenty of men who were willing to advance him
credit on the security of the ship: he bought off
his crew with liberal allowances, took the
*Speedwell* to Hong Kong and put her in drydock, and
soon was ready for business with a fine vessel
of his own.  Well, he knew that personal
repugnance wouldn't be carried to commercial lengths;
that he and the ship, by cutting freights a little,
could find plenty to do.  As for the rest of it,
the moral score, he seemed cheerfully prepared
to face the music, and probably foresaw that with
the passage of time he would be able to live down
the record.

"The old *Omega* and I were down the China
Sea on a trading voyage while these events were
taking place.  When we got back to Hong Kong,
Wilbur had already sailed for Antwerp, leaving
his story to swell the scandal and fire the
indignation of the water-front.  I heard it first from my
friend, Lee Fu Chang.

"'An extraordinary incident, is it not?'
exclaimed Lee Fu in conclusion  'Extraordinary!
I am deeply interested.  First of all, I am
interested in your laws.  Here is a man who has stolen
a ship; and your laws, it is discovered, support
him in the act.  But the man himself is the most
interesting.  It is a crowning stroke, Captain
Nichols, that he has not seen fit to change the
name of the vessel.  Consider this fact.  All is
as it was before, when the well-known and
reputable Captain Wilbur commanded the fine ship
*Speedwell* on voyages to the East'

"'Can it be possible?' said I  'Isn't there
some mistake?  The man must have the gall of
a highway robber!  Does the crowd have
anything to do with him?'

"'None of his old associates speak in passing;
they cross the street to avoid him.  He goes
about like one afflicted with a pestilence.  But
the wonder is that he is not disturbed by this
treatment.  That makes it very extraordinary.
He is neither cringing nor brazen; he makes no
protests, offers no excuse, and takes no notice.
In the face of outrageous insult, Captain, he
maintains an air of dignity and reserve, like a man
conscious of inner rectitude'

"'Did you talk with him, Lee Fu?' I asked.

"'Oh, yes.  In fact, I cultivated his acquaintance.
The study fascinated me; it relieved, as
it were, the daily monotony of virtue.  In him
there is no trace of humbug or humility.  Do not
think that he is a simple man.  His heart in this
matter is unfathomable ... well worth sounding'

"'By Jove, I believe you liked him!' I
exclaimed.

"'No, not that'  Lee Fu folded his hands
within the long sleeves of his embroidered coat
and rested them across his stomach in a
characteristic attitude of meditation.  'No, quite the
opposite.  I abhorred him.  He seemed to me
unnatural, monstrous, beyond the range of
common measure.  Captain, there are crimes and
crimes, and it has been my lot to know men who
have committed many of them.  There are
murder, theft, arson, treason, infidelity, and all
the rest; and these, in a manner of speaking, are
natural crimes.  Shall we define it thus: a natural
crime is one which eventually brings its own
retribution?  Sooner or later, if justice is not
done, the natural crime works havoc with its
perpetrator; it plagues his conscience, it fastens
like a fungus on his soul.  Through lust or
passion, natural impulses, he has committed error;
but he cannot escape the final payment of the
price.  On the other hand, there are unnatural
crimes, crimes for which there is no reason, crimes
requiring no liquidation; and there are unnatural
criminals, feeling no remorse.  Such a criminal,
I take it, is this Captain Wilbur, who goes his
way in peace from the betrayal of a sacred
trust'

"'Aren't you drawing it a little strong?' I
laughed 'It isn't exactly a crime...'

"Lee Fu smiled quietly, giving me a glance
that was a mere flicker of the eyelids.  'Perhaps
not to you' said he  'Fixed in the mind of your
race is a scale of violence by which to measure
the errors of men; if no blood flows, then it is not
so bad.  Your justice is still a barbarian.  Thus
you constantly underestimate the deeper crimes,
allowing your master criminals to go scathless, or
even, in some instances, to prosper and win
repute by their machinations.  But, let me tell
you, Captain, murder is brave and honourable
compared with this.  Consider what he did.
Trained to the sea and ships, after a lifetime of
honourable service to his traditions, he suddenly
forsakes them utterly.  Because the matter rests
with him alone, because there is nothing in it for
him to fear, his serenity condemns his very soul.
He has fallen from heaven to hell; flagrantly,
remorselessly, and without attempt at concealment
or evasion, he has played false with sacred
honour and holy life.  It is blasphemy that he
has committed; when the master of the ship is
not to be trusted, the gods tremble in the sky.
So I abhor him—and am fascinated.  He does
not speak of his crime, of course, yet I find
myself waiting and watching for a hint, an
explanation.  Believe me, Captain, when I tell
you, that in all my talk with him I have received
not a single flash of illumination; no, not one!
There is no key to his design.  He speaks of his
ship and her affairs as other captains do.  He is
a tall, jovial, healthy man, with frank glances and
open speech.  For all that seems, he might have
forgotten what went on at Ombay Pass.  I swear
to you that his heart is untroubled.  As you
would say, he does not care a damn....  And
that is horrible'

"A little amused at my friend's moral fervour,
I adopted a bantering tone.  'Perhaps the man
is innocent' said I  'Perhaps there's something
unexplained....'

"'You forget that he holds the vessel as his
property—the same vessel that he himself ran on
shore' Lee Fu reminded me  'You are still
thinking, Captain, of violence and blood.  No
one was lost, no shots were fired ... so, never
mind.  It is not vital to you that a strong man
within your circle has murdered the spirit; you
refuse to become excited or alarmed ... Wait
then till actual blood flows'

"'What do you mean by that, Lee Fu?  You
think...?'

"'I think Captain Wilbur will bear watching.
In the meantime, take my advice, and study him
when opportunity offers.  Thus we learn of
heaven and hell'"





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   III

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"A few years went by, while the case of
Captain Wilbur and the *Speedwell* passed
through its initial stages of being forgotten.
Nothing succeeds like success; the man owned a
fine ship, and those who did business with him
soon came to take the situation for granted.
Wilbur made fast passages, kept the *Speedwell*
in excellent trim, and paid his bills promptly;
rumour of course had it that he was growing rich.
In all probability it was true.  After a while,
some of his old friends were willing to let
bygones be bygones; there were many more to
whom the possession of a fine piece of property
seemed of enough importance to cover a
multitude of sins.  The new fellows who came to the
East and heard the tale for the first time couldn't
credit it after meeting Wilbur in the flesh.
Little by little one began to see him again on the
quarter-deck at the evening gatherings of the
fleet, or among seafaring men ashore at tiffin.
When, in time, it became unwise to start the story
against him, for fear of misconstruction of one's
motive, it was evident that he had well-nigh won
his nefarious match against society.

"I'd met him a number of times, of course,
during this interval, and had come to understand
Lee Fu's urgent advice.  Indeed, for one
curious about the habits of the human species,
Wilbur compelled attention.  That perfect
urbanity, that air of unfailing dignity and
confidence, that aura of a commanding personality, of
an able ship-master among his brethren, of a
man whose position in the world was secure
beyond peradventure: all this could spring from
one of only two spiritual conditions—either from
a quiet and innocent conscience, or from a heart
perfectly attuned to villainy.  As he sat among
us, taking up his proper word in the conversation,
assuming no mask, showing no concern, it was
with the utmost difficulty that one placed him as
a man with a dark past, with a damnable blot on
his escutcheon.  So unconscious was his poise
that one often doubted the evidence of memory,
and found oneself going back over the record,
only to fetch up point-blank against the incontestable
fact that he had stolen his ship and
betrayed his profession.  By Jove, it seemed
fantastic!  Here he was, to all intents and
purposes a gentleman; a likeable fellow, too, in
many ways.  He talked well, was positive
without being arbitrary, usually had a fair and
generous word for the issue under discussion,
never indulged in criticism; and above all, damn
him, he sustained a reputation for expert mastery
over this profession to which he'd dealt such a
foul blow.

"'It is a triumph of character!' Lee Fu used
to repeat, as we compared notes on the case from
time to time.  'I think he has not been guilty of
a single minor error.  His correctness is nothing
short of diabolical.  It presages disaster, like too
much fair weather in the typhoon season.  Wait
and watch; mark my word, Captain, when
the major error comes it will be a great tragedy'

"'Must there be a major error?' I asked,
falling into the mood of Lee Fu's exaggerated
concern  'He's carried it off so far with the
greatest ease'

"'Yes, with the greatest ease' said Lee Fu
thoughtfully  'Yet I begin to wonder whether
he has been properly put to the test.  See how
the world protects him!  Sometimes I am appalled.
It is as if we wrapped the doers of evil in cotton
wool, so that not even rudeness might disturb
them.  He has merely maintained a perfect
silence, and the world has done the rest.  It has
seemed more anxious to forget his crime than he
to have it forgotten.  So he lives with impunity,
as it were.  But he is not invulnerable.  Life
will challenge him yet ... it must be ... life,
which is truth, and not the world.  Can a man
escape the anger and justice of the gods?  That
is why I concern myself with him—to know his
final destiny'

"'You admit, then, that he's not the incarnate
criminal you once thought him' I chaffed, unable
to take the matter so deeply to heart  'He may
be only a stupid fool with a wooden face and
naturally good manners....'

"'Not stupid' Lee Fu interrupted  'Yet, on
the other hand, not exceptional, not superior to
life.  Such faultless power of will is in itself no
mean part of ability.  He is, as you might say,
self-centred—most accurately self-centred.  But
the challenge of the gods displaces the centre of
all.  He will be like a top that is done spinning.
A little breath may topple him at last.  Wait and
see....  But, for the present, it is evident that
were is nothing more to be learned.  The mask
is inscrutable'

"Thinking the case over at sea, I often
laughed to myself over Lee Fu's intensity.
Voyage followed voyage; at one time when I
had just come in from Bankok and was on my
way from the Jetty to Lee Fu's office, I passed
Captain Wilbur on the opposite side of Queen's
Road.  He waved a hand to me as he turned the
corner: at once it flashed across my mind that
I hadn't observed the *Speedwell* in the roadstead
as I came in.  When I had finished my business
with Lee Fu, I asked him for an explanation of
Wilbur's presence in Hong Kong without his
vessel.

"'You are mistaken, Captain—it has little
significance' he answered with a quizzical smile
'So, after all, you pay a little attention?  The
fact is, the successful Captain Wilbur has retired
from active service on the sea.  He is now a ship
owner, nothing more, and has favoured Hong
Kong above all other ports as the seat of his
retirement.  He resides in a fine house on
Graham Terrace, and has three chairmen in white
livery edged with crimson....  Captain Nichols,
you should steal a ship'

"'Who has gone in the *Speedwell*?' I
inquired

"'An old friend of ours, one Captain Turner'
said Lee Fu slowly, glancing in my direction.

"'Not Will Turner?'

"'The same'

"I pursed up my mouth in a silent whistle.
Will Turner in the *Speedwell*!  Poor fellow, he
must have lost another of his ill-starred vessels.
Hard luck seemed to pursue him.  One ship
would be sold from under his command; several
he had lost in deep water, by fire, storm or old
age; another had sprung a leak in the Java Sea,
to be condemned a little later when he had worked
her into Batavia.  A capable sailor and an honest
man; yet life had afforded him nothing but a
succession of hard blows and heavy falls.  Death
and sorrow, too; he had buried a wife and child,
swept off by cholera, in the Bay of Bengal.  A
dozen years before, Turner and I had landed
together in the China Sea, and were thrown much
in each other's company; I knew his heart, his
history, some of his secrets, and liked him
tremendously for the man he was.

"Watching Lee Fu in silence, I thought again
of the relationship between Will Turner and this
extraordinary Chinaman.  I won't go into that
story now, but there were overwhelming reasons
why these two should think well of each other;
why Lee Fu should respect and honour Captain
Turner, and why Turner should consider Lee Fu
his best friend.  It had come about as the result
of an incident of Turner's early days in the East;
an incident of a ship, a rascal and a doctored
charter-party, that might have turned into an
ugly business save for the conduct and
perspicacity of the two chief victims.  It had thrown
them violently together; ever since, they had kept
the bond close and hidden, as became men of
reserve.  Probably I was the only man in the
world who knew how strong it was.

"And now Turner had taken Wilbur's ship.
Strange how this new development seemed to
impinge on Lee Fu's fancy, how it brought the
Wilbur case nearer home.  The next moment, of
course, the impression had passed; and I saw that,
instead of marking another stroke of ill-luck for
Turner, it might spell the beginning of good
fortune.

"'What happened to the old *Altair*?' I asked.
Turner had commanded a trading packet of that
name three months before.

"'She was bought by certain parties for a
store-ship, and now lies moored on Kowloon-side'
answered Lee Fu  'I was about to make a
proposal to Captain Turner, when this plan came
forward' he went on, as if excusing himself  'I
did not know of it until he had actually accepted.
I said everything in my power to dissuade
him...'

"'What's the trouble?  Didn't Wilbur do the
right thing by him?' I asked.

"'Captain, you are perverse.  The business
arrangement is immaterial.  It is unthinkable that
our friend should command a ship for such a man.
The jealous gods have not yet shown their hand'

"'Nonsense, Lee Fu!' I exclaimed, finding
myself irritated at the out-cropping of the old
conceit  'Since the thing is done, hadn't we
better try to be practical in our attitude?'

"'Exactly' said Lee Fu  'Let us be practical....
Captain Nichols, is it impossible for the
Caucasian to reason from cause to effect?  There
seems to be no logic in your design—which
explains many curious facts of history.  I have
merely insisted, in our consideration of this case,
that a man who would do one thing would do
another, and that sooner or later life would
inevitably present him with another thing to do'

"'But I've known too many men who escaped
what you call destiny' I argued peevishly.

"'Have you?' inquired Lee Fu.

"He said no more, and we went out to tiffin"





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   IV

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"That year I plunged into the Malay
Archipelago for an extended cruise, was gone seven
months among the islands, and wasted another
month coming up the China Sea in order to
dodge the tail-end of the typhoon season.  But
luck favoured me, of course, since I wasn't in a
hurry; and so it happened that for the last three
hundred miles across from Luzon I raced with a
typhoon after all, beating it to an anchorage in
Hong Kong by a margin of twelve hours.  It was
an exceptionally late storm; and the late ones,
you know, are the least dependable in their
actions.  Typhoon signals were flying from the
Peak as I came in; before the *Omega's* sails
were furled the sky to the eastward had lowered
and darkened like a shutter, and the wind had
begun to whip in vicious gusts across the
harbour.

"I went ashore at once, for I carried important
papers from Lee Fu's chief agent in the islands.
When I reached his outer office, I found it full of
gathering gloom, although it was still early
afternoon.  Sing Toy immediately took in my name.
In a moment I was ushered into the familiar
room where my friend sat beside a shaded lamp,
facing a teakwood desk inlaid with ivory and
invariably bare, save for a priceless Ming vase
and an ornament of old green bronze.

"'Back again, Lee Fu' said I, placing the
island letters on the desk before him  'And just
in time, it seems'  A rising gust outside whined
along the street.

"He paid no attention to my greeting or the
letters.  'Sit down, Captain' said he  'I have
bad news'

"'Yes?' I queried, somewhat alarmed at the
vagueness of the announcement.  So far as I
was aware, no matter that we shared between us
could result in 'bad news' said in such a tone.

"Folding his hands across his stomach and
slightly bowing his head, he gazed at me with a
level upturned glance that without betraying
expression carried by its very immobility a hint
of deep emotion.

"'It is as I told you' said he at last  'Now,
perhaps, you will believe'

"'For Heaven's sake, what are you talking
about?' I demanded  'Tell me instantly what
is wrong'

"He nodded slowly.  'There is plenty of
time—and I will tell.  It is often said that the
season that brings a late typhoon, as now, is also
ushered in by an early typhoon.  So it was this
season.  A very severe storm came down before
its time, and almost without warning....  It
was this storm into whose face our late friend
Captain Turner took his ship, the *Speedwell*,
sailing from Hong Kong for New York some
four months ago'

"'You don't mean that Turner has lost her?'

"'I regret to inform you, yes.  Also, he has
lost himself.  Three days after sailing, he met
the typhoon outside, and was blown upon a lee
shore two hundred miles along the China Coast.
In this predicament, he cut away his masts and
came to anchor.  But his ship would not float,
and accordingly sank at her anchors....'

"'Sank at her anchors!' I exclaimed  'How
could that be?  A tight ship never did such a
thing'

"'Nevertheless, she sank there in the midst
of the storm, and all on board perished.
Afterwards, the news was reported from shore, and
the hull of the *Speedwell* was discovered in ten
fathoms of water.  There has been talk of trying
to save the ship; and Captain Wilbur himself,
her owner, in a diver's suit, has inspected the
wreck.  Surely, he should be well-fitted to save
her again, if it were possible!  He says no, and
it is reported that the insurance companies are in
agreement with him.  That is, they have decided
that he cannot turn the trick a second time'
Lee Fu's voice dropped to a rasping tone  'The
lives, likewise, cannot be saved'

"I sat for some moments in silence, gazing at
the green bronze dragon on the desk.  Turner
gone?  A friend's death is shocking, even
though it makes so little difference.  And
between us, too, there had been a bond....  I
was thinking of the personal loss, and had missed
the significance of Lee Fu's phraseology.  I
looked up at him blankly; found him still
regarding me with up-turned eyes, his chin sunk
lower on his breast.

"'That is not all' said he suddenly.

"I sat up as if under the impact of a blow.
Across my mind raced thoughts of all that might
happen to a man on that abandoned coast.
'What more?' I asked.

"'Listen, Captain, and pay close attention.
I have investigated with great care, and am fully
satisfied that no mistake has been made.  You
must believe me....  Some weeks after the
departure and loss of the *Speedwell*, word came
to my ears that a man had a tale worth hearing.
You know how information reaches me, and that
my sources run through unexpected channels
among my people.  This man was brought; he
proved to be a common coolie, a lighter-man who
had been employed in the loading of the *Speedwell*.
Note how slight chance may lead to
serious occasions.  This coolie had been
gambling during the dinner hour, and had lost the
small sum that he should have taken home as the
product of several days' labour.  Like many
others, he feared his wife, and particularly her
mother, who was a shrew.  In a moment of
desperation, as the lighter was preparing to leave
the vessel for the night, he escaped from the
others and secreted himself in the *Speedwell's*
lower hold, among the bales of merchandise.
What he planned is hard to tell; it does not
matter.

"'This happened while yet the ship's lower hold
was not quite filled' Lee Fu went on after a pause
'The coolie, as I said, secreted himself in the cargo,
well forward, for he had entered by the fore hatch.
There he remained many hours, sleeping, and when
he awoke, quietness had descended on the deck
above.  He was about to climb into the between-decks,
the air below being heavy with the odours
of the cargo, when he heard a sound on the
ladder that led down from the upper deck.  It
was a sound of quiet steps, mingled with a faint
metallic rattling.  In a moment a foot descended
on the floor of the between-decks, and a lantern
was cautiously lighted.  The coolie retreated
quickly to his former hiding place, from
which post he was able to see all that went on'

"Again Lee Fu paused, as if lingering in
imagination over the scene.  'It seems that this
late and secret comer into the hold of the
*Speedwell* was none other than her owner, Captain
Wilbur' he slowly resumed  'The coolie knew
his face; a distant cousin had once been in the
employment of the Wilbur household, and the man
was already aware whose ship it was.  Most of
the inner facts of life are disseminated through
the gossip of servants, and are known to a wide
circle.  Furthermore, as the lighter had been
preparing to depart that evening, this coolie had seen
the owner come on board in his own sampan.
Afterwards, through my inquiries among
sampan-men and others, I learned that Captain Turner
had spent that night on shore.  It was Captain
Wilbur's custom, it seems, frequently to sleep on
board his ship when she lay here in port; the
starboard stateroom was kept in readiness for him.
So he had done this night—and he had been alone
in the cabin'

"'What was he doing in the hold with a
lantern?' I asked, unable to restrain my impatience.

"'Exactly ... you shall hear.  I was obliged
to make certain deductions from the story of the
coolie, for he was not technically acquainted with
the internal construction of a vessel.  Yet what he
saw was perfectly obvious to the most ignorant
eye....  Have you ever been in the lower hold
of the *Speedwell*, Captain Nichols?'

"'No, I haven't'

"'But you recall the famous matter of her
bow-ports, do you not?'

"'Yes, indeed.  I was in Singapore when they
were cut'

"The incident came back to me at once, in full
detail.  There had been a cargo of ironwood on
the beach, destined for the repair of a temple
somewhere up the Yang-tse-kiang; among it were seven
magnificent sticks of timber, each over a hundred
feet in length and forty inches square at the
butt—these were for columns, I suppose.  It had been
necessary to find a large ship to take this cargo
from Singapore to Shanghai; the *Speedwell* had
finally accepted the charter.  In order to load the
immense column-timbers, she had been obliged to
cut bow-ports of extraordinary size; fifty inches
in depth they were, and nearly seven feet in width,
according to my recollection—the biggest
bow-ports on record.

"'It has been my privilege' Lee Fu went on
'to examine the fore-peak of the *Speedwell* when
these ports were in and her hold was empty.  I
had once chartered the ship, and felt alarmed for
her safety until I had seen the interior fastenings
of those great windows which, when she was
loaded, looked out into the deep sea.  But my
alarm was groundless.  There was a most ingenious
device for strengthening the bows where they had
been weakened by the cutting of the ports.  Four
or five timbers had been severed; but these had
been reproduced on the port itself, and the whole
was fashioned like a massive door.  It lifted
upward on immense wrought iron hinges, a hinge to
every timber; when it was lowered into its place,
gigantic bars of iron, fitted into brackets on the
adjoining timbers, stretched across its inner face
to hold it against the impact of the waves.  At
the bottom there were additional fastenings.  Thus
the port, when tightly caulked from without,
became an integral part of the hull; I was told, and
could believe it, that there had never been a trace
of leakage from her bows.  Most remarkable of
all, I was told that when it became necessary to
lift these ports for use, the task could easily be
accomplished by two or three men and a stout
watch-tackle....  This, also, I am prepared to
believe'

"There seemed to be a general drift to Lee
Fu's rambling narrative, but I hadn't yet caught
sight of a logical dénouement.  'To resume the
story of the coolie' he continued with exasperating
deliberation  'This, in plain language, is what he
saw.  Our friend, Captain Wilbur, descended into
the lower hold, and worked his way forward to
the fore-peak, where there was little cargo.  There
he laboured with great effort for several hours;
you will recall that he is a vigorous man.  He had
equipped himself with a short crowbar, and carried
a light tackle wrapped about his body beneath the
coat.  The tackle he loosened and hung to a hook
above the middle of the port; I take it that he
had brought this gear merely for the purpose of
lowering easily the iron cross bars, so that they
would make no noise.  Had one fallen...'

"'Good God, Lee Fu, what are you trying to
tell me?'

"'Merely occurrences.  Many quite impossible
things, Captain, nevertheless get themselves done
in the dark, in secret places, out of sight and
mind....  So, with the short crowbar he pried
loose little by little the iron braces to the port,
slinging them in his tackle and dropping them
softly one by one into the ship's bottom.  It was
a heavy task; the coolie said that sweat poured
from the big man like rain.  Yet he was bent on
accomplishment, and persevered until he had done
the job.  Later he removed all the additional port
fastenings; last of all he covered the cross-bars
with dunnage, and rolled against the bow several
bulky bales of matting to conceal the crime....
Captain, when the *Speedwell* sailed from Hong
Kong on her last voyage in command of our
honoured friend one of her great bowports below
the water hung on its hinges without internal
fastenings, held in place only by the tightness
of the caulking.  The first heavy sea...'

"'Can it be possible?' said I through clenched
teeth.

"'Oh, yes, so easily.  It happened, and has
become a part of life.  As I told you, I have
investigated with scrupulous care; my men dare
not tell me lies'

"I was still trying to get my bearings, to grasp
a clue.  'But why should he do it, Lee Fu?  Had
he anything against Turner?'

"'Not at all.  You do not seem to understand.
He was tired of the vessel, and freights were
becoming very poor.  He wanted the insurance.
He now assures himself that he had no thought
of disaster; one could hardly foresee an early
typhoon.  He had it in mind for the ship to sink
discreetly, in pleasant weather, so that all hands
might escape....  Yet he was willing to run the
risk of wholesale murder.  Remember how he
sweated at the task, there in the fetid air of the
lower hold.  It was absentee murder, if you will;
he did not contemplate, he was not forced to
contemplate, the possible results of his act on the
lives of others....  What do you think now,
Captain, of a man who will betray his profession?'

"I got up abruptly and began to pace the floor.
The damnable affair had made me sick at heart,
and a little sick at the stomach.  What to think?—what
to believe?  It seemed incredible, fantastic;
there must be some mistake....  While
I was pacing, Lee Fu changed his position.  He
faced the desk, stretched out an arm, and put his
palm flat down on the polished surface.

"'Thus the gods have struck' said he, in that
changeless voice that seemed an echo of the ages
'There is blood at last, Captain—twenty-seven
lives, and among them one dear to us—enough
to convince even one of your race that a crime has
been committed.  But my analysis was seriously
in error.  The criminal, it seems, is destined not
to suffer.  He continues to go about carried by
three men in white and crimson livery, his belly
full of food and wine.  Others have paid the
price.  Instead of toppling, his life spins on with
renewed momentum.  My query has been
answered; he has escaped the gods'

"'Can't you rip the case open, jostle his
security?  Isn't there some way...?'

"'No way' said Lee Fu with a shake of the
head  'You forget the fine principle of
extraterritoriality, which you have so kindly imposed
on us by force of arms.  Captain Wilbur is not
subject to Chinese justice; your own courts have
exclusive jurisdiction over him, his kind, and all
their works.  No, Captain, he is amply protected.
What could I accomplish in your courts with this
fanciful accusation, and for witnesses a coolie and
a sampan-man?'

"I continued to pace the floor, thinking dark
thoughts.  There was a way, of course
... between man and man; but such things aren't
done any longer by civilized people.  We're
supposed not to go about with firearms, privately
meting out justice.  We are domesticated.
Whatever the thoughts I might have harboured, in the
first anger of the realization of wrong, I knew
very well that I shouldn't act on them.  Lee Fu
was right, there was nothing to be done; the man
had made good his escape from the hand of
destiny.

"Pacing rapidly, as if pursued by a veritable
phantom of crime, and oblivious of everything but
the four walls of the room, I nearly floored the
chief clerk, Sing Toy, as he pattered in with a
message from the outer office.  He ducked,
slipped behind the lamp, and began whispering in
Lee Fu's ear.

"'*Ah!*' exclaimed Lee Fu sharply.

"I started, whirled around in my tracks.  His
voice had lost the level, passive tone; it had taken
on the timbre of action.  Suddenly, with a quick
rustle of silken garments, he stood up behind the
desk; the abrupt motion threw his shadow across
the floor and up the opposite wall.  With a subtle
thrill of anticipation, I felt the profound psychic
change that had come over my friend.  The very
air of the room had quickened before that single
exclamation, as if a cold breeze had blown
through....  A breeze, indeed, was at that
moment trying hard to find an entrance; the
absolute silence of the room brought out in sharp
relief the tumult outside, the hoarse voice of the
rising gale.  We stood as if listening.  I looked
at Lee Fu, caught his eye.  It was charged with
energy and purpose, with something like
relief—like the eye of a man who has made up his mind
after a long period of bewilderment, who begins
to understand....

"'Send him in, alone' said he in Chinese to
Sing Toy, now at the outer door.

"'Who is it?' I asked hoarsely.

"'The man we have been speaking of'

"'Wilbur?  What the devil...?'

"'He merely dropped in as he was passing, to
make a call' said Lee Fu, speaking rapidly  'So
he thinks—but I think otherwise'  Leaning
forward across the desk, he fixed me with an
extended arm that trembled slightly before it
found its aim.  'Keep silence' he commanded
'Beware of word or glance.  This chanced by
predestination.  We are on the threshold of the gods'





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   V

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Lee Fu remained standing as Captain Wilbur
entered the room.  His hurried admonition still
rang in my ears  'Keep silence—beware of word
or glance!'  But I couldn't have spoken; had I
opened my mouth just then, it would have been
only to emit a snarl of anger.  To beware of
glances was a different matter.  The task might
be easy enough for Lee Fu, with that perfect
self-control of his that extended to the last nerve
of his eyelids and the last muscle of his fingertips;
but for my part I was spiritually incapable,
as it were, of keeping rage and abomination out
of my eyes.  I stood as if rooted to the floor,
gazing point-blank at Wilbur with a stare that
must have made him wonder about my sanity.
For, of course, he hadn't the slightest suspicion
that we knew what we knew.

"'Good afternoon, Captain Wilbur' said Lee
Fu blandly  'Do you seek refuge from the
storm? ... I think you are acquainted with Captain
Nichols, of the barque *Omega*.  He arrived this
morning from the Celebes'

"'Oh, how do you do, Nichols' said Wilbur,
advancing down the room  'I've missed you
around town for a good while, it seems to me.
So you've been off on one of your famous exploring
trips?  Then you'll have a lot to tell us.  I
suppose you had the usual assortment of romantic
and tragic adventures?'

"I drew back behind the desk, to escape
shaking his hand.  'No' I answered 'nothing
like the adventure that awaited me here'

"He settled himself in a chair, directly in range
of the light; smiled, and lifted his eyebrows.  'So...?
Well, I can believe you.  This office,
you know, is the heart of all adventure.  The
most romantic room in the East—presided over
by the very genius of romance'  He bowed
toward Lee Fu, and touched a match to a long
Manila.  'Genius, or demon, which is it, now?'
he chuckled, his eyes twinkling from Lee Fu to me.

"'You honour me, Captain' interposed Lee
Fu quickly, cutting me off from the necessity of
speaking.  'If, indeed, you do not flatter.  I
merely observe and live.  It is life that may be
called the heart of all adventure—life, with its
amazing secrets that one by one transpire into
the day, and with its enormous burden of evil
that weighs us down like slaves'

"Wilbur laughed.  'Yes, that's it, no doubt.
But there's some good, too, Lee Fu—plenty of
good.  Don't be a pessimist.  Yet you're right
enough in a way; the evil always does manage
to be more romantic'

"'Much more romantic' observed Lee Fu
'And the secrets are more romantic still.
Consider, for instance, the case of a man with a dark
secret that by chance has become known, though
he is not aware of the fact.  How infinitely
romantic!  He feels secure; yet inevitably it will
be disclosed.  When, and how?  Such a case
would be well worth watching ... as the great
poet had in mind when he wrote "Murder will out"'

"The winged words made no impression on
their mark.  Wilbur met Lee Fu's glance frankly,
innocently, with interest and even with a trace of
amusement at the other's flight of fancy.  The
full light of the lamp illuminated his features, the
least fleeting expression couldn't have escaped
us.  By Jove, he was superb; the damned rascal
hadn't a nerve in his body.  To be sure, he still
had no suspicion, and attributed Lee Fu's shaft
to a mere chance; yet this very factor of safety
lent additional point to the finish of his
dissimulation.  He might at least have indulged himself in
a start, a glance, a knitting of the eyebrows; his
conscience, or his memory if he hadn't a conscience,
might have received a faint surprise.  But
his watchfulness must have been unfailing,
automatic.  Or was it that a reminder of his appalling
crime woke no echo at all in his breast?

"I examined him closely.  Above a trimmed
brown beard his cheeks showed the ruddy colour
of health and energy; his eyes were steady, his
mouth was strong and clean, a head of fine grey
hair surmounted a high forehead; the whole
aspect of his countenance was pleasing and
dignified.  He had good hands, broad yet closely
knit, and ruddy with the same glow of health that
rose in his face.  He was dressed neatly in a
plain blue serge suit, with square-toed russet shoes
encasing small feet, a dark bow-tie at his throat,
and a narrow gold watch chain strung across his
vest.  Sitting at ease, with an arm thrown over
the chair-back and one ankle resting on the other
knee, he presented a fine figure of a man, a figure
that might have been that of a prosperous and
benevolent merchant, a man who had passed
through the world with merit and integrity, and
now was enjoying his just reward.

"He gave a hearty laugh.  'For the Lord's
sake, you fellows, come on out of the gloom!' he
cried  'A pretty state of mind you seem to have
worked yourselves into, hobnobbing here behind
closed doors.  I drop in for a chat, and find a
couple of blue devils up to their ears in the sins
of humanity.  Nichols, over there, is just as bad
as the other; he's scarcely opened his mouth since
I came in.  What's the matter? ... You have
to fight these moods, you know' he quizzed  'It
doesn't do to let them get the upper hand'

"'It is the mood of the approaching storm'
said Lee Fu quietly  'We have been speaking
of typhoons, and of the fate that they sometimes
bring to men'

"A fiercer squall than the last shook the
building; it passed in a moment, ceasing suddenly, as
if dropping us somewhere in mid-air.  Wilbur
was the first to speak after the uproar.

"'Yes, it's going to be another terror, I'm
afraid.  A bad night to be on the water,
gentlemen.  I shouldn't care to be threshing around
outside, now, as poor Turner was such a short
time ago'

"I could have struck him across the mouth for
the shocking callousness of the words.  A bad
night outside!  He dared to speak of it; he,
sitting there so comfortably, so correctly, alive
and well, glad to be safe in port and sorry for
those afloat—the same remorseless devil who had
sent Turner to his doom.

"Lee Fu's voice fell like oil on a breaking sea.
'All signs point to another severe typhoon.  But,
as I was telling Captain Nichols, these late storms
are often irregular—like the early ones....  It
happened, Captain Wilbur, that the loss of the
*Speedwell* was the subject we were discussing
when you came in'

"'Too bad—too bad' said Wilbur soberly, as
if overcome by thoughts of the disaster  'You
were away, Nichols, weren't you?  Of course!—then
you've just heard of it.  It was a bad week
here, I can tell you, after the news came in.  I
shall never forget it....  Well, we take our
chances....'

"'Some of us do, and some of us don't' I snapped.

"'That's just the way I felt about it, at the
time' said he simply  'I didn't feel right, to
have both feet on the ground.  Seemed as if
there must have been something we could have
done, something we had neglected.  It came
home hard to me'

"My jaw fairly dropped as I listened to the
man.  Something he had neglected? ... Was
it possible that he liked to talk about the affair?
He didn't seem anxious to turn the conversation.

"'Captain Nichols and I were wondering'
observed Lee Fu 'why it was that the *Speedwell*
did not remain afloat, after she had cast her
anchors.  Neither of us can recall another
incident of the kind.  What is your opinion,
Captain Wilbur; you have examined the hull, as
it lies on the bottom'

"'It isn't a matter of opinion' Wilbur answered
'Haven't I told you?—I thought I'd seen you
since the inspection.  I put on a diver's suit, you
know, Nichols, and went down....  Why, the
simple explanation is, her starboard bow-port in
the lower hold is stove in.  It must have happened
after she came to anchor.  She lay there just
scooping up water at every plunge—filled and
sank as she lay.  I've always been afraid of those
big bow-ports; the moment I heard of the peculiar
circumstances of the disaster, I knew in my heart
what had happened'

"'Did you?' inquired Lee Fu, with a slight
hardening of the voice  'Strange—but so did I'

"Wilbur gazed at him questioningly, knitting
his brows.  'Oh, yes, I remember.  I was
wondering how you happened to think of her
bow-ports.  But you told me that you had
examined them....'

"'Yes, I examined them....  Captain
Wilbur, have you collected your insurance
money?'  The question came with an abruptness
that marked a change of tactics; to me, who knew
Lee Fu so well, it obviously marked the first
turning point in some as yet impenetrable plan.

"Wilbur frowned and glanced up sharply, very
properly offended.  The next moment he had
decided to pass it off as an instance of alien
manners.  'As a matter of fact, I've just cleaned
up to-day' he replied brusquely  'Had my final
settlement with Lloyds this morning—and did a
silly thing, as a fellow will sometimes.  You
know, they had a package of large denomination
bank notes in the office, crisp, wonderful looking
fellows; I took a sudden fancy for them, and in a
moment of childishness asked to have my money
in that form.  They chaffed me a good deal, but
I stuck to it.  You'd hardly believe, would you,
that a fellow would be such a fool?  I can prove
it to you, though; I've got those bills in my
pocket now.  By Jove, that reminds me—what
time is it getting to be?  I must leave them at the
bank before it closes'

"'What is the total amount of the bank notes
that you have in your possession?' asked Lee Fu
in a level tone that carried its own insult.

Wilbur plainly showed his astonishment now.
'The total amount? ... Well, if you want all
the details, I have about forty thousand dollars
in my pocket.  I'm not aware, however, that it's
any concern of yours....'

"Lee Fu shot at me a stare full of meaning; it
might have been a look of caution, or a glance of
triumph.  I was expected to understand something;
but for the life of me I couldn't catch the
drift of the situation.  Confused by the terrific
struggle to keep my mouth shut, I only perceived
that a crisis was impending.

"'As I was saying, I once examined the bow-ports
of the *Speedwell*' Lee Fu calmly resumed.
'At that time, I satisfied myself as to their
construction; unlike you, Captain Wilbur, I could
not be afraid of them.  When properly fastened,
they were impregnable to any danger of the sea....
And I remember, Captain, that it occurred
to me, as I examined their fastenings, how easily
these ports could be loosened from within, by
anyone who desired to sink the vessel.  The iron
cross-bars could be lifted from their brackets by
a single strong man; with a small tackle they
could be dropped without noise into the bottom.
No one need know of it; and, lo, the ship would
sail to meet her destiny riding on the waves.  Has
the thought ever occurred to you, Captain
Wilbur?'

"Wilbur's air of mingled repugnance and perplexity
was innocence itself.  'I can't say that it
has' he answered shortly  'Your imagination is
a little morbid, Lee Fu—I won't say worse.  Who
would want to sink the *Speedwell*, I'd like to
know?'

"'Who, indeed?' observed Lee Fu, staring at
Wilbur with a steady, biting gaze.  As he stared,
he reached out slowly with his right hand and
opened the top drawer of the desk.  Suddenly
he stood up.  The hand held a revolver, which
pointed with an unwavering aim at Wilbur's
breast.

"'If you move from your chair, Captain, I will
shoot you dead, and your end will never be
known' said he rapidly, throwing a cold
determination into his voice  'It is time we came to
an understanding, for the day wanes'

"Wilbur uncrossed his legs, leaned forward,
and looked at Lee Fu narrowly.  'What's the
joke?' he demanded.

"'A joke that will be clear as time goes on—like
one you played with bow-ports on my
friend....  Captain, we are about to go on a
journey.  Will you join us, Captain Nichols, or
will you remain on shore?'

"The question was perfunctory; whatever was
in the wind, Lee Fu knew that my decision rested
in his hands.  I stood up—for until now I'd
been chained to my chair by the amazing turn of
the moment.

"'Bow-ports?...' Wilbur was saying
'Put that gun down.  What in hell do you
mean?'  He started to rise.

'Sit down!' commanded Lee Fu  'I mean
that I will shoot.  This is not play'  Their eyes
met in a sharp struggle, which Lee Fu won.
Wilbur sank back, angry and confused.

"'Are you crazy, Lee Fu?' he growled
'What is it—do you want to rob me?  What's
the meaning of this nonsense, Nichols?  Have
both of you gone mad?'

"'No, Captain' interposed Lee Fu  'But we
have found a man who wanted to sink the
*Speedwell*,, and we wish to observe him under
certain conditions....  Is it possible that you
do not as yet comprehend that I share your
secret?  You were seen, Captain, that black and
cruel night in the forepeak; and those details,
also, are known to me.  It is needless to
dissemble longer'

"'That night in the forepeak? ... For
God's sake, Lee Fu, what are you talking about?
Nichols, this is too ridiculous!  Tell me the
answer, and get over with it'

"'Ah!' exclaimed Lee Fu with something
like satisfaction  'You are worthy of the
occasion, Captain.  It will be most interesting'

"He slapped his palm sharply on the desk;
Sing Toy appeared at the door as if by a
mechanical arrangement.  'Bring oilskin coats
and hats for three' Lee Fu commanded  'Also
send in haste to my cruising sampan, with orders
to prepare for an immediate journey.  Have
water and food prepared for a week.  We come
within the half-hour, and will sail without delay'

"'Master!' protested Sing Toy breathlessly—their
words, in rapid Chinese, were wholly
unintelligible to Wilbur.  'Master, the
typhoon!'  He glanced at the revolver in Lee
Fu's hand, then raised his eyes to the wall that
smothered the tumult of the gale.

"'I know, fool' answered Lee Fu  'I am
neither deaf nor blind.  But it is necessary to
sail.  Go, quickly, do as I say'

"He sat down, resting the revolver on the
corner of the desk, and resumed his former tone
of bland conversation  'I am sorry, gentlemen,
that the rain has already come; but there is water
also below, as Captain Wilbur should be well
aware.  Yes, it was destined from the first that
this should be a wet journey.  Yet it will be
possible still to breathe; not quite so bad as solid
water all around, where after a grim struggle one
lies at rest, neither caring nor remembering....
Captain Wilbur, attend to what I say.  We go
from this office to my sampan, which lies moored
at the bulkhead, not far away.  During the walk,
you will precede us.  I shall hold my revolver in
my hand—and I am an excellent shot.  If you
attempt to escape, or to communicate with any
passerby—if you call for help, or even disclose
by your manner the strangeness of the occasion—you
will immediately be dead.  Bear this in
mind.  And do not think that I should fear
the consequences; we shall pass through Chinese
streets, where action of mine would not be
questioned'

"'Damn you!' Wilbur burst out  'What
crazy nonsense are you up to?  Nichols, will you
permit this?  Where are you taking me?'

"'Never mind' replied Lee Fu  'As for
Captain Nichols, he knows, if anything, less than
you do about it.  He, also, is at my mercy....
Ah, here are the raincoats.  Put one on, Captain
Wilbur; you will need it sorely before your
return.  Now we must hurry.  I would be clear
of the harbour before darkness falls entirely'





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   VI

.. vspace:: 2

"As we issued from the doorway, the gale
caught us with a swirl that carried us round the
corner and down a side street before we could
get our breath.  'To the right' Lee Fu shouted.
Wilbur, lurching ahead, obeyed sullenly.  We
came about and made for the water front through
the fringe of the Chinese quarter—the most
remarkable trio, perhaps, that had ever threaded
those familiar thoroughfares.  Few people were
abroad; a Chinaman now and then scurried to
cover in our path, and more infrequently we
caught sight of a stray European in the distance,
called out somewhere by the exigencies of business.

"Overhead, the sky had settled low on the
slope of the Peak, cutting off the heights from
view; it presented the aspect of a heavy leaden
roof, spreading above the mainland to northward,
fitting tight along the horizon, and seeming to
compress the whole atmosphere.  Torrents of
rain fell from the frequent squalls; the running
water in the streets spurted about our ankles.
We floundered on, enveloped in a sort of grey
gloom like that of an eclipse.  When we reached
the harbour, the face of the bay had undergone
a sinister change; its yellow-green waters were
lashed into sickly foam, and shrouded by an
unnatural gleaming darkness.  A distant
moaning sound ran through the upper air, vague yet
distinctly audible.  It was evident to the
practised eye that the southern margin of the
typhoon wasn't far away; with the wind in this
quarter, its centre was headed straight in our
direction.

"As we staggered along the quay, my thoughts
worked rapidly.  The wind and the open had
cleared my mind as to the swift events of the last
half-hour; I began to perceive the plan, now, and
immediately recognized the dangerous nature of
the undertaking on which we'd embarked.  It was
to be a game of bluff, in which we should have to
risk our lives if the other held his ground.  I'd
seen Lee Fu in action; I knew that he would
hesitate at nothing, since his face was committed
to the enterprise.

"I edged toward him.  'Will you go on the
water?' I asked close to his ear.

"He nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on Wilbur.

"'But it can't be done' I told him  'A boat
won't live....'

"'There is always a definite alternative' he replied.

"'Yes, that she sinks'

"'Exactly'

"I drew away, reviewing the details once
more....  All at once, in a flash of enlightenment,
the greatness of the occasion came to me.
By Jove!  Lee Fu had taken the matter into his
own hands, he had stepped in where the gods were
impotent.  But not rudely, as men are apt to do
in sudden passion; not with blood and vengeance,
an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.  No,
he had observed the divine proprieties; had
recognized that if he presumed to act for the gods,
he must throw his own life as well into the
balance.  He himself must run every risk.  It
was for them, after all, to make the final choice.
His part was to force action on the gods.

"I gazed at him in wonder—and with more
than a flurry of alarm.  He advanced stiffly
against the storm, walking like an automaton; his
expression was absolutely inscrutable.  Beneath
the close-pulled rim of a black sou'wester his
smooth, oval countenance looked ridiculously
vacant, like the face of a placid moon.  He was
the only calm object in earth, sea, or sky; against
the lashing rain, the dancing boats, the scudding
clouds, the hurried shadows of appearing and
vanishing men, he stood out solidly, a different
essence, the embodiment of mind and will.  Only
these could have been superior to the grosser
temptation; only these could have met the test,
and risen to the awful stratagem.

"And how was it with Wilbur, off there in the
lead?  He, too, walked stiffly, wrapped in
thought.  Once he turned round, as if to come
back and speak to us; then whirled with a violent
movement of decision and plunged on into the
rain.  He must have known, by now, what it was
all about, if not what to expect.  He must have
known that his crime had been discovered.  Yet
he had made no break; in no particular had he
given himself away.  What had he been about to
say?—what had he decided?  To hold on, of
course, maintain the bluff—for he could not
believe that we knew all.  Would he confess,
when he faced death on the water?  How long
would he hold on?

"Observing his broad back, his commanding
figure, that looked thoroughly at home in its
oilskin coat and leaning against the storm, it came to
me that he would put up a desperate defence before
he succumbed.  He, too, was a strong man, and
no part of a coward; he, too, in a different way,
was a superior being, the embodiment of mind
and will.  I didn't under-estimate him.  Indeed,
he was worthy of the occasion and of his adversary.
It was to be a battle of the giants, with typhoon
for background and accompaniment.

"Then, for an instant, my own spirit went
slump with the realization of what might lie
ahead, and a great weakness overcame me.  I
edged again toward Lee Fu.

"'My God, suppose the man is really
innocent?' I cried  'He hasn't turned a
hair....'

"Lee Fu gave me a flash of the moon-face
beneath the sou'wester.

"'Have no fear, my friend' said he  'I am
completely satisfied, in regions where the soul
dwells.  It has begun very well'





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   VII

.. vspace:: 2

"When we reached the sampan, lying under a
weather shore beneath the bulkhead, we found a
scene of consternation.  Lee Fu's orders had
arrived and been executed; yet the men couldn't
believe that he actually meant to sail.  Gathered
in a panic-stricken group on the fore deck of the
sampan, they chattered like a flock of magpies;
their gleaming wet bodies writhed in wild gestures
under the half-light.  As they caught sight of us,
they swarmed across the bulkhead and fell at Lee
Fu's feet, begging for mercy.

"'Up dogs!' he cried  'There is no danger.
I shall steer; and it is necessary that we go.  If
any would remain, let them depart now, with no
tale to tell.  Let those who stay prepare at once
for sea'

"Not a man made a move to go; the presence
and voice of the master had reassured them.
Without another word, they rose and filed on
board.

"I found Wilbur beside me.  'What is this
madness, Nichols?' he demanded for the last
time  'Are you fool enough to go on the water
in that craft?  What has that lunatic been saying
to the men?—I don't understand their damned
lingo'

"'He told his crew to prepare for sea' I
answered shortly  'If he goes, we all go.  He
says there is no danger'

"'Huh!  You're a bigger fool than I took you for'

"A moment later we stood together on the
quarter-deck of the cruising sampan.  Lee Fu
took his station at the great tiller, that archaic
steering arrangement worked by blocks and
tackles which the Chinese cherish like the precepts
of Confucius in the face of mechanical invention.
The wind lulled for a moment, as the trough of a
squall passed over.  Lee Fu gave a few sharp
orders.  Moorings were cast off, a pinch of sail
was lifted forward.  The big craft found her
freedom with a lurch and a stagger; then pulled
herself together and left the land with a steady
rush, skimming dead before the wind across the
smooth weather reach of the harbour, and quickly
losing herself in the murk and spray that hung off
Gowloon Point.  If we were sighted from the
fleet, which is extremely doubtful, we were put
down as a junk that had broken adrift.
Somehow Lee Fu managed to avoid the ships at
anchor off Wanchi.  Straight down the length
of the bay he struck; in an incredibly short time
we had left the harbour behind, and were whirling
through the narrow gut of Lymoon Pass
before a terrific squall, bound for the open sea.

"I watched Captain Wilbur.  He stood in a
careless attitude at the rail in our race down the
harbour, scanning the boat and the water with an
air of confidence and unconcern.  A slight sneer
curled his lip; he had made up his mind to see
the nonsense through.  The sailor in him had
quickly recognized that the craft would stand the
weather, so long as she remained in quiet water.
Probably he expected every minute that Lee Fu
would change his tactics and put into some
sheltered cove....  But when we shot through
Lymoon Pass, I saw him turn and scrutinize the
Chinaman closely.  Darkness was falling behind
the murk, the real night now; ahead of us lay a
widening reach among the islands, that opened
abruptly on the main body of the China Sea.
We were rapidly leaving the protection of
Victoria Island.  Soon we should be unable to
see our way.  Ten miles outside a high sea was
running.  And with every blast of wind that
held in the same quarter, the centre of the
typhoon was bearing down on us with unerring aim.

"These facts were as patent to Wilbur as to
any of us.  It was his knowledge, of course, that
finally was his undoing; had he been less of a
sailor, or had he been entirely ignorant of the
sea, he could have resigned himself to the
situation, on the assumption that those who were
sailing the craft wouldn't put themselves in
actual danger.  Perhaps Lee Fu had realized
this when he'd chosen the sea as the medium of
justice; perhaps he had glimpsed the profound
and subtle truth that Wilbur couldn't properly
be broken save in his native environment.  He
knew the sea, he had trifled with it; then let him
face the sea.

"The time came, just before we lost the loom of
the land, when Wilbur could stand it no longer;
as a sailor, used to responsibility and authority, he
had to speak his mind.  He knew that the
situation was growing very dangerous....  For my
part, I had become convinced by now that it was
irretrievable; it began to look as if we'd burned our
last bridge behind us.  I didn't pretend to
understand; Lee Fu seemed reckless beyond measure,
he had apparently given away his cards without
trying to play them.  One thing was certain—if
some way couldn't be found to hold up this mad
race immediately, we should be forced in the next
five minutes to run the gauntlet of the typhoon
in open water.

"Wilbur dropped aft beside Lee Fu, and made
a funnel of his hands.

"'You're running to your death!' he shouted.
'Do you realize what you're doing?  You've
already lost Pootoy.  If you can't haul up and
make the lee of the Lema Islands...'

"'I intend to pass nowhere near them—and I
know exactly what I am doing' answered Lee Fu,
keeping his eyes on the yawing bow of the sampan.

"'There's nothing to the eastward ... no
more shelter..."

"'Of that I am aware'

"'Do you know the meaning of *that*?' Wilbur
pointed wildly above the stern rail, into the face
of the onrushing storm.

"'I think we shall get the centre of the
typhoon, Captain, by noon of tomorrow'

"Wilbur made a move as if to grasp the tiller.
'Haul up, you fool!...'

"A stray gleam in the gathering darkness
caught the barrel of the revolver, as Lee Fu
steered for a moment with one hand.

"'Beware, Captain!  You are the fool; would
you broach us to, and end it now?  One thing
alone will send me to seek the last shelter; and
for that thing I think you are not ready'

"'What?'

"'To say that you sank the *Speedwell*, as I
have indicated'

"Wilbur gathered his strength as if to strike;
his face was distorted with passion.

"'You lie, you yellow hound!'

"'Exactly....  Captain, be careful—come
no nearer!  Also, leave me now, and go away, for
I have work to do.  If you value your life, you
will keep silence, and stay a little forward.  Go,
quickly!  Here I could shoot you with even
greater impunity'"





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   VIII

.. vspace:: 2

Nichols paused.  "It may be that some of you
fellows have never seen Lee Fu's cruising
sampan" he remarked  "In reality she is more of a
junk than a sampan; a sizeable craft of over a
hundred tons, the best product of the Chinese
shipyard.  Lee Fu built her for trips along the
coast, where conditions of wind and weather
are likely to be severe; many of his own ideas,
born of an expert knowledge of ships of every rig
and nationality, entered into her construction.
The result is a distinctly Chinese creation, a craft
that in some unaccountable way seems to reflect
his own personality, that responds to his touch
and works mysteriously for him.  She's higher in
the bows than an ordinary junk, and a trifle lower
in the stern; a broad, shallow hull, requiring a
centreboard on the wind.  She is completely
decked over for heavy weather.  In charge of any
one of us, perhaps, she would be fairly unmanageable;
but in Lee Fu's hands, I can assure you,
she's a sea-boat of remarkable attainments and a
yacht of no insignificant speed.

"I had seen him handle her under difficult
conditions, but never in such a pass as this.  How
he accomplished it was inconceivable to me.
The last I saw of him that evening, he had called
two men to help him at the tiller; so far, he had
managed to keep the craft before the wind....
He continued to keep her before it throughout
the night, running eastward in open water along
the China coast.  That is to say, he must have
kept her before it—because we came through the
night, alive and still afloat.  But how, I cannot tell.

"For hours I was alone with the elements,
surrounded by pitchy blackness and the storm.  I
clung to a stanchion, hardly changing my position
during the night, drenched by rain and spray,
seeing nothing, hearing no word of my
companions.  The gale roared above us with the
peculiar tearing sound that accompanies the body
of a typhoon—a sound suggestive of unearthly
anger and violence, as if elemental forces were
ripping up the envelope of the universe—a sound
that carries its own message of latent power, of
savage impulse, of unloosed destruction.  The
wind gained steadily in volume; it picked up the
sea in steep ridges of solid water that flung us
like a chip from crest to crest, or caught us, burst
above us, and swallowed us whole, as if we had
suddenly sunk down a deep well.  From these
plunges the sampan would emerge after a long
interval, like a fish coming up to blow.  It seemed
impossible that she could be kept running; to
come into the wind, however, would have been
certain disaster.  Every moment I expected
would be our last.  Yet, as time wore on, I felt,
through the boat's frantic floundering, a touch of
mastery.  Lee Fu steered—she still was under
his control.

"So we came through, and saw the dawn.  A
pale, watery light crept little by little across the
east, disclosing a scene of terror beyond description.
The face of the sea was livid with flying
yellow foam; the torn sky hung closely over it
like the fringe of a mighty waterfall.  In the
midst of this churning cauldron our little craft
seemed momentarily on the point of disappearing,
about to be engulfed by the sheer wrath of
the elements.  It was a scene to compel the eye,
while the heart whined in fear for the return of
darkness or the swift downfall of oblivion.

"In a lull of the storm my glance encountered
Wilbur; for a long while I'd forgotten him
entirely.  He hung to the rail a little farther
forward, gazing across the maelstrom with a fixed
exhausted expression.  His face was haggard;
the strain of the night had marked him with a
ruthless hand.  As I watched him, his eyes turned
slowly in my direction; he gave me an anxious
look, then crawled along the rail to a place by my side.

"'Nichols, we're lost!' I heard him cry in my
ear.  The voice was uneven, plaintive; it made
me angry, and revived a few sparks of my own
courage.

"'What of it?' I cried harshly  'Turner was
lost, too'

"'You believe that?...'

"I looked at him point-blank; his eyes
suddenly shifted, he couldn't face me now.

"'Why don't you own up, before it's too late?'
I shouted at him.

"Without answering he moved away hastily,
like innocence offended.  But the strong man
was gone, the air of perfect confidence had
disappeared; he was shattered and spent, but not
yet broken.  Pride is a more tenacious quality
than courage; men with hearts of water, with
their knees knocking together, will continue to
function through self-esteem.  Besides, what
would have been the use now, as he saw it, to
make confession?  Nothing, apparently, could
save us; there was no shelter, no hope in sight....

"Looking above his head, where the sky and
the sea met in a blanket of flying spume, I caught
sight for an instant of something that resembled
the vague form of a headland.  Watching closely,
I saw it again—unmistakeably the shadow of
land, broad on the port bow....  Land!  That
meant that the wind had shifted to southward,
that we were being blown against the shore.  And
that, in turn, meant that the centre of the typhoon
had passed inland, behind Hong Kong, and
would issue into the China Sea somewhere down
the coast.

"I worked my way cautiously aft, where Lee
Fu stood like a man of iron at the tiller, lashed
to a heavy cross-rail that must have been
constructed for such occasions.  He saw me coming,
leaned slightly toward me.

"'Land!' I shouted, pointing on the port bow.

"He nodded vigorously, disclosing that he'd
already seen it.  '... Recognize...'  The
rest of his answer was blown away by the storm.

"By pantomime, I called his attention to the
shift of wind.  Again he nodded—then ducked
his head in Wilbur's direction, shouting
something that I couldn't quite follow.  '... Change
our tactics ...' was what I understood him to say.

"What did he mean by that?  My mind
refused to function, save in channels of fantastic
conjecture.  I'd gained the impression that he
was disappointed at the present turn of affairs.
Had he depended on the centre of the typhoon
for his climax?  Good God, had he wanted it to
catch us?  As matters stood, it was only by the
extreme grace of providence that we remained
alive.  Now, it seems, something had miscarried,
we must change our tactics ... find some new
horror to take the place of the one that had passed
us by.

"He beckoned me to come closer; grasping
the cross-rail, I swung down beside him.

"'I know our position' he cried in my ear
'Have no alarm, my friend.  There are two large
islands, and a third behind them, small like a
button.  Watch closely the button, while I steer.
When it touches the high headland of the
second larger island, give me the news
instantly'

"He had hauled the junk a trifle to port as he
spoke, and now with every opportunity began
edging toward the land.  Perilous business, in
that tremendous seaway; but he executed the
manoeuvre with infinite patience and caution, with
consummate skill.  Wilbur had now seen the
land, had straightened his figure and leaned
forward, watching it intently.  Distances were
veiled and distorted in that murky atmosphere;
we were nearer to the headland than I had at first
supposed.  For perhaps twenty minutes we ran
on, a tense new excitement tugging at our hearts.
Then, as we raced before the gale, I felt the sea
begin to grow calmer; glancing to windward, I
saw on the horizon a fringe of spouting reefs, and
realized that we'd entered the zone of their
protection.  The tall headland, which now revealed
itself as the point of the second island, grew
plainer with every moment; soon I made out the
island like a button, and saw it closing rapidly
on the land behind.

"'*Now!*' I shouted to Lee Fu, holding up
both my arms, when the two points of land had
touched.

"He swung the sampan a couple of points to
starboard, discovering close beneath our bows
the tip of another reef that stretched toward the
land diagonally across the path of the wind.  In
a moment we were abreast this point of reef; a
hundred yards away its spray lashed our decks,
as the low-lying black rocks caught the broken
wash of the storm.  Another swing of the great
tiller, and we had hauled up in the lee of the
reef—in quiet water at last, but with the gale still
screaming overhead like a defeated demon.  We
reached along this weather shore in a smother of
spray, until we came abruptly to the little island.
This we passed with a rush, and shot forward into
a relatively smooth basin that lay under the
protection of the high headland on the larger island.

"It was like nothing but a return from hell.
The wind held us in a solid blast; but to feel the
deck grow quiet, to be able to think, to speak, to
hear ... to see the land close aboard....  By
Jove, we were saved!—it seemed more incredible
than the adventure itself.  Heads began to bob
up forward, faces drawn with terror, frantic with
relief—the faces of men who had lost and found
a world.

"A voice spoke gruffly beside us.  'By God,
I hope you're satisfied!'  We turned to see
Wilbur standing at the head of the cross-rail.  A
twitching face belied the nonchalance that he'd
attempted to throw into the words.  It was a new
phase of the man; his former perfect poise was
stripped off like a mask, revealing an inner nature
without force or quality, a common empty soul.
The very assumption of coolness, a reflex of his
over-powering relief, disclosed weakness instead
of strength, impotence instead of authority.

"'I don't know how we managed to come
through!' he snarled  'In the name of God, what
made you try it?  Nothing but luck—and now
the typhoon's leaving us.  We can haul up here
until the wind goes down'

"'Is that all, Captain, that you have to say?'
inquired Lee Fu, his attention still riveted on the
course of the sampan.

"Wilbur clutched the rail as if he would tear it
from its fastenings.  'A damned sight more, you
blackguards, but I'll save that for the authorities!'

"'You feel no thanks for your escape—and
there is nothing on your mind?'

"'We shouldn't have needed to escape, if you
hadn't gone crazy.  Come, let's wind up this farce
and get to anchor somewhere.  I'm fagged out'

"'No, we are going on' said Lee Fu calmly,
making no move to bring the sampan into the
wind  'No time for rest, Captain; the voyage is
not over'

"'Going on?...'  Wilbur's glance swept the
sea ahead.  Until that moment, I suppose, he
thought he had won the battle; he hadn't dreamed
that Lee Fu, after such a miraculous escape,
would again put us all in jeopardy.  He saw that,
on the course we were holding, in a very brief
interval we should leave the protection of the
headland.  What lay beyond, it was impossible
to discover through the murk.  He turned back
fiercely; for a moment he and Lee Fu gazed deep
into each other's eyes, in a grapple that gave no
quarter.

"'Yes, Captain!' said Lee Fu sharply  'We
have not yet reached the spot where the
*Speedwell* met her doom.  I cannot waste further time
in talk.  Return to your station, before I am
forced to threaten you again....  This is merely
an interlude'





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   IX

.. vspace:: 2

"Since that experience, I've many times
examined the charts of the region where we were"
Nichols went on  "But they don't begin to show
the whole story.  Beyond the middle island,
under whose headland we'd found transitory
shelter, stretched a larger island, distant some five
miles from the other; between them lay the most
intricate, extraordinary and terrible nest of reefs
ever devised by the mind of the Maker and the
hand of geologic change.  No wonder the surveys
haven't been completed in that region; I defy
any man, in the calmest and clearest of weather,
to take a craft among those reefs and come out
with a whole bottom.  Any man, that is, but Lee
Fu Chang, who isn't in the service of the
Admiralty.

"The outlying fringe of reefs that had broken
our first approach ended at the middle island;
beyond that, to windward, lay clear water, and the
nest of reefs that I've mentioned received the full
force of the wind and sea.  Five miles of water
stretched in mad confusion, a solid whiteness of
spouting foam that seemed to generate a hideous
illumination, that reflected a dingy glow into the
abandoned sky.  All the cataracts of the world
rolled into one couldn't have matched the awful
spectacle.  We were still flying through quiet
water; but just beyond the point of the middle
island the long wind-swept rollers burst in tall
columns of spray that shut off the farther view
like a curtain, where the reef of rocks stood in an
apparently unbroken wall.

"It was directly against the face of this wall
that Lee Fu was driving the sampan.  The first
lift of the outside swell had begun to catch us.  I
held my breath, as moment by moment we cut
down the margin of safety.  No use to interfere;
perhaps he knew what he was doing, perhaps he
had really gone mad under the terrific strain of
the night.  As he steered, he seemed to be
watching intently for landmarks; his eyes were
everywhere, but more often, I noticed, on the shore to
windward that rapidly changed its contour as we
left it on the port quarter.  Was it possible that,
in this abandoned spot, he knew his bearings
... that there was a way through?...

"Wilbur, at Lee Fu's command, had left us
without a word.  He now stood at the rail,
supporting himself by main strength, facing the
frightful line of the approaching reef; on his back
was written the desperate struggle that went on
in his soul.  It bent and twisted, sagging in
sudden irresolution, writhing with stubborn
obduracy, straightening and shaking itself at times
as a wave of firmness and confidence passed over
him, only to quail once more before the sight that
met his eyes ... He couldn't believe that Lee
Fu would hold that suicidal course.  Only
another moment!—he kept crying to himself.
Hold on a little longer!  Yet the power of his
will had been sapped by the long hours of night
and the terrors of the dawn; and courage, which
with him rested only on the sands of ostentation,
had crumbled long ago.

"For my part, I was cruelly afraid.  Without
clear comprehension, I felt the tremendous
significance of the moment, perceived that the
crisis had come in the battle of the wills.  One or
the other of them must break now; but if it didn't
happen shortly, there would be no time left in
which to record the triumph.  My eyes met Lee
Fu's for an instant, as he swept the retreating
shore.  He threw some message into the glance—but
I had passed beyond the range of understanding.
It seemed to me that he was excited, even
elated, and as calm as ever—as if he'd found those
marks he had been looking for, as if he knew his
ground.

"The deafening roar of the breakers filled our
ears smothering the voice of the storm like an
outburst of heavy artillery.  I turned away,
overcome by a sickening sensation.  I couldn't bear
to look any longer.  Instead, I found myself
watching Lee Fu.  He waited tensely, peering
ahead and to windward with lightning glances.  A
wave caught us, flung us forward.  Suddenly I
heard him cry out at my side in exultation, as he
bore down on the tiller.  The cry was echoed
from forward by a loud scream that shot like an
arrow through the thunder, where Wilbur had
sunk beside the rail.  The sampan fell off, still
carried high on the crest of the wave....

"Then, in a moment like the coming of death,
we plunged into the reef.  I have no knowledge
of what took place; there are no words to tell the
story.  Solid water swamped us; the thunder of
the surf crushed the mind....  But we didn't
strike, there was a way through, we had crossed
the outer margin of the reef.  The sampan
emerged from the breakers, remained afloat,
slowly became manageable.  The wind caught us
again.  Ahead stretched the suggestion of a
channel.  Ten minutes passed, ten minutes
that seemed like as many ages, while we ran the
terrible gauntlet of the reef, surrounded by
towering breakers, lost in the appalling steady roar of
the elements.  Suddenly, without warning, we
were flung between a pair of jagged ledges and
launched forward bodily on the surface of an open
lagoon.

"A low rocky island lay in the centre of the
nest of reefs, a stretch of open water to leeward of
it, all completely hidden from view until that
moment.  The open water ran for perhaps a
couple of miles; beyond that, again, the surf
began in another unbroken line.  It would take
us ten minutes to cross this lagoon ... another
interlude.

"'Bring Captain Wilbur' said Lee Fu in my ear.

"I crept forward, where Wilbur lay beside the
rail, his arm around a stanchion.  He was moaning
to himself like an injured man.  I kicked him
roughly; he lifted an ashen face.

"'Come aft—you're wanted' I cried.

"He followed like a whipped cur.  Lee Fu, at
the tiller, beckoned us to stand beside him.  I
pulled Wilbur up by the slack of the coat, and
pinned him against the cross-rail.

"'This is the end' said Lee Fu, speaking in
loud jerks, as he steered across the lagoon  'From
this haven there is no way out, except by the way
we came.  That way, of course, is closed by the
gale.  To windward is shelter, ahead is destruction.
I will seek the shelter if you will speak.  If
not, I shall go on.  By this time, Captain, you
know me to be a man of my word'

"'You yellow devil!...'

"'Waste no time in recriminations.  Beyond
these reefs, Captain, lies the wreck of your ship,
the *Speedwell*.  I have brought you to see the
scene.  There my friend met death at your hands.
You have had full time to consider.  Will you
join him beneath the waves, or will you return to
Hong Kong?  A word will save you.  Remember,
the moments pass very swiftly'

"'What about yourself and Nichols?'
blustered Wilbur.

"'We go too ... or stay ... it makes little
difference.  This is a matter that you cannot
understand.  We do not care'

"At this juncture, I was fated to under-estimate
Wilbur after all.  I thought him broken; but a
last flicker of obstinate pride remained, to prop
his extraordinary ego.  He pulled himself
together again, and whirled on us.

"'I didn't do it!' he snarled.  'It's a damned,
scoundrelly lie!'

"'Very well, Captain.  Go forward once more,
and reserve your final explanation for the gods'

"The flicker of pride persisted; Wilbur
staggered off, holding by the rail.  I waited
beside Lee Fu.  Thus we stood, like wooden
images, watching the approach of the lagoon's
leeward margin.  Had Lee Fu spoken truthfully—was
there no way out, in that direction?  I
couldn't be certain.  All I knew was that the wall
of spouting surf was at our bows, that the jaws of
death were opening again.

"Suddenly Wilbur's head snapped back; he
flung up his arms in a gesture of finality, shaking
clenched fists into the sky.  With a thrill that
tingled to my finger-tips, I realized that he was
at the point of surrender.  The torture had
reached his vitals.  He turned and floundered aft,
holding his hands before his face like a man
struck blind.

"'What is it I must say?' he cried hoarsely, in
a voice that by its very abasement had taken on a
certain dignity.

"'You know.  The truth, or nothing!'

"His face was shocking in its self-revelation;
a strong man breaking isn't a pleasant object.  I
saw how awful had been this struggle of the wills.
He came to his final decision as we watched, lost
his last grip....

"'I did it—as you said—you must know all
about it.  I suppose I sank her—I had no
intention ... You madman!  For God's sake,
haul up, before you're in the breakers!'

"'Show me your insurance money' said Lee
Fu inexorably.

"Wilbur dug frantically in an inside pocket,
produced a packet of bank notes, and held them
out in a hand that trembled violently as the gale
fluttered the crisp leaves.

"'Throw them overboard'

"For the fraction of a second he hesitated;
then all resolution went out in his eyes like a dying
flame.  He extended his arm rigidly, and loosed
the notes.  They were gone down the wind
almost before our eyes could follow them.

"In the same instant, Lee Fu flung down the
great tiller.  The sampan came into the wind with
a shock that threw us all to the deck.  Close
under our lee quarter lay the breakers, less than a
couple of hundred yards away.  Lee Fu made
frantic signals forward, where the crew were
watching us in a state of utter terror.  I felt the
centreboard drop; a patch of sail rose slowly on
the mainmast.  The boat answered, gathered
headway, drove forward....

"It was just in time.  We had run past the low
island, and couldn't hope to regain its shelter in
such a gale; but a pile of tumbled rocks lay off its
leeward end, carving out a small sub-zone of
protection.  This spot we might be able to fetch, if
we managed to escape the clutch of the breakers.
Escape them we did, after a hair-raising five
minutes, and threw out our anchors in the most
precarious berth ever afforded, with our stern
brushing the very fringe of the breakers.  But
the anchors held; and there we rode until the
storm was over.

"Wilbur lay as he had fallen after the sampan's
frantic plunge.  He made no movement; and we,
on our part, left him where he was"





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   X

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"Two nights later, under a clear starry sky, we
slipped through Lymoon Pass on the tail of the
land breeze.  Before we reached Wanchi, it fell
flat calm.  We shipped the long sweeps and began
to row; the chattering crew, who'd never expected
to see Hong Kong again, fell to work willingly.
The lights of the city twinkled against the Peak,
the sleeping fleet swung at anchor in the
landlocked harbour; all was silence and tranquillity
... as we see it now.  But that night, let me
tell you, the familiar scene was invested with a
poignant charm.  At length we reached the
bulkhead, from which we'd taken our maniac departure
three days before, and settled in our berth as
comfortably as if we'd just returned from a
pleasure trip down the bay.

"No words were said as we came in.  I sat
against the bulwarks, almost afraid to move, like
a man awakening to consciousness after a long
siege of fever.  A little forward of my position,
Wilbur rose to his feet.  He hadn't spoken or
touched food since that tragic hour under the
reefs two nights before; had spent most of his time
below decks, locked in a tiny stateroom, and had
come out only in the last few minutes, as if in
response to the nearing sounds of the land.  He
stood at the rail, a figure wrapped in silence and
immobility, watching them berth the sampan.
Then, without a glance in our direction, he walked
to the gangway and stepped ashore.  On the
bulkhead he paused for a moment irresolute,
turning and gazing across the harbour.  His form
stood out plainly against a bright light up the
street.  It had lost those lines of vigour and
alertness; it was the figure of a different and older
man.  A broken figure, that could never again be
the same....

"A moment later he had lurched away, vanishing
suddenly in the darkness of a side street.
Three days afterwards, we heard that he had taken
the boat for Singapore.  He hasn't been seen or
heard of in this part of the world since that day.

"When he had gone, that night at the bulkhead
Lee Fu approached me; we crossed the deck of
the sampan, and stood for a long while silent at
the harbour rail.

"'Thank you, Captain' said he at last  'As I
foresaw, it has been supremely interesting.  For
your part, I hope you feel repaid?'

"'It's quite enough to be alive, just now' I
confessed without shame  'I want to see a chart
of that locality, Lee Fu.  I want to find out what
you did'

"'Oh, that?  It was not much.  The gods
were always with us, as you must have observed.
As for the rest of it, I know that region pretty
well'

"'Evidently....  Did the *Speedwell* fetch
up among those same reefs, or to leeward of them?'

"'The *Speedwell*?  Captain, you did not
believe my little pleasantry?  We were nowhere
near the wreck of the *Speedwell*, at any time—as
Captain Wilbur should have known, had he
retained his mental perspective'

"I smiled feebly.  'Well, I didn't know it.
Tell me another thing, Lee Fu.  Were you bluffing,
there at the last, or was there really no passage
through the reef?'

"'So far as I am aware, Captain, there was no
passage.  I believe we were heading for solid rock
when we came into the wind'

"The answer surprised me.  'Would you have
piled us up' I asked 'if Wilbur hadn't given in?'

"'That is a hypothetical question.  I knew
perfectly well that I should not be forced to do
it.  I was only afraid lest, in the final anguish,
Captain Wilbur might lose his seaman's judgment,
and so might wait too long.  That, I confess,
would have been unfortunate.  Otherwise, there
was no especial doubt or danger'

"'I'm glad to hear it!' I exclaimed, with a
shudder of recollection  'It wasn't apparent at
the time'

"'No, perhaps not.  Time was very swift, just
then.  I will tell you now, Captain Nichols, that
I myself had begun to grow alarmed.  He waited
very long.  He was more wilful than I had fully
anticipated; a strong, determined man, and an
arch-criminal.  But, as it chanced, this made it
the more interesting'

"I didn't care to argue such a subtle point.
'What did you have in mind, Lee Fu' I asked
'before the typhoon shifted?  Did you expect the
centre of it to catch us?'

"The question seemed to amuse him.  'Captain,
I had no plan' he explained in a puzzled
tone  'It is dangerous to make plans, or to live
according to a fixed design.  There was a task to
be begun; the determination of its direction and
result lay with the gods.  It was plain to me that
I had been called upon to act; beyond that I
neither saw nor cared to see.  Action once begun,
I seized events as they came my way....  How
characteristic that you ask me for my plan!
Would you have the temerity to inquire into the
divine control of events?  Or do you think that a
man really may make a plan?'

"I could believe his statement only because I'd
witnessed his incredible calmness.

"He waved a hand toward the city.  'Come,
my friend, let us sleep' said he  'We have earned
our rest—and that is something not always won
from life.  But beware of over-confidence, and
never plan.  It is by straining to see the future
that men exhaust themselves for present
usefulness.  It is by daring to make plans that men
bring down on their heads the wrath of heaven.
We are the instruments of the gods; through us,
they put their own plans in operation.  The only
failure in life is not to hear when the gods
command.  In this case, however, there could have
been no question; the design was too apparent.
From the first, I was sure and happy.  There
were constantly too many propitious signs'"





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.. _`THE UNCHARTED ISLE`:

.. class:: center x-large bold

   THE UNCHARTED ISLE

.. vspace:: 3

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   THE UNCHARTED ISLE

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   I

.. vspace:: 2

"They say the man is mad" I whispered,
nodding across the room  "Pendleton pointed him
out to me in Wellington Street this morning"

Nichols gave his twisted smile.  "Yes, mad, or
inspired, or something very wonderful.  Who is
competent to judge?  But I haven't seen him up
this way for a long while.  Another expedition
must be on foot in search of the Uncharted Isle"

"What's that?  You know him, then?"

"Perhaps I am the only man in the East who
does know him, in the proper sense of the word.
Every one else listens, laughs, and passes on.
But I believe.  Yes, in spite of ridicule and life's
disaster, I continue to believe ... well, not so
much in the fact itself, as in the man.  By Jove,
he's faithful—and that, you must admit, is marvel
enough.  And his madness isn't entirely
impossible; it can be explained.  Yet it strikes the
world as being funny—and that's his crowning
misfortune.  A man in search of a lost and
apparently non-existent island can't help being a
little ridiculous, I suppose, until he becomes a
thundering bore.  For no one else, of course, is
looking for such a thing, or wants to find one.
We keep safely within the charted area....
But let me tell you the story, and you can form
your own opinion.  Don't attract his attention; he
won't notice us here in the shadow"

There used to be a certain tea-house in Hong
Kong, the name of which was jealously guarded
from touring vandals.  It opened on the face of
an enchanted terrace high above the harbour and
the town; from the parapet the eye travelled
inland over the low peninsula of Kowloon, as
far as the foothills of China, the fringe of a
mighty land veiled in mystery.  Romance came
to that terrace, filtering through lacy bamboo
leaves, borne on the night breeze along with the
fragrance of flowers and the music of hidden
voices.  The place wasn't a temple of the
conventional.  It isn't running now; the songs are
still, the little cups no longer tinkle in the
half-darkness, and no sweet, startled faces,
peep out at visitors from behind the dragon-screens.

Nichols and I had been sitting there some time
that evening, when the man came in.  Of course
Nichols knew him; who with any pretentious to
a history wasn't catalogued in his omnivorous
files?  While I waited, I listened to a rapid
conversation in Chinese somewhere in the back
of the establishment.  Dusk had swallowed the
white houses and green slopes below us; the
riding lights on the harbour had begun to prick
out the berths of ships; with the coming of
night, voices seemed hushed among the yellow
lanterns.

"What is madness?  Who will lay down the
line between madness and sanity?" demanded
Nichols suddenly  "They are like right and
wrong, or good and evil .... much as you want
to believe.  If we dared for a moment to face
the logic of existence, I think we should find that
we're all a little mad, each in his own way.  An
entirely sane man would sort of puff out, like a
candle.  It's our madness that keeps us going,
feeds the flame.  The world's an illusion,
anyway, of course; ergo, why aren't the maddest
people the sanest?  Certainly, the maddest man
of all would be he who tried to define the states
of the human mind.

"For that's beyond our province.  They say,
for instance, that Devereux is mad: what they
mean is that they can't fathom him.  His life,
likewise, hasn't been charted.  Well, what's the
difficulty?  All the lives and islands haven't been
discovered yet.  And there are certain bald facts,
written in black-and-white records, that seem to
support his claim...."

A waxy Chinaman changed our tea.  Nichols
gazed thoughtfully into the soft darkness beyond
the terrace, getting his story under way.

"Devereux is no longer a young man, as you
see" he began slowly  "I'd say he was about
our own age.  He was born and reared, I believe,
in our own New England, though I've never
heard the name of his home town.  I presume he
had parents there once, brothers and sisters,
maybe a sweetheart.  The Devereuxs, you know,
are a fine family, with strains of originality
cropping out here and there, which might once in a
while have amounted to genius in a free
atmosphere.  They're a high-strung breed.  I'd
be willing to affirm that, even before the episode
of the island, this particular Devereux was a
serious and romantic soul.  Look at his face,
hanging in the glow of that lantern.  Temperament,
sensibility, melancholy....  But what he
was, and what he might have been, are both sunk
in the tremendous distances of a lifetime,
obscured by the apparition of an island, the
wraith of a tragic destiny.

"He went to sea, in the wake of his generation.
At the age of twenty-one, he had worked
up from the forecastle to a room on the port side
of the forward cabin; in due time he became first
mate of the ship *Evening Star*.  I forget who
was captain of her, or what was the name of the
second mate who managed to reach Callao in the
whaleboat.  Those who survived the disaster have
vanished along with those who never returned,
and Devereux alone has perpetuated the event
in nautical history because of a madness that
descended on him out of the sky.

"They sailed from New York for San Francisco
in a year that is likewise immaterial, and
had a long and tedious passage round the Horn.
It was one of those unlucky and exasperating
voyages, you know—calms, and even trade winds,
and unseasonable storms; so that when they
finally got headed north in the Pacific, they were
a disheartened ship's company.  The southeast
trades in the Pacific failed them completely;
whatever wind they found, from 20 south up
to the line, came from the east and north; and
with the best course they could make, the ship
was crowded over far to the westward of the
regular track.  Then, as they approached the line,
the northeast breeze settled down in earnest, and
nothing for it but to hold her on a
N.N.W. course, as close to the wind as possible on the
starboard tack.  They managed to weather the
fringe of the South Sea Islands by a few hundred
miles, and drifted across the line somewhere in
the neighbourhood of 135° west longitude.
Provisions and water were holding out well, though
one hundred and seventy-five days had passed
since they'd lost sight of Sandy Hook.

"One evening in the early dog-watch, they
noticed a few land birds flying about the ship.
Devereux told me they were quite excited over
the incident for an hour or two, with the quick
sympathy of sailors for an unusual manifestation
of life-forces.  The nearest land at that time was
the Marquesas, five hundred miles away to the
southward.  Some of the men tried to entice the
birds to alight on deck or in the rigging, but they
didn't seem at all weary, and scorned the
blandishments of food.

"'Wonderful creatures—birds' said the
captain, as they were discussing the occurrence
on the quarter-deck  'Five hundred miles isn't a
drop in the bucket to them.  All the bob-o'-links
at home go to Brazil and back every winter'

"'They've probably run over from the
Marquesas since supper' chimed in the second
mate  'Half an hour from now they'll be back
there, perching on some tree above an island
beauty.  God, I'd like to be a bird!'

"But Devereux demurred to their conclusion—he
knew something of the habits of birds.
'That's all right in the migrating season, but
these birds don't migrate' said he  'You can see
that they aren't bound anywhere in particular.
And land birds don't fly five hundred miles to
sea for the fun of going back again.  They
do get tuckered, too.  I think it's mighty strange'

"He had the first watch.  It was one of those
typical Pacific nights—a velvet sky, a smooth sea,
the air somehow expressing the character of an
ocean illimitable and magnificent, an ocean that
spreads like the floor of the universe.  After the
captain had gone below for the night, Devereux
cast his imagination adrift to follow those birds,
to see the land again.  What could their visit
have meant?  Was there any land nearer than
the Marquesas—perhaps an uninhabited island?
He promised himself a careful survey of the chart
when he went below at midnight....  He'd
been thinking in this desultory fashion some time,
lost in the dreams of night watches, when a sharp
cry from forward struck him like a knife flying
through the darkness.

"You know those single cries on shipboard, in
the dead of night—cries of warning, of apprehension,
of impending danger.  The heart stops for
a moment at the sound.  Then a thousand
possibilities crowd into the mind at once, a thousand
processes of thought leap into action.  There can
be no indecision; moments are priceless.  And
there must be no mistake.

"The cry met him a second time as he passed
the mizzen rigging, running forward.  '*Breakers
ahead!*'  Instinctively, he shouted the order over
his shoulder as he ran.

"'Put the helm down!  *Hard down!  Hard down!*'

"But it was too late to save her.  He told me
that he paused at the break of the poop, listening,
and in a sudden hush that went over the ship,
heard distinctly a low sucking sound under the
bows—the horrible gasping of water over rocks
awash.  He clung to the rail, cowed by the only
fear a sailor knows.  At that moment, she struck
heavily, and stood still.  She had been making
about five knots, enough to give her plenty of
momentum.  The shock was terrific: some of the
top-hamper crashed to the deck, and the voices
of men suddenly broke out in screams of terror.
The ship rose a little by the head, seemed to draw
back, and surged forward again with a dull,
rending, sickening plunge.

"But what's the need to rehearse the details of
that oldest tragedy of the sea?  There was time
enough for them to get out the boats, time enough,
even, to fully provision them—and that's more
than some have been allowed.  But the ship was
dead and done for.  Her whole bow must have
been stove in under water.  Five minutes after
they pushed clear of her, she slumped like a rock,
and they lost her in the darkness.  A whirlpool of
foam showed for a while on the surface of the
black water.  Then that, too, faded; and the wide,
open Pacific received them in their three boats as
frail as cockle-shells, and the velvet night covered
it all.

"The captain commanded the longboat, the
second mate and Devereux had a whaleboat
apiece.  Devereux's was the smallest; his crew
consisted of six men besides himself.  The boats
drew together on the quiet water for a consultation.
A deep stillness invested the place, the stillness
of a lofty cavern, of an empty world; and
somewhere off in the gloom that awful sucking sound
went on, now loud, now dying out to a faint
echo, like a demon chuckling over human
disaster.

"All night they played hide-and-seek with that
demon in the darkness.  The breeze fell off, and
after a while it grew flat calm.  At times the voice
of the reef was hoarse and low and languid; at
times it purred and bubbled energetically; at
times it would be silent so long that they'd lean
over the gunwale to listen, thinking they had lost
it—when unexpectedly it would snarl out again,
close at hand.  In the middle of the night they
did seem to be really losing the sound, and were
afraid they'd drifted from the vicinity; they bent
to the oars rather aimlessly, for no one could
judge the exact direction, and before they knew
it were almost running afoul of the hideous thing.
Some of the men swore that the sound moved on
the water; this seemed plausible, for it was to be
supposed that the reef extended a considerable
distance, yet the notion nevertheless gave rise to
a vague superstitious fear.  Either it moved, or
they were surrounded by a nest of reefs—one was
about as bad as the other.  Devereux said it was
a night to drive a nervous man crazy, a night that
they began to think would never end.

"When dawn came at last, they looked about
them and saw nothing at all—nothing but an
unbroken horizon, a boundless ocean, a few spars
floating idly in the midst of a great calm, and a
little dark dot like a pimple on the face of the
waters, just in front of the rising sun.

"They rowed toward this pimple on the surface.
It opened and closed with the sucking motion of
a loose mouth, and between the monstrous flickering
lips of water a point of rock protruded, black
and swollen like the tongue of a drowned man.
It seemed impossible that this solitary rock had
made all the commotion of the night, had invested
them as if with an army of breakers; yet there
was absolutely nothing else in sight—the rest had
been imagination.

"They rowed across the south face of the rock,
where the ship had struck, and found the water
there deep past all knowing.  The rock wasn't
coral, and no coral formation surrounded it.  In
the clear blue water beneath them huge banners
of kelp waved and winnowed like lifeless hands.
Not a vestige of the *Evening Star* remained; she
had disappeared in the unfathomable gulfs of the
Pacific.  It was a mere crag that had caught her,
a needle-point piercing the floor of an otherwise
unobstructed ocean, the topmost spire of some
mighty mountain sunk in the bowels of the world.
It may never before have been seen by mortal
man; it certainly wasn't indicated on the best
charts of that day.  She would have had to seek
a thousand years to touch it.  A ship's length
either side would have cleared her....

"They waited beside the rock till noon, to get
an observation.  Then they rowed away to the
northward, bound for the Sandwich Islands.  The
dark spot on the water dwindled and disappeared
in their wake.  Devereux told me that, quite
unaccountably, he felt his heart sinking as they
lost sight of it; after all, it was their only
link with a remote and perhaps unattainable world.

"The first night after the disaster, a heavy
squall separated the boats.  They couldn't find
each other, and never came together again.  The
second mate reached Callao after a terrible
journey, the first to report the loss of the *Evening
Star*.  He had been nearly swamped in that first
squall.  For two days he had hunted frantically
for the other boats.  Then, not being a good
navigator, and having a very imperfect chart of
the Pacific Islands, he had changed his course
and steered due east, knowing that he would strike
the American continent if he could keep on going.
The fact of his arrival in Callao, its date, and his
reported date of the disaster, are beyond dispute;
for my own satisfaction, I have looked these
matters up in the official records.

"The captain, in the longboat, was never
heard of again.  Him and his crew the Pacific
took for toll.

"Devereux was picked up at sea, alive, well,
and alone in the *Evening Star's* small whaleboat,
*exactly one year and three months after the ship
went down*"

"Easy, Nichols!" I remonstrated  "Say that
again, please.  You can't expect me to swallow it
whole at the first try"

"Those are the facts, I tell you" said Nichols
calmly  "I have also verified this latter
statement, through correspondence with the captain
who picked him up.  It really happened—and the
dates were as I said.  He was picked up just
north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean by the
ship *Vanguard*, and brought in to San Francisco.
I was informed by the captain of the *Vanguard*
that he had been driven out of his course by
meeting the northeast trade winds too far south,
and had sighted Devereux adrift one morning in
about 135° west and 2° north.  The man was
nearly dead from thirst, and was quite mad when
they took him aboard; raved about an island
nearby, said he'd been blown away from it, and
begged them to cruise in search of it before they
left the ground.  There was no island in that
vicinity, of course, nearer than the Marquesas.
'I was sorry for the poor fellow' the captain of
the *Vanguard* wrote me 'but we couldn't waste
time in indulging his fancy.  He quieted down
after a day or two, and seemed to settle into a sort
of dull melancholy'

"This castaway, giving his name as Devereux,
claimed to have been mate of the *Evening Star*,
lost in that same quarter of the Pacific the year
before.  The people on the *Vanguard* had heard
nothing of this disaster; in fact, the first report
of it, brought in by the second mate, had just
reached San Francisco from Callao when they
got in.  To corroborate the story, however, the
whaleboat in which Devereux had been picked up
had presented a battered and weather-beaten
appearance, her paint peeling off and her bottom
badly scarred, as if she'd been used a good while
on the beach; and on her stern they had
been able to decipher the letters—ENI-G —AR.
Devereux claimed that his ship had touched a
needle of rock and had sunk immediately; but no
danger of that nature was laid down on the
*Vanguard's* chart.  A year later, as a result of these
conflicting and sensational tales, the United States
Government sent a gunboat to look for the rock,
perhaps with secret instructions to keep a weather
eye open for Devereux's island; but nothing was
to be found.  Devereux couldn't remember the
*Evening Star's* exact latitude and longitude on
the day before the disaster; his records and
instruments had vanished along with his crew in
the heart of a deep mystery.  And the second
mate, who alone came in in regular order, was a
poor navigator, you'll remember, and may easily
have made an error about the place of his
departure.  At any rate, nothing was to be found.  On
the charts of the Hydrographic Office to-day you'll
see, in that position, a dotted circle, marked
Evening Star Rock, with an interrogation point after
the name.

"Devereux's story was a nine days' wonder in
San Francisco, confirmed in substance as it was
by the recent authentic report from Callao.  The
newspapers made good copy of it.  Many believed
him outright; a man doesn't float about in the
Pacific for over a year and emerge from the
experience in robust health, without there being
some simple and practical explanation.  Yet
sensational publicity quickly prejudiced the case, as
it invariably does.  After the first flush of
pleasurable excitement, public interest began to put him
down either as a hoax or a madman, and then
promptly forgot him.  One of the papers tried to
start a subscription for a schooner, so that he might
search for his island, but it met with little response.
The return wave of prosaic life rolled over him,
left him submerged and helpless.  For a while he
went about seeking sympathy and assistance, but
his melancholy tale soon came to be a nuisance,
doors were shut in his face, and men avoided him.

"At length he had the good sense to go away.
He wandered to the East, moved about from
place to place.  The story followed him, distorted
in the passage of time.  And so we meet him
here, a man with a strange hallucination—an
interesting case, and romantic, but unquestionably mad"





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   II

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Nichols leaned toward me, his eyes kindling.
"Let me take you back to the morning after the
squall that separated the boats" said he  "The
sun rose in a clear sky; the quick tropical storm
had entirely disappeared.  Devereux looked
about him, and saw no sign of the others.  One
hardly realizes, until one has experienced the fact,
how easy it is for boats to become separated in
the night, especially under severe conditions of
weather, or how rapidly a dozen miles may spring
up between them.  And a dozen might as well
be as many hundreds, for all chances of their
coming together again.  The wind had died to a
baffling breeze that seemed to be trying to blow
from all directions at once.  Devereux had no
chronometer—nothing but a pocket watch, a
sextant, a compass, and an old general chart of the
Pacific.  After an hour's study of his situation, he
came to a quick decision.  The chart and the
pocket watch couldn't be trusted to get him to the
Sandwich Islands; like the second mate, somewhere
within a radius of twenty-five miles from
him at that moment, he changed the boat's course
and steered due east in search of a continent.

"While they were getting up the sail to catch a
wandering air that seemed to have settled in the
west, a man forward shouted in tones of horror
that the water cask was empty.  A frantic
investigation verified the fact.  An oar carelessly
thrown down had loosened the plug in the head
of the cask, and their precious supply of water
was washing around in the bottom of the boat.
They tasted it, but found it too salt to drink;
the boat, fresh from the top of the forward house,
was leaking quite a little.

"Then began the nightmare of heat and thirst.
The sun that day was pitiless.  They had no luck
with the wind, which soon fell flat calm; the
exertion of rowing added to the misery.  Not a
drop of rain fell.  By noon, the horror of the first
day's thirst had begun to grip them; by nightfall
it had them cowed and broken, whining for water.
It's that first day which is always the worst, you
know—until the end.  Devereux still hoped that
he might pick up one of the other boats, and all
hands kept a sharp lookout; but the hope died
as the hours wore on.  The sheer loneliness of
the vast Pacific under a brilliant sun oppressed
them like a foretaste of death, like a vista of
eternity.  They made little progress that day.

"A night passed, between sleeping and waking;
dawn once more showed them a deserted sea.
After a couple of hours' rowing, they threw down
the oars in despair.  What was the use of making
little dabs with a wooden blade at an ocean beyond
span or circumference?  Devereux says that he,
too, was completely disheartened.  They rested
all that forenoon, waiting for a breeze.  By this
time the thirst had eaten into their vitals.  Spots
were dancing before their eyes, and frequently
one of the men would insist that he saw a boat on
the horizon; but after a while they learned to
accept the cruelty of this delusion.

"Some time a little after noon, Devereux was
in the stern sheets steering; he had persuaded
the men to take up the oars again.  He was
gazing off on the port quarter, in an aimless state
of misery, when all at once he thought his mind
must be breaking with the thirst.  A vision swam
before him—a vision of a peaceful island, fringed
with palm trees, crowned by a low green hill, all
shimmering with heat and inverted in the sky.
He says he gazed at it a long time without daring
to speak; he was afraid the others wouldn't be
able to see it, afraid it wasn't real.  Finally he
could stand the suspense no longer.

"'Look!' he cried, pointing  'Is anything there?'

"And they saw it, too.  For it was nothing but
the mirage of an actual island, an indeterminate
distance away.  It hung in the sky like a mysterious
apparition.  They regarded it fixedly, with
glances almost hostile, as if questioning its
integrity; but the vision persisted.  Then they
turned the boat, and rowed like madmen throughout
the afternoon.  The mirage had faded in the
course of an hour; but Devereux urged them on
by arguments and promises, explaining the nature
of the phenomenon and enlarging on their chances
of deliverance.  Hadn't they all seen it?  It
couldn't be far off; it must lie somewhere along
the line of the compass bearing that he had taken.

"That night they rowed by watches, Devereux
himself taking stroke oar with either crew.  And
when morning dawned, the real island lay right
side up a couple of miles ahead, fair and alluring
on the steel-blue rim of the sea.  You can imagine
the hoarse shout that went up from parched
throats!  Weak and wild, they struggled
painfully at the oars; and shortly after sunrise the
boat entered a little cove that split the front of
the island, where the ground swell at once dropped
off under the shelter of a curving point of land.
A few strokes more, and the surf caught them.
A long roller flung them high up the beach—a
lucky thing, for God knows they wouldn't have
had the strength to save themselves.  The roller
went out, leaving them planted upright on a white
coral strand; in the silence before the coming of
another wave, they heard the drip of a little
stream running down the hillside at the head of
the cove.  Water!  They left the boat as she
was, the oars cock-billed in the rowlocks, the sail,
which they'd hoisted just before dawn and had
been too weak or excited to take in, flapping loose
across the gunwale, and ran with the last strength
in their bodies toward the sound.  The rivulet
had cut a shallow channel in the coral, from the
jungle to the water's edge; they threw themselves
face downward, buried their mouths in the stream,
and drank like animals.

"For some time afterwards they lay as they had
fallen, saturated like so many sponges, feeling the
water sink into their blood.  Then Devereux, who
had exercised his will power and drunk as
sparingly as possible, got to his feet and turned
toward the jungle.  A second time he thought his
eyes were deceiving him.  A woman stood there
in the half-shadow, still grasping the branches
she had parted as she stepped out on the beach.
She didn't appear frightened, but gazed at him
frankly in wonder and admiration.  He thought
she was the most beautiful creature he had ever
seen.  His heart went out to her in that
astonishing moment of their meeting, went out freely,
without restraint or volition ... and she's held
it ever since, and always will.  One can hardly
imagine, to see him sitting over there so
dejectedly, that off on the floor of the Pacific,
years ago, and utterly unseen of the world of men,
he lived such a transcendent moment, that such a
romance came to him under the sun that we all
know.  It takes one back to the days of Sinbad
and Urashima and Oisin.

"He advanced toward her, making signs of
friendliness—of affection, it's to be supposed.
Their hearts were free as the air, and they went
naturally, like God's children, into each other's
arms.  She remained unafraid ... so he
discovered that she loved him, too.  Their meeting
at the head of the beach had been unobserved;
they melted together into the jungle like creatures
of the light, and the boughs that she'd parted as
if opening the door of life silently closed behind them.

"A little later he returned to the beach and
aroused his crew; the men had fallen into a sort
of stupor as they lay in the hot sun.  The girl led
them inland to the main village of her people,
where they were received like gods dropped from
the sky"

Nichols leaned back in his chair, smiling
crookedly.  "The story of the advance of civilization"
said he grimly "is the story of how savages
have had to learn that white men aren't gods.  It's
an old story now—old and threadbare.  It's been
pretty nearly completely learned....  These
people among whom Devereux and his party had
fallen had never seen a white man before.  The
story was all new and fresh to them.  But owing
to the wholly exceptional circumstances, its
ending didn't run according to the usual
distressful formula.  In fact, it resulted in a real
victory.

"The white men were very few, to begin with;
and they couldn't call on their governments, at
the head of the organized world, to support and
further with mechanical engines of destruction
their various lusts and designs.  Happily, three
of them died within a week after they had landed,
from the effects of that first drink of water and the
intemperate eating that followed.  The other
three, however, rapidly recovered strength and
peccancy, and began casting their eyes on the
women of the village.  You know the ripe,
luxuriant beauty of the Marquesan women: these
people were of the same root stock.  It wasn't
many days before a number of violent outrages
had been committed, which rang around the
island—a couple of husbands murdered, maidens
violated, and wives put to shame.

"Now, these people were moral, of course,
after the wise and simple code of nature; and the
chief of the village was a man of character and
decision.  He didn't waste time in parley; when
the crimes were brought home beyond peradventure,
and it was seen that the gods had turned to
clay, he had the offending sailors taken into
custody, and himself dispatched all three of them
with the same club.  Later their best parts were
eaten at a feast of fairly legitimate rejoicing.
Devereux was spared because he had behaved
himself, and because of the love of the girl, who,
it appears, was the chief's daughter.

"We've all dreamed of a life of truth and
freedom; but few of us have both won it and lost
it, in the brief span of a year.  You should see
Devereux's eyes kindle, while he tells you of it,
while he's trying to convince you that he isn't
mad.  The people of this island had no traditions
of their origin, no legends of visits from the
outside world.  It happens, through the fact of
prevailing winds in the Pacific, that no sailing
ship route passed near this region; steamers, also,
gave it a wide berth, for it didn't lie between
anywhere and anywhere.  It was a place apart,
visited by human agency only on the remotest
chance.  It may well be that during a period of
many years the only two vessels to wander down
those particular miles of waters were the ship that
left Devereux floating on the ocean and the ship
that picked him up in the same spot over a year
later.  Thus it was that the island had remained
undiscovered, peopled by a race without knowledge
of the world.  They were honest and lovable
children—much as God intended all of us to be,
I suppose, much as we might have been if we
hadn't found a way temporarily to surmount our
destiny.

"The island itself was an emerald anchored in
a field of cobalt, a jewel floating on the broad
bosom of the sea.  The rustling palm trees waved
day and night before the steady trade winds; the
air hung cool in the shadows, the white surf broke
on the reefs in constant thunder, and the tropical
sunlight surrounded the gem like a halo of misty
gold.  Devereux lived there a year, and the love
that came to him partook of the nature of the
place—fresh, divine, alluring, rich with colour and
meaning, pure as the light, true as the unchanging
wind.  A son was born to them.  Nothing crossed
their lives of sorrow or evil.  They had forgotten
time and its desperate occasions.  The new day
was but a repetition of the old.

"But I can't begin to show you half of the
peace and beauty of that year.  Ask me what the
heart of man desires, and I'll answer that every
element of it existed there on the island—conquest,
honour, joy, creative impulse, love—enough
for a dreamer or a doer, the wise design
of nature with her uneasy and aspiring
offsprings.  Devereux grew to love the people;
and because he seemed so different, yet
conformed naturally to the island proprieties, they
exalted him.  And, marvellous to relate, he knew
the worth of what he had found; he fulfilled the
opportunity, he appreciated the honour, he was
worthy of the romantic choice"

Nichols struck the table sharply with his fist.
"Beware of too much happiness!" he growled
"That's another lesson of a jaundiced civilization.
It isn't expedient to embrace truth too
hard....  Who could have conceived an
existence safer than Devereux's, or one more
likely to last?  The broadest ocean in the world
guarded him; the place of his retreat had never
been discovered.  The people adored him, the
arms of a great love enfolded him; and he was
glad to stay.  What better ramparts could life
have built for his defence?  But fate, the old
destroyer, willed it otherwise; and he was sent
back to us, to an unbelieving world—to point
some obscure moral, I suppose, perhaps in an
attempt to show up all the hollowness and
unreality ... if we only had the eyes to see.

"They had saved the whaleboat, of course;
Devereux used to cruise about the island in her,
catching wonderful fish, for he was a sailor at
heart, and couldn't keep off the water.  One day
something led him far off shore—a speck on the
horizon, which he'd no sooner seen than he wished
to investigate.  It looked like a piece of
wreckage, or a boat; he became suddenly excited
to think of finding traces of his fellow-men.
Thus the devil with a memory lured him to
destruction.  The object was farther away than
he had at first realized; it continued for a long
while to look like a boat with a man's figure
propped up in one end.  But when he finally
came up to it, he found nothing more interesting
than a tree floating half submerged with a huge
root that indeed resembled, even at close range,
the fancy his mind had created.

"About this time it fell flat calm; he noticed
a heavy squall gathering on the eastern horizon.
He took down the sail and started to row with
two short oars which he carried for an emergency.
But four or five miles lay between him and the
island; before he'd covered a third of the distance,
the squall met him head on.

"It was one of those savage arch-squalls that
occur on the fringe of the trade winds once or
twice in the course of a year.  The island lay to
windward of him; he didn't set the sail, of course,
for he would have been unable to do anything
but run before it.  In fact, there was nothing left
but to try to keep her head in the wind with the
two short oars.  The squall became more violent;
a short choppy sea sprang up as if by magic, and
spray flew from the wave-tops in blinding sheets.
At last he had to give it up.  He managed to
save the oars; with one of them in his hand he
scrambled aft.  The boat sped around like a
chip as his weight settled in the stern.  Then she
gathered headway, and he began to steer,
running away from the island.  Darkness was
falling; he couldn't see how fast he was dropping
the land.  But his sailor's instinct told him all
about it.  As night closed in, he realized the
worst; he and the whaleboat were being blown
to sea.

"It seemed as if the squall would never end.
The gale rushed at him for hours, a veritable
hurricane of wind, accompanied by a deluge of
warm rain.  He was badly frightened, not so
much for his physical safety as on account of his
imagination.  He says that during those long
hours of tumult and darkness, a premonition of
doom became as real to his fancy as if an actual
spirit, an embodiment of disaster, had settled
down out of the night to keep him company.
He didn't feel alone—fate sailed with him.

"In the morning, the island had, of course,
disappeared.  The squall had at length passed
over; the sea grew calm, and the hot sun burned
down on the water.  It remained calm all day,
so that he couldn't use the sail.  He rowed the
heavy boat until his hands could barely touch the
oars, steering as best he knew how by the sun.
He had no compass, and his idea of the direction
of the island was vague; the squall, he thought,
had struck him from about E.S.E., but he
couldn't be certain.  It might have veered a
point or two in the night, blowing him off at a
new angle.  And what did it matter?—for he
couldn't pick out the points of the compass with
the wind gone and the sun directly overhead.  A
horrible fear oppressed him that with all his
frantic pulling he was shaping a course past the
island.  But which side—which side?  As the
day wore on, with no land appearing, this fear
became a certainty.

"The second night was terrible; he had begun
to comprehend the immensity of the ocean.  He
was lost on the Pacific.  Nothing but a miracle
of miracles would lead him back to the island.
In his mind's eyes he saw a chart of the region;
a dot marked the island, a smaller dot his present
position—the rest was a waste of waters.
Thousands of lines radiated from the smaller
dot; these were the possible directions in which
he might steer.  Only three or four of them
approached the island; the rest led nowhere.

"He remembered that he was far from the
track of vessels.  Not that he wanted to return to
the world, but a vessel might help him to find the
island.  He was too full of life to want to die....
Scenes of the island crossed his mind with
poignant intensity.  They would be searching
for him in their frail dug-out canoes.  The
women would be wailing behind the village.
Would his love believe that he had left her?
No, he felt her faith, across the silence.  In
fancy, he saw her standing at the head of the
beach, where she had first appeared to him.  But
her face now was drawn in wild sorrow, her
streaming eyes ranged the horizon as if she would
pierce the veil of death.  He cried out to her;
but the vast cavern of the sky swallowed his words.

"It would have been merciful to kill him there
in the boat; hunger and thirst of the body are
nothing, are soon over with.  But think of the
surpassing cruelty of saving him!  Great pains
were taken to that end; winds were manipulated,
a ship was selected and driven from her course;
it was as if the elements had conspired together
and the whole machinery of the universe had
paused a moment for the consummation of the
act.  On a certain morning he was sighted from
the quarter-deck of the *Vanguard*; an hour later
he was picked up, half dead from thirst, and
babbling of an island—as mad as a hatter, of
course, since the nearest land was the Marquesas,
five hundred miles away"





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   III

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"I've often tried to imagine Devereux's outlook
on life, as he begged the captain of the
*Vanguard* that morning to turn his ship about and
institute a search for an uncharted island.  How
the refusal must have stunned him, with the
reality still a living presence in his heart.  By
Jove, you know, the smell of the land lingered
in his nostrils as if he'd just that moment left it;
he could hear the voices, could feel the touch of
lips that were barely parted from his....  But
they were rough and practical on board the
*Vanguard*; they had to be, for weren't they
sailing in the employment of a strictly ordered
enterprise?  They laughed at him, and held
their course.  It was then that he began to hate
a world that wouldn't listen.  He's used to it
now; like the savages, he has learned his lesson.
And his interpretation of it is accepted only as
a further indication of his madness.  He says
simply that we have lost our souls.

"On the top of this, came the experience in
San Francisco.  To have his hopes raised so
high, only to be shattered overnight when public
interest threw down the new plaything, was the
final stroke of disillusionment.  He went back
to the sea; this was his only means of livelihood,
and in spite of the romantic hallucination he
remained a good sailor.  The ship on which he
sailed from San Francisco took him south
through the Pacific, along the route of homeward
bound vessels.  This, of all Pacific sailing routes,
strikes nearest to the region where Devereux had
been lost and found.  But it doesn't run quite
far enough to the westward actually to cross it.
Devereux went to the captain, told him
straight-forwardly the inwardness of his trouble and
adventure, and begged him to shift the course a
little—just to run to leeward, so that they might
strike the longitude of the place.  He didn't
ask to waste any time in search.  But the captain,
who'd heard about his mate before he shipped
him, saw nothing in this but a mild outcropping
of the madness, and of course couldn't listen to
the appeal.  Running a ship to leeward was a
matter of dollars and cents....  So they drew
near the island, passed it a few hundred miles
away, and left it astern as they picked up the
southeast trades.

"This was the first of many voyages; he
remained in the San Francisco trade for several
years.  Half a dozen times he passed the island,
always leaving it far to leeward; and the memory
didn't grow cold.  Rather, it burned warmer and
higher under this harrowing tantalization, a flame
fed by hope and clarified by love.  Some time, if
he waited patiently, the elements would be
propitious, the right chance would come.

"But he, too, became practical about it,
recognizing that until he was his own master he
wouldn't be free to seize a chance if it came his
way.  He saved his money, and worked hard to
advance his reputation.  In due time he was
rewarded with the command of a little barque.
For a number of voyages his owners sent him to
the China Sea; it was at this time that I first met
him, to fall under the spell of his romantic
destiny.  At last, however, he arrived in Singapore
one voyage to learn that he'd been chartered
to carry coals from Newcastle, New South
Wales, to San Francisco.  He felt a wonderful
elation at the news.  It looked like his
long-awaited opportunity.

"In the natural order of things, you know, on
the passage from Newcastle to California, he
would cross the Pacific in the westerlies below
the southeast trades, strike north through the
trade winds close hauled on the starboard tack,
fetch within a reasonable distance of the coast of
Mexico, pick up the northeast trades there, and
take a weatherly departure for the last stage of
the journey.  By crossing the equator in 135°
west longitude he would be thrown to leeward
heavily on that last stage.  But he must chance
it; no one would know, and he could make his
easting in the North Pacific, above the trades.
Chance it?—he couldn't have failed to accept the
opening, his whole life was centred on the play.
God knows, he'd waited long enough, devotedly
enough, for deliverance from this protracted
anguish, for the resumption of happiness, for
another glimpse of the form of love and beauty,
for a sight of the island that more and more
appeared to him in the nature of a vivid dream.

"And, by Jove, when he got there, he couldn't
find it!  It didn't seem, to be in existence any
longer; at least, it wasn't to be discovered in the
region where he had expected to come across it.
He couldn't remember the exact latitude and
longitude, you'll remember, although he had an
approximate position which ought to have served
the purpose.  He cruised in the locality for over
a week, backward and forward, around and
around, combing every square mile of its waters;
but he saw no sign of land.  He had a terrible
feeling that he might have passed it by night,
that if the night could have been turned to day
he might have caught a glimpse of it on the
distant horizon.  It was at night, he says, that the
sense of its nearness was most acute, an ethereal
presence lying all about him in the soft,
impenetrable obscurity.  At times he could almost smell
the land.  He felt that she, too, had remembered,
and had remained faithful to him; that the pain
and longing in her heart hung in mysterious
vibrations about the island, to guide him to her
if ever he came that way.  But, as of old, he
couldn't tell the direction; it was always his bitter
fate to lack a compass at the crises of life.  He
didn't find either the island or the rock that had
split the *Evening Star*; and in the end he had
to go away.

"He tried again, some years later, but with the
same lack of success.  I have an idea that his
latitude and longitude were away off; yet the
place where he had been picked up was exact
enough.  Or perhaps ... But what's the use of
speculating on a hypothesis without tangible
grounds?  He couldn't find the island.  *He*
is the story—as you see him over there.

"By this time a hopeless melancholy had settled
on him; yet he persisted in what he conceived to
be the main business of life.  His faith, indeed,
was unquestioning; he apparently couldn't have
done otherwise, and all his days and designs
arranged themselves around this central purpose
as naturally as mists rise to the sun.  He left the
sea, and went into the pearl fishing enterprise
down on the north coast of Australia.  He wanted
to make money—and he made it.  As soon as he
possessed the means, he bought a schooner, fitted
her up for a year's cruise, and disappeared over
the eastern rim of the Pacific.  It was well
over a year, in fact, before he turned up again.

"I happened to be in Singapore when he
arrived from that first cruise.  Going down the
Jetty late one afternoon to lake my sampan, I met
him wandering in the opposite direction.  One
look at his face told me that he'd failed again.
He had come in at noon, wasn't going anywhere,
didn't know what he wanted to do.  I took him
aboard with me to supper, and we had a long
evening on deck under the awning.

"'Devereux, has it ever occurred to you that
the island may have sunk in a volcanic
disturbance?' I suggested, after he'd gone over the
affair for the twentieth time.

"The idea gave him comfort, strange as it may
seem; he could contemplate the entire destruction
of his beloved as an event of minor importance.
It offered something to fall back on, in his mental
agony; a practical explanation to dull the edge of
the frantic feeling that all the while the island
existed, if he could only find it.  When I noted
how he devoured the suggestion, I enlarged
on its possibility.

"'You see, you haven't been able to find the
rock, either' I pointed out  'And I remember
you told me there wasn't any coral formation in
the neighbourhood of that rock.  A sure sign of
recent volcanic activity.  I'd be willing to bet
that it hadn't been on the surface very long; it
had been poked up recently for your especial
benefit.  And where volcanic action is busy
poking things up, it's just as liable to sink them
down again'

"'But the island had been there a long while'
he objected  'It had a coral reef all the way
round; our boat crossed it by a miracle that
morning.  And the people, Nichols—people don't
rise full grown from the sea, or drop down out of
the air'

"I wondered whether they didn't, in this case.
'Never mind, this was the way of it' said I  'The
rock was an indication of volcanic action that
hadn't yet extended to the island.  But the whole
area was in danger, and the next outbreak, which
happened to be one of depression, dragged down
the island, too'

"We left the question pending, and went our
various ways.  Now and then I'd run into him,
wandering about the world, as the years went by.
He's never wholly given up the search.  The
singular thing about it is that material fortune has
fairly pursued him.  He's made a lot of money,
and sunk it all in fruitless expeditions.  Too bad
it is that he didn't possess a scientific bent; he
knows all there is to know of the Pacific islands on
their practical side—that is, on the side that isn't
worth knowing"

Nichols struck the table again.  "Well, what
do you think of it?" he demanded "There he
goes, now—alone, always alone.  Why was he
sent back to us?  What's his obscure moral?
Do you get any hint?"

"Nichols, do you yourself believe in the reality
of this island?" I asked.

He glanced at me keenly.  "Isn't that wholly
beside the point?" said he  "I don't believe the
island exists to-day, if that is what you mean.  But
there's a year in an open boat, back at the
beginning of the record, to be explained.  The
point is that he believes in the island.  By Jove,
he remembers it—do you understand?  See that
droop in his back, as he stands absently looking
out of the door?  He's growing old, and the
woman would be past middle age to-day, and the
boy would be a man; but they have a trick of
remaining young in his memory.  Oh, he faces
the fact, of course, in his practical moments;
wonders what they have come to, whether the boy
ever matured, whether the woman waited, or gave
him up for lost and married another man.  He can
speak about these things, because he's quite
determined to believe that the island is sunk under
the ocean, that they're all dead.  But when the
moon's out, and he gets to dreaming, they come
back to him just as he left them, a young and
beautiful woman with a child at her breast, both
of them perfectly alive.  How can you ask me
... whether I believe in the island?"





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   IV

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The day following this conversation, Nichols
introduced me to Devereux; I met and talked
with him several times before I left Hong Kong.
If he was mad, the fact didn't affect his daily
intercourse.  He was a man of charming personality;
a man who held something back, of course, but
this merely added interest to the charm.  Only
his eyes were strange; as he talked, they invariably
wandered upward, and were recalled to the scene
in intermittent sharp flashes.

Then I left Hong Kong, and forgot all about
him for a couple of years.  At the end of that time
I found myself in Batavia on business, when who
should arrive but Nichols in the barque *Omega*.
I left a message for him at his broker's, and that
evening he called on me at the hotel.  Already, I
had determined to ask him for a passage north.

"But it'll take me a couple of months to reach
Hong Kong" he told me  "I'm going from here
to Macassar, then on up the straights to Cebu and
Iloilo"

"Time is no object to me" I answered.

"Good" said he  "I'll be glad enough of
your company.  I have one passenger already,
but he's hardly exhilarating.  It's Devereux—you
remember him.  The fellow who lost an
island in the Pacific"

"Yes, indeed.  How is he now?"

"He's in bad shape" said Nichols, tapping his
head significantly  "I've had him aboard the
round trip, for his health, but it hasn't seemed to
help him.  I'm afraid he is really breaking up,
this time"

So it was arranged that I accompany Nichols
northward.  I went off on board with him that
night, to enjoy the fresh sea-breeze in the outer
roads.  There I renewed my acquaintance with
Devereux in more intimate circumstances.

The change in him was decidedly noticeable.
His manner was odder, more distrait; throughout
the evening he sat with his chair pulled close to
the side, speaking only when spoken to, gazing
off into the night and drumming constantly on the
rail with his hand.  We sailed from Batavia in a
couple of days.  Quite abruptly, on the morning
of our departure, Devereux approached me with a
new manner, as if anxious to enter into confidences.
The anchor had just fetched away, the ship had
begun to turn on her heel.  Something had moved
him to the depths, some gleam of colour, some
distant view of the palm-covered islands in the
offing.  He stopped me in the weather alley-way,
his delicate features working with a powerful
emotion.

"I've tried..." he began; then broke off for
an instant, and drew nearer.  "You know, I
hardly said good-bye" he told me impressively
"I went off in a great hurry that morning"  He
gazed at me profoundly, like a man looking at his
own image in a mirror.  "Do you know the
Pacific?" he suddenly demanded.

"Not very well" I answered  "I've been to
Honolulu, and New Caledonia.  Nothing in
between"

"Oh..." he murmured  "Then I must tell
you"  Without warning, he plunged into a
relation of his own tale.  I listened politely, then
curiously, then with growing excitement.  The
tale transported him, inspired him.  It was poetic
drama, tragic and magnificent, that I heard; scene
after scene unfolded itself before me as he talked,
made real by his unconscious perfection of detail,
and invested with truth by his air of fervour and
simplicity.  I saw the island in bold outline, in
vivid colouring; I felt the hunger and thirst, and
tasted the water that they found there on the
beach; I looked up with him to behold the woman
of his dreams.  His dreams, or his memories—which
was it?  Had there ever been an island?
The question seemed never so baffling as at that
moment, when his present madness stood so
openly revealed.

After this experience he retained me in his
confidence—didn't want to talk about anything else
but the vision that he saw and the sorrow that lay
on his heart.  It was very distressing.  One
morning as I came up the companion-way after
breakfast, he plucked me nervously by the sleeve.

"Look here" said he, leading me to windward
"Nichols knows the position of that island.  He's
trying to pass it..."

"Nonsense, Devereux!" I exclaimed  "You
mustn't credit such a thought.  Nichols knows
less about it than we do"

"He's always poring over the chart" said
Devereux darkly  "He tries to keep our position
from me.  Oh, I can see it in his eye!"

"But we aren't in that part of the world" I
argued, like a man wrestling with the wind.

He passed a hand wearily across his eye.  "It
looks the same" said he.  Suddenly he shot at
me a piercing glance.  "I don't know whether to
believe you or not!" he snarled  "You're all
against me, every damned one of you!"

He quickly dropped the mood of suspicion,
however, for that evening we had another long
talk about the island.  The next forenoon he took
a notion to go aloft; spent a number of hours
perched on the main royal yard.  There we could
see him steadily searching the horizon.  We
seized the opportunity to talk over his case at
length in the cabin, but could come to no decision
except to let affairs run their course.

"Good Lord, Nichols, suppose he really sights
an island, up there!" I suddenly exclaimed.  We
bent over the chart, pricking off our exact position
that morning; and breathed a sigh of relief to
discover that, as we were going, we shouldn't sight
any land till the following day.

It was in Macassar that we saw the first evidence
of violent abberration in Devereux.  The three
of us had gone ashore for the day; after an early
dinner, we were taking a short drive in the cool of
the evening through a region of small rice and
coffee plantations.  Somewhere beyond the
outskirts of the town, a native woman stepped from
the road in front of us to make way for our horses.
She drew back against a fringe of bamboo trees
by the roadside, stretched out her arms to part the
branches behind her, and stood there motionless,
in sharp relief against the sunset, watching us pass
by.  Beside us, Devereux uttered a wild cry, some
unintelligible name, and leaped from the moving
vehicle.

We found him prostrate at the feet of the
woman, babbling in a musical, strange tongue.
The light on his face was the very madness of joy.
The woman shrieked, drawing back among the
bamboo stems.  Nichols reassured her in the
Bugis dialect.

"Devereux, come away!" he commanded
sharply  "You don't know her.  For God's sake,
come away!"

Devereux got up slowly, gazing at us in wild
alarm; then held out his arms to the woman.
She struggled farther back into the bamboo
thicket.  Again he turned to us, drew himself
together, and spoke with authority and defiance.

"She is my wife!" said he.

It was pathetic and terrible—the very devil of
a scene.  He fought and struggled; we had to
take him to the carriage by main strength.  A
crowd had gathered.  At last Devereux grew
quiet.  Nichols explained as best he could to the
woman, while half a hundred ears listened eagerly
to the astonishing tale.  A rapid colloquy ensued;
though I couldn't understand the words, I heard
the woman's voice melt with pity.

"She wants to know whether your wife had a
birthmark on her bosom" Nichols interpreted,
turning to the carriage.

Devereux shook his head; he was still dazed
with the struggle.  The woman left cover, and
came close to the carriage without fear.  The
upper part of her sarong slipped down, disclosing
a broad red blotch on the dusky skin above her
right breast.  Leaning forward, she spoke a few
words in a soothing voice.

"She says that you must be mistaken" repeated
Nichols  "She says she is sorry—but now you
have seen that it cannot be"

Devereux stiffened in his seat, and the light
suddenly went out of his eyes.  He gazed at her
a moment like a rudely awakened somnambulist.
Then he slumped in the corner, as if felled by a
sharp invisible blow.  The woman nodded to us,
and we drove rapidly away.

He was ill for several days after that, keeping
close in his room.  When he was able to come on
deck again, we had reached well across the Celebes
Sea, and were about to make Sibutu Passage on
the coast of Borneo.  We watched him anxiously
that forenoon for signs of a return of his malady.
But he'd evidently forgotten the incident in
Macassar; he talked with us all day in a normal
manner, without reference to his affairs.  It
seemed as if the worst of the attack was over.

A long, narrow island lies on the west side of
Sibutu Passage, clear of the mainland and hiding
several smaller islands behind it.  This was
sighted while we were at dinner that noon; when
we came up for our cigars, it stood in plain view
on the lee bow.  Being an island against the
main, with land rising behind it as we came on,
we didn't think of it as a possible new source of
excitement.  As the afternoon passed, however,
Nichols called my attention to Devereux, who
was acting strangely again.  For a while he
would lean against the lee rail, talking rapidly to
himself; suddenly he would leave that off and take
to pacing the deck in short, quick turns, rubbing
his hands together.  His eyes, it was to be
noticed, kept watching the island, now less than
four miles away.  His face worked with nervous
energy.  His whole air was one of suppressed
excitement, mingled with a certain quiet elation.

"He's using that Polynesian dialect!" Nichols
exclaimed in a worried whisper  "What can we
do with him?  We must pass the island"

"Can't you stop there long enough to set him
ashore—convince him that it isn't his island?" I
suggested.

Nichols considered soberly, then shook his
head.  "It wouldn't work" said he  "First
place, the currents are bad, there's no harbour or
village, and no anchorage, so far as I'm aware.
Second place, would anything convince him?
Even if there was once a real island, mightn't this
one, in his present condition, look as good as the
next to him?  Suppose he were to insist on a
hunt for the inhabitants?  We'd have to bring
him away in the end—and that might only prolong
the agony"

"I guess you're right, Nichols; but what's the
alternative?"

"Tack ship, and stand away till night" he
answered without hesitation  "Slip through the
passage under cover of darkness.  Trust to luck
that he'll change the mood again tomorrow, and
forget what he saw this afternoon.  We can get
him to sleep somehow—drug him if necessary"

"But he'll make a row at once, when you tack ship"

"I suppose so.  We'll have to play him at his
own game"

It seemed the better plan, and Nichols acted
on it immediately.  Devereux, lost in his own
sphere of unreality, didn't discover that the ship
was coming about until the island began to change
its position along the rail.  He watched it a
moment, looked up to see the sails flat aback, then
turned in alarm and ran toward the stern.

"What are you doing?" he cried  "You can
make the anchorage on this tack.  The cove lies
just round that first point"

"I know" said Nichols easily  "But it's
getting late, and I am afraid of the reefs.  The
channel is narrow, the wind's dying, the currents
can't be trusted around that entrance.  I'm going
to stand off and on all night, and wait for the
morning"

"Nonsense!" urged Devereux  "We could
easily make it!  Why, Nichols, I know that
channel like a book.  There's plenty of daylight
left...."

"Sorry, old fellow, but I just don't dare try
it" said Nichols decisively, throwing into the
words all the power of his normality  "You must
remember that I have the ship on my hands"

Devereux regarded him sourly, in a sort of
hostile dejection.  His case throughout was
marked by a singular docility, as if all things
assumed an illogical aspect to him, and were to
be met by circumlocutory methods.  "Well, I
suppose your word is law" he allowed  "But
its damned hard on me.  I've waited a good many
years, Nichols, for this night"  Without deigning
to discuss the matter further, he went off
down the companion like a sulky child.  Following
him a few moments later to reconnoitre, I
found the door of his stateroom tightly closed.

He didn't appear at the supper table; as the
evening passed it seemed evident that he wasn't
coming out again.  We began to have hope of
getting through the night without another painful
scene.  When I looked into his room after supper
and found him sound asleep in the bunk, it
seemed too good to be true.  Nichols at once
tacked ship again, and we stood back toward
Sibutu Passage.

Our plan for slipping through under cover of
the darkness, however, had failed to reckon with
the moonlight; that both of us had forgotten it
is a good indication of the state of our minds.
For the night, when it settled down, was positively
radiant.  A great soft moon hung high in the
heavens, flooding the sea with a subdued glare,
and revealing every detail of the land as we came
abreast of the point of the island shortly after
midnight.  Sleep was out of the question.
Nichols, of course, had to navigate the ship
through the intricate passage.  Thus it became
my duty to run below every little while, keeping
a watch on Devereux's door.  But no sound or
movement came from the closed room.

We had already forged past the main point of
the island, which lay abaft the lee beam, less than
half a mile distant, when I started on this errand
for the last time.  Going down the companion,
I was struck by an uneasy feeling, and found
myself hurrying through the entry.  When I
reached the cabin, Devereux's door stood open,
a black hole in the dim light of the swinging lamp
above the chart table.  A glance into the room
showed me that he was no longer in the bunk.
I ran to the forward cabin door, but seeing no one
out there, turned and jumped up the after
companion on the dead run.

"Have you seen Mr Devereux come on
deck?" I cried to the helmsman.

"No, sir"

Nichols, at the stern rail, had heard my question,
and ran forward to meet me.  "Isn't he in
his room?" he asked.

"No.  I can't find him anywhere in the cabin.
Must have gone up the forward companion"

Together we hurried forward along the weather
alley.  Reaching the corner of the house, where
the main deck opened before us, we made out two
men standing to leeward of the mainmast,
apparently in earnest conversation.  One seemed
eager, excited; the other was evidently on the
defensive.  Devereux and the mate, we saw the
next instant.  It crossed my mind that the mate
was ignorant of the intimate details of Devereux's
malady; he wasn't the sort of fellow to take into
confidential relations.

We heard his voice, now, sharply raised, as if
in a final attempt to quell the other's insistence.

"But we aren't going to stop here, I tell you!
There's nothing to stop for, no place to
call...."

"*Not going to stop?...*" Devereux
repeated wildly.  He turned toward the rail,
holding his arms stiffly outstretched in a gesture
of utter distraction.  Who can imagine the
thoughts that leaped through his brain at that
moment, or fathom the depths of the disappointment
that suddenly crushed his already broken mind?

"Look out" cried Nichols at my elbow
"Don't let him get away!"

But it was already too late; Devereux had
heard the warning, too, and accepted it as a
challenge.  With a wild cry that seemed to
tremble among the upper sails and echo back
from the wooded heights of the island, he leaped
forward, dodging the mate, and gained the
bulwarks just abaft the fore preventor backstay.
For an instant he stood there, silhouetted against
the bright track of the moonlight, confronting
the vision that was reality—then plunged with
a magnificent abandon, and disappeared under
the silvery surface of the water.

We saw him strike out toward the island.
The ship forged ahead, carrying the moon-track
with her; before we could get out a boat, he had
vanished in the shrouded wastes astern.  We
sought for a night and a day, but could find no
trace of his body.  In that swift current setting
seaward, it was impossible that he could have
reached the land.





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.. _`SERVANT AND MASTER`:

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   SERVANT AND MASTER

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   SERVANT AND MASTER

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center large bold

   I

.. vspace:: 2

"Steward!"

"Yes, sir, Cappen"

The little old Chinaman looked up from the
brass threshold that he was polishing.  Kneeling
at the entrance to the forward cabin, with his back
toward Captain Sheldon, he peered round his
shoulder with a gnome-like movement, his hands
pausing on the brass.

Captain Sheldon laid down his book.  He
pointed an accusing forefinger at the
stateroom threshold, which the steward had just
finished.

"That's dirty, Wang.  You haven't half
polished it.  What's the matter with you lately?"

"All light, Cappen, all light.  Eye gettee old"

He shifted his pan of brick-dust, scuttled
across on his knees to the stateroom threshold,
and attacked the brass again.  With head bent
low and hands flying, he worked silently.  His
back disclosed nothing beyond the familiar
mechanical impersonality.

Captain Sheldon watched him with narrowing
eyes.  He realized that he was beginning to
"get down on" the old steward; yet to his mind
there was justice in the feeling.  Wang wasn't
so neat or careful as he used to be.  He frowned
as he noted the greasy collar of the Chinaman's
tunic.  A dirty steward!—he had always abhorred
the notion.  To his strict ideas of nautical
propriety, it meant the beginning of a ship's
disintegration.  The time was not far distant, he saw
clearly, when he would have to get rid of old Wang.

He had inherited the steward along with the
ship *Retriever* when his father died.  "Wang-ti,
His Mark" the entry had stood voyage after
voyage on the ship's articles; young John Sheldon
had grown up taking the venerable Chinaman for
granted.  He was the "old man's" trusted
servant, as much a part of the vessel as her
compass or her keel.  He took entire charge of the
ship's provisioning, as well as of the cabin
accessories.  He kept the commissary accounts, with
never a penny out of the way; his prudence and
honesty had saved the ship many a dollar.  John
often used to hear his father boast that be
wouldn't be able to go to sea without Wang-ti.

In his boyhood on shipboard, there had existed
a natural intimacy between the captain's son and
the factotum of the nautical household.  John's
mother was dead, he roamed the ship wild from
forecastle to lazaret; and Wang had guarded his
fortunes with the wise faithfulness that knows
how to keep its attentions unobserved.  The
captain had even permitted his son to sit in the
steward's room, watching him smoke a temperate
pipeful of opium after the noon dishes were done;
this was the measure of his trust in the old
Chinaman.

Indeed, John Sheldon, had he been disposed,
might have recalled a great deal that went on
in Wang's narrow room on the port side of the
forward cabin—incidents fraught with deep
importance to boyhood.  The room was a place
of retreat, a zone of freedom.  It made little
difference whether Wang were there or not, the two
understood each other, conversed only in
monosyllables, and the Chinaman apparently took
no interest in what the boy did.  In return, the
boy throughout this period never so much as
made an inquiry into Wang's life; that matter,
too, was taken for granted.  Many an afternoon
he would lie for hours on the clean, hard bed,
his head buried in a book, while the steward sat
beside him on a three-legged wooden stool,
sewing or figuring his accounts, neither of them
speaking a word or glancing at the other.  The
click of the stone as the Chinaman mixed his ink,
the rustle of the pages, and the faint creak of the
wooden finish in the cabin, would mingle with the
fainter sounds aloft and along decks as the vessel
slipped quietly through the water.

But this was long ago, before life had opened,
before days of responsibility and authority had
overlaid youthful sentiment with a hard veneer
of efficiency.  The door of that room had closed
on John Sheldon for the last time when he left
the ship in New York, a boy of thirteen, to spend
a few years at home in school; he was not to
share another hour with Wang until the final
hour.  When next he joined the *Retriever's*
company, it was in the capacity of a rousing
young second mate of seventeen, broad
shouldered and full of confidence, believing that
his place in life depended on strength and
self-assertion.  He picked quarrels with the crew
largely for the sake of fighting; he was
aggressive and overbearing, as befitted the type of
commanding officer that appealed to his
imagination.  In him, real ability was combined with a
physical prowess beyond the ordinary; he failed
to meet the reverses that teach men of lesser
combative powers a much-needed lesson, and the
years conspired to develop the arbitrary side of
his character.  As an instance of this unfortunate
tendency, he had allowed himself, after rising to
the position of first mate on the *Retriever*, to
quarrel with his father over some trifling matter
of discipline; so that at the end of the voyage
he had quitted the deck on which he had been
brought up, and had shipped away in another vessel.

It was on the voyage immediately following
this incident that his father had died suddenly at
sea, half way across the Indian Ocean on the
passage home.  John Sheldon had arrived in
New York from the West Coast almost in
company with the *Retriever*, brought in by the
mate who had taken his place.  The first news
he heard was that his father had been buried at
sea.  The ship was owned in the family; it
seemed natural, in view of this stroke of destiny,
that he should have her as his first command.
The officers left, he took possession of the cabin
and the quarterdeck that had been his father's
province for so many years; and Wang continued
his duties in the forward cabin as if nothing had
happened.  The Chinaman had nursed Captain
Sheldon when he took to his bed, had found him
dying the next morning, had heard his last words,
and had laid out his body for burial.

Six years had passed since then.  John Sheldon
was a dashing young shipmaster of twenty-seven;
and now Wang was failing.  No doubt about it.
The dishes weren't clean any longer; a greasy
knife annoyed Captain Sheldon almost as much
as an insult.  Lately, he had begun to notice a
heavy, musty smell as he passed by the pantry
door.  A dirty steward!—it wasn't to be
supported, not on his ship, at any rate.

The Chinaman finished the brasses, gathered
up his pan and rags, and started for the forward
cabin.  Captain Sheldon laid down his book
again.

"Steward, have you got a home?"

"Oh, yes, Cappen.  I got two piecee house,
Hong Kong side"

Wang paused in the doorway, turning half
round and steadying himself as the ship lurched.
His fingers left a smudge on the white paint.  As
if perceiving it, he wiped the place furtively with
the corner of his cotton tunic, only spreading
the smudge.  Captain Sheldon, watching the
manoeuvre, sniffed in disgust, and continued the
inquiry.

"Have you got a wife?"

"She dead, seven, eight year"

"Any children?"

"Oh, I got some piecee children, maybe three, four"

"For God's sake, don't you know how many
children you've got?"

"Yes, sir, Cappen.  I got four piecee, all go
'way.  Maybe some dead.  I no hear"

"Hm-m"  The captain knit his brows ponderously,
a habit he had acquired in the last few
years, and fixed a severe glance on the old
Chinaman.  "Don't you ever want to go home?"

"Oh, no, Cappen.  Why fo' I go home?  I
b'long ship side"

After waiting a moment in silence for further
questions, Wang realized that the conversation
was not to be concluded this time.  He turned
slowly and shuffled off through the forward cabin,
head bent and eyes peering hard at the floor.
Captain Sheldon did not see him stumble heavily
against the corner of the settee.

In the protection of the pantry, Wang put down
the pan of brick-dust and stood for a long time
motionless, holding the dirty rags in the other
hand, facing the window above the dresser.  He
could see the small square of light plainly, but the
rest of the room was vague.  His tiny, inanimate
figure, in the midst of the dim clutter of the room,
expressed a weary relaxation; he stood like a
man lost in vacant thought.  No one would have
suspected the feelings behind the wizened face;
Wang's countenance, as he gazed steadfastly at
the square of light, was an expressionless blank.
He seemed scarcely to breathe; the spark of life
seemed to have sunk low within him, to have
retreated in fear or impotence.  The hand holding
the rags paused rigidly, as if petrified in the
act of putting down its grimy burden.  Had
Captain Sheldon come upon him at that moment,
he would have ordered him shortly to get busy,
begin to do something.

All his thoughts, in the silence of the pantry,
were of loyalty.  That uncommunicative intimacy
of the past had been fruitful to one, at least, of the
parties to the contract.  "Young Cappen" who
as a boy had been Wang's pride and charge, was
his pride and charge still.  Had not "Old
Cappen" on his deathbed, whispered the final
order "Keep an eye on the boy, Wang.  He's
stepping high now—but the time may come when
he will need you"  But of these words, his
father's last utterance "Young Cappen" of course
knew nothing.  They remained a profound secret
between Wang and the dead.

If it were true, Wang recognized in that
unwavering gaze, that his days of usefulness were
over, he would no longer be able to discharge this
obligation.  Not that his strength was less; his
withered, cord-like sinews ached to scrub and
polish, to keep his domain in its old efficient order.
But this voyage he hadn't been able to see what
needed to be done.  He had hardly dared allow
his mind to formulate the explanation.  But now
he must face it.  He was going blind.

He comprehended fully the meaning of the
recent conversation in the after cabin.  The pain
that held him inert and motionless was half of love
and half of fear.  Perhaps, he tried to tell himself
"Young Cappen" was now safely launched on
the sea of life; perhaps he no longer had need of
an old man's service.  Yet, in the same moment
of thought, Wang knew that this was not the fact.
The knowledge filled him with a desperate
tenacity; until fate actually laid him low, he could
not submit to the turn of fortune.  Old and
wise in life, he realized that "Young Cappen's"
hardest lessons still lay ahead of him.  He must
serve as long as he was able.

That night over the supper table, Captain
Sheldon opened a biscuit; there was a dead
cockroach in it.  His knife had cut it in halves.
He threw the biscuit down in disgust.  Wang
always made the cabin bread....  Well, why
didn't the old fool take it away?  He must have
seen the incident.  Captain Sheldon knew that
he was standing a few feet away in the pantry
door.  Taking up his plate, he snapped over his
shoulder

"Steward!"

Wang was at his elbow in an instant.  The
captain thrust the biscuit into his trembling hand.

"Look at that!  Take them all away, and bring
some bread"

"Yes, sir, Cappen"  The Chinaman mumbled
incoherently, trying to cover his confusion.  His
innate sense of the etiquette of human relations,
which even after fifty years of service had not
accommodated itself to the brusque callousness of
European manners, felt bitterly outraged; no way
had been left him to save his face.  Yet other and
stronger emotions quickly submerged the insult.
The biscuit plate rattled like a castanet as he set
it down on the pantry dresser.  As he cut into a
new loaf of bread, he shook his head slowly from
side to side, like an animal in pain, stopping in the
midst of the operation to bend above the offending
biscuit and examine it closely.  He loosened the
cockroach with the point of the bread knife; it fell
to the plate, a dark spot on the white china.
Under his breath he heaved a staccato sigh
"Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah"

Captain Sheldon found himself unable to forget
this trivial incident; he kept brooding over it all
the evening.  At breakfast next morning it came
to his mind again, and followed him intermittently
throughout the day—a day of petty mishaps and
annoyances, one of those days when everything
aboard the vessel seemed to be going wrong, when
even the best efforts of officers and men to please
him resulted in misfortune, and the simplest words
rubbed him the wrong way.  Captain Sheldon was
nearing the end of a long and tedious passage, with
nerves and temper badly frayed.

Coming below an hour after dinner, in hope to
find a little peace, he met the heavy odour of
opium smoke floating through the cabin.  The
door into the forward cabin had been left open.
He strode out angrily; the steward's door was
open, too.  Glancing into the stateroom, he saw
the old Chinaman stretched on the bed, staring
with glassy eyes at the ceiling, the pipe slipping
from his fingers.  Thin wisps of opium smoke
curled up from the bowl and drifted out into the
cabin.

Captain Sheldon's patience snapped suddenly.
By God, this was too much!  First, bugs in the
bread; and now ... the lazy old swine, lying
there in an opium dream, too indolent even to
close the door!  The ship's discipline was going
plumb to hell.  His authority was becoming a
joke.  A dirty steward!  By God, he wouldn't
stand it any longer.

"Steward!  Steward!  Wake up, there!"

"What, Cappen?"

By a violent effort, Wang pulled himself out of
the delicious stupor and sat up on the edge of the
bunk.  The drug had not fully overcome him; in
a long lifetime, he had never exceeded the
moderate daily pipeful that would put him to sleep
for only half an hour.

"Steward, I can't permit this any longer.
You've left your door open, and stunk up the
whole cabin with the damned stuff"

"I s'pose close him, Cappen.  Maybe wind
swing him open"

"You didn't close it!  You don't finish anything,
now-a-days.  It's got to stop, I tell you.  I
can see what the trouble is.  This devilish opium
is getting the best of you.  It's got to stop—and
the best way to stop, is to begin now....  Give
me all the opium you've got"

"Yes, sir, Cappen"

The import of the captain's words brought the
old Chinaman to his senses with a rush.  He got
up unsteadily, went to his chest, and began
fumbling in the lower corner.  Soon he brought out a
number of small square packages done up in
Chinese paper.

"Cappen, what you do with him?"

Captain Sheldon snatched the packages from
the steward's hand.

"I'm going to throw it all overboard!  If you've
got any more of the stuff hidden away, you're not
to smoke it—do you understand?  I won't have
such a mess in my cabin"

"Cappen, no can do!"

Wang was panting; a shrill note of anguish
came into his voice.  He reached out a trembling
hand toward the precious drug.

"Yes, you can, and you will.  It's nothing but
a nasty, degenerate habit.  You're too old for such
things.  It's making you dirty and careless.
Brace up, now—show that you're good for
something.  You used to be the best steward in the
fleet.  I'm only trying to help you out.  If things
were to go on like this much longer, I'd have to
find a new steward in Hong Kong"

Captain Sheldon, struggling to regain control of
himself after the outburst of temper, stamped off
through the after cabin.  Wang heard him go up
the companion.  He sat down again on the edge
of the bunk, a crumpled heap, inert and silent, his
eyes dulled by a fear beyond any he had yet
known.  For fifty years he had smoked daily that
tiny pipeful of opium.  With all that life had
brought him, could he summon strength for this
new and terrible ordeal?





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   II

.. vspace:: 2

Fire, like the rain, falls on the just and the
unjust alike, and eats up a tall ship at sea as readily
as it guts a splendid castle.  They were half way
across from Luzon to the China coast, only a few
hundred miles from Hong Kong and the end of
the passage, when the blaze was discovered in the
fore hold, already well under way.  Quickly it
became unmanageable.  Through a day and a
night of frantic effort the whole ship's company
fought the flames, retreating aft inch by inch while
destruction followed them relentlessly under decks.
In the gleam of a dawn striking across a smooth
sea and lighting up the pale faces gathered on the
top of the after house, it became apparent that the
ship was doomed.

Daylight found them in the boats, standing off
to watch the last lurid scene.  The ship burned
fiercely throughout the forenoon.  At midday,
under a blistering sun, her bows seemed suddenly
to crumple and dissolve; surrounded by a cloud
of steam, she settled forward with a loud hissing
noise, and slowly vanished under the waters of the
China Sea.

Captain Sheldon, sitting upright in the stern of
the long-boat, watched the scene with set jaw and
snapping eyes.  It was his first disaster, the first
time he had met destiny coming the other way.  A
fierce anger, like the fire he had just been fighting,
ran in his blood.  He was beside himself.  It
seemed inconceivable that there was no way to
bring his ship back out of the deep; that the very
means of authority had vanished, that he was
powerless, that the event was sealed for all time.
He wanted to strike out blindly, hit something,
crush something.

Well he knew that if any blame attached to the
matter, it rested on him alone.  For some occult
reason, as it now seemed, the mate a few days
before had broached the subject of fire, in
conversation at the supper table.  Not that fire was to
be expected; no one ever had heard of it with such
a cargo.  Why had the mate chosen that day, of
all others, when the captain had lost his patience
with old Wang, to talk about fire throughout the
supper period, to follow him on deck with the
subject in the evening?  The talk had only
aroused the perversity of his own opposition.
The mate, waxing eloquent and imaginative, had
at length succeeded in frightening himself; had
wanted to take off the fore hatch in the dog watch,
just to look into the hold.  Had he done so then,
the fire would probably have been discovered in
season to overcome it.  But Captain Sheldon,
sarcastic and bristling with arbitrariness, had
flatly commanded him to leave the fore hatch
alone.

Well, no use in crying over spilt milk.  The
ship was gone.

"Give way!" he shouted across the water to the
mate's boat  "Keep along with me.  We'll strike
in for the coast, and follow it down"

All the afternoon they rowed silently in the
broiling heat and mirror-like calm.  The coast of
China came in sight, a range of high blue-grey
mountains far inland.  Nearer at hand, a group of
outlying islands appeared on the horizon.
Captain Sheldon swung his course to the westward,
heading directly into the blinding sun that by this
time had sunk low in the western sky.

In the extreme bow of the longboat sat the old
steward, gazing straight ahead with unseeing eyes.
His head was uncovered; the sun beat down on
him without effect.  He made no movement,
uttered no sound.  Alone and helpless, he
suffered the throes of the most desperate struggle
that human consciousness affords—the struggle of
the will against the call of a body habituated to
opium.

In the latter part of the afternoon they sighted
a big Chinese junk, close inshore against the
islands.  A light breeze had begun to ruffle the
water.  On the impulse of the moment, Captain
Sheldon decided to board the junk and have
himself carried to Hong Kong under sail.  The idea
caught him and suited his fancy; he couldn't bear
to think of arriving in port in open boats.
Instructions were shouted to the mate's boat, the
head of the longboat was again swung around, and
a course was laid to intercept the brown-sailed
native craft under the lee of the land.

All this passed unnoticed by the silent figure in
the bow, wandering blindly through a grim vale of
endeavour.  As time went on, however, Wang
seemed to realize that a change had taken place in
the plan of their progress.  The sun no longer
shone full in his face.  He glanced up dully,
caught a vague sight of the junk, now close aboard
and standing, to his veiled eyes, like a dark blot
on the clear rim of the horizon; then pulled himself
hastily together and made a low inquiry of the man
at the bow oar.  The answer seemed to galvanize
his tortured body into action.  He began to
scramble aft under the moving oars.

"Here, what's the trouble forward?"  Captain
Sheldon tried to make out the cause of the
commotion.

"Wang wants to come aft, sir"

"What for?  Shove him into the bottom of the boat"

"He says he must see you, sir"

"Oh, the devil ... Well, let him come.  He
needn't hold up the boat for that"

Many hands helped the old Chinaman aft.

Muttering rapidly to himself, he sank into a place
beside the captain.

"What's that you say?" demanded Captain
Sheldon  "What are you trying to hatch up now?"

Wang made a vague beckoning gesture in the
captain's face.  Behind all that floated wildly
through his mind, stood the fixed thought that he
must not shame "Young Cappen" by openly
imparting information.

"Are you sick or crazy?" demanded Captain
Sheldon again, bending above the maundering old
man.

"Cappen, junk he no good!" whispered Wang
feverishly  "No can do, Cappen!  Must go 'way,
chop-chop.  Night come soon.  Maybe no see"

Captain Sheldon gave a loud laugh.  He spoke
for all to hear.

"What damned nonsense have you got into
your head now?"

"No, sir, Cappen.  Look-see!"  Wang grasped
the other's arm with frantic strength, pulling him
down  "You no savvy him, Cappen.  Killee
quick, no good!  You no wanchee him.  Go
Hong Kong side, chop-chop.  Night come, maybe
can do.  Cappen, I savvy plenty what for!"

"Oh, shut up, you raving old idiot!" cried
Captain Sheldon, roughly.

At this inopportune moment the mate, ranging
alongside in his boat, offered a suggestion.  They
were closing in with the junk now; a row of yellow
faces peered over the side toward them, watching
with narrow bright eyes every movement of the
approaching boats.

"Captain Sheldon, I don't like the looks of that
crowd" said the mate nervously  "Hadn't we
better sheer off, sir?"

"No, certainly not!" shouted the angry
captain.  "I suppose I'm still in charge here, even
if the ship is gone.  Do you think I haven't any
judgment?  By God, between a timid mate and a
crazy steward....  Give way, boys, there's
nothing to be afraid of!"

The breeze had by this time died away, the
junk was scarcely moving.  A moment later their
oars rattled against the side.  Captain Sheldon
scrambled aboard.  He gave a rapid glance along
the low maindeck, but saw nothing to arouse his
suspicion.  A man, evidently the captain of the
craft, was advancing toward him; the crew were
crowding around to overhear the conversation.
But all this was only natural.  An ordinary
trading junk, of course; heaven alone knew what
all these native craft really were doing.  After
a moment's scrutiny, he dismissed from his mind
any thought that may secretly have been aroused
by Wang's warning and the mate's unfortunate
remark.

"You losee ship—ha?"  The captain of the
junk accosted him in good pidgin English.

"Yes—she burned this morning.  I want you
to take me to Hong Kong"

Within half an hour the bargain had been
struck, and they were comfortably established on
the new deck.  The breeze had freshened, the
junk's head had been put about, the two ship's
boats trailed astern in single file at the end of a
long line.  The *Retriever's* company had
partaken of a Chinese supper; many of them were
spending the last hour of daylight in examining
the queer craft, passing remarks on her strange
nautical points, while the native crew watched
their movements with furtive gaze.

Captain Sheldon paced to and fro on the high
poop deck, chewing the end of a cigar and
ruminating on the unaccountable turns of fortune.  The
adventure of boarding the junk had for a time
broken the savage current of his thoughts; but
now, with the affair settled and night closing in,
the mood of anger and bitterness claimed him
again with redoubled intensity.

The mate ranged up beside him with a friendly
air.  He felt the need of a reconciliation.

"You'll be interested to hear, Captain, that
old Wang has found a pipeful of opium"

"The devil you say!  I wondered where the
old rascal had disappeared to.  How do you
know?"

"He's been hanging around the Chinese crew,
sir, ever since we came aboard.  I went through
their quarters down below forward a while ago,
and there he lay in one of their bunks, dead to
the world, with the pipe across his chest"

"The useless old sot!" exclaimed Captain
Sheldon  "I had made up my mind to get rid of
him this time, anyway.  You know he has been
in the family, so to speak.  But I don't like the
idea of his going off with his native gang.
Combined with the opium business, it looks suspicious.
You'd better keep an eye on him.  He's got a
grudge against me, you know, since I took away
his stuff"

"I guess they'll all bear watching, sir"

"Oh, nonsense!  There isn't the slightest
cause for alarm.  It's perfectly evident that this
craft is a peaceful trader, and we could handle
the whole gang of 'em if they began to make
trouble.  They won't, though, never fear; a
Chinaman is too big a coward.  This captain
seems to be quite an intelligent fellow; I've just
been having a yarn with him.  He has given up
his room to me; well, not much of a room, nothing
but a bunk and a door, but such as it is, it's all
he has.  Funny quarters they have down below,
like a labyrinth of passages, all leading nowhere.

The mate laughed.  "Funny enough forward,
too; a damned stinking hole, if you ask me, sir"

While they were talking on the poop, Wang
appeared on deck forward, went to the weather
rail and sniffed a deep breath of the land breeze.
He had had an hour's opium sleep—an hour of
heaven, an hour of life again.  Now he could
command his faculties.  Blindness was no
hindrance to work in the dark; was even an
advantage, since for many months now he had
been accustomed to feeling and groping his way.
Fate had been good to him, at the last.  Now he
possessed the strength to do what he would have
to do.

The familiar voices of the mate and the
captain came to his ears, but he did not glance
in their direction.  The least move on his part
to give information would have been his last.
He had heard enough already to know that the
death of the whole ship's company that night was
being actively planned, for the sake of the boats
and the mysterious tin box that Captain Sheldon
carried.





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   III

.. vspace:: 2

In spite of physical exhaustion, it was nearly
midnight before Captain Sheldon left the deck
and crawled into the narrow den under the
poop-deck that had been given up to him by the
Chinese captain.  He could not get to sleep for
a long while.  He was taking his loss very hard;
that inflexible, proud disposition would almost
have met death sooner than admit an error.  At
length, however, he fell into a light and uneasy
slumber.

He was awakened some time later by a light
touch on the arm—a touch that started him from
sleep without alarming him into action.  A voice
whispered softly in his ear

"Cappen!  Cappen!  This b'long Wang.
No makee speakee"  A firm hand was laid over
his mouth.

In the pitchy darkness of the close room,
Captain Sheldon could see absolutely nothing.
Listening intently, he heard stealthy movements
outside the door.  On deck there was utter
silence.  He became aware instinctively that the
junk was no longer moving, that the wind had gone.

He lay perfectly still.  The suddenness of the
occasion had brought an unaccountable conflict of
impulses and emotions.  He felt that an alarming
crisis was in the air.  Along with this feeling
came another, strange enough at such a time—a
sense of confidence in the old steward.  He had
immediately recognized the voice in his ear.
Why hadn't he jumped out of bed?  Why wasn't
he lying there in momentary expectation of a
knife in the ribs—why didn't he throw himself
aside to avoid it?  He could not understand his
own immobility; yet he remained quiet.  Something
in the old Chinaman's whisper held him in
its command.  Pride had succumbed to intrinsic
authority.

The rapid whisper began again, panting and insistent.

"Cappen, you come now.  Mus' come quick.
I savvy how can do.  Maybe got time.  S'pose
stay here, finishee chop-chop"  The hand
was removed from his mouth, as if
conscious that discretion had sufficiently been
imposed.

"What has happened, Wang?" whispered the
agitated captain.

"Makee killee, all samee I know"

"Where's the mate?  Where's the crew?"

"All go, Cappen"  Again the hand came
over his mouth  "You come quick.  Bym'by,
no can do"

Captain Sheldon flung the steward's arm aside
and sat up wildly.  "Good God, let me go,
Wang!  I must go out...."

"Cappen, make no bobbery"

"Where's my revolver?"  The captain was
hunting distractedly through the bed.

"He go, too"  The whisper took on a
despairing tone.  "Cappen, s'pose you gotee
match?"

"Yes"

"Makee one light"

Captain Sheldon found the box and struck a
match.  The tiny illumination filled the narrow
cabin.  As the flame brightened, Wang rolled
over on the floor, disclosing one hand held against
his left breast, a hand holding a bloody wad of
tunic against a hidden wound.  A sop of blood
on the floor marked the spot where he had been
lying.

The match burned out.  Again came the painful
whisper.

"Maybe can do now.  Bym'by, no can do"

"My God, Wang!  You're wounded!  How
can we get out?  I'll carry you"

"No, sir, Cappen.  I savvy way.  You feelee
here, Cappen"

The steward was already fumbling with his
free hand at a ringbolt in the floor.  He guided
the captain's arm to it.  Captain Sheldon grasped
the ringbolt, pulled up a trap-door that seemed
to lead into the hold.  Letting himself over the
edge, his feet found a deck not far below.  He
stood upright in the opening, and lifted Wang
bodily to the lower level.  The old Chinaman
struggled to be put down.

"Wang, keep still—let me carry you"

"No, sir, Cappen.  Walkee-walkee, can do.
You no savvy way"

Stooping and keeping an arm half around him,
Captain Sheldon followed Wang through a
shallow lazaret.  It led forward into the open
hold.  They passed beneath a hatch, where Wang
drew aside in the deeper shadow, listening.  Not
a sound came from overhead.  Again they stole
forward.  The wounded man held on indomitably,
bearing his pain in a silence that seemed
almost supernatural, as if unknown to the other
he had been rendered invulnerable by a magic
spell.  Beyond the hatch they entered a narrow
passage-way, and came out suddenly into the
junk's forecastle, the quarters of the Chinese
crew.  A ladder led to another open hatch in the
deck above.

As they reached the foot of the ladder, a
fearful yelling suddenly broke out toward the stern,
a sound of savage anger.  Naked feet pattered
on the deck overhead going aft.  Wang grasped
the captain's arm.

"S'pose breakee in door, no findee.  One
minute have got!  Boat stand off, waitee!  Go
quickee, Cappen, jump ovelboa'!"

Captain Sheldon heard him with a shock of
incredulity.  "The boats are standing off?  The
crew haven't been killed?"

"No, sir, Cappen.  All hand savee!  You go now"

He felt the old man sag in his arms.

"Wang, I can't leave you here!"

"Why for, Cappen?  Wang no good.
Quickee!  Makee jump!"

The voice broke; the frail body crumpled and
slipped to the floor.

Gathering all his strength, Captain Sheldon
slung the old steward's unconscious form over his
shoulder and swarmed up the ladder.  As he
gained the deck, a tall figure dashed between him
and the rail; other figures were racing through
the waist of the junk.  An angry chatter broke
out at the foot of the ladder up which he had just
come.

Holding Wang to one side, he struck out
heavily at the man who blocked his path, felling
him to the deck.  Darkness and surprise saved
the day for him; their quarry had appeared like a
whirlwind in their very midst.  The next instant
Captain Sheldon had gained the rail, and jumped
clear of the junk's side.  The two bodies made a
loud splash that echoed through the calmness of
the night.  As he came to the surface, desperately
striking away from the junk and trying to keep
Wang's head above water, he heard a shout a
little distance off in the darkness, and the rattle
of oars as the boats sprang into action.





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   IV

.. vspace:: 2

The longboat was the first to reach him.  They
pulled him in with his burden still in his arms.
The mate, appearing beside them in the other
boat, gave vent to his anxiety.

"Good God, Captain Sheldon, I thought you
were done for!  Why didn't you come, sir?
Wang gave me your orders; we hauled up the
boats very quietly as you said, and got into them,
while he kept the Chinamen busy forward with
talk.  He said you would come, sir; but we were
discovered, and I had to sheer off.  I was afraid
they'd sink the boats, sir, before we could do
anything.  I didn't know what weapons they had.
I was just planning an attack, sir.  Then I
thought I saw them stab old Wang...."

"I've got Wang" said Captain Sheldon
solemnly  "They did stab him.  Those weren't
my orders—they were his.  And he's the only
one to pay the price!"  The young captain was
beginning to face a harder lesson than the mere
loss of a vessel.

"I don't understand, sir.  Wasn't it the right
thing to do?"  The mate was completely puzzled
by this new development.

"Yes, yes, it was the right thing to do!" cried
Captain Sheldon impatiently  "He was right,
and I was wrong.  Now leave me alone"

He bent above the shrunken form of the old
steward.  Wang's eyelids fluttered; he was
slowly regaining consciousness.

"Wang, why didn't you come and tell me, in
time to save all this?"

The Chinaman's eyes regarded him with a stare
of mingled surprise and affection, a stare that
somehow suggested a wise and quiet amusement.

"I tellee you, Cappen.  You no savvy.
S'pose no savvy, no can do.  Mus' wait, makee
savvy."

It was a terrible condemnation.  Captain
Sheldon ground his teeth at the bitter truth of it.
His own obstinacy, his own evil!  Nothing that
Wang could have said, before the thing had
happened, would possibly have changed his mind.
He had committed himself to error.  The old
servant had been forced to save them single-handed,
to retrieve his master's failure with his
own life.

Wang was muttering, as he neared the end.
He was about to join "Old Cappen"  With a
good report and a clean record.  No one could
have known the depth of the calm that had come
to that aged heart.  Even the awful pain of the
wound had stopped, under the shock of the cool
water.  He seemed to be drifting off into an
eternal opium dream.

"What is it, Wang?  Can I do anything for you?"

"No, sir, Cappen.  Bym'by, finishee"

He lay quiet for a moment, then plucked at
the other's sleeve.

"Old Cappen say, boy step high.  Look out!
Maybe more-better stop, look-see"

Captain Sheldon buried his face in his hand.
Had the words come with lesser force, they would
have infuriated him; had the advice been given
as advice, it would have defeated its own ends.
But now it came with the authority of death,
sealed with the final service it came with the
meaning of life, and could not be denied.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`RESCUE AT SEA`:

.. class:: center x-large bold

   RESCUE AT SEA

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   RESCUE AT SEA

.. vspace:: 2

When an Arctic blizzard strikes the Atlantic
Coast without warning, the coal laden schooner
that puts to sea trusting in an uncertain
Providence catches it off to the northward of Cape Cod
or down along the Jersey shore; and you read in
your morning paper how some steamer reached
her in the nick of time, and rescued her frozen
crew as she was on the point of going down.

But this was not always the way of it; a
mechanical age has completely forgotten the day
when steam was an innovation on the sea, when
sailing ships were the accepted mode of travel and
transportation, and when the details of rescue
breathed a more romantic story.  It was not so
many years ago that steamers themselves were
heavily rigged, relying to a large extent on their
canvas when the wind was favourable.  Then
the lanes of the sea were crowded with handsome
square-rigged sailing vessels; and your morning
paper reported more often how sail had lent a
hand to steam, than steam to sail.

But let me tell it in the captain's own words.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



I was coming home that time from Liverpool
to New York in the ship *Pactolus*, a moderate
clipper of the early seventies.  A regular run, it
was; voyage after voyage I'd been the rounds from
New York with general cargo to San Francisco,
from San Francisco with wheat to Liverpool,
thence home in ballast, less than a year for the
complete circuit.  A famous course, the course
that had called into being the extreme clipper
ship, and the one on which her best and most
astonishing records had been made.

So we were flying light, in a great hurry to
swing across the Western Ocean; for my owners
had cabled that the cargo was ready and the ship
badly needed.  A spell of dirty weather had
followed us ever since leaving Liverpool; it had
kept me on deck night and day, but I wasn't
complaining so long as the wind hung on our tail.
At length, however, the easterly spell seemed to
have blown itself out, and a change of weather
was imminent.  Nightfall of the day that brought
us abreast of the Banks of Newfoundland closed
in with threatening signs.  I kept the deck till
midnight, saw the wind shift into the sout'ard, but
at last decided that we weren't to catch a blow
that night.  It was early autumn, a season when
storms in the Atlantic aren't always dependable.
Soon after the watch was changed I went below,
leaving word to be called in case things took a turn.

At four o'clock in the morning, when they
changed the watch again, the mate stepped below
and rapped at the cabin door.  I came out of my
bunk all-standing, thinking at once of a change
of weather and trying to feel it in the angle of
the deck.

"What's up, Mr Ridley?" I called  "Is it
breezing on from the southeast?"

"No, sir" he answered through the door
"But there's a strange light on the weather bow,
sir, a long way off.  I wish you'd come up and
have a look at it.  I think it must be a ship afire"

I dressed immediately, and went on deck.  Off
about three points on the weather bow a big glow
lit up the heavens, like an island burning
somewhere below the horizon.  It was impossible to
estimate the distance it was away; but only one
thing could cause it, there on the broad Atlantic
with no land nearer than five hundred miles.
That thing was fire.  For it distinctly wasn't a
natural phenomenon; all those hard violet rays
that characterize electrical disturbances were
lacking, and in their place were the warm tones of
smoke and flame, reflected brightly in the
low-hanging sky.

I hauled the ship up as close to the wind as
possible, trimmed the yards carefully, and found
that I could just fetch the light of the conflagration
by jamming her hard.  Before this, we had been
running free, with the wind a couple of points
abaft the beam.  Almost as soon as we brought
her to the wind, it began to breeze on in little
gusts; the delayed southeaster, I realized, was at
last rapping at the door.  The skysails were
already furled, and under ordinary conditions I
should now have taken in the royals; but I kept
them set and let her go.  She was a smart vessel
on the wind; the more sail she carried, up to a
certain point, the better she liked it and the higher
she would point.  She heeled a little harder as
she felt the squalls, gave a lift and a lunge, then
found her pace and settled to it, heading directly
for the lurid glow in the western, sky.

Within an hour we were able to make out the
tops of flame above the horizon, and saw that there
must be a big vessel afire.  The flames flickered,
appearing and vanishing behind the rim of the
ocean, as if the world had caught ablaze and was
trying to touch off the sky.  A wild sight, almost
supernatural; it sent a chill through our hearts,
and the whole ship's company were terribly
excited.  I thought of trying to set the skysails,
but my better judgment prevailed.  It wouldn't do
to carry anything aloft at such a time.  In the
freshening breeze the *Pactolus* had all the canvas
she wanted, and was making an excellent run of
it, as if she realized that time might be a matter of
life and death.

The burning ship, when the mate first called
me, must have been about thirty-five miles away.
At half past six we had her well in view.  She
looked like an enormous torch dropped on a black
and angry ocean; solid flames mounted hundreds
of feet in air, illuminating a wide arc of the western
horizon.  Long before we reached her, the fire
lighted our own decks with a wild glare and
painted our sails a hideous red.

At seven o'clock, just as dawn was beginning to
break, we passed a hundred yards to windward of
her, took up a favourable position a short distance
beyond, and swung our main yard.  She was a
large three-masted bark-rigged steamer, a
passenger vessel, I saw with increasing alarm.
Her main and mizzen masts had already been
burned away, the middle section of her hull was
red-hot like a stove, and the sheet of solid flame
that we'd been watching for hours rose above her
with a steady appalling roar, as if a great bellows
were blowing under her keel.

It had been apparent to us from the first that
nobody could be left aboard—nobody left alive,
that is.  I felt certain, however, that if they had
managed to get away in the boats, they'd be clinging
to the vicinity of the disaster, in the knowledge
that she would attract everything afloat through a
radius of fifty miles or more.  Almost immediately,
this notion was confirmed; we sighted a bright
light on the water just astern of the steamer, then
another, and in a few minutes three flare-ups were
burning in as many boats and as many directions.
Nothing for us to do but keep our mainyard aback
and let them row to us.  Thus fifteen or twenty
minutes passed, while I was on tenterhooks over
the ship's situation.

At length, after a desperate struggle, they
dragged one by one under our lee.  The mate
had charge of getting the people aboard.  Men in
the main channels passed a bow and stern line to
each boat, others fended them off with boat-hooks,
still others helped the castaways over the rail.  It
was a lucky chance that we reached them when we
did; the three boats were badly overloaded, half
full of water, the wind by this time was breezing
on sharply, and the sea making up minute by
minute.  They wouldn't have been able to keep
themselves afloat another hour.

The captain's boat was the first to come
alongside.  I saw them pass up a woman with a
year-old baby, then an invalid man.  Next came
another woman, who proved to be the stewardess
of the steamer; she was carrying a heavy parcel
done up in a tablecloth, that rattled and jangled
like a bag of doubloons.  In an overloaded boat,
in half a gale of wind, she had salvaged the ship's
tableware!  The rest of the crowd were indiscriminate;
except for the women, of whom there
weren't many, I couldn't tell passengers from
crew.  As I stood watching at the break of the
poop, a man with a long beard and a blanket
wrapped around him came up to me.  He seemed
half dazed; he was carrying in his hand a small
hatchet, the blade stained with blood.

"What the devil are you doing with that
thing?" I demanded.

"I killed the ox, sir" he answered wildly—it
came over me in a flash that he must be the cook.
"I couldn't leave him there to burn"

The captain was the last man from that boat to
come over the side.  I shook his hand, but had no
time just then for conversation; a fact that he
recognized at a glance, drawing a little way aft
along the weather alley and leaving me alone.
For everything had to be done at once, you
know; these people saved, and my own ship
looked after.  We were in a ticklish position.
With main yard aback, and every squall heavier
than the last, we might easily get stern-way on
and that would never do.  I felt pretty confident
of my gear aloft, but if anything carried away to
hinder the handling of the sails, we should find
ourselves in a pretty kettle of fish.  Above all, I
kept a sharp eye on the relative position of the
burning steamer.  Aback as we were, with so
much canvas spread, we must, I thought, be
drifting steadily down toward her; and it would
be the end of us to run afoul of that inferno, or
even to fall to leeward of her.  Watching closely,
I soon made out that we held our distance from
the craft, or rather, that she held her distance
from us; incredible as it seemed, she was drifting
as fast as we were.  I turned to her captain,
calling his attention to this mystery.

"Yes, I noticed it" said he  "It seems to me
that the sheet of flame must in some way be acting
like an enormous sail.  I can think of no other
explanation"

Neither could I—and I believe that he was
right.  She had been barque-rigged, as I said,
and the foremast with its heavy yards, still
standing, kept her head three or four points off the wind,
so that she lay in the position of running free; her
sides, too, were high, caught a lot of wind, and
gave her headway.  But the sheet of flame must
have helped her progress.  For here we were with
a ship flying light, and sufficient canvas spread to
drive us to leeward at a rate of four or five knots
an hour, even with the main yard holding her dead.

Too much canvas, in fact; the wind had begun
to come with a new weight and no time afforded
for proper seamanship.  No time.  We had taken
in the royals before we reached the steamer; had
clewed them up, but been obliged to leave them
hanging, we'd ranged past her so rapidly.  As we
backed the main yard, we had let all three of the
topgallant yards run down, and hauled down the
flying jib.  All these light sails were threshing and
pounding aloft, while the men who should have
furled them were busy saving life in the lee
channels; the jib was slatting itself to pieces on
the end of the jibboom.  At that very moment,
under ordinary conditions, we should have been
housed down under reefed upper topsails.

The captain of the steamer had been waiting for
me to find a free moment.  Now he pulled up
beside me.

"My name is Potter, Captain Clark" said he
"I just heard your mate call you by name.  It's
needless to say anything, sir, about what you are
doing for us"

"Yes" I answered "save that for the coffee.
We haven't got through the soup yet"

He gave a short laugh.  "Speaking of grub,
Captain, how about fresh water?  We haven't
much in the boats, and we're adding a good many
to your ship's company"

"I've water enough to last a hundred men for a
month" I told him  "Water enough for washing,
and all purposes"  The iron tank below the main-deck,
five thousand gallons, had just been filled in
Liverpool.

He looked at me a little incredulously.
"Thank God!" said he  "I've been worrying about
that ever since I came aboard.  Your American
ships go well provided for"

The third boat had then come alongside.  "Is
this your whole outfit, Captain Potter?" I asked.

"Good God, no!" he cried "There's another
boat somewhere—if it hasn't gone down"

"We sighted only three.  But we'll find it for
you, all in due time" I reassured him.

"It's the second mate's boat" said he  "The
poor fellow was half blind from fighting the fire,
but he insisted that he could take charge of a boat.
He couldn't have lost her—he was no more heavily
loaded than we were.  I expect he's been left
somewhere to windward, Captain; we have drifted
away from him.  You'd hardly believe it, but we
had tough work, rowing our strongest, to keep up
with the drift of the vessel.  My orders were to
keep her in company as long as she burned"

"Well, if your second mate is to windward, we
may have difficulty in reaching him" I pointed out
"You see how it is, sir; this will be a living gale
inside of an hour.  But we will do everything
possible.  Wait till it grows a little lighter.  In
the meantime, what about these boats of yours?"

"I'm done with them, Captain" he answered
"You can do what you like"

There were two big steel lifeboats, and a smaller
Whitehall boat.  "I'll swing the lifeboats aboard,
then, and let the other go" said I  "We may
have a fire of our own before we reach New York;
and my boats would barely accommodate my own
ship's company.  Mr. Ridley, rig a preventor lift
on the lee main yard-arm, and hoist those two big
boats aboard"

My mate, I'm sorry to say, had lost his head in
the excitement and confusion.  A fine old man, an
excellent seaman, came from down Deer Island
way; but he had outlived his usefulness, as many
of us do.  He was running fore and aft the ship,
accomplishing nothing, and chiefly whining about
his sails being slat to pieces.

Just as I gave the order to hoist in the boats,
the third group of castaways, in charge of the
steamer's boatswain, were coming over the rail.
These men were mostly from the forecastle; for
she had been heavily sparred, crossed a couple of
royal yards, and carried fourteen men before the
mast to handle her sails.  The boatswain was an
impudent little Londoner, every inch a sailor, and
one of your old-fashioned chanty-men.  He caught
my eye from the maindeck, and whipped out his
whistle.

"Shall I tyke the order, Captain?" he roared
through the din.

"Go ahead!" I told him, waving my hand.
Old Ridley hadn't heard me, anyway.

"Aloft there, men!" cried the boatswain with a
swagger, giving a long blow on his whistle
"Here's a bloomin' deck under yer feet again, an'
Di-vy Jones'll wyt a while longer.  D'ye hear the
Old Man's orders?  Preventor lift on the lee
main yard-arm, there, and hoist in the bloomin'
boats.  Lively now, lend a hand, my lads, an'
show 'em what ye knows"

They sprang up the ratlines like monkeys;
heaven knows, a tarry rope must have felt good in
their hands again!  In a jiffy they had rigged the
lift, and got a sling under the first boat.  A few
moments later, as the boat rose slowly across the
rail, I heard the little Cockney's voice aloft, raised
in a hauling chanty:

   |  "Oh, Bony was a war-ri-or,
   |    A-*way*!  Ay-*yah!*
   |  A war-ri-or, a ter-ri-or,
   |    Jean Fran-swar!"

His men came in loudly on the chorus; their
voices gave me a turn, to think of the vicissitudes
of fortune.  For they had been snatched from
certain death, and they knew it already.  As it
happened, that tall fire in mid-ocean was not
reported by anyone else; we were the only ship
in all those waters to sight and come up with it.
And in less than an hour after we had taken the
last man aboard, we were stripped to three lower
topsails, hove-to in a howling gale.

Full daylight had come while they were hoisting
in the boats.  We still lay with the main yard
aback, to windward of the burning steamer; forty
minutes, perhaps, had passed since we'd come into
the wind.  In a few minutes more we should be
ready to get under way—and no sign yet of the
fourth boat with her load of frightened humanity.

I caught a young scamp running by, a boy from
home that I'd had for the round voyage.  "Here,
you young rascal, jump aloft and see if you can
pick up another boat anywhere" said I  "She's
likely to be to windward.  Hustle, now!  You've
been nothing but trouble all the voyage; now earn
your salt"  I knew that he had the sharpest pair
of eyes aboard.

He was up the mainmast in a flash, slipped past
the slatting topgallant-sail, and reached the
sky-sail yard.  In a few minutes he sang out

"I see a boat to leeward, sir!"

"Where away?"

"Just abeam, beyond the steamer"

I feared that his imagination had run away with
him, so sent the second mate into the mizzen
cross-trees with a pair of binoculars.  He reported a
boat sure enough to leeward—a boat with a tiny
sail set.

"That accounts for it!" exclaimed Captain
Potter  "I forgot that leg-o'-mutton sail in the
second mate's boat.  But why has he used it, to
run away from the steamer, when I ordered him to
stand by her?"

"I'm afraid it means that he is hard pressed" I
answered  "He's had to run for it, in order to
keep afloat.  We must fill away at once.  I hope
we can manage to reach him in time"

While we were swinging the main yard, Captain
Potter stood on the after house, alone beside the
mizzen mast, watching his burning vessel.  She
was a splendid steamer, only a few years old.  He
watched her soberly.  I left him to himself.
After we had got the *Pactolus* off before the wind,
with things around decks a little under control, he
said good-bye to his command, as it were, turned
aft, and took his place beside me on the quarterdeck.

"Can you make out the boat yet from the deck?"

"She's dead ahead.  They have seen her from
the forecastle"

We looked aloft.  Yards were groaning, gear
was cracking; under full upper-topsails the ship
swept down the wind like a racehorse, fairly
leaping through the water.  She must have been a
splendid sight to those poor fellows in the second
mate's boat, waiting for her at the door of death.

"You have a fine ship, sir" said Captain
Potter.  "I've never seen a ship handled so
smartly, in such a breeze and under so much sail.
You must avail yourself of any help that my crew
can give you.  My officers are thorough seamen,
brought up under sail"

"Thank you, sir—I see that they are" I
answered  "But after we have things straightened
around once more, I think we won't need any
assistance"  My pride was up, you know, now
that the affair was beginning to turn out so well.
She was a British steamer, and these officers, fine
young Englishmen of the best breed, ambitious
and well-trained in the school of sailing ships,
were watching me and my vessel with critical eyes.
I'd show them what it meant to be picked up by a
Yankee clipper.

"I make this passage every year, Captain" I
went on "and always carry extra men for it.
After leaving my wheat in Liverpool, I have to get
back to New York in the quickest possible time, to
load again for California.  It's much like your
steamer with her schedule.  With extra men I'm
able to carry on sail a little longer, handle her in
ordinary weather with one watch, and save the
wear and tear on the crew.  The wear and tear
comes mostly on me.  I'll have your crew to fall
back on now, and will be able to hold my sail still
longer.  A sort of reserve force, you know, ready
to jump in an emergency"

He glanced over the stern-rail, where the
steamer lay blazing in our wake.  In falling off
we had swung a wide circle around her, to escape
the path of the sparks as they whirled down the
wind; and now had left her a couple of miles
astern.

"She burns well, Captain" I observed  "That's
the hottest fire I ever felt, or ever wanted to
feel"

He gave a bitter laugh.  "They loaded her
especially for it" said he  "Cotton goods, and
butter, and bacon, and hams"  As if not caring
to look at her any longer, he turned forward,
mounted the steps to the top of the house, and
took up his old position by the mizzen mast.

In twenty minutes after filling away, we had
reached the second mate's boat.  A look through
the binoculars showed me that things were indeed
in a bad way with them; there wasn't a moment to
lose.  The boat seemed momentarily on the point
of filling, while half a dozen men along her sides
baled frantically with buckets and other utensils.
A man in the stern sheets was waving wildly at us,
as if to communicate some information.  I had a
notion what it was; they were trying to tell us that
they wouldn't be able to bring the boat into the
wind.  I saw that plainly.  Captain Potter,
coming hurriedly to the after end of the house,
evidently saw it, too.

"How will you pick them up, Captain?" he
asked nervously.

"I think we can do it without difficulty" I
answered, as if such measures were a matter of
course.  In point of fact, I had never executed the
manoeuvre that seemed necessary in this pass, and
had never heard of its being tried by anyone else.
As we approached the boat, I hauled the ship well
out on their starboard quarter, passed them several
hundred yards to port and left them a quarter of a
mile astern; then swung the ship across their
course, came up to leeward of them with a shock
and a crash, backed the main yard, lost headway,
and stopped in exactly the right position for them
to fetch our stern as they ran before the wind.  In
other words, I cut a half circle around them and
placed myself athwart their hawse, in the way of an
old-fashioned naval manoeuvre.

We looked down on them from the quarter-deck
as they raced toward us.  Several men seemed
disabled, water was washing nearly up to her
thwarts, but a few oars were poised in readiness,
showing intelligence and discipline somewhere
aboard.  In a moment she was on the point of our
weather quarter, sweeping past our stern.

"Round the stern!" shouted Captain Potter
and I together  "Get under the lee, and jump for
the main channels!"

But they had already seized their last and only
opportunity.  A smooth patch on the water
favoured them; they made the turn nicely, let go
their sail, and succeeded in paddling up under our
quarter.

"Jump while it's smooth!" I cried  "Let the
boat go"

My crew had by this time become expert
channelsmen.  One of them caught the painter,
others used their boathooks; and the last load of
castaways from the steamer tumbled over the side,
more dead than alive, but alive enough to know
that they'd been saved.  The painter was cast off,
the boat drifted clear of the quarter, filled,
overturned, and was whirled away on the top of a
breaking sea.  Safely on our decks, watching this
symbol of elemental destruction, stood every soul
of the steamer's company.

"I really must congratulate you again!" said
Captain Potter heartily  "That was a feat of
seamanship, sir.  You seem to be able to put your
ship through the eye of a needle"

"She handles nicely, doesn't she?" I agreed.
As a matter of fact, I felt like congratulating
myself; I won't deny that I had a feeling of pride,
as well as a prayer of thankfulness for our universal
good luck.  Things had gone without a hitch, at a
time when a hitch might easily have called for
payment in human life.

So here we were, with sixty people landed
suddenly on our decks; with whole topsails set,
and a gale of wind turned loose upon us.  I'd
been obliged to abandon the upper sails, while we
were saving the first three boatloads; they had
slat themselves to shreds before we could find time
to furl them.  The chief thing now was to get the
upper topsails in.  I made up my mind that we
would shorten sail with our own crew.  The crowd
from the steamer were completely fagged out;
they had been fighting fire and the Atlantic for
twenty-four hours.  I told them to go below, in
the after cabin or the forward house, anywhere,
have a smoke, and rest wherever they could find
a chance to lie down; and instructed my steward
to pass round a supply of dry tobacco.

When they had faded away and the decks were
cleared for action, Captain Potter approached me
again.  "I hardly dare ask about provisions" he
began  "I'm sorry to tell you that we brought
very little.  The fire cleaned out our galley and
store-rooms first of all, and we were barely able
to save a meal or two of biscuits and canned grub"

I thought a minute, making a rough estimate.
"We can furnish provisions to go with the water,
Captain" I told him.

"What!—without allowance?" he cried.

"Without allowance" said I  "I never liked
the idea of putting people on an allowance; it's
too much like starving yourself by degrees.  I can
guarantee you provisions to last us for a month or
six weeks, three good meals a day; and we can't
in common fortune be out that long.  The best
of provisions, I think you'll find"

"How does it happen, sir?" he demanded.

"It doesn't happen.  We're always prepared
for just such an emergency.  More than once I've
met a ship short of provisions, and furnished her
with a boatload or two.  You can't anticipate what
is liable to happen; but a lazaret full of beef
and flour and potatoes fills in almost anywhere"

He shook his head in amazement.  "I've often
heard it said that American ships were remarkably
well-found" he observed  "But I shouldn't have
believed a yarn like this from my best friend.
Let's see, we've brought you three times your
ordinary ship's company; and you have provisions
and water for all hands to last longer than twice
your usual run to New York.  Are you positive, sir?"

"Positive.  Give yourself no further worry on
that score"

"Back there in the boats" said Captain Potter
"I was thinking that, if God was good to us, we
might be picked up by some Slavonian bark, with
only macaroni enough aboard to take him to the
Banks of Newfoundland, where he'd depend on
catching a few codfish, and water or not according
as it rained.  Then it would have been a case of
Halifax or St. Johns, or else a transfer in open
boats to another vessel, with more danger to my
passengers and crew.  This, Captain, seems like
a pleasant dream"

There was no necessity for telling him how it
really did happen.  In the line for which I was
sailing, a captain had the fitting out of his own
vessel, and was given practically a free hand.  I'd
found that there were many things that I could
buy cheaper and better in Liverpool; and I always
laid in a supply of these for the round trip.
Things like hams, and bacon, and tobacco; yes,
tobacco, the best American plug at a shilling a
pound, the same article that I would have had to
pay fifty cents for in New York.  At Liverpool,
too, we could get the finest French and Irish
potatoes; though they wouldn't keep for the round
trip, I used to lay in enough to last me to New
York and down to the Line on the outward
passage.  We had a ton and a half of potatoes on
board that trip, when we sailed from Liverpool;
we reached New York with half a ton of them left,
so you can judge how short of provisions we were.
Then there were certain things, especially flour,
and canned fruits, vegetables and preserves of
all kinds, which I could buy cheapest and best in
San Francisco; I'd supplied the ship there with
these articles, for the round trip, and a good half of
the stock still remained.  Butter—we had barrels
of it.  In fact, we could actually have fed all hands
of them for two or three months without allowance;
but I didn't want to spoil the effect by overdoing
it.  I let them continue to think that this
was the accepted fashion on board of an American
ship crossing the Western Ocean.

That afternoon, when the *Pactolus* was at last
shortened down, the empty bolt-ropes unbent from
the upper yards, and the decks cleared for heavy
weather, the question of accommodations had to
be disposed of.  We started with the after cabin;
the woman with her baby had one spare stateroom,
the invalid man another.  To Captain Potter I
assigned a third spare stateroom, so that he could
be by himself.  My own room, with double bunk,
sofa, and mattresses on the floor, I gave up to the
rest of the women passengers; the stewardess
slept on the sofa in the after cabin, and generally
looked after the ladies' quarters.

This accounted for all the spare staterooms we
had.  For myself, I took the upper bunk in the
mate's room, at the same time moving the second
mate to this room, where he and the mate, having
alternate watches, could share the same bunk.
This left the second mate's room free for the
accommodation of the steamer's three deck
officers, with two single bunks and a knock-down
of pillows and blankets on the floor.  In the
steward's room also there were two berths; my
steward kept the lower, the first steward of the
steamer had the upper, and her second steward
another knock-down on the floor.

In the forward house there were the galley,
carpenter's shop, and sail room, all narrow rooms
running from side to side of the house, each with
two doors and two windows; forward of the sail
room were the two forecastles, separated from each
other by a fore-and-aft partition in the middle of
the house, and opening forward on either side of
the fore hatch.  I moved all of my crew into one
forecastle, since my only watch would be sleeping
at a time; and put the steamer's crew into the
vacated one, where bunks and bed clothes were
ready for them to use.  The engine room crowd
were assigned to the carpenter's shop; the rest of
the men-folk, a miscellaneous lot, first, second,
and third class passengers all together, were
given the sail room.

We had on board quantities of second-hand
burlap and old sails, rolls and rolls of them, to be
put down under the cargo of wheat, enough to
line the whole inside of the ship when she was
loaded; these were rolled up in the 'tween-decks
after we discharged at Liverpool, to be overhauled
and repaired on the passage across to New York,
before being stowed away for use again in San
Francisco.  They were just what we needed for
beds and coverings.  In the two narrow rooms in
the forward house, spread plenty thick on the
floors, they made the finest possible knock-downs;
although they were packed in pretty tight, the
men couldn't have been more comfortable in their
own berths.

Captain Potter wanted me to put them below
the hatches.  We were ballasted with salt in the
lower hold, but the 'tween-decks were clean and
empty; she was in splendid trim for sailing, dry
as a bone in heavy weather.  Undoubtedly, the
'tween-decks would have made a comfortable
place for the men, with plenty of room all around.
But my objection was a perfectly practical one.
Every one of these men had saved his pipe; in
many cases it seemed to be about all that he had
saved.  Pipes had been going in every mouth
since they'd come aboard.  And the sight of that
burning steamer was seared into my eyes.  It
gave me the shivers merely to think of sending
all those pipes to sit on a bed of sail-cloth below
the hatches.  Some kind of a fire was only to be
expected; but a fire in the forward house would
be the lesser of two evils.

With all my care, I made a serious mistake in
these arrangements; a mistake due to my ignorance
of steamship etiquette.  I assigned the chief
engineer to a place forward with the engine-room
crowd, and paid him no further attention.  The
status of engineers wasn't in my category; I
thought of them, when I thought of them at all,
as belonging to some indefinite lower region, and
lumped them all together.  But I was careful to
make the proper distinction with the deck officers,
for this was a matter within my own province.

Captain Potter gave me a broad hint that
afternoon.  "My chief engineer is a fine man, sir" he
said  "There has never been friction between us.
He is highly thought of by the office"

I received the news as something in the way of
conversation; wasn't much interested just then in
the affairs of his vessel.  What did I know of
steamers?  I'd been brought up under sail; and
a steamer to me was nothing but a new-fangled
usurper of the ocean, a thing to be sneered at, and
to be outsailed when possible.  It wasn't till some
years afterwards, I remember, that I learned by
accident that the chief engineer of a steamer was
next in position to her master, above all of the
deck officers.  The knowledge was a shock to me;
I recalled Captain Potter's remark, realized what
I'd done, and saw how nice they had been about
it.  Even to-day, it annoys me to think of the
mistake, and of the comment it must have caused.

We lived like kings; I gave free access to the
provisions, fore and aft.  The first steward of
the steamer said "I'll wait at table"  Our
forward cabin table, hauled out to its full length,
would seat fourteen people; he had to set it up
three times for each meal, for all the passengers
ate aft.  The second steward said "I'll wash
dishes"  So he stood all day in the pantry,
digging away at an endless job; for of course there
weren't dishes enough to go around three whacks.
The cook joined my cook and steward in the
galley forward; among them they kept us fed.
Made up a barrel of flour into bread every day,
for one item.  By chance, I overheard the
steamer's first officer say one evening after supper,
that her fare at its best hadn't equalled ours.

They were frank in admiration of the ship; of
her equipment, her sailing qualities, her cleverness,
dryness, and general seaworthiness; I could
see that they were a little envious, too, of the way
we handled her.  We had a crew of Liverpool
toughs, hard men, but experienced sailors, bred
to American ships and their ways.  They had
caught the spirit of the game, filled the steamer's
crew full of tall yarns in the dog-watch, and
performed feats of seamanship for them on deck
whenever the opportunity offered.  Once the
excitement of that first day was over, old Ridley's
superb knowledge of his position emerged again.
My second officer was one of your tall, fiery
down-east youths, twenty-one years old, smart as a steel
trap and able as a whirlwind.

We put the *Pactolus* through her paces, I can
assure you; carried sail till all was blue.  Luck
sent us strong and favourable winds.  In the dead
of night I would often see the steamer's officers,
dressed and wandering around the decks, or
gathered in a group and holding low conversation;
the ship would be scuppers under, the deck
at a dangerous angle, masts and yards buckling
and groaning, a spread of motionless canvas rising
aloft as hard as a board; the whole hull
humming like a top, as she raced through the water at
a fourteen-knot clip.  It made them nervous;
they wanted to give me their advice, but being
young and proud, they wouldn't do it.  I suppose
they called me a reckless Yankee.  But I knew
my ship and trusted in my gear, knew exactly
what I could do with them; and didn't carry away
so much as a rope-yarn throughout the passage.

Only once did I have to call on our visitors for
help.  Closing in with Nantucket, we had run
full-tilt into another southerly wind.  It wasn't
more than half a gale, and I had kept her running
under a heavy press of canvas.  After twelve
hours had gone by, I knew that soon the wind
would jump into the westward in a flurry, as all
southeasters do in the end.  Feeling secure, with
extra men to draw on in case I got caught aback,
I held my sail and course till the last gun was
fired.  We were running with the wind on the
port beam, under three whole topsails, whole
mainsail and foresail, spanker, mizzen, main and
foretopmast staysails, and inner jib.

And before I knew it, I had really got caught.
The wind jumped without warning, jumped quick
and hard; one minute it was our old half-gale from
the southward, the next minute it was a howling
westerly squall.  Before we could possibly pay
off to the northward, the ship was flat aback.
Then it was "All hands on deck to shorten sail!"
with a vengeance, the vessel lying down to port,
the masts cracking, the shrouds slackening with
an ominous sag, and things in general looking
badly for a while.  The officers of the steamer
ran on deck feather white, feeling the ship go over
to windward; her first mate ranged up close beside
me, and kept glancing backward and forward from
my face to the masts, as if he expected them to go
over the side any minute and wanted to watch me
when they fell.

As soon as I'd seen that we were caught aback,
I had let the three upper topsails come down with
a run.  My crew were aloft now on fore, main and
mizzen, furling these sails, which I couldn't afford
to lose.  Neither could I afford to lose the
mainsail or break the main yard; but at that moment
there were no men to spare from the topsails,
where the second mate was working like a demon;
while old Ridley had all that he could do on deck,
letting go gear and attending to the three topsail
yards.  With every fresh puff of westerly wind,
I saw the main yard bending like a bow; it was a
big spar, over ninety feet long.  The mainsail
was a new piece of canvas, and probably would
hold; but the tack or the weather brace might
carry away under the unequal strain, and then the
yard was gone.

"You can blow your whistle, sir" I said to the
young officer who had been watching me so closely—they
all carried whistles in their pockets, to call
their men with.  "Take charge of that mainsail,
if you please, and get it off her as quickly as you can"

He needed no second invitation; was off in a
flash, blowing a loud toot as he ran forward.  I
heard the call answered by another whistle in the
waist; that little Cockney boatswain had been
getting anxious, too.  Out came the steamer's
crew with a rush from their side of the forward
house, where they'd fallen into the habit of loafing
regardless of what went on outside.  Clew-garnets
and buntlines were manned with seamanlike
precision, the tack was started, the sheet was eased
away, and in a remarkably short time they had
smothered the big sail and hauled it up to the yard.

But they didn't intend to leave the job half
finished.  "Aloft, boys, and out on the yard!"
cried the mate.  A moment later he sprang up
the ratlines himself, to superintend the job; the
little Cockney took the weather yardarm, piping a
song as he perched above the water; they furled
the sail smartly, reaching the deck along with our
own men from the topsail yard.

Captain Potter, who had come on deck in the
interval, was watching his men with manifest
pride.  I was glad that it happened so, and took
especial pains to compliment the chief officer
before all hands.  He blushed like a school girl,
now that the emergency was over.  The little
Cockney, however, couldn't resist a stroke of
impudence.

"We thanks ye, Captain" he sang out loudly
"That's the w'y we does it aboard of a bloomin'
lime-juicer"

The sally brought a roar from the whole main-deck,
in which I'd have been a stick if I hadn't
joined.

"What do you do with such saucy rascals?" I
called to Captain Potter  "Shall I keel-haul him,
or serve him an extra pint of grog?"

"Myke it a pint o' grog all around, Ol' Bo-ri-i"
giggled the boatswain, dodging around the mast.

"I would if I could, my men" I laughed
"But as you know, we have no grog or lime-juice
in a Yankee ship.  Beef and biscuit, work and
wages, is what we sail on.  You need no grog, if
that's a sample of the way you feel"  And I
pointed aloft to the neatly furled mainsail.

With stern way on, we had by this time hauled
out to port, braced the yards sharp up, and caught
the wind in the foresail and three lower topsails.
Our visitors perhaps had saved us from a serious
accident; at any rate, they'd demonstrated their
ability.  It gave them something to brag about
on their own account; while the effect on my crew
was only to intensify the spirit of rivalry.  In fact,
the incident brought a great improvement to the
tone of the ship; for I had noticed during the last
couple of days a growing animosity between the
steamer's forecastle and ours, due to the forced
inactivity of the former.

On the following day the westerly breeze blew
itself out; in the early afternoon a steamer
overtook us, bound in for New York, passing about
four miles to windward.  We were then off to the
southward of Nantucket, having come about on
the starboard tack during the night.  I set a string
of signals "Come closer.  Have important news
to communicate"  The steamer made them out,
changed her course, and ran down within hailing
distance.  She was a German vessel, one of the
first oil-tankers to cross the Atlantic, they told me
in New York; her name was the *Energie*.  Her
captain couldn't speak English fluently; but he
had picked up a New York pilot somewhere on
the Banks, a man who'd been carried to sea by
another vessel in a storm.  He was the fellow who
talked to me from the bridge, although I didn't
know it at the time.

"Steamer ahoy!" I hailed; "The British
steamer *Santiago* has burned at sea.  I have on
board her entire ship's company, and am taking
them to New York.  No one was lost, either
passengers or crew.  Please report us all well"

They held a consultation over this news on the
bridge of the *Energie*.  Soon I was hailed in a
familiar South Street twang.

"Captain, don't you want to be relieved of your
guests?  You must be short of provisions"

I heard Captain Potter chuckle behind me.

"There's your chance to get to New York ahead
of us" said I, turning to him.  It was a smooth
day on the water, with little prospect of wind.

"Do you want to be rid of us, Captain?" he asked.

"No, sir" said I emphatically.

"Then we'll stay aboard, if you don't mind,
and reach New York when you do"

I hailed the steamer again.  "We need no
assistance, thank you.  Please report us all well,
and inform the steamship company"

The *Energie* went on about her business, and
soon passed out of sight ahead.  Late in the
afternoon a fresh breeze sprang up unexpectedly
from a little to the eastward of north; a breeze
that was destined to carry us all the way to
harbour.  We braced the yards around to starboard,
set every rag of sail, and laid a course for
Sandy Hook with the wind a couple of points free
on the starboard quarter.

Throughout the next day we were running
along the southern shore of Long Island, in
smooth water, the breeze still fresh and steady,
every stitch of canvas drawing, and the ship at
her best point for sailing, logging some fifteen
knots an hour.  The days of the extreme clipper
ship had long since gone by, at the time I'm telling
of; but many a moderate clipper of the later years,
with fuller cargo carrying capacity, but retaining
many of the fine lines of the greyhound of the
seas, and embodying all the best of their experience,
could reel off a day's run that might astonish
the nautical historian.  I'll never forget that
wonderful reach in the *Pactolus* under the lee of
the Long Island shore.  She was a trim and lofty
vessel, lean and graceful on the water; a cloud of
canvas aloft, she heeled at a constant angle, as if
moving through a picture, while the long curl of
a wave rolled out steadily from her lee quarter, as
she swept like a bird over the smooth sea.

At three in the afternoon, a steamer was
reported dead ahead, some ten or a dozen miles
away.  Within half an hour, it was apparent that
we were crawling up on her; and in an hour's time,
we could estimate that we had overhauled her by
something like five miles.  I had a strong
suspicion that she was our old friend, the *Energie*,
but said nothing about it just then.  Every one
aboard was excited over the race, the *Santiago's*
company no less so than my own.  In fact, the
young British officers could hardly contain
themselves, wouldn't for anything have seen us fail to
overtake her, kept running to me and suggesting
this and that, or asking if the wind would hold.

Another hour of this terrific sailing brought
us near enough to read her name.  And she was
the *Energie*, sure enough.  I thought that handsome
young first officer of the *Santiago* was going
to fling his arms around me, when I took my eye
from the long glass and told them the news.

"Hurrah for the *Pactolus*!" he shouted,
running forward and waving both his hands  "By
Gad, they won't have the chance to report us this
time!  We'll do our own reporting"

"She must be foul—although these freighters
don't pretend to any speed" observed Captain
Potter, a little concerned, I thought, for the
reputation of steam.

"She's making about ten knots" said I
"And we are logging fifteen steady, and sixteen
by spurts, when the breeze puffs a little"

"You don't tell me!" he exclaimed, glancing
over the side.  Then he looked up at the clumsy
old steamer, ploughing along a quarter of a mile
to leeward.  "By Jove, Captain, we're passing
her as if she were standing still!"

Indeed, we were; the spectacle, from a romantic
point of view, was an inspiring one, although it
must have been a jealous sight for the German
captain.  But now we were drawing in toward
the approaches to New York harbour; our race
had been with daylight as well as with steam.
For I'd promised myself that, by hook or crook,
we would arrive that night.  I scanned the
horizon anxiously for a pilot boat—in those days
the New York pilot boats were small but
exceptionally sea-worthy two-masted schooners; and at
seven o'clock in the evening, with half an hour
of daylight still remaining, caught sight of one
standing toward us on the weather bow.  We
came together rapidly.  By this time we had left
the *Energie* a couple of miles astern.

When the pilot boat was within a mile of us, I
called Mr. Ridley and the mate of the *Santiago*,
and had a private conference with them; gave
them instructions to place all hands in position for
certain manoeuvres, but to keep the men out of
sight behind the bulwarks.  Stepping to the after
companionway, I sang out below "Captain
Potter, ask the ladies to come on deck and see
us take the pilot on board"  They hurried up in
a flutter of excitement, the captain in their wake.
A glance along the maindeck told him that
something unusual was about to happen, but he
kept his own counsel.  It's hard to educate a
taciturn Britisher to new ways, but the constant
surprise of the experience through which Captain
Potter was passing had begun to make an
impression.

The pilot boat was now running down to us
on the opposite tack, about four points on our
weather bow.  She expected us, of course, to
heave-to and wait for her.  We kept on, however,
at a racing clip, making not the slightest
movement to check our terrific progress.  To add zest
to the game, the wind puffed substantially at that
moment, sending us through the water with a rush
really magnificent.

I could see that, on board the pilot boat, they
didn't know what to make of it.  As we drew up
on them, changing the angle of their bearing, they
shifted their course little by little, letting their
craft fall off before the wind and following us
with her nose.  In another moment she stood
directly abeam of us, less than three hundred
yards away.  With a gesture of dismissal, as it
were, they hauled the schooner up again on the
port tack, prepared to stand away to sea and leave
us to our own devices.

At that instant, I waved my hand, and gave a
sharp order to the helmsman.  The men jumped
from their concealment under the bulwarks; up
went the courses like a piece of magic, down went
the helm, and ship and main yard swung together,
as if both controlled by a single turn of the wheel.
The *Pactolus* came into the wind with a bird-like
swoop, felt the main yard aback, checked her
pace, and stopped dead in her tracks; there she
lay, nodding sweetly to the slight swell, the last
rays of the setting sun striking through her sails.

A shout went up from the pilot boat.  They
fell off immediately, jibbed to the port tack, crossed
our stern waving their hands, and dropped their
skiff overboard.  In a few moments the pilot
nosed up under our lee quarter.

"Good Lord, Captain!" he cried, as he came
over the rail  "What are you running here, a
packet ship?  I haven't seen a trick like that
turned since the days of the Black Ball Line"

"I'm in a hurry to get in" I answered "and
I don't want to waste time over it.  I have a
double crew aboard to help me.  This is Captain
Potter, pilot, of the British steamship *Santiago*,
burned at sea"

Later that evening we took a towboat off the
lightship, and clewed up our sails.  I thought
I'd be extravagant and have a second tug, since
I saw another coming toward us; the wind had
suddenly shifted into the northwest, dead ahead,
and every one was anxious to get in.  A hard
enough tow it turned out, even with two boats
ahead, for the wind soon settled down in earnest
for an old-fashioned off-shore gale.  I told our
passengers to go to bed as usual; that all was
safe now, and they would wake up next morning
to find the ship at anchor.

At three o'clock in the morning we came to
off the Statue of Liberty, and dropped a hook
into the bottom.  They had passed us through
quarantine under extraordinary dispensation,
meanwhile sending word of the disaster and its
happy outcome up the bay ahead of us.  At daylight,
the *Santiago's* company hurried their biggest
tugboat alongside, stocked with emergency
provision, if you please, for they expected us to be
half starved.  Captain Potter met the representative
of his company at the rail; when they had
talked for a while in private, I broke in on them.

"Captain" said I "it would give us the
greatest pleasure if you and your ship's company
would stay on board and have a last breakfast
with us.  Permit me to extend the invitation to
this gentleman.  Tell your tug to wait for you
alongside until we're through"

"Thank you, sir—we'll do it" he answered
heartily  "Mr. Folsom, this is my good friend
Captain Clark.  He has treated us to a reception
aboard the *Pactolus* unique in the annals of the
Atlantic, as you'll be able to see for yourself
when you go below.  I'll promise you as good a
breakfast as you would find ashore"

So the tugboat with her emergency provisions
waited, while we enjoyed a hearty breakfast.  I
finished as soon as possible, however, and said
good-bye to my guests; for a tugboat from my
owners had come alongside in the meanwhile, and
I was in a hurry to get ashore.  Reaching the
deck with my papers, I found the German tanker
*Energie* churning past us, bound somewhere up
the East River.  She had already been
discovered from our forecastle; all hands lined the
bulwarks forward, laughing and jeering, waving
their caps at her.

At my appearance on the quarter-deck, a group
of three men, led by the Cockney boatswain of the
*Santiago*, detached themselves from the others
forward and met me at the break of the poop.

"Committee from the crew o' the *Santiago*,
sir" announced the boatswain  "We has to
inform you, sir, that we votes your ship is a
beauty, your officers is gentlemen, and yourself is
a man we'd like to sail with whenever you're
looking for a crew.  You've treated us like kings,
sir—and we're the boys as knows when we're
well treated.  We thanks ye, sir, from the bottom
of our hearts"

I was taken aback for a minute, not being a
ready speechmaker: "Well, boys" said I at last,
blinking back a tear of emotion "it's been a
pleasure to me to be able to make you
comfortable.  I can only answer you in the same words,
in a way we all understand: if I needed a crew,
I'd rather have you in the forecastle than any
crowd I ever saw.  You have handled yourselves
like seamen under trying circumstances.  And,
well, I'm damned glad that I came along!"

I jumped aboard the tug, then, to forestall any
further demonstration.  But as I drew away from
the ship's side, Captain Potter, with Folsom
beside him, mounted the after-house.

"Now, my lads!" he cried  "Three cheers for
Captain Clark!  And give them with a will!"

They gave them.

"Three cheers, now, for the good ship
*Pactolus*!  And when we're cast adrift again,
pray God she picks us up!"

You could hear the cheer all over the upper
harbour.  The Staten Island ferryboat, on her
way from the Battery to St. George, changed her
course and passed close beside us, to see what the
excitement was.





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   I

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It was at the time of New England's success
and prosperity on the sea that young Captain
Bradley took the ship *Viking* on her maiden
voyage.  In those days the building and sending
forth of a ship was a community enterprise.  One
sharp November morning, the seaport that had
seen her keel laid down the previous winter, had
watched her rise on the stocks through the long
days of summer, and had launched her successfully
in the early fall, turned out to bid the
*Viking* good-bye and Godspeed.  Her crew was
made up of home boys; Captain Bradley himself
had been born and reared in the town.  He had
started out before the mast at the age of fifteen;
now, at twenty-four, he had set his foot on the top
rung of the nautical ladder.  The town was proud
of him.  It was proud of all its boys; but
especially of one who had shown such steadiness
and ability as young Frank Bradley, the old man
Jabez Bradley's son.

Perhaps Captain Bradley was a little proud of
his own achievement.  He could look back over
a clean, hard record.  In his nine years of
seafaring he had not spared himself.  Obey, work,
learn, develop judgment and decision, be able to
handle any job or meet any emergency; these
principles had ruled his life, the *sine qua non* of
old-fashioned seamanship.  The reward had
come unexpectedly.  Captain Marshall, the
leading shipowner of the town, whose fortune and
influence lay behind the building of the *Viking*,
had offered him the ship that summer as she
stood on the stocks.

"I've had my eye on you for a long time,
Frank" the old man had told him  "I knew your
father before you, and you're a chip off the same
block.  I guess you're just the man for my new ship"

But young Bradley had already received too
many hard knocks, had learned too thoroughly
how to discipline himself, to be unduly puffed
up over success that came in the course of a
deserved advancement.  His real pride, from
that moment, was in his ship.  She was the
finest square-rigger that had ever been launched
in the town, a ship of eighteen hundred tons,
crossing three skysail yards.  Her lines were
those of the moderate or commercial clipper.  As
he looked up from the quarter-deck at her lofty
spars that November morning, while they waited
for the tide—at the maze of freshly tarred rigging
and new manila running gear, at the brightly
varnished yards, at the furled sails that stretched
from yardarm to yardarm like caps of snow—a
thrill of genuine sentiment coursed through his
blood.  His ship—and he loved her already.
Soon those white sails would be set to the breeze,
soon those strong, slender masts would sway
against the sky, bearing aloft their press of
flattened canvas, soon those new ropes would
snap and sing, settling into a taut network from
deck to truck and from masthead to masthead,
whose every strand would have its use and
meaning.  Soon the ship would surge beneath him—his
to control, to guide, to learn, to play upon, as
an organist brings out the tone and volume of
his instrument.  His trust, too, and his future;
at moments like this responsibility weighed with
crushing force.  The greater the chance, the
greater the danger; the greater the success, the
greater the failure if things went wrong.

"I won't fail her!" he cried in a rush of
emotion  "We're going on together, the *Viking*
and I.  By God, I'll sail her as long as she stays
afloat.  She shall be my first and last command"

Suddenly he thought of the face that would be
appearing every few minutes, on this morning of
his departure, at the southern window of a house
in town.  He could see the house plainly, a high
brick mansion facing the bay.  "It will be only
a year" he had told her the previous evening
"Then I'll be back, dear, and we can be married,
and you can go to sea with me.  No more of this
sailing and staying at home alone; it's a miserable
business"

She had looked up at him bravely.  "Yes,
Frank, I know.  But come back safely.  Think
what might happen in a year!"  It was the cry
of the sailor-woman.  She had learned it from
her mother—and from her father, who had been
lost at sea with all hands on one voyage when his
family had remained at home.

An hour later, when, with all sail set, the *Viking*
had gathered headway before the light
land-breeze, taking her first steps into the world,
Captain Bradley went to the stern-rail and gazed
back at the lessening town.  He stood there a
long while, lost in thought.  He could still make
out the familiar pattern of streets and houses.
Home.  It seemed to him as if he had always
been either leaving or returning.  His short,
quick boyhood was already half-forgotten, like a
snatch of another existence.  Five years before,
his mother had died there in the town; he had
received the news on his arrival in Singapore.
His father had vanished in a sea tragedy long
before he could remember.  No home for him
remained, either there or here; he would have to
make one.  What was this seafaring life, that he
had now asked a young girl to share?  Every day
he heard men call it a dog's life, growl that the
game wasn't worth the candle.  Perhaps so—but
she knew all about it.  She had been born in a
ship's cabin; she loved the sea.  And here was
the *Viking*, young, strong and beautiful—what
better?  A fierce determination swept over him
to *make* life worth while, even the life beyond
the horizon; to give her a worthy gift, a home
of love and happiness, all he had.  Any life could
be worth while, if full enough of love.

Glancing over his shoulder, to make sure that
no one observed him, for it would not do to give
his men the materials of a jest, he leaned across
the rail and waved his handkerchief toward the
town.  She would expect it—would be watching
with the glasses from that southern window.
Sailor women saw the last of their grief; they
didn't turn away and hide.

"I'll try to make up for the waiting, Grace" he
whispered; then swung forward resolutely, to face
the coming years.





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   II

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Autumn returned to the old seaport, and with
it the *Viking*, back from her first China voyage.
Captain Bradley was welcomed with a hearty
"well done"  The voyage had been prosperous;
the homeward run from Hong Kong had been
made in the remarkably fast time of eighty-two
days.  Hereafter the *Viking* would be a favourite
among Chinese shippers.

A month after his arrival, young Captain
Bradley was married in the high house fronting
the bay.  That night he and his wife left town
to join the ship, loading in New York for
Yokohama.

Then began ten happy years of life.  They
were the last ten years of American maritime
prosperity, the close of the sailing ship era.
Charters were plentiful; the *Viking* made money.
Captain Bradley found himself a man of means.
Without question, he invested his earnings in
ship-property; most of the transactions passed
through Captain Marshall's hands.  Why not put
his money into ships?  Ships had been his life
and the life of five generations before him, had
made him a good living, had taught him all he
knew.  Most of his friends were doing the same
thing.  Few there were in those days among the
old shipping people, who saw into the next
quarter-century, who realized the nature and
magnitude of the coming change.

One year, five thousand dollars went to build
a new house in the home town.  Every captain
built a new house, whether he used it or not.
Captain Bradley's house was occupied for the
length of one China voyage, while Mrs. Bradley
remained ashore and gave birth to a son, their
only child.  Except for this voyage, she
accompanied her husband constantly on the sea.  She
had been reared to the life of wind and wave.  In
the *Viking's* spacious and comfortable cabin, they
made their home from year to year.  Their son
passed his boyhood on ship-board.  He was the
apple of his father's eye.  Captain Bradley
invariably spoke of him as "my Frankie" with a
note of pride and affection in his voice.  Sturdy
and manly, the little boy filled the ship with the
interest and activity of childhood.

On a quiet evening in the trade winds, when
Frankie had placed his mother's deck-chair near
the weather rail and crouched beside her, perhaps
weaving for her amusement one of the strange
fancies of which his head was full, it seemed to
Captain Bradley that life had brought him all
that a man could desire.  A happy wife, a beautiful
son, a splendid ship—good times, comfortable
circumstances, a pleasant prospect: in youth he
had dared to hope for such things, but had not
expected to see the hope come true.  Now life
had given him confidence.  He would sit on the
weather bitts beside them, dreaming of the future,
of that day when their son would be grown up,
when he and his wife would retire from the sea.

But the future, in those years, after all seemed
unsubstantial; Captain Bradley believed in
enjoying the present reality.  A large share of the
money that he earned he spent.  He spent it
extravagantly, spent it with a flush hand.  In the
China ports whither all of his charters led him,
there were always a dozen or twenty American
vessels lying in the roads.  Lavish entertainment
went the round of the fleet.  "What's a little
money, more or less?" Captain Bradley was
fond of saying.  "Times are good, aren't they?
More will come"  He was for ever buying pieces
of cloisonné and rare porcelain for his empty
house at home, silks and embroideries for his
wife; things to be packed away in camphor wood
chests after she was dead.  The habit of
extravagance grew upon him; he spent more money
than he realized.

In fact, from a selfish standpoint, Captain
Bradley was a poor business man.  Seamanship
was his vocation; he understood few of the ins
and outs of a financial order founded on usury.
Its sentiment and psychology he understood not
at all; these were considerations entirely alien to
him.  To his mind, money, to be clean, had to
be straightforwardly earned.  The plain transactions
of a ship's business were all he needed to
know.  A certain sum of money put into a ship
would, if she were properly handled, yield certain
dividends: a charter at so much the lump sum,
would pay so much on the voyage.  Thus it
always had been; thus, if he ever gave the matter
a thought, he supposed it always would be.

As the flush years went by, he developed into a
typical sea captain of the old school; a man of
honour, of ideals, of simple dignity and original
thought, careless, buoyant, at times a little
reckless, a stern disciplinarian, a wise judge of human
nature, a sentimentalist at heart, a believer in the
inherent righteousness of things, a man of sincerity
and individuality.  Dishonesty, laziness, hypocrisy,
he hated as he hated crime.  Inefficient men
found him a hard taskmaster.  By nature and
training he was arrogant and imperious; the
instinct of command ran strongly in his blood.  He
spoke his mind at all times; he was equally ready
to defend his position.  His pride in his wife, in
his boy, in his ship, in everything he loved, was
enormous.  In short, he was a man singularly
adapted to the high and responsible calling of
master mariner—singularly ill-fitted for his
coming encounter with the world.





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   III

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The first stroke fell out of a clear sky.  Captain
Marshall died suddenly, leaving his business
affairs in a bad way.  For three months, the town
was in turmoil.  At the end of that time, it
became apparent that the old shipowner had involved
all of his own property, as well as that of many
others, in a series of disastrous speculations.  No
one hinted at dishonesty, but the hard fact
remained.  Ship property had greatly fallen off in
value in the last few years; this, it would seem,
had been the immediate cause of Captain Marshall's
financial stringency.  He, too, had banked
heavily on the old times.

Captain Bradley arrived that year from Hong
Kong, to find himself poorer by more than half
of his modest fortune.  All of his ready money
was gone in the wreck; what remained was a
bundle of pieces of vessels, quarters and sixteenths
and thirty-seconds.  Worst of all, the *Viking*, the
one ship that Captain Marshall had owned
outright, with the exception of the eighth share
standing in Captain Bradley's name, would have
to be sold by auction to satisfy the creditors.
In this crisis, Captain Bradley's idealism
overcame all other considerations.  "By God, I'll buy
her myself!" he cried.  His friends told him that
he was a fool; but this only heightened his
determination.  He called the creditors together,
and made them an offer.  By great exertions, he
managed to negotiate on his various ship holdings,
disposing of some at figures below their value,
mortgaging others, selling the house, and finally
raising sufficient money to carry out his word.
It took all he had; but he was glad that he
possessed enough property to do it.  When he
sailed from New York on the next voyage, he
was the sole owner of the vessel.  His confidence,
momentarily shaken by the failure of one of the
pillars of his world, had begun to return.  He
realized that times were not what they had been;
but it seemed impossible that the demand for
sailing ships would ever wholly go by.

The next few years, however, seriously
undermined his assurance.  Freights were falling
rapidly, were even becoming hard to get.  One
time he had laid her up in Hong Kong for six
months, resolving to wait for a better figure than
had been offered, and had at length been obliged
to accept a charter that barely paid the ship's way.
Steam was to blame for it all.  He began to hate
steamers with a bitter and unreasoning hatred.
They were driving the fine old sailing ships off
the sea.

Then, as suddenly as the financial crash, came
the blow from which he never fully recovered.
On the homeward passage, shortly after rounding
the Cape of Good Hope, his wife sickened and
died.  She had been ailing ever since they left
Anjer, but he had not realized the seriousness of
her condition.  They had already caught the
trades in the South Atlantic; it was hopeless to
think of putting back to Capetown.  He urged
the ship with every rag of sail, trying to reach
St. Helena in time; but the trades held light, the
elements were against him.  For three days of
nearly flat calm he paced the deck in agony, or
sat beside his wife's bunk while she talked to him
in a low voice, telling him of her love, of what to
do when she was gone; trying to make it easy
for him, for she knew that she was dying.  On
the third day, she died in his arms.  That night
his hair turned from black to white.  He came
on deck the next morning an old and broken man.
The wind continued light and uncertain, there
was no chance of reaching St. Helena in time
for the last rites; and he buried her there in the
deep sea.

That voyage, they had left their son at home
in school.  Alone now in the empty cabin,
Captain Bradley's thoughts were much of his boy.
He himself could stand it, must stand it.  But
how could he tell Frankie, his Frankie?  Night
after night he paced the narrow floor below, going
back over life, living in the past from which he
had now been definitely cut adrift.  Perhaps he
was not quite sane for the remainder of the
passage; he could never remember clearly those
weeks before his arrival.  But always, behind
every conscious thought, lay the dread of what
he would have to tell Frankie.  This he
remembered; it seemed to have been beaten into his
brain.

Then a wonderful thing happened.  He arrived
home to find that the boy they had left behind
had grown into a young man, had developed a
strong and resolute character of his own.  He
came to meet his father at the train; the news
had reached him already.  "I did all that I could,
Frankie" were Captain Bradley's first words, as
they faced each other on the gloomy platform.
His son looked at him steadily, fighting back the
tears.  "I know you did, sir"  It was the son
who put his arms around the father's shoulders;
Captain Bradley had felt a strange hesitation,
almost akin to shame or fear.  But now his heart
rose for the first time since his wife had gone.  This
was the stuff that men were made of.  His son.

They entered the house together—the old
Bradley house, where Frankie lived with his aunt
when he was at home.  Captain Bradley greeted
his sister, took off his hat and sat down heavily.
Suddenly the boy cried out and fell at his father's
feet, holding him by the knees, his whole body
shaking.

"My God, father, your hair is white!"

"Yes, yes, Frankie.  That doesn't matter.
Poor mother, poor mother!"  He leaned forward
to hold the heaving shoulders.  For a long while
they cried in each other's arms.

As the days went by, Captain Bradley found
himself depending more and more on the new
young strength.  The two were inseparable; they
seemed to meet on common ground.  Captain
Bradley was one of those men who never lose
their youthful outlook; while the boy was in
reality older than his years.

When the time came to sail on another voyage,
Frankie insisted on leaving school and going away
with his father.  For the next eighteen months
they lived together on the ship, at sea and in
foreign ports, and their intimacy grew profound.
They talked, read aloud in the evenings, studied
navigation and history, discussed the mysteries
of life and love; side by side they stood on the
quarter-deck through storm and fair weather, and
Frankie learned the lore of seamanship at the
hands of a past-master.  Gradually, Captain
Bradley got back his grip on life.  The boy had
renewed his courage.  He even began to dream
of the future again—of marriage and a career for
Frankie, no following the sea, but a safe career
ashore.

Then another long voyage, alone this time, for
Frankie had entered college to tackle his
education in earnest.  He had decided to become a
civil engineer.  This voyage was in many ways
a hard one for Captain Bradley.  Business was
poor; he had a great deal of trouble with his
crew, for only the outcasts of society could now
be induced to enter the forecastle of a sailing
ship; a succession of storms followed him, and
at last he lost a foretopmast off the coast of Luzon.
He had to face the fact that the *Viking* was
growing old; for several years he had been acutely
aware that her top-hamper needed extensive overhauling.

As for himself, he knew too well that he had
turned the corner of life.  The voyage dragged
on to its close.  He reached the Atlantic Coast
in the dead of winter.  Three weeks of threshing
around outside in the teeth of northeast
snowstorms and icy northwesters completed the
disheartenment.  But at length ship and man,
ice-bound and weary, passed in by Sandy Hook and
made a harbour once more.

The news that met Captain Bradley seemed too
heavy to be borne.  A month before his arrival,
when the *Viking* had been somewhere off the
Windward Islands, running up in the northeast
trades, his son, skating on the river beside the
college, had fallen through the ice and been
drowned.





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   IV

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After a while, Captain Bradley gathered up
the fag-ends of his life and started out in the
*Viking* on another voyage.  She was all he had
now.  A few more years went by, years of
increasing discouragement, aimless and fugitive.
Times were becoming very hard.  The day of
China charters was over; steamers monopolized
that business now.  The *Viking* became a tramp
ship, they picked up what freights they could get,
and the old ports knew them no longer.  The
vessel barely paid her way; operating expenses
were retrenched on every hand, there was no
money left for upkeep, and Captain Bradley saw
her literally falling to pieces before his eyes.  But
the old hull remained sound.

He lived a blank life; but he continued to live,
which was something.  The old days were indeed
passing, and with them the ships and the men.
Sailors were not what they used to be; business
ethics was not what it used to be.  He began to
feel as if the very fibre of mankind had changed.
Nothing seemed left but memory and the remnants
of an invincible pride.  He could not realize that
he had made what would be commonly called a
mistake, in buying the *Viking* with his last dollar.
His philosophy did not provide the materials for
such a conception.

The day came when the old *Viking* was almost
the last of her race, the only wooden full-rigged
three-masted ship to sail out of Atlantic ports.
All her lofty companions had passed away, or had
been converted into coal barges.  Her arrival in
New York was an item of news.  This was the
one substantial reward of Captain Bradley's
declining years as a ship-master; he had sailed his
ship beyond her era, he had flaunted her in the
face of a new generation.  That compact made
with the *Viking* in her maiden hour had been no
idle sentiment; it had been life's supremest
dedication, and he had kept the vow.

A few old friends remained to him, though he
had made no new ones in the latter years.  These
friends kept urging him, every voyage, to sell the
*Viking* for a coal barge while there was time,
while even this way offered for the disposal of
an outworn hull.  The coal companies were
beginning to build their own barges.  The *Viking*
would still be worth some fifteen thousand dollars
as a coal barge.  He could retire on the proceeds,
and live in modest comfort for the rest of his days.

"Never!" he invariably answered  "Do I
look like a man who needs to retire?  She shall
never be a coal barge while I live"

Yet it had to come to that; perhaps he had
long foreseen it, perhaps the vehemence of his
denial was only the face of pride set against the
inevitable.  On a certain voyage he had been
obliged to run into debt, to fit out the vessel.
The voyage netted less than nothing.  When he
returned to New York the ship was attached for
the debt.  There was no business in sight; the
bottom had at last dropped out of the shipping
world.  He did all that was possible, but he could
not raise the money; he and the *Viking* were no
longer a good risk as borrowers—their credit was
gone.  The ship was sold at auction, in equity
proceedings, and was bid in by one of the large
coal companies operating along the Atlantic Coast.
Captain Bradley, at sixty years of age, found
himself stranded on South Street without a penny in
his pocket.  The proceeds of the sale had barely
covered the debt.  But his honour, at any rate,
was clear.

"Another wreck for Snug Harbour" the word
was passed, as he stalked out of the room where
the transaction had been completed.  But they
reckoned without their host.  That afternoon the
*Viking* was towed to Erie Basin, to be stripped
for a coal barge.  At almost the same hour,
Captain Bradley disappeared from South Street.
The shipping world never saw him again.





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   V

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A tramp steamer, dirty and ill-kept about decks,
streaked with iron-rust alongside, came up the bay
from Sandy Hook and anchored off Quarantine.
She had arrived from a long and wandering
voyage.  When the health officer had left the
vessel, the captain called the second mate to the
bridge.  An old man stumbled up the steps.

"Mr. Bradley, get your things together and go
ashore with me.  I'll pay you off at once.  You
old trouble-maker, you're not going to stay aboard
the ship an hour longer"

The old mate gazed at his superior officer in
silence.  Tears of anger rose to his eyes.  He
turned away to hide them, walking to the end of
the bridge.  His cup of bitterness was running
over.  Frank Bradley, commander on the high
seas for forty years, discharged from a second
mate's billet on a tramp steamer—discharged by
an incompetent captain, because his incompetence
had been found out.  He shut his jaws grimly,
recalling the scene of two days before.  Out there
in the fog he had refused to obey the captain's
orders; had wrested the wheel from the hands of
the quartermaster, had held them both off with
threats of physical violence, while he steered the
ship himself; and thus had kept her from running
ashore on Diamond Shoal.  The captain's orders
had been completely wrong.  He had probably
said some sharp things about them; it had been
no time for mincing words.  Touch and go—but
he had saved the ship—saved the captain's
certificate, too.

He stood at the end of the bridge, staring down
at the grey water.  What should he do now?
While he struggled with himself, his eyes rose
slowly, resting on a hulk that lay at anchor close
alongside, between the steamer and the hills of
Staten Island.  For a moment he regarded her
with a dazed and absent concern, trying to fathom
the significance of half-awakened sensations.
Then, with a suddenness that stopped his throat,
his heart gave a great leap of recognition.  Neither
coal dust nor dismantlement could hide those
familiar lines.  The *Viking*, his old ship, lay
before him.

A hoarse cry escaped him.  Through the
dreadful pall of the latter years, through
bitterness, shame and inertia, burst in a blinding flood
the memory and presence of other days.  The
shock passed instantaneously, and left him utterly
changed.  Facing his old ship, he became once
more the man her master had been.  Decision and
authority returned to him, as they always did in a
crisis; for they were intrinsic, in spite of life and
destiny.

A rowboat was passing the steamer; he hailed
it sharply.  "Rowboat ahoy!  Come alongside,
and wait there for me"  He crossed the bridge
with strong steps, stood before the captain, gazed
at him steadily, until the eyes of the other fell.

"I'll leave your dirty tramp immediately, sir.
You can keep my wages—I don't want them.
Take them and buy a book on seamanship.
You'll need it the next time you get in shoal
water"

"You insolent old devil...!"

"Don't touch me!"  The old man's voice was
level and hard; his hands swung at his sides.
He advanced threateningly.  "You didn't dare
touch me at sea; don't do it now.  I..."
Speechlessness overcame him.  Too much: it
could never be put into words.  "My God!" he
murmured, turning away "I was master of a ship
before he was born"

Ten minutes later, seated in the rowboat with
all his worldly belongings stacked around him, he
directed the boatman to row him aboard the
*Viking*.  As they passed under her stern, he
looked up at the well-remembered letters.  They
were dim now; time and weather had worn off the
gilt.  An afternoon in Hong Kong harbour came
back to him; he recalled it vividly.  He had been
coming off from shore in his sampan, full of news;
the ship had been chartered for home.  Grace
would be delighted.  Approaching the ship, he
had overhauled her with a critical eye, and found
no blemish in her; then, as they rounded the
stern, had looked up at these same letters.  His
Frankie had called from the rail, running forward
to meet him at the gangway.  Time and weather—the
awful dimming of life.  He bowed his head
in his hands, and wept like a child.





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   VI

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A stroke of luck was about to befall Captain
Bradley.  When he gained the *Viking's* deck, he
found no one in command of the barge.  Four
frightened sailors gathered around him, taking him
for their new captain.  Piecing together their
incoherent stories, he learned that the captain of
the barge had been killed that morning in an
accident at the loading berth.  A hopper had
broken loose, and had brained him as he stood
beside the hatch.  The mate, a drunken rascal,
had disappeared on shore the evening before, and
the captain had not expected him to return.  The
moment the scene of the accident had been cleaned
up, they had towed the barge into the stream, in
order to free the loading berth.  There she lay,
waiting for a new set of officers to be sent off from
shore.

When he had learned this much, a strange idea
came to Captain Bradley.  It seemed a slender
chance; but a surprising energy and hope had
taken possession of him.  He got the address of
the coal company's shipping office, the place where
these men had found their jobs; left his things
aboard the *Viking*, gave the boatman two dollars
to hurry him ashore, and went at once to the
number on West Street where he had been told
to apply.  Luck followed him.  He found the
shipping office in a quandary over the *Viking's*
case; they had no waiting list of barge officers,
the tow for Boston was to be made up that
afternoon, and the barge could not be sent to sea
without someone in command.  Captain Bradley told
his story simply, showing papers that covered a
career of nearly fifty years on the sea.  His
dignified and authoritative presence bore out the tale.

"Well, Captain Bradley" said the shipping
superintendent kindly "the job is yours.  I guess
you deserve it, sir"

"Thank you"  Captain Bradley gave a wry
smile  "I think I can fulfil my duties.  I'll try to
give satisfaction, sir"

He had not told them of his own relation to the
*Viking*, fearing the injection of sentiment into a
business-like application.  That afternoon he
joined his old command, at forty dollars a month
and all found.

He would not have called it a stroke of luck in
the other days.  How incredible, then, to look
ahead, would have seemed the natural development
that time had wrought.  Could he have
foreseen the end that he was coming to, he would
have blown out his brains.  But life had
accomplished it easily and inexorably; failure had at
last ground down the keen edge of his spirit,
disappointment had rounded off the corners of his
imperative nature.  As he stepped across the rail
of the barge *Viking*, only a great and pathetic
happiness found place in his heart.  His fight
was finished.  He had kept his pride at too
terrible a cost.  Now he gave it up, freely, gladly.
Perhaps he would be allowed to die in peace,
aboard the ship that had shared his better days.

Fine old ship—life had gone hard with her, too.
The lofty masts and spreading spars had been
lopped away; nothing remained above decks but
the three lower masts.  The decks themselves
were grimy with coal dust; the woodwork had not
seen paint for years.  How well Captain Bradley
remembered her appearance, when, spick and span
from the shipyard, the best production of her day,
he had taken her on her maiden voyage.  It
seemed impossible that a whole era of such intense
human activity could so completely disappear,
carrying its lore, its lessons, its origins, its very
worth and meaning, into the oblivion of time.
An economic empire had passed away.

Dingy, battered, neglected, yet Captain Bradley
loved the old vessel—loved her all the more for
the hard knocks she had seen.  A sentiment that
he had thought to be dead reawoke in his heart.
He had not known, he had not dared to admit,
how much he had missed her.  He felt as if he
had come home.

His duties were light.  There were on the
barge four men besides himself.  He found time
to clean her up.  After every loading or
discharging, he would have the decks thoroughly swept
and washed down, and all the paintwork
scrubbed.  Later, out of his own pocket (he had
no use for money now), he bought paint and
freshened her appearance about decks; for the
coal company, knowing that she would not last
much longer, would provide nothing for
upkeep.  The cabin, the scene of so much that was
sacred to him, he scrubbed and painted with his
own hands, spending many quiet hours over the
task while the barge was towing up and down the
coast.  It was a labour of peace and love.

For a long while the matter of sails gave
Captain Bradley deep concern.  The barge was
rigged on the three lower masts with fore-and-aft
sails, to be used in an emergency, when she
had broken adrift from her tow.  Often these
sails would be set to assist her progress when the
wind was fair.  Smothered in coal dust, exposed
to sun and rain, the first suit that had been given
her as a barge was now worn out; the canvas
would hardly hold together to be hoisted.  Not
that Captain Bradley cared a pin for his own
safety; nothing would have better pleased him
than to be lost at sea aboard the *Viking*.  But
the condition offended his sense of seamanship
and responsibility.  It was an indecency to the
old ship to fail to provide her with the ordinary
weapons of battle; and there were other lives
than his involved.

At length, seeing that it was hopeless to expect
her owners to furnish the barge with a new suit
of sails, he began to save his money.  In a year's
time he had laid up enough to supply them at his
own expense.  It seemed like a touch of the
old seafaring activity to be drawing up their
specifications; he ordered thick duck and stout
bolt-ropes, for this was to be a suit of real
heavy-weather sails.  When, one afternoon under the
coal chute at Perth Amboy, he was able to stow
away this strong white canvas in the lazaret,
together with a couple of coils of first-grade
Manila for reeving off new sheets and halyards,
he felt that he could go to sea again with a clear
conscience.

That evening he sat for a long while alone in
the cabin.  The interest of looking over and
stowing away the sails had passed; he saw the
truth now, saw how things really stood.  Buying
a suit of sails for a coal barge: was it for this that
he had spent his hard apprenticeship, had learned
and practised the intricate lore of the sea?  He
could remember greater triumphs.  For two
hours of grim thought he sat with hands clenched
on the arms of the chair, facing the world's defeat
without surrender.  In his heart of heart he knew
that he had not failed.  He had kept respect and
dignity, saved his honour, been true to himself
through it all.

He sat on into the night; the storied cabin
enclosed him as if with loving arms; slowly, as
the mood of revolt wore away, his mind drifted
back into the old days.  He remembered how
his wife used to sit there beside him, on evenings
at sea, busy with her sewing; he remembered
how little Frankie used to come running in.
These things had happened so often, so naturally.
But not for a long, long time....

Gone with the era, gone with manhood and
success, gone with the further use of life's
endeavour.  The old man's head fell back against
the chair; tears streamed down his cheeks and
sank into his beard.

"What have I done?" he cried in agony.
"I cannot understand it.  What have I done?"





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   VII

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Two more years passed by, and winter came
on.  It was the hardest winter in a decade along
the Atlantic Coast.  Beginning in the latter part
of November, snowstorm after snowstorm struck
in from sea in quick succession; one of those
easterly spells that, to the mariner, seems destined
to hang on for ever.  Early in January, the wind
backed for a few days into the northwest, and
the harsh weather offered a temporary respite.
Seizing the opportunity, three heavily laden coal
barges, in tow of a powerful seagoing tugboat,
set out from Hampton Roads bound for Boston.
The old *Viking* was the last barge of the string.

The weather permitted them to get well outside
the Capes of the Chesapeake; then it changed.
Wisps of clouds gathered in the southern sky, a
heavy bank loomed just above the horizon; the
wind began to sing in the rigging with a low
moaning sound.  Captain Bradley, pacing his
quarter-deck at the tail of the tow, plainly recognised
the signs.  Another spell of easterly weather
was coming on.

They were already too far outside to think of
turning back, and too far offshore to run for Sandy
Hook.  Nothing for it but to push on toward
Vineyard Haven.  The towboat was doing her
best; a nasty head sea remained from the last
storm, and began to pick up as the wind veered
to the northward and eastward.  The barges
strained at their hawsers, pitching and rolling
incessantly.  Captain Bradley could never
accustom himself to this motion, so different from the
motion of a ship under sail.  It annoyed and
distressed him to the core of his being.  Together,
he and the *Viking* had once roamed the sea boldly,
the man striking off the course, the ship leaping
forward along it, bending to the wind, sailing free
under the sun and stars.  Now they dragged
about at the end of a hawser, engaged in a servile
traffic, trailing in the wake of steam.

Minute by minute the clouds piled up from the
southward; a grey gloom fell on the ocean.  The
wind, now settled in the northeast, rose steadily,
lifting the sea before it.  The air grew colder,
the chill of the coming storm.  The old ship
wallowed and plunged, groaning in every timber.
She was very low in the water; already green seas
were coming over her bows.  Soon the night shut
in, black as a cavern—and Gay Head light not
yet in sight.

At six o'clock Captain Bradley went below to
put on his oilskins and drink a cup of tea.
Coming on deck a little later, rigged for the storm, he
paused a moment beside the binnacle, as an officer
fresh from below always will.  In that instant,
the hawser parted.  He heard no sound, he saw
no sign; but he knew that the ship was free.
The fact was communicated to him through the
deck, through the motion of the hull.  He sprang
to the rail, and ran forward along the starboard
alleyway.  Abreast of the mainmast, he stumbled
against the mate in the darkness.

"Hawser's parted, sir!"

"I know it.  Turn out all hands, and loose the
foresail.  She's falling off to the westward—the
wrong way.  We must wear her around on the
other tack, and scratch offshore"

"They'll be back to pick us up, Captain, as
soon as they miss us"

"Not if they know their duty.  It would
endanger the other two barges; this is going to
be a bad blow.  We'll have to look out for ourselves now"

"Good Lord, sir, what can we do with this old hooker?"

"Do?—everything!  Do as I say.  Up with
that foresail, now, and be handy about it.  There
was a time when you wouldn't have called her an
old hooker!  I'll show you what she's made of"

Then it was that the labour of love which
Captain Bradley had expended on the *Viking*
bore worthy fruit.  Every block was in order,
every rope was clear and fast in its proper pin.
Unconsciously, under his training, the crew had
acquired a measure of seamanship.  They had
learned to obey orders, at any rate; had learned,
too, to respect and trust their old wind-jammer
commander.

For the first time in many years, an emergency
confronted Captain Bradley.  He faced it without
hesitation, filled with a certain fierce joy, sure of
his power and ability.  Almost before the ship
had lost her towing headway, he had decided on
his course.  He and the *Viking* had more than
once clawed off the Jersey shore in the teeth of a
northeaster.  They could do it again.  Then,
when the storm had broken, he would take her to
New York, as if they were arriving from a China voyage.

Before the little foresail, the ship wore around
sweetly, came up to the wind with her nose pointed
toward the broad Atlantic, and hung there steady
and true.  The old free motion had returned to
her deck, the old life ran along her keel.
Immediately, they set the spanker, mainsail and jib;
this was all the sail she had.  The whole area of
it would hardly have equalled her former mainsail,
dropping its solid square of canvas from an eighty
foot mainyard; but it was enough for the purpose,
and the *Viking* answered to it.  The gale had
struck; the ship heeled sharply, plunging forward
on the port tack at a three-knot gait.  She made
considerable leeway, but headed up to east-south-east.
Captain Bradley knew that if he could
drive her on this course for the next twelve hours,
they would stand a chance of clearing the danger
that lay under their lee.

Pacing once more the quarter-deck of a ship
under sail, a tempest of recollections beset the
old man's mind.  Past voyages, dangers, storms,
past conquests of the elements, thronged upon
him at the call of an awakened vocation.  Adrift,
now, in a long-pent flood of creative effort, other
memories flashed before his eyes; scenes of love
and achievement, scenes of weakness and
self-indulgence, scenes of error and wrong.  Life had
always been hard for him to live, even at its
happiest; his high spirit had ever been in arms
against itself.  He seemed to-night to be able
to remember all of it—snatches of conversations,
lights and colours, tones and meanings, touches
of hands and the unspoken messages of hearts—all
that had ruled his life and formed his character.

Through these recollections constantly
appeared the figures of his wife and child.  He
thought of them deeply, tenderly, calmly.  Once,
when they had been at sea with him, the *Viking*
had run into a cyclone off Mauritius; he recalled
his going below in the midst of it, to reassure
them.  "How is it, Frank?  Will it blow much
harder?"  "No, dear, the worst has passed"  "Oh,
Papa, aren't you afraid?"  "No, my son,
there is nothing to be afraid of in the world"
He had said those words—he laughed, now, to
remember.  God had punished him well for his
audacity.

He was surprised to find himself thinking of
these things without pain.  A change had taken
place within him, a change born of the familiar
exigency.  In some inexplicable way, he was
happy again.  A task of seamanship lay before
him; lives depended on his strength.  He was
a master mariner, in charge of his old ship—his
ship, as truly as she had been that other morning,
when, full of ambition and pride and courage, he
had looked up at her untried sails.  He felt her
surge beneath the heavy cargo, rising, flanking
the seas, flinging them off savagely, like a man
striking out from the shoulder.  He knew, he
understood—that was the way he felt about it,
too.  A couple of old hulks, living beyond their
time; but the spirit was in them still.

Unseen, surrounded by darkness, Captain
Bradley stood upright against the weather rail,
an indomitable figure, facing the storm.  The
world could crush them—never the sea and the
wind.  The sea was their home, the wind was
their brother.  This was the fight that found
them armed.





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   VIII

.. vspace:: 2

The storm increased; the air was thick with
snow, cold with the breath of Arctic winter.  In
the middle of the night, the foresail and mainsail
blew out of the bolt-ropes.  They bent and set
the heavy new sails.  Soon the spanker went,
and was replaced.  Captain Bradley was driving
the ship without mercy; for the wind was hauling
inch by inch into the east, heading them off
toward the dangerous lee shore.  The *Viking*
stood the strain; her seaworthiness had never
been put to a harder test, had never shown itself
so handsomely.  She had been built in a day
when work and honour had gone hand in hand.

The morning dawned on a wild scene.  Great
waves rushed at the ship, lifted her high in air,
broke above her bows, and stopped her progress
as if she had run against a wall.  It was high
time to heave her to.  They lowered the
mainsail, foresail and jib, and managed somehow to
get them furled.  The quarter-deck was
comparatively dry; they had no difficulty in
double-reefing the spanker.  In his specifications to the
sailmaker, Captain Bradley had insisted on a
double row of reef-point for this sail.

To this tiny patch of canvas the *Viking* rode
hove-to for the next forty-eight hours, while the
storm howled down on them from the waste of
waters.  The decks were piled with snow, the
ropes and sails were clogged with ice; slowly,
mile after mile, the ship drifted against a pitiless
lee shore.  Captain Bradley constantly kept the
deck.  There was nothing more to be done—but
he had to see the business through.

When the storm broke, they were less than
five miles off the Jersey shore at Atlantic City—so
close had been their call.  The drive through
the night at the beginning of the storm had saved
them; without the offing made at that time, they
would long since have landed in the breakers at
Barnegat.  The wind jumped into the southwest,
the clouds quickly rolled away.  They chopped
the gaskets, cleared the ice away from the booms
and sheets and halyards, and set all sail.  The
ship paid off, heading up the coast; from the
frozen and snowbound shore the sweet land-smell,
always a miracle to sailors nearing port in winter,
came off to them.  Night fell, the air grew
crystalline, stars sparkled white and big in the
cloudless sky.  Minute by minute the easterly
swell decreased, knocked down by the offshore
wind, as the old barge crept northward.  She
sunk the lights of Atlantic City, picked up
Barnegat, brought it abeam, dropped it on her port
quarter.  Then Captain Bradley left the deck,
for almost the first time in three days.

He could not have kept on his feet any longer.
The pain in his chest, that had set in the night
before and grown by leaps and bounds during the
last day of the storm, had now become so intense,
at spasmodic intervals, that he felt unable to
conceal his distress.  At times it was well-nigh
unbearable.  His heart seemed trying to burst
out of his body.  Perhaps rest would ease the
pain.  At any rate, he wanted to sit down
somewhere, alone, in an effort to face and compass this
new development.  He wanted to give his courage
an overhauling.

They had sounded the pumps at sunset, with
no result; the splendid old hull had not leaked a
drop throughout the storm.  But at midnight they
found two feet of water in the hold.  The mate,
frightened half out of his wits, rushed below with
the news.  Captain Bradley sat like a statue in
the big chair, gripping the arms, his face white
and drawn.  In his excitement, the mate did not
notice his extraordinary pallor and rigidity.

"Captain, Captain, she's sprung a leak!
There's two feet of water in the hold already!

"Two feet of water? ... Impossible!"

The old man heaved himself to his feet and
stumbled on deck, walking slowly and carefully,
holding tight to the rail.  The shock of the news
had loosed the terrible pain again; at every breath
he drew, something seemed to be stabbing him
with daggers.  He sounded the pumps with his
own hands, to find that the mate's discovery was
only too true.

"What can have happened, what can have
happened?" he kept muttering  "The change of
tack must have done it.  That's it!—the change
of tack"  Now that he had found an explanation,
he could face the issue.  They manned the pumps
at once—this was before the day of steam pumps
aboard coal barges.  But the leak gained steadily
on them, in spite of all they could do.

It was a race with time now—for both of them.
Captain Bradley gave a bitter laugh; he and the
*Viking* were throwing up the sponge together.
The breeze had freshened, but the old ship was
pitifully slow.  He swore to himself as he clung
to the weather rail, watching the water drag past.
He was thinking of the speed that she would have
shown under her former canvas; twelve to fifteen
knots, she would easily have reeled off with
sky-sails set in this smashing breeze.  While he
watched, the swift stabbing went on in his chest,
as if some invisible enemy were taking full and
cruel satisfaction.  Was he not to be permitted
to bring his old ship to port?  Was this final
insignificant success to be denied him?

The winking eye of Navesink came in sight
just before dawn.  At eight o'clock, they were
abreast the Highland lightship.  The old barge
was very low in the water, but she still retained
a margin of buoyancy.  With Captain Bradley,
conditions for the last hour had been a little
better.  He had kept the deck since the pumps
began, refusing to give up to a physical
encumbrance; and the pain had eased away, as if
temporarily succumbing to his invincible will.

Soon after passing the lightship, a towboat
approached them, hauling up alongside.

"Barge ahoy!  What barge is that?"

"*Viking*.  Broke adrift from a tow—three
days ago—off Montauk Point"

"The devil you say!  I'll send a hawser right
aboard"

"You'd better.  Snatch us—up the bay—quick
as you can.  Five feet of water—in the hold"

"Perhaps I'd better beach you somewhere
inside the Hook?"

"No—tow us in.  I guess—the leak will
stop—in quiet water"

Whether it was judgment or prescience, Captain
Bradley's surmise proved correct.  As they towed
up the bay, pumping continually, the water in the
hold at first remained for a while at a constant
level, then began slowly to fall, enough to show
that they were gaining on the leak.

Below the Narrows, the tugboat dropped astern,
ranging up on the *Viking's* quarter.

"Well, old man, where have you decided to go?"

Captain Bradley stood in the starboard alley-way,
one hand grasping the rail, the other the
corner of the after house.  It was the only way
that he could hold himself upright.  In the last
half hour the pain had returned with fresh violence.
Since its return, he had known what he would
have to do.  The ship was all right now; but, for
him, little time remained.

"Anchor us—at Tompkinsville—close inshore.
Send word to my office.  Get some men—my
crew are—worn out.  Bring off a doctor—for
God's sake!..."  The strained voice broke in
a shrill cry.

The mate ran aft along the alley-way.  "Captain!—what's
the matter, sir?"

"Sick"  Captain Bradley's hand flew to his
breast, clutching his coat in a great handful.  His
face turned deathly white, his eyes closed, his
mouth twisted in the intensity of the pain.  For
an instant he swayed; then opened his eyes again,
and pulled himself upright against the rail.

"I brought her in!" he cried loudly  "My old
ship ... under sail"

The mate was just in time to catch him as he
pitched forward insensible.





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.. class:: center large bold

   IX

.. vspace:: 2

The doctor came out of the captain's stateroom
with a grave look on his face.  The mate stood
in the middle of the cabin floor, nervous and
unstrung; he had been fond of Captain Bradley.
The afternoon sun streamed through the cabin
skylight.  For several hours they had been
watching the old man struggle for breath.  The
mate's gaze roved uneasily over the top of the
chart table, where, according to his invariable
habit, the captain had that morning spread the
tablecover that he used in port, and had set out
a few pictures and ornaments, to make the cabin
look more homelike.  He had done it between
spasms of pain, while they had been towing up
the bay; had done it for something to occupy his
mind.  He always tried to arrange the things as
he remembered his wife used to do.

"He can't last much longer" said the doctor
"His heart is practically gone"

The mate nodded without looking up.  "Is he
suffering much pain?"

"Not now.  I've just given him another
hypodermic.  That's all we can do for him"

They went together into the stateroom.  Captain
Bradley lay quietly against a heap of pillows,
with his eyes half closed.  He had regained
consciousness as soon as they had brought him below.
As the mate bent above him, he opened his eyes
and stared dully around the room.  He was
muttering to himself.  The mate leaned
closer—then drew back sharply, realizing that the
words were only the product of delirium.

"Hello, hello! ... that you, Sargent?  When
did you arrive?  Let's get a couple of chairs this
afternoon, and go along Glenealy Road.  I want
to see Hong Kong harbour again through the
bamboo trees....  Remember that day we had
a picnic on Glenealy Road?  You had your wife
with you that voyage.  My Frankie got tired:
I had to carry him in my arms....  Frankie
never grew up.  No....  He died"

The mate shook his head violently, as if to
throw off the mortality of the scene.  He turned
away from the bunk.  "Why does the old man
have to wander so?" he demanded sharply.

"The opiate" said the doctor  "Don't worry—he
isn't suffering now"

Captain Bradley regarded his officer with a
long and profound stare.  Suddenly, recognition
dawned in his eyes.

"Oh, Foster!—what do you say?  How much
water do the pumps give now?  Any chance of
the leak drying up?"

"Only a couple of feet left in her, Captain.
Four men have come off from shore to relieve our
crew.  We'll soon have her as dry as a bone, sir"

"No use"  Captain Bradley rolled his head
on the pillow  "You'll find her larboard strake
started—port side of the keel.  She's finished.
She'll have to go to the junk heap now"  He lay
quiet a moment, thinking.  "If I had my way,
she should be towed to sea, and sunk in deep
water.  I ought to go along with her....  But
I suppose she's worth a few dollars as junk"
Suddenly he sat up in bed, threw off the clothes,
and raised his clenched hands above his head.
"Oh, my God!" he screamed  "I've been
working all my life, and I haven't a few dollars
to redeem my old ship!"

"Lie down, Captain.  You must keep quiet.
Lie down, sir.  You'll feel better in a little while"

"Yes, yes"  The paroxysm passed; the old
man fell back exhausted.  Again his mind
wandered; he seemed to be sinking off into a
doze.  Like a child at the end of the day, half
way between sleeping and waking, he babbled
of endeavours on the playground of the world.

"After that typhoon, I rigged a jury rudder and
brought her into Manila....  Oh, yes, they said
it was....  You wouldn't expect an accident in
the trade winds.  The fore-topmast went at the
head of the lower mast, carrying the jibboom with
it; but in a couple of weeks you couldn't have
told that anything had happened....  Pleasant
weather, pleasant weather....  I looked up, and
saw his green light almost hanging over my bow....
Funny, isn't it, how things come round?..."

Gradually he stopped muttering.  The doctor
took his pulse, then beckoned the mate to follow
him into the cabin.  "It can't be long now" he
whispered  "Who was the old fellow, anyway?
He seems to have a strange assortment on his mind"

"I don't know much about him.  He was a
fine man....  Say, you stand in the door, there,
and tell me when he's finished.  I can't bear to
watch him any longer"

They had been waiting some time in silence,
when a quick movement in the bunk started them
running toward the stateroom.  Captain Bradley
was sitting up in bed again.  All trace of pain
had left his features.  His hands lay quietly on
the coverlet, his eyes were fixed on something far
away.  The faint shadow of a smile crossed his
face, illuminating it with an expression of wisdom
and serenity.

"Grace!  Frankie!  *Under sail!*" he cried in
a loud voice—then settled slowly back among the
pillows.

When they reached him, the old man was dead.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`ANJER`:

.. class:: center x-large bold

   ANJER

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   ANJER

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center large bold

   I

.. vspace:: 2

"Do you see that mass of trees in the deep
shadow?" asked Nichols, pointing toward the
shore  "There's a house behind them—the old
consulate bungalow.  Years ago, when the China
trade was flourishing, all ships used to stop at
Anjer for mail and orders; for this reason, I
suppose, our government used to keep a consul
here, though he wasn't much but a postmaster.
Anjer was the first port of call after the long
outward passage; every man who has sailed to the
East remembers it with affection.  You crossed
the Indian Ocean in the 'roaring forties' then
swung abruptly north through the southeast trades.
At length, one morning, fresh from a three months'
chase of the empty horizon, you sighted Java
Head, that black old foreland looming out of the
water like a gigantic sperm whale; and before the
day had gone, you'd entered the Straits of Sunda,
with Java to starboard, close aboard, and Sumatra
in the distance to port; had passed Princess
Island, sighted and drawn abreast of Krakatoa,
taken your cross-bearings on the Button and the
Cap, turned off at Twart-the-Way; and, toward
sunset, had drifted into Anjer Roads, before the
last puffs of the sea-breeze.

"You had reached the land again.  Reached
it?—you'd plunged into its very heart.  And such
a heart—and such a land.  The Gateway of the
East, the Portal of the Dawn—a scene of love
and longing, the ecstasy of life, rich with
tumultuous growth, and charged with the passionate
odour of blooming flowers.  You had come to it
from the ocean, remember; from wide expanses
of waste and emptiness, from the high sky and
the brooding night and the homeless wind, from
the mental standpoint of one who had forgotten
his measure of comparison, who had lost his grip
on reality.  The very strangeness of the limited
and circumscribed sea, with shores on every hand,
with mountains piling the whole horizon, inspired
a sensation of wonder and curiosity, as if this had
been your first view of the terrestrial world.  But
ere this sensation, the breaking of the sea-habit,
the shortening of the focus, the opening of the
door, had fairly possessed you, other allurements
were striving for the mastery.  There was the
hand of the East, held out in alien greeting;
there was the breath of romance in the nostrils,
the call of love in the heart, the smells, the voices,
the colours, the whisper of adventure, the touch
of magic and mystery.  All this, in the old days,
was meant to you by Anjer, by that cluster of
bamboo houses beyond the fringe of the banyan
trees, that point, that lighthouse, those hills
climbing the eastern sky, and this secluded anchorage,
where we happened to drift before the tide—deserted
now, as you see it, and quite forgotten,
but once the toll-keeper of the sailing fleets of the
world"

Nichols waved a hand.

"What about the old consulate bungalow?"
someone asked,

"Oh, yes; I'll tell you"  The captain of the
*Omega* pulled himself up abruptly  "I knew it
first as a boy before the mast.  My maiden voyage
was made into the East; I came to Anjer, saw
the native dugouts gather around the ship,
examined their wares of fruit and birds and monkeys,
rolls of painted cloth and wonderful shells; I saw
the consul's boat bring off the old tin post-box
that visited every ship calling at Anjer—it
disgorged for my delight, I remember, a letter from
my mother, the first home letter that I had ever
received at sea; and later in the day, I pulled bow
oar in the captain's, boat when he went ashore
to pay the consul a social call.  From that time
onward, hardly a year passed that I didn't see the
consulate bungalow.  When I became master of
a vessel, I always used to go ashore and visit the
place; it's beautifully situated among palm trees,
with an open view of the roadstead and a winding
path leading up from the landing.  Old Reardon
was glad to see a fellow countryman; we'd have
a drink or two, chat for an hour over some month-old
piece of news that had just reached this outpost
of civilization; then part for another interval, he
to hold the lodge of the Orient, I to continue an
endless pilgrimage.

"Yes, I felt that I knew the consulate bungalow
of Anjer pretty well.  But, in these quick
lands, a house is a mere incident, is nothing
but its inhabitants; and my familiarity with this
structure in Reardon's time didn't exactly prepare
me for what I was afterwards to meet between
its walls....  And now I'll have to begin at the
beginning"





.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   II

.. vspace:: 2

He waited so long in silence that we began to
grow impatient.  A faint evening breeze drew
across the water, bringing the heavy scent of
the land.  Above the Anjer hills hung a full
golden moon, beneath which, in vague,
translucent shadow, the shores of Java seemed sunk
in an enchanted calm.

"I was wondering whether I could show you
the sort of man Bert Mackay was" Nichols
resumed suddenly  "It's difficult enough to lay
down the lines of any human being; and Bert
was a doubly complex subject, chiefly, perhaps,
because the key to his nature was so simple.
Simplicity seems the most erratic of qualities to
a world trained in suppression and negation.  He
was one of those startling fellows whom people
instinctively like, but daren't approve of.  He
was brilliant but not entirely well balanced, let
us put it; as primitive a soul as I've ever come
in contact with.  In fact, he was really wild, like
nature—didn't attempt to pause or reckon, but
let life come and go; and like nature, too, his
growth was a series of instinctive processes.  A
man of the open, swift-minded, magnetic, and
sincere, he was a tremendous vital force, stirring
life violently wherever he touched it; while a
romantic conscience, which plunged him into
moods of contrition and despair, seemed to bring
him out of every experience with a clear eye and
an innocence apparently unimpaired.

"You can imagine, with all this, that his way
with women was rash, sudden, appalling, and
awfully fascinating.  He couldn't talk well, but
had a presence and manner that spoke for him
louder than words.  He was tall and dark and
virile, a devilishly handsome chap.  In fact, he
possessed the secret of power that can't be
cultivated or affected, the emanation of love, a
glorious and terrible inheritance.  Something
quite different, you know, from any trace of
carnality; he wasn't a sensual man at all.  He
broke many hearts, I'm afraid; how, in the
ordinary course of life and days, could it have
been otherwise?  I used to warn him to watch
out; to tell him that some day, in a stroke of
divine retribution, his own heart would be broken
past mending.

"'I hope so, Nichols!' he used to fling out,
with the serious gaiety that was one of his most
charming characteristics  'You can't imagine what
a lost soul I am.  Nothing else will save me'

"I'd known Bert Mackay since college days,
when for a couple of years we had roomed
together and established one of the priceless
understandings of life.  The affection that lay between
us was closer than that of brothers, close enough
mutually to excuse our faults in each other's eyes.
He became an electrical engineer, went to New
York, and rose rapidly in his profession; while I,
as you know, followed the sea.  Every now and
then I'd come to New York; and while in port,
would move my things uptown and live with him.
He was well connected, knew many groups of
interesting people, and seemed, to my eye, to be
living the richest sort of life.  Our intermittent
relation was an ideal one for two friends; our
intimacy grew closer, as voyage followed voyage,
and I supposed there wasn't an adventure of his
that I didn't know about.  But I might have
realized, of course, that when the bolt of divine
retribution actually struck him, it would be the
last subject on which he'd give me his confidence.

"However that may be, I wasn't aware of any
trouble, hadn't anticipated disaster, and was both
shocked and alarmed, on my arrival in New York
one summer, to find a brief note from him saying
that he had gone away.  He gave no address, and
told me not to hunt for him.  The letter was four
or five months old.  'I am trying to do the right
thing' he wrote  'God knows, I've done enough
wrong things.  Perhaps you'll hear from me again,
perhaps you won't.  It will depend on how I feel.
I'm throwing up the whole game here.  Something
pretty hard has come into my life, and I
have got to go.  I must work this out alone.
There isn't much of a chance—but that doesn't
matter.  The price has to be paid just the same'  Then,
after a few instructions about some of his
private affairs, he asked me to forgive him, said
I was not to worry, and assured me of his
unfailing affection.

"You can imagine how the news took hold of
me.  The nature of the affair was unmistakeable;
a tragedy of the heart had overtaken him—the
fate that I'd often lightly predicted, and that he
as often had expressed a willingness to find.
Well, he was saved now, it would seem.  I
wondered....  Searching the past for a clue to
this untoward development, I recalled his air of
mingled restraint and melancholy at the time of
our last meeting, the year before.  I had noticed
it only to put it down to one of his many
incomprehensible moods.  The night of my
departure, I remembered, after we'd come in from
the theatre, he had spent hours, it seemed, on the
couch in the studio living-room, strumming on an
old guitar and singing to himself in an incoherent
form of improvisation, a habit of his when he was
feeling especially blue.  I'd been trying to write
some letters, and the maddening mournful sounds,
with the notes of the guitar picking through, had
at length driven me to desperation.

"'For God's sake, sing something!' I cried,
dashing out of my room—he was a brilliant
musician.  'But if you go on whining like the
wind through a knothole, I can't be answerable
for the consequences'

"'All right, Nicky, I'll stop' he had answered
with a grin  'I'm a selfish ass, I know.  But I'm
not whining....  No, I don't feel like singing
to-night'  I realized now that, even then, he must
have been in the toils of the tragedy.

"So this was the end of a comradeship all too
brief, as life goes.  Friends are scarce enough,
heaven knows, without a fellow's losing one in
such vague circumstances.  But the years went
by, and I didn't hear a word from Bert.  At first,
I missed and worried about him acutely; then,
little by little, he faded off into the background,
as even the sharpest details of the great picture
of life do if we keep moving.  Perspectives
change, too.  I continued, of course, to think of
him now and then, wondering what he might have
lost or found.  But I never felt occasion to doubt
the nature of his quest; he had come into that
heritage foreordained at the launching of his
sensitive and romantic soul.  Something had
called him down the wind, some note, some
fragrance, some face of beauty, some revelation of
delight; and he'd gone out to find the answer and
consummation—love or death—that hearts like
his pursue"





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   III

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Nichols reached for a cigar.  "Ten years and
more had gone by" he went on slowly "when, one
voyage, I reached the Straits of Sunda, bound for
Hong Kong and Amoy.  The southwest monsoon
was on the point of breaking; for several days
we'd been treated to baffling winds.  It was in
the latter part of the afternoon that, favoured by
an unexpected slant of offshore wind, I managed
to fetch the anchorage here, slipped into Anjer
Roads with quite a rush, and dropped my anchor
in a berth abreast of the landing.  I hadn't been
through Sunda for a couple of years.

"The first boat that came off from shore—Reardon's
old whaleboat—brought me disappointing
news.  Reardon himself, it seemed, had been
transferred to Batavia the year before, and the
consulate had been discontinued; my letters, if
any had been sent to Anjer, were being held in
Batavia or Singapore.  Old Sa-lee, Reardon's
boatswain, was still in charge of the boat, but
seemed to be merely following a lifelong habit in
coming off to every ship that called.  He wanted
to see his old friends, to gossip, and to bemoan the
decline of human institutions.  While we talked,
leaning across the rail, he told me in the course
of conversation that, some time after Reardon had
left Anjer, the consulate bungalow had been
occupied by a stranger.  The fact wasn't of
sufficient interest to me just then to elicit an
inquiry.  I had just reached the realization, with
a shock of deep regret, that Anjer the beautiful
had taken its place with the rest of the world's
lost glories, that another page in the romantic
annals of seafaring had closed.

"The air was hot and heavy that evening—one
of those nights of threatening showers that
never come.  After supper, I had settled myself
morosely in a deck-chair; it seemed quite
unaccountable not to be going ashore in this familiar
situation.  The moon was high and full above
the hills, as it is to-night, but clouded by a faint
mist like descending veils of dew.  The ship
seemed resting after the long passage; on the
forecastle-head a couple of men were singing,
accompanied by an old accordion.  Across the
water, as if in answer, floated the voices of natives
somewhere in the jungle, lifted in wild and
startling melodies.  The same breeze fanned down
from the land—the breeze that seems always to
be blowing here in the early evening, filling the
straits with the overpowering sweetness of bloom
and decay.

"It must have been quite late—the moon had
risen overhead, and the singing had died out
forward and ashore—when I first noticed lights
in the old consulate bungalow.  I at once thought
of the stranger whom Sa-lee had mentioned.
Who could he be?  What misanthrope had chosen
that house of solitude for his habitation?  How
did he manage to pass the time?  It went without
saying that he was a European; Sa-lee would not
have mentioned him otherwise.  I kept my eye
on the light, which seemed to travel about,
vanishing now and then as if behind a closed door.  As
I watched, my interest became more and more
awakened.  I began to imagine all sorts of people
in that bungalow; a tremendous failure, a fellow
who'd fled from the wreck of a tragic past; an exile,
for some romantic reason or other, who had seen
my ship in the offing, had hurried home, and was
making ready for a visit, longing for the sight
of a strange face and a word from the outside
world; a criminal, who feared my presence in the
roadstead, who was even now busy concealing
evidence, sweeping tables, locking drawers.

"Suddenly it occurred to me to go ashore and
satisfy my curiosity.  Why hadn't I thought of it
before?  I called my mate.  'Mr. Hunter' said
I 'send some men aft and throw the dingey
overboard.  Then haul her up to the side-ladder'

"Handling the tiller-ropes of the dingey, with
two men rowing, I directed her bow toward
Reardon's old landing.  Under the hills the land
loomed high.  You know that feeling of strangeness,
of transmutation, which comes at the end of
a voyage at sea, when for the first time you step
from the ship's deck into a small boat, when you
look across the water from a lower level, see the
shore approach, and hear the hum of waves on a
beach close at hand.  There's a trace almost of
apprehension mingled with it, the instinct of the
sailor warning him of shallow water and danger in
proximity.  I felt it, a nameless tingling excitement;
besides, I had by this time worked myself
to quite a pitch of fancy over Sa-lee's stranger.

"Reardon's landing was already dilapidated; I
scrambled up it and picked my way to the shore,
telling the men to wait there for me without fail,
for I didn't want them straying to the village.
Striking the path at the head of the pier, I hurried
forward, keeping myself as much as possible in
the deep shadow of palm trees that lined the
up-hill slope.  I wanted to catch this fellow napping,
whoever he was, wanted to observe his face in a
moment of surprise.  Then I should be better
able to place him.  The air under the trees was
thick with the reek of tropic earth; sounds made
themselves distinctly heard in the great silence.
I advanced up the path noiseless and unseen, and
in a few minutes arrived in plain sight of the
bungalow.

"The little house, with its broad flanking
verandahs, stood surrounded by trees and
underbrush.  It had a neglected appearance; even in
the night I could make out how the jungle had
closed around it in the two years since Reardon's
departure.  The light inside the bungalow was
gone; heavy shadows filled the verandahs, so that
I couldn't have seen a person sitting there.  I
began to wonder whether the tenant had turned
in for the night; stepped aside from the path, and
started to skirt the house, with the instinct that
invariably leads a man to the rear when he's
eavesdropping; and was about to strike across a
patch of bright moonlight toward the side porch,
when a strange sound broke the intense stillness
and knocked me back into the shadow as if by a
physical blow.

"Someone had begun to play a guitar on the
verandah.  The next moment a voice came out
on the night, soft and suppressed, a voice like an
echo, that seemed to lose itself in the silken
chamber of the night.  Either a baritone or a
very deep contralto; but I felt it to be a man's
voice, without understanding why.  I listened,
but couldn't hear distinctly.  While I listened,
I was conscious of an exquisite perfection of
emotion.  I seemed to stand at the heart of an
old and visionary land, the witness of an ancient
parable; the voice was the voice of Adam
singing the first love song in Eden, and the veiled
languorous moon was the same moon that had
stirred that song through the untold nights of men.

"Suddenly the voice rose and swelled; I
caught the words, the tone, the melody....  All
at once I remembered—and knew, with a shock
of recollection, who it was.  The quality of the
voice hadn't changed; the song itself was familiar.
I'd heard it often, as he lay on the couch in the
New York studio, or sat at the piano in one of
his wandering musical moods.  It seemed
impossible.  How could he be here?  I choked, in the
midst of uttering a low exclamation—must have
made quite a fuss.  He got up abruptly, breaking
off the song; I heard the guitar strike the floor
with a hollow clash.

"'Who is there?' he asked softly, as if
expecting a visitor from that direction.

"I pulled myself together, started across the
patch of open ground, and came into the moonlight.
When I'd reached a little nearer, I saw
him standing at the rail of the verandah; he
leaned out, showing his face—a good deal older
than I remembered, but unmistakeably the face
of my vanished friend.

"'Who is it?' he asked again, sharply now, for
he had discovered that it was a man.

"I felt the need of making an excuse for introduction.
'Bert' said I  'I haven't been following
your trail.  It's just an amazing stroke of chance.
That is my ship in the roadstead.  I happened to call.

"He leaned out farther, a look of helpless
bewilderment on his face.  Then recognition
dawned with a great rush.  'Nichols!' he cried
desperately.  Gazing at me wide-eyed, he
repeated my name in a lower tone, in accents of
simple wonder.  Suddenly, as he gazed, the
weight of the years seemed to strike him with a
crushing force; he crumpled, dropped to his
knees, and buried his face on the railing.  When
I took his hand, he gripped me like a vice.  We
didn't speak for a long time.





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   IV

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"After I'd sent my boat back aboard, with
orders to come ashore for me in the morning, we
sat talking on the verandah till late in the night.
Ten years of life had to be reconstructed; the
astonishing thing was that I had found him even
then.  'Of all places on earth' I asked 'how did
you happen to land in this God-forsaken spot?'

"'Oh, I came up from Australia, about eight
months ago' said he  'A friend of mine down
there, a sea captain, told me about it; said the
bungalow was vacant and could be had almost
for the asking.  It's quiet here, and yet a fellow
sees ships and things—watches life go by'  He
had been pacing backward and forward, and now
stopped in front of my chair.  'It's heaven!' he
cried  'Nothing to raise a row, nothing to fight
for, nothing to live for, much....  Nothing to
bother—that is....  You can't imagine how quiet
and peaceful it seems'

"His words confirmed the impression I'd
always had of his disappearance; yet, even in
the midst of his hopelessness I seemed to detect
a note of hesitation, something concealed from
me—perhaps concealed from him, for he rarely
analyzed his own reactions.  I led him away from
his story for a while, trying to fix the status of
his existence.  We talked of old times; he
remembered them keenly, kept citing queer details, jests
that used to amuse us, chance remarks that seemed
to have lodged in his mind.  Almost at once, his
infectious laugh came into play.  The old spirit
was unquenchable.  By Jove, the man wasn't half
so hopeless as he would have himself believe....
I took my eyes away from him, looked
around at the jungle rising against the hills; and
all at once it struck me how closely he resembled,
in essential nature, the land he'd stumbled on.
A land full of the instinct of beauty, the gift of
love; weary, too, and wise with age, yet fired with
the undying youth of quick vitality.

"'Why don't you stay here?' I demanded  'Why
talk of going home?  I have a notion that
you belong here.  Why don't you love, be
happy?...'

"'No, no!' he interrupted hurriedly  'You
don't know what you're talking about'  He
stopped short, gazing at me as if he were
searching my mind.  'Love won't come to me again'
said he.

"'Nonsense!' I answered  'That's morbid,
Bert.  What possible reason...'

"'Good God!' he burst out  'Haven't I the
right to know?'  He wandered to the railing,
leaned against a post there, and turned his face
away.  'Long ago' said he slowly 'I took every
ray and hope of love out of my heart, and took
them in my hands—so—and crushed them, and
killed them, and threw them down—as if I'd taken
my heart itself and squeezed the last drop of
blood out of it like a sponge.  I tell you, Nichols,
the thing's dead'

"'But you haven't told me' I reminded him.

"He took a longer walk this time, round the
corner of the verandah; when he came back, he
sat down beside me like a man tired with carrying
a load.  'Do you remember a little girl I used to
talk about?' he asked  'I think you met her once
in New York, the year before I left.  Her name
was Helen Rand'

"'A slender girl with dark hair and brown eyes?'

"'Yes....  Well, she went away.  She's got
the same eyes now, wide childish....'

"'Now!' I shouted  'You don't mean—she isn't...'

"'No, no' said he  'I haven't seen her for
these eight months.  She's down in Australia—was
then—Melbourne'

"'What have you been doing now?...' I
began, but he cut me off sharply.

"'Nothing' said he  'She isn't mine—never has
been'  He leaned toward me  'But I've been
near her night and day—as near as I could get.
Ready to help, you know—anything.  God, I had
to be in the same place.  But perhaps you won't
understand'  He hesitated, then went on
doggedly  'I found out too late that I loved her.  I
found it out just one day too late.  I've been
paying for that one day.  And all I've done, all I
could do, wouldn't begin to balance the account.
I wonder whether you see?'

"'How could you keep it going so long?' I asked.

"He laughed harshly.  'I knew you wouldn't
understand.  Just because you think that love
means faith and chastity, quietness, placid days
and years, you have no eye for the love that lives
in the fires of hell.  But it's the same love.  Bad
as she is, I can't help loving her'

"The story, coming brokenly, by fits and
starts, achieved by its very barrenness a certain
grim intensity.  The white light of his
extraordinary narrative revealed a background sombre
and hard, against which stood the drama of his
ineffectual warfare, a play without hope and
without reward, saved from inanity only by the
tremendous fervour of his love.  She had fled
from New York without warning, it seems, fleeing
from life, from him, from the scene and memory,
perhaps, of that one day.  He had a slight clue,
but it took him half a year to find her.  When
at last they met, she didn't want him, didn't need
him, wouldn't have him.  This was in San Francisco,
where she went on the stage again, and lived
for over a year, successful, apparently happy,
and growing more beautiful every day.  'People
talked about her, you know' he told me  'She
became quite the rage.  Such a little girl, with
serious eyes....'

She must have been clever, too, for she kept
a good grip on herself.  Soon she married a man
of twice her years with a considerable fortune, and
passed into another world.  Bert had forsaken
his profession, and had gone into journalism; he
could have done anything passably well.  One
thing, however, he could not bring himself to do
again, and that was to enter society.  He didn't
get on as a journalist—couldn't put his heart into
the business of life.  He told me that for a time
he went shabby and hungry.  Once in a great
while he would see her, perhaps in passing, and
they would have a few words together; but the
occasions became more and more infrequent.

"'Then she left her husband, in the whirlwind
of a sensational scandal.  Bert missed only by the
merest chance having to write about it for his
paper.  He sought her out at once; she had gone
to an hotel there in the city, where she lived openly
as the mistress of the other man.  'What are you
doing, Bert, hanging around this town?' she had
asked him point blank  'I want to be near in case
you need me, Helen' he answered humbly.  She
gazed at him with those eyes that, according to
his account, still retained their innocence—though
it's hard to believe they hadn't by then acquired
a trace or two of calculation.  'It's gone a long
way beyond that' said she coldly  'I won't need
you again'  He tried to take her hand.  'I can't
let you go thus, Helen!' he cried  'Let me
go?  You sent me' she told him.

"'What was the use?' said he to me 'I
thought of the old days—they seemed old already;
and when I looked at her, I couldn't realize that
there had been any change.  But it seemed pretty
evident that she had left off caring.  So I left
her—but I couldn't go away'

"Some months later, she went in a yacht for
a cruise among the South Sea Islands.  The
cruise was a long one; it ended, for her, in a
quarrel at Honolulu, as a result of which she
changed her second man for a third, and took up
her abode in that glorious island of the Pacific
where everything but happiness is supposed to
wither and die in the magic sun.  In the course
of time Bert heard the details, folded his tent and
followed her.  But almost as soon as he landed
in Honolulu she was off on another tack; for by
now she had settled into the stride of her career.

"So it went on, year after year, from Honolulu
to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Hong Kong, and
down the coast to Singapore; a term in Calcutta,
another term in Batavia; a year on the West
Coast, Lima, Iquiqui, Valparaiso, she never
resting, and he following in due time.  It's hard
to imagine what her life must have been during
this pilgrimage; for now we know that she loved
him, too, and that her heart likewise burned in
the fires of hell.  Pride, pride, what anguish will
be borne in thy name!  She had of course grown
into a strong, clear-headed woman; only strength
could have carried her so far.  But he must have
managed things very badly.  I haven't a doubt
that the thought of him constantly at her heels,
the sight of him now and then in her wake, making
hard weather of it, spurred her to the course that
she had chosen.  No woman respects a man who
can't solve his own destiny.

"How they finally came to Australia, I don't
clearly remember.  They must have been there
some time; he spoke of Sydney, of Newcastle,
of Brisbane, and of Melbourne, where he saw her
for the last time.  'I met her face to face one
day' said he  'She looked a little tarnished—as
if things had been going downhill with her.  I
suppose I told her so; I wasn't in the mood to
dodge facts that day.  She was angry at my
comment—I don't blame her.  But I tried to make up
for it the next moment—show her what I really
meant, how glad I would be—that is, that it rested
with her to change everything.  I asked her if I
mightn't come to see her; she answered that it
wasn't difficult to gain access to her apartment.
All the while she was looking me over with a sort
of amused scorn.  Then she said something that
was quite unnecessary.  She said I didn't look
as if I had the price....  That woke me up.
I realized suddenly, fully, decisively, how
impossible it was to keep on.  Impossible!...'  By
chance, I'd been talking about Anjer with Captain
Roach that very morning.  He was sailing the
next day, bound up this way, and I came along
with him.  Reardon leased me the bungalow; I
went with Roach to Batavia, for he knew that the
consulate had been abandoned.  So here I am.
I've got a little money, enough to live on.  And
God's being good to me—I've found a measure of
peace.  Now you have come along—I think I'll
be all right....'

"'Yes, this certainly was the place for you'
I temporized, struggling with irritation at the mess
he had made of existence.  I couldn't but recognize
the inevitability of what he had told me; but
my heart kept asking, why is it necessary for men
to be so selfish, so helpless in the face of results
clearly to be foreseen?

"'Exactly' he agreed with my spoken word.
'This land has taught me a great lesson.  I'm
getting back my grip ... more than I hoped....'  He
stopped abruptly.  Again I had the
feeling of something being held back, of something
missing from the story.  I awoke to the fact
that, notwithstanding all he had told me, his
present spiritual status remained unexplained.
He quite obviously *had* recovered his grip—but
how, and why?  It wasn't in keeping with the
rest of the hidden years.  And of course I didn't
believe my own platitude on the influence of the
land.

"'I mean, I'm getting back my self-respect'
he said  'I'm really thinking of going home.  The
past begins to look like a sort of joke—a horrible,
fantastic joke; but I shall leave off loving her
now.  Try to, anyway.  I've learned....'

"I wondered what it could be that so puzzled
me about the case.  After I'd gone to bed that
night—it was nearly morning—I lay awake for a
long while trying to think the problem out.  Why
had he lost his self-respect, in the beginning?
Because she wouldn't love him?  I thought I knew
him well enough to recognize this as the correct
answer; he belonged to the unhappy company of
men who can't support life when the ego is denied.
But she had sent him away, at last, with a lash
of the whip, with scorn that even his tried humility
couldn't brook.  How the devil, then, had he
recovered his self-respect?  Self-respect is a
matter of human relations; it can't be drawn out
of the air.





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"While I tossed on the bed, vainly trying to
piece this broken logic together, I heard someone
moving on the opposite side of the house.  Bert
and I were alone in the bungalow.  He, too, had
been kept awake by the excitement of our
meeting.  Soon he began to pace softly up and down
the far side of the verandah.  I was debating in
my mind the wisdom of going out to have another
smoke with him, when his footsteps seemed to
leave the porch and sink into the grass.  In a
moment I heard low voices outside, a little
distance from the house.  I couldn't make out
what was being said.  Suddenly I thought that
someone must have come with a message from
the ship.  I jumped up and ran to the window.

"My window opened on the patch of moonlight
across which I'd come earlier in the evening.  He
stood there now, as if waiting; and, before I could
speak, a woman came toward him with a gliding,
crouching step, starting out of the very shadow
where I'd paused to hear the song.  As she drew
near, he held out his arms; she quickened her
pace, like a jungle deer, and flung herself on his
breast, uttering low, native cries.  'You are safe?
You will not go?' she asked breathlessly.
'Safe?' he asked, bending above her  'Have you
been watching?'  She looked into his face with
a glance of infinite concern.  'The man stood
beside me, as I was about to call' said she  'I
would have killed him, but I saw that you were
warned'  'Thank God!' he exclaimed  'You
should have known—and gone away'  She drew
her arms about his neck.  'I could not go!' she
cried  'I had to see you!'  'Hush!' said he
'Speak lower—you will wake my friend'

"She used perfect English, though her language
was picturesque.  'Your friend?  Who is your
friend?' she asked fiercely  'In all the time that
you have dwelt here, no ships have waited, you
have had no friends come.  Who is your friend
that comes in a great ship, unknown and
unbidden?'  He smiled down at her.  'Dear heart'
said he 'he is more than brother to me, and I
have not seen him for many years'

"She shrank away from him.  'Ah!' she cried
'Then he will take you—you will go?'

"'No, not yet' he told her  'Not, perhaps, for
a long time'

"'But you will go?' she persisted  'Some day
you will not be here—and, for me, the sun will
fail to rise, and the moon and stars will grow cold,
and all light will die—and you will not be here!'

"'I have told you, dear, it must be so' said he.
'You knew it long ago'

"Again her arms clasped him.  'No, no!' she
cried  'I cannot let you!  You are mine!  Stay
here.  It is a fair land—and am I not fair?'  She
touched her breast  'You will not look at me!'
said she.

"'I dare not!'

"'Then look!' she whispered.

"I saw him take her in his arms.  So he had
found ... this, beyond what he had hoped.
Another wave of irritation at his heartlessness
swept over me.  I turned away angrily—then
paused a moment, considering the true nature of
the phenomenon that had appeared before me as
if out of the sky.  I felt that he hadn't sought
this new entanglement.  No, but he had evidently
accepted it.  Yet the woman had furnished the
motive force, literally had flung herself at his
head.  Nonsense!—why be a prudish ass?  It
wasn't in the least a matter of morals; why persist,
then, in viewing it on the moral plane?  Incurable
habit of conventionality, never so strong as when
we strive to be unconventional!  Here was a
meeting of instincts and elements, a transaction in
lucid terms, according to a simple formula.  It
was a phase of God's excruciating biological
experiment.  She wanted him alone, and had
taken her way to get him.  He was receptive, for
he wanted love.  Could she have awakened love
in him, he would not have denied it.  Failing that,
he would be forced to seek elsewhere.  In the
meantime, why repel divine experience? ... But
the shocking callousness of this experiment!
While he dallied, detached and unconcerned, his
life had been refreshed as if at a fountain of
vitality.  His heart sang with the knowledge that
she loved him; he was happy, whole, and
conscious of his power again.  He'd said that he had
recovered his self-respect—a curious choice of
words, in view of the occasion; but now I
understood what he had meant....  This had been
her priceless gift to him.

"A quick exclamation outside drew me again
to the window—could you fellows have kept away?
He was trying to disengage her arms from about
his neck.  'It cannot be!' said he decisively  'It
is impossible!  So, to save greater pain, I will go
at once'

"She clung to him desperately.  'I do not
understand' she cried.

"'Dear heart' he answered  'I have seen too
much, and failed too miserably, to want the spell
to fall on you.  All that I touch turns to ashes;
whoever enters my life is cursed with my own pain'

"She gazed deeply into his eyes.  'I am not
afraid' said she  'It is for this I love.  For what
is past, I have no memory.  To-day lives,
to-morrow we carry with us like a child unborn, but
yesterday is dead.  What do you seek?  Love?
Have I not given you all?'  She threw out her
arm in a sweeping gesture  'My love will never
fail!' she cried.

"'I prize your love above all else' said he.

"'What do you seek?' she cried again, springing
away, confronting him with a savage crouching
intensity.  'Faith?  Happiness?  Peace?  All are
here.  My people will honour you, for I am noble
in the hills.  What do you seek?  Ask, and I will give!'

"He leaned toward her, held her at arm's
length, returned her gaze.  I heard him heave a sigh.

"'It is because you do not love!' said she
quite low  'Before Allah, am I not fair?  Why
have I not your love?  Look—we are alone.  See
how I hold you, feel my heart here, behold my
eyes—ah!'  Her face was close to his.  'If love
lay in your heart, you could not stand thus' she
whispered.

"'Stop!' he cried  'You cannot see...'

"'I cannot see, my eyes are dim with love!'

"He thrust her away suddenly, as if in fear.
'Listen' said he in a dead voice  'For many
years I have followed a woman who would not
love me.  To the ends of the earth I have followed
her, until I am weary, and heartsick, and must
forget.  I have left my home, I have forsaken my
friends.  But now I must return.  Dear heart'
said he 'if I were young and full of hope, I would
not stand here idly, I would stay with you.  But
I have nothing left to offer.  An old
heart—broken—a brain without fire...'

"'I will make well the heart, and fire the
brain!' she cried.

"He swayed toward her, met her in a brief
embrace—then broke away.  She gave a little cry.
'You will not?' said she  'I cannot ask again'

"'Dear, it is not to hurt you...' he began
'Why won't you understand?'  He covered his
face with his hands  'Oh, God, why can't I make
you understand?'

"She pointed toward the house.  'It is because
your friend has come' said she fiercely  'Never
before have you been as to-night.  Never before
have you refused me.  He brings you memory,
and now you think of home.  I should have killed
him when I stood at his side!'  She fell back a
step, a savage figure, magnificently tall 'So—you
have chosen' said she  'This which I offer,
you throw down.  What is it that you seek?
What will you find?  Is love so strong in your
land, are nights like this, is happiness so deep?
In convent-school I learned otherwise'  He put
out his hand; she drew away like a wild creature.
'No!  It is done' she cried.

"A moment passed.  He stood irresolute, the
plaything of fate, while she devoured him with
her eyes.  Then, with a swift motion, she left him
standing in the grass, and ran toward the shadow.
He started to follow.  She must have turned at
the border of the jungle; I couldn't see her clearly,
but she seemed to make a violent gesture, and the
moonlight struck sharply on a bracelet that she wore"





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   VI

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"Bert spent the following day with me aboard
the ship; I had decided to remain another night
in Anjer.  We found much to talk about, but
didn't approach the incident outside my window
that morning; although I'd felt certain that he,
not suspecting my awareness, would broach the
subject.  In fact, I more than once adroitly
guided the conversation in this direction; but his
mouth was closed.  This gave me both alarm and
satisfaction; at least, he took the affair with the
seriousness that it deserved.

"Late in the afternoon, as we sat here under a
little patch of awning spread from the spanker
boom, we sighted a small barque to the westward,
coming up the straits.  She'd just appeared beyond
the lower point, some three or four miles distant.
Watching her idly through the glass—-I had a
powerful telescope—I seemed to find something
familiar about her; and a little later, when she had
drifted another mile nearer, I suddenly recognized
the craft.  'That's Halsted, in his little packet'
I remarked  'Her name's the *Senegal*.  You
must have seen her before, if you've been here
over six months.  He makes two trips a year'

"Bert took the glass from my hand.  'I can't
remember' said he after a moment's scrutiny
'Ships look all alike to me.  Where has she come
from?  You seem to know about her'

"'Why, Australia, of course!' I exclaimed,
suddenly remembering his own point of departure
for Anjer  'You must have seen this little barque
in Melbourne, if you were familiar with the
waterfront.  Halsted runs a sort of packet service from
there to Singapore'

"'Halsted, Halsted' said Bert  'No, I think
I've never met anyone of that name—certainly
not there.  Look, Nichols, he seems to have run
into a strip of calm'

"'Yes, and that strip of calm will spread until
it covers the straits' I answered  'I know the box
he's in—he's just about an hour too late.  There's
a nasty current off the point, with a tide-rip on the
ebb.  He'll drift away from us for several hours,
then slip back in the night, when he picks up the
land breeze'

"After supper we went ashore.  I planned to
sail in the morning, but should be down the
China Sea again in three months' time.  Bert
had promised to make his arrangements in the
meanwhile, and to leave Anjer with me on my
return.  I'd urged him to come at once, and would
have waited a day or two longer, but he wouldn't
listen to it.  It was another calm, hazy evening,
with no wind on the water, but a faint languorous
breeze among the palms.  We sat on the verandah
planning the future, if you please; he seemed to
want to talk about the world, and I felt it best to
encourage the inclination.

"'Well, old man' said he at last  'I've got to
turn in.  I'm weary to the bone—didn't sleep well
last night, at all.  This has been an exciting time
for me, you know'

"'Go ahead, and leave me here to finish out my
smoke' I answered  'I'll be all right—I know my
way about'

"To tell the truth, I welcomed the opportunity
to sit for a while alone, in the midst of the
luminous night, close to the land.  Perhaps I
might achieve the hint of a solution; I was baffled
and pained by the tremendous vital difficulties I'd
observed.  The wind had risen; it swept down
the hillside in a solid breath of sweetness, softly
clashing together the broad leaves of the palms.
Halsted, it occurred to me in a wandering moment,
would now be creeping up under the lee of the
land.  I drew my chair to the edge of the
verandah.  The scene of the previous night stood
vividly before me; I couldn't keep my eyes away
from that region of heavy shadow, where she stood
at my elbow undecided whether to kill me or let me
go.  Suddenly I started; was there a movement
in the shadow?  I watched it narrowly—-and, by
Jove, in a moment she actually materialized there,
as if in answer to my thoughts; advanced, became
substantial, and moved into the moonlight, coming
swiftly in my direction.  I remained seated,
chained to my chair.  She came to the railing
and put her hand lightly on my arm, as if
administering caution.  Her eyes were level with
mine.

"'I must see you' said she in a repressed voice
'I have waited for him to go'

"'Me?' I exclaimed, for my first thought had
been that she'd mistaken the figure on the
verandah  'What do you want of me?'

"'Like you, I am his friend' she answered simply.

"'Yes?...' I parried.  Face to face with her,
I saw how beautiful she was.  She had the golden
Malay skin, dusky, full, smooth as dark marble;
across her brow she wore an ornament of ivory
and carved blackwood; her breast was bare in a
long slit, shadowed like the face of a quiet pool.
The moonlight revealed her, the jungle stood at
her back: and through her hand on my arm I felt
the blood of the East, rustling like water in the
hills after a tropical rain.

"I stood up abruptly.  'All are his friends'
said I.  She lifted her eyebrows.  'Has it been
thus?' she asked with meaning.  I nodded,
marvelling meanwhile at her admirable directness; a
woman pure as diamond, true as steel.  She lived,
like light, in instantaneous collimation.  'Yes'
said I 'he has found many friends'

"She pondered the fact.  'But none have loved
him with the heart?'  Was it a question, or a
statement?  'Many' I answered 'but none gained
the answer'  'None?' she asked, searchingly
'You know, and I can only repeat what is true'
said I  'His heart is given to one who wears it
on a chain for play'

"She trembled at the thought.  'Where is
she?' she demanded.  I told her that I didn't
know.  'Not ... home?' she asked  'Not
there?...'  She stretched out a hand vaguely.
'Oh, no' said I, relieved to be able to speak an
open word  'Then it is not for her that he goes?'
she cried, pathetically relieved.  'No' said I
again.  She leaned toward me, as if to make a
critical examination.  'Why have you come, to
change and take him from me?' she asked bitterly.
'I came by chance, without knowing' I answered
'It is the hand of destiny'  Throwing back her
head, with a passionate gesture she flung an
uplifted arm across her eyes.  'Is she so beautiful?'
she cried in a low voice, like one pleading with fate.

"I heard a slight movement behind me, and
whirled, to find Bert standing in the doorway.  He
gazed from one to the other of us in troubled
silence; then crossed the porch and stood beside
me at the rail.  She heard his step, and turned, a
superb figure, her uplifted arm still shading her
eyes.

"'Nichols, I'm awfully sorry...' he began weakly.

"'Ah!' she cried, her arrow-like candour
tearing the veil he would have dropped.  She went
to him swiftly.  'All day I have wandered in the
hills' said she  'All day I have thought of your
choice.  I have asked the forest, why? and the
mountains, why? and the great ocean, why?  I
have held up my hands to the white clouds, to the
sun of life and wisdom, asking why, why?  Now
I have come to you—and him—to ask you, why?
My Love' said she softly 'I think it is that you
do not understand, and your words fall without
knowledge.  You are the light of life to me, and
the breath of the body.  I cannot live alone.  You
have taken my heart from my breast, and now
would carry it with you to a strange land, where
it would perish and die.  But these are
words—you cannot mean them.  You will not go.  See
how I hold you fast!'

"He gazed at her in trepidation.  'It is
decided' said he  'When the ship returns, I am
to go'  'Then I shall follow!' she told him.  'I
shall go with you ... home'  He snatched his
hands away.  'Oh, no, you can't!' he shouted
'It isn't what you think'  'Blind one' she
answered 'would I not be near you?'  He started
violently; she took his lands again.  'Then stay
with me, here in my land, which waits for us alone.
Stay with me in these nights that never end!'

"He sighed profoundly.  'It would soon be
over....'

"'When it had ended, we could die' she whispered
'I would gladly die thus, having lived for
a time.  Stay with me till love grows cold!'

"He pushed her off like one dazed and
distracted.  For a long while he stood perfectly
motionless.  'Stay!' she whispered once more
'Be quiet—let me think' said he.  She pressed
against the railing.  'Look down!' said she
'To-night we live—but there may be no
to-morrow!'  While she was speaking, clear and
sharp across the water came the rattle of a falling
anchor-chain.

"He seemed to stiffen where he stood.  His
face in the moonlight looked sterner than its wont,
set in the struggle that came hard to him.  'No!'
he cried in a loud voice.  The word seemed to
echo among the palms, a tragic whisper of
universal negation.  She gazed at him a moment
in naked terror—then tottered and sank slowly to
the ground, uttering little stifled cries.  I saw him
leap the railing and kneel beside her; but I didn't
wait for more.  I'd stayed too long already; and
what was coming would be harder than what had gone.

"It must have been fully an hour later, after
I'd lost the path and threshed around in the jungle
until I was tired out, that I succeeded in regaining
the bungalow.  Bert was sitting on the porch,
alone.  I dropped into a chair beside him.  'Too
bad, old man' said he, observing the state of my
white linens  'It was decent of you, though'

"'Yes, we're a decent breed, aren't we?' I
snapped in reply  'Anyway, let's not balance a
heart against an hour of discomfort and a suit of
clothes'  He turned his head and looked me
over.  'I can't say that I blame you' he exclaimed
'But honestly, old man, I think she will forget'
'I don't' said I  'Did you?'  He winced, but
I went on angrily  'You ought to know better by
this time.  You've had a double experience
now—the chaser and the chased....'  'Hold on,
Nichols!' he interrupted  'You're getting
unpardonable.  What would you have me do?  Do
you want me to stay here and live with her?'
'No, I don't!' I shouted  'I merely want a
revision of life and human nature—no one to be
unhappy, no love to go unrequited, no heart to
be thrown away'  He laughed.  'I'd like that,
too' said he.

"The silence lengthened between us, as we
gazed across the placid harbour, thinking our own
thoughts.  In the brilliant moonlight, every object
in the roadstead was plainly discernible.  'I see
your friend has arrived' said Bert suddenly  'He's
anchored pretty close to your vessel.  By Jove,
that must have been his chain..'  'It was'
I answered, musing on the fortuitousness of
events that shape our lives.  'Now he seems to
be getting a boat into the water.  Where are your
night glasses?'  In a moment Bert brought them
to me.  Aboard the new arrival there was an
unaccountable flurry, but I couldn't make out the
scene below the rail.  In a short while, however,
a boat appeared out of the shadow there, and
swam toward us through the bright moonlight.
'I wonder why he's coming ashore, at this time
of night' I murmured.  'Can't imagine' Bert
replied.  Soon we heard the chunking of oars in
the rowlocks, and two or three quick commands.
The boat was nearing the beach.  She passed
for a moment behind the point of the jetty.  Now
she had reached the landing.  A confusion of
voices broke out, loud and jarring, pitched in a
key of anger and violence.  Then, cutting the
stillness like a knife, came a sudden sharp cry.

"My heart leaped into my mouth.  'My God,
did you hear that?' asked Bert, breathlessly.
'Keep still—it sounded like a woman's voice'
said I.  We leaned across the rail, straining our
eyes, but couldn't see what was taking place; the
landing lay too close under the trees.  After the
cry, an absolute silence had fallen.  This lasted
a full minute.  Then a man's voice started up,
the same angry, jarring tone 'Give way, boys!'
Almost immediately, we heard the sound of the
oars again.

"The unexpectedness of the occurrence had
held us spellbound; we stood gazing at each other
like two wooden images.  Then, in the same
instant, we found our voices, began to confer
hurriedly, and started on the run for the centre
of the verandah, where a broad flight of steps led
down to the jetty path.  At the head of the path
we both halted as if transfixed.  Someone was
coming up from the landing.  The moonlight
plainly showed it to be a woman.  She advanced
slowly, stopping now and then, staggering as she
walked.  When she drew nearer, we could see
that she was hatless and empty-handed.  She
walked like a somnambulist, gazing fixedly on the
ground before her, now and then holding out a
hand as if to feel the way.  At the last turn of
the path, she stopped and raised her head.  Bert,
at my side, made a low strangling sound.
Evidently discovering us, she started forward again.
Her face was quite terrible.  All hope seemed
gone from it, like the dead face of a suicide that
I once saw; her eyes stared at us blankly, and
she clutched with one hand at the bosom of her
dress.

"'Who is there?' she asked brokenly.

"Bert left my side and flung himself toward
her.  'Helen!' he cried.  She would have fallen,
but he caught her in his arms.  'Helen!' said
he again, with his face close to hers.

"'Bert?' she asked in eager fearfulness.  Her
low voice seemed to tear the heart.  She gazed
at him long and deep, while desperation turned
to wonder in her eyes.

"For the second time that evening I fled the
scene of life's amazing hazard.  This time I
hurried down the path with all haste, making for
the jetty; by shouting, I should be able to raise
the ship and have a boat sent ashore for me.  As
I glanced back at the corner, I saw Bert help the
woman up the steps.  I thought I heard her
sobbing; but, in a moment, I realized that the
sound came from another direction.  Off among
the trees, in the heavy shadow, someone was
uttering smothered, choking cries.  I broke into
a run.  The ways of the land were getting too
damnably complicated altogether; I wanted to
surround myself again with a safe strip of water.





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   VII

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Nichols reached for another cigar.  "And
that's the way he found her" he went on  "For
it wouldn't be true to say that she had found him;
until the moment in front of the bungalow when
he took her in his arms, she hadn't dreamed that
he was there.

"I heard the final chapter of their romance
while we were going up the China Sea; I'd waited
for him, after all, and had taken them both north
with me.  After Bert had left Melbourne, she
had missed him, and had awakened to the realization
that she'd driven him out of her life.  So she
discovered what it meant to her, what she'd been
doing, and bowed before the law that through
any wrong keeps the heart pure and the spirit
ready to fulfil itself.  She had determined to
follow, but couldn't locate him.  Some said he
was in Singapore, some in Hong Kong; the
consensus of many vague rumours, however, agreed
that he had gone north into the China Sea region.
It was familiar ground to her; she had friends
there, and sources of information.  She's always
known of Halsted's packet service; the next time
he came around, she had taken passage in the
*Senegal* for an indeterminate trip up the coast.

"Unfortunately, Halsted also knew of her.  He
was a beastly sort of character.  The moment
they got outside he grew familiar, and soon was
making forthright approaches.  She was the only
woman on the vessel; the other passenger was
an elderly man, to whom she couldn't hope to look
for protection.  She, of course, was a woman of
experience, as capable of protecting herself as is
humanly possible; but there are limits to the
power of the mind over brute force, when passion
is engaged.  Make no mistake—her aversion
from him was virginal, and nothing could have
induced her submission.

"'I took my revolver on deck one morning, to
show him my marksmanship' said she  'I shot
a bird on the end of the spanker gaff.  Then I
got him on one side, and told him what I would
do.  I told him that I should be constantly on
the watch, and that I would shoot him dead if
he came near me.  It was the only way—but I
knew he was a coward'

"So this was the situation on board the *Senegal*—on
the one hand defiance, on the other baulked
and fermenting desire.  Halsted watched her as
a cat watches a mouse, trying to catch her off
guard.  Throughout the afternoon while they had
been coming up the straits, even while my glass
had been looking them over, the silent battle had
been going on.  The presence of the land had
filled her with nameless apprehension.  Then
they had run into the calm; in this condition, the
supper hour had arrived.  She had waited on
deck until she thought the others would be nearly
finished; when she entered the forward cabin, she
saw that she had waited too long.  The mate and
the old gentleman had gone on deck forward;
Halsted sat there alone.  She had to pass him
to reach her seat.  As she attempted to slip by,
he rose suddenly and crushed her in his arms.
The Chinese steward in the pantry turned his
back on the scene.

"'My hand fell on a table knife' said she  'I
fought him with it—succeeded in cutting him
badly about the hands.  The blood frightened
him; he had to let me go.  I've never seen a
human being in such a dreadful rage.  He swore
he wouldn't keep me on board an hour longer'

"The rage had persisted; as soon as the sails
had been furled, after dropping the anchor, he
had put a boat overboard and bundled her into
it, bag and baggage—well he knew that she was
in no position to make trouble for him.  She had
thought of trying to attract the attention of the
other vessel, but finally had decided that she had
better take her chances on land.  She had
supposed there were white people ashore; at the
landing, where her things had been pitched at her
feet, she had asked Halsted the way to the
settlement.  When he'd told her brutally what an
abandoned place it was, she'd suddenly lost heart.
It was then that we had heard her cry out.

"'Go up to the consulate bungalow' Halsted
had told her  'See the lights?  Somebody must
live up there'

"So she had climbed the hill, trusting to luck,
which had already arranged the scene.  It might
have been vastly different, you know.  Suppose
she had found him with the native woman?  Well,
suppose it—the renunciation would merely have
changed hands.  Inexorable formula!—for them,
one or the other; for him, heads I win, tails you lose"





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   VIII

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Nichols went to the rail, and stood for some
time in silence, facing the land.  "And I have
seen the other" said he slowly  "It was about a
year later that my course led me again through
Sunda Straits, and I arrived at Anjer on another
evening of moonlight and stillness and awakened
memory.  After the anchor was down I ordered
a boat to be set overboard, and went ashore in
the late evening to revisit the bungalow.  As I
went up the path, the shadows seemed to start and
move about me, and a wandering breeze stirred
the palm trees with a quick rustle as of departing
feet.  I found the wreck of a rattan chair standing
on the verandah, pulled it to the railing, and
sat there a long while facing the oval of grass
flooded with moonlight, the fixed scene, as it were,
where the actors of this unseen drama had stalked
through their extravagant business and said their
futile words.

"Nothing had changed; I seemed as if I had
left the place but yesterday.  I turned to the
heavy shadow where I had seen and heard her
last, the shadow that must have marked the end
of a hillside trail; and it wasn't surprising to me,
but only natural, to see her standing there once
more, her form drawn back as if from a sight she
didn't dare behold.  In a moment the tense figure
moved.  She walked like a tiger, with a crouching
step of absolute grace, cautious yet unafraid.
Crossing the oval, she came directly to the railing.
I got up hastily, in excitement and alarm; and we
faced each other without speaking for quite a
period.

"'You?...' said she at last in a low voice,
drawing back.  Her hand tightened on the rail.
She was regally beautiful.

"'For what do you wait?' I asked, striving to
be calm.

"She threw down her arms with a violent
gesture.  'A word, a message!' she cried  'Can
you tell me nothing?  Has he come?'

"'He is far away' I answered.

"She put her hand on mine.  'You are his
friend' said she  'I do not blame you now; I
see that it rested with him alone.  But keep
nothing from me.  Has he sent no word by you?'

"'He does not know that I have come' said I.

"'Ah, I have waited, night upon night!' she
cried  'Whenever ships stop, I have waited here—in
darkness, in rain—always!—thinking to see
you, or that he might come, or that a message....
Will he not come?  Tell me!'

"'He will never come' said I.

"She drew her hand away, and stepped back
sharply.  Her voice rang out, fierce with hate.
'He was a child.  The woman took him!  Tell
me, why?...'

"'The woman was his wife' I felt obliged to say.

"'Enough!' she cried.  Her form became
rigid, as if every muscle were stretched to the
point of breaking.  Suddenly she relaxed, and
turned to me for the last time.

"'He is happy?' she asked quietly.

"I nodded—for the moment I couldn't speak.

"'She loves him?'

"Again I nodded.

"Her voice caught at the next question, but
rallied bravely.  'He loves her?—you are
sure?...'

"I cursed myself for having come—but there
could be no kindness in sustaining the delusion.
'I am certain' I answered  'He will never tire
of her.  He loves her better than all the world'

"She gave a quick cry, like one who has
received a mortal wound.  Before I could
recognize the significance of the moment, she had
moved swiftly into the open.  For an instant she
stood with arms outstretched; but not until the
dagger flashed above her breast did I see what
she held in her hand.  When I reached her she'd
fallen in the rank grass, and life had gone.

"And that's the way I left her, a figure very
beautiful, crouching low as if to spring, the tall
grass closing over her, the mystery dissolved in
mystery.  Aha!—these high spirits, this gruelling
difficulty of life.  But she, you'll note, had solved
the difficulty, had met it boldly and triumphantly,
with the master stroke that levels fate itself to the
dust.  As for the others, they had solved it, too,
though not so keenly, had triumphed, though not
so magnificently—had gone away, had found their
home, were happy, for a little longer....  What
did it signify?"

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