A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West Part 17

We stood at the rail. We did not speak; we stood watching. It was so still that the drip of steam from some loosened pipe far below was plainly audible, and it sounded in that lifeless, silent grayness like--G.o.d knows what--a death tick.

"You see," said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, "there's no mistake about it. She is moving--this way."

"Oh, a current, of course," Strokher tried to say cheerfully, "sets her toward us."

Would the morning never come?

Ally Bazan--his parents were Catholic--began to mutter to himself.

Then Hardenberg spoke aloud.

"I particularly don't want--that--out--there--to cross our bows. I don't want it to come to that. We must get some sails on her."

"And I put it to you as man to man," said Strokher, "where might be your wind."

He was right. The _Glarus_ floated in absolute calm. On all that slab of ocean nothing moved but the Dead s.h.i.+p.

She came on slowly; her bows, the high, clumsy bows pointed toward us, the water turning from her forefoot. She came on; she was near at hand.

We saw her plainly--saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, the rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I could imagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluent wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean. She made no sound. No single thing stirred aboard the hulk of her--but she moved.

We were helpless. The _Glarus_ could stir no boat in any direction; we were chained to the spot. n.o.body had thought to put out our lights, and they still burned on through the dawn, strangely out of place in their red-and-green garishness, like maskers surprised by daylight.

And in the silence of that empty ocean, in that queer half-light between dawn and day, at six o'clock, silent as the settling of the dead to the bottomless bottom of the ocean, gray as fog, lonely, blind, soulless, voiceless, the Dead s.h.i.+p crossed our bows.

I do not know how long after this the s.h.i.+p disappeared, or what was the time of day when we at last pulled ourselves together. But we came to some sort of decision at last. This was to go on--under sail. We were too close to the island now to turn back for--for a broken shaft.

The afternoon was spent fitting on the sails to her, and when after nightfall the wind at length came up fresh and favourable, I believe we all felt heartened and a deal more hardy--until the last canvas went aloft, and Hardenberg took the wheel.

We had drifted a good deal since the morning, and the bows of the _Glarus_ were pointed homeward, but as soon as the breeze blew strong enough to get steerageway Hardenberg put the wheel over and, as the booms swung across the deck, headed for the island again.

We had not gone on this course half an hour--no, not twenty minutes--before the wind s.h.i.+fted a whole quarter of the compa.s.s and took the _Glarus_ square in the teeth, so that there was nothing for it but to tack. And then the strangest thing befell.

I will make allowance for the fact that there was no centre-board nor keel to speak of to the _Glarus_. I will admit that the sails upon a nine-hundred-ton freighter are not calculated to speed her, nor steady her. I will even admit the possibility of a current that set from the island toward us. All this may be true, yet the _Glarus_ should have advanced. We should have made a wake.

And instead of this, our stolid, steady, trusty old boat was--what shall I say?

I will say that no man may thoroughly understand a s.h.i.+p--after all. I will say that new s.h.i.+ps are cranky and unsteady; that old and seasoned s.h.i.+ps have their little crochets, their little fussinesses that their skippers must learn and humour if they are to get anything out of them; that even the best s.h.i.+ps may sulk at times, s.h.i.+rk their work, grow unstable, perverse, and refuse to answer helm and handling. And I will say that some s.h.i.+ps that for years have sailed blue water as soberly and as docilely as a street-car horse has plodded the treadmill of the 'tween-tracks, have been known to balk, as stubbornly and as conclusively as any old Bay Billy that ever wore a bell. I know this has happened, because I have seen it. I saw, for instance, the _Glarus_ do it.

Quite literally and truly we could do nothing with her. We will say, if you like, that that great jar and wrench when the shaft gave way shook her and crippled her. It is true, however, that whatever the cause may have been, we could not force her toward the island. Of course, we all said "current"; but why didn't the log-line trail?

For three days and three nights we tried it. And the _Glarus_ heaved and plunged and shook herself just as you have seen a horse plunge and rear when his rider tries to force him at the steam-roller.

I tell you I could feel the fabric of her tremble and shudder from bow to stern-post, as though she were in a storm; I tell you she fell off from the wind, and broad-on drifted back from her course till the sensation of her shrinking was as plain as her own staring lights and a thing pitiful to see.

We roweled her, and we crowded sail upon her, and we coaxed and bullied and humoured her, till the Three Crows, their fortune only a plain sail two days ahead, raved and swore like insensate brutes, or shall we say like mahouts trying to drive their stricken elephant upon the tiger--and all to no purpose. "d.a.m.n the d.a.m.ned current and the d.a.m.ned luck and the d.a.m.ned shaft and all," Hardenberg would exclaim, as from the wheel he would catch the _Glarus_ falling off. "Go on, you old hooker--you tub of junk! My G.o.d, you'd think she was scared!"

Perhaps the _Glarus_ was scared, perhaps not; that point is debatable.

But it was beyond doubt of debate that Hardenberg was scared.

A s.h.i.+p that will not obey is only one degree less terrible than a mutinous crew. And we were in a fair way to have both. The stokers, whom we had impressed into duty as A.B.'s, were of course superst.i.tious; and they knew how the _Glarus_ was acting, and it was only a question of time before they got out of hand.

That was the end. We held a final conference in the cabin and decided that there was no help for it--we must turn back.

And back we accordingly turned, and at once the wind followed us, and the "current" helped us, and the water churned under the forefoot of the _Glarus_, and the wake whitened under her stern, and the log-line ran out from the trail and strained back as the s.h.i.+p worked homeward.

We had never a mishap from the time we finally swung her about; and, considering the circ.u.mstances, the voyage back to San Francisco was propitious.

But an incident happened just after we had started back. We were perhaps some five miles on the homeward track. It was early evening and Strokher had the watch. At about seven o'clock he called me up on the bridge.

"See her?" he said.

And there, far behind us, in the shadow of the twilight, loomed the Other s.h.i.+p again, desolate, lonely beyond words. We were leaving her rapidly astern. Strokher and I stood looking at her till she dwindled to a dot. Then Strokher said:

"She's on post again."

And when months afterward we limped into the Golden Gate and cast anchor off the "Front" our crew went ash.o.r.e as soon as discharged, and in half a dozen hours the legend was in every sailors' boarding-house and in every seaman's dive, from Barbary Coast to Black Tom's.

It is still there, and that is why no pilot will take the _Glarus_ out, no captain will navigate her, no stoker feed her fires, no sailor walk her decks. The _Glarus_ is suspect. She will never smell blue water again, nor taste the trades. She has seen a Ghost.

THE GHOST IN THE CROSSTREES

I

Cyrus Ryder, the President of the South Pacific Exploitation Company, had at last got hold of a "proposition"--all Ryder's schemes were, in his vernacular, "propositions"--that was not only profitable beyond precedent or belief, but that also was, wonderful to say, more or less legitimate. He had got an "island." He had not discovered it. Ryder had not felt a deck under his shoes for twenty years other than the promenade deck of the ferry-boat _San Rafael_, that takes him home to Berkeley every evening after "business hours." He had not discovered it, but "Old Rosemary," captain of the barkentine _Scottish Chief_, of Blyth, had done that very thing, and, dying before he was able to perfect the t.i.tle, had made over his interest in it to his best friend and old comrade, Cyrus Ryder.

"Old Rosemary," I am told, first landed on the island--it is called Paa--in the later '60's.

He established its location and took its lat.i.tude and longitude, but as minutes and degrees mean nothing to the lay reader, let it be said that the Island of Paa lies just below the equator, some 200 miles west of the Gilberts and 1,600 miles due east from Brisbane, in Australia. It is six miles long, three wide, and because of the prevailing winds and precipitous character of the coast can only be approached from the west during December and January.

"Old Rosemary" landed on the island, raised the American flag, had the crew witness the doc.u.ment by virtue of which he made himself the possessor, and then, returning to San Francisco, forwarded to the Secretary of State, at Was.h.i.+ngton, application for t.i.tle. This was withheld till it could be shown that no other nation had a prior claim.

While "Old Rosemary" was working out the proof, he died, and the whole matter was left in abeyance till Cyrus Ryder took it up. By then there was a new Secretary in Was.h.i.+ngton and times were changed, so that the Government of Ryder's native land was not so averse toward acquiring Eastern possessions. The Secretary of State wrote to Ryder to say that the application would be granted upon furnis.h.i.+ng a bond for $50,000; and you may believe that the bond was forthcoming.

For in the first report upon Paa, "Old Rosemary" had used the magic word "guano."

He averred, and his crew attested over their sworn statements, that Paa was covered to an average depth of six feet with the stuff, so that this last and biggest of "Cy" Ryder's propositions was a vast slab of an extremely marketable product six feet thick, three miles wide and six miles long.

But no sooner had the t.i.tle been granted when there came a dislocation in the proceedings that until then had been going forward so smoothly.

Ryder called the Three Black Crows to him at this juncture, one certain afternoon in the month of April. They were his best agents. The plums that the "Company" had at its disposal generally went to the trio, and if any man could "put through" a dangerous and desperate piece of work, Strokher, Hardenberg and Ally Bazan were those men.

Of late they had been unlucky, and the affair of the contraband arms, which had ended in failure of cataclysmic proportions, yet rankled in Ryder's memory, but he had no one else to whom he could intrust the present proposition and he still believed Hardenberg to be the best boss on his list.

If Paa was to be fought for, Hardenberg, backed by Strokher and Ally Bazan, was the man of all men for the job, for it looked as though Ryder would not get the Island of Paa without a fight after all, and nitrate beds were worth fighting for.

"You see, boys, it's this way," Ryder explained to the three as they sat around the spavined table in the grimy back room of Ryder's "office."

"It's this way. There's a scoovy after Paa, I'm told; he says he was there before 'Rosemary,' which is a lie, and that his Gov'ment has given him t.i.tle. He's got a kind of dough-dish up Portland way and starts for Paa as soon as ever he kin fit out. He's got no t.i.tle, in course, but if he gits there afore we do and takes possession it'll take fifty years o'