IF the deck had opened delivering up Mr. Althusen and his broken guitar the three men could not have been more astonished.
“I think it’s splendid,” she said again. “You saw everything all wrong, but how could you know. I think it’s just fine. Those hatchet men were a tough crowd and they’d have killed you for sure only you scattered them like you did. You saw a girl being kidnapped as you thought and you just dashed in. Nobody but white Americans would have acted like that.”
“Oh, anyone would,” murmured Hank.
“No they wouldn’t—they’d gone off for the police or said, ‘Oh, my, how shocking,’ and gone off about their business. You struck. Well, I’m sorry for locking you out, but I’m like yourselves, I didn’t know.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said George.
Tommie’s eyes were fixed on Candon.
“It was you collared me,” said she to him.
The blue eyes of Candon met the liquid brown eyes of Tommie.
He nodded his head.
Tommie considered him for a moment attentively, as though he were an object of curiosity or a view—anything but a living male being. It was sometimes a most disconcerting thing about her, this detachment from all trammels of sex and convention, the detachment of a child. She seemed making up her mind whether she liked him or not and doing it quite openly, and her mind seemed still not quite made up when, with a sigh, she came to.
“Well,” said she, “and now about getting back.”
“That’s the question now,” said George hurriedly and with his lips suddenly gone dry so that he had to moisten them. “We’ve got to get you back.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Hank, unenthusiastically. “We’ve got to do it somehow or ’nother.”
“Look here,” said George, suddenly taking his courage in both hands. “I don’t mind the row we’re sure to get into, it’s the guying that gets me. Think of the papers. When we started out on this fool business we got it pretty hot—and now this on top of everything.”
“I know,” said Tommie. She was sitting forward in her chair, clasping her knees, biting her lip in thought and staring at the deck planking. She saw the position of the unfortunates as clearly as they did. The fact that these men had done for her a fine and chivalrous action whichwas still absurd hit her in an extraordinary way. Her sturdy and honest little soul revolted at the thought of what the press would make of the business. She could hear the laughter only waiting to be touched off, she could read the scare head-lines. She knew, for publicity was part of her life.
The stage was already prepared for the farce: by now every paper in America would be setting up the story of how Tommie Coulthurst had been abducted. It only waited for these men to be dragged on as the abductors amidst a roar of laughter that would sound right round the world.
She had read in the Los Angeles papers the humorous comments on them and their expedition and now, this!
No, it must not be.
For a moment she looked back at the scene of the night before, finer than any scene in a cinema play, real, dramatic, heroic, yet seemingly based on absurdity—was it absurdity? Not a bit—not unless the finer promptings of humanity were absurd and courage and daring ridiculous. They had risked a lot, these men, and she had never in her life before seen men in action. Ridicule of them would hit every fibre of her being. No, it must not be. Question was how to save them.
“Say,” said Tommie, suddenly clasping her knees tighter and looking up, “we’re in a tough tangle, aren’t we?”
The others seemed to agree. “Sam Brown,”went on Tommie, “he’s one of the electric men at the Wallack Studios, caught a rat an’ put it in a flower pot with a slate on top and a weight on the slate and left it till next morning; he keeps dogs, an’ came to find it and it was gone, said it must have got out and put the slate back, and Wallack told us to remember that rat if we were ever cornered by difficulties in our work an’ take as our motto, ‘Never say die till you’re dead.’ Well, we’re in a tight place but we aren’t dead. Question is what’s the first thing to do?”
“The first thing,” said Hank, “why, it’s to get you back safe.”
“I’m safe enough,” said Tommie. “It’s not a question of safety s’much as smothering this thing. S’pose we put back now to Santa Barbara, where’d you be? No, the first thing is to get you time. I reckon that rat would have been eaten if he hadn’t had time to think his way out or if someone hadn’t foozled along and loosed him. What’s your plans? You said you were out after Vanderdecken, where’d you expect to catch him?”
Hank looked at Candon and noticed that he had turned away.
“Well, it’s not him we are after now so much as his boodle,” said Hank. “We know where it’s hid and we want to get it.”
“Where’s it hid?”
“Place called the Bay of Whales down below Cape St. Lucas.”
“How long will it take you to fetch there and back?”
“About a fortnight, maybe.”
Tommie considered for a moment.
“Well,” she said at last, “seems to me that the only thing to do is to go on till we meet some ship that’ll take me back. When I get back I’ll have to do a lot of lying, that’s all. Ten to one they’ll put this business down to Vanderdecken and maybe I’ll say Vanderdecken took me and you collared me back from him—how’d that be?”
Candon turned. He struck his right fist into his open left palm. “There’s more’n this than I can get the lie of,” said B. C. as if to himself.
“What you say?” asked Tommie.
“Oh, he means it’s a mix-up,” said George. “But see here—we can’t do it.”
“Which?”
“We can’t put more on you than we’ve done already. I know, I was mean enough to want you to go on with us when I started that talk about our being guyed—it’s different now.”
“Yep,” said Hank.
“Sure,” said Candon.
“Have you done?” asked Tommie. “Well then I’m going on, where’s the damage? I’m used to the rough and the open. That film we were working on is finished and I guess a few days’ holiday won’t do me any harm. B’sides it works up the publicity. Why, every day I’m away is worth a thousand dollars to Wallacks, leavingmyself alone. They’ll book that film in Timbuctoo. Do you see? It’s no trouble to me, why should you worry? Now I propose we get something to eat.”
“But how about clothes,” asked George.
“Which, mine? Oh, I reckon I’ll manage somehow. The thing that gets me is a toothbrush.”
“Thank God,” said George.
“Which?”
“I’ve got four new ones,” said the millionaire.
THE extraordinary thing about Miss Coulthurst was the absence and yet the presence of the feminine in her. Possessed of all the electrical properties of a woman and the chummable properties of a man, this dangerous individual presiding at the breakfast table of theWear Jackand dispensing tea to her captors created an atmosphere in which even the fried eggs seemed part of romantic adventure.
The sordid had dropped out of everything, fear of consequences had vanished for the moment, the shifting sunlight on the Venesta panelings, the glitter of the Tyrebuck tea things, the warm sea-scented air blowing through the skylight,—everything bright and pleasant seemed to the hypnotised ones part of Tommie.
There was no making conversation at that breakfast party. Shut up all night with no one to talk to, she did the talking, explaining first of all and staging for their consideration the people they had attacked the night before. Althusen was the biggest producer in Los Angeles—that is tosay the world, and Moscovitch, the camera man, was on all fours with him, Mrs. Raphael was Julia Raphael, the actress, and the play was “The Chink and the Girl.” The hatchet men were realkai-ginghand Tommie was the girl they were making off with, and the scene on San Nicolas was not the end of the play but somewhere in the middle, for pictures are produced in sections labelled and numbered and sometimes the end sections are produced first.
Tommie had been born on a ranch. She was quite free with her private history. Her father was Ben Coulthurst—maybe they’d heard of him. Well, anyway, he was well-known in Texas till he went broke and died and left Tommie to the care of an aunt who lived in San Francisco where Tommie was half smothered—she couldn’t stand cities—and maybe would have died if the movie business hadn’t come along and saved her. Fresh air stunts, as they knew, were her vocation, and she guessed she was made of india rubber, seeing up to this she had only broken one collarbone. Her last experience was dropping from an aëroplane on to the top of a sixty-mile-an-hour express.
“I’ve seen you do that,” said Hank. “Made me sweat in the palms of my hands.”
Well, that was nothing; plane and express moving at the same speed it was as simple as stepping off the sidewalk; being thrown out of a window was a lot worse. She thanked her Makershe was born so small, but what got her goat was the nicknames her diminutive size had evoked. Some smartie on a Los Angeles paper had called her the “Pocket Artemis.” What was an Artemis anyway?
“Search me,” said Hank.
“It’s a goddess,” said George, “same thing as Diana.”
Well, she had made him apologise, anyhow.
Candon alone took little part in the conversation. This gentleman, so ready in an emergency, seemed all abroad before the creature he had captured and carried off. He sat absorbing her without neglecting his food and later on when she was on deck he appeared with half an armful of books.
She was a book worm in private life and had hinted at the fact, out of which B. C. made profit.
“Here’s some books,” said he. “They aren’t much, but they’re all we’ve got. That chair comfortable?”
Then they fell into talk, Candon taking his seat beside her on the deck and close to the little heap of books.
They had scarcely spoken to one another at the breakfast table and now, all of a sudden, they were chattering together like magpies. Hank and George, smoking in the cabin down below, could hear their voices through the skylight.
“Wonder what she’d say if she knew,” said Hank in a grumbling tone.
“Knew what?” asked George.
“’Bout B. C. being Vanderdecken.”
“Oh, she’d ten to one like him all the better,” said George. “It’s his watch and I wish he’d quit fooling and look after the ship.”
“The ship’s all right,” said Hank.
“What do you mean?”
“You couldn’t hurt her or break her on a rock, not till she’s done with us; you couldn’t rip the masts out of her or put her ashore, not till she’s finished with us; she’s a mug trap and we’re the mugs. I believe Jake put a spell on her. What’s to be the end of it? I tell you it makes me crawl down the back when I think of that junk. What made that blue-eyed squatteroo of a B. C. ram her like that for?”
“Well, if he hadn’t, she’d have boarded us.”
“Boarded us, be hanged! If he’d blame well stuck ashore at ’Frisco, we wouldn’t have landed at San Nicolas.”
“Well, there’s no use whining,” said George. “We’re in the soup—question is how to get out. We’ve got to collar that boodle first so’s to have something to show.”
“Something to show—Lord! We’ll be shows enough.”
“Well, strikes me since we went into such a damn-fool business—”
Hank snorted. “Well, I didn’t pull you in, you would butt in—it’s none of my fault.”
“Who said it was?”
“I’m not saying who said it was or who said it wasn’t—thing is, there’s no use in complaining.”
“I said that a moment ago.”
“Oh, well, there you are—I’m going on deck.”
Almost a quarrel and all because the pocket Artemis was chatting to another man who had blue eyes—a blue-eyed squatteroo who was only yesterday good old B. C.
THE sea grew bluer.
Day by day the Kiro Shiwo increased its splendour as theWear Jack, at a steady ten knot clip, left the latitude of Guadeloupe behind, raising Eugenio Point and the heat-hazy coast that stretches to Cape San Pablo.
The threatened difference between Hank and George had died out. The reason of this release was not far to seek. Tommie, at that moment of her life, was as destitute of all the infernal sex wiles of womanhood as a melon. She had no idea of men as anything else than companions; that was why the pocket Artemis failed a bit in love scenes. A year ago she had signed a contract with the Wallack and Jackson Company by which she received forty thousand dollars a year for five years, and Wallack had reason sometimes to grumble. Tommie had no idea of how to fling herself into the arms of movie heroes, or to do the face-work in a close-up when the heroine is exhibiting to the audience the grin and glad eye, or the “Abandon,” or the “Passionate Appeal” so dear to the movie fan.
“Good God, that ain’t the way to make love,”would cry Scudder, her first producer. “Nuzzle him—stop. Now then, make ready and get abandon into it. He’s not the plumber come to mend the bath, nor your long-lost brother you wished had remained in ’Urope and you’re hugging for the sake of appearance. He’s the guy you’re in love with. Now then, put some heart, punch and pep into it—now then! Camera!”
No good.
“Oh Lord, oh Lord!” the perspiring Scudder would cry, “looks as if you were nursing a teddy bear.Strainhim to your heart. Stop flapping your hands on his back. Now, look up in his face—so—astonished yet almost fearful. Can’t you understand the wonder of love just born in the human heart, the soul’s awakening? Lord! you’re not lookin’ at an eclipse of the sun! That’s better, hang on so, count ten and then nuzzle him.”
But despite all directions Tommie was somewhat a failure in passion.
Wallack summed the position up when he declared that it would be worth paying ten thousand dollars a year to some man that would do the soul’s awakening business with Tommie. She could laugh, weep, fly into a temper, ride a mustang bare-backed, drive a motor car over a precipice, be as funny in her diminutive way as Charlie Chaplin, but she couldn’t make love worth a cent.
That was what Hank Fisher & Co. sensed, whenthe girl illusion vanished, disclosing a jolly companion and nothing more; sensed, without in the least sensing the fact that owing maybe to her small size, she had a power almost as strong as the power that wakens the wonder of love in the human heart.
Life was different on board, owing to this new importation; busier too. This was an entirely new stunt, to Tommie, and just as she knew everything about an automobile, an aëroplane, and a horse, she seemed determined to know everything about theWear Jack. Her capacity for assimilating detail was phenomenal; the use of everything from the main sheet buffer to the mast winch had to be explained, she had to learn how to steer, and, having learned, she insisted on taking her trick at the wheel. When she was not sitting with her nose in a book, she was helping or hindering in the running of the ship. Then there was the question of her clothes to keep them busy.
Drawing on to the tropics, it was more a question of shedding clothes, especially when it came to the matter of tweed coats and skirts. Bud, in his millionaire way, had come well provided; boxes and boxes had arrived from Hewson & Loder’s and had been received by Hank and stowed as “more of Bud’s truck.” White silk shirts, suits of white drill, they all rose up like a white cloud in George’s mind one blue and burning morning as he contemplated Tommie in her stuffy tweeds.
“Look here, T. C.,” said George, “you can’t get along in that toggery. I’ve half a dozen suits of white down below and I’ll get one of the Chinks to tailor a couple of them for you. Hank, roust out those boxes, will you?”
They tried a white drill coat on her.
They had never really recognised her size till they saw her in that coat, which would almost have done her for an overcoat. Then they recognised that perfect proportion had given her stature and that, if the gods had made her head an inch or so more in circumference, she would have been a dwarf.
Then Hank started forward to find a tailor amongst the Chinks and returned with a slit-eyed individual who contemplated his strange customer, standing like Mr. Hyde in the garment of Dr. Jekyll, took eye measurements of the length of her limbs and the circumference of her waist and retired to the foc’sle with two pairs of white drill trousers and two coats to work his works, also some white silk pajamas and shirts, producing by the next morning an outfit which fitted, more or less. She solved the question of shoes and stockings by discarding them on deck.
That was on the morning when, across the sea to port, Cape San Lazaro showed itself and the heat-hazy opening to Magdalena Bay.
The steady nor’westerly breeze that had held all night began to flicker out at dawn; when they came up from breakfast the world had gone tosleep. From the hazy coast to the hazy horizon nothing moved but the vast marching glassy swell coming up from a thousand miles away and unruffled by the faintest breeze.
Tommie, having come on deck and taken a sniff at the glacial condition of things, curled herself in one of the deck chairs with a book. TheWear Jackwas well provided with deck chairs and Hank, having inspected the weather, dived below and brought one up; George followed suit. Then, having placed the chairs about under the awning which had been rigged, they sat and smoked and talked, Tommie, up to her eyes in her confounded book, taking no part in the conversation.
T. C. was one of those readers who become absolutely dead to surroundings. Curled there with her nose in “Traffics and Discoveries,” she looked as if you might have knicked her without waking her, and this fact somehow cast a pall over the conversation of Hank and Bud, who, after a few minutes, found their conversation beginning to dry up.
“Lord,” said Hank, “I wonder how long this beastly calm’s going to hold.”
“Don’t know,” said George.
Then Candon came on deck. He had no chair. He stood with his back to the port rail cutting up some tobacco and filling a pipe.
“I wonder how long this beastly calm is going to hold,” said George.
“Lord knows,” said Candon.
Tommie chuckled. Something in the book had tickled her, she turned over a page rapidly and plunged deeper into oblivion like a puffin after smelts.
“What’s the current taking us?” asked George.
“Maybe three knots,” said Hank. “There’s no saying.” He yawned, then, as though the idea had just struck him, “Say—what’s wrong with trying the engine?”
“It’s too beastly hot for tinkering over engines,” yawned George, “and B. C. says he can’t get the thing to go.”
“Go’n’ have another try, B. C.,” said Hank. “There’s no use in us sitting here wagging our tails and waiting for the wind. Tell you what, I’ll draw lots with you—give’s a piece of paper, Bud.”
George produced an old letter and Hank tore off three slips, one long and two short.
Candon, with little interest in the business, drew a short slip, George the long one.
“It’s me,” said George rising. “Well now, I’ll just tell you, if I don’t get the thing to revolute I’ll stick there till I do. I’m not going to be beat by a bit of machinery.” He moved towards the hatch.
“I’ll go with you,” said Tommie, suddenly dog’s-earing a page and closing her book, as though she had been listening to the whole conversation, which, in a way, she had.
Hank and Candon were left alone and Candontook his seat in the chair vacated by George. Neither seemed in good humour; perhaps it was the heat.
From down below, through the open hatch leading to the little engine room, they could hear voices! George’s voice and the voice of T. C.
Then, as they sat yawning, another sound came, faint and far away, rhythmical, ghostly.
Hank raised himself and looked. Away to the s’uth’ard, across the glassy sea, a freighter was coming up. She was a great distance off, but in the absolute stillness and across that glacial calm the thud of her propellers could be felt by the ear.
Both men left their chairs and leaned on the rail watching her.
Said Candon, after a moment’s silence, “D’y’ know what I’ve been thinking? I’ve been thinking we’ve played it pretty low-down on T. C.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s this way. McGinnis will be after us, sure, as soon as he can get his hoofs under him. He’ll know we’re making for the Bay of Whales and he’ll be after us. Question is, can he get theHearttinkered up in time, or would he take another boat. If he does and catches us, there’s sure to be a fight. We should have told T. C. that. I thought of it this morning at breakfast.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell her?”
“Well, I didn’t, somehow. There’s anotherthing, we’ve never told her who I am. That’s worried me.”
“Well, it’s easy enough to tell her.”
“No, sir, it isn’t, not by a long chalk. I almost came to it yesterday. It was when you two were down below and I had her here on deck showing her how to make a fisherman’s bend. It came to me to tell her and I opened out about Vanderdecken, saying he wasn’t maybe as bad as some folk painted him, then she closed me up and put the lid on.”
“What did she say?”
“Said stealing was stealing and taking women’s jewelry was a dirty trick.”
“Why didn’t you explain?”
“Because she was right. Right or wrong, how’s a fellow to explain? Well, there it is. You’d better go down to her and say, ‘That lad Candon’s Vanderdecken and Pat McGinnis is after him and there’ll maybe be a dust-up when we get down to the Bay, and there’s a freighter coming along that’ll take you back north and you’d better get aboard her.’”
“Me!“
“Yes, you—it’s clean beyond me.”
Hank watched the freighter. She was away up now out of the water and showing the white of her bridge screen. At her present speed she would soon be level with them.
“She looks to be in ballast, don’t she?” said Hank.
“Yep.”
“Where’s she going, do you think?”
“’Frisco, sure.”
“That’s a long way from Los Angeles.”
“Maybe, but it’s nearer than the Bay o’ Whales.”
The freighter grew; she was making anything from twelve to fifteen knots; she would pass theWear Jackand a signal would stop her as sure as a bullet through the eye will stop a man.
Then, suddenly, something that had risen to Hank’s surface intelligence like a bubble, burst angrily.
“You can go down and tell her yourself,” said he, “it’s no affair of mine. If she wasn’t fooling there with Bud, she’d have seen the ship. How’n the nation do you think I’m going to go down and give you away like that?”
Candon hung silent, as if offended with the other. He wasn’t in the least. His eyes were fixed on the water over the side. Right below, in the bit of shadow cast by the ship against the morning sun, the water lay, pure emerald, and showing fathom-deep glimpses of life, scraps of fuci, hints of jelly fish and once, far down, like a moving jewel in a world of crystal, an albacore passing swift as a sword thrust.
Ahead of them on the lifting swell a turtle was sunning itself awash in the blue of that lazy silent sea, one polished plate of its carapace showing like a spot of burnished steel.
Candon found himself wondering why one plate should shine like that. It looked now like a littlewindow in a roof, then it seemed to him that out of that window came an idea, or rather a vision. A horrible vision of the freighter going off with Tommie and vanishing beyond the northern sky-line with her. Not till that moment had he recognised that T. C. was at once the lynch-pin of their coach and the thing that had suddenly come to lend reason to his own life. His whole existence had led logically up to the Vanderdecken business and the Vanderdecken business had led to her capture and her capture had given him something to care for, not as a man cares for a girl, but more as a lonely man cares for a child or a dog. It was her small size, maybe, that clinched the thing with him and made him feel that he’d sooner do a dive overside than lose touch with her.
Hank was feeling at that moment pretty much the same. The microscopic Tommie had captured the leathery Hank as a chum.
The freighter drew on and they could see now the touch of white where the spume rose in a feather at her fore foot. It was a huge brute of a Coleman liner up from Callao or Valparaiso, a five thousand tonner with a rust-red funnel.
If they stopped her, it would be necessary to get T. C. on deck right away and the Chinks ready to man the boat. There would be scarcely time to say good-bye—besides, it was ten to one T. C. wouldn’t want to go—besides she was in those togs. The freighter was abreast of them now. They watched her without a word. Suddenly a stream of bunting fluttered up and blew out onthe wind of her passage. Candon shaded his eyes and looked.
“Wishing us a pleasant voyage,” said Candon.
They watched the flags flutter down and the great turtle backed stern with the sunlight on it and the plumes of foam from the propellers. Then, as the wash reached them, making theWear Jackgroan and clatter her blocks, came a new sound, a thrud-thrud-thrud right under their feet, followed by the voice of George yelling, “Hi, you chaps, get the helm on her, engine’s going.”
Candon sprang to the wheel and Hank came and stood beside him.
Hank said, “That freighter must have thought us awful swine not acknowledging their signal.”
“Maybe they thought right,” said Candon.
At that moment, George appeared, triumphant from the engine room. “She’s running a treat,” said he, “and T. C.’s looking after her. What’s made the cross swell?” Without waiting for an answer and at a call from Tommie, he dived below again.
Half an hour later when he came on deck, taking a look aft, George said: “Now if we hadn’t an auxiliary engine and if it wasn’t running well, this calm would have lasted a fortnight. Look there!”
They looked. Away to northward a vast expanse of the glassy swell had turned to a tray of smashed sapphires.
It was the breeze.
THEY had given Tommie the after cabin, but this hot weather the three of them kept the deck at night so that she might have her door open, and to-night, just before dawn when theWear Jackwas right on to Cape St. Lucas, Candon and George were keeping watch and listening to Hank. Hank was lying on the deck with a pillow under his head, snoring. The engine had been shut off to save gasoline, and theWear Jack, with a Chink at the wheel and the main boom guyed out, was sailing dead before the wind, under a million stars, through a silence broken only by the bow wash and the snores of Hank.
Candon, pacing the deck with George, was in a reflective mood.
“Wonder what that Chink’s thinking about?” said he. “Home mostlike. They say every Chinaman carries China about with him in his box and unpacks it when he lights his opium pipe. Well, it’s a good thing to have a home. Lord! what’s the good of anything else, what’s the good of working for money to spend in Chicago orN’ York? I reckon there’s many a millionaire in the cities, living all day in his office on pills an’ pepsin, would swop his dollars for the old home if he could get it back, the old shanty near where the cows used to graze in the meadows and the fish jump in the stream, with his old dad and his mother sitting by the fire and his sister Sue playin’ on the step.”
“Where was your home?” asked George.
“Never had one,” said Candon, “and never will.”
“Oh, yes, you will.”
“Don’t see it. Don’t see where it’s to come from, even if I had the dollars. I’m a lone man. Reckon there’s bucks in every herd same as me. Look at me, getting on for forty and the nearest thing to a home is a penitentiary. That’s so.”
“Now look here, B. C.,” said George,—then he stopped dead. A sudden great uplift had come in his mind. Perhaps it was the night of stars through which they were driving or some waft from old Harley du Cane, the railway wrecker, who, still, always had his hand in his pocket for any unfortunate; perhaps he had long and sub-consciously been debating in his mind the case of Candon: who knows?
“You were going to say—?” said Candon.
“Just this,” said George. “Close up on the penitentiary business. There’s worse men than you in the church, B. C., or I’m a nigger. You’regoing to have a home yet and a jolly good one. I’ve got it for you.”
“Where?”
“In my pocket. Fruit farming, that’s your line, and a partner that can put up the dollars—that’s me.”
Candon was silent for a moment.
“It’s good of you,” said he at last, “damn good of you. I reckon I could make a business pay if it came to that, but there’s more than dollars, Bud. I reckon I was born a wild duck. I’ve no anchor on board that wouldn’t pull out of the mud first bit of wind that’d make me want to go wandering.”
“I’ll fix you up with an anchor,” said Bud, “somehow or other. You leave things to me and trust your uncle Bud.”
He was thinking of getting Candon married, somehow, to some girl. He could almost visualize her: a big, healthy, honest American girl, businesslike, with a heart the size of a cauliflower—some anchor.
“Sun’s coming,” said George, turning and stirring Hank awake with the point of his toe. Hank sat up yawning.
Away on the port bow, against a watery blue window of sky, Cape St. Lucas showed, its light-house winking at the dawn. Then came the clang of gulls, starting for the fishing, and moment by moment as they watched, the sea beyond the cape showed sharper, steel-blue and desolate beyondwords. The north could show nothing colder, till, all at once, over the hills came colour on a suddenly materialised reef of cloud.
They held their course whilst the day grew broader and the cape fell astern; then, shifting the helm, they steered right into the eye of the sun for the coast of Mexico.
They had turned the tip of Lower California.
MAGDALENA Bay, that great expanse of protected water between Punta Entrado and Santa Margarita Island, was once a great haunt of the sulphur bottom whales. Then came the shark fishers and then came the American Pacific Fleet and made a gun practice ground of it, just as they have made a speed testing ground of the Santa Barbara Channel between the Channel Islands and the coast. Maybe that drove the sulphur bottoms to go south all in a body and the more pessimistical ones to commit suicide in a bunch, and all on the same day in the bay once known as the Bay of Jaures and now as the Bay of Whales. For the bones seem all of the same date, ghost-white, calcined by sun and worn by the moving sands that cover them and uncover them and the winds that drive the sands.
Another thing, you find them almost to the foot of the low cliffs that ring the bay. How has this happened? The wind. The wind that can lift as well as drift, the wind that is always redisposing the sands.
The bay stretches for a distance of four miles between horn and horn; the water is strewn with reefs visible at low tide. Emerald shallows and sapphire depths and foam lines and snow of gulls all show more beautiful than any picture; and beyond lie the sands and the cliffs and the country desolate as when Jaures first sighted it. Near the centre of the beach, at the sea edge, stands a great rock shaped like a pulpit.
“That’s the bay,” said Candon, pointing ahead.
It was noon and theWear Jack, with all plain sail set, was driving straight for a great blue break in the reefs, Hank at the helm and Candon giving directions. The Chinks were all on deck, gathered forward, their faces turned shoreward, gazing at the land almost with interest.
“Where are the whales?” asked Tommie suddenly. “You said it was all covered with the skeletons of whales.”
“You’ll see them quick enough,” said Candon. “Port, steady so.”
The rip of the outgoing tide was making a lather round the reef spurs. Ahead the diamond-bright dead blue water showed up to a line where it suddenly turned to emerald.
“It’s twenty fathoms up to there,” said Candon, “and then the sands take hold. I’m anchoring somewhere about here. It’s a good bottom. Make ready with the anchor there!”
He held on for another minute or so, then the wind spilled from the sails and the anchor fell infifteen fathom water and nearly half a mile from the shore.
The boat was got over, with two Chinks to do the rowing, and they started, Candon steering.
“Where’s the whales?” asked Tommie.
They were almost on to the beach now and there lay the sands singing to the sun and wind. Miles and miles of sand, with ponds of mirage to the south, and gulls strutting on the uncovered beach; a vast desolation, with, far overhead, just a dot in the blue, an eagle from the hills of Sinaloa. An eagle so high as to be all but invisible, whose eyes could yet number the shells on the beach and the movement of the smallest crab. But where were the whales?
T. C. had once seen a whale’s skeleton in a museum, set up and articulated. Her vivid imagination had pictured a beach covered with whale skeletons just like that, and, instead of thanking providence for the absence of such a bone-yard, her mind grumbled. She was wearing one of Bud’s superfluous panamas and she took it off and put it on again.
As they landed close to the pulpit rock Hank said nothing, George said nothing, Candon, visibly disturbed, looked north and south. Here but a short time ago had been ribs lying about like great bent staves, skulls, vertebræ. Here to-day there was nothing but sand.
He did not know that a fortnight ago a south wind had “moved the beach,” bringing up hundredsof thousands of tons of sand not only from the south end but from the bay beyond; that in a month more, maybe, a north wind would move the beach, sending the sand back home; that only between the winds the bones were laid fully bare. No storm was required to do the work, just a steady driving wind sifting, sifting, sifting for days and days.
The fact that the beach seemed higher just here suddenly brought the truth to Candon.
“Boys,” said he, “it’s the sand.”
No one spoke for a moment under the frost that had fallen on them. Then Hank said, “Sure you’ve struck the right bay?”
Like Tommie, he had pictured entire skeletons, not bones and skulls lying flat and easily sanded over.
“Sure. It’s the sand has lifted over them.”
Scarcely had he spoken when a thunderbolt fell into the shallows a cable length away from the shore. It was the eagle. In a moment it rose, a fish in its talons, and went climbing the air to seaward, and then up a vast spiral stairs in the blue, and then, like an arrow, away to the far-off hills.
It was like an underscore to the desolation of this place, where man was disregarded if not unknown.
“Well,” said George, coming back to things, “the bones aren’t any use anyway. Let’s start for the boodle. Strike out for the cache, B. C.”
They turned, following their leader, and made diagonally for the cliffs to the north. Candon walked heavily, a vague suspicion filling his mind that Hank and George held something more in reservation than mere disappointment over absent skeletons. The odious thought that they might suspect him of being a fraud came to him as he walked, but he had little time for self communing. Something worse was in store, and he saw it now, and wondered at his stupidity in not having seen it before.
Amongst the implements of the expedition two spades had been brought. The Chinks carried these spades. They brought up the rear of the procession, silent, imperturbable, apparently incurious. They would not do the digging when the moment came. Candon and Hank, or George would be easily able to negotiate the few feet of hard sand that covered the treasure. The Chinks just carried the spades. Candon stopped dead all of a sudden. Then he went on, quickening his pace almost to a run. The booty had been buried at a place easily recognisable, on the southern side of a little out-jut of the cliff and about ten feet from an issue of water that came clear and cold and bright through a crack in the cliff face.
The issue was still there, but it was far lower than before; the sand had risen. The wind had done its work and five feet or more of new sand lay upon the cache. It ran up the cliff face like a snow drift. Five or six feet of pliable sand thatseemed an almost impassable barrier. The big man folded his arms and stood for a moment dumb. Then he laughed.
“Boys,” said he, “I’m a fraud.”
No answer came but the wash of the little waves on the beach and far gull voices from the south. He turned about fiercely.
“I’ve led you wrong. I’ve fooled you, but it’s not me. It’s my pardner. It’s the sand. Sand. That’s me and all my work. All I’ve ever stood on, sand. Sand. Six foot deep.”
“For the land’s sake, B. C.,” cried Hank, “get a clutch on yourself. What’s wrong with you anyhow?”
“He means the sand has covered the cache,” said the steady voice of Tommie.
Candon did not look at her. It seemed to him just then, in that moment of disappointment, that Fate was carefully explaining to him the futility of his works and his life, and in an immeasurably short space of time all sorts of little details, from his Alaskan experiences to his absurd rescue of Tommie, all sorts of weaknesses, from his enjoyment of robbery to his inaction in letting that freighter pass, rose before him. He struggled to find more words.
“It’s just me,” said he, and fell dumb and brooding.
“Well,” said George, “it’s a long way to come—to be fooled like this—but there’s an end of it. How many men would it take to move that stuff?”
“Six foot of sand and square yards of surface; it would take a steam dredger,” said Hank, in a hard voice.
Tommie’s eyes were fixed on Candon. She knew little of the whole thing, but she knew suffering when she saw it. From what he had said and from his attitude, she could almost read Candon’s thoughts. The movie business is a teacher of dumb expression.
“D’you mean to say you’re going to turn this down?” asked Tommie.
“What’s the good?” said George. He was feeling just as Hank felt. The absence of whales’ bones, the flatness of landing on an ordinary beach where they had expected to see strange sights, had deflated them both. They did not doubt the bona fides of B. C., but as a medicine man he was at a discount.
They saw before them hopeless digging. The thing was not hopeless, but in that moment of defection and disappointment it seemed impossible.
“Well,” said Tommie, “next time I start on a show of this kind, I’ll take girls along—that’s all I’ve got to say.”
In the dead silence following this bomb-shell, Candon looked up and found himself looking straight into the eyes of the redoubtable T. C.
“Talk of sands,” she went on, talking to him and seeming to disregard the others, “and all your life has been sands and that nonsense, why it’s the sand in a man that makes him. Anyhow,I’ve not come all this distance to go back without having a try. Aren’t you going to dig?”
The scorn in her tone had no equivalent in her mind, no more than the spur on a rider’s heel has to do with his mentality. She was out to save B. C. from himself. Also, although she did not care a button for the hidden “boodle,” her whole soul resented turning back when on the spot.
Candon, standing before her like a chidden child, seemed to flush under his tan, then his eyes turned to Hank.
“Lord! let’s dig,” suddenly said Hank. “Let’s have a try anyhow, if it takes a month.” He stopped and stared at the hopeless looking task before him. “We’ll get the whole of the Chinks to help—”
“Chinks!” said Candon, suddenly coming back to his old self in a snap. “This is white men’s work—I brought you here and I’ll do it myself if I have to dig with my hands. It’s there, and we’ve got to get it.”
“I’ll help,” said Tommie.
“Well, I reckon we’ll all help,” said George, unenthusiastically.
It was a strange fact that, of the three men, Tommie had least power over George du Cane. Less attraction for him maybe, even though the very clothes on her back were his.
THE size of the task was apparent to all of them, but to none more clearly than Candon.
First of all, reckoning to deal with hard stuff, he had brought spades, not shovels. The bundle had been buried hurriedly; even under the best conditions he would have had to turn over many square feet of stuff to find it. Then this soft fickle sand was a terrible material to work on; it was like trying to shovel away water, almost. But the most daunting thing to him was the fact that fate had induced him to make the cache on the south side of the out-jut of cliff instead of the north, for the south wind, blowing up from the bay beyond, had added feet to the depth to be dealt with, just as a wind drifts snow against any obstruction. The sand level on the north of the jut was much lower, and it was not drifted. Then there was the question of time. Given time enough the McGinnis crowd would surely arrive, if he knew anything of them, and there would be a fight. And there was the question of Tommie.
This last consideration only came to him now on top of her words, “I’ll help.” He stood for a moment plunged back into thought. Then he turned to the others.
“Boys, I reckon I’ve been talking through my hat. White man or yellow man it’s all the same, we’ll all have to take our turn. Back with you, you two, to the ship and get canvas enough for tents. We’ll want three. Grub, too; we’ll want enough for a week. Leave two Chinks to look after the schooner and try to get some boarding to make extra shovels, as much as you can, for we’ll want some to shore up the sand. We’ve got to camp here right on our work.”
“Sure,” said Hank. “Come along, Bud, we’ll fetch the truck.” They turned towards the boat.
“I’ll go with you,” said Tommie, “I want to fetch my book.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Candon, “I want you to help me here.”
“Me!” said Tommie surprised.
“Yes—if you don’t mind.”
“All right,” said she. Then to Hank, “You’ll find the book in my bunk, and fetch me my tooth brush, will you—and that hair brush and my pyjamas, if we’ve got to camp.”
“Right,” said Hank, “you trust me.”
They shoved off, and to George, as he looked back, the huge figure of Candon and the little figure of his companion seemed strange standing side by side on that desolate beach. Strangereven than the whales’ skeletons that had vanished.
The wind had veered to the west and freshened, blowing in cool from the sea.
“Well,” said Tommie after they had watched the boat half way to the schooner, “what are you going to do now? What did you want me for?”
“I want to have a word with you,” said Candon. “S’pose we sit down. It’s fresh and breezy here and I can think better sitting down than standing up. I’m bothered at your being dragged into this business, and that’s the truth, and I’ve things to tell you.” They sat down and the big man took his pipe from his pocket and filled it in a leisurely and far-away manner, absolutely automatically.
Tommie watched him, vastly interested all of a sudden.
“It’s this way,” said he, “I got rid of the other chaps so’s I could get you alone, and I’m not going one peg further in this business till you know all about me and the chances you’re running. Y’ remember one day on deck I was talking to you about that chap Vanderdecken?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m Vanderdecken.”
“You’re which?”
“I’m Vanderdecken. The swab that pirated those yachts.”
“You!” said Tommie.
“Yes. I’m the swab.”
A long pause followed this definite statement. The gulls cried and the waves broke. Tommie,leaning on her elbow and watching the breaking waves, seemed trying to adjust her mind to this idea and failing utterly. She was not considering the question of how Vanderdecken, who was being chased by Hank and George, had managed to be in partners with them; she was up against the great fact that Candon was a robber. It seemed impossible to her, yet he said so.
“But what made youdoit?” she cried, suddenly sitting up and looking straight at him.
“I didn’t start to do it,” said he, throwing the unlit pipe beside him on the sand. “All the same I did it, and I’ll tell you how it was.” He sat up and holding his knees started to talk, telling her the whole business.
It sounded worse than when he told Hank and George, for he gave nothing in extenuation, just the hard bricks. But hard bricks were good enough for Tommie; she could build better with them and quicker than if he had handed her out ornamental tiles to be inserted at given positions.
When he had done talking and when she had done building her edifice from his words, she shook her head over it. It wasn’t straight. In some ways it pleased her, as, for instance, the liquor business. She had sympathy with that, but the larceny appealed to her not as an act of piracy but theft. T. C. would have been smothered in a judge’s wig, but she would have made an excellent judge for all that. Candon was now clearly before her, the man and his actions; he had been frankas day with her, he was a repentant sinner, and to cap all he had saved her, at all events in intention, from Chinese slavers. His size and his sailor simplicity appealed to her.
All the same, her sense of right refused to be stirred by the blue eyes of Candon, by his size, his simplicity, his patent daring, by the something or other that made her like him even better than Hank or George, by the fact that he had carried her off on his shoulder against her will and in the face of destruction—and absurdity.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” said Tommie. “I don’t want to rub it in, but you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t have got mixed up with that McGinnis crowd. What made you?”
“You’ve put your finger on it,” said Candon. “I don’t know what made me. Want of steering.”
“Well,” said Tommie, “you wish you hadn’t, don’t you?”
“You bet.”
“Well then, you’re half out of the hole. D’you ever say your prayers?”
“Me! no—” Candon laughed. “Lord, no—I’ve never been given that way.”
“Maybe if you had you wouldn’t have got into this hole—or maybe you would. No telling,” said Tommie. “I’m no praying beetle myself, but I regularly ask the Lord for protection. You want it in the movies. Dope and a broken neck is what I’m afraid of. I don’t mind being killed, but I don’t want to be killed suddenly or fall for cocaineor whisky, the way some do. Well, I guess work is praying sometimes and I shouldn’t wonder but you’ll have some praying to do with your fists, getting the sand off that stuff. And when you’ve sent it back to its owners, you’ll have prayed yourself clear—that’s my ’pinion.”
“I’ve got something else to tell you,” said Candon, “I reckon you don’t know me yet, anyhow you’ve got to have the lot now I’ve begun.”
“Spit it out,” said the confessor, a bit uneasy in her mind at this new development and the serious tone of the other.
“I told the boys there was a black streak in me. And there is. I let you down.”
“Let me down?”
“Yep. D’you remember when you were tinkering at the engine that day the calm took us?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a big freighter passed within hail and I let her go.”
“Well, what about it?”
“I should have stopped her so that you might have got back to ’Frisco.”
“But I didn’t want to go to ’Frisco.”
“Why, you said the day we first had you on board that you could get back on some ship.”
“Oh, did I? I’d forgot—well, I wouldn’t have gone in the freighter, to ’Frisco of all places.”
“I didn’t know that. From what you said I should have stopped her.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Well,” said he, “I didn’t want to lose you. Hank and me didn’t want you to go off and leave us, you’d been such a good chum.”
“Well, forget it. I didn’t want to leave you, either. Not me! Why, this trip is the best holiday I’ve had for years. If that’s all you have to bother about, forget it.”
“There’s something else,” said he. “The McGinnis crowd is pretty sure to blow along down after us and there’ll be a fight, sure. You see, we’re held here by that sand; that will give them time to get on our tracks.”
“If they come, we’ll have to fight them,” said Tommie. “But, if you ask me, I don’t think there’s much fight in that lot, by what you say of them.”
“They’re toughs, all the same. I’m telling you, and I want you to choose right now—we can stay here and risk it, or push out and away back and put you down at Santa Barbara, give us the word.”
Tommie considered deeply for a moment. Then she said: “I’m not afraid. I reckon we can match them if it comes to scratching. No, we’ll stick. You see, there’s two things—you can’t put me back in Santa Barbara without the whole of this business coming out and Hank Fisher and Bud du Cane being guyed to death. Your ship is known, Althusen and that lot will give evidence—you can’t put me back out of theWear Jackanyhow.”
“Then how are you to get back?” asked Candon.
“I’ve been trying to think that long enough,” said Tommie. “You remember the rat in the flower pot—something or another will turn up, or I’ll have to do some more thinking.”
“Do you know what I’m thinking?” asked Candon. “I’m thinking there’s not many would stick this out just to save a couple of men from being guyed.”
“Maybe—I don’t know. Anyhow the other thing is I want to see the end of this business and that stuff got out of the sand and handed back to its owners. Lord, can’t you see? If we turned back now we’d be quitters, and I don’t know what you’d do with yourself; but I tell you what I’d do with myself, I’d take to making lace for a living—or go as mother’s help—paugh!”
“God!” said Candon, “give me your fist.”
Tommie held out her fist and they shook.
HANK, as before mentioned, was a man of resource; there was nothing much he could not do with his hands backed by his head. In two hours on board theWear Jackhe had found the materials for and constructed three tent poles; in the sail room, and by sacrificing the awning, he had obtained the necessary canvas; ropes and pegs evolved themselves from nowhere as if by magic. Then in some way, and from the interior of theWear Jack, he managed to get planking, not much, but enough for his purpose. Whilst he worked on these matters, George superintended the removal of stores, bully beef, canned tomatoes, canned kippered herrings, biscuits, butter, tea, condensed milk, rice. He sent two Chinks ashore with a boat-load; then, when they came back, the rest of the stuff was loaded into the boat, together with the tent poles and canvas and blankets. Last came a small bundle containing Tommie’s night things and tooth brush. Then they pushed off.
Candon helped in the unloading of the boat and then they set to raising the tents.
In this section of the bay there were two breaks in the line of cliffs, a north and a south break. Hank drew the line of the tents between the breaks and at right angles to the cliffs, so as to escape, as much as possible, the hot land wind when it blew. Also he put a long distance between each tent. Tommie’s was nearest the cliffs, the Chinks’ nearest the sea. By sunset the canvas was up, a fire lit, a beaker filled with fresh water from the issue in the cliff and the stores piled to leeward of the middle tent. Hank had even brought mosquito netting and a plan for using it in the tents. He seemed to have forgotten nothing, till Tommie opened her bundle.
“Where’s my book?” asked Tommie.
“Blest if I haven’t forgot it!” cried Hank. “Chucklehead—say! I’ll put off right now and fetch it.”
“Oh, it’ll wait,” said the other. “I guess I’ll be busy enough for a while not to want books. You can fetch it tomorrow.”
If Hank had known the consequences of delay, he would have fetched it there and then, but he didn’t. He went to attend to the fire. The fire was built of dry seaweed, bits of a broken-up packing case and fragments of wreck wood, and when the kettle was boiled over it and tea made, the sun had set and the stars were looking down on the beach.
After supper Tommie went off to her tent, leaving the men to smoke. The two Chinks, whohad built a microscopic fire of their own, were seated close to it talking, maybe of China and home. The wind had died out and through the warm night the sound of the waves all down the beach came like a lullaby.
Hank was giving his ideas of how they should start in the morning attacking the sand, when Candon, who had been smoking silently, suddenly cut in.
“I’ve told her,” said Candon.
“What you say?” asked Hank.
“I’ve told her all about myself and who I am, and the chances, told her when you chaps went off for the stores. Told her it’s possible McGinnis may light down on us before we’ve done, seeing the work before us on that sand, and there’ll maybe be fighting she oughtn’t to be mixed up in.”
“B’gosh!” said Hank. “I never thought of that. What did she say?”
“Oh, she said, ‘Let him come.’ Wouldn’t listen to anything about turning back, said we’d be quitters if we dropped it now.”
“Lord, she’s a peach.”
“She’s more than that,” said Candon. “Well, I’m going for a breather before turning in.” He tapped his pipe out and, rising, walked off down along the sea edge.
George laughed. He was laughing at the size of Candon compared to the size of Tommie, and the quaint idea that had suddenly come to him,the idea that Candon had suddenly become gone on her.
George could view the matter in a detached way, for though T. C. appealed to him as an individual, he scarcely considered her as a girl.
A lot of little signs and symptoms collected themselves together in his head, capped by the tone of those words, “She’s more than that.” Yes, it was highly probable that the heart punch had come to B. C. Why not? Tommie as an anchor wasn’t much, as far as size went, yet as far as character and heart—who could tell? All the indications were in her favour.
“She’s a peach,” murmured Hank, half aloud, half to himself.
Hullo, thought George, has old Hank gone bughouse on her too! Then aloud: “You mean Tommie?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, she’s not so bad.”
“And I went and forgot her book! Bud, d’you remember to-day, when we were all standing like a lot of lost hoodlums, going to turn our backs on this proposition, and the way she yanked us round? It came on me then.”
“What?”
“I dunno. Bud, say—”
“Yes?”
“She’s great. It came on me to-day like a belt on the head with a sandbag. It came to me before. Remember the day she was first aboard andwouldn’t put back, wanting to save our faces? Well, that hit me, but the jaw punch got me to-day, and just now when she trundled off to her tent, lugging that blanket behind her, I seemed to get one in the solar plexus that near sent me through the ropes. Bud, I’m on my back, being counted out.”
“Oh, talk sense,” said Bud. “We’ve too much work on hand to be carrying on with girls. Tie a knot in it, Hank, till we’re clear of this place, anyhow. Besides it’s ten to one there’s some other chap after her.”
A form loomed up coming towards them. It was Candon.