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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other
+Stories of the Sea, by Morgan Robertson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea
+
+
+Author: Morgan Robertson
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 18, 2007  [eBook #23539]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD" AND
+OTHER STORIES OF THE SEA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Hollander, David Clarke, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+   Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+
+   Dialect spellings, contractions and discrepancies have been
+   retained.
+
+
+
+
+
+"WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD"
+
+AND OTHER TALES OF THE SEA
+
+by
+
+MORGAN ROBERTSON
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Published by The Century Co.
+New York        M DCCC XC IX
+
+Copyright, 1899, by
+The Century Co.
+
+Copyright, 1898, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+Copyright, 1898, 1899, by The Curtis Publishing Co.
+Copyright, 1899, by Peter Fenelon Collier.
+Copyright, 1899, by Street & Smith.
+Copyright, 1897, 1898, by The S. S. McClure Co.
+Copyright, 1898, by Harper & Brothers.
+
+
+
+
+TO ITS GODFATHER
+JOHN S. PHILLIPS
+THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY
+DEDICATED
+
+
+
+
+"'Where Angels Fear to Tread'" was first published in the "Atlantic
+Monthly"; "Salvage" in the "Century Magazine"; "The Brain of the
+Battle-Ship," "The Wigwag Message," "Between the Millstones," and
+"The Battle of the Monsters," in the "Saturday Evening Post"; "The
+Trade-Wind" in "Collier's Weekly"; "From the Royal-Yard Down" in
+"Ainslee's Magazine"; "Needs Must when the Devil Drives" and "When
+Greek Meets Greek" in McClure's Syndicate; and "Primordial" in
+"Harper's Monthly Magazine."
+
+To the publishers of these periodicals I am indebted for the privilege
+of republishing the stories in book form.
+
+MORGAN ROBERTSON.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                           PAGE
+
+"WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD"                                  1
+
+THE BRAIN OF THE BATTLE-SHIP                                 57
+
+THE WIGWAG MESSAGE                                           88
+
+THE TRADE-WIND                                              111
+
+SALVAGE                                                     137
+
+BETWEEN THE MILLSTONES                                      170
+
+THE BATTLE OF THE MONSTERS                                  193
+
+FROM THE ROYAL-YARD DOWN                                    213
+
+NEEDS MUST WHEN THE DEVIL DRIVES                            233
+
+WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK                                      259
+
+PRIMORDIAL                                                  272
+
+
+
+
+"WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD"
+
+"I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of each; and I
+believe they both get paid in the end, but the fools first."
+                                            ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+
+
+PART I
+
+The first man to climb the _Almena's_ side-ladder from the tug was the
+shipping-master, and after him came the crew he had shipped. They
+clustered at the rail, looking around and aloft with muttered profane
+comments, one to the other, while the shipping-master approached a
+gray-eyed giant who stood with a shorter but broader man at the
+poop-deck steps.
+
+"Mr. Jackson--the mate here, I s'pose?" inquired the shipping-master. A
+nod answered him. "I've brought you a good crew," he continued; "we'll
+just tally 'em off, and then you can sign my receipt. The captain'll be
+down with the pilot this afternoon."
+
+"I'm the mate--yes," said the giant; "but what dry-goods store did you
+raid for that crowd? Did the captain pick 'em out?"
+
+"A delegation o' parsons," muttered the short, broad man,
+contemptuously.
+
+"No, they're not parsons," said the shipping-master, as he turned to
+the man, the slightest trace of a smile on his seamy face. "You're Mr.
+Becker, the second mate, I take it; you'll find 'em all right, sir.
+They're sailors, and good ones, too. No, Mr. Jackson, the skipper
+didn't pick 'em--just asked me for sixteen good men, and there you are.
+Muster up to the capstan here, boys," he called, "and be counted."
+
+As they grouped themselves amidships with their clothes-bags, the
+shipping-master beckoned the chief mate over to the rail.
+
+"You see, Mr. Jackson," he said, with a backward glance at the men,
+"I've only played the regular dodge on 'em. They've all got the
+sailor's bug in their heads and want to go coasting; so I told 'em this
+was a coaster."
+
+"So she is," answered the officer; "round the Horn to Callao is
+coasting. What more do they want?"
+
+"Yes, but I said nothin' of Callao, and they were all three sheets i'
+the wind when they signed, so they didn't notice the articles. They
+expected a schooner, too, big enough for sixteen men; but I've just
+talked 'em out of that notion. They think, too, that they'll have a
+week in port to see if they like the craft; and to make 'em think it
+was easy to quit, I told 'em to sign nicknames--made 'em believe that a
+wrong name on the articles voided the contract."
+
+"But it don't. They're here, and they'll stay--that is, if they know
+enough to man the windlass."
+
+"Of course--of course. I'm just givin' you a pointer. You may have to
+run them a little at the start, but that's easy. Now we'll tally 'em
+off. Don't mind the names; they'll answer to 'em. You see, they're all
+townies, and bring their names from home."
+
+The shipping-master drew a large paper from his pocket, and they
+approached the men at the capstan, where the short, broad second mate
+had been taking their individual measures with scowling eye.
+
+It was a strange crew for the forecastle of an outward-bound,
+deep-water American ship. Mr. Jackson looked in vain for the heavy,
+foreign faces, the greasy canvas jackets and blanket trousers he was
+accustomed to see. Not that these men seemed to be landsmen--each
+carried in his face and bearing the indefinable something by which
+sailors of all races may distinguish each other at a glance from
+fishermen, tugmen, and deck-hands. They were all young men, and their
+intelligent faces--blemished more or less with marks of overnight
+dissipation--were as sunburnt as were those of the two mates; and where
+a hand could be seen, it showed as brown and tarry as that of the
+ablest able seaman. There were no chests among them, but the canvas
+clothes-bags were the genuine article, and they shouldered and handled
+them as only sailors can. Yet, aside from these externals, they gave no
+sign of being anything but well-paid, well-fed, self-respecting
+citizens, who would read the papers, discuss politics, raise families,
+and drink more than is good on pay-nights, to repent at church in the
+morning. The hands among them that were hidden were covered with
+well-fitting gloves--kid or dog-skin; all wore white shirts and
+fashionable neckwear; their shoes were polished; their hats were in
+style; and here and there, where an unbuttoned, silk-faced overcoat
+exposed the garments beneath, could be seen a gold watch-chain with
+tasteful charm.
+
+"Now, boys," said the shipping-master, cheerily, as he unfolded the
+articles on the capstan-head, "answer, and step over to starboard as I
+read your names. Ready? Tosser Galvin."
+
+"Here." A man carried his bag across the deck a short distance.
+
+"Bigpig Monahan." Another--as large a man as the mate--answered and
+followed.
+
+"Moccasey Gill."
+
+"Good God!" muttered the mate, as this man responded.
+
+"Sinful Peck." An undersized man, with a cultivated blond mustache,
+lifted his hat politely to Mr. Jackson, disclosing a smooth, bald head,
+and passed over, smiling sweetly. Whatever his character, his name
+belied his appearance; for his face was cherubic in its innocence.
+
+"Say," interrupted the mate, angrily, "what kind of a game is this,
+anyhow? Are these men sailors?"
+
+"Yes, yes," answered the shipping-master, hurriedly; "you'll find 'em
+all right. And, Sinful," he added, as he frowned reprovingly at the
+last man named, "don't you get gay till my receipt's signed and I'm
+clear of you."
+
+Mr. Jackson wondered, but subsided; and, each name bringing forth a
+response, the reader called off: "Seldom Helward, Shiner O'Toole,
+Senator Sands, Jump Black, Yampaw Gallagher, Sorry Welch, Yorker
+Jimson, General Lannigan, Turkey Twain, Gunner Meagher, Ghost O'Brien,
+and Poop-deck Cahill."
+
+Then the astounded Mr. Jackson broke forth profanely. "I've been
+shipmates," he declared between oaths, "with freak names of all
+nations; but this gang beats me. Say, you," he called,--"you with the
+cro'-jack eye there,--what's that name you go by? Who are you?" He
+spoke to the large man who had answered to "Bigpig Monahan," and who
+suffered from a slight distortion of one eye; but the man, instead of
+civilly repeating his name, answered curtly and coolly:
+
+"I'm the man that struck Billy Patterson."
+
+Fully realizing that the mate who hesitates is lost, and earnestly
+resolved to rebuke this man as his insolence required, Mr. Jackson had
+secured a belaying-pin and almost reached him, when he found himself
+looking into the bore of a pistol held by the shipping-master.
+
+"Now, stop this," said the latter, firmly; "stop it right here, Mr.
+Jackson. These men are under my care till you've signed my receipt.
+After that you can do as you like; but if you touch one of them before
+you sign, I'll have you up 'fore the commissioner. And you fellers," he
+said over his shoulder, "you keep still and be civil till I'm rid of
+you. I've used you well, got your berths, and charged you nothin'. All
+I wanted was to get Cappen Benson the right kind of a crew."
+
+"Let's see that receipt," snarled the mate. "Put that gun up, too, or
+I'll show you one of my own. I'll tend to your good men when you get
+ashore." He glared at the quiescent Bigpig, and followed the
+shipping-master--who still held his pistol ready, however--over to the
+rail, where the receipt was produced and signed.
+
+"Away you go, now," said the mate; "you and your gun. Get over the
+side."
+
+The shipping-master did not answer until he had scrambled down to the
+waiting tug and around to the far side of her deck-house. There, ready
+to dodge, he looked up at the mate with a triumphant grin on his shrewd
+face, and called:
+
+"Say, Mr. Jackson, 'member the old bark _Fair Wind_ ten years ago,
+and the ordinary seaman you triced up and skinned alive with a
+deck-scraper? D' you 'member, curse you? 'Member breakin' the same
+boy's arm with a heaver? You do, don't you? I'm him. 'Member me sayin'
+I'd get square?"
+
+He stepped back to avoid the whirling belaying-pin sent by the mate,
+which, rebounding, only smashed a window in the pilot-house. Then, amid
+an exchange of blasphemous disapproval between Mr. Jackson and the tug
+captain, and derisive jeers from the shipping-master,--who also averred
+that Mr. Jackson ought to be shot, but was not worth hanging for,--the
+tug gathered in her lines and steamed away.
+
+Wrathful of soul, Mr. Jackson turned to the men on the deck. They had
+changed their position; they were now close to the fife-rail at the
+mainmast, surrounding Bigpig Monahan (for by their names we must know
+them), who, with an injured expression of face, was shedding outer
+garments and voicing his opinion of Mr. Jackson, which the others
+answered by nods and encouraging words. He had dropped a pair of
+starched cuffs over a belaying-pin, and was rolling up his
+shirt-sleeve, showing an arm as large as a small man's leg, and the
+mate was just about to interrupt the discourse, when the second mate
+called his name. Turning, he beheld him beckoning violently from the
+cabin companionway, and joined him.
+
+"Got your gun, Mr. Jackson?" asked the second officer, anxiously, as he
+drew him within the door. "I started for mine when the shippin'-master
+pulled. I can't make that crowd out; but they're lookin' for fight,
+that's plain. When you were at the rail they were sayin': 'Soak him,
+Bigpig.' 'Paste him, Bigpig.' 'Put a head on him.' They might be a lot
+o' prize-fighters."
+
+Mr. Becker was not afraid; his position and duties forbade it. He was
+simply human, and confronted with a new problem.
+
+"Don't care a rap what they are," answered the mate, who was sufficiently
+warmed up to welcome any problem. "They'll get fight enough. We'll
+overhaul their dunnage first for whisky and knives, then turn them to.
+Come on--I'm heeled."
+
+They stepped out and advanced to the capstan amidships, each with a
+hand in his trousers pocket.
+
+"Pile those bags against the capstan here, and go forrard," ordered the
+mate, in his most officer-like tone.
+
+"Go to the devil," they answered. "What for?--they're our bags, not
+yours. Who in Sam Hill are you, anyhow? What are you? You talk like a
+p'liceman."
+
+Before this irreverence could be replied to Bigpig Monahan advanced.
+
+"Look here, old horse," he said; "I don't know whether you're captain
+or mate, or owner or cook; and I don't care, either. You had somethin'
+to say 'bout my eyes just now. Nature made my eyes, and I can't help
+how they look; but I don't allow any big bull-heads to make remarks
+'bout 'em. You're spoilin' for somethin'. Put up your hands." He threw
+himself into an aggressive attitude, one mighty fist within six inches
+of Mr. Jackson's face.
+
+"Go forrard," roared the officer, his gray eyes sparkling; "forrard,
+all o' you!"
+
+"We'll settle this; then we'll go forrard. There'll be fair play; these
+men'll see to that. You'll only have me to handle. Put up."
+
+Mr. Jackson did not "put up." He repeated again his order to go
+forward, and was struck on the nose--not a hard blow; just a
+preliminary tap, which started blood. He immediately drew his pistol
+and shot the man, who fell with a groan.
+
+An expression of shock and horror over-spread every face among the
+crew, and they surged back, away from that murderous pistol. A
+momentary hesitance followed, then horror gave way to furious rage, and
+carnage began. Coats and vests were flung off, belaying-pins and
+capstan-bars seized; inarticulate, half-uttered imprecations punctuated
+by pistol reports drowned the storm of abuse with which the mates
+justified the shot, and two distinct bands of men swayed and zig-zagged
+about the deck, the center of each an officer fighting according to his
+lights--shooting as he could between blows of fists and clubs. Then the
+smoke of battle thinned, and two men with sore heads and bleeding faces
+retreated painfully and hurriedly to the cabin, followed by snarling
+maledictions and threats.
+
+It was hardly a victory for either side. The pistols were empty and the
+fight taken out of the mates for a time; and on the deck lay three
+moaning men, while two others clung to the fife-rail, draining blood
+from limp, hanging arms. But eleven sound and angry men were left--and
+the officers had more ammunition. They entered their rooms, mopped
+their faces with wet towels, reloaded the firearms, pocketed the
+remaining cartridges, and returned to the deck, the mate carrying a
+small ensign.
+
+"We'll run it up to the main, Becker," he said thickly,--for he
+suffered,--ignoring in his excitement the etiquette of the
+quarter-deck.
+
+"Aye, aye," said the other, equally unmindful of his breeding. "Will we
+go for 'em again?" The problem had defined itself to Mr. Becker. These
+men would fight, but not shoot.
+
+"No, no," answered the mate; "not unless they go for us and it's
+self-defense. They're not sailors--they don't know where they are. We
+don't want to get into trouble. Sailors don't act that way. We'll wait
+for the captain or the police." Which, interpreted, and plus the slight
+shade of anxiety showing in his disfigured face, meant that Mr. Jackson
+was confronted with a new phase of the problem: as to how much more
+unsafe it might be to shoot down, on the deck of a ship, men who did
+not know where they were, than to shoot down sailors who did. So, while
+the uninjured men were assisting the wounded five into the forecastle,
+the police flag was run up to the main-truck, and the two mates retired
+to the poop to wait and watch.
+
+In a few moments the eleven men came aft in a body, empty-handed,
+however, and evidently with no present hostile intention: they had
+merely come for their clothes. But that dunnage had not been searched;
+and in it might be all sorts of dangerous weapons and equally dangerous
+whisky, the possession of which could bring an unpleasant solution to
+the problem. So Mr. Jackson and Mr. Becker leveled their pistols over
+the poop-rail, and the chief mate roared: "Let those things alone--let
+'em alone, or we'll drop some more o' you."
+
+The men halted, hesitated, and sullenly returned to the forecastle.
+
+"Guess they've had enough," said Mr. Becker, jubilantly.
+
+"Don't fool yourself. They're not used to blood-letting, that's all. If
+it wasn't for my wife and the kids I'd lower the dinghy and jump her;
+and it isn't them I'd run from, either. As it is, I've half a mind to
+haul down the flag, and let the old man settle it. Steward," he called
+to a mild-faced man who had been flitting from galley to cabin,
+unmindful of the disturbance, "go forrard and find out how bad those
+fellows are hurt. Don't say I sent you, though."
+
+The steward obeyed, and returned with the information that two men had
+broken arms, two flesh-wounds in the legs, and one--the big
+man--suffered from a ragged hole through the shoulder. All were
+stretched out in bedless bunks, unwilling to move. He had been asked
+numerous questions by the others--as to where the ship was bound, who
+the men were who had shot them, why there was no bedding in the
+forecastle, the captain's whereabouts, and the possibility of getting
+ashore to swear out warrants. He had also been asked for bandages and
+hot water, which he requested permission to supply, as the wounded men
+were suffering greatly. This permission was refused, and the
+slight--very slight--nautical flavor to the queries, and the hopeful
+condition of the stricken ones, decided Mr. Jackson to leave the police
+flag at the masthead.
+
+When dinner was served in the cabin, and Mr. Jackson sat down before a
+savory roast, leaving Mr. Becker on deck to watch, the steward imparted
+the additional information that the men forward expected to eat in the
+cabin.
+
+"Hang it!" he mused; "they can't be sailor-men."
+
+Then Mr. Becker reached his head down the skylight, and said: "Raisin'
+the devil with the cook, sir--dragged him out o' the galley into the
+forecastle."
+
+"Are they coming aft?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"All right. Watch out."
+
+The mate went on eating, and the steward hurried forward to learn the
+fate of his assistant. He did not return until Mr. Jackson was about to
+leave the cabin. Then he came, with a wry face and disgust in his soul,
+complaining that he had been seized, hustled into the forecastle, and
+compelled, with the Chinese cook, to eat of the salt beef and pea-soup
+prepared for the men, which lay untouched by them. In spite of his
+aches and trouble of mind, Mr. Jackson was moved to a feeble grin.
+
+"Takes a sailor or a hog to eat it, hey, Steward?" he said.
+
+He relieved Mr. Becker, who ate his dinner hurriedly, as became a good
+second mate, and the two resumed their watch on the poop, noticing that
+the cook was jabbering Chinese protest in the galley, and that the men
+had climbed to the topgallant-forecastle--also watching, and
+occasionally waving futile signals to passing tugs or small
+sailing-craft. They, too, might have welcomed the police boat.
+
+But, either because the _Almena_ lay too far over on the Jersey flats
+for the flag to be noticed, or because harbor police share the
+fallibility of their shore brethren in being elsewhere when wanted, no
+shiny black steamer with blue-coated guard appeared to investigate the
+trouble, and it was well on toward three o'clock before a tug left the
+beaten track to the eastward and steamed over to the ship. The officers
+took her lines as she came alongside, and two men climbed the
+side-ladder--one, a Sandy Hook pilot, who need not be described; the
+other, the captain of the ship.
+
+Captain Benson, in manner and appearance, was as superior to the
+smooth-shaven and manly-looking Mr. Jackson as the latter was to the
+misformed, hairy, and brutal second mate. With his fashionably cut
+clothing, steady blue eye, and refined features, he could have been
+taken for an easy-going club-man or educated army officer rather than
+the master of a working-craft. Yet there was no lack of seamanly
+decision in the leap he made from the rail to the deck, or in the tone
+of his voice as he demanded:
+
+"What's the police flag up for, Mr. Jackson?"
+
+"Mutiny, sir. They started in to lick me 'fore turning to, and we've
+shot five, but none of them fatally."
+
+"Lower that flag--at once."
+
+Mr. Becker obeyed this order, and as the flag fluttered down the
+captain received an account of the crew's misdoing from the mate. He
+stepped into his cabin, and returning with a double-barreled shot-gun,
+leaned it against the booby-hatch, and said quietly: "Call all hands
+aft who can come."
+
+Mr. Jackson delivered the order in a roar, and the eleven men forward,
+who had been watching the newcomers from the forecastle-deck, straggled
+aft and clustered near the capstan, all of them hatless and coatless,
+shivering palpably in the keen December air. With no flinching of their
+eyes, they stared at Captain Benson and the pilot.
+
+"Now, men," said the captain, "what's this trouble about? What's the
+matter?"
+
+"Are you the captain here?" asked a red-haired, Roman-nosed man, as he
+stepped out of the group. "There's matter enough. We ship for a run
+down to Rio Janeiro and back in a big schooner; and here we're put
+aboard a square-rigged craft, that we don't know anything about, bound
+for Callao, and 'fore we're here ten minutes we're howled at and shot.
+Bigpig Monahan thinks he's goin' to die; he's bleedin'--they're all
+bleedin', like stuck pigs. Sorry Welch and Turkey Twain ha' got broken
+arms, and Jump Black and Ghost O'Brien got it in the legs and can't
+stand up. What kind o' work is this, anyhow?"
+
+"That's perfectly right. You were shot for assaulting my officers. Do
+you call yourselves able seamen, and say you know nothing about
+square-rigged craft?"
+
+"We're able seamen on the Lakes. We can get along in schooners. That's
+what we came down for."
+
+Captain Benson's lips puckered, and he whistled softly. "The Lakes," he
+said--"lake sailors. What part of the Lakes?"
+
+"Oswego. We're all union men."
+
+The captain took a turn or two along the deck, then faced them, and
+said: "Men, I've been fooled as well as you. I would not have an Oswego
+sailor aboard my ship--much less a whole crew of them. You may know
+your work up there, but are almost useless here until you learn.
+Although I paid five dollars a man for you, I'd put you ashore and ship
+a new crew were it not for the fact that five wounded men going out of
+this ship requires explanations, which would delay my sailing and incur
+expense to my owners. However, I give you the choice--to go to sea, and
+learn your work under the mates, or go to jail as mutineers; for to
+protect my officers I must prosecute you all."
+
+"S'pose we do neither?"
+
+"You will probably be shot--to the last resisting man--either by us or
+the harbor police. You are up against the law."
+
+They looked at each other with varying expressions on their faces; then
+one asked: "What about the bunks in the forecastle? There's no
+bedding."
+
+"If you failed to bring your own, you will sleep on the bunk-boards
+without it."
+
+"And that swill the Chinaman cooked at dinner-time--what about that?"
+
+"You will get the allowance of provisions provided by law--no more. And
+you will eat it in the forecastle. Also, if you have neglected to bring
+pots, pans, and spoons, you will very likely eat it with your fingers.
+This is not a lake vessel, where sailors eat at the cabin table, with
+knives and forks. Decide this matter quickly."
+
+The captain began pacing the deck, and the listening pilot stepped
+forward, and said kindly: "Take my advice, boys, and go along. You're
+in for it if you don't."
+
+They thanked him with their eyes for the sympathy, conferred together
+for a few moments, then their spokesman called out: "We'll leave it to
+the fellers forrard, captain"; and forward they trooped. In five
+minutes they were back, with resolution in their faces.
+
+"We'll go, captain," their leader said. "Bigpig can't be moved 'thout
+killin' him, and says if he lives he'll follow your mate to hell but
+he'll pay him back; and the others talk the same; and we'll stand by
+'em--we'll square up this day's work."
+
+Captain Benson brought his walk to a stop close to the shot-gun. "Very
+well, that is your declaration," he said, his voice dropping the
+conversational tone he had assumed, and taking on one more in
+accordance with his position; "now I will deliver mine. We sail at once
+for Callao and back to an American port of discharge. You know your
+wages--fourteen dollars a month. I am master of this ship, responsible
+to my owners and the law for the lives of all on board. And this
+responsibility includes the right to take the life of a mutineer. You
+have been such, but I waive the charge considering your ignorance of
+salt-water custom and your agreement to start anew. The law defines
+your allowance of food, but not your duties or your working- and
+sleeping-time. That is left to the discretion of your captain and
+officers. Precedent--the decision of the courts--has decided the
+privilege of a captain or officer to punish insolence or lack of
+respect from a sailor with a blow--of a fist or missile; but,
+understand me now, a return of the blow makes that man a mutineer, and
+his prompt killing is justified by the law of the land. Is this plain
+to you? You are here to answer and obey orders respectfully, adding the
+word 'sir' to each response; you are never to go to windward of an
+officer, or address him by name without the prefix 'Mr.'; and you are
+to work civilly and faithfully, resenting nothing said to you until you
+are discharged in an American port at the end of the voyage. A failure
+in this will bring you prompt punishment; and resentment of this
+punishment on your part will bring--death. Mr. Jackson," he concluded,
+turning to his first officer, "overhaul their dunnage, turn them to,
+and man the windlass."
+
+A man--the bald-headed Sinful Peck--sprang forward; but his face was
+not cherubic now. His blue eyes blazed with emotion much in keeping
+with his sobriquet; and, raising his hand, the nervously crooking
+fingers of which made it almost a fist, he said, in a voice explosively
+strident:
+
+"That's all right. That's _your_ say. You've described the condition o'
+nigger slaves, not American voters. And I'll tell you one thing, right
+here--I'm a free-born citizen. I know my work, and can do it, without
+bein' cursed and abused; and if you or your mates rub my fur the wrong
+way I'm goin' to claw back; and if I'm shot, you want to shoot sure;
+for if you don't, I'll kill that man, if I have to lash my knife to a
+broom-handle, and prod him through his window when he's asleep."
+
+But alas for Sinful Peck! He had barely finished his defiance when he
+fell like a log under the impact of the big mate's fist; then, while
+the pilot, turning his back on the painful scene, walked aft, nodding
+and shaking his head, and the captain's strong language and leveled
+shot-gun induced the men to an agitated acquiescence, the two officers
+kicked and stamped upon the little man until consciousness left him.
+Before he recovered he had been ironed to a stanchion in the
+'tween-deck, and entered in the captain's official log for threatening
+life. And by this time the dunnage had been searched, a few
+sheath-knives tossed overboard, and the remaining ten men were moodily
+heaving in the chain.
+
+And so, with a crippled crew of schooner sailors, the square-rigger
+_Almena_ was towed to sea, smoldering rebellion in one end of her, the
+power of the law in the other--murder in the heart of every man on
+board.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+Five months later the _Almena_ lay at an outer mooring-buoy in Callao
+Roads, again ready for sea, but waiting. With her at the anchorage
+were representatives of most of the maritime nations. English ships
+and barks with painted ports and spider-web braces, high-sided,
+square-sterned American half-clippers, clumsy, square-bowed "Dutchmen,"
+coasting-brigs of any nation, lumber-schooners from "'Frisco,"
+hide-carriers from Valparaiso, pearl-boats and fishermen, and even a
+couple of homesick Malay proas from the west crowded the roadstead; for
+the guano trade was booming, and Callao prosperous. Nearly every type
+of craft known to sailors was there; but the postman and the policeman
+of the seas--the coastwise mail-steamer and the heavily sparred
+man-of-war--were conspicuously absent. The Pacific Mail boat would not
+arrive for a week, and the last cruiser had departed two days before.
+
+Beyond the faint land- and sea-breeze, there was no wind nor promise of
+it for several days; and Captain Benson, though properly cleared at the
+custom-house for New York, was in no hurry, and had taken advantage of
+the delay to give a dinner to some captains with whom he had
+fraternized on shore. "I've a first-rate steward," he had told them,
+"and I'll treat you well; and I've the best-trained crew that ever went
+to sea. Come, all of you, and bring your first officers. I want to give
+you an object-lesson on the influence of matter over mind that you
+can't learn in the books."
+
+So they came, at half-past eleven, in their own ships' dinghies, which
+were sent back with orders to return at nightfall--six big-fisted,
+more or less fat captains, and six big-fisted, beetle-browed, and
+embarrassed chief mates. As they climbed the gangway they were met and
+welcomed by Captain Benson, who led them to the poop, the only dry and
+clean part of the ship; for the _Almena's_ crew were holystoning the
+main-deck, and as this operation consists in grinding off the oiled
+surface of the planks with sandstone, the resulting slime of sand, oily
+wood-pulp, and salt water made walking unpleasant, as well as being
+very hard on polished shoe-leather. But in this filthy slime the men
+were on their knees, working the six-inch blocks of stone, technically
+called "bibles," back and forth with about the speed and motion of an
+energetic woman over a wash-board.
+
+The mates also were working. With legs clad in long rubber boots, they
+filled buckets at the deck-pump and scattered water around where
+needed, occasionally throwing the whole bucketful at a doubtful spot on
+the deck to expose it to criticism. As the visitors lined up against
+the monkey-rail and looked down on the scene, Mr. Becker launched such
+a bucketful as only a second mate can--and a man who happened to be in
+the way was rolled over by the unexpected impact. He gasped a little
+louder than might have been necessary, and the wasting of the bucketful
+of water having forced Mr. Becker to make an extra trip to the pump,
+the officer was duly incensed.
+
+"Get out o' the way, there," he bawled, eying the man sternly. "What
+are you gruntin' at? A little water won't hurt you--soap neither."
+
+He went to the pump for more water, and the man crawled back to his
+holystone. It was Bigpig Monahan, hollow-eyed and thin, slow in his
+voluntary movements; minus his look of injury, too, as though he might
+have welcomed the bowling over as a momentary respite for his aching
+muscles.
+
+Now and then, when the officers' faces were partly turned, a man would
+stop, rise erect on his knees, and bend backward. A man may work a
+holystone much longer and press it much harder on the deck for these
+occasional stretchings of contracted tissue; but the two mates chose to
+ignore this physiological fact, and a moment later, a little man,
+caught in the act by Mr. Jackson, was also rolled over on his back, not
+by a bucket of water, but by the boot of the mate, who uttered words
+suitable to the occasion, and held his hand in his pocket until the
+little man, grinning with rage, had resumed his work.
+
+"There," said Captain Benson to his guests on the poop; "see that
+little devil! See him show his teeth! That is Mr. Sinful Peck. I've had
+him in irons with a broken head five times, and the log is full of him.
+I towed him over the stern running down the trades to take the
+cussedness out of him, and if he had not been born for higher things,
+he'd have drowned. He was absolutely unconquerable until I found him
+telling his beads one time in irons and took them away from him. Now to
+get an occasional chance at them he is fairly quiet."
+
+"So this is your trained crew, is it, captain?" said a grizzled old
+skipper of the party. "What ails that fellow down in the scuppers with
+a prayer-book?" He pointed to a man who with one hand was rubbing a
+small holystone in a corner where a large one would not go.
+
+"Ran foul of the big end of a handspike," answered Captain Benson,
+quietly; "he'll carry his arm in splints all the way home, I think. His
+name is Gunner Meagher. I don't know how they got their names, but they
+signed them and will answer to them. They are unique. Look at that
+outlaw down there by the bitts. That is Poop-deck Cahill. Looks like a
+prize-fighter, doesn't he? But the steward tells me that he was
+educated for the priesthood, and fell by the wayside. That one close to
+the hatch--the one with the red head and hang-dog jib--is Seldom
+Helward. He was shot off the cro'-jack yard; he fell into the lee clew
+of the cro'-jack, so we pulled him in."
+
+"What did he do, captain?" asked the grizzled skipper.
+
+"Threw a marlinespike at the mate."
+
+"What made him throw it?"
+
+"Never asked. I suppose he objected to something said to him."
+
+"Ought to ha' killed him on the yard. Are they all of a kind?"
+
+"Every man. Not one knew the ropes or his place when he shipped.
+They're schooner sailors from the Lakes, where the captain, if he is
+civil and respectful to his men, is as good as any of them. They
+started to clean us up the first day, but failed, and I went to sea
+with them. Since then, until lately, it has been war to the knife. I've
+set more bones, mended more heads, and plugged more shot-holes on this
+passage than ever before, and my officers have grown perceptibly
+thinner; but little by little, man by man, we've broken them in. Still,
+I admit, it was a job. Why, that same Seldom Helward I ironed and ran
+up on the fall of a main-buntline. We were rolling before a stiff
+breeze and sea, and he would swing six feet over each rail and bat
+against the mast in transit; but the dog stood it eight hours before he
+stopped cursing us. Then he was unconscious. When he came to in the
+forecastle, he was ready to begin again; but they stopped him. They're
+keeping a log, I learn, and are going to law. Every time a man gets
+thumped they enter the tragedy, and all sign their names."
+
+Captain Benson smiled dignifiedly in answer to the outburst of laughter
+evoked by this, and the men below lifted their haggard, hopeless faces
+an instant, and looked at the party with eyes that were
+furtive--cat-like. The grinding of the stones prevented their hearing
+the talk, but they knew that they were being laughed at.
+
+"Never knew a sailor yet," wheezed a portly and asthmatic captain, "who
+wasn't ready to sue the devil and try the court in hell when he's at
+sea. Trouble is, they never get past the first saloon."
+
+"They got a little law here," resumed Captain Benson, quietly. "I put
+them all in the guardo. The consul advised it, and committed them for
+fear they might desert when we lay at the dock. When I took them out to
+run to the islands, they complained of being starved; and to tell the
+truth, they didn't throw their next meal overboard as usual.
+Nevertheless, a good four weeks' board-bill comes out of their wages. I
+don't think they'll have a big pay-day in New York: the natives cleaned
+out the forecastle in their absence, and they'll have to draw heavily
+on my slop-chest."
+
+"That's where captains have the best of it," said one of the mates,
+jocularly--and presumptuously, to judge by his captain's frown; "we
+hammer 'em round and wear out their clothes, and it's the captain that
+sells 'em new ones."
+
+"Captain," said the grizzled one, who had been scanning the crew
+intently, "I'd pay that crew off if I were you; you ought to ha' let
+'em run, or worked 'em out and saved their pay. Look at 'em--look at
+the devils in their eyes. I notice your mates seldom turn their backs
+on 'em. I'd get rid of 'em."
+
+"What! Just when we have them under control and useful? Oh, no! They
+know their work now, and I'd only have to ship a crowd of beach-combers
+and half-breeds at nearly double pay. Besides, gentlemen, we're just a
+little proud of this crew. They are lake sailors from Oswego, a little
+port on Lake Ontario. When I was young I sailed on the Lakes a season
+or two and became thoroughly acquainted with the aggressive
+self-respect of that breed. They would rather fight than eat. Their
+reputation in this regard prevents them getting berths in any but
+Oswego vessels, and even affects the policy of the nation. There's a
+fort at Oswego, and whenever a company of soldiers anywhere in the
+country become unmanageable--when their officers can't control them
+outside the guard-house--the War Department at Washington transfers
+them to Oswego for the tutelage they will get from the sailors. And
+they get it; they are well-behaved, well-licked soldiers when they
+leave. An Oswego sailor loves a row. He is possessed by the fighting
+spirit of a bulldog; he inherits it with his Irish sense of injury; he
+sucks it in with his mother's milk, and drinks it in with his whisky;
+and when no enemies are near, he will fight his friends. Pay them off?
+Not much. I've taken sixteen of those devils round the Horn, and I'll
+take them back. I'm proud of them. Just look at them," he concluded
+vivaciously, as he waved his hand at his men; "docile and obedient,
+down on their knees with bibles and prayer-books."
+
+"And the name o' the Lord on their lips," grunted the adviser; "but not
+in prayer, I'll bet you."
+
+"Hardly," laughed Captain Benson. "Come below, gentlemen; the steward
+is ready."
+
+From lack of facilities the mild-faced and smiling steward could not
+serve that dinner with the style which it deserved. He would have
+liked, he explained, as they seated themselves, to bring it on in
+separate courses; but one and all disclaimed such frivolity. The dinner
+was there, and that was enough. And it was a splendid dinner. In front
+of Captain Benson, at the head of the table, stood a large tureen of
+smoking terrapin-stew; next to that a stuffed and baked freshly caught
+fish; and waiting their turn in the center of the spread, a couple of
+brace of wild geese from the inland lakes, brown and glistening,
+oyster-dressed and savory. Farther along was a steaming plum-pudding,
+overhead on a swinging tray a dozen bottles of wine, by the captain's
+elbow a decanter of yellow fluid, and before each man's plate a couple
+of glasses of different size.
+
+"We'll start off with an appetizer, gentlemen," said the host, as he
+passed the decanter to his neighbor. "Here is some of the best Dutch
+courage ever distilled; try it."
+
+The decanter went around, each filling his glass and holding it poised;
+then, when all were supplied, they drank to the grizzled old captain's
+toast: "A speedy and pleasant passage home for the _Almena_, and
+further confusion to her misguided crew." The captain responded
+gracefully, and began serving the stew, which the steward took from him
+plate by plate, and passed around.
+
+But, either because thirteen men had sat down to that table, or because
+the Fates were unusually freakish that day, it was destined that,
+beyond the initial glass of whisky, not a man present should partake of
+Captain Benson's dinner. On deck things had been happening, and just as
+the host had filled the last plate for himself, a wet, bedraggled,
+dirty little man, his tarry clothing splashed with the slime of the
+deck, his eyes flaming green, his face expanded to a smile of ferocity,
+appeared in the forward doorway, holding a cocked revolver which
+covered them all. Behind him in the passage were other men, equally
+unkempt, their eyes wide open with excitement and anticipation.
+
+"Don't ye move," yelped the little man, "not a man. Keep yer hands out
+o' yer pockets. Put 'em over yer heads. That's it. You too, cappen."
+
+They obeyed him (there was death in the green eyes and smile), all but
+one. Captain Benson sprang to his feet, with a hand in his breast
+pocket.
+
+"You scoundrels!" he cried, as he drew forth a pistol. "Leave this----"
+The speech was stopped by a report, deafening in the closed-up space;
+and Captain Benson fell heavily, his pistol rattling on the floor.
+
+"Hang me up, will ye?" growled another voice through the smoke.
+
+In the after-door were more men, the red-haired Seldom Helward in the
+van, holding a smoking pistol. "Get the gun, one o' you fellows over
+there," he called.
+
+A man stepped in and picked up the pistol, which he cocked.
+
+"One by one," said Seldom, his voice rising to the pitch and timbre of
+a trumpet-blast, "you men walk out the forward companionway with your
+hands over your heads. Plug them, Sinful, if two move together, and
+shoot to kill."
+
+Taken by surprise, the guests, resolute men though they were, obeyed
+the command. As each rose to his feet, he was first relieved of a
+bright revolver, which served to increase the moral front of the enemy,
+then led out to the booby-hatch, on which lay a newly broached coil of
+hambro-line and pile of thole-pins from the boatswain's locker. Here he
+was searched again for jack-knife or brass knuckles, bound with the
+hambro-line, gagged with a thole-pin, and marched forward, past the
+prostrate first mate, who lay quiet in the scuppers, and the erect but
+agonized second mate, gagged and bound to the fife-rail, to the port
+forecastle, where he was locked in with the Chinese cook, who,
+similarly treated, had preceded. The mild-faced steward, weeping now,
+as much from professional disappointment as from stronger emotion, was
+questioned sternly, and allowed his freedom on his promise not to "sing
+out" or make trouble. Captain Benson was examined, his injury diagnosed
+as brain-concussion, from the glancing bullet, more or less serious,
+and dragged out to the scuppers, where he was bound beside his
+unconscious first officer. Then, leaving them to live or die as their
+subconsciousness determined, the sixteen mutineers sacrilegiously
+reentered the cabin and devoured the dinner. And the appetites they
+displayed--their healthy, hilarious enjoyment of the good things on the
+table--so affected the professional sense of the steward that he ceased
+his weeping, and even smiled as he waited on them.
+
+When you have cursed, beaten, and kicked a slave for five months it is
+always advisable to watch him for a few seconds after you administer
+correction, to give him time to realize his condition. And when you
+have carried a revolver in the right-hand trousers pocket for five
+months it is advisable occasionally to inspect the cloth of the pocket
+to make sure that it is not wearing thin from the chafe of the muzzle.
+Mr. Jackson had ignored the first rule of conduct, Mr. Becker the
+second. Mr. Jackson had kicked Sinful Peck once too often; but not
+knowing that it was once too often, had immediately turned his back,
+and received thereat the sharp corner of a bible on his bump of
+inhabitiveness, which bump responded in its function; for Mr. Jackson
+showed no immediate desire to move from the place where he fell. Beyond
+binding, he received no further attention from the men. Mr. Becker, on
+his way to the lazarette in the stern for a bucket of sand to assist in
+the holystoning, had reached the head of the poop steps when this
+occurred; and turning at the sound of his superior's fall, had bounded
+to the main-deck without touching the steps, reaching for his pistol as
+he landed, only to pinion his fingers in a large hole in the pocket.
+Wildly he struggled to reclaim his weapon, down his trouser leg, held
+firmly to his knee by the tight rubber boot; but he could not reach it.
+His anxious face betrayed his predicament to the wakening men, and when
+he looked into Mr. Jackson's revolver, held by Sinful Peck, he
+submitted to being bound to the fife-rail and gagged with the end of
+the topgallant-sheet--a large rope, which just filled his mouth, and
+hurt. Then the firearm was recovered, and the descent upon the
+dinner-party quickly planned and carried out.
+
+Have you ever seen a kennel of hunting-dogs released on a fine day
+after long confinement--how they bark and yelp, chasing one another,
+biting playfully, rolling and tumbling over and over in sheer joy and
+healthy appreciation of freedom? Without the vocal expression of
+emotion, the conduct of these men after that wine dinner was very
+similar to that of such emancipated dogs. They waltzed, boxed,
+wrestled, threw each other about the deck, turned handsprings and
+cartwheels,--those not too weak,--buffeted, kicked, and clubbed the
+suffering Mr. Becker, reviled and cursed the unconscious captain and
+chief officer, and when tired of this, as children and dogs of play,
+they turned to their captives for amusement. The second mate was taken
+from the fife-rail, with hands still bound, and led to the forecastle;
+the gags of all and the bonds of the cook were removed, and the
+forecastle dinner was brought from the galley. This they were invited
+to eat. There was a piece of salt beef, boiled a little longer than
+usual on account of the delay; it was black, brown, green, and
+iridescent in spots; it was slippery with ptomaines, filthy to the
+sight, stinking, and nauseating. There were potatoes, two years old,
+shriveled before boiling--hard and soggy, black, blue, and bitter after
+the process. And there was the usual "weevily hardtack" in the
+bread-barge.
+
+Protest was useless. The unhappy captives surrounded that dinner on the
+forecastle floor (for there was neither table to sit at, nor chests,
+stools, or boxes to sit on, in the apartment), and, with hands behind
+their backs and disgust in their faces, masticated and swallowed the
+morsels which the Chinese cook put to their mouths, while their
+feelings were further outraged by the hilarity of the men at their
+backs, and their appetites occasionally jogged into activity by the
+impact on their heads of a tarry fist or pistol-butt. At last a portly
+captain began vomiting, and this being contagious, the meal ended; for
+even the stomachs of the sailors, overcharged as they were with the
+rich food and wine of the cabin table, were affected by the spectacle.
+
+There were cool heads in that crowd of mutineers--men who thought of
+consequences: Poop-deck Cahill, square-faced and resolute, but
+thoughtful of eye and refined of speech; Seldom Helward, who had shot
+the captain--a man whose fiery hair, arching eyebrows, Roman nose, and
+explosive language indicated the daredevil, but whose intelligent
+though humorous eye and corrugated forehead gave certain signs of
+repressive study and thought; and Bigpig Monahan, already described.
+These three men went into session under the break of the poop, and came
+to the conclusion that the consul who had jailed them for nothing would
+hang them for this; then, calling the rest to the conference as a
+committee of the whole, they outlined and put to vote a proposition to
+make sail and go to sea, leaving the fate of their captives for later
+consideration--which was adopted unanimously and with much profanity,
+the central thought of the latter being an intention to "make 'em
+finish the holystonin' for the fun they had laughin' at us." Then
+Bigpig Monahan sneaked below and induced the steward to toss through
+the store-room dead-light every bottle of wine and liquor which the
+ship contained. "For Seldom and Poop-deck," he said to him, "are the
+only men in the gang fit to pick up navigation and git this ship into
+port again; but if they git their fill of it, it's all day with you,
+steward."
+
+Six second mates on six American ships watched curiously, doubtingly,
+and at last anxiously, as sails were dropped and yards mastheaded on
+board the _Almena_, and as she paid off from the mooring-buoy before
+the land-breeze and showed them her stern, sent six dinghies, which
+gave up the pursuit in a few minutes and mustered around the buoy,
+where a wastefully slipped shot of anchor-chain gave additional
+evidence that all was not right. But by the time the matter was
+reported to the authorities ashore, the _Almena_, having caught the
+newly arrived southerly wind off the Peruvian coast, was hull down on
+the western horizon.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+Four days later, one of the _Almena's_ boats, containing twelve men
+with sore heads, disfigured faces, and clothing ruined by oily
+wood-pulp,--ruined particularly about the knees of their trousers,--came
+wearily into the roadstead from the open sea, past the shipping, and up
+to the landing at the custom-house docks. From here the twelve
+proceeded to the American consul and entered bitter complaint of
+inhuman treatment received at the hands of sixteen mutinous sailors on
+board the _Almena_--treatment so cruel that they had welcomed being
+turned adrift in an open boat; whereat, the consul, deploring the
+absence of man-of-war or steamer to send in pursuit, took their
+individual affidavits; and these he sent to San Francisco, from which
+point the account of the crime, described as piracy, spread to every
+newspaper in Christendom.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+A Northeast gale off Hatteras: immense gray combers, five to the mile,
+charging shoreward, occasionally breaking, again lifting their heads
+too high in the effort, truncated as by a knife, and the liquid apex
+shattered to spray; an expanse of leaden sky showing between the
+rain-squalls, across which heavy background rushed the darker scud and
+storm-clouds; a passenger-steamer rolling helplessly in the trough, and
+a square-rigged vessel, hove to on the port tack, two miles to windward
+of the steamer, and drifting south toward the storm-center. This is the
+picture that the sea-birds saw at daybreak on a September morning, and
+could the sea-birds have spoken they might have told that the
+square-rigged craft carried a navigator who had learned that a whirling
+fury of storm-center was less to be feared than the deadly Diamond
+Shoals--the outlying guard of Cape Hatteras toward which that steamer
+was drifting, broadside on.
+
+Clad in yellow oilskins and sou'wester, he stood by the
+after-companionway, intently examining through a pair of glasses the
+wallowing steamer to leeward, barely distinguishable in the half-light
+and driving spindrift. On the main-deck a half-dozen men paced up and
+down, sheltered by the weather rail; forward, two others walked the
+deck by the side of the forward house, but never allowed their march to
+extend past the after-corner; and at the wheel stood a little man who
+sheltered a cheerful face under the lee of a big coat-collar, and
+occasionally peeped out at the navigator.
+
+"Poop-deck," he shouted above the noise of the wind, "take the wheel
+till I fire up."
+
+"Thought I was exempt from steering," growled the other,
+good-humoredly, as he placed the glasses inside the companionway.
+
+"You're getting too fat and sassy; steer a little."
+
+Poop-deck relieved the little man, who descended the cabin stairs, and
+returned in a few moments, smoking a short pipe. He took the wheel, and
+Poop-deck again examined the steamer with the glasses.
+
+"There goes his ensign, union down," he exclaimed; "he's in trouble.
+We'll show ours."
+
+From a flag-locker inside the companionway he drew out the Stars and
+Stripes, which he ran up to the monkey-gaff. Then he looked again.
+
+"Down goes his ensign; up goes the code pennant. He wants to signal.
+Come up here, boys," called Poop-deck; "give me a hand."
+
+As the six men climbed the steps, he pulled out the corresponding code
+signal from the locker, and ran it up on the other part of the halyards
+as the ensign fluttered down. "Go down, one of you," he said, "and get
+the signal-book and shipping-list. He'll show his number next. Get ours
+ready--R. L. F. T."
+
+While a man sprang below for the books named, the others hooked
+together the signal-flags forming the ship's number, and Poop-deck
+resumed the glasses.
+
+"Q. T. F. N.," he exclaimed. "Look it up."
+
+The books had arrived, and while one lowered and hoisted again the code
+signal, which was also the answering pennant, the others pored over the
+shipping-list.
+
+"Steamer _Aldebaran_ of New York," they said.
+
+The pennant came down, and the ship's number went up to the gaff.
+
+"H. V.," called Poop-deck, as he scanned two flags now flying from the
+steamer's truck. "What does that say?"
+
+"Damaged rudder--cannot steer," they answered.
+
+"Pull down the number and show the answering pennant again," said
+Poop-deck; "and let me see that signal-book." He turned the leaves,
+studied a page for a moment, then said: "Run up H. V. R. That says,
+'What do you want?' and that's the nearest thing to it."
+
+These flags took the place of the answering pennant at the gaff-end,
+and again Poop-deck watched through the glasses, noting first the
+showing of the steamer's answering pennant, then the letters K. R. N.
+
+"What does K. R. N. say?" he asked.
+
+They turned the leaves, and answered: "I can tow you."
+
+"Tow us? We're all right; we don't want a tow. He's crazy. How can he
+tow us when he can't steer?" exclaimed three or four together.
+
+"He wants to tow us so that he _can_ steer, you blasted fools," said
+Poop-deck. "He can keep head to sea and go where he likes with a big
+drag on his stern."
+
+"That's so. Where's he bound--'you that has knowledge and eddication'?"
+
+"Didn't say; but he's bound for the Diamond Shoals, and he'll fetch up
+in three hours, if we can't help him. He's close in."
+
+"Tow-line's down the forepeak," said a man. "Couldn't get it up in an
+hour," said another. "Yes, we can," said a third. Then, all speaking at
+once, and each raising his voice to its limit, they argued excitedly:
+"Can't be done." "Coil it on the forecastle." "Yes, we can." "Too much
+sea." "Run down to wind'ard." "Line 'ud part, anyhow." "Float a
+barrel." "Shut up." "I tell you, we can." "Call the watch." "Seldom,
+yer daft." "Needn't get a boat over." "Hell ye can." "Call the boys."
+"All hands with heavin'-lines." "Can't back a topsail in this." "Go lay
+down." "Soak yer head, Seldom." "Hush." "Shut up." "Nothing _you_ can't
+do." "Go to the devil." "I tell you, we can; do as I say, and we'll get
+a line to him, or get his."
+
+The affirmative speaker, who had also uttered the last declaration, was
+Seldom Helward. "Put me in command," he yelled excitedly, "and do what
+I tell you, and we'll make fast to him."
+
+"No captains here," growled one, while the rest eyed Seldom
+reprovingly.
+
+"Well, there ought to be; you're all rattled, and don't know any more
+than to let thousands o' dollars slip past you. There's salvage down to
+looward."
+
+"Salvage?"
+
+"Yes, salvage. Big boat--full o' passengers and valuable cargo--shoals
+to looward of him--can't steer. You poor fools, what ails you?"
+
+"Foller Seldom," vociferated the little man at the wheel; "foller
+Seldom, and ye'll wear stripes."
+
+"Dry up, Sinful. Call the watch. It's near seven bells, anyhow. Let's
+hear what the rest say. Strike the bell."
+
+The uproarious howl with which sailors call the watch below was
+delivered down the cabin stairs, and soon eight other men came up,
+rubbing their eyes and grumbling at the premature wakening, while
+another man came out of the forecastle and joined the two pacing the
+forward deck. Seldom Helward's proposition was discussed noisily in
+joint session on the poop, and finally accepted.
+
+"We put you in charge, Seldom, against the rule," said Bigpig Monahan,
+sternly, "'cause we think you've some good scheme in your head; but if
+you haven't,--if you make a mess of things just to have a little fun
+bossin' us,--you'll hear from us. Go ahead, now. You're captain."
+
+Seldom climbed to the top of the after-house, looked to windward, then
+to leeward at the rolling steamer, and called out:
+
+"I want more beef at the wheel. Bigpig, take it; and you, Turkey, stand
+by with him. Get away from there, Sinful. Give her the upper
+maintopsail, the rest of you. Poop-deck, you stand by the
+signal-halyards. Ask him if he's got a tow-line ready."
+
+Protesting angrily at the slight put upon him, Sinful Peck relinquished
+the wheel, and joined the rest on the main-deck, where they had
+hurried. Two men went aloft to loose the topsail, and the rest cleared
+away gear, while Poop-deck examined the signal-book.
+
+"K. S. G. says, 'Have a tow-line ready.' That ought to do, Seldom," he
+called.
+
+"Run it up," ordered the newly installed captain, "and watch his
+answer." Up went the signal, and as the men on the main-deck were
+manning the topsail-halyards, Poop-deck made out the answer: "V. K. C."
+
+"That means 'All right,' Seldom," he said, after inspecting the book.
+
+"Good enough; but we'll get our line ready, too. Get down and help 'em
+mast-head the yard first, then take 'em forrard and coil the tow-line
+abaft the windlass. Get all the heavin'-lines ready, too."
+
+Poop-deck obeyed; and while the main-topsail-yard slowly arose to place
+under the efforts of the rest, Seldom himself ran up the answering
+pennant, and then the repetition of the steamer's last message: "All
+right." This was the final signal displayed between the two craft. Both
+signal-flags were lowered, and for a half-hour Seldom waited, until the
+others had lifted a nine-inch hawser from the forepeak and coiled it
+down. Then came his next orders in a continuous roar:
+
+"Three hands aft to the spanker-sheet! Stand by to slack off and haul
+in! Man the braces for wearing ship, the rest o' you! Hard up the
+wheel! Check in port main and starboard cro'-jack braces! Shiver the
+topsail! Slack off that spanker!"
+
+Before he had finished the men had reached their posts. The orders were
+obeyed. The ship paid off, staggered a little in the trough under the
+right-angle pressure of the gale, swung still farther, and steadied
+down to a long, rolling motion, dead before the wind, heading for the
+steamer. Yards were squared in, the spanker hauled aft, staysail
+trimmed to port, and all hands waited while the ship charged down the
+two miles of intervening sea.
+
+"Handles like a yacht," muttered Seldom, as, with brow wrinkled and
+keen eye flashing above his hooked nose, he conned the steering from
+his place near the mizzenmast.
+
+Three men separated themselves from the rest and came aft. They were
+those who had walked the forward deck. One was tall, broad-shouldered,
+and smooth-shaven, with a palpable limp; another, short, broad, and
+hairy, showed a lamentable absence of front teeth; and the third, a
+blue-eyed man, slight and graceful of movement, carried his arm in
+splints and sling. This last was in the van as they climbed the poop
+steps.
+
+"I wish to protest," he said. "I am captain of this ship under the law.
+I protest against this insanity. No boat can live in this sea. No help
+can be given that steamer."
+
+"And I bear witness to the protest," said the tall man. The short,
+hairy man might have spoken also, but had no time.
+
+"Get off the poop," yelled Seldom. "Go forrard, where you belong." He
+stood close to the bucket-rack around the skylight. Seizing bucket
+after bucket, he launched them at his visitors, with the result that
+the big man was tumbled down the poop steps head first, while the other
+two followed, right side up, but hurriedly, and bearing some sore
+spots. Then the rest of the men set upon them, much as a pack of dogs
+would worry strange cats, and kicked and buffeted them forward.
+
+There was no time for much amusement of this sort. Yards were braced to
+port, for the ship was careering down toward the steamer at a ten-knot
+rate; and soon black dots on her rail resolved into passengers waving
+hats and handkerchiefs, and black dots on the boat deck resolved into
+sailors standing by the end of a hawser which led up from the bitts
+below on the fantail. And the ship came down, until it might have
+seemed that Seldom's intention was to ram her. But not so; when a scant
+two lengths separated the two craft, he called out: "Hard down! Light
+up the staysail-sheet and stand by the forebraces!"
+
+Around the ship came on the crest of a sea; she sank into the hollow
+behind, shipped a few dozen tons of water from the next comber, and then
+lay fairly steady, with her bow meeting the seas, and the huge steamer
+not a half-length away on the lee quarter. The fore-topmast-staysail was
+flattened, and Seldom closely scrutinized the drift and heave of the ship.
+
+"How's your wheel, Bigpig?" he asked.
+
+"Hard down."
+
+"Put it up a little; keep her in the trough."
+
+He noted the effect on the ship of this change; then, as though
+satisfied, roared out: "Let your forebraces hang, forrard there! Stand
+by heavin'-lines fore and aft! Stand by to go ahead with that steamer
+when we have your line!" The last injunction, delivered through his
+hands, went down the wind like a thunder-clap, and the officers on the
+steamer's bridge, vainly trying to make themselves heard against the
+gale in the same manner, started perceptibly at the impact of sound,
+and one went to the engine-room speaking-tube.
+
+Breast to breast the two vessels lifted and fell. At times it seemed
+that the ship was to be dropped bodily on the deck of the steamer; at
+others, her crew looked up a streaked slope of a hundred feet to where
+the other craft was poised at the crest. Then the steamer would drop,
+and the next sea would heave the ship toward her. But it was noticeable
+that every bound brought her nearer to the steamer, and also farther
+ahead, for her sails were doing their work.
+
+"Kick ahead on board the steamer!" thundered Seldom from his eminence.
+"Go ahead! Start the wagon, or say your prayers, you blasted idiots!"
+
+The engines were already turning; but it takes time to overcome three
+thousand tons of inertia, and before the steamer had forged ahead six
+feet the ship had lifted above her, and descended her black side with a
+grinding crash of wood against iron. Fore and main channels on the ship
+were carried away, leaving all lee rigging slack and useless; lower
+braces caught in the steamer's davit-cleats and snapped, but the sails,
+held by the weather braces, remained full, and the yards did not swing.
+The two craft separated with a roll and came together again with more
+scraping and snapping of rigging. Passengers left the rail, dived
+indoors, and took refuge on the opposite side, where falling blocks and
+small spars might not reach them. Another leap toward the steamer
+resulted in the ship's maintopgallantmast falling in a zigzag whirl, as
+the snapping gear aloft impeded it; and dropping athwart the steamer's
+funnel, it neatly sent the royal-yard with sail attached down the iron
+cylinder, where it soon blazed and helped the artificial draft in the
+stoke-hold. Next came the foretopgallantmast, which smashed a couple of
+boats. Then, as the round black stern of the steamer scraped the lee
+bow of the ship, jib-guys parted, and the jib-boom itself went, snapping
+at the bowsprit-cap, with the last bite the ship made at the steamer
+she was helping. But all through this riot of destruction--while
+passengers screamed and prayed, while officers on the steamer shouted
+and swore, and Seldom Helward, bellowing insanely, danced up and down
+on the ship's house, and the hail of wood and iron from aloft threatened
+their heads--men were passing the tow-line.
+
+It was a seven-inch steel hawser with a Manila tail, which they had
+taken to the foretopsail-sheet bitts before the jib-boom had gone.
+Panting from their exertions, they watched it lift from the water as
+the steamer ahead paid out with a taut strain; then, though the
+crippled spars were in danger of falling and really needed their first
+attention, they ignored the fact and hurried aft, as one man, to attend
+to Seldom.
+
+Encouraged by the objurgations of Bigpig and his assistant, who were
+steering now after the steamer, they called their late commander down
+from the house and deposed him in a concert of profane ridicule and
+abuse, to which he replied in kind. He was struck in the face by the
+small fist of Sinful Peck, and immediately knocked the little man down.
+Then he was knocked down himself by a larger fist, and, fighting
+bravely and viciously, became the object of fist-blows and kicks,
+until, in one of his whirling staggers along the deck, he passed close
+to the short, broad, hairy man, who yielded to the excitement of the
+moment and added a blow to Seldom's punishment. It was an unfortunate
+mistake; for he took Seldom's place, and the rain of fists and boots
+descended on him until he fell unconscious. Mr. Helward himself
+delivered the last quieting blow, and then stood over him with a lurid
+grin on his bleeding face.
+
+"Got to put down mutiny though the heavens fall," he said painfully.
+
+"Right you are, Seldom," answered one. "Here, Jackson, Benson--drag him
+forrard; and, Seldom," he added, reprovingly, "don't you ever try it
+again. Want to be captain, hey? You can't; you don't know enough. You
+couldn't command my wheelbarrow. Here's three days' work to clear up
+the muss you've made."
+
+But in this they spoke more, and less, than the truth. The steamer,
+going slowly, and steering with a bridle from the tow-line to each
+quarter, kept the ship's canvas full until her crew had steadied the
+yards and furled it. They would then have rigged preventer-stays and
+shrouds on their shaky spars, had there been time; but there was not.
+An uncanny appearance of the sea to leeward indicated too close
+proximity to the shoals, while a blackening of the sky to windward told
+of probable increase of wind and sea. And the steamer waited no longer.
+With a preliminary blast of her whistle, she hung the weight of the
+ship on the starboard bridle, gave power to her engines, and rounded
+to, very slowly, head to sea, while the men on the ship, who had been
+carrying the end of the coiled hawser up the foretopmast rigging,
+dropped it and came down hurriedly.
+
+Released from the wind-pressure on her strong side, which had somewhat
+steadied her, the ship now rolled more than she had done in the trough,
+and with every starboard roll were ominous creakings and grindings
+aloft. At last came a heavier lurch, and both crippled topmasts fell,
+taking with them the mizzentopgallantmast. Luckily, no one was hurt,
+and they disgustedly cut the wreck adrift, stayed the fore- and
+mainmasts with the hawser, and resigning themselves to a large
+subtraction from their salvage, went to a late breakfast--a savory meal
+of smoking fried ham and potatoes, hot cakes and coffee served to
+sixteen in the cabin, and an unsavory meal of "hardtack-hash," with an
+infusion of burnt bread-crust, pease, beans, and leather, handed, but
+not served, to three in the forecastle.
+
+Three days later, with Sandy Hook lighthouse showing through the haze
+ahead, and nothing left of the gale but a rolling ground-swell, the
+steamer slowed down so that a pilot-boat's dinghy could put a man
+aboard each craft. And the one who climbed the ship's side was the
+pilot that had taken her to sea, outward bound, and sympathized with
+her crew. They surrounded him on the poop and asked for news, while the
+three men forward looked aft hungrily, as though they would have joined
+the meeting, but dared not. Instead of giving news, the pilot asked
+questions, which they answered.
+
+"I knew you'd taken charge, boys," he said at length. "The whole world
+knows it, and every man-of-war on the Pacific stations has been looking
+for you. But they're only looking out there. What brings you round
+here, dismasted, towing into New York?"
+
+"That's where the ship's bound--New York. We took her out; we bring her
+home. We don't want her--don't belong to us. We're law-abidin' men."
+
+"Law-abiding men?" asked the amazed pilot.
+
+"You bet. We're goin' to prosecute those dogs of ours forrard there to
+the last limit o' the law. We'll show 'em they can't starve and hammer
+and shoot free-born Americans just 'cause they've got guns in their
+pockets."
+
+The pilot looked forward, nodded to one of the three, who beckoned to
+him, and asked:
+
+"Who'd you elect captain?"
+
+"Nobody," they roared. "We had enough o' captains. This ship's an
+unlimited democracy--everybody just as good as the next man; that is,
+all but the dogs. They sleep on the bunk-boards, do as they're told,
+and eat salt mule and dunderfunk--same as we did goin' out."
+
+"Did they navigate for you? Did no one have charge of things?"
+
+"Poop-deck picked up navigation, and we let him off steerin' and
+standin' lookout. Then Seldom, here, he wanted to be captain just once,
+and we let him--well, look at our spars."
+
+"Poop-deck? Which is Poop-deck? Do you mean to say," asked the pilot
+when the navigator had been indicated to him, "that you brought this
+ship home on picked-up navigation?"
+
+"Didn't know anything about it when we left Callao," answered the
+sailor, modestly. "The steward knew enough to wind the chronometer
+until I learned how. We made an offing and steered due south, while I
+studied the books and charts. It didn't take me long to learn how to
+take the sun. Then we blundered round the Horn somehow, and before long
+I could take chronometer sights for the longitude. Of course I know we
+went out in four months and used up five to get back; but a man can't
+learn the whole thing in one passage. We lost some time, too, chasing
+other ships and buying stores; the cabin grub gave out."
+
+"You bought, I suppose, with Captain Benson's money."
+
+"S'pose it was his. We found it in his desk. But we've kept account of
+every cent expended, and bought no grub too good for a white man to
+eat."
+
+"What dismasted you?"
+
+They explained the meeting with the steamer and Seldom's misdoing; then
+requested information about the salvage laws.
+
+"Boys," said the pilot, "I'm sorry for you. I saw the start of this
+voyage, and you appear to be decent men. You'll get no salvage; you'll
+get no wages. You are mutineers and pirates, with no standing in court.
+Any salvage which the _Almena_ has earned will be paid to her owners
+and to the three men whom you deprived of command. What you can
+get--the maximum, though I can't say how hard the judge will lay it
+on--is ten years in state's prison, and a fine of two thousand dollars
+each. We'll have to stop at quarantine. Take my advice: if you get a
+chance, lower the boats and skip."
+
+They laughed at the advice. They were American citizens who respected
+the law. They had killed no one, robbed no one; their wages and
+salvage, independently of insurance liabilities, would pay for the
+stores bought, and the loss of the spars. They had no fear of any court
+of justice in the land; for they had only asserted their manhood and
+repressed inhuman brutality.
+
+The pilot went forward, talked awhile with the three, and left them
+with joyous faces. An hour later he pointed out the _Almena's_ number
+flying from the masthead of the steamer.
+
+"He's telling on you, boys," he said. "He knew you when you helped him,
+and used you, of course. Your reputation's pretty bad on the high seas.
+See that signal-station ashore there? Well, they're telegraphing now
+that the pirate _Almena_ is coming in. You'll see a police boat at
+quarantine."
+
+He was but partly right. Not only a police boat, but an outward-bound
+man-of-war and an incoming revenue cutter escorted the ship to
+quarantine, where the tow-line was cast off, and an anchor dropped.
+Then, in the persons of a scandalized health-officer, a naval captain,
+a revenue-marine lieutenant, and a purple-faced sergeant of the
+steamboat squad, the power of the law was rehabilitated on the
+_Almena's_ quarter-deck, and the strong hand of the law closed down on
+her unruly crew. With blank faces, they discarded--to shirts, trousers,
+and boots--the slop-chest clothing which belonged to the triumphant
+Captain Benson, and descended the side to the police boat, which
+immediately steamed away. Then a chuckling trio entered the ship's
+cabin, and ordered the steward to bring them something to eat.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+Now, there is no record either in the reports for that year of the
+police department, or from any official babbling, or from later yarns
+spun by the sixteen prisoners, of what really occurred on the deck of
+that steamer while she was going up the bay. Newspapers of the time
+gave generous space to speculations written up on the facts discovered
+by reporters; but nothing was ever proved. The facts were few. A tug
+met the steamer in the Narrows about a quarter to twelve that morning,
+and her captain, on being questioned, declared that all seemed well
+with her. The prisoners were grouped forward, guarded by eight officers
+and a sergeant. A little after twelve o'clock a Battery boatman
+observed her coming, and hied him around to the police dock to have a
+look at the murderous pirates he had heard about, only to see her
+heading up the North River, past the Battery. A watchman on the
+elevator docks at Sixty-third Street observed her charging up the river
+a little later in the afternoon, wondered why, and spoke of it. The
+captain of the _Mary Powel_, bound up, reported catching her abreast of
+Yonkers. He had whistled as he passed, and though no one was in sight,
+the salute was politely answered. At some time during the night,
+residents of Sing Sing were wakened by a sound of steam blowing off
+somewhere on the river; and in the morning a couple of fishermen, going
+out to their pond-nets in the early dawn, found the police boat
+grounded on the shoals. On boarding her they had released a pinioned,
+gagged, and hungry captain in the pilot-house, and an engineer,
+fireman, and two deck-hands, similarly limited, in the lamp-room.
+Hearing noises from below, they pried open the nailed doors of the
+dining-room staircase, and liberated a purple-faced sergeant and eight
+furious officers, who chased their deliverers into their skiff, and
+spoke sternly to the working-force.
+
+Among the theories advanced was one, by the editor of a paper in a
+small Lake Ontario town, to the effect that it made little difference
+to an Oswego sailor whether he shipped as captain, mate, engineer,
+sailor, or fireman, and that the officers of the New York Harbor Patrol
+had only under-estimated the caliber of the men in their charge,
+leaving them unguarded while they went to dinner. But his paper and
+town were small and far away, he could not possibly know anything of
+the subject, and his opinion obtained little credence.
+
+Years later, however, he attended, as guest, a meeting and dinner of
+the Shipmasters' and Pilots' Association of Cleveland, Ohio, when a
+resolution was adopted to petition the city for a harbor police
+service. Captain Monahan, Captain Helward, Captain Peck, and Captain
+Cahill, having spoken and voted in the negative, left their seats on
+the adoption of the proposition, reached a clear spot on the floor,
+shook hands silently, and then, forming a ring, danced around in a
+circle (the tails of their coats standing out in horizontal rigidity)
+until reproved by the chair.
+
+And the editor knew why.
+
+
+
+
+THE BRAIN OF THE BATTLE-SHIP
+
+
+Build an inverted Harvey-steel box about eight feet high, one hundred
+and fifty feet long, half as wide, with walls of eighteen-inch
+thickness, and a roof of three, and you have strong protection against
+shot and shell. Build up from the ends of the box two steel barbettes
+with revolving turrets as heavy as your side-walls; place in each a
+pair of thirteen-inch rifles; flank these turrets with four others of
+eight-inch wall, each holding two eight-inch guns; these again with
+four smaller, containing four six-inch guns, and you have power of
+offense nearly equal to your protection. Loosely speaking, a modern
+gun-projectile will, at short range, pierce steel equal to itself in
+cross-section, and from an elevated muzzle will travel as many miles as
+this cross-section measures in inches. Placed upon an outlying shoal,
+this box with its guns would make an efficient fortress, but would lack
+the advantage of being able to move and choose position.
+
+Build underneath and each way from the ends of the box a cellular hull
+to float it; place within it, and below the box, magazines, boilers,
+and engines; construct above, between the turrets, a lighter
+superstructure to hold additional quick-fire guns and torpedo-tubes;
+cap the whole with a military mast supporting fighting-tops, and
+containing an armored conning-tower in its base; man and equip,
+provision and coal the fabric, and you can go to sea, confident of your
+ability to destroy everything that floats, except icebergs and other
+battle-ships.
+
+Of these essentials was the first-class coast-defense battle-ship
+_Argyll_. She was of ten thousand tons displacement, and was propelled
+by twin screws which received ten thousand horse-power from twin
+engines placed below the water-line. Three long tubes--one fixed in the
+stem, two movable in the superstructure--could launch Whitehead
+torpedoes,--mechanical fish carrying two hundred and twenty pounds of
+guncotton in their heads,--which sought in the water a twenty-foot
+depth, and hurried where pointed at a thirty-knot rate of speed. Their
+impact below the water-line was deadly, and only equaled in effect by
+the work of the ram-bow, the blow of the ship as a whole--the last
+glorious, suicidal charge on an enemy that had dismounted the guns, if
+such could happen.
+
+Besides her thirteen-, eight-, and six-inch guns, she carried a
+secondary quick-fire battery of twenty six-pounders, four one-pounders,
+and four Gatling guns distributed about the superstructure and in the
+fighting-tops. The peculiar efficacy of this battery lay in its menace
+to threatening torpedo-boats, and its hostility to range-finders,
+big-gun sights, and opposing gunners. A torpedo-boat, receiving the
+full attention of her quick-fire battery, could be disintegrated and
+sunk in a yeasty froth raised by the rain of projectiles long before
+she could come within range of torpedo action; while a simultaneous
+discharge of all guns would distribute over seven thousand pounds of
+metal with foot-tons of energy sufficient to lift the ship herself high
+out of water. Bristling, glistening, and massive, a reservoir of death
+potential, a center of radiant destruction, a spitting, chattering,
+thundering epitome of racial hatred, she bore within her steel walls
+the ever-growing burden of progressive human thought. She was a maker
+of history, a changer of boundaries, a friend of young governments; and
+it chanced that on a fine tropical morning, in company with three
+armored cruisers, four protected cruisers, and a fleet of torpedo-boats
+and destroyers, she went into action.
+
+She was stripped to bare steel and signal-halyards. Davits, anchors,
+and cables were stowed and secured. Ladders, gratings, stanchions, and
+all movable deck-fittings were below the water-line. Wooden bulkheads,
+productive of splinters, were knocked down and discarded, while all
+boats, with the plugs out, were overboard, riding to a sea-anchor made
+up of oars and small spars.
+
+The crew was at quarters. Below, in the magazine, handling-rooms,
+stoke-holds, and bunkers, bare-waisted men worked and waited in
+stifling heat; for she was under forced draft, and compartments were
+closed, even though the enemy was still five miles away. The chief and
+his first assistant engineer watched the main engines in their twin
+compartments, while the subordinate aids and machinists attended to the
+dynamos, motors, and auxiliary cylinders that worked the turrets,
+pumps, and ammunition-hoists. All boilers were hot and hissing steam;
+all fire-pumps were working; all fire-hose connected and spouting
+streams of water. Perspiring men with strained faces deluged one
+another while they waited.
+
+In the turrets were the gun-crews, six men to a gun, with an officer
+above in the sighting-hood; behind the superstructure-ports were the
+quick-fire men, sailors and marines; and above all, in the
+fighting-tops, were the sharp-shooters and men who handled the
+one-pounders and Gatling guns--the easiest-minded of the ship's
+company, for they could see and breathe. Each division of fighters and
+workers was overseen by an officer; in some cases by two and three.
+
+Preparatory work was done, and, excepting the "black gang," men were
+quiescent, but feverish. Few spoke, and then on frivolous things, in
+tones that were not recognized. Occasionally a man would bring out a
+piece of paper and write, using for a desk a gun-breech or -carriage, a
+turret-wall, or the deck. An officer in a fighting-top used a
+telegraph-dial, and a stoker in the depths his shovel, in a chink of
+light from the furnace. These letters, written in instalments, were
+pocketed in confidence that sometime they would be mailed.
+
+From the captain down each man knew that a large proportion of their
+number was foredoomed; but not a consciousness among them could admit
+the possibility of itself being chosen. The great first law forbade it.
+Senior officers pictured in their minds dead juniors, and thought of
+extra work after the fight. Junior officers thought of vacancies above
+them and promotion. Men in the turrets bade mental good-by to their
+mates in the superstructure; and these, secure in their five-inch
+protection, pitied those in the fighting-tops, where, cold logic says,
+no man may live through a sea-fight. Yet all would have volunteered to
+fill vacancies aloft. The healthy human mind can postulate suffering,
+but not its own extinction.
+
+In a circular apartment in the military mast, protected by twelve
+inches of steel, perforated by vertical and horizontal slits for
+observation, stood the captain and navigating officer, both in
+shirt-sleeves; for this, the conning-tower, was hot. Around the inner
+walls were the nerve-terminals of the structure--the indicators,
+telegraph-dials, telephones, push-buttons, and speaking-tubes, which
+communicated with gun-stations, turrets, steering-room, engine-rooms,
+and all parts of the ship where men were stationed. In the forward part
+was a binnacle with small steering-wheel, disconnected now, for the
+steering was done by men below the water-line in the stern. A spiral
+staircase led to the main-deck below, and another to the first
+fighting-top above, in which staircase were small platforms where a
+signal-officer and two quartermasters watched through slits the signals
+from the flag-ship, and answered as directed by the captain below with
+small flags, which they mastheaded through the hollow within the
+staircase.
+
+The chief master-at-arms, bareheaded, climbed into the conning-tower.
+
+"Captain Blake, what'll we do with Finnegan?" he said. "I've released
+him from the brig as you ordered; but Mr. Clarkson won't have him in
+the turret where he belongs, and no one else wants him around. They
+even chased him out of the bunkers. He wants to work and fight, but Mr.
+Clarkson won't place him; says he washes his hands of Finnegan, and
+sent me to you. I took him to the bay, but he won't take medicine."
+
+Captain Blake, stern of face and kindly of eye, drew back from a
+peep-hole, and asked: "What's his condition?"
+
+"Shaky, sir. Sees little spiders and big spiders crawling round his
+cap-rim. Him and the recording angel knows where he gets it and where
+he keeps it, sir; but I don't. I've watched him for six months."
+
+"Send him to me."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+The master-at-arms descended, and in a few moments the unwanted
+Finnegan appeared--a gray-bearded, emaciated, bleary-eyed seaman, who
+brushed imaginary things from his neck and arms, and stammered, as he
+removed his cap: "Report for duty, sir."
+
+"For duty?" answered the captain, eying him sternly. "For death. You
+will be allowed the honorable death of an English seaman. You will die
+in the fighting-top sometime in the next three hours."
+
+The man shivered, elevated one shoulder, and rubbed his ear against it,
+but said nothing, while Mr. Dalrymple, the navigating officer, with his
+eyes at a peep-hole and his ears open to the dialogue, wondered (as he
+and the whole ship's company had wondered before) what the real
+relation was between the captain and this wretched, drunken butt of the
+crew. For the captain's present attitude was a complete departure.
+Always he had shielded Finnegan from punishment to the extent that
+naval etiquette would permit.
+
+"I have tried for six years," continued the captain, "to reform you and
+hold you to the manhood I once knew in you; but I give you up. You are
+not fit to live, and will never be fitter to die than this morning,
+when the chance comes to you to die fighting for your country. But I
+want you to die fighting. Do you wish to see the surgeon or the
+chaplain?"
+
+"No, no, no, cappen; one's bad as t' other. The chaplain'll pray and
+the doctor'll fill me up wi' bromide, and it just makes me crazy, sir.
+I'm all right, cappen, if I only had a drink. Just give me a drink,
+cappen,--the doctor won't,--and send me down to my station, sir. I know
+it's only in my head, but I see 'em plain, all round. You'll give me a
+drink, cappen, please; I know you'll give me a drink."
+
+He brushed his knees gingerly, and stepped suddenly away from an
+isolated speaking-tube. Captain Blake's stern face softened. His mind
+went back to his midshipman days, to a stormy night and a heavy sea, an
+icy foot-rope, a fall, a plunge, and a cold, hopeless swim toward a
+shadowy ship hove to against the dark background, until this man's
+face, young, strong, and cheery then, appeared behind a white
+life-buoy; and he heard again the panting voice of his rescuer: "Here
+ye are, Mr. Blake; boat's comin'."
+
+He whistled down the speaking-tube, and when answered, called: "Send an
+opened bottle of whisky into the conning-tower--no glasses."
+
+"Thankee, sir."
+
+The captain resumed his position at the peep-hole, and Finnegan busied
+himself with his troubles until a Japanese servant appeared with a
+quart bottle. The captain received it, and the Jap withdrew.
+
+"Help yourself, Finnegan," said the captain, extending the bottle;
+"take a good drink--a last one." Finnegan took the equivalent of three.
+"Now, up with you." The captain stood the bottle under the binnacle.
+"Upper top. Report to Mr. Bates."
+
+"Cappen, please send me down to the turret where I b'long, sir. I'm all
+right now. I don't want to go up there wi' the sogers. I'm not good at
+machine-guns."
+
+"No arguments. Up with you at once. You are good for nothing but to
+work a lever under the eye of an officer."
+
+Finnegan saluted silently and turned toward the stairs.
+
+"Finnegan!"
+
+He turned. The captain extended his hand. "Finnegan," he said, "I don't
+forget that night, but you must go; the eternal fitness of things
+demands it. Perhaps I'll go, too. Good-by."
+
+The two extremes of the ship's company shook hands, and Finnegan
+ascended. When past the quartermasters and out of hearing, he grumbled
+and whined: "No good, hey? Thirty years in the service, and sent up
+here to think of my sins like a sick monkey. Good for nothin' but to
+turn a crank with the sogers. Nice job for an able seaman. What's the
+blasted service a-comin' to?"
+
+The two fleets were approaching in similar formation, double column, at
+about a twelve-knot speed. Leading the left column was the _Lancaster_,
+and following came the _Argyll_, _Beaufort_, and _Atholl_, the last
+two, like the _Lancaster_, armored cruisers of the first class. On the
+_Lancaster's_ starboard bow was the flag-ship _Cumberland_, a large
+unarmored cruiser, and after her came the _Marlborough_, _Montrose_,
+and _Sutherland_, unarmored craft like the flag-ship, equally
+vulnerable to fire, the two columns making a zigzag line, with the
+heaviest ships to the left, nearest the enemy.
+
+Heading as they were, the fleets would pass about a mile apart. Led
+by a black, high-sided monster, the left column of the enemy was made
+up of four battle-ships of uncouth, foreign design and murderous
+appearance, while the right column contained the flag-ship and three
+others, all heavily armored cruisers. Flanking each fleet, far to the
+rear, were torpedo-boats and destroyers.
+
+"We're outclassed, Dalrymple," said Captain Blake. "There are the ships
+we expected--_Warsaw_, _Riga_, _Kharkov_, and _Moscow_, all of fighting
+weight, and the _Obdorsk_, _Tobolsk_, _Saratov_, and _Orenburg_.
+Leaving out the _Argyll_, we haven't a ship equal to the weakest one
+there. This fight is the _Argyll's_."
+
+"And the _Argyll_ is equal to it, captain. All I fear is torpedoes. Of
+course our ends and superstructure will catch it, and I suppose we'll
+lose men--all the quick-fire men, perhaps."
+
+"Those in the tops surely," said the captain. "Dalrymple, what do you
+think? I don't feel right about Finnegan. He belongs in the turret, and
+I've sentenced him. Have I the right? I've half a mind to call him
+down." He pushed a button marked "Forward turret," and listened at a
+telephone.
+
+"Mr. Clarkson!" he called. "I've put your man Finnegan in the upper
+top; but he seems all right now. Can you use him?"
+
+The answer came:
+
+"No, sir; I've filled his place."
+
+"Die, then. On my soul be it, Finnegan, poor devil," muttered the
+captain, gloomily.
+
+His foot struck the bottle under the binnacle, and, on an impulse due
+to his mood, he picked it up and uncorked it. Mr. Dalrymple observed
+the action and stepped toward him.
+
+"Captain, pardon me," he said, "if I protest unofficially. We are going
+into action--not to dinner."
+
+The captain's eyes opened wide and shone brighter, while his lip
+curled. He extended the bottle to the lieutenant.
+
+"The apologies are mine, Mr. Dalrymple," he said. "I forgot your
+presence. Take a drink."
+
+The officer forced a smile to his face, and stepped back, shaking his
+head. Captain Blake swallowed a generous portion of the whisky.
+
+"The fool!" mused the navigator, as he looked through the peep-hole.
+"The whole world is watching him to-day, and he turns to whisky. That's
+it, dammit; that's the bond of sympathy: Blake and Finnegan, Finnegan
+and Blake--dipsomaniacs. Lord, I never thought. I've seen him drunker
+than Finnegan, and if it wasn't for his position and obligations, he'd
+see spiders, too."
+
+Mr. Dalrymple was not the only one on board who disapproved of "Dutch
+courage" for captains. The Japanese servant, whose station was at the
+forward-turret ammunition-hoist, reported the service of the whisky to
+his mates, and from here the news spread--as news will in a cellular
+hull--up to turrets and gun-rooms, through speaking-tubes and
+water-tight bulkheads, down to stoke-hold, engine-rooms, and
+steering-room; and long before Captain Blake had thought of taking a
+drink the whole ship's company was commenting, mentally and openly, and
+more or less profanely, on the story that "the old man was getting
+drunk in the conning-tower."
+
+And another piece of news traveled as fast and as far--the whereabouts
+of Finnegan. Mr. Clarkson had incidentally informed his gun-captain,
+who told the gun-crew; and from them the news went down the hoist and
+spread. Men swore louder over this; for though they did not want
+Finnegan around and in the way, they did not want him to die. Strong
+natures love those which may be teased; and not a heart was there but
+contained a soft spot for the helpless, harmless, ever good-natured,
+drunk, and ridiculous Finnegan.
+
+The bark of an eight-inch gun was heard. Captain Blake saw, through the
+slits of the conning-tower, a cloud of thinning smoke drifting away
+from the flag-ship. Stepping back, he rang up the forward turret.
+
+"Mr. Clarkson," he said to the telephone when it answered him,
+"remember: aim for the nearest water-line, load and fire, and expect no
+orders after the first shot."
+
+Calling up the officer in the after-turret, he repeated the injunction,
+substituting turrets as the object of assault. He called to the
+officers at the eight-inch guns that conning-towers and superstructure
+were to receive their attention; to those at the six-inch guns to aim
+solely at turret apertures; to ensigns and officers of marine in charge
+of the quick-fire batteries to aim at all holes and men showing, to
+watch for torpedo-boats, and, like the others, to expect no orders
+after the first shot. Then, ringing up the round of gun-stations, one
+after another, he sang out, in a voice to be heard by all: "Fire away!"
+
+The initial gun had been fired from the flag-ship when the leading
+ships of the two fleets were nearly abreast. It was followed by
+broadsides from all, and the action began. The _Argyll_, rolling
+slightly from the recoil of her guns, smoked down the line like a thing
+alive, voicing her message, dealing out death and receiving it. In this
+first round of the battle the fire of the eight opposing vessels was
+directed at her alone. Shells punctured her vulnerable parts, and,
+exploding inside, killed men and dismounted guns. The groans of the
+stricken, the crash of steel against steel, the roar of the
+turret-guns, the rattling chorus of quick-fire rifles, and the drumming
+of heavy shells against the armor and turrets made an uproarious riot
+of sound over which no man above the water-line could lift his voice.
+But there were some there, besides the dead,--men who worked through
+and survived the action,--who, after the first impact of sound, did not
+hear it, nor anything else while they lived. They were the men who had
+neglected stuffing their ears with cotton.
+
+A fundamental canon of naval tactics is to maintain formation. Another
+is to keep moving, at the full speed of the slowest ship, not only to
+disconcert the enemy's fire, but to obtain and hold the most
+advantageous position--if possible, to flank him. As these rules apply
+equally well to both sides, it is obvious that two fleets, passing in
+opposite directions, and each trying to flank the rear of the other,
+will eventually circle around a common center; and if the effort to
+improve position dominates the effort to evade fire, this circle will
+narrow until the battle becomes a melee.
+
+The two lines, a mile apart and each about a mile in length, were
+squarely abreast in less than five minutes from the time of firing the
+first gun; and by now the furious bombardment of the _Argyll_ by eight
+ships had ceased, for each one found it more profitable to deal with
+its vis-a-vis. But there was yet a deafening racket in the _Argyll's_
+conning-tower as small projectiles from the rear battle-ship abreast
+impinged on its steel walls; and Captain Blake, his ears ringing, his
+eyes streaming, half stunned by the noise, almost blinded and
+suffocated by the smoke from his forward guns, did not know that his
+ship had dropped back in the line until the signal-officer descended
+and shouted in his ear an order signaled from the admiral: "Move ahead
+to position."
+
+"Hang the man who invented conning-towers," he muttered angrily. "Keep
+a lookout up there, Mr. Wright," he shouted; "I can see very little."
+
+The officer half saluted, half nodded, and ran up the stair, while
+Captain Blake rang "full speed" to the engines. The indicators on the
+wall showed increased revolution, and he resumed his place at the
+peep-hole. In a few moments Mr. Wright reappeared with a message from
+the flag-ship to "starboard helm; follow ship ahead."
+
+"All right. Watch out up there; report all you see," he answered.
+Peeping out, he saw the _Lancaster_ and the _Cumberland_ sheering to
+port, and he moved the lever of the steering-telegraph. There was no
+answering ring. "Shot away, by George," he growled. He yelled into a
+supplementary voice-tube to "starboard your wheel--slowly." This was
+not answered, and with his own hands he coupled up the steering-wheel
+on the binnacle and gave it a turn. It was merely a governor, which
+admitted steam to the steering-engine, and there was no resisting
+pressure to guide him; but a helm indicator showed him the changed
+position of the rudder, and, on looking ahead, he found that she
+answered the wheel; also, on looking to starboard, he found that he had
+barely escaped collision with the _Montrose_, whose fire he had been
+masking, to the scandal of the admiral and the _Montrose's_ officers.
+
+A little unnerved, Captain Blake called down a seven-inch tube to an
+apartment in the depths,--a central station of pipes and wires, to be
+used as a last resort,--directing the officer on post to notify the
+chief engineer of the damage, and to order the quartermasters in the
+steering-room to disconnect their wheel and stand by. This was
+answered, and the captain resumed his lookout, one hand on the wheel.
+
+"Reduces the captain of the ship to a helmsman," he muttered.
+
+The navigating officer approached, indicating by gesture and expression
+his intention of relieving him, but was waved away.
+
+"I want the wheel myself," shouted the captain. "Devil take a
+conning-tower, anyhow! Keep a lookout to port. But say, Dalrymple, send
+up for Finnegan. I'll not have him killed. Get him down, if he's
+alive."
+
+Mr. Dalrymple ascended the stair to pass the word for Finnegan, but did
+not come down. He had reached the signal-platform, where one
+quartermaster lay dead, and was transmitting the order to Mr. Wright,
+when a heavy shell struck the mast, above their heads and below the
+lower top, exploded inside, killed the three men on the platform, and
+hurled the upper part of the mast, with both tops full of dead men and
+living, high in air. The conning-tower was filled with gas and smoke;
+but Captain Blake, though burned and nearly stripped of clothing by the
+blast of flame, was uninjured by the flying fragments of the shell.
+Smarting, gasping, and choking, fully aware of the complete destruction
+above, his mind dwelt for an instant on the man who had once saved his
+life, whom he had sentenced to death. He looked up the hollow within
+the wrecked staircase, but saw nothing.
+
+Mr. Clarkson, however, happened to be looking through an upper
+peep-hole in the sighting-hood at this moment, and saw the upper half
+of the mast lift and turn; also, dimly through the smoke, he noticed,
+among the dozen of men hurled from the tops, the blue-shirted figure of
+one whom he knew to be Finnegan, clinging at arm's-length in mid-air to
+a Gatling gun, which had been torn from its fastenings. Then the smoke
+thickened and shut out the view; but a moment later he heard the
+rattling crash of the mast as it fell upon the superstructure beneath.
+
+"The whole mast's gone, boys," he shouted to his crew--"both tops.
+Finnegan's done for."
+
+And the story of Finnegan's finish went down the hoist and through the
+ship, everywhere received with momentary sorrow, and increased
+malediction on the drunken captain, who thought no more--and knew no
+more--of a blue-jacket than to masthead him with the marines.
+
+The tactics of both admirals being the same, and the speed of both
+fleets--that of their slowest ships--being equal, they turned, and,
+like two serpents pursuing each other's tails, charged around in a
+circle, each ship firing at the nearest or most important enemy. This
+fire was destructive. A ship a mile distant is a point-blank target for
+modern guns and gunners, and everything protected by less than eight
+inches of steel suffered. The _Argyll_ had lost her military mast and
+most of her secondary guns. The flag-ship _Cumberland_, raked and
+riddled by nine- and eleven-inch shells, surrounded herself with steam
+from punctured boilers shortly after the signal to turn, and swung
+drunkenly out of line, her boilers roaring, her heavy guns barking. A
+long, black thing, low down behind the wave created by its rush, darted
+by her, unstruck by the shells sent by the flag-ship and the _Marlborough_.
+A larger thing, mouse-colored and nearly hidden by a larger wave, was
+coming from the opposite direction, spitting one-pound shot at the rate
+of sixty a minute, but without present avail; for a spindle-shaped
+object left the deck of the first when squarely abreast of the helpless
+flag-ship, diving beneath the surface, and the existence and position
+of this object were henceforth indicated only by a line of bubbles, a
+darting streak of froth, traveling toward the _Cumberland_. In less
+than a minute it had reached her. The sea alongside arose in a mound,
+and she seemed to lean away from it; then the mound burst, and out of
+it, and spouting from funnels, ventilators, and ports, came a dense
+cloud of smoke, which mingled with the steam and hid her from view,
+while a dull, booming roar, barely distinguishable in the noise of
+battle, came across the water. When the cloud thinned there was nothing
+to be seen but heads of swimming men, who swam for a time and sank. The
+flag-ship had been torpedoed.
+
+But the torpedo-boat followed her. Pursued by the mouse-colored
+destroyer, she circled around and headed back in the endeavor to reach
+her consorts; but she had not time. Little by little the avenger crept
+up, pounding her with small shot and shell, until, leaking from a
+hundred wounds, she settled beneath the surface. She had fulfilled her
+mission; she was designed to strike once and die.
+
+No armored cruiser may withstand the fire of a battle-ship. The
+_Lancaster_, leading the _Argyll_, received through her eight-inch
+water-line belt the heavy shot and shell of the _Moscow_ and _Orenburg_.
+Nine- and eleven-inch shell fire, sent by Canet and Hontoria guns, makes
+short work of eight-inch armor, and the doomed _Lancaster_ settled and
+disappeared, her crew yelling, her screws turning, and her guns firing
+until the water swamped her. The following _Argyll_ scraped her funnels
+and masts as she passed over.
+
+Eight hundred feet back in the line was the _Beaufort_, armored like
+the _Lancaster_. Her ending was dramatic and suicidal. Drilled through
+and through by the fire of the _Riga_, she fought and suffered until
+the _Lancaster_ foundered; then, with all guns out of action, but with
+still intact engine-power, she left the line, not to run, but to ram.
+The circle was narrowing, but she had fully four minutes to steam
+before she could reach the opposite side and intercept her slayer. And
+in this short time she was reduced to scrap-iron by the concentrated
+fire of the _Warsaw_, _Riga_, and _Kharkov_. Every shot from every gun
+on the three battle-ships struck the unlucky cruiser; but in the face
+of the storm of flame and steel she went on, exhaling through fissures
+and ports smoke from bursting shells and steam from broken pipes.
+Half-way across, an almost solid belching upward and outward of white
+steam indicated a stricken boiler, and from now on her progress was
+slow. She was visibly lower in the water and rolled heavily. Soon
+another cloud arose from her, her headway decreased, and she came to a
+stop, two hundred yards on the port bow of the onrushing _Riga_, whose
+crew yelled derisively--whose quick-fire guns still punished her.
+
+But the yells suddenly ceased and the gunners changed their aim. A
+small thing had left the nearly submerged tube in the cruiser's stem,
+and the gunners were now firing at a darting line of bubbles,
+obliterating the target for a moment with the churning of the water,
+only to see the frothy streak within their range, coming on at
+locomotive speed. They aimed ahead; two five-inch guns added their
+clamor, and even a Hontoria turret-gun voiced its roar and sent its
+messenger. But the bubbles would not stop; they entered the bow wave of
+the battle-ship, and a second later the great floating fort separated
+into two parts, with a crackling thunder of sound and an outburst of
+flame and smoke which came of nothing less than an exploded magazine.
+The two halves rolled far to starboard, then to port, shivered,
+settled, turned completely over, and sank in a turmoil of bursting
+steam and air-bubbles. Three minutes later the _Beaufort_ lifted her
+stern and dived gently after her victim, still groaning hoarsely from
+her punctured iron lungs. In her death-agony she had given birth to a
+child more terrible than a battle-ship.
+
+The rear ship of the inner column, the _Atholl_, was officially an
+armored cruiser, but possessed none of the attributes of the cruiser
+class. She was the laggard of the fleet, and her heaviest guns were of
+six-inch caliber; but, being designed for a battle-ship, she carried
+this temporary battery behind sixteen inches of steel, and had
+maintained her integrity, taking harder blows than she could give. With
+the going down of the _Beaufort_ she took a position astern of the
+_Sutherland_, and the double line of battle was reduced to a single
+line; for the _Argyll_ had left the column when the flag-ship sank.
+
+And this is why the overmatched, battered, and all but demoralized
+cruisers received no more attention from the enemy; it were wiser to
+deal with the _Argyll_. The _Saratov_, blazing fiercely from the
+effects of a well-planted shell, had drawn out of line, the better to
+deal with her trouble. Her place in the line and that of the sunken
+_Riga_ were filled by the following ships drawing ahead; but the fleet
+still held to double column, and into the lane between the lines the
+_Argyll_ was coming at sixteen knots, breathing flame, vomiting
+steel--delivering destruction and death.
+
+She had rounded the _Moscow's_ stern, raking her as she came, and
+sending armor-piercing shells through her citadel. Some exploded on
+impact, some inside; all did work. An eight-inch projectile entered the
+after turret-port, and silenced the gun and gun-crew forever. Before
+the _Argyll_ was abeam the _Moscow_ had ceased firing. Rolling and
+smoking, her crew decimated, her guns disabled and steering-gear
+carried away, she swung out of line; and the appearance in his field of
+vision of several rushing waves with short smoke-stacks behind, and the
+supplementary pelting his ship was now receiving from the _Marlborough_,
+decided her commander to lower his flag.
+
+On the starboard bow of the _Argyll_ was the armored cruiser _Orenburg_.
+Her fire, hot and true, ceased on the explosion of a large shell at her
+water-line, and she swung out of the fight, silent but for the roar of
+escaping steam, heeled heavily to port, and sank in ten minutes, her
+ensigns flying to the last. Mr. Clarkson rejoiced with his gun-crew. He
+had sent the shell.
+
+On stormed the _Argyll_. Her next adversary was the _Kharkov_, a
+battle-ship nearly equal in guns and armor to herself, but not
+quite--by an inch. And that inch cost her the fight. With her main
+turrets damaged, her superstructure, secondary guns, and torpedo-tubes
+shot away, she yielded to fate, and, while the _Argyll_ passed on,
+hauled down her ensigns at the request of a torpedo-boat.
+
+Ahead and to starboard was the cruiser _Tobolsk_, leaving the
+neighborhood as fast as her twin screws could push her. Her end was in
+sight; in her wake were two gray destroyers, and behind, charging
+across the broken formation, was the fleet _Marlborough_. The _Argyll_
+ignored the _Tobolsk_; for slowing down to await her coming was the
+black and high-sided _Warsaw_, the monster of the fleet, bristling with
+guns, somber, and ominous in her silence.
+
+Ahead of her, and turning to port, was the flag-ship _Obdorsk_, also
+slowed down; but she promised to be fully occupied with the _Atholl_,
+_Sutherland_, and _Montrose_, who had wheeled in their tracks, no
+longer obliged to traverse a circle to reach an enemy.
+
+On rushed the _Argyll_, and when nearly up to the _Warsaw_, the latter
+gave steam to her engines. Breast to breast the gladiators charged
+across the sea, roaring, flaming, and smoking. A torpedo left the side
+of the _Warsaw_, pointed diagonally ahead, to intercept the _Argyll_.
+But it was badly aimed, and the hissing bubbles passed under her stern.
+Before another could be discharged, the torpedo-room, located by the
+_Argyll's_ officers, was enlarged to the size of three by the
+succeeding bombardment and the explosion of the remaining torpedoes.
+
+Twelve-inch armor cannot keep out thirteen-inch armor-piercing shell,
+and torpedoes cannot explode on board without damage to machinery,
+steering-gear, and vital connections. The _Warsaw_ yawed, slackened
+speed, and came to a stop, her turret-guns still speaking, but the
+secondary guns silent. The _Argyll_ circled around her, sending her
+thirteen-, eight-, and six-inch shells into her victim with almost
+muzzle energy. The two military masts of the _Warsaw_ sank, and dead
+men in the fighting-tops were flung overboard. The forward turret
+seemed to explode; smoke and flame shot out of the ports, and its top
+lifted and fell. Then the _Argyll_ turned and headed straight for her
+side.
+
+There was little need of gun fire now; but the forward-turret guns
+belched once during the charge, and the more quickly handled eight- and
+six-inch rifles stormed away while there was time to reload. Smoking,
+rolling, and barking,--ten thousand tons of inertia behind a solid
+steel knife,--she pounced on her now silent enemy. There was a
+crunching sound, muffled and continuous. The speed of the _Argyll_
+seemed hardly checked. In went the ram farther and farther, until the
+slanting edge began cutting above the water. Then the _Warsaw_, heeled
+far over by the impact, rolled back, and the knife cut upward. The
+smooth plates at the _Argyll's_ water-line wrinkled like paper, and the
+pile of shattered steel which had once been her forward deck and
+bulkheads was shaken up and adjusted to new positions; but not until
+her nose was actually buried in the wound--until the _Warsaw_ was cut
+half in two--did the reversed engines begin to work. The _Argyll_
+backed out, exposing for a moment a hole like a cavern's mouth; then
+the stricken ship rolled heavily toward her, burying the sore, and,
+humming and buzzing with exhausting steam and rushing air, settled
+rapidly and sank, while out from ports, doors, and nearly vertical
+hatches came her crew, as many as could. They sprang overboard and
+swam, and those that reached the now stationary _Argyll_ were rescued;
+for a cry had gone through the latter from the central station in her
+depths: "All hands on deck to save life! Bring ladders, life-buoys, and
+ropes' ends!"
+
+The battle was ended; for, with the ramming of the _Warsaw_, the
+_Obdorsk_ struck to the three ships circling around her. They had
+suffered, but the battle-ship _Argyll_ was reduced to a monitor. Her
+superstructure and the bow and stern above the water-line were
+shattered to a shapeless tangle of steel. What was left of her funnels
+and ventilators resembled nutmeg-graters, and she was perceptibly down
+by the head; for her bow leaked through its wrinkled plates, and the
+forward compartment below the protective deck was filled. Yet she could
+still fight in smooth water. Her box-like citadel was intact, and
+standing naked out of the wreck, scarred and dented, but uninjured,
+were the turrets, ammunition-hoists, and conning-tower. In the latter
+was the brain of the ship, that had fought her to victory and then sent
+the call to her crew to save the lives of their enemies.
+
+Two men met on a level spot amidships and clasped hands. Both were
+bare-waisted and grimy, and one showed red as a lobster under the
+stains. He was the chief engineer.
+
+"We've won, Clarkson," he said. "We've won the hottest fight that
+history can tell of--won it ourselves; but he'll get the credit."
+
+"And he's drunk as a lord--drunk through it all. What did he ram for?
+Why did he send two millions of prize-money to the bottom? O Lord! O
+Lord! it's enough to make a man swear at his mother. We had her licked.
+Why did he ram?"
+
+"Because he was drunk, that's why. He rang seven bells to me along at
+the first of the muss, and then sent word through young Felton that he
+wanted full speed. Dammit, he already had it, every pound of it. And he
+gave me no signal to reverse when we struck; if it wasn't for luck and
+a kind Providence we'd have followed the _Warsaw_. I barely got her
+over. Here, Mr. Felton; you were in the central, were you not? How'd
+the old man appear to be making it? Were his orders intelligible?"
+
+A young man had joined them, hot, breathing hard, and unclothed.
+
+"Not always, sir; I had to ask him often to repeat, and then I
+sometimes got another order. He kept me busy from the first, when he
+sent the torpedoes overboard."
+
+"The torpedoes!" exclaimed Mr. Clarkson. "Did we use them? I didn't
+know it."
+
+"He was afraid they'd explode on board, sir," he said. "That was just
+after we took full speed."
+
+"And just before he got too full to be afraid of anything," muttered
+the lieutenant. "Why don't he come out of that?" He glanced toward the
+conning-tower. Other officers had joined them.
+
+"We'll investigate," said Mr. Clarkson.
+
+The door on the level of the main-deck leading into the mast was found
+to be wedged fast by the blow of a projectile. Men, naked and black,
+sprawled about the wreckage breathing fresh air, were ordered to get up
+and to rig a ladder outside. They did so, and Mr. Clarkson ascended to
+the ragged end of the hollow stump and looked down. Standing at the
+wheel, steering the drifting ship with one hand and holding an empty
+bottle in the other, was a man with torn clothing and bloody face. In
+spite of the disfigurement Mr. Clarkson knew him. Jammed into the
+narrow staircase leading below was the body of a man partly hidden by a
+Gatling gun, the lever of which had pierced the forehead.
+
+"Finnegan," yelled the officer, "how'd you get there?"
+
+The man at the wheel lifted a bleary eye and blinked; then, unsteadily
+touching his forehead, answered: "Fe' dow'-shtairs, shir."
+
+"Come out of that! On deck there! Take the wheel, one hand, and stand
+by it!" Mr. Clarkson descended to the others with a serious look on his
+grimy face, and a sailor climbed the ladder and went down the mast.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the first lieutenant, impressively, "we were
+mistaken, and we wronged Captain Blake. He is dead. He died at the
+beginning. He lies under a Gatling gun in the bottom of the tower. I
+saw Finnegan hanging to that gun, whirling around it, when the mast
+blew up. It is all plain now. Finnegan and the gun fell into the tower.
+Finnegan may have struck the stairs and rolled down, but the gun went
+down the hollow within and killed the captain. We have been steered and
+commanded by a drunken man--but it was Finnegan."
+
+Finnegan scrambled painfully down the ladder. He staggered, stumbled,
+and fell in a heap.
+
+"Rise up," said Mr. Clarkson, as they surrounded him; "rise up, Daniel
+Drake Nelson Farragut Finnegan. You are small potatoes and few in the
+hill; you are shamefully drunk, and your nose bleeds; you are stricken
+with Spanish mildew, and you smell vilely--but you are immortal. You
+have been a disgrace to the service, but Fate in her gentle irony has
+redeemed you, permitting you, in one brief moment of your misspent
+life, to save to your country the command of the seas--to guide, with
+your subconscious intelligence, the finest battle-ship the science of
+the world has constructed to glorious victory, through the fiercest
+sea-fight the world has known. Rise up, Daniel, and see the surgeon."
+
+But Finnegan only snored.
+
+
+
+
+THE WIGWAG MESSAGE
+
+
+As eight bells sounded, Captain Bacon and Mr. Knapp came up from
+breakfast, and Mr. Hansen, the squat and square-built second mate,
+immediately went down. The deck was still wet from the morning washing
+down, and forward the watch below were emerging from the forecastle to
+relieve the other half, who were coiling loosely over the top of the
+forward house a heavy, wet hawser used in towing out the evening
+before. They were doing it properly, and as no present supervision was
+necessary, the first mate remained on the poop for a few moments'
+further conversation with the captain.
+
+"Poor crew, cap'n," he said, as, picking his teeth with the end of a
+match, he scanned the men forward. "It'll take me a month to lick 'em
+into shape."
+
+To judge by his physique, a month was a generous limit for such an
+operation. He was a giant, with a giant's fist and foot; red-haired and
+bearded, and of sinister countenance. But he was no more formidable in
+appearance than his captain, who was equally big, but smooth-shaven,
+and showing the square jaw and beetling brows of a born fighter.
+
+"Are the two drunks awake yet?" asked the latter.
+
+"Not at four o'clock, sir," answered the mate. "Mr. Hansen couldn't get
+'em out. I'll soon turn 'em to."
+
+As he spoke, two men appeared from around the corner of the forward
+house, and came aft. They were young men, between twenty-five and
+thirty, with intelligent, sun-burnt faces. One was slight of figure,
+with the refinement of thought and study in his features; the other,
+heavier of mold and muscular, though equally quick in his movements,
+had that in his dark eyes which said plainly that he was wont to
+supplement the work of his hands with the work of his brain. Both were
+dressed in the tar-stained and grimy rags of the merchant sailor at
+sea; and they walked the wet and unsteady deck with no absence of
+"sea-legs," climbed the poop steps to leeward, as was proper, and
+approached the captain and first mate at the weather rail. The heavier
+man touched his cap, but the other merely inclined his head, and
+smiling frankly and fearlessly from one face to the other, said, in a
+pleasant, evenly modulated voice:
+
+"Good morning. I presume that one of you is the captain."
+
+"I'm the captain. What do you want?" was the gruff response.
+
+"Captain, I believe that the etiquette of the merchant service requires
+that when a man is shanghaied on board an outward-bound ship he remains
+silent, does what is told him cheerfully, and submits to fate until the
+passage ends; but we cannot bring ourselves to do so. We were struck
+down in a dark spot last night,--sandbagged, I should say,--and we do
+not know what happened afterward, though we must have been kept
+unconscious with chloroform or some such drug. We wakened this morning
+in your forecastle, dressed in these clothes, and robbed of everything
+we had with us."
+
+"Where were you slugged?"
+
+"In Cherry Street. The bridge cars were not running, so we crossed from
+Brooklyn by the Catherine Ferry, and foolishly took a short cut to the
+elevated station."
+
+"Well, what of it?"
+
+"What--why--why, captain, that you will kindly put us aboard the first
+inbound craft we meet."
+
+"Not much I won't," answered the captain, decidedly. "You belong to my
+crew. I paid for twenty men; and you two and two others skipped at the
+dock. I had to wait all day in the Horseshoe. You two were caught dead
+drunk last night, and came down with the tug. That's what the runners
+said, and that's all I know about it. Go forrard."
+
+"Do you mean, captain----"
+
+"Go forrard where you belong. Mr. Knapp, set these men to work."
+
+Captain Bacon turned his back on them, and walked away.
+
+"Get off the poop," snarled the mate. "Forrard wi' you both!"
+
+"Captain, I advise you to reconsider----"
+
+The words were stopped by a blow of the mate's fist, and the speaker
+fell to the deck. Then a hoarse growl of horror and rage came from his
+companion; and Captain Bacon turned, to see him dancing around the
+first officer with the skill and agility of a professional boxer,
+planting vicious blows on his hairy face and neck.
+
+"Stop this," roared the captain, as his right hand sought the pocket of
+his coat. "Stop it, I say. Mr. Hansen," he called down the skylight,
+"on deck, here."
+
+The huge mate was getting the worst of the unexpected battle, and
+Captain Bacon approached cautiously. His right hand had come out of his
+pocket, armed with large brass knuckles; but before he could use them
+his dazed and astonished first officer went down under the rain of
+blows. It was then, while the victor waited for him to rise, that the
+brass knuckles impacted on his head, and he, too, went down, to lie
+quiet where he fell. The other young man had arisen by this time,
+somewhat shocked and unsteady in movement, and was coming bravely
+toward the captain; but before he could reach him his arms were
+pinioned from behind by Mr. Hansen, who had run up the poop steps.
+
+"What is dis, onnyway?" he asked. "Mudiny, I dink?"
+
+"Let go," said the other, furiously. "You shall suffer for this, you
+scoundrels. Let go of my arms." He struggled wildly; but Mr. Hansen was
+strong.
+
+Mr. Knapp had regained his feet and a few of his faculties. His
+conqueror was senseless on the deck, but this other mutineer was still
+active in rebellion. So, while the approving captain looked on in
+brass-knuckled dignity, he sprang forward and struck, with strength
+born of his rage and humiliation, again and again at the man helpless
+in the arms of Mr. Hansen, until his battered head sank supinely
+backward, and he struggled no more. Then Mr. Hansen dropped him.
+
+"Lay aft, here, a couple o' hands," thundered the captain from the
+break of the poop, and two awe-struck men obeyed him. The whole crew
+had watched the fracas from forward, and the man at the wheel had
+looked unspeakable things; but no hand or voice had been raised in
+protest. One at a time they carried the unconscious men to the
+forecastle; then the crew mustered aft at another thundering summons,
+and listened to a forceful speech by Captain Bacon, delivered in quick,
+incisive epigrams, to the effect that if a man aboard his ship--whether
+he believed himself shipped or shanghaied, a sailor, a priest, a
+policeman, or a dry-nurse--showed the slightest hesitation at obeying
+orders, or the slightest resentment at what was said to him, he would
+be punished with fists, brass knuckles, belaying-pins, or
+handspikes,--the officers were here for that purpose,--and if he
+persisted, he would be shot like a mad dog. They could go forward.
+
+They went, and while the watch on deck, under the supervision of the
+second mate, finished coiling down the tow-line, the watch below
+finished their breakfast, and when the stricken ones had recovered
+consciousness, advised them, unsympathetically, to submit and make the
+best of it until the ship reached Hong-Kong, where they could all "jump
+her" and get better berths.
+
+"For if ye don't," concluded an Irishman, "I take it ye'll die, an'
+take sam wan of us wid ye; fur this is an American ship, where the
+mates are hired fur the bigness o' their fists an' the hardness o'
+their hearts. Look pleasant, now, the pair o' ye; an' wan o' ye take
+this hash-kid back to the galley."
+
+The larger of the two victims sprang to his feet. He was stained and
+disfigured from the effects of the brass knuckles, and he looked
+anything but "pleasant."
+
+"Say, Irish," he said angrily, "do you know who you 're talkin' to?
+Looks as though you don't. I'm used to all sorts of guff from all sorts
+of men, but Mr. Breen here----"
+
+"Johnson," interrupted the other, "wait--it's of no account now. This
+man's advice is sound. No one would believe us, and we can prove
+nothing. We are thoroughly helpless, and must submit until we reach a
+consular port, or something happens. Now, men," he said to the others,
+"my name is Breen. Call me by it. You, too, Johnson. I yield to the
+inevitable, and will do my share of the work as well as I can. If I
+make mistakes, don't hesitate to criticize, and post me, if you will.
+I'll be grateful."
+
+"But I'll tell you one thing to start with," said Johnson, glaring
+around the forecastle: "we'll take turns at bringin' grub and cleanin'
+up the forecastle. Another thing: I've sailed in these wind-jammers
+enough to know my work; and that's more than you fellows know, by the
+looks of you. I don't want your instructions; but Mr. Breen,
+here--Breen, I mean" (a gesture from the other had interrupted
+him)--"Breen's forgotten what you and I will never learn, though he
+might not be used to pullin' ropes and swabbing paint-work. If I find
+one o' you pesterin' him, or puttin' up any jobs, I'll break that man's
+head; understand me? Any one want to put this thing to the test, now?"
+He scanned each man's face in turn; but none showed an inclination to
+respond. They had seen him fight the big first mate. "There's not the
+makin' of a whole man among you," he resumed. "You stand still while
+three men do up two, when, if you had any nerve, Mr. ---- Breen, here,
+might be aft, 'stead o' eatin' cracker-hash with a lot o' dock-rats and
+beach-combers. He's had better playmates; so 've I, for that matter, o'
+late years."
+
+"Johnson, keep still," said the other. "It doesn't matter what we have
+had, who we were or might be. We're before the mast, bound for
+Hong-Kong. We may find a consul at Anjer; I'm not sure. Meanwhile, I'm
+Breen, and you are Johnson, and it is no one's business what we have
+been. I'm not anxious for this matter to become public. I can explain
+to the department, and no one else need know."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+"No; not 'sir.' Keep that for our superiors."
+
+Johnson grumbled a little; then Mr. Hansen's round Swedish face
+appeared at the door.
+
+"Hi, you in dere--you big feller--you come out. You belong in der utter
+watch. You hear? You come out on deck," he called.
+
+"Aye, aye, sir," said Johnson, rising sullenly.
+
+"All the better, Johnson," whispered Breen. "One can keep a lookout all
+the time. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut."
+
+So for these two men the work of the voyage began. The hard-headed,
+aggressive Johnson, placed in the mate's watch, had no trouble in
+finding his place, and keeping it, at the top of the class. He ruled
+the assorted types of all nations, who worked and slept with him, with
+sound logic backed by a strong arm and hard fist, never trying to
+conceal his contempt for them.
+
+"You mixed nest o' mongrels," he would say, at the end of some petty
+squabble which he had settled for them, "why don't you stay in your own
+country ships? Or, if you must sign in American craft, try to feel and
+act like Americans. It's just this same yawping at one another in the
+forecastles that makes it easy for the buckoes aft to hunt you. And
+that's why you get your berths. No skipper 'll ship an American sailor
+while there's a Dutchman left in the shippin'-office. He wouldn't think
+it safe to go to sea with too many American sailors forward to call him
+down and make him treat 'em decent. He picks a Dago here, and a
+Dutchman there, and all the Sou'wegians he sees, and fills in with the
+rakin's and scrapin's o' Hell, Bedlam, and Newgate, knowin' they'll
+hate one another worse than they hate him, and never stand together."
+
+To which they would respond in kind, though of lesser degree, always
+yielding him the last word when he spoke it loud enough.
+
+But Breen, in the second mate's watch, had trouble with his fellows at
+first. They could not understand his quiet, gentlemanly demeanor,
+mistaking it for fear of them; so, unknown to Johnson, for he would not
+complain, they subjected him to all the petty annoyances which
+ignorance may inflict upon intelligence. Though he showed a theoretical
+knowledge of ships and the sea superior to any they had met with, he
+was not their equal in the practical work of a sailor. He was awkward
+at pulling ropes with others, placing his hands in the wrong place and
+mixing them up in what must be a concerted pull to be effective. His
+hands, unused to labor, became blistered and sore, and he often,
+unconsciously perhaps, held back from a task, to save himself from
+pain. He was an indifferent helmsman, and off Hatteras, in a blow, was
+sent from the wheel in disgrace. He did not know the ropes, and made
+sad mistakes until he had mastered the lesson. He could box the
+compass, in his own way; for instance, the quarter-points between
+north-northeast and northeast by north he persisted in naming from the
+first of these points instead of from the other, as was seamanlike and
+proper; and the same with the corresponding sectors in the other
+quadrants. Once, at the wheel, when the ship was heading southeast by
+south half-south, he had been asked the course, and answered:
+"South-southeast half-east, sir." For this he was profanely admonished
+by the captain and ridiculed by the men. Johnson had made the same
+mistake, but corrected himself in time, and nothing was said about it;
+but Breen was bullied and badgered in the watch below,--the lubberly
+nomenclature becoming a byword of derision and contempt,--until,
+patience leaving him, he doubled his sore fingers into fists one
+dog-watch, and thrashed the Irishman--his most unforgiving critic--so
+quickly, thoroughly, and scientifically that persecution ceased; for
+the Irishman had been the master spirit of the port forecastle.
+
+But the captain and mates were not won over. Practical Johnson--an able
+seaman from crown to toe--knew how to avoid or forestall their abuse;
+but Breen did not. The very presence of such a man as he before the
+mast was a continuous menace,--an insult to their artificial
+superiority,--and they assailed him at each mistake with volleys of
+billingsgate that brought a flush to his fine face and tears to his
+eyes; later, a deadly paleness that would have been a warning to
+tyrants of better discrimination. Once again, while being rebuked in
+this manner, his self-control left him. With white face and blazing
+eyes he darted at Mr. Knapp, and had almost repeated Johnson's feat on
+the poop when an iron belaying-pin in the hands of the captain
+descended upon him and broke his left arm. Mr. Knapp's fists and boots
+completed his tutelage, and he was carried to his bunk with another
+lesson learned. Johnson, swearing the while, skilfully set the broken
+bones and made a sling; then, by tactful wheedling of the steward,
+secured certain necessaries from the medicine-chest, with hot water
+from the galley; but open assistance was refused by the captain.
+
+Breen, scarcely able to move, held to his bunk for a few days; then,
+the first mild skirts of the trade-wind being reached, the mate drove
+him to the wheel, to steer one-handed through the day, while all hands
+(in the afternoon) worked in the rigging. But the trade-wind freshened,
+and his strength was not equal to the task set for it. With the men all
+aloft and the two mates forward, the ship nearly broached to one day,
+and only the opportune arrival of Captain Bacon on deck saved the
+spars. He seized the wheel, ground it up, and the ship paid off; then a
+whole man was called to relieve him, and the incompetent helmsman was
+promptly and properly punished. He was kicked off the poop, and his
+arm, as a consequence, needed resetting.
+
+Johnson had been aloft, but there was murder in his dark eyes when he
+came down at supper-time. Yet he knew its futility, and while bandaging
+the broken arm earnestly explained, as Breen's groans would allow, that
+if he killed one the other two would kill him, and nothing would be
+gained. "For they've brass knuckles in their pockets, sir," he said,
+"and pistols under their pillows. We haven't even sheath-knives, and
+the crew wouldn't help."
+
+Whereupon, an inspired Russian Finn of the watch remarked: "If a man
+know his work an' do his work, an' gif no back lip to te mates, he get
+no trupple mit te mates. In my country ships----" The dissertation was
+not finished. Johnson silently knocked him down, and the incident
+closed.
+
+But they found work which the crippled man could do, after a short
+"lying up." With the steward's washboard, he could wash the captain's
+soiled linen, which the steward would afterward wring out and hang up.
+He refused at first, but was duly persuaded, and went to work in the
+lee scuppers amidships. Johnson made a detour on his way to the
+main-rigging, and muttered: "Say the word, sir, and I 'll chance it. No
+jury'd convict."
+
+"No, no; go aloft, Johnson. I'm all right," answered Breen, as he bent
+over the distasteful task.
+
+Johnson climbed the rigging to the main-royalyard, which he was to
+scrape for reoiling, and had no sooner reached it than he sang out:
+
+"Sail oh! Dead ahead, sir. Looks like an armored cruiser o' the first
+class."
+
+"Armored cruiser o' the first class?" muttered the captain, as he
+carried his binoculars to the weather rail and looked ahead. "More 'n I
+can make out with the glasses."
+
+If three funnels, two masts, two bridges, and two sets of fighting-tops
+indicate an armored cruiser of the first class, Johnson was right.
+These the oncoming craft showed plainly even at seven miles' distance.
+Fifteen minutes later she was storming by, a half-mile to windward; a
+beautiful picture, long and white, with an incurving ram-bow, with
+buff-colored turrets and superstructure, and black guns bristling from
+all parts of her. The Stars and Stripes flew from the flagstaff at the
+stern; white-clad men swarmed about her decks, and one of them, on the
+forward bridge, close to a group of officers, was waving by its staff a
+small red-and-white flag. Captain Bacon brought out the American
+ensign, and with his own hands hoisted it to the monkey-gaff on the
+mizzen, dipped it three times in respectful salute, and left it at the
+gaff-end. Then he looked at the cruiser, as every man on board was
+doing except the man washing clothes in the lee scuppers. His business
+was to wash clothes, not to cross a broad deck and climb a high rail to
+look at passing craft; but, as he washed away, he looked furtively
+aloft, with eyes that sparkled, at the man on the mainroyalyard.
+Johnson was standing erect on the small spar, holding on with his left
+hand to the royal-pole,--certainly the most conspicuous detail of the
+whole ship to the eyes of those on board the cruiser,--and with his
+right hand he was waving his cap to the right and left, and up and
+down. There was method in his motions, for when he would cease, the
+small red-and-white flag on the cruiser's bridge would answer, waving
+to the right and left, and up and down.
+
+A secondary gun spoke from a midship sponson, and Captain Bacon
+exclaimed enthusiastically, "Salutin' the flag," and again dipped his
+ensign. Then, after an interval, during which it became apparent that
+the cruiser had altered her course to cross the ship's stern, there was
+seen another tongue of flame and cloud of smoke, and something seemed
+to rush through the air ahead of the ship. But it was a splash of water
+far off on the lee bow which really apprised them that the gun was
+shotted. At the same time a string of small flags arose to the
+signal-yard, and when Captain Bacon had found this combination in his
+code-book, he read with amazement: "Heave to or take the consequences."
+By this time the cruiser was squarely across his wake, most certainly
+rounding to for an interview.
+
+"Heave to or take the consequences!" he exclaimed. "And he's firin' on
+us. Down from aloft, all hands!" he roared upward; then he seized the
+answering pennant from the flag-locker and displayed it from the rail,
+begrudging the time needful to hoist it. The men were sliding to the
+deck on backstays and running-gear, and the mates were throwing down
+coils of rope from the belaying-pins.
+
+"Man both main clue-garnets, some o' you!" yelled the captain. "Clue
+up! Weather main-braces, the rest o' you! Slack away to looward! Round
+wi' the yards, you farmers--round wi' 'em! Down wi' the wheel, there!
+Bring her up three points and hold her. H----l an' blazes, what's he
+firin' on me for?"
+
+Excitedly, the men obeyed him; they were not used to gun fire, and it
+is certainly exciting to be shot at. Conspicuous among them was
+Johnson, who pulled and hauled lustily, shouting exuberantly the
+formless calls which sailors use in pulling ropes, and smiling
+sardonically. In five minutes from the time of the second gun the yards
+were backed, and, with weather leeches trembling, the ship lay "hove
+to," drifting bodily to leeward. The cruiser had stopped her headway,
+and a boat had left her side. There were ten men at the oars, a
+cockswain at the yoke-ropes, and with him in the stern-sheets a young
+man in an ensign's uniform, who lifted his voice as the boat neared the
+lee quarter, and shouted: "Rig a side-ladder aboard that ship!"
+
+He was hardly more than a boy, but he was obeyed; not only the
+side-ladder, but the gangway steps were rigged; and leaving the
+cockswain and bow oarsman to care for the boat, the young officer
+climbed aboard, followed by the rest--nine muscular man-of-war's-men,
+each armed with cutlass and pistol, one of them carrying a hand-bag,
+another a bundle. Captain Bacon, as became his position, remained upon
+the poop to receive his visitor, while the two mates stood at the main
+fife-rail, and the ship's crew clustered forward. Johnson, alert and
+attentive, stood a little in the van, and the man in the lee scuppers
+still washed clothes.
+
+"What's the matter, young man?" asked the captain from the break of the
+poop, with as much of dignity as his recent agitation would permit.
+"Why do you stop my ship on the high seas and board her with an armed
+boat's crew?"
+
+"You have an officer and seaman of the navy on board this ship,"
+answered the ensign, who had been looking about irresolutely. "Produce
+them at once, if you please."
+
+"What--what----" stuttered the captain, descending the poop steps; but
+before more was said there was a sound from forward as of something
+hard striking something heavy, and as they looked, they saw Captain
+Bacon's bucket of clothes sailing diagonally over the lee rail,
+scattering a fountain of soapy water as it whirled; his late laundryman
+coming toward them with head erect, as though he might have owned the
+ship and himself; and Johnson, limping slightly, making for the crowd
+of blue-jackets at the gangway. With these he fraternized at once,
+telling them things in a low voice, and somewhat profanely, while the
+two mates at the fife-rail eyed him reprovingly, but did not interrupt.
+
+Breen advanced to the ensign, and said, as he extended his hand: "I am
+Lieutenant Breen. Did you bring the clothing? This is an extremely
+fortunate meeting for me; but I can thank you--you and your brother
+officers--much more gracefully aboard the cruiser."
+
+The officer took the extended hand gingerly, with suspicion in his
+eyes. Perhaps, if it had not been thoroughly clean from its late
+friction with soap and water, he might have declined taking it; for
+there was nothing in the appearance of the haggard, ragged wreck before
+him to indicate the naval officer.
+
+"There is some mistake," he said coldly. "I am well acquainted with
+Lieutenant Breen, and you are certainly not he."
+
+Breen's face flushed hotly, but before he could reply, the captain
+broke in.
+
+"Some mistake, hey?" said he, derisively. "I guess there is--another
+mistake--another bluff that don't go. Get out o' here; and I tell you
+now, blast yer hide, that if you make me any more trouble 'board my
+ship yer liable to go over the side feet first, with a shackle to yer
+heels. And you, young man," he stormed, turning to the ensign, "you
+look round, if you like. There's my crew. All the navy officers you
+find you can have, and welcome to 'em." He turned his back, stamped a
+few paces along the deck, and returned, working himself into a fury.
+
+Breen had not moved, but, with a slight sparkle to his eyes, said to
+the young officer:
+
+"I think, sir, that if you take the trouble to investigate, you will be
+satisfied. There are two Breens in the navy. You know one, evidently; I
+am the other. Lieutenant William Breen is on shore duty at Washington,
+I think. Lieutenant John Breen, lately in command of the torpedo-boat
+_Wainwright_, with his signalman Thomas Johnson, are shanghaied on
+board this ship. There is Johnson talking to your men."
+
+The young man's face changed, and his hand went to his cap in salute;
+but the mischief was done. Captain Bacon's indignation was at
+bursting-pressure, and his mind in no condition to respond readily to
+new impressions. He was captain of the ship, and grossly affronted.
+Johnson, noting his purple face, wisely reached for a topsail-brace
+belaying-pin, and stepped toward him; for he now towered over Breen,
+cursing with volcanic energy.
+
+"Didn't I tell you to go forrard?" he roared, drawing back his powerful
+fist.
+
+Breen stood his ground; the officer raised his hand and half drew his
+sword, while the blue-jackets sprang forward; but it was Johnson's
+belaying-pin which stopped that mighty fist in mid-passage. It was an
+iron club, eighteen inches long by an inch and a half diameter; and
+Johnson, strong man though he was, used it two-handed. It struck the
+brawny forearm just above the wrist with a crashing sound, and seemed
+to sink in. Captain Bacon almost fell, but recovered his balance, and,
+holding the broken bones together, staggered toward the booby-hatch for
+support. He groaned in pain, but did not curse; for it requires a
+modicum of self-respect for this, and Captain Bacon's self-respect was
+completely shocked out of him.
+
+But Mr. Knapp and Mr. Hansen still respected themselves, and were
+coming.
+
+"You keep back, there--you two," yelled Johnson, excitedly. "Stand by
+here, mates. These buckoes 'll kill someone yet. Look out for their
+brass knuckles and guns."
+
+And the two officers halted. They had no desire to assert themselves
+before nine scowling, armed men, an angry and aggressive mutineer with
+a belaying-pin, and a rather confused, but wakening, young officer with
+drawn sword. Johnson backed toward the latter.
+
+"Don't you know me, Mr. Bronson," he said--"Tom Johnson, cocks'n o' the
+gig on your practice-cruise? 'Member me, sir? This is Lieutenant
+Breen--take my word, sir."
+
+"Yes--yes--I understand," said the ensign, with a face redder than
+Breen's had been. "I really beg your pardon, Mr. Breen. It was
+inexcusable in me, I know--but--I had expected to see a different face,
+and--and--we're three months out from Hong-Kong, you see----"
+
+Breen smiled, and interrupted with a gesture.
+
+"No time for explanations, Mr. Bronson," said he, kindly. "Did you
+bring the clothes? Thoughtful of Johnson to ask for them, wasn't it? It
+really would be embarrassing to join your ship in this rig. In the grip
+and bundle? All right. Form your men across the deck, please, forward
+of the cabin. Keep these brutes away from us while we change. Come,
+Johnson."
+
+Taking the hand-bag and the bundle, they brazenly entered the cabin by
+the forward door. In ten minutes they emerged, Johnson clad in the blue
+rig of a man-of-war's-man, Breen in the undress uniform of an officer,
+his crippled arm buttoned into the coat. As they stepped toward the
+gangway, Captain Bacon, pale and perspiring, wheezing painfully,
+entered the cabin and passed out of their lives. The steward followed
+at his heels, and the two mates, with curiously working faces,
+approached Breen.
+
+"Excuse me, sir," said Mr. Knapp, "but I want to say that I had no
+notion o' this at all; and I hope you won't make no trouble for me
+ashore."
+
+Breen, one foot on the steps while he waited for the blue-jackets to
+file over the side, eyed him thoughtfully.
+
+"No," he said slowly. "I hardly think, Mr. Knapp, that I shall exert
+myself to make trouble for you personally, or for the other two. There
+is a measure now before Congress which, if it passes, will legislate
+brutes like you and your captain off the American quarter-deck by its
+educational conditions. This, with a consideration for your owners, is
+what permits you to continue this voyage, instead of going back to the
+United States in irons. But if I had the power," he added, looking at
+the beautiful flag still flying at the gaff, "I would lower that
+ensign, and forbid you to hoist it. It is the flag of a free country,
+and should not float over slave-ships."
+
+He mounted the steps, and, assisted by the young officer and Johnson,
+descended to the boat; but before Johnson went down, he peered over the
+rail at the two mates, grinning luridly.
+
+"And I'll promise you," he said, "that I'm always willing to make
+trouble for you, ashore or afloat, and wish I had a little more time
+for it now. And you can tell your skipper, if you like, in case he
+don't know it, that he got smashed with the same club that he used on
+Mr. Breen, and I'm only d----d sorry I didn't bring it down on his
+head. So long, you bloody-minded hell-drivers. See you again some day."
+
+He descended, and Mr. Knapp gave the order to brace the yards.
+
+"Give a good deal," he mused, as the men manned the braces, "to know
+just how they got news to that cruiser. Homeward bound from
+Hong-Kong--three months out. Couldn't ha' been sent after us."
+
+But he never learned.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRADE-WIND
+
+
+The orgy was finished. The last sea-song had resounded over the smooth
+waters of the bay; the last drunken shout, oath, and challenge were
+voiced; the last fight ended in helplessness and maudlin amity, and the
+red-shirted men were sprawled around on the moonlit deck, snoring.
+Though the barrel of rum broached on the main-hatch was but slightly
+lowered, their sleep was heavy; scurvy-tainted men at the end of a Cape
+Horn passage may not drink long or deeply. Some lay as they fell--face
+upward; others on their sides for a while, then to roll over on their
+backs and so remain until the sleep was done; for in no other position
+may the human body rest easy on a hard bed with no pillow. And as they
+slept through the tropic night the full moon in the east rose higher
+and higher, passed overhead and disappeared behind a thickening haze in
+the western sky; but before it had crossed the meridian its cold,
+chemical rays had worked disastrously on the eyes of the sleeping men.
+
+Captain Swarth, prone upon the poop-deck, was the first to waken. There
+was pain in his head, pain in his eyes,--which were swollen,--and a
+whistling tumult of sound in his ears coming from the Plutonian
+darkness surrounding him, while a jarring vibration of the deck beneath
+him apprised his awakening brain that the anchor was dragging. As he
+staggered to his feet a violent pressure of wind hurled him against the
+wheel, to which he clung, staring into the blackness to windward.
+
+"All hands, there!" he roared! "Up with you all! Go forward and pay out
+on the chain!"
+
+Shouts, oaths, and growls answered him, and he heard the nasal voice of
+his mate repeating his order. "Angel," he called, "get the other anchor
+over and give her all of both chains."
+
+"Aye, aye, sir," answered the mate. "Send a lantern forrard, Bill.
+Can't see our noses."
+
+"Steward," yelled the captain, "where are you? Light up a deck-lantern
+and the binnacle. Bear a hand."
+
+He heard the steward's voice close to him, and the sound of the
+binnacle lights being removed from their places, then the opening and
+closing of the cabin companionway. He could see nothing, but knew that
+the steward had gone below to his store-room. In a minute more a shriek
+came from the cabin. It rang out again and again, and soon sounded from
+the companionway: "I'm blind, I'm blind, capt'n. I can't see. I lit the
+lantern and burned my fingers; but I can't see the light. I'm blind."
+The steward's voice ended in a howl.
+
+"Shut up, you blasted fool," answered Captain Swarth; "get down there
+and light up."
+
+"Where's that light?" came the mate's voice in a yell from amidships.
+"Shank-painter's jammed, Bill. Can't do a thing without a light."
+
+"Come aft here and get it. Steward's drunk."
+
+The doors in the forward part of the cabin slammed, and the mate's
+profanity mingled with the protest of the steward in the cabin. Then
+shouts came from forward, borne on the gale, and soon followed by the
+shuffling of feet as the men groped their way aft and climbed the poop
+steps.
+
+"We're stone-blind, cappen," they wailed. "We lit the fo'c'sle lamp,
+an' it don't show up. We can't see it. Nobody can see it. We're all
+blind."
+
+"Come down here, Bill," called the mate from below.
+
+As Captain Swarth felt his way down the stairs a sudden shock stilled
+the vibrations caused by the dragging anchor, and he knew that the
+chain had parted.
+
+"Stand by on deck, Angel; we're adrift," he said. "It's darker than ten
+thousand black cats. What's the matter with you?"
+
+"Can you see the light, Bill? I can't. I'm blind as the steward, or I'm
+drunker."
+
+"No. Is it lit? Where? The men say they're blind, too."
+
+"Here, forrard end o' the table."
+
+The captain reached this end, searched with his hands, and burned them
+on the hot glass of a lantern. He removed the bowl and singed the hair
+on his wrists. The smell came to his nostrils.
+
+"I'm blind, too," he groaned. "Angel, it's the moon. We're
+moonstruck--moon-blind. And we're adrift in a squall. Steward," he said
+as he made his way toward the stairs, "light the binnacle, and stop
+that whining. Maybe some one can see a little."
+
+When he reached the deck he called to the men, growling, cursing, and
+complaining on the poop. "Down below with you all!" he ordered. "Pass
+through and out the forrard door. If any man sees the light on the
+cabin table, let that man sing out."
+
+They obeyed him. Twenty men passed through the cabin and again climbed
+the poop stairs, their lamentations still troubling the night. But not
+one had seen the lantern. Some said that they could not open their eyes
+at all; some complained that their faces were swollen; others that
+their mouths were twisted up to where their ears should be; and one man
+averred that he could not breathe through his nose.
+
+"It'll only last a few days, boys," said the captain, bravely; "we
+shouldn't have slept in the moonlight in these latitudes. Drop the lead
+over, one of you--weather side. The devil knows where we're drifting,
+and the small anchor won't hold now; we'll save it." Captain Swarth was
+himself again.
+
+But not so his men. They had become children, with children's fear of
+the dark. Even the doughty Angel Todd was oppressed by the first horror
+of the situation, speaking only when spoken to. Above the rushing sound
+of wind and the smacking of short seas could be heard the voice of the
+steward in the cabin, while an occasional heart-borne malediction or
+groan--according to temperament--added to the distraction on deck. One
+man, more self-possessed than the rest, had dropped the lead over the
+side. An able seaman needs no eyes to heave the lead.
+
+"A quarter six," he sang out, and then, plaintively: "We'll fetch up on
+the Barrier, capt'n. S'pose we try an' get the other hook over."
+
+"Yes, yes," chorused some of the braver spirits. "It may hold. We don't
+want to drown on the reef. Let's get it over. Chain's overhauled."
+
+"Let the anchor alone," roared the captain. "No anchor-chain'll hold in
+this. Keep that lead a-going, Tom Plate, if it's you. What bottom do
+you find?"
+
+"Quarter less six," called the leadsman. "Soft bottom. We're shoaling."
+
+"Angel," said the captain to his mate, who stood close to him, "we're
+blowing out the south channel. We've been drifting long enough to fetch
+up on the reef if it was in our way. There's hard bottom in the north
+channel, and the twenty-fathom lead wouldn't reach it half a length
+from the rocks."
+
+The mate had nothing to say.
+
+"And the south channel lay due southeast from our moorings," continued
+the captain. "Wind's nor'west, I should say, right down from the
+hilltops; and I've known these blasted West India squalls to last three
+days, blowing straight and hard. This has the smell of a gale in it
+already. Keep that lead a-going, there."
+
+"No bottom," answered the leadsman.
+
+"Good enough," said the captain, cheerfully.
+
+"No bottom," was called repeatedly, until the captain sang out:
+"That'll do the lead." Then the leadsman coiled up the line, and they
+heard his rasping, unpleasant voice, cursing softly but fiercely to
+himself. Captain Swarth descended the stairs, silenced the steward with
+a blow, felt of the clock hands, secured his pistols, and returned to
+the deck.
+
+"We're at sea," he said. "Two hands to the wheel. Loose and set the
+foretopmast-staysails and the foretopsail. Staysail first. Let a man
+stay in the slings to square the yard by the feel as it goes up."
+
+"What for?" they answered complainingly. "What ye goin' to do? We can't
+see. Why didn't you bring to when you had bottom under you?"
+
+"No arguments!" yelled Swarth. "Forrard with you. What are you doing on
+the poop, anyway? If you can't see, you can feel, and what more do you
+want? Jump, now. Set that head-sail and get her 'fore the wind--quick,
+or I'll drop some of you."
+
+They knew their captain, and they knew the ropes--on the blackest of
+dark nights. Blind men climbed aloft, and felt for foot-ropes and
+gaskets. Blind men on deck felt for sheets, halyards, and braces, and
+in ten minutes the sails were set, and the brig was charging wildly
+along before the gale, with two blind men at the wheel endeavoring to
+keep her straight by the right and left pressure of the wind on their
+faces.
+
+"Keep the wind as much on the port quarter as you can without broaching
+to," yelled the captain in their ears, and they answered and did their
+best. She was a clean-lined craft and steered easily; yet the off-shore
+sea which was rising often threw her around until nearly in the trough.
+The captain remained by them, advising and encouraging.
+
+"Where're ye goin', Bill?" asked the mate, weakly, as he scrambled up
+to him.
+
+"Right out to sea, and, unless we get our eyes back soon, right across
+to the Bight of Benin, three thousand miles from here. We've no
+business on this coast in this condition. What ails you, Angel? Lost
+your nerve?"
+
+"Mebbe, Bill." The mate's voice was hoarse and strained. "This is new
+to me. I'm falling--falling--all the time."
+
+"So am I. Brace up. We'll get used to it. Get a couple of hands aft and
+heave the log. We take our departure from Kittredge Point, Barbados
+Island, at six o'clock this morning of the 10th October. We'll keep a
+Geordie's log-book--with a jack-knife and a stick."
+
+They hove the log for him. It was marked for a now useless 28-second
+sand-glass, which Captain Swarth replaced by a spare chronometer, held
+to his ear in the companionway. It ticked even seconds, and when
+twenty-eight of them had passed he called, "Stop." The markings on the
+line that had slipped through the mate's fingers indicated an
+eight-knot speed.
+
+"Seven, allowing for wild steering," said the captain when he had
+stowed away his chronometer and returned to the deck. "Angel, we know
+we're going about sou'east by east, seven knots. There's practically
+no variation o' the compass in these seas, and that course'll take us
+clear of Cape St. Roque. Just as fast as the men can stand it at the
+wheel, we'll pile on canvas and get all we can out o' this good wind.
+If it takes us into the southeast trades, well and good. We can feel
+our way across on the trade-wind--unless we hit something, of course.
+You see, it blows almost out of the east on this side, and 'll haul
+more to the sou'east and south'ard as we get over. By the wind first,
+then we'll square away as we need to. We'll know the smell o' the
+trades--nothing like it on earth--and the smell o' the Gold Coast,
+Ivory Coast, Slave Coast, and the Kameruns. And I'll lay odds we can
+feel the heat o' the sun in the east and west enough to make a fair
+guess at the course. But it won't come to that. Some of us 'll be able
+to see pretty soon."
+
+It was wild talk, but the demoralized mate needed encouraging. He
+answered with a steadier voice: "Lucky we got in grub and water
+yesterday."
+
+"Right you are, Angel. Now, in case this holds on to us, why, we'll
+find some of our friends over in the Bight, and they'll know by our rig
+that something's wrong. Flanders is somewhere on the track,--you know
+he went back to the nigger business,--and Chink put a slave-deck in his
+hold down Rio way last spring. And old man Slack--I did him a service
+when I crippled the corvette that was after him, and he's grateful.
+Hope we'll meet him. I'd rather meet Chink than Flanders in the dark,
+and I'd trust a Javanese trader before either. If either of them come
+aboard we'll be ready to use their eyes for our benefit, not let 'em
+use ours for theirs. Flanders once said he liked the looks of this
+brig."
+
+"S'pose we run foul of a bulldog?"
+
+"We'll have to chance it. This coast's full o' them, too. Great guns,
+man! Would you drift around and do nothing? Anywhere east of due south
+there's no land nearer than Cape Orange, and that's three hundred and
+fifty miles from here. Beginning to-morrow noon, we'll take deep-sea
+soundings until we strike the trade-wind."
+
+The negro cook felt his way through the preparing of meals and served
+them on time. The watches were set, and sail was put on the brig as
+fast as the men became accustomed to the new way of steering, those
+relieved always imparting what they had learned to their successors.
+Before nightfall on that first day they were scudding under foresail,
+topsail and topgallantsail and maintopsail, with the spanker furled as
+useless, and the jib adding its aid to the foretopmast-staysail in
+keeping the brig before the quartering seas which occasionally climbed
+aboard. The bowsprit light was rigged nightly; they hove the log every
+two hours; and Captain Swarth made scratches and notches on the
+sliding-hood of the companionway, while careful to wind his chronometer
+daily.
+
+But, in spite of the cheer of his indomitable courage and confidence,
+his men, with the exception of a few, dropped into a querulous, whining
+discontent. Mr. Todd, spurred by his responsibility, gradually came
+around to something like his old arbitrary self. Yank Tate, the
+carpenter, maintained through it all a patient faith in the captain,
+and, in so far as his influence could be felt, acted as a foil to the
+irascible, fault-finding Tom Plate, the forecastle lawyer, the man who
+had been at the lead-line at Barbados. But the rest of them were dazed
+and nerveless, too shaken in brain and body to consider seriously Tom's
+proposition to toss the afterguard overboard and beach the brig on the
+South American coast, where they could get fresh liver of shark, goat,
+sheep, or bullock, which even a "nigger" knew was the only cure for
+moon-blindness.
+
+They had not yet recovered from the unaccustomed debauch; their clouded
+brains seemed too large for their skulls, and their eyeballs ached in
+their sockets, while they groped tremblingly from rope to rope at the
+behest of the captain or mate.
+
+So Tom marked himself for future attention by insolent and disapproving
+comments on the orders of his superiors, and a habit of moving swiftly
+to another part of the deck directly he had spoken, which prevented the
+blind and angry captain from finding him in the crowd.
+
+Dim as must have been the light of day through the pelting rain and
+storm-cloud, it caused increased pain in their eyes, and they bound
+them with their neckerchiefs, applying meanwhile such remedies as
+forecastle lore could suggest. The captain derided these remedies, but
+frankly confessed his ignorance of anything but time as a means of
+cure. And so they existed and suffered through a three days' damp gale
+and a fourth day's dead calm, when the brig rolled scuppers under with
+all sail set, ready for the next breeze. It came, cool, dry, and faint
+at first, then brisker--the unmistakable trade-wind. They boxed the
+brig about and braced sharp on the starboard tack, steering again by
+the feel of the wind and the rattling of shaking leeches aloft. The
+removal of bandages to ascertain the sun's position by sense of light
+or increase of pain brought agonized howls from the experimenters, and
+this deterred the rest. Not even by its warmth could they locate it. It
+was overhead at noon and useless as a guide. In the early morning and
+late afternoon, when it might have indicated east and west, its warmth
+was overcome by the coolness of the breeze. So they steered on blindly,
+close-hauled on the starboard tack, nearly as straight a course as
+though they were whole men.
+
+They took occasional deep-sea soundings with the brig shaking in the
+wind, but found no bottom, and at the end of fifteen days a longer
+heave to the ground-swell was evidence to Captain Swarth's mind that he
+was passing Cape St. Roque, and the soundings were discontinued.
+
+"No use bothering about St. Paul Rocks or the Rocas, Angel," said he.
+"They rise out o' the deep sea, and if we're to hit, soundings won't
+warn us in time. I take it we'll pass between them and well north of
+Ascension." So he checked in the yards a little and brought the wind
+more abeam.
+
+One day Yank Tate appeared at the captain's elbow, and suggested, in a
+low voice, that he examine the treasure-chests in the 'tween-deck. "I
+was down stowing away some oakum," he said, "an' I was sure I heard the
+lid close; but nobody answered me, an' I couldn't feel anybody."
+
+Captain Swarth descended to his cabin and found his keys missing; then
+he and the carpenter visited the chests. They were locked tight, and as
+heavy as ever.
+
+"Some one has the keys, Yank, and has very likely raided the diamonds.
+We can't do anything but wait. He can't get away. Keep still about it."
+
+The air became cooler as they sailed on; and judging that the
+trade-wind was blowing more from the south than he had allowed for, the
+captain brought the wind squarely abeam, and the brig sailed faster.
+Still, it was too cool for the latitude, and it puzzled him, until a
+man came aft and groaned that he had lifted his bandage to bathe his
+eyes, and had unmistakably seen the sun four points off the port
+quarter; but his eyes were worse now, and he could not do it again.
+
+"Four points off!" exclaimed Swarth. "Four o'clock in the afternoon.
+That's just about where the sun ought to be heading due east, and far
+enough south o' the line to bring this cool weather. We're not far from
+Ascension. Never knew the sou'east trade to act like this before. Must
+ha' been blowing out o' the sou'west half the time."
+
+A week later they were hove to on the port tack under double-reefed
+topsails, with a cold gale of wind screaming through the rigging and
+cold green seas boarding their weather bow. It was the first break in
+the friendly trade-wind, and Swarth confessed to himself--though not to
+his men--that he was out of his reckoning; but one thing he was sure
+of--that this was a cyclone with a dangerous center.
+
+The brig labored heavily during the lulls as the seas rose, and when
+the squalls came, flattening them to a level, she would lie down like a
+tired animal, while the aeolian song aloft prevented orders being heard
+unless shouted near by. Captain Swarth went below and smashed the glass
+of an aneroid barometer (newly invented and lately acquired from an
+outward-bound Englishman), in which he had not much confidence, but
+which might tell him roughly of the air-density. Feeling of the
+indicator, and judging by the angle it made with the center,--marked by
+a ring at the top,--he found a measurement which startled him. Setting
+the adjustable hand over the indicator for future reference, he
+returned to the deck, ill at ease, and ordered the topsails
+goose-winged. By the time the drenched and despairing blind men had
+accomplished this, a further lowering of the barometer induced him to
+furl topsails and foretopmast-staysail, and allow the brig to ride
+under a storm-spanker. Then the increasing wind required that this also
+should be taken in, and its place filled by a tarpaulin lashed to the
+weather main-rigging.
+
+"Angel," said the captain, shouting into the mate's ear, "there's only
+one thing to account for this. We're on the right tack for the Southern
+Ocean; but the storm-center is overtaking us faster than we can drift
+away from it. We must scud out of its way."
+
+So they took in the tarpaulin and set the foretopmast-staysail again,
+and, with the best two helmsmen at the wheel, they sped before the
+tempest for four hours, during which there was no increase of the wind
+and no change in the barometer; it still remained at its lowest
+reading.
+
+"Keep the wind as much on the port quarter as you dare," ordered
+Swarth. "We're simply sailing around the center, and perhaps in with
+the vortex."
+
+They obeyed him as they could, and in a few hours more there was less
+fury in the blast and a slight rise in the barometer.
+
+"I was right," said the captain. "The center will pass us now. We're
+out of its way."
+
+They brought the brig around amid a crashing of seas over the port
+rail, and stowing the staysail, pinned her again on the port tack with
+the tarpaulin. But a few hours of it brought an increase of wind and a
+fall of the barometer.
+
+"What in d--nation does it mean, Angel?" cried the captain,
+desperately. "By all laws of storms we ought to drift away from the
+center."
+
+The mate could not tell; but a voice out of the night, barely
+distinguishable above the shrieking wind, answered him.
+
+"You--all-fired--fool--don't--you--know--any--more--than--to--heave--to
+--in--the--Gulf--Stream?"
+
+Then there was the faintest disturbance in the sounds of the sea,
+indicating the rushing by of a large craft.
+
+"What!" roared Swarth. "The Gulf Stream? I've lost my reckoning. Where
+am I? Ship ahoy! Where am I?"
+
+There was no answer, and he stumbled down to the main-deck among his
+men, followed by the mate.
+
+"Draw a bucket of water, one of you," he ordered.
+
+This was done, and he immersed his hand. The water was warm.
+
+"Gulf-Stream," he yelled frantically, "Gulf Stream--how in h----l did we
+get up here? We ought to be down near St. Helena. Angel, come here.
+Let's think. We sailed by the wind on the southeast trade for--no, we
+didn't. It was the northeast trade. We caught the northeast trade, and
+we've circled all over the Western Ocean."
+
+"You're a bully full-rigged navigator, you are," came the sneering,
+rasping voice of Tom Plate from the crowd. "Why didn't you drop your
+hook at Barbados, and give us a chance for our eyes?"
+
+The captain lunged toward him on the reeling deck; but Tom moved on.
+
+"Your time is coming, Tom Plate," he shouted insanely; then he climbed
+to the poop, and when he had studied the situation awhile, called his
+bewildered mate up to him.
+
+"We were blown out of the north entrance o' the bay, Angel, instead of
+the south, as we thought. I was fooled by the soundings. At this time
+o' the year Barbados is about on the thermal equator--half-way between
+the trades. This is a West India cyclone, and we're somewhere around
+Hatteras. No wonder the port tack drifted us into the center. Storms
+revolve against the sun north o' the line, and with the sun south of
+it. Oh, I'm the two ends and the bight of a d--d fool! Wear ship!" he
+added in a thundering roar.
+
+They put the brig on the starboard tack, and took hourly soundings with
+the deep-sea lead. As they hauled it in for the fourth time, the men
+called that the water was cold; and on the next sounding the lead
+reached bottom at ninety fathoms.
+
+"We're inside the Stream and the hundred-fathom curve, Angel. The
+barometer's rising now. The storm-center's leaving us, and we're
+drifting ashore," said the captain. "I know pretty well where I am.
+These storms follow an invariable track, and I judge the center is to
+the east of us, moving north. That's why we didn't run into it when we
+thought we were dodging it. We'll square away with the wind on the
+starboard quarter now, and if we pick up the Stream and the glass don't
+rise, I'll be satisfied to turn in. I'm about fagged out."
+
+"It's too much for me, Bill," answered Mr. Todd, wearily. "I can
+navigate; but this ain't navigation. This is blindman's-buff."
+
+But he set the head-sail for his captain, and again the brig fled
+before the wind. Only once did they round to for soundings, and this
+time found no bottom; so they squared away, and when, a few hours
+later, the seas came aboard warm, Swarth was confident enough of his
+position to allow his mind to dwell on pettier details of his business.
+
+It was nearly breakfast-time now, and the men would soon be eating.
+With his pistols in his coat pockets he stationed himself beside the
+scuttle of the fore-hatch,--the entrance to the forecastle,--and waited
+long and patiently, listening to occasional comments on his folly and
+bad seamanship which ascended from below, until the harsh voice of Tom
+Plate on the stairs indicated his coming up. He reached toward Tom with
+one hand, holding a cocked pistol with the other; but Tom slid easily
+out of his wavering grasp and fled along the deck. He followed his
+footsteps until he lost them, and picked up instead the angry plaint of
+the negro cook in the galley amidships.
+
+"I do' know who you are, but you want to git right out o' my galley,
+now. You heah me? I'se had enough o' dis comin' inter my galley. Gwan,
+now! Is you de man dat's all time stealin' my coffee? I'll gib you
+coffee, you trash! Take dat!"
+
+Captain Swarth reached the galley door in time to receive on the left
+side of his face a generous share of a pot of scalding coffee. It
+brought an involuntary shriek of agony from him; then he clung to the
+galley-lashings and spoke his mind. Still in torment, he felt his way
+through the galley; but the cook and the intruder had escaped by the
+other door and made no sound.
+
+All that day and the night following he chose to lie in his darkened
+state-room, with his face bandaged in oily cloths, while Yank Tate
+stood his watch. In the morning he removed the bandages and took in the
+sight of his state-room fittings: the bulkhead, his desk, chronometer,
+cutlass, and clothing hanging on the hooks. It was a joyous sight, and
+he shouted in gladness. He could not see with his right eye and but
+dimly with his left, but a scrutiny of his face in a mirror disclosed
+deep lines that had not been there, distorted eyelids, and the left
+side where the coffee had scalded puffed to a large, angry blister. He
+tied up his face, leaving his left eye free, and went on deck.
+
+The wind had moderated, but on all sides was a wild gray waste of
+heaving, white-crested combers, before which the brig was still
+scudding under the staysail. Three miles off on the port bow was a
+large, square-bowed, square-yarded ship, hove to and heading away from
+them, which might be a frigate or a subsidized Englishman with painted
+ports; but in either case she could not be investigated now. He looked
+at the compass. The brig was heading about southeast, and his judgment
+was confirmed. Two haggard-faced men with bandaged eyes were grinding
+the wheel to starboard and port, and keeping the brig's yaws within two
+points each way--good work for blind men. Angel Todd stood near, his
+chin resting in his hand and his elbow on the companionway. Forward the
+watch sat about in coils of rope and sheltered nooks or walked the deck
+unsteadily, and a glance aloft showed the captain his rigging hanging
+in bights and yards pointed every way. She was unkempt as a wreck. The
+same glance apprised him of an English ensign, union down, tattered and
+frayed to half its size, at the end of the standing spanker-gaff, with
+the halyards made fast high on the royal-backstay, above the reach of
+bungling blind fingers. Tom Plate was coming aft with none of the
+hesitancy of the blind, and squinting aloft at the damaged
+distress-signal. He secured another ensign--American--from the
+flag-locker in the booby-hatch, mounted the rail, and hoisted it, union
+down, in place of the other. Then he dropped to the deck and looked
+into the glaring left eye and pepper-box pistol of Captain Swarth, who
+had descended on him.
+
+"Hands up, Tom Plate, over your head--quick, or I'll blow your brains
+out!"
+
+White in the face and open-mouthed, Tom obeyed.
+
+"Mr. Todd," called the captain, "come down here--port main-rigging."
+
+The mate came quickly, as he always did when he heard the prefix to his
+name. It was used only in emergencies.
+
+"What soundings did you get at the lead when we were blowing out?"
+asked the captain. "What water did you have when you sang out 'a
+quarter six' and 'a quarter less six'?"
+
+"N-n-one, capt'n. There warn't any bottom. I jess wanted to get you to
+drop the other anchor and hold her off the reef."
+
+"Got him tight, cappen?" asked the mate. "Shall I help you hold 'im?"
+
+"I've got my sight back. I've got Tom Plate under my gun. How long have
+you been flying signals of distress, Tom Plate?"
+
+"Ever since I could see, capt'n," answered the trembling sailor.
+
+"How long is that?"
+
+"Second day out, sir."
+
+"What's your idea in keeping still about it? What could you gain by
+being taken aboard a man-of-war?"
+
+"I didn't want to have all the work piled on me jess 'cause I could
+see, capt'n. I never thought anybody could ever see again. I slept
+partly under No. 2 gun that night, and didn't get it so bad."
+
+"You sneaked into my room, got my keys, and raided the treasure-chests.
+You know what the rules say about that? Death without trial."
+
+"No, I didn't, capt'n; I didn't."
+
+"Search him, Mr. Todd."
+
+The search brought to light a tobacco-pouch in which were about fifty
+unset diamonds and a few well-jeweled solid-gold ornaments, which the
+captain pocketed.
+
+"Not much of a haul, considering what you left behind," he said calmly.
+"I suppose you only took what you could safely hide and swim with."
+
+"I only took my share, sir; I did no harm; I didn't want to be driftin'
+round wi' blind men. How'd I know anybody could ever see any more?"
+
+"Sad mistake, Tom. All we wanted, it seems, was a good scalding with
+hot coffee." He mused a few moments, then continued: "There must be
+some medical virtue in hot coffee which the doctors haven't learned,
+and--well--Tom, you've earned your finish."
+
+"You won't do it, capt'n; you can't do it. The men won't have it;
+they're with me," stuttered the man.
+
+"Possibly they are. I heard you all growling down the hatch yesterday
+morning. You're a pack of small-minded curs. I'll get another crew. Mr.
+Todd," he said to the listening mate, "steward told me he was out of
+coffee, so we'll break a bag out o' the lazarette. It's a heavy
+lift--two hundred pounds and over--'bout the weight of a man; so we'll
+hoist it up. Let Tom, here, rig a whip to the spanker-gaff. He can
+see."
+
+"Aye, aye, sir," answered the mate. "Get a single block and a strap and
+a gant-line out o' the bo's'n's locker, Tom."
+
+"Is it all right, capt'n?" asked Tom, lowering his hands with a deep
+sigh of relief. "I did what seemed right, you know."
+
+"Rig that whip," said Swarth, turning his back and ascending the poop.
+
+Tom secured the gear, and climbing aloft and out the gaff, fastened the
+block directly over the lazarette-hatch, just forward of the binnacle.
+Then he overhauled the rope until it reached the deck, and descended.
+
+"Come up here on the poop," called the captain; and he came.
+
+"Shall I go down and hook on, sir?" he asked zealously.
+
+"Make a hangman's noose in the end of the rope," said Swarth.
+
+"Eh--what--a runnin' bowline--a timber-hitch? No, no," he yelled, as he
+read the captain's face. "You can't do it. The men----"
+
+"Make a hangman's knot in the end of the rope," thundered the captain,
+his pistol at Tom's ear.
+
+With a face like that of a death's-head he tied the knot.
+
+"Pass it round your neck and draw it tight."
+
+Hoarse, inarticulate screams burst from the throat of the man, ended by
+a blow on the side of his face by the captain's iron-hard fist. He
+fell, and lay quiet, while Swarth himself adjusted the noose and bound
+the hands with his own handkerchief. The men at the wheel strained
+their necks this way and that, with tense waves of conflicting
+expressions flitting across their weary faces, and the men forward,
+aroused by the screams, stood about in anxious expectancy until they
+heard Swarth's roar: "Lay aft here, the watch!"
+
+They came, feeling their way along by rail and hatch.
+
+"Clap on to that gant-line at the main fife-rail, and lift this bag of
+coffee out o' the lazarette," sang out the captain.
+
+They found the loose rope, tautened it, hooked the bight into an open
+sheave in the stanchion, and listlessly walked forward with it. When
+they had hoisted the unconscious Tom to the gaff, Swarth ordered:
+"Belay, coil up the fall, and go forrard."
+
+They obeyed, listlessly as ever, with no wondering voice raised to
+inquire why they had not lowered the coffee they had hoisted.
+
+Captain Swarth looked at the square-rigged ship, now on the port
+quarter--an ill-defined blur to his imperfect vision. "Fine chance we'd
+have had," he muttered, "if that happened to be a bulldog. Angel," he
+said, as the mate drew near, "hot coffee is good for moon-blindness,
+taken externally, as a blistering agent--a counter-irritant. We have no
+fly-blisters in the medicine-chest, but smoking-hot grease must be just
+as good, if not better than either. Have the cook heat up a potful, and
+you get me out a nice small paint-brush."
+
+Forty-eight hours later, when the last wakening vision among the twenty
+men had taken cognizance of the grisly object aloft, the gaff was guyed
+outboard, the rope cut at the fife-rail, and the body of Tom Plate
+dropped, feet first, to the sea.
+
+Then when Captain Swarth's eyes permitted he took an observation or
+two, and, after a short lecture to his crew on the danger of sleeping
+in tropic moonlight, shaped his course for Barbados Island, to take up
+the burden of his battle with fate where the blindness had forced him
+to lay it down; to scheme and to plan, to dare and to do, to war and to
+destroy, against the inevitable coming of the time when fate should
+prove the stronger--when he would lose in a game where one must always
+win or die.
+
+
+
+
+SALVAGE
+
+
+She had a large crew, abnormally large hawse-pipes, and a bad
+reputation--the last attribute born of the first. Registered as the
+_Rosebud_, this innocent name was painted on her stern and on her
+sixteen dories; but she was known among the fishing-fleet as the
+_Ishmaelite_, and the name fitted her. Secretive and unfriendly, she
+fished alone, avoided company, answered few hails, and, seldom filling
+her hold, disposed of her catch as her needs required, in out-of-the-way
+ports, often as far south as Charleston. And she usually left behind
+her such bitter memories of her visit as placed the last port at the
+bottom of her list of markets.
+
+No ship-chandler or provision-dealer ever showed her receipted bills,
+and not a few of them openly averred that certain burglaries of their
+goods had plausible connection with her presence in port. Be this as it
+may, the fact stood that farmers on the coast who saw her high bow and
+unmistakable hawse-pipes when she ran in for bait invariably
+double-locked their barns and chicken-coops, and turned loose all tied
+dogs when night descended, often to find both dogs and chickens gone in
+the morning.
+
+Once, too, three small schooners had come home with empty holds, and
+complained of the appearance, while anchored in the fog, of a flotilla
+of dories manned by masked men, who overpowered and locked all hands in
+cabin or forecastle, and then removed the cargoes of fish to their own
+craft, hidden in the fog. Shortly after this, the _Ishmaelite_ disposed
+of a large catch in Baltimore, and the piracy was believed of her, but
+never proved.
+
+Her luck at finding things was remarkable. Drifting dories, spars,
+oars, and trawl-tubs sought her unsavory company, as though impelled by
+the inanimate perversity which had sent them drifting. They were sold
+in port, or returned to their owners, when paid for. In the early part
+of her career she had towed a whistling buoy into Boston and claimed
+salvage of the government, showing her logbook to prove that she had
+picked it up far at sea. The salvage was paid; but, as her reputation
+spread, there were those who declared that she herself had sent the
+buoy adrift.
+
+As poets and sailors believe that ships have souls, it may be that she
+gloried in her shame, like other fallen creatures; for her large,
+slanting oval hawse-pipes and boot-top stripe gave a fine, Oriental
+sneer to her face-like bow, and there was slur and insult to
+respectable craft in the lazy dignity with which she would swash
+through the fleet on the port tack, compelling vessels on the starboard
+tack to give up their right of way or be rammed; for she was a large
+craft, and there was menace in her solid, one-piece jib-boom, thick as
+an ordinary mainmast. An outward-bound coasting-schooner, resenting
+this lawlessness on one occasion, attempted to assert her rights, and
+being on the lawful starboard tack, bore steadily down on the
+_Ishmaelite_,--who budged not a quarter-point,--and, losing heart at
+the last moment, luffed up, all shaking, in just the position to allow
+the ring of her port anchor to catch on the bill of the _Ishmaelite's_
+starboard anchor. As her own ring-stopper and shank-painter were weak,
+the patent windlass unlocked, and the end of the cable not secured in
+the chain-locker, the _Ishmaelite_ walked calmly away with the anchor
+and a hundred fathoms of chain, which, at the next port, she sold as
+legitimate spoil of the sea.
+
+As her reputation increased, so did the hatred of men, while the number
+of ports on the coast which she could safely enter became painfully
+small. To avoid conflict with local authority, she had hurried to sea
+without clearing at the custom-house from Boston, Bangor, Portland, and
+Gloucester. She had carried local authority in the persons of
+distressed United States marshals to sea with her from three other
+ports, and landed it on some outlying point before the next meal-hour.
+With her blunt jib-boom she had prodded a hole in the side of a
+lighthouse supply-boat, and sailed away without answering questions.
+The government was taking cognizance, and her description was written
+on the fly-leaves of several revenue cutters' log-books, while Sunday
+newspapers in the large cities began a series of special articles about
+the mysterious schooner-rigged pirate of the fishing-fleet.
+
+The future looked dark for her, and when the time came that she was
+chased away from Plymouth harbor--which she had entered for
+provisions--by a police launch, it seemed that the end was at hand; for
+she had done no wrong in Plymouth, and the police boat was evidently
+acting on general principles and instructions, which were vital enough
+to extend the pursuit to the three-mile limit. Her trips had become
+necessarily longer, and there was but two weeks' supply of food in the
+lazarette. The New England coast was an enemy's country, but in the
+crowded harbor of New York was a chance to lie unobserved at anchor
+long enough to secure the stores she needed, which only a large city
+can supply. So Cape Cod was doubled on the way to New York; but the
+brisk offshore wind, which had helped her in escaping the police boat,
+developed to a gale that blew her to sea, and increased in force as the
+hours passed by.
+
+Hard-headed, reckless fellows were these men who owned the _Rosebud_ and
+ran her on shares and under laws of their own making. Had they been of
+larger, broader minds, with no change of ethics they would have acquired
+a larger, faster craft with guns, hoisted the black flag, and sailed
+southward to more fruitful fields. Being what they were,--fishermen gone
+wrong,--they labored within their limitations and gleaned upon known
+ground.
+
+They were eighteen in number, and they typified the maritime nations of
+the world. Americans predominated, of course, but English, French,
+German, Portuguese, Scandinavian, and Russian were among them. The cook
+was a West India negro, and the captain--or their nearest approach to a
+captain--a Portland Yankee. Both were large men, and held their
+positions by reason of special knowledge and a certain magnetic mastery
+of soul which dominated the others against their rules; for in this
+social democracy captains and bosses were forbidden. The cook was an
+expert in the galley and a thorough seaman; the other as able a seaman,
+and a navigator past the criticism of the rest.
+
+His navigation had its limits, however, and this gale defined them. He
+could find his latitude by meridian observation, and his longitude by
+morning sights and chronometer time; his dead-reckoning was
+trustworthy, and he possessed a fair working conception of the set and
+force of the Atlantic currents and the heave of the sea in a blow. But
+his studies had not given him more than a rudimentary knowledge of
+meteorology and the laws of storms. A gale was a gale to him, and he
+knew that it would usually change its direction as a clock's hands will
+in moving over the dial; and if, by chance, it should back around to
+its former point, he prepared for heavier trouble, with no reference to
+the fluctuations of the barometer, which instrument to him was merely a
+weather-glass--about as valuable as a rheumatic big toe.
+
+So, in the case we are considering, not knowing that he was caught by
+the southern fringe of a St. Lawrence valley storm, with its center of
+low barometer to the northwest and coming toward him, he hove to on the
+port tack to avoid Cape Cod, and drifted to sea, shortening sail as the
+wind increased, until, with nothing set but a small storm-mainsail, he
+found himself in the sudden calm of the storm-center, which had
+overtaken him. Here, in a tumultuous cross-sea, fifty miles off the
+shore, deceived by the light, shifty airs and the patches of blue sky
+showing between the rushing clouds, he made all sail and headed west,
+only to have the masts whipped out as the whistling fury of wind on the
+opposite side of the vortex caught and jibed the canvas.
+
+It was manifestly a judgment of a displeased Providence; and, glad that
+the hull was still tight, they cut away the wreck and rode out the
+gale,--now blowing out of the north,--hanging to the tangle of spar and
+cordage which had once been the foremast and its gear. It made a fairly
+good sea-anchor, with the forestay--strong as any chain--for a cable,
+and she lay snug under the haphazard breakwater and benefited by the
+protection, as the seas must first break their heads over the wreckage
+before reaching her. The mainmast was far away, with all that pertained
+to it; but the solid, hard-pine jib-boom was still intact, and not one
+of the sixteen dories piled spoon-fashion in the four nests had been
+injured when the spars went by the board. So they were content to
+smoke, sleep, and kill time as they could, until the gale and sea
+should moderate, and they could rig a jury-foremast of the wreck.
+
+But before they could begin,--while there was still wind enough to curl
+the head of an occasional sea into foam,--a speck which had been
+showing on the shortened horizon to windward, when the schooner lifted
+out of the hollows, took form and identity--a two-masted steamer, with
+English colors, union down, at the gaff. High out of water, her
+broadside drift was faster than that of the dismasted craft riding to
+her wreckage, and in a few hours she was dangerously near, directly
+ahead, rolling heavily in the trough of the sea. They could see shreds
+of canvas hanging from masts and gaffs.
+
+"Wunner what's wrong wid her," said the cook, as he relinquished the
+glasses to the next man. "Amos," he called to another, "you've been in
+the ingine-room, you say. Is her ingine bus' down?"
+
+"Dunno," answered Amos. "Steam's all right; see the jet comin' out o'
+the stack? There! she's turnin' over--kickin' ahead. 'Bout time if she
+wants to clear us. She's signalin'. What's that say, Elisha?"
+
+The ensign was fluttering down, and a string of small flags going aloft
+on the other part of the signal-halyards, while the steamer, heading
+west, pushed ahead about a length under the impulse of her propeller.
+Elisha, the navigator, went below, and returned with a couple of books,
+which he consulted.
+
+"Her number," he said. "She's the _Afghan Prince_ o' London." As the
+schooner carried no signal-flags, he waved his sou'wester in answer,
+and the flags came down, to be replaced by others.
+
+"Rudder carried away," he read, and then looked with the glasses.
+"Rudder seems all right; must mean his steerin'-gear. Why don't they
+rig up suthin', or a drag over the stern?"
+
+"Don't know enough," said an expatriated Englishman of the crew. "She's
+one o' them bloomin', undermanned tramps, run by apprentices an' Thames
+watermen. They're drivin' sailors an' sailin'-ships off the sea blarst
+'em!"
+
+"Martin," said Elisha to the cook, "what's the matter with our bein' a
+drag for her?"
+
+"Dead easy, if we kin git his line an' he knows how to rig a bridle."
+
+"We can show him, if it comes to it. What ye say, boys? If we steer her
+into port we're entitled to salvage. She's helpless; we're not, for
+we've got a jury-rig under the bows. Hello! what's he sayin' now?"
+Other flags had gone aloft on the steamer, which asked for the
+longitude. Then followed others which said that the chronometer was
+broken.
+
+"Better 'n ever!" exclaimed Elisha, excitedly. "Can't navigate. Our
+chronometer's all right; we never needed it, an' don't now, but it's a
+big help in a salvage claim. What ye say? Can't we get our hemp cable
+to him with a dory?"
+
+Why not? They were fishermen, accustomed to dory work. A short confab
+settled this point; a dory was thrown over, and Elisha and Amos pulled
+to the steamer, which was now abreast, near enough for the name which
+Elisha had read to be seen plainly on the stern, but not near enough
+for the men shouting from her taffrail to make themselves heard on the
+schooner. Elisha and Amos, in the dory, conferred with these men and
+then returned.
+
+"Badly rattled," they reported. "Tiller-ropes parted, an' not a man
+aboard can put a long splice in a wire rope, an' o' course we said we
+couldn't. They'll take our line, an' we're to chalk up the position an'
+the course to New York. Clear case o' salvage. We furnish everything,
+an' sacrifice our jury-material to aid 'em."
+
+"What'll be our chance in court, I'm thinkin'," said one, doubtfully.
+"Hadn't we better keep out o' the courts? It's been takin' most of our
+time lately."
+
+"What's the matter wi' ye?" yelled Elisha. "We owe a few hundreds, an'
+mebbe a fine or two; an' there's anywhere from one to two hundred
+thousand--hull an' cargo--that we save. We'll get no less than a third,
+mebbe more. Go lay down, Bill."
+
+Bill subsided. They knotted four or five dory rodings together, coiled
+the long length of rope in the dory, unbent the end of their water-laid
+cable from the anchor, and waited until the wallowing steamer had
+drifted far enough to leeward to come within the steering-arc of a
+craft with no canvas; then they cut away the wreck, crowded forward,
+all hands spreading coats to the breeze, and when the schooner had paid
+off, steered her down with the wind on the quarter until almost near
+enough to hail the steamer, where they rounded to, safe in the
+knowledge that she could not drift as fast as the other.
+
+Away went the dory, paying out on the roding, the end of which was
+fastened to the disconnected cable, and when it had reached the
+steamer, a heaving-line was thrown, by which the roding was hauled
+aboard. Then the dory returned, while the steamer's men hauled the
+cable to their stern. The bridle, two heavy ropes leading from the
+after-winch out the opposite quarter-chocks to the end of the cable,
+was quickly rigged by the steamer's crew.
+
+With a warning toot of the whistle, she went ahead, and the long
+tow-line swept the sea-tops, tautened, strained, and creaked on the
+windlass-bitts, and settled down to its work, while the schooner,
+dropping into her wake, was dragged westward at a ten-knot rate.
+
+"This is bully," said Elisha, gleefully. "Now I'll chalk out the
+position an' give her the course--magnetic, to make sure."
+
+He did so, and they held up in full view of the steamer's bridge a
+large blackboard showing in six-inch letters the formula: "Lat. 41-20.
+Lon. 69-10. Mag. Co. W. half S."
+
+A toot of the whistle thanked them, and they watched the steamer, which
+had been heading a little to the south of this course, painfully swing
+her head up to it by hanging the schooner to the starboard leg of the
+bridle; but she did not stop at west-half-south, and when she pointed
+unmistakably as high as northwest, still dragging her tow by the
+starboard bridle, a light broke on them.
+
+"She's goin' on her way with us," said Elisha. "No, no; she can't.
+She's bound for London," he added. "Halifax, mebbe."
+
+They waved their hats to port, and shouted in chorus at the steamer.
+They were answered by caps flourished to starboard from the bridge, and
+outstretched arms which pointed across the Atlantic Ocean, while the
+course changed slowly to north, then faster as wind and sea bore on the
+other bow, until the steamer steadied and remained at east-by-north.
+
+"The rhumb course to the Channel," groaned Elisha, wildly. "The nerve
+of it! An' I'm supposed to give the longitude every noon. Why, dammit,
+boys, they'll claim they rescued us, an' like as not the English
+courts'll allow them salvage on our little tub."
+
+"Let go the tow-line! Let 'em go to h----l!" they shouted angrily, and
+some started forward, but were stopped by the cook. His eyes gleamed in
+his black face, and his voice was a little higher pitched than usual;
+otherwise he was the steadiest man there.
+
+"We'll hang right on to our bran-new cable, men," he said. "It's ours,
+not theirs. 'Course we kin turn her adrif' ag'in, an' be wuss off, too;
+we can't find de foremast now. But dat ain't de bes' way. John," he
+called to the Englishman of the crew, "how many men do you' country
+tramp steamers carry?"
+
+John computed mentally, then muttered: "Two mates, six ash-cats,[1] two
+flunkies, two quartermasters, watchman, deck-hands--oh, 'bout sixteen
+or seventeen, Martin."
+
+      [1] Ash-cats: engineers and firemen.
+
+"Boys, le' 's man de win'lass. We'll heave in on our cable, an' if we
+kin git close enough to climb aboard, we'll reason it out wid dat
+English cappen, who can't fin' his way roun' alone widout stealin'
+little fishin'-schooners."
+
+"Right!" they yelled. "Man the windlass. We'll show the lime-juice
+thief who's doin' this."
+
+"Amos," said Martin to the ex-engineer, "you try an' 'member all you
+forgot 'bout ingines in case anything happens to de crew o' dat
+steamer; an', Elisha, you want to keep good track o' where we go, so's
+you kin find you' way back."
+
+"I'll get the chronometer on deck now. I can take sights alone."
+
+They took the cable to the windlass-barrel and began to heave. It was
+hard work,--equal to heaving an anchor against a strong head wind and
+ten-knot tideway,--and only half the crew could find room on the
+windlass-brakes; so, while the first shift labored and swore and
+encouraged one another, the rest watched the approach of a small tug
+towing a couple of scows, which seemed to have arisen out of the sea
+ahead of them. When the steamer was nearly upon her, she let go her
+tow-line and ranged up alongside, while a man leaning out of the
+pilot-house gesticulated to the steamer's bridge and finally shook his
+fist. Then the tug dropped back abreast of the schooner. She was a
+dingy little boat, the biggest and brightest of her fittings being the
+name-board on her pilot-house, which spelled in large gilt letters the
+appellation _J. C. Hawks_.
+
+"Say," yelled her captain from his door, "I'm blown out wi' my barges,
+short o' grub an' water. Can you gi' me some? That lime-juice sucker
+ahead won't."
+
+"Can you tow us to New York?" asked Elisha, who had brought up the
+chronometer and placed it on the house, ready to take morning sights
+for his longitude if the sun should appear.
+
+"No; not unless I sacrifice the barges an' lose my contract wi' the
+city. They're garbage-scows, an' I haven't power enough to hook on to
+another. Just got coal enough to get in."
+
+"An' what do you call this--a garbage-scow?" answered Elisha,
+ill-naturedly. "We've got no grub or water to spare. We've got troubles
+of our own."
+
+"Dammit, man, we're thirsty here. Give us a breaker o' water. Throw it
+overboard; I'll get it."
+
+"No; told you we have none to spare; an' we're bein' yanked out to
+sea."
+
+"Well, gi' me a bottleful; that won't hurt you."
+
+"No; sheer off. Git out o' this. We're not in the Samaritan business."
+
+A forceful malediction came from the tug captain, and a whirling
+monkey-wrench from the hand of the engineer, who had listened from the
+engine-room door. It struck Elisha's chronometer and knocked it off the
+house, box and all, into the sea. He answered the profanity in kind,
+and sent an iron belaying-pin at the engineer; but it only dented the
+tug's rail, and with these compliments the two craft separated, the tug
+steaming back to her scows.
+
+"That lessens our chance just so much," growled Elisha, as he joined
+the rest. "Now we can't do all we agreed to."
+
+"Keep dead-reckonin', 'Lisha," said Martin; "dat's good 'nough for us;
+an', say, can't you take sights by a watch--jess for a bluff, to show
+in de log-book?"
+
+"Might; 't wouldn't be reliable. Good enough, though, for log-book
+testimony. That's what I'll do."
+
+Inch by inch they gathered in their cable and coiled it down, unmoved
+by the protesting toots of the steamer's whistle. When half of it lay
+on the deck, the steamer slowed down, while her crew worked at their
+end of the rope; then she went ahead, the schooner dropped back to
+nearly the original distance, and they saw a long stretch of new Manila
+hawser leading out from the bridle and knotted to their cable. They
+cursed and shook their fists, but pumped manfully on the windlass, and
+by nightfall had brought the knot over their bows by means of a
+"messenger," and were heaving on the new hawser.
+
+"Weakens our case just that much more," growled Elisha. "We were to
+furnish the tow-line."
+
+"Heave away, my boys!" said Martin. "Dey's only so many ropes aboard
+her, an' when we get 'em all we've got dat boat an' dem men."
+
+So they warped their craft across the Western Ocean. Knot after knot,
+hawser after hawser, came over the bows and cumbered the deck.
+
+They would have passed them over the stern as fast as they came in,
+were they not salvors with litigation ahead; for their hands must be
+clean when they entered their claim, and to this end Elisha chalked out
+the longitude daily at noon and showed it to the steamer, always
+receiving a thankful acknowledgment on the whistle. He secured the
+figures by his dead-reckoning; but the carefully kept log-book also
+showed longitude by chronometer sights, taken when the sun shone, with
+his old quadrant and older watch, and corrected to bring a result
+plausibly near to that of the reckoning by log and compass. But the
+log-book contained no reference to the loss of the chronometer. That
+was to happen at the last.
+
+On stormy days, when the sea rose, they dared not shorten their
+tow-line, and the steamer-folk made sure that it was long enough to
+eliminate the risk of its parting. So these days were passed in
+idleness and profanity; and when the sea went down they would go to
+work, hoping that the last tow-line was in their hands. But it was not
+until the steamer had given them three Manila and two steel hawsers,
+four weak--too weak--mooring-chains, and a couple of old and frayed
+warping-lines, that the coming up to the bow of an anchor-chain of
+six-inch link told them that the end was near, that the steamer had
+exhausted her supply of tow-lines, and that her presumably sane skipper
+would not give them his last means of anchoring--the other chain.
+
+They were right. Either for this reason or because of the proximity to
+English bottom, the steamer ceased her coyness, and her crew watched
+from the taffrail, while those implacable, purposeful men behind crept
+up to them. It was slow, laborious work; for the small windlass would
+not grip the heavy links of the chain, and they must needs climb out a
+few fathoms, making fast messengers to heave on, while the idle half of
+them gathered in the slackened links by hand.
+
+On a calm, still night they finally unshipped the windlass-brakes and
+looked up at the round, black stern of the steamer not fifty feet
+ahead. They were surrounded by lights of outgoing and incoming craft,
+and they knew by soundings taken that day, when the steamer had slowed
+down for the same purpose, that they were within the hundred-fathom
+curve, close to the mouth of the Channel, but not within the three-mile
+limit. Rejoicing at the latter fact, they armed themselves to a man
+with belaying-pins from their still intact pin-rails, and climbed out
+on the cable, the whole eighteen of them, man following man, in close
+climbing order.
+
+"Now, look here," said a portly man with a gilt-bound cap to the leader
+of the line, as he threw a leg over the taffrail, "what's the meaning,
+may I ask, of this unreasonable conduct?"
+
+"You may ask, of course," said the man,--it was Elisha,--"but we'd like
+to ask something, too" (he was sparring for time until more should
+arrive); "we'd like to ask why you drag us across the Atlantic Ocean
+against our will?"
+
+Another man climbed aboard, and said:
+
+"Yes; we 'gree to steer you into New York. You's adrif' in de trough of
+de sea, an' you got no chronometer, an' you can't navigate, an' we come
+'long--under command, mind you--an' give you our tow-line, an' tell you
+de road to port. Wha' you mean by dis?"
+
+"Tut, tut, my colored friend!" answered the man of gilt. "You were
+dismasted and helpless, and I gave you a tow. It was on the high seas,
+and I chose the port, as I had the right."
+
+Another climbed on board.
+
+"We were not helpless," rejoined Elisha. "We had a good jury-rig under
+the bows, and we let it go to assist you. Are you the skipper here?"
+
+"I am."
+
+Martin's big fist smote him heavily in the face, and the blow was
+followed by the crash of Elisha's belaying-pin on his head. The captain
+fell, and for a while lay quiet. There were four big, strong men over
+the rail now, and others coming. Opposing them were a second mate, an
+engineer, a fireman, coal-passer, watchman, steward, and cook--easy
+victims to these big-limbed fishermen. The rest of the crew were on
+duty below decks or at the steering-winch. It was a short, sharp
+battle; a few pistols exploded, but no one was hurt, and the firearms
+were captured and their owners well hammered with belaying-pins; then,
+binding all victims as they overcame them, the whole party raided the
+steering-winch and engine-room, and the piracy was complete.
+
+But from their standpoint it was not piracy--it was resistance to
+piracy; and when Amos, the ex-engineer, had stopped the engines and
+banked the fires, they announced to the captives bound to the rail
+that, with all due respect for the law, national and international,
+they would take that distressed steamboat into New York and deliver her
+to the authorities, with a claim for salvage. The bargain had been made
+on the American coast, and their log-book not only attested this, but
+the well-doing of their part of the contract.
+
+When the infuriated English captain, now recovered, had exhausted his
+stock of adjectives and epithets, he informed them (and he was backed
+by his steward and engineer) that there was neither food nor coal for
+the run to New York; to which Elisha replied that, if so, the foolish
+and destructive waste would be properly entered in the log-book, and
+might form the basis of a charge of barratry by the underwriters, if it
+turned out that any underwriters had taken a risk on a craft with such
+an "all-fired lunatic" for a skipper as this. But they would go back;
+they might be forced to burn some of the woodwork fittings (her decks
+were of iron) for fuel, and as for food, though their own supply of
+groceries was about exhausted, there were several cubic yards of salt
+codfish in the schooner's hold, and this they would eat: they were used
+to it themselves, and science had declared that it was good
+brain-food--good for feeble-minded Englishmen who couldn't splice wire
+nor take care of a chronometer.
+
+Before starting back they made some preliminary and precautionary
+preparations. While Martin inventoried the stores and Amos the
+coal-supply, the others towed the schooner alongside and moored her.
+Then they shackled the schooner's end of the chain cable around the
+inner barrel of the windlass and riveted the key of the shackle. They
+transhipped their clothing and what was left of the provisions. They
+also took the log-book and charts, compass, empty outer
+chronometer-case,--which Elisha handled tenderly and officiously by its
+strap in full view of the captives,--windlass-brakes, tool-chest,
+deck-tools, axes, handspikes, heavers, boat-hooks, belaying-pins, and
+everything in the shape of weapon or missile by which disgruntled
+Englishmen could do harm to the schooner or their rescuers.
+
+Then they passed the rescued ones down to the schooner, and Martin told
+them where they would find the iron kettle for boiling codfish, with
+the additional information that with skill and ingenuity they could
+make fish-balls in the same kettle.
+
+Martin had reported a plenitude of provisions, and anathematized the
+lying captain and steward; and Amos had declared his belief that with
+careful economy in the use of coal they could steam to the American
+coast with the supply in the bunkers: so they did not take any of the
+codfish, and the hawsers, valuable as fuel in case of a shortage, were
+left where they would be more valuable as evidence against the lawless,
+incompetent Englishmen. And they also left the dories, all but one, for
+reasons in Elisha's mind which he did not state at the time.
+
+They removed the bonds of one man--who could release the others--and
+cast off the fastenings; then, with Amos and a picked crew of pupils in
+the boat's vitals, they went ahead and dropped the prison-hulk back to
+the full length of the chain, while the furious curses of the prisoners
+troubled the air. They found a little difficulty in steering by the
+winch and deck-compass (they would have mended the tiller-ropes with a
+section of backstay had they not bargained otherwise), but finally
+mastered the knack, and headed westerly.
+
+You cannot take an Englishman's ship from under him--homeward bound and
+close to port--and drag him to sea again on a diet of salt codfish
+without impinging on his sanity. When day broke they looked and saw the
+hawsers slipping over the schooner's rail, and afterward a fountain of
+fish arising from her hatches to follow the hawsers overboard.
+
+"What's de game, I wunner?" asked Martin. "Tryin' to starve deyselves?"
+
+"Dunno," answered Elisha, with a serious expression. "They're not doin'
+it for nothin'. They're wavin' their hats at us. Somethin' on their
+minds."
+
+"We'll jes let 'em wave. We'll go 'long 'bout our business."
+
+So they went at eight knots an hour; for, try as he might, Amos could
+get no more out of the engine. "She's a divil to chew up coal," he
+explained; "we may have to burn the boat yet."
+
+"Hope not," said Elisha. "'Tween you an' me, Amos, this is a desperate
+bluff we're makin', an' if we go to destroyin' property we may get no
+credit for savin' it. We'd have no chance in the English courts at all,
+but it's likely an American judge 'ud recognize our original
+position--our bargain to steer her in."
+
+"Too bad 'bout that tarred cable of ours," rejoined Amos; "three days'
+good fuel in that, I calculate."
+
+"Well, it's gone with the codfish, and the fact is properly entered in
+the log as barratrous conduct on the part of the skipper. Enough to
+prove him insane."
+
+And further to strengthen this possible aspect of the case, Elisha
+found a blank space on the leaf of the log-book which recorded the
+first meeting and bargain to tow, and filled it with the potential
+sentence, "Steamer's commander acts strangely." For a well-kept logbook
+is excellent testimony in court.
+
+Elisha's knowledge of navigation did not enable him to project a course
+on the great circle--the shortest track between two points on the
+earth's surface, and the route taken by steamers. But he possessed a
+fairly practical and ingenious mind, and with a flexible steel
+straight-edge rule, and a class-room globe in the skipper's room, laid
+out his course between the lane-routes of the liners,--which he would
+need to vary daily,--as it was not wise to court investigation. But he
+signaled to two passing steamships for Greenwich time, and set his
+watch, obtaining its rate of correction by the second favor; and with
+this, and his surely correct latitude by meridian observation, he hoped
+to make an accurate landfall in home waters.
+
+And so the hours went by, with their captives waving caps ceaselessly,
+until the third day's sun arose to show them an empty deck on the
+schooner, over a dozen specks far astern and to the southward, and an
+east-bound steamship on their port bow. The specks could be nothing but
+the dories, and they were evidently trying to intercept the steamship.
+Elisha yelled in delight.
+
+"They've abandoned ship--just what I hoped for--in the dories. They've
+no case at all now."
+
+"But what for, Elisha?" asked Martin. "Mus' be hungry, I t'ink."
+
+"Mebbe, or else they think that liner, who can stop only to save
+life,--carries the mails, you see,--will turn round and put 'em in
+charge here. Why, nothin' but an English man-o'-war could do that now."
+
+They saw the steamship slow down, while the black specks flocked up to
+her, and then go on her way. And they went on theirs; but three days
+later they had reasoned out a better explanation of the Englishmen's
+conduct. Martin came on deck with a worried face, and announced that,
+running short of salt meat in the harness-cask, he had broken out the
+barrels of beef, pork, and hard bread that he had counted upon, and
+found their contents absolutely uneatable, far gone in putrescence,
+alive with crawling things.
+
+"Must ha' thought he was fitting out a Yankee hell-ship when he bought
+this," said Elisha, in disgust, as he looked into the ill-smelling
+barrels. "Overboard with it, boys!"
+
+Overboard went the provisions, for starving animals could not eat of
+them, and the odor permeated the ship. They resigned themselves to a
+gloomy outlook--gloomier when Amos reported that the coal in the
+bunkers would last but two days longer. He had been mistaken, he said;
+he had calculated to run compound engines with Scotch boilers, not a
+full-powered blast-furnace with six inches of scale on the
+crown-sheets.
+
+"And they knew this," groaned Elisha. "That's why they chucked the
+stuff overboard--to bring us to terms, and never thinkin' they'd starve
+first. They were dead luny, but we're lunier."
+
+They stopped the engines and visited the schooner in the dory. Not a
+scrap of food was there, and the fish-kettle was scraped bright. They
+returned and went on. With plenty of coal there was still six days' run
+ahead to New York. How many with wood fuel, chopped on empty stomachs
+and burned in coal-furnaces, they could not guess. But they went to
+work. There were three axes, two top-mauls, and several handspikes and
+pinch-bars aboard, and with these they attacked bulkheads and spare
+woodwork, and fed the fires with the fragments; for a glance down the
+hatches had shown them nothing more combustible and detachable in the
+cargo than a few layers of railroad iron, which covered and blocked the
+openings to the lower hold.
+
+With the tools at hand they could not supply the rapacious fires fast
+enough to keep up steam, and the engines slowed to a five-knot rate. As
+this would not maintain a sufficient tension on the dragging schooner
+to steer by, they were forced to sacrifice the best item in their claim
+for salvage: they spliced the tiller-ropes and steered from the
+pilot-house. They would have sacrificed the schooner, too, for Amos
+complained bitterly of the load on the engines; but Elisha would not
+hear of it. She was the last evidence in their favor now, their last
+connection with respectability.
+
+"She and the pavement o' h----l," he growled fiercely, "are all we've
+got to back us up. Without proof we're pirates under the law."
+
+However, he made no entry in the log of the splicing, trusting that a
+chance would come in port to remove the section of wire rope with which
+they had joined the broken ends.
+
+And, indeed, it seemed that their claim was dwindling. The chronometer
+which they were to use for the steamer's benefit was lost; the tow-line
+which they were to furnish had been given back to them; the course to
+New York which they chalked out had not been accepted; the abandoning
+of their ship by the Englishmen was clearly enforced by the pressure of
+their own presence; and now they themselves had been forced to cancel
+from the claim the schooner's value as a necessary drag behind the
+steamer, by substituting a three hours' splicing-job, worth five
+dollars in a rigging-loft, and possibly fifty if bargained for at sea.
+Nothing was left them now but their good intentions, duly entered in
+the log-book.
+
+But fate, and the stupid understanding of some one or two of them,
+decreed that their good intentions also should be taken from them. The
+log-book disappeared, and the strictest search failing to bring it to
+light, the conclusion was reached that it had been fed to the fires
+among the wreckage of the skipper's room and furniture. They blasphemed
+to the extent that the occasion required, and there was civil war for a
+time, while the suspected ones were being punished; then they drew what
+remaining comfort they could from burning the steamer's log-book and
+track-chart, which contained data conflicting with their position in
+the case, and resumed their labors.
+
+Martin had raked and scraped together enough of food to give them two
+scant meals; but these eaten, starvation began. The details of their
+suffering need not be given. They chopped, hammered, and pried in
+hunger and anxiety, and with lessening strength, while the days passed
+by--fortunately spared the torture of thirst, for there was plenty of
+water in the tanks. Upheld by the dominating influence of Elisha,
+Martin, and Amos, they stripped the upper works and fed to the fires
+every door and sash, every bulkhead and wooden partition, all chairs,
+stools, and tables, cabin berths and forecastle bunks. Then they
+attempted sending down the topmasts, but gave it up for lack of
+strength to get mast-ropes aloft, and attacked instead the boats on the
+chocks, of which there were four.
+
+It was no part of the plan to ask help of passing craft and have their
+distressed condition taken advantage of; but when the hopelessness of
+the fight at last appealed to the master spirits, they consented to the
+signaling of an east-bound steamer, far to the northward, in the hope
+of getting food. So the English ensign, union down, was again flown
+from the gaff. It was at a time when Elisha could not stand up at the
+wheel, when Amos at the engines could not have reversed them, when
+Martin--man of iron--staggered weakly around among the rest and struck
+them with a pump-brake, keeping them at work. (They would strive under
+the blows, and sit down when he had passed.) But the flag was not seen;
+a haze arose between the two craft and thickened to fog.
+
+By Elisha's reckoning they were on the Banks now, about a hundred miles
+due south from Cape Sable, and nearer to Boston than to Halifax;
+otherwise he might have made for the latter port and defied alien
+prejudice. But the fog continued, and it was not port they were looking
+for now; it was help, food: they were working for life, not salvage;
+and, wasting no steam, they listened for whistles or fog-horns, but
+heard none near enough to be answered by their weak voices.
+
+And so the boat, dragging the dismal mockery behind her, plodded and
+groped her way on the course which Elisha had shaped for Boston, while
+man after man dropped in his tracks, refusing to rise; and those that
+were left nourished the fires as they could, until the afternoon of the
+third day of fog, when the thumping, struggling engines halted,
+started, made a half-revolution, and came to a dead stop. Amos crawled
+on deck and forward to the bridge, where, with Elisha's help, he
+dragged on the whistle-rope and dissipated the remaining steam in a
+wheezy, gasping howl, which lasted about a half-minute. It was answered
+by a furious siren-blast from directly astern; and out of the fog, at
+twenty knots an hour, came a mammoth black steamer. Seeming to heave
+the small tramp out of the way with her bow wave, she roared by at six
+feet distance, and in ten seconds they were looking at her vanishing
+stern. But ten minutes later the stern appeared in view, as the liner
+backed toward them. The reversed English ensign still hung at the gaff;
+and the starving men, some prostrate on the deck, some clinging to the
+rails, unable to shout, had painted to the flag of distress and
+beckoned as the big ship rushed by.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+"There's a chance," said the captain of this liner to the pilot, as he
+rejoined him on the bridge an hour later, "of international complications
+over this case, and I may have to lose a trip to testify. That's the
+_Afghan Prince_ and consort that I was telling you about. Strange,
+isn't it, that I should pick up these fellows after picking up the
+legitimate crew going east? I don't know which crew was the hungriest.
+The real crew charge this crowd with piracy. By George, it's rather
+funny!"
+
+"And these men," said the pilot, with a laugh, "would have claimed
+salvage?"
+
+"Yes, and had a good claim, too, for effort expended; but they've
+offset it by their violence. Their chance was good in the English
+courts, if they'd only allowed the steamer to go on; and then, too,
+they abandoned her in a more dangerous position than where they found
+her. You see, they met her off Nantucket with sea-room, and nothing
+wrong with her but broken tiller-ropes; and they quit her here close to
+Sandy Hook, in a fog, more than likely to hit the beach before morning.
+Then, in that case, she belongs to the owners or underwriters."
+
+"Why didn't they make Boston?" asked the pilot.
+
+"Tried to, but overran their distance. Chronometer must have been 'way
+out. I talked to the one who navigated, and found that he'd never
+thought of allowing for local attraction,--didn't happen to run against
+the boat's deviation table,--and so, with all that railway iron below
+hatches, he fetched clear o' Nantucket, and 'way in here."
+
+"That's tough. The salvage of that steamer would make them rich,
+wouldn't it? And I think they might have got it if they could have held
+out."
+
+"Yes; think they might. But here's another funny thing about it. They
+needn't have starved. They needn't have chopped her to pieces for fuel.
+I just remember, now. Her skipper told me there was good anthracite
+coal in her hold, and Chicago canned meats, Minnesota flour, beef,
+pork, and all sorts of good grub. He carried some of the rails in the
+'tween-deck for steadying ballast, and I suppose it prevented them
+looking farther. And now they'll lose their salvage, and perhaps have
+to pay it on their own schooner if anything comes along and picks them
+up. That's the craft that'll get the salvage."
+
+"Not likely," said the pilot; "not in this fog, and the wind and sea
+rising. I'll give 'em six hours to fetch up on the Jersey coast. A mail
+contract with the government is sometimes a nuisance, isn't it,
+captain? How many years would it take you to save money to equal your
+share of the salvage if you had yanked that tramp and the schooner into
+New York?"
+
+"It would take more than one lifetime," answered the captain, a little
+sadly. "A skipper on a mail-boat is the biggest fool that goes to sea."
+
+The liner did not reach quarantine until after sundown, hence remained
+there through the night. As she was lifting her anchor in the morning,
+preparatory to steaming up to her dock, the crew of the _Rosebud_,
+refreshed by food and sleep, but still weak and nerveless, came on deck
+to witness a harrowing sight. The _Afghan Prince_ was coming toward the
+anchorage before a brisk southeast wind. Astern of her, held by the
+heavy iron chain, was their schooner. Moored to her, one on each side,
+were two garbage-scows; and at the head of the parade, pretending to
+tow them all,--puffing, rolling, and smoking in the effort to keep a
+strain on the tow-line,--and tooting joyously with her whistle, was a
+little, dingy tugboat, with a large gilt name on her pilot-house--_J.
+C. Hawks_.
+
+
+
+
+BETWEEN THE MILLSTONES
+
+
+He stood before the recruiting officer, trembling with nervousness,
+anxious of face, and clothed in rags; but he was clean, for, knowing
+the moral effect of cleanliness, he had lately sought the beach and
+taken a swim.
+
+"Want to enlist?" asked the officer, taking his measure with trained
+eye.
+
+"Yes, sir; I read you wanted men in the navy."
+
+"Want seamen, firemen, and landsmen. What's your occupation? You look
+like a tramp."
+
+"Yes," he answered bitterly, "I'm a tramp. That's all they'd let me be.
+I used to be a locomotive engineer--before the big strike. Then they
+blacklisted me, and I've never had a job above laborin' work since.
+It's easy to take to the road and stay at it when you find you can't
+make over a dollar a day at back-breakin' work after earnin' three and
+four at the throttle. An engineer knows nothin' but his trade, sir.
+Take it away, and he's a laborin' man.
+
+"I'd ha' worked and learned another, but they jailed me--put me in
+choky, 'cause I had no visible means o' support. I had no money, and
+was a criminal under the law. And they kept at it,--jailed me again and
+again as a vagrant,--when all I wanted was work. After a while I didn't
+care. But now's my chance, sir, if you'll take me on. I don't know much
+about boats and the sea, but I can fire an engine, and know something
+about steam."
+
+"A fireman's work on board a war-vessel is very different from that of
+a locomotive fireman," said the officer, leaning back in his chair.
+
+"I know, sir; that may be," the tramp replied eagerly; "but I can
+shovel coal, and I can learn, and I can work. I'm not very strong now,
+'cause I haven't had much to eat o' late years; but I'm not a drinkin'
+man--why, that costs more than grub. Give me a chance, sir; I'm an
+American; I'm sick o' bein' hunted from jail to jail, like a wild
+animal, just 'cause I can't be satisfied with pick-and-shovel work.
+I've spent half o' the last five years in jail as a vagrant. I put in a
+month at Fernandina, and then I was chased out o' town. They gave me
+two months at Cedar Keys, and I came here, only to get a month more in
+this jail. I got out this mornin', and was told by the copper who
+pinched me to get out o' Pensacola or he'd run me in again. And he's
+outside now waitin' for me. I dodged past 'im to get in."
+
+"Pass this man in to the surgeon," said the officer, with something
+like a sympathetic snort in the tone of his voice; for he also was an
+American.
+
+An orderly escorted him to the surgeon, who examined him and passed
+him. Then the recruit signed his name to a paper.
+
+"Emaciated," wrote the surgeon in his daily report; "body badly
+nourished, and susceptible to any infection. Shows slight febrile
+symptoms, which should be attended to. An intelligent man; with good
+food and care will become valuable."
+
+The tramp marched to the receiving-ship with a squad of other recruits,
+and on the way smiled triumphantly into the face of a mulatto
+policeman, who glared at him. He had signed his name on a piece of
+paper, and the act had changed his status. From a hunted fugitive and
+habitual criminal he had become a defender of his country's honor--a
+potential hero.
+
+On board the receiving-ship he was given an outfit of clothes and
+bedding; but before he had learned more than the correct way to lash
+his hammock and tie his silk neckerchief he was detailed for sea duty,
+and with a draft of men went to Key West in a navy-yard tug; for war
+was on, and the fleet blockading Havana needed men.
+
+At Key West he was appointed fireman on a torpedo-boat, where his
+work--which he soon learned--was to keep up steam in a tubular boiler.
+But he learned nothing of the rest of the boat, her business, or the
+reason of her construction. Seasickness prevented any assertion of
+curiosity at first, and later the febrile symptoms which the examining
+surgeon had noted developed in him until he could think of nothing
+else. There being no doctor aboard to diagnose his case, he was jeered
+by his fellows, and kept at work until he dropped; then he took to his
+hammock. Shooting pains darted through him, centering in his head,
+while his throat was dry and his thirst tormenting.
+
+Life on a torpedo-boat engaged in despatch duty and rushing through a
+Gulf Stream sea at thirty knots is torture to a healthy, nervous
+system. It sent this sick man into speedy delirium. He could eat very
+little, but he drank all the water that was given him. Moaning and
+muttering, tossing about in his hammock, never asleep, but sometimes
+unconscious, at other times raving, and occasionally lucid, he
+presented a problem which demanded solution. His emaciated face,
+flushed at first, had taken on a peculiar bronzed appearance, and there
+were some who declared that it was Yellow Jack. But nothing could be
+done until they reached the fleet and could interview a cruiser with a
+surgeon.
+
+The sick man solved the problem. He scrambled out of his hammock at
+daylight in the morning and dressed himself in his blue uniform,
+carefully tying his black neckerchief in the regulation knot. Then,
+muttering the while, he gained the deck.
+
+The boat was charging along at full speed, throwing aside a bow wave
+nearly as high as herself. Three miles astern, just discernible in the
+half-light, was a pursuing ram-bowed gunboat, spitting shot and shell;
+and forward near the conning-tower were two blue-coated, brass-buttoned
+officers, watching the pursuer through binoculars.
+
+The crazed brain of the sick man took cognizance of nothing but the
+blue coats and brass buttons. He did not look for locust clubs and
+silver shields. These were policemen--his deadliest enemies; but he
+would escape them this time.
+
+With a yell he went overboard, and, being no swimmer, would have
+drowned had not one of the blue-coated officers flung a lifebuoy. He
+came to the surface somewhat saner, and seized the white ring, which
+supported him, while the torpedo-boat rushed on. She could not stop for
+one man in time of war, with a heavily armed enemy so near.
+
+A twenty-knot gunboat cannot chase a thirty-knot torpedo-boat very long
+without losing her below the horizon; but this pursuit lasted ten
+minutes from the time the sick man went overboard before the gunboat
+ceased firing and slackened speed. The quarry was five miles away, out
+of Spanish range, and the floating man directly under her bow. He was
+seen and taken on board, with Spanish profanity sounding in his
+unregarding ears.
+
+He lay on the deck, a bedraggled heap, gibbering and shivering, while a
+surgeon, with cotton in his nostrils and smelling-salts in his hand,
+diagnosed his case. Then the gunboat headed north and dropped anchor in
+the bight of a small, crescent-shaped sand-key of the Florida Reef. For
+the diagnosis was such as to suggest prompt action. Two brave men
+bundled him into the dinghy, lowered it, pulled ashore, and laid him on
+the sand.
+
+Returning, they stripped and threw away their clothing, sank the boat
+with a buoy on the painter, took a swim, and climbed aboard to be
+further disinfected. Then the gunboat lifted her anchor and steamed
+eastward, her officers watching through glasses a small, low
+torpedo-boat, far to the southeast,--too far to be reached by gun
+fire,--which was steering a parallel course, and presumably watching
+the gunboat.
+
+An idiot, a lunatic, with bloodshot eyes glaring from a yellow face,
+raved, rolled, and staggered bareheaded under the sun about the sandy
+crescent until sundown, then fell prostrate and unconscious into the
+water on the beach, luckily turning over so that his nostrils were not
+immersed. The tide went down, leaving him damp and still on the sands.
+In about an hour a sigh, followed by a deep, gasping breath, escaped
+him; another long inhalation succeeded, and another; then came steady,
+healthy breathing and childlike sleep, with perspiration oozing from
+every pore. He had passed a crisis.
+
+About midnight the cloudy sky cleared and the tropic stars came out,
+while the tide climbed the beach again, and lapped at the sleeping
+man's feet; but he did not waken, even when the Spanish gunboat stole
+slowly into the bay from the sea and dropped anchor with a loud
+rattling of chain in the hawse-pipe. A boat was lowered, and a single
+man sculled it ashore; then lifting out a small cask and bag, he placed
+them high on the sands and looked around.
+
+Spying the sleeping man, half immersed now, he approached and felt of
+the damp clothing and equally damp face. Not noticing that he breathed
+softly, the man crossed himself, then moved quickly and nervously
+toward his boat, muttering, "Muerto, muerto!" Pushing out, he sculled
+rapidly toward the anchored craft, and disposed of the boat and his
+clothing as had been done before; then he swam to the gangway and
+climbed aboard.
+
+Shortly after, the sleeping man, roused by the chill of the water,
+crawled aimlessly up the sand and slept again--safe beyond the
+tide-line. In three hours he sat up and rubbed his eyes, half awake,
+but sane.
+
+Strange sights and sounds puzzled him. He knew nothing of this starlit
+beach and stretch of sparkling water--nothing of that long black craft
+at anchor, with the longer beam of white light reaching over the sea
+from her pilot-house. He could only surmise that she was a war-vessel
+from the ram-bow,--a feature of the government model which had
+impressed him at Key West,--and from the noise she was making. She
+quivered in a maze of flickering red flashes, and the rattling din of
+her rapid-fire and machine guns transcended in volume all the roadside
+blastings he had heard in his wanderings. Dazed and astonished, he rose
+to his feet, but, too weak to stand, sat down again and looked.
+
+Half a mile seaward, where the beam of light ended, a small craft, low
+down between two crested waves, was speeding toward the gunboat in the
+face of her fire. The water about her was lashed into turmoil by the
+hail of projectiles; but she kept on, at locomotive speed, until within
+a thousand feet of the gunboat, when she turned sharply to starboard,
+doubled on her track, and raced off to sea, still covered by the
+search-light and followed by shot and shell while the gunners could see
+her.
+
+When the gun fire ceased, a hissing of steam could be heard in the
+distance, and a triumphant Spanish yell answered. The small enemy had
+been struck, and the gunboat slipped her cable and followed.
+
+The tired brain could not cope with the problem, and again the man
+slept, to awaken at sunrise with ravenous hunger and thirst, and a
+memory of what seemed to be horrible dreams,--vague recollections of
+painful experiences,--torturing labor with aching muscles and blistered
+hands; harsh words and ridicule from strong, bearded men; and running
+through and between, the shadowy figures of blue-coated, brass-buttoned
+men, continually ordering him on, and threatening arrest. The spectacle
+of the night was as dream-like as the rest; for he remembered nothing
+of the gunboat which had rescued and marooned him.
+
+His face had lost its yellowish-bronze color, but was pale and
+emaciated as ever, while his sunken eyes held the soft light which
+always comes of extreme physical suffering. He was too weak to remain
+on his feet, but in the effort to do so he spied the cask and bag
+higher up on the beach and crawled to them. Prying a plug from the
+bunghole with his knife, he found water, sweet and delicious, which he
+drank by rolling the cask carefully and burying his lips in the
+overflow. Evidently some one in authority on the gunboat had decreed
+that he should not die of hunger or thirst, for the bag contained hard
+bread.
+
+Stronger after a meal, he climbed the highest sand-dune and studied the
+situation. An outcropping of coral formed the backbone of the thin
+crescent which held him, and which was about half a mile between the
+points. To the south, opening out from the bay, was a clear stretch of
+sea, green in the sunlight, deep blue in the shadows of the clouds, and
+on the horizon were a few sails and smoke columns. West and east were
+other sandy islets and coral reefs, and to the north a continuous line
+of larger islands which might be inhabited, but gave no indication of
+it.
+
+Out in the bay, bobbing to the heave of the slight ground-swell, were
+the three white buoys left by the Spaniards to mark the sunken boats
+and slipped cable; and far away on the beach, just within the western
+point, was something long and round, which rolled in the gentle surf
+and glistened in the sunlight. He knew nothing of buoys, but they
+relieved his loneliness; they were signs of human beings, who must have
+placed him there with the bread and water, and who might come for him.
+
+"Wonder if I got pinched again, and this is some new kind of a choky,"
+he mused. "Been blamed sick and silly, and must ha' lost the job and
+got jailed again. Just my luck! S'pose the jug was crowded and they run
+me out here. Wish they'd left me a hat. Wonder how long I'm in for this
+time."
+
+He descended to the beach and found that repeated wettings of his hair
+relieved him from the headache that the sun's heat was bringing on; and
+satisfied that the strong hand of local law had again closed over him,
+he resigned himself to the situation, resenting only the absence of a
+shade-tree or a hat. "Much better 'n the calaboose in El Paso," he
+muttered, "or the brickyard in Chicago."
+
+As he lolled on the sand, the glistening thing over at the western
+point again caught his eye. After a moment's scrutiny he rose and
+limped toward it, following the concave of the beach, and often pausing
+to rest and bathe his head. It was a long journey for him, and the
+tide, at half-ebb when he started, was rising again when he came
+abreast of the object and sat down to look at it. It was of metal, long
+and round, rolling nearly submerged, and held by the alternate surf and
+undertow parallel with the beach, about twenty feet out.
+
+He waded in, grasped it by a T-shaped projection in the middle, and
+headed it toward the shore. Then he launched it forward with all his
+strength--not much, but enough to lift a bluntly pointed end out of
+water as it grounded and exposed a small, four-bladed steel wheel,
+shaped something like a windmill. He examined this, but could not
+understand it, as it whirled freely either way and seemed to have no
+internal connection. The strange cylinder was about sixteen feet long
+and about eighteen inches in diameter.
+
+"Boat o' some kind," he muttered; "but what kind? That screw's too
+small to make it go. Let's see the other end."
+
+He launched it with difficulty, and noticed that when floating end on
+to the surf it ceased to roll and kept the T-shaped projection
+uppermost, proving that it was ballasted. Swinging it, he grounded the
+other end, which was radically different in appearance. It was long and
+finely pointed, with four steel blades or vanes, two horizontal and two
+vertical,--like the double tails of an ideal fish,--and in hollowed
+parts of these vanes were hung a pair of unmistakable propellers, one
+behind the other, and of opposite pitch and motion.
+
+"One works on the shaft, t' other on a sleeve," he mused, as he turned
+them. "A roundhouse wiper could see that. Bevel-gearin' inside, I
+guess. It's a boat, sure enough, and this reverse action must be to
+keep her from rolling."
+
+On each of the four vanes he found a small blade, showing by its
+connection that it possessed range of action, yet immovable as the vane
+itself, as though held firmly by inner leverage. Those on the
+horizontal vanes were tilted upward. Just abaft the T-shaped
+projection--which, fastened firmly to the hull, told him nothing of its
+purpose--were numerous brass posts buried flush with the surface, in
+each of which was a square hole, as though intended to be turned with a
+key or crank. Some were marked with radiating lines and numbers, and
+they evidently controlled the inner mechanism, part of which he could
+see--little brass cog-wheels, worms, and levers--through a fore-and-aft
+slot near the keyholes.
+
+Rising from the forward end of this slot, and lying close to the metal
+hull in front of it, was a strong lever of brass, L-shaped, connected
+internally, and indicating to his trained mechanical mind that its only
+sphere of action was to lift up and sink back into the slot. He
+fingered it, but did not yet try to move it. A little to the left of
+this lever was a small blade of steel, curved to fit the convex
+hull,--which it hugged closely,--and hinged at its forward edge. This,
+too, must have a purpose,--an internal connection,--and he did not
+disturb it until he had learned more.
+
+To the right of the brass lever was an oblong hatch about eight inches
+long, flush with the hull, and held in place by screws. Three seams,
+with lines of screws, encircled the round hull, showing that it was
+constructed in four sections; and these screws, with those in the
+hatch, were strong and numerous--placed there to stay.
+
+Fatigued from his exertion, he moistened his hair, sat down, and
+watched the incoming tide swing the craft round parallel with the
+beach. As the submerged bow raised to a level with the stern, he
+noticed that the small blades on the horizontal vanes dropped from
+their upward slant to a straight line with the vanes.
+
+"Rudders," he said, "horizontal rudders. Can't be anything else." With
+his chin in his hand and his wrinkled brow creased with deeper
+corrugations, he put his mind through a process of inductive reasoning.
+
+"Horizontal rudders," he mused, "must be to keep her from diving, or to
+make her dive. They work automatically, and I s'pose the vertical
+rudders are the same. There's nothing outside to turn 'em with. That
+boat isn't made to ride in,--no way to get into her,--and she isn't big
+enough, anyhow. And as you can't get into her, that brass lever must be
+what starts and stops her. Wonder what the steel blade's for. 'T isn't
+a handy shape for a lever,--to be handled with fingers,--too sharp; but
+it has work to do, or it wouldn't be there. That section o' railroad
+iron on top must be to hang the boat by,--a traveler,--when she's out
+o' water.
+
+"And the fan-wheel on the nose--what's that for? If it's a speed or
+distance indicator, the dial's inside, out o' sight. There's no
+exhaust, so the motive power can't be steam. Clockwork or electricity,
+maybe. Mighty fine workmanship all through! That square door is fitted
+in for keeps, and she must ha' cost a heap. Now, as she has horizontal
+rudders, she's intended to steer up and down; and as there's no way to
+get into her or to stay on her, and as she can't be started from the
+inside or steered from the outside, I take it she's a model o' one o'
+those submarine boats I've heard of--some fellow's invention that's got
+away from him. Guess I'll try that lever and see what happens. I'll
+bury the propellers, though; no engine ought to race."
+
+He pushed the craft into deeper water, pointed it shoreward, and
+cautiously lifted the curved blade to a perpendicular position, as high
+as it would go. Nothing happened. He lowered it, raised it again,--it
+worked very easily,--then, leaving it upright, he threw the long brass
+lever back into the slot. A slight humming came from within, the
+propellers revolved slowly, and the craft moved ahead until the bow
+grounded. Then he followed and lifted the lever out of the slot to its
+first position, shutting off the power.
+
+Delighted with his success, he backed it out farther than before and
+again threw back the brass lever, this time with the curved blade down
+flat on the hull. With the sinking of the lever into the slot the
+mechanism within gave forth a rushing sound, the propellers at the
+stern threw up a mound of foam, and the craft shot past him, dived
+until it glanced on the sandy bottom, then slid a third of its length
+out of water on the beach and stopped, the propellers still churning,
+and the small wheel on the nose still spinning with the motion given it
+by the water.
+
+"Air-pressure!" he exclaimed, as he shut it off. He had seen a line of
+bubbles rise as the thing dived. "An air-engine, and the whole thing
+must be full o' compressed air. The brass lever turns it on, and if the
+steel blade's up it gives it the slow motion; if it's down, she gets
+full speed at once. Now I know why it's blade-shaped. It's so the water
+itself can push it down--after she starts."
+
+He did not try to launch it; he waited until the tide floated it, then
+pushed it along the beach toward his store of food, arriving at high
+water too exhausted to do more that day than ground his capture and
+break hard bread. And as the afternoon drew to a close the fatigue in
+his limbs became racking pain; either as a result of his exposure, or
+as a later symptom of the fever, he was now in the clutch of a new
+enemy--rheumatism.
+
+Then, with the coming of night came a return of his first violent
+symptoms; he was hot, shivery, and feverish by turns, with dry tongue
+and throat, and a splitting headache; but in this condition he could
+still take cognizance of a black, ram-bowed gunboat, which stole into
+the bay from the east and dropped anchor near the buoys.
+
+A half-moon shone in the western sky, and by its light the steamer
+presented an unkempt, broken appearance, even to the untrained eye of
+this castaway. Her after-funnel was but half as high as the other;
+there were gaps in her iron rail, and vacancies below the twisted
+davits where boats should be; and her pilot-house was wrecked--the
+starboard door and nearest window merged in a large, ragged hole.
+
+Officers on the bridge gave orders in foreign speech, in tones which
+came shoreward faintly. Men sprang overboard with ropes, which they
+fastened to the buoys; then they swam back, and for an hour or two the
+whole crew was busy getting the boats to the davits and the end of the
+cable into the hawse-pipe.
+
+The man on the beach recognized the craft he had seen when he wakened.
+
+He felt that she must in some way be connected with his being there,
+and he waited, expecting to see a boat put off; but when both boats
+were hoisted and he heard the humming of a steam-windlass, he gave up
+this expectation and tried to hail.
+
+His voice could not rise above a hoarse whisper. The anchor was fished,
+and after an interval he heard the windlass again, heaving in the other
+chain. They were going away--going to leave him there to die.
+
+He crawled and stumbled down to the water's edge. The tide was up
+again, rippling around the strange thing he had resolved to navigate.
+It was not a boat, but it would go ahead, and it would float--it would
+possibly float him.
+
+With strength born of desperation and fear, he pushed it, inch by inch,
+into the water until it was clear of the sand, and tried the engine on
+the slow motion. The propellers turned and satisfied him. He shut off
+the power, swung the thing round until it pointed toward the steamer,
+and seated himself astride of it, just abaft the T-shaped projection in
+the middle. The long cylinder sank with him, and when it had steadied
+to a balance between his weight and its buoyancy he found that it bore
+him, shoulders out; and the position he had taken--within reach of the
+levers behind him--lifted the blunt nose higher than the stern, but not
+out of water. This was practicable.
+
+He reached behind, raised the blade lever, threw back the large brass
+lever, and the craft went ahead, at about the speed of a healthy man's
+walk. He kept his left hand on the blade lever to hold it up, and by
+skilful paddling with his right maintained his balance and assisted his
+legs in steering. He had never learned to swim, but he felt less fear
+of drowning than of slow death on the island.
+
+In five minutes he was near enough to the steamer to read her name. He
+pulled the starting-lever forward, stopping his headway; for he must be
+sure of his welcome.
+
+"Say, boss," he called faintly and hoarsely, "take me along, can't you?
+Or else gi' me some medicine. I'm blamed sick--I'll die if I stay
+here."
+
+The noise of the windlass and chain prevented this being heard, but at
+last, after repeated calls on his part, a Spanish howl went up from
+amidships, and a sailor sprang from one of the boats to the deck,
+crossed himself, and pointing to the man in the water, ran forward.
+
+"Madre de Dios!" he yelled. "El aparecido del muerto."
+
+Work stopped, and a call down a hatchway stopped the windlass. In ports
+and dead-lights appeared faces; and those on deck, officers and men,
+crowded to the rail, some to cross themselves, some to sink on their
+knees, others to grip the rail tightly, while they stared in silence at
+the torso and livid face in the moonlight on the sea--the ghastly face
+of the man they had marooned to die alone, who had been seen later dead
+on the beach.
+
+"Take me with you, boss," he pleaded with his weak voice. "I'm sick; I
+can't hold on much longer."
+
+It was not the dead man's body washed out from the beach, for it moved,
+it spoke. And it was not a living man; no man may recover from advanced
+yellow fever, and this man had been found afterward, dead--cold and
+still. And no living man may swim in this manner--high out of water,
+patting and splashing with one hand. It was a ghost. It had come to
+punish them.
+
+"Por que nos atormentan asi, hombre, deja?" cried a white-faced
+officer.
+
+"Can't you hear me?" asked the apparition. "I'll come closer."
+
+He threw back the starting-lever, and the thing began moving. Then a
+rifle-barrel protruded from a dead-light. There was a report and a
+flash, and a bullet passed through his hair. The shock startled him,
+and he lost his balance. In the effort to recover it his leg knocked
+down the blade lever, and the steel cylinder sprang forward, leaving
+him floundering in the water. Pointed upward, it appeared for a moment
+on the surface, then dived like a porpoise and disappeared. In five
+seconds something happened to the gunboat.
+
+Coincident with a sound like near-by thunder, the black craft lifted
+amidships like a bending jack-knife, and up from the shattered deck,
+and out from ports, doors, and dead-lights, came a volcano of flame and
+smoke. The sea beneath followed in a mound, which burst like a great
+bubble, sending a cloud of steam and spray and whitish-yellow smoke
+aloft to mingle with the first and meet the falling fragments. These
+fell for several seconds--hatches, gratings, buckets, ladders,
+splinters of wood, parts of men, and men whole, but limp.
+
+A side-ladder fell near the choking and half-stunned sick man, and he
+seized it. Before he could crawl on top the two halves of the gunboat
+had sunk in a swirl of bubbles and whirlpools.
+
+A few broken and bleeding swimmers approached to share his support, saw
+his awful face in the moonlight, and swam away.
+
+A few hours later a gray cruiser loomed up close by and directed a
+search-light at him. Then a gray cutter full of white-clad men
+approached and took him off the ladder. He was delirious again, and
+bleeding from mouth, nose, and ears.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+The surgeon and the torpedo-lieutenant came up from the sick-bay, the
+latter with enthusiasm on his face,--for he was young,--and joined a
+group of officers on the quarterdeck.
+
+"He'll pull through, gentlemen," said the surgeon. "He is the man
+Mosher lost overboard, though he doesn't know anything about it, nor
+how he got on that sand-key. I suppose the _Destructor_ picked him
+up and landed him. He found bread and water, he says. You see, the
+first symptoms are similar in Yellow Jack and relapsing bilious fever.
+I don't wonder that Mosher was nervous."
+
+"Then it _was_ the _Destructor_?" asked an ensign, pulling out a
+note-book and a pencil. "And Lieutenant Mosher was right, after all?"
+
+"Yes; this man read her name before she blew up; and a Spanish sailor
+has waked up and confirmed it. She was the _Destructor_, just over, and
+trying to get into Havana. Instead of blowing up in Algeciras Bay, as
+they thought, she had left with despatches for Havana, only to blow up
+on the Florida Reef."
+
+"The _Destructor_," said the ensign, as he pocketed his note-book and
+pencil, "carried fifty-five men. Don't we get the bounty as the nearest
+craft?"
+
+"Not much," said the young and enthusiastic torpedo-lieutenant. "We
+were not even within signal distance, and came along by accident.
+Listen, all of you. When an American war-craft sinks or destroys a
+larger enemy, there is a bounty due her crew of two hundred dollars for
+every man on board the enemy. That is law, isn't it?" They nodded. "If
+a submarine boat can be a war-craft, so may a Whitehead torpedo, and
+certainly is one, being built for war. A war-craft abandoned is a
+derelict, and the man who finds her becomes her lawful commander for
+the time. If he belongs to the navy his position is strengthened, and
+if he is alone he is not only commander, but the whole crew, and
+consequently he is entitled to all the bounty she may earn. That is
+law.
+
+"Now, listen hard. Lieutenant Mosher sent one torpedo at the gunboat;
+it missed and became derelict, while Mosher escaped under one boiler.
+This man found the derelict adrift, puzzled out the action, waited
+until the gunboat came back for her anchor, then straddled his craft,
+and rode out with the water-tripper up. They shot at him. He turned his
+dog loose and destroyed the enemy. If the _Destructor_ carried
+fifty-five men he is entitled to eleven thousand dollars, and the
+government must pay, for that is law."
+
+
+
+
+THE BATTLE OF THE MONSTERS
+
+
+Extract from hospital record of the case of John Anderson, patient of
+Dr. Brown, Ward 3, Room 6:
+
+    August 3. Arrived at hospital in extreme mental distress, having
+    been bitten on wrist three hours previously by dog known to have
+    been rabid. Large, strong man, full-blooded and well nourished.
+    Sanguine temperament. Pulse and temperature higher than normal, due
+    to excitement. Cauterized wound at once (2 P.M.) and inoculated
+    with antitoxin.
+
+    As patient admits having recently escaped, by swimming ashore, from
+    lately arrived cholera ship, now at quarantine, he has been
+    isolated and clothing disinfected. Watch for symptoms of cholera.
+
+    August 3, 6 P.M. Microscopic examination of blood corroborative of
+    Metschnikoff's theory of fighting leucocytes. White corpuscles
+    gorged with bacteria.
+
+He was an amphibian, and, as such, undeniably beautiful; for the
+sunlight, refracted and diffused in the water, gave his translucent,
+pearl-blue body all the shifting colors of the spectrum. Vigorous and
+graceful of movement, in shape he resembled a comma of three
+dimensions, twisted, when at rest, to a slight spiral curve; but in
+traveling he straightened out with quick successive jerks, each one
+sending him ahead a couple of lengths. Supplemented by the undulatory
+movement of a long continuation of his tail, it was his way of
+swimming, good enough to enable him to escape his enemies; this, and
+riding at anchor in a current by his cable-like appendage, constituting
+his main occupation in life. The pleasure of eating was denied him;
+nature had given him a mouth, but he used it only for purposes of
+offense and defense, absorbing his food in a most unheard-of
+manner--through the soft walls of his body.
+
+Yet he enjoyed a few social pleasures. Though the organs of the five
+senses were missing in his economy, he possessed an inner sixth sense
+which answered for all and also gave him power of speech. He would
+converse, swap news and views, with creatures of his own and other
+species, provided that they were of equal size and prowess; but he
+wasted no time on any but his social peers. Smaller creatures he
+pursued when they annoyed him; larger ones pursued him.
+
+The sunlight, which made him so beautiful to look at, was distasteful
+to him; it also made him too visible. He preferred a half-darkness and
+less fervor to life's battle--time to judge of chances, to figure on an
+enemy's speed and turning-circle, before beginning flight or pursuit.
+But his dislike of it really came of a stronger animus--a shuddering
+recollection of three hours once passed on dry land in a comatose
+condition, which had followed a particularly long and intense period of
+bright sunlight. He had never been able to explain the connection, but
+the awful memory still saddened his life.
+
+And now it seemed, as he swam about, that this experience might be
+repeated. The light was strong and long-continued, the water
+uncomfortably warm, and the crowd about him denser--so much so as to
+prevent him from attending properly to a social inferior who had
+crossed his bow. But just as his mind grasped the full imminence of the
+danger, there came a sudden darkness, a crash and vibration of the
+water, then a terrible, rattling roar of sound. The social inferior
+slipped from his mouth, and with his crowding neighbors was washed far
+away, while he felt himself slipping along, bounding and rebounding
+against the projections of a corrugated wall which showed white in the
+gloom. There was an unpleasant taste to the water, and he became aware
+of creatures in his vicinity unlike any he had known,--quickly darting
+little monsters about a tenth as large as himself,--thousands of them,
+black and horrid to see, each with short, fish-like body and square
+head like that of a dog; with wicked mouth that opened and shut
+nervously; with hooked flippers on the middle part, and a bunch of
+tentacles on the fore that spread out ahead and around. A dozen of them
+surrounded him menacingly; but he was young and strong, much larger
+than they, and a little frightened. A blow of his tail killed two, and
+the rest drew off.
+
+The current bore them on until the white wall rounded off and was lost
+to sight beyond the mass of darting creatures. Here was slack water,
+and with desperate effort he swam back, pushing the small enemies out
+of his path, meeting some resistance and receiving a few bites, until,
+in a hollow in the wall, he found temporary refuge and time to think.
+But he could not solve the problem. He had not the slightest idea where
+he was or what had happened--who and what were the strange black
+creatures, or why they had threatened him.
+
+His thoughts were interrupted. Another vibrant roar sounded, and there
+was pitch-black darkness; then he was pushed and washed away from his
+shelter, jostled, bumped, and squeezed, until he found himself in a
+dimly lighted tunnel, which, crowded as it was with swimmers, was
+narrow enough to enable him to see both sides at once. The walls were
+dark brown and blue, broken up everywhere into depressions or caves,
+some of them so deep as to be almost like blind tunnels. The dog-faced
+creatures were there--as far as he could see; but besides them, now,
+were others, of stranger shape--of species unknown to him.
+
+A slow current carried them on, and soon they entered a larger tunnel.
+He swam to the opposite wall, gripped a projection, and watched in
+wonder and awe the procession gliding by. He soon noticed the source of
+the dim light. A small creature with barrel-like body and innumerable
+legs or tentacles, wavering and reaching, floated past. Its body
+swelled and shrank alternately, with every swelling giving out a
+phosphorescent glow, with every contraction darkening to a faint red
+color. Then came a group of others; then a second living lamp; later
+another and another: they were evenly distributed, and illumined the
+tunnel.
+
+There were monstrous shapes, living but inert, barely pulsing with
+dormant life, as much larger than himself as the dog-headed kind were
+smaller--huge, unwieldy, disk-shaped masses of tissue, light gray at
+the margins, dark red in the middle. They were in the majority, and
+blocked the view. Darting and wriggling between and about them were
+horrible forms, some larger than himself, others smaller. There were
+serpents, who swam with a serpent's motion. Some were serpents in form,
+but were curled rigidly into living corkscrews, and by sculling with
+their tails screwed their way through the water with surprising
+rapidity. Others were barrel- or globe-shaped, with swarming tentacles.
+With these they pulled themselves along, in and out through the crowd,
+or, bringing their squirming appendages rearward,--each an individual
+snake,--used them as propellers, and swam. There were creatures in the
+form of long cylinders, some with tentacles by which they rolled along
+like a log in a tideway; others, without appendages, were as inert and
+helpless as the huge red-and-gray disks. He saw four ball-shaped
+creatures float by, clinging together; then a group of eight, then one
+of twelve. All these, to the extent of their volition, seemed to be in
+a state of extreme agitation and excitement.
+
+The cause was apparent. The tunnel from which he had come was still
+discharging the dog-faced animals by the thousand, and he knew now the
+business they were on. It was war--war to the death. They flung
+themselves with furious energy into the parade, fighting and biting all
+they could reach. A hundred at a time would pounce on one of the large
+red-and-gray creatures, almost hiding it from view; then, and before
+they had passed out of sight, they would fall off and disperse, and the
+once living victim would come with them, in parts. The smaller, active
+swimmers fled, but if one was caught, he suffered; a quick dart, a
+tangle of tentacles, an embrace of the wicked flippers, a bite--and a
+dead body floated on.
+
+And now into the battle came a ponderous engine of vengeance and
+defense. A gigantic, lumbering, pulsating creature, white and
+translucent but for the dark, active brain showing through its walls,
+horrible in the slow, implacable deliberation of its movements, floated
+down with the current. It was larger than the huge red-and-gray
+creatures. It was formless, in the full irony of the definition--for it
+assumed all forms. It was long--barrel-shaped; it shrank to a sphere,
+then broadened laterally, and again extended above and below. In turn
+it was a sphere, a disk, a pyramid, a pentahedron, a polyhedron. It
+possessed neither legs, flippers, nor tentacles; but out from its
+heaving, shrinking body it would send, now from one spot, now from
+another, an active arm, or feeler, with which it swam, pulled, or
+pushed. An unlucky invader which one of them touched made few more
+voluntary movements; for instantly the whole side of the whitish mass
+bristled with arms. They seized, crushed, killed it, and then pushed it
+bodily through the living walls to the animal's interior to serve for
+food. And the gaping fissure healed at once, like the wounds of
+Milton's warring angels.
+
+The first white monster floated down, killing as he went; then came
+another, pushing eagerly into the fray; then came two, then three, then
+dozens. It seemed that the word had been passed, and the army of
+defense was mustering.
+
+Sick with horror, he watched the grim spectacle from the shelter of the
+projection, until roused to an active sense of danger to himself--but
+not from the fighters. He was anchored by his tail, swinging easily in
+the eddy, and now felt himself touched from beneath, again from above.
+A projection down-stream was extending outward and toward him. The cave
+in which he had taken refuge was closing on him like a great mouth--as
+though directed by an intelligence behind the wall. With a terrified
+flirt of his tail he flung himself out, and as he drifted down with the
+combat the walls of the cave crunched together. It was well for him
+that he was not there.
+
+The current was clogged with fragments of once living creatures, and
+everywhere, darting, dodging, and biting, were the fierce black
+invaders. But they paid no present attention to him or to the small
+tentacled animals. They killed the large, helpless red-and-gray kind,
+and were killed by the larger white monsters, each moment marking the
+death and rending to fragments of a victim, and the horrid interment of
+fully half his slayers. The tunnel grew larger, as mouth after mouth of
+tributary tunnels was passed; but as each one discharged its quota of
+swimming and drifting creatures, there was no thinning of the crowd.
+
+As he drifted on with the inharmonious throng, he noticed what seemed
+the objective of the war. This was the caves which lined the tunnel.
+Some were apparently rigid, others were mobile. A large red-and-gray
+animal was pushed into the mouth of one of the latter, and the walls
+instantly closed; then they opened, and the creature drifted out, limp
+and colorless, but alive; and with him came fragments of the wall,
+broken off by the pressure. This happened again and again, but the
+large creature was never quite killed--merely squeezed. The tentacled
+non-combatants and the large white fighters seemed to know the danger
+of these tunnel mouths, possibly from bitter experiences, for they
+avoided the walls; but the dog-faced invaders sought this death, and
+only fought on their way to the caves. Sometimes two, often four or
+more, would launch themselves together into a hollow, but to no avail;
+their united strength could not prevent the closing in of the
+mechanical maw, and they were crushed and flung out, to drift on with
+other debris.
+
+Soon the walls could not be seen for the pushing, jostling crowd, but
+everywhere the terrible, silent war went on until there came a time
+when fighting ceased; for each must look out for himself. They seemed
+to be in an immense cave, and the tide was broken into cross-currents
+rushing violently to the accompaniment of rhythmical thunder. They were
+shaken, jostled, pushed about and pushed together, hundreds of the
+smaller creatures dying from the pressure. Then there was a moment of
+comparative quiet, during which fighting was resumed, and there could
+be seen the swiftly flying walls of a large tunnel. Next they were
+rushed through a labyrinth of small caves with walls of curious,
+branching formation, sponge-like and intricate. It required energetic
+effort to prevent being caught in the meshes, and the large
+red-and-gray creatures were sadly torn and crushed, while the white
+ones fought their way through by main strength. Again the flying walls
+of a tunnel, again a mighty cave, and the cross-currents, and the
+rhythmical thunder, and now a wild charge down an immense tunnel, the
+wall of which surged outward and inward, in unison with the roaring of
+the thunder.
+
+The thunder died away in the distance, though the walls still
+surged--even those of a smaller tunnel which divided the current and
+received them. Down-stream the tunnel branched again and again, and
+with the lessening of the diameter was a lessening of the current's
+velocity, until, in a maze of small, short passages, the invaders,
+content to fight and kill in the swifter tide, again attacked the
+caves.
+
+But to the never-changing result: they were crushed, mangled, and cast
+out, the number of suicides, in this neighborhood, largely exceeding
+those killed by the white warriors. And yet, in spite of the large
+mortality among them, the attacking force was increasing. Where one
+died two took his place; and the reason was soon made plain--they were
+reproducing. A black fighter, longer than his fellows, a little
+sluggish of movement, as though from the restrictive pressure of a
+large, round protuberance in his middle, which made him resemble a
+snake which had swallowed an egg, was caught by a white monster and
+instantly embraced by a multitude of feelers. He struggled, bit, and
+broke in two; then the two parts escaped the grip of the astonished
+captor, and wriggled away, the protuberance becoming the head of the
+rear portion, which immediately joined the fight, snapping and biting
+with unmistakable jaws. This phenomenon was repeated.
+
+And on went the battle. Illumined by the living lamps, and watched by
+terrified non-combatants, the horrid carnival continued with
+never-slacking fury and ever-changing background--past the mouths of
+tributary tunnels which increased the volume and velocity of the
+current and added to the fighting strength, on through widening
+archways to a repetition of the cross-currents, the thunder, and the
+sponge-like maze, down past the heaving walls of larger tunnels to
+branched passages, where, in comparative slack water, the siege of the
+caves was resumed. For hour after hour this went on, the invaders dying
+by hundreds, but increasing by thousands and ten thousands, as the
+geometrical progression advanced, until, with swimming-spaces nearly
+choked by their bodies, living and dead, there came the inevitable turn
+in the tide of battle. A white monster was killed.
+
+Glutted with victims, exhausted and sluggish, he was pounced upon by
+hundreds, hidden from view by a living envelop of black, which pulsed
+and throbbed with his death-throes. A feeler reached out, to be bitten
+off; then another, to no avail. His strength was gone, and the
+assailants bit and burrowed until they reached a vital part, when the
+great mass assumed a spherical form and throbbed no more. They dropped
+off, and, as the mangled ball floated on, charged on the next enemy
+with renewed fury and courage born of their victory. This one died as
+quickly.
+
+And as though it had been foreseen, and a policy arranged to meet it,
+the white army no longer fought in the open, but lined up along the
+walls to defend the immovable caves. They avoided the working jaws of
+the other kind, which certainly needed no garrison, and drifting slowly
+in the eddies, fought as they could, with decreasing strength and
+increasing death-rate. And thus it happened that our conservative
+non-combatant, out in midstream, found himself surrounded by a horde of
+black enemies who had nothing better to do than attack him.
+
+And they did. As many as could crowd about him closed their wicked jaws
+in his flesh. Squirming with pain, rendered trebly strong by his
+terror, he killed them by twos and threes as he could reach them with
+his tail. He shook them off with nervous contortions, only to make room
+for more. He plunged, rolled, launched himself forward and back, up and
+down, out and in, bending himself nearly double, then with lightning
+rapidity throwing himself far into the reverse curve. He was fighting
+for his life, and knew it. When he could, he used his jaws, only once
+to an enemy. He saw dimly at intervals that the white monsters were
+watching him; but none offered to help, and he had not time to call.
+
+He thought that he must have become the object of the war; for from all
+sides they swarmed, crowding about him, seeking a place on which to
+fasten their jaws. Little by little the large red-and-gray creatures,
+the non-combatants, and the phosphorescent animals were pushed aside,
+and he, the center of an almost solid black mass, fought, in utter
+darkness, with the fury of extreme fright. He had no appreciation of
+the passing of time, no knowledge of his distance from the wall, or the
+destination of this never-pausing current. But finally, after an
+apparently interminable period, he heard dimly, with failing
+consciousness, the reverberations of the thunder, and knew momentary
+respite as the violent cross-currents tore his assailants away. Then,
+still in darkness, he felt the crashing and tearing of flesh against
+obstructing walls and sharp corners, the repetition of thunder and the
+roar of the current which told him he was once more in a large tunnel.
+An instant of light from a venturesome torch showed him to his enemies,
+and again he fought, like a whale in his last flurry, slowly dying from
+exhaustion and pain, but still potential to kill--terrible in his
+agony. There was no counting of scalps in that day's work; but perhaps
+no devouring white monster in all the defensive army could have shown a
+death-list equal to this. From the surging black cloud there was a
+steady outflow of the dead, pushed back by the living.
+
+Weaker and weaker, while they mangled his flesh, and still in darkness,
+he fought them down through branching passages to another network of
+small tunnels, where he caught a momentary view of the walls and the
+stolid white guard, thence on to what he knew was open space. And here
+he felt that he could fight no more. They had covered him completely,
+and, try as he might with his failing strength, he could not dislodge
+them. So he ceased his struggles; and numb with pain, dazed with
+despair, he awaited the end.
+
+But it did not come. He was too exhausted to feel surprise or joy when
+they suddenly dropped away from him; but the instinct of
+self-preservation was still in force, and he swam toward the wall. The
+small creatures paid him no attention; they scurried this way and that,
+busy with troubles of their own, while he crept stupidly and painfully
+between two white sentries floating in the eddies,--one of whom
+considerately made room for him,--and anchored to a projection, luckily
+choosing a harbor that was not hostile.
+
+"Any port in a storm, eh, neighbor?" said the one who had given him
+room, and who seemed to notice his dazed condition. "You'll feel better
+soon. My, but you put up a good fight, that's what you did!"
+
+He could not answer, and the friendly guard resumed his vigil. In a few
+moments, however, he could take cognizance of what was going on in the
+stream. There was a new army in the fight, and reinforcements were
+still coming. A short distance above him was a huge rent in the wall,
+and the caves around it, crushed and distorted, were grinding fiercely.
+Protruding through the rent and extending half-way across the tunnel
+was a huge mass of some strange substance, roughly shaped to a
+cylindrical form. It was hollow, and out of it, by thousands and
+hundred thousands, was pouring the auxiliary army, from which the black
+fighters were now fleeing for dear life.
+
+The newcomers, though resembling in general form the creatures they
+pursued, were much larger and of two distinct types. Both were light
+brown in color; but while one showed huge development of head and jaw,
+with small flippers, the other kind reversed these attributes, their
+heads being small, but their flippers long and powerful. They ran their
+quarry down in the open, and seized them with outreaching tentacles. No
+mistakes were made--no feints or false motions; and there was no
+resistance by the victims. Where one was noticed he was doomed. The
+tentacles gathered him in--to a murderous bite or a murderous embrace.
+
+At last, when the inflow had ceased,--when there must have been
+millions of the brown killers in the tunnel,--the great hollow cylinder
+turned slowly on its axis and backed out through the rent in the wall,
+which immediately closed, with a crushing and scattering of fragments.
+Though the allies were far down-stream now, the war was practically
+ended; for the white defenders remained near the walls, and the black
+invaders were in wildest panic, each one, as the resistless current
+rushed him past, swimming against the stream, to put distance between
+himself and the destroyer below. But before long an advance-guard of
+the brown enemy shot out from the tributaries above, and the tide of
+retreat swung backward. Then came thousands of them, and the massacre
+was resumed.
+
+"Hot stuff, eh?" said his friendly neighbor to him.
+
+"Y-y-y-es--I guess so," he answered, rather vacantly; "I don't know. I
+don't know anything about it. I never saw such doings. What is it all
+for? What does it mean?"
+
+"Oh, this is nothing; it's all in a lifetime. Still, I admit it might
+ha' been serious for us--and you, too--if we hadn't got help."
+
+"But who are they, and what? They all seem of a family, and are killing
+each other."
+
+"Immortal shade of Darwin!" exclaimed the other sentry, who had not
+spoken before. "Where were you brought up? Don't you know that
+variations from type are the deadliest enemies of the parent stock?
+These two brown breeds are the hundredth or two-hundredth cousins of
+the black kind. When they've killed off their common relative, and get
+to competing for grub, they'll exterminate each other, and we'll be rid
+of 'em all. Law of nature. Understand?"
+
+"Oh, y-yes, I understand, of course; but what did the black kind attack
+me for? And what do they want, anyway?"
+
+"To follow out their destiny, I s'pose. They're the kind of folks who
+have missions. Reformers, we call 'em--who want to enforce their
+peculiar ideas and habits on other people. Sometimes we call them
+expansionists--fond of colonizing territory that doesn't belong to
+them. They wanted to get through the cells to the lymph-passages,
+thence on to the brain and spinal marrow. Know what that means?
+Hydrophobia."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Oh, say, now! You're too easy."
+
+"Come, come," said the other, good-naturedly; "don't guy him. He never
+had our advantages. You see, neighbor, we get these points from the
+subjective brain, which knows all things and gives us our instructions.
+We're the white corpuscles,--phagocytes, the scientists call us,--and
+our work is to police the blood-vessels, and kill off invaders that
+make trouble. Those red-and-gray chumps can't take care of themselves,
+and we must protect 'em. Understand? But this invasion was too much for
+us, and we had to have help from outside. You must have come in with
+the first crowd--think I saw you--in at the bite. Second crowd came in
+through an inoculation tube, and just in time to pull you through."
+
+"I don't know," answered our bewildered friend. "In at the bite? What
+bite? I was swimming round comfortable-like, and there was a big noise,
+and then I was alongside of a big white wall, and then----"
+
+"Exactly; the dog's tooth. You got into bad company, friend, and you're
+well out of it. That first gang is the microbe of rabies, not very well
+known yet, because a little too small to be seen by most microscopes.
+All the scientists seem to have learned about 'em is that a colony a
+few hundred generations old--which they call a culture, or serum--is
+death on the original bird; and that's what they sent in to help out.
+Pasteur's dead, worse luck, but sometime old Koch'll find out what
+we've known all along--that it's only variation from type."
+
+"Koch!" he answered eagerly and proudly. "Oh, I know Koch; I've met
+him. And I know about microscopes, too. Why, Koch had me under his
+microscope once. He discovered my family, and named us--the comma
+bacilli--the Spirilli of Asiatic Cholera."
+
+In silent horror they drew away from him, and then conversed together.
+Other white warriors drifting along stopped and joined the conference,
+and when a hundred or more were massed before him, they spread out to a
+semi-spherical formation and closed in.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked nervously. "What's wrong? What are you
+going to do? I haven't done anything, have I?"
+
+"It's not what you've done, stranger," said his quondam friend, "or
+what we're going to do. It's what you're going to do. You're going to
+die. Don't see how you got past quarantine, anyhow."
+
+"What--why--I don't want to die. I've done nothing. All I want is peace
+and quiet, and a place to swim where it isn't too light nor too dark. I
+mind my own affairs. Let me alone--you hear me--let me alone!"
+
+They answered him not. Slowly and irresistibly the hollow formation
+contracted--individuals slipping out when necessary--until he was
+pushed, still protesting, into the nearest movable cave. The walls
+crashed together and his life went out. When he was cast forth he was
+in five pieces.
+
+And so our gentle, conservative, non-combative cholera microbe, who
+only wanted to be left alone to mind his own affairs, met this violent
+death, a martyr to prejudice and an unsympathetic environment.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+Extract from hospital record of the case of John Anderson:
+
+    August 18. As period of incubation for both cholera and hydrophobia
+    has passed and no initial symptoms of either disease have been
+    noticed, patient is this day discharged, cured.
+
+
+
+
+FROM THE ROYAL-YARD DOWN
+
+
+As night descended, cold and damp, the wind hauled, and by nine o'clock
+the ship was charging along before a half-gale and a rising sea from
+the port quarter. When the watch had braced the yards, the mate ordered
+the spanker brailed in and the mizzen-royal clued up, as the ship
+steered hard. This was done, and the men coiled up the gear.
+
+"Let the spanker hang in the brails; tie up the royal," ordered the
+mate from his position at the break of the poop.
+
+"Aye, aye, sir," answered a voice from the group, and an active figure
+sprang into the rigging. Another figure--slim and graceful, clad in
+long yellow oilskin coat, and a sou'wester which could not confine a
+tangled fringe of wind-blown hair--left the shelter of the
+after-companionway and sped along the alley to the mate's side.
+
+"The foot-rope, Mr. Adams," she said hurriedly. "The seizing was
+chafed, you remember."
+
+"By George, Miss Freda!" said the officer. "Forgot all about it. Glad
+you spoke. Come down from aloft," he added in a roar.
+
+The sailor answered and descended.
+
+"Get a piece of spun yarn out o' the booby-hatch and take it up wi'
+you," continued the mate. "Pass a temporary seizing on the lee royal
+foot-rope. Make sure it's all right 'fore you get on it, now."
+
+"Aye, aye, sir."
+
+The man passed down the poop steps, secured the spun yarn, and while
+rolling it into a ball to put in his pocket, stood for a moment in the
+light shining from the second mate's room. The girl on the poop looked
+down at him. He was a trim-built, well-favored young fellow, with more
+refinement in his face than most sailors can show; yet there was no
+lack of seamanly deftness in the fingers which balled up the spun yarn
+and threw a half-hitch with the bight of the lanyard over the point of
+the marlinespike which hung to his neck. As he climbed the steps, the
+girl faced him, looking squarely into his eyes.
+
+"Be careful, John--Mr. Owen," she said. "The seizing is chafed through.
+I heard the man report it--it was Dutch George of the other watch. Do
+be careful."
+
+"Eh, why--why, yes, Miss Folsom. Thank you. But you startled me. I've
+been Jack for three years--not John, nor Mister. Yes, it's all right;
+I----"
+
+"Get aloft to that mizzenroyal," thundered the mate, now near the
+wheel.
+
+"Aye, aye, sir." He touched his sou'wester to the girl and mounted the
+weather mizzen-rigging, running up the ratlines as a fireman goes up a
+ladder. It was a black night with cold rain, and having thrown off his
+oiled jacket, he was already drenched to the skin; but no environment
+of sunshine, green fields and woodland, and flower-scented air ever
+made life brighter to him than had the incident of the last few
+moments; and with every nerve in his body rejoicing in his victory, and
+her bitter words of four years back crowding his mind as a contrasting
+background, he danced up and over the futtock-shrouds, up the
+topmast-rigging, through the crosstrees, and up the topgallant-rigging
+to where the ratlines ended and he must climb on the runner of the
+royal-halyards. As the yard was lowered, this was a short climb, and he
+swung himself upward to the weather yard-arm, where he rolled up one
+side of the sail with extravagant waste of muscular effort; for she had
+said he was not a man, and he had proved her wrong: he had conquered
+himself, and he had conquered her.
+
+He hitched the gasket, and crossed over to the lee side, forgetting, in
+his exhilaration, the object of the spun yarn in his pocket and the
+marlinespike hung from his neck, stepped out on the foot-rope, passed
+his hands along the jack-stay to pull himself farther, and felt the
+foot-rope sink to the sound of snapping strands. The jackstay was torn
+from his grasp, and he fell, face downward, into the black void
+beneath.
+
+An involuntary shriek began on his lips, but was not finished. He felt
+that the last atom of air was jarred from his lungs by what he knew was
+the topgallant-yard, four feet below the royal; and, unable to hold on,
+with a freezing cold in his veins and at the hair-roots, he experienced
+in its fullness the terrible sensation of falling,--whirling
+downward,--clutching wildly at vacancy with stiffened fingers.
+
+The first horror past, his mind took on a strange contemplativeness;
+fear of death gave way to mild curiosity as to the manner of it. Would
+he strike on the lee quarter, or would he go overboard? And might he
+not catch something? There was rigging below him--the lee
+royal-backstay stretched farthest out from the mast, and if he brushed
+it, there was a possible chance. He was now face upward, and with the
+utmost difficulty moved his eyes,--he could not yet, by any exercise of
+will or muscle, move his head,--and there, almost within reach, was a
+dark line, which he knew was the royal-backstay; farther in toward the
+spars was another--the topgallant-backstay; and within this, two other
+ropes which he knew for the topgallant-rigging, though he could see no
+ratlines, nor could he distinguish the lay of the strands; the ropes
+appeared like solid bars. This, with the fact that he was still but a
+few feet below the topgallant-yard, surprised him, until it came to him
+that falling bodies travel over sixteen feet in the first second of
+descent, which is at a rate too fast for distinct vision, and that the
+apparent slowness of his falling was but relative--because of the
+quickness of his mind, which could not wait on a sluggish optic nerve
+and more sluggish retina.
+
+Yet he wondered why he could not reach out and grasp the backstay. It
+seemed as though invisible fetters bound every muscle and joint, though
+not completely. An intense effort of will resulted in the slow
+extension of all the fingers of his right hand, and a little
+straightening of the arm toward the backstay; but not until he had
+fallen to the level of the upper topsail-yard was this result reached.
+It did no good; the backstay was now farther away. As it led in a
+straight line from the royal-masthead to the rail, this meant that he
+would fall overboard, and the thought comforted him. The concussion
+would kill him, of course; but no self-pity afflicted him now. He
+merely considered that she, who had relented, would be spared the sight
+of him crushed to a pulp on the deck.
+
+As he drifted slowly down past the expanse of upper topsail, he noticed
+that his head was sinking and his body turning so that he would
+ultimately face forward; but still his arms and legs held their
+extended position, like those of a speared frog, and the thought
+recalled to him an incident of his infancy--a frog-hunt with an older
+playmate, his prowess, success, wet feet, and consequent illness. It
+had been forgotten for years, but the chain was started, and led to
+other memories, long dead, which rose before him. His childhood passed
+in review, with its pleasures and griefs; his school-days, with their
+sports, conflicts, friends and enemies; college, where he had acquired
+the polish to make him petted of all but one--and abhorrent to her.
+Almost every person, man or woman, boy or girl, with whom he had
+conversed in his whole life, came back and repeated the scene; and as
+he passed the lower topsail-yard, nearly head downward, he was
+muttering commonplaces to a brown-faced, gray-eyed girl, who listened,
+and looked him through and through, and seemed to be wondering why he
+existed.
+
+And as he traversed the depth of the lower topsail, turning gradually
+on his axis, he lived it over--next to his first voyage, the most
+harrowing period of his life: the short two months during which he had
+striven vainly to impress this simple-natured sailor-girl with his good
+qualities, ending at last with his frantic declaration of a love that
+she did not want.
+
+"But it's not the least use, John," she said to him. "I do not love
+you, and I cannot. You are a gentleman, as they say, and as such I like
+you well enough; but I never can love you, nor any one like you. I've
+been among men, real men, all my life, and perhaps have ideals that are
+strange to you. John,"--her eyes were wide open in earnestness,--"you
+are not a man."
+
+Writhing under her words, which would have been brutal spoken by
+another, he cursed, not her, nor himself, but his luck and the fates
+that had shaped his life. And next she was showing him the opened door,
+saying that she could tolerate profanity in a man, but not in a
+gentleman, and that under no circumstances was he to claim her
+acquaintance again. Then followed the snubbing in the street, when,
+like a lately whipped dog, he had placed himself in her way, hoping she
+would notice him; and the long agony of humiliation and despair as his
+heart and soul followed her over the seas in her father's ship, until
+the seed she had planted--the small suspicion that her words were
+true--developed into a wholesome conviction that she had measured him
+by a higher standard than any he had known, and found him wanting. So
+he would go to her school, and learn what she knew.
+
+With lightning-like rapidity his mind rehearsed the details of his
+tuition: the four long voyages; the brutality of the officers until he
+had learned his work; their consideration and rough kindness when he
+had become useful and valuable; the curious, incongruous feeling of
+self-respect that none but able seamen feel; the growth in him of an
+aggressive physical courage; the triumphant satisfaction with which he
+finally knew himself as a complete man, clean in morals and mind, able
+to look men in the face. And then came the moment when, mustering at
+the capstan with the new crew of her father's ship, he had met her
+surprised eyes with a steady glance, and received no recognition.
+
+And so he pleaded his cause, dumbly, by the life that he lived. Asking
+nothing by word or look, he proved himself under her eyes--first on
+deck; first in the rigging; the best man at a weather-earing; the best
+at the wheel; quick, obedient, intelligent, and respectful, winning the
+admiration of his mates, the jealous ill will of the officers, but no
+sign of interest or approval from her until to-night--the ninety-second
+day of the passage. She had surrendered; he had reached her level, only
+to die; and he thought this strange.
+
+Facing downward, head inboard now, and nearly horizontal, he was
+passing the cross-jack yard. Below him was the sea--black and crisp,
+motionless as though carved in ebony. Neither was there movement of the
+ship and its rigging; the hanging bights of ropes were rigid, while a
+breaking sea just abaft the main chains remained poised, curled, its
+white crest a frozen pillow of foam. "The rapidity of thought," he
+mused dreamily; "but I'm falling fast enough--fast enough to kill me
+when I strike."
+
+He could not move an eyelid now, nor was he conscious that he breathed;
+but, being nearly upright, facing aft and inboard, the quarter-deck and
+its fittings were before his eyes, and he saw what brought him out of
+eternity to a moment of finite time and emotion. The helmsman stood at
+the motionless wheel with his right hand poised six inches above a
+spoke, as though some sudden paralysis gripped him, and his face,
+illumined by the binnacle light, turned aloft inquiringly. But it was
+not this. Standing at the taffrail, one hand on a life-buoy, was a girl
+in yellow looking at him,--unspeakable horror in the look,--and around
+her waist the arm of the mate, on whose rather handsome face was an
+evil grin.
+
+A pang of earthly rage and jealousy shot through him, and he wished to
+live. By a supreme effort of will he brought his legs close together
+and his arms straight above his head; then the picture before him shot
+upward, and he was immersed in cold salt water, with blackness all
+about him. How long he remained under he could not guess. He had struck
+feet first and suffered no harm, but had gone down like a deep-sea
+lead. He felt the aching sensation in his lungs coming from suppressed
+breathing, and swam blindly in the darkness, not knowing in which
+direction was the surface, until he felt the marlinespike--still
+fastened to his neck--extending off to the right. Sure that it must
+hang downward, he turned the other way, and, keeping it parallel with
+his body, swam with bursting lungs, until he felt air upon his face and
+knew that he could breathe. In choking sobs and gasps his breath came
+and went, while he paddled with hands and feet, glad of his reprieve;
+and when his lungs worked normally, he struck out for a white, circular
+life-buoy, not six feet away. "Bless her for this," he prayed, as he
+slipped it under his arms. His oilskin trousers were cumbersome, and
+with a little trouble he shed them.
+
+He was alive, and his world was again in motion. Seas lifted and
+dropped him, occasionally breaking over his head. In the calm of the
+hollows, he listened for voices of possible rescuers. On the tops of
+the seas,--ears filled with the roar of the gale,--he shouted, facing
+to leeward, and searching with strained eyes for sign of the ship or
+one of her boats. At last he saw a pin-point of light far away, and
+around it and above it blacker darkness, which was faintly shaped to
+the outline of a ship and canvas--hove to in the trough, with
+maintopsail aback, as he knew by its foreshortening. And even as he
+looked and shouted it faded away. He screamed and cursed, for he wanted
+to live. He had survived that terrible fall, and it was his right.
+
+Something white showed on the top of a sea to leeward and sank in a
+hollow. He sank with it, and when he rose again it was nearer.
+
+"Boat ahoy!" he sang out. "Boat ahoy!--this way--port a
+little--steady."
+
+He swam as he could, cumbered by the life-buoy, and with every heaving
+sea the boat came nearer. At last he recognized it--the ship's dinghy;
+and it was being pulled into the teeth of that forceful wind and sea by
+a single rower--a slight figure in yellow.
+
+"It's Freda," he exclaimed; and then, in a shout: "This way, Miss
+Folsom--a little farther."
+
+She turned, nodded, and pulled the boat up to him. He seized the
+gunwale, and she took in the oars.
+
+"Can you climb in alone, John?" she asked in an even voice--as even as
+though she were asking him to have more tea. "Wait a little,--I am
+tired,--and I will help you."
+
+She was ever calm and dispassionate, but he wondered at her now; yet he
+would not be outdone.
+
+"I'll climb over the stern, Freda, so as not to capsize you. Better go
+forward to balance my weight."
+
+She did so. He pulled himself to the stern, slipped the life-buoy over
+his head and into the boat, then, by a mighty exercise of all his
+strength, vaulted aboard with seeming ease and sat down on a thwart. He
+felt a strong inclination to laughter and tears, but repressed himself;
+for masculine hysterics would not do before this young woman. She came
+aft to the next thwart, and when he felt steadier he said:
+
+"You have saved my life, Freda; but thanks are idle now, for your own
+is in danger. Give me the oars. We must get back to the ship."
+
+She changed places with him, facing forward, and said wearily, as he
+shipped the oars: "So you want to get back?"
+
+"Why, yes; don't you? We are adrift in an open boat."
+
+"The wind is going down, and the seas do not break," she answered, in
+the same weary voice. "It does not rain any more, and we will have the
+moon."
+
+A glance around told him that she spoke truly. There was less pressure
+to the wind, and the seas rose and fell, sweeping past them like moving
+hills of oil. Moonlight shining through thinning clouds faintly
+illumined her face, and he saw the expressionless weariness of her
+voice, and a sad, dreamy look in her gray eyes.
+
+"How did you get the dinghy down, Freda?" he asked. "And why did no one
+come with you?"
+
+"Father was asleep, and the mate was incompetent. I had my revolver,
+and they backed the yards for me and threw the dinghy over. I had
+loosened the gripes as you went aloft. I thought you would fall.
+Still--no one would come."
+
+"And you came alone," he said in a broken voice, "and pulled this boat
+to windward in this sea. You are a wonder."
+
+"I saw you catch the life-buoy. Why did you fall? You were cautioned."
+
+"I forgot the foot-rope. I was thinking of you."
+
+"You are like the mate. He forgot the foot-rope all day because he was
+thinking of me. I should have gone aloft and seized it myself."
+
+There was no reproof or sarcasm in the tired voice. She had simply made
+an assertion.
+
+"Why are you at sea, before the mast--a man of your talents?"
+
+It was foolish, he knew; but the word "man" sent a thrill through him.
+
+"To please you if I may; to cultivate what you did not find in me."
+
+"Yes, I knew; when you came on board I knew it. But you might have
+spoken to me."
+
+There was petulance in the tone now, and the soul of the man rejoiced.
+The woman in her was asserting itself.
+
+"Miss Folsom," he answered warmly, "I could not. You had made it
+impossible. It was your right, your duty, if you wished it. But you
+ignored my existence."
+
+"I was testing you. I am glad now, Mr. Owen."
+
+The petulance was gone, but there was something chilling in this
+answer.
+
+"Can you see the ship?" he asked after a moment's silence. "The
+moonlight is stronger."
+
+"We will not reach her. They have squared away. The mate had the deck,
+and father is asleep."
+
+"And left you in an open boat," he answered angrily.
+
+"He knew I was with you."
+
+What was irrelevant in this explanation of the mate's conduct escaped
+him at the time. The full moon had emerged from behind the racing
+clouds, and it brightened her face, fringed by the tangled hair and
+yellow sou'wester, to an unearthly beauty that he had never seen
+before. He wondered at it, and for a moment a grisly thought crossed
+his mind that this was not life, but death; that he had died in the
+fall, and in some manner the girl had followed.
+
+She was standing erect, her lithe figure swaying to the boat's motion,
+and pointing to leeward, while the moonlit face was now sweetened by
+the smile of a happy child. He stood up, and looked where she pointed,
+but saw nothing, and seated himself to look at her.
+
+"See!" she exclaimed gleefully. "They have hauled out the spanker and
+are sheeting home the royal. I will never be married! I will never be
+married! He knew I was with you."
+
+Again he stood up and searched the sea to leeward. There was nothing in
+sight.
+
+"Unhinged," he thought, "by this night's trouble. Freda," he said
+gently, "please sit down. You may fall overboard."
+
+"I am not insane," she said, as though reading his thought; and,
+smiling radiantly in his face, she obeyed him.
+
+"Do you know where we are?" he asked tentatively. "Are we in the track
+of ships?"
+
+"No," she answered, while her face took on the dreamy look again. "We
+are out of all the tracks. We will not be picked up. We are due west
+from Ilio Island. I saw it at sundown broad on the starboard bow. The
+wind is due south. If you will pull in the trough of the sea we can
+reach it before daylight. I am tired--so tired--and sleepy. Will you
+watch out?"
+
+"Why, certainly. Lie down in the stern-sheets and sleep if you can."
+
+She curled up in her yellow oil-coat and slumbered through the night,
+while he pulled easily on the oars--not that he had full faith in her
+navigation, but to keep himself warm. The sea became smoother, and as
+the moon rose higher, it attained a brightness almost equal to that of
+the sun, casting over the clear sky a deep-blue tint that shaded
+indefinitely into the darkness extending from itself to the horizon.
+Late in the night he remembered the danger of sleeping in strong
+moonlight, and arising softly to cover her face with his damp
+handkerchief, he found her looking at him.
+
+"We are almost there, John. Wake me when we arrive," she said, and
+closed her eyes.
+
+He covered her face, and, marveling at her words, looked ahead. He was
+within a half-mile of a sandy beach which bordered a wooded island. The
+sea was now like glass in its level smoothness, and the air was warm
+and fragrant with the smell of flowers and foliage. He shipped the
+oars, and pulled to the beach. As the boat grounded she arose, and he
+helped her ashore.
+
+The beach shone white under the moonlight, and dotting it were large
+shellfish and moving crabs that scuttled away from them. Bordering the
+beach were forest and undergrowth with interlacery of flowering vines.
+A ridge of rocks near by disclosed caves and hollows, some filled by
+the water of tinkling cascades. Oranges snowed in the branches of
+trees, and cocoa-palms lifted their heads high in the distance. A
+small deer arose, looked at them, and lay down, while a rabbit
+inspected them from another direction and began nibbling.
+
+"An earthly paradise, I should say," he observed, as he hauled the boat
+up the beach. "Plenty of food and water, at any rate."
+
+"It is Ilio Island," she answered, with that same dreamy voice. "It is
+uninhabited and never visited."
+
+"But surely, Freda, something will come along and take us off."
+
+"No; if I am taken off I must be married, of course; and I will never
+be married."
+
+"Who to, Freda? Whom must you marry if we are rescued?"
+
+"The mate--Mr. Adams. Not you, John Owen--not you. I do not like you."
+
+She was unbalanced, of course; but the speech pained him immeasurably,
+and he made no answer. He searched the clean-cut horizon for a moment,
+and when he looked back she was close to him, with the infantile smile
+on her face, candor and sanity in her gray eyes. Involuntarily he
+extended his arms, and she nestled within them.
+
+"You _will_ be married, Freda," he said; "you _will_ be married, and to
+me."
+
+He held her tightly and kissed her lips; but the kiss ended in a
+crashing sound, and a shock of pain in his whole body which expelled
+the breath from his lungs. The moonlit island, sandy beach, blue sea
+and sky were swallowed in a blaze of light, which gave way to pitchy
+darkness, with rain on his face and whistling wind in his ears, while
+he clung with both arms, not to a girl, but to a hard, wet, and cold
+mizzentopgallant-yard whose iron jack-stay had bumped him severely
+between the eyes. Below him in the darkness a scream rang out, followed
+by the roar of the mate: "Are you all right up there? Want any help?"
+
+He had fallen four feet.
+
+When he could speak he answered: "I'm all right, sir." And catching the
+royal foot-rope dangling from the end of the yard above him, he brought
+it to its place, passed the seizing, and finished furling the royal.
+But it was a long job; his movements were uncertain, for every nerve in
+his body was jumping in its own inharmonious key.
+
+"What's the matter wi' you up there?" demanded the mate when he reached
+the deck; and a yellow-clad figure drew near to listen.
+
+"It was nothing, sir; I forgot about the foot-rope."
+
+"You're a bigger lunkhead than I thought. Go forrard."
+
+He went, and when he came aft at four bells to take his trick at the
+wheel, the girl was still on deck, standing near the companionway,
+facing forward. The mate stood at the other side of the binnacle,
+looking at her, with one elbow resting on the house. There was just
+light enough from the cabin skylight for Owen to see the expression
+which came over his face as he watched the graceful figure balancing to
+the heave of the ship. It took on the same evil look which he had seen
+in his fall, while there was no mistaking the thought behind the gleam
+in his eyes. The mate looked up,--into Owen's face,--and saw something
+there which he must have understood; for he dropped his glance to the
+compass, snarled out, "Keep her on the course," and stepped into the
+lee alleyway, where the dinghy, lashed upside down on the house, hid
+him from view.
+
+The girl approached the man at the wheel.
+
+"I saw you fall, Mr. Owen," she said in a trembling voice, "and I could
+not help screaming. Were you hurt much?"
+
+"No, Miss Folsom," he answered in a low though not a steady tone; "but
+I was sadly disappointed."
+
+"I confess I was nervous--very nervous--when you went aloft," she said;
+"and I cleared away the life-buoy. Then, when you fell, it slipped out
+of my hand and went overboard. Mr. Adams scolded me. Wasn't it
+ridiculous?" There were tears and laughter in the speech.
+
+"Not at all," he said gravely; "it saved my life--for which I thank
+you."
+
+"How--why----"
+
+"Who in Sam Hill's been casting off these gripe-lashings?" growled the
+voice of the mate behind the dinghy.
+
+The girl tittered hysterically, and stepped beside Owen at the wheel,
+where she patted the moving spokes, pretending to assist him in
+steering.
+
+"Miss Freda," said the officer, sternly, as he came around the corner
+of the house, "I must ask you plainly to let things alone; and another
+thing, please don't talk to the man at the wheel."
+
+"Will you please mind your own business?" she almost screamed; and
+then, crying and laughing together: "If you paid as much attention to
+your work as you do to--to--me, men wouldn't fall from aloft on account
+of rotten foot-ropes."
+
+The abashed officer went forward, grumbling about "discipline" and
+"women aboard ship." When he was well out of sight in the darkness, the
+girl turned suddenly, passed both arms around Owen's neck, exerted a
+very slight pressure, patted him playfully on the shoulder as she
+withdrew them, and sped down the companionway.
+
+He steered a wild course during that trick, and well deserved the
+profane criticism which he received from the mate.
+
+
+
+
+NEEDS MUST WHEN THE DEVIL DRIVES
+
+
+Hogged at bow and stern, her deck sloped at the ends like a truck's
+platform, while a slight twist in the old hull canted the foremast to
+port and the mizzen to starboard. It would be hard to know when she was
+on an even keel. The uneven planking, inboard and out, was scarred like
+a chopping-block, possibly from a former and intimate acquaintance with
+the coal trade. Aloft were dingy gray spars, slack hemp rigging,
+untarred for years, and tan-colored sails, mended with patch upon patch
+of lighter-hued canvas that seemed about to fall apart from their own
+weight. She was English-built, bark-rigged, bluff in the bow, square in
+the stern, unpainted and leaky--on the whole as unkempt and
+disreputable-looking a craft as ever flew the black flag; and with the
+clank of the pumps marking time to the wailing squeak of the
+tiller-ropes, she wallowed through the waves like a log in an eddying
+tideway.
+
+Even the black flag at the gaff-end wore a makeshift, slovenly air. It
+was a square section of the bark's foreroyal, painted black around the
+skull-and-cross-bones design, which had been left the original hue of
+the canvas. The port-holes were equally slovenly in appearance, being
+cut through between stanchions with axes instead of saws; and the
+bulwarks were further disfigured by extra holes smashed through at the
+stanchions to take the lashings of the gun-breechings. But the guns
+were bright and cared for, as were the uniforms of the crew; for they
+had been lately transhipped. Far from home, with a general cargo, this
+ancient trader had been taken in a fog by Captain Swarth and his men an
+hour before their own well-found vessel had sunk alongside--which gave
+them just time to hoist over guns and ammunition. When the fog shifted,
+the pursuing English war-brig that had riddled the pirate saw nothing
+but the peaceful old tub ahead, and went on into the fog, looking for
+the other.
+
+"Any port in a storm, Angel," remarked Captain Swarth, as he flashed
+his keen eyes over the rickety fabric aloft; "but we'll find a better
+one soon. How do the boys stand the pumping?"
+
+Mr. Angel Todd, first mate and quartermaster, filled a black pipe
+before answering. Then, between the first and second deep puffs, he
+said: "Growlin'--dammum."
+
+"At the work?"
+
+"Yep, and the grub. And they say the 'tween-deck and forecastle smells
+o' bedbugs and bilge-water, and they want their grog. 'An ungodly
+witness scorneth judgment: and the mouth of the wicked devoureth
+iniquity.'" Mr. Todd had been educated for the pulpit; but, going out
+as a missionary, he had fallen into ungodly ways and taken to the sea,
+where he was more successful. Many of his old phrasings clung to him.
+
+"Well," drawled the captain, "men get fastidious and high-toned in this
+business,--can't blame them,--but we've got to make the coast, and if
+we don't pick up something on the way, we must careen and stop the
+leak. Then they'll have something to growl about."
+
+"S'pose the brig follows us in?"
+
+"Hope she will," said Captain Swarth, with a pleasant smile and a
+lightening of his eyes--"hope she will, and give me a chance. Her
+majestic widowship owes me a brig, and that's a fine one."
+
+Mr. Todd had never been known to smile, but at this speech he lifted
+one eyebrow and turned his saturnine face full at his superior, inquiry
+written upon every line of it. Captain Swarth was musing, however, and
+said no more; so the mate, knowing better than to attempt probing his
+mind, swung his long figure down the poop-ladder, and went forward to
+harass the men--which, in their opinion, was all he was good for.
+
+According to his mood, Mr. Todd's speech was choicest English or the
+cosmopolitan, technical slang of the sea, mingled with wonderful
+profanity. But one habit of his early days he never dropped: he wore,
+in the hottest weather, and in storm and battle, the black frock and
+choker of the clerical profession. Standing now with one foot on the
+fore-hatch, waving his long arms and objurgating the scowling men at
+the pumps, he might easily have seemed, to any one beyond the reach of
+his language, to be a clergyman exhorting them. Captain Swarth watched
+him with an amused look on his sunburnt face, and muttered: "Good man,
+every inch of him, but he can't handle men." Then he called him aft.
+
+"Angel," he said, "we made a mistake in cutting the ports; we can't
+catch anything afloat that sees them, so we'll have to pass for a
+peaceable craft until we can drift close enough to board something. I
+think the brig'll be back this way, too. Get out some old tarpaulins
+and cover up the ports. Paint them, if you can, the color of the sides,
+and you might coil some lines over the rail, as though to dry. Then you
+can break out cargo and strike the guns down the main-hatch."
+
+Three days later, with Cape St. Roque a black line to the westward, a
+round shot across her bows brought the old vessel--minus the black
+emblem now, and outwardly respectable--up to the wind, with maintopsail
+aback, while Captain Swarth and a dozen of his men--equally respectable
+in the nondescript rig of the merchant sailor--watched the approach of
+an English brig of war. Mr. Todd and the rest of the crew were below
+hatches with the guns.
+
+The brig came down the wind like a graceful bird--a splendid craft,
+black, shiny, and shipshape, five guns to a side, brass-bound officers
+on her quarter-deck, blue-jackets darting about her white deck and up
+aloft, a homeward-bound pennant trailing from her main-truck, and at
+her gaff-end a British ensign as large as her mainroyal. Captain Swarth
+lazily hoisted the English flag to the bark's gaff, and, as the brig
+rounded to on his weather beam, he pointed to it; but his dark eyes
+sparkled enviously as he viewed the craft whose government's protection
+he appealed to.
+
+"Bark ahoy!" came a voice through a trumpet. "What bark is that?"
+
+Captain Swarth swung himself into the mizzen-rigging and answered
+through his hands with an excellent cockney accent: "_Tryde Wind_
+o' Lunnon, Cappen Quirk, fifty-one dyes out fro' Liverpool, bound to
+Callao, gen'ral cargo."
+
+"You were not heading for the Horn."
+
+"Hi'm a-leakin' badly. Hi'm a-goin' to myke the coast to careen. D'ye
+happen to know a good place?"
+
+An officer left the group and returned with what Captain Swarth knew
+was a chart, which a few of them studied, while their captain hailed
+again:
+
+"See anything more of that pirate brig the other day?"
+
+"What! a pirate? Be 'e a pirate?" answered Captain Swarth, in agitated
+tones. "Be that you a-chasin' of 'im? Nao, hi seed nothink of 'im arter
+the fog shut 'im out."
+
+The captain conferred with his officers a moment, then called:
+
+"We are going in to careen ourselves. That fellow struck us on the
+water-line. We are homeward bound, and Rio's too far to run back.
+Follow us in; but if you lose sight of us, it's a small bay, latitude
+nine fifty-one forty south, rocks to the north, lowland to the south,
+good water at the entrance, and a fine beach. Look out for the brig.
+It's Swarth and his gang. Good morning."
+
+"Aye, that hi will. Thank ye. Good marnin'."
+
+In three hours the brig was a speck under the rising land ahead; in
+another, she was out of sight; but before this Captain Swarth and his
+crew had held a long conference, which resulted in sail being
+shortened, though the man at the wheel was given a straight course to
+the bay described by the English captain.
+
+Late on the following afternoon the old bark blundered into this bay--a
+rippling sheet of water, bag-shaped, and bordered on all sides by a
+sandy beach. Stretching up to the mountainous country was a luxurious
+forest of palm, laurel, and cactus, bound and intertwined by almost
+impassable undergrowth, and about half-way from the entrance to the end
+of the bay was the English brig, moored and slightly careened on the
+inshore beach. Captain Swarth's seamanly eye noted certain appearances
+of the tackles that held her down, which told him that the work was
+done and she was being slacked upright. "Just in time," he muttered.
+
+They brought the bark to anchor near the beach, about a half-mile from
+the brig, furled the canvas, and ran out an anchor astern, with the
+cable over the taffrail. Heaving on this, they brought the vessel
+parallel with the shore. So far, good. Guns and cargo lightered ashore,
+more anchors seaward to keep her off the beach, masthead tackles to the
+trees to heave her down, and preventer rigging and braces to assist the
+masts, would have been next in order, but they proceeded no further
+toward careening. Instead, they lowered the two crazy boats,
+provisioned and armed them on the in-shore side of the bark, made
+certain other preparations--and waited.
+
+On the deck of the English brig things were moving. A gang of
+blue-jackets, under the first lieutenant, were heaving in the cable;
+another gang, under the boatswain, were sending down and stowing away
+the heavy tackles and careening-gear, tailing out halyards and sheets
+and coiling down the light-running rigging, while topmen aloft loosed
+the canvas to bunt-gaskets, ready to drop it at the call from the deck.
+
+The second lieutenant, overseeing this latter, paced the port
+quarter-deck and answered remarks from Captain Bunce, who paced the
+sacred starboard side (the brig being at anchor) and occasionally
+turned his glass on the dilapidated craft down the beach.
+
+"Seems to me, Mr. Shack," he said across the deck, "that an owner who
+would send that bark around the Horn, and the master who would take
+her, ought to be sequestered and cared for, either in an asylum or in
+jail."
+
+"Yes, sir, I think so too," answered the second lieutenant, looking
+aloft. "Might be an insurance job. Clear away that bunt-gasket on the
+royal-yard," he added in a roar.
+
+Captain Bunce--round, rosy, with brilliant mutton-chop
+whiskers--muttered: "Insurance--wrecked intentionally--no, not here
+where we are; wouldn't court investigation by her Majesty's officers."
+He rolled forward, then aft, and looked again through the glass.
+
+"Very large crew--very large," he said; "very curious, Mr. Shack."
+
+A hail from the forecastle, announcing that the anchor was short,
+prevented Mr. Shack's answering. Captain Bunce waved a deprecatory hand
+to the first lieutenant, who came aft at once, while Mr. Shack
+descended to the waist, and the boatswain ascended the forecastle steps
+to attend to the anchor. The first lieutenant now had charge of the
+brig, and from the quarter-deck gave his orders to the crew, while
+Captain Bunce busied himself with his glass and his thoughts.
+
+Fore-and-aft sail was set and head-sheets trimmed down to port, square
+sails were dropped, sheeted home, and hoisted, foreyards braced to
+port, the anchor tripped and fished, and the brig paid off from the
+land-breeze, and, with foreyards swung, steadied down to a course for
+the entrance.
+
+"Mr. Duncan," said the captain, "there are fully forty men on that
+bark's deck, all dressed alike--all in red shirts and knitted caps--and
+all dancing around like madmen. Look!" He handed the glass to the first
+lieutenant, who brought it to bear.
+
+"Strange," said the officer, after a short scrutiny; "there were only a
+few showing when we spoke her outside. It looks as though they were all
+drunk."
+
+As they drew near, sounds of singing--uproarious discord--reached them,
+and soon they could see with the naked eye that the men on the bark
+were wrestling, dancing, and running about.
+
+"Quarters, sir?" inquired Mr. Duncan. "Shall we bring to alongside?"
+
+"Well--no--not yet," said the captain, hesitatingly; "it's all
+right--possibly; yet it is strange. Wait a little."
+
+They waited, and had sailed down almost abreast of the gray old craft,
+noticing, as they drew near, an appreciable diminution of the uproar,
+when a flag arose from the stern of the bark, a dusky flag that
+straightened out directly toward them, so that it was difficult to make
+out.
+
+But they soon understood. As they reached a point squarely abreast of
+the bark, five points of flame burst from her innocent gray sides, five
+clouds of smoke ascended, and five round shot, coming with the thunder
+of the guns, hurtled through their rigging. Then they saw the design of
+the flag, a white skull and cross-bones, and noted another, a black
+flag too, but pennant-shaped, and showing in rudely painted letters the
+single word "Swarth," sailing up to the forepeak.
+
+"Thunder and lightning!" roared Captain Bunce. "Quarters, Mr. Duncan,
+quarters, and in with the kites. Give it to them. Put about first."
+
+A youngster of the crew had sprung below and immediately emerged with a
+drum which, without definite instruction, he hammered vigorously; but
+before he had begun, men were clearing away guns and manning flying-jib
+downhaul and royal clue-lines. Others sprang to stations, anticipating
+all that the sharp voice of the first lieutenant could order. Around
+came the brig on the other tack and sailed back, receiving another
+broadside through her rigging and answering with her starboard guns.
+Then for a time the din was deafening. The brig backed her main-yards
+and sent broadside after broadside into the hull of the old craft. But
+it was not until the eighth had gone that Captain Bunce noticed through
+the smoke that the pirates were not firing. The smoke from the burning
+canvas port-coverings had deluded him. He ordered a cessation. Fully
+forty solid shot had torn through that old hull near the water-line,
+and not a man could now be seen on her deck.
+
+"Out with the boats, Mr. Duncan," he said; "they're drunk or crazy, but
+they're the men we want. Capture them."
+
+"Suppose they run, sir--suppose they take to their boats and get into
+the woods--shall we follow?"
+
+"No, not past the beach--not into an ambush."
+
+The four boat-loads of men which put off from the brig found nothing
+but a deserted deck on the sinking bark and two empty boats hauled up
+on the beach. The pirates were in the woods, undoubtedly, having kept
+the bark between themselves and the brig as they pulled ashore. While
+the blue-jackets clustered around the bows of their boats and watched
+nervously the line of forest up the beach, from which bullets might
+come at any time, the two lieutenants conferred for a few moments, and
+had decided to put back, when a rattling chorus of pistol reports
+sounded from the depths of the woods. It died away; then was heard a
+crashing of bush and branch, and out upon the sands sprang a figure--a
+long, weird figure in black frock of clerical cut. Into their midst it
+sped with mighty bounds, and sinking down, lifted a glad face to the
+heavens with the groaning utterance: "O God, I thank thee. Protect me,
+gentlemen--protect me from those wicked men."
+
+"What is it? Who are you?" asked Mr. Duncan. "Were they shooting at
+you?"
+
+"Yes, at me, who never harmed a fly. They would have killed me. My name
+is Todd. Oh, such suffering! But you will protect me? You are English
+officers. You are not pirates and murderers."
+
+"But what has happened? Do you live around here?"
+
+It took some time for Mr. Todd to quiet down sufficiently to tell his
+story coherently. He was an humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord.
+He had gleaned among the poorest of the native population in the
+outskirts of Rio de Janeiro until his health suffered, and had taken
+passage home in a passenger-ship, which, ten days out, was captured by
+a pirate brig. And the pirate crew had murdered every soul on board but
+himself, and only spared his life, as he thought, for the purpose of
+amusement; for they had compelled him to dance--he, a minister of the
+gospel--and had made him drink under torture, and recite ribald poetry,
+and swear, and wash their clothes. All sorts of indignities had been
+heaped upon him, but he had remembered the injunction of the Master; he
+had invariably turned the other cheek when smitten, and had prayed for
+their souls. He told of the flight from the English war-brig, of the
+taking of the old bark in the fog and the sinking of the pirate craft,
+of the transfer of guns and treasure to the bark, and the interview at
+sea with the English brig, in which Captain Swarth had deceived the
+other, and of Captain Swarth's reckless confidence in himself, which
+had induced him to follow the brig in and careen in the same bay. He
+wound up his tale with a lurid description of the drunken debauch
+following the anchoring of the bark,--during which he had trembled for
+his life,--of the insane firing on the brig as she passed, and the
+tumbling into the boats when the brig returned the fire, of the flight
+into the woods, the fighting among themselves, and his escape under
+fire.
+
+As he finished he offered an incoherent prayer of thankfulness, and the
+sympathetic Mr. Shack drew forth his pocket-flask and offered it to the
+agitated sufferer; but Mr. Todd, who could probably drink more whisky
+and feel it less than any other man in the pirate crew, declined the
+poison with a shiver of abhorrence. Then Mr. Duncan, who had listened
+thoughtfully, said: "You speak of treasure; did they take it with
+them?"
+
+Mr. Todd opened wide his eyes, looked toward the dark shades of the
+forest, then at the three masts of the bark rising out of the water,
+and answered impressively:
+
+"Gentlemen, they did not. They were intoxicated--mad with liquor. They
+took arms and a knapsack of food to each man,--they spoke of an inland
+retreat to which they were going,--but the treasure from the
+passenger-ship--the bars of gold and the bags of diamonds--they forgot.
+They transferred it from their sinking vessel when sober, but when
+intoxicated they remembered food and left it behind. Gentlemen, there
+is untold wealth in the hull out there which your fire has sunk. It is,
+verily, the root of all evil; let us hope that it remains at the bottom
+of the sea."
+
+"Bars of gold--bags of diamonds!" said Mr. Duncan. "Come on board, Mr.
+Todd; we'll see what the captain thinks."
+
+At dinner in the brig's cabin that evening--as a prelude to which Mr.
+Todd said grace--his account of the wealth spread out on Captain
+Swarth's cabin table after the taking of the passenger-ship was
+something to arouse interest in a less worldly man than Captain Bunce.
+Virgin gold--in bars, ingots, bricks, and dust--from the Morro Velho
+mines of Brazil was there, piled up on the table until the legs had
+given way and launched the glittering mass to the floor. Diamonds
+uncut, uncounted, of untold value,--a three years' product of the whole
+Chapada district,--some as large as walnuts, had been spread out and
+tossed about like marbles by those lawless men, then boxed up with the
+gold and stowed among the cargo under the main-hatch. Again Mr. Todd
+expressed the hope that Providence would see fit to let this treasure
+remain where the pirates had left it, no longer to tempt man to kill
+and steal. But Captain Bunce and his officers thought differently.
+Glances, then tentative comments, were exchanged, and in five minutes
+they were of one mind, even including Mr. Todd; for it may not be
+needless to state that the treasure and the passenger-ship existed only
+in his imagination.
+
+Pending the return of the boats the brig's anchor had been dropped
+about two hundred yards from the bark; now canvas was furled, and at
+eight bells all hands were mustered aft to hear what was in store.
+Captain Bunce stated the case succinctly; they were homeward bound and
+under general orders until they reported to the admiral at Plymouth.
+Treasure was within their reach, apportionable, when obtained, as
+prize-money. It was useless to pursue the pirates into the Brazilian
+jungle; but they would need to be watchful and ready for surprise at
+any moment, either while at work raising the bark or at night; for
+though they had brought out the two boats in which the pirates had
+escaped, they could find other means of attack, should they dare or
+care to make it. The English sailors cheered. Mr. Todd begged to say a
+few words, and enjoined them not to allow the love of lucre to tempt
+their minds from the duty they owed to their God, their country, and
+their captain, which was also applauded and forgotten in a moment.
+Then, leaving a double-anchor watch, provided with blue fire and strict
+instructions, on deck, the crew turned in to dream of an affluent
+future, and Mr. Todd was shown to a comfortable state-room. He removed
+his coat and vest, closed the door and dead-light, filled and lighted
+his black pipe, and rolled into the berth with a seaman's sigh of
+contentment.
+
+"That was a good dinner," he murmured, after he had filled the room
+with smoke--"a good dinner. Nothing on earth is too good for a
+sky-pilot. I'd go back to the business when I've made my pile, if it
+wasn't so all-fired hard on the throat; and then the trustees, with
+their eternal kicking on economy, and the sisters, and the
+donation-parties--yah, to h----l with 'em! Wonder if this brig ever
+carried a chaplain? Wonder how Bill and the boys are making out? Fine
+brig, this,--'leven knots on a bow-line, I'll bet,--fine state-room,
+good grub, nothin' to do but save souls and preach the Word on Sunday.
+Guess I'll strike the fat--duffer--for the--job--in--the--morn----" The
+rest of the sentence merged into a snore, and Mr. Todd slept through
+the night in the fumes of tobacco, which so permeated his very being
+that Captain Bunce remarked it at breakfast. "Smoke, Captain Bunce? I
+smoke? Not I," he answered warmly; "but, you see, those ungodly men
+compelled me to clean all their pipes,--forty foul pipes,--and I do not
+doubt that some nicotine has lodged on my clothing." Whereupon Captain
+Bunce told of a chaplain he had once sailed with whose clothing smelled
+so vilely that he himself had framed a petition to the admiral for his
+transfer to another ship and station. And the little story had the
+effect on Mr. Todd of causing him mentally to vow that he'd "ship with
+no man who didn't allow smoking," and openly aver that no sincere,
+consistent Christian clergyman would be satisfied to stultify himself
+and waste his energies in the comfort and ease of a naval chaplaincy,
+and that a chaplain who would smoke should be discredited and forced
+out of the profession. But later, when Captain Bunce and his officers
+lighted fat cigars, and he learned that the aforesaid chaplain had
+merely been a careless devotee of pipe and pigtail twist, Mr. Todd's
+feelings may be imagined (by a smoker); but he had committed himself
+against tobacco and must suffer.
+
+During the breakfast the two lieutenants reported the results of a
+survey which they had taken of the wreck at daylight.
+
+"We find," said Mr. Duncan, "about nine feet of water over the deck at
+the stern, and about three feet over the fore-hatch at low tide. The
+topgallant-forecastle is awash and the end of the bowsprit out of
+water, so that we can easily reach the upper ends of the bobstays.
+There is about five feet rise and fall of tide. Now, we have no
+pontoons nor casks. Our only plan, captain, is to lift her bodily."
+
+"But we have a diving-suit and air-pump," said Mr. Shack,
+enthusiastically, "and fifty men ready to dive without suits. We can
+raise her, captain, in two weeks."
+
+"Gentlemen," said Captain Bunce, grandly, "I have full faith in your
+seamanship and skill. I leave the work in your hands." Which was
+equivalent to an admission that he was fat and lazy, and did not care
+to take an active part.
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Mr. Duncan, and "Thank you, sir," said Mr.
+Shack; then the captain said other pleasant things, which brought other
+pleasant responses, and the breakfast passed off so agreeably that Mr.
+Todd, in spite of the soul-felt yearning for a smoke inspired by the
+cigars in the mouths of the others, felt the influence of the
+enthusiasm and bestowed his blessing--qualifiedly--on the enterprise.
+
+Every man of the brig's crew was eager for the work, but few could
+engage at first; for there was nothing but the forecastle-deck and the
+bark's rigging to stand upon. Down came the disgraceful black flags the
+first thing, and up to the gaff went the ensign of Britain. Then they
+sent down the fore and main lower and topsail yards, and erected them
+as sheers over the bow and stern, lower ends well socketed in spare
+anchor-stocks to prevent their sinking in the sand, upper ends lashed
+together and stayed to each other and to the two anchors ahead and
+astern. To the sheer-heads they rigged heavy threefold tackles, and to
+the disconnected bobstays (chains leading from the bowsprit end to the
+stem at the water-line) they hooked the forward tackle, and heaving on
+the submerged windlass, lifted the bow off the bottom--high enough to
+enable them to slip two shots of anchor-chain under the keel, one to
+take the weight at the stern, the other at the bow, for the bobstays
+would pull out of the stem under the increased strain as the bark
+arose.
+
+Most of this work was done under water; but a wetting is nothing to men
+looking for gold, and nobody cared. Yet, as a result of ruined
+uniforms, the order came from Captain Bunce to wear underclothing only
+or go naked, which latter the men preferred, though the officers clung
+to decency and tarry duck trousers. Every morning the day began with
+the washing of the brig's deck and scouring of brasswork--which must be
+done at sea though the heavens fall; then followed breakfast, the
+arming of the boats ready for an attack from the shore, and the descent
+upon the bark of as many men as could work.
+
+Occasionally Captain Bunce would order the dinghy, and, accompanied by
+Mr. Todd, would visit the bark and offer interfering suggestions, after
+the manner of captains, which only embarrassed the officers; and Mr.
+Todd would take advantage of these occasions to make landlubberly
+comments and show a sad ignorance of things nautical. But often he
+would decline the invitation, and when the captain was gone would
+descend to his room, and, shutting the door, grip his beloved--though
+empty--black pipe between his teeth and breathe through it, while his
+eyes shone fiercely with unsatisfied desire, and his mind framed silent
+malediction on Bill Swarth for condemning him to this smokeless
+sojourn. For he dared not smoke; stewards, cooks, and sailors were all
+about him.
+
+In three days the bark's nose was as high as the seven-part tackle
+would bring it, with all men heaving who could find room at the
+windlass-brakes. Then they clapped a luff-tackle on the fall, and by
+heaving on this, nippering and fleeting up, they lifted the fore-hatch
+and forecastle scuttle out of water--which was enough. Before this
+another gang had been able to slip the other chain to position abaft
+the mizzenmast, hook on the tackle, and lead the fall through a
+snatch-block at the quarter-bitts forward to the midship capstan.
+Disdaining the diving-suit, they swam down nine feet to do these
+things, and when they had towed the rope forward they descended seven
+feet to wind it around the capstan and ship the bars, which they found
+in a rack at the mainmast.
+
+A man in the water weighs practically nothing, and to heave around a
+capstan under water requires lateral resistance. To secure this they
+dived with hammers and nails, and fastened a circle of cleats to catch
+their feet. Then with a boy on the main fife-rail (his head out)
+holding slack, eighteen men--three to a bar--would inhale all the air
+their lungs could hold, and, with a "One, two, three," would flounder
+down, push the capstan around a few pawls, and come up gasping, and
+blue in the face, to perch on their bars and recover. It went slowly,
+this end, but in three days more they could walk around with their
+heads above water.
+
+The next day was Sunday, and they were entitled to rest; but the flavor
+of wealth had entered their souls, and they petitioned the captain for
+privilege to work, which was granted, to the satisfaction of the
+officers, and against the vigorous protest of Mr. Todd, who had
+prepared a sermon and borrowed clean linen from Mr. Shack in which to
+deliver it.
+
+With luff-tackles on the fall they hove the stern up until the cabin
+doors and all deck-openings but the main-hatch were out of water, and
+then, with the bark hanging to the sheers as a swinging-cradle hangs
+from its supports, some assisted the carpenter and his mates in
+building up and calking an upward extension of the main-hatch coaming
+that reached above water at high tide, while others went over the side
+looking for the shot-holes of eight broadsides. These, when found, were
+covered with planking, followed by canvas, nails being driven with
+shackles, sounding-leads, and stones from the bottom in the hands of
+naked men clinging to weighted stagings--men whose eyes protruded,
+whose lungs ached, whose brains were turning.
+
+Then, and before a final inspection by the boatswain in the diving-suit
+assured them that the last shot-hole was covered, they began bailing
+from the main-hatch, and when the water perceptibly lowered--the first
+index of success--a feverish yell arose and continued, while nude
+lunatics wrestled and floundered waist-deep on the flooded deck. The
+bark's pumps were manned and worked under water, bailing-pumps--square
+tubes with one valve--were made and plunged up and down in each hatch,
+whips were rigged, and buckets rose and fell until the obstructing
+cargo confined the work to the bark's pumps. Can-hooks replaced the
+buckets on the whips, then boxes and barrels were hoisted, broken into,
+and thrown overboard, until the surface of the bay was dotted with
+them. They drifted back and forth with the tide, some stranding on the
+beach, others floating seaward through the inlet. And all the time that
+they worked, sharp eyes had watched through the bushes, and a few miles
+inland, in a glade surrounded by the giant trees of the Brazilian
+forest, red-shirted men lolled and smoked and grew fat, while they
+discussed around the central fire the qualities of barbecued wild oxen,
+roast opossum and venison, and criticized the seamanship of the
+Englishmen.
+
+With a clear deck to work on, every man and boy of the brig's crew,
+except the idlers (stewards, cooks, and servants), was requisitioned,
+and boxes flew merrily; but night closed down on the tenth day of their
+labor without sign of the treasure, and now Mr. Todd, who had noticed a
+shade of testiness in the queries of the officers as to the exact
+location of the gold and diamonds, expressed a desire to climb the
+rigging next afternoon, a feat he had often wished to perform, which he
+did clumsily, going through the lubber's hole, and seated in the
+maintop with Mr. Duncan's Bible, he remained in quiet meditation and
+apparent reading and prayer until the tropic day changed to sudden
+twilight and darkness, and the hysterical crew returned. Then he came
+down to dinner.
+
+In the morning the work was resumed, and more boxes sprinkled the bay.
+They drifted up with the flood, and came back with the ebb-tide; but
+among them now were about forty others, unobserved by Captain Bunce,
+pacing his quarter-deck, but noted keenly by Mr. Todd. These forty
+drifted slowly to the offshore side of the brig and stopped, bobbing up
+and down on the crisp waves, even though the wind blew briskly with the
+tide, and they should have gone on with the others. It was then that
+Captain Bunce stepped below for a cigar, and it was then that Mr. Todd
+became strangely excited, hopping along the port-rail and throwing
+overboard every rope's end within reach, to the wonder and scandal of
+an open-eyed steward in the cabin door, who immediately apprised the
+captain.
+
+Captain Bunce, smoking a freshly lit cigar, emerged to witness a
+shocking sight--the good and godly Mr. Todd, with an intense expression
+on his somber countenance, holding a match to a black pipe and puffing
+vigorously, while through the ports and over the rail red-shirted men,
+dripping wet and scowling, were boarding his brig. Each man carried a
+cutlass and twelve-inch knife, and Captain Bunce needed no special
+intelligence to know that he was tricked.
+
+One hail only he gave, and Mr. Todd, his pipe glowing like a hot coal,
+was upon him. The captain endeavored to draw his sword, but sinewy arms
+encircled him; his cigar was removed from his lips and inserted in the
+mouth of Mr. Todd alongside the pipe; then he was lifted, spluttering
+with astonishment and rage, borne to the rail and dropped overboard,
+his sword clanking against the side as he descended. When he came to
+the surface and looked up, he saw through a cloud of smoke on the rail
+the lantern-jaws of Mr. Todd working convulsively on pipe and cigar,
+and heard the angry utterance: "Yes, d--n ye, I smoke." Then a vibrant
+voice behind Mr. Todd roared out: "Kill nobody--toss 'em overboard,"
+and the captain saw his servants, cooks, and stewards tumbling over to
+join him.
+
+Captain Bunce turned and swam--there was nothing else to do. Soon he
+could see a black-eyed, black-mustached man on his quarter-deck
+delivering orders, and he recognized the thundering voice, but none of
+the cockney accent of Captain Quirk. Men were already on the yards
+loosing canvas; and as he turned on his back to rest--for, though
+fleshy and buoyant, swimming in full uniform fatigued him--he saw his
+anchor-chains whizzing out the hawse-pipes.
+
+He was picked up by the first boat to put off from the bark, and
+ordered pursuit; but this was soon seen to be useless. The clean-lined
+brig had sternway equal to the best speed of the boats, and now
+head-sails were run up, and she paid off from the shore. Topsails were
+sheeted home and hoisted, she gathered way, and with topgallantsails
+and royals, spanker and staysails, following in quick succession, the
+beautiful craft hummed down to the inlet and put to sea, while yells of
+derision occasionally came back to the white-faced men in the boats.
+
+A month later the rehabilitated old bark also staggered out the
+entrance, and, with a naked, half-starved crew and sad-eyed,
+dilapidated officers, headed southward for Rio de Janeiro.
+
+
+
+
+WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK
+
+    "Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just."
+                                            BARD OF AVON.
+
+    "But 4 times he who gits hiz blo' in fust."
+                                           JOSH BILLINGS.
+
+
+Captain William Belchior was more than a martinet. He was known as
+"Bucko" Belchior in every port where the English language is spoken,
+having earned this prefix by the earnest readiness with which, in his
+days as second and chief mate, he would whirl belaying-pins, heavers,
+and handspikes about the decks, and by his success in knocking down,
+tricing up, and working up sailors who displeased him. With a blow of
+his fist he had broken the jaw of a man helplessly ironed in the
+'tween-deck, and on the same voyage, armed with a simple belaying-pin,
+had sprung alone into a circle of brandishing sheath-knives and quelled
+a mutiny. He was short, broad, beetle-browed, and gray-eyed, of
+undoubted courage, but with the quality of sympathy left out of his
+nature.
+
+During the ten years in which he had been in command, he was relieved
+of much of the executive work that had made him famous when he stood
+watch, but was always ready to justify his reputation as a "bucko"
+should friction with the crew occur past the power of his officers to
+cope with. His ship, the _Wilmington_, a skysail-yard clipper, was
+rated by sailormen as the "hottest" craft under the American flag, and
+Captain Belchior himself was spoken of by consuls and commissioners,
+far and near, as a man peculiarly unfortunate in his selection of men;
+for never a passage ended but he was complainant against one or more
+heavily ironed and badly used-up members of his crew.
+
+His officers were, in the language of one of these defendants, "o' the
+same breed o' dorg." No others could or would sign with him. His crews
+were invariably put on board in the stream or at anchorage--never at
+the dock. Drunk when coerced by the boarding-masters into signing the
+ship's articles, kept drunk until delivery, they were driven or hoisted
+up the side like animals--some in a stupor from drink or drugs, some
+tied hand and foot, struggling and cursing with returning reason.
+
+Equipped thus, the _Wilmington_, bound for Melbourne, discharged her
+tug and pilot off Sandy Hook one summer morning, and, with a fresh
+quartering wind and raising sea, headed for the southeast. The day was
+spent in getting her sail on, and in the "licking into shape" of the
+men as fast as they recovered their senses. Oaths and missiles flew
+about the deck, knock-downs were frequent, and by eight bells in the
+evening, when the two mates chose the watches,--much as boys choose
+sides in a ball game,--the sailors were well convinced that their
+masters lived aft.
+
+Three men, long-haired fellows, sprawling on the main-hatch, helpless
+from seasickness, were left to the last in the choosing and then
+hustled into the light from the near-by galley door to be examined.
+They had been dragged from the forecastle at the mate's call for "all
+hands."
+
+"Call yourselves able seamen, I suppose," he said with an oath, as he
+glared into their woebegone faces.
+
+"No, pard," said the tallest and oldest of the three, in a weak voice.
+"We're not seamen; we don't know how we got here, neither."
+
+The mate's answer was a fist-blow under the ear that sent the man
+headlong into the scuppers, where he lay quiet.
+
+"Say 'sir' when you speak to me, you bandy-legged farmers," he snarled,
+glowering hard at the other two, as they leaned against the water-tank.
+"I'm pard to none of ye."
+
+They made him no answer, and he turned away in contempt. "Mr. Tomm," he
+called, "want these Ethiopians in your watch?"
+
+"No, sir," said the second mate; "I don't want 'em. They're no more use
+'an a spare pump."
+
+"I'll make 'em useful 'fore I'm done with 'em. Go forrard, you three.
+Get the bile out o' yer gizzards 'fore mornin', 'f ye value yer good
+looks." He delivered a vicious kick at each of the two standing men,
+bawled out, "Relieve the wheel an' lookout--that'll do the watch," and
+went aft, while the crew assisted the seasick men to the forecastle and
+into three bedless bunks--bedless, because sailors must furnish their
+own, and these men had been shanghaied.
+
+The wind died away during the night, and they awoke in the morning with
+their seasickness gone and appetites ravenous. Somber and ominous was
+their bearing as they silently ate of the breakfast in the forecastle
+and stepped out on deck with the rest in answer to the mate's roar:
+"All hands spread dunnage." Having no dunnage but what they wore, they
+drew off toward the windlass and conferred together while chests and
+bags were dragged out on deck and overhauled by the officers for whisky
+and sheath-knives. What they found of the former they pocketed, and of
+the latter, tossed overboard.
+
+"Where are the canal-drivers?" demanded the chief mate, as he raised
+his head from the last chest. "Where are our seasick gentlemen, who
+sleep all night--what--what----" he added in a stutter of surprise.
+
+He was looking down three eight-inch barrels of three heavy Colt
+revolvers, cocked, and held by three scowling, sunburnt men, each of
+whom was tucking with disengaged left hand the corner of a shirt into a
+waistband, around which was strapped a belt full of cartridges.
+
+"Hands up!" snapped the tall man; "hands up, every one of ye! Up with
+'em--over yer heads. That's right!" The pistols wandered around the
+heads of the crowd, and every hand was elevated.
+
+"What's this? What d' ye mean? Put them pistols down. Give 'em up. Lay
+aft, there, some o' ye, and call the captain," blustered the mate, with
+his hands held high.
+
+Not a man stirred to obey. The scowling faces looked deadly in earnest.
+
+"Right about, face!" commanded the tall man. "March, every man--back to
+the other end o' the boat. Laramie, take the other side and round up
+anybody ye see. Now, gentlemen, hurry."
+
+Away went the protesting procession, and, joined by the carpenter,
+sail-maker, donkey-man, and cook, "rounded up" from their sanctums by
+the man called Laramie, it had reached the main-hatch before the
+captain, pacing the quarter-deck, was aware of the disturbance. With
+Captain Belchior to think was to act. Springing to the cabin skylight,
+he shouted: "Steward, bring up my pistols. Bear a hand. Lower your
+weapons, you scoundrels; this is rank mutiny."
+
+A pistol spoke, and the captain's hat left his head. "There goes your
+hat," said a voice; "now for a button." Another bullet sped, which cut
+from his coat the button nearest his heart. "Come down from there--come
+down," said the voice he had heard. "Next shot goes home. Start while I
+count three. One--two----" Captain Belchior descended the steps. "Hands
+up, same as the rest." Up went the captain's hands; such marksmanship
+was beyond his philosophy. "'Pache," went on the speaker, "go up there
+and get the guns he wanted." The steward, with two bright revolvers in
+his hands, was met at the companion-hatch by a man with but one; but
+that one was so big, and the hand which held it was so steady, that it
+was no matter of surprise that he obeyed the terse command, "Fork over,
+handles first." The captain's nickel-plated pistols went into the
+pockets of 'Pache's coat, and the white-faced steward, poked in the
+back by the muzzle of that big firearm, marched to the main-deck and
+joined the others.
+
+"Go down that place, 'Pache, and chase out any one else ye find,"
+called the leader from behind the crowd. "Bring 'em all down here."
+
+'Pache descended, and reappeared with a frightened cabin-boy, whom,
+with the man at the wheel, he drove before him to the steps. There was
+no wind, and the ship could spare the helmsman.
+
+"Now, then, gentlemen," said the tall leader, "I reckon we're all here.
+Keep yer hands up. We'll have a powwow. 'Pache, stay up there, and you,
+Laramie, cover 'em from behind. Plug the first man that moves."
+
+He mounted the steps to the quarter-deck, and, as he replaced empty
+shells with cartridges, looked down on them with a serene smile on his
+not ill-looking face. His voice, except when raised in accents of
+command, had in it the musical, drawling, plaintive tone so peculiar to
+the native Texan--and so deceptive. The other two, younger and rougher
+men, looked, as they glanced at their victims through the sights of the
+pistols, as though they longed for the word of permission to riddle the
+ship's company with bullets.
+
+"You'll pay for this, you infernal cut-throats," spluttered the
+captain. "This is piracy."
+
+"Don't call any names now," said the tall man; "'t ain't healthy. We
+don't want to hurt ye, but I tell ye seriously, ye never were nearer
+death than ye are now. It's a risky thing, and a foolish thing, too,
+gentlemen, to steal three American citizens with guns under their
+shirts, and take 'em so far from land as this. Hangin''s the fit and
+proper punishment for hoss-stealin', but man-stealin''s so great a
+crime that I'm not right sure what the punishment is. Now, we don't
+know much 'bout boats and ropes,--though we can tie a hangman's knot
+when necessary,--but we do know somethin' 'bout guns and human
+natur'--here, you, come 'way from that fence."
+
+The captain was edging toward a belaying-pin; but he noticed that the
+speaker's voice had lost its plaintiveness, and three tubes were
+looking at him. He drew inboard, and the leader resumed:
+
+"Now, fust thing, who's foreman o' this outfit? Who's boss?"
+
+"I'm captain here."
+
+"You are? You are not. I'm captain. Get up on that shanty." The small
+house over the mizzen-hatch was indicated, and Captain Belchior climbed
+it. The tubes were still looking at him.
+
+"Now, you, there, you man who hit me last night when I was sick, who
+are you, and what?"
+
+"Mate, d---- you."
+
+"Up with you, and don't cuss. You did a cowardly thing, pardner--an
+unmanly thing--low down and or'nary. You don't deserve to live any
+longer; but my darter, back East at school, thinks I've killed enough
+men for one lifetime, and mebbe she's right--mebbe she's right. Anyhow,
+she don't like it, and that lets you out--though I won't answer for
+'Pache and Laramie when my back's turned. You kicked 'em both. But I'll
+just return the blow." The mate had but straightened up on top of the
+hatch-house when the terrible pistol spat out another red tongue, and
+his yell followed the report, as he clapped his hand to the ear through
+which the bullet had torn.
+
+"Hands up, there!" thundered the shooter, and the mate obeyed, while a
+stream of blood ran down inside his shirt-collar.
+
+"Any more bosses here?"
+
+The second mate did not respond; but 'Pache's pistol sought him out,
+and under its influence, and his guttural, "I know you; get up," he
+followed his superiors.
+
+"Any more?"
+
+A manly-looking fellow stepped out of the group, and said: "You've got
+the captain and two mates. I'm bo's'n here, and yonder's my mate. We're
+next, but we're not bosses in the way o' bein' responsible for anything
+that has happened or might happen to you. We b'long forrard. There's no
+call to shoot at the crew, for there's not a man among 'em but what 'ud
+be glad to see you get ashore, and get there himself."
+
+"Silence, bo's'n," bawled the captain. But the voice of authority
+seemed pitifully ludicrous and incongruous, coupled with the captain's
+position and attitude, and every face on the deck wore a grin. The
+leader noticed the silent merriment, and said:
+
+"Laramie, I reckon these men'll stand. You can come up here. I'm
+gettin' 'long in years, and kind o' steadyin' down, but I s'pose you
+and 'Pache want some fun. Start yer whistle and turn loose."
+
+Up the steps bounded Laramie, and, with a ringing whoop as a prelude,
+began whistling a clear, musical trill, while 'Pache, growling out,
+"Dance, dance, ye white-livered coyotes," sent a bullet through the
+outer edge of the chief mate's boot-heel.
+
+"Dance," repeated Laramie between bars of the music. _Crack, crack_,
+went the pistols, while bullets rattled around the feet of the men on
+the hatch, and Laramie's whistle rose and fell on the soft morning air.
+
+The sun, who has looked on many scandalous sights, looked on this, and
+hid his face under a cloud, refusing to witness. For never before had
+the ethics of shipboard life been so outrageously violated. A squat
+captain and two six-foot officers, nearly black in the face from rage
+and exertion, with hands clasped over their heads, hopped and skipped
+around a narrow stage to the accompaniment of pistol reports
+harmoniously disposed among the notes of a whistled tune, while bullets
+grazed their feet, and an unkempt, disfigured, and sore-headed crew
+looked on and chuckled. When the mate, weak from loss of blood, fell
+and rolled to the deck, the leader stopped the entertainment.
+
+"Now, gentlemen," he said in his serious voice, "I'm called Pecos Tom,
+and I've had considerable experience in my time, but this is my fust
+with human creatur's so weak and thoughtless that they'll drug and
+steal three men without takin' their guns away from them. And so, on
+'count o' this shiftless improvidence, I reckon this boat will have to
+turn round and go back."
+
+They bound them, rolled and kicked the two mates to the rail, lifted
+the captain to his feet, and then the leader said significantly:
+
+"Give the right and proper order to yer men to turn this boat round."
+
+With his face working convulsively, Captain Belchior glanced at his
+captors, at his eager, waiting crew, at the wheel without a helmsman,
+at a darkening of the water on the starboard bow to the southward, up
+aloft, and back again at the three frowning muzzles so close to his
+head.
+
+"One hand to the wheel! Square in main and cro'-jack yards!" he called.
+He was conquered.
+
+With a hurrah which indicated the sincerity of these orders, the crew
+sprang to obey them, and with foreyards braced to starboard and
+head-sheets flat, the ship _Wilmington_ paid off, wore around, and
+bringing the young breeze on the port quarter, steadied down to a
+course for Sandy Hook, which the captain, with hands released, but
+still under the influence of those threatening pistols, worked out from
+the mate's dead-reckoning. Then he was pinioned again, but allowed to
+pace the deck and watch his ship, while the two officers were kept
+under the rail, sometimes stepped upon or kicked, and often admonished
+on the evil of their ways.
+
+Early passengers on the East River ferryboats were treated to a novel
+sight next morning, which they appreciated according to their nautical
+knowledge. A lofty ship, with sky-sails and royals hanging in the
+buntlines, and jibs tailing ahead like flags, was charging up the
+harbor before a humming southerly breeze, followed by an elbowing crowd
+of puffing, whistling, snub-nosed tugs. It was noticeable that whenever
+a fresh tug arrived alongside, little white clouds left her
+quarter-deck, and that tug suddenly sheered off to take a position in
+the parade astern. Abreast of Governor's Island, topgallant-halyards
+were let go, as were those of the jibs; but no cluing up or hauling
+down was done, nor were any men seen on her forecastle-deck getting
+ready lines or ground-tackle. She passed the Battery and up the East
+River, craft of all kinds getting out of her way,--for it was obvious
+that something was wrong with her,--until, rounding slowly to a
+starboard wheel, with canvas rattling and running-gear in bights, she
+headed straight for a slip partly filled with canal-boats. Now her
+topsail-halyards were let go, and three heavy yards came down by the
+run, breaking across the caps; and amid a grinding, creaking, and
+crashing of riven timbers, and a deafening din of applauding tug
+whistles, she plowed her way into the nest of canal-boats and came to a
+stop.
+
+Then was a hejira. Down her black sides by ropes and chain-plates, to
+the wrecked and sinking canal-boats,--some with bags or chests, some
+without,--came eager men, who climbed to the dock, and answering no
+questions of the gathering crowd of dock-loungers, scattered into the
+side-streets. Then three other men appeared on the rail, who shook
+their fists, and swore, and shouted for the police, calling
+particularly for the apprehension of three dark-faced, long-haired
+fellows with big hats.
+
+In the light of later developments it is known that the police
+responded, and with the assistance of boarding-house runners gathered
+in that day nearly all of this derelict crew,--even to the cautious
+boatswain,--who were promptly and severely punished for mutiny and
+desertion. But the later developments failed to show that the three
+dark-faced men were ever seen again.
+
+
+
+
+PRIMORDIAL
+
+
+Gasping, blue in the face, half drowned, the boy was flung
+spitefully--as though the sea scorned so poor a victory--high on the
+sandy beach, where succeeding shorter waves lapped at him and retired.
+The encircling life-buoy was large enough to permit his crouching
+within it. Pillowing his head on one side of the smooth ring, he wailed
+hoarsely for an interval, then slept--or swooned. The tide went down
+the beach, the typhoon whirled its raging center off to sea, and the
+tropic moon shone out, lighting up, between the beach and barrier reef,
+a heaving stretch of oily lagoon on which appeared and disappeared
+hundreds of shark-fins quickly darting, and, out on the barrier reef,
+perched high, yet still pounded by the ocean combers raised by the
+storm, a fragment of ship's stern with a stump of mizzenmast. The
+elevated position of the fragment, the quickly darting dorsal fins, and
+the absence of company for the child on the beach spoke, too plainly,
+of shipwreck, useless boats, and horrible death.
+
+Sharks must sleep like other creatures, and they nestle in hollows at
+the bottom and in coral caves, or under overhanging ledges of the reefs
+which attract them. The first swimmer may pass safely by night, seldom
+the second. Like she-wolves, fiendish cats, and vicious horses, they
+have been known to show mercy to children. For one or both reasons,
+this child had drifted to the beach unharmed.
+
+Anywhere but on a bed of hot sand near the equator the sleep in wet
+clothing of a three-year-old boy might have been fatal; but salt water
+carries its own remedy for the evils of its moisture, and he wakened at
+daylight with strength to rise and cry out his protest of loneliness
+and misery. His childish mind could record facts, but not their reason
+or coherency. He was in a new, an unknown world. His mother had filled
+his old; where was she now? Why had she tied him into that thing and
+thrown him from her into the darkness and wet? Strange things had
+happened, which he dimly remembered. He had been roused from his sleep,
+dressed, and taken out of doors in the dark, where there were frightful
+crashing noises, shoutings of men, and crying of women and other
+children. He had cried himself, from sympathy and terror, until his
+mother had thrown him away. Had he been bad? Was she angry? And after
+that--what was the rest? He was hungry and thirsty now. Why did she
+not come? He would go and find her.
+
+With the life-buoy hanging about his waist--though of cork, a heavy
+weight for him--he toddled along the beach to where it ended at a
+massive ridge of rock that came out of the wooded country inland and
+extended into the lagoon as an impassable point. He called the chief
+word in his vocabulary again and again, sobbing between calls. She was
+not there, or she would have come; so he went back, glancing fearfully
+at the dark woods of palm and undergrowth. She might be in there, but
+he was afraid to look. His little feet carried him a full half-mile in
+the other direction before the line of trees and bushes reached so
+close to the beach as to stop him. Here he sat down, screaming
+passionately and convulsively for his mother.
+
+Crying is an expense of energy which must be replenished by food. When
+he could cry no longer he tugged at the straps and strings of the
+life-buoy. But they were wet and hard, his little fingers were weak,
+and he knew nothing of knots and their untying, so it was well on
+toward midday before he succeeded in scrambling out of the meshes, by
+which time he was famished, feverish with thirst, and all but
+sunstruck. He wandered unsteadily along the beach, falling
+occasionally, moaning piteously through his parched, open lips; and
+when he reached the obstructing ridge of rock, turned blindly into the
+bushes at its base, and followed it until he came to a pool of water
+formed by a descending spray from above. From this, on his hands and
+knees, he drank deeply, burying his lips as would an animal.
+
+Instinct alone had guided him here, away from the salt pools on the
+beach, and impelled him to drink fearlessly. It was instinct--a
+familiar phase in a child--that induced him to put pebbles, twigs, and
+small articles in his mouth until he found what was pleasant to his
+taste and eatable--nuts and berries; and it was instinct, the most
+ancient and deeply implanted,--the lingering index of an arboreal
+ancestry,--that now taught him the safety and comfort of these woody
+shades, and, as night came on, prompted him--as it prompts a drowning
+man to reach high, and leads a creeping babe to a chair--to attempt
+climbing a tree. Failing in this from lack of strength, he mounted the
+rocky wall a few feet, and here, on a narrow ledge, after indulging in
+a final fit of crying, he slept through the night, not comfortably on
+so hard a bed, but soundly.
+
+During the day, while he had crawled about at the foot of the rocks,
+wild hogs, marsupial animals, and wood-rats had examined him
+suspiciously through the undergrowth and decamped. As he slept, howling
+night-dogs came up, sniffed at him from a safe distance, and scattered
+from his vicinity. He would have yielded in a battle with a pugnacious
+kitten, but these creatures recognized a prehistoric foe, and would not
+abide with him.
+
+A week passed before he had ceased to cry and call for his mother; but
+from this on her image grew fainter, and in a month the infant
+intelligence had discarded it. He ate nuts and berries as he found
+them, drank from the pool, climbed the rocks and strolled in the wood,
+played on the beach with shells and fragments of splintered wreckage,
+wore out his clothes, and in another month was naked; for when buttons
+and vital parts gave way and a garment fell, he let it lie. But he
+needed no clothes, even at night; for it was southern summer, and the
+northeast monsoon, adding its humid warmth to the radiating heat from
+the sun-baked rocks, kept the temperature nearly constant.
+
+He learned to avoid the sun at midday, and, free from contagion and
+motherly coddling, escaped many of the complaints which torture and
+kill children; yet he suffered frightfully from colic until his stomach
+was accustomed to the change of diet, by which time he was emaciated to
+skin and bone. Then a reaction set in, and as time passed he gained
+healthy flesh and muscle on the nitrogenous food.
+
+Six months from the time of his arrival, another storm swept the beach.
+Pelted by the warm rain, terror-stricken, he cowered under the rocks
+through the night, and at daylight peered out on the surf-washed sands,
+heaving lagoon, and white line of breakers on the barrier reef. The
+short-lived typhoon had passed, but the wind still blew slantingly on
+the beach with force enough to raise a turmoil of crashing sea and
+undertow in the small bay formed by the extension of the wall. The
+fragment of ship's stern on the reef had disappeared; but a half-mile
+to the right--directly in the eye of the wind--was another wreck, and
+somewhat nearer, on the heaving swell of the lagoon, a black spot,
+which moved and approached. It came down before the wind and resolved
+into a closely packed group of human beings, some of whom tugged
+frantically at the oars of the water-logged boat which held them,
+others of whom as frantically bailed with caps and hands. Escorting the
+boat was a fleet of dorsal fins, and erect in the stern-sheets was a
+white-faced woman, holding a child in one arm while she endeavored to
+remove a circular life-buoy from around her waist. At first heading
+straight for the part of the beach where the open-eyed boy was
+watching, the boat now changed its course and by desperate exertion of
+the rowers reached a position from which it could drift to leeward of
+the point and its deadly maelstrom. With rowers bailing and the
+white-faced woman seated, fastening the child in the life-buoy, the
+boat, gunwale-deep, and the gruesome guard of sharks drifted out of
+sight behind the point. The boy had not understood; but he had seen his
+kind, and from association of ideas appreciated again his
+loneliness--crying and wailing for a week; but not for his mother: he
+had forgotten her.
+
+With the change of the monsoon came a lowering of the temperature.
+Naked and shelterless, he barely survived the first winter, tropical
+though it was. But the second found him inured to the surroundings--hardy
+and strong. When able to, he climbed trees and found birds' eggs, which
+he accidentally broke and naturally ate. It was a pleasant relief from
+a purely vegetable diet, and he became a proficient egg-thief; then the
+birds built their nests beyond his reach. Once he was savagely pecked
+by an angry brush-turkey and forced to defend himself. It aroused a
+combativeness and destructiveness that had lain dormant in his nature.
+
+Children the world over epitomize in their habits and thoughts the
+infancy of the human race. Their morals and modesty, as well as their
+games, are those of paleolithic man, and they are as remorselessly
+cruel. From the day of his fracas with the turkey he was a hunter--of
+grubs, insects, and young birds; but only to kill, maim, or torture; he
+did not eat them, because hunger was satisfied, and he possessed a
+child's dislike of radical change.
+
+Deprived of friction with other minds, he was slower than his social
+prototype in the reproduction of the epochs. At a stage when most boys
+are passing through the age of stone, with its marbles, caves, and
+slings, he was yet in the earlier arboreal period--a climber--and would
+swing from branch to branch with almost the agility of an ape.
+
+On fine, sunny days, influenced by the weather, he would laugh and
+shout hilariously; a gloomy sky made him morose. When hurt, or angered
+by disappointment in the hunt, he would cry out inarticulately; but
+having no use for language, did not talk, hence did not think, as the
+term is understood. His mind received the impressions of his senses,
+and could fear, hate, and remember, but knew nothing of love, for
+nothing lovable appealed to it. He could hardly reason, as yet; his
+shadow puzzled, angered, and annoyed him until he noticed its
+concomitance with the sun, when he reversed cause and effect,
+considered it a beneficent, mysterious Something that had life, and
+endeavored by gesture and grimace to placate and please it. It was his
+beginning of religion.
+
+His dreams were often horrible. Strange shapes, immense snakes and
+reptiles, and nondescript monsters made up of prehistoric legs, teeth,
+and heads, afflicted his sleep. He had never seen them; they were an
+inheritance, but as real to him as the sea and sky, the wind and rain.
+
+Every six months, at the breaking up of the monsoon, would come squalls
+and typhoons--full of menace, for his kindly, protecting shadow then
+deserted him. One day, when about ten years old, during a wild burst of
+storm, he fled down the beach in an agony of terror; for, considering
+all that moved as alive, he thought that the crashing sea and swaying,
+falling trees were attacking him, and, half buried in the sand near the
+bushes, found the forgotten life-buoy, stained and weather-worn. It was
+quiescent, and new to him,--like nothing he had seen,--and he clung to
+it. At that moment the sun appeared, and in a short time the storm had
+passed. He carried the life-buoy back with him--spurning and
+threatening his delinquent shadow--and looked for a place to put it,
+deciding at last on a small cave in the rocky wall near to the pool. In
+a corner of this he installed the ring of cork and canvas, and remained
+by it, patting and caressing it. When it rained again, he appreciated,
+for the first time, the comfort of shelter, and became a cave-dweller,
+with a new god--a fetish, to which he transferred his allegiance and
+obeisance because more powerful than his shadow.
+
+From correlation of instincts, he now entered the age of stone. He no
+longer played with shells and sticks, but with pebbles, which he
+gathered, hoarded in piles, and threw at marks,--to be gathered
+again,--seldom entering the woods but for food and the relaxation of
+the hunt. But with his change of habits came a lessening of his cruelty
+to defenseless creatures,--not that he felt pity: he merely found no
+more amusement in killing and tormenting,--and in time he transferred
+his antagonism to the sharks in the lagoon, their dorsal fins making
+famous targets for his pebbles. He needed no experience with these
+pirates to teach him to fear and hate them, and when he bathed--which
+habit he acquired as a relief from the heat, and indulged daily--he
+chose a pool near the rocks that filled at high tide, and in it learned
+to swim, paddling like a dog.
+
+And so the boy, blue-eyed and fair at the beginning, grew to early
+manhood, as handsome an animal as the world contains, tall, straight,
+and clean-featured, with steady eyes wide apart, and skin--the color of
+old copper from sun and wind--covered with a fine, soft down, which at
+the age of sixteen had not yet thickened on his face to beard and
+mustache, though his wavy brown hair reached to his shoulders.
+
+At this period a turning-point appeared in his life which gave an
+impetus to his almost stagnant mental development--his food-supply
+diminished and his pebble-supply gave out completely, forcing him to
+wander. Pebble-throwing was his only amusement; pebble-gathering his
+only labor; eating was neither. He browsed and nibbled at all hours of
+the day, never knowing the sensation of a full stomach, and, until
+lately, of an empty one. To this, perhaps, may be ascribed his
+wonderful immunity from sickness. In collecting pebbles his method was
+to carry as many as his hands would hold to a pile on the beach and go
+back for more; and in the six years of his stone-throwing he had found
+and thrown at the sharks every stone as small as his fist, within a
+sector formed by the beach and the rocky wall to an equal distance
+inland. The fruits, nuts, edible roots, and grasses growing in this
+area had hitherto supported him, but would no longer, owing to a
+drought of the previous year, which, luckily, had not affected his
+water-supply.
+
+One morning, trembling with excitement, eye and ear on the alert,--as a
+high-spirited horse enters a strange pasture,--he ventured past the
+junction of bush and tide-mark, and down the unknown beach beyond. He
+filled his hands with the first pebbles he found, but noticing the
+plentiful supply on the ground ahead of him, dropped them and went on;
+there were other things to interest him. A broad stretch of undulating,
+scantily wooded country reached inland from the convex beach of sand
+and shells to where it met the receding line of forest and bush behind
+him; and far away to his right, darting back and forth among stray
+bushes and sand-hummocks, were small creatures--strange, unlike those
+he knew, but in regard to which he felt curiosity rather than fear.
+
+He traveled around the circle of beach, and noticed that the moving
+creatures fled at his approach. They were wild hogs, hunted of men
+since hunting began. He entered the forest about midday, and emerging,
+found himself on a pebbly beach similar to his own, and facing a
+continuation of the rocky wall, which, like the other end, dipped into
+the lagoon and prevented further progress. He was thirsty, and found a
+pool near the rocks; hungry, and he ate of nuts and berries which he
+recognized. Puzzled by the reversal of perspective and the similarity
+of conditions, he proceeded along the wall, dimly expecting to find his
+cave. But none appeared, and, mystified,--somewhat frightened,--he
+plunged into the wood, keeping close to the wall and looking sharply
+about him. Like an exiled cat or a carrier-pigeon, he was making a
+straight line for home, but did not know it.
+
+His progress was slow, for boulders, stumps, and rising ground impeded
+him. Darkness descended when he was but half-way home and nearly on a
+level with the top of the wall. Forced to stop, he threw himself down,
+exhausted, yet nervous and wakeful, as any other animal in a strange
+place. But the familiar moon came out, shining through the foliage, and
+this soothed him into a light slumber.
+
+He was wakened by a sound near by that he had heard all his life at a
+distance--a wild chorus of barking. It was coming his way, and he
+crouched and waited, grasping a stone in each hand. The barking,
+interspersed soon with wheezing squeals, grew painfully loud, and
+culminated in vengeful growls, as a young pig sprang into a patch of
+moonlight, with a dozen dingoes--night-dogs--at its heels. In the
+excitement of pursuit they did not notice the crouching boy, but
+pounced on the pig, tore at it, snapping and snarling at one another,
+and in a few minutes the meal was over.
+
+Frozen with terror at this strange sight, the boy remained quiet until
+the brutes began sniffing and turning in his direction; then he stood
+erect, and giving vent to a scream which rang through the forest,
+hurled the two stones with all his strength straight at the nearest. He
+was a good marksman. Agonized yelps followed the impact of stone and
+hide; two dogs rolled over and over, then, gaining their feet, sped
+after their fleeing companions, while the boy sat down, trembling in
+every limb--completely unnerved. Yet he knew that he was the cause of
+their flight. With a stone in each hand, he watched and waited until
+daylight, then arose and went on homeward, with a new and intense
+emotion--not fear of the dingoes: he was the superior animal, and knew
+it--not pity for the pig: he had not developed to the pitying stage. He
+was possessed by a strong, instinctive desire to emulate the dogs and
+eat of animal food. It did not come of his empty stomach; he felt it
+after he had satisfied his hunger on the way; and as he plodded down
+the slope toward his cave, gripped his missiles fiercely and watched
+sharply for small animals--preferably pigs.
+
+But no pigs appeared. He reached his cave, and slept all day and the
+following night, waking in the morning hungry, and with the memory of
+his late adventure strong in his mind. He picked up the two stones he
+had brought home, and started down the beach, but stopped, came back,
+and turned inland by the wall; then he halted again and retraced his
+steps--puzzled. He pondered awhile,--if his mental processes may be so
+termed,--then walked slowly down the beach, entered the bush a short
+distance, turned again to the wall, and gained his starting-point. Then
+he reversed the trip, and coming back by way of the beach, struck
+inland with a clear and satisfied face. He had solved the problem--a
+new and hard one for him--that of two roads to a distant place; and he
+had chosen the shortest.
+
+In a few hours he reached his late camping-spot, and crouched to the
+earth, listening for barking and squealing--for a pig to be chased his
+way. But dingoes hunt only by night, and unmolested pigs do not squeal.
+Impatient at last, he went on through the forest in the direction from
+which they had come, until he reached the open country where he had
+first seen them; and here, rooting under the bushes at the margin of
+the wood, he discovered a family--a mother and four young ones--which
+had possibly contained the victim of the dogs. He stalked them slowly
+and cautiously, keeping bushes between himself and them, but was seen
+by the mother when about twenty yards away. She sniffed suspiciously,
+then, with a warning grunt and a scattering of dust and twigs, scurried
+into the woods, with her brood--all but one--in her wake.
+
+A frightened pig is as easy a target as a darting dorsal fin, and a fat
+suckling lay kicking convulsively on the ground. He hurried up, the
+hunting gleam bright in his eyes, and hurled the second stone at the
+little animal. It still kicked, and he picked up the first stone,
+thinking it might be more potent to kill, and crashed it down on the
+unfortunate pig's head. It glanced from the head to the other stone and
+struck a spark--which he noticed.
+
+The pig now lay still, and satisfied that he had killed it, he tried to
+repeat the carom, but failed. Yet the spark had interested him,--he
+wanted to see it again,--and it was only after he had reduced the pig's
+head to a pulp that he became disgusted and angrily threw the stone in
+his hand at the one on the ground. The resulting spark delighted him.
+He repeated the experiment again and again, each concussion drawing a
+spark, and finally used one stone as a hammer on the other, with the
+same result--to him, a bright and pretty thing, very small, but alive,
+which came from either of the dead stones. Tired of the play at last,
+he turned to the pig--the food that he had yearned for.
+
+It was well for him, perhaps, that the initial taste of bristle and fat
+prevented his taking the second mouthful. Slightly nauseated, he
+dropped the carcass and turned to go, but immediately bounded in the
+air with a howl of pain. His left foot was red and smarting. Once he
+had cut it on a sharp shell, and now searched for a wound, but found
+none. Rubbing increased the pain. Looking on the ground for the cause,
+he discovered a wavering, widening ring of strange appearance, and
+within it a blackened surface on which rested the two stones. They were
+dry flint nodules, and he had set fire to the grass with the sparks.
+
+Considering this to be a new animal that had attacked him, he pelted it
+with stones, dancing around it in a rage and shouting hoarsely. He
+might have conquered the fire and never invoked it again, had not the
+supply of stones in the vicinity given out, or those he had used grown
+too hot to handle; for he stayed the advancing flame at one side. But
+the other side was creeping on, and he used dry branches, dropping to
+his hands and knees to pound the fire, fighting bravely, crying out
+with pain as he burned himself, and forced to drop stick after stick
+which caught fire. Soon it grew too hot to remain near, and he stood
+off and launched fuel at it, which resulted in a fair-sized bonfire;
+then, in desperation and fear, he hurled the dead pig--the cause of the
+trouble--at the terrible monster, and fled.
+
+Looking back through the trees to see if he was pursued, he noticed
+that the strange enemy had taken new shape and color; it was reaching
+up into the air, black and cloud-like. Frightened, tired mentally and
+physically, and suffering keenly from his burns, he turned his back on
+the half-solved problem and endeavored to satisfy his hunger. But he
+was on strange territory and found little of his accustomed food; the
+chafing and abrading contact of bushes and twigs irritated his sore
+spots, preventing investigation and rapid progress, and at the end of
+three hours, still hungry, and exasperated by his torment into a
+reckless, fighting mood, he picked up stones and returned savagely to
+battle again with the enemy. But the enemy was dead. The grass had
+burned to where it met dry earth, and the central fire was now a
+black-and-white pile of still warm ashes, on which lay the charred and
+denuded pig, giving forth a savory odor. Cautiously approaching, he
+studied the situation, then, yielding to an irresistible impulse,
+seized the pig and ran through the woods to the wall and down to his
+cave.
+
+Two hours later he was writhing on the ground with a violent
+stomach-ache. It was forty-eight hours after when he ate again, and
+then of his old food--nuts and berries. But the craving returned in a
+week, and he again killed a pig, but was compelled to forego eating it
+for lack of fire.
+
+Though he had discovered fire and cooked food, his only conception of
+the process, so far, was that the mysterious enemy was too powerful for
+him to kill, that it would eat sticks and grass but did not like
+stones, and that a dead pig could kill it, and in the conflict be made
+eatable. It was only after months of playing with flints and sparks
+that he recognized the part borne by dry grass or moss, and that with
+these he could create it at will; that a dead pig, though always
+improved by the effort, could not be depended upon to kill it unless
+the enemy was young and small,--when stones would answer as well,--and
+that he could always kill it himself by depriving it of food.
+
+It is hardly possible that animal food produced a direct effect on his
+mind; but the effort to obtain it certainly did, arousing his torpid
+faculties to a keener activity. He grasped the relation of cause to
+effect--seeing one, he looked for the other. He noticed resemblances
+and soon realized the common attributes of fire and the sun; and, as
+his fetish was not always good to him,--the sun and storm seeming to
+follow their own sweet will in spite of his unspoken faith in the
+lifebuoy,--he again became an apostate, transferring his allegiance to
+the sun, of which the friendly fire was evidently a part or symbol. He
+did not discard his dethroned fetish completely; he still kept it in
+his cave to punch, kick, and revile by gestures and growls at times
+when the sun was hidden, retaining this habit from his former faith.
+The life-buoy was now his devil--a symbol of evil, or what was the same
+to him--discomfort; for he had advanced in religious thought to a point
+where he needed one. Every morning when the sun shone, and at its
+reappearance after the rain, he prostrated himself in a patch of
+sun-light--this and the abuse of the life-buoy becoming ceremonies in
+his fire-worship.
+
+In time he became such a menace to the hogs that they climbed the wall
+at the high ground and disappeared in the country beyond. And after
+them went the cowardly dingoes that preyed on their young. Rodent
+animals, more difficult to hunt, and a species of small kangaroo
+furnished him occupation and food until they, too, emigrated, when he
+was forced to follow; he was now a carnivorous animal, no longer
+satisfied with vegetable food.
+
+The longer hunts brought with them a difficulty which spurred him to
+further invention. He could carry only as many stones as his hands
+would hold, and often found himself far from his base of supply, with
+game in sight, and without means to kill it. The pouch in which the
+mother kangaroo carried her young suggested to his mind a like
+contrivance for carrying stones. Since he had cut his foot on the
+shell, he had known the potency of a sharp edge, but not until he
+needed to remove charred and useless flesh from his food did he
+appreciate the utility. It was an easy advance for him roughly to skin
+a female kangaroo and wear the garment for the pocket's sake. But it
+chafed and irritated him; so, cutting off the troublesome parts little
+by little, he finally reduced it to a girdle which held only the pouch.
+And in this receptacle he carried stones for throwing and shells for
+cutting, his expeditions now extending for miles beyond the wall, and
+only limited by the necessity of returning for water, of which, in the
+limestone rock, there were plenty of pools and trickling springs.
+
+He learned that no stones but the dry flints he found close to the wall
+would strike sparks; but, careless, improvident, petulant child of
+nature that he was, he exhausted the supply, and one day, too indolent
+to search his hunting-tracts to regain the necessary two, he endeavored
+to draw fire from a pair that he dug from the moist earth, and failing,
+threw them with all his strength at the rocky wall. One of them
+shivered to irregular pieces, the other parted with a flake--a six-inch
+dagger-like fragment, flat on one side, convex on the other, with sharp
+edges that met in a point at one end, and at the other, where lay the
+cone of percussion, rounded into a roughly cylindrical shape,
+convenient for handling. Though small, no flint-chipping savage of the
+stone age ever made a better knife, and he was quick to appreciate its
+superiority to a shell.
+
+Like most discoveries and inventions that have advanced the human race,
+his were, in the main, accidental; yet he could now reason from the
+accidental to the analogous. Idly swinging his girdle around his head,
+one day, and letting go, he was surprised at the distance to which,
+with little effort, he could send the stone-laden pouch. Months of
+puzzled experimenting produced a sling--at first with a thong of hide
+fast to each stone, later with the double thong and pouch that small
+boys and savages have not yet improved upon.
+
+To this centrifugal force, which he could use without wholly
+understanding, he added the factor of a rigid radius--a handle to a
+heavy stone; for only with this contrivance could he break large flints
+and open cocoanuts--an article of good food that he had passed by all
+his life and wondered at until his knife had divided a green one. His
+experiments in this line resulted in a heavy, sharp-edged, solid-backed
+flint, firmly bound with thongs to the end of a stick,--a rude
+tomahawk,--convenient for the _coup de grace_.
+
+The ease with which he could send a heavy stone out of sight, or bury a
+smaller one in the side of a hog at short range, was wonderful to him;
+but he was twenty years old before, by daily practice with his sling,
+he brought his marksmanship up to that of his unaided hand, equal to
+which, at an earlier date, was his skill at hatchet-throwing. He could
+outrun and tomahawk the fastest hog, could bring down with his sling a
+kangaroo on the jump or a pigeon on the wing, could smell and
+distinguish game to windward with the keen scent of a hound, and became
+so formidable an enemy of his troublesome rivals, the dingoes,--whose
+flesh he disapproved of,--and the sharks in the lagoon, that the one
+deserted his hunting-ground and the other seldom left the reef.
+
+He broke or lost one knife and hatchet after another, and learned, in
+making new ones, that he could chip them into improved shape when
+freshly dug, and that he must allow them to dry before using--when they
+were also available for striking fire. He had enlarged his pocket,
+making a better one of a whole skin by roughly sewing the edges
+together with thongs, first curing the hide by soaking in salt water
+and scraping with his knife. His food-list now embraced shellfish and
+birds, wild yams, breadfruit, and cocoanuts, which, even the latter, he
+cooked before eating and prepared before cooking. Pushed by an
+ever-present healthy appetite, and helped by inherited instincts based
+on the habits and knowledge of a long line of civilized ancestry, he
+had advanced in four years from an indolent, mindless existence to a
+plane of fearless, reasoning activity. He was a hunter of prowess,
+master of his surroundings, lord over all creatures he had seen, and,
+though still a cave-dweller when at home, in a fair way to become a
+hut-builder, herdsman, and agriculturist; for he had arranged boughs to
+shelter him from the rain when hunting, had attempted to block up the
+pass over the wall to prevent the further wanderings of a herd of hogs
+that he had pursued, and had lately become interested in the sprouting
+of nuts and seeds and the encroachments and changes of the vegetation.
+
+Yet he lacked speech, and did his thinking without words. The
+deficiency was not accompanied by the unpleasant twisted features and
+grimacing of mutes, which comes of conscious effort to communicate. His
+features were smooth and regular, his mouth symmetrical and firm, and
+his clear blue eye thoughtful and intent as that of a student; for he
+had studied and thought. He would smile and frown, laugh and shout,
+growl and whine, the pitch and timbre of his inarticulate utterance
+indicating the emotion which prompted it to about the same degree as
+does an intelligent dog's language to his master. But dogs and other
+social animals converse in a speech beyond human ken; and in this
+respect he was their inferior, for he had not yet known the need of
+language, and did not, until, one day, in a section of his domain that
+he had never visited before,--because game avoided it,--down by the sea
+on the side of the wall opposite to his cave, he met a creature like
+himself.
+
+He had come down the wooded slope on the steady jog-trot he assumed
+when traveling, tomahawk in hand, careless, confident, and happy
+because of the bright sunshine and his lately appeased hunger, and, as
+he bounded on to the beach with a joyous whoop, was startled by an
+answering scream.
+
+Mingled with the frightful monsters in the dreams of his childhood
+had been transient glimpses of a kind, placid face that he seemed
+to know--a face that bent over him lovingly and kissed him. These
+were subconscious memories of his mother, which lasted long after
+he had forgotten her. As he neared manhood, strange yearnings had
+come to him--a dreary loneliness and craving for company. In his
+sleep he had seen fleeting visions of forms and faces like his
+reflection in a pool--like, yet unlike; soft, curving outlines,
+tinted cheeks, eyes that beamed, and white, caressing hands
+appeared and disappeared--fragmentary and illusive. He could not
+distinctly remember them when he wakened, but their influence made
+him strangely happy, strangely miserable; and while the mood lasted
+he could not hunt and kill.
+
+Standing knee-deep in a shallow pool on the beach, staring at him with
+wide-open dark eyes, was the creature that had screamed--a living,
+breathing embodiment of the curves and color, the softness, brightness,
+and gentle sweetness that his subconsciousness knew. There were the
+familiar eyes, dark and limpid, wondering but not frightened; two white
+little teeth showing between parted lips; a wealth of long brown hair
+held back from the forehead by a small hand; and a rounded, dimpled
+cheek, the damask shading of which merged delicately into the olive
+tint that extended to the feet. No Venus ever arose from the sea with
+rarer lines of beauty than were combined in the picture of loveliness
+which, backed by the blue of the lagoon, appeared to the astonished
+eyes of this wild boy. It was a girl--naked as Mother Eve, and as
+innocently shameless.
+
+In the first confusion of his faculties, when habit and inherent
+propensity conflicted, habit dominated his mind. He was a
+huntsman--feared and avoided: here was an intruder. He raised his
+hatchet to throw, but a second impulse brought it slowly down; she had
+shown no fear--no appreciation of what the gesture threatened. Dropping
+the weapon to the ground, he advanced slowly, the wonder in his face
+giving way to a delighted smile, and she came out of the pool to meet
+him.
+
+Face to face they looked into each other's eyes--long and earnestly;
+then, as though the scrutiny brought approval, the pretty features of
+the girl sweetened to a smile, but she did not speak nor attempt to.
+Stepping past him, she looked back, still smiling, halted until he
+followed, and then led him up to the wall, where, on a level with the
+ground, was a hollow in the formation, somewhat similar to his cave,
+but larger. Flowering vines grew at the entrance, which had prevented
+his seeing it before. She entered, and emerged immediately with a
+life-buoy, which she held before him, the action and smiling face
+indicating her desire that he admire it.
+
+The boy thought that he saw his property in the possession of another
+creature, and resented the spoliation. With an angry snarl he snatched
+the life-buoy and backed away, while the girl, surprised and a little
+indignant, followed with extended hands. He raised it threateningly,
+and though she did not cower, she knew intuitively that he was angry,
+and feeling the injustice, burst into tears; then, turning from him,
+she covered her eyes with her hands and crouched to the ground, sobbing
+piteously.
+
+The face of the boy softened. He looked from the weeping girl to the
+life-buoy and back again; then, puzzled,--still believing it to be his
+own,--he obeyed a generous impulse. Advancing, he laid the treasure at
+her feet; but she turned away. Sober-faced and irresolute, not knowing
+what to do, he looked around and above. A pigeon fluttered on a branch
+at the edge of the wood. He whipped out his sling, loaded it, and sent
+a stone whizzing upward. The pigeon fell, and he was beneath it before
+it reached the ground. Hurrying back with the dead bird, he placed it
+before her; but she shuddered in disgust and would not touch it. Off in
+the lagoon a misguided shark was swimming slowly along,--its dorsal fin
+cutting the surface,--a full two hundred yards from the beach. He ran
+to the water's edge, looked back once, flourished his sling, and two
+seconds later the shark was scudding for the reef. If she had seen, she
+evidently was not impressed. He returned, picked up his tomahawk on the
+way, idly and nervously fingered the pebbles in his pocket, stood a
+moment over the sulky girl, and then studied the life-buoy on the
+ground. A light came to his eyes; with a final glance at the girl he
+bounded up the slope and disappeared in the woods.
+
+Three hours later he returned with his discarded fetish, and found her
+sitting upright, with her life-buoy on her knees. She smiled gladly as
+he approached, then pouted, as though remembering. Panting from his
+exertion, he humbly placed the faded, scarred, and misshapen ring on
+top of the brighter, better-cared-for possession of the girl, and
+stood, mutely pleading for pardon. It was granted. Smiling
+radiantly,--a little roguishly,--she arose and led him again to the
+cave, from which she brought forth another treasure. It was a billet of
+wood,--a dead branch, worn smooth at the ends,--around which were
+wrapped faded, half-rotten rags of calico. Hugging it for a moment, she
+handed it to him. He looked at it wonderingly and let it drop, turning
+his eyes upon her; then, with impatience in her face, she reclaimed it,
+entered the cave,--the boy following,--and tenderly placed it in a
+corner.
+
+It was her doll. Up to the borders of womanhood--untutored, unloved
+waif of the woods--living through the years of her simple existence
+alone--she had lavished the instinctive mother-love of her heart on a
+stick, and had clothed it, though not herself.
+
+With a thoughtful little wrinkle in her brow, she studied the face of
+this new companion who acted so strangely, and he, equally mystified,
+looked around the cave. A pile of nuts in a corner indicated her
+housewifely thrift and forethought. A bed of dry moss with an evenly
+packed elevation at the end--which could be nothing but a
+pillow--showed plainly the manner in which she had preserved the
+velvety softness of her skin. Tinted shells and strips of faded calico,
+arranged with some approach to harmony of color around the sides and
+the border of the floor, gave evidence of the tutelage of the
+bower-birds, of which there were many in the vicinity. And the vines at
+the entrance had surely been planted--they were far from others of the
+kind. In her own way she had developed as fully as he. As he stood
+there, wondering at what he saw, the girl approached, slowly and
+irresolutely; then, raising her hand, she softly pressed the tip of her
+finger into his shoulder.
+
+In the dim and misty ages of the past, when wandering bands of ape-like
+human beings had not developed their tribal customs to the level of
+priestly ceremonies,--when the medicine-man had not arisen,--a marriage
+between a man and young woman was generally consummated by the man
+beating the girl into insensibility, and dragging her by the hair to
+his cave. Added to its simplicity, the custom had the merit of
+improving the race, as unhealthy and ill-favored girls were not
+pursued, and similar men were clubbed out of the pursuit by stronger.
+But the process was necessarily painful to the loved one, and her
+female children very naturally inherited a repugnance to being wooed.
+
+When a civilized young lady, clothed and well conducted, anticipates
+being kissed or embraced by her lover, she places in the way such
+difficulties as are in her power; she gets behind tables and chairs,
+runs from him, compels him to pursue, and expects him to. In her
+maidenly heart she may want to be kissed, but she cannot help
+resisting. She obeys the same instinct that impelled this wild girl to
+spring from the outstretched arms of the boy and go screaming out of
+the cave and down the beach in simulated terror--an instinct inherited
+from the prehistoric mother, who fled for dear life and a whole skin
+from a man behind armed with a club and bent upon marriage.
+
+Shouting hoarsely, the boy followed, in what, if he had been called
+upon to classify it, might have seemed to him a fury of rage, but it
+was not. He would not have harmed the girl, for he lacked the tribal
+education that induces cruelty to the weaker sex. But he did not catch
+her; he stubbed his toe and fell, arising with a bruised kneecap which
+prevented further pursuit. Slowly, painfully, he limped back, tears
+welling in his eyes and increasing to a copious flood as he sat down
+with his back to the girl and nursed his aching knee. It was not the
+pain that brought the tears; he was hardened to physical suffering. But
+his feelings had been hurt beyond any disappointment of the hunt or
+terror of the storm, and for the first time in his life since his
+babyhood he wept--like the intellectual child that he was.
+
+A soft, caressing touch on his head aroused him and brought him to his
+feet. She stood beside him, tears in her own eyes, and sympathy
+overflowing in every feature of the sweet face. From her lips came
+little cooing, gurgling sounds which he endeavored to repeat. It was
+their first attempt at communication, and the sounds that they
+used--understood by mothers and infants of all races--were the first
+root-words of a new language. He extended his arms, and though she held
+back slightly, while a faint smile responded to his own, she did not
+resist, and he drew her close--forgetting his pain as he pressed his
+lips to hers.
+
+
+
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