A Master of Fortune Part 22

"We'll get the canvas off her, and then you can go below and shave. You can sleep in a sh.o.r.e bed this night, if you choose, sir, and to-morrow we'll see about fingering the salvage. There'll be no trouble there now; we shall just have to ask for a check and Lloyds will pay it, and then you and the hands will take your share, and I--by James! Mr. Philipps, I shall be a rich man over this business. I shouldn't be a bit surprised but what I finger a snug 500 as my share. Oh, sir, Heaven's been very good to me over this, and I know it, and I'm grateful. My wife will be grateful too. I wish you could come to our chapel some day and see her."

"You deserve your luck, Captain, if ever a man did in this world, and, by Jove! we'll celebrate it. We've been living on pig's food for long enough. We'll find the best hotel in Cardiff, and we'll get the best dinner the _chef_ there can produce. I want you to be my guest at that."

"I must ask you to excuse me," said Kettle. "I've received a good deal just lately, and I'm thankful, and I want to say so. If you don't mind, I'd rather say it alone."

"I understand, Skipper. You're a heap better man than I am, and if you don't mind, I'd like to shake hands with you. Thanks. We may not meet again, but I shall never forget you and what we've seen on this murderous old wreck of a s.h.i.+p. Hullo, there's Cardiff not twenty minutes ahead. Well, I must go below and clean up after you've docked her."

CHAPTER VIII

TO CAPTURE AN HEIRESS

The _Parakeet_ had discharged the last of her coal into the lighters alongside, had cast off from the mooring buoys, and was steaming out of the baking heat of Suez harbor on her way down toward the worse heat of the Red Sea beyond. The clatter and dirt of the-working s.h.i.+ps, with the smells of hot iron and black humanity, were dying out astern, and presently she slowed up to drop the pilot into his boat, and then stood on again along her course.

A pa.s.senger, a young man of eight or nine-and-twenty, lounged on a camp-stool under the upper bridge awning, and watched the _Parakeet's_ captain as he walked briskly across and across, and presently, when the little sailor faced him, he nodded as though he had decided something that was in his thoughts.

"Well, sir?" said Captain Kettle.

"I wish you wouldn't look so anxious. We've started now, and may as well make up our minds to go through it comfortably."

"Quite so," said Kettle. "I'm thinking out how we are to do this business in comfort--and safety," and with that he resumed his walk.

The man beside him had introduced himself when the black workers were carrying the _Parakeet's_ cargo of coal in baskets from the holds to the lighters alongside; and Kettle had been rather startled to find that he carried a letter of introduction from the steamboat's owners. The letter gave him no choice of procedure. It stated with clearness that Mr. Hugh Wenlock, solicitor, had laid his wishes before them, and that they had agreed to further these wishes (through the agency of their servant--Captain Owen Kettle) in consideration of the payment of 200 sterling.

The _Parakeet_ was a cargo tramp, and carried no pa.s.senger certificate, but a letter of recommendation like this was equivalent to a direct order, and Kettle signed Mr. Wenlock on to his crew list as "Doctor,"

and put to sea with an anxious mind.

Wenlock waited awhile, watching squalid Suez sink into the sea behind; and then he spoke again.

"Look here, Captain," he said, "those South Arabian ports have got a lot worse reputation than they really deserve. The people down there twenty years ago were a pack of pirates, I'll grant you, but nowadays they know that if they get at any of their old games, a British gunboat promptly comes up next week and bombards them at two-mile range, and that's not good enough. They may not be honest from inclination, but they've got the fear of the gunboat always handy, and that's a wonderful civilizing power. I tell you, captain, you needn't be frightened; that pirate business is exploded for now and always."

"I know all about the piratical hankerings of those South Arabian n.i.g.g.e.rs, sir," said Kettle stiffly, "and I know what they can do and what they can't do as well as any man living. And I know also what I can do myself at a push, and the knowledge leaves me pretty comfortable. But if you choose to think me frightened, I'll own I am. It's the navigation down there that gave me cold s.h.i.+vers the first moment you mentioned it."

"Why, it's no worse than the Red Sea here, anyway."

"Red Sea's bad, but you can get good charts of it and rely on them.

South Arabian coast is no better, and the charts aren't worth the paper they're printed on. There are bad tide-rips down there, sir, and there are bad reefs, and there's bad fog, and the truth of it is, there's no handier place to lose a s.h.i.+p in all the big, wide world."

"I wouldn't like you to wreck the steamer down there. It might be awkward for me getting back."

"Quite so," said Kettle, "you're thinking of yourself, and I don't blame you. I'm thinking of myself also. I'm a man that's met a great deal of misfortune, sir, and from one thing and another I've been eight years without a regular command. I had the luck to bring in a derelict the other day, and pocket a good salvage out of her, and my present owners heard of it, and they put me as master of this steamer, just because of that luck."

"Nothing like luck."

"If you don't lose it. But I am not anxious to pile up this steamboat on some uncharted reef just because luck has left me, and have to wait another eight years before I find another command."

"And, as I say, I'm as keen as you are not to get the steamer wrecked, and if there's any way she can be kept out of a dangerous area, and you can manage to set me ash.o.r.e where I want in a boat, just you say, and I'll meet you all I can. But at the same time, Skipper, if you don't mind doing a swap, you might give me a good deal of help over my matter in return."

"I haven't heard your business yet, sir. All you've told me is that you want to be set down in this place, Dunkhot, and be taken off again after you've stayed there four-and-twenty hours."

"Well, you see I didn't want it talked over beforehand. If the newspapers got hold of the yarn, and made a lot of fuss about it, they might upset a certain marriage that I've very much set my heart upon."

Captain Kettle looked puzzled. "I don't seem to quite follow you, sir."

"You shall hear the tale from the beginning. We have plenty of time ahead of us just now. You remember the wreck of the _Rangoon_?"

"She was coming home from East Indian ports, wasn't she, and got on fire somewhere off Cape Guardafui? But that'll have been twenty years back, in the old overland days, before the Ditch was opened. Only about ten of her people saved, if I remember."

"That's about right," said Wenlock, "though it's twenty years ago now.

She was full of Anglo-Indians, and their loss made a great sensation at the time. Amongst others was a Colonel Anderson, and his wife, and their child Teresa, aged nine; and what made their deaths all the more sad was the fact that Anderson's elder brother died just a week before, and he would have come home to find a peerage and large estates waiting for him."

"I can feel for that man," said Kettle.

"I can feel most for the daughter," said Wenlock.

"How do you mean, sir?"

"Well, Colonel Anderson's dead, and his wife's dead, but the daughter isn't, or at any rate she was very much alive twelve months ago, that's all. The whole lot of them, with others, got into one of the _Rangoon's_ boats, and after frizzling about at sea till they were nearly starved, got chucked on that South Arabian coast (which you say is so rocky and dangerous), and were drowned in the process. All barring Teresa, that is. She was pulled out of the water by the local n.i.g.g.e.rs, and was brought up by them, and I've absolutely certain information that not a year ago she was living in Dunkhot as quite a big personage in her way."

"And she's 'My Lady' now, if she only knew?"

"Well, not that. The t.i.tle doesn't descend in the female line, but Colonel Anderson made a will in her favor after she was born, and the present earl, who's got the estates, would have to sh.e.l.l out if she turned up again."

"My owners, in their letter, mentioned that you were a solicitor. Then you are employed by his lords.h.i.+p, sir?"

Mr. Wenlock laughed. "Not much," he said. "I'm on my own hook. Why, hang it all, Captain, you must see that no man of his own free will would be idiot enough to resurrect a long-forgotten niece just to make himself into a beggar."

"I don't see why not, sir, if he got to know she was alive. Some men have consciences, and even a lord, I suppose, is a man."

"The present earl has far too good a time of it to worry about running a conscience. No, I bet he fights like a thief for the plunder, however clear a case we have to show him. And as he's the man in possession and has plenty of ready cash for law expenses, the odds are he'll turn out too big to worry at through all the courts, and we shall compromise.

I'd like that best myself. Cash down has a desirable feel about it."

"It has, sir," said Kettle with a reminiscent sigh. "Even to pocket a tenth of what is rightfully yours is better than getting mixed up with that beastly law. But will the other relatives of the young lady, those that are employing you, I mean, agree to that?"

"Don't I tell you, Captain, I'm on my own hook? There are no other relatives--or at least none that would take a ha'porth of interest in Teresa's getting the estates. I've gone into the thing on sheer spec, and for what I can make out of it, and that, if all's well, will be the whole lump."

"But how? The young lady may give you something in her grat.i.tude, of course, but you can't expect it all."

"I do, though, and I tell you how I'm going to get it. I shall marry the fair Teresa. Simple as tumbling off a house."

Kettle drew himself up stiffly and walked to the other end of the bridge, and began ostentatiously to look with a professional eye over his vessel.

Wenlock was quick to see the change. "Come, what is it now, Captain?" he asked with some surprise.

"I don't like the idea of those sort of marriages," said the little sailor, acidly.