The Wrecker (Stevenson) Part 2

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ISLAND AND THE WRECK.

All hands were filled with joy. It was betrayed in their alacrity and easy faces: Johnson smiling broadly at the wheel, Nares studying the sketch chart of the island with an eye at peace, and the hands clustered forward, eagerly talking and pointing: so manifest was our escape, so wonderful the attraction of a single foot of earth after so many suns had set and risen on an empty sea. To add to the relief, besides, by one of those malicious coincidences which suggest for fate the image of an underbred and grinning schoolboy, we had no sooner worn ship than the wind began to abate.

For myself, however, I did but exchange anxieties. I was no sooner out of one fear than I fell upon another; no sooner secure that I should myself make the intended haven, than I began to be convinced that Trent was there before me. I climbed into the rigging, stood on the board, and eagerly scanned that ring of coral reef and bursting breaker, and the blue lagoon which they enclosed. The two islets within began to show plainly—Middle Brooks and Lower Brooks Island, the Directory named them: two low, bush-covered, rolling strips of sand, each with glittering beaches, each perhaps a mile or a mile and a half ​in length, running east and west, and divided by a narrow channel. Over these, innumerable as maggots, there hovered, chattered, screamed and clanged, millions of twinkling sea-birds: white and black; the black by far the largest. With singular scintillations, this vortex of winged life swayed to and fro in the strong sunshine, whirled continually through itself, and would now and again burst asunder and scatter as wide as the lagoon: so that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions. And a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main—the Flying Scud, the fruit of so many toilers, a recollection in so many lives of men, whose tall spars had been mirrored in the remotest corners of the sea—lay stationary at last and forever, in the first stage of naval dissolution. Towards her, the taut Norah Creina, vulture-wise, wriggled to windward: come from so far to pick her bones. And, look as I pleased, there was no other presence of man or of man's handiwork; no Honolulu schooner lay there crowded with armed rivals, no smoke rose from the fire at which I fancied Trent cooking a meal of sea-birds. It seemed, after all, we were in time, and I drew a mighty breath.

I had not arrived at this reviving certainty before the breakers were already close aboard, the leadsman at his station, and the captain posted in the fore cross-trees to con us through the coral lumps of the lagoon. All circumstances were in our favour, the light behind, the sun low, the wind still fresh and steady, and the tide about the turn. A moment ​

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She lay head to the reef, where the huge blue wall of the rollers was for ever ranging up and crumbling down" (p. 207). ​later we shot at racing speed betwixt two pier heads of broken water; the lead began to be cast, the captain to bawl down his anxious directions, the schooner to tack and dodge among the scattered dangers of the lagoon; and at one bell in the first dog watch, we had come to our anchor off the north-east end of Middle Brooks Island, in five fathoms water. The sails were gasketted and covered, the boats emptied of the miscellaneous stores and odds and ends of sea-furniture, that accumulate in the course of a voyage, the kedge sent ashore, and the decks tidied down: a good three-quarters of an hour's work, during which I raged about the deck like a man with a strong toothache. The transition from the wild sea to the comparative immobility of the lagoon had wrought strange distress among my nerves: I could not hold still whether in hand or foot; the slowness of the men, tired as dogs after our rough experience outside, irritated me like something personal; and the irrational screaming of the sea-birds saddened me like a dirge. It was a relief when, with Nares, and a couple of hands, I might drop into the boat and move off at last for the Flying Scud.

“She looks kind of pitiful, don't she?” observed the captain, nodding towards the wreck, from which we were separated by some half a mile. “Looks as if she didn't like her berth, and Captain Trent had used her badly. Give her ginger, boys!” he added to the hands, “and you can all have shore liberty to-night to see the birds and paint the town red.”

We all laughed at the pleasantry, and the boat skimmed the faster over the rippling face of the lagoon. The Flying Scud would have seemed small enough beside the wharves of San Francisco, but she was some thrice the size of the Norah Creina, which had been so long our continent; and as we craned up at her wall-sides, she impressed us with a mountain magnitude. She lay head to the reef, where the huge ​blue wall of the rollers was for ever ranging up and crumbling down; and to gain her starboard side, we must pass below the stern. The rudder was hard aport, and we could read the legend—

FLYING SCUD
HULL

On the other side, about the break of the poop, some half a fathom of rope ladder trailed over the rail, and by this we made our entrance.

She was a roomy ship inside, with a raised poop standing some three feet higher than the deck, and a small forward house, for the men's bunks and the galley, just abaft the foremast. There was one boat on the house, and another and larger one, in beds on deck, on either hand of it. She had been painted white, with tropical economy, outside and in; and we found, later on, that the stanchions of the rail, hoops of the scuttle butt, etc., were picked out with green. At that time, however, when we first stepped aboard, all was hidden under the droppings of innumerable sea-birds.

The birds themselves gyrated and screamed meanwhile among the rigging; and when we looked into the galley, their outrush drove us back. Savage-looking fowl they were, savagely beaked, and some of the black ones great as eagles. Half-buried in the slush, we were aware of a litter of kegs in the waist; and these, on being somewhat cleaned, proved to be water beakers and quarter casks of mess beef with some colonial brand, doubtless collected there before the Tempest hove in sight, and while Trent and his men had no better expectation than to strike for Honolulu in the boats. Nothing else was notable on deck, save where the loose topsail had played some havoc with the rigging, and there hung, and swayed, and sang in the declining wind, a raffle of intorted cordage.

​With a shyness that was almost awe, Nares and I descended the companion. The stair turned upon itself and landed us just forward of a thwart-ship bulkhead that cut the poop in two. The fore part formed a kind of miscellaneous store-room, with a double-bunked division for the cook (as Nares supposed) and second mate. The after part contained, in the midst, the main cabin, running in a kind of bow into the curvature of the stern; on the port side, a pantry opening forward and a stateroom for the mate; and on the starboard, the captain's berth and water-closet. Into these we did but glance: the main cabin holding us. It was dark, for the sea-birds had obscured the skylight with their droppings; it smelt rank and fusty; and it was beset with a loud swarm of flies that beat continually in our faces. Supposing them close attendants upon man and his broken meat, I marvelled how they had found their way to Midway reef; it was sure at least some vessel must have brought them, and that long ago, for they had multiplied exceedingly. Part of the floor was strewn with a confusion of clothes, books, nautical instruments, odds and ends of finery, and such trash as might be expected from the turning out of several seamen's chests, upon a sudden emergency and after a long cruise. It was strange in that dim cabin, quivering with the near thunder of the breakers and pierced with the screaming of the fowls, to turn over so many things that other men had coveted, and prized, and worn on their warm bodies—frayed old underclothing, pyjamas of strange design, duck suits in every stage of rustiness, oil skins, pilot coats, bottles of scent, embroidered shirts, jackets of Ponjee silk—clothes for the night watch at sea or the day ashore in the hotel verandah; and mingled among these, books, cigars, fancy pipes, quantities of tobacco, many keys, a rusty pistol, and a sprinkling of cheap curiosities—Benares brass, Chinese jars and pictures, ​and bottles of odd shells in cotton, each designed no doubt for somebody at home—perhaps in Hull, of which Trent had been a native and his ship a citizen.

Thence we turned our attention to the table, which stood spread, as if for a meal, with stout ship's crockery and the remains of food—a pot of marmalade, dregs of coffee in the mugs, unrecognisable remains of foods, bread, some toast, and a tin of condensed milk. The table-cloth, originally of a red colour, was stained a dark brown at the captain's end, apparently with coffee; at the other end, it had been folded back, and a pen and ink-pot stood on the bare table. Stools were here and there about the table, irregularly placed, as though the meal had been finished and the men smoking and chatting; and one of the stools lay on the floor, broken.

“See! they were writing up the log,” said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. “Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet, that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels. What a regular, lime-juicer spread!” he added contemptuously. “Marmalade—and toast for the old man! Nasty, slovenly pigs!”

There was something in this criticism of the absent that jarred upon my feelings. I had no love indeed for Captain Trent or any of his vanished gang; but the desertion and decay of this once habitable cabin struck me hard: the death of man's handiwork is melancholy like the death of man himself; and I was impressed with an involuntary and irrational sense of tragedy in my surroundings.

“This sickens me,” I said. “Let's go on deck and breathe.”

The captain nodded. “It is kind of lonely, isn't it?” he said. “But I can't go up till I get the code signals. I want to run up 'Got Left' or something, just to brighten up this island home. Captain Trent ​hasn't been here yet, but he'll drop in before long; and it'll cheer him up to see a signal on the brig.”

“Isn't there some official expression we could use?” I asked, vastly taken by the fancy. “'Sold for the benefit of the underwriters: for further particulars, apply to J. Pinkerton, Montana Block, S.F.'”

“Well,” returned Nares, “I won't say but what an old navy quartermaster might telegraph all that, if you gave him a day to do it in and a pound of tobacco for himself. But it's above my register. I must try something short and sweet: KB, urgent signal, 'Heave all aback'; or LM, urgent, 'The berth you're now in is not safe'; or what do you say to PQH?—'Tell my owners the ship answers remarkably well.'”

“It's premature,” I replied; “but it seems calculated to give pain to Trent. PQH for me.”

The flags were found in Trent's cabin, neatly stored behind a lettered grating; Nares chose what he required and (I following) returned on deck, where the sun had already dipped, and the dusk was coming.

“Here! don't touch that, you fool!” shouted the captain to one of the hands, who was drinking from the scuttle but. “That water's rotten!”

“Beg pardon, sir,” replied the man. “Tastes quite sweet.”

“Let me see,” returned Nares, and he took the dipper and held it to his lips. “Yes, it's all right,” he said. “Must have rotted and come sweet again. Queer, isn't it, Mr. Dodd? Though I've known the same on a Cape Horner.”

There was something in his intonation that made me look him in the face; he stood a little on tiptoe to look right and left about the ship, like a man filled with curiosity, and his whole expression and bearing testified to some suppressed excitement.

“You don't believe what you're saying!” I broke out.

“Oh, I don't know but what I do!” he replied, ​laying a hand upon me soothingly. “The thing's very possible. Only, I'm bothered about something else.”

And with that he called a hand, gave him the code flags, and stepped himself to the main signal halliards, which vibrated under the weight of the ensign overhead. A minute later, the American colours, which we had brought in the boat, replaced the English red, and PQH was fluttering at the fore.

“Now, then,” said Nares, who had watched the breaking out of his signal with the old-maidish particularity of an American sailor, “out with those handspikes, and let's see what water there is in the lagoon.”

The bars were shoved home; the barbarous cacophony of the clanking pump rose in the waist; and streams of ill-smelling water gushed on deck and made valleys in the slab guano. Nares leaned on the rail, watching the steady stream of bilge as though he found some interest in it.

“What is it that bothers you?” I asked.

“Well, I'll tell you one thing shortly,” he replied. “But here's another. Do you see those boats there, one on the house and two on the beds? Well, where is the boat Trent lowered when he lost the hands?”

“Got it aboard again, I suppose,” said I.

“Well, if you'll tell me why!” returned the captain.

“Then it must have been another,” I suggested.

“She might have carried another on the main hatch, I won't deny,” admitted Nares; “but I can't see what she wanted with it, unless it was for the old man to go out and play the accordion in, on moonlight nights.”

“It can't much matter, anyway,” I reflected.

“Oh, I don't suppose it does,” said he, glancing over his shoulder at the spouting of the scuppers.

​“And how long are we to keep up this racket?” I asked. “We're simply pumping up the lagoon. Captain Trent himself said she had settled down and was full forward.”

“Did he?” said Nares, with a significant dryness. And almost as he spoke the pumps sucked, and sucked again, and the men threw down their bars. “There, what do you make of that?” he asked. “Now, I'll tell, Mr. Dodd,” he went on, lowering his voice, but not shifting from his easy attitude against the rail, “this ship is as sound as the Norah Creina. I had a guess of it before we came aboard, and now I know.”

“It's not possible!” I cried. “What do you make of Trent?”

“I don't make anything of Trent; I don't know whether he's a liar or only an old wife; I simply tell you what's the fact,” said Nares. “And I'll tell you something more,” he added: “I've taken the ground myself in deep-water vessels; I know what I'm saying; and I say that, when she first struck and before she bedded down, seven or eight hours' work would have got this hooker off, and there's no man that ever went two years to sea but must have known it.”

I could only utter an exclamation.

Nares raised his finger warningly. “Don't let them get hold of it,” said he. “Think what you like, but say nothing.”

I glanced round; the dusk was melting into early night; the twinkle of a lantern marked the schooner's position in the distance; and our men, free from further labour, stood grouped together in the waist, their faces illuminated by their glowing pipes.

“Why didn't Trent get her off?” inquired the captain. “Why did he want to buy her back in 'Frisco for these fabulous sums, when he might have sailed her into the bay himself?”

​“Perhaps he never knew her value until then,” I suggested.

“I wish we knew her value now,” exclaimed Nares. “However, I don't want to depress you; I'm sorry for you, Mr. Dodd; I know how bothering it must be to you; and the best I can say's this: I haven't taken much time getting down, and now I'm here I mean to work this thing in proper style. I just want to put your mind at rest: you shall have no trouble with me.”

There was something trusty and friendly in his voice; and I found myself gripping hands with him, in that hard, short shake that means so much with English-speaking people.

“We'll do, old fellow,” said he. “We've shaken down into pretty good friends, you and me; and you won't find me working the business any the less hard for that. And now let's scoot for supper.”

After supper, with the idle curiosity of the seafarer, we pulled ashore in a fine moonlight, and landed on Middle Brook's Island. A flat beach surrounded it upon all sides; and the midst was occupied by a thicket of bushes, the highest of them scarcely five feet high, in which the sea-fowl lived. Through this we tried at first to strike; but it were easier to cross Trafalgar Square on a day of demonstration than to invade these haunts of sleeping sea-birds. The nests sank, and the eggs burst under footing; wings beat in our faces, beaks menaced our eyes, our minds were confounded with the screeching, and the coil spread over the island and mounted high into the air.

“I guess we'll saunter round the beach,” said Nares, when we had made good our retreat.

The hands were all busy after sea-birds' eggs, so there were none to follow us. Our way lay on the crisp sand by the margin of the water: on one side, the thicket from which we had been dislodged; on the other, the face of the lagoon, barred with a broad ​path of moonlight, and beyond that, the line, alternately dark and shining, alternately hove high and fallen prone, of the external breakers. The beach was strewn with bits of wreck and drift: some redwood and spruce logs, no less than two lower masts of junks, and the stern-post of a European ship—all of which we looked on with a shade of serious concern, speaking of the dangers of the sea and the hard case of castaways. In this sober vein we made the greater part of the circuit of the island; had a near view of its neighbour from the southern end; walked the whole length of the westerly side in the shadow of the thicket; and came forth again into the moonlight at the opposite extremity.

On our right, at the distance of about half a mile, the schooner lay faintly heaving at her anchors. About half a mile down the beach, at a spot still hidden from us by the thicket, an upboiling of the birds showed where the men were still (with sailor-like insatiability) collecting eggs. And right before us, in a small indentation of the sand, we were aware of a boat lying high and dry, and right side up.

Nares crouched back into the shadow of the bushes.

“What the devil's this?” he whispered.

“Trent,” I suggested, with a beating heart.

“We were damned fools to come ashore unarmed,” said he. “But I've got to know where I stand.” In the shadow, his face looked conspicuously white, and his voice betrayed a strong excitement. He took his boat's whistle from his pocket. “In case I might want to play a tune,” said he, grimly, and thrusting it between his teeth, advanced into the moonlit open; which we crossed with rapid steps, looking guiltily about us as we went. Not a leaf stirred; and the boat, when we came up to it, offered convincing proof of long desertion. She was an eighteen-foot whaleboat of the ordinary type, equipped with oars and thole-pins. Two or three quarter-casks lay on the bilge amidships, one of which must have been broached, ​and now stank horribly; and these, upon examination, proved to bear the same New Zealand brand as the beef on board the wreck.

“Well, here's the boat,” said I; “here's one of your difficulties cleared away.”

“H'm,” said he. There was a little water in the bilge, and here he stooped and tasted it.

“Fresh,” he said. “Only rain water.”

“You don't object to that?” I asked.

“No,” said he.

“Well, then, what ails you?” I cried.

“In plain United States, Mr. Dodd,” he returned, “a whaleboat, five ash sweeps, and a barrel of stinking pork.”

“Or, in other words, the whole thing?” I commented.

“Well, it's this way,” he condescended to explain. “I've no use for a fourth boat at all; but a boat of this model tops the business. I don't say the type's not common in these waters; it's as common as dirt; the traders carry them for surf-boats. But the Flying Scud? a deep-water tramp, who was lime-juicing around between big ports, Calcutta and Rangoon and 'Frisco and the Canton River? No, I don't see it.”

We were leaning over the gunwale of the boat as we spoke. The captain stood nearest the bow, and he was idly playing with the trailing painter, when a thought arrested him. He hauled the line in hand over hand, and stared, and remained staring, at the end.

“Anything wrong with it?” I asked.

“Do you know, Mr. Dodd,” said he, in a queer voice, “this painter's been cut? A sailor always seizes a rope's end, but this is sliced short off with the cold steel. This won't do at all for the men,” he added. “Just stand by till I fix it up more natural.”

“Any guess what it all means?” I asked.

“Well, it means one thing,” said he. “It means ​Trent was a liar. I guess the story of the Flying Scud was a sight more picturesque than he gave out.”

Half an hour later, the whaleboat was lying astern of the Norah Creina; and Nares and I sought our bunks, silent and half-bewildered by our late discoveries.

 CHAPTER XIV.

THE CABIN OF THE "FLYING SCUD."

The sun of the morrow had not cleared the morning bank: the lake of the lagoon, the islets, and the wall of breakers now beginning to subside, still lay clearly pictured in the flushed obscurity of early day, when we stepped again upon the deck of the Flying Scud: Nares, myself, the mate, two of the hands, and one dozen bright, virgin axes, in war against that massive structure. I think we all drew pleasurable breath; so profound in man is the instinct of destruction, so engaging is the interest of the chase. For we were now about to taste, in a supreme degree, the double joys of demolishing a toy and playing “Hide the handkerchief”—sports from which we had all perhaps desisted since the days of infancy. And the toy we were to burst in pieces was a deep-sea ship; and the hidden good for which we were to hunt was a prodigious fortune.

The decks were washed down, the main hatch removed, and a gun-tackle purchase rigged before the boat arrived with breakfast. I had grown so suspicious of the wreck, that it was a positive relief to me to look down into the hold, and see it full, or nearly full, of undeniable rice packed in the Chinese fashion in boluses of matting. Breakfast over, Johnson and the hands turned to upon the cargo; while Nares and I, having ​smashed open the skylight and rigged up a windsail on deck, began the work of rummaging the cabins.

I must not be expected to describe our first day's work, or (for that matter) any of the rest, in order and detail as it occurred. Such particularity might have been possible for several officers and a draft of men from a ship of war, accompanied by an experienced secretary with a knowledge of shorthand. For two plain human beings, unaccustomed to the use of the broad-axe and consumed with an impatient greed of the result, the whole business melts, in the retrospect, into a nightmare of exertion, heat, hurry, and bewilderment; sweat pouring from the face like rain, the scurry of rats, the choking exhalations of the bilge, and the throbs and splinterings of the toiling axes. I shall content myself with giving the cream of our discoveries in a logical rather than a temporal order; though the two indeed practically coincided, and we had finished our exploration of the cabin, before we could be certain of the nature of the cargo.

Nares and I began operations by tossing up pell-mell through the companion, and piling in a squalid heap about the wheel, all clothes, personal effects, the crockery, the carpet, stale victuals, tins of meat, and in a word, all movables from the main cabin. Thence, we transferred our attention to the captain's quarters on the starboard side. Using the blankets for a basket, we sent up the books, instruments, and clothes to swell our growing midden on the deck; and then Nares, going on hands and knees, began to forage underneath the bed. Box after box of Manilla cigars rewarded his search. I took occasion to smash some of these boxes open, and even to guillotine the bundles of cigars; but quite in vain—no secret cache of opium encouraged me to continue.

“I guess I've got hold of the dicky now!” exclaimed Nares, and turning round from my perquisitions, I found he had drawn forth a heavy iron box, ​

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And lo! there was disclosed but a trayful of papers" (p. 219). ​secured to the bulkhead by chain and padlock. On this he was now gazing, not with the triumph that instantly inflamed my own bosom, but with a somewhat foolish appearance of surprise.

“By George, we have it now!” I cried, and would have shaken hands with my companion; but he did not see, or would not accept, the salutation.

“Let's see what's in it first,” he remarked dryly. And he adjusted the box upon its side, and with some blows of an axe burst the lock open. I threw myself beside him, as he replaced the box on its bottom and removed the lid. I cannot tell what I expected; a million's worth of diamonds might perhaps have pleased me; my cheeks burned, my heart throbbed to bursting; and lo! there was disclosed but a trayful of papers, neatly taped, and a cheque-book of the customary pattern. I made a snatch at the tray to see what was beneath; but the captain's hand fell on mine, heavy and hard.

“Now, boss!” he cried, not unkindly, “is this to be run shipshape? or is it a Dutch grab-racket?”

And he proceeded to untie and run over the contents of the papers, with a serious face and what seemed an ostentation of delay. Me and my impatience it would appear he had forgotten; for when he was quite done, he sat awhile thinking, whistled a bar or two, refolded the papers, tied them up again; and then, and not before, deliberately raised the tray.

I saw a cigar-box, tied with a piece of fishing-line, and four fat canvas-bags. Nares whipped out his knife, cut the line, and opened the box. It was about half full of sovereigns.

“And the bags?” I whispered.

The captain ripped them open one by one, and a flood of mixed silver coin burst forth and rattled in the rusty bottom of the box. Without a word, he set to work to count the gold.

“What is this?” I asked.

​“It's the ship's money,” he returned, doggedly continuing his work.

“The ship's money?” I repeated. “That's the money Trent tramped and traded with? And there's his cheque-book to draw upon his owners? And he has left it?”

“I guess he has,” said Nares, austerely, jotting down a note of the gold; and I was abashed into silence till his task should be completed.

It came, I think, to three hundred and seventy-eight pounds sterling; some nineteen pounds of it in silver: all of which we turned again into the chest.

“And what do you think of that?” I asked.

“Mr. Dodd,” he replied, “you see something of the rumness of this job, but not the whole. The specie bothers you, but what gets me is the papers. Are you aware that the master of a ship has charge of all the cash in hand, pays the men advances, receives freight and passage money, and runs up bills in every port? All this he does as the owner's confidential agent, and his integrity is proved by his receipted bills. I tell you, the captain of a ship is more likely to forget his pants than these bills which guarantee his character. I've known men drown to save them—bad men, too; but this is the shipmaster's honour. And here this Captain Trent—not hurried, not threatened with anything but a free passage in a British man-of-war—has left them all behind! I don't want to express myself too strongly, because the facts appear against me, but the thing is impossible.”

Dinner came to us not long after, and we ate it on deck, in a grim silence, each privately racking his brain for some solution of the mysteries. I was indeed so swallowed up in these considerations, that the wreck, the lagoon, the islets, and the strident sea-fowl, the strong sun then beating on my head, and even the gloomy countenance of the captain at ​my elbow, all vanished from the field of consciousness. My mind was a blackboard, on which I scrawled and blotted out hypotheses; comparing each with the pictorial records in my memory—ciphering with pictures. In the course of this tense mental exercise I recalled and studied the faces of one memorial masterpiece, the scene of the saloon; and here I found myself, on a sudden, looking in the eyes of the Kanaka.

“There's one thing I can put beyond doubt, at all events,” I cried, relinquishing my dinner and getting briskly afoot. “There was that Kanaka I saw in the bar with Captain Trent, the fellow the newspapers and ship's articles made out to be a Chinaman. I mean to rout his quarters out and settle that.”

“All right,” said Nares. “I'll lazy off a bit longer, Mr. Dodd; I feel pretty rocky and mean.”

We had thoroughly cleared out the three after-compartments of the ship: all the stuff from the main cabin and the mate's and captain's quarters lay piled about the wheel; but in the forward stateroom with the two bunks, where Nares had said the mate and cook most likely berthed, we had as yet done nothing. Thither I went. It was very bare; a few photographs were tacked on the bulkhead, one of them indecent; a single chest stood open, and, like all we had yet found, it had been partly rifled. An armful of two-shilling novels proved to me beyond a doubt it was a European's; no Chinaman would have possessed any, and the most literate Kanaka conceivable in a ship's galley was not likely to have gone beyond one. It was plain, then, that the cook had not berthed aft, and I must look elsewhere.

The men had stamped down the nests and driven the birds from the galley, so that I could now enter without contest. One door had been already blocked with rice; the place was in part darkness, full of a ​foul stale smell, and a cloud of nasty flies; it had been left, besides, in some disorder, or else the birds, during their time of tenancy, had knocked the things about; and the floor, like the deck before we washed it, was spread with pasty filth. Against the wall, in the far corner, I found a handsome chest of camphor wood bound with brass, such as Chinamen and sailors love, and indeed all of mankind that plies in the Pacific. From its outside view I could thus make no deduction; and, strange to say, the interior was concealed. All the other chests, as I have said already, we had found gaping open, and their contents scattered abroad; the same remark we found to apply afterwards in the quarters of the seamen; only this camphor-wood chest, a singular exception, was both closed and locked.

I took an axe to it, readily forced the paltry Chinese fastening, and, like a Custom House officer, plunged my hands among the contents. For some while I groped among linen and cotton. Then my teeth were set on edge with silk, of which I drew forth several strips covered with mysterious characters. And these settled the business, for I recognised them as a kind of bed-hanging popular with the commoner class of the Chinese. Nor were further evidences wanting, such as night-clothes of an extraordinary design, a three-stringed Chinese fiddle, a silk handkerchief full of roots and herbs, and a neat apparatus for smoking opium, with a liberal provision of the drug. Plainly, then, the cook had been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. stolen the chest before he proceeded to ship under a false name and domicile? It was possible, as anything was possible in such a welter; but, regarded as a solution, it only led and left me deeper in the bog. For why should this chest have been deserted and neglected, when the others were rummaged or removed? and where ​had Jos. come by that second chest, with which (according to the clerk at the What Cheer) he had started for Honolulu?

“And how have you fared?” inquired the captain, whom I found luxuriously reclining in our mound of litter. And the accent on the pronoun, the heightened colour of the speaker's face, and the contained excitement in his tones, advertised me at once that I had not been alone to make discoveries.

“I have found a Chinaman's chest in the galley,” said I, “and John (if there was any John) was not so much as at the pains to take his opium.”

Nares seemed to take it mighty quietly. “That so?” said he. “Now, cast your eyes on that and own you're beaten!” And with a formidable clap of his open hand he flattened out before me, on the deck, a pair of newspapers.

I gazed upon them dully, being in no mood for fresh discoveries.

“Look at them, Mr. Dodd,” cried the captain sharply. “Can't you look at them?” And he ran a dirty thumb along the title. “'Sydney Morning Herald, November 26th,' can't you make that out?” he cried, with rising energy. “And don't you know, sir, that not thirteen days after this paper appeared in New South Pole, this ship we're standing in heaved her blessed anchors out of China? How did the Sydney Morning Herald get to Hong Kong in thirteen days? Trent made no land, he spoke no ship, till he got here. Then he either got it here or in Hong Kong. I give you your choice, my son!” he cried, and fell back among the clothes like a man weary of life.

“Where did you find them?” I asked. “In that black bag?”

“Guess so,” he said. “You needn't fool with it. There's nothing else but a lead-pencil and a kind of worked-out knife.”

​I looked in the bag, however, and was well rewarded.

“Every man to his trade, captain,” said I. “You're a sailor, and you've given me plenty of points; but I am an artist, and allow me to inform you this is quite as strange as all the rest. The knife is a palette-knife; the pencil a Winsor and Newton, and a B B B at that. A palette-knife and a B B B on a tramp brig! It's against the laws of nature.”

“It would sicken a dog, wouldn't it?” said Nares.

“Yes,” I continued, “it's been used by an artist, too: see how it's sharpened—not for writing—no man could write with that. An artist, and straight from Sydney? How can he come in?”

“Oh, that's natural enough,” sneered Nares. “They cabled him to come up and illustrate this dime novel.”

We fell a while silent.

“Captain,” I said at last, “there is something deuced underhand about this brig. You tell me you've been to sea a good part of your life. You must have seen shady things done on ships, and heard of more. Well, what is this? is it insurance? is it piracy? what is it about? what can it be for?”

“Mr. Dodd,” returned Nares, “you're right about me having been to sea the bigger part of my life. And you're right again when you think I know a good many ways in which a dishonest captain mayn't be on the square, nor do exactly the right thing by his owners, and altogether be just a little too smart by ninety-nine and three-quarters. There's a good many ways, but not so many as you'd think; and not one that has any mortal thing to do with Trent. Trent and his whole racket has got to do with nothing—that's the bed-rock fact; there's no sense to it, and no use in it, and no story to it—it's a beastly dream. And don't you run away with that notion that landsmen take about ships. A society ​actress don't go around more publicly than what a ship does, nor is more interviewed, nor more humbugged, nor more run after by all sorts of little fussinesses in brass buttons. And more than an actress, a ship has a deal to lose; she's capital, and the actress only character—if she's that. The ports of the world are thick with people ready to kick a captain into the penitentiary if he's not as bright as a dollar and as honest as the morning star; and what with Lloyd keeping watch and watch in every corner of the three oceans, and the insurance leeches, and the consuls, and the customs bugs, and the medicos, you can only get the idea by thinking of a landsman watched by a hundred and fifty detectives, or a stranger in a village Down East.”

“Well, but at sea?” I said.

“You make me tired,” retorted the captain. “What's the use—at sea? Everything's got to come to bearings at some port, hasn't it? You can't stop at sea for ever, can you?—No; the Flying Scud is rubbish; if it meant anything, it would have to mean something so almighty intricate that James G. Blaine hasn't got the brains to engineer it; and I vote for more axeing, pioneering, and opening up the resources of this phenomenal brig, and less general fuss,” he added, arising. “The dime-museum symptoms will drop in of themselves, I guess, to keep us cheery.”

But it appeared we were at the end of discoveries for the day; and we left the brig about sundown, without being further puzzled or further enlightened. The best of the cabin spoils—books, instruments, papers, silks, and curiosities—we carried along with us in a blanket, however, to divert the evening hours; and when supper was over, and the table cleared, and Johnson set down to a dreary game of cribbage between his right hand and his left, the captain and I turned out our blanket on the floor, and sat side by side to examine and appraise the spoils.

​The books were the first to engage our notice. These were rather numerous (as Nares contemptuously put it) “for a lime-juicer.” Scorn of the British mercantile marine glows in the breast of every Yankee merchant captain; as the scorn is not reciprocated, I can only suppose it justified in fact; and certainly the old country mariner appears of a less studious disposition. The more credit to the officers of the Flying Scud, who had quite a library, both literary and professional. There were Findlay's five directories of the world—all broken-backed, as is usual with Findlay, and all marked and scribbled over with corrections and additions—several books of navigation, a signal code, and an Admiralty book of a sort of orange hue, called “Islands of the Eastern Pacific Ocean,” Vol. III., which appeared from its imprint to be the latest authority, and showed marks of frequent consultation in the passages about the French Frigate Shoals, the Harman, Cure, Pearl, and Hermes reefs, Lisiansky Island, Ocean Island, and the place where we then lay—Brooks or Midway. A volume of Macaulay's “Essays” and a shilling Shakespeare led the van of the belles lettres; the rest were novels: several Miss Braddons—of course, “Aurora Floyd,” which has penetrated to every isle of the Pacific, a good many cheap detective books, “Rob Roy,” Auerbach's “Auf der Hohe” in the German, and a prize temperance story, pillaged (to judge by the stamp) from an Anglo-Indian circulating library.

“The Admiralty man gives a fine picture of our island,” remarked Nares, who had turned up Midway Island. “He draws the dreariness rather mild, but you can make out he knows the place.”

“Captain,” I cried, “you've struck another point in this mad business. See here,” I went on eagerly, drawing from my pocket a crumpled fragment of the Daily Occidental which I had inherited from Jim: “'misled by Hoyt's Pacific Directory'? Where's Hoyt?”

​“Let's look into that,” said Nares. “I got that book on purpose for this cruise.” Therewith he fetched it from the shelf in his berth, turned to Midway Island, and read the account aloud. It stated with precision that the Pacific Mail Company were about to form a depôt there, in preference to Honolulu, and that they had already a station on the island.

“I wonder who gives these directory men their information,” Nares reflected. “Nobody can blame Trent after that. I never got in company with squarer lying; it reminds a man of a presidential campaign.”

“All very well,” said I. “That's your Hoyt, and a fine, tall copy. But what I want to know is, where is Trent's Hoyt?”

“Took it with him,” chuckled Nares. “He had left everything else, bills and money and all the rest; he was bound to take something, or it would have aroused attention on the Tempest. 'Happy thought,' says he, 'let's take Hoyt.'”

“And has it not occurred to you,” I went on, “that all the Hoyts in creation couldn't have misled Trent, since he had in his hand that red Admiralty book, an official publication, later in date, and particularly full on Midway Island?”

“That's a fact!” cried Nares; “and I bet the first Hoyt he ever saw was out of the mercantile library of San Francisco. Looks as if he had brought her here on purpose, don't it? But then that's inconsistent with the steam-crusher of the sale. That's the trouble with this brig racket; any one can make half a dozen theories for sixty or seventy per cent. of it; but when they're made, there's always a fathom or two of slack hanging out of the other end.”

I believe our attention fell next on the papers, of which we had altogether a considerable bulk. I had hoped to find among these matter for a full-length character of Captain Trent; but here I was doomed, on the whole, to disappointment. We could make ​out he was an orderly man, for all his bills were docketed and preserved. That he was convivial, and inclined to be frugal even in conviviality, several documents proclaimed. Such letters as we found were, with one exception, arid notes from tradesmen. The exception, signed Hannah Trent, was a somewhat fervid appeal for a loan. “You know what misfortunes I have had to bear,” wrote Hannah, “and how much I am disappointed in George. The landlady appeared a true friend when I first came here, and I thought her a perfect lady. But she has come out since then in her true colours; and if you will not be softened by this last appeal, I can't think what is to become of your affectionate——” and then the signature. This document was without place or date, and a voice told me that it had gone likewise without answer. On the whole, there were few letters anywhere in the ship; but we found one before we were finished, in a seaman's chest, of which I must transcribe some sentences. It was dated from some place on the Clyde. “My dearist son,” it ran, “this is to tell you your dearist father passed away, Jan twelft, in the peace of the Lord. He had your photo and dear David's lade upon his bed, made me sit by him. Let's be a' thegither, he said, and gave you all his blessing. Oh my dear laddie, why were nae you and Davie here? He would have had a happier passage. He spok of both of ye all night most beautiful, and how ye used to stravaig on the Saturday afternoons, and of auld Kelvinside. Sooth the tune to me, he said, though it was the Sabbath, and I had to sooth him Kelvin Grove, and he looked at his fiddle, the dear man. I cannae bear the sight of it, he'll never play it mair. Oh my lamb, come home to me, I'm all by my lane now.” The rest was in a religious vein and quite conventional. I have never seen any one more put out than Nares, when I handed him this letter; he had read but a few words, before he ​cast it down; it was perhaps a minute ere he picked it up again, and the performance was repeated the third time before he reached the end.

“It's touching, isn't it?” said I.

For all answer, Nares exploded in a brutal oath; and it was some half an hour later that he vouchsafed an explanation. “I'll tell you what broke me up about that letter,” said he. “My old man played the fiddle, played it all out of tune: one of the things he played was “Martyrdom,” I remember—it was all martyrdom to me. He was a pig of a father, and I was a pig of a son; but it sort of came over me I would like to hear that fiddle squeak again. Natural,” he added; “I guess we're all beasts.”

“All sons are, I guess,” said I. “I have the same trouble on my conscience: we can shake hands on that.” Which (oddly enough, perhaps) we did.

Amongst the papers we found a considerable sprinkling of photographs; for the most part either of very debonair-looking young ladies or old women of the lodging-house persuasion. But one among them was the means of our crowning discovery.

“They're not pretty, are they, Mr. Dodd?” said Nares, as he passed it over.

“Who?” I asked, mechanically taking the card (it was a quarter-plate) in hand, and smothering a yawn; for the hour was late, the day had been laborious, and I was wearying for bed.

“Trent and Company,” said he. “That's a historic picture of the gang.”

I held it to the light, my curiosity at a low ebb: I had seen Captain Trent once, and had no delight in viewing him again. It was a photograph of the deck of the brig, taken from forward: all in apple-pie order; the hands gathered in the waist, the officers on the poop. At the foot of the card was written “Brig Flying Scud, Rangoon,” and a date; and above or below each individual figure the name had been carefully noted.

​As I continued to gaze, a shock went through me; the dimness of sleep and fatigue lifted from my eyes, as fog lifts in the channel; and I beheld with startled clearness the photographic presentment of a crowd of strangers. “1. Trent, Master” at the top of the card directed me to a smallish, weazened man, with bushy eyebrows and full white beard, dressed in a frock coat and white trousers; a flower stuck in his button-hole, his bearded chin set forward, his mouth clenched with habitual determination. There was not much of the sailor in his looks, but plenty of the martinet: a dry, precise man, who might pass for a preacher in some rigid sect; and whatever he was, not the Captain Trent of San Francisco. The men, too, were all new to me: the cook, an unmistakable Chinaman, in his characteristic dress, standing apart on the poop steps. But perhaps I turned on the whole with the greatest curiosity to the figure labelled “E. Goddedaal, 1st off.” He whom I had never seen, he might be the identical; he might be the clue and spring of all this mystery; and I scanned his features with the eye of a detective. He was of great stature, seemingly blonde as a viking, his hair clustering round his head in frowsy curls, and two enormous whiskers, like the tusks of some strange animal, jutting from his cheeks. With these virile appendages and the defiant attitude in which he stood, the expression of his face only imperfectly harmonised. It was wild, heroic, and womanish looking; and I felt I was prepared to hear he was a sentimentalist, and to see him weep.

For some while I digested my discovery in private, reflecting how best, and how with most of drama, I might share it with the captain. Then my sketch-book came in my head; and I fished it out from where it lay, with other miscellaneous possessions, at the foot of my bunk and turned to my sketch of Captain Trent and the survivors of the British brig Flying Scud in the San Francisco bar-room.

​“Nares,” said I, “I've told you how I first saw Captain Trent in that saloon in 'Frisco? how he came with his men, one of them a Kanaka with a canary-bird in a cage? and how I saw him afterwards at the auction, frightened to death, and as much surprised at how the figures skipped up as anybody there? Well,” said I, “there's the man I saw”—and I laid the sketch before him—“there's Trent of 'Frisco and there are his three hands. Find one of them in the photograph, and I'll be obliged.”

Nares compared the two in silence. “Well,” he said at last, “I call this rather a relief: seems to clear the horizon. We might have guessed at something of the kind from the double ration of chests that figured.”

“Does it explain anything?” I asked.

“It would explain everything,” Nares replied, “but for the steam-crusher. It'll all tally as neat as a patent puzzle, if you leave out the way these people bid the wreck up. And there we come to a stone wall. But whatever it is, Mr. Dodd, it's on the crook.”

“And looks like piracy,” I added.

“Looks like blind hookey!” cried the captain. “No, don't you deceive yourself; neither your head nor mine is big enough to put a name on this business.”

CHAPTER XV.

THE CARGO OF THE “FLYING SCUD.”

In my early days I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my generation. I was a dweller under roofs: the gull of that which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit; and a prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the​company of artists, and a man famous in our small world for gallantry, knee breeches, and dry and pregnant sayings. He, looking on the long meals and waxing bellies of the French, whom I confess I somewhat imitated, branded me as “a cultivator of restaurant fat.” And I believe he had his finger on the dangerous spot; I believe, if things had gone smooth with me, I should be now swollen like a prize-ox in body, and fallen in mind to a thing perhaps as low as many types of bourgeois—the implicit or exclusive artist. That was a home word of Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the portico of every school of art: “What I can't see is why you should want to do nothing else.” The dull man is made, not by the nature, but by the degree of his immersion in a single business. And all the more if that be sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than one half of him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will be distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration, and the heat of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of gentlemen, who describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and natural careers. Those who dwell in clubs and studios may paint excellent pictures or write enchanting novels. There is one thing that they should not do: they should pass no judgment on man's destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear: the eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort, lies upon one side, scarce changed since the beginning.

I would I could have carried along with me to Midway Island all the writers and the prating artists of my time. Day after day of hope deferred, of heat, of unremitting toil; night after night of aching limbs, ​bruised hands, and a mind obscured with the grateful vacancy of physical fatigue: the scene, the nature of my employment; the rugged speech and faces of my fellow-toilers, the glare of the day on deck, the stinking twilight in the bilge, the shrill myriads of the ocean-fowl: above all, the sense of our immitigable isolation from the world and from the current epoch—keeping another time, some eras old; the new day heralded by no daily paper, only by the rising sun; and the State, the churches, the peopled empires, war, and the rumours of war, and the voices of the arts, all gone silent as in the days ere they were yet invented. Such were the conditions of my new experience in life, of which (if I had been able) I would have had all my confrères and contemporaries to partake: forgetting, for that while, the orthodoxies of the moment, and devoted to a single and material purpose under the eye of heaven.

Of the nature of our task, I must continue to give some summary idea. The forecastle was lumbered with ship's chandlery, the hold nigh full of rice, the lazarette crowded with the teas and silks. These must all be dug out; and that made but a fraction of our task. The hold was ceiled throughout; a part, where perhaps some delicate cargo was once stored, had been lined, in addition, with inch boards; and between every beam there was a movable panel into the bilge. Any of these, the bulkheads of the cabins, the very timbers of the hull itself, might be the place of hiding. It was therefore necessary to demolish, as we proceeded, a great part of the ship's inner skin and fittings, and to auscultate what remained, like a doctor sounding for a lung disease. Upon the return, from any beam or bulkhead, of a flat or doubtful sound, we must up axe and hew into the timber: a violent and—from the amount of dry rot in the wreck—a mortifying exercise. Every night saw a deeper inroad into the bones of the Flying ​Scud—more beams tapped and hewn in splinters, more planking peeled away and tossed aside—and every night saw us as far as ever from the end and object of our arduous devastation. In this perpetual disappointment, my courage did not fail me, but my spirits dwindled; and Nares himself grew silent and morose. At night, when supper was done, we passed an hour in the cabin, mostly without speech: I, sometimes dozing over a book; Nares, sullenly but busily drilling sea-shells with the instrument called a Yankee Fiddle. A stranger might have supposed we were estranged; as a matter of fact, in this silent comradeship of labour, our intimacy grew.

I had been struck, at the first beginning of our enterprise upon the wreck, to find the men so ready at the captain's lightest word. I dare not say they liked, but I can never deny that they admired him thoroughly. A mild word from his mouth was more valued than flattery and half a dollar from myself; if he relaxed at all from his habitual attitude of censure, smiling alacrity surrounded him; and I was led to think his theory of captainship, even if pushed to excess, reposed upon some ground of reason. But even terror and admiration of the captain failed us before the end. The men wearied of the hopeless, unremunerative quest and the long strain of labour. They began to shirk and grumble. Retribution fell on them at once, and retribution multiplied the grumblings. With every day it took harder driving to keep them to the daily drudge; and we, in our narrow boundaries, were kept conscious every moment of the ill-will of our assistants.

In spite of the best care, the object of our search was perfectly well known to all on board; and there had leaked out, besides, some knowledge of those inconsistencies that had so greatly amazed the captain and myself. I could overhear the men debate the character of Captain Trent, and set forth competing ​theories of where the opium was stowed; and as they seemed to have been eavesdropping on ourselves, I thought little shame to prick up my ears when I had the return chance of spying upon them, in this way. I could diagnose their temper and judge how far they were informed upon the mystery of the Flying Scud. It was after having thus overheard some almost mutinous speeches that a fortunate idea crossed my mind. At night, I matured it in my bed, and the first thing the next morning, broached it to the captain.

“Suppose I spirit up the hands a bit,” I asked, “by the offer of a reward?”

“If you think you're getting your month's wages out of them the way it is, I don't,” was his reply. “However, they are all the men you've got, and you're the supercargo.”

This, from a person of the captain's character, might be regarded as complete adhesion; and the crew were accordingly called aft. Never had the captain worn a front more menacing. It was supposed by all that some misdeed had been discovered, and some surprising punishment was to be announced.

“See here, you!” he threw at them over his shoulder as he walked the deck, “Mr. Dodd here is going to offer a reward to the first man who strikes the opium in that wreck. There's two ways of making a donkey go—both good, I guess; the one's kicks and the other's carrots. Mr. Dodd's going to try the carrots. Well, my sons,”—and here he faced the men for the first time with his hands behind him—“if that opium's not found in five days, you can come to me for the kicks.”

He nodded to the present narrator, who took up the tale. “Here is what I propose, men,” said I: “I put up one hundred and fifty dollars. If any man can lay hands on the stuff right away, and off his own ​club, he shall have the hundred and fifty down. If any one can put us on the scent of where to look, he shall have a hundred and twenty-five, and the balance shall be for the lucky one who actually picks it up. We'll call it the Pinkerton Stakes, captain,” I added, with a smile.

“Call it the Grand Combination Sweep, then,” cries he. “For I go you better. Look here, men, I make up this jack-pot to two hundred and fifty dollars, American gold coin.”

“Thank you, Captain Nares,” said I; “that was handsomely done.”

“It was kindly meant,” he returned.

The offer was not made in vain; the hands had scarce yet realised the magnitude of the reward, they had scarce begun to buzz aloud in the extremity of hope and wonder, ere the Chinese cook stepped forward with gracious gestures and explanatory smiles.

“Captain,” he began, “I serv-um two year Melican navy; serv-um six year mail-boat steward. Savvy plenty.”

“Oho!” cried Nares, “you savvy plenty, do you? (Beggar's seen this trick in the mail-boats, I guess.) Well, why you no savvy a little sooner, sonny?”

“I think bimeby make-um reward,” replied the cook, with smiling dignity.

“Well, you can't say fairer than that,” the captain admitted, “and now the reward's offered you'll talk? Speak up, then. Suppose you speak true, you get reward. See?”

“I think long time,” replied the Chinaman. “See plenty litty mat lice; too-muchy plenty litty mat lice; sixty ton litty mat lice. I think all-e time perhaps plenty opium plenty litty mat lice.”

“Well, Mr. Dodd, how does that strike you?” asked the captain. “He may be right, he may be wrong. He's likely to be right, for if he isn't, where can the stuff be? On the other hand, if he's wrong, ​we destroy a hundred and fifty tons of good rice for nothing. It's a point to be considered.”

“I don't hesitate,” said I. “Let's get to the bottom of the thing. The rice is nothing; the rice will neither make nor break us.”

“That's how I expected you to see it,” returned Nares.

And we called the boat away and set forth on our new quest.

The hold was now almost entirely emptied; the mats (of which there went forty to the short ton) had been stacked on deck, and now crowded the ship's waist and forecastle. It was our task to disembowel and explore six thousand individual mats, and incidentally to destroy a hundred and fifty tons of valuable food. Nor were the circumstances of the day's business less strange than its essential nature. Each man of us, armed with a great knife, attacked the pile from his own quarter, slashed into the nearest mat, burrowed in it with his hands, and shed forth the rice upon the deck, where it heaped up, overflowed, and was trodden down, poured at last into the scuppers, and occasionally spouted from the vents. About the wreck, thus transformed into an overflowing granary, the sea-fowl swarmed in myriads and with surprising insolence. The sight of so much food confounded them; they deafened us with their shrill tongues, swooped in our midst, dashed in our faces, and snatched the grain from between our fingers. The men—their hands bleeding from these assaults—turned savagely on the offensive, drove their knives into the birds, drew them out crimsoned, and turned again to dig among the rice, unmindful of the gawking creatures that struggled and died among their feet. We made a singular picture—the hovering and diving birds; the bodies of the dead discolouring the rice with blood; the scuppers vomiting breadstuff; the men, frenzied by the gold hunt, toiling, slaying, and shouting aloud: ​over all the lofty intricacy of rigging and the radiant heaven of the Pacific. Every man there toiled in the immediate hope of fifty dollars; and I, of fifty thousand. Small wonder if we waded callously in blood and food.

It was perhaps about ten in the forenoon when the scene was interrupted. Nares, who had just ripped open a fresh mat, drew forth, and slung at his feet, among the rice, a papered tin box.

“How's that?” he shouted.

A cry broke from all hands: the next moment, forgetting their own disappointment, in that contagious sentiment of success, they gave three cheers that scared the sea-birds; and the next, they had crowded round the captain, and were jostling together and groping with emulous hands in the new-opened mat. Box after box rewarded them, six in all; wrapped, as I have said, in a paper envelope, and the paper printed on, in Chinese characters.

Nares turned to me and shook my hand. “I began to think we should never see this day,” said he. “I congratulate you, Mr. Dodd, on having pulled it through.”

The captain's tones affected me profoundly; and when Johnson and the men pressed round me in turn with congratulations, the tears came in my eyes.

“These are five-tael boxes, more than two pounds,” said Nares, weighing one in his hand. “Say two hundred and fifty dollars to the mat. Lay into it, boys! We'll make Mr. Dodd a millionaire before dark.”

It was strange to see with what a fury we fell to. The men had now nothing to expect; the mere idea of great sums inspired them with disinterested ardour. Mats were slashed and disembowelled, the rice flowed to our knees in the ship's waist, the sweat ran in our eyes and blinded us, our arms ached to agony; and yet our fire abated not. Dinner came; we were too weary to eat, too hoarse for conversation; ​and yet dinner was scarce done, before we were afoot again and delving in the rice. Before nightfall not a mat was unexplored, and we were face to face with the astonishing result.

For of all the inexplicable things in the story of the Flying Scud, here was the most inexplicable. Out of the six thousand mats, only twenty were found to have been sugared; in each we found the same amount, about twelve pounds of drug; making a grand total of two hundred and forty pounds. By the last San Francisco quotation, opium was selling for a fraction over twenty dollars a pound; but it had been known not long before to bring as much as forty in Honolulu, where it was contraband.

Taking, then, this high Honolulu figure, the value of the opium on board the Flying Scud fell considerably short of ten thousand dollars, while at the San Francisco rate it lacked a trifle of five thousand. And fifty thousand was the price that Jim and I had paid for it. And Bellairs had been eager to go higher! There is no language to express the stupor with which I contemplated this result.

It may be argued we were not yet sure; there might be yet another cache; and you may be certain in that hour of my distress the argument was not forgotten. There was never a ship more ardently perquested; no stone was left unturned, and no expedient untried; day after day of growing despair, we punched and dug in the brig's vitals, exciting the men with promises and presents; evening after evening Nares and I sat face to face in the narrow cabin, racking our minds for some neglected possibility of search. I could stake my salvation on the certainty of the result: in all that ship there was nothing left of value but the timber and the copper nails. So that our case was lamentably plain; we had paid fifty thousand dollars, borne the charges of the schooner, and paid fancy interest on money; and if things went well with us, we might ​realise fifteen per cent. of the first outlay. We were not merely bankrupt, we were comic bankrupts—a fair butt for jeering in the streets. I hope I bore the blow with a good countenance; indeed, my mind had long been quite made up, and since the day we found the opium I had known the result. But the thought of Jim and Mamie ached in me like a physical pain, and I shrank from speech and companionship.

I was in this frame of mind when the captain proposed that we should land upon the island. I saw he had something to say, and only feared it might be consolation; for I could just bear my grief, not bungling sympathy; and yet I had no choice but to accede to his proposal.

We walked awhile along the beach in silence. The sun overhead reverberated rays of heat; the staring sand, the glaring lagoon, tortured our eyes; and the birds and the boom of the far-away breakers made a savage symphony.

“I don't require to tell you the game's up?” Nares asked.

“No,” said I.

“I was thinking of getting to sea to-morrow,” he pursued.

“The best thing you can do,” said I.

“Shall we say Honolulu?” he inquired.

“O, yes; let's stick to the programme,” I cried. “Honolulu be it!”

There was another silence, and then Nares cleared his throat.

“We've been pretty good friends, you and me, Mr. Dodd,” he resumed. “We've been going through the kind of thing that tries a man. We've had the hardest kind of work, we've been badly backed, and now we're badly beaten. And we've fetched through without a word of disagreement. I don't say this to praise myself: it's my trade; it's what I'm paid for, and trained for, and brought up to. But it was another ​thing for you; it was all new to you; and it did me good to see you stand right up to it and swing right into it—day in, day out. And then see how you've taken this disappointment, when everybody knows you must have been tautened up to shying-point! I wish you'd let me tell you, Mr. Dodd, that you've stood out mighty manly and handsomely in all this business, and made every one like you and admire you. And I wish you'd let me tell you, besides, that I've taken this wreck business as much to heart as you have; something kind of rises in my throat when I think we're beaten; and if I thought waiting would do it, I would stick on this reef until we starved.”

I tried in vain to thank him for these generous words, but he was beforehand with me in a moment.

“I didn't bring you ashore to sound my praises,” he interrupted. “We understand one another now, that's all; and I guess you can trust me. What I wished to speak about is more important, and it's got to be faced. What are we to do about the Flying Scud and the dime novel?”

“I really have thought nothing about that,” I replied. “But I expect I mean to get at the bottom of it; and if the bogus Captain Trent is to be found on the earth's surface, I guess I mean to find him.”

“All you've got to do is talk,” said Nares; “you can make the biggest kind of boom; it isn't often the reporters have a chance at such a yarn as this; and I can tell you how it will go. It will go by telegraph, Mr. Dodd; it'll be telegraphed by the column, and head-lined, and frothed up, and denied by authority, and it'll hit bogus Captain Trent in a Mexican bar-room, and knock over bogus Goddedaal in a slum somewhere up the Baltic, and bowl down Hardy and Brown in sailors' music halls round Greenock. Oh, there's no doubt you can have a regular domestic Judgment Day. The only point is whether you deliberately want to.”

​“Well,” said I, “I deliberately don't want one thing: I deliberately don't want to make a public exhibition of myself and Pinkerton: so moral—smuggling opium; such damned fools—paying fifty thousand for a 'dead horse'!”

“No doubt it might damage you in a business sense,” the captain agreed. “And I'm pleased you take that view; for I've turned kind of soft upon the job. There's been some crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, Law bless you! if we dropped upon the troupe, all the premier artists would slip right out with the boodle in their grip-sacks, and you'd only collar a lot of old mutton-headed shell-backs that didn't know the back of the business from the front. I don't take much stock in mercantile Jack, you know that; but, poor devil, he's got to go where he's told; and if you make trouble, ten to one it'll make you sick to see the innocents who have to stand the racket. It would be different if we understood the operation; but we don't, you see: there's a lot of queer corners in life; and my vote is to let the blame' thing lie.”

“You speak as if we had that in our power,” I objected.

“And so we have,” said he.

“What about the men?” I asked. “They know too much by half; and you can't keep them from talking.”

“Can't I?” returned Nares. “I bet a boarding-master can! They can be all half-seas-over, when they get ashore, blind drunk by dark, and cruising out of the Golden Gate in different deep-sea ships by the next morning. Can't keep them from talking, can't I? Well, I can make 'em talk separate, leastways. If a whole crew came talking, parties would listen; but if it's only one lone old shell-back, it's the usual yarn. And at least, they needn't talk before six months, or—if we have luck, and there's a whaler handy—three years. And by that time, Mr. Dodd, it's ancient history.”

​“That's what they call Shanghaiing, isn't it?” I asked. “I thought it belonged to the dime novel.”

“Oh, dime novels are right enough,” returned the captain. “Nothing wrong with the dime novel, only that things happen thicker than they do in life, and the practical seamanship is off-colour.”

“So we can keep the business to ourselves,” I mused.

“There's one other person that might blab,” said the captain. “Though I don't believe she has anything left to tell.”

“And who is she?” I asked.

“The old girl there,” he answered, pointing to the wreck. “I know there's nothing in her; but somehow I'm afraid of som one else—it's the last thing you'd expect, so it's just the first that'll happen—someone dropping into this God-forgotten island where nobody drops in, waltzing into that wreck that we've grown old with searching, stooping straight down, and picking right up the very thing that tells the story. What's that to me? you may ask, and why am I gone Soft Tommy on this Museum of Crooks? They've smashed up you and Mr. Pinkerton; they've turned my hair grey with conundrums; they've been up to larks, no doubt; and that's all I know of them—you say. Well, and that's just where it is. I don't know enough; I don't know what's uppermost; it's just such a lot of miscellaneous eventualities as I don't care to go stirring up; and I ask you to let me deal with the old girl after a patent of my own.”

“Certainly—what you please,” said I, scarce with attention, for a new thought now occupied my brain. “Captain,” I broke out, “you are wrong: we cannot hush this up. There is one thing you have forgotten.”

“What is that?” he asked.

“A bogus Captain Trent, a bogus Goddedaal, a whole bogus crew, have all started home,” said I. “If we are right, not one of them will reach his journey's ​end. And do you mean to say that such a circumstance as that can pass without remark?”

“Sailors,” said the captain, “only sailors! If they were all bound for one place, in a body, I don't say so; but they're all going separate—to Hull, to Sweden, to the Clyde, to the Thames. Well, at each place, what is it? Nothing new. Only one sailor man missing: got drunk, or got drowned, or got left—the proper sailor's end.”

Something bitter in the thought and in the speaker's tones struck me hard. “Here is one that has got left!” I cried, getting sharply to my feet; for we had been some time seated. “I wish it were the other. I don't—don't relish going home to Jim with this!”

“See here,” said Nares, with ready tact, “I must be getting aboard. Johnson's in the brig annexing chandlery and canvas, and there's some things in the Norah that want fixing against we go to sea. Would you like to be left here in the chicken-ranch? I'll send for you to supper.”

I embraced the proposal with delight. Solitude, in my frame of mind, was not too dearly purchased at the risk of sunstroke or sand-blindness; and soon I was alone on the ill-omened islet. I should find it hard to tell of what I thought—of Jim, of Mamie, of our lost fortune, of my lost hopes, of the doom before me: to turn to at some mechanical occupation in some subaltern rank, and to toil there, unremarked and unamused, until the hour of the last deliverance. I was, at least, so sunk in sadness that I scarce remarked where I was going; and chance (or some finer sense that lives in us, and only guides us when the mind is in abeyance) conducted my steps into a quarter of the island where the birds were few. By some devious route, which I was unable to retrace for my return, I was thus able to mount, without interruption, to the highest point of land. And here I was recalled to consciousness by a last discovery.

​The spot on which I stood was level, and commanded a wide view of the lagoon, the bounding reef, the round horizon. Nearer hand I saw the sister islet, the wreck, the Norah Creina, and the Norah's boat already moving shoreward. For the sun was now low, flaming on the sea's verge; and the galley chimney smoked on board the schooner.

It thus befell that though my discovery was both affecting and suggestive, I had no leisure to examine further. What I saw was the blackened embers of fire of wreck. By all the signs, it must have blazed to a good height and burned for days; from the scantling of a spar that lay upon the margin only half consumed, it must have been the work of more than one; and I received at once the image of a forlorn troop of castaways, houseless in that lost corner of the earth, and feeding there their fire of signal. The next moment a hail reached me from the boat; and bursting through the bushes and the rising sea-fowl, I said farewell (I trust for ever) to that desert isle.

CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH I TURN SMUGGLER, AND THE CAPTAIN CASUIST.

The last night at Midway, I had little sleep; the next morning, after the sun was risen, and the clatter of departure had begun to reign on deck, I lay a long while dozing; and when at last I stepped from the companion, the schooner was already leaping through the pass into the open sea. Close on her board, the huge scroll of a breaker unfurled itself along the reef with a prodigious clamour; and behind I saw the wreck vomiting into the morning air a coil of smoke. The wreaths already blew out far to leeward, flames already glittered in the cabin sky-​light; and the sea-fowl were scattered in surprise as wide as the lagoon. As we drew farther off, the conflagration of the Flying Scud flamed higher; and long after we had dropped all signs of Midway Island, the smoke still hung in the horizon like that of a distant steamer. With the fading out of that last vestige, the Nora Creina, passed again into the empty world of cloud and water by which she had approached; and the next features that appeared, eleven days later, to break the line of sky, were the arid mountains of Oahu.

It has often since been a comfortable thought to me that we had thus destroyed the tell-tale remnants of the Flying Scud; and often a strange one that my last sight and reminiscence of that fatal ship should be a pillar of smoke on the horizon. To so many others besides myself the same appearance had played a part in the various stages of that business: luring some to what they little imagined, filling some with unimaginable terrors. But ours was the last smoke raised in the story; and with its dying away the secret of the Flying Scud became a private property.

It was by the first light of dawn that we saw, close on board, the metropolitan island of Hawaii. We held along the coast, as near as we could venture, with a fresh breeze and under an unclouded heaven; beholding, as we went, the arid mountain sides and scrubby cocoa-palms of that somewhat melancholy archipelago. About four of the afternoon we turned Waimanolo Point, the westerly headland of the great bight of Honolulu; showed ourselves for twenty minutes in full view; and then fell again to leeward, and put in the rest of daylight, plying under shortened sail under the lee of Waimanolo.

A little after dark we beat once more about the point, and crept cautiously toward the mouth of the Pearl Lochs, where Jim and I had arranged I was ​to meet the smugglers. The night was happily obscure, the water smooth. We showed, according to instructions, no light on deck: only a red lantern dropped from either cathead to within a couple of feet of the water. A lookout was stationed on the bowsprit end, another in the crosstrees; and the whole ship's company crowded forward, scouting for enemies or friends. It was now the crucial moment of our enterprise; we were now risking liberty and credit; and that for a sum so small to a man in my bankrupt situation, that I could have laughed aloud in bitterness. But the piece had been arranged, and we must play it to the finish.

For some while, we saw nothing but the dark mountain outline of the island, the torches of native fishermen glittering here and there along the foreshore, and right in the midst that cluster of brave lights with which the town of Honolulu advertises itself to the seaward. Presently a ruddy star appeared inshore of us, and seemed to draw near unsteadily. This was the anticipated signal; and we made haste to show the countersign, lowering a white light from the quarter, extinguishing the two others, and laying the schooner incontinently to. The star approached slowly; the sounds of oars and of men's speech came to us across the water; and then a voice hailed us—

“Is that Mr. Dodd?”

“Yes,” I returned. “Is Jim Pinkerton there?”

“No, sir,” replied the voice. “But there's one of his crowd here; name of Speedy.”

“I'm here, Mr. Dodd,” added Speedy himself. “I have letters for you.”

“All right,” I replied. “Come aboard, gentlemen, and let me see my mail.”

A whaleboat accordingly ranged alongside, and three men boarded us: my old San Francisco friend, the stock-gambler Speedy, a little wizened person of the name of Sharpe, and a big, flourishing, ​dissipated-looking man called Fowler. The two last (I learned afterward) were frequent partners; Sharpe supplied the capital, and Fowler, who was quite a character in the islands and occupied a considerable station, brought activity, daring, and a private influence, highly necessary in the case. Both seemed to approach the business with a keen sense of romance; and I believe this was the chief attraction, at least with Fowler—for whom I early conceived a sentiment of liking. But in that first moment I had something else to think of than to judge my new acquaintances; and before Speedy had fished out the letters, the full extent of our misfortune was revealed.

“We've rather bad news for you, Mr. Dodd,” said Fowler. “Your firm's gone up.”

“Already!” I exclaimed.

“Well, it was thought rather a wonder Pinkerton held on as long as he did,” was the reply. “The wreck deal was too big for your credit; you were doing a big business, no doubt, but you were doing it on precious little capital; and when the strain came, you were bound to go. Pinkerton's through all right: seven cents dividend; some remarks made, but nothing to hurt; the press let you down easy—I guess Jim had relations there. The only trouble is, that all this Flying Scud affair got in the papers with the rest; everybody's wide awake in Honolulu, and the sooner we get the stuff in and the dollars out, the better for all concerned.”

“Gentlemen,” said I, “you must excuse me. My friend, the captain here, will drink a glass of champagne with you to give you patience; but as for myself, I am unfit even for ordinary conversation till I have read these letters.”

They demurred a little: and indeed the danger of delay seemed obvious; but the sight of my distress, which I was unable entirely to control, appealed strongly to their good-nature; and I was suffered at ​last to get by myself on deck, where, by the light of a lantern smuggled under shelter of the low rail, I read the following wretched correspondence.

“My dear Loudon,” ran the first, “this will be handed you by your friend Speedy of the Catamount. His sterling character and loyal devotion to yourself pointed him out as the best man for our purposes in Honolulu—the parties on the spot being difficult to manipulate. A man called Billy Fowler (you must have heard of Billy) is the boss; he is in politics some, and squares the officers. I have hard times before me in the city, but I feel as bright as a dollar and as strong as John L. Sullivan. What with Mamie here, and my partner speeding over the seas, and the bonanza in the wreck, I feel like I could juggle with the Pyramids of Egypt, same as conjurers do with aluminium balls. My earnest prayers follow you, Loudon, that you may feel the way I do—just inspired! My feet don't touch the ground; I kind of swim. Mamie is like Moses and Aaron that held up the other individual's arms. She carries me along like a horse and buggy. I am beating the record.

“Your true partner,
“J. Pinkerton.”

Number two was in a different style:—

“My Dearest Loudon, how am I to prepare you for this dire intelligence? Oh dear me, it will strike you to the earth. The fiat has gone forth; our firm went bust at a quarter before twelve. It was a bill of Bradley's (for two hundred dollars) that brought these vast operations to a close, and evolved liabilities of upwards of two hundred and fifty thousand. O, the shame and pity of it, and you but three weeks gone! Loudon, don't blame your partner; if human hands and brains could have sufficed, I would have held the thing together. But it just slowly crumbled; Bradley was the last kick, but the blamed business just melted. I give the liabilities; it's supposed they're all in; for the cowards were waiting, and the claims were filed like taking tickets to hear Patti. I don't quite have the hang of the assets yet, our interests were so extended; but I am at it day and night, and I guess will make a creditable dividend. If the wreck pans out only half the way it ought, we'll turn the laugh still. I am as full of grit and work as ever, and just tower above our troubles. Mamie is a host in herself. Somehow I feel like it was only me that had gone bust, and you and she soared clear of it. Hurry up. That's all you have to do.

“Yours ever,
“J. Pinkerton.”

​The third was yet more altered:—

“My poor Loudon,” it began, “I labour far into the night getting our affairs in order; you could not believe their vastness and complexity. Douglas B. Longhurst said humorously that the receiver's work would be cut out for him. I cannot deny that some of them have a speculative look. God forbid a sensitive, refined spirit like yours should ever come face to face with a Commissioner in Bankruptcy; these men get all the sweetness knocked right out of them. But I could bear up better if it weren't for press comments. Often and often, Loudon, I recall to mind your most legitimate critiques of the press system. They published an interview with me, not the least like what I said, and with jeering comments; it would make your blood boil, it was literally inhumane; I wouldn't have written it about a yellow dog that was in trouble like what I am. Mamie just winced, the first time she has turned a hair right through the whole catastrophe. How wonderfully true was what you said long ago in Paris, about touching on people's personal appearance! The fellow said——” And then these words had been scored through; and my distressed friend turned to another subject. “I cannot bear to dwell upon our assets. They simply don't show up. Even Thirteen Star, as sound a line as can be produced upon this coast, goes begging. The wreck has thrown a blight on all we ever touched. And where's the use? God never made a wreck big enough to fill our deficit. I am haunted by the thought that you may blame me; I know how I despised your remonstrances. Oh, Loudon, don't be hard on your miserable partner. The funny-dog business is what kills. I fear your stern rectitude of mind like the eye of God. I cannot think but what some of my books seem mixed up; otherwise, I don't seem to see my way as plain as I could wish to. Or else my brain is gone soft. Loudon, if there should be any unpleasantness, you can trust me to do the right thing and keep you clear. I've been telling them already, how you had no business grip and never saw the books. Oh, I trust I have done right in this! I knew it was a liberty; I know you may justly complain; but it was some things that were said. And mind you, all legitimate business! Not even your shrinking sensitiveness could find fault with the first look of one of them, if they had panned out right. And you know, the Flying Scud was the biggest gamble of the crowd, and that was your own idea. Mamie says she never could bear to look you in the face, if that idea had been mine, she is so conscientious!

“Your broken-hearted
“Jim.”

​The last began without formality:—

“This is the end of me commercially. I give up; my nerve is gone. I suppose I ought to be glad; for we're through the court. I don't know as ever I knew how, and I'm sure I don't remember. If it pans out—the wreck, I mean—we'll go to Europe, and live on the interest of our money. No more work for me. I shake when people speak to me. I have gone on, hoping and hoping, and working and working, and the lead has pinched right out. I want to lie on my back in a garden and read Shakespeare and E. P. Roe. Don't suppose it's cowardice, Loudon. I'm a sick man. Rest is what I must have. I've worked hard all my life; I never spared myself; every dollar I ever made, I've coined my brains for it. I've never done a mean thing; I've lived respectable, and given to the poor. Who has a better right to a holiday than I have? And I mean to have a year of it straight out; and if I don't, I shall lie right down here in my tracks, and die of worry and brain trouble. Don't mistake. That's so. If there are any pickings at all, trust Speedy; don't let the creditors get wind of what there is. I helped you when you were down; help me now. Don't deceive yourself; you've got to help me right now, or never. I am clerking, and not fit to cipher. Mamie's typewriting at the Phœnix Guano Exchange, down town. The light is right out of my life. I know you'll not like to do what I propose. Think only of this; that it's life or death for Jim Pinkerton.”

“P.S. Our figure was seven per cent. Oh, what a fall was there! Well, well, it's past mending; I don't want to whine. But, Loudon, I do want to live. No more ambition; all I ask is life. I have so much to make it sweet to me! I am clerking, and useless at that. I know I would have fired such a clerk inside of forty minutes, in MY time. But my time's over. I can only cling on to you. Don't fail Jim Pinkerton.”

There was yet one more postscript, yet one more outburst of self-pity and pathetic adjuration; and a doctor's opinion, unpromising enough, was besides enclosed. I pass them both in silence. I think shame to have shown, at so great length, the half-baked virtues of my friend dissolving in the crucible of sickness and distress; and the effect upon my spirits can be judged already. I got to my feet when I had done, drew a deep breath, and stared hard at Honolulu. One moment the world seemed at an end; the next, I ​was conscious of a rush of independent energy. On Jim I could rely no longer; I must now take hold myself. I must decide and act on my own better thoughts.

The word was easy to say; the thing, at the first blush, was undiscoverable. I was overwhelmed with miserable, womanish pity for my broken friend; his outcries grieved my spirit; I saw him then and now—then, so invincible; now, brought so low—and knew neither how to refuse, nor how to consent to his proposal. The remembrance of my father, who had fallen in the same field unstained, the image of his monument incongruously rising, a fear of the law, a chill air that seemed to blow upon my fancy from the doors of prisons, and the imaginary clank of fetters, recalled me to a different resolve. And then again, the wails of my sick partner intervened. So I stood hesitating, and yet with a strong sense of capacity behind: sure, if I could but choose my path, that I should walk in it with resolution.

Then I remembered that I had a friend on board, and stepped to the companion.

“Gentlemen,” said I, “only a few moments more: but these, I regret to say, I must make more tedious still by removing your companion. It is indispensable that I should have a word or two with Captain Nares.”

Both the smugglers were afoot at once, protesting. The business, they declared, must be despatched at once; they had run risk enough, with a conscience; and they must either finish now, or go.

“The choice is yours, gentlemen,” said I, “and, I believe, the eagerness. I am not yet sure that I have anything in your way; even if I have, there are a hundred things to be considered; and I assure you it is not at all my habit to do business with a pistol to my head.”

“That is all very proper, Mr. Dodd; there is no wish to coerce you, believe me,” said Fowler; “only, ​please consider our position. It is really dangerous; we were not the only people to see your schooner off Waimanolo.”

“Mr. Fowler,” I replied, “I was not born yesterday. Will you allow me to express an opinion, in which I may be quite wrong, but to which I am entirely wedded? If the Custom House officers had been coming, they would have been here now. In other words, somebody is working the oracle, and (for a good guess) his name is Fowler.”

Both men laughed loud and long; and being supplied with another bottle of Longhurst's champagne, suffered the captain and myself to leave them without further word.

I gave Nares the correspondence, and he skimmed it through.

“Now, captain,” said I, “I want a fresh mind on this. What does it mean?”

“It's large enough text,” replied the captain. “It means you're to stake your pile on Speedy, hand him over all you can, and hold your tongue. I almost wish you hadn't shown it me,” he added wearily. “What with the specie from the wreck and the opium money, it comes to a biggish deal.”

“That's supposing that I do it?” said I.

“Exactly,” said he, “supposing you do it.”

“And there are pros and cons to that,” I observed.

“There's San Quentin, to start in with,” said the captain; “and suppose you clear the penitentiary, there's the nasty taste in the mouth. The figure's big enough to make bad trouble, but it's not big enough to be picturesque; and I should guess a man always feels kind of small who has sold himself under six ciphers. That would be my way, at least; there's an excitement about a million that might carry me on; but the other way, I should feel kind of lonely when I woke in bed. Then there's Speedy. Do you know him well?”

​“No, I do not,” said I.

“Well, of course he can vamoose with the entire speculation, if he chooses,” pursued the captain, “and if he don't I can't see but what you've got to support and bed and board with him to the end of time. I guess it would weary me. Then there's Mr. Pinkerton, of course. He's been a good friend to you, hasn't he? Stood by you, and all that? and pulled you through for all he was worth?”

“That he has,” I cried; “I could never begin telling you my debt to him!”

“Well, and that's a consideration,” said the captain. “As a matter of principle, I wouldn't look at this business at the money. 'Not good enough,' would be my word. But even principle goes under when it comes to friends—the right sort, I mean. This Pinkerton is frightened, and he seems sick; the medico don't seem to care a cent about his state of health; and you've got to figure how you would like it if he came to die. Remember, the risk of this little swindle is all yours; it's no sort of risk to Mr. Pinkerton. Well, you've got to put it that way plainly, and see how you like the sound of it: my friend Pinkerton is in danger of the New Jerusalem, I am in danger of San Quentin; which risk do I propose to run?”

“That's an ugly way to put it,” I objected, “and perhaps hardly fair. There's right and wrong to be considered.”

“Don't know the parties,” replied Nares; “and I'm coming to them, anyway. For it strikes me, when it came to smuggling opium, you walked right up?”

“So I did,” I said; “sick I am to have to say it!”

“All the same,” continued Nares, “you went into the opium-smuggling with your head down; and a good deal of fussing I've listened to, that you hadn't more of it to smuggle. Now, maybe your partner's not quite fixed the same as you are; maybe he sees ​precious little difference between the one thing and the other.”

“You could not say truer: he sees none, I do believe,” cried I; “and though I see one, I could never tell you how.”

“We never can,” said the oracular Nares; “taste is all a matter of opinion. But the point is, how will your friend take it? You refuse a favour, and you take the high horse at the same time; you disappoint him, and you rap him over the knuckles. It won't do, Mr. Dodd; no friendship can stand that. You must be as good as your friend, or as bad as your friend, or start on a fresh deal without him.”

“I don't see it!” said I. “You don't know Jim!”

“Well, you will see,” said Nares. “And now, here's another point. This bit of money looks mighty big to Mr. Pinkerton; it may spell life or health to him; but among all your creditors, I don't see that it amounts to a hill of beans—I don't believe it'll pay their car-fares all round. And don't you think you'll ever get thanked. You were known to pay a long price for the chance of rummaging that wreck; you do the rummaging, you come home, and you hand over ten thousand—or twenty, if you like—a part of which you'll have to own up you made by smuggling; and, mind! you'll never get Billy Fowler to stick his name to a receipt. Now just glance at the transaction from the outside, and see what a clear case it makes. Your ten thousand is a sop; and people will only wonder you were so damned impudent as to offer such a small one! Whichever way you take it, Mr. Dodd, the bottom's out of your character; so there's one thing less to be considered.”

“I daresay you'll scarce believe me,” said I, “but I feel that a positive relief.”

“You must be made some way different from me, then,” returned Nares. “And, talking about me, I might just mention how I stand. You'll have no ​trouble from me—you've trouble enough of your own; and I'm friend enough, when a friend's in need, to shut my eyes and go right where he tells me. All the same, I'm rather queerly fixed. My owners'll have to rank with the rest on their charter-party. Here am I, their representative! and I have to look over the ship's side while the bankrupt walks his assets ashore in Mr. Speedy's hat-box. It's a thing I wouldn't do for James G. Blaine; but I'll do it for you, Mr. Dodd, and only sorry I can't do more.”

“Thank you, captain; my mind is made up,” said I. “I'll go straight, ruat cœlum! I never understood that old tag before to-night.”

“I hope it isn't my business that decides you?” asked the captain.

“I'll never deny it was an element,” said I. “I hope, I hope I'm not cowardly; I hope I could steal for Jim myself; but when it comes to dragging in you and Speedy, and this one and the other, why, Jim has got to die, and there's an end. I'll try and work for him when I get to 'Frisco, I suppose; and I suppose I'll fail, and look on at his death, and kick myself: it can't be helped—I'll fight it on this line.”

“I don't say as you're wrong,” replied Nares, “and I'll be hanged if I know if you're right. It suits me anyway. And look here—hadn't you better just show our friends over the side?” he added; “no good of being at the risk and worry of smuggling for the benefit of creditors.”

“I don't think of the creditors,” said I. “But I've kept this pair so long, I haven't got the brass to fire them now.”

Indeed, I believe that was my only reason for entering upon a transaction which was now outside my interest, but which (as it chanced) repaid me fifty-fold in entertainment. Fowler and Sharpe were both preternaturally sharp; they did me the honour in the beginning to attribute to myself their proper ​vices; and before we were done had grown to regard me with an esteem akin to worship. This proud position I attained by no more recondite arts, than telling the mere truth and unaffectedly displaying my indifference to the result. I have doubtless stated the essentials of all good diplomacy, which may be rather regarded, therefore, as a grace of state, than the effect of management. For to tell the truth is not in itself diplomatic, and to have no care for the result a thing involuntary. When I mentioned, for instance, that I had but two hundred and forty pounds of drug, my smugglers exchanged meaning glances, as who should say, “Here is a foeman worthy of our steel!” But when I carelessly proposed thirty-five dollars a pound, as an amendment to their offered twenty, and wound up with the remark: “The whole thing is a matter of moonshine to me, gentlemen. Take it or want it, and fill your glasses”—I had the indescribable gratification to see Sharpe nudge Fowler warningly, and Fowler choke down the jovial acceptance that stood ready on his lips, and lamely substitute a “No—no more wine, please, Mr. Dodd!” Nor was this all: for when the affair was settled at fifty dollars a pound—a shrewd stroke of business for my creditors—and our friends had got on board their whaleboat and shoved off, it appeared they were imperfectly acquainted with the conveyance of sound upon still water, and I had the joy to overhear the following testimonial.

“Deep man, that Dodd,” said Sharpe.

And the bass-toned Fowler echoed, “Damned if I understand his game.”

Thus we were left once more alone upon the Norah Creina; and the news of the night, and the lamentations of Pinkerton, and the thought of my own harsh decision, returned and besieged me in the dark. According to all the rubbish I had read, I should have been sustained by the warm consciousness of ​virtue. Alas, I had but the one feeling: that I had sacrificed my sick friend to the fear of prison-cells and stupid starers. And no moralist has yet advanced so far as to number cowardice amongst the things that are their own reward.

CHAPTER XVII.

LIGHT FROM THE MAN OF WAR.

In the early sunlight of the next day, we tossed close off the buoy and saw the city sparkle in its groves about the foot of the Punch-bowl, and the masts clustering thick in the small harbour. A good breeze, which had risen with the sea, carried us triumphantly through the intricacies of the passage; and we had soon brought up not far from the landing-stairs. I remember to have remarked an ugly horned reptile of a modern warship in the usual moorings across the port, but my mind was so profoundly plunged in melancholy that I paid no heed.

Indeed, I had little time at my disposal. Messieurs Sharpe and Fowler had left the night before in the persuasion that I was a liar of the first magnitude; the genial belief brought them aboard again with the earliest opportunity, proffering help to one who had proved how little he required it, and hospitality to so respectable a character. I had business to mind, I had some need both of assistance and diversion; I liked Fowler—I don't know why; and in short, I let them do with me as they desired. No creditor intervening, I spent the first half of the day inquiring into the conditions of the tea and silk market under the auspices of Sharpe; lunched with him in a private apartment at the Hawaiian Hotel—for Sharpe was a ​teetotaler in public; and about four in the afternoon was delivered into the hands of Fowler. This gentleman owned a bungalow on the Waikiki beach; and there in company with certain young bloods of Honolulu, I was entertained to a sea-bathe, indiscriminate cocktails, a dinner, a hula-hula, and (to round off the night), poker and assorted liquors. To lose money in the small hours to pale, intoxicated youth, has always appeared to me a pleasure overrated. In my then frame of mind, I confess I found it even delightful; put up my money (or rather my creditors'), and put down Fowler's champagne with equal avidity and success; and awoke the next morning to a mild headache and the rather agreeable lees of the last night's excitement. The young bloods, many of whom were still far from sober, had taken the kitchen into their own hands, vice the Chinaman deposed; and since each was engaged upon a dish of his own, and none had the least scruple in demolishing his neighbour's handiwork, I became early convinced that many eggs would be broken and few omelets made. The discovery of a jug of milk and a crust of bread enabled me to stay my appetite; and since it was Sunday, when no business could be done, and the festivities were to be renewed that night in the abode of Fowler, it occurred to me to slip silently away and enjoy some air and solitude.

I turned seaward under the dead crater known as Diamond Head. My way was for some time under the shade of certain thickets of green, thorny trees, dotted with houses. Here I enjoyed some pictures of the native life: wide-eyed, naked children, mingled with pigs; a youth asleep under a tree; an old gentleman spelling through glasses his Hawaiian Bible; the somewhat embarrassing spectacle of a lady at her bath in a spring; and the glimpse of gaudy-coloured gowns in the deep shade of the houses. Thence I found a road along the beach ​itself, wading in sand, opposed and buffeted by the whole weight of the Trade: on one hand, the glittering and sounding surf, and the bay lively with many sails; on the other, precipitous, arid gullies and sheer cliffs, mounting towards the crater and the blue sky. For all the companionship of skimming vessels, the place struck me with a sense of solitude. There came in my head what I had been told the day before at dinner, of a cavern above in the bowels of the volcano, a place only to be visited with the light of torches, a treasure-house of the bones of priests and warriors, and clamorous with the voice of an unseen river pouring seaward through the crannies of the mountain. At the thought, it was revealed to me suddenly, how the bungalows, and the Fowlers, and the bright busy town and crowding ships, were all children of yesterday; and for centuries before, the obscure life of the natives, with its glories and ambitions, its joys and crimes and agonies, had rolled unseen, like the mountain river, in that sea-girt place. Not Chaldea appeared more ancient, nor the Pyramids of Egypt more abstruse; and I heard time measured by “the drums and tramplings” of immemorial conquests, and saw myself the creature of an hour. Over the bankruptcy of Pinkerton and Dodd, of Montana Block, S. F., and the conscientious troubles of the junior partner, the spirit of eternity was seen to smile.

To this mood of philosophic sadness, my excesses of the night before no doubt contributed; for more things than virtue are at times their own reward: but I was greatly healed at least of my distresses. And while I was yet enjoying my abstracted humour, a turn of the beach brought me in view of the signal-station, with its watch-house and flag-staff, perched on the immediate margin of a cliff. The house was new and clean and bald, and stood naked to the Trades. The wind beat about it in loud squalls; the seaward ​

"'I am afraid I am an American,' I said apologetically" (p. 261).

​windows rattled without mercy; the breach of the surf below contributed its increment of noise; and the fall of my foot in the narrow verandah passed unheard by those within.

There were two on whom I thus entered unexpectedly: the look-out man, with grizzled beard, keen seaman's eyes, and that brand on his countenance that comes of solitary living; and a visitor, an oldish, oratorical fellow, in the smart tropical array of the British man-o'-war's man, perched on a table, and smoking a cigar. I was made pleasantly welcome, and was soon listening with amusement to the sea-lawyer.

“No, if I hadn't have been born an Englishman,” was one of his sentiments, “damn me! I'd rather 'a been born a Frenchy! I'd like to see another nation fit to black their boots.” Presently after, he developed his views on home politics with similar trenchancy. “I'd rather be a brute beast than what I'd be a Liberal,” he said. “Carrying banners and that! a pig's got more sense. Why, look at our chief engineer—they do say he carried a banner with his own 'ands: 'Hooroar for Gladstone!' I suppose, or 'Down with the Aristocracy!' What 'arm does the aristocracy do? Show me a country any good without one! Not the States; why, it's the 'ome of corruption! I knew a man—he was a good man, 'ome born—who was signal quartermaster in the Wyandotte. He told me he could never have got there if he hadn't have 'run with the boys'—told it me as I'm telling you. Now, we're all British subjects here——” he was going on.

“I am afraid I am an American,” I said apologetically.

He seemed the least bit taken aback, but recovered himself; and with the ready tact of his betters, paid me the usual British compliment on the riposte. “You don't say so!” he exclaimed. “Well, I give you my word of honour, I'd never have guessed it. No​body could tell it on you,” said he, as though it were some form of liquor.

I thanked him, as I always do, at this particular stage, with his compatriots: not so much perhaps for the compliment to myself and my poor country, as for the revelation (which is ever fresh to me) of Britannic self-sufficiency and taste. And he was so far softened by my gratitude as to add a word of praise on the American method of lacing sails. “You're ahead of us in lacing sails,” he said. “You can say that with a clear conscience.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “I shall certainly do so.”

At this rate, we got along swimmingly; and when I rose to retrace my steps to the Fowlery, he at once started to his feet and offered me the welcome solace of his company for the return. I believe I discovered much alacrity at the idea, for the creature (who seemed to be unique, or to represent a type like that of the dodo) entertained me hugely. But when he had produced his hat, I found I was in the way of more than entertainment; for on the ribbon I could read the legend: “H.M.S. Tempest.”

“I say,” I began, when our adieus were paid, and we were scrambling down the path from the look-out, “it was your ship that picked up the men on board the Flying Scud, wasn't it?”

“You may say so,” said he. “And a blessed good job for the Flying-Scuds. It's a God-forsaken spot, that Midway Island.”

“I've just come from there,” said I. “It was I who bought the wreck.”

“Beg your pardon, sir,” cried the sailor: “gen'lem'n in the white schooner?”

“The same,” said I.

My friend saluted, as though we were now, for the first time, formally introduced.

“Of course,” I continued, “I am rather taken up ​with the whole story; and I wish you would tell me what you can of how the men were saved.”

“It was like this,” said he. “We had orders to call at Midway after castaways, and had our distance pretty nigh run down the day before. We steamed half-speed all night, looking to make it about noon, for old Tootles—beg your pardon, sir—the captain—was precious scared of the place at night. Well, there's nasty, filthy currents round that Midway; you know, as has been there; and one on 'em must have set us down. Leastways, about six bells, when we had ought to been miles away, some one sees a sail, and lo and be'old, there was the spars of a full-rigged brig! We raised her pretty fast, and the island after her; and made out she was hard aground, canted on her bilge, and had her ens'n flying, union down. It was breaking 'igh on the reef, and we laid well out, and sent a couple of boats. I didn't go in neither; only stood and looked on; but it seems they was all badly scared and muddled, and didn't know which end was uppermost. One on 'em kep' snivelling and wringing of his 'ands; he come on board all of a sop like a monthly nurse. That Trent, he come first, with his 'and in a bloody rag. I was near 'em as I am to you; and I could make out he was all to bits—'eard his breath rattle in his blooming lungs as he come down the ladder. Yes, they was a scared lot, small blame to 'em, I say! The next after Trent, come him as was mate.”

“Goddedaal!” I exclaimed.

“And a good name for him too,” chuckled the man-o'-war's man, who probably confounded the word with a familiar oath. “A good name too; only it weren't his. He was a gen'lem'n born, sir, as had gone maskewerading. One of our officers knowed him at 'ome, reckonises him, steps up, 'olds out his 'and right off, and says he: '’Ullo, Norrie, old chappie!' he says. The other was coming up, as bold as look at it; didn't seem put out—that's where blood tells, ​sir! Well, no sooner does he 'ear his born name given him, than he turns as white as the Day of Judgment, stares at Mr. Sebright like he was looking at a ghost, and then (I give you my word of honour) turned to, and doubled up in a dead faint. 'Take him down to my berth,' says Mr. Sebright. Tis poor old Norrie Carthew,' he says.”

“And what—what sort of a gentleman was this Mr. Carthew?” I gasped.

“The ward-room steward told me he was come of the best blood in England,” was my friend's reply: “Eton and 'Arrow bred;—and might have been a bar'net!”

“No, but to look at?” I corrected him.

“The same as you or me,” was the uncompromising answer: “not much to look at. I didn't know he was a gen'lem'n; but then, I never see him cleaned up.”

“How was that?” I cried. “O yes, I remember: he was sick all the way to 'Frisco, was he not?”

“Sick, or sorry, or something,” returned my informant. “My belief, he didn't hanker after showing up. He kep' close; the ward-room steward, what took his meals in, told me he ate nex' to nothing; and he was fetched ashore at 'Frisco on the quiet. Here was how it was. It seems his brother had took and died, him as had the estate. This one had gone in for his beer, by what I could make out; the old folks at 'ome had turned rusty; no one knew where he had gone to. Here he was, slaving in a merchant brig, shipwrecked on Midway, and packing up his duds for a long voyage in a open boat. He comes on board our ship, and by God, here he is a landed proprietor, and may be in Parliament to-morrow! It's no less than natural he should keep dark: so would you and me in the same box.”

“I daresay,” said I. “But you saw more of the others?”

​“To be sure,” says he: “no 'arm in them from what I see. There was one 'Ardy there: colonial born he was, and had been through a power of money. There was no nonsense about 'Ardy; he had been up, and he had come down, and took it so. His 'eart was in the right place; and he was well-informed, and knew French; and Latin, I believe, like a native! I liked that 'Ardy; he was a good-looking boy, too.”

“Did they say much about the wreck?” I asked.

“There wasn't much to say, I reckon,” replied the man-o'-war's man. “It was all in the papers. 'Ardy used to yarn most about the coins he had gone through; he had lived with book-makers, and jockeys, and pugs, and actors, and all that—a precious low lot,” added this judicious person. “But it's about here my 'orse is moored, and by your leave I'll be getting ahead.”

“One moment,” said I. “Is Mr. Sebright on board?”

“No, sir, he's ashore to-day,” said the sailor. “I took up a bag for him to the 'otel.”

With that we parted. Presently after my friend overtook and passed me on a hired steed which seemed to scorn its cavalier; and I was left in the dust of his passage, a prey to whirling thoughts. For I now stood, or seemed to stand, on the immediate threshold of these mysteries. I knew the name of the man Dickson—his name was Carthew; I knew where the money came from that opposed us at the sale—it was part of Carthew's inheritance; and in my gallery of illustrations to the history of the wreck, one more picture hung, perhaps the most dramatic of the series. It showed me the deck of a warship in that distant part of the great ocean, the officers and seamen looking curiously on; and a man of birth and education, who had been sailing under an alias on a trading brig, and was now rescued from desperate ​peril, felled like an ox by the bare sound of his own name. I could not fail to be reminded of my own experience at the Occidental telephone. The hero of three styles, Dickson, Goddedaal, or Carthew, must be the owner of a lively—or a loaded—conscience, and the reflection recalled to me the photograph found on board the Flying Scud; just such a man, I reasoned, would be capable of just such starts and crises, and I inclined to think that Goddedaal (or Carthew) was the mainspring of the mystery.

One thing was plain: as long as the Tempest was in reach, I must make the acquaintance of both Sebright and the doctor. To this end, I excused myself with Mr. Fowler, returned to Honolulu, and passed the remainder of the day hanging vainly round the cool verandahs of the hotel. It was near nine o'clock at night before I was rewarded.

“That is the gentleman you were asking for,” said the clerk.

I beheld a man in tweeds, of an incomparable languor of demeanour, and carrying a cane with genteel effort. From the name, I had looked to find a sort of Viking and young ruler of the battle and the tempest; and I was the more disappointed, and not a little alarmed, to come face to face with this impracticable type.

“I believe I have the pleasure of addressing Lieutenant Sebright,” said I, stepping forward.

“Aw, yes,” replied the hero; “but, aw! I dawn't knaw you, do I?” (He spoke for all the world like Lord Foppington in the old play—a proof of the perennial nature of man's affectations. But his limping dialect, I scorn to continue to reproduce.)

“It was with the intention of making myself known, that I have taken this step,” said I, entirely unabashed (for impudence begets in me its like—perhaps my only martial attribute). “We have a common subject of interest, to me very lively; and ​I believe I may be in a position to be of some service to a friend of yours—to give him, at least, some very welcome information.”

The last clause was a sop to my conscience: I could not pretend, even to myself, either the power or the will to serve Mr. Carthew; but I felt sure he would like to hear the Flying Scud was burned.

“I don't know—I—I don't understand you,” stammered my victim. “I don't have any friends in Honolulu, don't you know?”

“The friend to whom I refer is English,” I replied. “It is Mr. Carthew, whom you picked up at Midway. My firm has bought the wreck; I am just returned from breaking her up; and—to make my business quite clear to you—I have a communication it is necessary I should make; and have to trouble you for Mr. Carthew's address.”

It will be seen how rapidly I had dropped all hope of interesting the frigid British bear. He, on his side, was plainly on thorns at my insistence; I judged he was suffering torments of alarm lest I should prove an undesirable acquaintance; diagnosed him for a shy, dull, vain, unamiable animal, without adequate defence—a sort of dishoused snail; and concluded, rightly enough, that he would consent to anything to bring our interview to a conclusion. A moment later, he had fled, leaving me with a sheet of paper, thus inscribed:—

Norris Carthew,
Stallbridge-le-Carthew,
Dorset.

I might have cried victory, the field of battle and some of the enemy's baggage remaining in my occupation. As a matter of fact, my moral sufferings during the engagement had rivalled those of Mr. Sebright; I was left incapable of fresh hostilities; I owned that the navy of old England was (for me) ​invincible as of yore; and giving up all thought of the doctor, inclined to salute her veteran flag, in the future, from a prudent distance. Such was my inclination, when I retired to rest; and my first experience the next morning strengthened it to certainty. For I had the pleasure of encountering my fair antagonist on his way on board; and he honoured me with a recognition so disgustingly dry, that my impatience overflowed, and (recalling the tactics of Nelson) I neglected to perceive or to return it.

Judge of my astonishment, some half-hour later, to receive a note of invitation from the Tempest.

“Dear Sir,” it began, “we are all naturally very much interested in the wreck of the Flying Scud, and as soon as I mentioned that I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, a very general wish was expressed that you would come and dine on board. It will give us all the greatest pleasure to see you to-night, or in case you should be otherwise engaged, to luncheon either to-morrow or to-day.” A note of the hours followed, and the document wound up with the name of “J. Lascelles Sebright,” under an undeniable statement that he was sincerely mine.

“No, Mr. Lascelles Sebright,” I reflected, “you are not, but I begin to suspect that (like the lady in the song) you are another's. You have mentioned your adventure, my friend; you have been blown up; you have got your orders; this note has been dictated; and I am asked on board (in spite of your melancholy protests) not to meet the men, and not to talk about the Flying Scud, but to undergo the scrutiny of someone interested in Carthew—the doctor, for a wager. And for a second wager, all this springs from your facility in giving the address.” I lost no time in answering the billet, electing for the earliest occasion; and at the appointed hour, a somewhat blackguard-looking boat's crew from the Norah Creina conveyed me under the guns of the Tempest.

​The ward-room appeared pleased to see me; Sebright's brother officers, in contrast to himself, took a boyish interest in my cruise; and much was talked of the Flying Scud; of how she had been lost, of how I had found her, and of the weather, the anchorage, and the currents about Midway Island. Carthew was referred to more than once without embarrassment; the parallel case of a late Earl of Aberdeen, who died mate on board a Yankee schooner, was adduced. If they told me little of the man, it was because they had not much to tell, and only felt an interest in his recognition and pity for his prolonged ill-health. I could never think the subject was avoided; and it was clear that the officers, far from practising concealment, had nothing to conceal.

So far, then, all seemed natural, and yet the doctor troubled me. This was a tall, rugged, plain man, on the wrong side of fifty, already grey, and with a restless mouth and bushy eyebrows: he spoke seldom, but then with gaiety; and his great, quaking, silent laughter was infectious. I could make out that he was at once the quiz of the ward-room and perfectly respected; and I made sure that he observed me covertly. It is certain I returned the compliment. If Carthew had feigned sickness—and all seemed to point in that direction—here was the man who knew all—or certainly knew much. His strong, sterling face progressively and silently persuaded of his full knowledge. That was not the mouth, these were not the eyes, of one who would act in ignorance, or could be led at random. Nor again was it the face of a man squeamish in the case of malefactors; there was even a touch of Brutus there, and something of the hanging judge. In short, he seemed the last character for the part assigned him in my theories; and wonder and curiosity contended in my mind.

​Luncheon was over, and an adjournment to the smoking-room proposed, when (upon a sudden impulse) I burned my ships, and pleading indisposition, requested to consult the doctor.

“There is nothing the matter with my body, Dr. Urquart,” said I, as soon as we were alone.

He hummed, his mouth worked, he regarded me steadily with his gray eyes, but resolutely held his peace.

“I want to talk to you about the Flying Scud and Mr. Carthew,” I resumed. “Come: you must have expected this. I am sure you know all; you are shrewd, and must have a guess that I know much. How are we to stand to one another? and how am I to stand to Mr. Carthew?”

“I do not fully understand you,” he replied, after a pause; and then, after another: “It is the spirit I refer to, Mr. Dodd.”

“The spirit of my inquiries?” I asked.

He nodded.

“I think we are at cross-purposes,” said I. “The spirit is precisely what I came in quest of. I bought the Flying Scud at a ruinous figure, run up by Mr. Carthew through an agent; and I am, in consequence, a bankrupt. But if I have found no fortune in the wreck, I have found unmistakable evidences of foul play. Conceive my position: I am ruined through this man, whom I never saw; I might very well desire revenge or compensation; and I think you will admit I have the means to extort either.”

He made no sign in answer to this challenge.

“Can you not understand, then,” I resumed, “the spirit in which I come to one who is surely in the secret, and ask him, honestly and plainly, How do I stand to Mr. Carthew?”

“I must ask you to be more explicit,” said he.

“You do not help me much,” I retorted. “But see if you can understand: my conscience is not very ​fine-spun; still, I have one. Now, there are degrees of foul play, to some of which I have no particular objection. I am sure with Mr. Carthew, I am not at all the person to forego an advantage; and I have much curiosity. But on the other hand, I have no taste for persecution; and I ask you to believe that I am not the man to make bad worse, or heap trouble on the unfortunate.”

“Yes; I think I understand,” said he. “Suppose I pass you my word that, whatever may have occurred, there were excuses—great excuses—I may say, very great?”

“It would have weight with me, doctor,” I replied.

“I may go further,” he pursued. “Suppose I had been there, or you had been there. After a certain event had taken place, it's a grave question what we might have done—it's even a question what we could have done—ourselves. Or take me. I will be plain with you, and own that I am in possession of the facts. You have a shrewd guess how I have acted in that knowledge. May I ask you to judge from the character of my action, something of the nature of that knowledge, which I have no call, nor yet no title, to share with you?”

I cannot convey a sense of the rugged conviction and judicial emphasis of Dr. Urquart's speech. To those who did not hear him, it may appear as if he fed me on enigmas; to myself, who heard, I seemed to have received a lesson and a compliment.

“I thank you,” I said. “I feel you have said as much as possible, and more than I had any right to ask. I take that as a mark of confidence, which I will try to deserve. I hope, sir, you will let me regard you as a friend.”

He evaded my proffered friendship with a blunt proposal to rejoin the mess; and yet a moment later, contrived to alleviate the snub. For, as we entered ​the smoking-room, he laid his hand on my shoulder with a kind familiarity—

“I have just prescribed for Mr. Dodd,” says he, “a glass of our Madeira.”

I have never again met Dr. Urquart: but he wrote himself so clear upon my memory that I think I see him still. And indeed I had cause to remember the man for the sake of his communication. It was hard enough to make a theory fit the circumstances of the Flying Scud; but one in which the chief actor should stand the least excused, and might retain the esteem or at least the pity of a man like Dr. Urquart, failed me utterly. Here at least was the end of my discoveries; I learned no more, till I learned all; and my reader has the evidence complete. Is he more astute than I was? or, like me, does he give it up?

CHAPTER XVIII.

CROSS-QUESTIONS AND CROOKED ANSWERS.

I have said hard words of San Francisco; they must scarce be literally understood (one cannot suppose the Israelites did justice to the land of Pharaoh); and the city took a fine revenge of me on my return. She had never worn a more becoming guise; the sun shone, the air was lively, the people had flowers in their buttonholes and smiles upon their faces; and as I made my way towards Jim's place of employment, with some very black anxieties at heart, I seemed to myself a blot on the surrounding gaiety.

My destination was in a by-street in a mean, rickety building; “The Franklin H. Dodge Steam Printing Company” appeared upon its front, and in characters of greater freshness, so as to suggest recent conversion, the watch-cry, “White Labour Only.” In

​the office, in a dusty pen, Jim sat alone before a table. A wretched change had overtaken him in clothes, body, and bearing; he looked sick and shabby; he who had once rejoiced in his day's employment, like a horse among pastures, now sat staring on a column of accounts, idly chewing a pen, at times heavily sighing, the picture of inefficiency and inattention. He was sunk deep in a painful reverie; he neither saw nor heard me; and I stood and watched him unobserved. I had a sudden vain relenting. Repentance bludgeoned me. As I had predicted to Nares, I stood and kicked myself. Here was I come home again, my honour saved; there was my friend in want of rest, nursing, and a generous diet; and I asked myself with Falstaff, “What is in that word honour? what is that honour?” and, like Falstaff, I told myself that it was air.

“Jim!” said I.

“Loudon!” he gasped, and jumped from his chair and stood shaking.

The next moment I was over the barrier, and we were hand in hand.

“My poor old man!” I cried.

“Thank God, you're home at last!” he gulped, and kept patting my shoulder with his hand.

“I've no good news for you, Jim!” said I.

“You've come—that's the good news that I want,” he replied. “Oh, how I've longed for you, Loudon!”

“I couldn't do what you wrote me,” I said, lowering my voice. “The creditors have it all. I couldn't do it.”

“S-s-h!” returned Jim. “I was crazy when wrote. I could never have looked Mamie in the face if we had done it. Oh, Loudon, what a gift that woman is? You think you know something of life: you just don't know anything. It's the goodness of the woman, it's a revelation!”

​“That's all right,” said I. “That's how I hoped to hear you, Jim.”

“And so the Flying Scud was a fraud,” he resumed. “I didn't quite understand your letter, but I made out that.”

“Fraud is a mild term for it,” said I. “The creditors will never believe what fools we were. And that reminds me,” I continued, rejoicing in the transition, “how about the bankruptcy?”

“You were lucky to be out of that,” answered Jim, shaking his head; “you were lucky not to see the papers. The Occidental called me a fifth-rate kerb-stone broker with water on the brain; another said I was a tree-frog that had got into the same meadow with Longhurst, and had blown myself out till I went pop. It was rough on a man in his honeymoon; so was what they said about my looks, and what I had on, and the way I perspired. But I braced myself up with the Flying Scud. How did it exactly figure out anyway? I don't seem to catch on to that story, Loudon.”

“The devil you don't!” thinks I to myself; and then aloud: “You see we had neither one of us good luck. I didn't do much more than cover current expenses; and you got floored immediately. How did we come to go so soon?”

“Well, we'll have to have a talk over all this,” said Jim with a sudden start. “I should be getting to my books, and I guess you had better go up right away to Mamie. She's at Speedy's. She expects you with impatience. She regards you in the light of a favourite brother, Loudon.”

Any scheme was welcome which allowed me to postpone the hour of explanation, and avoid (were it only for a breathing space) the topic of the Flying Scud. I hastened accordingly to Bush Street. Mrs. Speedy, already rejoicing in the return of a spouse, hailed me with acclamation. “And it's beautiful ​you're looking, Mr. Dodd, my dear,” she was kind enough to say. “And a miracle they naygur waheenies let ye lave the oilands. I have my suspicions of Shpeedy,” she added, roguishly. “Did ye see him after the naygresses now?”

I gave Speedy an unblemished character.

“The one of ye will niver bethray the other,” said the playful dame, and ushered me into a bare room, where Mamie sat working a type-writer.

I was touched by the cordiality of her greeting. With the prettiest gesture in the world she gave me both her hands; wheeled forth a chair, and produced from a cupboard a tin of my favourite tobacco, and a book of my exclusive cigarette papers.

“There!” she cried; “you see, Mr. Loudon, we were all prepared for you; the things were bought the very day you sailed.”

I imagined she had always intended me a pleasant welcome; but the certain fervour of sincerity, which I could not help remarking, flowed from an unexpected source. Captain Nares, with a kindness for which I can never be sufficiently grateful, had stolen a moment from his occupations, driven to call on Mamie, and drawn her a generous picture of my prowess at the wreck. She was careful not to breathe a word of this interview, till she had led me on to tell my adventures for myself.

“Ah! Captain Nares was better,” she cried, when I had done. “From your account, I have only learned one new thing, that you are modest as well as brave.”

I cannot tell with what sort of disclamation I sought to reply.

“It is of no use,” said Mamie. “I know a hero. And when I heard of you working all day like a common labourer, with your hands bleeding and your nails broken—and how you told the captain to 'crack on' (I think he said) in the storm, when he ​was terrified himself—and the danger of that horrid mutiny”—(Nares had been obligingly dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse)—“and how it was all done, in part at least, for Jim and me—I felt we could never say how we admired and thanked you.”

“Mamie,” I cried, “don't talk of thanks; it is not a word to be used between friends. Jim and I have been prosperous together; now we shall be poor together. We've done our best, and that's all that need be said. The next thing is for me to find a situation, and send you and Jim up country for a long holiday in the redwoods—for a holiday Jim has got to have.”

“Jim can't take your money, Mr. Loudon,” said Mamie.

“Jim?” cried I. “He's got to. Didn't I take his?”

Presently after, Jim himself arrived, and before he had yet done mopping his brow, he was at me with the accursed subject. “Now, Loudon,” said he, “here we are all together, the day's work done and the evening before us; just start in with the whole story.”

“One word on business first,” said I, speaking from the lips outward, and meanwhile (in the private apartments of my brain) trying for the thousandth time to find some plausible arrangement of my story. “I want to have a notion how we stand about the bankruptcy.”

“Oh, that's ancient history,” cried Jim. “We paid seven cents, and a wonder we did as well. The receiver—” (methought a spasm seized him at the name of this official, and he broke off). “But it's all past and done with anyway; and what I want to get at is the facts about the wreck. I don't seem to understand it; appears to me like as there was something underneath.”

“There was nothing in it, anyway,” I said, with a forced laugh.

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"'The day's work done, and the evening before us; just start in with the whole story'" (p. 276) ​“That's what I want to judge of,” returned Jim.

“How the mischief is it I can never keep you to that bankruptcy? It looks as if you avoided it,” said I—for a man in my situation, with unpardonable folly.

“Don't it look a little as if you were trying to avoid the wreck?” asked Jim.

It was my own doing; there was no retreat. “My dear fellow, if you make a point of it, here goes!” said I, and launched with spurious gaiety into the current of my tale. I told it with point and spirit; described the island and the wreck, mimicked Anderson and the Chinese, maintained the suspense.... My pen has stumbled on the fatal word. I maintained the suspense so well that it was never relieved; and when I stopped—I dare not say concluded, where there was no conclusion—I found Jim and Mamie regarding me with surprise.

“Well?” said Jim.

“Well, that's all,” said I.

“But how do you explain it?” he asked.

“I can't explain it,” said I.

Mamie wagged her head ominously.

“But, great Cæsar's ghost! the money was offered!” cried Jim. “It won't do, Loudon; it's nonsense, on the face of it! I don't say but what you and Nares did your best; I'm sure, of course, you did; but I do say, you got fooled. I say the stuff is in that ship to-day, and I say I mean to get it.”

“There is nothing in the ship, I tell you, but old wood and iron!” said I.

“You'll see,” said Jim. “Next time I go myself. I'll take Mamie for the trip; Longhurst won't refuse me the expense of a schooner. You wait till I get the searching of her.”

“But you can't search her!” cried I. “She's burned.”

“Burned!” cried Mamie, starting a little from the ​attitude of quiescent capacity in which she had hitherto sat to hear me, her hands folded in her lap.

There was an appreciable pause.

“I beg your pardon, Loudon,” began Jim at last, “but why in snakes did you burn her?”

“It was an idea of Nares's,” said I.

“This is certainly the strangest circumstance of all,” observed Mamie.

“I must say, Loudon, it does seem kind of unexpected,” added Jim. “It seems kind of crazy even. What did you—what did Nares expect to gain by burning her?”

“I don't know; it didn't seem to matter; we had got all there was to get,” said I.

“That's the very point,” cried Jim. “It was quite plain you hadn't.”

“What made you so sure?” asked Mamie.

“How can I tell you?” I cried. “We had been all through her. We were sure; that's all that I can say.”

“I begin to think you were,” she returned, with a significant emphasis.

Jim hurriedly intervened. “What I don't quite make out, Loudon, is that you don't seem to appreciate the peculiarities of the thing,” said he. “It doesn't seem to have struck you same as it does me.”

“Pshaw! why go on with this?” cried Mamie, suddenly rising. “Mr. Dodd is not telling us either what he thinks or what he knows.”

“Mamie!” cried Jim.

“You need not be concerned for his feelings, James; he is not concerned for yours,” returned the lady. “He dare not deny it, besides. And this is not the first time he has practised reticence. Have you forgotten that he knew the address, and did not tell it you until that man had escaped?”

Jim turned to me pleadingly—we were all on our feet. “Loudon,” he said, “you see Mamie has some ​fancy; and I must say there's just a sort of a shadow of an excuse; for it is bewildering—even to me, Loudon, with my trained business intelligence. For God's sake, clear it up.”

“This serves me right,” said I. “I should not have tried to keep you in the dark; I should have told you at first that I was pledged to secrecy; I should have asked you to trust me in the beginning. It is all I can do now. There is more of the story, but it concerns none of us, and my tongue is tied. I have given my word of honour. You must trust me and try to forgive me.”

“I daresay I am very stupid, Mr. Dodd,” began Mamie, with an alarming sweetness, “but I thought you went upon this trip as my husband's representative and with my husband's money? You tell us now that you are pledged, but I should have thought you were pledged first of all to James. You say it does not concern us; we are poor people, and my husband is sick, and it concerns us a great deal to understand how we come to have lost our money, and why our representative comes back to us with nothing. You ask that we should trust you; you do not seem to understand—the question we are asking ourselves is whether we have not trusted you too much.”

“I do not ask you to trust me,” I replied. “I ask Jim. He knows me.”

“You think you can do what you please with James; you trust to his affection, do you not? And me, I suppose, you do not consider,” said Mamie. “But it was perhaps an unfortunate day for you when we were married, for I at least am not blind. The crew run away, the ship is sold for a great deal of money, you know that man's address and you conceal it, you do not find what you were sent to look for, and yet you burn the ship; and now, when we ask explanations, you are pledged to secrecy! But I am pledged to no such thing; I will not stand by in silence and see my ​sick and ruined husband betrayed by his condescending friend. I will give you the truth for once. Mr. Dodd, you have been bought and sold.”

“Mamie,” cried Jim, “no more of this! It's me you're striking; it's only me you hurt. You don't know, you cannot understand these things. Why, to-day, if it hadn't been for Loudon, I couldn't have looked you in the face. He saved my honesty.”

“I have heard plenty of this talk before,” she replied. “You are a sweet-hearted fool, and I love you for it. But I am a clear-headed woman; my eyes are open, and I understand this man's hypocrisy. Did he not come here to-day and pretend he would take a situation—pretend he would share his hard-earned wages with us until you were well? Pretend! It makes me furious! His wages! a share of his wages! That would have been your pittance, that would have been your share of the Flying Scud—you who worked and toiled for him when he was a beggar in the streets of Paris. But we do not want your charity; thank God, I can work for my own husband! See what it is to have obliged a gentleman. He would let you pick him up when he was begging; he would stand and look on, and let you black his shoes, and sneer at you. For you were always sneering at my James; you always looked down upon him in your heart, you know it!” She turned back to Jim. “And now when he is rich,” she began, and then swooped again on me. “For you are rich, I dare you to deny it; I defy you to look me in the face and try to deny that you are rich—rich with our money—my husband's money——”

Heaven knows to what a height she might have risen, being, by this time, bodily whirled away in her own hurricane of words. Heart-sickness, a black depression, a treacherous sympathy with my assailant, pity unutterable for poor Jim, already filled, divided, and abashed my spirit. Flight seemed the ​only remedy; and making a private sign to Jim, as if to ask permission, I slunk from the unequal field.

I was but a little way down the street, when I was arrested by the sound of some one running, and Jim's voice calling me by name. He had followed me with a letter which had been long awaiting my return.

I took it in a dream. “This has been a devil of a business,” said I.

“Don't think hard of Mamie,” he pleaded. “It's the way she's made; it's her high-toned loyalty. And of course I know it's all right. I know your sterling character; but you didn't, somehow, make out to give us the thing straight, Loudon. Anybody might have—I mean it—I mean——”

“Never mind what you mean, my poor Jim,” said I. “She's a gallant little woman and a loyal wife: and I thought her splendid. My story was as fishy as the devil. I'll never think the less of either her or you.”

“It'll blow over; it must blow over,” said he.

“It never can,” I returned, sighing: “and don't you try to make it! Don't name me, unless it's with an oath. And get home to her right away. Good-bye, my best of friends. Good-bye, and God bless you. We shall never meet again.”

“Oh Loudon, that we should live to say such words!” he cried.

I had no views on life, beyond an occasional impulse to commit suicide, or to get drunk, and drifted down the street, semi-conscious, walking apparently on air, in the light-headedness of grief. I had money in my pocket, whether mine or my creditors' I had no means of guessing; and, the Poodle Dog lying in my path, I went mechanically in and took a table. A waiter attended me, and I suppose I gave my orders; for presently I found myself, with a sudden return of consciousness, beginning dinner. On ​the white cloth at my elbow lay the letter, addressed in a clerk's hand, and bearing an English stamp and the Edinburgh postmark. A bowl of bouillon and a glass of wine awakened in one corner of my brain (where all the rest was in mourning, the blinds down as for a funeral) a faint stir of curiosity; and while I waited the next course, wondering the while what I had ordered, I opened and began to read the epoch-making document.

“Dear Sir,—I am charged with the melancholy duty of announcing to you the death of your excellent grandfather, Mr. Alexander Loudon, on the 17th ult. On Sunday the 13th, he went to church as usual in the forenoon, and stopped on his way home, at the corner of Princes Street, in one of our seasonable east winds, to talk with an old friend. The same evening acute bronchitis declared itself; from the first, Dr. M'Combie anticipated a fatal result, and the old gentleman appeared to have no illusion as to his own state. He repeatedly assured me it was 'by' with him now; 'and high time, too,' he once added with characteristic asperity. He was not in the least changed on the approach of death: only (what I am sure must be very grateful to your feelings) he seemed to think and speak even more kindly than usual of yourself: referring to you as 'Jeannie's yin,' with strong expressions of regard. 'He was the only one I ever liket of the hale jing-bang,' was one of his expressions; and you will be glad to know that he dwelt particularly on the dutiful respect you had always displayed in your relations. The small codicil, by which he bequeaths you his Molesworth and other professional works, was added (you will observe) on the day before his death; so that you were in his thoughts until the end. I should say that, though rather a trying patient, he was most tenderly nursed by your uncle, and your cousin, Miss Euphemia. I enclose a copy of the testament, by which you will see that you share equally with Mr. Adam, and that I hold at your disposal a sum nearly approaching seventeen thousand pounds. I beg to congratulate you on this considerable acquisition, and expect your orders, to which I shall hasten to give my best attention. Thinking that you might desire to return at once to this country, and not knowing how you may be placed, I enclose a credit for six hundred pounds. Please sign the accompanying slip, and let me have it at your earliest convenience.

“I am, dear sir, yours truly,
“W. Rutherford Gregg.”

​“God bless the old gentleman!” I thought; “and for that matter God bless Uncle Adam! and my cousin Euphemia! and Mr. Gregg!” I had a vision of that grey old life now brought to an end—“and high time too”—a vision of those Sabbath streets alternately vacant and filled with silent people; of the babel of the bells, the long-drawn psalmody, the shrewd sting of the east wind, the hollow, echoing, dreary house to which “Ecky” had returned with the hand of death already on his shoulder; a vision, too, of the long, rough country lad, perhaps a serious courtier of the lasses in the hawthorn den, perhaps a rustic dancer on the green, who had first earned and answered to that harsh diminutive. And I asked myself if, on the whole, poor Ecky had succeeded in life; if the last state of that man were not on the whole worse than the first; and the house in Randolph Crescent a less admirable dwelling than the hamlet where he saw the day and grew to manhood. Here was a consolatory thought for one who was himself a failure.

Yes, I declare the word came in my mind; and all the while, in another partition of the brain, I was glowing and singing for my new-found opulence. The pile of gold—four thousand two hundred and fifty double eagles, seventeen thousand ugly sovereigns, twenty-one thousand two hundred and fifty Napoleons—danced, and rang and ran molten, and lit up life with their effulgence, in the eye of fancy. Here were all things made plain to me: Paradise—Paris, I mean—Regained, Carthew protected, Jim restored, the creditors...

“The creditors!” I repeated, and sank back benumbed. It was all theirs to the last farthing: my grandfather had died too soon to save me.

I must have somewhere a rare vein of decision. In that revolutionary moment, I found myself prepared for all extremes except the one: ready to do ​anything, or to go anywhere, so long as I might save my money. At the worst, there was flight, flight to some of those blest countries where the serpent, extradition, has not yet entered in.

On no condition is extradition
    Allowed in Callao!

—the old lawless words haunted me; and I saw myself hugging my gold in the company of such men as had once made and sung them, in the rude and bloody wharfside drinking-shops of Chili and Peru. The run of my ill-luck, the breach of my old friendship, this bubble fortune flaunted for a moment in my eyes and snatched again, had made me desperate and (in the expressive vulgarism) ugly. To drink vile spirits among vile companions by the flare of a pine-torch; to go burthened with my furtive treasure in a belt; to fight for it knife in hand, rolling on a clay floor; to flee perpetually in fresh ships and to be chased through the sea from isle to isle, seemed, in my then frame of mind, a welcome series of events.

That was for the worst; but it began to dawn slowly on my mind that there was yet a possible better. Once escaped, once safe in Callao, I might approach my creditors with a good grace; and properly handled by a cunning agent, it was just possible they might accept some easy composition. The hope recalled me to the bankruptcy. It was strange, I reflected: often as I had questioned Jim, he had never obliged me with an answer. In his haste for news about the wreck, my own no less legitimate curiosity had gone disappointed. Hateful as the thought was to me, I must return at once and find out where I stood.

I left my dinner still unfinished, paying for the whole, of course, and tossing the waiter a gold piece. I was reckless; I knew not what was mine and cared not: I must take what I could get and give as I was ​able; to rob and to squander seemed the complementary parts of my new destiny. I walked up Bush Street, whistling, brazening myself to confront Mamie in the first place, and the world at large and a certain visionary judge upon a bench in the second. Just outside, I stopped and lighted a cigar to give me greater countenance; and puffing this and wearing what (I am sure) was a wretched assumption of braggadocio, I reappeared on the scene of my disgrace.

My friend and his wife were finishing a poor meal—rags of old mutton, the remainder cakes from breakfast eaten cold, and a starveling pot of coffee.

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Pinkerton,” said I. “Sorry to inflict my presence where it cannot be desired; but there is a piece of business necessary to be discussed.”

“Pray do not consider me,” said Mamie, rising, and she sailed into the adjoining bedroom.

Jim watched her go and shook his head; he looked miserably old and ill.

“What is it, now?” he asked.

“Perhaps you remember you answered none of my questions,” said I.

“Your questions?” faltered Jim.

“Even so, Jim. My questions,” I repeated. “I put questions as well as yourself; and however little I may have satisfied Mamie with my answers, I beg to remind you that you gave me none at all.”

“You mean about the bankruptcy?” asked Jim.

I nodded.

He writhed in his chair. “The straight truth is, I was ashamed,” he said. “I was trying to dodge you. I've been playing fast and loose with you, Loudon; I've deceived you from the first, I blush to own it. And here you came home and put the very question I was fearing. Why did we bust so soon? Your keen business eye had not deceived you. That's the ​point, that's my shame; that's what killed me this afternoon when Mamie was treating you so, and my conscience was telling me all the time, Thou art the man.'”

“What was it, Jim?” I asked.

“What I had been at all the time, Loudon,” he wailed; “and I don't know how I'm to look you in the face and say it, after my duplicity. It was stocks,” he added in a whisper.

“And you were afraid to tell me that!” I cried. “You poor, old, cheerless dreamer! what would it matter what you did or didn't? Can't you see we're doomed? And anyway, that's not my point. It's how I stand that I want to know. There is a particular reason. Am I clear? Have I a certificate, or what have I to do to get one? And when will it be dated? You can't think what hangs by it!”

“That's the worst of all,” said Jim, like a man in a dream, “I can't see how to tell him!”

“What do you mean?” I cried, a small pang of terror at my heart.

“I'm afraid I sacrificed you, Loudon,” he said, looking at me pitifully.

“Sacrificed me?” I repeated. “How? What do you mean by sacrifice?”

“I know it'll shock your delicate self-respect,” he said; “but what was I to do? Things looked so bad. The receiver—” (as usual, the name stuck in his throat, and he began afresh). “There was a lot of talk; the reporters were after me already; there was the trouble and all about the Mexican business; and I got scared right out, and I guess I lost my head. You weren't there, you see, and that was my temptation.”

I did not know how long he might thus beat about the bush with dreadful hintings, and I was already beside myself with terror. What had he done? I saw he had been tempted; I knew from ​his letters that he was in no condition to resist. How had he sacrificed the absent?

“Jim,” I said, “you must speak right out. I've got all that I can carry.”

“Well,” he said—“I know it was a liberty—I made it out you were no business man, only a stone-broke painter; that half the time you didn't know anything anyway, particularly money and accounts. I said you never could be got to understand whose was whose. I had to say that because of some entries in the books——”

“For God's sake,” I cried, “put me out of this agony! What did you accuse me of?”

“Accuse you of?” repeated Jim. “Of what I'm telling you. And there being no deed of partnership, I made out you were only a kind of clerk that I called a partner just to give you taffy; and so I got you ranked a creditor on the estate for your wages and the money you had lent. And——”

I believe I reeled. “A creditor!” I roared; “a creditor! I'm not in the bankruptcy at all?”

“No,” said Jim. “I know it was a liberty——”

“Oh damn your liberty! read that,” I cried, dashing the letter before him on the table, “and call in your wife, and be done with eating this truck”—as I spoke, I slung the cold mutton in the empty grate—“and let's all go and have a champagne supper. I've dined—I'm sure I don't remember what I had; I'd dine again ten scores of times upon a night like this. Read it, you blaying ass! I'm not insane. Here, Mamie,” I continued, opening the bedroom door, “come out and make it up with me, and go and kiss your husband; and I'll tell you what, after the supper, let's go to some place where there's a band, and I'll waltz with you till sunrise.”

“What does it all mean?” cried Jim. “It means we have a champagne supper to-night, ​and all go to Napa Valley or to Monterey to-morrow,” said I. “Mamie, go and get your things on; and you, Jim, sit down right where you are, take a sheet of paper, and tell Franklin Dodge to go to Texas. Mamie, you were right, my dear; I was rich all the time, and didn't know it.

CHAPTER XIX.

TRAVELS WITH A SHYSTER.

The absorbing and disastrous adventure of the Flying Scud was now quite ended; we had dashed into these deep waters and we had escaped again to starve, we had been ruined and were saved, had quarrelled and made up; there remained nothing but to sing Te Deum, draw a line, and begin on a fresh page of my unwritten diary. I do not pretend that I recovered all I had lost with Mamie; it would have been more than I had merited; and I had certainly been more uncommunicative than became either the partner or the friend. But she accepted the position handsomely; and during the week that I now passed with them, both she and Jim had the grace to spare me questions. It was to Calistoga that we went; there was some rumour of a Napa land-boom at the moment, the possibility of stir attracted Jim, and he informed me he would find a certain joy in looking on, much as Napoleon on St. Helena took a pleasure to read military works. The field of his ambition was quite closed; he was done with action; and looked forward to a ranch in a mountain dingle, a patch of corn, a pair of kine, a leisurely and contemplative age in the green shade of forests. “Just let me get down on my back in a hayfield,” said he, “and you'll find there's no more snap to me than that much putty.”

​And for two days the perfervid being actually rested. The third, he was observed in consultation with the local editor, and owned he was in two minds about purchasing the press and paper. “It's a kind of a hold for an idle man,” he said, pleadingly; “and if the section was to open up the way it ought to, there might be dollars in the thing.” On the fourth day he was gone till dinner-time alone; on the fifth we made a long picnic drive to the fresh field of enterprise; and the sixth was passed entirely in the preparation of prospectuses. The pioneer of McBride City was already upright and self-reliant as of yore; the fire rekindled in his eye, the ring restored to his voice; a charger sniffing battle and saying ha-ha, among the spears. On the seventh morning we signed a deed of partnership, for Jim would not accept a dollar of my money otherwise; and having once more engaged myself—or that mortal part of me, my purse—among the wheels of his machinery, I returned alone to San Francisco and took quarters in the Palace Hotel.

The same night I had Nares to dinner. His sunburnt face, his queer and personal strain of talk, recalled days that were scarce over and that seemed already distant. Through the music of the band outside, and the chink and clatter of the dining-room, it seemed to me as if I heard the foaming of the surf and the voices of the sea-birds about Midway Island. The bruises on our hands were not yet healed; and there we sat, waited on by elaborate darkies, eating pompano and drinking iced champagne.

“Think of our dinners on the Norah, captain, and then oblige me by looking round the room for contrast.”

He took the scene in slowly. “Yes, it is like a dream,” he said: “like as if the darkies were really about as big as dimes; and a great big scuttle might open up there, and Johnson stick in a great big head ​and shoulders, and cry, 'Eight bells!'—and the whole thing vanish.”

“Well, it's the other thing that has done that,” I replied. “It's all bygone now, all dead and buried. Amen! say I.”

“I don't know that, Mr. Dodd; and to tell you the fact, I don't believe it,” said Nares. “There's more Flying Scud in the oven; and the baker's name, I take it, is Bellairs. He tackled me the day we came in: sort of a razee of poor old humanity—jury clothes—full new suit of pimples: knew him at once from your description. I let him pump me till I saw his game. He knows a good deal that we don't know, a good deal that we do, and suspects the balance. There's trouble brewing for somebody.”

I was surprised I had not thought of this before. Bellairs had been behind the scenes; he had known Dickson; he knew the flight of the crew; it was hardly possible but what he should suspect; it was certain if he suspected, that he would seek to trade on the suspicion. And sure enough, I was not yet dressed the next morning ere the lawyer was knocking at my door. I let him in, for I was curious; and he, after some ambiguous prolegomena, roundly proposed I should go shares with him.

“Shares in what?” I inquired.

“If you will allow me to clothe my idea in a somewhat vulgar form,” said he, “I might ask you, did you go to Midway for your health?”

“I don't know that I did,” I replied.

“Similarly, Mr. Dodd, you may be sure I would never have taken the present step without influential grounds,” pursued the lawyer. “Intrusion is foreign to my character. But you and I, sir, are engaged on the same ends. If we can continue to work the thing in company, I place at your disposal my knowledge of the law and a considerable practice in delicate negotiations similar to this. Should you refuse to ​consent, you might find in me a formidable and”—he hesitated—“and to my own regret, perhaps a dangerous competitor.”

“Did you get this by heart?” I asked, genially.

“I advise you to!” he said, with a sudden sparkle of temper and menace, instantly gone, instantly succeeded by fresh cringing. “I assure you, sir, I arrive in the character of a friend; and I believe you underestimate my information. If I may instance an example, I am acquainted to the last dime with what you made (or rather lost), and I know you have since cashed a considerable draft on London.”

“What do you infer?” I asked.

“I know where that draft came from,” he cried, wincing back like one who has greatly dared, and instantly regrets the venture.

“So?” said I.

“You forget I was Mr. Dickson's confidential agent,” he explained. “You had his address, Mr. Dodd. We were the only two that he communicated with in San Francisco. You see my deductions are quite obvious: you see how open and frank I deal with you, as I should wish to do with any gentleman with whom I was conjoined in business. You see how much I know; and it can scarcely escape your strong commonsense, how much better it would be if I knew all. You cannot hope to get rid of me at this time of day, I have my place in the affair, I cannot be shaken off; I am, if you will excuse a rather technical pleasantry, an encumbrance on the estate. The actual harm I can do, I leave you to valuate for yourself. But without going so far, Mr. Dodd, and without in any way inconveniencing myself, I could make things very uncomfortable. For instance, Mr. Pinkerton's liquidation. You and I know, sir—and you better than I—on what a large fund you draw. Is Mr. Pinkerton in the thing at all? It was you only who knew the address, and ​you were concealing it. Suppose I should communicate with Mr. Pinkerton——”

“Look here!” I interrupted, “communicate with him (if you will permit me to clothe my idea in a vulgar shape) till you are blue in the face. There is only one person with whom I refuse to allow you to communicate further, and that is myself. Good morning.”

He could not conceal his rage, disappointment, and surprise; and in the passage (I have no doubt) was shaken by St. Vitus.

I was disgusted by this interview; it struck me hard to be suspected on all hands, and to hear again from this trafficker what I had heard already from Jim's wife; and yet my strongest impression was different and might rather be described as an impersonal fear. There was something against nature in the man's craven impudence; it was as though a lamb had butted me; such daring at the hands of such a dastard, implied unchangeable resolve, a great pressure of necessity, and powerful means. I thought of the unknown Carthew, and it sickened me to see this ferret on his trail.

Upon inquiry I found the lawyer was but just disbarred for some malpractice; and the discovery added excessively to my disquiet. Here was a rascal without money or the means of making it, thrust out of the doors of his own trade, publicly shamed, and doubtless in a deuce of a bad temper with the universe. Here, on the other hand, was a man with a secret—rich, terrified, practically in hiding—who had been willing to pay ten thousand pounds for the bones of the Flying Scud. I slipped insensibly into a mental alliance with the victim; the business weighed on me; all day long, I was wondering how much the lawyer knew, how much he guessed, and when he would open his attack.

Some of these problems are unsolved to this day; ​others were soon made clear. Where he got Carthew's name is still a mystery; perhaps some sailor on the Tempest, perhaps my own sea-lawyer served him for a tool; but I was actually at his elbow when he learned the address. It fell so. One evening, when I had an engagement and was killing time until the hour, I chanced to walk in the court of the hotel while the band played. The place was bright as day with the electric light; and I recognised, at some distance among the loiterers, the person of Bellairs in talk with a gentleman whose face appeared familiar. It was certainly someone I had seen, and seen recently; but who or where, I knew not. A porter standing hard by, gave me the necessary hint. The stranger was an English navy man, invalided home from Honolulu, where he had left his ship; indeed, it was only from the change of clothes and the effects of sickness, that I had not immediately recognised my friend and correspondent, Lieutenant Sebright.

The conjunction of these planets seeming ominous, I drew near; but it seemed Bellairs had done his business; he vanished in the crowd, and I found my officer alone.

“Do you know whom you have been talking to, Mr. Sebright?” I began.

“No,” said he; “I don't know him from Adam. Anything wrong?”

“He is a disreputable lawyer, recently disbarred,” said I. “I wish I had seen you in time. I trust you told him nothing about Carthew?”

He flushed to his ears. “I'm awfully sorry,” he said. “He seemed civil, and I wanted to get rid of him. It was only the address he asked.”

“And you gave it?” I cried.

“I'm really awfully sorry,” said Sebright. “I'm afraid I did.”

“God forgive you!” was my only comment, and I turned my back upon the blunderer.

​The fat was in the fire now: Bellairs had the address, and I was the more deceived or Carthew would have news of him. So strong was this impression, and so painful, that the next morning I had the curiosity to pay the lawyer's den a visit. An old woman was scrubbing the stair, and the board was down.

“Lawyer Bellairs?” said the old woman. “Gone East this morning. There's Lawyer Dean next block up.”

I did not trouble Lawyer Dean, but walked slowly back to my hotel, ruminating as I went. The image of the old woman washing that desecrated stair had struck my fancy; it seemed that all the water-supply of the city and all the soap in the State would scarce suffice to cleanse it, it had been so long a clearing-house of dingy secrets and a factory of sordid fraud. And now the corner was untenanted; some judge, like a careful housewife, had knocked down the web, and the bloated spider was scuttling elsewhere after new victims. I had of late (as I have said) insensibly taken sides with Carthew; now when his enemy was at his heels, my interest grew more warm; and I began to wonder if I could not help. The drama of the Flying Scud was entering on a new phase. It had been singular from the first: it promised an extraordinary conclusion; and I, who had paid so much to learn the beginning, might pay a little more and see the end. I lingered in San Francisco, indemnifying myself after the hardships of the cruise, spending money, regretting it, continually promising departure for the morrow. Why not go indeed, and keep a watch upon Bellairs? If I missed him, there was no harm done, I was the nearer Paris. If I found and kept his trail, it was hard if I could not put some stick in his machinery, and at the worst I could promise myself interesting scenes and revelations.

In such a mixed humour, I made up what it pleases me to call my mind, and once more involved myself in the story of Carthew and the Flying Scud. The ​same night I wrote a letter of farewell to Jim, and one of anxious warning to Dr. Urquart begging him to set Carthew on his guard; the morrow saw me in the ferry-boat; and ten days later, I was walking the hurricane deck on the City of Denver. By that time my mind was pretty much made down again, its natural condition: I told myself that I was bound for Paris or Fontainebleau to resume the study of the arts; and I thought no more of Carthew or Bellairs, or only to smile at my own fondness. The one I could not serve, even if I wanted; the other I had no means of finding, even if I could have at all influenced him after he was found.

And for all that, I was close on the heels of an absurd adventure. My neighbour at table that evening was a 'Frisco man whom I knew slightly. I found he had crossed the plains two days in front of me, and this was the first steamer that had left New York for Europe since his arrival. Two days before me meant a day before Bellairs; and dinner was scarce done before I was closeted with the purser.

“Bellairs?” he repeated. “Not in the saloon, I am sure. He may be in the second class. The lists are not made out, but—Hullo! 'Harry D. Bellairs?' That the name? He's there right enough.”

And the next morning I saw him on the forward deck, sitting in a chair, a book in his hand, a shabby puma skin rug about his knees: the picture of respectable decay. Off and on, I kept him in my eye. He read a good deal, he stood and looked upon the sea, he talked occasionally with his neighbours, and once when a child fell he picked it up and soothed it. I damned him in my heart; the book, which I was sure he did not read—the sea, to which I was ready to take oath he was indifferent—the child, whom I was certain he would as lieve have tossed overboard—all seemed to me elements in a theatrical performance; and I made no doubt he was already nosing after the ​secrets of his fellow-passengers. I took no pains to conceal myself, my scorn for the creature being as strong as my disgust. But he never looked my way, and it was night before I learned he had observed me.

I was smoking by the engine-room door, for the air was a little sharp, when a voice rose close beside me in the darkness.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Dodd,” it said.

“That you, Bellairs?” I replied.

“A single word, sir. Your presence on this ship has no connection with our interview?” he asked. “You have no idea, Mr. Dodd, of returning upon your determination?”

“None,” said I; and then, seeing he still lingered, I was polite enough to add “Good evening;” at which he sighed and went away.

The next day, he was there again with the chair and the puma skin; read his book and looked at the sea with the same constancy; and though there was no child to be picked up, I observed him to attend repeatedly on a sick woman. Nothing fosters suspicion like the act of watching; a man spied upon can hardly blow his nose but we accuse him of designs; and I took an early opportunity to go forward and see the woman for myself. She was poor, elderly, and painfully plain; I stood abashed at the sight, felt I owed Bellairs amends for the injustice of my thoughts, and seeing him standing by the rail in his usual attitude of contemplation, walked up and addressed him by name.

“You seem very fond of the sea,” said I.

“I may really call it a passion, Mr. Dodd,” he replied. “‘And the tall cataract haunted me like a passion,’” he quoted. “I never weary of the sea, sir. This is my first ocean voyage. I find it a glorious experience.” And once more my disbarred lawyer dropped into poetry: “‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!’”

​Though I had learned the piece in my reading-book at school, I came into the world a little too late on the one hand—and I daresay a little too early on the other—to think much of Byron; and the sonorous verse, prodigiously well delivered, struck me with surprise.

“You are fond of poetry, too?” I asked.

“I am a great reader,” he replied. “At one time I had begun to amass quite a small but well selected library; and when that was scattered, I still managed to preserve a few volumes—chiefly of pieces designed for recitation—which have been my travelling companions.”

“Is that one of them?” I asked, pointing to the volume in his hand.

“No, sir,” he replied, showing me a translation of the The Sorrows of YoungWerther, “that is a novel I picked up some time ago. It has afforded me great pleasure, though immoral.”

“Oh, immoral!” cried I, indignant as usual at any complication of art and ethics.

“Surely you cannot deny that, sir—if you know the book,” he said. “The passion is illicit, although certainly drawn with a good deal of pathos. It is not a work one could possibly put into the hands of a lady; which is to be regretted on all accounts, for I do not know how it may strike you; but it seems to me—as a depiction, if I make myself clear—to rise high above its compeers—even famous compeers. Even in Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, or Hawthorne, the sentiment of love appears to me to be frequently done less justice to.”

“You are expressing a very general opinion,” said I.

“Is that so, indeed, sir?” he exclaimed, with unmistakable excitement. “Is the book well known? and who was Go-eath? I am interested in that, because upon the title-page the usual initials are ​omitted, and it runs simply 'by Go-eath.' Was he an author of distinction? Has he written other works?”

Such was our first interview, the first of many; and in all he showed the same attractive qualities and defects. His taste for literature was native and unaffected; his sentimentality, although extreme and a thought ridiculous, was plainly genuine. I wondered at my own innocent wonder. I knew that Homer nodded, that Cæsar had compiled a jest-book, that Turner lived by preference the life of Puggy Booth, that Shelley made paper boats, and Wordsworth wore green spectacles! and with all this mass of evidence before me, I had expected Bellairs to be entirely of one piece, subdued to what he worked in, a spy all through. As I abominated the man's trade, so I had expected to detest the man himself; and behold, I liked him. Poor devil! he was essentially a man on wires, all sensibility and tremor, brimful of a cheap poetry, not without parts, quite without courage. His boldness was despair; the gulf behind him thrust him on; he was one of those who might commit a murder rather than confess the theft of a postage-stamp. I was sure that his coming interview with Carthew rode his imagination like a nightmare; when the thought crossed his mind, I used to think I knew of it, and that the qualm appeared in his face visibly. Yet he would never flinch: necessity stalking at his back, famine (his old pursuer) talking in his ear; and I used to wonder whether I most admired, or most despised, this quivering heroism for evil. The image that occurred to me after his visit was just; I had been butted by a lamb; and the phase of life that I was now studying might be called the Revolt of a Sheep.

It could be said of him that he had learned in sorrow what he taught in song—or wrong; and his life was that of one of his victims. He was born in ​the back parts of the State of New York; his father a farmer, who became subsequently bankrupt and went West. The lawyer and money-lender who had ruined this poor family seems to have conceived in the end a feeling of remorse; he turned the father out indeed, but he offered, in compensation, to charge himself with one of the sons: and Harry, the fifth child and already sickly, was chosen to be left behind. He made himself useful in the office; picked up the scattered rudiments of an education; read right and left; attended and debated at the Young Men's Christian Association; and in all his early years, was the model for a good story-book. His landlady's daughter was his bane. He showed me her photograph; she was a big, handsome, dashing, dressy, vulgar hussy, without character, without tenderness, without mind, and (as the result proved) without virtue. The sickly and timid boy was in the house; he was handy; when she was otherwise unoccupied, she used and played with him—Romeo and Cressida; till in that dreary life of a poor boy in a country town, she grew to be the light of his days and the subject of his dreams. He worked hard, like Jacob, for a wife; he surpassed his patron in sharp practice; he was made head clerk; and the same night, encouraged by a hundred freedoms, depressed by the sense of his youth and his infirmities, he offered marriage and was received with laughter. Not a year had passed, before his master, conscious of growing infirmities, took him for a partner; he proposed again; he was accepted; led two years of troubled married life; and awoke one morning to find his wife had run away with a dashing drummer, and had left him heavily in debt. The debt, and not the drummer, was supposed to be the cause of the hegira; she had concealed her liabilities, they were on the point of bursting forth, she was weary of Bellairs; and she took the drummer as she might have taken a cab. The blow disabled her ​husband, his partner was dead; he was now alone in the business, for which he was no longer fit; the debts hampered him; bankruptcy followed; and he fled from city to city, falling daily into lower practice. It is to be considered that he had been taught, and had learned as a delightful duty, a kind of business whose highest merit is to escape the commentaries of the bench: that of the usurious lawyer in a county town. With this training, he was now shot, a penniless stranger, into the deeper gulfs of cities; and the result is scarce a thing to be surprised at.

“Have you heard of your wife again?” I asked.

He displayed a pitiful agitation. “I am afraid you will think ill of me,” he said.

“Have you taken her back?” I asked.

“No, sir. I trust I have too much self-respect,” he answered, “and, at least, I was never tempted. She won't come, she dislikes, she seems to have conceived a positive distaste for me, and yet I was considered an indulgent husband.”

“You are still in relations, then?” I asked.

“I place myself in your hands, Mr. Dodd,” he replied. “The world is very hard; I have found it bitter hard myself—bitter hard to live. How much worse for a woman, and one who has placed herself (by her own misconduct, I am far from denying that) in so unfortunate a position!”

“In short, you support her?” I suggested.

“I cannot deny it. I practically do,” he admitted. “It has been a millstone round my neck. But I think she is grateful. You can see for yourself.”

He handed me a letter in a sprawling, ignorant hand, but written with violet ink on fine, pink paper with a monogram. It was very foolishly expressed, and I thought (except for a few obvious cajoleries) very heartless and greedy in meaning. The writer said she had been sick, which I disbelieved; declared the last remittance was all gone in doctor's bills, for ​which I took the liberty of substituting dress, drink, and monograms; and prayed for an increase, which I could only hope had been denied her.

“I think she is really grateful?” he asked, with some eagerness, as I returned it.

“I daresay,” said I. “Has she any claim on you?”

“Oh, no, sir. I divorced her,” he replied. “I have a very strong sense of self-respect in such matters, and I divorced her immediately.”

“What sort of life is she leading now?” I asked.

“I will not deceive you, Mr. Dodd. I do not know, I make a point of not knowing; it appears more dignified. I have been very harshly criticised,” he added, sighing.

It will be seen that I had fallen into an ignominious intimacy with the man I had gone out to thwart. My pity for the creature, his admiration for myself, his pleasure in my society, which was clearly unassumed, were the bonds with which I was fettered; perhaps I should add, in honesty, my own ill-regulated interest in the phases of life and human character. The fact is (at least) that we spent hours together daily, and that I was nearly as much on the forward deck as in the saloon. Yet all the while I could never forget he was a shabby trickster, embarked that very moment in a dirty enterprise. I used to tell myself at first that our acquaintance was a stroke of art, and that I was somehow fortifying Carthew. I told myself, I say; but I was no such fool as to believe it, even then. In these circumstances I displayed the two chief qualities of my character on the largest scale—my helplessness and my instinctive love of procrastination—and fell upon a course of action so ridiculous that I blush when I recall it.

We reached Liverpool one forenoon, the rain falling thickly and insidiously on the filthy town. I ​had no plans, beyond a sensible unwillingness to let my rascal escape; and I ended by going to the same inn with him, dining with him, walking with him in the wet streets, and hearing with him in a penny gaff that venerable piece, The Ticket-of-Leave Man. It was one of his first visits to a theatre, against which places of entertainment he had a strong prejudice; and his innocent, pompous talk, innocent old quotations, and innocent reverence for the character of Hawkshaw delighted me beyond relief. In charity to myself, I dwell upon and perhaps exaggerate my pleasures. I have need of all conceivable excuses, when I confess that I went to bed without one word upon the matter of Carthew, but not without having covenanted with my rascal for a visit to Chester the next day. At Chester we did the Cathedral, walked on the walls, discussed Shakespeare and the musical glasses—and made a fresh engagement for the morrow. I do not know, and I am glad to have forgotten, how long these travels were continued. We visited at least, by singular zigzags, Stratford, Warwick, Coventry, Gloucester, Bristol, Bath, and Wells. At each stage we spoke dutifully of the scene and its associations; I sketched, the Shyster spouted poetry and copied epitaphs. Who could doubt we were the usual Americans, travelling with a design of self-improvement? Who was to guess that one was a blackmailer, trembling to approach the scene of action—the other a helpless, amateur detective, waiting on events?

It is unnecessary to remark that none occurred, or none the least suitable with my design of protecting Carthew. Two trifles, indeed, completed though they scarcely changed my conception of the Shyster. The first was observed in Gloucester, where we spent Sunday, and I proposed we should hear service in the cathedral. To my surprise, the creature had an ism of his own, to which he was loyal; and he left me to ​go alone to the cathedral—or perhaps not to go at all—and stole off down a deserted alley to some Bethel or Ebenezer of the proper shade. When we met again at lunch, I rallied him, and he grew restive.

“You need employ no circumlocutions with me, Mr. Dodd,” he said suddenly. “You regard my behaviour from an unfavourable point of view: you regard me, I much fear, as hypocritical.”

I was somewhat confused by the attack. “You know what I think of your trade,” I replied, lamely and coarsely.

“Excuse me, if I seem to press the subject,” he continued, “but if you think my life erroneous, would you have me neglect the means of grace? Because you consider me in the wrong on one point, would you have me place myself on the wrong in all? Surely, sir, the church is for the sinner.”

“Did you ask a blessing on your present enterprise?” I sneered.

He had a bad attack of St. Vitus, his face was changed, and his eyes flashed. “I will tell you what I did!” he cried. “I prayed for an unfortunate man and a wretched woman whom he tries to support.”

I cannot pretend that I found any repartee.

The second incident was at Bristol, where I lost sight of my gentleman some hours. From this eclipse, he returned to me with thick speech, wandering footsteps, and a back all whitened with plaster. I had half expected, yet I could have wept to see it. All disabilities were piled on that weak back—domestic misfortune, nervous disease, a displeasing exterior, empty pockets, and the slavery of vice.

I will never deny that our prolonged conjunction was the result of double cowardice. Each was afraid to leave the other, each was afraid to speak, or knew not what to say. Save for my ill-judged allusion at Gloucester, the subject uppermost in both our minds was buried. Carthew, Stallbridge-le-Carthew, Stall​bridge-Minster—which we had long since (and severally) identified to be the nearest station—even the name of Dorsetshire was studiously avoided. And yet we were making progress all the time, tacking across broad England like an unweatherly vessel on a wind; approaching our destination, not openly, but by a sort of flying sap. And at length, I can scarce tell how, we were set down by a dilatory butt-end of local train on the untenanted platform of Stallbridge-Minster.

The town was ancient and compact—a domino of tiled houses and walled gardens, dwarfed by the disproportionate bigness of the church. From the midst of the thoroughfare which divided it in half, fields and trees were visible at either end; and through the sally-port of every street, there flowed in from the country a silent invasion of green grass. Bees and birds appeared to make the majority of the inhabitants; every garden had its row of hives, the eaves of every house were plastered with the nests of swallows, and the pinnacles of the church were flickered about all day long by a multitude of wings. The town was of Roman foundation; and as I looked out that afternoon from the low windows of the inn, I should scarce have been surprised to see a centurion coming up the street with a fatigue draft of legionaries. In short, Stallbridge-Minster was one of those towns which appear to be maintained by England for the instruction and delight of the American rambler; to which he seems guided by an instinct not less surprising than the setter's; and which he visits and quits with equal enthusiasm.

I was not at all in the humour of the tourist. I had wasted weeks of time and accomplished nothing; we were on the eve of the engagement, and I had neither plans nor allies. I had thrust myself into the trade of private providence and amateur detective; I was spending money and I was reaping disgrace. All ​the time, I kept telling myself that I must at least speak; that this ignominious silence should have been broken long ago, and must be broken now. I should have broken it when he first proposed to come to Stallbridge-Minster; I should have broken it in the train; I should break it there and then, on the inn doorstep, as the omnibus rolled off. I turned toward him at the thought; he seemed to wince, the words died on my lips, and I proposed instead that we should visit the Minster.

While we were engaged upon this duty, it came on to rain in a manner worthy of the tropics. The vault reverberated; every gargoyle instantly poured its full discharge; we waded back to the inn, ankle-deep in impromptu brooks; and the rest of the afternoon sat weatherbound, hearkening to the sonorous deluge. For two hours I talked of indifferent matters, laboriously feeding the conversation; for two hours my mind was quite made up to do my duty instantly—and at each particular instant I postponed it till the next. To screw up my faltering courage, I called at dinner for some sparkling wine. It proved when it came to be detestable; I could not put it to my lips; and Bellairs, who had as much palate as a weevil, was left to finish it himself. Doubtless the wine flushed him; doubtless he may have observed my embarrassment of the afternoon; doubtless he was conscious that we were approaching a crisis, and that that evening, if I did not join with him, I must declare myself an open enemy. At least he fled. Dinner was done; this was the time when I had bound myself to break my silence; no more delays were to be allowed, no more excuses received. I went upstairs after some tobacco; which I felt to be a mere necessity in the circumstances; and when I returned, the man was gone. The waiter told me he had left the house.

The rain still plumped, like a vast shower-bath, over the deserted town. The night was dark and ​windless: the street lit glimmeringly from end to end, lamps, house windows, and the reflections in the rain-pools all contributing. From a public-house on the other side of the way, I heard a harp twang and a doleful voice upraised in the “Larboard Watch,” “The Anchor's Weighed,” and other naval ditties. Where had my Shyster wandered? In all likelihood to that lyrical tavern; there was no choice of diversion; in comparison with Stallbridge-Minster on a rainy night, a sheepfold would seem gay.

Again I passed in review the points of my interview, on which I was always constantly resolved so long as my adversary was absent from the scene, and again they struck me as inadequate. From this dispiriting exercise I turned to the native amusements of the inn coffee-room, and studied for some time the mezzotints that frowned upon the wall. The railway guide, after showing me how soon I could leave Stallbridge and how quickly I could reach Paris, failed to hold my attention. An illustrated advertisement book of hotels brought me very low indeed; and when it came to the local paper, I could have wept. At this point, I found a passing solace in a copy of Whittaker's Almanac, and obtained in fifty minutes more information than I have yet been able to use.

Then a fresh apprehension assailed me. Suppose Bellairs had given me the slip? Suppose he was now rolling on the road to Stallbridge-le-Carthew? or perhaps there already and laying before a very white-faced auditor his threats and propositions? A hasty person might have instantly pursued. Whatever I am, I am not hasty, and I was aware of three grave objections. In the first place, I could not be certain that Bellairs was gone. In the second, I had no taste whatever for a long drive at that hour of the night and in so merciless a rain. In the third, I had no idea how I was to get admitted if I went, and no idea what I should say if I got admitted. “In short,” I ​concluded, “the whole situation is the merest farce. You have thrust yourself in where you had no business and have no power. You would be quite as useful in San Francisco; far happier in Paris; and being (by the wrath of God) at Stallbridge-Minster, the wisest thing is to go quietly to bed.” On the way to my room, I saw (in a flash) that which I ought to have done long ago, and which it was now too late to think of—written to Carthew, I mean, detailing the facts and describing Bellairs, letting him defend himself if he were able, and giving him time to flee if he were not. It was the last blow to my self-respect; and I flung myself into my bed with contumely.

I have no guess what hour it was, when I was wakened by the entrance of Bellairs carrying a candle. He had been drunk, for he was bedaubed with mire from head to foot; but he was now sober and under the empire of some violent emotion which he controlled with difficulty. He trembled visibly; and more than once, during the interview which followed, tears suddenly and silently overflowed his cheeks.

“I have to ask your pardon, sir, for this untimely visit,” he said. “I make no defence, I have no excuse, I have disgraced myself, I am properly punished; I appear before you to appeal to you in mercy for the most trifling aid or, God help me! I fear I may go mad.”

“What on earth is wrong?” I asked.

“I have been robbed,” he said. “I have no defence to offer; it was of my own fault, I am properly punished.”

“But, gracious goodness me!” I cried, “who is there to rob you in a place like this?”

“I can form no opinion,” he replied. “I have no idea. I was lying in a ditch inanimate. This is a degrading confession, sir; I can only say in self-defence that perhaps (in your good nature) you have ​made yourself partly responsible for my shame. I am not used to these rich wines.”

“In what form was your money? Perhaps it may be traced,” I suggested.

“It was in English sovereigns. I changed it in New York; I got very good exchange,” he said, and then, with a momentary outbreak, “God in heaven, how I toiled for it!” he cried.

“That doesn't sound encouraging,” said I. “It may be worth while to apply to the police, but it doesn't sound a hopeful case.”

“And I have no hope in that direction,” said Bellairs. “My hopes, Mr. Dodd, are all fixed upon yourself. I could easily convince you that a small, a very small advance, would be in the nature of an excellent investment; but I prefer to rely on your humanity. Our acquaintance began on an unusual footing; but you have now known me for some time, we have been some time—I was going to say we had been almost intimate. Under the impulse of instinctive sympathy, I have bared my heart to you, Mr. Dodd, as I have done to few; and I believe—I trust—I may say that I feel sure—you heard me with a kindly sentiment. This is what brings me to your side at this most inexcusable hour. But put yourself in my place—how could I sleep—how could I dream of sleeping, in this blackness of remorse and despair? There was a friend at hand—so I ventured to think of you; it was instinctive; I fled to your side, as the drowning man clutches at a straw. These expressions are not exaggerated, they scarcely serve to express the agitation of my mind. And think, sir, how easily you can restore me to hope and, I may say, to reason. A small loan, which shall be faithfully repaid. Five hundred dollars would be ample.” He watched me with burning eyes. “Four hundred would do. I believe, Mr. Dodd, that I could manage with economy on two.”

​“And then you will repay me out of Carthew's pocket?” I said. “I am much obliged. But I will tell you what I will do: I will see you on board a steamer, pay your fare through to San Francisco, and place fifty dollars in the purser's hands, to be given you in New York.”

He drank in my words; his face represented an ecstasy of cunning thought. I could read there, plain as print, that he but thought to overreach me.

“And what am I to do in 'Frisco?” he asked. “I am disbarred, I have no trade, I cannot dig, to beg——” he paused in the citation. “And you know that I am not alone,” he added, “others depend upon me.”

“I will write to Pinkerton,” I returned. “I feel sure he can help you to some employment, and in the meantime, and for three months after your arrival, he shall pay to yourself personally, on the first and the fifteenth, twenty-five dollars.”

“Mr. Dodd, I scarce believe you can be serious in this offer,” he replied. “Have you forgotten the circumstances of the case? Do you know these people are the magnates of the section? They were spoken of to-night in the saloon; their wealth must amount to many millions of dollars in real estate alone; their house is one of the sights of the locality, and you offer me a bribe of a few hundred!”

“I offer you no bribe, Mr. Bellairs, I give you alms,” I returned. “I will do nothing to forward you in your hateful business; yet I would not willingly have you starve.”

“Give me a hundred dollars then, and be done with it,” he cried.

“I will do what I have said, and neither more nor less,” said I.

“Take care,” he cried. “You are playing a fool's game; you are making an enemy for nothing; you will gain nothing by this, I warn you of it!” And ​then with one of his changes, “Seventy dollars—only seventy—in mercy, Mr. Dodd, in common charity. Don't dash the bowl from my lips! You have a kindly heart. Think of my position, remember my unhappy wife.”

“You should have thought of her before,” said I. “I have made my offer, and I wish to sleep.”

“Is that your last word, sir? Pray consider; pray weigh both sides: my misery, your own danger. I warn you—I beseech you; measure it well before you answer,” so he half pleaded, half threatened me, with clasped hands.

“My first word, and my last,” said I.

The change upon the man was shocking. In the storm of anger that now shook him, the lees of his intoxication rose again to the surface; his face was deformed, his words insane with fury; his pantomime excessive in itself, was distorted by an access of St. Vitus.

“You will perhaps allow me to inform you of my cold opinion,” he began, apparently self-possessed, truly bursting with rage: “when I am a glorified saint, I shall see you howling for a drop of water and exult to see you. That your last word! Take it in your face, you spy, you false friend, you fat hypocrite! I defy, I defy and despise and spit upon you! I'm on the trail, his trail or yours, I smell blood, I'll follow it on my hands and knees, I'll starve to follow it! I'll hunt you down, hunt you, hunt you down! If I were strong, I'd tear your vitals out, here in this room—tear them out—I'd tear them out! Damn, damn, damn! You think me weak! I can bite, bite to the blood, bite you, hurt you, disgrace you ...”

He was thus incoherently raging, when the scene was interrupted by the arrival of the landlord and inn servants in various degrees of deshabille, and to them I gave my temporary lunatic in charge.

​“Take him to his room,” I said, “he's only drunk.”

These were my words; but I knew better. After all my study of Mr. Bellairs, one discovery had been reserved for the last moment—that of his latent and essential madness.

CHAPTER XX.

STALLBRIDGE-LE-CARTHEW.

Long before I was awake, the shyster had disappeared, leaving his bill unpaid. I did not need to inquire where he was gone, I knew too well, I knew there was nothing left me but to follow; and about ten in the morning, set forth in a gig for Stallbridge-le-Carthew.

The road, for the first quarter of the way, deserts the valley of the river, and crosses the summit of a chalk-down, grazed over by flocks of sheep and haunted by innumerable larks. It was a pleasant but a vacant scene, arousing but not holding the attention; and my mind returned to the violent passage of the night before. My thought of the man I was pursuing had been greatly changed. I conceived of him, somewhere in front of me, upon his dangerous errand, not to be turned aside, not to be stopped, by either fear or reason. I had called him a ferret; I conceived him now as a mad dog. Methought he would run, not walk; methought, as he ran, that he would bark and froth at the lips; methought, if the great wall of China were to rise across his path, he would attack it with his nails.

Presently the road left the down, returned by a precipitous descent into the valley of the Stall, and ran thenceforward among enclosed fields and under the continuous shade of trees. I was told we had now entered on the Carthew property. By and by, a battlemented wall appeared on the left hand, and a ​little after I had my first glimpse of the mansion. It stood in a hollow of a bosky park, crowded to a degree that surprised and even displeased me, with huge timber and dense shrubberies of laurel and rhododendron. Even from this low station and the thronging neighbourhood of the trees, the pile rose conspicuous like a cathedral. Behind, as we continued to skirt the park wall, I began to make out a straggling town of offices which became conjoined to the rear with those of the home farm. On the left was an ornamental water sailed in by many swans. On the right extended a flower garden, laid in the old manner, and at this season of the year, as brilliant as stained glass. The front of the house presented a façade of more than sixty windows, surmounted by a formal pediment and raised upon a terrace. A wide avenue, part in gravel, part in turf, and bordered by triple alleys, ran to the great double gateways. It was impossible to look without surprise on a place that had been prepared through so many generations, had cost so many tons of minted gold, and was maintained in order by so great a company of emulous servants. And yet of these there was no sign but the perfection of their work. The whole domain was drawn to the line and weeded like the front plot of some suburban amateur; and I looked in vain for any belated gardener, and listened in vain for any sounds of labour. Some lowing of cattle and much calling of birds alone disturbed the stillness, and even the little hamlet, which clustered at the gates, appeared to hold its breath in awe of its great neighbour, like a troop of children who should have strayed into a king's anteroom.

The Carthew Arms, the small but very comfortable inn, was a mere appendage and outpost of the family whose name it bore. Engraved portraits of bygone Carthews adorned the walls; Fielding Carthew, Recorder of the city of London; Major-General John Carthew in uniform, commanding some ​military operations; the Right Honourable Bailley Carthew, Member of Parliament for Stallbridge, standing by a table and brandishing a document; Singleton Carthew, Esquire, represented in the foreground of a herd of cattle—doubtless at the desire of his tenantry, who had made him a compliment of this work of art; and the Venerable Archdeacon Carthew, D.D., LL.D., A.M., laying his hand on the head of a little child in a manner highly frigid and ridiculous. So far as my memory serves me, there were no other pictures in this exclusive hostelry; and I was not surprised to learn that the landlord was an ex-butler, the landlady an ex-lady's-maid, from the great house; and that the bar-parlour was a sort of perquisite of former servants.

To an American, the sense of the domination of this family over so considerable a tract of earth was even oppressive; and as I considered their simple annals, gathered from the legends of the engravings, surprise began to mingle with my disgust. “Mr. Recorder” doubtless occupies an honourable post; but I thought that, in the course of so many generations, one Carthew might have clambered higher. The soldier had stuck at Major-General; the churchman bloomed unremarked in an archidiaconate; and though the Right Honourable Bailley seemed to have sneaked into the privy council, I have still to learn what he did when he had got there. Such vast means, so long a start, and such a modest standard of achievement, struck in me a strong sense of the dulness of that race.

I found that to come to the hamlet and not visit the Hall, would be regarded as a slight. To feed the swans, to see the peacocks and the Raphaels—for these commonplace people actually possessed two Raphaels—to risk life and limb among a famous breed of cattle called the Carthew Chillinghams, and to do homage to the sire (still living) of Donibristle, ​a renowned winner of the oaks: these, it seemed, were the inevitable stations of the pilgrimage. I was not so foolish as to resist, for I might have need before I was done of general goodwill; and two pieces of news fell in which changed my resignation to alacrity. It appeared in the first place, that Mr. Norris was from home “travelling;” in the second, that a visitor had been before me and already made the tour of the Carthew curiosities. I thought I knew who this must be; I was anxious to learn what he had done and seen; and fortune so far favoured me that the under-gardener singled out to be my guide had already performed the same function for my predecessor.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “an American gentleman right enough. At least, I don't think he was quite a gentleman, but a very civil person.”

The person, it seems, had been civil enough to be delighted with the Carthew Chillinghams, to perform the whole pilgrimage with rising admiration, and to have almost prostrated himself before the shrine of Donibristle's sire.

“He told me, sir,” continued the gratified under-gardener, “that he had often read of the 'stately 'omes of England,' but ours was the first he had the chance to see. When he came to the 'ead of the long alley, he fetched his breath. 'This is indeed a lordly domain!' he cries. And it was natural he should be interested in the place, for it seems Mr. Carthew had been kind to him in the States. In fact, he seemed a grateful kind of person, and wonderful taken up with flowers.”

I heard this story with amazement. The phrases quoted told their own tale; they were plainly from the shyster's mint. A few hours back I had seen him a mere bedlamite and fit for a strait waistcoat; he was penniless in a strange country; it was highly probable he had gone without breakfast; the absence of Norris ​must have been a crushing blow; the man (by all reason) should have been despairing. And now I heard of him, clothed and in his right mind, deliberate, insinuating, admiring vistas, smelling flowers, and talking like a book. The strength of character implied amazed and daunted me.

“This is curious,” I said to the under-gardener. “I have had the pleasure of some acquaintance with Mr. Carthew myself; and I believe none of our western friends ever were in England. Who can this person be? He couldn't—no, that's impossible, he could never have had the impudence. His name was not Bellairs?”

“I didn't 'ear the name, sir. Do you know anything against him?” cried my guide.

“Well,” said I, “he is certainly not the person Carthew would like to have here in his absence.”

“Good gracious me!” exclaimed the gardener. “He was so pleasant spoken, too; I thought he was some form of a schoolmaster. Perhaps, sir, you wouldn't mind going right up to Mr. Denman? I recommended him to Mr. Denman, when he had done the grounds. Mr. Denman is our butler, sir,” he added.

The proposal was welcome, particularly as affording me a graceful retreat from the neighbourhood of the Carthew Chillinghams; and, giving up our projected circuit, we took a short cut through the shrubbery and across the bowling green to the back quarters of the Hall.

The bowling-green was surrounded by a great hedge of yew, and entered by an archway in the quick. As we were issuing from this passage, my conductor arrested me.

“The Honourable Lady Ann Carthew,” he said, in an august whisper. And looking over his shoulder, I was aware of an old lady with a stick, hobbling somewhat briskly along the garden path. She must have been extremely handsome in her youth; and even ​the limp with which she walked could not deprive her of an unusual and almost menacing dignity of bearing. Melancholy was impressed besides on every feature, and her eyes, as she looked straight before her, seemed to contemplate misfortune.

“She seems sad,” said I, when she had hobbled past and we had resumed our walk.

“She enjoy rather poor spirits, sir,” responded the under-gardener. “Mr. Carthew—the old gentleman, I mean—died less than a year ago; Lord Tillibody, her ladyship's brother, two months after; and then there was the sad business about the young gentleman. Killed in the 'unting-field, sir; and her ladyship's favourite. The present Mr. Norris has never been so equally.”

“So I have understood,” said I, persistently, and (I think) gracefully pursuing my inquiries and fortifying my position as a family friend. “Dear, dear, how sad! And has this change—poor Carthew's return, and all—has this not mended matters?”

“Well, no, sir, not a sign of it,” was the reply. “Worse, we think, than ever.”

“Dear, dear!” said I again.

“When Mr. Norris arrived, she did seem glad to see him,” he pursued; “and we were all pleased, I'm sure; for no one knows the young gentleman but what likes him. Ah, sir, it didn't last long! That very night they had a talk, and fell out or something; her ladyship took on most painful; it was like old days, but worse. And the next morning Mr. Norris was off again upon his travels. 'Denman,' he said to Mr. Denman, 'Denman, I'll never come back,' he said, and shook him by the 'and. I wouldn't be saying all this to a stranger, sir,” added my informant, overcome with a sudden fear lest he had gone too far.

He had indeed told me much, and much that was unsuspected by himself. On that stormy night of his return, Carthew had told his story; the old lady had ​

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A lady with silver hair, a slender silver voice, and a stream of insignificant information not to be diverted, led me through the picture gallery" (p. 317).

​more upon her mind than mere bereavements; and among the mental pictures on which she looked, as she walked staring down the path, was one of Midway Island and the Flying Scud.

Mr. Denman heard my inquiries with discomposure, but informed me the shyster was already gone.

“Gone?” cried I. “Then what can he have come for? One thing I can tell you, it was not to see the house.”

“I don't see it could have been anything else,” replied the butler.

“You may depend upon it it was,” said I. “And whatever it was, he has got it. By the way, where is Mr. Carthew at present? I was sorry to find he was from home.”

“He is engaged in travelling, sir,” replied the butler, dryly.

“Ah, bravo!” cried I. “I laid a trap for you there, Mr. Denman. Now I need not ask you; I am sure you did not tell this prying stranger.”

“To be sure not, sir,” said the butler.

I went through the form of “shaking him by the 'and”—like Mr. Norris—not, however, with genuine enthusiasm. For I had failed ingloriously to get the address for myself; and I felt a sure conviction that Bellairs had done better, or he had still been here and still cultivating Mr. Denman.

I had escaped the grounds and the cattle; I could not escape the house. A lady with silver hair, a slender silver voice, and a stream of insignificant information not to be diverted, led me through the picture gallery, the music-room, the great dining-room, the long drawing-room, the Indian room, the theatre, and every corner (as I thought) of that interminable mansion. There was but one place reserved; the garden-room, whither Lady Ann had now retired. I paused a moment on the outside of the door, and smiled to myself. The situation was ​indeed strange, and these thin boards divided the secret of the Flying Scud.

All the while, as I went to and fro, I was considering the visit and departure of Bellairs. That he had got the address, I was quite certain: that he had not got it by direct questioning, I was convinced; some ingenuity, some lucky accident, had served him. A similar chance, an equal ingenuity, was required; or I was left helpless, the ferret must run down his prey, the great oaks fall, the Raphaels be scattered, the house let to some stockbroker suddenly made rich, and the name which now filled the mouths of five or six parishes dwindle to a memory. Strange that such great matters, so old a mansion, a family so ancient and so dull, should come to depend for perpetuity upon the intelligence, the discretion, and the cunning of a Latin-Quarter student! What Bellairs had done, I must do likewise. Chance or ingenuity, ingenuity or chance—so I continued to ring the changes as I walked down the avenue, casting back occasional glances at the red brick façade and the twinkling windows of the house. How was I to command chance? where was I to find the ingenuity?

These reflections brought me to the door of the inn. And here, pursuant to my policy of keeping well with all men, I immediately smoothed my brow, and accepted (being the only guest in the house) an invitation to dine with the family in the bar parlour. I sat down accordingly with Mr. Higgs the ex-butler, Mrs. Higgs the ex-lady's-maid, and Miss Agnes Higgs their frowsy-headed little girl, the least promising and (as the event showed) the most useful of the lot. The talk ran endlessly on the great house and the great family; the roast beef, the Yorkshire pudding, the jam-roll, and the cheddar cheese came and went, and still the stream flowed on; near four generations of Carthews were touched upon without eliciting one point of interest; and we had killed Mr. Henry in ​“the 'unting-field,” with a vast elaboration of painful circumstance, and buried him in the midst of a whole sorrowing county, before I could so much as manage to bring upon the stage my intimate friend, Mr. Norris. At the name, the ex-butler grew diplomatic, and the ex-lady's-maid tender. He was the only person of the whole featureless series who seemed to have accomplished anything worth mention; and his achievements, poor dog, seemed to have been confined to going to the devil and leaving some regrets. He had been the image of the Right Honourable Bailley, one of the lights of that dim house, and a career of distinction had been predicted of him in consequence almost from the cradle. But before he was out of long clothes, the cloven foot began to show; he proved to be no Carthew, developed a taste for low pleasures and bad company, went birdnesting with a stable-boy before he was eleven, and when he was near twenty, and might have been expected to display at least some rudiments of the family gravity, rambled the country over with a knapsack, making sketches and keeping company in wayside inns. He had no pride about him, I was told; he would sit down with any man; and it was somewhat woundingly implied that I was indebted to this peculiarity for my own acquaintance with the hero. Unhappily, Mr. Norris was not only eccentric, he was fast. His debts were still remembered at the University; still more, it appeared, the highly humorous circumstances attending his expulsion. “He was always fond of his jest,” commented Mrs. Higgs.

“That he were!” observed her lord.

But it was after he went into the diplomatic service that the real trouble began.

“It seems, sir, that he went the pace extraordinary,” said the ex-butler, with a solemn gusto.

“His debts were somethink awful,” said the lady's-maid. “And as nice a young gentleman all the time as you would wish to see!”

​“When word came to Mr. Carthew's ears, the turn up was 'orrible,” continued Mr. Higgs. “I remember it as if it was yesterday. The bell was rung after her la'ship was gone, which I answered it myself, supposing it were the coffee. There was Mr. Carthew on his feet. '’Iggs,' he says, pointing with his stick, for he had a turn of the gout, 'order the dog-cart instantly for this son of mine which has disgraced hisself.' Mr. Norris say nothink: he sit there with his 'ead down, making belief to be looking at a walnut. You might have bowled me over with a straw,” said Mr. Higgs.

“Had he done anything very bad?” I asked.

“Not he, Mr. Dodsley!” cried the lady—it was so she had conceived my name. “He never did anythink to all really wrong in his poor life. The 'ole affair was a disgrace. It was all rank favouritising.”

“Mrs. 'Iggs! Mrs. 'Iggs!” cried the butler warningly.

“Well, what do I care?” retorted the lady, shaking her ringlets. “You know it was yourself, Mr. 'Iggs, and so did every member of the staff.”

While I was getting these facts and opinions, I by no means neglected the child. She was not attractive; but fortunately she had reached the corrupt age of seven, when half a crown appears about as large as a saucer and is fully as rare as the dodo. For a shilling down, sixpence in her money-box, and an American gold dollar which I happened to find in my pocket, I bought the creature soul and body. She declared her intention to accompany me to the ends of the earth; and had to be chidden by her sire for drawing comparisons between myself and her uncle William, highly damaging to the latter.

Dinner was scarce done, the cloth was not yet removed, when Miss Agnes must needs climb into my lap with her stamp album, a relic of the generosity of Uncle William. There are few things I despise more ​than old stamps, unless perhaps it be crests; for cattle (from the Carthew Chillinghams down to the old gate-keeper's milk-cow in the lane) contempt is far from being my first sentiment. But it seemed I was doomed to pass that day in viewing curiosities, and smothering a yawn, I devoted myself once more to tread the well-known round. I fancy Uncle William must have begun the collection himself and tired of it, for the book (to my surprise) was quite respectably filled. There were the varying shades of the English penny, Russians with the coloured heart, old undecipherable Thurn-und-Taxis, obsolete triangular Cape of Good Hopes, Swan Rivers with the Swan, and Guianas with the sailing ship. Upon all these I looked with the eyes of a fish and the spirit of a sheep; I think indeed I was at times asleep; and it was probably in one of these moments that I capsized the album, and there fell from the end of it, upon the floor, a considerable number of what I believe to be called “exchanges.”

Here, against all probability, my chance had come to me; for as I gallantly picked them up, I was struck with the disproportionate amount of five-sous French stamps. Some one, I reasoned, must write very regularly from France to the neighbourhood of Stallbridge-le-Carthew. Could it be Norris? On one stamp I made out an initial C; upon a second I got as far as C H; beyond which point, the postmark used was in every instance undecipherable. C H, when you consider that about a quarter of the towns in France begin with “chateau,” was an insufficient clue; and I promptly annexed the plainest of the collection in order to consult the post-office.

The wretched infant took me in the fact.

“Naughty man, to 'teal my 'tamp!” she cried; and when I would have brazened it off with a denial, recovered and displayed the stolen article.

My position was now highly false; and I believe it ​was in mere pity that Mrs. Higgs came to my rescue with a welcome proposition. If the gentleman was really interested in stamps, she said, probably supposing me a monomaniac on the point, he should see Mr. Denman's album. Mr. Denman had been collecting forty years, and his collection was said to be worth a mint of money. “Agnes,” she went on, “if you were a kind little girl, you would run over to the 'All, tell Mr. Denman there's a connaisseer in the 'ouse, and ask him if one of the young gentlemen might bring the album down.”

“I should like to see his exchanges too,” I cried, rising to the occasion. “I may have some of mine in my pocket-book and we might trade.”

Half an hour later Mr. Denman arrived himself with a most unconscionable volume under his arm.

“Ah, sir,” he cried, “when I 'eard you was a collector, I dropped all. It's a saying of mine, Mr. Dodsley, that collecting stamps makes all collectors kin. It's a bond, sir; it creates a bond.”

Upon the truth of this, I cannot say; but there is no doubt that the attempt to pass yourself off for a collector falsely creates a precarious situation.

“Ah, here's the second issue!” I would say, after consulting the legend at the side. “The pink—no, I mean the mauve—yes, that's the beauty of this lot. Though of course, as you say,” I would hasten to add, “this yellow on the thin paper is more rare.”

Indeed I must certainly have been detected, had I not plied Mr. Denman in self-defence with his favourite liquor—a port so excellent that it could never have ripened in the cellar of the Carthew Arms, but must have been transported, under cloud of night, from the neighbouring vaults of the great house. At each threat of exposure, and in particular whenever I was directly challenged for an opinion, I made haste ​to fill the butler's glass, and by the time we had got to the exchanges, he was in a condition in which no stamp collector need be seriously feared. God forbid I should hint that he was drunk; he seemed incapable of the necessary liveliness; but the man's eyes were set, and so long as he was suffered to talk without interruption, he seemed careless of my heeding him.

In Mr. Denman's exchanges, as in those of little Agnes, the same peculiarity was to be remarked, an undue preponderance of that despicably common stamp, the French twenty-five centimes. And here joining them in stealthy review, I found the C and the CH; then something of an A just following; and then a terminal Y. Here was also the whole name spelt out to me; it seemed familiar, too; and yet for some time I could not bridge the imperfection. Then I came upon another stamp, in which an L was legible before the Y, and in a moment the word leaped up complete. Chailly, that was the name; Chailly-en-Biere, the post town of Barbizon—ah, there was the very place for any man to hide himself—there was the very place for Mr. Norris, who had rambled over England making sketches—the very place for Goddedaal, who had left a palette-knife on board the Flying Scud. Singular, indeed, that while I was drifting over England with the shyster, the man we were in quest of awaited me at my own ultimate destination.

Whether Mr. Denman had shown his album to Bellairs, whether, indeed, Bellairs could have caught (as I did) this hint from an obliterated postmark, I shall never know, and it mattered not. We were equal now; my task at Stallbridge-le-Carthew was accomplished; my interest in postage-stamps died shamelessly away; the astonished Denman was bowed out; and ordering the horse to be put in, I plunged into the study of the time-table.

CHAPTER XXI.

FACE TO FACE.

I fell from the skies on Barbizon about two o'clock of a September afternoon. It is the dead hour of the day; all the workers have gone painting, all the idlers strolling, in the forest or the plain; the winding causewayed street is solitary, and the inn deserted. I was the more pleased to find one of my old companions in the dining-room; his town clothes marked him for a man in the act of departure; and indeed his portmanteau lay beside him on the floor.

“Why, Stennis,” I cried, “you're the last man I expected to find here.”

“You won't find me here long,” he replied. “King Pandion he is dead; all his friends are lapped in lead. For men of our antiquity, the poor old shop is played out.”

“I have had playmates, I have had companions,” I quoted in return. We were both moved, I think, to meet again in this scene of our old pleasure parties so unexpectedly, after so long an interval, and both already so much altered.

“That is the sentiment,” he replied. “All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. I have been here a week, and the only living creature who seemed to recollect me was the Pharaon. Bar the Sirons, of course, and the perennial Bodmer.”

“Is there no survivor?” I inquired.

“Of our geological epoch? not one,” he replied. “This is the city of Petra in Edom.”

“And what sort of Bedouins encamp among the ruins?” I asked.

“Youth, Dodd, youth; blooming, conscious youth,” he returned. “Such a gang, such reptiles! to think we were like that! I wonder Siron didn't sweep us from his premises.”

​“Perhaps we weren't so bad,” I suggested.

“Don't let me depress you,” said he. “We were both Anglo-Saxons, anyway, and the only redeeming feature to-day is another.”

The thought of my quest, a moment driven out by this rencounter, revived in my mind. “Who is he?” I cried. “Tell me about him.”

“What, the Redeeming Feature?” said he. “Well, he's a very pleasing creature, rather dim, and dull, and genteel, but really pleasing. He is very British, though, the artless Briton! Perhaps you'll find him too much so for the transatlantic nerves. Come to think of it, on the other hand, you ought to get on famously. He is an admirer of your great republic in one of its (excuse me) shoddiest features; he takes in and sedulously reads a lot of American papers. I warned you he was artless.”

“What papers are they?” cried I.

“San Francisco papers,” said he. “He gets a bale of them about twice a week, and studies them like the Bible. That's one of his weaknesses; another is to be incalculably rich. He has taken Masson's old studio—you remember?—at the corner of the road; he has furnished it regardless of expense, and lives there surrounded with vins fins and works of art. When the youth of to-day goes up to the Caverne des Brigands to make punch—they do all that we did, like some nauseous form of ape (I never appreciated before what a creature of tradition mankind is)—this Madden follows with a basket of champagne. I told him he was wrong, and the punch tasted better; but he thought the boys liked the style of the thing, and I suppose they do. He is a very good-natured soul, and a very melancholy, and rather a helpless. O, and he has a third weakness which I came near forgetting. He paints. He has never been taught, and he's past thirty, and he paints.”

“How?” I asked.

​“Rather well, I think,” was the reply. “That's the annoying part of it. See for yourself. That panel is his.”

I stepped toward the window. It was the old familiar room, with the tables set like a Greek P, and the sideboard, and the aphasiac piano, and the panels on the wall. There were Romeo and Juliet, Antwerp from the river, Enfield's ships among the ice, and the huge huntsman winding a huge horn; mingled with them a few new ones, the thin crop of a succeeding generation, not better and not worse. It was to one of these I was directed—a thing coarsely and wittily handled, mostly with the palette-knife, the colour in some parts excellent, the canvas in others loaded with mere clay. But it was the scene, and not the art or want of it, that riveted my notice. The foreground was of sand and scrub and wreckwood; in the middle distance the many-hued and smooth expanse of a lagoon, enclosed by a wall of breakers; beyond, a blue strip of ocean. The sky was cloudless, and I could hear the surf break. For the place was Midway Island; the point of view the very spot at which I had landed with the captain for the first time, and from which I had re-embarked the day before we sailed. I had already been gazing for some seconds, before my attention was arrested by a blur on the sea-line; and stooping to look, I recognised the smoke of a steamer.

“Yes,” said I, turning toward Stennis, “it has merit. What is it?”

“A fancy piece,” he returned. “That's what pleased me. So few of the fellows in our time had the imagination of a garden snail.”

“Madden, you say his name is?” I pursued.

“Madden,” he repeated.

“Has he travelled much?” I inquired.

“I haven't an idea. He is one of the least autobiographical of men. He sits, and smokes, and giggles, and sometimes he makes small jests; but his contri​butions to the art of pleasing are generally confined to looking like a gentleman and being one. No,” added Stennis, “he'll never suit you, Dodd; you like more head on your liquor. You'll find him as dull as ditch water.”

“Has he big blonde side-whiskers like tusks?” I asked, mindful of the photograph of Goddedaal.

“Certainly not: why should he?” was the reply.

“Does he write many letters?” I continued.

“God knows,” said Stennis. “What is wrong with you? I never saw you taken this way before.”

“The fact is, I think I know the man,” said I. “I think I'm looking for him. I rather think he is my long-lost brother.”

“Not twins, anyway,” returned Stennis.

And about the same time, a carriage driving up to the inn, he took his departure.

I walked till dinner-time in the plain, keeping to the fields; for I instinctively shunned observation, and was racked by many incongruous and impatient feelings. Here was a man whose voice I had once heard, whose doings had filled so many days of my life with interest and distress, whom I had lain awake to dream of like a lover; and now his hand was on the door; now we were to meet; now I was to learn at last the mystery of the substituted crew. The sun went down over the plain of the Angelus, and as the hour approached, my courage lessened. I let the laggard peasants pass me on the homeward way. The lamps were lit, the soup was served, the company were all at table, and the room sounded already with multitudinous talk before I entered. I took my place and found I was opposite to Madden. Over six feet high and well set up, the hair dark and streaked with silver, the eyes dark and kindly, the mouth very good-natured, the teeth admirable; linen and hands exquisite; English clothes, an English voice, an English bearing: the man stood out conspicuous from the ​company. Yet he had made himself at home, and seemed to enjoy a certain quiet popularity among the noisy boys of the table d'hôte. He had an odd, silver giggle of a laugh, that sounded nervous even when he was really amused, and accorded ill with his big stature and manly, melancholy face. This laugh fell in continually all through dinner like the note of the triangle in a piece of modern French music; and he had at times a kind of pleasantry, rather of manner than of words, with which he started or maintained the merriment. He took his share in these diversions, not so much like a man in high spirits, but like one of an approved good nature, habitually self-forgetful, accustomed to please and to follow others. I have remarked in old soldiers much the same smiling sadness and sociable self-effacement.

I feared to look at him, lest my glances should betray my deep excitement, and chance served me so well that the soup was scarce removed before we were naturally introduced. My first sip of Château Siron, a vintage from which I had been long estranged, startled me into speech.

“O, this'll never do!” I cried, in English.

“Dreadful stuff, isn't it?” said Madden, in the same language. “Do let me ask you to share my bottle. They call it Chambertin, which it isn't; but it's fairly palatable, and there's nothing in this house that a man can drink at all.”

I accepted; anything would do that paved the way to better knowledge.

“Your name is Madden, I think,” said I. “My old friend Stennis told me about you when I came.”

“Yes, I am sorry he went; I feel such a Grandfather William, alone among all these lads,” he replied.

“My name is Dodd,” I resumed.

“Yes,” said he, “so Madame Siron told me.”

“Dodd, of San Francisco,” I continued. “Late of Pinkerton and Dodd.”

​“Montana Block, I think?” said he.

“The same,” said I.

Neither of us looked at each other; but I could see his hand deliberately making bread pills.

“That's a nice thing of yours,” I pursued, “that panel. The foreground is a little clayey, perhaps, but the lagoon is excellent.”

“You ought to know,” said he.

“Yes,” returned I, “I'm rather a good judge of—that panel.”

There was a considerable pause.

“You know a man by the name of Bellairs, don't you?” he resumed.

“Ah!” cried I, “you have heard from Doctor Urquart?”

“This very morning,” he replied.

“Well, there is no hurry about Bellairs,” said I. “It's rather a long story and rather a silly one. But I think we have a good deal to tell each other, and perhaps we had better wait till we are more alone.”

“I think so,” said he. “Not that any of these fellows know English, but we'll be more comfortable over at my place. Your health, Dodd.”

And we took wine together across the table.

Thus had this singular introduction passed unperceived in the midst of more than thirty persons, art students, ladies in dressing-gowns and covered with rice powder, six foot of Siron whisking dishes over our head, and his noisy sons clattering in and out with fresh relays.

“One question more,” said I: “Did you recognise my voice?”

“Your voice?” he repeated. “How should I? I had never heard it—we have never met.”

“And yet, we have been in conversation before now,” said I, “and I asked you a question which you never answered, and which I have since had many thousand better reasons for putting to myself.”

​He turned suddenly white. “Good God!” he cried, “are you the man in the telephone?”

I nodded.

“Well, well!” said he. “It would take a good deal of magnanimity to forgive you that. What nights I have passed! That little whisper has whistled in my ear ever since, like the wind in a keyhole. Who could it be? What could it mean? I suppose I have had more real, solid misery out of that ...” He paused, and looked troubled. “Though I had more to bother me, or ought to have,” he added, and slowly emptied his glass.

“It seems we were born to drive each other crazy with conundrums,” said I. “I have often thought my head would split.”

Carthew burst into his foolish laugh. “And yet neither you nor I had the worst of the puzzle,” he cried. “There were others deeper in.”

“And who were they?” I asked.

“The underwriters,” said he.

“Why, to be sure!” cried I, “I never thought of that. What could they make of it?”

“Nothing,” replied Carthew. “It couldn't be explained. They were a crowd of small dealers at Lloyd's who took it up in syndicate; one of them has a carriage now; and people say he is a deuce of a deep fellow, and has the makings of a great financier. Another furnished a small villa on the profits. But they're all hopelessly muddled; and when they meet each other, they don't know where to look, like the Augurs.”

Dinner was no sooner at an end than he carried me across the road to Masson's old studio. It was strangely changed. On the walls were tapestry, a few good etchings, and some amazing pictures—a Rousseau, a Corot, a really superb old Crome, a Whistler, and a piece which my host claimed (and I believe) to be a Titian. The room was furnished with comfort​able English smoking-room chairs, some American rockers, and an elaborate business table; spirits and soda-water (with the mark of Schweppe, no less) stood ready on a butler's tray, and in one corner, behind a half-drawn curtain, I spied a camp-bed and a capacious tub. Such a room in Barbizon astonished the beholder, like the glories of the cave of Monte Cristo.

“Now,” said he, “we are quiet. Sit down, if you don't mind, and tell me your story all through.”

I did as he asked, beginning with the day when Jim showed me the passage in the Daily Occidental, and winding up with the stamp album and the Chailly postmark. It was a long business; and Carthew made it longer, for he was insatiable of details; and it had struck midnight on the old eight-day clock in the corner, before I had made an end.

“And now,” said he, “turn about: I must tell you my side, much as I hate it. Mine is a beastly story. You'll wonder how I can sleep. I've told it once before, Mr. Dodd.”

“To Lady Ann?” I asked.

“As you suppose,” he answered; “and to say the truth, I had sworn never to tell it again. Only, you seem somehow entitled to the thing; you have paid dear enough, God knows; and God knows I hope you may like it, now you've got it!”

With that he began his yarn. A new day had dawned, the cocks crew in the village and the early woodmen were afoot, when he concluded.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE REMITTANCE MAN.

Singleton Carthew, the father of Norris, was heavily built and feebly vitalised, sensitive as a musician, dull as a sheep, and conscientious as a dog. He took his ​position with seriousness, even with pomp; the long rooms, the silent servants, seemed in his eyes like the observances of some religion of which he was the mortal god. He had the stupid man's intolerance of stupidity in others; the vain man's exquisite alarm lest it should be detected in himself. And on both sides Norris irritated and offended him. He thought his son a fool, and he suspected that his son returned the compliment with interest. The history of their relation was simple; they met seldom, they quarrelled often. To his mother, a fiery, pungent, practical woman, already disappointed in her husband and her elder son, Norris was only a fresh disappointment.

Yet the lad's faults were no great matter; he was diffident, placable, passive, unambitious, unenterprising; life did not much attract him; he watched it like a curious and dull exhibition, not much amused, and not tempted in the least to take a part. He beheld his father ponderously grinding sand, his mother fierily breaking butterflies, his brother labouring at the pleasures of the Hawbuck with the ardour of a soldier in a doubtful battle; and the vital sceptic looked on wondering. They were careful and troubled about many things; for him there seemed not even one thing needful. He was born disenchanted, the world's promises awoke no echo in his bosom, the world's activities and the world's distinctions seemed to him equally without a base in fact. He liked the open air; he liked comradeship, it mattered not with whom, his comrades were only a remedy for solitude. And he had a taste for painted art. An array of fine pictures looked upon his childhood, and from these roods of jewelled canvas he received an indelible impression. The gallery at Stallbridge betokened generations of picture lovers; Norris was perhaps the first of his race to hold the pencil. The taste was genuine, it grew and strengthened with his growth; and yet ​he suffered it to be suppressed with scarce a struggle. Time came for him to go to Oxford, and he resisted faintly. He was stupid, he said; it was no good to put him through the mill; he wished to be a painter. The words fell on his father like a thunderbolt, and Norris made haste to give way. “It didn't really matter, don't you know?” said he. “And it seemed an awful shame to vex the old boy.”

To Oxford he went obediently, hopelessly; and at Oxford became the hero of a certain circle. He was active and adroit; when he was in the humour, he excelled in many sports; and his singular melancholy detachment gave him a place apart. He set a fashion in his clique. Envious undergraduates sought to parody his unaffected lack of zeal and fear; it was a kind of new Byronism more composed and dignified. “Nothing really mattered;” among other things, this formula embraced the dons; and though he always meant to be civil, the effect on the college authorities was one of startling rudeness. His indifference cut like insolence; and in some outbreak of his constitutional levity (the complement of his melancholy) he was “sent down” in the middle of the second year.

The event was new in the annals of the Carthews, and Singleton was prepared to make the most of it. It had been long his practice to prophesy for his second son a career of ruin and disgrace. There is an advantage in this artless parental habit. Doubtless the father is interested in his son; but doubtless also the prophet grows to be interested in his prophecies. If the one goes wrong, the others come true. Old Carthew drew from this source esoteric consolations; he dwelt at length on his own foresight; he produced variations hitherto unheard from the old theme “I told you so,” coupled his son's name with the gallows and the hulks, and spoke of his small handful of college debts as though he must raise money on a mortgage to discharge them.

​“I don't think that is fair, sir,” said Norris. “I lived at college exactly as you told me. I am sorry I was sent down, and you have a perfect right to blame me for that; but you have no right to pitch into me about these debts.”

The effect upon a stupid man not unjustly incensed need scarcely be described. For a while Singleton raved.

“I'll tell you what, father,” said Norris at last, “I don't think this is going to do. I think you had better let me take to painting. It's the only thing I take a spark of interest in. I shall never be steady as long as I'm at anything else.”

“When you stand here, sir, to the neck in disgrace,” said the father, “I should have hoped you would have had more good taste than to repeat this levity.”

The hint was taken; the levity was never more obtruded on the father's notice, and Norris was inexorably launched upon a backward voyage. He went abroad to study foreign languages, which he learned, at a very expensive rate; and a fresh crop of debts fell soon to be paid, with similar lamentations, which were in this case perfectly justified, and to which Norris paid no regard. He had been unfairly treated over the Oxford affair; and with a spice of malice very surprising in one so placable, and an obstinacy remarkable in one so weak, refused from that day forward to exercise the least captaincy on his expenses. He wasted what he would; he allowed his servants to despoil him at their pleasure; he sowed insolvency; and when the crop was ripe, notified his father with exasperating calm. His own capital was put in his hands, he was planted in the diplomatic service and told he must depend upon himself.

He did so till he was twenty-five; by which time he had spent his money, laid in a handsome choice of debts, and acquired (like so many other melancholic and uninterested persons) a habit of gambling. An ​Austrian colonel—the same who afterwards hanged himself at Monte Carlo—gave him a lesson which lasted two-and-twenty hours, and left him wrecked and helpless. Old Singleton once more repurchased the honour of his name, this time at a fancy figure; and Norris was set afloat again on stern conditions. An allowance of three hundred pounds in the year was to be paid to him quarterly by a lawyer in Sydney, New South Wales. He was not to write. Should he fail on any quarter-day to be in Sydney, he was to be held for dead, and the allowance tacitly withdrawn. Should he return to Europe, an advertisement publicly disowning him was to appear in every paper of repute.

It was one of his most annoying features as a son, that he was always polite, always just, and in whatever whirlwind of domestic anger, always calm. He expected trouble; when trouble came, he was unmoved: he might have said with Singleton, “I told you so:” he was content with thinking, “just as I expected.” On the fall of these last thunderbolts, he bore himself like a person only distantly interested in the event; pocketed the money and the reproaches, obeyed orders punctually; took ship and came to Sydney. Some men are still lads at twenty-five; and so it was with Norris. Eighteen days after he landed, his quarter's allowance was all gone, and with the light-hearted hopefulness of strangers in what is called a new country, he began to besiege offices and apply for all manner of incongruous situations. Everywhere, and last of all from his lodgings, he was bowed out; and found himself reduced, in a very elegant suit of summer tweeds, to herd and camp with the degraded outcasts of the city.

In this strait, he had recourse to the lawyer who paid him his allowance.

“Try to remember that my time is valuable, Mr. Carthew,” said the lawyer. “It is quite unnecessary you should enlarge on the peculiar position in which ​you stand. Remittance men, as we call them here, are not so rare in my experience; and in such cases I act upon a system. I make you a present of a sovereign; here it is. Every day you choose to call, my clerk will advance you a shilling; on Saturday, since my office is closed on Sunday, he will advance you half a crown. My conditions are these: that you do not come to me, but to my clerk; that you do not come here the worse of liquor; and you go away the moment you are paid and have signed a receipt. I wish you a good-morning.”

“I have to thank you, I suppose,” said Carthew. “My position is so wretched that I cannot even refuse this starvation allowance.”

“Starvation!” said the lawyer, smiling. “No man will starve here on a shilling a day. I had on my hands another young gentleman, who remained continuously intoxicated for six years on the same allowance.” And he once more busied himself with his papers.

In the time that followed, the image of the smiling lawyer haunted Carthew's memory. “That three minutes' talk was all the education I ever had worth talking of,” says he. “It was all life in a nutshell. Confound it! I thought, have I got to the point of envying that ancient fossil?”

Every morning for the next two or three weeks, the stroke of ten found Norris, unkempt and haggard, at the lawyer's door. The long day and longer night he spent in the Domain, now on a bench, now on the grass under a Norfolk Island pine, the companion of perhaps the lowest class on earth, the Larrikins of Sydney. Morning after morning, the dawn behind the lighthouse recalled him from slumber; and he would stand and gaze upon the changing east, the fading lenses, the smokeless city, and the many-armed and many-masted harbour growing slowly clear under his eyes. His bed-fellows (so to call them) were less active; they lay sprawled upon the ​grass and benches, the dingy men, the frowsy women, prolonging their late repose; and Carthew wandered among the sleeping bodies alone, and cursed the incurable stupidity of his behaviour. Day brought a new society of nursery-maids and children, and fresh-dressed and (I am sorry to say) tight-laced maidens, and gay people in rich traps; upon the skirts of which Carthew and “the other blackguards”—his own bitter phrase—skulked, and chewed grass, and looked on. Day passed, the light died, the green and leafy precinct sparkled with lamps or lay in shadow, and the round of the night began again, the loitering women, the lurking men, the sudden outburst of screams, the sound of flying feet. “You mayn't believe it,” says Carthew, “but I got to that pitch that I didn't care a hang. I have been wakened out of my sleep to hear a woman screaming, and I have only turned upon my other side. Yes, it's a queer place, where the dowagers and the kids walk all day, and at night you can hear people bawling for help as if it was the Forest of Bondy, with the lights of a great town all round, and parties spinning through in cabs from Government House and dinner with my lord!”

It was Norris's diversion, having none other, to scrape acquaintance, where, how, and with whom he could. Many a long dull talk he held upon the benches or the grass; many a strange waif he came to know; many strange things he heard, and saw some that were abominable. It was to one of these last that he owed his deliverance from the Domain. For some time the rain had been merciless; one night after another he had been obliged to squander fourpence on a bed and reduce his board to the remaining eightpence: and he sat one morning near the Macquarrie Street entrance, hungry, for he had gone without breakfast, and wet, as he had already been for several days, when the cries of an animal in ​distress attracted his attention. Some fifty yards away, in the extreme angle of the grass, a party of the chronically unemployed had got hold of a dog, whom they were torturing in a manner not to be described. The heart of Norris, which had grown indifferent to the cries of human anger or distress, woke at the appeal of the dumb creature. He ran amongst the Larrikins, scattered them, rescued the dog, and stood at bay. They were six in number, shambling gallowsbirds; but for once the proverb was right, cruelty was coupled with cowardice, and the wretches cursed him and made off. It chanced that this act of prowess had not passed unwitnessed. On a bench near by there was seated a shopkeeper's assistant out of employ, a diminutive, cheerful, red-headed creature by the name of Hemstead. He was the last man to have interfered himself, for his discretion more than equalled his valour; but he made haste to congratulate Carthew, and to warn him he might not always be so fortunate.

“They're a dyngerous lot of people about this park. My word! it doesn't do to ply with them!” he observed, in that rycy Austrylian English, which (as it has received the imprimatur of Mr. Froude) we should all make haste to imitate.

“Why, I'm one of that lot myself,” returned Carthew.

Hemstead laughed and remarked that he knew a gentleman when he saw one.

“For all that, I am simply one of the unemployed,” said Carthew, seating himself beside his new acquaintance, as he had sat (since this experience began) beside so many dozen others.

“I'm out of a plyce myself,” said Hemstead.

“You beat me all the way and back,” says Carthew. “My trouble is that I have never been in one.”

“I suppose you've no tryde?” asked Hemstead.

​“I know how to spend money,” replied Carthew, “and I really do know something of horses and something of the sea. But the unions head me off; if it weren't for them, I might have had a dozen berths.”

“My word!” cried the sympathetic listener. “Ever try the mounted police?” he inquired.

“I did, and was bowled out,” was the reply; “couldn't pass the doctors.”

“Well, what do you think of the ryleways, then?” asked Hemstead.

“What do you think of them, if you come to that?” asked Carthew.

“Oh, I don't think of them; I don't go in for manual labour,” said the little man proudly. “But if a man don't mind that, he's pretty sure of a job there.”

“By George, you tell me where to go!” cried Carthew, rising.

The heavy rains continued, the country was already overrun with floods; the railway system daily required more hands, daily the superintendent advertised; but “the unemployed” preferred the resources of charity and rapine, and a navvy, even an amateur navvy, commanded money in the market. The same night, after a tedious journey, and a change of trains to pass a landslip, Norris found himself in a muddy cutting behind South Clifton, attacking his first shift of manual labour.

For weeks the rain scarce relented. The whole front of the mountain slipped seaward from above, avalanches of clay, rock, and uprooted forest spewed over the cliffs and fell upon the beach or in the breakers. Houses were carried bodily away and smashed like nuts; others were menaced and deserted, the door locked, the chimney cold, the dwellers fled elsewhere for safety. Night and day the fire blazed in the encampment; night and day hot coffee was served to the ​overdriven toilers in the shift; night and day the engineer of the section made his rounds with words of encouragement, hearty and rough and well suited to his men. Night and day, too, the telegraph clicked with disastrous news and anxious inquiry. Along the terraced line of rail, rare trains came creeping and signalling; and paused at the threatened corner, like living things conscious of peril. The commandant of the post would hastily review his labours, make (with a dry throat) the signal to advance; and the whole squad line the way and look on in a choking silence, or burst into a brief cheer as the train cleared the point of danger and shot on, perhaps through the thin sunshine between squalls, perhaps with blinking lamps into the gathering, rainy twilight.

One such scene Carthew will remember till he dies. It blew great guns from the seaward; a huge surf bombarded, five hundred feet below him, the steep mountain's foot; close in was a vessel in distress, firing shots from a fowling-piece, if any help might come. So he saw and heard her the moment before the train appeared and paused, throwing up a Babylonian tower of smoke into the rain, and oppressing men's hearts with the scream of her whistle. The engineer was there himself; he paled as he made the signal: the engine came at a foot's pace; but the whole bulk of mountain shook and seemed to nod seaward, and the watching navvies instinctively clutched at shrubs and trees: vain precautions, vain as the shots from the poor sailors. Once again fear was disappointed; the train passed unscathed; and Norris, drawing a long breath, remembered the labouring ship and glanced below. She was gone.

So the days and the nights passed: Homeric labour in Homeric circumstance. Carthew was sick with sleeplessness and coffee; his hands, softened by the wet, were cut to ribbons; yet he enjoyed a peace of mind and health of body hitherto unknown. Plenty ​of open air, plenty of physical exertion, a continual instancy of toil; here was what had been hitherto lacking in that misdirected life, and the true cure of vital scepticism. To get the train through: there was the recurrent problem; no time remained to ask if it were necessary. Carthew, the idler, the spendthrift, the drifting dilettante, was soon remarked, praised, and advanced. The engineer swore by him and pointed him out for an example. “I've a new chum, up here,” Norris overheard him saying, “a young swell. He's worth any two in the squad.” The words fell on the ears of the discarded son like music; and from that moment, he not only found an interest, he took a pride, in his plebeian tasks.

The press of work was still at its highest when quarter-day approached. Norris was now raised to a position of some trust; at his discretion, trains were stopped or forwarded at the dangerous cornice near North Clifton; and he found in this responsibility both terror and delight. The thought of the seventy-five pounds that would soon await him at the lawyer's, and of his own obligation to be present every quarter-day in Sydney, filled him for a little with divided councils. Then he made up his mind, walked in a slack moment to the inn at Clifton, ordered a sheet of paper and a bottle of beer, and wrote, explaining that he held a good appointment which he would lose if he came to Sydney, and asking the lawyer to accept this letter as an evidence of his presence in the colony, and retain the money till next quarter-day. The answer came in course of post, and was not merely favourable but cordial. “Although what you propose is contrary to the terms of my instructions,” it ran, “I willingly accept the responsibility of granting your request. I should say I am agreeably disappointed in your behaviour. My experience has not led me to found much expectations on gentlemen in your position.”

​The rains abated, and the temporary labour was discharged; not Norris, to whom the engineer clung as to found money; not Norris, who found himself a ganger on the line in the regular staff of navvies. His camp was pitched in a grey wilderness of rock and forest, far from any house; as he sat with his mates about the evening fire, the trains passing on the track were their next and indeed their only neighbours, except the wild things of the wood. Lovely weather, light and monotonous employment, long hours of somnolent camp-fire talk, long sleepless nights, when he reviewed his foolish and fruitless career as he rose and walked in the moonlit forest, an occasional paper of which he would read all, the advertisements with as much relish as the text: such was the tenor of an existence which soon began to weary and harass him. He lacked and regretted the fatigue, the furious hurry, the suspense, the fires, the midnight coffee, the rude and mud-bespattered poetry of the first toilful weeks. In the quietness of his new surroundings, a voice summoned him from this exorbital part of life, and about the middle of October he threw up his situation and bade farewell to the camp of tents and the shoulder of Bald Mountain.

Clad in his rough clothes, with a bundle on his shoulder and his accumulated wages in his pocket, he entered Sydney for the second time, and walked with pleasure and some bewilderment in the cheerful streets, like a man landed from a voyage. The sight of the people led him on. He forgot his necessary errands, he forgot to eat. He wandered in moving multitudes like a stick upon a river. Last he came to the Domain and strolled there, and remembered his shame and sufferings, and looked with poignant curiosity at his successors. Hemstead, not much shabbier and no less cheerful than before, he recognised and addressed like an old family friend.

“That was a good turn you did me,” said he. ​

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The domain, Sydney—“My word, no!” replied the little man. “I just sit here and read the ‘Dead Bird’.” (p. 343).

​“That railway was the making of me. I hope you've had luck yourself.”

“My word, no!” replied the little man. “I just sit here and read the Dead Bird. It's the depression in tryde, you see. There's no positions goin' that a man like me would care to look at.” And he showed Norris his certificates and written characters, one from a grocer in Wooloomooloo, one from an ironmonger, and a third from a billiard saloon. “Yes,” he said, “I tried bein' a billiard marker. It's no account; these lyte hours are no use for a man's health. I won't be no man's slyve,” he added firmly.

On the principle that he who is too proud to be a slave is usually not too modest to become a pensioner, Carthew gave him half a sovereign, and departed, being suddenly struck with hunger, in the direction of the Paris House. When he came to that quarter of the city, the barristers were trotting in the streets in wig and gown, and he stood to observe them with his bundle on his shoulder, and his mind full of curious recollections of the past.

“By George!” cried a voice, “it's Mr. Carthew!”

And turning about he found himself face to face with a handsome sunburnt youth, somewhat fatted, arrayed in the finest of fine raiment, and sporting about a sovereign's worth of flowers in his buttonhole. Norris had met him during his first days in Sydney at a farewell supper; had even escorted him on board a schooner full of cockroaches and black-boy sailors, in which he was bound for six months among the islands; and had kept him ever since in entertained remembrance. Tom Hadden (known to the bulk of Sydney folk as Tommy) was heir to a considerable property, which a prophetic father had placed in the hands of rigorous trustees. The income supported Mr. Hadden in splendour for about three months out of twelve; the rest of the year he passed in retreat ​among the islands. He was now about a week returned from his eclipse, pervading Sydney in hansom cabs and airing the first bloom of six new suits of clothes; and yet the unaffected creature hailed Carthew in his working jeans and with the damning bundle on his shoulder, as he might have claimed acquaintance with a duke.

“Come and have a drink!” was his cheerful cry.

“I'm just going to have lunch at the Paris House,” returned Carthew. “It's a long time since I have had a decent meal.”

“Splendid scheme!” said Hadden. “I've only had breakfast half an hour ago; but we'll have a private room, and I'll manage to pick something. It'll brace me up. I was on an awful tear last night, and I've met no end of fellows this morning.” To meet a fellow, and to stand and share a drink, were with Tom synonymous terms.

They were soon at table in the corner room up-stairs, and paying due attention to the best fare in Sydney. The odd similarity of their positions drew them together, and they began soon to exchange confidences. Carthew related his privations in the Domain and his toils as a navvy; Hadden gave his experience as an amateur copra merchant in the South Seas, and drew a humorous picture of life in a coral island. Of the two plans of retirement, Carthew gathered that his own had been vastly the more lucrative; but Hadden's trading outfit had consisted largely of bottled stout and brown sherry for his own consumption.

“I had champagne too,” said Hadden, “but I kept that in case of sickness, until I didn't seem to be going to be sick, and then I opened a pint every Sunday. Used to sleep all morning, then breakfast with my pint of fizz, and lie in a hammock and read Hallam's Middle Ages. Have you read that? I ​always take something solid to the islands. There's no doubt I did the thing in rather a fine style; but if it was gone about a little cheaper, or there were two of us to bear the expense, it ought to pay hand over fist. I've got the influence, you see. I'm a chief now, and sit in the speak-house under my own strip of roof. I'd like to see them taboo me! They daren't try it; I've a strong party, I can tell you. Why, I've had upwards of thirty cowtops sitting in my front verandah eating tins of salmon.”

“Cowtops?” asked Carthew, “what are they?”

“That's what Hallam would call feudal retainers,” explained Hadden, not without vainglory. “They're My Followers. They belong to My Family. I tell you, they come expensive, though; you can't fill up all these retainers on tinned salmon for nothing; but whenever I could get it, I would give 'em squid. Squid's good for natives, but I don't care for it, do you?—or shark either. It's like the working classes at home. With copra at the price it is, they ought to be willing to bear their share of the loss; and so I've told them again and again. I think it's a man's duty to open their minds, and I try to, but you can't get political economy into them; it doesn't seem to reach their intelligence.”

There was an expression still sticking in Carthew's memory, and he returned upon it with a smile. “Talking of political economy,” said he, “you said if there were two of us to bear the expense, the profits would increase. How do you make out that?”

“I'll show you! I'll figure it out for you!” cried Hadden, and with a pencil on the back of the bill of fare proceeded to perform miracles. He was a man, or let us rather say a lad, of unusual projective power. Give him the faintest hint of any speculation, and the figures flowed from him by the page. A ​lively imagination and a ready though inaccurate memory supplied his data; he delivered himself with an inimitable heat that made him seem the picture of pugnacity; lavished contradiction; had a form of words, with or without significance, for every form of criticism; and the looker-on alternately smiled at his simplicity and fervour, or was amazed by his unexpected shrewdness. He was a kind of Pinkerton in play. I have called Jim's the romance of business; this was its Arabian tale.

“Have you any idea what this would cost?” he asked, pausing at an item.

“Not I,” said Carthew.

“Ten pounds ought to be ample,” concluded the projector.

“Oh, nonsense!” cried Carthew. “Fifty at the very least.”

“You told me yourself this moment you knew nothing about it!” cried Tommy. “How can I make a calculation, if you blow hot and cold? You don't seem able to be serious!”

But he consented to raise his estimate to twenty; and a little after, the calculation coming out with a deficit, cut it down again to five pounds ten, with the remark, “I told you it was nonsense. This sort of thing has to be done strictly, or where's the use?”

Some of these processes struck Carthew as unsound; and he was at times altogether thrown out by the capricious startings of the prophet's mind. These plunges seemed to be gone into for exercise and by the way, like the curvets of a willing horse. Gradually the thing took shape; the glittering if baseless edifice arose; and the hare still ran on the mountains, but the soup was already served in silver plate. Carthew in a few days could command a hundred and fifty pounds; Hadden was ready with five hundred; why should they not recruit a fellow or two more, charter ​an old ship, and go cruising on their own account? Carthew was an experienced yachtsman; Hadden professed himself able to “work an approximate sight.” Money was undoubtedly to be made, or why should so many vessels cruise about the islands? they, who worked their own ship, were sure of a still higher profit.

“And whatever else comes of it, you see,” cried Hadden, “we get our keep for nothing. Come, buy some togs, that's the first thing you have to do of course; and then we'll take a hansom and go to the Currency Lass.”

“I'm going to stick to the togs I have,” said Norris.

“Are you?” cried Hadden. “Well, I must say I admire you. You're a regular sage. It's what you call Pythagoreanism, isn't it? if I haven't forgotten my philosophy.”

“Well, I call it economy,” returned Carthew. “If we are going to try this thing on, I shall want every sixpence.”

“You'll see if we're going to try it!” cried Tommy, rising radiant from table. “Only, mark you, Carthew, it must be all in your name. I have capital, you see; but you're all right. You can play vacuus viator, if the thing goes wrong.”

“I thought we had just proved it was quite safe,” said Carthew.

“There's nothing safe in business, my boy,” replied the sage; “not even bookmaking.”

The public house and tea garden called the Currency Lass represented a moderate fortune gained by its proprietor, Captain Bostock, during a long, active, and occasionally historic career among the islands. Anywhere from Tonga to the Admiralty Isles, he knew the ropes and could lie in the native dialect. He had seen the end of sandal wood, the end of oil, and the beginning of copra; and he was ​himself a commercial pioneer, the first that ever carried human teeth into the Gilberts. He was tried for his life in Fiji in Sir Arthur Gordon's time; and if ever he prayed at all, the name of Sir Arthur was certainly not forgotten. He was speared in seven places in New Ireland—the same time his mate was killed—the famous “outrage on the brig Jolly Roger;” but the treacherous savages made little by their wickedness, and Bostock, in spite of their teeth, got seventy-five head of volunteer labour on board, of whom not more than a dozen died of injuries. He had a hand, besides, in the amiable pleasantry which cost the life of Patteson; and when the sham bishop landed, prayed, and gave his benediction to the natives, Bostock, arrayed in a female chemise out of the traderoom, had stood at his right hand and boomed amens. This, when he was sure he was among good fellows, was his favourite yarn. “Two hundred head of labour for a hatful of amens,” he used to name the tale; and its sequel, the death of the real bishop, struck him as a circumstance of extraordinary humour.

Many of these details were communicated in the hansom, to the surprise of Carthew.

“Why do we want to visit this old ruffian?” he asked.

“You wait till you hear him,” replied Tommy. “That man knows everything.”

On descending from the hansom at the Currency Lass, Hadden was struck with the appearance of the cabman, a gross, salt-looking man, red-faced, blue-eyed, short-handed and short-winded, perhaps nearing forty.

“Surely I know you?” said he. “Have you driven me before?”

“Many's the time, Mr. Hadden,” returned the driver. “The last time you was back from the islands, it was me that drove you to the races, sir.”

​“All right: jump down and have a drink then,” said Tom, and he turned and led the way into the garden.

Captain Bostock met the party: he was a slow, sour old man, with fishy eyes; greeted Tommy offhand, and (as was afterwards remembered) exchanged winks with the driver.

“A bottle of beer for the cabman there at that table,” said Tom. “Whatever you please from shandygaff to champagne at this one here; and you sit down with us. Let me make you acquainted with my friend, Mr. Carthew. I've come on business, Billy; I want to consult you as a friend; I'm going into the island trade upon my own account.”

Doubtless the captain was a mine of counsel, but opportunity was denied him. He could not venture on a statement, he was scarce allowed to finish a phrase, before Hadden swept him from the field with a volley of protest and correction. That projector, his face blazing with inspiration, first laid before him at inordinate length a question, and as soon as he attempted to reply, leaped at his throat, called his facts in question, derided his policy, and at times thundered on him from the heights of moral indignation.

“I beg your pardon,” he said once. “I am a gentleman, Mr. Carthew here is a gentleman, and we don't mean to do that class of business. Can't you see who you are talking to? Can't you talk sense? Can't you give us 'a dead bird' for a good traderoom?”

“No, I don't suppose I can,” returned old Bostock; “not when I can't hear my own voice for two seconds together. It was gin and guns I did it with.”

“Take your gin and guns to Putney!” cried Hadden. “It was the thing in your times, that's right enough; but you're old now, and the game's ​up. I'll tell you what's wanted nowadays, Bill Bostock,” said he; and did, and took ten minutes to it.

Carthew could not refrain from smiling. He began to think less seriously of the scheme, Hadden appearing too irresponsible a guide; but on the other hand, he enjoyed himself amazingly. It was far from being the same with Captain Bostock.

“You know a sight, don't you?” remarked that gentleman, bitterly, when Tommy paused.

“I know a sight more than you, if that's what you mean,” retorted Tom. “It stands to reason I do. You're not a man of any education; you've been all your life at sea or in the islands; you don't suppose you can give points to a man like me?”

“Here's your health, Tommy,” returned Bostock. “You'll make an A1 bake in the New Hebrides.”

“That's what I call talking,” cried Tom, not perhaps grasping the spirit of this doubtful compliment. “Now you give me your attention. We have the money and the enterprise, and I have the experience: what we want is a cheap, smart boat, a good captain, and an introduction to some house that will give us credit for the trade.”

“Well, I'll tell you,” said Captain Bostock. “I have seen men like you baked and eaten, and complained of afterwards. Some was tough, and some hadn't no flaviour,” he added grimly.

“What do you mean by that?” cried Tom.

“I mean I don't care,” cried Bostock. “It ain't any of my interests. I haven't underwrote your life. Only I'm blest if I'm not sorry for the cannibal as tries to eat your head. And what I recommend is a cheap, smart coffin and a good undertaker. See if you can find a house to give you credit for a coffin! Look at your friend there; he's got some sense; he's laughing at you so as he can't stand.”

The exact degree of ill-feeling in Mr. Bostock's ​mind was difficult to gauge; perhaps there was not much, perhaps he regarded his remarks as a form of courtly badinage. But there is little doubt that Hadden resented them. He had even risen from his place, and the conference was on the point of breaking up, when a new voice joined suddenly in the conversation.

The cabman sat with his back turned upon the party smoking a meerschaum pipe. Not a word of Tommy's eloquence had missed him, and he now faced suddenly about with these amazing words:—

“Excuse me, gentlemen; if you'll buy me the ship I want, I'll get you the trade on credit.” There was a pause.

“Well, what do you, mean?” gasped Tommy.

“Better tell 'em who I am, Billy,” said the cabman.

“Think it safe, Joe?” inquired Mr. Bostock.

“I'll take my risk of it,” returned the cabman.

“Gentlemen,” said Bostock, rising solemnly, “let me make you acquainted with Captain Wicks of the Grace Darling.”

“Yes, gentlemen, that is what I am,” said the cabman. “You know I've been in trouble; and I don't deny but what I struck the blow, and where was I to get evidence of my provocation? So I turned to and took a cab, and I've driven one for three year now and nobody the wiser.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Carthew, joining almost for the first time; “I'm a new chum. What was the charge?”

“Murder,” said Captain Wicks, “and I don't deny but what I struck the blow. And there's no sense in my trying to deny I was afraid to go to trial, or why would I be here? But it's a fact it was flat mutiny. Ask Billy here. He knows how it was.”

Carthew breathed long; he had a strange, half-pleasurable sense of wading deeper in the ​tide of life. “Well,” said he, “you were going on to say?”

“I was going on to say this,” said the captain sturdily. “I've overheard what Mr. Hadden has been saying, and I think he talks good sense. I like some of his ideas first chop. He's sound on traderooms; he's all there on the traderoom, and I see that he and I would pull together. Then you're both gentlemen, and I like that,” observed Captain Wicks. “And then I'll tell you I'm tired of this cabbing cruise, and I want to get to work again. Now, here's my offer. I've a little money I can stake up—all of a hundred anyway. Then my old firm will give me trade, and jump at the chance; they never lost by me; they know what I'm worth as supercargo. And, last of all, you want a good captain to sail your ship for you. Well, here I am. I've sailed schooners for ten years. Ask Billy if I can handle a schooner.”

“No man better,” said Billy.

“And as for my character as a shipmate,” concluded Wicks, “go and ask my old firm.”

“But look here!” cried Hadden, “how do you mean to manage? You can whisk round in a hansom, and no questions asked. But if you try to come on a quarter-deck, my boy, you'll get nabbed.”

“I'll have to keep back till the last,” replied Wicks, “and take another name.”

“But how about clearing? what other name?” asked Tommy, a little bewildered.

“I don't know yet,” returned the captain, with a grin. “I'll see what the name is on my new certificate, and that'll be good enough for me. If I can't get one to buy, though I never heard of such a thing, there's old Kirkup, he's turned some sort of farmer down Bondi way; he'll hire me his.”

“You seemed to speak as if you had a ship in view,” said Carthew.

“So I have, too,” said Captain Wicks, “and a beauty. ​Schooner yacht Dream—got lines you never saw the beat of; and a witch to go. She passed me once off Thursday Island, doing two knots to my one and laying a point and a half better, and the Grace Darling was a ship that I was proud of. I took and tore my hair. The Dream's been my dream ever since. That was in her old days, when she carried a blue ens'n. Grant Sanderson was the party as owned her; he was rich and mad, and got a fever at last somewhere about the Fly River, and took and died. The captain brought the body back to Sydney, and paid off. Well, it turned out Grant Sanderson had left any quantity of wills and any quantity of widows, and no fellow could make out which was the genuine article. All the widows brought lawsuits against all the rest, and every will had a firm of lawyers on the quarter-deck as long as your arm. They tell me it was one of the biggest turns-to that ever was seen, bar Tichborne; the Lord Chamberlain himself was floored, and so was the Lord Chancellor; and all that time the Dream lay rotting up by Glebe Point. Well, it's done now; they've picked out a widow and a will—tossed up for it, as like as not—and the Dream's for sale. She'll go cheap; she's had a long turn-to at rotting.”

“What size is she?”

“Well, big enough. We don't want her bigger. A hundred and ninety, going two hundred,” replied the captain. “She's fully big for us three; it would be all the better if we had another hand, though it's a pity too, when you can pick up natives for half nothing. Then we must have a cook. I can fix raw sailor-men, but there's no going to sea with a new-chum cook. I can lay hands on the man we want for that: a Highway boy, an old shipmate of mine, of the name of Amalu. Cooks first rate, and it's always better to have a native; he aint fly, you can turn him to as you please, and he don't know enough to stand out for his rights.”

​From the moment that Captain Wicks joined in the conversation, Carthew recovered interest and confidence; the man (whatever he might have done) was plainly good-natured, and plainly capable; if he thought well of the enterprise, offered to contribute money, brought experience, and could thus solve at a word the problem of the trade, Carthew was content to go ahead. As for Hadden, his cup was full; he and Bostock forgave each other in champagne; toast followed toast; it was proposed and carried amid acclamation to change the name of the schooner (when she should be bought) to the Currency Lass; and the Currency Lass Island Trading Company was practically founded before dusk.

Three days later, Carthew stood before the lawyer, still in his jean suit, received his hundred and fifty pounds, and proceeded rather timidly to ask for more indulgence.

“I have a chance to get on in the world,” he said. “By to-morrow evening I expect to be part owner of a ship.”

“Dangerous property, Mr. Carthew,” said the lawyer.

“Not if the partners work her themselves and stand to go down along with her,” was the reply.

“I conceive it possible you might make something of it in that way,” returned the other. “But are you a seaman? I thought you had been in the diplomatic service.”

“I am an old yachtsman,” said Norris. “And I must do the best I can. A fellow can't live in New South Wales upon diplomacy. But the point I wish to prepare you for is this. It will be impossible I should present myself here next quarter-day; we expect to make a six months' cruise of it among the islands.”

“Sorry, Mr. Carthew: I can't hear of that,” replied the lawyer.

​“I mean upon the same conditions as the last,” said Carthew.

“The conditions are exactly opposite,” said the lawyer. “Last time I had reason to know you were in the colony; and even then I stretched a point. This time, by your own confession, you are contemplating a breach of the agreement; and I give you warning if you carry it out and I receive proof of it (for I will agree to regard this conversation as confidential) I shall have no choice but to do my duty. Be here on quarter-day, or your allowance ceases.”

“This is very hard and, I think, rather silly,” returned Carthew.

“It is not of my doing. I have my instructions,” said the lawyer.

“And you so read these instructions, that I am to be prohibited from making an honest livelihood?” asked Carthew.

“Let us be frank,” said the lawyer. “I find nothing in these instructions about an honest livelihood. I have no reason to suppose my clients care anything about that. I have reason to suppose only one thing—that they mean you shall stay in this colony, and to guess another, Mr. Carthew. And to guess another.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Norris.

“I mean that I imagine, on very strong grounds, that your family desire to see no more of you,” said the lawyer. “O, they may be very wrong; but that is the impression conveyed, that is what I suppose I am paid to bring about, and I have no choice but to try and earn my hire.”

“I would scorn to deceive you,” said Norris, with a strong flush, “you have guessed rightly. My family refuse to see me; but I am not going to England, I am going to the islands. How does that affect the islands?”

​“Ah, but I don't know that you are going to the islands,” said the lawyer, looking down, and spearing the blotting-paper with a pencil.

“I beg your pardon. I have the pleasure of informing you,” said Norris.

“I am afraid, Mr. Carthew, that I cannot regard that communication as official,” was the slow reply.

“I am not accustomed to have my word doubted!” cried Norris.

“Hush! I allow no one to raise his voice in my office,” said the lawyer. “And for that matter—you seem to be a young gentleman of sense—consider what I know of you. You are a discarded son; your family pays money to be shut of you. What have you done? I don't know. But do you not see how foolish I should be, if I exposed my business reputation on the safeguard of the honour of a gentleman of whom I know just so much and no more? This interview is very disagreeable. Why prolong it? Write home, get my instructions changed, and I will change my behaviour. Not otherwise.”

“I am very fond of three hundred a year,” said Norris, “but I cannot pay the price required. I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you again.”

“You must please yourself,” said the lawyer. “Fail to be here next quarter-day, and the thing stops. But I warn you, and I mean the warning in a friendly spirit. Three months later you will be here begging, and I shall have no choice but to show you in the street.”

“I wish you a good-evening,” said Norris.

“The same to you, Mr. Carthew,” retorted the lawyer, and rang for his clerk.

So it befell that Norris during what remained to him of arduous days in Sydney, saw not again the face of his legal adviser; and he was already at sea, and land was out of sight, when Hadden brought ​him a Sydney paper, over which he had been dozing in the shadow of the galley, and showed him an advertisement.

“Mr. Norris Carthew is earnestly entreated to call without delay at the office of Mr. ——, where important intelligence awaits him.”

“It must manage to wait for me six months,” said Norris, lightly enough, but yet conscious of a pang of curiosity.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE BUDGET OF THE "CURRENCY LASS."

Before noon on the 26th November, there cleared from the port of Sydney the schooner, Currency Lass. The owner, Norris Carthew, was on board in the somewhat unusual position of mate; the master's name purported to be William Kirkup; the cook was a Hawaiian boy, Joseph Amalu; and there were two hands before the mast, Thomas Hadden and Richard Hemstead, the latter chosen partly because of his humble character, partly because he had an odd-job-man's handiness with tools. The Currency Lass was bound for the South Sea Islands, and first of all for Butaritari in the Gilberts, on a register; but it was understood about the harbour that her cruise was more than half a pleasure trip. A friend of the late Grant Sanderson (of Auchentroon and Kilclarty) might have recognised in that tall-masted ship, the transformed and rechristened Dream; and the Lloyd's surveyor, had the services of such a one been called in requisition, must have found abundant subject of remark.

For time, during her three years' inaction, had eaten deep into the Dream and her fittings; she had ​sold in consequence a shade above her value as old junk; and the three adventurers had scarce been able to afford even the most vital repairs. The rigging, indeed, had been partly renewed, and the rest set up; all Grant Sanderson's old canvas had been patched together into one decently serviceable suit of sails; Grant Sanderson's masts still stood, and might have wondered at themselves. “I haven't the heart to tap them,” Captain Wicks used to observe, as he squinted up their height or patted their rotundity; and “as rotten as our foremast” was an accepted metaphor in the ship's company. The sequel rather suggests it may have been sounder than was thought; but no one knew for certain, just as no one except the captain appreciated the dangers of the cruise. The captain, indeed, saw with clear eyes and spoke his mind aloud; and though a man of an astonishing hot-blooded courage, following life and taking its dangers in the spirit of a hound upon the slot, he had made a point of a big whaleboat. “Take your choice,” he had said; “either new masts and rigging or that boat. I simply ain't going to sea without the one or the other. Chicken coops are good enough, no doubt, and so is a dinghy; but they ain't for Joe.” And his partners had been forced to consent, and saw six and thirty pounds of their small capital vanish in the turn of a hand.

All four had toiled the best part of six weeks getting ready; and though Captain Wicks was of course not seen or heard of, a fifth was there to help them, a fellow in a bushy red beard, which he would sometimes lay aside when he was below, and who strikingly resembled Captain Wicks in voice and character. As for Captain Kirkup, he did not appear till the last moment, when he proved to be a burly mariner, bearded like Abou Ben Adhem. All the way down the harbour and through the Heads, his milk-white whiskers blew in the wind and were con​spicuous from shore; but the Currency Lass had no sooner turned her back upon the lighthouse, than he went below for the inside of five seconds and reappeared clean shaven. So many doublings and devices were required to get to sea with an unseaworthy ship and a captain that was “wanted.” Nor might even these have sufficed, but for the fact that Hadden was a public character, and the whole cruise regarded with an eye of indulgence as one of Tom's engaging eccentricities. The ship, besides, had been a yacht before; and it came the more natural to allow her still some of the dangerous liberties of her old employment.

A strange ship they had made of it, her lofty spars disfigured with patched canvas, her panelled cabin fitted for a traderoom with rude shelves. And the life they led in that anomalous schooner was no less curious than herself. Amalu alone berthed forward; the rest occupied staterooms, camped upon the satin divans, and sat down in Grant Sanderson's parquetry smoking-room to meals of junk and potatoes, bad of their kind and often scant in quantity. Hemstead grumbled; Tommy had occasional moments of revolt and increased the ordinary by a few haphazard tins or a bottle of his own brown sherry. But Hemstead grumbled from habit, Tommy revolted only for the moment, and there was underneath a real and general acquiescence in these hardships. For besides onions and potatoes, the Currency Lass may be said to have gone to sea without stores. She carried two thousand pounds' worth of assorted trade, advanced on credit, their whole hope and fortune. It was upon this that they subsisted—mice in their own granary. They dined upon their future profits; and every scanty meal was so much in the savings bank.

Republican as were their manners, there was no practical, at least no dangerous, lack of discipline. ​Wicks was the only sailor on board, there was none to criticise; and besides, he was so easy-going, and so merry-minded, that none could bear to disappoint him. Carthew did his best, partly for the love of doing it, partly for love of the captain; Amalu was a willing drudge, and even Hemstead and Hadden turned to upon occasion with a will. Tommy's department was the trade and traderoom; he would work down in the hold or over the shelves of the cabin, till the Sydney dandy was unrecognizable; come up at last, draw a bucket of sea-water, bathe, change, and lie down on deck over a big sheaf of Sydney Heralds and Dead Birds, or perhaps with a volume of Buckle's History of Civilisation, the standard work selected for that cruise. In the latter case, a smile went round the ship, for Buckle almost invariably laid his student out, and when Tom awoke again he was almost always in the humour for brown sherry. The connection was so well established that “a glass of Buckle” or “a bottle of civilisation” became current pleasantries on board the Currency Lass.

Hemstead's province was that of the repairs, and he had his hands full. Nothing on board but was decayed in a proportion; the lamps leaked; so did the decks; door-knobs came off in the hand, mouldings parted company with the panels, the pump declined to suck, and the defective bathroom came near to swamp the ship. Wicks insisted that all the nails were long ago consumed, and that she was only glued together by the rust. “You shouldn't make me laugh so much, Tommy,” he would say. “I'm afraid I'll shake the sternpost out of her.” And, as Hemstead went to and fro with his tool basket on an endless round of tinkering, Wicks lost no opportunity of chaffing him upon his duties. “If you'd turn to at sailoring or washing paint or something useful, now,” he would say, “I could see the fun of it. But to be ​mending things that haven't no insides to them appears to me the height of foolishness.” And doubtless these continual pleasantries helped to reassure the landsmen, who went to and fro unmoved, under circumstances that might have daunted Nelson.

The weather was from the outset splendid, and the wind fair and steady. The ship sailed like a witch. “This Currency Lass is a powerful old girl, and has more complaints than I would care to put a name on,” the captain would say, as he pricked the chart; “but she could show her blooming heels to anything of her size in the Western Pacific.” To wash decks, relieve the wheel, do the day's work after dinner on the smoking-room table, and take in kites at night—such was the easy routine of their life. In the evening—above all, if Tommy had produced some of his civilisation—yarns and music were the rule. Amalu had a sweet Hawaiian voice; and Hemstead, a great hand upon the banjo, accompanied his own quavering tenor with effect. There was a sense in which the little man could sing. It was great to hear him deliver My Boy Tammie in Austrylian; and the words (some of the worst of the ruffian Macneil's) were hailed in his version with inextinguishable mirth.

Where hye ye been a' dye?

he would ask, and answer himself:—

I've been by burn and flowery brye,
Meadow green an' mountain grye,
Courtin' o' this young thing,
Just come frye her mammie.

It was the accepted jest for all hands to greet the conclusion of this song with the simultaneous cry: “My word!” thus winging the arrow of ridicule with a feather from the singer's wing. But he had his revenge with Home, Sweet Home, and Where is my ​Wandering Boy To-night?—ditties into which he threw the most intolerable pathos. It appeared he had no home, nor had ever had one, nor yet any vestige of a family, except a truculent uncle, a baker in Newcastle, N.S.W. His domestic sentiment was therefore wholly in the air, and expressed an unrealised ideal. Or perhaps, of all his experiences, this of the Currency Lass, with its kindly, playful, and tolerant society, approached it the most nearly.

It is perhaps because I know the sequel, but I can never think upon this voyage without a profound sense of pity and mystery; of the ship (once the whim of a rich blackguard) faring with her battered fineries and upon her homely errand, across the plains of ocean, and past the gorgeous scenery of dawn and sunset; and the ship's company, so strangely assembled, so Britishly chuckle-headed, filling their days with chaff in place of conversation; no human book on board with them except Hadden's Buckle, and not a creature fit either to read or to understand it; and the one mark of any civilised interest, being when Carthew filled in his spare hours with the pencil and the brush: the whole unconscious crew of them posting in the meanwhile towards so tragic a disaster.

Twenty-eight days out of Sydney, on Christmas eve, they fetched up to the entrance of the lagoon, and plied all that night outside, keeping their position by the lights of fishers on the reef and the outlines of the palms against the cloudy sky. With the break of day, the schooner was hove to, and the signal for a pilot shown. But it was plain her lights must have been observed in the darkness by the native fishermen, and word carried to the settlement, for a boat was already under weigh. She came towards them across the lagoon under a great press of sail, lying dangerously down, so that at times, in the heavier puffs, they thought she would turn turtle; covered ​the distance in fine style, luffed up smartly alongside, and emitted a haggard looking white man in pyjamas.

“Good-mornin', cap'n,” said he, when he had made good his entrance. “I was taking you for a Fiji man-of-war, what with your flush decks and them spars. Well, gen'lemen all, here's wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” he added, and lurched against a stay.

“Why, you're never the pilot?” exclaimed Wicks, studying him with a profound disfavour. “You've never taken a ship in—don't tell me!”

“Well, I should guess I have,” returned the pilot. “I'm Captain Dobbs, I am; and when I take charge, the captain of that ship can go below and shave.”

“But, man alive! you're drunk, man!” cried the captain.

“Drunk!” repeated Dobbs. “You can't have seen much life if you call me drunk. I'm only just beginning. Come night, I won't say; I guess I'll be properly full by then. But now I'm the soberest man in all Big Muggin.”

“It won't do,” retorted Wicks. “Not for Joseph, sir. I can't have you piling up my schooner.”

“All right,” said Dobbs, “lay and rot where you are, or take and go in and pile her up for yourself like the captain of the Leslie. That's business, I guess; grudged me twenty dollars' pilotage, and lost twenty thousand in trade and a brand new schooner; ripped the keel right off of her, and she went down in the inside of four minutes, and lies in twenty fathom, trade and all.”

“What's all this?” cried Wicks. “Trade? What vessel was this Leslie, anyhow?”

“Consigned to Cohen and Co., from 'Frisco,” returned the pilot, “and badly wanted. There's a barque inside filling up for Hamburg—you see her spars over there; and there's two more ships due, all ​the way from Germany, one in two months, they say, and one in three; Cohen and Co.'s agent (that's Mr. Topelius) has taken and lain down with the jaundice on the strength of it. I guess most people would, in his shoes; no trade, no copra, and twenty hundred ton of shipping due. If you've any copra on board, cap'n, here's your chance. Topelius will buy, gold down, and give three cents. It's all found money to him, the way it is, whatever he pays for it. And that's what come of going back on the pilot.”

“Excuse me one moment, Captain Dobbs. I wish to speak with my mate,” said the captain, whose face had begun to shine and his eyes to sparkle.

“Please yourself,” replied the pilot. “You couldn't think of offering a man a nip, could you? just to brace him up. This kind of thing looks damned inhospitable, and gives a schooner a bad name.”

“I'll talk about that after the anchor's down,” returned Wicks, and he drew Carthew forward. “I say,” he whispered, “here's a fortune.”

“How much do you call that?” asked Carthew.

“I can't put a figure on it yet—I daren't!” said the captain. “We might cruise twenty years and not find the match of it. And suppose another ship came in to-night? Everything's possible! And the difficulty is this Dobbs. He's as drunk as a marine. How can we trust him? We ain't insured—worse luck!”

“Suppose you took him aloft and got him to point out the channel?” suggested Carthew. “If he tallied at all with the chart, and didn't fall out of the rigging, perhaps we might risk it.”

“Well, all's risk here,” returned the captain. “Take the wheel yourself, and stand by. Mind, if there's two orders, follow mine, not his. Set the cook for'ard with the heads'ls, and the two others at the main sheet, and see they don't sit on it.” With that he called the pilot; they swarmed aloft in the fore ​rigging, and presently after there was bawled down the welcome order to ease sheets and fill away.

At a quarter before nine o'clock on Christmas morning the anchor was let go.

The first cruise of the Currency Lass had thus ended in a stroke of fortune almost beyond hope. She had brought two thousand pounds' worth of trade, straight as a homing pigeon, to the place where it was most required. And Captain Wicks (or, rather, Captain Kirkup) showed himself the man to make the best of his advantage. For hard upon two days he walked a verandah with Topelius, for hard upon two days his partners watched from the neighbouring public house the field of battle; and the lamps were not yet lighted on the evening of the second before the enemy surrendered. Wicks came across to the Sans Souci, as the saloon was called, his face nigh black, his eyes almost closed and all bloodshot, and yet bright as lighted matches.

“Come out here, boys,” he said; and when they were some way off among the palms, “I hold twenty-four,” he added in a voice scarcely recognizable, and doubtless referring to the venerable game of cribbage.

“What do you mean?” asked Tommy.

“I've sold the trade,” answered Wicks; “or, rather, I've sold only some of it, for I've kept back all the mess beef and half the flour and biscuit; and, by God, we're still provisioned for four months! By God, it's as good as stolen!”

“My word!” cried Hemstead.

“But what have you sold it for?” gasped Carthew, the captain's almost insane excitement shaking his nerve.

“Let me tell it my own way,” cried Wicks, loosening his neck. “Let me get at it gradual, or I'll explode. I've not only sold it, boys, I've wrung out a charter on my own terms to 'Frisco and back; on my own terms. I made a point of it. I fooled him first by making ​believe I wanted copra, which of course I knew he wouldn't hear of—couldn't, in fact; and whenever he showed fight, I trotted out the copra, and that man dived! I would take nothing but copra, you see; and so I've got the blooming lot in specie—all but two short bills on 'Frisco. And the sum? Well, this whole adventure, including two thousand pounds of credit, cost us two thousand seven hundred and some odd. That's all paid back; in thirty days' cruise we've paid for the schooner and the trade. Heard ever any man the match of that? And it's not all! For besides that,” said the captain, hammering his words, “we've got Thirteen Blooming Hundred Pounds of profit to divide. I bled him in four Thou.!” he cried, in a voice that broke like a schoolboy's.

For a moment the partners looked upon their chief with stupefaction, incredulous surprise their only feeling. Tommy was the first to grasp the consequences.

“Here,” he said, in a hard, business tone. “Come back to that saloon. I've got to get drunk.”

“You must please excuse me, boys,” said the captain, earnestly. “I daren't taste nothing. If I was to drink one glass of beer, it's my belief I'd have the apoplexy. The last scrimmage, and the blooming triumph, pretty nigh hand done me.”

“Well, then, three cheers for the captain,” proposed Tommy.

But Wicks held up a shaking hand. “Not that either, boys,” he pleaded. “Think of the other buffer, and let him down easy. If I'm like this, just fancy what Topelius is! If he heard us singing out, he'd have the staggers.”

As a matter of fact, Topelius accepted his defeat with a good grace; but the crew of the wrecked Leslie, who were in the same employment and loyal to their firm, took the thing more bitterly. Rough words and ugly looks were common. Once even they hooted Captain Wicks from the saloon verandah; the Cur​rency Lasses drew out on the other side; for some minutes there had like to have been a battle in Butaritari; and though the occasion passed off without blows, it left on either side an increase of ill-feeling.

No such small matter could affect the happiness of the successful traders. Five days more the ship lay in the lagoon, with little employment for any one but Tommy and the captain, for Topelius's natives discharged cargo and brought ballast; the time passed like a pleasant dream; the adventurers sat up half the night debating and praising their good fortune, or strayed by day in the narrow isle, gaping like Cockney tourists; and on the first of the new year, the Currency Lass weighed anchor for the second time and set sail for 'Frisco, attended by the same fine weather and good luck. She crossed the doldrums with but small delay; on a wind and in ballast of broken coral, she outdid expectations; and, what added to the happiness of the ship's company, the small amount of work that fell on them to do, was now lessened by the presence of another hand. This was the boatswain of the Leslie; he had been on bad terms with his own captain, had already spent his wages in the saloons of Butaritari, had wearied of the place, and while all his shipmates coldly refused to set foot on board the Currency Lass, he had offered to work his passage to the coast. He was a north of Ireland man, between Scotch and Irish, rough, loud, humorous, and emotional, not without sterling qualities, and an expert and careful sailor. His frame of mind was different indeed from that of his new shipmates; instead of making an unexpected fortune, he had lost a berth; and he was besides disgusted with the rations, and really appalled at the condition of the schooner. A stateroom door had stuck, the first day at sea, and Mac (as they called him) laid his strength to it and plucked it from the hinges.

“Glory!” said he, “this ship's rotten.”

​“I believe you, my boy,” said Captain Wicks.

The next day the sailor was observed with his nose aloft.

“Don't you get looking at these sticks,” the captain said, “or you'll have a fit and fall overboard.”

Mac turned towards the speaker with rather a wild eye. “Why, I see what looks like a patch of dry rot up yonder, that I bet I could stick my fist into,” said he.

“Looks as if a fellow could stick his head into it, don't it?” returned Wicks. “But there's no good prying into things that can't be mended.”

“I think I was a Currency Ass to come on board of her!” reflected Mac.

“Well, I never said she was seaworthy,” replied the captain: “I only said she could show her blooming heels to anything afloat. And besides, I don't know that it's dry rot; I kind of sometimes hope it isn't. Here; turn to and heave the log; that'll cheer you up.”

“Well, there's no denying it, you're a holy captain,” said Mac.

And from that day on, he made but the one reference to the ship's condition; and that was whenever Tommy drew upon his cellar. “Here's to the junk trade!” he would say, as he held out his can of sherry.

“Why do you always say that?” asked Tommy.

“I had an uncle in the business,” replied Mac, and launched at once into a yarn, in which an incredible number of the characters were “laid out as nice as you would want to see,” and the oaths made up about two-fifths of every conversation.

Only once he gave them a taste of his violence; he talked of it, indeed, often; “I'm rather a violent man,” he would say, not without pride; but this was the only specimen. Of a sudden, he turned on Hemstead in the ship's waist, knocked him against the ​foresail boom, then knocked him under it, and had set him up and knocked him down once more, before any one had drawn a breath.

“Here! Belay that!” roared Wicks, leaping to his feet. “I won't have none of this.”

Mac turned to the captain with ready civility. “I only want to learn him manners,” said he. “He took and called me Irishman.”

“Did he?” said Wicks. “Oh, that's a different story! What made you do it, you tomfool? You ain't big enough to call any man that.”

“I didn't call him it,” spluttered Hemstead, through his blood and tears. “I only mentioned-like he was.”

“Well, let's have no more of it,” said Wicks.

“But you are Irish, ain't you?” Carthew asked of his new shipmate shortly after.

“I may be,” replied Mac, “but I'll allow no Sydney duck to call me so. No,” he added, with a sudden heated countenance, “nor any Britisher that walks! Why, look here,” he went on, “you're a young swell, aren't you? Suppose I called you that! 'I'll show you,' you would say, and turn to and take it out of me straight.”

On the 28th of January, when in lat. 27° 20' N., long. 177° W., the wind chopped suddenly into the west, not very strong, but puffy and with flaws of rain. The captain, eager for easting, made a fair wind of it and guyed the booms out wing and wing. It was Tommy's trick at the wheel, and as it was within half an hour of the relief (7.30 in the morning), the captain judged it not worth while to change him.

The puffs were heavy but short; there was nothing to be called a squall, no danger to the ship, and scarce more than usual to the doubtful spars. All hands were on deck in their oilskins, expecting breakfast; the galley smoked, the ship smelt of ​coffee, all were in good humour to be speeding eastward a full nine; when the rotten foresail tore suddenly between two cloths and then split to either hand. It was for all the world as though some archangel with a huge sword had slashed it with the figure of a cross; all hands ran to secure the slatting canvas; and in the sudden uproar and alert, Tommy Hadden lost his head. Many of his days have been passed since then in explaining how the thing happened; of these explanations it will be sufficient to say that they were all different and none satisfactory; and the gross fact remains that the main boom gybed, carried away the tackle, broke the mainmast some three feet above the deck and whipped it overboard. For near a minute the suspected foremast gallantly resisted; then followed its companion; and by the time the wreck was cleared, of the whole beautiful fabric that enabled them to skim the seas, two ragged stumps remained.

In these vast and solitary waters, to be dismasted is perhaps the worst calamity. Let the ship turn turtle and go down, and at least the pang is over. But men chained on a hulk may pass months scanning the empty sea line and counting the steps of death's invisible approach. There is no help but in the boats, and what a help is that! There heaved the Currency Lass, for instance, a wingless lump, and the nearest human coast (that of Kauai in the Sandwiches) lay about a thousand miles to south and east of her. Over the way there, to men contemplating that passage in an open boat, all kinds of misery, and the fear of death and of madness, brooded.

A serious company sat down to breakfast; but the captain helped his neighbours with a smile.

“Now, boys,” he said, after a pull at the hot coffee, “we're done with this Currency Lass, and no ​mistake. One good job: we made her pay while she lasted, and she paid first rate; and if we were to try our hand again, we can try in style. Another good job: we have a fine, stiff, roomy boat, and you know who you have to thank for that. We've got six lives to save, and a pot of money; and the point is, where are we to take 'em?”

“It's all two thousand miles to the nearest of the Sandwiches, I fancy,” observed Mac.

“No, not so bad as that,” returned the captain. “But it's bad enough: rather better'n a thousand.”

“I know a man who once did twelve hundred in a boat,” said Mac, “and he had all he wanted. He fetched ashore in the Marquesas, and never set a foot on anything floating from that day to this. He said he would rather put a pistol to his head and knock his brains out.”

“Ay, ay!” said Wicks. “Well I remember a boat's crew that made this very island of Kauai, and from just about where we lie, or a bit further. When they got up with the land, they were clean crazy. There was an iron-bound coast and an Old Bob Ridley of a surf on. The natives hailed 'em from fishing-boats, and sung out it couldn't be done at the money. Much they cared! there was the land, that was all they knew; and they turned to and drove the boat slap ashore in the thick of it, and was all drowned but one. No; boat trips are my eye,” concluded the captain, gloomily.

The tone was surprising in a man of his indomitable temper. “Come, Captain,” said Carthew, “you have something else up your sleeve; out with it!”

“It's a fact,” admitted Wicks. “You see there's a raft of little bally reefs about here, kind of chicken-pox on the chart. Well, I looked 'em all up, and there's one—Midway or Brooks they call it, ​not forty mile from our assigned position—that I got news of. It turns out it's a coaling station of the Pacific Mail,” he said, simply.

“Well, and I know it ain't no such a thing,” said Mac. “I been quartermaster in that line myself.”

“All right,” returned Wicks. “There's the book. Read what Hoyt says—read it aloud and let the others hear.”

Hoyt's falsehood (as readers know) was explicit; incredulity was impossible, and the news itself delightful beyond hope. Each saw in his mind's eye the boat draw in to a trim island with a wharf, coal-sheds, gardens, the Stars and Stripes and the white cottage of the keeper; saw themselves idle a few weeks in tolerable quarters, and then step on board the China mail, romantic waifs, and yet with pocketsful of money, calling for champagne, and waited on by troops of stewards. Breakfast, that had begun so dully, ended amid sober jubilation, and all hands turned immediately to prepare the boat.

Now that all spars were gone, it was no easy job to get her launched. Some of the necessary cargo was first stowed on board; the specie, in particular, being packed in a strong chest and secured with lashings to the afterthwart in case of a capsize. Then a piece of the bulwark was razed to the level of the deck, and the boat swung thwart-ship, made fast with a slack line to either stump, and successfully run out. For a voyage of forty miles to hospitable quarters, not much food or water was required; but they took both in superfluity. Amalu and Mac, both ingrained sailor-men, had chests which were the headquarters of their lives; two more chests with hand-bags, oilskins, and blankets supplied the others; Hadden, amid general applause, added the last case of the brown sherry; the captain brought the log, instru​ments, and chronometer; nor did Hemstead forget the banjo or a pinned handkerchief of Butaritari shells.

It was about three P.M. when they pushed off, and (the wind being still westerly) fell to the oars. “Well, we've got the guts out of you!” was the captain's nodded farewell to the hulk of the Currency Lass, which presently shrank and faded in the sea. A little after a calm succeeded, with much rain; and the first meal was eaten, and the watch below lay down to their uneasy slumber on the bilge under a roaring shower-bath. The twenty-ninth dawned overhead from out of ragged clouds; there is no moment when a boat at sea appears so trenchantly black and so conspicuously little; and the crew looked about them at the sky and water with a thrill of loneliness and fear. With sunrise the trade set in, lusty and true to the point; sail was made; the boat flew; and by about four in the afternoon, they were well up with the closed part of the reef, and the captain standing on the thwart, and holding by the mast, was studying the island through the binoculars.

“Well, and where's your station?” cried Mac.

“I don't someway pick it up,” replied the captain.

“No, nor never will!” retorted Mac, with a clang of despair and triumph in his tones.

The truth was soon plain to all. No buoys, no beacons, no lights, no coal, no station; the castaways pulled through a lagoon and landed on an isle, where was no mark of man but wreckwood, and no sound but of the sea. For the sea-fowl that harboured and lived there at the epoch of my visit were then scattered into the uttermost parts of the ocean, and had left no traces of their sojourn besides dropped feathers and addled eggs. It was to this they had been sent, for this they had stooped all night over the dripping oars, hourly moving further from relief. ​The boat, for as small as it was, was yet eloquent of the hands of men, a thing alone indeed upon the sea but yet in itself all human; and the isle, for which they had exchanged it, was ingloriously savage, a place of distress, solitude, and hunger unrelieved. There was a strong glare and shadow of the evening over all; in which they sat or lay, not speaking, careless even to eat, men swindled out of life and riches by a lying book. In the great good-nature of the whole party, no word of reproach had been addressed to Hadden, the author of these disasters. But the new blow was less magnanimously borne, and many angry glances rested on the captain.

Yet it was himself who roused them from their lethargy. Grudgingly they obeyed, drew the boat beyond tidemark, and followed him to the top of the miserable islet, whence a view was commanded of the whole wheel of the horizon, then part darkened under the coming night, part dyed with the hues of the sunset and populous with the sunset clouds. Here the camp was pitched and a tent run up with the oars, sails, and mast. And here Amalu, at no man's bidding, from the mere instinct of habitual service, built a fire and cooked a meal. Night was come, and the stars and the silver sickle of new moon beamed overhead, before the meal was ready. The cold sea shone about them, and the fire glowed in their faces, as they ate. Tommy had opened his case, and the brown sherry went the round; but it was long before they came to conversation.

“Well, is it to be Kauai after all?” asked Mac suddenly.

“This is bad enough for me,” said Tommy. “Let's stick it out where we are.”

“Well, I can tell ye one thing,” said Mac, “if ye care to hear it. When I was in the China mail, we once made this island. It's in the course from Honolulu.”

​“Deuce it is!” cried Carthew. “That settles it, then. Let's stay. We must keep good fires going; and there's plenty wreck.”

“Lashings of wreck!” said the Irishman. “There's nothing here but wreck and coffin boards.”

“But we'll have to make a proper blyze,” objected Hemstead. “You can't see a fire like this, not any wye awye, I mean.”

“Can't you?” said Carthew. “Look round.”

They did, and saw the hollow of the night, the bare, bright face of the sea, and the stars regarding them; and the voices died in their bosoms at the spectacle. In that huge isolation, it seemed they must be visible from China on the one hand and California on the other.

“My God, it's dreary!” whispered Hemstead.

“Dreary?” cried Mac, and fell suddenly silent.

“It's better than a boat, anyway,” said Hadden. “I've had my bellyful of boat.”

“What kills me is that specie!” the captain broke out. “Think of all that riches—four thousand in gold, bad silver, and short bills—all found money, too!—and no more use than that much dung!”

“I'll tell you one thing,” said Tommy. “I don't like it being in the boat—I don't care to have it so far away.”

“Why, who's to take it?” cried Mac, with a guffaw of evil laughter.

But this was not at all the feeling of the partners, who rose, clambered down the isle, brought back the inestimable treasure-chest slung upon two oars, and set it conspicuous in the shining of the fire.

“There's my beauty!” cried Wicks, viewing it with a cocked head. “That's better than a bonfire. What! we have a chest here, and bills for close upon two thousand pounds; there's no show to that—it would go in your vest-pocket—but the rest! upwards of ​forty pounds avoirdupois of coined gold, and close on two hundredweight of Chile silver! What! ain't that good enough to fetch a fleet? Do you mean to say that won't affect a ship's compass? Do you mean to tell me that the lookout won't turn to and smell it?” he cried.

Mac, who had no part nor lot in the bills, the forty pounds of gold, or the two hundredweight of silver, heard this with impatience, and fell into a bitter, choking laughter. “You'll see!” he said harshly. “You'll be glad to feed them bills into the fire before you're through with ut!” And he turned, passed by himself out of the ring of the firelight, and stood gazing seaward.

His speech and his departure extinguished instantly those sparks of better humour kindled by the dinner and the chest. The group fell again to an ill-favoured silence, and Hemstead began to touch the banjo, as was his habit of an evening. His repertory was small: the chords of Home, Sweet Home fell under his fingers; and when he had played the symphony, he instinctively raised up his voice. “Be it never so 'umble, there's no plyce like 'ome,” he sang. The last word was still upon his lips, when the instrument was snatched from him and dashed into the fire; and he turned with a cry to look into the furious countenance of Mac.

“I'll be damned if I stand this!” cried the captain, leaping up belligerent.

“I told ye I was a voilent man,” said Mac, with a movement of deprecation very surprising in one of his character. “Why don't he give me a chance then? Haven't we enough to bear the way we are?” And to the wonder and dismay of all, the man choked upon a sob. “It's ashamed of meself I am,” he said presently, his Irish accent twenty-fold increased. “I ask all your pardons for me voilence; and especially the little man's, who is a harmless crayture, and ​here's me hand to'm, if he'll condescind to take me by 't.”

So this scene of barbarity and sentimentalism passed off, leaving behind strange and incongruous impressions. True, every one was perhaps glad when silence succeeded that all too appropriate music; true, Mac's apology and subsequent behaviour rather raised him in the opinion of his fellow-castaways. But the discordant note had been struck, and its harmonics tingled in the brain. In that savage, houseless isle, the passions of man had sounded, if only for the moment, and all men trembled at the possibilities of horror.

It was determined to stand watch and watch in case of passing vessels; and Tommy, on fire with an idea, volunteered to stand the first. The rest crawled under the tent, and were soon enjoying that comfortable gift of sleep, which comes everywhere and to all men, quenching anxieties and speeding time. And no sooner were all settled, no sooner had the drone of many snorers begun to mingle with and overcome the surf, than Tommy stole from his post with the case of sherry, and dropped it in a quiet cove in a fathom of water. But the stormy inconstancy of Mac's behaviour had no connection with a gill or two of wine; his passions, angry and otherwise, were on a different sail plan from his neighbours'; and there were possibilities of good and evil in that hybrid Celt beyond their prophecy.

About two in the morning, the starry sky—or so it seemed, for the drowsy watchman had not observed the approach of any cloud—brimmed over in a deluge; and for three days it rained without remission. The islet was a sponge, the castaways sops; the view all gone, even the reef concealed behind the curtain of the falling water. The fire was soon drowned out; after a couple of boxes of matches had been scratched in vain, it was decided to wait for ​better weather; and the party lived in wretchedness on raw tins and a ration of hard bread.

By the 2nd February, in the dark hours of the morning watch, the clouds were all blown by; the sun rose glorious; and once more the castaways sat by a quick fire, and drank hot coffee with the greed of brutes and sufferers. Thenceforward their affairs moved in a routine. A fire was constantly maintained; and this occupied one hand continuously, and the others for an hour or so in the day. Twice a day, all hands bathed in the lagoon, their chief, almost their only pleasure. Often they fished in the lagoon with good success. And the rest was passed in lolling, strolling, yarns, and disputation. The time of the China steamers was calculated to a nicety; which done, the thought was rejected and ignored. It was one that would not bear consideration. The boat voyage having been tacitly set aside, the desperate part chosen to wait there for the coming of help or of starvation, no man had courage left to look his bargain in the face, far less to discuss it with his neighbours. But the unuttered terror haunted them; in every hour of idleness, at every moment of silence, it returned, and breathed a chill about the circle, and carried men's eyes to the horizon. Then, in a panic of self-defence, they would rally to some other subject. And, in that lone spot, what else was to be found to speak of but the treasure?

That was indeed the chief singularity, the one thing conspicuous in their island life; the presence of that chest of bills and specie dominated the mind like a cathedral; and there were besides connected with it, certain irking problems well fitted to occupy the idle. Two thousand pounds were due to the Sydney firm: two thousand pounds were clear profit, and fell to be divided in varying proportions among six. It had been agreed how the partners were to range; ​

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"Now he rose mechanically, shaking and stumbling like a drunkard after a debauch." (p. 382).

​every pound of capital subscribed, every pound that fell due in wages, was to count for one “lay.” Of these, Tommy could claim five hundred and ten, Carthew one hundred and seventy, Wicks one hundred and forty, and Hemstead and Amalu ten apiece: eight hundred and forty “lays” in all. What was the value of a lay? This was at first debated in the air and chiefly by the strength of Tommy's lungs. Then followed a series of incorrect calculations; from which they issued, arithmetically foiled, but agreed from weariness upon an approximate value of £2 7s. 7¼d. The figures were admittedly incorrect; the sum of the shares came not to £2000, but to £1996 6s.—£3 14s. being thus left unclaimed. But it was the nearest they had yet found, and the highest as well, so that the partners were made the less critical by the contemplation of their splendid dividends. Wicks put in £100 and stood to draw captain's wages for two months; his taking was £333 3s. 6½d. Carthew had put in £150: he was to take out £401 18s. 6½ pence. Tommy's £500 had grown to be £1213 12s. 9¾d.; and Amalu and Hemstead, ranking for wages only, had £22 16s.s 0½d. each.

From talking and brooding on these figures, it was but a step to opening the chest; and once the chest open, the glamour of the cash was irresistible. Each felt that he must see his treasure separate with the eye of flesh, handle it in the hard coin, mark it for his own, and stand forth to himself the approved owner. And here an insurmountable difficulty barred the way. There were some seventeen shillings in English silver: the rest was Chile; and the Chile dollar, which had been taken at the rate of six to the pound sterling, was practically their smallest coin. It was decided, therefore, to divide the pounds only, and to throw the shillings, pence, and fractions in a common fund. This, with the three pound fourteen already ​in the heel, made a total of seven pounds one shilling.

“I'll tell you,” said Wicks. “Let Carthew and Tommy and me take one pound apiece, and Hemstead and Amalu split the other four, and toss up for the odd bob.”

“Oh, rot!” said Carthew. “Tommy and I are bursting already. We can take half a sov' each, and let the other three have forty shillings.”

“I'll tell you now it's not worth splitting,” broke in Mac. “I've cards in my chest. Why don't you play for the slump sum?”

In that idle place, the proposal was accepted with delight. Mac, as the owner of the cards, was given a stake; the sum was played for in five games of cribbage; and when Amalu, the last survivor in the tournament, was beaten by Mac, it was found the dinner hour was past. After a hasty meal, they fell again immediately to cards, this time (on Carthew's proposal) to Van John. It was then probably two p.m. of the 9th of February; and they played with varying chances for twelve hours, slept heavily, and rose late on the morrow to resume the game. All day of the 10th, with grudging intervals for food, and with one long absence on the part of Tommy from which he returned dripping with the case of sherry, they continued to deal and stake. Night fell: they drew the closer to the fire. It was maybe two in the morning, and Tommy was selling his deal by auction, as usual with that timid player; when Carthew, who didn't intend to bid, had a moment of leisure and looked round him. He beheld the moonlight on the sea, the money piled and scattered in that incongruous place, the perturbed faces of the players; he felt in his own breast the familiar tumult; and it seemed as if there rose in his ears a sound of music, and the moon seemed still to shine upon a sea, but the sea was changed, and the Casino towered from among lamp​lit gardens, and the money clinked on the green board. “Good God!” he thought, “am I gambling again?” He looked the more curiously about the sandy table. He and Mac had played and won like gamblers; the mingled gold and silver lay by their places in the heap. Amalu and Hemstead had each more than held their own, but Tommy was cruel far to leeward, and the captain was reduced to perhaps fifty pounds.

“I say, let's knock off,” said Carthew.

“Give that man a glass of Buckle,” said someone, and a fresh bottle was opened, and the game went inexorably on.

Carthew was himself too heavy a winner to withdraw or to say more; and all the rest of the night he must look on at the progress of this folly, and make gallant attempts to lose with the not uncommon consequence of winning more. The first dawn of the 11th February found him well-nigh desperate. It chanced he was then dealer, and still winning. He had just dealt a round of many tens; every one had staked heavily; the captain had put up all that remained to him—twelve pounds in gold and a few dollars—and Carthew, looking privately at his cards before he showed them, found he held a natural.

“See here, you fellows,” he broke out, “this is a sickening business, and I'm done with it for one.” So saying, he showed his cards, tore them across, and rose from the ground.

The company stared and murmured in mere amazement; but Mac stepped gallantly to his support.

“We've had enough of it, I do believe,” said he. “But of course it was all fun, and here's my counters back. All counters in, boys!” and he began to pour his winnings into the chest, which stood fortunately near him.

​Carthew stepped across and wrung him by the hand. “I'll never forget this,” he said.

“And what are ye going to do with the Highway boy and the plumber?” inquired Mac, in a low tone of voice. “They've both wan, ye see.”

“That's true!” said Carthew aloud. “Amalu and Hemstead, count your winnings; Tommy and I pay that.”

It was carried without speech: the pair glad enough to receive their winnings, it mattered not from whence; and Tommy, who had lost about five hundred pounds, delighted with the compromise.

“And how about Mac?” asked Hemstead. “Is he to lose all?”

“I beg your pardon, plumber. I'm sure ye mean well,” returned the Irishman, “but you'd better shut your face, for I'm not that kind of a man. If I t'ought I had wan that money fair, there's never a soul here could get it from me. But I t'ought it was in fun; that was my mistake, ye see; and there's no man big enough upon this island to give a present to my mother's son. So there's my opinion to ye, plumber, and you can put it in your pockut till required.”

“Well, I will say, Mac, you're a gentleman,” said Carthew, as he helped him to shovel back his winnings into the treasure chest.

“Divil a fear of it, sir! a drunken sailor-man,” said Mac.

The captain had sat somewhile with his face in his hands; now he rose mechanically, shaking and stumbling like a drunkard after a debauch. But as he rose, his face was altered, and his voice rang out over the isle, “Sail, ho!”

All turned at the cry, and there, in the wild light of the morning, heading straight for Midway Reef, was the brig Flying Scud of Hull.

CHAPTER XXIV.

A HARD BARGAIN.

The ship which thus appeared before the castaways had long “tramped” the ocean, wandering from one port to another as freights offered. She was two years out from London, by the Cape of Good Hope, India, and the Archipelago; and was now bound for San Francisco in the hope of working homeward round the Horn. Her captain was one Jacob Trent. He had retired some five years before to a suburban cottage, a patch of cabbages, a gig, and the conduct of what he called a Bank. The name appears to have been misleading. Borrowers were accustomed to choose works of art and utility in the front shop; loaves of sugar and bolts of broadcloth were deposited in pledge; and it was a part of the manager's duty to dash in his gig on Saturday evenings from one small retailer's to another, and to annex in each the bulk of the week's takings. His was thus an active life, and to a man of the type of a rat, filled with recondite joys. An unexpected loss, a law suit, and the unintelligent commentary of the judge upon the bench, combined to disgust him of the business. I was so extraordinarily fortunate as to find, in an old newspaper, a report of the proceedings in Lyall v. The Cardiff Mutual Accommodation Banking Co. “I confess I fail entirely to understand the nature of the business,” the judge had remarked, while Trent was being examined in chief; a little after, on fuller information—“They call it a bank,” he had opined, “but it seems to me to be an unlicensed pawnshop”; and he wound up with this appalling allocution: “Mr. Trent, I must put you on your guard; you must be very careful, or we shall see you here again.” In the inside of a week the captain disposed of the ​bank, the cottage, and the gig and horse; and to sea again in the Flying Scud, where he did well and gave high satisfaction to his owners. But the glory clung to him; he was a plain sailor-man, he said, but he could never long allow you to forget that he had been a banker.

His mate, Elias Goddedaal, was a huge viking of a man, six feet three and of proportionate mass, strong, sober, industrious, musical, and sentimental. He ran continually over into Swedish melodies, chiefly in the minor. He had paid nine dollars to hear Patti; to hear Nilsson, he had deserted a ship and two months' wages; and he was ready at any time to walk ten miles for a good concert, or seven to a reasonable play. On board he had three treasures: a canary bird, a concertina, and a blinding copy of the works of Shakespeare. He had a gift, peculiarly Scandinavian, of making friends at sight: an elemental innocence commended him; he was without fear, without reproach, and without money or the hope of making it.

Holdorsen was second mate, and berthed aft, but messed usually with the hands.

Of one more of the crew, some image lives. This was a foremast hand out of the Clyde, of the name of Brown. A small, dark, thickset creature, with dog's eyes, of a disposition incomparably mild and harmless, he knocked about seas and cities, the uncomplaining whiptop of one vice. “The drink is my trouble, ye see,” he said to Carthew shyly; “and it's the more shame to me because I'm come of very good people at Bowling, down the wa'er.” The letter that so much affected Nares, in case the reader should remember it, was addressed to this man Brown.

Such was the ship that now carried joy into the bosoms of the castaways. After the fatigue and the bestial emotions of their night of play, the approach ​of salvation shook them from all self-control. Their hands trembled, their eyes shone, they laughed and shouted like children as they cleared their camp: and some one beginning to whistle Marching Through Georgia, the remainder of the packing was conducted, amidst a thousand interruptions, to these martial strains. But the strong head of Wicks was only partly turned.

“Boys,” he said, “easy all! We're going aboard of a ship of which we don't know nothing; we've got a chest of specie, and seeing the weight, we can't turn to and deny it. Now, suppose she was fishy; suppose it was some kind of a Bully Hayes business! It's my opinion we'd better be on hand with the pistols.”

Every man of the party but Hemstead had some kind of a revolver; these were accordingly loaded and disposed about the persons of the castaways, and the packing was resumed and finished in the same rapturous spirit as it was begun. The sun was not yet ten degrees above the eastern sea, but the brig was already close in and hove to, before they had launched the boat and sped, shouting at the oars, towards the passage.

It was blowing fresh outside, with a strong send of sea. The spray flew in the oarsmen's faces. They saw the Union Jack blow abroad from the Flying Scud, the men clustered at the rail, the cook in the galley door, the captain on the quarter-deck with a pith helmet and binoculars. And the whole familiar business, the comfort, company, and safety of a ship, heaving nearer at each stroke, maddened them with joy.

Wicks was the first to catch the line, and swarm on board, helping hands grabbing him as he came and hauling him across the rail.

“Captain, sir, I suppose?” he said, turning to the hard old man in the pith helmet.

​“Captain Trent, sir,” returned the old gentleman.

“Well, I'm Captain Kirkup, and this is the crew of the Sydney schooner Currency Lass, dismasted at sea January 28th.”

“Ay, ay,” said Trent. “Well, you're all right now. Lucky for you I saw your signal. I didn't know I was so near this beastly island, there must be a drift to the south'ard here; and when I came on deck this morning at eight bells, I thought it was a ship afire.”

It had been agreed that, while Wicks was to board the ship and do the civil, the rest were to remain in the whaleboat and see the treasure safe. A tackle was passed down to them; to this they made fast the invaluable chest, and gave the word to heave. But the unexpected weight brought the hand at the tackle to a stand; two others ran to tail on and help him, and the thing caught the eye of Trent.

“'Vast heaving!” he cried sharply; and then to Wicks: “What's that? I don't ever remember to have seen a chest weigh like that.”

“It's money,” said Wicks.

“It's what?” cried Trent.

“Specie,” said Wicks; “saved from the wreck.”

Trent looked at him sharply. “Here, let go that chest again, Mr. Goddedaal,” he commanded, “shove the boat off, and stream her with a line astern.”

“Ay, ay, sir!” from Goddedaal.

“What the devil's wrong?” asked Wicks.

“Nothing, I daresay,” returned Trent. “But you'll allow it's a queer thing when a boat turns up in mid-ocean with half a ton of specie, and everybody armed,” he added, pointing to Wicks's pocket. “Your boat will lay comfortably astern, while you come below and make yourself satisfactory.”

​“O, if that's all!” said Wicks. “My log and papers are as right as the mail; nothing fishy about us.” And he hailed his friends in the boat, bidding them have patience, and turned to follow Captain Trent.

“This way, Captain Kirkup,” said the latter. “And don't blame a man for too much caution; no offence intended; and these China rivers shake a fellow's nerve. All I want is just to see you're what you say you are; it's only my duty, sir, and what you would do yourself in the circumstances. I've not always been a ship-captain: I was a banker once, and I tell you that's the trade to learn caution in. You have to keep your weather-eye lifting Saturday nights.” And with a dry, business-like cordiality, he produced a bottle of gin.

The captains pledged each other; the papers were overhauled; the tale of Topelius and the trade was told in appreciative ears and cemented their acquaintance. Trent's suspicions, thus finally disposed of, were succeeded by a fit of profound thought, during which he sat lethargic and stern, looking at and drumming on the table.

“Anything more?” asked Wicks.

“What sort of a place is it inside?” inquired Trent, sudden as though Wicks had touched a spring.

“It's a good enough lagoon—a few horses' heads, but nothing to mention,” answered Wicks.

“I've a good mind to go in,” said Trent. “I was new rigged in China; it's given very bad, and I'm getting frightened for my sticks. We could set it up as good as new in a day. For I daresay your lot would turn to and give us a hand?”

“You see if we don't!” said Wicks.

“So be it, then,” concluded Trent. “A stitch in time saves nine.”

​They returned on deck; Wicks cried the news to the Currency Lasses; the foretopsail was filled again, and the brig ran into the lagoon lively, the whaleboat dancing in her wake, and came to single anchor off Middle Brooks Island before eight. She was boarded by the castaways, breakfast was served, the baggage slung on board and piled in the waist, and all hands turned to upon the rigging. All day the work continued, the two crews rivalling each other in expense of strength. Dinner was served on deck, the officers messing aft under the slack of the spanker, the men fraternising forward. Trent appeared in excellent spirits, served out grog to all hands, opened a bottle of Cape wine for the after-table, and obliged his guests with many details of the life of a financier in Cardiff. He had been forty years at sea, had five times suffered shipwreck, was once nine months the prisoner of a pepper rajah, and had seen service under fire in Chinese rivers; but the only thing he cared to talk of, the only thing of which he was vain, or with which he thought it possible to interest a stranger, was his career as a money-lender in the slums of a seaport town.

The afternoon spell told cruelly on the Currency Lasses. Already exhausted as they were with sleeplessness and excitement, they did the last hours of this violent employment on bare nerves; and when Trent was at last satisfied with the condition of his rigging, expected eagerly the word to put to sea. But the captain seemed in no hurry. He went and walked by himself softly, like a man in thought. Presently he hailed Wicks.

“You're a kind of company, ain't you, Captain Kirkup?” he inquired.

“Yes, we're all on board on lays,” was the reply.

“Well, then, you won't mind if I ask the lot of you down to tea in the cabin?” asked Trent.

​Wicks was amazed, but he naturally ventured no remark; and a little after, the six Currency Lasses sat down with Trent and Goddedaal to a spread of marmalade, butter, toast, sardines, tinned tongue, and steaming tea. The food was not very good, and I have no doubt Nares would have reviled it, but it was manna to the castaways. Goddedaal waited on them with a kindness far before courtesy, a kindness like that of some old, honest countrywoman in her farm. It was remembered afterwards that Trent took little share in these attentions, but sat much absorbed in thought, and seemed to remember and forget the presence of his guests alternately.

Presently he addressed the Chinaman.

“Clear out!” said he, and watched him till he had disappeared in the stair. “Now, gentlemen,” he went on, “I understand you're a joint-stock sort of crew, and that's why I've had you all down; for there's a point I want made clear. You see what sort of a ship this is—a good ship, though I say it, and you see what the rations are—good enough for sailor-men.”

There was a hurried murmur of approval, but curiosity for what was coming next prevented an articulate reply.

“Well,” continued Trent, making bread pills and looking hard at the middle of the table, “I'm glad of course to be able to give you a passage to 'Frisco; one sailor-man should help another, that's my motto. But when you want a thing in this world, you generally always have to pay for it.” He laughed a brief, joyless laugh. “I have no idea of losing by my kindness.”

“We have no idea you should, captain,” said Wicks.

“We are ready to pay anything in reason,” added Carthew.

At the words, Goddedaal, who sat next to him, ​touched him with his elbow, and the two mates exchanged a significant look. The character of Captain Trent was given and taken in that silent second.

“In reason?” repeated the captain of the brig. “I was waiting for that. Reason's between two people, and there's only one here. I'm the judge; I'm reason. If you want an advance you have to pay for it”—he hastily corrected himself—“If you want a passage in my ship, you have to pay my price,” he substituted. “That's business, I believe. I don't want you; you want me.”

“Well, sir,” said Carthew, “and what is your price?”

The captain made bread pills. “If I were like you,” he said, “when you got hold of that merchant in the Gilberts, I might surprise you. You had your chance then; seems to me it's mine now. Turn about's fair play. What kind of mercy did you have on that Gilbert merchant?” he cried, with a sudden stridency. “Not that I blame you. All's fair in love and business,” and he laughed again, a little frosty giggle.

“Well, sir?” said Carthew, gravely.

“Well, this ship's mine, I think?” he asked sharply.

“Well, I'm of that way of thinking meself,” observed Mac.

“I say it's mine, sir!” reiterated Trent, like a man trying to be angry. “And I tell you all, if I was a driver like what you are, I would take the lot. But there's two thousand pounds there that don't belong to you, and I'm an honest man. Give me the two thousand that's yours, and I'll give you a passage to the coast, and land every man-jack of you in 'Frisco with fifteen pounds in his pocket, and the captain here with twenty-five.”

​Goddedaal laid down his head on the table like a man ashamed.

“You're joking,” said Wicks, purple in the face.

“Am I?” said Trent. “Please yourselves. You're under no compulsion. This ship's mine, but there's that Brooks Island don't belong to me, and you can lay there till you die for what I care.”

“It's more than your blooming brig's worth!” cried Wicks.

“It's my price anyway,” returned Trent.

“And do you mean to say you would land us there to starve?” cried Tommy.

Captain Trent laughed the third time. “Starve? I defy you to,” said he. “I'll sell you all the provisions you want at a fair profit.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Mac, “but my case is by itself I'm working me passage; I got no share in that two thousand pounds nor nothing in my pockut; and I'll be glad to know what you have to say to me?”

“I ain't a hard man,” said Trent. “That shall make no difference. I'll take you with the rest, only of course you get no fifteen pound.”

The impudence was so extreme and startling, that all breathed deep, and Goddedaal raised up his face and looked his superior sternly in the eye.

But Mac was more articulate. “And you're what ye call a British sayman, I suppose? the sorrow in your guts!” he cried.

“One more such word, and I clap you in irons!” said Trent, rising gleefully at the face of opposition.

“And where would I be the while you were doin' ut?” asked Mac. “After you and your rigging, too! Ye ould puggy, ye haven't the civility of a bug, and I'll learn ye some.”

​His voice did not even rise as he uttered the threat; no man present, Trent least of all, expected that which followed. The Irishman's hand rose suddenly from below the table, an open clasp-knife balanced on the palm; there was a movement swift as conjuring; Trent started half to his feet, turning a little as he rose so as to escape the table, and the movement was his bane. The missile struck him in the jugular; he fell forward, and his blood flowed among the dishes on the cloth.

The suddenness of the attack and the catastrophe, the instant change from peace to war and from life to death, held all men spellbound. Yet a moment they sat about the table staring open-mouthed upon the prostrate captain and the flowing blood. The next, Goddedaal had leaped to his feet, caught up the stool on which he had been sitting, and swung it high in air, a man transfigured, roaring (as he stood) so that men's ears were stunned with it. There was no thought of battle in the Currency Lasses; none drew his weapon; all huddled helplessly from before the face of the baresark Scandinavian. His first blow sent Mac to ground with a broken arm. His second bashed out the brains of Hemstead. He turned from one to another, menacing and trumpeting like a wounded elephant, exulting in his rage. But there was no counsel, no light of reason, in that ecstasy of battle; and he shied from the pursuit of victory to hail fresh blows upon the supine Hemstead, so that the stool was shattered and the cabin rang with their violence. The sight of that post-mortem cruelty recalled Carthew to the life of instinct, and his revolver was in hand and he had aimed and fired before he knew. The ear-bursting sound of the report was accompanied by a yell of pain; the colossus paused, swayed, tottered, and fell headlong on the body of his victim.

In the instant silence that succeeded, the sound of ​feet pounding on the deck and in the companion leaped into hearing; and a face, that of the sailor Holdorsen, appeared below the bulkheads in the cabin doorway. Carthew shattered it with a second shot, for he was a marksman.

“Pistols!” he cried, and charged at the companion, Wicks at his heels, Tommy and Amalu following. They trod the body of Holdorsen underfoot, and flew up-stairs and forth into the dusky blaze of a sunset red as blood. The numbers were still equal, but the Flying Scuds dreamed not of defence, and fled with one accord for the forecastle scuttle. Brown was first in flight; he disappeared below unscathed; the Chinaman followed head-foremost with a ball in his side; and the others shinned into the rigging.

A fierce composure settled upon Wicks and Carthew, their fighting second wind. They posted Tommy at the fore and Amalu at the main to guard the masts and shrouds, and going themselves into the waist, poured out a box of cartridges on deck and filled the chambers. The poor devils aloft bleated aloud for mercy. But the hour of any mercy was gone by; the cup was brewed and must be drunken to the dregs; since so many had fallen all must fall. The light was bad, the cheap revolvers fouled and carried wild, the screaming wretches were swift to flatten themselves against the masts and yards or find a momentary refuge in the hanging sails. The fell business took long, but it was done at last. Hardy the Londoner was shot on the fore-royal yard, and hung horribly suspended in the brails. Wallen, the other, had his jaw broken on the maintop-gallant crosstrees, and exposed himself, shrieking, till a second shot dropped him on the deck.

This had been bad enough, but worse remained behind. There was still Brown in the forepeak. Tommy, with a sudden clamour of weeping, begged ​for his life. “One man can't hurt us,” he sobbed. “We can't go on with this. I spoke to him at dinner. He's an awful decent little cad. It can't be done. Nobody can go into that place and murder him. It's too damned wicked.”

The sound of his supplications was perhaps audible to the unfortunate below.

“One left, and we all hang,” said Wicks. “Brown must go the same road.” The big man was deadly white and trembled like an aspen; and he had no sooner finished speaking, than he went to the ship's side and vomited.

“We can never do it if we wait,” said Carthew. “Now or never,” and he marched towards the scuttle.

“No, no, no!” wailed Tommy, clutching at his jacket.

But Carthew flung him off, and stepped down the ladder, his heart rising with disgust and shame. The Chinaman lay on the floor, still groaning; the place was pitch dark.

“Brown!” cried Carthew, “Brown, where are you?”

His heart smote him for the treacherous apostrophe, but no answer came.

He groped in the bunks: they were all empty. Then he moved towards the forepeak, which was hampered with coils of rope and spare chandlery in general.

“Brown!” he said again.

“Here, sir,” answered a shaking voice; and the poor invisible caitiff called on him by name, and poured forth out of the darkness an endless, garrulous appeal for mercy. A sense of danger, of daring, had alone nerved Carthew to enter the forecastle; and here was the enemy crying and pleading like a frightened child. His obsequious “Here, sir,” his horrid fluency of obtestation, made the murder ten​fold more revolting. Twice Carthew raised the pistol, once he pressed the trigger (or thought he did) with all his might, but no explosion followed; and with that the lees of his courage ran quite out, and he turned and fled from before his victim.

Wicks sat on the fore hatch, raised the face of a man of seventy, and looked a wordless question. Carthew shook his head. With such composure as a man displays marching towards the gallows, Wicks arose, walked to the scuttle, and went down. Brown thought it was Carthew returning, and discovered himself, half crawling from his shelter, with another incoherent burst of pleading. Wicks emptied his revolver at the voice, which broke into mouse-like whimperings and groans. Silence succeeded, and the murderer ran on deck like one possessed.

The other three were now all gathered on the fore hatch, and Wicks took his place beside them without question asked or answered. They sat close, like children in the dark, and shook each other with their shaking. The dusk continued to fall; and there was no sound but the beating of the surf and the occasional hiccup of a sob from Tommy Hadden.

“God, if there was another ship!” cried Carthew of a sudden.

Wicks started and looked aloft with the trick of all seamen, and shuddered as he saw the hanging figure on the royal yard.

“If I went aloft, I'd fall,” he said simply. “I'm done up.”

It was Amalu who volunteered, climbed to the very truck, swept the fading horizon, and announced nothing within sight.

“No odds,” said Wicks. “We can't sleep ...”

“Sleep!” echoed Carthew; and it seemed as if the ​whole of Shakespeare's Macbeth thundered at the gallop through his mind.

“Well, then, we can't sit and chitter here,” said Wicks, “till we've cleaned ship; and I can't turn to till I've had gin, and the gin's in the cabin, and who's to fetch it?”

“I will,” said Carthew, “if any one has matches.”

Amalu passed him a box, and he went aft and down the companion and into the cabin, stumbling upon bodies. Then he struck a match, and his looks fell upon two living eyes.

“Well?” asked Mac, for it was he who still survived in that shambles of a cabin.

“It's done; they're all dead,” answered Carthew.

“Christ!” said the Irishman, and fainted.

The gin was found in the dead captain's cabin; it was brought on deck, and all hands had a dram, and attacked their farther task. The night was come, the moon would not be up for hours; a lamp was set on the main hatch to light Amalu as he washed down decks; and the galley lantern was taken to guide the others in their graveyard business. Holdorsen, Hemstead, Trent, and Goddedaal were first disposed of, the last still breathing as he went over the side; Wallen followed; and then Wicks, steadied by the gin, went aloft with a boathook and succeeded in dislodging Hardy. The Chinaman was their last task; he seemed to be light-headed, talked aloud in his unknown language as they brought him up, and it was only with the splash of his sinking body that the gibberish ceased. Brown, by common consent, was left alone. Flesh and blood could go no further.

All this time they had been drinking undiluted gin like water; three bottles stood broached in different quarters; and none passed without a gulp. Tommy collapsed against the mainmast; Wicks fell ​on his face on the poop ladder and moved no more; Amalu had vanished unobserved. Carthew was the last afoot: he stood swaying at the break of the poop, and the lantern, which he still carried, swung with his movement. His head hummed; it swarmed with broken thoughts; memory of that day's abominations flared up and died down within him like the light of a lamp in a strong draught. And then he had a drunkard's inspiration.

“There must be no more of this,” he thought, and stumbled once more below.

The absence of Holdorsen's body brought him to a stand. He stood and stared at the empty floor, and then remembered and smiled. From the captain's room he took the open case with one dozen and three bottles of gin, put the lantern inside, and walked precariously forth. Mac was once more conscious, his eyes haggard, his face drawn with pain and flushed with fever; and Carthew remembered he had never been seen to, had lain there helpless, and was so to lie all night, injured, perhaps dying. But it was now too late; reason had now fled from that silent ship. If Carthew could get on deck again, it was as much as he could hope; and casting on the unfortunate a glance of pity, the tragic drunkard shouldered his way up the companion, dropped the case overboard, and fell in the scuppers helpless.

CHAPTER XXV.

A BAD BARGAIN.

With the first colour in the east, Carthew awoke and sat up. A while he gazed at the scroll of the morning bank and the spars and hanging canvas of the brig, ​like a man who wakes in a strange bed, with a child's simplicity of wonder. He wondered above all what ailed him, what he had lost, what disfavour had been done him, which he knew he should resent, yet had forgotten. And then, like a river bursting through a dam, the truth rolled on him its instantaneous volume: his memory teemed with speech and pictures that he should never again forget; and he sprang to his feet, stood a moment hand to brow, and began to walk violently to and fro by the companion. As he walked, he wrung his hands. “God—God—God,” he kept saying, with no thought of prayer, uttering a mere voice of agony.

The time may have been long or short, it was perhaps minutes, perhaps only seconds, ere he awoke to find himself observed, and saw the captain sitting up and watching him over the break of the poop, a strange blindness as of fever in his eyes, a haggard knot of corrugations on his brow. Cain saw himself in a mirror. For a flash they looked upon each other, and then glanced guiltily aside; and Carthew fled from the eye of his accomplice, and stood leaning on the taffrail.

An hour went by, while the day came brighter, and the sun rose and drank up the clouds: an hour of silence in the ship, an hour of agony beyond narration for the sufferers. Brown's gabbling prayers, the cries of the sailors in the rigging, strains of the dead Hemstead's minstrelsy, ran together in Carthew's mind, with sickening iteration. He neither acquitted nor condemned himself: he did not think, he suffered. In the bright water into which he stared, the pictures changed and were repeated: the baresark rage of Goddedaal; the blood-red light of the sunset into which they had run forth; the face of the babbling Chinaman as they cast him over; the face of the captain, seen a moment since, as he awoke from drunkenness into remorse. And time passed, and ​the sun swam higher, and his torment was not abated.

Then were fulfilled many sayings, and the weakest of these condemned brought relief and healing to the others. Amalu the drudge awoke (like the rest) to sickness of body and distress of mind; but the habit of obedience ruled in that simple spirit, and appalled to be so late, he went direct into the galley, kindled the fire, and began to get breakfast. At the rattle of dishes, the snapping of the fire, and the thin smoke that went up straight into the air, the spell was lifted. The condemned felt once more the good dry land of habit under foot; they touched again the familiar guide-ropes of sanity; they were restored to a sense of the blessed revolution and return of all things earthly. The captain drew a bucket of water and began to bathe. Tommy sat up, watched him awhile, and slowly followed his example; and Carthew, remembering his last thoughts of the night before, hastened to the cabin.

Mac was awake; perhaps had not slept. Over his head Goddedaal's canary twittered shrilly from its cage.

“How are you?” asked Carthew.

“Me arrum's broke,” returned Mac; “but I can stand that. It's this place I can't abide. I was coming on deck anyway.”

“Stay where you are, though,” said Carthew. “It's deadly hot above, and there's no wind. I'll wash out this——” and he paused, seeking a word and not finding one for the grisly foulness of the cabin.

“Faith, I'll be obliged to ye, then,” replied the Irishman. He spoke mild and meek, like a sick child with its mother. There was now no violence in the violent man; and as Carthew fetched a bucket and swab and the steward's sponge, and began to cleanse the field of battle, he alternately watched him ​or shut his eyes and sighed like a man near fainting. “I have to ask all your pardons,” he began again presently, “and the more shame to me as I got ye into trouble and couldn't do nothing when it came. Ye saved me life, sir; ye're a clane shot.”

“For God's sake, don't talk of it!” cried Carthew. “It can't be talked of; you don't know what it was. It was nothing down here; they fought. On deck—Oh, my God!” And Carthew, with the bloody sponge pressed to his face, struggled a moment with hysteria.

“Kape cool, Mr. Cart'ew. It's done now,” said Mac; “and ye may bless God ye're not in pain and helpless in the bargain.”

There was no more said by one or other, and the cabin was pretty well cleansed when a stroke on the ship's bell summoned Carthew to breakfast. Tommy had been busy in the meanwhile; he had hauled the whaleboat close aboard, and already lowered into it a small keg of beef that he found ready broached beside the galley door; it was plain he had but the one idea—to escape.

“We have a shipful of stores to draw upon,” he said. “Well, what are we staying for? Let's get off at once for Hawaii. I've begun preparing already.”

“Mac has his arm broken,” observed Carthew; “how would he stand the voyage?”

“A broken arm?” repeated the captain. “That all? I'll set it after breakfast. I thought he was dead like the rest. That madman hit out like——” and there, at the evocation of the battle, his voice ceased and the talk died with it.

After breakfast, the three white men went down into the cabin.

“I've come to set your arm,” said the captain.

“I beg your pardon, captain,” replied Mac; “but ​the firrst thing ye got to do is to get this ship to sea. We'll talk of me arrum after that.”

“Oh, there's no such blooming hurry,” returned Wicks.

“When the next ship sails in, ye'll tell me stories!” retorted Mac.

“But there's nothing so unlikely in the world,” objected Carthew.

“Don't be deceivin' yourself,” said Mac. “If ye want a ship, divil a one'll look near ye in six year; but if ye don't, ye may take my word for ut, we'll have a squadron layin' here.”

“That's what I say,” cried Tommy; “that's what I call sense! Let's stock that whaleboat and be off.”

“And what will Captain Wicks be thinking of the whaleboat?” asked the Irishman.

“I don't think of it at all,” said Wicks. “We've a smart-looking brig under foot; that's all the whaleboat I want.”

“Excuse me!” cried Tommy. “That's childish talk. You've got a brig, to be sure, and what use is she? You daren't go anywhere in her. What port are you to sail for?”

“For the port of Davy Jones's Locker, my son,” replied the captain. “This brig's going to be lost at sea. I'll tell you where, too, and that's about forty miles to windward of Kauai. We're going to stay by her till she's down; and once the masts are under, she's the Flying Scud no more, and we never heard of such a brig; and it's the crew of the schooner Currency Lass that comes ashore in the boat, and takes the first chance to Sydney.”

“Captain dear, that's the first Christian word I've heard of ut!” cried Mac. “And now, just let me arrum be, jewel, and get the brig outside.”

“I'm as anxious as yourself, Mac,” returned Wicks; ​“but there's not wind enough to swear by. So let's see your arm, and no more talk.”

The arm was set and splinted; the body of Brown fetched from the forepeak, where it lay still and cold, and committed to the waters of the lagoon; and the washing of the cabin rudely finished. All these were done ere mid-day; and it was past three when the first cat's-paw ruffled the lagoon, and the wind came in a dry squall, which presently sobered to a steady breeze.

The interval was passed by all in feverish impatience, and by one of the party in secret and extreme concern of mind. Captain Wicks was a fore-and-aft sailor; he could take a schooner through a Scotch reel, felt her mouth and divined her temper like a rider with a horse; she, on her side, recognising her master and following his wishes like a dog. But by a not very unusual train of circumstance, the man's dexterity was partial and circumscribed. On a schooner's deck he was Rembrandt or (at the least) Mr. Whistler; on board a brig he was Pierre Grassou. Again and again in the course of the morning, he had reasoned out his policy and rehearsed his orders; and ever with the same depression and weariness. It was guess-work; it was chance; the ship might behave as he expected, and might not; suppose she failed him, he stood there helpless, beggared of all the proved resources of experience. Had not all hands been so weary, had he not feared to communicate his own misgivings, he could have towed her out. But these reasons sufficed, and the most he could do was to take all possible precautions. Accordingly he had Carthew aft, explained what was to be done with anxious patience, and visited along with him the various sheets and braces.

“I hope I'll remember,” said Carthew. “It seems awfully muddled.”

​“It's the rottenest kind of rig,” the captain admitted: “all blooming pocket-handkerchiefs! And not one sailor-man on deck! Ah, if she'd only been a brigantine, now! But it's lucky the passage is so plain; there's no manœuvring to mention. We get under way before the wind, and run right so till we begin to get foul of the island; then we haul our wind and lie as near south-east as may be till we're on that line; 'bout ship there and stand straight out on the port tack. Catch the idea?”

“Yes, I see the idea,” replied Carthew, rather dismally, and the two incompetents studied for a long time in silence the complicated gear above their heads.

But the time came when these rehearsals must be put in practice. The sails were lowered, and all hands heaved the anchor short. The whaleboat was then cut adrift, the upper topsails and the spanker set, the yards braced up, and the spanker sheet hauled out to starboard.

“Heave away on your anchor, Mr. Carthew.”

“Anchor's gone, sir.”

“Set jibs.”

It was done, and the brig still hung enchanted. Wicks, his head full of a schooner's mainsail, turned his mind to the spanker. First he hauled in the sheet, and then he hauled it out, with no result.

“Brail the damned thing up!” he bawled at last, with a red face. “There ain't no sense in it.”

It was the last stroke of bewilderment for the poor captain, that he had no sooner brailed up the spanker than the vessel came before the wind. The laws of nature seemed to him to be suspended; he was like a man in a world of pantomime tricks; the cause of any result, and the probable result of any action, equally concealed from him. He was the more careful not to shake the nerve of his amateur assistants. He stood there with a face like a torch; ​but he gave his orders with aplomb, and indeed, now the ship was under weigh, supposed his difficulties over.

The lower topsails and courses were then set, and the brig began to walk the water like a thing of life, her fore-foot discoursing music, the birds flying and crying over her spars. Bit by bit the passage began to open and the blue sea to show between the flanking breakers on the reef; bit by bit, on the starboard bow, the low land of the islet began to heave closer aboard. The yards were braced up, the spanker sheet hauled aft again; the brig was close hauled, lay down to her work like a thing in earnest, and had soon drawn near to the point of advantage, where she might stay and lie out of the lagoon in a single tack.

Wicks took the wheel himself, swelling with success. He kept the brig full to give her heels, and began to bark his orders: “Ready about. Helm's a-lee. Tacks and sheets. Mainsail haul.” And then the fatal words: “That'll do your mainsail; jump forrard and haul round your foreyards.”

To stay a square-rigged ship is an affair of knowledge and swift sight: and a man used to the succinct evolutions of a schooner will always tend to be too hasty with a brig. It was so now. The order came too soon; the topsails set flat aback; the ship was in irons. Even yet, had the helm been reversed, they might have saved her. But to think of a stern-board at all, far more to think of profiting by one, were foreign to the schooner-sailor's mind. Wicks made haste instead to wear ship, a manœuvre for which room was wanting, and the Flying Scud took ground on a bank of sand and coral about twenty minutes before five.

Wicks was no hand with a square-rigger, and he had shown it. But he was a sailor and a born ​captain of men for all homely purposes, where intellect is not required and an eye in a man's head and a heart under his jacket will suffice. Before the others had time to understand the misfortune, he was bawling fresh orders, and had the sails clewed up, and took soundings round the ship.

“She lies lovely,” he remarked, and ordered out a boat with the starboard anchor.

“Here! steady!” cried Tommy. “You ain't going to turn us to, to warp her off?”

“I am though,” replied Wicks.

“I won't set a hand to such tomfoolery for one,” replied Tommy. “I'm dead beat.” He went and sat down doggedly on the main hatch. “You got us on; get us off again,” he added.

Carthew and Wicks turned to each other.

“Perhaps you don't know how tired we are,” said Carthew.

“The tide's flowing!” cried the captain. “You wouldn't have me miss a rising tide?”

“Oh, gammon! there's tides to-morrow!” retorted Tommy.

“And I'll tell you what,” added Carthew, “the breeze is failing fast, and the sun will soon be down. We may get into all kinds of fresh mess in the dark and with nothing but light airs.”

“I don't deny it,” answered Wicks, and stood awhile as if in thought. “But what I can't make out,” he began again, with agitation, “what I can't make out is what you're made of! To stay in this place is beyond me. There's the bloody sun going down—and to stay here is beyond me!”

The others looked upon him with horrified surprise. This fall of their chief pillar—this irrational passion in the practical man, suddenly barred out of his true sphere—the sphere of action—shocked and daunted them. But it gave to another and unseen hearer the chance for which he had been waiting. ​Mac, on the striking of the brig, had crawled up the companion, and he now showed himself and spoke up.

“Captain Wicks,” said he, “it's me that brought this trouble on the lot of ye. I'm sorry for ut, I ask all your pardons, and if there's any one can say 'I forgive ye,' it'll make my soul the lighter.”

Wicks stared upon the man in amaze; then his self-control returned to him. “We're all in glass houses here,” he said; “we ain't going to turn to and throw stones. I forgive you, sure enough; and much good may it do you!”

The others spoke to the same purpose.

“I thank ye for ut, and 'tis done like gentlemen,” said Mac. “But there's another thing I have upon my mind. I hope we're all Prodestan's here?”

It appeared they were; it seemed a small thing for the Protestant religion to rejoice in!

“Well, that's as it should be,” continued Mac. “And why shouldn't we say the Lord's Prayer? There can't be no hurt in ut.”

He had the same quiet, pleading, childlike way with him as in the morning; and the others accepted his proposal, and knelt down without a word.

“Knale if ye like!” said he. “I'll stand.” And he covered his eyes.

So the prayer was said to the accompaniment of the surf and seabirds, and all rose refreshed and felt lightened of a load. Up to then, they had cherished their guilty memories in private, or only referred to them in the heat of a moment and fallen immediately silent. Now they had faced their remorse in company, and the worst seemed over. Nor was it only that. But the petition “Forgive us our trespasses,” falling in so apposite after they had them​selves forgiven the immediate author of their miseries, sounded like an absolution.

Tea was taken on deck in the time of the sunset, and not long after the five castaways—castaways once more—lay down to sleep.

Day dawned windless and hot. Their slumbers had been too profound to be refreshing, and they woke listless, and sat up, and stared about them with dull eyes. Only Wicks, smelling a hard day's work ahead, was more alert. He went first to the well, sounded it once and then a second time, and stood awhile with a grim look, so that all could see he was dissatisfied. Then he shook himself, stripped to the buff, clambered on the rail, drew himself up and raised his arms to plunge. The dive was never taken. He stood instead transfixed, his eyes on the horizon.

“Hand up that glass,” he said.

In a trice they were all swarming aloft, the nude captain leading with the glass.

On the northern horizon was a finger of grey smoke, straight in the windless air like a point of admiration.

“What do you make it?” they asked of Wicks.

“She's truck down,” he replied; “no telling yet. By the way the smoke builds, she must be heading right here.”

“What can she be?”

“She might be a China mail,” returned Wicks, “and she might be a blooming man-of-war, come to look for castaways. Here! This ain't the time to stand staring. On deck, boys!”

He was the first on deck, as he had been the first aloft, handed down the ensign, bent it again to the signal halliards, and ran it up union down.

“Now hear me,” he said, jumping into his trousers, “and everything I say you grip on to. If that's a man-of-war, she'll be in a tearing hurry; all these ​ships are what don't do nothing and have their expenses paid. That's our chance; for we'll go with them, and they won't take the time to look twice or to ask a question. I'm Captain Trent; Carthew, you're Goddedaal; Tommy, you're Hardy; Mac's Brown; Amalu—hold hard! we can't make a Chinaman of him! Ah Wing must have deserted; Amalu stowed away; and I turned him to as cook, and was never at the bother to sign him. Catch the idea? Say your names.”

And that pale company recited their lesson earnestly.

“What were the names of the other two?” he asked. “Him Carthew shot in the companion, and the one I caught in the jaw on the main top-gallant?”

“Holdorsen and Wallen,” said some one.

“Well, they're drowned,” continued Wicks; “drowned alongside trying to lower a boat. We had a bit of a squall last night: that's how we got ashore.” He ran and squinted at the compass. “Squall out of nor'-nor'-west-half-west; blew hard; every one in a mess, falls jammed, and Holdorsen and Wallen spilt overboard. See? Clear your blooming heads!” He was in his jacket now, and spoke with a feverish impatience and contention that rang like anger.

“But is it safe?” asked Tommy.

“Safe?” bellowed the captain. “We're standing on the drop, you moon-calf! If that ship's bound for China (which she don't look to be), we're lost as soon as we arrive; if she's bound the other way, she comes from China, don't she? Well, if there's a man on board of her that ever clapped eyes on Trent or any blooming hand out of this brig, we'll all be in irons in two hours. Safe! no, it ain't safe; it's a beggarly last chance to shave the gallows, and that's what it is.”

​At this convincing picture, fear took hold on all.

“Hadn't we a hundred times better stay by the brig?” cried Carthew. “They would give us a hand to float her off.”

“You'll make me waste this holy day in chattering!” cried Wicks. “Look here, when I sounded the well this morning, there was two foot of water there against eight inches last night. What's wrong? I don't know; might be nothing; might be the worst kind of smash. And then, there we are in for a thousand miles in an open boat, if that's your taste!”

“But it may be nothing, and anyway their carpenters are bound to help us repair her,” argued Carthew.

“Moses Murphy!” cried the captain. “How did she strike? Bows on, I believe. And she's down by the head now. If any carpenter comes tinkering here, where'll he go first? Down in the forepeak, I suppose! And then, how about all that blood among the chandlery? You would think you were a lot of members of Parliament discussing Plimsoll; and you're just a pack of murderers with the halter round your neck. Any other ass got any time to waste? No? Thank God for that! Now, all hands! I'm going below, and I leave you here on deck. You get the boat cover off that boat; then you turn to and open the specie chest. There are five of us; get five chests, and divide the specie equal among the five—put it at the bottom—and go at it like tigers. Get blankets, or canvas, or clothes, so it won't rattle. It'll make five pretty heavy chests, but we can't help that. You, Carthew—dash me!—You, Mr. Goddedaal, come below. We've our share before us.”

And he cast another glance at the smoke, and hurried below with Carthew at his heels.

​The logs were found in the main cabin behind the canary's cage; two of them, one kept by Trent, one by Goddedaal. Wicks looked first at one, then at the other, and his lip stuck out.

“Can you forge hand of write?” he asked.

“No,” said Carthew.

“There's luck for you—no more can I!” cried the captain. “Hullo! here's worse yet, here's this Goddedaal up to date; he must have filled it in before supper. See for yourself: 'Smoke observed.—Captain Kirkup and five hands of the schooner Currency Lass.' Ah! this is better,” he added, turning to the other log. “The old man ain't written anything for a clear fortnight. We'll dispose of your log altogether, Mr. Goddedaal, and stick to the old man's—to mine, I mean; only I ain't going to write it up, for reasons of my own. You are. You're going to sit down right here and fill it in the way I tell you.”

“How to explain the loss of mine?” asked Carthew.

“You never kept one,” replied the captain. “Gross neglect of duty. You'll catch it.”

“And the change of writing?” resumed Carthew. “You began; why do you stop and why do I come in? And you'll have to sign anyway.”

“O! I've met with an accident and can't write,” replied Wicks.

“An accident?” repeated Carthew. “It don't sound natural. What kind of an accident?”

Wicks spread his hand face-up on the table, and drove a knife through his palm.

“That kind of an accident,” said he. “There's a way to draw to windward of most difficulties, if you've a head on your shoulders.” He began to bind up his hand with a handkerchief, glancing the while over Goddedaal's log. “Hullo!” he said, “this'll never do for us—this is an impossible kind of a yarn. Here, ​to begin with, is this Captain Trent trying some fancy course, leastways he's a thousand miles to south'ard of the great circle. And here, it seems, he was close up with this island on the sixth, sails all these days, and is close up with it again by daylight on the eleventh.”

“Goddedaal said they had the deuce's luck,” said Carthew.

“Well, it don't look like real life—that's all I can say,” returned Wicks.

“It's the way it was, though,” argued Carthew.

“So it is; and what the better are we for that, if it don't look so?” cried the captain, sounding unwonted depths of art criticism. “Here! try and see if you can't tie this bandage; I'm bleeding like a pig.”

As Carthew sought to adjust the handkerchief, his patient seemed sunk in a deep muse, his eye veiled, his mouth partly open. The job was yet scarce done, when he sprang to his feet.

“I have it,” he broke out, and ran on deck. “Here, boys!” he cried, “we didn't come here on the eleventh; we came in here on the evening of the sixth, and lay here ever since becalmed. As soon as you've done with these chests,” he added, “you can turn to and roll out beef and water breakers; it'll look more shipshape—like as if we were getting ready for the boat voyage.”

And he was back again in a moment, cooking the new log. Goddedaal's was then carefully destroyed, and a hunt began for the ship's papers. Of all the agonies of that breathless morning, this was perhaps the most poignant. Here and there the two men searched, cursing, cannoning together, streaming with heat, freezing with terror. News was bawled down to them that the ship was indeed a man-of-war, that she was close up, that she was lowering a boat; and still they sought in vain. By what accident they ​missed the iron box with the money and accounts, is hard to fancy; but they did. And the vital documents were found at last in the pocket of Trent's shore-going coat, where he had left them when last he came on board.

Wicks smiled for the first time that morning. “None too soon,” said he. “And now for it! Take these others for me; I'm afraid I'll get them mixed if I keep both.”

“What are they?” Carthew asked.

“They're the Kirkup and Currency Lass papers,” he replied. “Pray God we need 'em again!”

“Boat's inside the lagoon, sir,” hailed down Mac, who sat by the skylight doing sentry while the others worked.

“Time we were on deck, then, Mr. Goddedaal,” said Wicks.

As they turned to leave the cabin, the canary burst into piercing song.

“My God!” cried Carthew, with a gulp, “we can't leave that wretched bird to starve. It was poor Goddedaal's.”

“Bring the bally thing along!” cried the captain.

And they went on deck.

An ugly brute of a modern man-of-war lay just without the reef, now quite inert, now giving a flap or two with her propeller. Nearer hand, and just within, a big white boat came skimming to the stroke of many oars, her ensign blowing at the stern.

“One word more,” said Wicks, after he had taken in the scene. “Mac, you've been in China ports? All right; then you can speak for yourself. The rest of you I kept on board all the time we were in Hongkong, hoping you would desert; but you fooled me and stuck to the brig. That'll make your lying come easier.”

​The boat was now close at hand; a boy in the stern sheets was the only officer, and a poor one plainly, for the men were talking as they pulled.

“Thank God, they've only sent a kind of a middy!” ejaculated Wicks. “Here you, Hardy, stand for'ard! I'll have no deck hands on my quarter-deck,” he cried, and the reproof braced the whole crew like a cold douche.

The boat came alongside with perfect neatness, and the boy officer stepped on board, where he was respectfully greeted by Wicks.

“You the master of this ship?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said Wicks. “Trent is my name, and this is the Flying Scud of Hull.”

“You seem to have got into a mess,” said the officer.

“If you'll step aft with me here, I'll tell you all there is of it,” said Wicks.

“Why, man, you're shaking!” cried the officer.

“So would you, perhaps, if you had been in the same berth,” returned Wicks; and he told the whole story of the rotten water, the long calm, the squall, the seamen drowned; glibly and hotly; talking, with his head in the lion's mouth, like one pleading in the dock. I heard the same tale from the same narrator in the saloon in San Francisco; and even then his bearing filled me with suspicion. But the officer was no observer.

“Well, the captain is in no end of a hurry,” said he; “but I was instructed to give you all the assistance in my power, and signal back for another boat if more hands were necessary. What can I do for you?”

“O, we won't keep you no time,” replied Wicks cheerily. “We're all ready, bless you—men's chests, chronometer, papers and all.”

“Do you mean to leave her?” cried the officer. ​“She seems to me to lie nicely; can't we get your ship off?”

“So we could, and no mistake; but how we're to keep her afloat's another question. Her bows is stove in,” replied Wicks.

The officer coloured to the eyes. He was incompetent and knew he was; thought he was already detected, and feared to expose himself again. There was nothing further from his mind than that the captain should deceive him; if the captain was pleased, why, so was he. “All right,” he said. “Tell your men to get their chests aboard.”

“Mr. Goddedaal, turn the hands to to get the chests aboard,” said Wicks.

The four Currency Lasses had waited the while on tenter-hooks. This welcome news broke upon them like the sun at midnight; and Hadden burst into a storm of tears, sobbing aloud as he heaved upon the tackle. But the work went none the less briskly forward; chests, men, and bundles were got over the side with alacrity; the boat was shoved off; it moved out of the long shadow of the Flying Scud, and its bows were pointed at the passage.

So much, then, was accomplished. The sham wreck had passed muster; they were clear of her, they were safe away; and the water widened between them and her damning evidences. On the other hand, they were drawing nearer to the ship of war, which might very well prove to be their prison and a hangman's cart to bear them to the gallows of which they had not yet learned either whence she came or whither she was bound; and the doubt weighed upon their heart like mountains.

It was Wicks who did the talking. The sound was small in Carthew's ears, like the voices of men miles away, but the meaning of each word struck home to him like a bullet. “What did you say your ship was?” inquired Wicks.

​“Tempest, don't you know?” returned the officer.

Don't you know? What could that mean? Perhaps nothing: perhaps that the ships had met already. Wicks took his courage in both hands. “Where is she bound?” he asked.

“Oh, we're just looking in at all these miserable islands here,” said the officer. “Then we bear up for San Francisco.”

“Oh, yes, you're from China ways, like us?” pursued Wicks.

“Hong Kong,” said the officer, and spat over the side.

Hong Kong. Then the game was up; as soon as they set foot on board, they would be seized; the wreck would be examined, the blood found, the lagoon perhaps dredged, and the bodies of the dead would reappear to testify. An impulse almost incontrollable bade Carthew rise from the thwart, shriek out aloud, and leap overboard; it seemed so vain a thing to dissemble longer, to dally with the inevitable, to spin out some hundred seconds more of agonised suspense, with shame and death thus visibly approaching. But the indomitable Wicks persevered. His face was like a skull, his voice scarce recognisable; the dullest of men and officers (it seemed) must have remarked that tell-tale countenance and broken utterance. And still he persevered, bent upon certitude.

“Nice place, Hong Kong?” he said.

“I'm sure I don't know,” said the officer. “Only a day and a half there; called for orders and came straight on here. Never heard of such a beastly cruise.” And he went on describing and lamenting the untoward fortunes of the Tempest.

But Wicks and Carthew heeded him no longer. They lay back on the gunnel, breathing deep, sunk in a stupor of the body: the mind within still nimbly and agreeably at work, measuring the past danger, exulting in the present relief, numbering with ecstasy ​their ultimate chances of escape. For the voyage in the man-of-war they were now safe; yet a few more days of peril, activity, and presence of mind in San Francisco, and the whole horrid tale was blotted out; and Wicks again became Kirkup, and Goddedaal became Carthew—men beyond all shot of possible suspicion, men who had never heard of the Flying Scud, who had never been in sight of Midway Reef.

So they came alongside, under many craning heads of seamen and projecting mouths of guns; so they climbed on board somnambulous, and looked blindly about them at the tall spars, the white decks, and the crowding ship's company, and heard men as from far away, and answered them at random.

And then a hand fell softly on Carthew's shoulder.

“Why, Norrie, old chappie, where have you dropped from? All the world's been looking for you. Don't you know you've come into your kingdom?”

He turned, beheld the face of his old schoolmate Sebright, and fell unconscious at his feet.

The doctor was attending him, a while later, in Lieutenant Sebright's cabin, when he came to himself. He opened his eyes, looked hard in the strange face, and spoke with a kind of solemn vigour.

“Brown must go the same road,” he said; “now or never.” And then paused, and his reason coming to him with more clearness, spoke again: “What was I saying? Where am I? Who are you?”

“I am the doctor of the Tempest,” was the reply. “You are in Lieutenant Sebright's berth, and you may dismiss all concern from your mind. Your troubles are over, Mr. Carthew.”

“Why do you call me that?” he asked. “Ah, I ​remember—Sebright knew me! Oh!” and he groaned and shook. “Send down Wicks to me; I must see Wicks at once!” he cried, and seized the doctor's wrist with unconscious violence.

“All right,” said the doctor. “Let's make a bargain. You swallow down this draught, and I'll go and fetch Wicks.”

And he gave the wretched man an opiate that laid him out within ten minutes and in all likelihood preserved his reason.

It was the doctor's next business to attend to Mac; and he found occasion, while engaged upon his arm, to make the man repeat the names of the rescued crew. It was now the turn of the captain, and there is no doubt he was no longer the man that we have seen; sudden relief, the sense of perfect safety, a square meal and a good glass of grog, had all combined to relax his vigilance and depress his energy.

“When was this done?” asked the doctor, looking at the wound.

“More than a week ago,” replied Wicks, thinking singly of his log.

“Hey?” cried the doctor, and he raised his hand and looked the captain in the eyes.

“I don't remember exactly,” faltered Wicks.

And at this remarkable falsehood, the suspicions of the doctor were at once quadrupled.

“By the way, which of you is called Wicks?” he asked easily.

“What's that?” snapped the captain, falling white as paper.

“Wicks,” repeated the doctor; “which of you is he? that's surely a plain question.”

Wicks stared upon his questioner in silence.

“Which is Brown, then?” pursued the doctor.

“What are you talking of? what do you mean by this?” cried Wicks, snatching his half-bandaged hand ​away, so that the blood sprinkled in the surgeon's face.

He did not trouble to remove it. Looking straight at his victim, he pursued his questions. “Why must Brown go the same way?” he asked.

Wicks fell trembling on a locker. “Carthew's told you,” he cried.

“No,” replied the doctor, “he has not. But he and you between you have set me thinking, and I think there's something wrong.”

“Give me some grog,” said Wicks. “I'd rather tell than have you find out. I'm damned if it's half as bad as what any one would think.”

And with the help of a couple of strong grogs, the tragedy of the Flying Scud was told for the first time.

It was a fortunate series of accidents that brought the story to the doctor. He understood and pitied the position of these wretched men, and came whole-heartedly to their assistance. He and Wicks and Carthew (so soon as he was recovered) held a hundred councils and prepared a policy for San Francisco. It was he who certified “Goddedaal” unfit to be moved and smuggled Carthew ashore under cloud of night; it was he who kept Wicks's wound open that he might sign with his left hand; he who took all their Chile silver and (in the course of the first day) got it converted for them into portable gold. He used his influence in the wardroom to keep the tongues of the young officers in order, so that Carthew's identification was kept out of the papers. And he rendered another service yet more important. He had a friend in San Francisco, a millionaire; to this man he privately presented Carthew as a young gentleman come newly into a huge estate, but troubled with Jew debts which he was trying to settle on the quiet. The millionaire came readily to help; and it was ​with his money that the wrecker gang was to be fought. What was his name, out of a thousand guesses? It was Douglas Longhurst.

As long as the Currency Lasses could all disappear under fresh names, it did not greatly matter if the brig were bought, or any small discrepancies should be discovered in the wrecking. The identification of one of their number had changed all that. The smallest scandal must now direct attention to the movements of Norris. It would be asked how he who had sailed in a schooner from Sydney, had turned up so shortly after in a brig out of Hong Kong; and from one question to another all his original shipmates were pretty sure to be involved. Hence arose naturally the idea of preventing danger, profiting by Carthew's new-found wealth, and buying the brig under an alias; and it was put in hand with equal energy and caution. Carthew took lodgings alone under a false name, picked up Bellairs at random, and commissioned him to buy the wreck.

“What figure, if you please?” the lawyer asked.

“I want it bought,” replied Carthew. “I don't mind about the price.”

“Any price is no price,” said Bellairs. “Put a name upon it.”

“Call it ten thousand pounds then, if you like!” said Carthew.

In the meanwhile, the captain had to walk the streets, appear in the consulate, be cross-examined by Lloyd's agent, be badgered about his lost accounts, sign papers with his left hand, and repeat his lies to every skipper in San Francisco: not knowing at what moment he might run into the arms of some old friend who should hail him by the name of Wicks, or some new enemy who should be in a position to deny him that of Trent. And the latter incident did actually befall him, but was transformed ​by his stout countenance into an element of strength. It was in the consulate (of all untoward places) that he suddenly heard a big voice inquiring for Captain Trent. He turned with the customary sinking at his heart.

“You ain't Captain Trent!” said the stranger, falling back. “Why, what's all this? They tell me you're passing off as Captain Trent—Captain Jacob Trent—a man I knew since I was that high.”

“Oh, you're thinking of my uncle as had the bank in Cardiff,” replied Wicks, with desperate aplomb.

“I declare I never knew he had a nevvy!” said the stranger.

“Well, you see he has!” says Wicks.

“And how is the old man?” asked the other.

“Fit as a fiddle,” answered Wicks, and was opportunely summoned by the clerk.

This alert was the only one until the morning of the sale, when he was once more alarmed by his interview with Jim; and it was with some anxiety that he attended the sale, knowing only that Carthew was to be represented, but neither who was to represent him nor what were the instructions given. I suppose Captain Wicks is a good life. In spite of his personal appearance and his own known uneasiness, I suppose he is secure from apoplexy, or it must have struck him there and then, as he looked on at the stages of that insane sale and saw the old brig and her not very valuable cargo knocked down at last to a total stranger for ten thousand pounds.

It had been agreed that he was to avoid Carthew, and above all Carthew's lodging, so that no connection might be traced between the crew and the pseudonymous purchaser. But the hour for caution was gone by, and he caught a tram and made all speed to Mission Street.

​Carthew met him in the door.

“Come away, come away from here,” said Carthew; and when they were clear of the house, “All's up!” he added.

“Oh, you've heard of the sale, then?” said Wicks.

“The sale!” cried Carthew. “I declare I had forgotten it.” And he told of the voice in the telephone, and the maddening question: “Why did you want to buy the Flying Scud?”

This circumstance, coming on the back of the monstrous improbabilities of the sale, was enough to have shaken the reason of Immanuel Kant. The earth seemed banded together to defeat them; the stones and the boys on the street appeared to be in possession of their guilty secret. Flight was their one thought. The treasure of the Currency Lass they packed in waist-belts, expressed their chests to an imaginary address in British Columbia, and left San Francisco the same afternoon, booked for Los Angeles.

The next day they pursued their retreat by the Southern Pacific route, which Carthew followed on his way to England; but the other three branched off for Mexico.

EPILOGUE.

TO WILL H. LOW.

Dear Low: The other day (at Manihiki of all places) I had the pleasure to meet Dodd. We sat some two hours in the neat, little, toy-like church, set with pews after the manner of Europe, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the style (I suppose) of the New Jerusalem. The natives, who are decidedly the​most attractive inhabitants of this planet, crowded round us in the pew, and fawned upon and patted us; and here it was I put my questions, and Dodd answered me.

I first carried him back to the night in Barbizon when Carthew told his story, and asked him what was done about Bellairs. It seemed he had put the matter to his friend at once, and that Carthew took it with an inimitable lightness. “He's poor, and I'm rich,” he had said. “I can afford to smile at him. I go somewhere else, that's all—somewhere that's far away and dear to get to. Persia would be found to answer, I fancy. No end of a place, Persia. Why not come with me?” And they had left the next afternoon for Constantinople, on their way to Teheran. Of the shyster, it is only known (by a newspaper paragraph) that he returned somehow to San Francisco and died in the hospital.

“Now there's another point,” said I. “There you are off to Persia with a millionaire, and rich yourself. How come you here in the South Seas, running a trader?”

He said, with a smile, that I had not yet heard of Jim's last bankruptcy. “I was about cleaned out once more,” he said; “and then it was that Carthew had this schooner built, and put me in as supercargo. It's his yacht and it's my trader; and as nearly all the expenses go to the yacht, I do pretty well. As for Jim, he's right again; one of the best businesses, they say, in the West—fruit, cereals, and real estate; and he has a Tartar of a partner now—Nares, no less. Nares will keep him straight, Nares has a big head. They have their country-places next door at Saucelito, and I stayed with them time about, the last time I was on the coast. Jim had a paper of his own—I think he has a notion of being senator one of these days—and he wanted me to throw up the schooner and come and write his editorials. He holds ​strong views on the State Constitution, and so does Mamie.”

“And what became of the other three Currency Lasses after they left Carthew?” I inquired.

“Well, it seems they had a huge spree in the city of Mexico,” said Dodd; “and then Hadden and the Irishman took a turn at the gold fields in Venezuela, and Wicks went on alone to Valparaiso. There's a Kirkup in the Chilean navy to this day, I saw the name in the papers about the Balmaceda war. Hadden soon wearied of the mines, and I met him the other day in Sydney. The last news he had from Venezuela, Mac had been knocked over in an attack on the gold train. So there's only the three of them left, for Amalu scarcely counts. He lives on his own land in Maui, at the side of Hale-a-ka-la, where he keeps Goddedaal's canary; and they say he sticks to his dollars, which is a wonder in a Kanaka. He had a considerable pile to start with, for not only Hemstead's share but Carthew's was divided equally among the other four—Mac being counted.”

“What did that make for him altogether?” I could not help asking, for I had been diverted by the number of calculations in his narrative.

“One hundred and twenty-eight pounds nineteen shillings and eleven pence halfpenny,” he replied with composure. “That's leaving out what little he won at Van John. It's something for a Kanaka, you know.”

And about that time we were at last obliged to yield to the solicitations of our native admirers, and go to the pastor's house to drink green cocoanuts. The ship I was in was sailing the same night, for Dodd had been beforehand and got all the shell in the island; and though he pressed me to desert and return with him to Auckland (whither he was now bound to pick up Carthew) I was firm in my refusal.

The truth is, since I have been mixed up with Havens and Dodd in the design to publish the latter's ​narrative, I seem to feel no want for Carthew's society. Of course I am wholly modern in sentiment, and think nothing more noble than to publish people's private affairs at so much a line. They like it, and if they don't, they ought to. But a still small voice keeps telling me they will not like it always, and perhaps not always stand it. Memory besides supplies me with the face of a pressman (in the sacred phrase) who proved altogether too modern for one of his neighbours, and

Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum

as it were, marshalling us our way. I am in no haste to

—nos proecedens—

be that man's successor. Carthew has a record as “a clane shot,” and for some years Samoa will be good enough for me.

We agreed to separate, accordingly; but he took me on board in his own boat with the hard-wood fittings, and entertained me on the way with an account of his late visit to Butaritari, whither he had gone on an errand for Carthew, to see how Topelius was getting along, and, if necessary, to give him a helping hand. But Topelius was in great force, and had patronised and—well—out-manœuvred him.

“Carthew will be pleased,” said Dodd; “for there's no doubt they oppressed the man abominably when they were in the Currency Lass. It's diamond cut diamond now.”

This, I think, was the most of the news I got from my friend Loudon; and I hope I was well inspired, and have put all the questions to which you would be curious to hear an answer.

But there is one more that I daresay you are burning to put to myself; and that is, what your own ​name is doing in this place, cropping up (as it were uncalled-for) on the stern of our poor ship? If you were not born in Arcadia, you linger in fancy on its margin; your thoughts are busied with the flutes of antiquity, with daffodils, and the classic poplar, and the footsteps of the nymphs, and the elegant and moving aridity of ancient art. Why dedicate to you a tale of a caste so modern;—full of details of our barbaric manners and unstable morals;—full of the need and the lust of money, so that there is scarce a page in which the dollars do not jingle:—full of the unrest and movement of our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama—in the end, as blood-bespattered as an epic?

Well, you are a man interested in all problems of art, even the most vulgar; and it may amuse you to hear the genesis and growth of “The Wrecker.” On board the schooner Equator, almost within sight of the Johnstone Islands (if anybody knows where these are) and on a moonlit night when it was a joy to be alive, the authors were amused with several stories of the sale of wrecks. The subject tempted them; and they sat apart in the alley-way to discuss its possibilities. “What a tangle it would make,” suggested one, “if the wrong crew were aboard. But how to get the wrong crew there?”—“I have it!” cried the other; “the so-and-so affair!” For not so many months before, and not so many hundred miles from where we were then sailing, a proposition almost tantamount to that of Captain Trent had been made by a British skipper to some British castaways.

Before we turned in, the scaffolding of the tale had been put together. But the question of treatment was as usual more obscure. We had long been at once attracted and repelled by that very modern form of the police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn anywhere but at ​the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art. It seemed the cause might lie partly in the abrupt attack; and that if the tale were gradually approached, some of the characters introduced (as it were) beforehand, and the book started in the tone of a novel of manners and experience briefly treated, this defect might be lessened and our mystery seem to inhere in life. The tone of the age, its movement, the mingling of races and classes in the dollar hunt, the fiery and not quite unromantic struggle for existence with its changing trades and scenery, and two types in particular, that of the American handy-man of business and that of the Yankee merchant sailor—we agreed to dwell upon at some length, and make the woof to our not very precious warp. Hence Dodd's father, and Pinkerton, and Nares, and the Dromedary picnics, and the railway work in New South Wales—the last an unsolicited testimonial from the powers that be, for the tale was half written before I saw Carthew's squad toil in the rainy cutting at South Clifton, or heard from the engineer of his “young swell.” After we had invented at some expense of time this method of approaching and fortifying our police novel, it occurred to us it had been invented previously by someone else, and was in fact—however painfully different the results may seem—the method of Charles Dickens in his later work.

I see you staring. Here, you will say, is a pro​digious quantity of theory to our halfpenny worth of police novel; and withal not a shadow of an answer to your question.

Well, some of us like theory. After so long a piece of practice, these may be indulged for a few pages. And the answer is at hand. It was plainly desirable, from every point of view of convenience and contrast, that our hero and narrator should partly stand aside from those with whom he mingles, and be but a pressed-man in the dollar hunt. Thus it was that Loudon Dodd became a student of the plastic arts, and that our globe-trotting story came to visit Paris and look in at Barbizon. And thus it is, dear Low, that your name appears in the address of this epilogue.

For sure, if any person can here appreciate and read between the lines, it must be you—and one other, our friend. All the dominos will be transparent to your better knowledge; the statuary contract will be to you a piece of ancient history; and you will not have now heard for the first time of the dangers of Roussillon. Dead leaves from the Bas Breau, echoes from Lavenue's and the Rue Racine, memories of a common past, let these be your bookmarkers as you read. And if you care for naught else in the story, be a little pleased to breathe once more for a moment the airs of our youth.

THE END.

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Printed by Cassell & Company, Limited, La belle Sauvage, London, E.C.

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