A kindred wonder in my eyes was the nature of his courage. There was
never a braver man: he went out to welcome danger; an emergency (came it
never so sudden) strung him like a tonic. And yet, upon the other hand,
I have known none so nervous, so oppressed with possibilities, looking
upon the world at large, and the life of a sailor in particular, with
so constant and haggard a consideration of the ugly chances. All
his courage was in blood, not merely cold, but icy with reasoned
apprehension. He would lay our little craft rail under, and "hang on" in
a squall, until I gave myself up for lost, and the men were rushing
to their stations of their own accord. "There," he would say, "I guess
there's not a man on board would have hung on as long as I did that
time; they'll have to give up thinking me no schooner sailor. I guess
I can shave just as near capsizing as any other captain of this vessel,
drunk or sober." And then he would fall to repining and wishing himself
well out of the enterprise, and dilate on the peril of the seas, the
particular dangers of the schooner rig, which he abhorred, the various
ways in which we might go to the bottom, and the prodigious fleet of
ships that have sailed out in the course of history, dwindled from the
eyes of watchers, and returned no more. "Well," he would wind up, "I
guess it don't much matter. I can't see what any one wants to live for,
anyway. If I could get into some one else's apple-tree, and be about
twelve years old, and just stick the way I was, eating stolen apples, I
won't say. But there's no sense in this grown-up business--sailorising,
politics, the piety mill, and all the rest of it. Good clean drowning is
good enough for me." It is hard to imagine any more depressing talk for
a poor landsman on a dirty night; it is hard to imagine anything less
sailor-like (as sailors are supposed to be, and generally are) than this
persistent harping on the minor.


But I was to see more of the man's gloomy constancy ere the cruise was
at an end.

On the morning of the seventeenth day I came on deck, to find the
schooner under double reefs, and flying rather wild before a heavy run
of sea. Snoring trades and humming sails had been our portion hitherto.
We were already nearing the island. My restrained excitement had begun
again to overmaster me; and for some time my only book had been the
patent log that trailed over the taffrail, and my chief interest the
daily observation and our caterpillar progress across the chart. My
first glance, which was at the compass, and my second, which was at the
log, were all that I could wish. We lay our course; we had been doing
over eight since nine the night before; and I drew a heavy breath of
satisfaction. And then I know not what odd and wintry appearance of the
sea and sky knocked suddenly at my heart. I observed the schooner
to look more than usually small, the men silent and studious of the
weather. Nares, in one of his rusty humours, afforded me no shadow of a
morning salutation. He, too, seemed to observe the behaviour of the ship
with an intent and anxious scrutiny. What I liked still less, Johnson
himself was at the wheel, which he span busily, often with a visible
effort; and as the seas ranged up behind us, black and imminent, he kept
casting behind him eyes of animal swiftness, and drawing in his neck
between his shoulders, like a man dodging a blow. From these signs, I
gathered that all was not exactly for the best; and I would have given
a good handful of dollars for a plain answer to the questions which
I dared not put. Had I dared, with the present danger signal in the
captain's face, I should only have been reminded of my position as
supercargo--an office never touched upon in kindness--and advised, in
a very indigestible manner, to go below. There was nothing for it,
therefore, but to entertain my vague apprehensions as best I should be
able, until it pleased the captain to enlighten me of his own accord.
This he did sooner than I had expected; as soon, indeed, as the Chinaman
had summoned us to breakfast, and we sat face to face across the narrow
board.

"See here, Mr. Dodd," he began, looking at me rather queerly, "here is a
business point arisen. This sea's been running up for the last two days,
and now it's too high for comfort. The glass is falling, the wind is
breezing up, and I won't say but what there's dirt in it. If I lay her
to, we may have to ride out a gale of wind and drift God knows where--on
these French Frigate Shoals, for instance. If I keep her as she goes,
we'll make that island to-morrow afternoon, and have the lee of it to
lie under, if we can't make out to run in. The point you have to figure
on, is whether you'll take the big chances of that Captain Trent making
the place before you, or take the risk of something happening. I'm
to run this ship to your satisfaction," he added, with an ugly sneer.
"Well, here's a point for the supercargo."

"Captain," I returned, with my heart in my mouth, "risk is better than
certain failure."

"Life is all risk, Mr. Dodd," he remarked. "But there's one thing: it's
now or never; in half an hour, Archdeacon Gabriel couldn't lay her to,
if he came down stairs on purpose."

"All right," said I. "Let's run."

"Run goes," said he; and with that he fell to breakfast, and passed half
an hour in stowing away pie and devoutly wishing himself back in San
Francisco.

When we came on deck again, he took the wheel from Johnson--it appears
they could trust none among the hands--and I stood close beside him,
feeling safe in this proximity, and tasting a fearful joy from our
surroundings and the consciousness of my decision. The breeze had
already risen, and as it tore over our heads, it uttered at times a
long hooting note that sent my heart into my boots. The sea pursued
us without remission, leaping to the assault of the low rail. The
quarter-deck was all awash, and we must close the companion doors.

"And all this, if you please, for Mr. Pinkerton's dollars!" the captain
suddenly exclaimed. "There's many a fine fellow gone under, Mr. Dodd,
because of drivers like your friend. What do they care for a ship or
two? Insured, I guess. What do they care for sailors' lives alongside
of a few thousand dollars? What they want is speed between ports, and
a damned fool of a captain that'll drive a ship under as I'm doing this
one. You can put in the morning, asking why I do it."

I sheered off to another part of the vessel as fast as civility
permitted. This was not at all the talk that I desired, nor was the
train of reflection which it started anyway welcome. Here I was, running
some hazard of my life, and perilling the lives of seven others; exactly
for what end, I was now at liberty to ask myself. For a very large
amount of a very deadly poison, was the obvious answer; and I thought
if all tales were true, and I were soon to be subjected to
cross-examination at the bar of Eternal Justice, it was one which would
not increase my popularity with the court. "Well, never mind, Jim,"
thought I. "I'm doing it for you."

Before eleven, a third reef was taken in the mainsail; and Johnson
filled the cabin with a storm-sail of No. 1 duck and sat cross-legged
on the streaming floor, vigorously putting it to rights with a couple of
the hands. By dinner I had fled the deck, and sat in the bench corner,
giddy, dumb, and stupefied with terror. The frightened leaps of the
poor Norah Creina, spanking like a stag for bare existence, bruised me
between the table and the berths. Overhead, the wild huntsman of the
storm passed continuously in one blare of mingled noises; screaming
wind, straining timber, lashing rope's end, pounding block and bursting
sea contributed; and I could have thought there was at times another, a
more piercing, a more human note, that dominated all, like the wailing
of an angel; I could have thought I knew the angel's name, and that his
wings were black. It seemed incredible that any creature of man's art
could long endure the barbarous mishandling of the seas, kicked as the
schooner was from mountain side to mountain side, beaten and blown upon
and wrenched in every joint and sinew, like a child upon the rack. There
was not a plank of her that did not cry aloud for mercy; and as she
continued to hold together, I became conscious of a growing sympathy
with her endeavours, a growing admiration for her gallant staunchness,
that amused and at times obliterated my terrors for myself. God bless
every man that swung a mallet on that tiny and strong hull! It was not
for wages only that he laboured, but to save men's lives.

All the rest of the day, and all the following night, I sat in the
corner or lay wakeful in my bunk; and it was only with the return of
morning that a new phase of my alarms drove me once more on deck. A
gloomier interval I never passed. Johnson and Nares steadily relieved
each other at the wheel and came below. The first glance of each was
at the glass, which he repeatedly knuckled and frowned upon; for it was
sagging lower all the time. Then, if Johnson were the visitor, he would
pick a snack out of the cupboard, and stand, braced against the table,
eating it, and perhaps obliging me with a word or two of his hee-haw
conversation: how it was "a son of a gun of a cold night on deck, Mr.
Dodd" (with a grin); how "it wasn't no night for panjammers, he could
tell me": having transacted all which, he would throw himself down
in his bunk and sleep his two hours with compunction. But the captain
neither ate nor slept. "You there, Mr. Dodd?" he would say, after the
obligatory visit to the glass. "Well, my son, we're one hundred and four
miles" (or whatever it was) "off the island, and scudding for all we're
worth. We'll make it to-morrow about four, or not, as the case may be.
That's the news. And now, Mr. Dodd, I've stretched a point for you;
you can see I'm dead tired; so just you stretch away back to your bunk
again." And with this attempt at geniality, his teeth would settle
hard down on his cigar, and he would pass his spell below staring and
blinking at the cabin lamp through a cloud of tobacco smoke. He has
told me since that he was happy, which I should never have divined. "You
see," he said, "the wind we had was never anything out of the way; but
the sea was really nasty, the schooner wanted a lot of humouring, and
it was clear from the glass that we were close to some dirt. We might
be running out of it, or we might be running right crack into it. Well,
there's always something sublime about a big deal like that; and it kind
of raises a man in his own liking. We're a queer kind of beasts, Mr.
Dodd."

The morning broke with sinister brightness; the air alarmingly
transparent, the sky pure, the rim of the horizon clear and strong
against the heavens. The wind and the wild seas, now vastly swollen,
indefatigably hunted us. I stood on deck, choking with fear; I seemed
to lose all power upon my limbs; my knees were as paper when she plunged
into the murderous valleys; my heart collapsed when some black mountain
fell in avalanche beside her counter, and the water, that was more than
spray, swept round my ankles like a torrent. I was conscious of but
one strong desire, to bear myself decently in my terrors, and whatever
should happen to my life, preserve my character: as the captain said,
we are a queer kind of beasts. Breakfast time came, and I made shift
to swallow some hot tea. Then I must stagger below to take the time,
reading the chronometer with dizzy eyes, and marvelling the while what
value there could be in observations taken in a ship launched (as ours
then was) like a missile among flying seas. The forenoon dragged on in
a grinding monotony of peril; every spoke of the wheel a rash, but an
obliged experiment--rash as a forlorn hope, needful as the leap that
lands a fireman from a burning staircase. Noon was made; the captain
dined on his day's work, and I on watching him; and our place was
entered on the chart with a meticulous precision which seemed to me
half pitiful and half absurd, since the next eye to behold that sheet of
paper might be the eye of an exploring fish. One o'clock came, then two;
the captain gloomed and chafed, as he held to the coaming of the house,
and if ever I saw dormant murder in man's eye, it was in his. God help
the hand that should have disobeyed him.

Of a sudden, he turned towards the mate, who was doing his trick at the
wheel.

"Two points on the port bow," I heard him say. And he took the wheel
himself.

Johnson nodded, wiped his eyes with the back of his wet hand, watched a
chance as the vessel lunged up hill, and got to the main rigging, where
he swarmed aloft. Up and up, I watched him go, hanging on at every
ugly plunge, gaining with every lull of the schooner's movement, until,
clambering into the cross-trees and clinging with one arm around the
masts, I could see him take one comprehensive sweep of the southwesterly
horizon. The next moment, he had slid down the backstay and stood on
deck, with a grin, a nod, and a gesture of the finger that said "yes";
the next again, and he was back sweating and squirming at the wheel, his
tired face streaming and smiling, and his hair and the rags and corners
of his clothes lashing round him in the wind.

Nares went below, fetched up his binocular, and fell into a silent
perusal of the sea-line; I also, with my unaided eyesight. Little by
little, in that white waste of water, I began to make out a quarter
where the whiteness appeared more condensed: the sky above was whitish
likewise, and misty like a squall; and little by little there thrilled
upon my ears a note deeper and more terrible than the yelling of the
gale--the long, thundering roll of breakers. Nares wiped his night glass
on his sleeve and passed it to me, motioning, as he did so, with his
hand. An endless wilderness of raging billows came and went and danced
in the circle of the glass; now and then a pale corner of sky, or the
strong line of the horizon rugged with the heads of waves; and then of
a sudden--come and gone ere I could fix it, with a swallow's
swiftness--one glimpse of what we had come so far and paid so dear to
see: the masts and rigging of a brig pencilled on heaven, with an ensign
streaming at the main, and the ragged ribbons of a topsail thrashing
from the yard. Again and again, with toilful searching, I recalled that
apparition. There was no sign of any land; the wreck stood between sea
and sky, a thing the most isolated I had ever viewed; but as we drew
nearer, I perceived her to be defended by a line of breakers which drew
off on either hand, and marked, indeed, the nearest segment of the reef.
Heavy spray hung over them like a smoke, some hundred feet into the air;
and the sound of their consecutive explosions rolled like a cannonade.

In half an hour we were close in; for perhaps as long again, we skirted
that formidable barrier toward its farther side; and presently the sea
began insensibly to moderate and the ship to go more sweetly. We had
gained the lee of the island as (for form's sake) I may call that ring
of foam and haze and thunder; and shaking out a reef, wore ship and
headed for the passage.




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 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
but, 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.

"O, 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.

"O, 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, 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 a while 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: cyphering 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?"

"O, 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."