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Pirates' Hope

by Francis Lynde · English · Gutenberg #45141 · 463,330 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Pirates' Hope

Author: Francis Lynde


        
Release date: March 15, 2014 [eBook #45141]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIRATES' HOPE ***

_BY FRANCIS LYNDE_

    PIRATES' HOPE
    THE FIRE BRINGERS
    THE GIRL A HORSE AND A DOG
    THE WRECKERS
    DAVID VALLORY
    BRANDED
    STRANDED IN ARCADY
    AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN
    THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS
    THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGEBRUSH
    THE PRICE
    A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT

    _CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS_




PIRATES' HOPE




PIRATES' HOPE

    BY
    FRANCIS LYNDE


    NEW YORK
    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
    1922




    COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

    Printed in the United States of America

    Published April, 1922

[Illustration]





    TO
    EDWARD YOUNG CHAPIN

    FRIEND OF MANY YEARS AND
    KINDLIEST OF CRITICS, THIS
    BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY
    INSCRIBED.




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                      PAGE
        I INTRODUCING MR. MACHIAVELLI VAN DYCK      3
       II THE SHIP'S COMPANY                       19
      III THE MAJOR--AND OTHERS                    36
       IV THE LOG OF THE _Andromeda_               50
        V ANY PORT IN A STORM                      61
       VI A SEA CHANGE                             72
      VII SHORE LEAVE                              86
     VIII INTO THE PRIMITIVE                      103
       IX THE BULLY                               115
        X THE BONES OF THE _Santa Lucia_          131
       XI FINDERS KEEPERS                         144
      XII BONTECK UNLOADS                         159
     XIII THE WIND AND THE WAVES ROARING          175
      XIV HAND TO MOUTH                           193
       XV THE MERRY WAR                           212
      XVI A MARATHON AND AN ULTIMATUM             235
     XVII CAPTAIN ELIJAH SCORES                   251
    XVIII UNDER A GIBBOUS MOON                    266
      XIX THE FORWARD LIGHT                       285




PIRATES' HOPE




I

INTRODUCING MR. MACHIAVELLI VAN DYCK


TO those who knew him best and had known him longest, Bonteck Van
Dyck, sometime captain of his university eleven, a ball player with
the highest batting average on the university nine, a large-lettered
star in everything pertaining to athletic accomplishments, and above
and beyond this the fortunate--or unfortunate, as one chooses to view
it--inheritor of the obese Van Dyck fortune, figured, like the dead
kitten discovered on the ash heap by the investigative infant, as "a
perfectly good cat, spoiled."

As was most natural, the spoiling was usually charged in a lump sum
to the exaggerated fortune. In the university Van Dyck was a breezy,
whole-souled, large-hearted man's man, the idol of his set and
fraternity and a pathetically easy mark for the college borrower. Past
the college period, however, there came rumors of a radical change;
sharp-edged hints that the easy mark was becoming an increasingly
hard mark; vague intimations that this prince of good fellows of an
earlier day was attaining a certain stony indifference to suffering on
the part of those who sought to relieve him of some portion of the
money burden. Nay, more; it was whispered that he was not above using
the bloated bank account as a club wherewith to dash out the brains
of his opponents, not only in the market-place, but at the social
fireside, where, as a handsome young Croesus, owning a goodly handful
of Manhattan frontages, sailing his own yacht, and traveling in his
own private car, he was the legitimate quarry of the match-making
mothers--or fathers.

Though we had been reasonably close friends in the university days, it
so chanced that I had seen next to nothing of Van Dyck during the three
years immediately following the doling out of the coveted sheepskins in
Commencement Week; and the echoes of these derogatory stories--echoes
were all that had drifted out to me in the foreign field to which, as
a constructing engineer, I had gone soon after my graduation--were
somehow vastly unconvincing. But on a certain memorable autumn evening
in a New Orleans hotel, when I found myself sitting across a table
for two as Van Dyck's guest, listening while he explained, or tried
to explain, why he had cabled me from Havana to meet him at this
particular time and place, it was disconcertingly evident that the
golden youth of the old university days had really developed into
something different--different, and just a shade puzzling.

"You see, Preble, you are the one man I was most anxious to find,"
he was saying, for the third time since the half-shell oysters had
been served. "By the sheerest good luck I happened to run across
Bertie Witherspoon in Havana, and he told me that you were, or had
been, running the blockade, or something of that sort, down on the
Venezuela coast, and that a wire to the Barcado Brothers' New Orleans
headquarters would probably reach you."

"Running the blockade!" I broke in derisively. "That is about as near
as a New York provincial like Bertie Witherspoon could come to any fact
outside of his native Borough of Manhattan! There is no blockade on the
Venezuelan coast; and I've been building a railroad from Trujillo up
into the Sierra Nevada de Merida. Does this trifling difference make me
any less the man you were anxious to find?"

"Not in the least," he returned, with the old-time, boyish smile
wrinkling at the corners of his fine eyes. "But I do hope you've
got your railroad built and are footloose and free to take another
commission."

"No," I said; "the railroad isn't finished. But as it probably never
will be, under the present Venezuelan administration, we can leave it
out of the question."

"Then you could take a month or so off, if you should feel like it?"

"I could, yes; if the hotel bills wouldn't prove to be too high."

Again the good-natured smile identified the Teck Van Dyck of other days
for me.

"There won't be any hotel bills," he said gently. "You are to be my
guest on the _Andromeda_ for a little cruise."

"On the _Andromeda_?" I exclaimed. "You don't mean to say you've got
that baby Cunarder with you down here in these waters?"

"Yea, verily, and for a fact," was the smiling reply. "I came up the
big river in her this afternoon. Been knocking about a bit among the
islands to dodge the country-house invitations up home."

"Out of tune with the little social gods and goddesses?" I ventured.

"Out of tune with a good many things, Dick. This is a sorry old world,
and the people in it are sorrier--most of 'em. Everything's a bore."

I laughed.

"Since when have you been soaking Diogenes and the later Cynics?"

"Chortle if you want to," he returned. "Old Man Socrates had it about
right when he said that virtue is knowledge, and Antisthenes went him
one better when he said, 'Let men gain wisdom--or buy a rope.' Another
time he says, 'A horse I can see, but horsehood I can not see.' That
applies to humanity, as well."

"Meaning that things--and people--are not always what they seem?"

"Meaning that people are so seldom what they seem that you can ignore
the exceptions. Somebody has said that there are two distinct entities
in the ego; the man as he sees himself, and the man as God sees him.
That is only a fraction of a great truth. There are as many entities as
the man has human contacts; he is not precisely the same man to any two
of his acquaintances, and he is a hypocrite with most."

"Bosh!" said I, thinking I had the key to all this hard-bitted, and
lately acquired, philosophy. "You have too much money, Bonteck; that is
all that is the matter with you."

He put down his oyster fork and looked me squarely in the eye. He
was the same handsome, upstanding young Hercules that he had always
been, but there was something new and more or less provocative in the
contemptuous set of the mouth and the half belligerent emphasis of the
well-defined jaw.

"You've said it, Dick; I have too much money, and other people haven't
enough," was his rather enigmatical retort. Then: "You may call it
madman raving if you like, but I've lost my sense of perspective; I
can't tell an honest man--or woman--when I see one."

"All of which leads up to?----"

"To the thing which has brought me to New Orleans, and to my reason for
wiring you from Havana. My philosophy has led me to the jumping-off
place, Dick. Before I am two months older I am going to know at least
one small bunch of people for what they really are under their skins.
And you are going to help me to acquire this invaluable information.
How does that proposal strike you?"

"It strikes me a trifle remindfully, if you insist on knowing," I said.
"I haven't been altogether out of touch with the home people, and quite
a few of them have had something to say about this loss of perspective
that you've just confessed to. I've been writing most of the gossip off
to profit and loss, but----"

"You needn't," was his brusque interruption. "As I've said, this is a
pretty rotten world, if anybody should ask."

"Is it, indeed? How many millions does it take to give a man that point
of view?"

"That is the devil of it," he said, with a touch of bitterness. "Will
you believe me when I say that, apart from yourself and two or three
other honest money-despisers like you, I don't really know, as man to
man, or man to woman, half a dozen people on the face of the planet?"

"I'll believe that you think so. Still, that is all piffle, as you very
well know. So far as the women are concerned, it merely means that you
haven't met the one and only."

Van Dyck was silent while the waiter was placing the meat course.
During the plate-changing interval I became unpleasantly conscious
of the presence--the curiously obtrusive presence--of a dark-faced,
black-mustachioed little man sitting two tables away, and apparently
engrossed in his dinner. Why this one foreign-looking individual, out
of the many late diners comfortably filling the large room, should
disturb me, I could not determine; but the vague disquietude came--and
remained. Twice I thought I caught the small man watching my tablemate
furtively from beneath his heavy eyebrows; and when Van Dyck began
to speak again, I was almost certain I detected that half mechanical
cocking of an ear which betrays the intentional and eager eavesdropper.

"The one and only woman," said Van Dyck musingly, taking up the
thread of the table talk at the point where it had been broken by the
shifting of plates. "That is another exploded fallacy, Preble. There
are dozens of the 'one-and-onlys,' each with a scheming mamma, or a
grafting father, or an impecunious guardian who has been thriftlessly
making ducks and drakes of his ward's trust funds. And they are all
so immitigably decent and well-behaved and conventional that butter
wouldn't melt in the mouth of a single one of them. They never, by any
chance, let you see one-sixty-fourth of an inch below the surface."

"I grant you surfaces are more or less deceptive," I admitted. "But
your charge is too sweeping. You can't lump humanity any more than you
can the stars in heaven."

"Can't I? Wait and you shall see. And it isn't altogether what you are
thinking; that I have been 'touched' so often that it has soured me.
Heaven knows I've been a perfect Pool of Bethesda to a whole worldful
of financial cripples ever since I left the university; but I don't
especially mind the graft. What I do mind is the fact that it makes
smiling hypocrites out of the grafters, big and little. Not one of them
dares show me his real self, and there are times when I am fairly sick
at heart for one little refreshing glimpse of humanity in the raw."

"Which is more piffle," I commented. "You didn't cable me to come and
eat a New Orleans dinner with you on the bare chance that I'd let you
work off a batch of grouches on me, did you?"

His answer was delayed so long that I wondered if he were trying to
determine beforehand how much or how little he might be obliged to tell
me. But finally he broke ground, rather cautiously, I thought, in the
field of the explanations.

"No; I didn't ask you for the purpose of unloading my peculiar and
personal grievances upon you, tempting as that may have been. I have
a deep-laid plot, and I want you to help me carry it out. It is just
about the maddest thing you ever heard of, and I've got to have at
least one sane man along--as a sort of sea-anchor to tie to when the
hurricane begins ripping the masts out of us, and all that."

"In other words, you are out to pick up a bit of moral backing for the
plot. Is that it?"

"You have hit it precisely. You are to go along and hold me up to
the mark, Dick. If I show any signs of weakening, you are to jab a
knife into me and twist it around a few times. You are on salary, you
know--if you care to have it that way."

"If you say money to me again, I quit you cold, right here and now,"
was my answer to that. And then: "Pitch out and tell me: what is this
piratical scheme that you are afraid you may not have the nerve to
carry through?"

The plotter sat back in his chair, regarding me through half-closed
eyelids; and again I thought I caught the dark-faced foreigner two
tables distant stealthily watching him.

"On the face of it, it looks almost as thrilling as an old maids' tea
party--and not any less conventional," Van Dyck began. "You have been
around and about a good bit in the Caribbean, haven't you?"

"I suppose I might be able to pilot the _Andromeda_ into most of the
well-known harbors, if I had to," I boasted.

"Good. But you haven't been much out of the regular steamer lanes?--or
have you?"

"Now and then; yes. Once, when I was trying to blow around from
Carthagena to La Guaira in a coasting schooner, our old tub of a wind
jammer was caught in a hurricane and piled up on a coral reef. We were
Crusoes on the ghastly little island for nearly a month before a tramp
steamer happened along and saw our signals."

Van Dyck nodded as one who is hearing what has been heard before.

"You wrote home about that adventure, as you may, or may not, remember,
and the story got around to me. Afterward, I chanced to see in the
shipping news the report of the captain of the tramp 'tanker' which
had picked you up. Your island wasn't down on any of the charts,
and Captain Svenson gave the latitude and longitude as a matter of
information. Have you any idea what island it was--or is?"

"No. As you may imagine, I was only too glad to see the last of it when
we were taken off."

"It is said to be the Lost Island of the old English plateship
harriers--Sir Frankie Drake and the rest," Van Dyck went on. "There is
a story that Drake once ran a Spanish treasure ship into the lagoon
which encircles the island, shot it full of holes, and finally burned
it after a siege lasting a couple of days. The tale adds that during
the two-day fight the Spaniards had time to unload and bury some of the
gold bars in the galleon's cargo. Drake tried to make his prisoners
tell what they had done with the treasure--so the story goes--and when
they proved obstinate he sailed away and left them to starve. At a
somewhat later period the island appears in the legends as 'Pirates'
Hope'--place where the black-flag rovers used to put in to refit.
Nobody seems to know why it hasn't been put down on the modern charts."

I closed my eyes and a cold little chill ran up and down my back. Van
Dyck's yarn was probably only a figment of the story-tellers, but it
brought back most vividly the memory of that despairing month I had
spoken of; the dragging hours and days, the pinch of starvation, the
hope deferred as we stared our eyes out sweeping the meeting line
of sea and sky that never--until that last welcome day--gave back a
sign of the world out of which we had been blotted. Also, the story
resurrected another memory, one which had been almost forgotten with
the lapse of time. There had been relics on the island; a few bits
of the iron and woodwork of an ancient wreck, and a few bleached
bones--human bones. Still, I had all the incredulity of one who had
listened to many marvelous tales of the sea.

"You can hear dozens of yarns like that about every coral island and
cay in the Caribbean," I said.

"I know," he agreed. "And on a pleasure voyage it helps out wonderfully
if you have some one along who can tell them. How would the old
Spanish Main strike you as a winter cruising ground for the good ship
_Andromeda_?"

It was at this point that I began to see a few rays of daylight--or
thought I did.

"Show me the _Andromeda's_ passenger list and I can tell better," I
laughed.

"Your fellow voyagers will be people you know, or used to know--the
majority of them," he returned; then, with what seemed to be a curious
lack of enthusiasm, he enumerated them. "I've invited the newly married
Greys; the Ph.D. Sanfords; Major Terwilliger and his nephew, Jerry
Dupuyster; Conetta Kincaide and her dragoness aunt, Miss Mehitable;
Madeleine Barclay and her father; young Grisdale and his bull pup; and
Hobart Ingerson. And last, but by no means least, Mrs. Eager Van Tromp
and her three daughters."

"Heavens!" I interjected. "Why didn't you include all of New York,
while you were about it? Do you mean to tell me that you have all these
people with you in the _Andromeda_?"

"Not yet, but soon," he qualified. "They are on the way down here in my
private car. I'm here to meet them, and so, by the same token, are you."

"Good Lord! If you had hired a Hagenbeck to make your collection it
couldn't have been more zoo-like! What under the sun were you thinking
of, Teck?"

"They are all people I'd like to know better," he rejoined half
absently. "The 'collection,' as you so scoffingly call it, was quite
carefully chosen, if you did but know it."

"But Ingerson!" I protested.

"I know. Ingerson is a brute, you would say; and so would I, if I were
on the witness stand and obliged to testify. But in condemning him we
should be in the minority, Dick. He has the _entrée_ to the best houses
in New York, and half of the dowagers in that abandoned city would snap
at him for a son-in-law."

"That may well be. But to shut yourself up with him in a yacht party
for weeks on end----"

"Your point is well taken. But you will remember that I have admitted
the madnesses from start to finish. The vital thing, however, is this:
Will you consent to go along with us to add the saving touch of sanity?
Don't turn me down, Dick," he added, and the adjuration was almost a
pleading.

"I'm not turning you down," I hastened to say. "I am merely asking
'why?'"

Van Dyck's face was a study in moody perplexity, and he spoke slowly,
almost hesitantly, when he answered my query.

"I don't know that I can explain the exact 'why,' or give a logical
reason, even to so good a friend as you are, Dick. The winter-cruise
notion originated with Mrs. Van Tromp, I believe; and she is
responsible for the inclusion of the major and his nephew. Also, she
is the one who asked me to invite Ingerson. She has been playing in
hard luck lately, and for the sake of her three girls, who, in her
point of view, have simply _got_ to marry money, she is obliged to
keep the pace. I suppose the prospect of a winter in Florida--the
four of them at Palm Beach, with no chance to cut economical corners,
you know--appalled her. Besides, she knows the _Andromeda_, and the
_Andromeda's chef_. That goes a long way with as good a trencherwoman
as she is."

"That will do for a starter," I said. "Let us say that Mrs. Van Tromp
and her daughters are bread-and-butter guests. But how about the
others?"

Van Dyck did not reply until after the deft serving man had cleared the
table and brought the cigars.

"The others, with the possible exception of Billy Grisdale, who is
only an infant, are people with whom I should like to become better
acquainted, as I have said."

"Which is still purer piffle," I put in. "You've known all of them
practically all your life. But go on."

"I've known them, and I haven't known them," he asserted. "There are
the Sanfords--the professor and his wife: they typify the older
married set, and the casual onlooker would say that they try to give
the impression that they are still satisfied and happy. I should like
to find out if they really are satisfied and happy. Then there are the
Greys; they are still in the billing and cooing stage: I'd like to see
if it isn't possible for them to get too much of each other when the
doors are all shut and locked and neither of them can duck out for a
breath of the fresh air of solitude."

"Jehu!" I muttered. "The blue-bearded old gentleman of the Old-World
legend wasn't in it with you. Let's have the rest of it."

Van Dyck's smile barely missed being a saturnine grin, and there was
scarcely a suggestion of mirth in it.

"Major Terwilliger poses as a generous, large-hearted old rounder who
is eventually going to do something handsome for Jerry Dupuyster, his
sister's son. Privately, I have a notion that the major's liberal
fortune--which he promises to bestow upon Gerald--is largely, if not
wholly, a myth, and that he is selfish enough to keep Jerry dangling as
a bait to the scheming mammas--and aunts--for the social advantages and
'side' thereby accruing to Jerry's uncle."

"Conetta Kincaide's aunt, for example?" I interpolated.

"Yes, Aunt Mehitable, if you like. And, this being the case, I have a
perfectly normal curiosity to see what will happen when the dragoness
gets the major and Jerry in a clear field, with no possibility of a
breakaway for them, or of interference with her dragonizing for her."

"Having already used Bluebeard, I'm out of comparisons for you," I
said. "What about the Barclays, father and daughter?"

Van Dyck shook his head and the faintest possible shadow of a frown
came and sat between his eyes.

"We needn't be ill-natured on the wholesale plan," he evaded. "You
wouldn't suspect a man like Holly Barclay of offering his daughter to
the highest bidder, would you? Supposing we admit that he has gone
through the fortune that his wife's father got together, and let it
stand at that."

"You are not letting it stand at that," I countered shrewdly.

"No, perhaps I am not," he admitted, after a thoughtful pause. "I
thought I should like to prove or disprove a thing that I have heard,
about Holly Barclay--and Madeleine--and--well, you'll guess it if I
don't say it--about Ingerson."

"Again with the clear field and no favor, I suppose," I put in a bit
savagely. Then: "Van Dyck, you ought to be shot!"

He was glancing at his watch, and his smile was wry.

"I shall get my little drink of hemlock before the table is cleared,
never fear," he said soberly. "Any time you may think I am not getting
it, you have my permission to blow the gaff; to call the others
together and tell them what I've done to them. That is fair, isn't it?"

I nodded, and again he relapsed into thoughtful silence. Our dinner
appointment had been for a rather late hour in the evening, and
by now the great dining-room was all but empty, though the small
dark-faced man on our right was still dallying with the sweets and
the black coffee. A heavy, intoxicating fragrance drifted across
from the flowering cereus in the palm room, and the distance-mellowed
strains of an orchestra playing in an alcove on the opposite side
of the rotunda added another sensuous touch. The glamour of the
tropics, a far-reaching breath of the beckoning mystery of shimmering
seas, and coral reefs singing to the beat of the murmuring surf--the
mystery whose appeal is ever and most strongly to the senses and the
passions--was in the air when I said, gravely enough, I make no doubt:

"I'll go with you, Bonteck; and chiefly for the reason you have just
given--the reason and the permission. Let this be your fair warning: if
at any time your little farce threatens to grow into a tragedy, I shall
most certainly call you down."

"I was rather hoping you'd say something like that," he agreed, with
what appeared to be the utmost sincerity.

"At the same time," I went on, "it is only fair to add that your
expensive experiment will fail. Nothing will happen on the _Andromeda_
that couldn't, or wouldn't, happen in a house party at your country
place in the Berkshires. You will come back as wise--or as foolish--as
you are now."

"Oh, well," he said, pushing his chair back and casting the napkin
aside, "we needn't pull the bud in pieces to find out what kind of
a flower it's going to be. I can't promise you that you will be
greatly edified, and it is quite within the possibilities that you
may find yourself frightfully bored. But, in any event, it will help
out a little if we leave something to the imagination, don't you
think?--something to speculate about and to look forward to. I know it
does look rather cut-and-dried in the prospect; eight bells breakfast,
luncheon when you like to have it, dinner in the second dog-watch,
and cards--always cards when Mrs. Van Tromp can find a partner and a
table--in the evening."

He had got upon his feet and was standing before me, an acutely
attractive figure of a well-built, well-groomed man in faultless
evening dress. The identifying smile of other and less cynical days was
drawing at the corners of his eyes when he went on.

"We'll live in hopes. Perhaps we shall be able to smash the _Andromeda_
on some reef that isn't down on the charts. Failing that, there is
always the chance of a stray hurricane--with the other chance of
the engines breaking down at the inopportune moment. We shall find
excitement of some kind; I can feel it in my bones."

"Small chance on a baby Cunarder," I grumbled, rising in my turn.

"Oh, I don't know," he offered, in gentle deprecation. "At any rate we
can still be hopeful. Now if you are ready we'll go to the railroad
station and meet the players. I told you they were on the way down from
New York, but I omitted to add that they are due to arrive to-night;
within fifteen or twenty minutes, to be strictly accurate. Let's gather
up a few for-hire autos and go to the rescue."




II

THE SHIP'S COMPANY


WE were on the sidewalk--"banquette," as it is called in New
Orleans--in front of the hotel, and Van Dyck was marshaling a number of
vehicles for a descent upon the railroad station, when a small man with
his soft hat pulled well down over his eyes appeared at my elbow as
silently as if he had materialized out of the rain-wet pavement.

"Pardon, M'sieu'," he murmured, in the broken English which placed him,
apparently, as a native of the French quarter, "ze brother of my cousin
ees h-ask me to fin' out for heem w'en M'sieu' Van Dyck's steamsheep
comes on N' Orlean. 'Ees h-oncle been de _chef_ h-on dat sheep, an'
'ee's want sand heem lettaire. _Oui._"

Van Dyck had started his procession of cabs, and he called to me as
the last of the vehicles pulled up to the curb to take us in. Almost
mechanically I gave the soft-spoken and apologetic questioner his
answer.

"Mr. Van Dyck's yacht came up the river to-day. Tell your cousin's
brother he will have to hurry his letter. The _Andromeda_ will sail
either to-night or to-morrow morning, I believe."

It was not until after I had joined Van Dyck in the waiting taxi, and
we were sluing and skidding over the wet pavements on the way to the
railroad station, that my companion said: "Didn't I see you talking to
a little fellow in gray tweeds and a soft hat just before we drove away
from the hotel? Do you know the man?"

"No; he was a stranger to me," I returned. "He asked a question and I
answered it. He is the man who sat two tables away on your right in the
hotel dining-room. He said he was the cousin of a cousin of somebody
who wanted to send a letter to the _Andromeda's_ cook, and he wanted to
know when the yacht would arrive."

"You told him the _Andromeda_ is already here?"

"Yes."

"That's a bit odd," was Van Dyck's comment.

"What is odd?"

"That this little sallow-faced fellow should turn up here in New
Orleans practically at the same moment that I do. I spotted him while
we were at dinner and wondered if he could be the same one."

"The same one as who? And why shouldn't he be here?" I asked, rather
more than mildly curious.

"The same one I have seen at least twice before in the past few weeks.
The first time was at our anchorage in the Hudson when he, or somebody
very much like him, was the last man overside as we were leaving port a
month ago. I understood then that he was a friend of some member of the
_Andromeda's_ crew and had come aboard for a farewell visit."

"And the second time?"

"The second time was some three weeks later, and the place was Havana.
There he, or again somebody exactly like him, was hanging around the
water front chinning with any member of the crew who happened to have
shore leave. That time he wasn't trying to mail a letter; he was trying
to find out why it had apparently taken us three weeks, instead of
something less than one, to make the run down from New York to Cuba."

"Did he find out?" I inquired, with a little private wonderment of my
own to prompt the query.

"I can't say as to that," was Van Dyck's half-guarded reply. "What is
puzzling me now is his--er--omnipresence, so to speak. So far as I
know, we left him in Havana. How does he come to be here in New Orleans
on the very day of our arrival?"

"That is easy," I said; "the method, I mean--not his object. He could
have come by railroad from Key West in less time than it took the
_Andromeda_ to steam across the Gulf."

"Of course," Van Dyck agreed, quite as if this simple explanation had
not occurred to him. And then, since we had reached the station, where,
upon inquiry, we found that the New York train was already in, there
was time only for a hospitable dash to the platform upon which our
prospective ship's company was at the moment debarking.

Though I knew all of Van Dyck's guests well enough to need no
introductions, the mob of them that was pouring out of the private car
_Kalmia_ was overwhelming by sheer weight of numbers.

"Heavens!" I said to Van Dyck as we came upon the scene, "I don't
wonder that you wanted help," and therewith we plunged in to bring
order out of the platform chaos of mingled humanity and hand baggage.

It was after we had the human part of the chaos marching, with an army
of laden red-caps, upon the line of chartered taxis, that Van Dyck
thrust a sheaf of baggage checks into my hand.

"Be a good fellow, Dick, and see to it that the heavy dunnage gets
started for the _Andromeda's_ wharf before you leave, won't you?" he
asked. "I'll go on with the crowd, and have one of the taxis wait for
you--T. and P. wharf, foot of Thalia Street, you know."

That was how it came about that I was left alone to wrestle with the
baggage-masters and the transfer people, and after I had seen the last
truck-load of steamer trunks sorted, tarpaulined, and started on its
way over town, I returned to the cab rank and found my taxi awaiting
me, as Van Dyck had promised.

It was not until I was climbing into the covered cab that I discovered
that it was already occupied. As I ducked for shelter from the rain,
which was now falling smartly, a voice that I should have recognized
if I had heard it on another planet said, "I hope you found my little
green trunk with the others. It has all my dinner gowns in it."

"Conetta!" I gasped; and then I saw what Van Dyck had done, either with
malice aforethought or in sheer heedlessness. In the taxicab loading
there had been an overflow of one, and Conetta Kincaide had been left
behind to share the waiting vehicle with me.

"You--you knew this was my cab?" I stammered, after I had accumulated
wit enough to shut the door and tell the driver to go on.

"Of course. Bonteck put me in and said you'd be along in a few minutes;
that you'd gone to look after the baggage. How do you happen to be
here with Bonteck?"

"That," I evaded, "is a rather tedious story. Later on you may have
it for what it is worth, if you still care to hear it. Excuse me a
moment," and I leaned forward and stuck my head through the open window
at the taxi-driver's ear to whisper: "Take your time, and don't bother
to make any short cuts."

"What was that you were saying to the man?" was the question I had to
answer after I had fallen back into the seat beside the possessor of
the cool voice and self-contained manner.

"I was telling him he needn't hurry," I confessed brazenly. "In a few
minutes you will be one of the crowd again, and there are three years
to be bridged, in some fashion, in those few minutes."

I felt, rather than heard, her little gasp of dismay.

"Do you mean to say that--that you are going along in the _Andromeda_?"
she asked faintly.

"It is even so--more is the pity. I had committed myself to Bonteck, in
a way, before I knew the names on his passenger list."

"And if you had known, you would have refused?"

"I don't know. Most likely I should; and not altogether out of
consideration for you. You see, I am quite frank."

"You are; most refreshingly frank. One might have hoped that time,
and--and----"

----"And absence and new fields and faces, and all that, would make
me forget," I finished for her. "Unhappily, they haven't. But that is
neither here nor there. Though I have kept pretty well out of the
civilized world for the past three years, there has been a word now and
then from home. Tell me plainly, Connie--how much does Jerry Dupuyster
know?"

"He knows that three years ago we were engaged to be married, you and
I." The cool voice trembled a little, but it was still well under
control.

"That is better," I commented with a sigh of relief; and it was better
because, if Jerry hadn't known, there would have been chances for
hideous complications on the proposed cruise of the _Andromeda_, or at
least, in some inchoate way, I felt there would. "Does Jerry know why
it was broken off?" I went on.

"He thinks he does."

"Which is to say that he accepts your Aunt Mehitable's version of it;
the one she published broadcast among our friends--that, without any
cause assigned, we simply agreed to disagree?"

"I suppose so."

Silence for a square or so, broken only by the drumming of the taxi's
motor. Then I took the bull by the horns.

"Shall I tell Bonteck that, for reasons which I don't care to explain,
I shall have to drop out of this badly mixed ship's company of his?"

The cool voice had fully regained its even tones when she said: "Why
should you?"

"There is no 'why' unless you care to interpose one of your own making.
But I should think, with Jerry Dupuyster along----"

"The _Andromeda_ is a reasonably roomy little ship," was the calm
retort. "And, besides, there are enough of us to afford protection--the
protection of a crowd. If you have promised Bonteck, you can hardly
break with him at the last moment, can you?"

"You don't care, then?"

"Why should I care? What is done is done, and can't be helped. Aunt
Mehitable thinks I ought to marry; I suppose she thinks I owe it to her
to marry and set up an establishment of my own. Perhaps I do owe it to
her. I've been a charge upon her generosity all my life."

"So you are going to marry Jerry Dupuyster, a lisping club-lizard
who apes the English so hard that he forgets that he has a string of
American ancestors as long as your arm?" I flamed out.

"Well, if I am, what is it to you, Dick Preble? Or to any one else
besides Jerry and me? Also, I might ask what right I have given you to
put me upon the rack?"

"None; none whatever," I admitted gloomily. "Still, I have a right,
of a sort--the right of the first man. You seem conveniently and
successfully to have forgotten. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to
forget, though I have tried all of the customary antidotes."

"Other women?" she asked, with the faintest possible touch of malice.

I was resentful enough to meet her baldly upon her own ground.

"There was a young woman in Venezuela; a pure Castilian, with the blood
of kings in her veins. I could have married her."

"Why didn't you?" she asked sweetly.

"I have wished many times that I had. I wonder if you can understand if
I say that I was afraid?"

"Mr. Kipling says that we can't understand--that we can never
understand. But I think I know what you mean. You may have been
Adam--the first man, again--for her; but she wasn't, and never could
be, Eve--the first woman--for you. Was that it?"

The taxi was finally approaching the quarter of the city in which our
wharf lay. There were other things to be said, and they had to be said
hurriedly.

"Let us get things straightened out--before the crowd messes in," I
said. "Three years ago we were engaged to be married. One day I was
obliged to tell your Aunt Mehitable that the comfortable fortune my
father had left me had been swallowed up in an exhausted Colorado gold
mine, and that I'd have to go to work for a living. She then told
me--with what seemed to me to be unnecessary spitefulness--that her
will was made in favor of some charitable institution, and since you
would thus be left penniless, it was up to me to set you free and give
you a chance to marry somebody who could provide for you. Am I stating
it clearly?"

"Clearly enough."

"Then she went on to say that the news of my misfortune had preceded
me; that you had already been told all there was to tell; and that it
would be a kindness to you if I should agree not to see you again."

"And you did me the kindness," she put in calmly. "I ought to be
thankful for that. Perhaps I am thankful."

"I was furious," I confessed. "If you will permit me to say it this
long after the fact, your aunt carries a vicious tongue in her head,
and she didn't spare me. Also, I'll admit that my own temper isn't
exactly patient or forgiving. It was the next morning that I had the
chance to go to South America thrust at me, and the ship was sailing at
noon. I left a letter for you and disappeared over the horizon."

"Yes," she replied in the same even tone; "I got the letter."

"That brings us down to date," I went on, as the taxi drew up at the
wharf. "The next thing is the _modus vivendi_--the way we must live
for the next few weeks. You say that Jerry knows that we were once
engaged. If he is half a man, there will be plenty of chances for
misunderstanding and trouble. We must agree to be decently quarrelsome."

"You have begun it beautifully," she said, with a hard little
laugh. "Admitting your premises, what will Jerry think of this taxi
drive--without a chaperon?"

"Jerry will never know that you came over with me--unless you tell him."

"Aunt Mehitable can tell him," she retorted, again with the touch of
malice in her voice.

"But, for the sake of Major Terwilliger's money, she won't tell
him," I ventured drily; and a moment later I was handing her up the
_Andromeda's_ accommodation ladder with a sharper misery in my heart
than I had suffered since the night three years in the past when her
dragoness aunt had goaded me into effacing myself.

There was a pleasant bustle of impending departure already going on
aboard the yacht when we reached the deck. Most of the women--all
of them, in fact, save the youngest of the Van Tromp trio and
Annette Grey--had gone to their several staterooms, and the men were
scattered--"dotted" was Conetta's word--here and there, apparently
trying to find themselves, like so many cats in a strange garret.

"You will go below?" I said to Conetta when I had shown her the way aft.

"Yes; and by myself, if you please." Then, with a quick turn of the
proud little head, and a look in the slate-blue eyes that was far
beyond any man's fathoming: "Good-night, Dick, and good-by. Perhaps our
quarrel would better begin right here and now." And with that she was
gone.

It was possibly five minutes later that I met Grey, the newly married,
roving in search of his mate.

"Annette?" he queried. "Have you seen her anywhere, Preble?"

"She is with Edie Van Tromp on the bridge," I told him. Then I linked
an arm in his and drew him to the shoreward rail, saying: "Don't rush
off. Throw that vile cigar away and light a fresh one, and tell me how
the New York law partnership is getting along. Remember, there are some
weeks ahead of you in which you won't be able to get any farther away
from Annette than the length of the _Andromeda_--no matter how badly
you may want to."

The married lover twisted his arm out of mine and dropped the stub of
his cigar over the rail.

"Preble, you're a brute," he remarked, quite conversationally. And then
he added: "By Jove, don't you know, I wouldn't be a bachelor again for
the shiniest million that was ever minted! I didn't realize, until
within the last few weeks, what a crabbed, dog-in-the-manger beggar it
would make of a man."

"Thanks," I laughed. "Experience counts for something, even if it is
short and pretty recent, as you might say. Where is the major?"

Grey clipped the end of the fresh cigar I had given him and lighted it.
He was sparing me a few moments merely to show me that it was possible
for him to stay that long out of sight and sound of the loved one.

"The major is in a class by himself, as you ought to know if you've
preserved any fragment of memory, Preble. He is down in the yacht's
smoking-room, hobnobbing with a glass of hot brandy and soda, and
finishing a novel that he has been reading all the way down from
Chattanooga. Think of it--hot toddy in this weather!"

"A veteran--even a Spanish War Veteran--has to do something to
individualize himself," I jested; and then Grey took his turn at me.

"You are a veteran yourself, Richard--of a sort. They tell me you have
been knocking around here in the tropics so long that you've forgotten
all the little decent and civilized ameliorations. Why don't you marry
and settle down?"

I laughed.

"Go up yonder on the bridge and ask Annette why some men marry and some
don't; she'll tell you," I said; and he promptly took me at my word, at
least so far as leaving me was concerned.

A short time after this, just after I had identified the two smokers in
the wicker lounging chairs under the afterdeck awning as Ingerson and
Madeleine Barclay's father, the last truck-load of trunks came. While
the baggage was going into the _Andromeda's_ forehold, Dupuyster,
looking more English than any Briton to the manner born, came lounging
aft and greeted me chirpingly.

"'Lo, old chappie; dashed glad to know you're comin' along, what? Bonty
was just tellin' me he'd scragged you for the voyage. Topping, I'll
say."

"Topping, if you say so, Jerry. How long have you been over?"

"Eh, what?--how long have I been over? I say, old dear--that's a jolly
good one, y' know. But tell me; where is this bally old tub of Bonty's
goin' to sail for? Bonty won't tell us. He's as mysterious about it
as--as----"

Realizing that he was feeling around in his ultra-British vocabulary
for a fitting Anglo-maniacal simile, I helped him out.

"As a bag of tricks, let us say. I don't know, any more than you do,
Jerry. Summer seas in midwinter, and all that, I suppose. What do we
care?"

"Haw! dashed little, so long as the _Andromeda's_ well found in the
provision lockers: eh? what? And Bonty will have seen to that." Then:
"I've been lookin' about a bit for Conetta. Did she come aboard with
you?"

I nodded. "She has gone to her stateroom, I believe."

The young man whose chief end in life seemed to be to out-English the
English lighted a cigarette and lounged on farther aft. I followed the
movements of his white-flanneled figure with the gaze speculative.
Quite as truly as in the case of Bonteck Van Dyck--though in a vastly
different manner--here was a "perfectly good cat, spoiled." I had
known Jerry Dupuyster quite intimately in the university days; known
him for a lovable fellow with rather more, than less, than his fair
allowance of brains and ability. But something, either the bait of the
major's hypothetical fortune, or too much idleness--or both--had turned
him into ... the speculative train paused. I didn't know what the
compelling influences had turned Jerry Dupuyster into, but whatever it
might be, it seemed too trivial to warrant the effort needful to try to
define it.

Sauntering forward on the starboard promenade I saw that Grey had
joined his wife and Edie Van Tromp on the bridge, and that Van Dyck and
a lean, hatchet-faced man whom I took to be the yacht's sailing-master,
were with them. While I looked on, Goff, the sailing-master, came down
to the rail to direct the stowing of the last load of luggage through
the open port below. Like some other things in this Caribbean cruise
entourage, this man Goff was a new wrinkle, and a rather astounding
one. Hitherto--at least in my knowing of them--the _Andromeda's_
skippers had been of the Atlantic-liner class, spick and span martinets
in natty uniform, with fine, quarter-deck manners, and maintaining a
discipline comparable only to that of the Navy.

But Goff was at the other end of the gamut of extremes; a gaunt,
hard-bitted old Yankee fishing-smack captain, if appearances counted
for anything; hungry-looking, lank and weather-beaten, with a harsh
voice and a bad eye. And to emphasize the oddities, the sailormen he
was directing seemed to be all foreigners; another sea change sharply
opposed to Van Dyck's former notions about manning his yacht.

As it appeared, there was to be no loss of time in the outsetting.
While the trunks were still tumbling into the hold baggage-room,
a subdued clamor came up from the fire hold, and the yacht's twin
funnels began to echo to the roar of the stirred fires. A minute later
the lower-river pilot, a hairy-faced giant who might have taken the
heavy villain's part in comic opera, climbed aboard. With a bare nod
to the sailing-master, the giant ascended to the bridge, and almost
immediately the yacht's searchlight blazed out, the order to cast off
was given, and the trim white hull, shuddering to the thrust of its
propellers, edged away into the brown flood of the Mississippi, and
made a majestic half-circle in midstream to pass the lights of the city
in review as it was headed for the Gulf.

Dodging the pair of smokers under the after-deck awning, I went around
to the port promenade, where I stumbled upon Billy Grisdale sitting
alone with his bull pup between his knees.

"Hello, Prebby," he said, much as if it had been only three days
instead of as many years since he had come down to the East River pier,
a fresh-faced prep. school-boy, to see me off for the tropics. "Come
over here and sit down and give me a smoke." And when I had done all
three: "Rum old go, isn't it? If I wasn't such an ass about carrying
a tune, I'd be warbling 'My native land, good-night.' Got your life
insured?"

"I'm an orphan and a bachelor; why should I carry insurance, Billy?" I
said, laughing at his doleful humor.

"I don't know. Guess I've got a bad case of the hyps. Can't think of
anything but that bloody-bones jingle of Stevenson's:

    'Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,
     Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!'

Teck Van Dyck's a pirate. He's gone daffy over something, and we're all
going to heaven in a hand-basket."

Of course this was all froth; pure froth. But there was usually a
little clear liquor in the bottom of Billy's stein.

"What ails you?" I asked.

An impish grin spread itself over his smooth, boyish face.

"I'm in love, if anybody should ask you. Everything looks green to me,
and I want to chew slate-pencils. _Ergo_--which is college slang for
'Ah, there, stay there'--I'm as daffy as Teck. Don't laugh or I'll set
Tige on you. Say, Prebby, do I look like an invalid?"

"Yes; about as much as Mr. John Sullivan did when he carried the world
heavy-weight wallop in his good right hand."

"Yet I am an invalid. Doc Fanning says I am, and he's like George
Washington. He might lie if he could, but he can't because he's lost
the combination."

"What on earth are you gibbering about, Billy?"

"Facts; iron-clad, brass-bound, blown-in-the-bottle,
sold-only-in-the-original-package facts. Fanning's the family
physician, you know, and he has gone on record as declaring that I need
half a winter off in a mild climate. And I don't know to this good
minute whether I succeeded in fooling him, or whether he was just plain
good-natured enough to size the thing up and fool the governor--I
don't, really, Prebby."

"But why?" I persisted.

"The 'why' is a girl, of course; you ought to know that without being
told. She's a lulu and a charmer, and if I can't marry her I'll end it
all with a bare bodkin. Her name? I'm going to tell you, Prebby; and,
again, if you laugh, I'll make Tige bite you. It's Edith."

"Not Edie Van Tromp!"

"Prebby, you're the one only and original wizard. You could make your
fortune if you should set up as a guesser."

"Ye gods and little children!" I commented. "Edie Van Tromp is
eighteen, if I remember correctly; and you are----"

"I was twenty a few days ago, if you don't mind," he returned, tickling
the cropped ears of the bull pup. And then: "'Crazy,' you say? Maybe
so--quite likely so. I've got to keep the pace, you know. This little
ship's full of crazy people. I'm crazy about Edie, and, if you listen
to what you hear, Jerry Dupuyster's crazy about Conetta Kincaide--just
like you used to be--and Jack Grey's crazy about his Annette, and
Ingerson and Teck are both crazy about Madeleine Barclay. So there you
are. And if the wind gets around into the sour east, Teck's going to
sink the ship in the deep-blue Caribbean, and drown us all--all but
Madeleine--and live happily ever after. Apropos of nothing at all,
Prebby, this is a rotten cigar you gave me, and I'm all mussed up and
discouraged. What's that bell clanging about?"

"It is striking five bells in the first night watch--otherwise, or
landsman-wise, half-past ten o'clock."

"Good!--excellent good. Let's turn in, so we can turn out bright and
early for our first shot at the blue water. What do you say?"

I said the required word, and we went below to our respective
staterooms. The next morning when I turned out and drew aside the
curtain shading the stateroom port light, the sun was shining brightly,
and for a horizon there were only the tumbling wavelets of the Gulf of
Mexico.




III

THE MAJOR--AND OTHERS


THE first morning in blue water developed the fact that breakfast
on the _Andromeda_ was destined to be a broken meal. In the
white-lacquered dining-saloon, only three members of the ship's
company, Major Terwilliger, Madeleine Barclay's father, and Professor
Sanford were at table, though Van Dyck and Billy Grisdale had been
still earlier, had already breakfasted and had gone on deck.

As I took my place, the major, affecting the bluff heartiness which
was merely a mask for an ease-loving, self-centered habit which
never for a moment lost sight of the creature comforts, was trying,
quite ineffectually, to draw Sanford into a discussion of the merits
and demerits of certain French liqueurs--a subject upon which the
clean-living, abstemious professor of mathematics was as poorly
informed as any anchorite of the desert.

"Vermuth, now; a dash of vermuth in your morning bitters," the major
expatiated; "there's nothing like it for an appetiser. I'm not saying
anything against the modern cocktail, properly compounded; it has
its place. But for a morning eye-opener it is crude. Believe me, a
Frenchman knows the meaning of the word _apéritif_ much better than we
do."

"Yes?" said the professor, with a palpable effort to galvanize an
interest which he was evidently far from feeling.

"Quite so," declared the major; after which he proceeded to enlarge
upon American backwardness in the matter of picking and choosing among
the potables, inveighing with all the warmth of a past master in the
art of good living against the barbarism of taking one's liquor raw.

While the major was giving his alcoholic homily, and not omitting,
meanwhile, to keep his plate well supplied with the crispest bits of
bacon and the hottest of the rolls, I had an opportunity to observe the
silent man whose place was opposite my own. Holly Barclay had changed
greatly in the three years which had elapsed since I had last seen him
in New York. I never knew--I do not yet know--what particular form his
dissipation took, but it had left its indubitable record in the haggard
face, the deep-sunken eyes, and in the womanish hands which trembled a
bit in spite of an evident effort to hold them steady.

Fragmentary gossip of former days had said that Holly Barclay's bane
was women; other whispers had it that it was the gaming table; still
others that it was the larger gaming table of the Street. Whatever
it was, it had apparently left him a rather ghastly wreck of a man;
a prey, not to remorse, perhaps, but certainly to fear. And with the
fear in the deep-set eyes there was a hint of childish petulance; the
irritable humor of a man who has fought a losing battle with life and
expects to be waited upon and coddled as a reward for his defeat and
humiliation.

It was a relief to turn from this haggard wreck, and from the
sham-hearty major, to the mild-eyed professor. Sanford I had known in
the university, and a less self-conscious or more lovable man never
lived. Deeply immersed in the natural sciences, which were his hobby,
and absent-minded at times to a degree that put to shame the best
efforts of the college-professor-joke makers, he was nevertheless the
most human of men; a faculty member whose door was always hospitably
open to the homesick Freshman, and whose influence for good in the
lush field of the college campus was second only to that of his
plain-featured, motherly wife.

"Ah, yes," he was saying, in answer to the major's eulogy of chartreuse
as a cordial, "it is said to be a distillation from the leaves of
_Urtica pilulifera_, the much-abused nettle, I believe. Those old
Alpine monks had a wonderful knowledge of the scanty flora of the high
altitudes where they built their monasteries. Which reminds me: I hope
Bonteck will give us an opportunity to study some of the remarkable
plant forms peculiar to the tropics before we return. It would be most
enlightening to a stay-at-home like myself."

The major's facial expression was that of a person who has been
basely betrayed into casting pearls before swine. That any one could
be so benighted as to associate a divine cordial only with the crude
materials out of which it might be made was quite beyond his powers of
comprehension.

"Hum," he muttered, "I've always understood that the process of
chartreuse-making was a secret that was most jealously guarded." And
with that he let the pearl casting stop abruptly.

Here was a striking example, one would say, of the ill-assortment
of our mixed ship's company manifesting itself at the introductory
breakfast at sea. Throughout the meal Barclay said nothing to any of
us. His few remarks were addressed to the serving steward, and they
were all in the nature of complaints. His coffee was too weak, the
bacon was too crisp, the cold meats were underdone. What with the
gourmet appetite of the major, and Barclay's apparent lack of any
appetite at all, the broken meal was anything but a feast of reason
and a flow of soul, and I was glad to break away to the freedom of the
decks.

Finding the after-deck untenanted, I strolled forward. The _Andromeda_
was loafing along over a sea as calm as a mill-pond, and her course,
as nearly as I could guess it from the position of the sun, was a
little to the east of south. Van Dyck and Billy Grisdale were on the
bridge, and one of the foreign-looking sailormen had the wheel. On the
main-deck forward three members of the crew were swabbing down, and
two others were polishing brass. As I paused at the rail in the shadow
of the bridge overhang, Goff, the sailing-master, came stumping along.
Though no one had as yet told me that he was a Gloucesterman, I took a
shot at it.

"This is not much like cracking on with a schooner for the Banks, is
it, Captain?" was the form the shot took; and the grizzled veteran of
the sea stopped and looked me over with an eye militantly appraisive.

"What you know about the Banks?" he inquired hostilely.

"Little enough," I admitted. "One trip, made when I was a boy, in the
schooner _Maria Ann_, of Gloucester, Captain Standifer."

"I want to know!" he said, thawing perceptibly. "Old _Maria Ann's_
afloat yit, but Standifer's gone; run down in a dory in a fog." Then,
lowering his voice: "You don't belong to this New York clanjamfry, do
ye?"

"Not strictly speaking; I signed on in New Orleans."

"Know these waters putty middlin' well?"

"I've sailed them a few times."

"Friend o' Cap'n Van Dyck's, I cal'late?"

"As good a friend as he has on earth, I hope."

At this the old sea dog thrust an arm in mine and led me aft until we
were out of earshot from the bridge.

"What d' ye know about this here winter cruise?" He fired the question
at me belligerently.

"About its course and destination? Little or much, as you choose to put
it. What should I know?"

He paid no attention to my question.

"Cap'n Van Dyck's all right, only he's too dum hardheaded," he
confided. "Picked up his 'tween-decks lackeys in New York an' Havana.
Don't like the looks o' some on 'em. If you're a friend of the Cap'n's,
you keep a weather eye on that slick lookin' yaller boy that waits on
table in the dinin'-saloon."

"How am I to keep an eye on him?" I asked.

"When you're eatin' with the folks, you keep 'em from talkin' about
things that yaller boy hadn't ought to hear," he bit out, and with that
he left me.

Here was a little mystery on our first day at sea. What was it, in
particular, that the mulatto serving boy shouldn't hear? My mind went
back to the talk of the previous evening, across the table in the
dining-room of the New Orleans hotel. Now that I came to analyze it,
I realized that it had been only cursorily explanatory on Van Dyck's
part. While he seemed at the time to be perfectly frank with me, it
occurred to me now that I had all along been conscious of certain
reservations. A winter cruise in the Caribbean; for the ship's company
a gathering of people whom he had threatened to know better before the
cruise ended; these were about the only definite objects he had set
forth.

But two things were pretty plainly evident. Goff was deeper in Van
Dyck's confidence than I was; and, beyond this, the sailing-master was
making the mistake of thinking that I knew as much as he did. It was no
great matter, I thought. If the mulatto under-steward needed watching,
I'd watch him, trusting to the future to reveal the reason--if any
there were--why he should be watched.

Making my way to the awning-sheltered after-deck lounge, which was
still untenanted, I picked out the easiest of the wicker chairs and
sat down to fill my pipe for an after-breakfast smoke. Before the pipe
had burned out, Ingerson put in his appearance, lighting a black cigar
as he came up the cabin stair. If I had been free to select, he was
the last man in our curious assortment whom I should have chosen as a
tobacco companion, but short of a pointed retreat to some other part of
the ship, there was no escape.

"Hello, Preble," he grunted, casting his gross body into a chair.
"Monopolizing the view, are you? Seen anything of Madeleine?"

"Miss Barclay hadn't appeared when I breakfasted," I returned; and if I
bore down a bit hard on the courtesy prefix it was because I hated to
hear Madeleine's Christian name come so glibly off his tongue.

"How many days of this are we in for?" was his next attempt.

"That, I suppose, will be left to the wishes of the ship's company."

"All right," he grinned; "I guess I can stand it as long as Van Dyck
can."

I stole a glance aside at his heavy featured, half-bestial face. It was
the face of a man prematurely aged, or aging, by the simple process of
giving free rein to his passions and appetites. Though he couldn't have
been more than thirty-two or three, the telltale pouches were already
forming under the bibulous eyes. Though I suppose he was fresh from his
morning bath, I fancied I could detect the aroma of many and prolonged
midnight carousals about him. Van Dyck's intimation that there was
even a possibility of Madeleine Barclay's throwing herself away upon
this gross piece of flesh came back to me with a tingling shock of
repugnance. Surely she would never do such a thing of her own free will.

We had been sitting in uncomradely silence for maybe five minutes
when Mrs. Van Tromp, mother of marriageable, and as yet unmarried,
daughters came waddling aft to join us. How far she might go in letting
Ingerson's wealth atone for his many sins, I neither knew nor cared,
but that the wealth had its due and proper weight with her was proved
by the alacrity with which she relieved me of the necessity of taking
any part in a three-cornered talk. So, when I got up to empty my pipe
ashes over the rail, I kept on going, quite willingly abandoning the
field to inherited money and its avid worshiper.

With such an unfruitful beginning, one might predicate an
introductory day little less than stupefying. But later on there
were ameliorations. After luncheon, which, like the breakfast, was a
straggling meal with only three or four of us at table at the same
time, I found myself lounging on the port promenade with Beatrice, the
middle member of the Van Tromp trio, a fair-haired, self-contained
young woman with a slant toward bookish things which set her well apart
from her athletic older sister and tomboyish younger.

"'Westward Ho!'?" I said, glancing at the title of the book lying in
her lap.

"Yes; I've been trying to get the atmosphere. But Kingsley takes too
much time with his introductions. Whereabouts are we now?"

I marked the slow rise and fall of the ship as it swung along making
its leisurely southing. As in the early morning, the _Andromeda_ was
logging only loafing speed.

"We are still a long way from the scene of Sir Francis Drake's more or
less piratical exploits," I told her. "Do you take Kingsley at his face
value?"

"He calls it war, but it seems to me more like legalized buccaneering,"
she rejoined. Then: "How much of it do you suppose is true?"

I laughed.

"Have you already learned to distrust history, at your tender age?" I
mocked. "Isn't it all set down in the books?"

She turned large and disparaging eyes upon me.

"Of course you know well enough that all history is distorted;
especially war history where the victors are the only source of
information. The other people can't tell their side of it."

"True enough," I admitted. "I fancy old Sir Francis was a good bit
more than half a pirate, if all the facts were known. That story about
his burning of the Spanish galleon at Pirates' Hope, for example."

"I haven't heard it. Tell it to me," she urged.

I gave her the story as Van Dyck had given it to me, omitting--for no
good reason that I could have offered--all mention of my own unnerving
experiences on the island of the legend.

"Left those poor wretches to starve because they wouldn't buy their
lives off him?" she commented, with a belated horror in her voice.

"It is only a legend, you must remember," I hastened to say. "Most
likely there isn't a word of truth in it."

Her gaze was upon the distant merging line of sea and sky, and there
was a dreamy look in her eyes.

"I should like to see that island," she said. "I wonder if we shall go
anywhere near it?"

If I smiled it was only at the hold the ancient tale had apparently
taken upon her.

"Bonteck will doubtless make it a port of call, if you ask him to. But
it is hundreds of miles from here."

"What does it look like?"

"Very much like any or all of the coral islands you may have seen
pictured in your school geographies, only it is long and narrow instead
of being circular, like the Pacific atolls. But it is a true coral
island, for all that; a strip of land possibly a quarter of a mile wide
and a mile long, densely wooded--jungled, you might say--with tropical
vegetation; a beach of white sand running all the way around; beyond
the beach, a lagoon; and enclosing the lagoon, and with only a few
passages through it here and there, the usual coral reef. The lagoon is
shallow for the greater part of it, but outside of the reef the bottom
goes down like the side of a mountain."

"Why, you must have seen the island!" she said.

"I have," I answered, rather grimly.

"Did you land on it when you were there?--but of course you must have,
to be able to describe it so well."

"Oh, yes; I landed upon it," I admitted.

Again she let her gaze go adrift to leeward. She was evidently reveling
in something that seemed to her more tangible than Kingsley's famous
story of Amyas Leigh and his voyagings.

"You say it is called Pirates' Hope. Was that on account of Sir Francis
Drake's battle with the Spanish galleon?"

"Oh, no; I imagine it got its name at a much later date; in the time of
the bold buccaneers. There are two little bays, one on the north and
another on the south. Either would be a good place in which to careen
the little cockleshell ships of our ancestors and scrape their bottoms.
Possibly Morgan or some of the others put in there for that purpose and
thus gave the island its name."

"Did you find any relics when you were there?"

It didn't seem necessary to tell this open-minded young woman about the
bones, so I turned her question aside.

"The last of the buccaneers was permanently hanged some time in the
closing decade of the seventeenth century, if I remember rightly. You'd
scarcely expect to find any traces of them or their works now."

"No; that's so," she conceded.

Into the pause that followed I thrust a query of my own.

"Where has Conetta been keeping herself all day?"

"She is with her aunt. It seems that Miss Gilmore isn't a very good
sailor."

I laughed because I couldn't help it. If the dragoness was upset by the
easy swinging of the _Andromeda_ over a sea that was more like a gently
undulating mirror than anything else, what would happen to her if we
should encounter a gale, or even half a gale?

"You needn't laugh," Beatrice put in reproachfully. "There is nothing
funny about seasickness."

"I was laughing at the idea of anybody's being seasick in weather like
the present," I explained. "But I fancy it is the old story in the case
of Miss Mehitable. If she had nothing worse than a toothache, Conetta
would have to play the part of a nurse."

"My-oh!" said my pretty lounging-companion; "it is perfectly easy to
see that there is no love lost between you and Miss Mehitable."

"There isn't," I replied shortly; and there that matter rested.

Still later in the day--just at sunset, to be strictly accurate as
to the time--there was another compensation for a day which had been
hanging rather heavily on my hands. I had gone alone into the yacht's
fore-peak, and was wondering if I should have time to smoke another
pipe before the dinner call should sound, when a mocking voice behind
me said: "Isn't it about time we were quarreling some more?"

I went on filling my pipe without looking around.

"You've been careful not to give me an earlier chance," I said. "How is
your Aunt Mehitable by this time?"

"She is able to sit up and take a bit of nourishment." Then: "How you
do hate poor Aunt Mehitable, don't you?"

"As I see it, I haven't any particularly good reason to squander any
part of my scanty store of affection upon her. Did she know I was going
to make one of this mixed-up ship's-quota?"

"Honestly, I don't think she did. She said a tremendous lot of things
last night when she saw you with Bonteck. Aren't you going to be decent
to her?"

"She is Bonteck's guest, or one of them, and I'm another. South
America and the tropics haven't sacked me of quite all of the
conventionalities."

"How nice! Of course, we've all been supposing they had. When are you
going to tell me some more about the Castilian princess? the one you
could have married, and didn't--to your later sorrow."

Strange as it may seem, all this light-hearted mockery cut into me
much more deeply than any real bitterness could have. Because, let me
explain, it was precisely the attitude she used to hold toward me in
the old days when the mockeries were only so many love taps, as one
might say; a sort of joyous letting down, or keying up, for her, after
a day-long immurement with a crotchety, sharp-tongued maiden aunt.

"I've told you all there is to tell," I said, as gruffly as I could.

"Oh, dear, no; I'm sure you haven't. Was she--is she--very beautiful?
But of course she must be; luminous dark eyes burning with--er--with
all sorts of things; midnight hair; an olive skin so clear and
transparent that you can almost see through it; little aristocratic
hands--blue-blooded hands; and a figure ... tell me, is she large and
queenly? or petite and child-like?"

I laughed derisively.

"You seem to have forgotten that not all Spaniards are black. There are
some among them as fair as you are. The 'princess,' as you call her,
has hair about the color of yours, and her eyes are blue, even bluer
than yours. But I don't see what interest you can have in her. I didn't
marry her."

"But you may go back there--wherever it is--and correct that dreadful
mistake."

"In that case I should first be obliged to murder her present husband.
Perhaps I omitted to tell you last night that she was very successfully
married to a wealthy young coffee planter, just before I left Trujillo."

"Well, you wouldn't let a little thing like that stop you if you wanted
to go back, would you?"

"Oh, no; certainly not. Don Jesus Maria Diego de Traviano would
probably do the stopping act--with a soft-nosed bullet. He is a crack
shot with a Mauser, as I happen to know."

"Poor you!" she murmured. Then, with the lightning-like change of front
which had been one of her chief attractions--for me--in the old days:
"Why don't you quarrel?--say something that I'll have to get mad and
bitter at?"

I turned to face her and the sheer beauty of her shook me. Yet I did
contrive to strike back, after a fashion.

"The voyage is yet young. There will doubtless be many quarrelsome
occasions. Just now I don't think of anything more vital than this:
if you are meaning to keep Jerry Dupuyster in hand, you are going the
wrong way about it. If you seem to prefer my company to his, I have an
idea that he would be just Quixotic enough to let you have your own
way."

"Thanks, awfully," she laughed, but behind the laugh the slate-blue
eyes were saying things out of a very different vocabulary. "That will
do very nicely for a beginning. I suppose I shall have to give Jerry a
few lessons in the proper reactions. Isn't that the tinkle-tinkle of
the dinner gong?"

It was; and a few minutes later our ship's company, lacking only Miss
Mehitable, who was still confined to her stateroom, gathered for the
first time as a whole around the long table in the dining-saloon of
the _Andromeda_. And in the seating I took blessed good care to have
Beatrice Van Tromp on my left and motherly Mrs. Sanford for a bulwark
on my right.




IV

THE LOG OF THE ANDROMEDA


DURING the first few days of our southward voyaging the routine on
board fell easily into the rut predicted by Van Dyck in the talk across
the dinner-table in the New Orleans hotel; three meals a day, a good
bit of more or less listless lounging under the awnings between times,
and rather half-hearted battles with the cards in the evenings.

Day after day we had the same cloudless skies, and the same gentle
breeze quartering over the port bow; and each morning there was
apparently the same school of porpoises tumbling in the swell under
the yacht's forefoot. Marking the course, I saw little change in it
from day to day. We were still steering either south or a few points
east of south, and if Van Dyck had any intention of touching at any of
the Central American ports, the telltale compass in the ceiling of the
dining-saloon did not indicate it.

Of the growth of Bonteck's cynical scheme of human analysis there were
as yet no signs visible to the casual bystander. Mrs. Eager Van Tromp
and Conetta's dragoness aunt sat in the shade of the after-deck awning,
reading novels, and fanning themselves in moments when the breeze
failed; and the Van Tromp trio, sometimes with Conetta and Madeleine
Barclay, and always with Billy Grisdale and his bull pup, when they
were not pointedly driven away, roamed the ship from bow to stern,
and from bridge to engine-room. The Greys, prolonging their honeymoon,
hid themselves in out-of-the way corners like a pair of lovers; and
the Sanfords, serenely enjoying their first real vacation, could be
stumbled upon now and then--so Billy Grisdale averred--holding hands
quite like the younger pair.

As for the men, candor compels the admission that the deadly blight of
_ennui_ seemed to be slowly settling down upon at least four of us. Van
Dyck, though scrupulously careful of his responsibilities as host, was
anything but good company when he was off duty. The major and Holly
Barclay, with Ingerson and anybody who could be dragooned into taking a
fourth hand, played cards hours on end in the yacht's smoking-room; for
nominal stakes, John Grey hinted, when neither Ingerson nor Van Dyck
was sitting in, but with the sky for the limit when either of the two
really rich men was present and betting.

The second time Grey mentioned this I thought it might be well to dig a
little deeper.

"You are Bonteck's guest, Jack, and so am I," I said bluntly. "Are you
making charges?"

"Not me," returned the married lover, with a lapse into prematrimonial
carelessness of speech. And then, after a reflective moment, "But for
that matter, I don't have to make them, Preble. Everybody buys wisdom
of the major now and then over the card table. It has come to be a
proverb, back home. For a supposedly rich man he plays a mighty thrifty
game--and that remark is not original with me, not by a long shot."

"Possibly the major is saving his money for Gerald," I suggested, more
to see what Grey would say than for any other reason.

Grey's slow wink was more expressive than many words.

"That worn-out joke doesn't fool you any more than it does me," he
asserted baldly. "You've never seen Major Terwilliger in his great and
unapproachable act of coupon-clipping, have you?"

I was obliged to admit that I had not.

"Well, neither has anyone else, I venture to say. He is a shrewd,
shifty old rounder, Preble; no more and no less. And there are men in
New York who will tell you that he sails pretty close to the wind a
good bit of the time--that he has to to save his face. It's a nasty
thing to say, but I more than half believe he is playing Gerald up to
Conetta for purely fiduciary reasons."

"But Conetta has no money," I protested.

"No; but Aunt Mehitable has--a barrel of it. And it will come to
Conetta, sooner or later--always provided Conetta marries to please
Aunt Mehitable."

Now this statement was not exactly in accordance with the facts, as I
knew them, or thought I knew them, and I said so.

"Miss Mehitable's will is already made, and I happen to know that her
money will not go to Conetta. It will be divided among a number of
charitable institutions."

We were on the starboard promenade forward, and Grey looked around as
if to make sure there were no overhearers.

"I'm going to breach a professional confidence and tell you something,
Preble, taking it for granted that it will go no farther. One day about
three years ago, while I was reading for my Bar examinations in the
office of Maxim, Townsend and Maxim, Miss Mehitable did make just such
a will as you mention; I know it because I made the transcript of it.
That will was left in the office safe, and something like a week later
she came back, asked for it, got it, and destroyed it. Then she had
Townsend draw another--which I also copied. That one, so far as I know,
is still in existence and unchanged. It leaves a few bequests to the
charity folk, and the bulk of the property to Conetta."

If Grey had drawn off and hit me in the face I could scarcely have
been more dumfounded. For some inscrutable--and wicked--reason of her
own, Aunt Mehitable had wanted to break our engagement, Conetta's and
mine, and the loss of my patrimony had given her an easy half of the
means. Upon hearing of my loss she had quickly supplied the other half
by making the will which she didn't mean to let stand--which she had
promptly destroyed as soon as I had been safely eliminated. The grim
irony of her expedient might have been amusing if I hadn't been so
angry. She might easily have lied to me about the disposition of her
property, but that would have been against her principles. To quiet
what she was probably calling her conscience, she had actually made the
will with which she had clubbed me to death; a will which she fully
intended to revoke, and did revoke--after I was out of the way.

How much or how little Grey suspected the turmoil he had stirred up in
me by his breach of office confidence I do not know, but he was good
enough to give me a chance to get back to normal, searching his pockets
for a cigar, and, when he had found one, turning his back to me--and
the breeze--while he lighted it.

"Do you think Miss Gilmore believes in the major's coupon clipping?" I
asked, after I had contrived to swallow the shock he had given me.

Again he let me see the slow wink.

"That is the farcical part of it. For a sharp-eyed, keen-witted maiden
lady who has made a good bit of real money buying and selling in the
Street, it is little less than wonderful. But it's a fact, Preble; she
_does_ believe in it. She lets the major write himself off at his own
valuation, and never dreams of asking to see a certified check. She
seems to regard Jerry Dupuyster as one of the few really desirable
matrimonial propositions on the market. That is why she is here--with
Conetta."

This last assertion of Grey's told me nothing that I had not
already set down as an obvious fact, but his gossipy talk afforded
a luminous commentary upon the manner in which an isolated group of
human beings will secrete all sorts of small uncharities, if the
isolation be only complete enough. These little incidents to the
contrary notwithstanding, however, I could not see that Van Dyck
was making much progress in his unmasking experiment. Up to this
time, and outwardly, at least, we were still only a party of winter
loiterers, pleasurers, decently grateful to our host and decently and
conventionally well-behaved. If there were any plots or conspiracies
of the money-hunting sort in the air, they were not suffered to become
unpleasantly obtrusive.

But for one member of the party I was conscious of a great and growing
contempt. In former days we of the younger set had known Holly Barclay
as a sort of reincarnation of the Beau Brummell type; an idler of the
clubs who lived upon his wife's money, and who was much too indolent to
be even manfully vicious. Good-looking, in a way, self-centered, and
even more finically careful for the creature comforts and luxuries than
Major Terwilliger, I remember it had seemed grossly incredible to us
younger folk that he could be the father of the thoughtful, high-minded
and convincingly beautiful young woman who paid him the compliment of
being his daughter.

From the beginning of the voyage Barclay's attitude had been
sufficiently apparent to me, or I thought it was. I decided that he
was somewhat anxiously weighing the pros and cons as between Van Dyck
and Ingerson in the matrimonial scale; weighing them strictly with
reference to the results as they might affect him, individually, and
quite without concern for his daughter's future happiness. That Bonteck
was a clean man and a gentleman, while his rival was everything that
Van Dyck was not, appeared to cut no figure.

It was hugely farcical, if one could but shut his eyes to the possible
tragedies involved. Holly Barclay had joined the _Andromeda's_ company
to dispose of his daughter. Ingerson had come as a cold-blooded buyer
to the market. Miss Mehitable was hoping to corner the major and
Gerald Dupuyster; and Mrs. Van Tromp, yielding precedence, of course,
to Barclay and his schemings, had come on the chance of dividing the
spoils, since one of the two chief matrimonial prizes would be left
after Madeleine--or rather Madeleine's father--had secured the other.

That Mrs. Van Tromp's armament was only a secondary battery might
have been denied by some. Alicia, the oldest of the trio, was, as
I may have said, an attractive young woman of the athletic type, a
rider to hounds, a champion swimmer, and a good comrade where men were
concerned. In the modern meaning of the term she was a man's woman,
with a sort of compelling charm that was all her own.

Beatrice, the second daughter, had, as has been noted, a bookish turn.
If she had chosen to study surgery she would have been a ruthless
vivisector. As a result of this inquiring bent, she had an astonishing,
and sometimes rather disconcerting, knowledge of things as they are.
But to offset the touch of the blue-stocking, she owned a pair of
long-lashed eyes that kindled quickly at any torch of sentiment, and
they were set in a face of uncommon sweetness--winsomeness, one would
say, if the word were not so desperately outworn.

Edith, for whose sake Billy Grisdale was cutting a good half of his
Sophomore year, was a replica, in rounder lines and easier curves, of
her sister Alicia. Having been carefully held back to give her older
sisters a clear field, she was still something of a tomboy, but her
very roughnesses were lovable, and Billy's callow folly found, it must
be admitted, its full and sufficient excuse in its object.

It was Edie Van Tromp, roaming the yacht like a restless bit of
misdirected energy, as was her custom, who came to fling herself into
the steamer chair next to mine; this in the afternoon of the day when
John Grey had given me still less cause to love Miss Mehitable Gilmore.

"I'm bored, Mr. Richard Preble--bored to extinction!" she gasped,
fanning herself with a vigor that was all her own. "Is nothing ever
going to happen on this tiresome ship?"

"There are things happening all the time, if we only have eyes to
perceive them," I told her, laughing. "In your own case, for example,
there is Billy Grisdale. To an interested and sympathetic onlooker
like myself it would seem that he is constantly happening in as many
different ways as he can devise."

"Oh, Billy--yes," she admitted, with pouting emphasis. Then, with a
great show of confidence: "Uncle Dick--I may call you Uncle Dick, if I
want to, mayn't I?--if you were only a little older and grayer I might
tell you something."

"Tell me anyhow," I urged. "I am old enough to be perfectly safe, don't
you think?"

"It's Billy, and you started it," she went on pertly. "That boy is
fairly worrying the life out of me. Positively, I'm getting the
dreadful habit of carrying my head on my shoulder. He--he's always just
there, you know, if I look around."

"Is that why you are bored?"

"I suppose it is; it must be. Nothing can ever come of it, of course.
Billy is nothing but just a handsome, good-natured, sweet-tempered
_boy_. It would be years and years, and then more years before----"

"So it would," I agreed. "And, besides, Billy has three brothers and
two sisters coming along, and Grisdale _père_ is only moderately
well-to-do, as fortunes go nowadays."

Instantly Miss Edith's straight-browed eyes flashed blue fire.

"Money--always and forever money!" she flamed out. "I haven't heard
anything else all my life! One would think that heaven itself was
paved with it and that the angels wear gold coins for charmstrings. I
_hate_ it!"

"Oh, no, you don't," I hastened to say. "It's a good, broad-backed
little beast, and you can always count upon it for carrying the load.
And Billy will probably have to make his own way, without even so much
as a loan of the little beast."

"I don't care! I think it is perfectly frightful the way we bow down
and kowtow to your beast--the great god Cash! I'd rather wash dishes
and make bread--for two!"

This seemed to be verging toward the edge of things serious. I knew
that Mrs. Van Tromp was suffering Billy only because he was so absurdly
young as to be supposedly harmless. But if Edith, the healthy-bodied
and strong-willed, were even beginning to take notice, there was
trouble ahead.

"We can none of us afford to defy the conventions, my dear girl," I
cautioned, taking the avuncular rôle she had tried to thrust upon me.
"And we mustn't let ourselves get into narrow little ruts. The play's
the thing, and we are only a part of the audience--you and I."

"The play?" she echoed doubtfully. "You mean the--the----"

"I mean the great human comedy, of course. It is going on all around
us, all the time."

"I don't get you," she said, in the free phrase which may have been her
own, or may have been a Billy Grisdale transplantation.

"You are too young and inexperienced," I asserted in mock gravity.
"Otherwise you could hardly have lived a week in the _Andromeda_
without realizing that the stage is set, with the call-boy making his
last hasty round, beating upon the doors of the dressing-rooms and
summoning the people of the play to come and take their places."

"I can't understand a word you say!" she protested petulantly. "Do you
mean Conetta and Jerry Dupuyster?"

"Miss Kincaide and Jerry are only two, and the cast of characters is
large. Wait patiently, Edie, and you shall see. Meanwhile, if I am not
mistaken, that long, low streak in the west--you can just make it out
if you shade your eyes from the sun glare on the water--is land."

She was up and gone at the word, flying to the bridge and crying her
discovery--or mine. What the land was, I could not tell. Van Dyck
had made a joking mystery of the yacht's course, which, naturally,
none of us could determine with any degree of accuracy merely by
looking now and then at the telltale compass in the cabin ceiling. I
fancied that Van Dyck's object in keeping us in the dark was chiefly
to add something to the zest of the cruise, the interest lying in the
uncertainty as to what landfall we should first make. As to this,
however, nobody seemed to care greatly where we were going, or when
we should arrive, so, as one may say, the small mystery had hitherto
fallen flat.

But now there was a stir among the after-deck idlers, and Major
Terwilliger, thrifty grasper at opportunity, immediately made a
pool upon the name of the landfall--with Jack Grey whispering
to me that the major had already fortified himself by casually
questioning the hard-faced sailing-master as to the yacht's latest
quadrant-reading--from which he had doubtless been able privately to
prick off the latitude and approximate position of the _Andromeda_ upon
the cabin chart.




V

ANY PORT IN A STORM


AS an easy matter of course, Major Terwilliger won the pool. The land
sighted proved to be Cape Gracias á Dios, the easternmost point of
Nicaragua. It would say itself that the Mosquito Coast, low, swampy,
and with only three practicable harbors along its three-hundred-mile
sweep, could have no attractions for a party of winter pleasurers, and
we were leaving Cape Gracias astern when the _Andromeda's_ course was
suddenly changed and she was headed for land.

Climbing to the bridge a little later, where I found Van Dyck setting
the course for the Madeira-man who had the wheel, I learned the reason
for the unannounced change.

"Trouble in the engine-room," Van Dyck explained. "The port propeller
shaft is running hot and threatening to quit on us. We'll have to lay
up for a few hours until Haskell can find out what has gone wrong."

"The shaft hasn't been giving any trouble heretofore, has it?" I asked.

"No; Haskell says it began to heat all at once, shortly after we
sighted land."

"You'll put in at Gracias?"

He nodded. "The harbor isn't much, and the town is still less. But we
don't need anything but an anchorage. Haskell thinks we won't be held
up very long."

That was a cheering prediction, but the event proved it to be too
optimistic. The mechanical trouble turned out to be in the thrust
bearing of the propeller shaft, and it was more serious than Haskell,
chief of the engine-room squad, had supposed it would be. The bearing
which, like everything else on the yacht, had been cared for with
warship thoroughness, had apparently run dry and it was badly scored
and "cut," as a machinist would say. The repair called for hours
of patient scraping and filing, and Haskell, who had served as an
assistant engineer in the Navy, was properly humiliated.

"It sure gets my goat, Mr. Preble," he confided to me when I climbed
down into his bailiwick some three or four hours after we had dropped
anchor in Gracias á Dios harbor. "It looks as if it was on me, and
maybe it is, but I've never had anything like this happen to me
before--not since I began as an oiler on one of the old Cunarders.
We have automatic lubrication; all the latest wrinkles; and yet that
cussed shaft's tore up like it had been runnin' dry for a week. You're
an engineer--I just wish you'd look at it."

To oblige him I donned overalls and crawled down into the shaft
tunnel. A glance at the excoriated bearing showed that Haskell hadn't
exaggerated. Quinby, Haskell's first assistant, was scraping and
smoothing in a space that was too confined to let a man take the kinks
out of his back, and in which there was no room for two men to work.

"That is no hurry job," I told Haskell, after I had crawled out. "I
think I may safely tell our people that they may have shore leave, if
they want it."

"You can that," Haskell grinned. "We'll be right here to-morrow
morning, and blamed lucky if we can heave up the mud hook by some time
to-morrow afternoon."

It was too late to spread the news after I left the engine-room. When I
reached the main deck all of our ship's company had apparently turned
in, though there were lights in the smoking-room to hint that the
card-players were still at their favorite pastime. But as I went aft to
smoke a bed-time pipe I found Madeleine Barclay curled up in one of the
deep wicker chairs.

"Pardon me," I said; "I didn't know there was any one here. Don't let
me disturb your maiden meditations. I'll vanish."

"You needn't," she returned quite amiably; then, seeing the pipe: "And
you may smoke if you want to. You know well enough that I don't mind.
How long do we stay here?"

"That is upon the knees of the gods. I've just been below, and I should
say we are good for twenty-four hours, or maybe more, though Haskell
thinks we may get out by to-morrow afternoon."

"Do we go ashore?"

I shook my head. "The others may if they want to; I shan't."

"Why not?"

"The _Andromeda_ after-deck is much more comfortable than anything to
be found ashore in this corner of Nicaragua."

"You have been here before?"

"Yes; I came around here once, something over a year ago, on a steamer
from Belize. We made a stop of a few hours and I was besotted enough
to leave the ship. I shan't make any such mistake again."

"Gracias á Dios," she said musingly. "I wonder who said it first--and
why he was thanking God--particularly?"

I laughed. "Some storm-tossed mariner of the early centuries, I
imagine, who was glad enough to make a landfall of any sort."

"Storm-tossed," she repeated. "Aren't we all more or less storm-tossed,
Richard?"

"I suppose we are, either mentally, morally, or physically. It's a sad
enough world, if you want to take that angle."

"But I don't want to take that angle. When I do take it, it's because I
have to."

Being as much of a hypocrite as any of those whom Van Dyck had proposed
putting under his analytical microscope, I said: "But there are no
constraining influences at work upon any of us aboard this beautiful
little pleasure ship--there can't be."

"Do you think not?" she threw in; and then, without warning: "How about
you and Conetta, Richard?"

In common justice to Conetta I had to feign an indifference I was far
from feeling--which was more of the hypocrisy.

"That was all over and done with three years ago, as you must know,
Madeleine. She wasn't aware of the fact that I was to be in the
_Andromeda_ party; and I didn't know she was to be--at least, not
until after I had committed myself to Bonteck. Of course we promptly
quarreled the moment we met. Perhaps you may have noticed that we've
been quarreling ever since."

She smiled soberly.

"You have made it obvious--both of you; perhaps a little too obvious."
Then, after a momentary silence: "Did Miss Mehitable give the real
reason for that other and mortal quarrel, three years ago, Richard?"

"The reason she gave was enough, wasn't it?"

"Some of us thought it wasn't. I don't know how you were acting, but
Conetta didn't give a very good imitation of a person who has 'agreed
to disagree.'"

"I can fill out the picture for you," I said grimly. "I was acting like
a man who had been fool enough to lose his temper at the invitation
of a crabbed and rather spiteful person who was old enough to be his
mother."

"Ah!" she said; "I thought it was Miss Mehitable." Then: "Was it
because you had lost your money?"

"Yes," I said, merely because the simple affirmative seemed to afford
the easiest way of brushing aside explanations which might not explain.

It was then that Miss Madeleine Barclay became a plagiarist, stealing
the very words uttered so hotly by Edie Van Tromp only a few hours
earlier.

"Money--always money! I _hate_ it, Dick Preble!"

I did not answer her as I had answered Edith.

"It is a holy hatred, Madeleine. The love of money, and what money will
buy, has proved the undoing of--but I don't need to preach to you.
Let's talk about something pleasant. Have you ever seen a finer night
than this?"

"A fine night, and ideal conditions. In a way, we've almost left the
strugglesome, toiling, avariciously dollar-chasing old world behind us,
haven't we?"

"You say 'almost'; why not quite?"

She made a little gesture inclusive of the _Andromeda_ as a whole.

"Too many reminders of the money and what it will buy. We'd need to be
shipwrecked upon some uninhabited island to make the isolation perfect.
As that isn't going to happen, I think I'll make the most of what we
have and go to bed. Good-night." And she left me.

My pipe had gone out and I refilled it. While I had called the night
fine, it was measurably warm. With the yacht at anchor there was little
breeze, and what little there was came from sea. My stateroom was on
the port side, and as the _Andromeda_ was lying with that side toward
the land, I was reluctant to leave the open air for the closer quarters
between decks.

It was while I was smoking a second pipe in comfortable solitude that
I fell asleep. The lapse into unconsciousness seemed only momentary,
but when I picked up the pipe which had fallen into my lap there was no
fire in it and the bowl had grown cold. Also, in the interval, long or
short, the yacht's lights had been switched off and the after-deck was
shrouded in the soft darkness of the tropical night. From somewhere in
the under-depths came a faint clatter of tools to tell me that Haskell
and his men were still at work on the disabled shaft, but apart from
this the silence was unbroken.

Descending the cabin stair I groped my way to the door of my room,
which was the farthest forward on the port side, and I remembered
afterward that I thought it odd that the saloon lights were all off.
On all other occasions when I had been up late I had found a single
incandescent left on; one, at least.

Inside of the luxurious little sleeping-room that had been assigned
to me I felt for the wall switch and snapped it. Nothing happened.
I snapped it back and on again, and still nothing happened. Down in
the machinery hold I could hear the fluttering murmur of the small
auxiliary engine which ran the lighting dynamo, and since it was
running, there seemed to be no reason why the lights shouldn't come on.
But they wouldn't.

While I was speculating upon this curious failure of the lighting
system and wondering if it were worth while to go below to ask Haskell
what was the matter with the cabin circuit, sounds like the subdued
splashing of oars cautiously handled came floating in through the
open port. Since I judged it must be midnight or worse, it was only
natural that I should want to know why a boat should be coming off to
the _Andromeda_ after all the yacht's people save myself were abed and
asleep. Not being able to see anything from the stateroom port-light,
I hurried back through the darkened saloon and up to the deck. From
the rail on the shoreward side I could make out the dim shape of the
approaching craft. As nearly as I could determine, it was a large
row-boat with at least four men in it; at all events there were four
oars. I could see and count the phosphorescent swirls as the blades
were dipped.

It was evident at once that the boat was coming off to the _Andromeda_.
We were anchored well out in the harbor, and there was nothing beyond
us; nothing but the harbor mouth and the open sea. Visions of banditry
began to flit through my brain. When I had been last in the Caribbean,
some three months earlier, Nicaragua had been in the throes of one of
its perennial guerrilla wars. A rich man's yacht, offering dazzling
loot, might easily be a tempting bait to any lawless band happening to
be within striking distance.

While I was straining my eyes to get a better sight of the approaching
boat, and deliberating as to whether or not I hadn't better call Van
Dyck or the sailing-master, a voice at my elbow said: "So you are up
late, too, are you, Dick?" and I faced about with a prickling shock of
surprise to find Bonteck standing beside me.

"I must be getting weak-kneed and nervous," I said. "I thought I was
the only person awake at this end of things, and you gave me a start.
What boat is that?"

"A shore boat, I suppose," he answered evenly. "After I found that we
were likely to be delayed until to-morrow, I told Goff he might give
some of his men shore leave for a few hours. They were asking for it."

"But that isn't one of the _Andromeda's_ boats," I objected.

"No; they didn't take one of our boats; they hailed a harbor craft
of some sort. I fancied they'd make a night of it, but it seems they
didn't."

"What time is it now?" I asked.

"Two bells in the middle watch--otherwise one o'clock."

While we were talking, the boat was pulled up to the port bows of
the yacht and a number of men, some half-dozen or more, came aboard.
We could see dark figures climbing the rail, but since the yacht was
painted white, and Van Dyck and I were both wearing yachting flannels,
I suppose we were invisible to the group at the bows. In a minute or so
the boat pushed off, cut a clumsy half circle in turning, and headed
for the shore, and there was just enough of my foolish nervousness left
to suggest that the oarsmen were still trying not to make any more
noise than they could help. But the second thought made me smile at the
remains of the nervousness. What more natural than that our returning
shore-leave men had cautioned the boatmen against making a racket and
waking everybody on the _Andromeda_?

"I take it you've been down with Haskell," I said to Bonteck, after the
shore boat had become a vanishing blur in the darkness.

"Yes. He is as sore as a boil about that propeller shaft. Says he never
had anything like that happen to him before, and that it reflects upon
him as chief. He tried to tell me how unaccountable it was, but I
hardly know enough about mechanical things to keep me from spoiling."

"It is rather unaccountable," I offered. "I was down a few hours ago
and crawled into the shaft tunnel to have a look at it. Ordinarily,
when a bearing as large as that begins to run dry, it gives warning
some little time beforehand. But Quinby, Haskell's second, says he put
his hand on it less than an hour before it began to complain, and it
was perfectly cool."

"Oh, well," was Van Dyck's easy-going rejoinder, "such things are all
in a life-time. We're in luck that it didn't 'seize,' as Haskell says,
and twist itself off. You're yawning as if you were sleepy. Better turn
in and get whatever this hot night will let you have. Good-night."

That was the end of the day for me, save that when I went to my
stateroom and once more tried the wall switch the lights came on as
usual.

The next morning, after a breakfast so early that I sat alone at the
long table in the white-lacquered saloon, I went below and offered my
services as those of a highly educated jack-of-all-trades to Haskell.

"By golly, you're saving my life, Mr. Preble," said our chief mechanic,
whose eyes were looking like two burned holes in a blanket. "If you'll
boss the job and let me get about a couple of hours in the hay----"

"Sure," I agreed; and crawling into the extra suit of overclothes, I
proceeded to do it, becoming so mechanically interested in a short time
that I not only neglected to call Haskell when his two hours were up,
but also let the luncheon hour go by unheeded.

By keeping faithfully at it, our gang got the recalcitrant thrust
bearing in shape by the middle of the afternoon, the fires were broken
out and the blowers put on, and by four o'clock the _Andromeda_ was
once more under way and pointing her sharp nose for the open water. As
I came up out of the engine-hold to make a bolt for a bath and clean
clothes, I saw that Van Dyck had the wheel and was apparently heading
the ship straight out toward the Mosquito Cays. As the trim little
vessel--which was little only by comparison with the great liners of
which it was a copy in the small--went shearing its way at full speed
through the heaving ground swell with the westering sun fairly astern,
I could not help wondering what our next port of call would be, and if
it would be a disabled piece of machinery which would drive us into it.




VI

A SEA CHANGE


WITH the Nicaraguan coast fairly astern, and the _Andromeda_ picking
her way gingerly among the cays and reefs which extend from fifty to
one hundred miles off the eastern hump of the Central American camel,
we soon made the open Caribbean, and our course was once more laid
indefinitely to the south and east. If we were to hold this general
direction we should bring up in due time somewhere upon the Colombian
or Venezuelan coast of South America.

Watching my opportunity, I cornered Van Dyck on the bridge at a moment
when he had relieved the man at the wheel; this on our second evening
out from Gracias á Dios. As I came up, he was changing the course more
to the southward, and I asked him if we were slated to do the Isthmus
and the Canal.

"I hadn't thought very much about it," he answered half-absently. "Do
you think the others would like it?"

"The Isthmus is pretty badly hackneyed, nowadays," I suggested; "and
for your particular purpose----"

"Forget it!" he broke in abruptly. And then: "It's a hideous failure,
Dick, as you have doubtless found out for yourself."

"Which part of it is a failure--your experiment, or the other thing?"

"I don't know what you mean by 'the other thing'," he bit out.

"Then I'll tell you: You thought it wouldn't be such a bad idea to show
Madeleine Barclay what a vast difference there is between yourself and
Ingerson as a three-meal-a-day proposition; as a steady diet, so to
speak, in an environment which couldn't very well be changed or broken.
Wasn't that it?"

"Something of the sort, maybe," he admitted, rather sheepishly, I
thought.

"And it isn't working out?"

"You can see for yourself."

"What I see is that you are giving Ingerson a good bit more than a
guest's chance."

"You don't understand," he returned gloomily.

"Naturally. I'm no mind reader."

While the _Andromeda_ was shearing her way through three of the long
Caribbean swells he was silent. Then he said: "I'm going to tell you,
Dick; I shall have a fit if I don't tell somebody. Madeleine has turned
me down--not once, you know, but a dozen times. It's the cursed money!"

"But Ingerson has money, too," I put in.

"I know; but that is different. Can't you conceive of such a thing as
a young woman's turning down the man she really cares for, and then
letting herself be dragooned into marrying somebody else?"

"You are asking too much," I retorted. "You want me to believe that a
sane, well-balanced young woman like Madeleine Barclay will refuse a
good fellow because he happens to be rich, and marry the other kind of
a fellow who has precisely the same handicap. It may be only my dull
wit, but I can't see it."

"I could make you see it if you were a little less thick-headed,"
he cut in impatiently. And then he added: "Or if you knew Mr. Holly
Barclay a little better."

It was just here that I began to see a great light, with Madeleine
Barclay threatening to figure as a modern martyr to a mistaken sense of
duty. Did she know that her father would make his daughter's husband
his banker? And was she generously refusing to involve the man she
loved?

"It ought to make you all the more determined, Bonteck," I said, after
I had reasoned it out. "It is little less than frightful to think
of--the other thing, I mean. Ingerson will buy her for so much cash
down; that is about what it will amount to."

"Don't you suppose I know it?" he exclaimed wrathfully. "Good Lord,
Dick, I've racked my brain until it is sore trying to think up some
way of breaking the combination. You don't know the worst of it. Holly
Barclay is in deep water. Strange as it may seem, his sister, Emily
Vancourt, named him, of all the incompetents in a silly world, as
her executor and the guardian of her son. The boy is in college in
California, and next year he will come of age."

"And Barclay can't pay out?"

"You've said it. He has squandered the boy's fortune as he has
Madeleine's. I don't know how he did it, but I fancy the bucket-shops
have had the most of it. Anyway, it's gone, and when the fatal day of
accounting rolls around he will stand a mighty good chance of going to
jail."

"Does Madeleine know?" I asked.

"Not the criminal part, you may be sure. She merely knows that her
father is in urgent need of money--a good, big chunk of it. And she
also knows, without being told, that the man who marries her will be
invited to step into the breach. Isn't it horrible?"

"You have discovered the right word for it," I agreed. And then: "You
are not letting it stand at that, are you?"

He did not reply at once. From the after-deck came sounds of cheerful
laughter, with Alicia Van Tromp's rich contralto dominating; came also
the indistinguishable words of a popular song which Billy Grisdale
was chanting to his own mandolin accompaniment. Presently Jack Grey's
mellow tenor joined in, and in the refrain I could hear Conetta's
silver-toned treble. It jarred upon me a little; and yet I tried to
make myself believe that I was glad she was happy enough to sing. True
to her word, she had consistently maintained the barrier quarrelsome
between us; and Jerry Dupuyster was playing his part like an obedient
little soldier.

"You'd say it was a chance for a man to do something pretty desperate,
wouldn't you, Dick?" Van Dyck said, breaking the long pause in his own
good time.

"I think you would be justified in considering the end, rather than the
particular means," I conceded.

"I have had a crazy project up my sleeve--a sort of forlorn hope, you
know. But after working out all of the details time and again, I've
always weakened on it."

"Perhaps some of the details are weak," I suggested, willing to be
helpful if I could.

"One of them is, and I can't seem to build it up so that it will seem
reasonably plausible. Of course you know that I'd pay the father out
of the prison risk in the hollow half of a minute if I could make it
appear as anything less than sheer charity. But I can't do anything
like that openly; and if I should do it in any other ordinary way,
Madeleine would be sure to find out about it and argue that I was
merely lowering myself to Ingerson's plane--paving the way with the
money that she despises. And she'd turn me down again--with some show
of reason. I am still sane enough to foresee that."

"If Miss Barclay only had some money of her own with which to buy her
release from that unspeakable father of hers," I began.

"That would break the combination easily," he said. "And she did have
money once; half of her mother's fortune was left to her--with her
father as trustee. It went the same way as Barclay's own half, and the
Vancourt trust fund."

With Conetta's voice in my ears I couldn't think straight enough
to help him much. What I said was more an echo of my own growing
determination regarding Conetta than anything else.

"I'd fight for my own, Bonteck; and I'd do it with whatever weapon came
handiest," I declared; and then the return of the steersman whom Van
Dyck had relieved put an end to the confidences for the time being.

With the sea routine resumed, and the _Andromeda_ once more steaming
free and footloose, a night and a day elapsed before I again had
private speech with Van Dyck. As before, it was after dinner in the
evening, and Van Dyck had sent one of the cabin stewards to ask me to
join him in his stateroom. It was a matchless night, and I was lounging
with the younger members of the ship's company on the after-deck when
the steward came and whispered to me. We were all singing college songs
with Billy Grisdale's mandolin for an accompaniment, and I was able to
slip away unnoticed.

I found Van Dyck sitting at his table, stepping off distances on a
spread-out chart with a pair of compasses, and somehow I fancied that
the air of the luxuriously fitted little den was surcharged with the
electricity of portent.

"You sent for me?" I queried.

"Yes; sit down and light your pipe," and he motioned me to a chair.
"What are the others doing?"

"The young people, with the Greys, are on the after-deck, caterwauling
with Billy, as you can hear. There is a bridge table in full blast in
the saloon, with Mrs. Van Tromp, Aunt Mehitable, Holly Barclay and
Ingerson sitting in. The Sanfords have disappeared--gone to bed, I
imagine; and the major is in the smoking-room, guzzling hot toddies."

"Good!" was the brief rejoinder. "Everything quiet up forward?"

"Why, yes--for all I know to the contrary," I answered in some little
surprise. "Why shouldn't it be quiet?"

For a moment Van Dyck seemed embarrassed. And his explanation, when he
made it, was half halting.

"There has been some little trouble with--er--the crew, you know.
Quite likely you haven't seen any signs of it. I--I've been trying to
keep it under cover as well as I could."

"Trouble?--of what sort?" I demanded.

"Why--er--the only kind one ever has with a crew; something like a
threatened mutiny, I believe."

I laughed aloud.

"A mutiny on a private yacht? Why, heavens and earth--your men don't
have anything to do but to draw their pay and their breath!"

"I know; that is the way it would appear. But there is something
behind--something you don't understand. If I should tell you that the
_Andromeda_ left New York with a quarter of a million dollars in her
hold----"

"What's that?" I ejaculated, shocked into sudden and lively attention.

"You must forgive me, Dick, if I don't go into the particulars," he
went on hastily. "I might say, with a good degree of truth, that it
isn't altogether my own secret. But--but the fact remains."

"A quarter of a mil--Great Caesar!" I gasped. Then the deductive part
of my brain began to fit the fragmentary admissions into a probable
whole. All summer there had been flying rumors in the West India
ports of a revolution brewing in one of the South American republics;
an upheaval which was to be financed--in the interests of a great
importing corporation--by New York capital. Could it be possible that
Van Dyck had foolishly allowed his yacht to be made use of as a money
transport?

"You don't mean to say that we have that money on board now?" I
protested, when the possible consequences began to make themselves
manifest.

"As it happens, we haven't," he replied, quite calmly. "That is why it
took the _Andromeda_ so long to make the run from New York to Havana. I
was getting rid of the impedimenta."

"But if you've gotten rid of it, why should your crew--"

"That is just the point," he explained patiently. "The thing had to
be done quietly, and proper precautions were taken at both ends of
the line to keep anybody and everybody from finding out that we were
carrying a small fortune between-decks. Still, I am afraid it did leak
out. That little black-mustached fellow who turned up at Havana, and
again in New Orleans----"

"That reminds me of something that occurred to me no longer ago than
this morning's breakfast-time," I broke in; "a thing that I've been
meaning to ask you about ever since. Manuel, the mulatto boy who
usually serves breakfast, was invisible this morning, and he had a
substitute."

"Well?"

"I was going to say that, if I'm not greatly mistaken, you have that
same mysterious little man--minus the mustaches--on your payroll at
this moment, Bonteck. He is the under-steward who goes by the name of
Lequat; he was the man who substituted for Manuel this morning, and he
was the man who came to me just now to tell me that you wanted me."

It was now Van Dyck's turn to sit up and take notice and he did both,
emphatically.

"That fellow?--In the _Andromeda_?" he exclaimed.

"As I say--if I'm not much mistaken. I had a pretty good chance to
familiarize myself with his face that night in the hotel dining-room in
New Orleans, and I have a fairly decent memory for faces."

Van Dyck fell into a muse, breaking the silence finally to say: "By
Jove, Dick, that may prove to be a horse of another color, don't you
know!"

Waiving the question as to what the color of the original horse might
have been, I stuck to the point at issue.

"If, as you say, you have gotten rid of the money, the situation can't
be very alarming. Including engineers, firemen and cabin servants, you
can't have over thirty-five or forty men in the crew, all told. There
are nine of us in the cabin, and Haskell and the Americans will all
stand with us. If we get together and put up a good front----"

Van Dyck interrupted hastily--over-hastily, I thought, for a man of his
inches and determination in other fields.

"It is not to be thought of, Dick; not for a single moment, with all
these women aboard. Besides, we have no arms. We'd be shot down in cold
blood if it should come to blows."

This was so singularly unlike the Bonteck Van Dyck I had known best in
the college days that it fairly made me gasp.

"Why, Bonteck!" I exclaimed; "what has come over you? You don't mean to
say that you would calmly hand the yacht over to those fellows if they
should ask you for it?"

"It might easily be the only thing to do," he asserted, half
mechanically. "Of course, as I say, we haven't the money, and they
would have their trouble for their pains, after all. Still, it might
be difficult to convince them that the gol--the money has been actually
disposed of. If they learned in New York that we really took it on
board, and didn't learn afterward that it was disembarked elsewhere ...
well, you see how it stacks up, don't you?"

"I see that you are making mountains out of molehills," I retorted.
"What does Goff say about this potential mutiny?"

Van Dyck shook his head as if the mention of Goff merely added to the
difficulties of the situation.

"That is another thing: Goff may be in it himself. He is an awful
tough-looking old pirate. Don't you think so?"

"What I think is that you must have been completely off your head
when you changed from your Atlantic-liner master and crew to this old
fisherman and his Portuguese."

"Er--somebody recommended him; I forget just who it was," he went on
to explain. "I needed a sailing-master who knew the Caribbean well,
and who would do what he was told to do and ask no questions. You see
the--er--shipping of the quarter million made some difference, and I
couldn't afford to have too much intelligence aboard."

Again there was a pause, during which I was trying to persuade myself
that this half-hearted young man across the stateroom table from me was
really the same Bonteck Van Dyck who had coached crews, captained the
'Varsity football, and had otherwise proved himself a man and a leader
of men--the sort of leader who fights to the final gasp, and even then
doesn't know when he is beaten. The inability to do it put a little
unconscious scorn into my summing-up of the situation.

"It is up to you, of course," I said. "We are merely your guests, and
what you say is what we shall do. At the same time, I think--in fact I
know--that you could count upon practically every man in our much-mixed
passenger list to help you put down a mutiny."

"That is it--that is just why I sent for you, Dick," he cut in eagerly.
"I knew you would be all for making a fight, and that you would
probably lead it. For the sake of the women there mustn't be any scrap,
you know. It would scare them into hysterics, naturally. If it should
come to a showdown we must just make up our minds to take it easy--take
the line of the least resistance--if you get what I mean. At the very
worst, the mutineers couldn't well do more than to put us ashore
somewhere, so that they might have a chance to search the yacht for the
money. I have had that in mind all along, and when you came in just now
I was trying to figure out our present latitude and longitude. Have you
any idea where we are?"

"Trying to figure out?" I echoed. "Do you mean to tell me calmly that
you--a navigator yourself and the owner of this ship--don't _know_
where we are?"

"I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know--precisely. Goff keeps the
reckoning, you see, and I have thought that perhaps he wasn't giving me
the correct figures."

If any additional evidence had been needed, here was another and still
more startling proof of the devastating change which had somehow been
wrought in the Bonteck Van Dyck I had been thinking I knew. One of his
hobbies in the past had been the study of practical navigation, and on
more than one long cruise he had been his own sailing-master. That he
should deliberately turn the _Andromeda_ over to a man who had been
merely "recommended" by some one whose name was already forgotten was
little short of astounding.

"I truly hope there is nothing worse than an ordinary, every-day mutiny
in store for us," I said grimly. "Judging from our course--which Goff
may have changed every night, for all you seem to know--we ought to be
somewhere in the southern half of the Caribbean. The steamer lanes are
well charted, but there are a good many cays and islands outside of
them--places where the bones of the _Andromeda_ might lie until they
rotted before anybody would ever discover them."

"And not all of the islands are inhabited, I take it," said Van Dyck,
peering down at his chart as if he hoped to identify some of them.

"You know that as well as I do--or better," I snapped. And then: "What
in the name of common sense has turned you into such a milk-blooded
shuffler, Bonteck? You talk and act as if you weren't more than
half----"

"Listen!" he said hastily, holding up a warning finger.

The stringy tinkle of Billy Grisdale's mandolin had stopped, and with
it the singing. Above the murmuring diapason of the yacht's engines
we both heard Edie Van Tromp's shrill cry of "Land-o-o-o!" As if the
cry had been a pre-concerted signal, it was followed instantly by
a confused trampling of feet on the deck over our heads, a sudden
slackening of the yacht's speed, and more cries and foot-tramplings.

I was upon my feet and was reaching for the door-knob when Mrs. Van
Tromp's throaty scream came from the adjoining saloon where the bridge
players were sitting. Before I could turn the knob the door was thrust
open, and the under-steward, whose ship name was Lequat, backed by two
evil-faced fore-deck men armed with rifles, stood in the doorway. At
the appearance of this warlike demonstration I was glad to see that Van
Dyck, for once in a way, seemed genuinely shocked.

"You?" he demanded. "How is this? Where is Mr. Goff?"

The little man's smile and bow were like those of a dancing master.

"Ze captaine is sand me to inform you zat you are both ze prisonaire,
_oui_. You vill sit down in ze chair and wait patient', M'sieu' Van
Dyck--and you, Mistaire Preb'. Zis ees w'at you call all cut-and-dry,
and----"

I suppose I sprang at his throat; it was the only thing for a live man
to do. But the little beggar was quicker than a cat, and he brought me
up all standing, with a huge pistol thrust into my face.

"Aha! you vill choke me, ees it? By gar, Mistaire Preb', eet is possib'
I make you--how you say it?--walk ze board--ze plank, yes? You vill
sit down on ze chair and tek eet easy. Ze sheep ees belong to h-us,
and your fran's 'ave all been lock' up in ze staterooms. You can do
notting; _moi_, Alphonse Lequat, vill tek ze comman'."

It was not until after all of this had happened that Van Dyck found his
voice.

"Is this--is this a mutiny, Lequat?" he asked, as mild as mush.

"Eet is vat you vill be please' to call heem, M'sieu' Van Dyck,
_certainement_. For fifteen, twanty, feefty minute' you vill sit on ze
chair, and Pedro, he is stay outside ze door and keel you eef you make
noises. Bam-by, _moi_, Alphonse Lequat, s'all come back to tell you vat
eet is you s'all do." And then to his men: "_Allons, mes garçons!_"

And with that he backed out of the owner's private cabin, and shut and
locked the door.




VII

SHORE LEAVE


COINCIDENT with the taking over of the yacht by the mutineers, the
engines stopped; but after Lequat had locked us in and left us, the
trampling tune of the machinery began again, though it presently became
apparent that we were proceeding at something less than half speed. At
first I thought the creeping progress might be Haskell's way of showing
his reluctance to obey his new masters; but after the engines had made
a few of the slow revolutions we heard the sing-song cry of a seaman in
the main chains taking soundings.

"Feeling for an anchorage," said Van Dyck, speaking for the first time
since he had asked Lequat that mush-mild question as to whether or not
the outbreak was a mutiny. "Wouldn't you put it up that way?"

His query seemed too trivial to merit an answer.

"I haven't any time to waste on the guesses," I said, and most likely
the tone was as crabbed as the words. Then: "Are you fully awake
at last? Do you realize that you've been held up and robbed of a
five-hundred-thousand-dollar yacht?"

His shrug was perfectly spineless.

"'What can't be cured must be endured'," he quoted, handing me the
time-worn maxim as if it sufficiently accounted for everything. "Of
course, as the person chiefly responsible, I'm all kinds of sorry for
you and the others. It's a horribly rude interruption to our pleasure
jaunt, and I take it there is no telling what these fellows may do to
us." Then, with still more of the air of the completest detachment:
"The nervy beggars! Who would ever have suspected it of them? And to
carry it off so neatly, too."

"It was all plotted and planned beforehand, of course. Didn't this man
Lequat say that it was cut-and-dried? Goff is the head and front of it,
isn't he?"

"Heaven knows. You wouldn't imagine it of Goff--or would you?"

"I can easily imagine him breaking rock in a Federal prison--which is
what he will do--if he succeeds in keeping his leathery old neck out of
the hangman's noose!"

"Naturally," Van Dyck agreed easily. "But that is an after
consideration. The present realities are what concern us just now. I'm
wondering what their next move will be."

"You don't seem to be letting your wonderment disturb you very much."
I was still warm, both over the bootless little tussle with Lequat,
and because Van Dyck had so ignominiously failed to rise to the
occasion--and was still continuing to fail.

"What's the use?" he queried. "We are like the harmless and inoffensive
citizen who wakes up in the middle of the night to find a burglar's
spot-light shining in his eyes and the burglar's gun shoved in his
face. Discretion is always the better part of valor. Haven't you
learned that invaluable lesson, knocking about in this harsh old world?
But getting back to things present and pressing--there goes our
anchor."

The brief roar of the cable running through its hawse-hole told us that
the _Andromeda_ was in comparatively shallow soundings. We could feel
the snub of the anchor as the yacht's way was checked, and a little
later the sounds overhead advertised the fact that the mutineers were
lowering one of the boats.

Beyond the slap of the lowered boat as it took the water, the noises
were less easily definable. There were bumpings and bangings which
seemed to come from forward of the bridge, muffled sounds like those of
a busy baggage-room at train-time, the shrilling of blocks and tackle,
and a skirling chatter suggestive of a steam winch in action. Following
these we could hear the low humming of the motor in the dropped
electric launch; a murmur which gradually died away as we listened.

Somewhat farther along, after the buzzing motor murmur had come and
gone often enough to tell us that the launch was plying industriously
between the yacht and some other destination, Van Dyck said: "You'd
say they were taking an entire cargo ashore, wouldn't you?--provided
the _Andromeda_ carried any cargo." Then: "I've cornered a guess,
Dick--which you may have for what it is worth. I believe these fellows
are meaning to take a leaf out of the book of the old buccaneers of the
Spanish Main and maroon us."

"What makes you think that?" I demanded.

"Putting two and two together. That is the hoist winch making all the
clatter up forward. They are unloading the forehold--of our dunnage
and some part of the provisions, we'll say--and lightering the stuff
ashore in the launch. Assuming that they expect to find a quarter of
a million dollars hidden away somewhere in the _Andromeda_, they'll
figure that they need to get rid of us, and run fast and far to make
their get-away, won't they?"

"That sounds sufficiently barbarous to fit in with the rest of it," I
fumed.

"Right-o. That being the case, they have only to stow us away in some
safe place--where we won't be found and rescued too soon--and then up
stick and away; put steam to the yacht and vanish. Once they get going,
they'll be safe enough. The _Andromeda_ will outrun anything of her
inches, short of the torpedo chasers and the hydroplanes, when she is
pushed to it. What do you say?"

"I'm not saying anything," I returned crustily. "I'm too busy wondering
what in Heaven's name has thinned your blood to the milk-and-water
consistency, Bonteck. I've heard a few queer things about you during
the past three years, but I wasn't told that you had gone completely
dippy. Why, man alive! if your guess is right, you stand to lose a cool
half-million in the value of the yacht--to say nothing of what may
happen to the bunch of us if we are marooned on some lonesome island in
the southern Caribbean!"

"Yes, there is the marooning to be considered, of course," he said
coolly, filling his pipe and lighting it. "But we needn't cross that
bridge until we come to it. As to the possible loss of the yacht, that
is the least of my troubles, just now. She'll turn up again somewhere,
I guess; if they don't smash or sink her."

It seemed utterly hopeless to try to arouse him to any adequate sense
of the enormity of the thing that had befallen us, and I jumped up
and began to pace the narrow limits of the little cabin. Van Dyck's
attitude seemed explainable only upon the hypothesis that he had lost
his mind, and I wondered if his brooding over the wretched dilemma into
which his love for Madeleine Barclay had plunged him hadn't thrown him
off his balance. It was certainly beginning to look that way.

While I was tramping back and forth in a fever of gloomy rage and
helplessness, with Van Dyck sitting at the table and calmly smoking
his pipe, the ship's noises took new forms. There was much tramping
up and down the saloon stairs, a rattling of keys in locks, opening
and shutting of doors, and the like. Again and again the motor launch
repeated its short trips, and between two of them there were voices
raised in the adjoining saloon; Ingerson's in savage and profane
protest, and Mrs. Van Tromp's in tearful inquiry as to what had been
done with Mr. Van Dyck. In due course of time our own turn came, and it
was Lequat who unlocked and opened our door.

"Ze momment ees come," he announced, with a bow and a smirk. "Ze anchor
ees--vat ees it you say?--hove short, and ze launch ees wait' for you
zhentleman. You vill come peaceab'?--or ees it that ve have to asseest
you?"

It was now or never, if we meant to try conclusions with this little
scoundrel, and I looked to Van Dyck for the answer. He had put on his
cap, slung a cased field-glass over his shoulder, and was closing and
locking the drawers of the writing-table. As I have said, it was his
final chance for making some show of resistance, and he was weakly
letting it go.

When we reached the deck, guarded closely by four or five of the
mutineers, it became evident that we were the last of the ship's
company to be summoned. The night was fine, with a sickle of a moon
in its first quarter, and the sea undisturbed by so much as a ripple.
The _Andromeda_ was at anchor a short distance from one of the many
cays with which the southern Caribbean is dotted; a long, low-lying
island plumed with palms and densely jungled with tropical undergrowth.
The yacht lay within a stone's throw of an outer reef, and the reef
enclosed a broad lagoon reflecting the shadows of the palms like
a silver mirror under the shimmering moonlight; and the shadowy
background of foliage was made blacker by contrast with a ribbon of
white sand beach.

Though there was a passage through the reef just opposite the
_Andromeda's_ temporary berth, the mutineers had apparently been too
cautious to try to enter it with the yacht. They had merely felt their
way with the sounding line to within bottoming distance on the outside
of the reef, and dropped the anchor. There was little question now as
to their intention. They were stopping only long enough to get rid of
us.

In ominous silence Van Dyck and I were herded toward the accommodation
ladder, at the foot of which lay the electric launch. Up to the final
moment I was hoping to see Bonteck reassert himself, at least to the
extent of protesting against the high-handed crime these scoundrels
were committing. When it became apparent that he was not going to say
anything, I took a chance for myself.

"I suppose you know what you are doing, Lequat," I barked, after we had
taken our places in the launch. "This is piracy on the high seas, and
you don't have to be much of a sailorman to know what that means."

"You vill not be trouble you'self 'bout me, Mistaire Preb'," he
returned politely. Then, as the man at the ladder foot pushed us
off: "_Bon voyage_, M'sieu' Van Dyck. _Bon soir_, and--how you say
it?--G-o-o-d-by!"

The launch, manned by a crew numerous enough to have thrown us
overboard if we had raised a hand in rebellion, sped silently across to
the narrow inlet in the reef and entered the peaceful lagoon. Almost at
once a sickening, terrifying conviction began to force itself upon me.
From the first out-of-door glance at the surroundings there had been
something familiar in the appearance of the reef, the pond-like lagoon,
and the low-lying island. As we were passing through the inlet the
moonbeams struck out the black and shattered remains of a wreck hanging
upon the outer reef a short distance on our right, and then I _knew_!

"The Lord have mercy!" I gasped; and Van Dyck looked up quickly.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The wreck of the _Mary Jane_!" I whispered, pointing to the black
skeleton on the rocks. "This is the island I told you about--the
horrible place where we were shipwrecked a year ago last winter!"

"You don't say so!" he returned; and then, to make the reply still more
trite: "What a remarkable coincidence!"

His indifference was maddening, and my temper--the temper that had once
cost me any shadow of a chance that I might have had in persuading Miss
Mehitable Gilmore that, money or no money, Conetta's happiness, as
well as my own, was of more importance than any mere fortune lost or
gained--this flyaway temper got the better of me and I said things for
which I was sorry the moment they were said.

"Pile it on as thick as you please, old man," Van Dyck rejoined,
meekly, after I had abused him like an angry fishwife. "It is coming to
you--and to the others, as well. What they will do to me presently will
doubtless be good and plenty, and you'll have your revenge."

Two minutes later the launch was nosing the white sand of the beach,
and the man at the tiller made motions for us to get out. Van Dyck
stepped ashore and I followed him. A few yards away, at the edge of the
jungle thicketing, our cabin castaways were huddled around a great pile
of luggage and ship's stores. Their greeting of Van Dyck when he joined
them was all that his most vindictive accuser could have desired;
cries and reproaches, eager questionings and sobbing protests from the
women; and from the men a fierce storm of demandings led by the major
and Holly Barclay. Since Jerry Dupuyster made no move to do it, I drew
Conetta quickly out of the Babel and walked her beyond earshot. Major
Terwilliger was so far forgetting himself as to swear savagely at his
late host, and Ingerson's language was brutal.

"Tell me, reasonably and sanely, if you can, Dick, just what has
been done to us," urged my companion, with a little shiver of fright
or disgust--or possibly of both; this when we paused to watch the
retreating launch cleave its way across the lagoon to the waiting yacht.

"I don't know very much more about it than you do," I told her. "There
is a mutiny, with a plot to steal the _Andromeda_, it seems, and it
is quite evident the thing was carefully planned. I was below when it
climaxed and so saw nothing of what was happening on deck. They didn't
hurt anybody, did they?"

"I think not. It came so suddenly that they didn't need to use force.
We were under the awning, just as you left us. Edie Van Tromp saw
this island and called out 'Land-o,' and the next thing we knew a
lot of men with guns had surrounded us and were ordering us to go
to our staterooms and to be quick about it. That little dark-faced
under-steward who talks so brokenly seemed to be the leader. He was
polite enough about it, but when Jack Grey and Billy began to protest,
he made four of his men grab them."

"Then you were hustled below?"

"Yes. When we got down to the saloon, more of the armed men were
shoving the bridge players into the staterooms, and Hobart Ingerson was
swearing awfully. So was the major when they dragged him out of the
smoking-room."

"They are swearing yet," I said. "What did your aunt say?"

"She didn't say a single word; she just walked into our stateroom ahead
of me, as stiff as a poker, and I couldn't get a word out of her. I
don't know whether she was scared, or just too angry for words. She sat
on the edge of her bed like a frozen statue until they came to take
us ashore. What are the wretches going to do?--leave us here on this
deserted little strip of an island?"

The answer to her question was at that very moment shaping itself
before our eyes. While its propeller was still churning idly, the
electric launch was hooked and hoisted to its davits, the anchor was
broken out, and the _Andromeda_ began to forge slowly ahead, again with
a man in the bow heaving the lead and calling out the soundings.

"We are marooned," I said soberly enough, I guess. "It may be for a
day, a week, a month or a year. I happen to know this island only too
well. I was shipwrecked upon it once. Those are the bones of our old
schooner, the _Mary Jane_, out yonder on the reef."

She gave a little gasp of shocked surprise.

"You shipwrecked?--and I never heard of it!" she exclaimed. "How long
were you here, Dick?"

"Nearly a month. A tramp steamer, blown out of its course between Colon
and La Guaira by a hurricane, saw our signals and took us off."

She glanced over her shoulder apprehensively.

"There are no--no savages, are there?" she shuddered.

I shook my head. "Hardly; not in the twentieth century. For that
matter, I doubt if there ever were any. The place isn't big enough to
support much of a population."

We were walking again now, keeping to the hard sands, and turning our
backs resolutely upon the vanishing white phantom which was the ship
that was deserting us.

"There are eighteen of us," Conetta said, after a time. "Doesn't that
mean starvation, sooner or later?"

"There were six of us who were washed ashore from the _Mary Jane_," I
said. "We lived on shell fish and cocoanuts--just barely, as you might
say. There is a tradition that we were not the first, and that the
others, the crew of a Spanish treasure ship marooned by the old English
sea rovers, did starve."

"Heavens!" she breathed. "The place ought to be full of ghosts! But you
don't believe those terrible old tales, do you?"

"They were true enough, doubtless; but we needn't go out of our way to
localize them. In the present instance----" I was about to tell her of
the remains of the ancient wreck farther down the beach, but I thought
better of it and switched--"in the present instance we are not going to
starve, for a while, at least. The mutineers have given us a fighting
chance by dividing the ship's stores with us. Didn't you hear the
launch going back and forth before you were taken off?"

"Yes, I heard it," she acknowledged. "That must have been part of the
plan, too." Then she stopped and faced me suddenly. "Where was Bonteck
while all the rest of us were being hustled out of the way?"

"He was a prisoner in his stateroom, locked in, and with a man on
guard."

She looked me squarely in the eyes after a disconcerting fashion which
might have been acquired from her downright aunt.

"Do you know that, Dick? Or is it only a friendly guess?"

"I know it because I was locked in with him. The mutineers had given
us our orders--told us that we were down and out, you know."

"And you made no resistance--you two?"

I didn't say anything about my futile attempt to choke Lequat.

"Bonteck seemed to be afraid of a general massacre, or something of
that sort, if we should put up a fight."

"I'm not satisfied," she returned promptly. "It is too absurd. Could a
thing like this have been planned without some hint of it getting to
Bonteck? And then there is Mr. Goff: you don't mean to tell me that
that crabbed, sour, shrimmy old piece of New England honesty and prying
curiosity could be kept from finding out."

"Bonteck hints that Goff may be heading the mutiny."

"That," said Conetta, with calm conviction, "is simply nonsense. I
wouldn't believe it, not if Mr. Goff told me so himself." And then:
"Shall we go back to the others now? The storm seems to have blown
itself out: and we mustn't forget--you and I--that we have agreed to
disagree."

Her use of Aunt Mehitable's phrase touched off that cursed temper of
mine again, and if I had made any reply at all it would have been one
that I should have repented of. So we walked back to the haphazard
landing place in sober silence.

When we joined the main body of castaways it seemed that Van Dyck had
contrived by some means to stem the storm of question and reproach
and to quiet it, for the time, at least. The women were sitting apart
on the boxes of canned things, and Grey and Grisdale, under Bonteck's
directions, and with his help, were setting up the three tents which
the mutineers' generosity, or chivalry, had included in our dunnage.
Somebody had kindled a small fire on the beach, but the night was so
warm that, apart from the cheer of it, the blaze served no purpose
other than to light up the somber faces turned toward it.

After the tent-pegging--in which I hastened to share a part when I
saw what was toward--we four made an attack upon the boxed stores.
There were provisions in plenty; meats in canvas and meats in tins,
vegetables fresh and vegetables in cans, ship's biscuit, and a variety
of the other more ornamental--and less filling--kind; tea, coffee,
sugar and evaporated cream; all of the calories to make a balanced
ration. Last, but not least, there was a beaker of fresh water, though
as to this, there were two good springs on the island, and a rill from
one of them was trickling into the lagoon a few yards from our landing
place.

Besides the necessary proteins, hydrocarbons and the like, there were
a few of the luxuries; a case of liquors, a box of candles, another of
cigars, cigarettes and tobacco, soap and towels, and even a couple of
mirrors ravished from the bulkheads of the _Andromeda_--these last, I
dare swear, a thought of the dancing-master Lequat's.

For beds there was a bale of canvas hammocks; and somebody's chivalric
promptings--Lequat's or another's--had gone the length of including the
baggage-hold-stored steamer trunks of the women, though we men had only
the clothes we stood in.

Before our amateur camp was fully pitched the dark cloud of dismay and
disheartenment began to show rifts here and there. After all was said,
we were all alive and well, with plenty to eat and drink, and with no
immediate prospect of hardship. Perhaps it was no matter for surprise
that Sanford, the absent-minded professor of mathematics, was the first
to rise to the philosophical demands of the occasion.

"I dare say there isn't a civilized human being in the world who
hasn't, at one time or another, wished to be situated just as we find
ourselves at the present moment," he began, after Grey and Billy
Grisdale and the Van Tromp girls had goaded him into his proper
class-room-lecturer's attitude. "For the time being--which we may very
properly hope will not be unduly extended beyond the pleasant and
profitable limit--we shall be able to live in a little world of our
own making. If we have any resources of our own to fall back upon--and
I trust none of us is wholly lacking in that respect--we may prove
and try them, and quite possibly we may discover that, after all,
environment, the conventions, the social machinery with which our
civilization has surrounded us, are by no means strictly necessary to
the sane, normal human being. Let us, therefore, eat and drink, and
be thankful that things are no worse with us than we are at present
finding them."

As if he had been an after-dinner speaker rising to express his
pleasure at being among us, the professor was heartily applauded, and,
following his suggestion, we had a bed-time snack of biscuits and
tea around the handful of camp-fire. And, such is the force of good
example, by the time the second pannikin of water was boiling, the
younger members were making a jest of the most serious adventure that
had ever befallen any of them. Jerry Dupuyster was pouring tea for
Beatrice Van Tromp; Conetta had deliberately left her aunt's side to
come and sit on the sand between Annette Grey and me; and Madeleine
Barclay, as fetchingly beautiful in her white yachting flannels as
she had ever appeared in her richest dinner gown, was listening
patiently--nay, sympathetically, I thought--to Bonteck's well-worn
explanation (which did not explain) of how it had all come about.

To offset these cheerful ameliorations there were a sufficient
number of death's heads at the feast, as a matter of course. Major
Terwilliger, contemplating a prospect which promised little in the way
of his cherished diversions, sat apart and grumbled peevishly because
the tea tasted smoky. Holly Barclay, robbed at one sheer stroke of all
the little refinements and luxuries which made the sum of his aimless
and worthless life, was still in the bickering stage; and Ingerson,
with the few restraints which he recognized stricken away, was a
plain brute, taking no pains to conceal his angry disgust, and making
snappish bids to be let alone when any one was charitable enough to
speak to him.

As for the women, the three who would be the first to feel the pinch
of any privations that might come upon us were behaving beautifully,
putting the major's gloom and Barclay's pettishness and Ingerson's
grumpy rage to shame. Mrs. Van Tromp--a most easy-going soul when
she could forget for the moment that she had three marriageable,
and as yet unmarried, daughters on her hands--had already forgotten
her reproachful complainings. Conetta's Aunt Mehitable was arguing
peacefully with the professor on the philosophical aspect of the
situation, though quite without prejudice, I fancied, to the sharp eye
she was keeping upon Conetta in her new juxtaposition between Annette
Grey and me. Mrs. Sanford, who, in spite of her motherliness, was a
frail little body physically, was apparently regarding the hammock beds
with some degree of trepidation; nevertheless, she went on sipping her
tea with evident relish, and she found time and the spirit to smile
understandingly across the circle at Billy Grisdale and Edie Van Tromp,
and to stoop and pat Billy's bull pup, when the dog, finding that his
master had no present use for him, wandered from one to another to
stick his extremely _retroussé_ nose into any hospitable palm that
offered.

"Shall we be able to keep this up, do you suppose?" Conetta whispered
to me, between the last two bites of her biscuit.

"I think the moonlight, what there is of it, is entrancingly beautiful,
don't you?" I laughed. "'Sufficient unto the day (or night)----' You
know the rest of it. I'm willing to let to-morrow take care of itself.
Are you?"

"Maybe I am." Then, with a return to the old-time dartings aside: "What
do you imagine Jerry is finding so alluring in Bee Van Tromp? He has
never read a book in his life."

"Beatrice isn't all book," I retorted. "On this voyage which has come
to such an abrupt halt I have been finding her a very charming young
woman. Her eyes, now."

"Shush! Any woman can make eyes at a man. If you'll look around at me,
I'll show you."

"Not any more," I said, and the saying was purely in self-defense.

"Wait," she teased. "The island is small--you said it was, didn't
you?--and you can't always look the other way." Then: "Can't we even
quarrel decently, Dickie Preble?"

Mrs. Van Tromp was rising stiffly and I was saved the necessity of
replying.

"Time to go to bed, my dears," said the mother of three with great
good-nature. And then to me: "Dick Preble, are you sure you fastened
my hammock securely? Because, if you didn't--well, you know--I'm
dreadfully heavy. There now! Wild horses wouldn't have dragged that
admission out of me at home. Conetta, you rogue, you're laughing at
me, but you're blushing, as well, and that's one of the conventions,
too. Never mind. I'm afraid every second step will be on a crab, or a
scorpion, or some other hideous thing. Good-night, all!"




VIII

INTO THE PRIMITIVE


IT was I who told Edie Van Tromp that the name, or legendary name, of
our island was "Pirates' Hope," and when she announced it at our first
camp breakfast it was acclaimed with a cheerful unanimity which went
far to show how, after a night's rest, we were able to make a jest out
of what had figured, only a few hours earlier, as a crude calamity.

After breakfast, Van Dyck, throwing off the lethargy which had
apparently bound him hand and foot when a little decision might have
turned the tables upon the mutineers, took his place energetically and
capably as the governor of our little colony. Under his directions a
signal was set at the nearer, or western, end of the island, enough
of the jungle was cleared to enable us to pitch the tents under the
shade of the palms, a cooking camp was established, and a rude thatched
shelter was built to protect the stores and luggage.

In these various industries there were only three idlers among the
men--the major, Holly Barclay, and Hobart Ingerson; and Edie Van Tromp,
volunteering to go with me to start a smoke fire at the signal cape,
was furious.

"Wouldn't that set your back teeth on edge, seeing those three
able-bodied gentlemen sunning themselves on the beach while everybody
else is getting blisters on their hands!" she flamed out, with a fine
disregard for the little grammatical inaccuracies. "I'd be ashamed!"

"You shouldn't deny the gentlemen the privilege of smoking their
after-breakfast cigars in comfort," I protested, grinning. "Perhaps,
after the cigars are all gone, and we come down to just plain pipes and
plebeian cut-plug tobacco----"

"I don't care! It's perfectly horrid of them, _I_ think. Mother got
us women together this morning while you men were fixing the tents,
and we all agreed to do the cooking, taking turns at it. When it comes
my turn, I shall tell those three loafing gentlemen that they can
undertake to wash the dishes, or go hungry!"

"Good!" I applauded. "You are a real, honest-to-goodness human woman,
under the skin, aren't you, Edie?"

She stuck out a pretty under lip at me.

"Did you ever, for one little fraction of a minute, doubt it, Mr.
Richard Preble?"

"No; it is only fair to say that I have never doubted it. You and Billy
are the real thing, whatever may be said for the remainder of us."

"Billy is a darling!" she declared enthusiastically. "Last night, when
those pirates rushed us with their guns, you know, I wanted to cry;
boo-hoo right out like a silly baby. It was just plain scare. A grown
man would have tried to comfort me, I suppose, but Billy joshed me and
made fun of me until I was too mad to be scared. Isn't it a thousand
pities that he's so young, and so--so----"

"So poor?" I finished for her. "It is; a thousand pities. But there
is hope on ahead, my dear child. Billy will outgrow his infancy some
time; and you mustn't lose sight of the fact that, so far as poverty
and riches are concerned, we all look very much alike, just now."

In such light-hearted banterings back and forth we put the quarter-mile
of beach behind us and got busy with our smudge-fire building at the
foot of the stripped palm-tree which carried one of Madeleine Barclay's
knitted shoulder wraps for a distress signal. With a few palmetto
leaves and bits of rotting wood to crisp and smoulder in the blaze we
soon had our smoke column erected; and beyond this there was nothing
much to do save to scan the horizon for the hoped-for sail.

"Do you really believe we shall be taken off before long, Dick Preble?"
was Miss Edith's soberly put query, this after the fire was well
established, and we were doing the horizon-sweeping stunt.

"Do you want the bald truth, or some nice little hopeful fiction?" I
asked.

"You may save the fictions for Conetta and Madeleine and Annette, if
you please. As you were kind enough to admit, a few minutes ago, I am a
woman grown."

"Then I shall tell you plainly, Edie. I know this island. It is quite
some distance from the nearest of the steamer lanes. It may be a long
time before any one finds us."

She was silent for a little while, but the resolute, girlish eyes were
quite unterrified. When she spoke again it was of a different matter.

"Dick," she began earnestly, "do you believe there is anything more
than foolishness at the bottom of all the talk we hear about a woman's
intuition?"

"All sober-minded people admit that there is, don't they?" I said.

"There is something behind all this that is happening to us," she
asserted gravely; "something that I can feel, and can't grasp or
understand. It is as real to me as the breeze in those palms, or this
staring sunshine, and is as intangible as both."

"You have been talking with Conetta," I said shortly.

"About this? No, I haven't. What makes you say that?"

"No matter; go on with your intangibility."

"This sudden mutiny and the way it was hurled at us: it is all so
strange and unaccountable. Who ever heard of the sailing-master of a
private yacht turning pirate? And especially a dear, cross old Uncle
Elijah, whose ancestors probably came over in the _Mayflower_?"

"Is Bonteck saying that Goff headed the mutiny?" I asked.

"He is letting the others say it, which is just the same."

"As you say, it is fairly incredible. Yet the fact remains. We are
here, and the _Andromeda_, with Goff on board, has vanished."

"I know; but the mystery isn't to be solved in any such easy way as
that. What possible use can Uncle Elijah or his crew of Portuguese and
mixed-bloods make of the _Andromeda_, which is probably known in every
civilized harbor of the world as Mr. Bonteck Van Dyck's private yacht?"

I hesitated to tell her the story of the treasure-carrying. That was
Van Dyck's secret, so long as he chose to make a secret of it.

"As to the object of the mutiny, we are all entitled to a guess," I
said. Then I offered one which was plausible or not, as one chose to
view it: "Suppose we suppose that some one of the Central or South
American countries is on the edge of a revolution; that isn't very hard
to imagine, is it?"

"No."

"Very well. The sharpest need of the rebels in any revolution is for
arms and ammunition; next to this, a fast ship to carry the arms
and ammunition. If there should happen to be money enough in the
revolutionary war-chest, isn't it conceivable that even an Uncle Elijah
might be tempted?"

She turned and looked me squarely in the eye.

"Is that your guess, Dick Preble?" she demanded.

"It is as good as any, isn't it?" I replied evasively.

When she said: "It doesn't satisfy me; it is too absurd," her
repetition of Conetta's protest of the previous night was almost
startling.

"There are times when you women are almost uncanny," I told her, but
she merely laughed at that.

"The absurdity isn't my only hunch," she went on, after the
frank-speaking manner of her kind. "This Robinson Crusoe experience is
going to be a dreadful thing, in a way. There won't be any illusions
left for any of us, I'm afraid--any more than there were for the people
of the Stone Age."

That sage remark brought on more talk, and we speculated cheerfully on
the death of the illusions and what might reasonably be expected as the
results thereof. My chatty companion had a lively imagination, and her
forecastings of the changes that would ensue in the different members
of our colony were handsomely entertaining.

"And you," she said, when she had worked her way around to me in the
prophesying; "I can just see what an unlivable person you will become."

"Why should I be so particularly unlivable?" I asked.

"That awful temper of yours," she went on baldly. "With all the
civilized veneer cracked and peeling off--my-oh!"

Now it is one thing to be well assured, in one's own summings-up,
of the possession of a violent temper, and quite another to be told
bluntly that the possession is a commonly accepted fact among one's
friends and acquaintances. Edie Van Tromp's assertion of the fact as
one that had--or might have been--published in the newspapers came with
a decided shock.

"Am I as bad as all that?" I protested.

"Everybody knows what a vile temper you have," she replied coolly.
"Anybody who couldn't get along with Conetta Kincaide without
quarreling with her------"

"Oh; so she has told you I have quarreled with her?"

"There you go," she gibed. "One has only to mention Conetta to you to
touch off the powder train. What makes you quarrel with her, Uncle
Dick?"

"What makes you think I am quarreling with her?"

"Hoo! I've got eyes, I guess. Of course, you've been decently polite to
her, but a blind person could see that it was just put on. The veneer
wasn't cracked then. I shudder to think what will happen when it gets
all cracked and peelly."

I thought it was time for a diversion, so I turned the tables upon her.

"How will it be with you after the veneer glue lets go?"

"Oh, me?--I'm just a crude little brute, anyway. I don't just see how
I _could_ change for the worse. I'm saying this because I know it is
what you are thinking. But there's one comfort. Billy won't see any
difference in me, no matter what I do. And Billy himself won't change;
he's too obvious."

We prolonged our watch until nearly noon, when the professor and his
wife came out to relieve us. It may say itself that during our two
hours or more of horizon-searching we saw no signs of a rescue vessel.
In the wide three-quarters of a circle visible from the western point
of the island--a point where I had spent many weary hours after the
shipwreck of the _Mary Jane_--there had been only the calm expanse of
sea and sky with nothing to break the monotony.

At the camp under the palms we found things settling into some sort of
routine. A fire was going in the rude fire place built of rough chunks
of the coral, and Mrs. Van Tromp and her athletic eldest were cooking
dinner. The major and Holly Barclay were still loafing on the beach,
both of them smoking as though we had a Tampa cigar factory to draw
upon instead of a strictly limited supply of Van Dyck's "perfectos."
Madeleine and Beatrice Van Tromp, working together, were trying to
fashion a basket out of stripped palm fronds--though just what purpose
a basket would serve I couldn't imagine.

Billy Grisdale, suddenly become useful, was gathering bits of wood
for the cooking fire. Jack Grey, who, besides being a rising young
attorney, had a flair for building things, was adding to the thatch
of the dunnage shelter, and Annette was helping him. Ingerson was
invisible, and so was Van Dyck. Miss Mehitable, whose health may or
may not have been all that it should be, was lying in her hammock, and
Conetta, ever dutiful, was fanning her with a broad palmetto leaf.
Among the workers it was Jerry Dupuyster who appeared in the most
original rôle. In the nattiest of one-piece bathing suits--supplied, as
I made no doubt, out of the luggage of one of the Van Tromp girls--he
had swum the lagoon to the wreck of the _Mary Jane_, where he now
appeared, a symphony in cerise stripes and bare legs, hacking manfully
at the wreck with a hand-axe to the end that we might increase our
scanty stock of firewood.

After the noon meal, at which Van Dyck appeared just as we were sitting
down to it, Jerry and I were told off to go on sentry duty at the
eastern end of the island, where we were to establish another distress
signal.

"Us for the sentry-go, old chappie," said Jerry cheerfully, and
together we took the beach trail for our post.

Reaching the eastern extremity of things after a walk of perhaps
three-quarters of a mile along the beach, we presently had an
improvised flag flying from a lopped tree, and after we had lighted a
smoke smudge there was nothing more to do but to watch for the sail
which I, for one, did not expect to see.

"Jolly rum old go, what?" said Jerry, casting himself full length upon
the sand when our labors were ended. "Shouldn't mind it so much, don't
y' know, if we didn't have the women along. Smoke?" and he handed me
his tobacco bag.

"The women, and one or two others," I qualified, filling my pipe.

"Haw, yes: Hob Ingerson, for one. Actin' like a bally cad, Ingerson is.
Needs to have some chappie give him a wallop or so, what?"

"Yes; and when it comes to the show-down, I rather hope I'll be the
'chappie'," I said.

"Not if I see him first," Jerry cut in, and this, indeed, was a new
development.

"You're under weight, Jerry; you wouldn't make two bites for Ingerson
if you should try to mix it with him."

"Eh, what?" exclaimed the transformed--or transforming--one, sitting
up suddenly. "If he doesn't stop his dashed swearin' before the women,
I'll take him on; believe me, I will, old dear."

"What makes you think you'd last out the first half of the first round
with a big bully like Ingerson?" I asked, grinning at him.

"Number of little things, old top; this, for one," and he opened his
shirt to show me something that looked like a ten-dollar gold piece
suspended by a silken cord around his neck.

"And what might that be?" I inquired, mildly curious.

He pulled the string off over his head and handed me the gold disk. It
proved to be a medal, struck by some gentlemen's boxing club of London,
testifying to the facts that Mr. Gerald Dupuyster was a member in good
standing, and that he had won the medal by reason of his being the
top-notcher in the club's series of light-weight matches.

"I never would have suspected it of you, Jerry," I commented, returning
the medal. "In fact, I should have said you were the last person on
earth to go in for the manly art of self-defense. What made you?"

"Oh, I say!--all the chappies with any red blood in 'em go in for it
over there, y' know. Jolly good sport, too; what?"

"Here's to you, if you conclude to try it on with Ingerson," I laughed.
"I'll be your towel-holder. But Ingerson isn't the only one we could do
without on this right little tight little island of ours, Jerry."

"You're dashed right. There's Barclay, for another."

"Yes; and----"

"Say it, old dear. Don't I know that the old uncle is cuttin' up rusty?
Grousing because he can't sit in an easy-chair and swig toddies no end!
Makes me jolly well ashamed, he does."

Here was another astonishing revelation. From what I had seen on
shipboard--from what we had all seen--there had been ample grounds for
the supposition that Jerry was a mere pawn in any game his uncle might
choose to play. But now there seemed to be quite a different Jerry
lying just under the cracking crust of the conventions. The discovery
took a bit of the bitterness out of my soul. If I couldn't have Conetta
for myself, it was a distinct comfort to know that she wasn't going
to draw a complete blank in the great lottery. Under all of Jerry's
Anglomaniacal fripperies there was apparently a man.

At the refilling of his pipe this changed, or changing, Jerry spoke of
my former immurement on the island, saying that Conetta had told him
a bit about it, and asking if I wouldn't tell him a bit more. So once
again I told the story of the ill-fated voyage of the _Mary Jane_ and
its near-tragic sequel for six poor castaways.

"Rummy old go, that," he commented, when the tale was told. "Dashed
easy to see how a chap might lose out on all the little decencies when
the belly-pinch takes hold. Are we likely to come a cropper into that
ditch before some bally old tub turns up to take us off?"

"I'm hoping not," I said.

He was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say: "We've
eighteen mouths to fill, old dear; how long can we fill 'em out of the
blooming tins; eh? what?"

I shook my head. "Van Dyck and I checked the provisions over this
morning while we were storing them. We shall do well enough for two or
three weeks; maybe longer, if we're careful not to waste any of the
food."

At this my fellow watcher swore roundly in good, plain American.

"Saw Holly Barclay turn up his damned nose and pitch his ship's
biscuits into the lagoon this morning," he explained. "Said something
about their not bein' fit for a human being to eat, by Jove!"

"He'll sing another tune if we have to come down to cocoanuts and
sea worms," I prophesied. Even this early in the game it was plainly
evident that Barclay, the major, and Hobart Ingerson were going to be
our sorest afflictions when the pinch should come.

In such fashion we wore out the afternoon, blinding our eyes, as I had
many times blinded mine in other days, with fruitless searchings of the
unresponsive waste of waters. At dusk we built up the signal fire to
make it last as long as possible and returned to the camp at the other
end of the island. When we came in sight of it, Mrs. Van Tromp and two
of her girls were putting the supper for the eighteen of us on a clean
tarpaulin spread upon the beach. Van Dyck met us just before we joined
the others.

"Nothing?" he queried.

"Nothing," we answered.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.




IX

THE BULLY


THAT remark of Edith Van Tromp's, to the effect that the illusions
would all be swept away, had its confirmation before we had tholed
through the first week of our island captivity. Little by little the
masks slipped aside, and some of the revealments of the true character
hiding behind them--some of the revelations, but not all--were grimly
illuminating.

Before the week's end I saw the major slyly slip the last box of the
precious cigars under his coat when he thought no one was looking and
go off to hide it in a shallow hole scooped in the dry sand of the
beach edge at a safe distance from the camp. Later, I came upon him
as he was burying a couple of bottles of the diminishing supply of
liquor in the same place--and he lied to me and said he was digging for
shell-fish.

Two or three days earlier than this, Holly Barclay had taken to his
hammock bed in a fit of purely imaginary illness, exacting constant
attendance and pampering in which he made a toiling slave of his pretty
daughter. When the pampering began and continued with no sign of
abatement in the querulous demands Barclay was making upon Madeleine,
Van Dyck grew gloomy and snappish, and I knew that the day was only
postponing itself when Bonteck would flame out at the sham invalid and
tell him exactly and precisely what a selfish malingerer he was.

Still lower in the unmasking scale came Ingerson--the real
Ingerson--who had lapsed into a sullen barbarian; unshaven, unbathed,
and with the coarse warp and woof of him showing at every threadbare
seam. What time he had free access to the liquor, he drank himself
ugly at least once in every twenty-four hours; and when Mrs. Van Tromp
finally shamed him out of his daylight attacks upon the liquor chest,
he took to raiding it after the camp was asleep, keeping this up until
one night when he found that the remainder of the bottled stuff had
disappeared. After this he became a morose threat to everybody, and
even Mrs. Van Tromp ignored his millions and turned a cold shoulder
upon him.

Three nights after his unsuccessful effort to turn up another bottle of
whiskey in the stores, the drink maniac tried it again, and this time
Van Dyck awoke and caught him at it.

"Looking for something you haven't lost, Ingerson?" he said, speaking
quietly to keep from disturbing the others.

Ingerson backed out of the palmetto-thatched store shelter and whirled
upon Van Dyck with a face which, as the firelight showed it to me, was
that of a devil denied.

"Where have you hid it?" he demanded hoarsely. "Tell me, or I'll wring
your damned neck!"

Van Dyck's smile was almost as devilish as Ingerson's teeth-baring
snarl.

"You needn't make a racket and wake the camp," he said in the evenest
of tones. "I did hide it, and it was partly to give you a decently
fair chance. Come with me." And he got up and the pair of them
disappeared among the palms.

Not trusting Ingerson any more than I would have trusted a snake, I
rose silently and followed them into the shadows, coming in sight of
them again as they entered a little open glade on the opposite side of
the island. Ingerson had halted and was gesticulating angrily.

"I want to know here and now what you meant by that 'decent chance'
break you made at me!" he was saying. "If you mean Madge Barclay, I can
tell you right off the bat that you're a dead one!"

"We will leave Miss Barclay quite out of it, if you please," said
Bonteck, still apparently as cool as Ingerson was hot. "You want
liquor, and I've brought you here to give it to you."

"We'll settle that other little thing first," Ingerson broke in
truculently. "You put up this winter cruise, that you've bungled and
turned into a starvation picnic, with the notion that you were going to
corner the market for yourself, I suppose. I'm here to tell you that
you lose out. Barclay makes this deal without any brokers, and I hold
an option on him."

"You will have to make that part of it a little plainer, I'm afraid,"
said Van Dyck; and now there was a dangerous softness in his voice.

"You can have it straight, if you want it that way. Barclay's in a hole
for money; he's always in a hole. I've agreed to pay him out, once for
all, and he's accepted the bid."

"And the price?" queried Bonteck gently--very gently.

"You can ask Madge about that," was the surly rejoinder. And then: "Get
a move: where have you hid that whiskey?"

"You shall have the whiskey presently, Ingerson; but first I'm going
to give you something you've been needing a good bit worse for a long
time. Put up your hands, if you know how!"

It was a very pretty fight, out there in the moonlit glade, with the
camp far enough removed to make the privacy of it safe, and with no
ring-side audience, so far as either of the combatants knew, to hiss
or applaud. Ingerson was no coward, neither was he lacking in bull
strength, nor in the skill to make fairly good use of it. Though he
went in at the beginning with a handicap of blind rage, the first few
passes steadied him and for a minute or so it looked as if Bonteck had
taken on a full load.

But, as a very ordinary prophet might have foretold, Ingerson's late
prolonged soak--for it was nothing less--presently got in its work.
Twice Van Dyck landed swinging body blows; and though neither of
these would have winded a sober man, the second left Ingerson gasping
and with his jaw hanging. I thought that settled it, and it did,
practically, though the bully was still game. Handling himself as
coolly as if he were giving a boxing lesson on a gymnasium floor, Van
Dyck landed again and again, and each blow was sent home with an impact
that sounded like the kick of a mule.

Ingerson stood up to it as long as he could, and when his wind was
gone he went into a clinch. Bonteck broke the clinch with a volley of
short-arm jabs that was little less than murderous, and when he was
hammered out of the clinch, Ingerson staggered and went down. I looked
to see him stay down, but he didn't. After a moment of breath-catching
he was up and at it again, and it took three more of the well-planted
body blows to drive him into a second clinch. As before, he failed to
pinion Van Dyck's right arm, and I made sure he tried to set his teeth
in Van Dyck's shoulder.

At this, Bonteck shifted his short-arm jabs from the ribs and swung
upon the unguarded jaw; whereupon Ingerson lost his grip and curled up
on the ground like some huge worm that had been stepped on.

Van Dyck stood over him, breathing hard.

"Have you had enough?" he demanded; and when the vanquished one made
some sort of grunting acknowledgment, Bonteck brought water from the
near-by spring in a folded leaf of a giant begonia and held it while
Ingerson struggled to his knees and bathed the battered jaw.

"Now I'll get you your whiskey," said Van Dyck shortly; and leaving
Ingerson to dabble his hands in the cooling water, he went aside into
the jungle, returning after a minute or so with a case-bottle. "Here
you are," he said, giving the bottle to the beaten bully; "take it and
make a brute of yourself, if that's what you want to do." And then I
had to hurry to be before Bonteck in the camp clearing; to be in my
place beside the handful of night fire before he should return and
catch me out of it. For I had no notion of marring the perfect joy of
victory which I knew must be filling his soul.

After this there were other days merging slowly into weeks; days of
back-slippings into deeper depths of the primitive, a retrogradation
in which we all participated more or less; days in which we stolidly
maintained the signal fires at either extremity of the island and wore
out the dragging hours as best we could, scanning the horizon for the
coming sail of rescue, though each succeeding day with less hope of
seeing it, I think.

More and more markedly the conventions withdrew into a past which was
daily growing to seem more like life in a former avatar than a reality
once ours to possess. From merely slipping aside now and again, the
masks were carelessly dropped and suffered to remain where they fell.
Seen in the new perspective, there were many surprising changes, and
not all of them were disappointing. For example: Mrs. Eager Van Tromp,
in her normal state a good lady driven to distraction by her efforts
to hold her footing on the social ladder and so to marry her daughters
adequately, became, _en séquestre_, the good-natured, plain-spoken
mother of us all, and a past mistress in the fine art of camp
cooking--a specialty in which she was ably seconded by all three of her
daughters, also, when she would permit it, by Mrs. Sanford, Annette
Grey and Conetta.

Courageous fortitude best describes the change that had come over
Madeleine Barclay. With her irritable father to placate and wait upon,
and with Ingerson's attitude toward her coming to be that of blunt
possessorship, she was by turns the patient nurse to the malingerer
and the cheerful heartener of the rest of us. Never, in all those
depressing days of hope deferred, did I hear her complain; and always
she had a steadying word for the despairing ones: if a ship didn't come
for us to-day, it would come to-morrow, and into the most dejected she
could put new life--for the moment, at least.

In John Grey and Annette, and in the professor and his wife, the
changes were the least marked. For the newly married couple nothing
much seemed to matter so long as they had each other. Once or twice,
indeed, I surprised Grey with a look in his eyes that told of the dread
undercurrent that must have been underlying his every thought of the
future and what it might hold for Annette, but that was all. And as
for the older couple--well, perhaps they had attained to a higher and
serener plane than any to which we younger ones could climb. Day in and
day out, when he was not doing his apportioned share of the common camp
tasks, the professor was immersed to the eyes in a study of the lush
flora of the island, thumbing a little pocket Botany until its leaves
were worn and frayed with much turning. And where he wandered, his wife
wandered with him.

In Miss Mehitable, too, a transformation of a sort was wrought. For
many days she held sourly aloof and had bitter words for Van Dyck, and
black looks for me when by any chance I was able to deprive her for a
time, long or short, of Conetta's caretaking and coddling. But with the
lapse of time I fancied that even this crabbed lady was beginning to
lose her sense of the mere money distinctions, and I was rash enough to
say as much to Conetta on a day when I was so fortunate as to secure
her for a companion in the signal-fire watch which Bonteck still made
us maintain.

"You shouldn't say such things about poor Aunt Mehitable," was the
reproof I got. "This is a very terrible experience for her--as it would
be for any woman of her age--and she is really more than half sick."

"Don't mistake me," I made haste to say. "I meant it wholly in a
congratulatory sense."

"She has changed," Conetta admitted, adding: "But dear me! we have all
changed."

"'All the world's queer, excepting thee and me, and sometimes
even thee's a little queer'," I quoted. "What changes have you
remarked--particularly?"

"For one, Major Terwilliger is just a selfish, peevish old man, utterly
impossible to live with," she said calmly.

"Amen to that. Yet, one of these days you will probably have to reckon
with him as a member of your household. Go on."

She went on, paying no attention to what I had said about householding
the major.

"The professor is a dear, just as you'd expect him to be, and so is
Mrs. Professor. Annette is as brave as brave, and the way she is
keeping up is only equaled by Jack's adorable care of her, which is at
the bottom of his constant breezy assurances that each day will be the
last of our Crusoeing."

"And Billy?" I prompted.

"Billy is a dear, too. He has changed less than any one, I think.
Yesterday, at supper-time, he nearly broke my heart. Perhaps you
remember that he got up and went away while we were eating, saying that
he'd forgotten something. A few minutes later I went back to the spring
to get some fresh water for Aunt Mehitable and found him sharing his
supper with Tige. He'd heard what Major Terwilliger had said about our
wasting food on the dog when we'd probably need it ourselves. Wouldn't
that make you weep?"

"The dog is much more worthy of his rations than the major is of what
he consumes," I averred. "Tige is at least willing to do his best if
anybody will show him how. Any more transmogrifications?"

"Lots of them. Possibly you've noticed that Mrs. Van Tromp no longer
tries to shoo Billy away from Edie. That's a miracle in itself. Then
there is Madeleine: I have always thought her rather--um--well, you
know; rather stand-offish and maybe a bit self-centered. Dick, she is
an angel! The way she devotes herself, body and soul, to that father of
hers, and still finds time and the heart to chirk the rest of us up, is
beyond all praise."

"You can't get a quarrel out of me on that score," I returned.
"Madeleine is all that you say she is, and more. As for her father, I
guess we can pass him up. Between us two, he is no more sick than I am.
And I don't believe he has changed a particle; we are merely coming to
know him better as he really is, and always has been."

"I have known him for a long time," Conetta said thoughtfully. Then she
agreed with me: "We'll leave him out; he cancels himself on the minus
side of the equation, as you used to say of certain people we knew in
the old days at home."

I wasn't half sure enough of myself to be willing to have her drag
in the old days, so I urged her to go on with her cataloguing of our
fellow castaways, saying: "You haven't completed the list yet."

"There is one more to be omitted--Hobart Ingerson," she said soberly,
with a shadow of deep disgust coming into her eyes.

"Will Madeleine omit him?" I asked quickly.

"If she doesn't--after what we've been compelled to see and feel and
endure! Dick, it's dreadful; simply dreadful!"

"Yet she will marry him," I insisted--purely to hear what my companion
would say to that.

"It is unbelievable. What possible motive could she have in doing such
an unspeakable thing?"

"A few minutes ago you called her an angel; perhaps it will be the
angelic motive. Her father needs money; needs a very considerable sum
of money, and needs it badly. She knows of the need--though I think she
doesn't know the immediate and exciting cause of it--and she also knows
that Ingerson is willing to buy and pay."

"How perfectly horrible!" said my watchmate, with a shudder. And then:
"What a pity it is that Madeleine's money was all swallowed up in that
bank failure out West."

I smiled when she said that. Madeleine's fortune hadn't gone in any
bank failure, neither out West nor back East. This was only another of
Holly Barclay's plausible little fictions.

"You mean?--" I suggested.

"I mean that if she had money of her own she might buy her freedom. I
imagine it is purely a financial matter with Mr. Holly Barclay. If she
could only find some of the Spaniards' gold--find it for herself so
that it would belong to her.... Wouldn't that be splendid!"

This was something entirely new to me, and I said: "What gold is this
you are talking about?"

She looked around at me with wide-open eyes.

"Why--haven't you heard?" Then: "Oh, I remember; Bonteck was telling
us the story last evening, while you and the professor were out at the
other signal fire." And thereupon she repeated the old tale of the
siege and wreck of the Spanish galleon in Queen Elizabeth's reign, with
the tradition of the hidden treasure whose hiding place the survivors
had refused to betray--paying for their refusal with their lives.

"Of course, that is only a sea yarn--one of the many that are told
about those old days and the doings in them," was my comment. "You knew
that while you were listening to it, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes; I supposed it wasn't true. I kept telling myself that Bonteck
was only trying to start some new interest that would keep us from
going stark mad over this wretched imprisonment, and the watching and
waiting that never amounts to anything. It's serving a purpose, too.
Most of the young ones are turning treasure hunters--going in couples.
Jerry Dupuyster was trying to persuade Beatrice to slip away just as we
left the camp. I heard him."

That small reference to Jerry and his disloyalty--which was becoming
daily more and more apparent, and which I may have omitted to
mention--moved me as one of the Yellowstone Park geysers is said to be
moved by the dropping into it of a bar of soap.

"One of these fine days I'm going to beat Jerry Dupuyster until his
best friend wouldn't recognize him," I said savagely.

Conetta laughed; the silvery little laugh that I was once besotted
enough to believe that she kept especially for me.

"There goes your temper again. That is one thing that hasn't changed,"
she said. And then: "Poor Jerry! You'd have to have one hand tied
behind you, wouldn't you?--just to be reasonably fair, you know."

There had been a time when I should have admitted that her gibe hit the
mark, but that was before the transformed--or transforming--Jerry had
been revealed to me.

"Nothing like that," I said. "He may not have confided it to you, but
Jerry is a man of his hands. Hasn't he ever shown you the medal he won
in England?"

She shook her head. "There are lots of things Jerry hasn't shown
me--yet."

"Well, he has the medal, and it says he was the top-notcher in his
class in some London boxing club. I give him credit for that; but just
the same, there have been times during the past few days when I've had
a curious longing to see how near I could come to throwing him bodily
across the lagoon."

Again she said, "Poor Jerry!" and had the calm assurance to ask me what
he had done to incur my ill will.

"Done!" I exclaimed. "What hasn't he done? If he thinks he is going to
be allowed to play fast and loose with you for a chit of a girl like
Beatrice Van Tromp----"

Once more her silvery laugh interrupted.

"Beatrice will be twenty-three on her next birthday. She is quite well
able to fight her own battles, Mr. Dickie Preble."

"Oh, confound it all; you know what I mean!" I fumed hotly. "He has
asked you to marry him, hasn't he?"

"He has," she replied quite calmly.

"Well, isn't that enough?"

"Don't be silly," she said. "You must try to control that dreadful
temper of yours. You're miles too touchy, Dickie, dear."

That remark was so true that I was constrained to wrench the talk aside
from Jerry and the temperamental things by main strength.

"This treasure-hunting business," I said. "I'm wondering if that is
what Bonteck has had on his mind? He has been acting like a man half
out of his senses for the past few days. Surely you have noticed it?"

"Yes; and I've been setting it down as one of the most remarkable of
the changes we have been talking about. You know how he was at first;
he seemed to take everything as a matter of course, and was able to
calm everybody's worries. But lately, as you say, he has been acting
like a man with an unconfessed murder on his soul. I was so glad when
he told us that galleon story last night. He was more like himself."

"He feels his responsibility, naturally," I suggested, "and it grows
heavier the longer we are shut up here. While I think very few of us
blame him personally for what has happened to us, he can't help feeling
that if he hadn't planned the cruise and invited us, the thing wouldn't
have happened at all."

"Of course; anybody would feel that way," she agreed, and after that
she fell silent.

The weather on this day of our morning watch under the western
palm-tree signal staff was much like that of all the other days;
superlatively fine, and with the sun's warmth delightfully tempered by
the steady fanning of the breeze which was tossing miniature breakers
over the comb of the outer reef. Conetta's gaze was fixed upon the
distant horizon, and when I looked around I saw that her eyes were
slowly filling with tears.

We had been comrades as well as lovers in the old days; which was
possibly why I took her hand and held it, and why she did not resent
the new-old caress.

"Tell me about it," I urged. "You used to be able to lean upon me once,
Conetta, dear."

"It's just the--the loneliness, Dick," she faltered, squeezing the
tears back. "We've all been dropping the masks and showing what we
really are; but there is one mask that we never drop--any of us. We
laugh and joke, and tell one another that to-morrow, or the next day at
the very farthest, will see the end of this jolly picnic on Pirates'
Hope. But really, in the bottom of our hearts, we know that it may
never end--only with our lives. Isn't that so?"

I did not dare tell her the bald truth; that it might, indeed, come to
a life-and-death struggle with starvation before our slender chance of
rescue should materialize.

"I don't allow myself to think of that," I said quickly--and it was
a lie out of the whole cloth. "And you mustn't let your small anchor
drag, either, Connie, girl."

"I know; but I can't help hearing--and seeing. This morning early,
before most of them were up, I saw Billy and Jack Grey trying to make
some fishing lines and hooks; they were jollying each other about the
fun they were going to have whipping the lagoon for a change of diet
for us. And yesterday I happened to overhear the professor telling
Bonteck that he had made a careful search of the island for the edible
roots that grow wild in the tropics, and hadn't been able to find any.
Naturally, I knew at once what these things meant. The provisions are
running low."

I nodded. It didn't seem worth while to try to lie to her.

"How far has it spread?" I asked. "Mrs. Van Tromp has been trying to
keep the scarcity in the background. Does any one else know?"

"I can't say. But I do know that Mrs. Van Tromp is anxious to hide it
from her girls--and from Madeleine."

"Why from Madeleine in particular?"

Again Conetta let her honest eyes look fairly into mine.

"Because Bonteck will not have Madeleine told. He means to spare her to
the very last, no matter how much she has to waste upon her father's
finicky appetite. Only this morning, she had to throw his entire
breakfast away--after he'd messed with it and spoiled it--and get him
another one!"

This was growing serious; much more serious than I had suspected; and
I made a mental resolve to get the men of our party together on a
short-rations basis at once. We had been hideously reckless with our
stores; no one could deny that.

"This smudge will smoke for an hour or so longer," I pointed out,
rising and helping Conetta to her feet. "Suppose we take a walk around
on the south beach and look over toward my old stamping ground in
Venezuela."

She made no objection, and once we were in motion we kept on, since the
southern horizon was just as likely to yield the hopeful sign for which
we were straining our eyes as any other. I am morally certain that I
had no hunch to prompt the change of view-point, and if my companion
had, she didn't mention it. Nevertheless, when we had measured
something less than half the length of the island, tramping side by
side in sober silence over the white sands, the thing we had looked for
in vain through so many weary hours appeared, and we both saw it at the
same instant--the long, low smoke trail of a steamer blackening the
line where sea and sky came together.

There was nothing to be done; absolutely nothing that we could do to
attract the attention of those people who were just out of sight below
the blurred horizon. For so long as we could distinguish the slowly
vanishing harbinger of rescue we stood transfixed, hardly daring to
breathe, hoping against hope that the steamer's course was laid toward
us instead of away from us. But when the black of the smoke trail had
faded to gray, and the gray became so faint that it was no longer
separable from the slight haze of the sky-line, Conetta turned and
clung to me, sobbing like a hurt and frightened child. It was too much,
and I took her in my arms and comforted her, as I had once had the
right to do.

And at that climaxing moment, out of the jungle thicketing behind us
came Jerry Dupuyster and Beatrice Van Tromp. Beatrice was laughing
openly, and on Jerry's face there was an inane smile that made me wish
very heartily to kill him where he stood.




X

THE BONES OF THE "SANTA LUCIA."


CONETTA'S assertion, made in half-confidence to me, to the effect that
Bonteck's attitude had changed, had ample backgrounding in the fact,
and the cause--at least, so it appeared to me--was a sharp and growing
anxiety.

Time and again I had surprised him sweeping the horizon with the
field-glass, which was the only thing he had taken from his cabin
stateroom when Lequat had come for us; and while there was nothing
especially remarkable about this, I remembered that he had heretofore
been turning this duty carelessly over to the various watchers at
the signal fires. To be sure, the diminishing supply of eatables was
a sufficient cause for any amount of anxiety, but I could not help
thinking that there was something even bigger than the prospective food
shortage gnawing at him. And that conclusion was confirmed on the day
after Conetta and I had seen the steamer smoke, when I came upon him
sitting on the beach at the farthest extremity of the island, with his
head in his hands--a picture of the deepest dejection.

But with all this, he was still unremitting in his efforts to keep us
from stagnating and slipping into that pit of despair which always
yawns for the shipwrecked castaway. His revival of the legendary tale
of the old Spanish plate ship, with its sequel of the starving crew and
the buried treasure, was one of the expedients; and though gold was the
one thing for which our marooned ship's company had the least possible
use, the story served an excellent purpose.

Treasure-trove became, as one might say, the stock joke of the moment.
Even the Sanfords went strolling about the island, prodding with sticks
in the soft sand and turning up the fallen leaves in the wood; and Grey
proposed jocularly that we stake off the beach in the vicinity of the
skeleton wreck of the old galleon and fall to digging systematically,
each on his own mining claim.

It was while this treasure-hunting diversion was holding the center of
the stage that a thing I had been anticipating came to pass. Van Dyck
suddenly broke over the host-and-guest barriers and read the riot act
to Holly Barclay. I happened to be within earshot at the cataclysmic
moment--it was one of the rare moments when Madeleine wasn't dancing
attendance upon the sham invalid--and what Van Dyck said to Barclay was
quite enough, I thought, to kill any possible chance he might have had
as a suitor, with a father who stood ready to purchase immunity from
just punishment at the price of his daughter's happiness.

"You are acting like a spoiled child, Barclay; that is the plain
English of it," was Bonteck's blunt charge. "You are not sick, and if
you were, it would be no excuse for the way you are tying your daughter
down. Hereafter there will be a new deal. Madeleine must have some time
every day for exercise and recreation."

"She won't take it," retorted the malingerer.

"She will if you tell her to; and you are going to insist upon it."

"I won't be bullied by you, Bonteck Van Dyck! You haven't anything to
say--after the way you've let us in for this hellish nightmare. What
business is it of yours if Madge chooses to make things a little less
unbearable for me?"

"I am making it my business, and what I say goes as it lies. You turn
Madeleine loose for her bit of freedom mornings and evenings. If you
don't, I shall tell her what I know about her cousin's fortune, and
what you have done with it."

Barclay crumpled up like a man hit in the stomach by a soft-nosed
bullet, and the faded pink in his cheeks turned to a sickly copper
yellow.

"Don't!" he gasped. "For God's sake, don't do that, Van Dyck! She may
go--I'll make her go. I--I'm a sick man, I tell you, and you're trying
to kill me! Go away and let me alone!"

Van Dyck came out of the palm clump where Barclay's hammock was
swung--and found me eavesdropping.

"That was a piker's trick--listening in on me, Dick," he remonstrated
half-impatiently. But, after all, I think he was glad he had a witness
to Barclay's promise.

As may be imagined, Madeleine got her freedom, or some measure of it,
immediately. It was Alicia Van Tromp who told me that a miracle had
been wrought.

"I think Mr. Holly Barclay must be near his end," she said, with fine
scorn. "He is insisting that Madeleine go for a walk. Wouldn't that
shock you?"

When Madeleine made her appearance, I looked to see Bonteck monopolize
her, as he had earned the right to do; but what he did was to thrust me
into the breach.

"You heard what I said to Holly Barclay and you know why I said it,"
was the way he put it up to me. "Madeleine hasn't been out of shouting
distance of her father's hammock half a dozen times since the night
we were marooned. Trot her all around the shop and make her think of
something different. I'll square things for you with Conetta."

"You are about three years too late to square me with Conetta," I said
sourly. "Have you anything else up your sleeve?"

"Several things; but I'm not going to show them to you just now. Be
a good sport and help me out. I'd do as much for you, any day; in
fact, I've done a good bit more as it is, if you only knew it. Here
she comes; don't let Ingerson get in ahead of you. Take her around
the south beach and come back the other way. Jump for it, you crabbed
old woman-hater! It isn't every day in the week that you have such a
privilege jammed down your throat."

It was no very difficult task--the capturing of Madeleine. She fell
in promptly and amiably with my suggestion that we go on an exploring
tramp around the beach line of the island, and I took her the
roundabout way, as Bonteck had directed, to make her release last as
long as possible.

I don't recall what we talked about at first, only I know that it was
all perfectly innocuous. We had common ground enough--the people we
both knew at home, a summer fortnight on the North Shore when she was a
débutante and we were fellow guests in the same house group, a winter
tour in California when we had both chanced to be members of the same
party. But inevitably, and in spite of all I could do to turn it aside,
the talk eventually drifted around to the present with its more than
dubious possibilities.

"Conetta tells me that you were once ship-wrecked on this same bit of
coral, Dick," was the way she switched from the North Shore house party
to Pirates' Hope. "Doesn't it seem a most remarkable coincidence that
you should have the misfortune to have to repeat that experience?"

"Compared with the other experience, this is a vacation pleasure camp,"
I said, trying to keep the serious aspect of things in the background.
"We came ashore in a hurricane, the six of us who were not drowned, and
had to live on cocoanuts and raw fish. We hadn't even the makings of a
fire."

"How dreadful it must have been!" she exclaimed. "I should think that
the memory of that terrible time would color every minute of the day
for you now, with all the reminders there must be."

"Not a bit of it," I denied cheerfully. "'The mill doesn't grind with
the water that has passed,' you know. And, besides, the _Mary Jane's_
survivors were taken off in due time--which we may take as an earnest
that we shall be picked up, sooner or later."

We had reached the extreme eastern point of the islet by this time, and
she stopped and faced me.

"Are you really believing that, Dick?" she asked, with a little
trembling of the pretty lips that she could not wholly control, though
a blind man might have seen that she was trying to, hard enough.

"Of course I am."

"I'm afraid you wouldn't admit it to me if you weren't. You see, I
can't forget that those others stayed here and starved--long ago, you
know--the crew of the _Santa Lucia_."

"You have been listening to Bonteck's ghost stories," I jested. "You
mustn't take them for matters of fact."

"But there _is_ a wreck," she insisted; "I mean besides the one on the
reef opposite our camp."

"Oh, yes; there is a bare suggestion of an older wreck," I said. "We'll
go and have a look at it, if you like. It's on the north beach, and we
can go back that way. Would you care to see it?"

She nodded, and we strolled on in sober silence for another half-mile.
I was afraid I was not making much of a success of the job of keeping
her spirits up, and was beginning to wish very heartily that I had made
Bonteck do his own jollying. Just why she should be looking upon the
blue side of things at last, after she had been the one to do most of
the cheering in the past, I couldn't imagine at first, but a bit later
the solution--or a possible solution--came to me. Perhaps the invalid,
knowing that he was going to lose some of his hold upon her through
Van Dyck's insistence upon more freedom for her, had been pressing the
Ingerson claim still harder.

The wreck of the galleon--if, indeed, the few bits of barnacled timber
and rusting ironwork could, by any stretch of imagination, be dated
back to a period so remote as that of the conquest of Peru--was in the
bight of a little bay, well sheltered by the tallest of the palms,
which effectually screened it from our camp end of the island. It
wanted possibly half an hour of sunset when we came upon the few dumb
relics, and the shadows of the palms were making weird traceries upon
the white sand of the beach.

Assuming that the largest of the charred and blackened "bones" was
the stem of the ancient wreck, it was to be inferred that the ship
had entered the lagoon bay through the seaward opening in the outer
reef, had been beached bows on, and had so lain and burned, or rotted.
Assuming, again, that the vessel had really been one of the old,
high-bowed galleons, it was apparent that the beaching had been done
with considerable force; a drive so hard that the bowsprit of the ship
must have been thrust like a huge pointing finger into the jungle
thicketing, which, at this point, ran well down to the edge of the
lagoon.

It was Van Dyck who made this hypothetical platting of the beaching of
the vessel for us; Bonteck himself, who had slipped ghost-like out of
the palm shadows to join us while we were trying to trace the skeleton
outline of the ship's timbering in the obliterating sands.

"I've been all over this ground before," he explained, and for once in
a way he seemed to have thrown off the burden, whatever it was, that
had been wei

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