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The Crusade of the Excelsior

by Bret Harte · English · Gutenberg #2471 · 438,065 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Crusade of the Excelsior

Author: Bret Harte


        
Release date: May 17, 2006 [eBook #2471]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2471

Credits: Produced by Donald Lainson; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUSADE OF THE EXCELSIOR ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





THE CRUSADE OF THE EXCELSIOR

by Bret Harte




CONTENTS.


PART I.--      IN BONDS.


CHAPTER I.--   A CRUSADER AND A SIGN


CHAPTER II.--  ANOTHER PORTENT


CHAPTER III--  "VIGILANCIA"


CHAPTER IV.--  IN THE FOG


CHAPTER V.--   TODOS SANTOS


CHAPTER VI.--  "HAIL AND FAREWELL"


CHAPTER VII.-- THE GENTLE CASTAWAYS


CHAPTER VIII.--IN SANCTUARY


CHAPTER IX.--  AN OPEN-AIR PRISON


CHAPTER X.--   TODOS SANTOS SOLVES THE MYSTERY


CHAPTER XI.--  THE CAPTAIN FOLLOWS HIS SHIP



PART II.--     FREED.


CHAPTER I.--   THE MOURNERS AT SAN FRANCISCO


CHAPTER II.--  THE MOURNERS AT TODOS SANTOS


CHAPTER III.-- INTERNATIONAL COURTESIES


CHAPTER IV.--  A GLEAM OF SUNSHINE


CHAPTER V.--   CLOUDS AND CHANGE


CHAPTER VI.--  A MORE IMPORTANT ARRIVAL


CHAPTER VII.-- THE RETURN OF THE EXCELSIOR


CHAPTER VIII.--HOSTAGE


CHAPTER IX.--  LIBERATED




THE CRUSADE OF THE EXCELSIOR




PART I. IN BONDS.




CHAPTER I.

A CRUSADER AND A SIGN.


It was the 4th of August, 1854, off Cape Corrientes. Morning was
breaking over a heavy sea, and the closely-reefed topsails of a barque
that ran before it bearing down upon the faint outline of the Mexican
coast. Already the white peak of Colima showed, ghost-like, in the east;
already the long sweep of the Pacific was gathering strength and volume
as it swept uninterruptedly into the opening Gulf of California.

As the cold light increased, it could be seen that the vessel showed
evidence of a long voyage and stress of weather. She had lost one of
her spars, and her starboard davits rolled emptily. Nevertheless, her
rigging was taut and ship-shape, and her decks scrupulously clean.
Indeed, in that uncertain light, the only moving figure besides the
two motionless shadows at the wheel was engaged in scrubbing the
quarter-deck--which, with its grated settees and stacked camp-chairs,
seemed to indicate the presence of cabin passengers. For the barque
Excelsior, from New York to San Francisco, had discharged the bulk of
her cargo at Callao, and had extended her liberal cabin accommodation to
swell the feverish Californian immigration, still in its height.

Suddenly there was a slight commotion on deck. An order, issued from
some invisible depth of the cabin, was so unexpected that it had to be
repeated sternly and peremptorily. A bustle forward ensued, two or three
other shadows sprang up by the bulwarks, then the two men bent over the
wheel, the Excelsior slowly swung round on her heel, and, with a parting
salutation to the coast, bore away to the northwest and the open sea
again.

"What's up now?" growled one of the men at the wheel to his companion,
as they slowly eased up on the helm.

"'Tain't the skipper's, for he's drunk as a biled owl, and ain't stirred
out of his bunk since eight bells," said the other. "It's the first
mate's orders; but, I reckon, it's the Senor's idea."

"Then we ain't goin' on to Mazatlan?"

"Not this trip, I reckon," said the third mate, joining them.

"Why?"

The third mate turned and pointed to leeward. The line of coast had
already sunk enough to permit the faint silhouette of a trail of smoke
to define the horizon line of sky.

"Steamer goin' in, eh?"

"Yes. D'ye see--it might be too hot, in there!"

"Then the jig's up?"

"No. Suthin's to be done--north of St. Lucas. Hush!"

He made a gesture of silence, although the conversation, since he had
joined them, had been carried on in a continuous whisper. A figure,
evidently a passenger, had appeared on deck. One or two of the
foreign-looking crew who had drawn near the group, with a certain undue
and irregular familiarity, now slunk away again.

The passenger was a shrewd, exact, rectangular-looking man, who had
evidently never entirely succumbed to the freedom of the sea either in
his appearance or habits. He had not even his sea legs yet; and as the
barque, with the full swell of the Pacific now on her weather bow, was
plunging uncomfortably, he was fain to cling to the stanchions. This did
not, however, prevent him from noticing the change in her position, and
captiously resenting it.

"Look here--you; I say! What have we turned round for? We're going away
from the land! Ain't we going on to Mazatlan?"

The two men at the wheel looked silently forward, with that exasperating
unconcern of any landsman's interest peculiar to marine officials. The
passenger turned impatiently to the third mate.

"But this ain't right, you know. It was understood that we were going
into Mazatlan. I've got business there."

"My orders, sir," said the mate curtly, turning away.

The practical passenger had been observant enough of sea-going rules to
recognize that this reason was final, and that it was equally futile to
demand an interview with the captain when that gentleman was not visibly
on duty. He turned angrily to the cabin again.

"You look disturbed, my dear Banks. I trust you haven't slept badly,"
said a very gentle voice from the quarter-rail near him; "or, perhaps,
the ship's going about has upset you. It's a little rougher on this
tack."

"That's just it," returned Banks sharply. "We HAVE gone about, and
we're not going into Mazatlan at all. It's scandalous! I'll speak to
the captain--I'll complain to the consignees--I've got business at
Mazatlan--I expect letters--I"--

"Business, my dear fellow?" continued the voice, in gentle protest.
"You'll have time for business when you get to San Francisco. And as for
letters--they'll follow you there soon enough. Come over here, my boy,
and say hail and farewell to the Mexican coast--to the land of Montezuma
and Pizarro. Come here and see the mountain range from which Balboa
feasted his eyes on the broad Pacific. Come!"

The speaker, though apparently more at his ease at sea, was in dress and
appearance fully as unnautical as Banks. As he leaned over the railing,
his white, close-fitting trousers and small patent-leather boots gave
him a jaunty, half-military air, which continued up to the second button
of his black frock-coat, and then so utterly changed its character
that it was doubtful if a greater contrast could be conceived than that
offered by the widely spread lapels of his coat, his low turned-down
collar, loosely knotted silk handkerchief, and the round, smooth-shaven,
gentle, pacific face above them. His straight long black hair, shining
as if from recent immersion, was tucked carefully behind his ears, and
hung in a heavy, even, semicircular fringe around the back of his neck
where his tall hat usually rested, as if to leave his forehead meekly
exposed to celestial criticism. When he had joined the ship at Callao,
his fellow-passengers, rashly trusting to the momentary suggestion of
his legs on the gang-plank, had pronounced him military; meeting him
later at dinner, they had regarded the mild Methodistic contour of his
breast and shoulders above the table, and entertained the wild idea
of asking him to evoke a blessing. To complete the confusion of
his appearance, he was called "Senor" Perkins, for no other reason,
apparently, than his occasional, but masterful, use of the Spanish
vernacular.

Steadying himself by one of the quarter stanchions, he waved his right
hand oratorically towards the sinking coast.

"Look at it, sir. One of the finest countries that ever came from the
hand of the Creator; a land overflowing with milk and honey; containing,
sir, in that one mountain range, the products of the three zones--and
yet the abode of the oppressed and down-trodden; the land of faction,
superstition, tyranny, and political revolution."

"That's all very well," said Banks irritably, "but Mazatlan is a
well-known commercial port, and has English and American correspondents.
There's a branch of that Boston firm--Potter, Potts & Potter--there. The
new line of steamers is going to stop there regularly."

Senor Perkins' soft black eyes fell for an instant, as if accidentally,
on the third mate, but the next moment he laughed, and, throwing back
his head, inhaled, with evident relish, a long breath of the sharp, salt
air.

"Ah!" he said enthusiastically, "THAT'S better than all the business you
can pick up along a malarious coast. Open your mouth and try to take in
the free breath of the glorious North Pacific. Ah! isn't it glorious?"

"Where's the captain?" said Banks, with despairing irritation. "I want
to see him."

"The captain," said Senor Perkins, with a bland, forgiving smile and a
slight lowering of his voice, "is, I fear, suffering from an accident
of hospitality, and keeps his state-room. The captain is a good fellow,"
continued Perkins, with gentle enthusiasm; "a good sailor and careful
navigator, and exceedingly attentive to his passengers. I shall
certainly propose getting up some testimonial for him."

"But if he's shut up in his state-room, who's giving the orders?" began
Banks angrily.

Senor Perkins put up a small, well-kept hand deprecatingly.

"Really, my dear boy, I suppose the captain cannot be omnipresent. Some
discretion must be left to the other officers. They probably know his
ideas and what is to be done better than we do. You business men trouble
yourselves too much about these things. You should take them more
philosophically. For my part I always confide myself trustingly to these
people. I enter a ship or railroad car with perfect faith. I say to
myself, 'This captain, or this conductor, is a responsible man, selected
with a view to my safety and comfort; he understands how to procure that
safety and that comfort better than I do. He worries himself; he
spends hours and nights of vigil to look after me and carry me to my
destination. Why should I worry myself, who can only assist him by
passive obedience? Why'--" But here he was interrupted by a headlong
plunge of the Excelsior, a feminine shriek that was half a laugh, the
rapid patter of small feet and sweep of flying skirts down the slanting
deck, and the sudden and violent contact of a pretty figure.

The next moment he had forgotten his philosophy, and his companion his
business. Both flew to the assistance of the fair intruder, who, albeit
the least injured of the trio, clung breathlessly to the bulwarks.

"Miss Keene!" ejaculated both gentlemen.

"Oh dear! I beg your pardon," said the young lady, reddening, with a
naive mingling of hilarity and embarrassment. "But it seemed so stuffy
in the cabin, and it seemed so easy to get out on deck and pull myself
up by the railings; and just as I got up here, I suddenly seemed to be
sliding down the roof of a house."

"And now that you're here, your courage should be rewarded," said the
Senor, gallantly assisting her to a settee, which he lashed securely.
"You are perfectly safe now," he added, holding the end of the rope in
his hand to allow a slight sliding movement of the seat as the vessel
rolled. "And here is a glorious spectacle for you. Look! the sun is just
rising."

The young girl glanced over the vast expanse before her with sparkling
eyes and a suddenly awakened fancy that checked her embarrassed smile,
and fixed her pretty, parted lips with wonder. The level rays of the
rising sun striking the white crests of the lifted waves had suffused
the whole ocean with a pinkish opal color: the darker parts of each wave
seemed broken into facets instead of curves, and glittered sharply. The
sea seemed to have lost its fluidity, and become vitreous; so much so,
that it was difficult to believe that the waves which splintered
across the Excelsior's bow did not fall upon her deck with the ring of
shattered glass.

"Sindbad's Valley of Diamonds!" said the young girl, in an awed whisper.

"It's a cross sea in the Gulf of California, so the mate says," said
Banks practically; "but I don't see why we" . . .

"The Gulf of California?" repeated the young girl, while a slight shade
of disappointment passed over her bright face; "are we then so near"--

"Not the California you mean, my dear young lady," broke in Senor
Perkins, "but the old peninsula of California, which is still a part of
Mexico. It terminates in Cape St. Lucas, a hundred miles from here, but
it's still a far cry to San Francisco, which is in Upper California. But
I fancy you don't seem as anxious as our friend Mr. Banks to get to your
journey's end," he added, with paternal blandness.

The look of relief which had passed over Miss Keene's truthful face gave
way to one of slight embarrassment.

"It hasn't seemed long," she said hastily; and then added, as if to turn
the conversation, "What is this peninsula? I remember it on our map at
school."

"It's not of much account," interrupted Banks positively. "There ain't a
place on it you ever heard of. It's a kind of wilderness."

"I differ from you," said Senor Perkins gravely. "There are, I have
been told, some old Mexican settlements along the coast, and there is no
reason why the country shouldn't be fruitful. But you may have a chance
to judge for yourself," he continued beamingly. "Since we are not going
into Mazatlan, we may drop in at some of those places for water. It's
all on our way, and we shall save the three days we would have lost
had we touched Mazatlan. That," he added, answering an impatient
interrogation in Banks' eye, "at least, is the captain's idea, I
reckon." He laughed, and went on still gayly,--"But what's the use of
anticipating? Why should we spoil any little surprise that our gallant
captain may have in store for us? I've been trying to convert this
business man to my easy philosophy, Miss Keene, but he is incorrigible;
he is actually lamenting his lost chance of hearing the latest news at
Mazatlan, and getting the latest market quotations, instead of offering
a thanksgiving for another uninterrupted day of freedom in this glorious
air."

With a half humorous extravagance he unloosed his already loose
necktie, turned his Byron collar still lower, and squared his shoulders
ostentatiously to the sea breeze. Accustomed as his two companions were
to his habitually extravagant speech, it did not at that moment seem
inconsistent with the intoxicating morning air and the exhilaration of
sky and wave. A breath of awakening and resurrection moved over the face
of the waters; recreation and new-born life sparkled everywhere; the
past night seemed forever buried in the vast and exundating sea. The
reefs had been shaken out, and every sail set to catch the steadier
breeze of the day; and as the quickening sun shone upon the dazzling
canvas that seemed to envelop them, they felt as if wrapped in the
purity of a baptismal robe.

Nevertheless, Miss Keene's eyes occasionally wandered from the charming
prospect towards the companion-ladder. Presently she became ominously
and ostentatiously interested in the view again, and at the same moment
a young man's head and shoulders appeared above the companionway. With
a bound he was on the slanting deck, moving with the agility and
adaptability of youth, and approached the group. He was quite surprised
to find Miss Keene there so early, and Miss Keene was equally surprised
at his appearance, notwithstanding the phenomenon had occurred with
singular regularity for the last three weeks. The two spectators of this
gentle comedy received it as they had often received it before, with a
mixture of apparent astonishment and patronizing unconsciousness, and,
after a decent interval, moved away together, leaving the young people
alone.

The hesitancy and awkwardness which usually followed the first moments
of their charming isolation were this morning more than usually
prolonged.

"It seems we are not going into Mazatlan, after all," said Miss Keene at
last, without lifting her conscious eyes from the sea.

"No," returned the young fellow quickly. "I heard all about it down
below, and we had quite an indignation meeting over it. I believe Mrs.
Markham wanted to head a deputation to wait upon the captain in his
berth. It seems that the first officer, or whosoever is running the
ship, has concluded we've lost too much time already, and we're going to
strike a bee-line for Cape St. Lucas, and give Mazatlan the go-by. We'll
save four days by it. I suppose it don't make any difference to you,
Miss Keene, does it?"

"I? Oh, no!" said the girl hastily.

"I'M rather sorry," he said hesitatingly.

"Indeed. Are you tired of the ship?" she asked saucily.

"No," he replied bluntly; "but it would have given us four more days
together--four more days before we separated."

He stopped, with a heightened color. There was a moment of silence, and
the voices of Senor Perkins and Mr. Banks in political discussion on the
other side of the deck came faintly. Miss Keene laughed.

"We are a long way from San Francisco yet, and you may think
differently."

"Never!" he said, impulsively.

He had drawn closer to her, as if to emphasize his speech. She cast
a quick glance across the deck towards the two disputants, and drew
herself gently away.

"Do you know," she said suddenly, with a charming smile which robbed
the act of its sting, "I sometimes wonder if I am REALLY going to San
Francisco. I don't know how it is; but, somehow, I never can SEE myself
there."

"I wish you did, for I'M going there," he replied boldly.

Without appearing to notice the significance of his speech, she
continued gravely:

"I have been so strongly impressed with this feeling at times that it
makes me quite superstitious. When we had that terrible storm after we
left Callao, I thought it meant that--that we were all going down, and
we should never be heard of again."

"As long as we all went together," he said, "I don't know that it would
be the worst thing that could happen. I remember that storm, Miss Keene.
And I remember"--He stopped timidly.

"What?" she replied, raising her smiling eyes for the first time to his
earnest face.

"I remember sitting up all night near your state-room, with a cork
jacket and lots of things I'd fixed up for you, and thinking I'd die
before I trusted you alone in the boat to those rascally Lascars of the
crew."

"But how would you have prevented it?" asked Miss Keene, with a
compassionate and half-maternal amusement.

"I don't know exactly," he said, coloring; "but I'd have lashed you to
some spar, or made a raft, and got you ashore on some island."

"And poor Mrs. Markham and Mrs. Brimmer--you'd have left them to the
boats and the Lascars, I suppose?" smiled Miss Keene.

"Oh, somebody would have looked after Mrs. Markham; and Mrs. Brimmer
wouldn't have gone with anybody that wasn't well connected. But what's
the use of talking?" he added ruefully. "Nothing has happened, and
nothing is going to happen. You will see yourself in San Francisco, even
if you don't see ME there. You're going to a rich brother, Miss Keene,
who has friends of his own, and who won't care to know a poor fellow
whom you tolerated on the passage, but who don't move in Mrs. Brimmer's
set, and whom Mr. Banks wouldn't indorse commercially."

"Ah, you don't know my brother, Mr. Brace."

"Nor do you, very well, Miss Keene. You were saying, only last night,
you hardly remembered him."

The young girl sighed.

"I was very young when he went West," she said explanatorily; "but I
dare say I shall recall him. What I meant is, that he will be very glad
to know that I have been so happy here, and he will like all those who
have made me so."

"Then you have been happy?"

"Yes; very." She had withdrawn her eyes, and was looking vaguely towards
the companion-way. "Everybody has been so kind to me."

"And you are grateful to all?"

"Yes."

"Equally?"

The ship gave a sudden forward plunge. Miss Keene involuntarily clutched
the air with her little hand, that had been resting on the settee
between them, and the young man caught it in his own.

"Equally?" he repeated, with an assumed playfulness that half veiled his
anxiety. "Equally--from the beaming Senor Perkins, who smiles on all, to
the gloomy Mr. Hurlstone, who smiles on no one?"

She quickly withdrew her hand, and rose. "I smell the breakfast," she
said laughingly. "Don't be horrified, Mr. Brace, but I'm very hungry."
She laid the hand she had withdrawn lightly on his arm. "Now help me
down to the cabin."




CHAPTER II.

ANOTHER PORTENT.


The saloon of the Excelsior was spacious for the size of the vessel, and
was furnished in a style superior to most passenger-ships of that epoch.
The sun was shining through the sliding windows upon the fresh and
neatly arranged breakfast-table, but the presence of the ominous
"storm-racks," and partitions for glass and china, and the absence of
the more delicate passengers, still testified to the potency of the Gulf
of California. Even those present wore an air of fatigued discontent,
and the conversation had that jerky interjectional quality which
belonged to people with a common grievance, but a different individual
experience. Mr. Winslow had been unable to shave. Mrs. Markham,
incautiously and surreptitiously opening a port-hole in her state-room
for a whiff of fresh air while dressing, had been shocked by the
intrusion of the Pacific Ocean, and was obliged to summon assistance
and change her dress. Jack Crosby, who had attired himself for tropical
shore-going in white ducks and patent leathers, shivered in the keen
northwest Trades, and bewailed the cheap cigars he had expected to buy
at Mazatlan. The entrance of Miss Keene, who seemed to bring with her
the freshness and purity of the dazzling outer air, stirred the younger
men into some gallant attention, embarrassed, however, by a sense of
self-reproach.

Senor Perkins alone retained his normal serenity. Already seated at
the table between the two fair-headed children of Mrs. Brimmer, he
was benevolently performing parental duties in her absence, and gently
supervising and preparing their victuals even while he carried on an
ethnological and political discussion with Mrs. Markham.

"Ah, my dear lady," continued the Senor, as he spread a hot biscuit with
butter and currant jelly for the youngest Miss Brimmer, "I am afraid
that, with the fastidiousness of your sex, you allow your refined
instincts against a race who only mix with ours in a menial capacity to
prejudice your views of their ability for enlightened self-government.
That may be true of the aborigines of the Old World--like our friends
the Lascars among the crew"--

"They're so snaky, dark, and deceitful-looking," interrupted Mrs.
Markham.

"I might differ from you there, and say that the higher blonde types
like the Anglo-Saxon--to say nothing of the wily Greeks--were the
deceitful races: it might be difficult for any of us to say what a sly
and deceitful man should be like"--

"Oor not detheitful--oor a dood man," interpolated the youngest Miss
Brimmer, fondly regarding the biscuit.

"Thank you, Missie," beamed the Senor; "but to return: our Lascar
friends, Mrs. Markham, belong to an earlier Asiatic type of civilization
already decayed or relapsed to barbarism, while the aborigines of the
New World now existing have never known it--or, like the Aztecs, have
perished with it. The modern North American aborigine has not yet got
beyond the tribal condition; mingled with Caucasian blood as he is in
Mexico and Central America, he is perfectly capable of self-government."

"Then why has he never obtained it?" asked Mrs. Markham.

"He has always been oppressed and kept down by colonists of the Latin
races; he has been little better than a slave to his oppressor for the
last two centuries," said Senor Perkins, with a slight darkening of his
soft eyes.

"Injins is pizen," whispered Mr. Winslow to Miss Keene.

"Who would be free, you know, the poet says, ought themselves to light
out from the shoulder, and all that sort of thing," suggested Crosby,
with cheerful vagueness.

"True; but a little assistance and encouragement from mankind generally
would help them," continued the Senor. "Ah! my dear Mrs. Markham,
if they could even count on the intelligent sympathy of women like
yourself, their independence would be assured. And think what a proud
privilege to have contributed to such a result, to have assisted at the
birth of the ideal American Republic, for such it would be--a Republic
of one blood, one faith, one history."

"What on earth, or sea, ever set the old man off again?" inquired
Crosby, in an aggrieved whisper. "It's two weeks since he's given us any
Central American independent flapdoodle--long enough for those nigger
injins to have had half a dozen revolutions. You know that the vessels
that put into San Juan have saluted one flag in the morning, and have
been fired at under another in the afternoon."

"Hush!" said Miss Keene. "He's so kind! Look at him now, taking off the
pinafores of those children and tidying them. He is kinder to them than
their nurse, and more judicious than their mother. And half his talk
with Mrs. Markham now is only to please her, because she thinks she
knows politics. He's always trying to do good to somebody."

"That's so," exclaimed Brace, eager to share Miss Keene's sentiments;
"and he's so good to those outlandish niggers in the crew. I don't see
how the captain could get on with the crew without him; he's the only
one who can talk their gibberish and keep them quiet. I've seen him
myself quietly drop down among them when they were wrangling. In my
opinion," continued the young fellow, lowering his voice somewhat
ostentatiously, "you'll find out when we get to port that he's stopped
the beginning of many a mutiny among them."

"I reckon they'd make short work of a man like him," said Winslow, whose
superciliousness was by no means lessened by the community of sentiment
between Miss Keene and Brace. "I reckon, his political reforms, and his
poetical high-falutin' wouldn't go as far in the forecastle among live
men as it does in the cabin with a lot of women. You'll more likely
find that he's been some sort of steward on a steamer, and he's
working his passage with us. That's where he gets that smooth,
equally-attentive-to-anybody sort of style. The way he skirmished around
Mrs. Brimmer and Mrs. Markham with a basin the other day when it was so
rough convinced ME. It was a little too professional to suit my style."

"I suppose that was the reason why you went below so suddenly," rejoined
Brace, whose too sensitive blood was beginning to burn in his cheeks and
eyes.

"It's a shame to stay below this morning," said Miss Keene,
instinctively recognizing the cause of the discord and its remedy. "I'm
going on deck again--if I can manage to get there."

The three gentlemen sprang to accompany her; and, in their efforts to
keep their physical balance and hers equally, the social equilibrium was
restored.

By noon, however, the heavy cross-sea had abated, and the Excelsior bore
west. When she once more rose and fell regularly on the long rhythmical
swell of the Pacific, most of the passengers regained the deck. Even
Mrs. Brimmer and Miss Chubb ventured from their staterooms, and were
conveyed to and installed in some state on a temporary divan of cushions
and shawls on the lee side. For even in this small republic of equal
cabin passengers the undemocratic and distinction-loving sex had managed
to create a sham exclusiveness. Mrs. Brimmer, as the daughter of a
rich Bostonian, the sister of a prominent lawyer, and the wife of a
successful San Francisco merchant, who was popularly supposed to be
part-owner of the Excelsior, was recognized, and alternately caressed
and hated as their superior. A majority of the male passengers, owning
no actual or prospective matrimonial subjection to those charming
toad-eaters, I am afraid continued to enjoy a mild and debasing equality
among themselves, mitigated only by the concessions of occasional
gallantry. To them, Mrs. Brimmer was a rather pretty, refined,
well-dressed woman, whose languid pallor, aristocratic spareness,
and utter fastidiousness did not, however, preclude a certain nervous
intensity which occasionally lit up her weary eyes with a dangerous
phosphorescence, under their brown fringes. Equally acceptable was Miss
Chubb, her friend and traveling companion; a tall, well-bred girl, with
faint salmon-pink hair and complexion, that darkened to a fiery brown in
her shortsighted eyes.

Between these ladies and Mrs. Markham and Miss Keene existed an
enthusiastic tolerance, which, however, could never be mistaken for
a generous rivalry. Of the greater popularity of Miss Keene as the
recognized belle of the Excelsior there could be no question; nor was
there any from Mrs. Brimmer and her friend. The intellectual preeminence
of Mrs. Markham was equally, and no less ostentatiously, granted. "Mrs.
Markham is so clever; I delight to hear you converse together," Mrs.
Brimmer would say to Senor Perkins, "though I'm sure I hardly dare talk
to her myself. She might easily go into the lecture-field--perhaps she
expects to do so in California. My dear Clarissa"--to Miss Chubb--"don't
she remind you a little of Aunt Jane Winthrop's governess, whom we
came so near taking to Paris with us, but couldn't on account of her
defective French?"

When "The Excelsior Banner and South Sea Bubble" was published in lat.
15 N. and long. 105 W., to which Mrs. Markham contributed the editorials
and essays, and Senor Perkins three columns of sentimental poetry,
Mrs. Brimmer did not withhold her praise of the fair editor. When the
Excelsior "Recrossed the Line," with a suitable tableau vivant and
pageant, and Miss Keene as California, in white and blue, welcomed from
the hands of Neptune (Senor Perkins) and Amphitrite (Mrs. Markham) her
fair sister, Massachusetts (Mrs. Brimmer), and New York (Miss Chubb),
Mrs. Brimmer was most enthusiastic of the beauty of Miss Keene.

On the present morning Mr. Banks found his disappointment at not going
into Mazatlan languidly shared by Mrs. Brimmer. That lady even made a
place for him on the cushions beside her, as she pensively expressed her
belief that her husband would be still more disappointed.

"Mr. Brimmer, you know, has correspondents at Mazatlan, and no doubt
he has made particular arrangements for our reception and entertainment
while there. I should not wonder if he was very indignant. And if, as I
fear, the officials of the place, knowing Mr. Brimmer's position--and my
own connections--have prepared to show us social courtesies, it may be
a graver affair. I shouldn't be surprised if our Government were obliged
to take notice of it. There is a Captain-General of port--isn't there? I
think my husband spoke of him."

"Oh, he's probably been shot long ago," broke in Mr. Crosby cheerfully.
"They put in a new man every revolution. If the wrong party's got in,
they've likely shipped your husband's correspondent too, and might
be waiting to get a reception for you with nigger soldiers and ball
cartridges. Shouldn't wonder if the skipper got wind of something of the
kind, and that's why he didn't put in. If your husband hadn't been so
well known, you see, we might have slipped in all right."

Mrs. Brimmer received this speech with the languid obliviousness of
perception she usually meted out to this chartered jester.

"Do you really think so, Mr. Crosby? And would you have been afraid to
leave your cabin--or are you joking? You know I never know when you are.
It is very dreadful, either way."

But here Miss Chubb, with ready tact, interrupted any possible retort
from Mr. Crosby.

"Look," she said, pointing to some of the other passengers, who, at
a little distance, had grouped about the first mate in animated
discussion. "I wonder what those gentlemen are so interested about. Do
go and see."

Before he could reply, Mr. Winslow, detaching himself from the group,
hurried towards them.

"Here's a row: Hurlstone is missing! Can't be found anywhere! They think
he's fallen overboard!"

The two frightened exclamations from Miss Chubb and Mrs. Brimmer
diverted attention from the sudden paleness of Miss Keene, who had
impulsively approached them.

"Impossible!" she said hurriedly.

"I fear it is so," said Brace, who had followed Winslow; "although," he
added in a lower tone, with an angry glance at the latter, "that brute
need not have blustered it out to frighten everybody. They're searching
the ship again, but there seems no hope. He hasn't been seen since last
night. He was supposed to be in his state-room--but as nobody missed
him--you know how odd and reserved he was--it was only when the steward
couldn't find him, and began to inquire, that everybody remembered they
hadn't seen him all day. You are frightened, Miss Keene; pray sit down.
That fellow Winslow ought to have had more sense."

"It seems so horrible that nobody knew it," said the young girl,
shuddering; "that we sat here laughing and talking, while perhaps he
was--Good heavens! what's that?"

A gruff order had been given: in the bustle that ensued the ship began
to fall off to leeward; a number of the crew had sprung to the davits of
the quarter boat.

"We're going about, and they're lowering a boat, that's all; but it's as
good as hopeless," said Brace. "The accident must have happened before
daylight, or it would have been seen by the watch. It was probably long
before we came on deck," he added gently; "so comfort yourself, Miss
Keene, you could have seen nothing."

"It seems so dreadful," murmured the young girl, "that he wasn't even
missed. Why," she said, suddenly raising her soft eyes to Brace, "YOU
must have noticed his absence; why, even I"--She stopped with a slight
confusion, that was, however, luckily diverted by the irrepressible
Winslow.

"The skipper's been routed out at last, and is giving orders. He don't
look as if his hat fitted him any too comfortably this morning, does
he?" he laughed, as a stout, grizzled man, with congested face and
eyes, and a peremptory voice husky with alcoholic irritation, suddenly
appeared among the group by the wheel. "I reckon he's cursing his luck
at having to heave-to and lose this wind."

"But for a human creature's life!" exclaimed Mrs. Markham in horror.

"That's just it. Laying-to now ain't going to save anybody's life, and
he knows it. He's doin' it for show, just for a clean record in the log,
and to satisfy you people here, who'd kick up a row if he didn't."

"Then you believe he's lost?" said Miss Keene, with glistening eyes.

"There ain't a doubt of it," returned Winslow shortly.

"I don't agree with you," said a gentle voice.

They turned quickly towards the benevolent face of Senor Perkins, who
had just joined them.

"I differ from my young friend," continued the Senor courteously,
"because the accident must have happened at about daybreak, when we were
close inshore. It would not be impossible for a good swimmer to reach
the land, or even," continued Senor Perkins, in answer to the ray of
hope that gleamed in Miss Keene's soft eyes, "for him to have been
picked up by some passing vessel. The smoke of a large steamer was
sighted between us and the land at about that time."

"A steamer!" ejaculated Banks eagerly; "that was one of the new line
with the mails. How provoking!"

He was thinking of his lost letters. Miss Keene turned, heart-sick,
away. Worse than the ghastly interruption to their easy idyllic life
was this grim revelation of selfishness. She began to doubt if even the
hysterical excitement of her sister passengers was not merely a pleasant
titillation of their bored and inactive nerves.

"I believe the Senor is right, Miss Keene," said Brace, taking her
aside, "and I'll tell you why." He stopped, looked around him, and went
on in a lower voice, "There are some circumstances about the affair
which look more like deliberation than an accident. He has left nothing
behind him of any value or that gives any clue. If it was a suicide he
would have left some letter behind for somebody--people always do, you
know, at such times--and he would have chosen the open sea. It seems
more probable that he threw himself overboard with the intention of
reaching the shore."

"But why should he want to leave the ship?" echoed the young girl
simply.

"Perhaps he found out that we were NOT going to Mazatlan, and this was
his only chance; it must have happened just as the ship went about and
stood off from shore again."

"But I don't understand," continued Miss Keene, with a pretty knitting
of her brows, "why he should be so dreadfully anxious to get ashore
now."

The young fellow looked at her with the superior smile of youthful
sagacity.

"Suppose he had particular reasons for not going to San Francisco, where
our laws could reach him! Suppose he had committed some offense! Suppose
he was afraid of being questioned or recognized!"

The young girl rose indignantly.

"This is really too shameful! Who dare talk like that?"

Brace colored quickly.

"Who? Why, everybody," he stammered, for a moment abandoning his
attitude of individual acumen; "it's the talk of the ship."

"Is it? And before they know whether he's alive or dead--perhaps even
while he is still struggling with death--all they can do is to take his
character away!" she repeated, with flashing eyes.

"And I'm even worse than they are," he returned, his temper rising with
his color. "I ought to have known I was talking to one of HIS friends,
instead of one whom I thought was MINE. I beg your pardon."

He turned away as Miss Keene, apparently not heeding his pique, crossed
the deck, and entered into conversation with Mrs. Markham.

It is to be feared that she found little consolation among the other
passengers, or even those of her own sex, whom this profound event
had united in a certain freemasonry of sympathy and interest--to the
exclusion of their former cliques. She soon learned, as the return of
the boats to the ship and the ship to her course might have clearly told
her, that there was no chance of recovering the missing passenger. She
learned that the theory advanced by Brace was the one generally held by
them; but with an added romance of detail, that excited at once their
commiseration and admiration. Mrs. Brimmer remembered to have heard him,
the second or third night out from Callao, groaning in his state-room;
but having mistakenly referred the emotion to ordinary seasickness,
she had no doubt lost an opportunity for confidential disclosure. "I am
sure," she added, "that had somebody as resolute and practical as you,
dear Mrs. Markham, approached him the next day, he would have revealed
his sorrow." Miss Chubb was quite certain that she had seen him one
night, in tears, by the quarter railing. "I saw his eyes glistening
under his slouched hat as I passed. I remember thinking, at the time,
that he oughtn't to have been left alone with such a dreadful temptation
before him to slip overboard and end his sorrow or his crime." Mrs.
Markham also remembered that it was about five o'clock--or was it
six?--that morning when she distinctly thought she had heard a splash,
and she was almost impelled to get up and look out of the bull's-eye.
She should never forgive herself for resisting that impulse, for she
was positive now that she would have seen his ghastly face in the water.
Some indignation was felt that the captain, after a cursory survey
of his stateroom, had ordered it to be locked until his fate was more
positively known, and the usual seals placed on his effects for their
delivery to the authorities at San Francisco. It was believed that some
clue to his secret would be found among his personal chattels, if only
in the form of a keepsake, a locket, or a bit of jewelry. Miss Chubb had
noticed that he wore a seal ring, but not on the engagement-finger. In
some vague feminine way it was admitted without discussion that one of
their own sex was mixed up in the affair, and, with the exception of
Miss Keene, general credence was given to the theory that Mazatlan
contained his loadstar--the fatal partner and accomplice of his crime,
the siren that allured him to his watery grave. I regret to say that the
facts gathered by the gentlemen were equally ineffective. The steward
who had attended the missing man was obliged to confess that their most
protracted and confidential conversation had been on the comparative
efficiency of ship biscuits and soda crackers. Mr. Banks, who was known
to have spoken to him, could only remember that one warm evening, in
reply to a casual remark about the weather, the missing man, burying his
ears further in the turned-up collar of his pea-jacket, had stated, "'It
was cold enough to freeze the ears off a brass monkey,'--a remark, no
doubt, sir, intended to convey a reason for his hiding his own." Only
Senor Perkins retained his serene optimism unimpaired.

"Take my word for it, we shall yet hear good news of our missing friend.
Let us at least believe it until we know otherwise. Ah! my dear Mrs.
Markham, why should the Unknown always fill us with apprehension? Its
surprises are equally often agreeable."

"But we have all been so happy before this; and this seems such an
unnecessary and cruel awakening," said Miss Keene, lifting her sad eyes
to the speaker, "that I can't help thinking it's the beginning of the
end. Good heavens! what's that?"

She had started at the dark figure of one of the foreign-looking
sailors, who seemed to have suddenly risen out of the deck beside them.

"The Senor Perkins," he said, with an apologetic gesture of his hand to
his hatless head.

"You want ME, my good man?" asked Senor Perkins paternally.

"Si, Senor; the mate wishes to see the Patrono," he said in Spanish.

"I will come presently."

The sailor hesitated. Senor Perkins took a step nearer to him
benignantly. The man raised his eyes to Senor Perkins, and said,--

"Vigilancia."

"Bueno!" returned the Senor gently. "Excuse me, ladies, for a moment."

"Perhaps it is some news of poor Mr. Hurlstone?" said Miss Keene, with
an instinctive girlish movement of hope.

"Who knows?" returned Senor Perkins, waving his hand as he gayly tripped
after his guide. "Let us believe in the best, dear young lady, the
best!"




CHAPTER III.

"VIGILANCIA."


Without exchanging another word with his escort, Senor Perkins followed
him to the main hatch, where they descended and groped their way through
the half obscurity of the lower deck. Here they passed one or two
shadows, that, recognizing the Senor, seemed to draw aside in a half
awed, half suppressed shyness, as of caged animals in the presence of
their trainer. At the fore-hatch they again descended, passing a figure
that appeared to be keeping watch at the foot of the ladder, and almost
instantly came upon a group lit up by the glare of a bull's-eye lantern.
It was composed of the first and second mate, a vicious-looking Peruvian
sailor with a bandaged head, and, to the Senor's astonishment, the
missing passenger Hurlstone, seated on the deck, heavily ironed.

"Tell him what you know, Pedro," said the first mate to the Peruvian
sailor curtly.

"It was just daybreak, Patrono, before we put about," began the man
in Spanish, "that I thought I saw some one gliding along towards the
fore-hatch; but I lost sight of him. After we had tumbled up to go on
the other tack, I heard a noise in the fore-hold. I went down and found
HIM," pointing to Hurlstone, "hiding there. He had some provisions
stowed away beside him, and that package. I grabbed him, Patrono.
He broke away and struck me here"--he pointed to his still wet
bandage--"and would have got out overboard through the port, but the
second mate heard the row and came down just in time to stop him."

"When was this?" asked Senor Perkins.

"Guardia di Diana."

"You were chattering, you fellows."

"Quien sabe?" said the Peruvian, lifting his shoulders.

"How does he explain himself?"

"He refuses to speak."

"Take off his irons," said Senor Perkins, in English.

"But"--expostulated the first mate, with a warning gesture.

"I said--take off his irons," repeated Senor Perkins in a dry and
unfamiliar voice.

The two mates released the shackles. The prisoner raised his eyes to
Senor Perkins. He was a slightly built man of about thirty, fair-haired
and hollow-cheeked. His short upper lip was lifted over his teeth, as
if from hurried or labored breathing; but his features were regular and
determined, and his large blue eyes shone with a strange abstraction of
courage and fatuity.

"That will do," continued the Senor, in the same tone. "Now leave him
with me."

The two mates looked at each other, and hesitated; but at a glance
from Perkins, turned, and ascended the ladder again. The Peruvian alone
remained.

"Go!" said the Senor sharply.

The man cast a vindictive look at the prisoner and retreated sullenly.

"Did HE tell you," said the prisoner, looking after the sailor grimly,
"that I tried to bribe him to let me go, but that I couldn't reach
his figure? He wanted too much. He thought I had some stolen money or
valuables here," he added, with a bitter laugh, pointing to the package
that lay beside him.

"And you hadn't?" said Perkins shortly.

"No."

"I believe you. And now, my young friend," said Perkins, with a singular
return of his beaming gentleness, "since those two efficient and
competent officers and this energetic but discourteous seaman are gone,
would you mind telling me WHAT you were hiding for?"

The prisoner raised his eyes on his questioner. For the last three weeks
he had lived in the small community of which the Senor was a prominent
member, but he scarcely recognized him now.

"What if I refuse?" he said.

The Senor shrugged his shoulders.

"Those two excellent men would feel it their duty to bring the Peruvian
to the captain, and I should be called to interpret to him."

"And I should throw myself overboard the first chance I got. I would
have done so ten minutes ago, but the mate stopped me."

His eye glistened with the same fatuous determination he had shown at
first. There was no doubt he would do as he said.

"I believe you would," said the Senor benevolently; "but I see no
present necessity for that, nor for any trouble whatever, if you will
kindly tell me WHAT I am to say."

The young man's eyes fell.

"I DID try to conceal myself in the hold," he said bluntly. "I intended
to remain there hidden while the ship was at Mazatlan. I did not know
until now that the vessel had changed her course."

"And how did you believe your absence would be accounted for?" asked the
Senor blandly.

"I thought it would be supposed that I had fallen overboard before we
entered Mazatlan."

"So that anybody seeking you there would not find you, and you would be
believed to be dead?"

"Yes." He raised his eyes quickly to Senor Perkins again. "I am neither
a thief nor a murderer," he said almost savagely, "but I do not choose
to be recognized by any one who knows me on this side of the grave."

Senor Perkins' eyes sought his, and for an instant seemed to burn
through the singular, fatuous mist that veiled them.

"My friend," he said cheerfully, after a moment's pause, "you have just
had a providential escape. I repeat it--a most providential escape.
Indeed, if I were inclined to prophesy, I would say you were a man
reserved for some special good fortune."

The prisoner stared at him with angry amazement.

"You are a confirmed somnambulist. Excuse me," continued the Senor, with
a soft, deprecating gesture; "you are, of course, unaware of it--most
victims of that singular complaint are, or at least fail to recognize
the extent of their aberration. In your case it has only been indicated
by a profound melancholy and natural shunning of society. In a paroxysm
of your disorder, you rise in the night, fully dress yourself, and glide
as unconsciously along the deck in pursuance of some vague fancy. You
pass the honest but energetic sailor who has just left us, who thinks
you are a phantom, and fails to give the alarm; you are precipitated
by a lurch of the ship through an open hatchway: the shock renders you
insensible until you are discovered and restored."

"And who will believe this pretty story?" said the young man scornfully.

"The honest sailor who picked you up, who has related it in his own
picturesque tongue to ME, who will in turn interpret it to the captain
and the other passengers," replied Senor Perkins blandly.

"And what of the two mates who were here?" said the prisoner
hesitatingly.

"They are two competent officers, who are quite content to carry out
the orders of their superiors, and who understand their duty too well to
interfere with the reports of their subordinates, on which these orders
are based. Mr. Brooks, the first officer, though fairly intelligent
and a good reader of history, is only imperfectly acquainted with the
languages, and Mr. M'Carthy's knowledge of Spanish is confined to a few
objurgations which generally preclude extended conversation."

"And who are you," said Hurlstone, more calmly, "who are willing to do
this for a stranger?"

"A friend--equally of yours, the captain's, and the other passengers',"
replied Senor Perkins pleasantly. "A man who believes you, my dear sir,
and, even if he did not, sees no reason to interrupt the harmony that
has obtained in our little community during our delightful passage.
Were any scandal to occur, were you to carry out your idea of throwing
yourself overboard, it would, to say nothing of my personal regret,
produce a discord for which there is no necessity, and from which no
personal good can be derived. Here at least your secret is secure, for
even I do not ask what it is; we meet here on an equality, based on
our own conduct and courtesy to each other, limited by no antecedent
prejudice, and restrained by no thought of the future. In a little while
we shall be separated--why should it not be as friends? Why should we
not look back upon our little world of this ship as a happy one?"

Hurlstone gazed at the speaker with a troubled air. It was once more
the quaint benevolent figure whom he had vaguely noted among the other
passengers, and as vaguely despised. He hesitated a moment, and then,
half timidly, half reservedly, extended his hand.

"I thank you," he said, "at least for not asking my secret. Perhaps, if
it was only"--

"Your own--you might tell it," interrupted the Senor, gayly. "I
understand. I see you recognize my principle. There is no necessity of
your putting yourself to that pain, or another to that risk. And now, my
young friend, time presses. I must say a word to our friends above,
who are waiting, and I shall see that you are taken privately to your
state-room while most of the other passengers are still on deck. If you
would permit yourself the weakness of allowing the steward to carry or
assist you it would be better. Let me advise you that the excitement of
the last three hours has not left you in your full strength. You must
really give ME the pleasure of spreading the glad tidings of your safety
among the passengers, who have been so terribly alarmed."

"They will undoubtedly be relieved," said Hurlstone, with ironical
bitterness.

"You wrong them," returned the Senor, with gentle reproach; "especially
the ladies."

The voice of the first mate from above here checked his further speech,
and, perhaps, prevented him, as he quickly reascended the upper deck,
from noticing the slight embarrassment of his prisoner.

The Senor's explanations to the mate were evidently explicit and brief.
In a few moments he reappeared with the steward and his assistant.

"Lean on these men," he said to Hurlstone significantly, "and do not
overestimate your strength. Thank Heaven, no bones are broken, and you
are only bruised by the fall. With a little rest, I think we can get
along without laying the captain's medicine-chest under contribution.
Our kind friend Mr. Brooks has had the lower deck cleared, so that you
may gain your state-room without alarming the passengers or fatiguing
yourself."

He pressed Hurlstone's hand as the latter resigned himself to the
steward, and was half led, half supported, through the gloom of the
lower deck. Senor Perkins remained for an instant gazing after him
with even more than his usual benevolence. Suddenly his arm was touched
almost rudely. He turned, and encountered the lowering eyes of the
Peruvian sailor.

"And what is to be done for me?" said the man roughly, in Spanish.

"You?"

"Yes. Who's to pay for this?" he pointed to his bandaged head.

Without changing his bland expression, Senor Perkins apparently allowed
his soft black eyes to rest, as if fondly, on the angry pupils of the
Peruvian. The eyes of the latter presently sought the ground.

"My dear Yoto," said Senor Perkins softly, "I scarcely think that
this question of personal damage can be referred to the State. I will,
however, look into it. Meantime, let me advise you to control your
enthusiasm. Too much zeal in a subordinate is even more fatal than
laxity. For the rest, son, be vigilant--and peaceful. Thou hast meant
well, much shall be--forgiven thee. For the present, vamos!"

He turned on his heel, and ascended to the upper deck. Here he found the
passengers thrilling with a vague excitement. A few brief orders, a
few briefer explanations, dropped by the officers, had already whetted
curiosity to the keenest point. The Senor was instantly beset with
interrogations. Gentle, compassionate, with well-rounded periods, he
related the singular accident that had befallen Mr. Hurlstone, and his
providential escape from almost certain death. "At the most, he has now
only the exhaustion of the shock, from which a day of perfect rest will
recover him; but," he added deprecatingly, "at present he ought not to
be disturbed or excited."

The story was received by those fellow-passengers who had been strongest
in their suspicions of Hurlstone's suicide or flight, with a keen sense
of discomfiture, only mitigated by a humorous perception of the cause
of the accident. It was agreed that a man whose ludicrous infirmity had
been the cause of putting the ship out of her course, and the passengers
out of their comfortable security, could not be wronged by attributing
to him manlier and more criminal motives. A somnambulist on shipboard
was clearly a humorous object, who might, however, become a bore. "It
all accounts for his being so deuced quiet and reserved in the daytime,"
said Crosby facetiously; "he couldn't keep it up the whole twenty-four
hours. If he'd only given us a little more of his company when he was
awake, he wouldn't have gallivanted round at night, and we'd have been
thirty miles nearer port." Equal amusement was created by the humorous
suggestion that the unfortunate man had never been entirely awake during
the voyage, and that he would now, probably for the first time, really
make the acquaintance of his fellow-voyagers. Listening to this
badinage with bland tolerance, Senor Perkins no doubt felt that, for the
maintenance of that perfect amity he so ardently apostrophized, it was
just as well that Hurlstone was in his state-room, and out of hearing.

He would have been more satisfied, however, had he been permitted to
hear the feminine comments on this incident. In the eyes of the lady
passengers Mr. Hurlstone was more a hero than ever; his mysterious
malady invested him with a vague and spiritual interest; his escape from
the awful fate reserved to him, in their excited fancy, gave him the
eclat of having ACTUALLY survived it; while the supposed real incident
of his fall through the hatchway lent him the additional lustre of a
wounded and crippled man. That prostrate condition of active humanity,
which so irresistibly appeals to the feminine imagination as segregating
their victim from the distractions of his own sex, and, as it were,
delivering him helpless into their hands, was at once their opportunity,
and his. All the ladies volunteered to nurse him; it was with difficulty
that Mrs. Brimmer and Mrs. Markham, reinforced with bandages, flannels,
and liniments, and supported by different theories, could be kept from
the door of his state-room. Jellies, potted meats, and delicacies from
their private stores appeared on trays at his bedside, to be courteously
declined by the Senor Perkins, in his new functions of a benevolent type
of Sancho Panza physician. To say that this pleased the gentle optimism
of the Senor is unnecessary. Even while his companion writhed under the
sting of this enforced compassion, the good man beamed philosophically
upon him.

"Take care, or I shall end this cursed farce in my own way," said
Hurlstone ominously, his eyes again filming with a vague desperation.

"My dear boy," returned the Senor gently, "reflect upon the situation.
Your suffering, real or implied, produces in the hearts of these gentle
creatures a sympathy which not only exalts and sustains their higher
natures, but, I conscientiously believe, gratifies and pleases their
lower ones. Why should you deny them this opportunity of indulging
their twofold organisms, and beguiling the tedium of the voyage, merely
because of some erroneous exhibition of fact?"

Later, Senor Perkins might have added to this exposition the singularly
stimulating effect which Hurlstone's supposed peculiarity had upon
the feminine imagination. But there were some secrets which were not
imparted even to him, and it was only to each other that the ladies
confided certain details and reminiscences. For it now appeared that
they had all heard strange noises and stealthy steps at night; and Mrs.
Brimmer was quite sure that on one occasion the handle of her state-room
door was softly turned. Mrs. Markham also remembered distinctly that
only a week before, being unable to sleep, she had ventured out into the
saloon in a dressing-gown to get her diary, which she had left with a
portfolio on a chair; that she had a sudden consciousness of another
presence in the saloon, although she could distinguish nothing by the
dim light of the swinging lantern; and that, after quickly returning to
her room, she was quite positive she heard a door close. But the most
surprising reminiscence developed by the late incident was from Mrs.
Brimmer's nurse, Susan. As it, apparently, demonstrated the fact that
Mr. Hurlstone not only walked but TALKED in his sleep, it possessed
a more mysterious significance. It seemed that Susan was awakened one
night by the sound of voices, and, opening her door softly, saw a figure
which she at first supposed to be the Senor Perkins, but which she now
was satisfied was poor Mr. Hurlstone. As there was no one else to be
seen, the voices must have proceeded from that single figure; and being
in a strange and unknown tongue, were inexpressibly weird and awful.
When pressed to remember what was said, she could only distinguish one
word--a woman's name--Virgil--Vigil--no: Virginescia!

"It must have been one of those creatures at Callao, whose pictures you
can buy for ten cents," said Mrs. Brimmer.

"If it is one of them, Susan must have made a mistake in the first two
syllables of the name," said Mrs. Markham grimly.

"But surely, Miss Keene," said Miss Chubb, turning to that young lady,
who had taken only the part of a passive listener to this colloquy, and
was gazing over the railing at the sinking sun, "surely YOU can tell
us something about this poor young man. If I don't mistake, you are the
only person he ever honored with his conversation."

"And only once, I think," said the young girl, slightly coloring. "He
happened to be sitting next to me on deck, and I believe he spoke only
out of politeness. At least, he seemed very quiet and reserved, and
talked on general topics, and I thought very intelligently. I--should
have thought--I mean," she continued hesitatingly--"I thought he was an
educated gentleman."

"That isn't at all inconsistent with photographs or sleep-walking," said
Mrs. Brimmer, with one of her vague simplicities. "Uncle Quincey brought
home a whole sheaf of those women whom he said he'd met; and one of my
cousins, who was educated at Heidelberg, used to walk in his sleep, as
it were, all over Europe."

"Did you notice anything queer in his eyes, Miss Keene?" asked Miss
Chubb vivaciously.

Miss Keene had noticed that his eyes were his best feature, albeit
somewhat abstracted and melancholy; but, for some vague reason she could
not explain herself, she answered hurriedly that she had seen nothing
very particular in them.

"Well," said Mrs. Markham positively, "when he's able to be out again,
I shall consider it my duty to look him up, and try to keep him
sufficiently awake in the daytime to ensure his resting better at
night."

"No one can do it, dear Mrs. Markham, better than you; and no one would
think of misunderstanding your motives," said Mrs. Brimmer sweetly. "But
it's getting late, and the air seems to be ever so much colder. Captain
Bunker says it's because we are really nearing the Californian coast. It
seems so odd! Mr. Brimmer wrote to me that it was so hot in Sacramento
that you could do something with eggs in the sun--I forget what."

"Hatch them?" suggested Miss Chubb.

"I think so," returned Mrs. Brimmer, rising. "Let us go below."

The three ladies rustled away, but Miss Keene, throwing a wrap around
her shoulders, lingered by the railing. With one little hand supporting
her round chin, she leaned over the darkly heaving water. She was
thinking of her brief and only interview with that lonely man whose name
was now in everybody's mouth, but who, until to-day, had been passed
over by them with an unconcern equal to his own. And yet to her refined
and delicately feminine taste there appeared no reason why he should not
have mingled with his fellows, and have accepted the homage from them
that SHE was instinctively ready to give. He seemed to her like a
gentleman--and something more. In her limited but joyous knowledge of
the world--a knowledge gathered in the happy school-life of an orphan
who but faintly remembered and never missed a parent's care--she knew
nothing of the mysterious dominance of passion, suffering, or experience
in fashioning the outward expression of men, and saw only that Mr.
Hurlstone was unlike any other. That unlikeness was fascinating. He had
said very little to her in that very brief period. He had not talked
to her with the general gallantry which she already knew her prettiness
elicited. Without knowing why, she felt there was a subtle flattery in
his tacit recognition of that other self of which she, as yet, knew so
little. She could not remember what they had talked about--nor why. Nor
was she offended that he had never spoken to her since, nor gone beyond
a grave lifting of his hat to her when he passed.




CHAPTER IV.

IN THE FOG.


By noon of the following day the coast of the Peninsula of California
had been sighted to leeward. The lower temperature of the northwest
Trades had driven Mrs. Brimmer and Miss Chubb into their state-rooms to
consult their wardrobes in view of an impending change from the light
muslins and easy languid toilets of the Tropics. That momentous question
for the moment held all other topics in abeyance; and even Mrs. Markham
and Miss Keene, though they still kept the deck, in shawls and wraps,
sighed over this feminine evidence of the gentle passing of their
summer holiday. The gentlemen had already mounted their pea-jackets
and overcoats, with the single exception of Senor Perkins, who, in
chivalrous compliment to the elements, still bared his unfettered throat
and forehead to the breeze. The aspect of the coast, as seen from the
Excelsior's deck, seemed to bear out Mr. Banks' sweeping indictment of
the day before. A few low, dome-like hills, yellow and treeless as
sand dunes, scarcely raised themselves above the horizon. The air, too,
appeared to have taken upon itself a dry asperity; the sun shone with a
hard, practical brilliancy. Miss Keene raised her eyes to Senor Perkins
with a pretty impatience that she sometimes indulged in, as one of the
privileges of accepted beauty and petted youth.

"I don't think much of your peninsula," she said poutingly. "It looks
dreadfully flat and uninteresting. It was a great deal nicer on the
other coast, or even at sea."

"Perhaps you are judging hastily, my dear young friend," said Senor
Perkins, with habitual tolerance. "I have heard that behind those hills,
and hidden from sight in some of the canyons, are perfect little Edens
of beauty and fruitfulness. They are like some ardent natures that cover
their approaches with the ashes of their burnt-up fires, but only do it
the better to keep intact their glowing, vivifying, central heat."

"How very poetical, Mr. Perkins!" said Mrs. Markham, with blunt
admiration. "You ought to put that into verse."

"I have," returned Senor Perkins modestly. "They are some reflections
on--I hardly dare call them an apostrophe to--the crater of Colima. If
you will permit me to read them to you this evening, I shall be charmed.
I hope also to take that opportunity of showing you the verses of a
gifted woman, not yet known to fame, Mrs. Euphemia M'Corkle, of Peoria,
Illinois."

Mrs. Markham coughed slightly. The gifted M'Corkle was already known to
her through certain lines quoted by the Senor; and the entire cabin had
one evening fled before a larger and more ambitious manuscript of the
fair Illinoisian. Miss Keene, who dreaded the reappearance of this
poetical phantom that seemed to haunt the Senor's fancy, could not,
however, forget that she had been touched on that occasion by a kindly
moisture of eye and tremulousness of voice in the reader; and, in spite
of the hopeless bathos of the composition, she had forgiven him. Though
she did not always understand Senor Perkins, she liked him too well to
allow him to become ridiculous to others; and at the present moment she
promptly interposed with a charming assumption of coquetry.

"You forget that you promised to let ME read the manuscript first, and
in private, and that you engaged to give me my revenge at chess this
evening. But do as you like. You are all fast becoming faithless. I
suppose it is because our holiday is drawing to a close, and we shall
soon forget we ever had any, or be ashamed we ever played so long.
Everybody seems to be getting nervous and fidgety and preparing for
civilization again. Mr. Banks, for the last few days, has dressed
himself regularly as if he were going down town to his office,
and writes letters in the corner of the saloon as if it were a
counting-house. Mr. Crosby and Mr. Winslow do nothing but talk of their
prospects, and I believe they are drawing up articles of partnership
together. Here is Mr. Brace frightening me by telling me that my brother
will lock me up, to keep the rich miners from laying their bags of
gold dust at my feet; and Mrs. Brimmer and Miss Chubb assure me that I
haven't a decent gown to go ashore in."

"You forget Mr. Hurlstone," said Brace, with ill-concealed bitterness;
"he seems to have time enough on his hands, and I dare say would
sympathize with you. You women like idle men."

"If we do, it's because only the idle men have the time to amuse us,"
retorted Miss Keene. "But," she added, with a laugh, "I suppose I'm
getting nervous and fidgety myself; for I find myself every now and
then watching the officers and men, and listening to the orders as if
something were going to happen again. I never felt so before; I never
used to have the least concern in what you call 'the working of the
ship,' and now"--her voice, which had been half playful, half pettish,
suddenly became grave,--"and now--look at the mate and those men
forward. There certainly is something going on, or is going to happen.
What ARE they looking at?"

The mate had clambered halfway up the main ratlines, and was looking
earnestly to windward. Two or three of the crew on the forecastle were
gazing in the same direction. The group of cabin-passengers on the
quarterdeck, following their eyes, saw what appeared to be another low
shore on the opposite bow.

"Why, there's another coast there!" said Mrs. Markham.

"It's a fog-bank," said Senor Perkins gravely. He quickly crossed the
deck, exchanged a few words with the officer, and returned. Miss Keene,
who had felt a sense of relief, nevertheless questioned his face as he
again stood beside her. But he had recovered his beaming cheerfulness.
"It's nothing to alarm you," he said, answering her glance, "but it may
mean delay if we can't get out of it. You don't mind that, I know."

"No," replied the young girl, smiling. "Besides, it would be a new
experience. We've had winds and calms--we only want fog now to complete
our adventures. Unless it's going to make everybody cross," she
continued, with a mischievous glance at Brace.

"You'll find it won't improve the temper of the officers," said Crosby,
who had joined the group. "There's nothing sailors hate more than a fog.
They can go to sleep in a hurricane between the rolls of a ship, but a
fog keeps them awake. It's the one thing they can't shirk. There's the
skipper tumbled up, too! The old man looks wrathy, don't he? But it's no
use now; we're going slap into it, and the wind's failing!"

It was true. In the last few moments all that vast glistening surface of
metallic blue which stretched so far to windward appeared to be slowly
eaten away as if by some dull, corroding acid; the distant horizon line
of sea and sky was still distinct and sharply cut, but the whole water
between them had grown gray, as if some invisible shadow had passed in
mid-air across it. The actual fog bank had suddenly lost its resemblance
to the shore, had lifted as a curtain, and now seemed suspended over the
ship. Gradually it descended; the top-gallant and top-sails were lost
in this mysterious vapor, yet the horizon line still glimmered faintly.
Then another mist seemed to rise from the sea and meet it; in another
instant the deck whereon they stood shrank to the appearance of a
raft adrift in a faint gray sea. With the complete obliteration of all
circumambient space, the wind fell. Their isolation was complete.

It was notable that the first and most peculiar effect of this misty
environment was the absolute silence. The empty, invisible sails above
did not flap; the sheets and halyards hung limp; even the faint creaking
of an unseen block overhead was so startling as to draw every eye
upwards. Muffled orders from viewless figures forward were obeyed by
phantoms that moved noiselessly through the gray sea that seemed to have
invaded the deck. Even the passengers spoke in whispers, or held their
breath, in passive groups, as if fearing to break a silence so replete
with awe and anticipation. It was next noticed that the vessel was
subjected to some vague motion; the resistance of the water had ceased,
the waves no longer hissed under her bows, or nestled and lapped under
her counter; a dreamy, irregular, and listless rocking had taken the
place of the regular undulations; at times, a faint and half delicious
vertigo seemed to overcome their senses; the ship was drifting.

Captain Bunker stood near the bitts, where his brief orders were
transmitted to the man at the almost useless wheel. At his side Senor
Perkins beamed with unshaken serenity, and hopefully replied to the
captain's half surly, half anxious queries.

"By the chart we should be well east of Los Lobos island, d'ye see?"
he said impatiently. "You don't happen to remember the direction of the
current off shore when you were running up here?"

"It's five years ago," said the Senor modestly; "but I remember we kept
well to the west to weather Cape St. Eugenio. My impression is that
there was a strong northwesterly current setting north of Ballenos Bay."

"And we're in it now," said Captain Bunker shortly. "How near St. Roque
does it set?"

"Within a mile or two. I should keep away more to the west," said Senor
Perkins, "and clear"--

"I ain't asking you to run the ship," interrupted Captain Bunker
sharply. "How's her head now, Mr. Brooks?"

The seamen standing near cast a rapid glance at Senor Perkins, but not
a muscle of his bland face moved or betrayed a consciousness of the
insult. Whatever might have been the feeling towards him, at that
moment the sailors--after their fashion--admired their captain; strong,
masterful, and imperious. The danger that had cleared his eye, throat,
and brain, and left him once more the daring and skillful navigator they
knew, wiped out of their shallow minds the vicious habit that had sunk
him below their level.

It had now become perceptible to even the inexperienced eyes of the
passengers that the Excelsior was obeying some new and profound impulse.
The vague drifting had ceased, and in its place had come a mysterious
but regular movement, in which the surrounding mist seemed to
participate, until fog and vessel moved together towards some unseen but
well-defined bourne. In vain had the boats of the Excelsior, manned
by her crew, endeavored with a towing-line to check or direct the
inexplicable movement; in vain had Captain Bunker struggled, with all
the skilled weapons of seamanship, against his invincible foe; wrapped
in the impenetrable fog, the ship moved ghost-like to what seemed to be
her doom.

The anxiety of the officers had not as yet communicated itself to the
passengers; those who had been most nervous in the ordinary onset of
wind and wave looked upon the fog as a phenomenon whose only disturbance
might be delay. To Miss Keene this conveyed no annoyance; rather that
placid envelopment of cloud soothed her fancy; she submitted herself to
its soft embraces, and to the mysterious onward movement of the ship,
as if it were part of a youthful dream. Once she thought of the ship
of Sindbad, and that fatal loadstone mountain, with an awe that was,
however, half a pleasure.

"You are not frightened, Miss Keene?" said a voice near her.

She started slightly. It was the voice of Mr. Hurlstone. So thick was
the fog that his face and figure appeared to come dimly out of it, like
a part of her dreaming fancy. Without replying to his question, she said
quickly,--

"You are better then, Mr. Hurlstone? We--we were all so frightened for
you."

An angry shadow crossed his thin face, and he hesitated. After a pause
he recovered himself, and said,--

"I was saying you were taking all this very quietly. I don't think
there's much danger myself. And if we should go ashore here"--

"Well?" suggested Miss Keene, ignoring this first intimation of danger
in her surprise at the man's manner.

"Well, we should all be separated only a few days earlier, that's all!"

More frightened at the strange bitterness of his voice than by the
sense of physical peril, she was vaguely moving away towards the dimly
outlined figures of her companions when she was arrested by a voice
forward. There was a slight murmur among the passengers.

"What did he say?" asked Miss Keene, "What are 'Breakers ahead'?"

Hurlstone did not reply.

"Where away?" asked a second voice.

The murmur still continuing, Captain Bunker's hoarse voice pierced the
gloom,--"Silence fore and aft!"

The first voice repeated faintly,--

"On the larboard bow."

There was another silence. Again the voice repeated, as if
mechanically,--

"Breakers!"

"Where away?"

"On the starboard beam."

"We are in some passage or channel," said Hurlstone quietly.

The young girl glanced round her and saw for the first time that, in
one of those inexplicable movements she had not understood, the other
passengers had been withdrawn into a limited space of the deck, as if
through some authoritative orders, while she and her companion had been
evidently overlooked. A couple of sailors, who had suddenly taken their
positions by the quarter-boats, strengthened the accidental separation.

"Is there some one taking care of you?" he asked, half hesitatingly;
"Mr. Brace--Perkins--or"--

"No," she replied quickly. "Why?"

"Well, we are very near the boat in an emergency, and you might allow me
to stay here and see you safe in it."

"But the other ladies? Mrs. Markham, and"--

"They'll take their turn after YOU," he said grimly, picking up a wrap
from the railing and throwing it over her shoulders.

"But--I don't understand!" she stammered, more embarrassed by the
situation than by any impending peril.

"There is very little danger, I think," he added impatiently. "There is
scarcely any sea; the ship has very little way on; and these breakers
are not over rocks. Listen."

She tried to listen. At first she heard nothing but the occasional low
voice of command near the wheel. Then she became conscious of a gentle,
soothing murmur through the fog to the right. She had heard such a
murmuring accompaniment to her girlish dreams at Newport on a still
summer night. There was nothing to frighten her, but it increased her
embarrassment.

"And you?" she said awkwardly, raising her soft eyes.

"Oh, if you are all going off in the boats, by Jove, I think I'll stick
to the ship!" he returned, with a frankness that would have been rude
but for its utter abstraction.

Miss Keene was silent. The ship moved gently onward. The monotonous cry
of the leadsman in the chains was the only sound audible. The soundings
were indicating shoaler water, although the murmuring of the surf had
been left far astern. The almost imperceptible darkening of the mist
on either beam seemed to show that the Excelsior was entering some
land-locked passage. The movement of the vessel slackened, the tide was
beginning to ebb. Suddenly a wave of far-off clamor, faint but sonorous,
broke across the ship. There was an interval of breathless silence, and
then it broke again, and more distinctly. It was the sound of bells!

The thrill of awe which passed through passengers and crew at this
spiritual challenge from the vast and intangible void around them had
scarcely subsided when the captain turned to Senor Perkins with a look
of surly interrogation. The Senor brushed his hat further back on his
head, wiped his brow, and became thoughtful.

"It's too far south for Rosario," he said deprecatingly; "and the only
other mission I know of is San Carlos, and that's far inland. But that
is the Angelus, and those are mission bells, surely."

The captain turned to Mr. Brooks. The voice of invisible command again
passed along the deck, and, with a splash in the water and the rattling
of chains, the Excelsior swung slowly round on her anchor on the bosom
of what seemed a placid bay.

Miss Keene, who, in her complete absorption, had listened to the
phantom bells with an almost superstitious exaltation, had forgotten the
presence of her companion, and now turned towards him. But he was gone.
The imminent danger he had spoken of, half slightingly, he evidently
considered as past. He had taken the opportunity offered by the slight
bustle made by the lowering of the quarter-boat and the departure of the
mate on a voyage of discovery to mingle with the crowd, and regain his
state-room. With the anchoring of the vessel, the momentary restraint
was relaxed, the passengers were allowed to pervade the deck, and Mrs.
Markham and Mr. Brace simultaneously rushed to Miss Keene's side.

"We were awfully alarmed for you, my dear," said Mrs. Markham, "until
we saw you had a protector. Do tell me--what DID he say? He must have
thought the danger great to have broken the Senor's orders and come upon
deck? What did he talk about?"

With a vivid recollection in her mind of Mr. Hurlstone's contemptuous
ignoring of the other ladies, Miss Keene became slightly embarrassed.
Her confusion was not removed by the consciousness that the jealous eyes
of Brace were fixed upon her.

"Perhaps he thought it was night, and walked upon deck in his sleep,"
remarked Brace sarcastically. "He's probably gone back to bed."

"He offered me his protection very politely, and begged to remain to put
me in the boat in case of danger," said Miss Keene, recovering herself,
and directing her reply to Mrs. Markham. "I think that others have made
me the same kind of offer--who were wide awake," she added mischievously
to Brace.

"I wouldn't be too sure that they were not foolishly dreaming too,"
returned Brace, in a lower voice.

"I should think we all were asleep or dreaming here," said Mrs. Markham
briskly. "Nobody seems to know where we are, and the only man who might
guess it--Senor Perkins--has gone off in the boat with the mate."

"We're not a mile from shore and a Catholic church," said Crosby, who
had joined them. "I just left Mrs. Brimmer, who is very High Church, you
know, quite overcome by these Angelus bells. She's been entreating the
captain to let her go ashore for vespers. It wouldn't be a bad idea, if
we could only see what sort of a place we've got to. It wouldn't do to
go feeling round the settlement in the dark--would it? Hallo! what's
that? Oh, by Jove, that'll finish Mrs. Brimmer, sure!"

"Hush!" said Miss Keene impulsively.

He stopped. The long-drawn cadence of a chant in thin clear soprano
voices swept through the fog from the invisible shore, rose high above
the ship, and then fell, dying away with immeasurable sweetness and
melancholy. Even when it had passed, a lingering melody seemed to
fill the deck. Two or three of the foreign sailors crossed themselves
devoutly; the other passengers withheld their speech, and looked at each
other. Afraid to break the charm by speech, they listened again, but in
vain an infinite repose followed that seemed to pervade everything.

It was broken, at last, by the sound of oars in their rowlocks; the boat
was returning. But it was noticed that the fog had slightly lifted
from the surface of the water, for the boat was distinctly visible two
cables' length from the ship as she approached; and it was seen that
besides the first officer and Senor Perkins there were two strangers
in the boat. Everybody rushed to the side for a nearer view of those
strange inhabitants of the unknown shore; but the boat's crew suddenly
ceased rowing, and lay on their oars until an indistinct hail and
reply passed between the boat and ship. There was a bustle forward, an
unexpected thunder from the Excelsior's eight-pounder at the bow
port; Captain Bunker and the second mate ranged themselves at the
companionway, and the passengers for the first time became aware that
they were participating at the reception of visitors of distinction, as
two strange and bizarre figures stepped upon the deck.




CHAPTER V.

TODOS SANTOS.


It was evident that the two strangers represented some exalted
military and ecclesiastical authority. This was shown in their dress--a
long-forgotten, half mediaeval costume, that to the imaginative
spectator was perfectly in keeping with their mysterious advent, and
to the more practical as startling as a masquerade. The foremost figure
wore a broad-brimmed hat of soft felt, with tarnished gold lace, and a
dark feather tucked in its recurved flap; a short cloak of fine black
cloth thrown over one shoulder left a buff leathern jacket and breeches,
ornamented with large round silver buttons, exposed until they were met
by high boots of untanned yellow buckskin that reached halfway up the
thigh. A broad baldric of green silk hung from his shoulder across his
breast, and supported at his side a long sword with an enormous
basket hilt, through which somewhat coquettishly peeped a white
lace handkerchief. Tall and erect, in spite of the grizzled hair and
iron-gray moustaches and wrinkled face of a man of sixty, he suddenly
halted on the deck with a military precision that made the jingling
chains and bits of silver on his enormous spurs ring again. He was
followed by an ecclesiastic of apparently his own age, but smoothly
shaven, clad in a black silk sotana and sash, and wearing the
old-fashioned oblong, curl-brimmed hat sacred to "Don Basilo," of the
modern opera. Behind him appeared the genial face of Senor Perkins,
shining with the benignant courtesy of a master of ceremonies.

"If this is a fair sample of the circus ashore, I'll take two tickets,"
whispered Crosby, who had recovered his audacity.

"I have the inexpressible honor," said Senor Perkins to Captain Bunker,
with a gracious wave of his hand towards the extraordinary figures, "to
present you to the illustrious Don Miguel Briones, Comandante of the
Presidio of Todos Santos, at present hidden in the fog, and the very
reverend and pious Padre Esteban, of the Mission of Todos Santos,
likewise invisible. When I state to you," he continued, with a slight
lifting of his voice, so as to include the curious passengers in
his explanation, "that, with very few exceptions, this is the usual
condition of the atmosphere at the entrance to the Mission and Presidio
of Todos Santos, and that the last exception took place thirty-five
years ago, when a ship entered the harbor, you will understand why these
distinguished gentlemen have been willing to waive the formality of your
waiting upon them first, and have taken the initiative. The illustrious
Comandante has been generous to exempt you from the usual port
regulations, and to permit you to wood and to water"--

"What port regulation is he talking of?" asked Captain Bunker testily.

"The Mexican regulations forbidding any foreign vessel to communicate
with the shore," returned Senor Perkins deprecatingly.

"Never heard of 'em. When were they given?"

The Senor turned and addressed a few words to the commander, who stood
apart in silent dignity.

"In 1792."

"In what?--Is he mad?" said Bunker. "Does he know what year this is?"

"The illustrious commander believes it to be the year of grace 1854,"
answered Senor Perkins quietly. "In the case of the only two vessels who
have touched here since 1792 the order was not carried out because they
were Mexican coasters. The illustrious Comandante explains that
the order he speaks of as on record distinctly referred to the ship
'Columbia, which belonged to the General Washington.'"

"General Washington!" echoed Bunker, angrily staring at the Senor.
"What's this stuff? Do you mean to say they don't know any history later
than our old Revolutionary War? Haven't they heard of the United States
among them? Nor California--that we took from them during the late war?"

"Nor how we licked 'em out of their boots, and that's saying a good
deal," whispered Crosby, glancing at the Comandante's feet.

Senor Perkins raised a gentle, deprecating hand.

"For fifty years the Presidio and the Mission of Todos Santos have had
but this communication with the outer world," he said blandly. "Hidden
by impenetrable fogs from the ocean pathway at their door, cut off by
burning and sterile deserts from the surrounding country, they have
preserved a trust and propagated a faith in enforced but not unhappy
seclusion. The wars that have shaken mankind, the dissensions that have
even disturbed the serenity of their own nation on the mainland,
have never reached them here. Left to themselves, they have created
a blameless Arcadia and an ideal community within an extent of twenty
square leagues. Why should we disturb their innocent complacency and
tranquil enjoyment by information which cannot increase and might impair
their present felicity? Why should we dwell upon a late political and
international episode which, while it has been a benefit to us, has been
a humiliation to them as a nation, and which might not only imperil our
position as guests, but interrupt our practical relations to the wood
and water, with which the country abounds?"

He paused, and before the captain could speak, turned to the silent
Commander, addressed him in a dozen phrases of fluent and courteous
Spanish, and once more turned to Captain Bunker.

"I have told him you are touched to the heart with his courtesy, which
you recognize as coming from the fit representative of the great Mexican
nation. He reciprocates your fraternal emotion, and begs you to consider
the Presidio and all that it contains, at your disposition and the
disposition of your friends--the passengers, particularly those fair
ladies," said Senor Perkins, turning with graceful promptitude towards
the group of lady passengers, and slightly elevating himself on the tips
of his neat boots, "whose white hands he kisses, and at whose feet he
lays the devotion of a Mexican caballero and officer."

He waved his hand towards the Comandante, who, stepping forward,
swept the deck with his plumed hat before each of the ladies in solemn
succession. Recovering himself, he bowed more stiffly to the male
passengers, picked his handkerchief out of the hilt of his sword,
gracefully wiped his lips, pulled the end of his long gray moustache,
and became again rigid.

"The reverend father," continued Senor Perkins, turning towards the
priest, "regrets that the rules of his order prevent his extending the
same courtesy to these ladies at the Mission. But he hopes to meet them
at the Presidio, and they will avail themselves of his aid and counsel
there and everywhere."

Father Esteban, following the speaker's words with a gracious and ready
smile, at once moved forward among the passengers, offering an antique
snuff-box to the gentlemen, or passing before the ladies with slightly
uplifted benedictory palms and a caressing paternal gesture. Mrs.
Brimmer, having essayed a French sentence, was delighted and half
frightened to receive a response from the ecclesiastic, and speedily
monopolized him until he was summoned by the Commander to the returning
boat.

"A most accomplished man, my dear," said Mrs. Brimmer, as the
Excelsior's cannon again thundered after the retiring oars, "like all of
his order. He says, although Don Miguel does not speak French, that
his secretary does; and we shall have no difficulty in making ourselves
understood."

"Then you really intend to go ashore?" said Miss Keene timidly.

"Decidedly," returned Mrs. Brimmer potentially. "It would be most
unpolite, not to say insulting, if we did not accept the invitation.
You have no idea of the strictness of Spanish etiquette. Besides, he may
have heard of Mr. Brimmer."

"As his last information was only up to 1792, he might have forgotten
it," said Crosby gravely. "So perhaps it would be safer to go on the
general invitation."

"As Mr. Brimmer's ancestors came over on the Mayflower, long before
1792, it doesn't seem so very impossible, if it comes to that," said
Mrs. Brimmer, with her usual unanswerable naivete; "provided always that
you are not joking, Mr. Crosby. One never knows when you are serious."

"Mrs. Brimmer is quite right; we must all go. This is no mere
formality," said Senor Perkins, who had returned to the ladies. "Indeed,
I have myself promised the Comandante to bring YOU," he turned towards
Miss Keene, "if you will permit Mrs. Markham and myself to act as your
escort. It was Don Miguel's express request."

A slight flush of pride suffused the cheek of the young girl, but the
next moment she turned diffidently towards Mrs. Brimmer.

"We must all go together," she said; "shall we not?"

"You see your triumphs have begun already," said Brace, with a nervous
smile. "You need no longer laugh at me for predicting your fate in San
Francisco."

Miss Keene cast a hurried glance around her, in the faint hope--she
scarcely knew why--that Mr. Hurlstone had overheard the Senor's
invitation; nor could she tell why she was disappointed at not seeing
him. But he had not appeared on deck during the presence of their
strange visitors; nor was he in the boat which half an hour later
conveyed her to the shore. He must have either gone in one of the other
boats, or fulfilled his strange threat of remaining on the ship.

The boats pulled away together towards the invisible shore, piloted by
Captain Bunker, the first officer, and Senor Perkins in the foremost
boat. It had grown warmer, and the fog that stole softly over them
touched their faces with the tenderness of caressing fingers. Miss
Keene, wrapped up in the stern sheets of the boat, gave way to the
dreamy influence of this weird procession through the water, retaining
only perception enough to be conscious of the singular illusions of the
mist that alternately thickened and lightened before their bow. At times
it seemed as if they were driving full upon a vast pier or breakwater of
cold gray granite, that, opening to let the foremost boat pass, closed
again before them; at times it seemed as if they had diverged from their
course, and were once more upon the open sea, the horizon a far-off
line of vanishing color; at times, faint lights seemed to pierce the
gathering darkness, or to move like will-o'-wisps across the smooth
surface, when suddenly the keel grated on the sand. A narrow but
perfectly well defined strip of palpable strand appeared before them;
they could faintly discern the moving lower limbs of figures whose
bodies were still hidden in the mist; then they were lifted from the
boats; the first few steps on dry land carried them out of the fog that
seemed to rise like a sloping roof from the water's edge, leaving them
under its canopy in the full light of actual torches held by a group of
picturesquely dressed people before the vista of a faintly lit, narrow,
ascending street. The dim twilight of the closing day lingered under
this roof of fog, which seemed to hang scarcely a hundred feet above
them, and showed a wall or rampart of brown adobe on their right that
extended nearly to the water; to the left, at the distance of a few
hundred yards, another low brown wall appeared; above it rose a fringe
of foliage, and, more distant and indistinct, two white towers, that
were lost in the nebulous gray.

One of the figures dressed in green jackets, who seemed to be in
authority, now advanced, and, after a moment's parley with Senor Perkins
while the Excelsior's passengers were being collected from the different
boats, courteously led the way along the wall of the fortification.
Presently a low opening or gateway appeared, followed by the challenge
of a green-jacketed sentry, and the sentence, "Dios y Libertad" It
was repeated in the interior of a dusky courtyard, surrounded by a
low corridor, where a dozen green-jacketed men of aboriginal type and
complexion, carrying antique flintlocks, were drawn up as a guard of
honor.

"The Comandante," said Senor Perkins, "directs me to extend his
apologies to the Senor Capitano Bunker for withholding the salute which
is due alike to his country, himself, and his fair company; but fifty
years of uninterrupted peace and fog have left his cannon inadequate to
polite emergencies, and firmly fixed the tampion of his saluting gun.
But he places the Presidio at your disposition; you will be pleased to
make its acquaintance while it is still light; and he will await you in
the guard-room."

Left to themselves, the party dispersed like dismissed school-children
through the courtyard and corridors, and in the enjoyment of their
release from a month's confinement on shipboard stretched their cramped
limbs over the ditches, walls, and parapets, to the edge of the glacis.

Everywhere a ruin that was picturesque, a decay that was refined and
gentle, a neglect that was graceful, met the eye; the sharp exterior and
reentering angles were softly rounded and obliterated by overgrowths
of semitropical creepers; the abatis was filled by a natural brake of
scrub-oak and manzanita; the clematis flung its long scaling ladders
over the escarpment, until Nature, slowly but securely investing
the doomed fortress, had lifted a victorious banner of palm from the
conquered summit of the citadel! Some strange convulsions of the earth
had completed the victory; the barbette guns of carved and antique
bronze commemorating fruitless and long-forgotten triumphs were
dismounted; one turned in the cheeks of its carriage had a trunnion
raised piteously in the air like an amputated stump; another, sinking
through its rotting chassis, had buried itself to its chase in the
crumbling adobe wall. But above and beyond this gentle chaos of defense
stretched the real ramparts and escarpments of Todos Santos--the
impenetrable and unassailable fog! Corroding its brass and iron with
saline breath, rotting its wood with unending shadow, sapping its
adobe walls with perpetual moisture, and nourishing the obliterating
vegetation with its quickening blood, as if laughing to scorn the puny
embattlements of men--it still bent around the crumbling ruins the
tender grace of an invisible but all-encompassing arm.

Senor Perkins, who had acted as cicerone to the party, pointed out these
various mutations with no change from his usual optimism.

"Protected by their peculiar isolation during the late war, there was
no necessity for any real fortification of the place. Nevertheless, it
affords some occupation and position for our kind friend, Don Miguel,
and so serves a beneficial purpose. This little gun," he continued,
stopping to attentively examine a small but beautifully carved bronze
six-pounder, which showed indications of better care than the others,
"seems to be the saluting-gun Don Miguel spoke of. For the last fifty
years it has spoken only the language of politeness and courtesy, and
yet through want of care the tampion, as you see, has become swollen and
choked in its mouth."

"How true in a larger sense," murmured Mrs. Markham, "the habit of
courtesy alone preserves the fluency of the heart."

"I know you two are saying something very clever," said Mrs. Brimmer,
whose small French slippers and silk stockings were beginning to show
their inadequacy to a twilight ramble in the fog; "but I am so slow, and
I never catch the point. Do repeat it slowly."

"The Senor was only showing us how they managed to shut up a smooth bore
in this country," said Crosby gravely. "I wonder when we're going
to have dinner. I suppose old Don Quixote will trot out some of his
Senoritas. I want to see those choir girls that sang so stunningly a
while ago."

"I suppose you mean the boys--for they're all boys in the Catholic
choirs--but then, perhaps you are joking again. Do tell me if you are,
for this is really amusing. I may laugh--mayn't I?" As the discomfited
humorist fell again to the rear amidst the laughter of the others, Mrs.
Brimmer continued naively to Senor Perkins,--"Of course, as Don Miguel
is a widower, there must be daughters or sisters-in-law who will meet
us. Why, the priest, you know--even he--must have nieces. Really, it's
a serious question--if we are to accept his hospitality in a social
way. Why don't you ask HIM?" she said, pointing to the green-jacketed
subaltern who was accompanying them.

Senor Perkins looked half embarrassed.

"Repeat your question, my dear lady, and I will translate it."

"Ask him if there are any women at the Presidio."

Senor Perkins drew the subaltern aside. Presently he turned to Mrs.
Brimmer.

"He says there are four: the wife of the baker, the wife of the saddler,
the daughter of the trumpeter, and the niece of the cook."

"Good heavens! we can't meet THEM," said Mrs. Brimmer.

Senor Perkins hesitated.

"Perhaps I ought to have told you," he said blandly, "that the old
Spanish notions of etiquette are very strict. The wives of the officials
and higher classes do not meet strangers on a first visit, unless they
are well known."

"That isn't it," said Winslow, joining them excitedly. "I've heard the
whole story. It's a good joke. Banks has been bragging about us all, and
saying that these ladies had husbands who were great merchants, and, as
these chaps consider that all trade is vulgar, you know, they believe
we are not fit to associate with their women, don't you see? All, except
one--Miss Keene. She's considered all right. She's to be introduced to
the Commander's women, and to the sister of the Alcalde."

"She will do nothing of the kind," said Miss Keene indignantly. "If
these ladies are not to be received with me, we'll all go back to the
ship together."

She spoke with a quick and perfectly unexpected resolution and
independence, so foreign to her usual childlike half dependent
character, that her hearers were astounded. Senor Perkins gazed at
her thoughtfully; Brace, Crosby, and Winslow admiringly; her sister
passengers with doubt and apprehension.

"There must be some mistake," said Senor Perkins gently. "I will
inquire."

He was absent but a few moments. When he returned, his face was beaming.

"It's a ridiculous misapprehension. Our practical friend Banks, in his
zealous attempts to impress the Comandante's secretary, who knows a
little English, with the importance of Mr. Brimmer's position as a large
commission merchant, has, I fear, conveyed only the idea that he was a
kind of pawnbroker; while Mr. Markham's trade in hides has established
him as a tanner; and Mr. Banks' own flour speculations, of which he
is justly proud, have been misinterpreted by him as the work of a
successful baker!"

"And what idea did he convey about YOU?" asked Crosby audaciously; "it
might be interesting to us to know, for our own satisfaction."

"I fear they did not do me the honor to inquire," replied Senor Perkins,
with imperturbable good-humor; "there are some persons, you know, who
carry all their worldly possessions palpably about with them. I am one
of them. Call me a citizen of the world, with a strong leniency towards
young and struggling nationalities; a traveler, at home anywhere; a
delighted observer of all things, an admirer of brave men, the devoted
slave of charming women--and you have, in one word, a passenger of the
good ship Excelsior."

For the first time, Miss Keene noticed a slight irony in Senor Perkins'
superabundant fluency, and that he did not conceal his preoccupation
over the silent saluting gun he was still admiring. The approach of Don
Miguel and Padre Esteban with a small bevy of ladies, however, quickly
changed her thoughts, and detached the Senor from her side. Her first
swift feminine impression of the fair strangers was that they were plain
and dowdy, an impression fully shared by the other lady passengers.
But her second observation, that they were more gentle, fascinating,
child-like, and feminine than her own countrywomen, was purely her own.
Their loose, undulating figures, guiltless of stays; their extravagance
of short, white, heavily flounced skirt, which looked like a petticoat;
their lightly wrapped, formless, and hooded shoulders and heads, lent a
suggestion of dishabille that Mrs. Brimmer at once resented.

"They might, at least, have dressed themselves," she whispered to Mrs.
Markham.

"I really believe," returned Mrs. Markham, "they've got no bodices on!"

The introductions over, a polyglot conversation ensued in French by the
Padre and Mrs. Brimmer, and in broken English by Miss Chubb, Miss Keene,
and the other passengers with the Commander's secretary, varied by
occasional scraps of college Latin from Mr. Crosby, the whole aided by
occasional appeals to Senor Perkins. The darkness increasing, the
party reentered the courtyard, and, passing through the low-studded
guard-room, entered another corridor, which looked upon a second
court, enclosed on three sides, the fourth opening upon a broad plaza,
evidently the public resort of the little town. Encompassing this open
space, a few red-tiled roofs could be faintly seen in the gathering
gloom. Chocolate and thin spiced cakes were served in the veranda,
pending the preparations for a more formal banquet. Already Miss Keene
had been singled out from her companions for the special attentions of
her hosts, male and female, to her embarrassment and confusion. Already
Dona Isabel, the sister of the Alcalde, had drawn her aside, and, with
caressing frankness, had begun to question her in broken English,--

"But Miss Keene is no name. The Dona Keene is of nothing."

"Well, you may call me Eleanor, if you like," said Miss Keene, smiling.

"Dona Leonor--so; that is good," said Dona Isabel, clapping her hands
like a child. "But how are you?"

"I beg your pardon," said Miss Keene, greatly amused, "but I don't
understand."

"Ah, Caramba! What are you, little one?" Seeing that her guest still
looked puzzled, she continued,--"Ah! Mother of God! Why are your friends
so polite to you? Why does every one love you so?"

"Do they? Well," stammered Miss Keene, with one of her rare, dazzling
smiles, and her cheeks girlishly rosy with naive embarrassment, "I
suppose they think I am pretty."

"Pretty! Ah, yes, you are!" said Dona Isabel, gazing at her curiously.
"But it is not all that."

"What is it, then?" asked Miss Keene demurely.

"You are a--a--Dama de Grandeza!"




CHAPTER VI.

"HAIL AND FAREWELL."


Supper was served in the inner room opening from the corridor lit by
a few swinging lanterns of polished horn and a dozen wax candles of
sacerdotal size and suggestion. The apartment, though spacious, was low
and crypt-like, and was not relieved by the two deep oven-like hearths
that warmed it without the play of firelight. But when the company had
assembled it was evident that the velvet jackets, gold lace, silver
buttons, and red sashes of the entertainers not only lost their tawdry
and theatrical appearance in the half decorous and thoughtful gloom, but
actually seemed more in harmony with it than the modern dresses of the
guests. It was the Excelsior party who looked strange and bizarre in
these surroundings; to the sensitive fancy of Miss Keene, Mrs. Brimmer's
Parisian toilet had an air of provincial assumption; her own pretty
Zouave jacket and black silk skirt horrified her with its apparent
ostentatious eccentricity; and Mrs. Markham and Miss Chubb seemed
dowdy and overdressed beside the satin mantillas and black lace of the
Senoritas. Nor were the gentlemen less outres: the stiff correctness
of Mr. Banks, and the lighter foppishness of Winslow and Crosby, not to
mention Senor Perkins' more pronounced unconventionality, appeared as
burlesques of their own characters in a play. The crowning contrast was
reached by Captain Bunker, who, in accordance with the habits of the
mercantile marine of that period when in port, wore a shore-going suit
of black broadcloth, with a tall hat, high shirt collar, and diamond
pin. Seated next to the Commander, it was no longer Don Miguel who
looked old-fashioned, it was Captain Bunker who appeared impossible.

Nevertheless, as the meal progressed, lightened by a sweet native wine
made from the Mission grape, and stimulated by champagne--a present of
Captain Bunker from the cabin lockers of the Excelsior--this contrast,
and much of the restraint that it occasioned, seemed to melt away. The
passengers became talkative; the Commander and his friends unbent, and
grew sympathetic and inquiring. The temptation to recite the news of the
last half century, and to recount the wonderful strides of civilization
in that time, was too great to be resisted by the Excelsior party. That
some of them--notwithstanding the caution of Senor Perkins--approached
dangerously near the subject of the late war between the United States
and Mexico, of which Todos Santos was supposed to be still ignorant,
or that Crosby in particular seized upon this opportunity for humorous
exaggeration, may be readily imagined. But as the translation of the
humorist's speech, as well as the indiscretions of his companions, were
left to the Senor, in Spanish, and to Mrs. Brimmer and Miss Keene, in
French, any imminent danger to the harmony of the evening was averted.
Don Ramon Ramirez, the Alcalde, a youngish man of evident distinction,
sat next to Miss Keene, and monopolized her conversation with a certain
curiosity that was both grave and childish in its frank trustfulness.
Some of his questions were so simple and incompatible with his apparent
intelligence that she unconsciously lowered her voice in answering them,
in dread of the ridicule of her companions. She could not resist the
impression, which repeatedly obtruded upon her imagination, that
the entire population of Todos Santos were a party of lost children,
forgotten by their parents, and grown to man and womanhood in utter
ignorance of the world.

The Commander had, half informally, drunk the health of Captain Bunker,
without rising from his seat, when, to Miss Keene's alarm, Captain
Bunker staggered to his feet. He had been drinking freely, as usual; but
he was bent on indulging a loquacity which his discipline on shipboard
had hitherto precluded, and which had, perhaps, strengthened his
solitary habit. His speech was voluble and incoherent, complimentary and
tactless, kindly and aggressive, courteous and dogmatic. It was left
to Senor Perkins to translate it to the eye and ear of his host without
incongruity or offense. This he did so admirably as to elicit not only
the applause of the foreigners who did not understand English, but of
his own countrymen who did not understand Spanish.

"I feel," said Senor Perkins, in graceful peroration, "that I have
done poor justice to the eloquence of this gallant sailor. My unhappy
translation cannot offer you that voice, at times trembling with
generous emotion, and again inaudible from excessive modesty in the
presence of this illustrious assembly--those limbs that waver and bend
under the undulations of the chivalrous sentiment which carries him away
as if he were still on that powerful element he daily battles with and
conquers."

But when coffee and sweets were reached, the crowning triumph of Senor
Perkins' oratory was achieved. After an impassioned burst of enthusiasm
towards his hosts in their own tongue, he turned towards his own party
with bland felicity.

"And how is it with us, dear friends? We find ourselves not in the
port we were seeking; not in the goal of our ambition, the haven of our
hopes; but on the shores of the decaying past. 'Ever drifting' on one of
those--

                       'Shifting
     Currents of the restless main,'

if our fascinating friend Mrs. Brimmer will permit us to use the words
of her accomplished fellow-townsman, H. W. Longfellow, of Boston--we
find ourselves borne not to the busy hum and clatter of modern
progress, but to the soft cadences of a dying crusade, and the hush of
ecclesiastical repose. In place of the busy marts of commerce and
the towering chimneys of labor, we have the ruined embattlements of a
warlike age, and the crumbling church of an ancient Mission. Towards
the close of an eventful voyage, during which we have been guided by the
skillful hand and watchful eye of that gallant navigator Captain Bunker,
we have turned aside from our onward course of progress to look back for
a moment upon the faded footprints of those who have so long preceded
us, who have lived according to their lights, and whose record is now
before us. As I have just stated, our journey is near its end, and
we may, in some sense, look upon this occasion, with its sumptuous
entertainment, and its goodly company of gallant men and fair women, as
a parting banquet. Our voyage has been a successful one. I do not now
especially speak of the daring speculations of the distinguished husband
of a beautiful lady whose delightful society is known to us all--need I
say I refer to Quincy Brimmer, Esq., of Boston" (loud applause)--"whose
successful fulfillment of a contract with the Peruvian Government, and
the landing of munitions of war at Callao, has checked the uprising
of the Quinquinambo insurgents? I do not refer especially to our
keen-sighted business friend Mr. Banks" (applause), "who, by buying up
all the flour in Callao, and shipping it to California, has virtually
starved into submission the revolutionary party of Ariquipa--I do not
refer to these admirable illustrations of the relations of commerce and
politics, for this, my friends--this is history, and beyond my feeble
praise. Let me rather speak of the social and literary triumphs of our
little community, of our floating Arcadia--may I say Olympus? Where
shall we find another Minerva like Mrs. Markham, another Thalia like
Miss Chubb, another Juno like Mrs. Brimmer, worthy of the Jove-like
Quincy Brimmer; another Queen of Love and Beauty like--like"--continued
the gallant Senor, with an effective oratorical pause, and a profound
obeisance to Miss Keene, "like one whose mantling maiden blushes forbid
me to name?" (Prolonged applause.) "Where shall we find more worthy
mortals to worship them than our young friends, the handsome Brace,
the energetic Winslow, the humorous Crosby? When we look back upon our
concerts and plays, our minstrel entertainments, with the incomparable
performances of our friend Crosby as Brother Bones; our recitations,
to which the genius of Mrs. M'Corkle, of Peoria, Illinois, has lent her
charm and her manuscript" (a burlesque start of terror from Crosby),
"I am forcibly impelled to quote the impassioned words from that gifted
woman,--

     'When idly Life's barque on the billows of Time,
       Drifts hither and yon by eternity's sea;
     On the swift feet of verse and the pinions of rhyme
       My thoughts, Ulricardo, fly ever to thee!'"

"Who's Ulricardo?" interrupted Crosby, with assumed eagerness, followed
by a "hush!" from the ladies.

"Perhaps I should have anticipated our friend's humorous question," said
Senor Perkins, with unassailable good-humor. "Ulricardo, though not
my own name, is a poetical substitute for it, and a mere figure of
apostrophe. The poem is personal to myself," he continued, with a slight
increase of color in his smooth cheek which did not escape the attention
of the ladies,--"purely as an exigency of verse, and that the inspired
authoress might more easily express herself to a friend. My acquaintance
with Mrs. M'Corkle has been only epistolary. Pardon this digression, my
friends, but an allusion to the muse of poetry did not seem to me to be
inconsistent with our gathering here. Let me briefly conclude by saying
that the occasion is a happy and memorable one; I think I echo the
sentiment of all present when I add that it is one which will not be
easily forgotten by either the grateful guests, whose feelings I have
tried to express, or the chivalrous hosts, whose kindness I have already
so feebly translated."

In the applause that followed, and the clicking of glasses, Senor
Perkins slipped away. He mingled a moment with some of the other guests
who had already withdrawn to the corridor, lit a cigar, and then passed
through a narrow doorway on to the ramparts. Here he strolled to some
distance, as if in deep thought, until he reached a spot where the
crumbling wall and its fallen debris afforded an easy descent into the
ditch. Following the ditch, he turned an angle, and came upon the beach,
and the low sound of oars in the invisible offing. A whistle brought the
boat to his feet, and without a word he stepped into the stern sheets. A
few strokes of the oars showed him that the fog had lifted slightly
from the water, and a green light hanging from the side of the Excelsior
could be plainly seen. Ten minutes' more steady pulling placed him on
her deck, where the second officer stood with a number of the sailors
listlessly grouped around him.

"The landing has been completed?" said Senor Perkins interrogatively.

"All except one boat-load more, which waits to take your final
instructions," said the mate. "The men have growled a little about it,"
he added, in a lower tone. "They don't want to lose anything, it seems,"
he continued, with a half sarcastic laugh.

Senor Perkins smiled peculiarly.

"I am sorry to disappoint them. Who's that in the boat?" he asked
suddenly.

The mate followed the Senor's glance.

"It is Yoto. He says he is going ashore, and you will not forbid him."

Senor Perkins approached the ship's side.

"Come here," he said to the man.

The Peruvian sailor rose, but did not make the slightest movement to
obey the command.

"You say you are going ashore?" said Perkins blandly.

"Yes, Patrono."

"What for?"

"To follow him--the thief, the assassin--who struck me here;" he pointed
to his head. "He has escaped again with his booty."

"You are very foolish, my Yoto; he is no thief, and has no booty. They
will put YOU in prison, not him."

"YOU say so," said the man surlily. "Perhaps they will hear me--for
other things," he added significantly.

"And for this you would abandon the cause?"

The man shrugged his shoulders.

"Why not?" he glanced meaningly at two of his companions, who had
approached the side; "perhaps others would. Who is sending the booty
ashore, eh?"

"Come out of that boat," said the Senor, leaning over the bulwarks with
folded arms, and his eyes firmly fixed on the man.

The man did not move. But the Senor's hand suddenly flew to the back
of his neck, smote violently downwards, and sent eighteen inches of
glittering steel hurtling through the air. The bowie-knife entered
the upturned throat of the man and buried itself halfway to the hilt.
Without a gasp or groan he staggered forward, caught wildly at the side
of the ship, and disappeared between the boat and the vessel.

"My lads," said Senor Perkins, turning with a gentle smile towards the
faces that in the light of the swinging lantern formed a ghastly circle
around him, "when I boarded this ship that had brought aid and succor
to our oppressors at Callao, I determined to take possession of it
peacefully, without imperiling the peace and property of the innocent
passengers who were intrusted to its care, and without endangering your
own lives or freedom. But I made no allowance for TRAITORS. The blood
that has been shed to-night has not been spilt in obedience to my
orders, nor to the cause that we serve; it was from DEFIANCE of it; and
the real and only culprit has just atoned for it."

He stopped, and then stepped back from the gangway, as if to leave it
open to the men.

"What I have done," he continued calmly, "I do not ask you to consider
either as an example or a warning. You are free to do what HE would have
done," he repeated, with a wave of his hand towards the open gangway and
the empty boat. "You are free to break your contract and leave the ship,
and I give you my word that I will not lift a hand to prevent it. But if
you stay with me," he said, suddenly turning upon them a face as livid
as their own, "I swear by the living God, that, if between this and the
accomplishment of my design, you as much as shirk or question any order
given by me, you shall die the death of that dog who went before you.
Choose as you please--but quickly."

The mate was the first to move. Without a word, he crossed over to
the Senor's side. The men hesitated a moment longer, until one, with
a strange foreign cry, threw himself on his knees before the Senor,
ejaculating, "Pardon! pardon!" The others followed, some impulsively
catching at the hand that had just slain their comrade, and covering it
with kisses!

"Pardon, Patrono--we are yours."

"You are the State's," said Senor Perkins coldly, with every vestige of
his former urbanity gone from his colorless face. "Enough! Go back to
your duty." He watched them slink away, and then turned to the mate.
"Get the last boat-load ready, and report to me."

From that moment another power seemed to dominate the ship. The men no
longer moved listlessly, or slunk along the deck with perfunctory limbs;
a feverish haste and eagerness possessed them; the boat was quickly
loaded, and the mysterious debarkation completed in rapidity and
silence. This done, the fog once more appeared to rise from the water
and softly encompass the ship, until she seemed to be obliterated from
its face. In this vague obscurity, from time to time, the faint rattling
of chains was heard, the soft creaking of blocks, and later on, the
regular rise and fall of oars. And then the darkness fell heavier, the
sounds became more and more indistinct and were utterly lost.

Ashore, however, the lanterns still glittered brightly in the courtyard
of the Presidio; the noise of laughter and revel still came from the
supper-room, and, later, the tinkling of guitars and rhythmical
clapping hands showed that the festivities were being wound up by a
characteristic fandango. Captain Bunker succumbed early to his potations
of fiery aguardiente, and was put to bed in the room of the Commander,
to whom he had sworn eternal friendship and alliance. It was long
past midnight before the other guests were disposed of in the various
quarters of the Presidio; but to the ladies were reserved the more
ostentatious hospitalities of the Alcalde himself, the walls of whose
ambitious hacienda raised themselves across the plaza and overlooked the
gardens of the Mission.

It was from one of the deep, quaintly barred windows of the hacienda
that Miss Keene gazed thoughtfully on the night, unable to compose
herself to sleep. An antique guest-chamber had been assigned to her in
deference to her wish to be alone, for which she had declined the couch
and vivacious prattle of her new friend, Dona Isabel. The events of the
day had impressed her more deeply than they had her companions, partly
from her peculiar inexperience of the world, and partly from her
singular sensitiveness to external causes. The whole quaint story of
the forgotten and isolated settlement, which had seemed to the other
passengers as a trivial and half humorous incident, affected her
imagination profoundly. When she could escape the attentions of her
entertainers, or the frivolities of her companions, she tried to touch
the far-off past on the wings of her fancy; she tried to imagine the
life of those people, forgetting the world and forgotten by it; she
endeavored to picture the fifty years of solitude amidst these decaying
ruins, over which even ambition had crumbled and fallen. It seemed to
her the true conventual seclusion from the world without the loss of
kinship or home influences; she contrasted it with her boarding-school
life in the fashionable seminary; she wondered what she would have
become had she been brought up here; she thought of the happy ignorance
of Dona Isabel, and--shuddered; and yet she felt herself examining
the odd furniture of the room with an equally childlike and admiring
curiosity. And these people looked upon HER as a superior being!

From the deep embrasure of the window she could see the tops of the pear
and olive trees, in the misty light of an invisible moon that suffused
the old Mission garden with an ineffable and angelic radiance. To her
religious fancy it seemed to be a spiritual effusion of the church
itself, enveloping the two gray dome-shaped towers with an atmosphere
and repose of its own, until it became the incarnate mystery and passion
where it stood.

She was suddenly startled by a moving shadow beside the wall, almost
immediately below her--the figure of a man! He was stealing cautiously
towards the church, as if to gain the concealment of the shrubbery
that grew beside it, and, furtively glancing from side to side, looked
towards her window. She unconsciously drew back, forgetting at the
moment that her light was extinguished, and that it was impossible
for the stranger to see her. But she had seen HIM, and in that instant
recognized Mr. Hurlstone!

Then he HAD come ashore, and secretly, for the other passengers believed
him still on the ship! But what was he doing there?--and why had he not
appeared with the others at the entertainment? She could understand
his avoidance of them from what she knew of his reserved and unsocial
habits; but when he could so naturally have remained on shipboard, she
could not, at first, conceive why he should wish to prowl around the
town at the risk of detection. The idea suddenly occurred to her that
he had had another attack of his infirmity and was walking in his sleep,
and for an instant she thought of alarming the house, that some one
might go to his assistance. But his furtive movements had not the serene
impassibility of the somnambulist. Another thought withheld her; he had
looked up at her window! Did he know she was there? A faint stirring of
shame and pleasure sent a slight color to her cheek. But he had gained
the corner of the shrubbery and was lost in the shadow. She turned from
the window. A gentle sense of vague and half maternal pity suffused her
soft eyes as she at last sought her couch and fell into a deep slumber.

Towards daybreak a wind arose over the sleeping town and far outlying
waters. It breathed through the leaves of the Mission garden, brushed
away the clinging mists from the angles of the towers, and restored
the sharp outlines of the ruined fortifications. It swept across the
unruffled sea to where the Excelsior, cradled in the softly heaving bay,
had peacefully swung at anchor on the previous night, and lifted the
snowy curtain of the fog to seaward as far as the fringe of surf, a
league away.

But the cradle of the deep was empty--the ship was gone!




CHAPTER VII.

THE GENTLE CASTAWAYS.


Miss Keene was awakened from a heavy sleep by a hurried shake of her
shoulder and an indefinite feeling of alarm. Opening her eyes, she was
momentarily dazed by the broad light of day, and the spectacle of Mrs.
Brimmer, pale and agitated, in a half-Spanish dishabille, standing at
her bedside.

"Get up and dress yourself, my dear, at once," she said hurriedly, but
at the same time attentively examining Miss Keene's clothes, that were
lying on the chair: "and thank Heaven you came here in an afternoon
dress, and not in an evening costume like mine! For something awful has
happened, and Heaven only knows whether we'll ever see a stitch of our
clothes again."

"WHAT has happened?" asked Miss Keene impatiently, sitting up in bed,
more alarmed at the unusual circumstance of Mrs. Brimmer's unfinished
toilet than at her incomplete speech.

"What, indeed! Nobody knows; but it's something awful--a mutiny, or
shipwreck, or piracy. But there's your friend, the Commander, calling
out the troops; and such a set of Christy Minstrels you never saw
before! There's the Alcalde summoning the Council; there's Mr. Banks
raving, and running round for a steamboat--as if these people ever heard
of such a thing!--and Captain Bunker, what with rage and drink, gone
off in a fit of delirium tremens, and locked up in his room! And the
Excelsior gone--the Lord knows where!"

"Gone!" repeated Miss Keene, hurrying on her clothes. "Impossible! What
does Father Esteban tell you? What does Dona Isabel say?"

"That's the most horrible part of it! Do you know those wretched idiots
believe it's some political revolution among ourselves, like their own
miserable government. I believe that baby Isabel thinks that King
George and Washington have something to do with it; at any rate, they're
anxious to know to what side you belong! So; for goodness' sake! if you
have to humor them, say we're all on the same side--I mean, don't you
and Mrs. Markham go against Miss Chubb and me."

Scarcely knowing whether to laugh or cry at Mrs. Brimmer's incoherent
statement, Miss Keene hastily finished dressing as the door flew open to
admit the impulsive Dona Isabel and her sister Juanita. The two Mexican
girls threw themselves in Miss Keene's arms, and then suddenly drew back
with a movement of bashful and diffident respect.

"Do, pray, ask them, for I daren't," whispered Mrs. Brimmer, trying
to clasp a mantilla around her, "how this thing is worn, and if they
haven't got something like a decent bonnet to lend me for a day or two?"

"The Senora has not then heard that her goods, and all the goods of
the Senores and Senoras, have been discovered safely put ashore at the
Embarcadero?"

"No?" said Mrs. Brimmer eagerly.

"Ah, yes!" responded Dona Isabel. "Since the Senora is not of the
revolutionary party."

Mrs. Brimmer cast a supplicatory look at Miss Keene, and hastily quitted
the room. Miss Keene would have as quickly followed her, but the young
Ramirez girls threw themselves again tragically upon her breast, and,
with a mysterious gesture of silence, whispered,--

"Fear nothing, Excellencia! We are yours--we will die for you, no matter
what Don Ramon, or the Comandante, or the Ayuntamiento, shall decide.
Trust us, little one!--pardon--Excellencia, we mean."

"What IS the matter?" said Miss Keene, now thoroughly alarmed, and
releasing herself from the twining arms about her. "For Heaven's sake
let me go! I must see somebody! Where is--where is Mrs. Markham?"

"The Markham? Is it the severe one?--as thus,"--said Dona Isabel,
striking an attitude of infantine portentousness.

"Yes," said Miss Keene, smiling in spite of her alarm.

"She is arrested."

"Arrested!" said Eleanor Keene, her cheeks aflame with indignation. "For
what? Who dare do this thing?"

"The Comandante. She has a missive--a despatch from the
insurrectionaries."

Without another word, and feeling that she could stand the suspense no
longer, Miss Keene forced her way past the young girls, unheeding their
cries of consternation and apology, and quickly reached the patio.
A single glance showed her that Mrs. Brimmer was gone. With eyes and
cheeks still burning, she swept past the astounded peons, through the
gateway, into the open plaza. Only one idea filled her mind--to see the
Commander, and demand the release of her friend. How she should do it,
with what arguments she should enforce her demand, never occurred to
her. She did not even think of asking the assistance of Mr. Brace, Mr.
Crosby, or any of her fellow-passengers. The consciousness of some vague
crisis that she alone could meet possessed her completely.

The plaza was swarming with a strange rabble of peons and soldiery; of
dark, lowering faces, odd-looking weapons and costumes, mules, mustangs,
and cattle--a heterogeneous mass, swayed by some fierce excitement. That
she saw none of the Excelsior party among them did not surprise her;
an instinct of some catastrophe more serious than Mrs. Brimmer's vague
imaginings frightened but exalted her. With head erect, leveled brows,
and bright, determined eyes she walked deliberately into the square.
The crowd parted and gave way before this beautiful girl, with her bared
head and its invincible crest of chestnut curls. Presently they began
to follow her, with a compressed murmur of admiration, until, before
she was halfway across the plaza, the sentries beside the gateway of the
Presidio were astonished at the vision of a fair-haired and triumphant
Pallas, who appeared to be leading the entire population of Todos Santos
to victorious attack. In vain a solitary bugle blew, in vain the rolling
drum beat an alarm, the sympathetic guard only presented arms as Miss
Keene, flushed and excited, her eyes darkly humid with gratified pride,
swept past them into the actual presence of the bewildered and indignant
Comandante.

The only feminine consciousness she retained was that she was more
relieved at her deliverance from the wild cattle and unbroken horses of
her progress than from the Indians and soldiers.

"I want to see Mrs. Markham, and to know by what authority she is
arrested," said Miss Keene boldly.

"The Senor Comandante can hold no conference with you until you disperse
your party," interpreted the secretary.

She was about to hurriedly reply that she knew nothing of the crowd that
had accompanied her; but she was withheld by a newly-born instinct of
tact.

"How do I know that I shall not be arrested, like my friend?" she said
quickly. "She is as innocent as myself."

"The Comandante pledges himself, as a hidalgo, that you shall not be
harmed."

Her first impulse was to advance to the nearest intruders at the gate
and say, "Do go away, please;" but she was doubtful of its efficiency,
and was already too exalted by the situation to be satisfied with its
prosaic weakness. But her newly developed diplomacy again came to her
aid. "You may tell them so, if you choose, I cannot answer for them,"
she said, with apparent dark significance.

The secretary advanced on the corridor and exchanged a few words with
her more impulsive followers. Miss Keene, goddess-like and beautiful,
remained erect behind him, and sent them a dazzling smile and ravishing
wave of her little hand. The crowd roared with an effusive and bovine
delight that half frightened her, and with a dozen "Viva la Reyna
Americanas!" she was hurried by the Comandante into the guard-room.

"You ask to know of what the Senora Markham is accused," said the
Commander, more gently. "She has received correspondence from the
pirate--Perkins!"

"The pirate--Perkins?" said Miss Keene, with indignant incredulity.

"The buccaneer who wrote that letter. Read it to her, Manuel."

The secretary took his eyes from the young girl's glowing face, coughed
slightly, and then read as follows:--


"ON BOARD THE EXCELSIOR, of the Quinquinambo Independent States Navy,
August 8, 1854.

"To Captain Bunker.--Sir," . . .

"But this is not addressed to YOU!" interrupted Miss Keene indignantly.

"The Captain Bunker is a raving madman," said the Commander gravely.
"Read on!"

The color gradually faded from the young girl's cheek as the secretary
continued, in a monotonous voice:--

"I have the honor to inform you that the barque Excelsior was, on the
8th of July, 1854, and the first year of the Quinquinambo Independence,
formally condemned by the Federal Council of Quinquinambo, for having
aided and assisted the enemy with munitions of war and supplies, against
the law of nations, and the tacit and implied good-will between the
Republic of the United States and the struggling Confederacies of South
America; and that, in pursuance thereof, and under the law of reprisals
and letters of marque, was taken possession of by me yesterday. The
goods and personal effects belonging to the passengers and yourself
have been safely landed at the Embarcadero of Todos Santos--a neutral
port--by my directions; my interpretation of the orders of the Federal
Council excepting innocent non-combatants and their official protector
from confiscation or amercement.

"I take the liberty of requesting you to hand the inclosed order on the
Treasury of the Quinquinambo Confederate States to Don Miguel Briones,
in payment of certain stores and provisions, and of a piece of
ordnance known as the saluting cannon of the Presidio of Todos Santos.
Vigilancia!

"Your obedient servant,

"LEONIDAS BOLIVAR PERKINS,

"Generalissimo Commanding Land and Sea Forces, Quinquinambo Independent
States."


In her consternation at this fuller realization of the vague
catastrophe, Miss Keene still clung to the idea that had brought her
there.

"But Mrs. Markham has nothing to do with all this?"

"Then why does she refuse to give up her secret correspondence with the
pirate Perkins?" returned the secretary.

Miss Keene hesitated. Had Mrs. Markham any previous knowledge of the
Senor's real character?

"Why don't you arrest the men?" she said scornfully. "There is Mr.
Banks, Mr. Crosby, Mr. Winslow, and Mr. Brace." She uttered the last
name more contemptuously, as she thought of that young gentleman's
protestations and her present unprotected isolation.

"They are already arrested and removed to San Antonio, a league hence,"
returned the secretary. "It is fact enough that they have confessed that
their Government has seized the Mexican province of California, and that
they were on their way to take possession of it."

Miss Keene's heart sank.

"But you knew all this yesterday," she faltered; "and our war with
Mexico is all over years ago."

"We did not know it last night at the banquet, Senora; nor would we have
known it but for this treason and division in your own party."

A sudden light flashed upon Miss Keene's mind. She now comprehended the
advances of Dona Isabel. Extravagant and monstrous as it seemed, these
people evidently believed that a revolution had taken place in the
United States; that the two opposing parties had been represented by the
passengers of the Excelsior; and that one party had succeeded, headed by
the indomitable Perkins. If she could be able to convince them of
their blunder, would it be wise to do so? She thought of Mrs. Brimmer's
supplication to be ranged "on her side," and realized with feminine
quickness that the situation might be turned to her countrymen's
advantage. But which side had Todos Santos favored? It was left to her
woman's wit to discover this, and conceive a plan to rescue her helpless
companions.

Her suspense was quickly relieved. The Commander and his secretary
exchanged a few words.

"The Comandante will grant Dona Leonora's request," said the secretary,
"if she will answer a question."

"What is it?" responded Miss Keene, with inward trepidation.

"The Senora Markham is perhaps beloved by the Pirate Perkins?"

In spite of her danger, in spite of the uncertain fate hanging over
her party, Miss Keene could with difficulty repress a half hysterical
inclination to laugh. Even then, it escaped in a sudden twinkle of her
eye, which both the Commander and his subordinate were quick to notice,
as she replied demurely, "Perhaps."

It was enough for the Commander. A gleam of antique archness and
venerable raillery lit up his murky, tobacco-colored pupils; a spasm of
gallantry crossed the face of the secretary.

"Ah--what would you?--it is the way of the world," said the Commander.
"We comprehend. Come!"

He led the way across the corridor, and suddenly opened a small
barred door. Whatever preconceived idea Miss Keene may have had of her
unfortunate country-woman immured in a noisome cell, and guarded by
a stern jailer, was quite dissipated by the soft misty sunshine that
flowed in through the open door. The prison of Mrs. Markham was a part
of the old glacis which had been allowed to lapse into a wild garden
that stretched to the edge of the sea. There was a summer-house built
on--and partly from--a crumbling bastion, and here, under the shade of
tropical creepers, the melancholy captive was comfortably writing,
with her portable desk on her knee, and a traveling-bag at her feet.
A Saratoga trunk of obtrusive proportions stood in the centre of the
peaceful vegetation, like a newly raised altar to an unknown deity. The
only suggestion of martial surveillance was an Indian soldier, whose
musket, reposing on the ground near Mrs. Markham, he had exchanged for
the rude mattock with which he was quietly digging.

The two women, with a cry of relief, flew into each other's arms. The
Commander and his secretary discreetly retired to an angle of the wall.

"I find everything as I left it, my dear, even to my slipper-bag," said
Mrs. Markham. "They've forgotten nothing."

"But you are a captive!" said Eleanor. "What does it mean?"

"Nothing, my dear. I gave them a piece of my mind," said Mrs. Markham,
looking, however, as if that mental offering had by no means exhausted
her capital, "and I have written six pages to the Governor at Mazatlan,
and a full account to Mr. Markham."

"And they won't get them in thirty years!" said Miss Keene impetuously.
"But where is this letter from Senor Perkins. And, for Heaven's sake,
tell me if you had the least suspicion before of anything that has
happened."

"Not in the least. The man is mad, my dear, and I really believe driven
so by that absurd Illinois woman's poetry. Did you ever see anything
so ridiculous--and shameful, too--as the 'Ulricardo' business? I don't
wonder he colored so."

Miss Keene winced with annoyance. Was everybody going crazy, or was
there anything more in this catastrophe that had only enfeebled the
minds of her countrywomen! For here was the severe, strong-minded Mrs.
Markham actually preoccupied, like Mrs. Brimmer, with utterly irrelevant
particulars, and apparently powerless to grasp the fact that they were
abandoned on a half hostile strand, and cut off by half a century from
the rest of the world.

"As to the letter," said Mrs. Markham, quietly, "there it is. There's
nothing in it that might not have been written by a friend."

Miss Keene took the letter. It was written in a delicate, almost
feminine hand. She could not help noticing that in one or two instances
corrections had been made and blots carefully removed with an eraser.


"Midnight, on the Excelsior.

"MY FRIEND: When you receive this I shall probably be once more on the
bosom of that mysterious and mighty element whose majesty has impressed
us, whose poetry we have loved, and whose moral lessons, I trust, have
not been entirely thrown away upon us. I go to the deliverance of one of
those oppressed nations whose history I have often recited to you,
and in whose destiny you have from time to time expressed a womanly
sympathy. While it is probable, therefore, that my MOTIVES may not be
misunderstood by you, or even other dear friends of the Excelsior, it is
by no means impossible that the celerity and unexpectedness of my ACTION
may not be perfectly appreciated by the careless mind, and may seem
to require some explanation. Let me then briefly say that the idea of
debarking your goods and chattels, and parting from your delightful
company at Todos Santos, only occurred to me on our unexpected--shall I
say PROVIDENTIAL?--arrival at that spot; and the necessity of expedition
forbade me either inviting your cooperation or soliciting your
confidence. Human intelligence is variously constituted--or, to use a
more homely phrase, 'many men have many minds'--and it is not impossible
that a premature disclosure of my plans might have jeopardized that
harmony which you know it has been my desire to promote. It was my
original intention to have landed you at Mazatlan, a place really
inferior in climate and natural attractions to Todo Santos, although,
perhaps, more easy of access and egress; but the presence of an American
steamer in the offing would have invested my enterprise with a certain
publicity foreign, I think, to all our tastes. Taking advantage,
therefore, of my knowledge of the peninsular coast, and the pardonable
ignorance of Captain Bunker, I endeavored, through my faithful
subordinates, to reach a less known port, and a coast rarely
frequented by reason of its prevailing fog. Here occurred one of those
dispensations of an overruling power which, dear friend, we have so
often discussed. We fell in with an unknown current, and were guided by
a mysterious hand into the bay of Todos Santos!

"You know of my belief in the infinite wisdom and benignity of events;
you have, dear friend, with certain feminine limitations, shared it with
me. Could there have been a more perfect illustration of it than the
power that led us here? On a shore, historic in interest, beautiful
in climate, hospitable in its people, utterly freed from external
influences, and absolutely without a compromising future, you are
landed, my dear friend, with your youthful companions. From the
crumbling ruins of a decaying Past you are called to construct an
Arcadia of your own; the rudiments of a new civilization are within your
grasp; the cost of existence is comparatively trifling; the various
sums you have with you, which even in the chaos of revolution I have
succeeded in keeping intact, will more than suffice to your natural
wants for years to come. Were I not already devoted to the task of
freeing Quinquinambo, I should willingly share this Elysium with you
all. But, to use the glowing words of Mrs. M'Corkle, slightly altering
the refrain--

     'Ah, stay me not!  With flying feet
     O'er desert sands, I rush to greet
     My fate, my love, my life, my sweet
       Quinquinambo!'

"I venture to intrust to your care two unpublished manuscripts of that
gifted woman. The dangers that may environ my present mission, the
vicissitudes of battle by sea or land, forbid my imperiling their
natural descent to posterity. You, my dear friend, will preserve them
for the ages to come, occasionally refreshing yourself, from time to
time, from that Parnassian spring.

"Adieu! my friend. I look around the familiar cabin, and miss your
gentle faces. I feel as Jason might have felt, alone on the deck of the
Argo when his companions were ashore, except that I know of no Circean
influences to mar their destiny. In examining the state-rooms to see if
my orders for the complete restoration of passengers' property had been
carried out, I allowed myself to look into yours. Lying alone, forgotten
and overlooked, I saw a peculiar jet hair-pin which I think I have
observed in the coils of your tresses. May I venture to keep this gentle
instrument as a reminder of the superior intellect it has so often
crowned? Adieu, my friend.

"Ever yours, LEONIDAS BOLIVAR PERKINS."


"Well?" said Mrs. Markham impatiently, as Miss Keene remained motionless
with the letter in her hand.

"It seems like a ridiculous nightmare! I can't understand it at all. The
man that wrote this letter may be mad--but he is neither a pirate nor a
thief--and yet"--

"He a pirate?" echoed Mrs. Markham indignantly; "He's nothing of the
kind! It's not even his FAULT!"

"Not his fault?" repeated Miss Keene; "are you mad, too?"

"No--nor a fool, my dear! Don't you see? It's all the fault of Banks and
Brimmer for compromising the vessel: of that stupid, drunken captain for
permitting it. Senor Perkins is a liberator, a patriot, who has periled
himself and his country to treat us magnanimously. Don't you see it?
It's like that Banks and that Mrs. Brimmer to call HIM a pirate! I've a
good mind to give the Commander my opinion of THEM."

"Hush!" said Miss Keene, with a sudden recollection of the Commander's
suspicions, "for Heaven's sake; you do not know what you are saying.
Look! they were talking with that strange man, and now they are coming
this way."

The Commander and his secretary approached them. They were both more
than usually grave; but the look of inquiry and suspicion with which
they regarded the two women was gone from their eyes.

"The Senor Comandante says you are free, Senoras, and begs you will only
decide whether you will remain his guests or the guests of the Alcalde.
But for the present he cannot allow you any communication with the
prisoners of San Antonio."

"There is further news?" said Miss Keene faintly, with a presentiment of
worse complications.

"There is! A body from the Excelsior has been washed on shore."

The two women turned pale.

"In the pocket of the murdered man is an accusation against one Senor
Hurlstone, who was concealed on the ship; who came not ashore openly
with the other passengers, but who escaped in secret, and is now hiding
somewhere in Todos Santos."

"And you suspect him of this infamous act?" said Eleanor, forgetting
all prudence in her indignation. "You are deceiving yourself. He is as
innocent as I am!"

The Commander and the secretary smiled sapiently, but gently.

"The Senor Comandante believes you, Dona Leonora: the Senor Hurlstone
is innocent of the piracy. He is, of a surety, the leader of the
Opposition."




CHAPTER VIII.

IN SANCTUARY.


When James Hurlstone reached the shelter of the shrubbery he leaned
exhaustedly against the adobe wall, and looked back upon the garden
he had just traversed. At its lower extremity a tall hedge of cactus
reinforced the crumbling wall with a cheval de frise of bristling
thorns; it was through a gap in this green barrier that he had found his
way a few hours before, as his torn clothes still testified. At one side
ran the low wall of the Alcalde's casa, a mere line of dark shadow in
that strange diaphanous mist that seemed to suffuse all objects. The
gnarled and twisted branches of pear-trees, gouty with old age, bent
so low as to impede any progress under their formal avenues; out of a
tangled labyrinth of figtrees, here and there a single plume of feathery
palm swam in a drowsy upper radiance. The shrubbery around him, of some
unknown variety, exhaled a faint perfume; he put out his hand to grasp
what appeared to be a young catalpa, and found it the trunk of an
enormous passion vine, that, creeping softly upward, had at last invaded
the very belfry of the dim tower above him; and touching it, his soul
seemed to be lifted with it out of the shadow.

The great hush and quiet that had fallen like a benediction on every
sleeping thing around him; the deep and passionless repose that seemed
to drop from the bending boughs of the venerable trees; the cool,
restful, earthy breath of the shadowed mold beneath him, touched only by
a faint jessamine-like perfume as of a dead passion, lulled the hurried
beatings of his heart and calmed the feverish tremor of his limbs. He
allowed himself to sink back against the wall, his hands tightly clasped
before him. Gradually, the set, abstracted look of his eyes faded and
became suffused, as if moistened by that celestial mist. Then he rose
quickly, drew his sleeve hurriedly across his lashes, and began slowly
to creep along the wall again.

Either the obscurity of the shrubbery became greater or he was growing
preoccupied; but in steadying himself by the wall he had, without
perceiving it, put his hand upon a rude door that, yielding to his
pressure, opened noiselessly into a dark passage. Without apparent
reflection he entered, followed the passage a few steps until it turned
abruptly; turning with it, he found himself in the body of the Mission
Church of Todos Santos. A swinging-lamp, that burned perpetually before
an effigy of the Virgin Mother, threw a faint light on the single
rose-window behind the high altar; another, suspended in a low archway,
apparently lit the open door of the passage towards the refectory. By
the stronger light of the latter Hurlstone could see the barbaric red
and tarnished gold of the rafters that formed the straight roof. The
walls were striped with equally bizarre coloring, half Moorish and half
Indian. A few hangings of dyed and painted cloths with heavy fringes
were disposed on either side of the chancel, like the flaps of a wigwam;
and the aboriginal suggestion was further repeated in a quantity of
colored beads and sea-shells that decked the communion-rails. The
Stations of the Cross, along the walls, were commemorated by paintings,
evidently by a native artist--to suit the same barbaric taste; while a
larger picture of San Francisco d'Assisis, under the choir, seemed
to belong to an older and more artistic civilization. But the sombre
half-light of the two lamps mellowed and softened the harsh contrast of
these details until the whole body of the church appeared filled with a
vague harmonious shadow. The air, heavy with the odors of past incense,
seemed to be a part of that expression, as if the solemn and sympathetic
twilight became palpable in each deep, long-drawn inspiration.

Again overcome by the feeling of repose and peacefulness, Hurlstone sank
upon a rude settle, and bent his head and folded arms over a low railing
before him. How long he sat there, allowing the subtle influence to
transfuse and possess his entire being, he did not know. The faint
twitter of birds suddenly awoke him. Looking up, he perceived that it
came from the vacant square of the tower above him, open to the night
and suffused with its mysterious radiance. In another moment the roof of
the church was swiftly crossed and recrossed with tiny and adventurous
wings. The mysterious light had taken an opaline color. Morning was
breaking.

The slow rustling of a garment, accompanied by a soft but heavy tread,
sounded from the passage. He started to his feet as the priest, whom
he had seen on the deck of the Excelsior, entered the church from the
refectory. The Padre was alone. At the apparition of a stranger, torn
and disheveled, he stopped involuntarily and cast a hasty look towards
the heavy silver ornaments on the altar. Hurlstone noticed it, and
smiled bitterly.

"Don't alarm yourself. I only sought this place for shelter."

He spoke in French--the language he had heard Padre Esteban address to
Mrs. Brimmer. But the priest's quick eye had already detected his own
mistake. He lifted his hand with a sublime gesture towards the altar,
and said,--

"You are right! Where should you seek shelter but here?"

The reply was so unexpected that Hurlstone was silent. His lips quivered
slightly.

"And if it were SANCTUARY I was seeking?" he said.

"You would first tell me why you sought it," said Padre Esteban gently.

Hurlstone looked at him irresolutely for a moment and then said, with
the hopeless desperation of a man anxious to anticipate his fate,--

"I am a passenger on the ship you boarded yesterday. I came ashore with
the intention of concealing myself somewhere here until she had sailed.
When I tell you that I am not a fugitive from justice, that I have
committed no offense against the ship or her passengers, nor have I
any intention of doing so, but that I only wish concealment from their
knowledge for twenty-four hours, you will know enough to understand that
you run no risk in giving me assistance. I can tell you no more."

"I did not see you with the other passengers, either on the ship or
ashore," said the priest. "How did you come here?"

"I swam ashore before they left. I did not know they had any idea of
landing here; I expected to be the only one, and there would have been
no need for concealment then. But I am not lucky," he added, with a
bitter laugh.

The priest glanced at his garments, which bore the traces of the sea,
but remained silent.

"Do you think I am lying?"

The old priest lifted his head with a gesture.

"Not to me--but to God!"

The young man followed the gesture, and glanced around the barbaric
church with a slight look of scorn. But the profound isolation, the
mystic seclusion, and, above all, the complete obliteration of that
world and civilization he shrank from and despised, again subdued and
overcame his rebellious spirit. He lifted his eyes to the priest.

"Nor to God," he said gravely.

"Then why withhold anything from Him here?" said the priest gently.

"I am not a Catholic--I do not believe in confession," said Hurlstone
doggedly, turning aside.

But Padre Esteban laid his large brown hand on the young man's shoulder.
Touched by some occult suggestion in its soft contact, he sank again
into his seat.

"Yet you ask for the sanctuary of His house--a sanctuary bought by that
contrition whose first expression is the bared and open soul! To the
first worldly shelter you sought--the peon's hut or the Alcalde's
casa--you would have thought it necessary to bring a story. You would
not conceal from the physician whom you asked for balsam either the
wound, the symptoms, or the cause? Enough," he said kindly, as Hurlstone
was about to reply. "You shall have your request. You shall stay here. I
will be your physician, and will salve your wounds; if any poison I know
not of rankle there, you will not blame me, son, but perhaps you will
assist me to find it. I will give you a secluded cell in the dormitory
until the ship has sailed. And then"--

He dropped quietly on the settle, took the young man's hand paternally
in his own, and gazed into his eyes as if he read his soul.

And then . . . Ah, yes . . . What then? Hurlstone glanced once more
around him. He thought of the quiet night; of the great peace that had
fallen upon him since he had entered the garden, and the promise of
a greater peace that seemed to breathe with the incense from those
venerable walls. He thought of that crumbling barrier, that even in its
ruin seemed to shut out, more completely than anything he had conceived,
his bitter past, and the bitter world that recalled it. He thought of
the long days to come, when, forgetting and forgotten, he might find a
new life among these simple aliens, themselves forgotten by the world.
He had thought of this once before in the garden; it occurred to him
again in this Lethe-like oblivion of the little church, in the kindly
pressure of the priest's hand. The ornaments no longer looked
uncouth and barbaric--rather they seemed full of some new spiritual
significance. He suddenly lifted his eyes to Padre Esteban, and, half
rising to his feet, said,--

"Are we alone?"

"We are; it is a half-hour yet before mass," said the priest.

"My story will not last so long," said the young man hurriedly, as if
fearing to change his mind. "Hear me, then--it is no crime nor offense
to any one; more than that, it concerns no one but myself--it is of"--

"A woman," said the priest softly. "So! we will sit down, my son."

He lifted his hand with a soothing gesture--the movement of a physician
who has just arrived at an easy diagnosis of certain uneasy symptoms.
There was also a slight suggestion of an habitual toleration, as if
even the seclusion of Todos Santos had not been entirely free from the
invasion of the primal passion.

Hurlstone waited for an instant, but then went on rapidly.

"It is of a woman, who has cursed my life, blasted my prospects, and
ruined my youth; a woman who gained my early affection only to blight
and wither it; a woman who should be nearer to me and dearer than all
else, and yet who is further than the uttermost depths of hell from me
in sympathy or feeling; a woman that I should cleave to, but from whom
I have been flying, ready to face shame, disgrace, oblivion, even that
death which alone can part us: for that woman is--my wife."

He stopped, out of breath, with fixed eyes and a rigid mouth. Father
Esteban drew a snuff-box from his pocket, and a large handkerchief.
After blowing his nose violently, he took a pinch of snuff, wiped his
lip, and replaced the box.

"A bad habit, my son," he said apologetically, "but an old man's
weakness. Go on."

"I met her first five years ago--the wife of another man. Don't misjudge
me, it was no lawless passion; it was a friendship, I believed, due to
her intellectual qualities as much as to her womanly fascinations; for I
was a young student, lodging in the same house with her, in an academic
town. Before I ever spoke to her of love, she had confided to me her own
unhappiness--the uncongeniality of her married life, the harshness, and
even brutality, of her husband. Even a man less in love than I was could
have seen the truth of this--the contrast of the coarse, sensual, and
vulgar man with an apparently refined and intelligent woman; but any one
else except myself would have suspected that such a union was not
merely a sacrifice of the woman. I believed her. It was not until long
afterwards that I learned that her marriage had been a condonation of
her youthful errors by a complaisant bridegroom; that her character
had been saved by a union that was a mutual concession. But I loved her
madly; and when she finally got a divorce from her uncongenial husband,
I believed it less an expression of her love for me than an act of
justice. I did not know at the time that they had arranged the divorce
together, as they had arranged their marriage, by equal concessions.

"I was the only son of a widowed mother, whose instincts were from
the first opposed to my friendship with this woman, and what she
prophetically felt would be its result. Unfortunately, both she and my
friends were foolish enough to avow their belief that the divorce was
obtained solely with a view of securing me as a successor; and it
was this argument more than any other that convinced me of my duty to
protect her. Enough, I married, not only in spite of all opposition--but
BECAUSE of it.

"My mother would have reconciled herself to the marriage, but my wife
never forgave the opposition, and, by some hellish instinct divining
that her power over me might be weakened by maternal influence,
precipitated a quarrel which forever separated us. With the little
capital left by my father, divided between my mother and myself, I took
my wife to a western city. Our small income speedily dwindled under
the debts of her former husband, which she had assumed to purchase
her freedom. I endeavored to utilize a good education and some
accomplishments in music and the languages by giving lessons and
by contributing to the press. In this my wife first made a show of
assisting me, but I was not long in discovering that her intelligence
was superficial and shallow, and that the audacity of expression,
which I had believed to be originality of conviction, was simply
shamelessness, and a desire for notoriety. She had a facility in writing
sentimental poetry, which had been efficacious in her matrimonial
confidences, but which editors of magazines and newspapers found to be
shallow and insincere. To my astonishment, she remained unaffected
by this, as she was equally impervious to the slights and sneers that
continually met us in society. At last the inability to pay one of her
former husband's claims brought to me a threat and an anonymous letter.
I laid them before her, when a scene ensued which revealed the
blindness of my folly in all its hideous hopelessness: she accused me of
complicity in her divorce, and deception in regard to my own fortune. In
a speech, whose language was a horrible revelation of her early habits,
she offered to arrange a divorce from me as she had from her former
husband. She gave as a reason her preference for another, and her belief
that the scandal of a suit would lend her a certain advertisement and
prestige. It was a combination of Messalina and Mrs. Jarley"--

"Pardon! I remember not a Madame Jarley," said the priest.

"Of viciousness and commercial calculation," continued Hurlstone
hurriedly. "I don't remember what happened; she swore that I struck
her! Perhaps--God knows! But she failed, even before a western jury, to
convict me of cruelty. The judge that thought me half insane would not
believe me brutal, and her application for divorce was lost.

"I need not tell you that the same friends who had opposed my marriage
now came forward to implore me to allow her to break our chains. I
refused. I swear to you it was from no lingering love for her, for her
presence drove me mad; it was from no instinct of revenge or jealousy,
for I should have welcomed the man who would have taken her out of
my life and memory. But I could not bear the idea of taking her first
husband's place in her hideous comedy; I could not purchase my freedom
at that price--at any price. I was told that I could get a divorce
against HER, and stand forth before the world untrammeled and unstained.
But I could not stand before MYSELF in such an attitude. I knew that
the shackles I had deliberately forged could not be loosened except by
death. I knew that the stains of her would cling to me and become a part
of my own sin, even as the sea I plunged into yesterday to escape her,
though it has dried upon me, has left its bitter salt behind.

"When she knew my resolve, she took her revenge by dragging my name
through the successive levels to which she descended. Under the plea
that the hardly-earned sum I gave to her maintenance apart from me was
not sufficient, she utilized her undoubted beauty and more doubtful
talent in amateur entertainments--and, finally, on the stage. She was
openly accompanied by her lover, who acted as her agent, in the hope
of goading me to a divorce. Suddenly she disappeared. I thought she had
forgotten me. I obtained an honorable position in New York. One night
I entered a theater devoted to burlesque opera and the exhibition of
a popular actress, known as the Western Thalia, whose beautiful and
audaciously draped figure was the talk of the town. I recognized my wife
in this star of nudity; more than that, she recognized me. The next day,
in addition to the usual notice, the real name of the actress was given
in the morning papers, with a sympathizing account of her romantic and
unfortunate marriage. I renounced my position, and, taking advantage of
an offer from an old friend in California, resolved to join him secretly
there. My mother had died broken-hearted; I was alone in the world. But
my wife discovered my intention; and when I reached Callao, I heard that
she had followed me, by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and that probably
she would anticipate me in Mazatlan, where we were to stop. The thought
of suicide haunted me during the rest of that horrible voyage; only my
belief that she would make it appear as a tacit confession of my guilt
saved me from that last act of weakness."

He stopped and shuddered. Padre Esteban again laid his hand softly upon
him.

"It was God who spared you that sacrifice of soul and body," he said
gently.

"I thought it was God that suggested to me to take the SIMULATION of
that act the means of separating myself from her forever. When we neared
Mazatlan, I conceived the idea of hiding myself in the hold of the
Excelsior until she had left that port, in the hope that it would be
believed that I had fallen overboard. I succeeded in secreting myself,
but was discovered at the same time that the unexpected change in the
ship's destination rendered concealment unnecessary. As we did not put
in at Mazatlan, nobody suspected my discovery in the hold to be anything
but the accident that I gave it out to be. I felt myself saved the
confrontation of the woman at Mazatlan; but I knew she would pursue me
to San Francisco.

"The strange dispensation of Providence that brought us into this
unknown port gave me another hope of escape and oblivion. While you
and the Commander were boarding the Excelsior, I slipped from the
cabin-window into the water; I was a good swimmer, and reached the shore
in safety. I concealed myself in the ditch of the Presidio until I
saw the passengers' boats returning with them, when I sought the safer
shelter of this Mission. I made my way through a gap in the hedge and
lay under your olive-trees, hearing the voices of my companions, beyond
the walls, till past midnight. I then groped my way along the avenue
of pear-trees till I came to another wall, and a door that opened to my
accidental touch. I entered, and found myself here. You know the rest."

He had spoken with the rapid and unpent fluency of a man who cared more
to relieve himself of an oppressive burden than to impress his auditor;
yet the restriction of a foreign tongue had checked repetition or
verbosity. Without imagination he had been eloquent; without hopefulness
he had been convincing. Father Esteban rose, holding both his hands.

"My son, in the sanctuary which you have claimed there is no divorce.
The woman who has ruined your life could not be your wife. As long as
her first husband lives, she is forever his wife, bound by a tie which
no human law can sever!"




CHAPTER IX.

AN OPEN-AIR PRISON.


An hour after mass Father Esteban had quietly installed Hurlstone in a
small cell-like apartment off the refectory. The household of the
priest consisted of an old Indian woman of fabulous age and miraculous
propriety, two Indian boys who served at mass, a gardener, and a
muleteer. The first three, who were immediately in attendance upon the
priest, were cognizant of a stranger's presence, but, under instructions
from the reverend Padre, were loyally and superstitiously silent; the
vocations of the gardener and muleteer made any intrusion from them
impossible. A breakfast of fruit, tortillas, chocolate, and red wine,
of which Hurlstone partook sparingly and only to please his entertainer,
nevertheless seemed to restore his strength, as it did the Padre's
equanimity. For the old man had been somewhat agitated during mass,
and, except that his early morning congregation was mainly composed of
Indians, muleteers, and small venders, his abstraction would have been
noticed. With ready tact he had not attempted, by further questioning,
to break the taciturnity into which Hurlstone had relapsed after his
emotional confession and the priest's abrupt half-absolution. Was it
possible he regretted his confidence, or was it possible that his
first free and untrammeled expression of his wrongs had left him with a
haunting doubt of their real magnitude?

"Lie down here, my son," said the old ecclesiastic, pointing to a small
pallet in the corner, "and try to restore in the morning what you have
taken from the night. Manuela will bring your clothes when they are
dried and mended; meantime, shift for yourself in Pepito's serape and
calzas. I will betake me to the Comandante and the Alcalde, to learn the
dispositions of your party, when the ship will sail, and if your absence
is suspected. Peace be with you, son! Manuela, attend to the caballero,
and see you chatter not."

Without doubting the substantial truth of his guest's story, the good
Padre Esteban was not unwilling to have it corroborated by such details
as he thought he could collect among the Excelsior's passengers. His own
experience in the confessional had taught him the unreliability of
human evidence, and the vagaries of both conscientious and unconscious
suppression. That a young, good-looking, and accomplished caballero
should have been the victim of not one, but even many, erotic episodes,
did not strike the holy father as being peculiar; but that he should
have been brought by a solitary unfortunate attachment to despair
and renunciation of the world appeared to him marvelous. He was not
unfamiliar with the remorse of certain gallants for peccadillos with
other men's wives; but this Americano's self-abasement for the sins
of his own wife--as he foolishly claimed her to be--whom he hated and
despised, struck Father Esteban as a miracle open to suspicion. Was
there anything else in these somewhat commonplace details of vulgar and
low intrigue than what he had told the priest? Were all these Americano
husbands as sensitive and as gloomily self-sacrificing and expiating?
It did not appear so from the manners and customs of the others,--from
those easy matrons whose complacent husbands had abandoned them to the
long companionship of youthful cavaliers on adventurous voyages; from
those audacious virgins, who had the freedom of married women. Surely,
this was not a pious and sensitive race, passionately devoted to their
domestic affections! The young stranger must be either deceiving him--or
an exception to his countrymen!

And if he was that exception--what then? An idea which had sprung up in
Father Esteban's fancy that morning now took possession of it with the
tenacity of a growth on fertile virgin soil. The good Father had been
devoted to the conversion of the heathen with the fervor of a one-ideaed
man. But his successes had been among the Indians--a guileless, harmless
race, who too often confounded the practical benefits of civilization
with the abstract benefits of the Church, and their instruction had
been simple and coercive. There had been no necessity for argument
or controversy; the worthy priest's skill in polemical warfare and
disputation had never been brought into play; the Comandante and Alcalde
were as punctiliously orthodox as himself, and the small traders and
artisans were hopelessly docile and submissive. The march of science,
which had been stopped by the local fogs of Todos Santos some fifty
years, had not disturbed the simple Aesculapius of the province with
heterodox theories: he still purged and bled like Sangrado, and met the
priest at the deathbed of his victims with a pious satisfaction that had
no trace of skeptical contention. In fact, the gentle Mission of Todos
Santos had hitherto presented no field for the good Father's exalted
ambition, nor the display of his powers as a zealot. And here was a
splendid opportunity.

The conversion of this dark, impulsive, hysterical stranger would be a
gain to the fold, and a triumph worthy of his steel. More than that, if
he had judged correctly of this young man's mind and temperament, they
seemed to contain those elements of courage and sacrificial devotion
that indicated the missionary priesthood. With such a subaltern, what
might not he, Father Esteban, accomplish! Looking further into the
future, what a glorious successor might be left to his unfinished work
on Todos Santos!

Buried in these reflections, Padre Esteban sauntered leisurely up
the garden, that gradually ascended the slight elevation on which the
greater part of the pueblo was built. Through a low gateway in the wall
he passed on to the crest of the one straggling street of Todos Santos.
On either side of him were ranged the low one-storied, deep-windowed
adobe fondas and artisans' dwellings, with low-pitched roofs of dull red
pipe-like tiles. Absorbed in his fanciful dreams, he did not at first
notice that those dwellings appeared deserted, and that even the
Posada opposite him, whose courtyard was usually filled with lounging
muleteers, was empty and abandoned. Looking down the street towards
the plaza, he became presently aware of some undefined stirring in the
peaceful hamlet. There was an unusual throng in the square, and afar on
that placid surface of the bay from which the fog had lifted, the two
or three fishing-boats of Todos Santos were vaguely pulling. But the
strange ship was gone.

A feeling of intense relief and satisfaction followed. Father Esteban
pulled out his snuff-box and took a long and complacent pinch. But
his relief was quickly changed to consternation as an armed cavalcade
rapidly wheeled out of the plaza and cantered towards him, with the
unmistakable spectacle of the male passengers of the Excelsior riding
two and two, and guarded by double files of dragoons on each side.

At a sign from the priest the subaltern reined in his mustang, halted
the convoy, and saluted respectfully, to the astonishment of the
prisoners. The clerical authority of Todos Santos evidently dominated
the military. Renewed hope sprang up in the hearts of the Excelsior
party.

"What have we here?" asked Padre Esteban.

"A revolution, your Reverence, among the Americanos, with robbery of the
Presidio saluting-gun; a grave affair. Your Reverence has been sent for
by the Comandante. I am taking these men to San Antonio to await the
decision of the Council."

"And the ship?"

"Gone, your Reverence. One of the parties has captured it."

"And these?"

"Are the Legitimists, your Reverence: at least they have confessed to
have warred with Mexico, and invaded California--the brigands."

The priest remained lost for a moment in blank and bitter amazement.
Banks took advantage of the pause to edge his way to the front.

"Ask him, some of you," he said, turning to Brace and Crosby, "when this
d----d farce will be over, and where we can find the head man--the boss
idiot of this foolery."

"Let him put it milder," whispered Winslow. "You got us into trouble
enough with your tongue already."

Crosby hesitated a moment.

"Quand finira ce drole representation?--et--et--qui est ce qui est
l'entrepreneur?" he said dubiously.

The priest stared. These Americans were surely cooler and less excitable
than his strange guest. A thought struck him.

"How many are still in the ship?" he asked gently.

"Nobody but Perkins and that piratical crew of niggers."

"And that infernal Hurlstone," added Winslow.

The priest pricked up his ears.

"Hurlstone?" he repeated.

"Yes--a passenger like ourselves, as we supposed. But we are satisfied
now he was in the conspiracy from the beginning," translated Crosby
painfully.

"Look at his strange disappearance--a regular put-up job," broke in
Brace, in English, without reference to the Padre's not comprehending
him; "so that he and Perkins could shut themselves up together without
suspicion."

"Never mind Hurlstone now; he's GONE, and we're HERE," said Banks
angrily. "Ask the parson, as a gentleman and a Christian, what sort of a
hole we've got into, anyhow. How far is the next settlement?"

Crosby put the question. The subaltern lit a cigarette.

"There is no next settlement. The pueblo ends at San Antonio."

"And what's beyond that?"

"The ocean."

"And what's south?"

"The desert--one cannot pass it."

"And north?"

"The desert."

"And east?"

"The desert too."

"Then how do you get away from here?"

"We do not get away."

"And how do you communicate with Mexico--with your Government?"

"When a ship comes."

"And when does a ship come?"

"Quien sabe?"

The officer threw away his cigarette.

"I say, you'll tell the Commander that all this is illegal; and that I'm
going to complain to our Government," continued Banks hurriedly.

"I go to speak to the Comandante," responded the priest gravely.

"And tell him that if he touches a hair of the ladies' heads we'll have
his own scalp," interrupted Brace impetuously.

Even Crosby's diplomatic modification of this speech did not appear
entirely successful.

"The Mexican soldier wars not with women," said the priest coldly.
"Adieu, messieurs!"

The cavalcade moved on. The Excelsior passengers at once resumed their
chorus of complaint, tirade, and aggressive suggestion, heedless of the
soldiers who rode stolidly on each side.

"To think we haven't got a single revolver among us," said Brace
despairingly.

"We might each grab a carbine from these nigger fellows," said Crosby,
eying them contemplatively.

"And if they didn't burst, and we weren't shot by the next patrol, and
if we'd calculated to be mean enough to run away from the women--where
would we escape to?" asked Banks curtly. "Hold on at least until we
get an ultimatum from that commodious ass at the Presidio! Then we'll
anticipate the fool-killer, if you like. My opinion is, they aren't in
any great hurry to try ANYTHING on us just yet."

"And I say, lie low and keep dark until they show their hand," added
Winslow, who had no relish for an indiscriminate scrimmage, and had his
own ideas of placating their captors.

Nevertheless, by degrees they fell into a silence, partly the effect
of the strangely enervating air. The fog had completely risen from the
landscape, and hung high in mid-air, through which an intense sun, shorn
of its fierceness, diffused a lambent warmth, and a yellowish, unctuous
light, as if it had passed through amber. The bay gleamed clearly and
distinctly; not a shadow flecked its surface to the gray impenetrable
rampart of fog that stretched like a granite wall before its entrance.
On one side of the narrow road billows of monstrous grain undulated to
the crest of the low hills, that looked like larger undulations of the
soil, furrowed by bosky canadas or shining arroyos. Banks was startled
into a burst of professional admiration.

"There's enough grain there to feed a thousand Todos Santos; and raised,
too, with tools like that," he continued, pointing to a primitive plow
that lay on the wayside, formed by a single forked root. A passing
ox-cart, whose creaking wheels were made of a solid circle of wood,
apparently sawn from an ordinary log, again plunged him into cogitation.
Here and there little areas of the rudest cultivation broke into a
luxuriousness of orange, lime, and fig trees. The joyous earth at the
slightest provocation seemed to smile and dimple with fruit and flowers.
Everywhere the rare beatitudes of Todos Santos revealed and repeated
its simple story. The fructifying influence of earth and sky; the
intervention of a vaporous veil between a fiery sun and fiery soil; the
combination of heat and moisture, purified of feverish exhalations, and
made sweet and wholesome by the saline breath of the mighty sea,
had been the beneficent legacy of their isolation, the munificent
compensation of their oblivion.

A gradual and gentle ascent at the end of two hours brought the
cavalcade to a halt upon a rugged upland with semi-tropical shrubbery,
and here and there larger trees from the tierra templada in the
evergreens or madrono. A few low huts and corrals, and a rambling
hacienda, were scattered along the crest, and in the midst arose a
little votive chapel, flanked by pear-trees. Near the roadside were the
crumbling edges of some long-forgotten excavation. Crosby gazed at it
curiously. Touching the arm of the officer, he pointed to it.

"Una mina de plata," said the officer sententiously.

"A mine of some kind--silver, I bet!" said Crosby, turning to the
others. "Is it good--bueno--you know?" he continued to the officer, with
vague gesticulations.

"En tiempos pasados," returned the officer gravely.

"I wonder what that means?" said Winslow.

But before Crosby could question further, the subaltern signaled to them
to dismount. They did so, and their horses were led away to a little
declivity, whence came the sound of running water. Left to themselves,
the Americans looked around them. The cavalcade seemed to have halted
near the edge of a precipitous ridge, the evident termination of
the road. But the view that here met their eyes was unexpected and
startling.

The plateau on which they stood seemed to drop suddenly away, leaving
them on the rocky shore of a monotonous and far-stretching sea of waste
and glittering sand. Not a vestige nor trace of vegetation could be
seen, except an occasional ridge of straggling pallid bushes, raised
in hideous simulation of the broken crest of a ghostly wave. On
either side, as far as the eye could reach, the hollow empty vision
extended--the interminable desert stretched and panted before them.

"It's the jumping-off place, I reckon," said Crosby, "and they've
brought us here to show us how small is our chance of getting away.
But," he added, turning towards the plateau again, "what are they doing
now? 'Pon my soul! I believe they're going off--and leaving us."

The others turned as he spoke. It was true. The dragoons were coolly
galloping off the way they came, taking with them the horses the
Americans had just ridden.

"I call that cool," said Crosby. "It looks deuced like as if we were to
be left here to graze, like cattle."

"Perhaps that's their idea of a prison in this country," said Banks.
"There's certainly no chance of our breaking jail in that direction,"
he added, pointing to the desert; "and we can't follow them without
horses."

"And I dare say they've guarded the pass in the road lower down," said
Winslow.

"We ought to be able to hold our own here until night," said Brace, "and
then make a dash into Todos Santos, get hold of some arms, and join the
ladies."

"The women are all right," said Crosby impatiently, "and are better
treated than if we were with them. Suppose, instead of maundering over
them, we reconnoitre and see what WE can do here. I'm getting devilishly
hungry; they can't mean to starve us, and if they do, I don't intend to
be starved as long as there is anything to be had by buying or stealing.
Come along. There's sure to be fruit near that old chapel, and I saw
some chickens in the bush near those huts. First, let's see if there's
any one about. I don't see a soul."

The little plateau, indeed, seemed deserted. In vain they shouted; their
voices were lost in the echoless air. They examined one by one the few
thatched huts: they were open, contained one or two rude articles of
furniture--a bed, a bench, and table--were scrupulously clean--and
empty. They next inspected the chapel; it was tawdry and barbaric in
ornament, but the candlesticks and crucifix and the basin for holy water
were of heavily beaten silver. The same thought crossed their minds--the
abandoned mine at the roadside!

Bananas, oranges, and prickly-pears growing within the cactus-hedge of
the chapel partly mollified their thirst and hunger, and they turned
their steps towards the long, rambling, barrack-looking building, with
its low windows and red-tiled roof, which they had first noticed. Here,
too, the tenement was deserted and abandoned; but there was evidence of
some previous and more ambitious preparation: in a long dormitory off
the corridor a number of scrupulously clean beds were ranged against
the whitewashed walls, with spotless benches and tables. To the complete
astonishment and bewilderment of the party another room, fitted up as a
kitchen, with the simpler appliances of housekeeping, revealed a
larder filled with provisions and meal. A shout from Winslow, who had
penetrated the inner courtyard, however, drew them to a more remarkable
spectacle. Their luggage and effects from the cabins of the Excelsior
were there, carefully piled in the antique ox-cart that had evidently
that morning brought them from Todos Santos!

"There's no mistake," said Brace, with a relieved look, after a hurried
survey of the trunks. "They have only brought our baggage. The ladies
have evidently had the opportunity of selecting their own things."

"Crosby told you they'd be all right," said Banks; "and as for
ourselves, I don't see why we can't be pretty comfortable here, and all
the better for our being alone. I shall take an opportunity of looking
around a bit. It strikes me that there are some resources in this
country that might pay to develop."

"And I shall have a look at that played-out mine," said Crosby; "if it's
been worked as they work the land, they've left about as much in it as
they've taken out."

"That's all well enough," said Brace, drawing a dull vermilion-colored
stone from his pocket; "but here's something I picked up just now that
ain't 'played out,' nor even the value of it suspected by those fellows.
That's cinnabar--quicksilver ore--and a big per cent. of it too; and if
there's as much of it here as the indications show, you could buy up all
your SILVER mines in the country with it."

"If I were you, I'd put up a notice on a post somewhere, as they do
in California, and claim discovery," said Banks seriously. "There's no
knowing how this thing may end. We may not get away from here for some
time yet, and if the Government will sell the place cheap, it wouldn't
be a bad spec' to buy it. Form a kind of 'Excelsior Company' among
ourselves, you know, and go shares."

The four men looked earnestly at each other. Already the lost Excelsior
and her mutinous crew were forgotten; even the incidents of the
morning--their arrest, the uncertainty of their fate, and the fact that
they were in the hands of a hostile community--appeared but as trivial
preliminaries to the new life that opened before them! They suddenly
became graver than they had ever been--even in the moment of peril.

"I don't see why we shouldn't," said Brace quickly. "We started out to
do that sort of thing in California, and I reckon if we'd found such a
spot as this on the Sacramento or American River we'd have been content.
We can take turns at housekeeping, prospect a little, and enter into
negotiations with the Government. I'm for offering them a fair sum for
this ridge and all it contains at once."

"The only thing against that," said Crosby slowly, "is the probability
that it is already devoted to some other use by the Government. Ever
since we've been here I've been thinking--I don't know why--that we've
been put in a sort of quarantine. The desertion of the place, the half
hospital arrangements of this building, and the means they have taken
to isolate us from themselves, must mean something. I've read somewhere
that in these out-of-the-way spots in the tropics they have a place
where they put the fellows with malarious or contagious diseases. I
don't want to frighten you boys: but I've an idea that we're in a sort
of lazaretto, and the people outside won't trouble us often."




CHAPTER X.

TODOS SANTOS SOLVES THE MYSTERY.


Notwithstanding his promise, and the summons of the Council, Father
Esteban, on parting with the Excelsior prisoners in the San Antonio
Road, did not proceed immediately to the presence of the Comandante.
Partly anxious to inform himself more thoroughly regarding Hurlstone's
antecedents before entering upon legislative functions that might
concern him, partly uneasy at Brace's allusion to any possible
ungentleness in the treatment of the fair Americanas, and partly
apprehensive that Mrs. Brimmer might seek him at the Mission in
the present emergency, the good Father turned his steps towards the
Alcalde's house.

Mrs. Brimmer, in a becoming morning wrapper, half reclining in an
Indian hammock in the corridor, supported by Miss Chubb, started at his
approach. So did the young Alcalde, sympathetically seated at her side.
Padre Esteban for an instant was himself embarrassed; Mrs. Brimmer
quickly recovered her usual bewildering naivete.

"I knew you would come; but if you hadn't, I should have mustered
courage enough to go with Miss Chubb to find you at the Mission," she
said, half coquettishly. "Not but that Don Ramon has been all kindness
and consideration, but you know one always clings to one's spiritual
adviser in such an emergency; and although there are differences of
opinion between us, I think I may speak to you as freely as I would
speak to my dear friend Dr. Potts, of Trinity Chapel. Of course you
don't know HIM; but you couldn't have helped liking him, he's so gentle,
so tactful, so refined! But do tell me the fullest particulars of this
terrible calamity that has happened so awkwardly. Tell me all! I fear
that Don Ramon, out of kindness, has not told me everything. I have been
perfectly frank, I told him everything--who I am, who Mr. Brimmer is,
and given him even the connections of my friend Miss Chubb. I can do
no more; but you will surely have no difficulty in finding some one in
Todos Santos who has heard of the Quincys and Brimmers. I've no doubt
that there are books in your library that mention them. Of course I can
say nothing of the other passengers, except that Mr. Brimmer would not
have probably permitted me to associate with any notorious persons. I
confess now--I think I told you once before, Clarissa--that I greatly
doubted Captain Bunker's ability"--

"Ah," murmured Don Ramon.

"--To make a social selection," continued Mrs. Brimmer. "He may have
been a good sailor, and boxed his compass, but he lacked a knowledge
of the world. Of the other passengers I can truly say I know nothing;
I cannot think that Mr. Crosby's sense of humor led him into bad
associations, or that he ever went beyond verbal impropriety. Certainly
nothing in Miss Keene's character has led me to believe she could so far
forget what was due to herself and to us as to address a lawless mob in
the streets as she did just now; although her friend Mrs. Markham, as
I just told Don Ramon, is an advocate of Women's Rights and Female
Suffrage, and I believe she contemplates addressing the public from the
lecturer's platform."

"It isn't possible!" interrupted Don Ramon excitedly, in mingled
horror of the masculinely rampant Mrs. Markham and admiration of the
fascinatingly feminine Mrs. Brimmer; "a lady cannot be an orator--a
haranguer of men!"

"Not in society," responded Mrs. Brimmer, with a sigh, "and I do not
remember to have met the lady before. The fact is, she does not move in
our circle--in the upper classes."

The Alcalde exchanged a glance with the Padre.

"Ah! you have classes? and she is of a distinct class, perhaps?"

"Decidedly," said Mrs. Brimmer promptly.

"Pardon me," said Padre Esteban, with gentle persuasiveness, "but you
are speaking of your fellow-passengers. Know you not, then, of one
Hurlstone, who is believed to be still in the ship Excelsior, and
perhaps of the party who seized it?"

"Mr. Hurlstone?--it is possible; but I know really nothing of him," said
Mrs. Brimmer carelessly. "I don't think Clarissa did, either--did you,
dear? Even in our enforced companionship we had to use some reserve,
and we may have drawn the line at him! He was a friend of Miss Keene's;
indeed, she was the only one who seemed to know him."

"And she is now here?" asked the Padre eagerly.

"No. She is with her friend the Senora Markham, at the Presidio. The
Comandante has given her the disposition of his house," said Don Ramon,
with a glance of grave archness at Mrs. Brimmer; "it is not known which
is the most favored, the eloquent orator or the beautiful and daring
leader!"

"Mrs. Markham is a married woman," said Mrs. Brimmer severely, "and,
of course, she can do as she pleases; but it is far different with Miss
Keene. I should scarcely consider it proper to expose Miss Chubb to
the hospitality of a single man, without other women, and I cannot
understand how she could leave the companionship and protection of your
lovely sisters."

The priest here rose, and, with formal politeness, excused himself,
urging the peremptory summons of the Council.

"I scarcely expected, indeed, to have had the pleasure of seeing my
colleague here," he added with quiet suavity, turning to the Alcalde.

"I have already expressed my views to the Comandante," said the
official, with some embarrassment, "and my attendance will hardly be
required."

The occasional misleading phosphorescence of Mrs. Brimmer's quiet eyes,
early alluded to in these pages, did not escape Father Esteban's quick
perception at that moment; however, he preferred to leave his companion
to follow its aberrations rather than to permit that fair ignis fatuus
to light him on his way by it.

"But my visit to you, Father Esteban," she began sweetly, "is only
postponed."

"Until I have the pleasure of anticipating it here," said the priest,
with paternal politeness bending before the two ladies; "but for the
present, au revoir!"

"It would be an easy victory to win this discreetly emotional Americana
to the Church," said Father Esteban to himself, as he crossed the plaza;
"but, if I mistake not, she would not cease to be a disturbing element
even there. However, she is not such as would give this Hurlstone any
trouble. It seems I must look elsewhere for the brains of this party,
and to find a solution of this young man's mystery; and, if I judge
correctly, it is with this beautiful young agitator of revolutions and
her oratorical duenna I must deal."

He entered the low gateway of the Presidio unchallenged, and even
traversed the courtyard without meeting a soul. The guard and sentries
had evidently withdrawn to their habitual peaceful vocations, and the
former mediaeval repose of the venerable building had returned. There
was no one in the guard-room; but as the priest turned back to the
corridor, his quick ear was suddenly startled by the unhallowed
and inconsistent sounds of a guitar. A monotonous voice also--the
Comandante's evidently--was raised in a thin, high recitative.

The Padre passed hastily through the guard-room, and opened the door
of the passage leading to the garden slope. Here an extraordinary group
presented itself to his astonished eyes. In the shadow of a palm-tree,
Mrs. Markham, seated on her Saratoga trunk as on a throne, was gazing
blandly down upon the earnest features of the Commander, who, at her
feet, guitar in hand, was evidently repeating some musical composition.
His subaltern sat near him, divided in admiration of his chief and the
guest. Miss Keene, at a little distance, aided by the secretary,
was holding an animated conversation with a short, stout, Sancho
Panza-looking man, whom the Padre recognized as the doctor of Todos
Santos.

At the apparition of the reverend Father, the Commander started,
the subaltern stared, and even the secretary and the doctor looked
discomposed.

"I am decidedly de trop this morning," soliloquized the ecclesiastic;
but Miss Keene cut short his reflection by running to him frankly, with
outstretched hand.

"I am so glad that you have come," she said, with a youthful,
unrestrained earnestness that was as convincing as it was fascinating,
"for you will help me to persuade this gentleman that poor Captain
Bunker is suffering more from excitement of mind than body, and that
bleeding him is more than folly."

"The man's veins are in a burning fever and delirium from aguardiente,"
said the little doctor excitedly, "and the fire must first be put out by
the lancet."

"He is only crazy with remorse for having lost his ship through his own
carelessness and the treachery of others," said Miss Keene doughtily.

"He is a maniac and will kill himself, unless his fever is subdued,"
persisted the doctor.

"And you would surely kill him by your way of subduing it," said the
young girl boldly. "Better for him, a disgraced man of honor, to die
by his own hand, than to be bled like a calf into a feeble and helpless
dissolution. I would, if I were in his place--if I had to do it by
tearing off the bandages."

She made a swift, half unconscious gesture of her little hand, and
stopped, her beautiful eyes sparkling, her thin pink nostrils dilated,
her red lips parted, her round throat lifted in the air, and one small
foot advanced before her. The men glanced hurriedly at each other, and
then fixed their eyes upon her with a rapt yet frightened admiration. To
their simple minds it was Anarchy and Revolution personified, beautiful,
and victorious.

"Ah!" said the secretary to Padre Esteban, in Spanish, "it is true! she
knows not fear! She was in the room alone with the madman; he would let
none approach but her! She took a knife from him--else the medico had
suffered!"

"He recognized her, you see! Ah! they know her power," said the
Comandante, joining the group.

"You will help me, Father Esteban?" said the young girl, letting the
fire of her dark eyes soften to a look of almost childish appeal--"you
will help me to intercede for him? It is the restraint only that is
killing him--that is goading him to madness! Think of him, Father--think
of him: ruined and disgraced, dying to retrieve himself by any reckless
action, any desperate chance of recovery, and yet locked up where he can
do nothing--attempt nothing--not even lift a hand to pursue the man who
has helped to bring him to this!"

"But he CAN do nothing! The ship is gone!" remonstrated the Comandante.

"Yes, the ship is gone; but the ocean is still there," said Miss Keene.

"But he has no boat."

"He will find or make one."

"And the fog conceals the channel."

"He can go where THEY have gone, or meet their fate. You do not know my
countrymen, Senor Comandante," she said proudly.

"Ah, yes--pardon! They are at San Antonio--the baker, the buffoon, the
two young men who dig. They are already baking and digging and joking.
We have it from my officer, who has just returned."

Miss Keene bit her pretty lips.

"They think it is a mistake; they cannot believe that any intentional
indignity is offered them," she said quietly. "Perhaps it is well they
do not."

"They desired me to express their condolences to the Senora," said the
Padre, with exasperating gentleness, "and were relieved to be assured by
me of your perfect security in the hands of these gentlemen."

Miss Keene raised her clear eyes to the ecclesiastic. That accomplished
diplomat of Todos Santos absolutely felt confused under the cool
scrutiny of this girl's unbiased and unsophisticated intelligence.

"Then you HAVE seen them," she said, "and you know their innocence, and
the utter absurdity of this surveillance?"

"I have not seen them ALL," said the priest softly. "There is still
another--a Senor Hurlstone--who is missing? Is he not?"

It was not in the possibility of Eleanor Keene's truthful blood to do
other than respond with a slight color to this question. She had already
concealed from every one the fact of having seen the missing man in the
Mission garden the evening before. It did not, however, prevent her the
next moment from calmly meeting the glance of the priest as she answered
gravely,--

"I believe so. But I cannot see what that has to do with the detention
of the others."

"Much, perhaps. It has been said that you alone, my child, were in the
confidence of this man."

"Who dared say that?" exclaimed Miss Keene in English, forgetti

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