The Iron Pirate: A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea

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THE IRON PIRATE

_UNIFORM WITH THIS WORK._

KRONSTADT. By Max Pemberton.

* * *

_Other Works by the same Author._

RED MORN. THE GIANT'S GATE. THE GARDEN OF SWORDS. A PURITAN'S WIFE. THE SEA WOLVES. THE IMPREGNABLE CITY. THE LITTLE HUGUENOT.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED.

[Illustration: THE IRON PIRATE (_p._ 124).]

THE ... IRON PIRATE

A PLAIN TALE OF STRANGE HAPPENINGS ON THE SEA

MAX PEMBERTON

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE MCMV. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

First Edition 1893. _Reprinted_ 1894, _March and July_ 1895, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1902, 1905.

Popular Edition _July_ 1899. _Reprinted August, September and October_ 1899, _February and July_ 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904.

Pocket Edition _August_, 1905.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Perfect Fool asks a Favour 1
II. I Meet Captain Black 13
III. "Four-Eyes" delivers a Message 31
IV. A Strange Sight on the Sea 43
V. The Writing of Martin Hall 59
VI. I Engage a Second Mate 92
VII. The Beginning of the Great Pursuit 101
VIII. I Dream of Paolo 114
IX. I Fall in with the Nameless Ship 123
X. The Spread of the Terror 140
XI. The Ship in the Black Cloak 153
XII. The Drinking Hole in the Bowery 166
XIII. Astern of the "Labrador" 180
XIV. A Cabin in Scarlet 193
XV. The Prison of Steel 198
XVI. Northward Ho! 205
XVII. One Shall Live 218
XVIII. The Den of Death 228
XIX. The Murders in the Cove 239
XX. I Quit Ice-Haven 262
XXI. To the Land of Man 274
XXII. The Robbery of the "Bellonic" 285
XXIII. I Go to London 298
XXIV. The Shadow on the Sea 308
XXV. The Dumb Man Speaks 329
XXVI. A Page in Black's Life 345
XXVII. I Fall to Wondering 371

THE IRON PIRATE.

_A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea._

CHAPTER I.

THE PERFECT FOOL ASKS A FAVOUR.

"En voiture! en voiture!"

If it has not been your privilege to hear a French guard utter these words, you have lost a lesson in the dignity of elocution which nothing can replace. "En voiture, en voiture; five minutes for Paris." At the well-delivered warning, the Englishman in the adjoining buffet raises on high the frothing tankard, and vaunts before the world his capacity for deep draughts and long; the fair American spills her coffee and looks an exclamation; the Bishop pays for his daughter's tea, drops the change in the one chink which the buffet boards disclose, and thinks one; the travelled person, disdaining haste, smiles on all with a pitying leer; the foolish man, who has forgotten something, makes public his conviction that he will lose his train. The adamantine official alone is at his ease, and, as the minutes go, the knell of the train-loser sounds the deeper, the horrid jargon is yet more irritating.

I thought all these things, and more, as I waited for the Perfect Fool at the door of my carriage in the harbour station at Calais. He was truly an impossible man, that small-eyed, short-haired, stooping mystery I had met at Cowes a month before, and formed so strange a friendship with. To-day he would do this, to-morrow he would not; to-day he had a theory that the world was egg-shaped, to-morrow he believed it to be round; in one moment he was hot upon a journey to St. Petersburg, in the next he felt that the Pacific Islands offered a better opportunity. If he had a second coat, no man had ever seen it; if he had a purpose in life, no man, I hold, had ever known it. And yet there was a fascination about him you could not resist; in his visible, palpitating, stultifying folly there was something so amazing that you drew to the man as to that unknown something which the world had not yet given to you, as a treasure to be worn daily in the privacy of your own enjoyment. I had, as I have said, picked the Perfect Fool up at Cowes, whither I had taken my yacht, _Celsis_, for the Regatta Week; and he had clung to me ever since with a dogged obstinacy that was a triumph. He had taken of my bread and eaten of my salt unasked; he was not a man such as the men I knew--he was interested in nothing, not even in himself--and yet I tolerated him. And in return for this toleration he was about to make me lose a train for Paris.

"WILL YOU COME ON?" I roared for the tenth time, as the cracked bell jangled and the guards hoisted the last stout person into the only carriage where there was not a seat for her. "Don't you see we shall be left behind? Hurry up! Hang your parcels! Now then--for the last time, Hall, Hill, Hull, whatever your confounded name is, are you coming?"

Many guards gave a hand to the hoist, and the Perfect Fool fell upon his hat-box, which was all the personal property he seemed to possess. He apologised to Mary, who sat in the far corner, with more grace than I had looked for from him, woke Roderick, who was in his fifth sleep since luncheon, and then gathered the remnants of himself into a coherent whole.

"Did anyone use my name?" he asked gravely, and as one offended. "I thought I heard someone call me Hull?"

"Exactly; I think I called you every name in the Directory, but I'm glad you answer to one of them."

"Yes, and I tell you what," said Roderick, "I wish you wouldn't come into a railway carriage on your hands and knees, waking a fellow up every time he tries to get a minute to himself; I don't speak for myself, but for my sister."

The Perfect Fool made a profound bow to Mary, who looked very pretty in her dainty yachting dress--she was only sixteen, I had known her all her life--and he said, "I cannot make your sister an apology worthy of her."

"If that isn't a shame, Mr. Hall," replied the blushing girl. "I never go to sleep in railway carriages."

"No, of course you don't," said Roderick, as he made himself comfortable for another nap, "but you may go to sleep in _a_ railway carriage;" then with a grunt, "Wake me up at Amiens, old man," he sank to slumber.

The train moved slowly over the sandy marsh which lies between Calais and Boulogne, and the vapid talk of the railway carriage held us to Amiens, and after. During the second half of the long journey Roderick was asleep, and Mary's pretty head had fallen against the cushion as the swing of the carriage gave the direct negative to her words at Calais station. At last, even the maker of commonplaces was silent; and as I reclined at greater length on the cushions of the stuffy compartment, I thought how strange a company we were then being carried over the dull, drear pasture-land of France, to the lights, the music, and the life of the great capital. Of the man Martin Hall--I remembered his true name in the moments of repose--I knew nothing beyond that which I have told you; but of my friends Roderick and Mary, accompanying me on this wildaway journey, I knew all that was to be known. Roderick and I had been at Caius College, Cambridge, together, friends drawn the closer in affection because our conditions in kith and kin, in possession and in purpose, in ambition and in idleness, were so very like. Roderick was an orphan twenty-four years of age, young, rich, desiring to know life before he measured strength with her, caring for no man, not vital enough to realise danger, an Englishman in tenacity of will, a good fellow, a gentleman. His sister was his only care. He gave to her the strength of an undivided love, and just as, in the shallowness of much of his life, there was matter for blame, so in this increasing affection and thought for the one very dear to him was there the strength of a strong manhood and a noble work.

For myself, I was twenty-five when the strange things of which I am about to write happened to me. Like Roderick, I was an orphan. My father had left me £50,000, which I drew upon when I was of age; but, shame that I should write it, I had spent more than £40,000 in four years, and my schooner, the _Celsis_, with some few thousand pounds, alone remained to me. Of what was my future to be, I knew not. In the senseless purpose of my life, I said only, "It will come, the tide in my affairs which taken at the flood should lead on to fortune." And in this supreme folly I lived the days, now in the Mediterranean, now cruising round the coast of England, now flying of a sudden to Paris with one they might have called a vulgarian, but one I chose to know. A journey fraught with folly, the child of folly, to end in folly, so might it have been said; but who can foretell the supreme moments of our lives, when unknowingly we stand on the threshold of action? And who should expect me to foresee that the man who was to touch the spring of my life's action sat before me--mocked of me, dubbed the Perfect Fool--over whose dead body I was to tread the paths of danger and the intricate ways of strange adventure?

But I would not weary you with more of these facts than are absolutely necessary for the understanding of this story, surpassing strange, which I judge it to be as much my duty as my privilege to write. Let us go back to the Gare du Nord, and the compartment wherein Mary and Roderick slept, while the Perfect Fool and I faced each other, surfeited with meteorological observations, sick to weariness with reflections upon the probability of being late or arriving before time. I would well have been silent and dozed as the others were doing; of a truth, I had done so had it not become very evident that the man who had begun to bore me wished at last to say something, relating neither to the weather nor to the speed of our train. His restless manner, the fidgeting of his hands with certain papers which he had taken from his great-coat pocket, the shifting of the small grey eyes, marked that within him which suffered not show except in privacy; and I waited for him, making pretence of interest in the great plain of hedgeless pasture-land which bordered the track on each side. At last he spoke, and, speaking, seemed to be the Perfect Fool no longer.

"They're both asleep, aren't they?" he asked suddenly, as he put his hand, which seemed to tremble, upon my arm, and pointed to the sleepers. "Would you mind making sure--quite sure--before I speak?--that is, if you will let me, for I have a favour to ask."

To see the man grave and evidently concerned was to me so unusual that for a moment I looked at him rather than at Roderick or Mary, and waited to know if the gravity were not of his humour and not of any deeper import. A single glance at him convinced me for the second time that I did him wrong. He was looking at me with a fitful pleading look unlike anything he had shown previously. In answer to his request I assured him at once that he might speak his mind; that, even if Roderick should overhear us, I would pledge my word for his good faith. Then only did he unbosom himself and tell me freely what he had to say.

"I wanted to speak to you some days ago," he said earnestly and quickly, as his hands continued to play with the paper, "but we have been so much occupied that I have never found the occasion. It must seem curious in your eyes that I, who am quite a stranger to you, should have been in your company for some weeks, and should not have told you more than my name. As the thing stands, you have been kind enough to make no inquiries; if I am an impostor, you do not care to know it; if I am a rascal hunted by the law, you have not been willing to help the law; you do not know if I have money or no money, a home or no home, people or no people, yet you have made me--shall I say, a friend?"

He asked the question with such a gentle inflexion of the voice that I felt a softer chord was touched, and in response I shook hands with him. After that he continued to speak.

"I am very grateful for all your trust, believe me, for I am a man that has known few friends in life, and I have not cared to go out of my way to seek them. You have given me your friendship unasked, and it is the more prized. What I wanted to say is this, if I should die before three days have passed, will you open this packet of papers I have prepared and sealed for you, and carry out what is written there as well as you are able? It is no idle request, I assure you; it is one that will put you in the place where I now stand, with opportunities greater than I dare to think of. As for the dangers, they are big enough, but you are the man to overcome them as I hope to overcome them--if I live!"

The sun fell over the lifeless scene without as he ceased to speak. I could see a crimson beam glowing upon a crucifix that stood on the wayside by the hill-foot yonder; but the cheerless monotony of plough land and of pasture, stretching away leafless, treeless, without bud or flower, herd or herdsman, church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ceased to speak. I had thought the man a fool and witless, flighty in purpose and shallow in thought, and yet he seemed to speak of great mysteries--and of death. In one moment the jester's cloak fell from him, and I saw the mail beneath. He had made a great impression upon me, but I concealed it from him, and replied jauntily and with no show of gravity--

"Tell me, are you quite certain that you are not talking nonsense?"

He replied by asking me to take his hand. I took it--it was chill with the icy cold as of death; and I doubted his meaning no more, but determined to have the whole mystery, then so faintly sketched, laid bare before me.

"If you are not playing the fool, Hall," said I, "and if you are sincere in wishing me to do something which you say is a favour to you, you must be more explicit. In the first place, how did you get this absurd notion that you are going to die into your head? Secondly, what is the nature of the obligation you wish to put upon me? It is quite clear that I can't accept a trust about which I know nothing, and I think that for undiluted vagueness your words deserve a medal. Let us begin at the beginning, which is a very good place to begin at. Now, why should you, who are going to Paris, as far as I know, simply as a common sightseer, have any reason to fear some mysterious calamity in a city where you don't know a soul?"

He laughed softly, looking out for a moment on the sunless fields, but his eyes flashed lights when he answered me, and I saw that he clenched his hands so that the nails pierced the flesh.

"Why am I going to Paris without aim, do you say? Without aim--I, who have waited years for the work I believe that I shall accomplish to-night--why am I going to Paris? Ha! I will tell you: I am going to Paris to meet one who, before another year has gone, will be wanted by every Government in Europe; who, if I do not put my hand upon his throat in the midst of his foul work, will make graves as thick as pines in the wood there before you know another month; one who is mad and who is sane, one who, if he knew my purpose, would crush me as I crush this paper; one who has everything that life can give and seeks more, a man who has set his face against humanity, and who will make war on the nations, who has money and men, who can command and be obeyed in ten cities, against whom the police might as well hope to fight as against the white wall of the South Sea; a man of purpose so deadly that the wisest in crime would not think of it--a man, in short, who is the product of culminating vice--him I am going to meet in this Paris where I go without aim--without aim, ha!"

"And you mean to run him down?" I asked, as his voice sank to a hoarse whisper, and the drops stood as beads on his brow; "what interest have you in him?"

"At the moment none; but in a month the interest of money. As sure as you and I talk of it now, there will be fifty thousand pounds offered for knowledge of him before December comes upon us!"

I looked at him as at one who dreams dreams, but he did not flinch.

"You meet the man in Paris?" I went on.

"To-night I shall be with him," he answered; "within three days I win all or lose all: for his secret will be mine. If I fail, it is for you to follow up the thread which I have unravelled by three years' hard work----"

"What sort of person do you say he is?" I continued, and he replied--

"You shall see for yourself. Dare you risk coming with me--I meet him at eight o'clock?"

"Dare I risk!--pooh, there can't be much danger."

"There is every danger!--but, so, the girl is waking!"

It was true; Mary looked up suddenly as we thundered past the fortifications of Paris, and said, as people do say in such circumstances, "Why, I believe I've been asleep!" Roderick shook himself like a great bear, and asked if we had passed Chantilly; the Perfect Fool began his banter, and roared for a cab as the lights of the station twinkled in the semi-darkness. I could scarce believe, as I watched his antics, that he was the man who had spoken to me of great mysteries ten minutes before. Still less could I convince myself that he had not many days to live. So are the fateful things of life hidden from us.

CHAPTER II.

I MEET CAPTAIN BLACK.

The lights of Paris were very bright as we drove down the Boulevard des Capucines, and drew up at length at the Hôtel Scribe, which is by the Opera House. Mary uttered a hundred exclamations of joy as we passed through the city of lights; and Roderick, who loved Paris, condescended to keep awake!

"I'll tell you what," he exclaimed, after a period of profound reflection, "the beauty of this place is that no one thinks here, except about cooking, and, after all, cooking is one of the first things worthy of serious speculation, isn't it? Suppose we plan a nice little dinner for four?"

"For two, my dear fellow, if you please," said Hall, with mock of state--he was quite the Perfect Fool again. "Mr. Mark Strong condescends to dine with me, and in that utter unselfishness of character peculiar to him insists on paying the bill--don't you, Mr. Mark?"

I answered that I did, and, be it known, I was the Mark Strong referred to.

"The fact is, Roderick," I explained, "that I made a promise to meet one of Mr. Hall's friends to-night, so you and Mary must dine alone. You can then go to sleep, don't you see, or take Mary out and buy her something."

"Yes, that would be splendid, Roderick," cried Mary, all the girlish excitement born of Paris strong upon her. "Let's go and buy a hundred things"--Roderick groaned--"but I wish, Mark, you weren't going to leave us on our first night here; you know what you said only yesterday!"

"What did I say yesterday?"

"That there were a lot of bounders in Paris--and I want to see them bound!"

I consoled her by telling her that bounders never made display after six o'clock, and assured her that Roderick had long confessed to me his intention to buy her the best hat in Paris, at which Roderick muttered exclamations for my ear only. By that time we were at the hotel, and the Perfect Fool had much to say.

"Could any gentleman oblige me with the time, English or French?" he asked; "my watch is so moved at the situation in which it finds itself that it is fourteen hours too slow."

I told him that it was ten minutes to eight, and the information quickened him.

"Ten minutes to eight, and half-a-dozen Russian princes, to say nothing of an English knight, to meet; so ho, my toilet must remain! Could anyone oblige me with a comb, fragmentary or whole?"

He continued his banter as we mounted the stairs of the cozy little hotel, whose windows overlook the core of the great throbbing heart of Paris, and so until we were alone in my room, whither he had followed me.

"Quick's the word," he said, as he shut the door, and took several articles from his hat-box, "and no more palaver. One pair of spectacles, one wig, one set of curiosities to sell--do I look like a second-hand dealer in odd lots, or do I not, Mr. Mark Strong?"

I had never seen such an utter change in any man made with such little show. The Perfect Fool was no longer before me; there was in his place a lounging, shady-looking, greed-haunted Hebrew. The haunching of the shoulders was perfect; the stoop, the walk, were triumphs. But he gave me little opportunity to inspect him or to ask for what reason he had thus disguised himself.

"It's five minutes from here," he said, "and the clocks are going eight--you are right as you are, for you are a cipher in the affair yet, and don't run the danger I run--now come!"

He passed down the stairs with this blunt invitation, and I followed him. So good was his disguise and make-pretence that the others, who were in the narrow hall, drew back, to let him go, not recognising him, and spoke to me, asking what I had done with him. Then I pointed to the new Perfect Fool, and without another word of explanation went on into the street.

We walked in silence for some little distance, keeping by the Opera, and so through to the broad Boulevard Haussmann. Thence he turned, crossing the busy thoroughfare, and passing through the Rue Joubert, stopped quite suddenly at last in the mouth of a _cul-de-sac_ which opened from the narrow street. He had something to say to me, and he gave it with quick words prompted by a quick and serious wit, for he had put off the _rôle_ of the jester at the hotel.

"This is the place," he said; "up here on the third, and there isn't much time for talk. Just this; you're my man, you carry this box of metal"--he meant the case of curiosities--"and don't open your mouth, unless you get the fool in you and want the taste of a six-inch knife. That's my risk, and I haven't brought you here to share it; so mum's the word, mum, mum, mum; and keep a hold on your eyes, whatever you see or whatever you hear. Do I look all right?"

"Perfectly--but just a word; if we are going into some den where we may have a difficulty in getting out again, wouldn't it be as well to go armed?"

"Armed!--pish!"--and he looked unutterable contempt, treading the passage with long strides, and entering a house at the far end of it.

Thither I followed him, still wondering, and passing the concierge found myself at last on the third floor, before a door of thick oak. Our first knocking upon this had no effect, but at the second attempt, and while he was pulling his hat yet more upon his eyes, I heard a great rolling voice which seemed to echo on the stairway, and so leapt from flight to flight, almost like the rattle of a cannon-shot with its many reverberations. For the moment indistinct, I then became aware that the voice was that of a man singing and walking at the same time, and seemingly in no hurry to give us admission, for he passed from room to room bellowing this refrain, and never varying it by so much as a single word:--

"There was a man of Boston town,
With his pistols three,
With his pistols three, three, three;
And never a skunk in Boston town
That he didn't chaw but me!"

When the noise stopped at last, there was silence, complete and unbroken, for at least five minutes, during which time Hall stood motionless, waiting for the door to be opened. After that we heard a great yell from the same voice, with the words, "Ahoy, Splinters, shift along the gear, will you?" and then Splinters, whoever he might be, was cursed in unchosen phrases as the son of all the lubbers that ever crowded a fo'cas'le. A mumbled discussion seemed to tread on the heels of the hullabaloo, when, apparently having arranged the "gear" to satisfaction, the man stalked to the door, singing once more in stentorian tones:

"There was a man of Boston town,
With his pistols three,
With his pistols----"

"Hullo--the darned little Jew and his kick-shaws; why, matey, so early in the morning?"

The exclamation came as he saw us, putting his head round the door, and showing one arm swathed all up in dirty red flannel. He was no sort of a man to look at, as the Scots say, for his head was a mass of dirty yellow hair, and his face did not seem to have known an ablution for a week. But there was an ugly jocular look about his rabbit-like eyes and a great mark cut clean into the side of his face which were a fit decoration for the red-burnt, pitted, and horribly repulsive countenance he betrayed. His leer, too, as he greeted Hall, was the evil leer of a man whose laugh makes those hearing hush with the horror of it; and, on my part, forgetting the warning, I looked at him and drew back repelled. This he saw, and with a flush and a display of one great stump of a tooth which protruded on his left lip, he turned on me.

"And who may you be, matey, that you don't go for to shake hands with Roaring John? Dip me in brine, if you was my son I'd dress you down with a two-foot bar. Why don't you teach the little Hebrew manners, old Josfos? but there," and this he said as he opened the door wider, "so long as our skipper will have to do with shiners to sell and land barnacles, what ken you look for?--walk right along here."

The room indicated opened from a small hall, for the place was built after the Parisian fashion--akin to that of our flats--and was a house in itself. The man who called himself "Roaring John" entered the apartment before us, bawling at the top of his voice, "Josfos, the Jew, and his pardner come aboard!" and then I found myself in the strangest company and the strangest place I have ever set eyes on. So soon as I could see things clearly through the hanging atmosphere of tobacco smoke and heavy vapour, I made out the forms of six or eight men, not sitting as men usually do in a place where they eat, but squatting on their haunches by a series of low narrow tables, which were, on closer inspection, nothing but planks put upon bricks and laid round the four sides of the apartment. Of other furniture there did not seem to be a vestige in the place, save such as pertained to the necessities of eating and sleeping. Each man lolled back on his own pile of dirty pillows and dirtier blankets; each had before him a great metal drinking-cup, a coarse knife, which I found was for hacking meat, long rolls of plug tobacco, and a small red bundle, which I doubt not was his portable property. Each, too, was dressed exactly as his fellow, in a coarse red shirt, seamen's trousers of ample blue serge, a belt with a clasp-knife about his waist, and each had some bauble of a bracelet on his arm, and some strange rings upon his fingers. In the first amazement at seeing such an assembly in the heart of civilised Paris, I did no more than glean a general impression, but that was a powerful one--the impression that I saw men of all ages from twenty-five years upwards; men marked by time as with long service on the sea; men scarred, burnt, some with traces of great cuts and slashes received on the open face; men fierce-looking as painted devils, with teeth, with none, with four fingers to the hand, with three; men whose laugh was a horrid growl like the tumult of imprisoned passions, whose threats chilled the heart to hear, whose very words seemed to poison the air, who made the great room like a cage of beasts, ravenous and ill-seeking. This and more was my first thought, as I asked myself, into what hovel of vice have I fallen, by what mischance have I come on such a company?

Martin Hall seemed to have no such ill opinion of the men, and put himself at his ease the moment we entered. I had, indeed, believed for the moment that he had brought me there with evil intent, distrusting the man who was yet little more than a stranger to me; but recalling all that passed, his disguise, his evident fear, I put the suspicion from me, and listened to him, more content, as he made his way to the top of the room and stood before one who forced from me individual notice, so strange-looking was he, and so deep did the respect which all paid him appear to be. We shall meet this man often in our travels together, you and I, my friends, so a few words, if you please, about him. He sat at the head of the rude table, as I have said, but not as the others sat, on pillows and blankets, for there was a pile of rich-looking skins--bear, tiger, and white wolf--beneath him, and he alone of all the company wore black clothes and a white shirt. He was a short man, I judged, black-bearded and smooth-skinned, with a big nose, almost an intellectual forehead, small, white-looking hands, all ablaze with diamonds, about whose fine quality there could not be two opinions; and, what was even more remarkable, there hung as a pendant to his watch-chain a great uncut ruby which must have been worth five thousand pounds. One trade-mark of the sea alone did he possess, in the dark, curly ringlets which fell to his shoulders, matted there as long uncombed, but typical in all of the man. This then was the fellow upon whose every word that company of ruffians appeared to hang, who obeyed him, as I observed presently, when he did so much as lift his hand, who seemed to have in their uncouth way a veneration for him, inexplicable, remarkable--the man of whom Martin Hall had painted such a fantastic picture, who was, as I had been told, soon to be wanted by every Government in Europe. And so I faced him for the first time, little thinking that before many months had gone I should know of deeds by his hand which had set the world aflame with indignation, deeds which carried me to strange places, and among dangers so terrible that I shudder when the record brings back their reality.

Hall was the first to speak, and it was evident to me that he cloaked his own voice, putting on the nasal twang and the manner of an East-end Jew dealer.

"I have come, Mister Black," he said, "as you was good enough to wish, with a few little things--beautiful things--which cost me moosh money----"

"Ho, ho!" sang out Captain Black, "here is a Jew who paid _much_ money for a few little things! Look at him, boys!--the Jew with much money! Turn out his pockets, boys!--the Jew with much money! Ho, ho! Bring the Jew some drink, and the little Jew, by thunder!"

His merriment set all the company roaring to his mood. For a moment their play was far from innocent, for one lighted a great sheet of paper and burnt it under the nose of my friend, while another pushed his dirty drinking-pot to my mouth, and would have forced me to drink. But I remembered Hall's words, and held still, giving banter for banter--only this, I learnt to my intense surprise that the pot did not contain beer but champagne, and that, by its bouquet, of an infinitely fine quality. In what sort of a company was I, then, where mere seamen wore diamond rings and drank fine champagne from pewter pots?

The unpleasant and rough banter ceased on a word from Captain Black, who called for lights, which were brought--rough, ready-made oil flares, stuck in jugs and pots--and Hall gathered up his trinkets and proceeded to lay them out with the well-simulated cunning of the trader.

"That, Mister Black," he said, putting a miniature of exquisite finish against the white fur on the floor, "is a portrait of the Emperor Napoleon, sometime in the possession of the Empress Josephine; that is a gold chain--he was eighteen carat--once the property of Don Carlos; here is the pen with which Francis Drake wrote his last letter to the Queen Elizabeth--beautiful goods as ever was, and cost moosh money!"

"To the dead with your much money," said the Captain with an angry gesture, as he snatched the trinkets from him, and eyed them to my vast surprise with the air of a practised connoisseur; "let's handle the stuff, and don't gibber. How much for this?" He held up the miniature, and admiration betrayed itself in his eyes.

"He was painted by Sir William Ross, and I sell him for two hundred pounds, my Captain. Not a penny less, or I'm a ruined man!"

"The Jew a ruined man! Hark at him! Four-Eyes"--this to a great lanky fellow who lay asleep in the corner--"the little Jew can't sell 'em under two hundred, I reckon; oh, certainly not; why, of course. Here, you, Splinters, pay him for a thick-skinned, thieving shark, and give him a hundred for the others."

The boy Splinters, who was a black lad, seemingly about twelve years old, came up at the word, and took a great canvas bag from a hook on the wall. He counted three hundred gold pieces on the floor--pieces of all coinages in Europe and America, as they appeared to be by their faces, and Hall, who had squatted like the others, picked them up. Then he asked a question, while the little black lad, who bore a look of suffering on his worn face, stood waiting the Captain's word.

"Mister Captain, I shall have waiting for me at Plymouth to-morrow a relic of the great John Hawkins, which, as I'm alive, you shouldn't miss. I have heard them say that it is the very sword with which he cut the Spaniards' beards. Since you have told me that you sail to-morrow, I have thought, if you put me on your ship across to Plymouth, I could show you the goods, and you shall have them cheap--beautiful goods, if I lose by them."

Now, instead of answering this appeal as he had done the others, with his great guffaw and banter, Captain Black turned upon Hall as he made his request, and his face lit up with passion. I saw that his eyes gave one fiery look, while he clenched his fists as though to strike the man as he sat, but then he restrained himself. Yet, had I been Hall, I would not have faced such another glance for all that adventure had given me. It was a look which meant ill--all the ill that one man could mean to another.

"You want to come aboard my boat, do you?" drawled the Captain, as he softened his voice to a fine tone of sarcasm. "The dealer wants a cheap passage; so ho! what do you say, Four-Eyes; shall we take the man aboard?"

Four-Eyes sat up deliberately, and struck himself on the chest several times as though to knock the sleep out of him. He seemed to be a brawny, thick-set Irishman, gigantic in limb, and with a more honest countenance than his fellows. He wore a short pea-jacket over the dirty red shirt, and a great pair of carpet slippers in place of the sea-boots which many of the others displayed. His hair was light and curly, and his eyes, keen-looking and large, were of a grey-blue and not unkindly-looking. I thought him a man of some deliberation, for he stared at the Captain and at Hall before he answered the question put to him, and then he drank a full and satisfying draught from the cup before him. When he did give reply, it was in a rich rolling voice, a luxurious voice which would have given ornament to the veriest common-place.

"Oi'd take him aboard, bedad," he shouted, leaning back as though he had spoken wisdom, and then he nodded to the Captain, and the Captain nodded to him.

The understanding seemed complete.

"We sail at midnight, tide serving," said the Captain, as he picked up the miniature and the other things; "you can come aboard when you like--here, boy, lock these in the chest."

The boy put out his hand to take the things, but in his fear or his clumsiness, he dropped the miniature, and it cracked upon the floor. The mishap gave me my first real opportunity of judging these men in the depth of their ruffianism. As the lad stood quivering and terror-struck, Black turned upon him, almost foaming at the lips.

"You clumsy young cub, what d'ye mean by that?" he asked; and then, as the boy fell on his knees to beg for mercy, casting one pitiful look towards me--a look I shall not soon forget--he kicked him with his foot, crying--

"Here, give him a dozen with your strap, one of you."

He had but to say the words, when a colossal brute seized the boy in his grip, and held his head down to the table board, while another, no more gentle, stripped his shirt off, and struck him blow after blow with the great buckle, so that the flesh was torn while the blood trickled upon the floor. The brutal act stirred the others to a fine merriment, yet for myself, I had all the will to spring up and grip the striker as he stood, but Hall, who had covered my hand with his, held it so surely, and with such prodigious strength, that my fingers almost cracked. It was the true sign-manual for me to say nothing, and I realised how hopeless such a struggle would be, and turned my head that I should not see the cruel thing to the end.

When the lad fainted they gave him a few kicks with their heavy boots, and he lay like a log on the floor, until the ruffian named "Roaring John" picked him up and threw him into the next room. The incident was forgotten at once, and Captain Black became quite merry.

"Bring in the victuals, you, John," he said, "and let Dick say us a grace; he's been doing nothing but drink these eight hours."

Dick, a red-haired, penetrating-looking Scotsman, who carried the economy of his race even to the extent of flesh, of which he was sparse, greeted the reproof by casting down his eyes into the empty can before him.

"Is a body to cheer himself wi' naething?" he asked; "not wi' a bit food and drink after twa days' toil? It's an unreasonable man ye are, Mister Black, an' I dinna ken if I'll remain another hoor as meenister to yer vessel."

"Ho, ho, Dick the Ranter sends in his resignation; listen to that, boys," said the Captain, who had found his humour again. "Dick will not serve the honourable company any longer. Ho, swear for the strangers, Dick, and let 'em hear your tongue."

The man, rascal and ill-tongued as I doubt not he was at times, refused to comply with the demand as the food at length was put upon the table. It was rich food, stews, with a profuse display of oysters, chickens, boiled, roast, à la maître d'hôtel, fine French trifles, pasties, ices--and it was to be washed down, I saw, by draughts from magnums of Pommery and Greno. I was, at this stage, so well accustomed to the scene that the novelty of a company of dirty, repulsive-looking seamen banqueting in this style did not surprise me one whit, only I wished to be away from a place whose atmosphere poisoned me, and where every word seemed garnished with some horrible oath. I whispered this thought to Hall, and he said, "Yes," and rose to go, but the Captain pulled him back, crying--

"What, little Jew, you wouldn't eat at other people's cost! Down with it, man, down with it; fill your pockets, stuff 'em to the top. Let's see you laugh, old wizen-face, a great sixty per cent. croak coming from your very boots--here, you, John, give the man who hasn't got any money some more drink; make him take a draught."

The men were becoming warmed with the stuff they had taken, and furiously offensive. One of them held Hall while the others forced champagne down his throat, and the man "Roaring John" attempted to pay me a similar compliment, but I struck the cup from his hand, and he drew a knife, turning on me. The action was foolish, for in a moment a tumult ensued. I heard fierce cries, the smash of overturned boards and lights, and remembered no more than some terrific blows delivered with my left, as Molt of Cambridge taught me, a sharp pain in my right shoulder as a knife went home, the voice of Hall crying, "Make for the door--the door," and the great yell of Captain Black above the others. His word, no doubt, saved us from greater harm; for when I had thought that my foolhardiness had undone us, and that we should never leave the place alive, I found myself in the Rue Joubert with Hall at my side, he torn and bleeding as I was, but from a slight wound only.

"That was near ending badly," he said, looking at the skin-deep cut on my shoulder. "They're wild enough sober, but Heaven save anyone from them when they're the other way!"

I looked at him steadily for a moment; then I asked--

"Hall, what does it mean? Who are these men, and what business carries you amongst them?"

"That you'll learn when you open the papers; but I don't think you will open them yet, for I'm going to succeed." He was gay almost to frivolity once more. "Did you hear him ask me to sail with him from Dieppe to-morrow?"

"I did, and I believe you're fool enough to go. Did you see the look he gave you when he said 'Yes'?"

"Never mind his look. I must risk that and more, as I have risked it many a time. Once aboard his yacht I shall have the key which will unlock six feet of rope for that man, or you may call me the Fool again."

It was light with the roseate, warm light of a late summer's dawn as we reached the hotel. Paris slept, and the stillness of her streets greeted the life-giving day, while the grey mist floated away before the scattered sunbeams, and the houses stood clear-cut in the finer air. I was hungry for sleep, and too tired to think more of the strange dream-like scene I had witnessed; but Hall followed me to my bedroom, and had yet a word to say.

"Before we part--we may not meet again for some time, for I leave Paris in a couple of hours--I want to ask you to do me yet one more service. Your yacht is at Calais, I believe--will you go aboard this morning and take her round to Plymouth? There ask for news of the American's yacht--he has only hired her, and she is called _La France_. News of the yacht will be news of me, and I shall be glad to think that someone is at my back in this big risk. If you should not hear of me, wait a month; but if you get definite proof of my death, break the seal of the papers you hold and read--but I don't think it will come to that."

So saying, he left me with a hearty handshake. Poor fellow, I did not know then that I should break the seal of his papers within three days.

CHAPTER III.

"FOUR-EYES" DELIVERS A MESSAGE.

A warming glare of the fuller sun upon my eyes, the cracking of whips, the shouting of fierce-lunged coachmen, the hum of moving morning life in the city, stirred me from a deep sleep as the clocks struck ten. I sat up in bed, uncertain in the effort of wit-gathering if night had not given me a dream rather than an experience, a chance play of the brain's imagining, and not a living knowledge of true scenes and strange men. For in this mood does nature often play with us, tricking us to fine thoughts as we lie dreaming, or creating such shows of life as we slumber, that in our first moments of wakefulness we do not detect the cheat or reckon with the phantoms. I knew not for some while, as I lay back listening to the hum of busy Paris, if the Perfect Fool had or had not told me anything, if we had gone together to a house near the Rue Joubert, or if we had remained in the hotel, if he had begged of me some favour, or if I had dreamed it. All was but a confused mind-picture, changing as a kaleidoscope, blurred, shadowy. It might have remained so long, had I not, looking about the room, become aware that a letter, neatly folded, lay on the small table at my bedside. It was the letter which brought the consciousness of reality; and in that moment I knew that I had not dreamed but lived the curious events of the night. But these are the words which Martin Hall wrote:--

"Hôtel Scribe. Seven a.m.--I leave in ten minutes, and write you
here my last word. We shall sail from Dieppe at midnight. Do not
forget to cross to Plymouth if you have any friendship for me. I
look to you alone.--MARTIN HALL."

He had left Paris then, and set out upon his great risk. The man's awe-inspiring courage, his immense self-reliance, his deep purpose, were marked strongly in those few simple words, and I had never felt so great an admiration for him. He looked to me alone, and assuredly he should not look in vain. I would follow him to Plymouth, losing no moment in the act; and I resolved then to go farther if the need should be, and to search for him in every land and on every sea, for he was a brave man whose like I had not often known.

I dressed in haste with this intention, and went to déjeûner in our private room below. Roderick was there, sleepy over his bottle of bad Bordeaux, and Mary, who insisted on taking an English breakfast, was in the height of a dissertation on Parisian tea.

"Did you ever see anything so feeble?" she said, being fond of Roderick's speech mannerisms and often mimicking them. "Isn't it pretty awful?" and she poured some from her spoon.

"'Pretty awful' is not the expression for a polite young woman," replied Roderick, with a severe yawn; "anyone who comes to Paris for tea deserves what he gets."

"Yes, and what he gets 'takes the biscuit.'"

"Mary!"

"Well, you always say, 'takes the biscuit'; why shouldn't I?"

"Because, my child, because," said Roderick, slowly and paternally, "because--why, here's Mark. Hallo! you're a pretty fellow; I hope you enjoyed yourself last night."

"Exceedingly, thanks; in fact, I may say that I had a most delightful evening with men who suited me to the--tea--thank you, Mary! I'll take a cup--and now tell me, what has he bought you?"

I thought that a judicious policy of dissimulation was the wise course at that time, for I had not then determined to share my secret even with Roderick, as, indeed, by my word I was bound not to do until Hall should so wish. In this intent I hid all my serious mood, and continued the pleasant chatter.

Mary had soon poured out a cup of the decoction which Frenchmen call tea, an aqueous product, the fluid of chopped hay long stewed in tepid water, and then she answered--

"Let me see, now, what did Roderick buy me? Oh, yes! I remember, he bought me a meerschaum pipe and a walking-stick!"

"A what?" I gasped.

"A meerschaum pipe, and a walking-stick with a little man to hold matches on the top of it."

Roderick looked guilty, and admitted it.

"You see," he said in apology, "they sold only those things at the first place we came to, and you don't expect a fellow to walk in Paris, do you? Now, when I've rested after breakfast, I suggest that we all make up our minds for a long stroll, and get to the Palais Royal."

"Well, that's about three hundred yards from here, isn't it? Are you quite sure you're equal to it?"

He looked at me reproachfully.

"You don't want a man to kill himself on his holiday, do you? You're fatally energetic. Now, I believe that the science of life is rest, the calm survey of great problems from the depths of an armchair. It's astonishing how easy things are if you take them that way; never let anything agitate you--I never do."

"No, he don't, does he, Mary? But about this excursion to the Palais Royal; I'm afraid you'll have to go alone, for I have just had a letter which calls me back to the yacht. It's awfully unfortunate, but I must go, although I will return here in a week, if possible, and pick you up; otherwise, you will hear of my movements as soon as I know them myself."

Somewhat to my astonishment, they both looked at me, saying nothing, but evidently very much surprised. Mary's big eyes were wide open with amazement, but Roderick had a more serious look on his face. He did not question me, he did not say a word, but I felt his thought--"You hold something back"--and the mute reproach was keen. Perhaps some explanation would then have been demanded had not another interruption broken the unwelcome silence. One of the servants of the hotel entered to tell me that a man who wished to speak with me was waiting outside, and asked if I would see him there or in the privacy of our room. As I could not recall that anyone in Paris had any business with me, I said, "Send the man here"; and presently he entered, when to my intense surprise I found him to be no other than one of the ruffians--the one called "Four-Eyes" by the Captain of the company I had met on the previous evening. Not that he seemed in any way abashed at the meeting--he walked into the room with a seaman's lurch, and steadied himself only when he saw Mary. Then he rang an imaginary bell-rope on his forehead, and "hitched" himself together, as sailors say, looking for all the world like some great dog that has entered a house where dogs are forbidden. His first words were somewhat unexpected--

"Oi was priest's boy in Tipperary, bedad," said he, and then he looked round as if that information should put him on good terms with us.

"Will you sit down, please?" was my request as he stood fingering his hat, and looking at Mary as though he had seen a vision, "and permit me to ask what the fact of your serving a priest in Ireland has to do with your presence here now?"

"That brings us to the point av it, and thanking yer honor, it's meself that ain't aisy on them land-craft which don't carry me cargo on an even keel at all, so I'll be standin', with no offence to the Missy, sure, an' gettin' to the writin' which is fur yer honor's ear alone as me instruckthshuns goes."

He rang the bell-rope over his right eye again, and gave me a letter, well written on good paper. I watched him as I read it, and saw that in a power of eye that was astounding, he had fixed one orb upon Mary and one upon the ceiling, and that the two objects shared his gaze, while his body swayed as though he was unaccustomed to balance himself upon a fair floor. But I read his letter, and write it for you here--

"Captain Black presents his compliments to Mr. Mark Strong, whom he
had the pleasure of receiving last night, and regrets the reception
which was offered to him. Captain Black hopes that it will be his
privilege to receive Mr. Strong on his yacht _La France_, now lying
over against the American vessel _Portland_, in Dieppe harbour, at
11 to-night, and to extend to him hospitality worthy of him and his
host."

Now, that was a curious thing indeed. Not only did it appear that my pretence of being Hall's partner in trade was completely unmasked by this man of the Rue Joubert; but he had my name--and, by his tone in writing, it was clear that he knew my position, and the fact that I was no trader at all. Whether such knowledge was good for me, I could not then say; but I made up my mind to act with cunning, and to shield Hall in so far as was possible.

"Did your master tell you to wait for any answer?" I asked suddenly, as the seaman brought his right eye from the direction of the ceiling and fixed it upon me; and he said--

"Is it for the likes of me to be advisin' yer honor? 'Sure,' says he, 'if the gentleman has the moind to wroite he'll wroite, if he has the moind to come aboard me--meanin' his yacht--he'll come aboard; and we'll be swimming in liquor together as gents should. And if so be as the gentleman' (which is yer honor), says he, 'will condescend to wipe his fate on me cabin shates, let him be aboard at Dieppe afore seven bells,' says he, 'and we'll shame the ould divil with a keg, and heave at daybreak'--which is yer honor's pleasure, or otherwise, as it's me juty to larn!"

It needed no very clever penetration on my part to read danger in every line of this invitation--not only danger to myself, who had been dragged by the heels into the business, but danger to Hall, whose disguise could scarce be preserved when mine was unmasked. And yet he had left Paris, and even then, perhaps, was in the power of the man Black and his crew! What I could do to help him, I could not think; but I determined if possible to glean something from the palpably cunning rogue who had come on the errand.

"I'll give you the answer to this in a minute," said I; "meanwhile, have a little whisky? A seaman like yourself doesn't thrive on cold water, does he?"

"Which is philosophy, yer honor--for could wather never warmed any man yet--me respects to the young lady"--here he looked deep into his glass, adding slowly, and as if there was credit to him in the recollection, "Oi was priest's boy in Tipperary, bedad"--and he drank the half of a stiff glass at a draught.

"Do you find this good weather in the Channel?" I inquired suddenly, looking hard at him over the table.

He made circles with his glass, and turned his eyes upon Mary, before he answered; and when he did, his voice died away like the fall of a gale which is tired. "Noice weather, did ye say--by the houly saints, it depends."

"On what?" I asked, driving the question home.

"On yer company," said he, returning my gaze, "and yer sowl."

"That's curious!"

"Yes, if ye have one to lose, and put anny price on it."

His meaning was too clear.

"Tell your master, with my compliments," I responded, "that I will come another time--I have business in Paris to-day!"

He still looked at me earnestly, and when he spoke again his voice had a fatherly ring. "If I make bold, it's yer honor's forgiveness I ask--but, if it was me that was in Paris I'd stay there," and putting his glass down quickly, he rolled to the door, fingered his hat there for one moment, put it on awry, and with the oft-repeated statement, "Oi was priest's boy in Tipperary, bedad," he swayed out of the room.

When he was gone, the others, who had not spoken, turned to me, their eyes asking for an explanation.

"One of Hall's friends," I said, trying to look unconcerned, "the mate on the yacht _La France_--the vessel he joins to-day."

Roderick tapped the table with his fingers; Mary was very white, I thought.

"He knows a queer company," I added, with a grim attempt at jocularity, "they're almost as rough as he is."

"Do you still mean to sail to-night?" asked Roderick.

"I must; I have made a promise to reach Plymouth without a moment's delay."

"Then I sail with you," said he, being very wide-awake.

"Oh, but you can't leave Paris; you promised Mary!"

"Yes, and I release him at once," interrupted Mary, the colour coming and going in her pretty cheeks, "I shall sail from Calais to-night with you and Roderick."

"It's very kind of you--but--you see----"

"That we mean to come," added Roderick quickly. "Go and pack your things, Mary; I have something to say to Mark."

We were alone, he and I, but there was between us the first shadow that had come upon our friendship.

"Well," said he, "how much am I to know?"

"What you choose to learn, and as much as your eyes teach you--it's a promise, and I've given my word on it."

"I was sure of it. But I don't like it, all the same--I distrust that fool, who seems to me a perfect madman. He'll drag you into some mess, if you'll let him. I suppose there's no danger yet, or you wouldn't let Mary come!"

"There can be no risk now, be quite sure of that--we are going for a three days' cruise in the Channel, that is all."

"All you care to tell me--well, I can't ask more; what time do you start?"

"By the club train. I have two hours' work to do yet, but I will meet you at the station, if you'll bring my bag----"

"Of course--and I can rest for an hour. That always does me good in the morning."

I left him so, being myself harassed by many thoughts. The talk with Black's man did not leave me any longer in doubt that Hall had gone to great risk in setting out with the ruffian's crew; and I resolved that if by any chance it could be done, I would yet call him back to Paris. For this I went at once to the office of the Police, and laid as much of the case before one of the heads as I thought needful to my purpose. He laughed at me; the yacht _La France_ was known to him as the property of an eccentric American millionaire, and he could not conceive that anyone might be in danger aboard her. As there was no hope from him, I took a fiacre and drove to the Embassy, where one of the clerks heard my whole story; and while inwardly laughing at my fears, as I could see, promised to telegraph to a friend in Calais, and get my message delivered.

I had done all in my power, and I returned to the Hôtel Scribe; but the others had left for the station. Thither I followed them, instructing a servant to come to me at the Gare du Nord if any telegram should be sent; and so reached the train, and the saloon. It was not, however, until the very moment of our departure that a messenger raced to our carriage, and thrust a paper at me; and then I knew that my warning had come too late. The paper said: "_La France_ has sailed, and your friend with her."

CHAPTER IV.

A STRANGE SIGHT ON THE SEA.

It was on the morning of the second day; three bells in the watch; the wind playing fickle from east by south, and the sea agold with the light of an August sun. Two points west of north to starboard I saw the chalky cliffs of the Isle of Wight faint through the haze, but away ahead the Channel opened out as an unbroken sea. The yacht lay without life in her sails, the flow of the swell beating lazily upon her, and the great mainsail rocking on the boom. We had been out twenty-four hours, and had not made a couple of hundred miles. The delay angered every man aboard the _Celsis_, since every man aboard knew that it was a matter of concern to me to overtake the American yacht, _La France_, and that a life might go with long-continued failure.

As the bells were struck, and Piping Jack, our boatswain--they called him Piping Jack because he had a sweetheart in every port from Plymouth to Aberdeen, and wept every time we put to sea--piped down to breakfast, my captain betrayed his irritation by an angry sentence. He was not given to words, was Captain York, and the men knew him as "The Silent Skipper"; but twenty-four hours without wind enough to "blow a bug," as he put it, was too much for any man's temper.

"I tell you what, sir," he said, sweeping the horizon with his glass for the tenth time in ten minutes, "this American of yours has taken the breeze in his pocket, and may it blow him to----I beg your pardon, I did not see that the young lady had joined us."

But Mary was there, fresh as a rose dipped in dew, and as Roderick followed her up the companion ladder, we held a consultation, the fifth since we left Calais.

"It's my opinion," said Roderick, "that if those men of yours had not been ashore on leave, York, and we could have sailed at midnight, we should have done the business and been in Paris again by this time."

"It's my opinion, sir, that your opinion is not worth a cockroach," cried the captain quite testily; "the men have nothing to do with it. Look above; if you'll show me how to move this ship without a hatful of wind, I'll do it, sir," and he strutted off to breakfast, leaving us with Dan, the forward look-out.

Dan was a grand old seaman, and there wasn't one of us who didn't appeal to him in our difficulties.

"Do you think it means to blow, Dan?" I asked, as I offered him my tobacco-pouch: and Mary said earnestly--

"Oh, Daniel, I do wish a gale would come on!"

"Ay, Miss, and so do many of us; but we can't be making wind no more'n we can make wittals--and excusing me, Miss, it ain't Daniel, not meaning no disrespect to the other gent, whose papers were all right, I don't doubt, but my mother warn't easy in larning, and maybe didn't know of him--it's Dan, Miss, free-and-easy like, but nat'ral."

"Well, Dan, do you think it will blow? Can't you promise it will blow?"

"Lor, Miss, I'd promise ye anything; but what is nater is nater, and there's an end on it--not as I don't say there won't be a hatful o' wind afore night--why should I? but as for promisin' of it, why I'd give ye a hurricane willing--or two."

We went down to breakfast, the red of sea strength on our cheeks; and in the cosy saloon we made short work of the coffee and soles, the great heaps of toast, and the fresh fruit. I could not help some gloomy thoughts as I found myself on my own schooner again, asking how long she would be mine, and how I should suffer the loss of her when all my money was spent. These were cast off in the excitement of the chase, and came only in the moments of absolute calm, when all the men aboard fretted and fumed, and every other question was: "Isn't it beginning to blow?"

The morning passed in this way, a long morning, with the sea like a mirror, and the sun as a great circle of red fire in the haze. Hour after hour we walked from the fore-hatch to the tiller, from the tiller to the fore-hatch, varying the exercise with a full inspection of every craft that showed above the horizon. At eight bells we lay a few miles farther westward, the island still visible to the starboard, but less distinct. At four bells, when we went to lunch, the heat was terrible below, and the sun was terrible on deck; but yet there was not a breeze. At six bells some dark and dirty clouds rose up from the south, and twenty hands pointed to them. At "one bell in the first dog" the clouds were thick, and the sun was hidden. Half-an-hour later there was a shrill whistling in the shrouds, and the rain began to patter on the deck, while the booms fretted, and we relieved her in part of her press of sail. When the squall struck us at last, the Channel was foaming with long lines of choppy seas; and the sky southward was dark as ink. But there was only joy of it aboard; we stood gladly as the _Celsis_ heeled to it, and rising free as an unslipped hound, sent the spray flying in clouds, and dipped her decks to the foam which washed her.

During one hour, when we must have made eleven knots, the wind blew strong, and was fresh again after that; so that we set the foresail unreefed and let the great mainsail go not many minutes later. The swift motion was an ecstasy to all of us, an unbounded delight; and even the skipper softened as we stood well out to sea, and looked on a great continent of clouds underlit with the spreading glow of the sunset, their rain setting up the mighty arched bow whose colours stood out with a rich light over the wide expanse of the east. Nor did the breeze fall, but stiffened towards night, so that in the first bell, when we came up from dinner, the _Celsis_ was straining and foaming as she bent under her pressure of canvas, and it needed a sailor's foot to tread her decks. But of this no one thought, for we had hardly come above when we heard Dan hailing--

"Yacht on the port-bow."

"What name?" came from twenty throats.

"_La France_," said Dan, and the words had scarce left his lips when the skipper roared the order--

"Stand by to go about!"

For some minutes the words "'bout ship" were not spoken. The schooner held her course, and rapidly drew up with the yacht we had set out to seek. From the first there was no doubt about her name, which she displayed in great letters of gold above her figure-head. Dan had read them as he sighted her; and we in turn felt a thrill of delight as we proved his keen vision, watching the big cutter, for such she was, heading, not for Plymouth, but for the nearer coast. But this was not the only strange thing about her course, for when she had made some few hundred yards towards the coast, she jibbed round of a sudden, with an appalling wrench at the horse; and there being, as it appeared, no hand either at the peak halyards or the throat halyards, the mainsail presently showed a great rent near the luff, while the foresail had torn free from the bolt-ropes of the stay, and was presenting a sorry spectacle as the yacht went about, and away towards France again.

Such a display of seamanship astounded our men.

"Close haul, you lubbers; close haul!" roared Dan, in the vain delusion that his voice would be heard a quarter of a mile away. "Keep down yer 'elm and close haul--wash me in rum if he ain't comin' up again, and there she goes right into it. Shake up, you gibbering fools; luff her a bit and make fast. Did ye ever see anythin' like it this side of a Margit steamer?"

The skipper said nothing, but as the yacht luffed right up into the wind again, he groaned as a man who is hurt. Piping Jack looked sorrowful too, and said, almost with tears in his eyes--

"Axin' yer pardon, sir, but hev you got a pair of eyes in your head which can make out anything unusual aboard there?"

"They're a queer lot, if that's what you mean, and they haven't got enough seamanship amongst them to run a washing tub. Is there anything else you make out?"

"A good deal, sir; and look you, there ain't a living soul on her deck, or may I never see shore again."

"By all that's curious, you're right. There isn't a man showing!"

"'Bout ship," roared the skipper, and every man ran to his post, while I touched Captain York on the shoulder and pointed to the seemingly deserted and errant yacht.

But the skipper's eyes were not those of a ground-gazer; he needed no aid from me; what others had seen, he had seen, and he nodded an affirmative to my unspoken question.

"What do you think it means?" I asked, as we came up into the wind, and the men were belaying after close hauling for the beat; "are they hiding from us, or is she deserted?"

But the only answer I got was the one word "Rum," uttered with a jerky emphasis, and taken up by Dan, who said--

"Very rum, and a good many drunk below, or I don't know the taste of it."

The obvious thought that the yacht we had sought and run down was without living men upon her decks had taken the lilt from the seamen's merry tongues, and a gloom settled on us all. Perhaps it was more than a mere surmise, for an uncanny feeling of something dreadful to come took hold of me, and I feared that, finding the yacht, we had also found the devil's work; but I held my peace on that, and made up my mind to act.

"Skipper," said I, "order a boat out; I'm going aboard her."

He looked at me, and shook his head.

"When the wind falls, perhaps; but now!" and he shrugged his shoulders.

"Is there any sign that the breeze will drop?"

"None at present; but I'll tell you more in an hour. Meanwhile," and here he whispered, "get your pistols out and say nothing to the men. I shall follow her."

His advice was wise; and as the dark began to fall and the night breeze to blow fresh, while the yacht ahead of us swung here and there, almost making circles about us, we hove to for the time and watched her. I begged Mary to go below, but she received the suggestion with merriment.

"Go below, when the men say there's fun coming! Why should I go below?"

"Because it may be serious fun."

She took my arm, and linking herself closely to me as to a brother, she said--

"Because there's danger to you and to Roderick; isn't that it, Mark?"

"Not to us any more than to the men; and there may be no danger, of course. It's only a thought of mine."

"And of mine, too. I shall stay where I am, or Roderick will go to sleep."

"What does Roderick say?"

He had joined us on the starboard side, and was gazing over the sea at the pursued yacht, which lay shaking dead in the wind's eye, but Mary's question upset whatever speculation he had entered upon.

"I've got an opinion," he drawled, with a yawn.

"You don't say so----"

"The wind's falling, and it's getting beastly dark."

"Two fairly obvious conclusions; do you think you could keep sufficiently awake to help man the boat?--in another ten minutes we shall see nothing."

"Do you think I'm a fool, that I'm going to stop here?"

"Forgive me, but I'm getting anxious. Martin Hall sailed on that yacht; and I promised to help him--but there's no need for you to do anything, you know."

"No need when you are going--pshaw, I'll fetch my Colt, and Mary shall watch us. I don't think she is afraid of much, are you, Rats?"--he called her "Rats" because they were the one thing on earth she feared--and then he went below, and I followed him, getting my revolver and my oil-skins, for I knew that it would be wet work. I had scarce reached the deck again when I felt the schooner moving; but no break of light showed the place where the other was, and the skipper called presently for a blue flare, which cast a glowing light for many hundred yards, and still left us uncertain.

"She's gone, for sure," said Dan to the men around him, for every soul on board, even including old Chasselot--called by the men "Cuss-a-lot"--our cook, was staring into the thick night; "and I wouldn't stake a noggin that her crew ain't cheated the old un at last an' gone down singing. It's mighty easy to die with your head full o' rum, but I don't go for to choose it meself, not particler."

Billy Eightbells, the second mate, was quite of Dan's opinion. The looks of the others told me then that they began to fear the adventure. Billy was the first really to give expression to the common sentiment.

"Making bold to speak," he said, "it were two years ago come Christmas as I met something like this afore, down Rio way----"

"Was it at eight bells, Billy?" asked Mary mischievously. She knew that all Billy's yarns began at eight bells.

"Well, I think it were, mum, but as I was saying----"

"Flash again," said the skipper, suddenly interrupting the harangue, and as the blue light flashed we saw right ahead of us the wanderer we sought; but she was bearing down upon us, and there was fear in the skipper's voice when he roared--

"For God's sake, hard a-starboard!"

The helm went over, and the yacht loomed up black, as our own light died away; and passed us within a cable's length. What lift of the night there was showed us her decks again; but they were not deserted, for as one or two aboard gave a great cry, I saw the white and horridly distorted face of a man who clung to the main shrouds--and he alone was guardian of the wanderer.

The horrid vision struck my own men with a deadly fearing.

"May the Lord help us!" said Dan.

"And him!" added Piping Jack solemnly.

"Was he alive, d'you think?" asked Dan.

"It's my opinion he'd seen something as no Christian man ought to see. Please God, we all get to port again!"

"Please God!" said half-a-dozen; and their words had meaning.

For myself, my thoughts were very different. That vision of the man I had left well and hopeful and strong not three days since was terrible to me. A brave man had gone to his death, but to what a death, if that agonised face and distorted visage betokened aught! And I had promised to aid him, and was drifting there with the schooner, raising no hand to give him help.

"Skipper," I cried, "this time we'll risk getting a boat off; I'm going aboard that vessel now, if I drown before I return." Then I turned to the men, and said: "You saw the yacht pass just now, and you saw that man aboard her--he's my friend, and I'm going to fetch him. Who amongst you is coming with me?"

They hung back for a moment before the stuff that was in them showed itself; then Dan lurched out, and said--

"I go!"

Billy Eightbells followed.

"And I," said he, "if it's the Old One himself."

"And I," said Piping Jack.

"And I," said Planks, the carpenter.

"Come on, then, and take your knives in your belts. Skipper, put about and show another light."

He obeyed mechanically, saying nothing; but he was a brave man, I knew. It was our luck to find that the boat went away from the davits with no more than a couple of buckets of water in her; and in two minutes' time the men were giving way, and we rose and fell to the still choppy sea, while the green spray ran from our oilskins in gallons. In this way we made a couple of hundred yards in the direction we judged the yacht would turn, and lit a flash. It showed her a quarter of a mile away, jibbing round and coming into the wind again.

"We shall catch her on the tack if she holds her bearing," said Dan, "and be aboard in ten minutes."

"What then?" said Billy.

"Ay, what then?" echoed the others.

"But it's a friend of the guv'nor's," repeated Dan, "and he's in danger--no common danger, neither. Please God, we all get to port again."

"Please God!" they responded, and Roderick, who sat at the tiller with me, whispered--

"I never saw men who liked a job less."

As the good fellows gave way again, and the boat rode easily before the wind, I noticed for the first time that the clouds were scattering; and we had not made another cable's length when a great cloud above us showed silver at its edges, and opaquely white in its centre, through which the moon shone. Anon it dissolved, and the transformation on the surface of the water was a transformation from the dark of storm to the chrome light of a summer moon. There, around us, the panorama stretched out: the sea, white-waved and rolling; the lights of a steamer to port; of a couple of sailing vessels astern; of a fishing fleet away ahead, and nearer to the shore. But these we had no thought for, since the deserted yacht was beating up to us, and we stood right in her track.

"Get a grapnel forward, and look out there," cried Dan, who was in command; and Billy stood ready, while we could hear the swish of the waves against the cutter's bows, and every man instinctively put his hand on his pistol or his knife.

As if to help us, the wind fell away as the schooner came up, and she began to shake her sails; making no way as she headed almost due east. It seemed a fit moment for effort, and Dan had just sung out "Give way," when every man who had gripped an oar let go the handle again and sat with horror writ on his countenance. For, almost with the words of the order, there was the sound as of fierce contest, of the bursting of wood, and the spread of flame; and in that instant the decks of the yacht were ripped up, and sheets of fire rose from them to the rigging above. The light of this mighty flare spread instantly over the sea about her, and far away you could look on the rolling waves, red as waves of fire. A terrible sight it was, and terrible sounds were those of the wood rending with the heat, of the stays snapping and flying, of the hissing of the flame where it met the water. But it was a sight of infinite horror to us, because we knew that one who might yet live was a prisoner of the conflagration--the one passenger, as it seemed then, of the vessel which was doomed.

"Give way," roared Dan again, for the men sat motionless with terror. "Are you going to let him burn? May God have mercy on him, for he needs mercy!"

The words awed them. They shot the long-boat forward; and I stood in her stern to observe, if I could, what passed on the burning decks. And I saw a sight the like to which I pray that I may never see again. Martin Hall stood at the main shrouds, motionless, volumes of flame around him, his figure clear to be viewed by that awful beacon.

"Why doesn't he jump it?" I called aloud. "If he can't swim, he could keep above until we're alongside"; and then I roared "Ahoy!" and every man repeated the cry, calling "Ahoy!" each time he bent to his oar, his voice hoarse with excitement. But Martin Hall never moved, his gaunt figure was motionless--the flames beat upon it, it did not stir; and we drew near enough anon and knew the worst.

"Devils' work, devils' work!" said Dan; "he's lashed there--and he's dead!" But the men still cried "Ahoy!" as they rushed their oars through the water, and were as those mad with fiery drink.

"Easy!" roared Dan. "Easy, for a parcel of stark fools! Would you run alongside her?"

There they lay, for any nearer approach would have been perilous, and even in that place where we were, twenty feet on the windward side, the heat was nigh unbearable. So near were we that I looked close as it might be into the dead face of Martin Hall, and saw that the fiends who had lashed him there had done their work too well. But I hoped in my heart that he had been dead when the end of the ship had begun to come, and that it were no reproach to me that he had perished: for to save his body from that holocaust was work no man might do.

So did we watch the mounting fire, and the last tack of the yacht _La France_. Saucily she raised her head to a new breeze, shook her great sail of flame in the night, and scattered red light about her. Then she dipped her burning jib as if in salute, and there was darkness.

"Rest to a good ship," said Dan, in melancholy mood; but I said--

"Rest to a friend." I had known the man whose death had come; and when his body went below I hungered for the grip of the hand which was then washed by the Channel waves.

"Give way," I cried to the men, who sat silent in their fear of it, and when they rowed again they cried as before, "Ahoy": so strong and vivid was the picture which the sea had then put out.

As we neared our own ship, Roderick endeavoured to speak to me, but his voice failed, and he took my hand, giving it a great grip. Then we came on board, where Mary waited for us with a white face, and the others stood silent; but we said nothing to them, going below. There I locked myself in my own cabin, and though fatigue lay heavy on me, and my eyes were clouded with the touch of sleep, I took Martin Hall's papers from my locker, and lighted the lamp to read them through.

But not without awe, for they were a message from the dead.

CHAPTER V.

THE WRITING OF MARTIN HALL.

The manuscript, which was sealed on its cover in many places, consisted of several pages of close writing, and of sketches and scraps from newspapers--Italian, French, and English. The sketches I looked at first, and was not a little surprised to see that one of them was the portrait of the man known as "Roaring John," whom I had met at Paris in the strange company; while there was with this a blurred and faint outline of the features of the seaman called "Four-Eyes," who had come to me at the Hôtel Scribe with the bidding to go aboard _La France_. But what, perhaps, was even more difficult to be understood was the picture of the great hull of what I judged to be a warship, showing her a-building, with the work yet progressing on her decks. The newspaper cuttings I deemed to be in some part an explanation of these sketches, for one of them gave a description of a very noteworthy battleship, constructed for a South American Republic, but in much secrecy; while another hinted that great pains had been taken with the vessel, which was built at a mighty cost, and on so new a plan that the shipwrights refused to give information concerning her until she had been some months at sea to prove her.

All this reading remained enigmatical, of course, and as I could make nothing of it to connect it with the events I have narrated, I went on to the writing, which was fine and small, as the writing of an exact man. And the words upon the head of it were these:--

SOME ACCOUNT OF A NAMELESS WARSHIP,

OF HER CREW, AND HER PURPOSE.

_Written for the eyes of Mark Strong, by Martin Hall, sometime
his friend._

I put from me the sorrow of the thought which the last three words brought to me, and read therefrom this history, which had these few sentences as its preface:--

"You read these words, Mark Strong, when I am dead; and I would ask
you before you go further with them to consider well if you would
wish, or have inclination for, a pursuit in which I have lost all
that a man can lose, and in which your risk, do you take the work
upon you, will be no less than mine was. For if you read what is
written here, and have in you that stuff which cannot brook
mystery, and is fired when mystery also is danger, I know that you
will venture upon this undertaking at the point where death has
held my hand; and that by so doing you may reap where I have sown.
And with this, think nor act in any haste lest you lay to my charge
that which may befall you in the pursuit you are about to begin."

I read on, for the desire to do justice to Martin Hall was strong upon me at the very beginning of it.

From that place the story was in great part autobiographical, but in no sense egotistical. It was, as you shall see, the simple narration of a man sincere in his dreaming, if he did dream; logical in his madness, if he were mad. And this was his story as first I read it:--

"Having well considered the warning which is the superscription of
this record, you have determined to continue this narrative, I do
not doubt; for I judge you to be a man who, having tasted the
succulent dish of curiosity, will not put it away until you have
eaten your fill. I will tell you, therefore, such a part of my life
as you should know when you come to ask yourself the question, 'Is
this man a fool or an imbecile, a crack-brained faddist or the
victim of hallucination?' This question should arise at a later
stage, and I beg you not to put it until you have read every word
that I have written here.

"I was born in Liverpool, thirty-three years ago, and was educated for a very few years at the well-known institute in that city. They taught me there that consciousness of ignorance which is half an education; and being the son of a man who starved on a fine ability for modelling things in clay, and plaster-moulding, I went out presently to make my living. First to America, you doubt not, to get the experience of coming home again; then to the Cape, to watch other men dig diamonds; to Rome, to Naples, to Genoa, that I might know what it was to want food; to South America as an able seaman; to Australia in the stoke-hole of a South Sea liner; home again to my poor father, who lay dead when I reached Liverpool.

"I was twenty-two years old then, and glutted with life. I had no relation living that I knew of; no friend who was not also a plain acquaintance. By what chance it was I cannot tell, but I drifted like a living log into the detective force of my city, and after working up for a few years through the grades, they put me on the landing stage at Liverpool to watch the men who wished to emigrate because they had no opinion of the police force here. It was miserable employment, but educating, for it taught me to read faces that were disguised, old men became beardless, young men made old at the touch of a _coiffeur_. I suppose I had more than common success, for when I had been so employed for five years, I was sent to London by our people and there commanded to go to the Admiralty and get new instructions. Regard this, please, as the first mark in this record I am making. Of my work for our own people I may not tell even you, since I engaged upon it under solemn bond of secrecy; but I can indicate that I was sent to Italy to pick up facts in the dockyards there, and that our people relied on my gifts of disguise, and on my knowledge of Italian, learnt upon Italian ships and in Italian ports. In short, I was expected to provide plans and accounts of many things material to our own service, and I entered on the business with alacrity, gained admittance to the public dockyards, and knew in a twelve-month all that any man could learn who had his wits only to guide him, and as much of those of other men as he could pick up.

"But I imagine your natural impatience, and your mental exclamation, 'What has all this rigmarole to do with me--how does it affect this pretended narrative?' Bear with me a moment when I tell you that it is vital to my story. It was in Italy during my second year of work that I had cause to be at Spezia, inspecting there a new type of gun-boat about which there was much talk and many opinions. I have no need to tell you, who have not the bombastic knowledge of a one-city man, that at Spezia is to be found all that is great in the naval life of Italy; on the grand forts of the bay which received the ashes of Shelley are her finest guns; on the glorious hills which arise above her limpid blue waters are her chief fortifications. There, at the feet of the hills where grows the olive, and where the vine matures to luxurious growth, you will find in juxtaposition with Nature's emblems of peace the storehouses of the shot and shell which one day shall sow the sea and the land with blood. Amongst these fortifications, amidst these adamantine terraces and turrets, my work lay; but the most part of it was done in the dockyards, both in the yards which were the property of the Government and in the private yards. My recreation was a rare cruise to the lovely gulfs which the bay embosoms, to the Casa di Mare, to Fezzano, to the Temple of Venus at the Porto Venere; or a walk when there was golden-red light on the clustering vines, and the Apennines were capped with the spreading fire which falls on them when the sun passes low at twilight. Many an hour I stood above the old town, asking why a common cheat of a spy, as I reckoned myself, should presume to find other thoughts when breathing that air laden of solitude; but they came to me whether I would or no; and it was often on my mind to throw over the whole business of prying; and to set out on a work which should achieve something, if only a little, for humanity. That I did not follow this impulse, which grew upon me from day to day, is to be laid to the charge of one of those very walks upon the hillside about which I have been telling you. It was an evening late in the year, and the sun was just setting. I watched the changing hues of the peaks as the light spread from point to point; watched it reddening the sea, and leaving it black in the shadows; watched it upon the church spires of Spezia, upon the castle roof, upon the steel hulls of great ships. And then I saw a strange thing, for amongst all the vessels which were so burnished by the invisible hand of Heaven, I saw one that stood out beyond them all, a great globe, not of silver, but of golden fire. There was no doubt about it at all; I rubbed my eyes, I used the glass I always carried with me; I viewed the hull I saw lying there from half-a-dozen heights, and I was sure that what I saw was no effect of evening light or strange refraction. The ship I looked on was built either of brass, or of some alloy of brass, as it seemed to me, for the notion that she could be plated with gold was preposterous; and yet the more I examined her, the more clearly did I make out that her hull was constructed of a metal infinitely gold-like, and of so beautiful a colour in the reddened stream which shone upon it that the whole ship had the aspect of a mirror of the purest gold I had ever seen.

"The sudden fading of the light behind the hills shut the vision--I could not call it less--from my eyes. The dark fell, and the vines rustled with the cold coming of night. I returned to the town quickly, and neglecting any thought of dinner, I went straight to the sea-front and began, if I could, to find where the water lay wherein this extraordinary steamer was docked. I had taken the bearings of it from the hills, and I was very quickly at that spot where I thought to have seen the strange vessel. There, truly enough, was a dock in which two small coasting steamers were moored, but of a sign of that which I sought there was none. I should have had the matter out there and then, searching the place to its extremity; but I had not been at my work ten minutes when I knew that I was watched. A man, dressed as a rough sailor, and remarkable for the hideousness of his face and a curious malformation of one tooth, lurked behind the heaps of sea lumber, and followed me from point to point. I did not care to have any altercation, so I left the matter there; but, being determined to probe the mystery to the very bottom, I returned in a good disguise of a common English seaman on the following evening, and again entered the dockyard. The same man was watching, but he had no suspicion of me.

"'Any job going?' I asked, and the question seemed to interest him.

"'I reckon that depends on the man,' he replied, sticking his hands deep into his pockets, and squirting his filthy tobacco all over the timber about. 'What's a little wizen chap like you good for, except to get yer neck broken?'

"'All in my line,' I answered jauntily, having fixed my plan; 'I'm starving amongst these cursed cut-throats here, and I'm ready for anything.'

"'Starving, are you! Then blarm me if you shan't earn your supper. D'y'see that four feet of bullock's fat and nigger working at them iron pins in the far corner?'--he pointed to a thick-set, dark and burly seaman working in the way he had described--'go and stick yer knife in him, and I'm good for a bottle--two, if you like, you darned little shootin' rat of a man'; and he clutched me with his great paw and shook me until my teeth chattered again. But his look was full of meaning, and I believe that he wished every word that he said.

"'Stick your knife into the man yourself,' I replied, when I was free of him, 'you great Yankee lubber--for another word I'd give you a taste of mine now.'

"He looked at me as I stood making this poor mock of a threat, and laughed till he rang up the hill-sides. Then he said--

"'You're my sort; I reckon I know your flag. Out with it, and we'll pour liquor on it, I guess; for there ain't no foolin' you--no, by thunder! You're just a daisy of a man, you are; so come along and let the nigger be. As for hurtin' of 'im--why, so help me blazes, he's my pard, he is, and I love him like my own little brother what died of lead-poisonin' down Sint Louis way. You come along, you little cuss, and see if I don't make you dance--oh, I reckon!'

"I take these words from my note-book, and write them out for you, to give you some idea of the class of man I met with first on this adventure. More of his nice language I do not intend to trouble you with; but will say that I drank with him, and later on with his companions, about as fine a dozen of self-stamped rascals as ever I wish to see. Next day, I came again to the dockyard, for the conversation of the previous evening had convinced me beyond doubt that I was at the foot of a mystery, and, to my delight, I got employment from the chief of the gang, named 'Roaring John' by his friends; and was soon at work on the simple and matter-of-fact business of cutting planks. This gave me an entry to the dockyard--all I wished at the moment.

"Now, you may ask, 'Why did you take the trouble to do all this from the mere motive of curiosity engendered by the strange ship you thought you saw from the hills?' I will tell you briefly. The fact of my being watched when I entered the dock convinced me that there was something there which no stranger might see. That which no stranger may see in a foreign yard spells also the word money. If there was any information to be got in that dock, I could sell it to my own Government, or to the first Government in Europe I chose to haggle with. This reason alone made me a hewer of wood amongst foul-mouthed companions, a tar-bedaubed loafer in a crew of loafers.

"You see me, then, at the stage when I had got admission to the dock, but had learnt nothing of the vessel. It is true that I was admitted only to the outer basin, where the coasting steamers lay, and that the man 'Roaring John' threatened me with all the curses he could command if I passed the gate which opened into the dock beyond; but such threats to a man whose business it was to lay bare mystery had no more effect on me than the braying of an ass in a field of clover. Minute by minute and hour by hour, I waited my opportunity. It came to me on the morning of the eighth day, when, in the poor hope of getting something by the loss of sleep, I reached the yard at four o'clock; and the gate being unopen, I lurked in hiding until the first man should come. He was no other than the one who had engaged me; and when he had gone in, about five minutes after I had come, he did not close the second door after him, there being no men then at their work. I need not tell you that I used my eyes well in those minutes, and while he was away--this was no more than a quarter of an hour--I had seen all I wished to see. There, sure enough, lay the most remarkable warship I had ever beheld--a great, well-armed cruiser, whose decks were bright with quick-firing guns, whose lines showed novelty in every inch of them. More remarkable than anything, however, was the confirmation of that which I had seen from the hills. The ship, seemingly, was built of the purest gold. This, of course, I knew could not be; but as the sun got up and his light fell on the vessel, I thought that I had never seen a more glorious sight. She shone with the refulgent beauty of a thousand mirrors; every foot of her deck, of her turrets, of her upper house made a sheen of dazzling fire; the points of her decklights were as beacons, all lurid and a-gold. So marvellous, truly, was her aspect, that I forgot all else but it, and stood entranced, marvelling, forgetful of myself and purpose. The flash of a knife in the air and a fearful oath brought me to my senses to know that I was in the grasp of the man 'Roaring John.'

"'Curse you for a small-eyed cheat! what are you doing here?' he asked, shaking me and threatening every minute to let me feel his steel; 'what are you doing here, you little cat of a man? Spit it out, or I'm darned if I don't spit you; oh, I guess!'

"I should have made some answer in the rough voice I always put on in this undertaking, but a bad mishap befel me. The best of my disguise was the thick, bushy black hair I wore about my face. As the ruffian went to take a firmer hold of my collar, he pulled aside a portion of my beard, and left my chin clean-shaven beneath as naturally it was. The intense surprise of this discovery seemed to hit him like a blow. He stepped back with a murderous look in his eyes--a look which meant that, if I stayed there to deal with him alone, I had not another minute to live. But I cheated him again, and, turning on my heel, I fled with all the speed I possessed, and got into the street with twenty ruffians at my heels, and a hue and cry such as I hope never to hear again.

"The escape was clever, but I reached my hotel and sat down to find expressions equal in power to my folly. The thought that I, who was a vulgar spy by profession, had committed a mistake worthy of a novelist's policeman, was gall and wormwood to me. Yet I was sure that I had cut off all hope of returning to the yard; and what information I was to get must come by other modes. The nature of these I knew not, but I was determined to set out upon a visit to Signor Vezzia, who was the builder to whom the docks wherein I worked belonged. To him I came as the pretended agent of a shipping firm in New York, with whom I had some little acquaintance, and he gave me audience readily. He was very willing to hear me when he learnt that I was in quest of a builder to lay down steamers for the American trade with Italy; and some while we passed in great cordiality, so ripe on his part that I ventured the other business.

"'By-the-by, Signor Vezzia, that's a marvellous battleship you have in your second dock; I have never seen anything like her before.'

"I spoke the words, and read him as one reads a barometer. He shrank visibly into his bulb, and the tone of his conversation marked a storm. I heard him mutter 'Diavolo!' under his breath, and then the mercury of his conversation mounted quickly.

"'Yes, yes; a curious vessel, quite a special thing, for a South American Republic, an idea of theirs--but you will extend me the favour of your pardon, I am busy'--and in his excitement he put his spectacles off and on, and called 'Giovanni, Giovanni!' to his head clerk, who made business to be rid of me. Clearly, as a piece in the game I was playing, Signor Vezzia had made his solitary move. He was no more upon my board, miserably void as it was, and in despair I mounted to my hill-top again; and spent the morning where the vines grew, looking down upon the golden ship which was built for a 'South American Republic.' That tale I never believed, for the man's face marked it as a lie as he gave it to me; but the mere telling of it added piquancy to the dish I had tasted of, and I resolved in that hour to devote myself heart and soul to the work of unravelling the slender threads, even if I lost my common employment in the business. The reverie held me long. I was roused from it by the sight of a dull vapour mounting from the funnel of the nameless ship. She was going to sail then--at the next tide she might leave Spezia, and there would be no more hope. I threw a word at my dreaming, and hurried from the vines to my hotel in the town below.

"Now you may form opinion that my prospects in this abstruse and perplexing chase were not at that time much to vaunt. My theories and my acts had led me into a mental _cul-de-sac_, a blind alley, where, in lack of exit, I took hold of every straw that the wind of thought set flying. Here was the problem at this stage as it then appeared to me:--Item (1): A ship built of some metal I had no knowledge of. Item (2): A ship that shone like a rich sunset on a garden lake. Item (3): A ship that was armed to the full, as a casual glance told me, with every kind of quick-firing guns, and with two ten-inch guns in her turret. Item (4): A ruffianly blackguard, to whom the cutting of a throat seemed meat and drink, with ten other rogues no less deserving, from a murderous point of view, put to watch about the ship that no strange eye might look upon her. Item (5): The confusion of Signor Vezzia, who made a fine tale and said at the same time with his eyes 'This is a lie, and a bad one; I'm sorry that I have nothing better ready.' Item (6): My own adamantine conviction that I stood near by some mystery, which was about to be a big mystery, and which would pay me to pursue. 'A fine bundle of nonsense,' I hear you say; 'as silly a flight of a vaporous brain as ever man conceived'--but stay your words awhile; remember that one who is bred up at the keyhole lets himself, if he be wise, be moved by his impulses, and first opinions. He does not quit them until he knows them to be false. Instinct told me to go on in this work, if I lost all other, if I starved, if I drowned, if I died at it. And to go on I meant.

"This was my musing at the Albergo, and when it was over I laughed aloud at its quixotic folly. 'Oh, poor fool,' I said, 'miserable, brain-blinded, groping fool, to talk of going on when the ship sails this night, this very night; and unless you put agents on in every part of the globe, you will never hear of her again. What a fine piece of dreamer's wit is yours! what a bar-parlour yarn to tell rustics in Somerset! Get up, and mind your own business, go on with your common labour, and let the ship and her crew go to the devil if they like.' For the matter of that, this advice perforce I had to follow, for I did not possess one single clue at that moment; and although I racked my brains for one all the afternoon, and went often to the hill-top to see if the nameless ship yet lay in the dock, I could pick up no new thread, nor light upon any infinitesimal vein of material. The very want of a _point d'appui_ irritated a brain already excited to a fine condition of unrest. Any hour the ship might sail; any hour something which would give me the name of her owner might come to me--but the hours went on and nothing came. I dined, and was no step advanced; I smoked cigars in three cafés, and was again at the beginning; I visited half-a-dozen folk I knew, and drew no word to help me. At last, mocking the whole mystery with a fine English phrase, I said, 'Let her go'; and I returned to the Albergo and to bed. I had hunted a marine covert for two days and had drawn blank.

"I have said that I went to bed, but it was a poor folly of a process, you do not doubt. I lay down, indeed, and read Poe's tales, which I love, an hour or more; then I went over the whole business again, raised every point; made my brain aflame with speculation; put out the candle; lit it again; read more mystery; held out the hand to sleep; told sleep I did not want her. You who know me will know also how useless are such gamings of man with Nature. I could not have slept if a king's ransom went with the sleeping; and so I lay fretful, blameful, scolding myself, condoling with myself, vowing the whole problem a plague and a cheat. This idle wandering might have lasted until dawn, had it not been for my neighbour in the room to my left, who began to talk with a low buzz as of a night-insect humming in a bed-curtain. The surging of the voice amused me; I lay quite still and listened to it. Now it rose loud--I gleaned a word, and was pleased; now it fell--and I fretted; but anon another voice was added to the first, and, if the one had pleased me, the second thrilled me. It was the voice of my friend who wished to stab me at the dock.

"Two words spoken by this man brought me to my feet; two more to the thin wooden door which divided our rooms, as oft you'll find them divided in cafés through Italy. With feverish impatience, I knelt to pry through the keyhole; and muttered a big oath when I saw that it was stuffed with paper, and that the sight of the two men was hidden from me. But I listened with an ear long trained to listening, and, although the men spoke so that few words reached me, I remained a whole hour upon my knees, amazed that the man should thus be sent by Providence to my very hotel; excited with the new sensation of a foot upon the trail. The ship had not sailed, then, for here was the ruffian, who watched her, wasting rest in the first hours to hold a parley; and if a parley, with whom? Why, with those who paid him for the work, I did not doubt.

"At the end of an hour the voices ceased, but there was still a movement in the room. That was hushed too; and I judged that my neighbour had gone to bed. For myself I had one of two courses before me: either to court sleep and wait luck, with the sun, or to see there and then what was in the room, and by whom it was occupied. You ask, How was that possible? but you forget my scurvy trade again. In my bag were forbidden implements sufficient to stock Clerkenwell. I took from that a brace and bit, and an oiled saw. In ten minutes I cut a hole in the partition and put my eye to it, waiting first to see if any man moved. For the moment my heart quaked as I thought that both the fellows had gone, but one look reassured me. A burly, black-bearded man sat in a reverie before a dressing-table, and I saw that there was spread upon the table a great heap of jewels which, at the lowest valuation, must have been worth a hundred thousand pounds. And beside the jewels was a big bull-dog revolver, close to the man's hand.

"The tension of the strange situation lasted for some minutes. I had no clear vision through my spy-hole, and knew not at the first watching whether the man I saw was asleep or awake. A finer inspection of him, made with a catlike poise as I knelt crouching at the door, showed me that he slept: had fallen to sleep with his fingers amongst the jewels--a great rough dog of a man clutching wealth in his dreaming. And he was, then, one of those connected with the golden ship in the harbour--the strange ship manned by cut-throats, and built for a 'South American Republic.' Indeed did the mystery deepen, the problem became more profound, every moment that I worked upon it. Who was this man? I asked, and why did he sit in an Italian hotel fingering jewels, and giving a meeting-place at midnight to a common murderer from a dockyard? Were the jewels his own? Had he stolen them? Suggestions and queries poured upon me; I felt that, whatever it might be, I would know the truth; and I resolved to dare beyond my custom, and to learn more of the bearded man and of his gems.

"Watch me, then; as I knelt for a whole hour at the place of observation, and waited for the fellow to awake. It must have been well on towards morning when he stirred in his chair, and then sat bolt upright. I thought he looked to have some tremor of nervousness upon him; clutching hastily at the jewels to put them in a great leather case, which again he shut in a large iron box, locking both, and placing the key under his pillow. After that he threw off his clothes with some impatience, and, leaving the lamp which burned upon his dressing-table, he dropped upon his bed. For myself my plan was already contrived; I had determined to go to great risk, and to enter the room--playing the common cheat again, yet more than the common cheat, for that was an enterprise which needed all the fine caution and daring which long years of police work had taught me. I had not only to ape the housebreaker, but also to get the good cunning of a jewel robber--and yet I knew that the things I had seen warranted me, from my point of view, in doing what I did, and that desperate means alone were fit to cope with the situation.

"Now the new work was quick. Being assured that my man slept, I put back with some cold glue, which was always in my tool chest, the piece I had cut from the door, and then picked the lock with one grip of my small pincers. My revolver I carried in the belt at my waist, for my hands were occupied with a soft cloth and a bottle of chloroform. I had big felt slippers upon my feet; and went straight to his bed, where I let him breathe the drug for a few moments, and deepened his light sleep until it became heavy unconsciousness. In this state I did what I would with him, and, having no fear of his awaking, I got at his keys and his jewels, and saw what I wished. There, true enough, were precious stones of all values: Brazilian diamonds, Cape stones tinged with yellow, yet big and valuable, the finer class of Indian turquoise, pink pearls, black pearls--all these loosely wrapped in tissue paper; but a magnificent parcel such as you would see only in a West End house in London. I must confess, however, that these stones interested me but little, for as I delved amongst his treasures I brought up at last a necklace of opals and diamonds, the first set gems I had discovered; and as I held them to the lamp and examined the curious grouping of the stones, and the strange Eastern form of the clasp, I knew that I had seen the bundle before. The conviction was instantaneous, powerful, convincing; yet even with my aptitude for recalling names, places, and things, I could not in my mind place those jewels. None the less was I assured that the one solid clue I had yet taken hold of was in my keeping; and, as a quick glance round the chamber told me no more, I put up the baubles in their case again, replaced the key, and quitted the chamber. Do not think, however, that I had neglected to mark my man; every line of his face was written in my mental notebook, every peculiarity of head and countenance, the shape of his arms, above all, the mould of the hands, that wonderful index to recognition; and henceforth I knew that I could pick him from a hundred thousand.

"When I had done with this business, I lay upon my bed, and brought the whole of my recollection back upon the jewels. Where had I seen them; in what circumstances; in whose hands? Again and again I travelled old ground, exhumed buried cases, dwelt upon names of forgotten criminals, and of big world people. An hour's intense mental concentration told me nothing; the dark of the hour before dawn gave way to the cold breaking of morning light, and yet I tossed in an agony of blank and futile reasoning. I must have slept from the sheer blinding of the brain somewhere about that hour; and in my dreaming I got what wakefulness had denied to me. There in my sleep was the whole history of the stones written for me. I remembered the Liverpool landing-stage; the departure of the Star liner, _City of St. Petersburg_, for New York; the arrest of the notorious jewel-thief, Carl Reichsmann; the discovery of the opal and diamond necklace upon him; the restoration of it to--to--the brain failed for a moment--then with a loud cry of delight, which roused me, I pronounced the words; to Lady Hardon, of 202A, Berkeley Square, London.

"It is a ridiculous situation to sit up in bed asking yourself if your dream be reality, or your reality be a dream; but when I awoke with that name on my lips, the joy of the thing was so surpassing that I repeated the name again and again, muttering it as I got into my clothes, using it all the time I washed, and speaking it aloud when I stood before the glass to tie my cravat. Here, I suppose the folly of the whole repetition dawned upon me, for, of a sudden, I shut my lips firm and close, and bethought me of the man in the next room. What of him? Was he still there? I listened. There was no sound, not so much as of a heavy sleeper. He had gone then, and had Lady Hardon's jewels--yet Lady Hardon, Lady Hardon----nay, but you could never know the sudden and awful emotion of that great awakening which came to me in that moment when my memory travelled quickly on to Lady Hardon's end; for I remembered then that she went down in the great steamer _Alexandria_, which was lost in the Bay of Biscay twelve months before I discovered the golden ship in the dockyard at Spezia; and I recalled the fact, known worldwide, that her famous jewels, this necklace amongst them, had gone with her to her end. Lost, I say; yet that was the account at Lloyd's; lost with never a soul to give a word about her agony; lost hopelessly in the broad of the bay. How came it, then, that this man who knew the ruffians in the dockyard below; who seemed a common fellow, yet possessed a hundred thousand pounds' worth of jewellery, how came it that he had got that which the world thought to be lying on the sands of the bay? You say, 'Pshaw, it was not the same bauble'; that is the obvious answer to my theorising, but in the recognition of historic gems a man trained as I was never makes an error. I would have staked my life that the jewels were those supposed to be under the sea; and, moved to a state of deep excitement, I left my hotel without breakfast, and mounted to the hill-top for tidings of the great vessel.

"But she had sailed, and the dock which had held her was empty.

"This discovery did not daunt me, for I had expected it. I should have been surprised if she had been at her berth; and the fact that she had weighed under cover of night fell in so well with my anticipation that I waited only to ascertain officially what ships had left Spezia during the past twenty-four hours. They told me at the Customs that the Brazilian war-vessel built by Signor Vezzia weighed at three a.m.; but more I could not learn, for these men had evidently been well bribed, and were as dumb as unfee'd lawyers. I knew that their information was not worth a groat, and hurried back to the Albergo to assure myself that my neighbour with the necklace had sailed also. To my surprise, he was at breakfast when I arrived at the hotel; and so one great link in my theoretic chain snapped at the first test. As he had not sailed with the others, he could have no direct connection with the nameless ship, no nautical part or lot with her. But what was he, then? That I meant to know as soon as opportunity should serve.

* * * * *

"I have led you up, Strong, step by step, through the details of this work to this point, that you may have the facts unalloyed as I have them; and may construct your history from this preamble as I have constructed mine. I am now about to move over the ground more quickly. I will quit Spezia, and ask you to come with me, after the interval of nigh a year--during which no man had known that which I now tell you--to London, where, in an hotel in Cecil Street, Strand, I was again the neighbour of the man with the jewels whom I had taken so daring an advantage of in Italy. Let me tell you briefly what had happened in the between-time. The day on which the nameless ship left the dock, this man--whom, I may say at once, I have always met under the name of Captain Black--quitted the town and reached Paris. Thither I followed him, staying one day in the French capital, but going onward with him on the following morning to Cherbourg. There he went aboard a small yacht, and I lost him in the Channel. I returned at once to Italy, and wired to friends in the police force at New York, at London, and San Francisco, and at three ports in South America for news (_a_) of a new war-ship lately completed at Spezia for the Brazilian republic; (_b_) of a man known as Captain Black, who left the port of Cherbourg in the cutter-yacht _La France_ on the morning of October 30th. For nearly twelve months I waited for an answer to these questions; but none came to me. To the best of my knowledge, the nameless war-ship was never seen upon the high seas. I began to ask myself, if she existed, how came it that a vessel, burnished to the beauty of gold, had been spoken of none, seen of none, reported in no harbour, mentioned in no despatch? Yet she remained known but to her crew and to me: and my study of shipping lists, gazettes, and papers in all tongues, never gave me clue to her. Only this, I had such a record of navigation as I think man never kept yet before; and I marked it as curious, if nothing more, that in the month when the cruiser quitted Spezia three ocean-going steamers, each carrying specie to the value of more than one hundred thousand pounds, went down in fair weather, and were paid for at Lloyd's. What folly! you say again; what are you going to conclude? I answer only--God grant that I conclude falsely--that this terrible thing I suspect is the phantom of a too-keen imagination.

"Now, when no tidings came, either of the ship I sought or of the man Black, I did not lose all hope. Indeed, I was much occupied making--during a month's leisure in London--a list, as far as that were possible, of all the gems and baubles which the dead men and women on the sunken steamers had owned. This was a paltry record of bracelets, and rings, and tiaras, and clasps, such stuff as any fellow of a jeweller may sell; unconvincing stuff, worth no more than a near relation for purposes of evidence. There was but one piece of the whole mass that did not come in my category--a great box with a fine painting by Jean Petitot upon its lid, and a curious circle of jasper all about the miniatures. This was a historic piece of _bijouterie_ mentioned as having once been the property of Necker, the French financier; then lost by a New York dealer, who was taking it from Paris to Boston in the steamship _Catalania_; the ship supposed to have foundered, with the loss of all hands, off the Banks of Newfoundland, sixteen days after the nameless ship left Spezia. I made a record of this trifle, and forgot it until, many months later, a private communication from the head of the New York Secret Service told me that the man I wanted was in London; that he was an American millionaire, who owned a house on the banks of the Hudson River; who had great influence in many cities, who came to Europe to buy precious stones and miniature paintings, a man who was considered eccentric by his friends. I kept the notes, and hurried to England--for I had been to Geneva some while--and took rooms in the hotel where Captain Black was staying. Three days after I was disguised as you have seen me, selling him miniatures. Within a week, by what steps I need not pause to say, I knew that the jasper box, lost, by report, in the steamer _Catalania_, was under lock and key in his bedroom.

"I cannot tell you how that discovery agitated me. Here, indeed, was my second direct link. The man had in his possession an historic and unmistakable casket, which all the world believed to be lost in a steamer from which no soul had escaped. How I treasured that knowledge! Three months the man remained in London; during three months he was not thirty hours out of my sight or knowledge. Day by day when with him, I consulted such shipping information as I could get; and scored another mark upon my record when I made sure that no inexplicable story from the sea was written while he remained ashore. This was perplexing for a surety. I could not in any way connect the man with the nameless ship, and yet he knew her crew; he was the one in whose possession the jewels were; above all, while he was ashore there were no disasters which could not be set down to ocean peril or the act of God, as the policies say. This further knowledge held me to him with the magnetic attraction of a mystery such as I have never known in my life. I resigned my work for the Government; and henceforth gave myself heart and soul to the pursuit of the man. I followed him to Paris, to St. Petersburg; I tracked him through France to Marseilles; I watched him embark, with three of the ruffians I had seen at Spezia, in his yacht again; and within a month the yacht was in harbour at Cowes without him; while a steamer, bound from the Cape to Cadiz, and known to have specie aboard her, went out of knowledge as the others had done. Then was I sure, sure of that awful dream I had dreamed, conscious that I alone shared with that man and his crew one of the most ghastly secrets that the deep has kept within her.

"The end of my story I judge now that you anticipate. Though absolutely convinced myself, I had still lack of the one direct link to make a legal chain. I had positively to connect the man Black with the nameless ship, for this I had only done so far by pure circumstance. For many months I have made no gain in this attempt. Last year in Liverpool I sketched in yet another point in my picture. I received tidings of the man in that city, and there I did trade with him in my old disguise; but he was not alone--the crew of ruffians you have known by this time kept company with him in that bold and bestial Bohemianism you will have witnessed with me. I kept vigil there a week, but lost him at the end of that time. When he reappeared in the circles of civilisation it was in Paris, but two days ago, when I asked you to accompany me. You know that I attempted to sail with him on his cruise, and your instinct tells you why. If I could, by being two days afloat in his company, prove beyond doubt that he used his yacht as a pretence; if I could prove that when he left port in her he sailed out to sea, and was picked up by the nameless ship, my chain was forged, my book complete, and I had but to call the Government to the work!

"But I have failed, and the labour I have set myself shall be done by others, but chiefly, Mark Strong, by you. From the valley of the dead whence soon I must look back, if it is to be on a life that has no achievement before God in it, I, who have laid down such a life as mine was in this cause, urge you upon it. You have youth, and money sufficient for the enterprise; you will get money in its pursuit. You have no fear of the black After, which is the end of life; but, after all, it may come to you as it came to me, that there is the finger of the Almighty God pointing to your path of duty. I have lived the life of a common eavesdropper; but believe me that in this work I have felt the call of humanity, and hoped, if I might live to accomplish it, that the Book of the Good should find some place for my name. So may you when my mantle falls upon you. What information I have, you have. The names of my friends in the cities mentioned I have written down for you; they will serve you for the memory of my name; but be assured at the outset that you will never take this man upon the sea. And as for the money which is rightly due to the one who rids humanity of this pest, I say, go to the Admiralty in London, and lay so much of your knowledge before them as shall prevent a robbery of your due; claim a fit reward from them and the steamship companies; and, as your beginning, go now to the Hudson River--I meant to go within a month--and learn there more of the man you seek; or, if the time be ripe, lay hands there upon him. And may the spirit of a dead man breathe success upon you!"

_On the yacht "Celsis" lying at Cowes, written in the month of
August, for Mark Strong._

When I put down the papers, my eyes were tear-stained with the effort of reading, and the cabin lamp was nigh out. My interest in the writing had been so sustained that I had not seen the march of daylight, now streaming through the glass above, upon my bare cabin table. But I was burnt up almost with a fever; and the oppressive fumes from the stinking lamp seemed to choke me, so that I went above, and saw that we were at anchor in the Solent, and that the whole glory of a summer's dawn lit the sleeping waters. And all the yacht herself breathed sleep, for the others were below, and Dan alone paced the deck.

The first knowledge that I had of the true effect of Martin Hall's narrative was the muttered exclamation of this old sailor--

"Ye haven't slept, sir," said he; "ye're just the colour of yon ensign!"

"Quite true, Dan--it was close down there."

"Gospel truth, without a hitch! but ye're precious bad, sir; I never seed a worse figger-'ed, excusing the liberty. I'd rest a bit, sir."

"Good advice, Dan. I'll sleep here an hour, if you'll get my rug from below."

I stretched myself on a deck-chair, and he covered my limbs almost with a woman's tenderness, so that I slept and dreamt again of Hall, of Captain Black, of the man "Four-Eyes," of a great holocaust on the sea. I was carried away by sleep to far cities and among other men, to great perils of the sea, to strange sights; but over them all loomed the phantom of a golden ship, and from her decks great fires came. When I awoke, a doctor from Southsea was writing down the names of drugs upon paper; and Mary was busy with ice. They told me I had slept for thirty hours, and that they had feared brain-fever. But the sleep had saved me; and when Mary talked of the doctor's order that I was to lie resting a week, I laughed aloud.

"You'd better prescribe that for Roderick," said I; "he'd rest a month; wouldn't you, old chap?"

"I don't know about a month, old man, but you mustn't try the system too much."

"Well, I'm going to try it now, anyway, for I start for London to-night!"

"What!" they cried in one voice.

"Exactly, and if Mary would not mind running on deck for a minute, I'll tell you why, Roderick."

She went at the word, casting one pleading look with her eyes as she stood at the door, but I gave no sign, and she closed it. I had fixed upon a course, and as Roderick, dreamingly indifferent, prepared to talk about that which he called my "madness," I took Hall's manuscript, and read it to him. When I had finished, there was a strange light in his eyes.

"Let us go at once," he said; and that was all.

CHAPTER VI.

I ENGAGE A SECOND MATE.

We caught the first train to London; and were at the Hotel Columbia by Charing Cross in time for dinner. Mary had insisted on her right to accompany us, and, as we could find no valid reason why she should not, we brought her to the hotel with us. Then by way of calming that trouble, excitement, and expectation which crowded on us both, we went to Covent Garden, where the autumn season of opera was then on, and listened to the glorious music of _Orfeo_ and the _Cavalleria_. Nor did either of us speak again that night of Hall or of his death; but I confess that the vision of it haunted my eyes, standing out upon all the scenes that were set, so that I saw it upon the canvas, and often before me the wind-worn struggle of a burning ship; while that awful "Ahoy!" of my own men yet rang in my ears.

When I returned to the hotel I wrote two letters, the beginning of my task. One was to the Admiralty, the other to the office of the Black Anchor Line of American Steamships. I told Roderick what I had done, but he laughed at the idea; so that I troubled him no more with it, awaiting its proof. On the next morning, in a few moments of privacy between us, he agreed to let me work alone for two days, and then to venture on suggestion himself. So it came to be that on the next day I found myself standing in a meagrely furnished anteroom at the Admiralty, and there waiting the pleasure of one of the clerks, who had been deputed to talk with me. He was a fine fellow, I doubt not: had much merit of his faultless bow, and great worth in the nicety of his spotless waistcoat, but God never made one so dull or so preposterous a blockhead. I see him now, rolling up the starved hairs which struggled for existence upon his chin, and letting his cuffs lie well upon his bony wrists as he asked me, with a floating drawl--

"And what service can I do for you?"

For me! What service could _he_ do for me? I smiled at him, and did not disguise my contempt.

"If there is any responsible person here," I said, with emphasis upon the word responsible, "I should be glad to impart to him some very curious, and, as it seems to me, very remarkable, information concerning a war-ship which has just left Spezia, and is supposed to be the property of the Brazilian Government."

"It's very good of you, don't you know," he replied, as he bent down to arrange his ample trousers; "but I fancy we heard something about her last week, so we won't trouble you, don't you know"; and he felt to see if his bow were straight.

"You may have heard something of the ship," I answered with warmth, "but that which I have to communicate is not of descriptive, but of national, importance. You cannot by any means have learnt my story, for there is only one man living who knows it."

He looked up at the clock a moment as though seeking inspiration, but his mind was quite vacant when he replied--

"It's awfully good of you, don't you know; we're so frightfully busy this month; if you could come up in a month's time----"

"In a month's time," I said, rising with scorn, "in a month's time, if you and yours don't stand condemned before Europe for a parcel of fools and incompetents, then you'll send for me, but I'll see you at blazes first--good-morning!"

I was outside the office before his exclamation of surprise had passed away; and within half an hour I sat in the private room of the secretary to the Black Anchor Steamship Company. He was a sharp man of business, keen-visaged as a ferret, and restless as a nervous horse long reined in. I told him shortly that I had reason to doubt the truth of the statement that a warship recently built at Spezia was intended for the purposes set down to her; that I believed she was the property of an American adventurer whose motives I scarce dared to realise; that I had proof, amounting to conviction, that this man possessed jewels which were commonly accounted as lost in his firm's steamer, _Catalania_; and that if his company would agree to bear the expense, and to give me suitable recompense if I succeeded in supporting my conjectures, I would undertake to bring him the whole history of the nameless ship within twelve months; and also to give him such knowledge as would enable him to lay hands on the man called "Captain Black," should this man prove the criminal I believed him to be. To all which tale he listened, his searching eye fixing its stare plump upon me, from time to time; but when I had done, he rang the bell for his clerk, and I could see that he felt himself in the company of a maniac. So I left him, and breathed the breath of liberty again as I went back to the hotel, and told Roderick of the utter and crushing failure waiting upon the very beginning of the task which Martin Hall had left to me.

Roderick was not at all surprised--it seemed to me rather that he was glad.

"What did I tell you?" he said, as he sat up on the couch, and took the tube of his hookah from his mouth; "who will believe such a tale as we are hawking in the market-place--selling, in fact, to the highest bidder? If a man came to you with the same account, and with no more authority to support him than the story of a dead detective--who may have lost his wits, or may never have had any to lose--would you put down a shilling to see him through with the business? Pshaw! my dear old Mark, you, with your long head and that horribly critical eyes of yours, you wouldn't give him a groat."

"Exactly, I should consider him a dupe or a stark-staring madman; but the case is different as it stands. I know--I would stake my life on it--that every word Martin Hall wrote is true, true as my life itself. I am not so sure that you are convinced, though."

I awaited his answer, but it did not come for many minutes. He had passed through his momentary enthusiasm and lay at full length upon the couch, making circles, parabolas, and ellipses of fine white smoke, while he fixed his gaze upon the frieze of the wall, as if he were counting the architraves.

"Mark," he said at last, "when we were at Harrow together an aged sage impressed upon us the meaning of Seneca's line, '_Veritas odit moras_.' I regard myself at the moment in a position of truth; but whether on calm reflection I believe the whole of your dead friend's story, I'm hanged if I know, and therefore"--here he made a long pause and smoked violently--"and therefore I have bought a steamer."

"You have done what?"

"At two o'clock to-day, in your absence, I bought the steam-yacht _Rocket_, lately the property of Lord Wilmer, now the property of Roderick Stewart, of the Hotel Columbia, London."

I think I must have laughed sorrowfully at him, as a man laughs at a drawing-room humorist, for he continued quickly--

"Before we go on board her, the yacht will be re-christened by Mary--who will stay with her dear maiden aunt in our absence--and will be named after your vessel _Celsis_. Her crew will consist of our silent friend, Captain York, of his brother as chief mate, and of your men now at Portsmouth, with half a dozen more. We shall need eight firemen, whom the agents will engage, and three engineers, already found, for I have taken on Lord Wilmer's men. Your cook, old 'Cuss-a-lot,' will serve us very well during the fourteen or fifteen days we shall need to go across the Atlantic, and we want now only a second and third officer. As these men will be mixed up with us on the quarter-deck, I have told the agents to send them up to see you here--so you'll run your eye over them and tell me if they'll do. I hate seeing people; they bore me, and I mean you to take the charge of this enterprise from the very beginning--you quite understand?"

"Roderick, my old friend, I'm as blank as a drawing-board--would you mind giving me that yarn from the beginning again--and tell me first, why are we going; then, where are we going; and after that, what has your steamer to do with the business of Martin Hall--and, well, and what we know?"

He spoke quickly in answer, and seemed disappointed.

"I hate palaver," he said, "and didn't think to find you dense, but you're growing silly at this business anyway. Now, look here; until you read me that paper in your cabin, I don't know that I ever felt anger against any man, but, before God, I'll bring the man who murdered Martin Hall, and Heaven knows how many others, to justice or I'll never know another hour's rest. You have been talking of Governments and ship-owners for twenty-four hours; but what have Governments and ship-owners to do with us? Is it money you want? Well, what's mine is yours; and I'm worth two hundred and fifty thousand pounds if I'm worth a shilling. Is it profit of a dead man's work you're after? Well then, mark your man, learn all about him, run him to his hole; and then, when other people besides yourself know his story, as it must be known in a few months' time, put your price on what is your own, and don't fear to recompense yourself. What I want you to see is this:--For some months, at any rate, we shall get no outside help in this matter from any living creature; what we're going to do must be done at our cost, which is my cost. And what we're going to do isn't to be done at this hotel, or on this couch, or in the City: it's going to be done on the high seas, and after that in America on the Hudson River, where, if Hall be right, is the home of Captain Black. It is to the Hudson River that I mean to go now--at once, as soon as money and the devil's own number of men can get the steam-yacht _Celsis_ ready for sea. And at my cost, don't forget that; though I'm a fool in the game, which is yours to make and yours to play, as it has been from the beginning, when the dead man chose you to finish it and to reckon with the scoundrels now afloat somewhere between here and the Banks. In his name I ask you now to close your hand with me on this bargain, to ask no question, to make no protests, and to remember that we sail in three days, if possible, and if not in three, then, in as small a number as will serve to get the steamer ready."

What could I say to a story such as this one? I could only wring his hand, and feel how hot it was, knowing that the same haunting wish to be up and off in pursuit was about him as about me. For half-an-hour we sat and smoked together. In three-quarters I was closeted in the room below with Francis Paolo, who had come from the agents to seek the berth of second officer to the new yacht _Celsis_. When the servant gave me this man's name, I had some misgiving at its Italian sound, but I remembered that Italy is breeding a nation of sailors; and I put off the prejudice and hurried down to see him. I found him to be a sprightly, dark-faced, black-haired Italian, apparently no more than twenty-five years old; and he greeted me with much smoothness of speech. He had served three years as third officer to the big steam-yacht owned by the noted Frenchman, the Marquis de Cluneville; and, as he was unmistakably a gentleman, and his discharges were in perfect order, I engaged him there and then for the post of second officer to the _Celsis_, and gave him orders to join her at Plymouth, where she lay, as soon as might be.

But had I known him then as I know him now, I would have paid a thousand pounds never to have seen him!

CHAPTER VII.

THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT PURSUIT.

It was our last day in London. Roderick and I sat down to dinner in the hotel, the touch of depression upon us both. Mary had left us early in the morning to go to Salisbury, where her kinsfolk lived, and I confess that her readiness to quit us without protest somewhat hurt me. I imagine that I was thinking of it, for I blurted out at last, when we had been silent for at least a quarter of an hour--

"I suppose she's arrived by this."

"No, I didn't post her till three," Roderick replied in equal reflective mood.

"Didn't post who?" I asked indignantly.

"Why, old Belle, of course. I sent her down with the guard to get her out of the way."

"Oh," I replied, "I was thinking of Mary, not of your dog."

"You always are," he said; "but, between ourselves, I'm glad she went. I thought there'd be a fuss; and if it comes to a row, as it most probably will, girls are in the way. Don't you think so? But, of course, you don't."

I didn't, and made no bones of pretence about it. Mary was a child; there was no doubt about that; but as I girded up my courage for this undertaking, I thought how much those pretty eyes would have encouraged me, and how sweet that childish laugh would have been in mid-Atlantic. But there--that's no part of this story.

We were going down to Plymouth by the nine o'clock mail from Paddington, and there was not a wealth of time to spare. So soon as we had dined, I went up to my room to put the small things of need away, meaning to be no more than five minutes at the work; but, to my amazement, the whole of the place had been turned utterly inside out by one who had been there before me. My trunk lay upside down; my writing-case was unlocked and stripped, my diary was torn and rent, my clothes were scattered; I thought at first that a common cheat of a hotel thief had been busy snapping up trifles; but I got a shock greater than any I had known since Martin Hall's death when I felt for his writing, which lay secure in its case, and found that, while the main narrative was intact, his letters to the police at New York, his plans, and his sketches had been taken. For the moment the discovery made me reel. I could not realise its import, and almost mechanically I rang for a servant, who sent the manager to me.

His perplexity and dismay were no less than mine.

"No one has any right to enter your rooms," he said; "and I will guarantee the honesty of my servants unhesitatingly. Let us ring and ask for the porter."

The porter was emphatic.

"No one has been here after you since yesterday, sir, when the Italian gentleman came," he pleaded. "To-day he sent a man for a parcel he left here, but I know of no one else who has even mentioned your name."

"What is the amount of your loss?" asked the manager, as he began to assist me to make things straight, and the question gave me inspiration. I made a hurried search, and I must have shown feeling, for I was conscious of pallor of face and momentary giddiness.

"You have lost something of great value, then?" he continued, as he watched. And I replied--

"Yes, but to myself only. Nothing has been taken from the room but papers, which may be worth ten thousand pounds to me. They are not worth a penny to anyone else."

"Oh! papers only--that is fortunate; it is, perhaps, a case for your own private detective."

"Quite so; I shouldn't have troubled you had I made a search before. I will see to it myself--many thanks."

He withdrew with profuse apologies, but I remained standing, with all the heart out of me. What, in Heaven's name, did it mean? Who had interest to rifle my portfolio and take the papers? Who could have interest? Who but the man I meant to hunt down? And what did he know of me--what? I asked, repeating the words over again, and so loudly that those in the neighbouring rooms must have heard them.

Was I watched from the very beginning? Had I to cope, at the very outset, with a man worth a million, the captain of a band of cutthroats, who stood at no devil's deed, no foul work, no crime, as Martin Hall's death clearly proved? My heart ached at the thought; I felt the sweat dropping off me; I stood without thought of any man; the one word "watched" singing in my ears like the surging of a great sea. And I had forgotten Roderick until he burst into my room, a great laugh on his lips, and a telegram in his hand; but he stood back as he saw me, and went pale, as I must have been.

"Great Scott!" he said; "what's the matter?--what are you doing? We leave in ten minutes; why aren't you ready?"

The excuse gurgled in my throat. I stammered out something, and began to pack as though pursued by Furies. Then I put him off by asking what his humour was about. He laughed again at the question--

"What do you think?" he said; "Mary's arrived all right."

"Oh, that's good; I hope she'll like Salisbury," I replied, bundling shirts, collars, and coats into my trunk with indiscriminate vigour.

"Yes, but you don't wait to hear the end," he continued, with a great roar of laughter; "she isn't at Salisbury at all; she's at Plymouth, on board the _Celsis_. She went straight down there, and devil a bit as much as sent her aunt a telegram!"

I rose up at his word, and looked him in the face.

"Well," he said, "what do you think?--you don't seemed pleased."

"I'm not pleased," I said, going on with my packing. "I don't think she ought to be there."

"I know that; we've talked it all over, but when I think of it, I don't see where the harm comes in; we can't meet mischief crossing the Atlantic, and when the danger does begin in New York I'll see she's well on the lee-side of it."

I did not answer him, for I knew that which he did not know. Perhaps he began to think that he did not do well to treat the matter so lightly, for he was mute when we entered the cab, and he did not open his lips until we were seated in the night mail for Plymouth. The compartment we rode in was reserved for us as he had wished; and, truth to tell, we neither of us had much liking for talk as the train rolled smoothly westward. We had entered upon this undertaking, so vast, so shadowy, so momentous, with such haste, and moved by such powerful motives, that I know not if some thought of sorrow did not then touch us both. Who could say if we should live to tell the tale, if our fate would not be the fate of Martin Hall, if we should ever so much as see the nameless ship, if chance would ever bring us face to face with Captain Black? And whither did we go? When should we set foot again in that England we loved? God alone could tell; and, with one great hope in a guiding and all-seeing Providence, I covered myself up in my rug, and slept until dawn came, and the fresh breezes from the Channel waves brought new strength and men's hearts to us again.

It was full day when we went on board the yacht, and I did not fail to cast a quick glance of admiration on her beautiful lines and perfect shape as I clambered up the ladder, at the top of which stood Captain York.

"Welcome aboard," he said, giving us hearty hand-shakes; and without further inspection at that hour we followed him to the cabin, where steaming coffee brought the blood to our hands and feet, and put us in better mood.

"So my sister's here," said Roderick, as he filled his cup for the third time.

"Yes, last night, no orders," jerked the skipper with his usual brevity.

"Ah, we must see to that--and the second officer----"

"Still ashore; he left a bit of writing; he'll be aboard midday!"

He had the writing in his hand, and was about to crumple it, but I caught sight of it, and snatched it from him. It was in the same handwriting as the letter which Captain Black had sent to me at the Hôtel Scribe in Paris.

"What's the matter?" said Roderick, as he heard me exclaim; but the skipper looked hard at me, and was much mystified.

"Do you know anything of the man?" he asked very slowly, as he leant back in his chair, but I had already seen the folly of my ejaculation, and I replied--

"Nothing at all, although I have seen that handwriting before somewhere; I could tell you where, perhaps, if I thought."

Roderick nodded his head meaningly, and deftly turned the subject. I yawned with a great yawn, and the episode passed as we both rose to go to our cabins. It is not well to greet the waking day with eyes that are half-closed in sleep; and, although the skipper seemed to desire some fuller knowledge as to the ends of our cruise and the course of it, we put him off, and left him to the coffee and the busy work of the final preparation. But Roderick followed me to my berth and had the matter of the handwriting out. I told him at once of the robbery of some of the papers, and the coincidence of the letter which the second mate had left with the skipper. He was quick-witted enough to see the danger; but he was quite reckless in the methods he proposed to meet it.

"There's no two thoughts about this matter at all," he said; "we've evidently run right into a trap, but luckily there's time to get out again--of course, we shall sail without a second mate?"

"That's one way out of the hole, no doubt, but it's very serious to find that our very first move in the matter is known to others. Hall said well that his diamond-buyer could command and be obeyed in ten cities: and there isn't much question that we've got one of his men aboard this ship--but I don't know that we shouldn't keep him."

"Keep him! What for?--to watch everything we do, and hear everything we say, and arrange for the cutting of our throats when we land at New York? You've a fine notion of diplomacy, Mark!"

"Perhaps so; but we won't quarrel about that. There's one thing you forget in this little calculation of yours--our men are as true as steel; this rogue couldn't turn one of them if he staked his life on it. Suppose he has come here to use his eyes, and hang about keyholes; well, we know him, fortunately; and what can he learn unless he learns it from you or me? There's not another soul aboard knows anything. You will tell the skipper that we cross to America for a pleasure trip; you will help me to keep so close an eye on Master Francis Paolo, second mate, that if he lose a hair of his head we shall know it. In that way it may turn out that we shall get from him the link which is lost in the chain; and when he would draw us, we shall pump him as dry as a sand-pit. At least, that's my way of thinking, and I don't think it's such a poor notion, after all."

"It's not poor at all--it never came to me like that. Of course, you're right; let's take the man aboard, but I wish we could have left Mary behind--don't you?"

That I did, but what could I tell him? It was bad enough to be hugging all those fears and thoughts of danger to my own heart, without setting him all a-ferment with apprehension and unrest; so I laughed off his question, and after a six hours' sleep I went aft to the quarter-deck, to take stock of the yacht and get some better acquaintance with her.

She was a finely-built ship of some seven hundred tons, and was schooner-rigged, so that she could either sail or steam. Her engines were unusually large for so small a vessel, being triple-compound; while the main saloon, aft, and the small library attached to it, showed in the luxurious fitting that her late owner had been a man of fine taste. In the very centre of her there was a deck-house for the chart-room, the skipper's and engineers' quarters, and a couple of spare cabins; but generally the accommodation was below, there being three small cabins with two berths apiece each side the saloon, and room for the steward and his men amidships. The fo'castle was large, and airy, giving ample berthing for the stokers and seamen; while the whole ornament of the deck was bright-looking with brass, and smart rails, and pots of flowers, these last showing clearly that Mary had been at work. Indeed, I had scarce made my inspection of our new ship when she burst up from below, and began her explanation, standing with flushed cheeks, while the wind played in her hair, and her eyes danced with the merriment of it.

"Come aboard," she said, mocking the seaman's "_Adsum_," and I said--

"That's evident; the question is, when are you going ashore again?"

"I don't know, but I guess I'll get ashore at New York, because I mean to go to Niagara----"

"You think you'll go ashore at New York, not 'you guess,' Mary."

"But I do guess, and I don't think, and I wish you wouldn't interrupt me with your perpetual grammar. What's the good of grammar? No one had a good time with grammar yet."

"That's not exactly the purpose of grammar----"

"No, nor of orthography, nor deportment; I learnt all these at a guinea a quarter extra when I was at school, so you're just wasting your time, because I'm finished."

"Finished?"

"Yes, didn't Roderick tell you that I went to a finishing school? You wouldn't finish me all over again, would you?"

"Not for anything--but the question is, why did you come aboard here, and why didn't you go to Salisbury? What is your old aunt thinking now?"

She laughed saucily, throwing back her head so that her hair fell well about her shoulders; and then she would have answered me, but I turned round, hearing a step, and there stood our new second mate, Francis Paolo. Our eyes met at once with a long, searching gaze, but he did not flinch. If he were a spy, he was no poor actor, and he stood his ground without the movement of a muscle.

"Well?" I said.

"Is Mr. Stewart awake yet, sir?" he said, asking for Roderick.

"I don't know, but you may wake him if he isn't."

"The skipper wants a word with him when he gets up," he continued; "we are all ready to heave anchor when he speaks."

"That's all right: I'll give you the word, so you can weigh now; perhaps, Mary, you'll go and hammer at Roderick's door, or he'll sleep until breakfast time to-morrow."

She ran at the word, and the new second mate turned to go, but first he followed the girl with his eyes, earnestly, as though he looked upon some all-fascinating picture.

I watched him walk forward, and followed him, listening as he directed the men; and a more seaman-like fellow I have never seen. If he were an Italian, he had left all accent of speech in his own country, and he gave his orders smartly and in a tone which demanded obedience. About his seamanship I never had a doubt from the first; and I say this now, a more capable officer than Francis Paolo never took a watch.

Yet he was a man of violent temper, soon displayed before me.

As I watched him from the hurricane deck, I heard a collier who had not yet left the ship give him some impudence, and look jauntily to the men for approval; but the smile was not off his cheeks when the new mate hit him such a terrific blow on the head with a spy-glass he held that the fellow reeled through the open bulwarks right into his barge, which lay along-side.

"That's to set your face straight," cried the mate after him; "next time you laugh aboard here I'll balance you on the other side."

The men were hushed before a display of temper like this; the skipper on the bridge flushed red with disapproval, but said nothing.

The order "Hands, heave anchor!" was sung out a moment after as Roderick joined me aft, the new _Celsis_ steamed away from Plymouth, and the episode was forgotten.

For truly, as we lost sight of the town and the beautiful yacht moved slowly upon the broader bosom of the Channel, thoughts of great moment held us; and I, for my part, fell to wondering if I should ever see the face of my country again.

And in that hour the great pursuit began.

CHAPTER VIII.

I DREAM OF PAOLO.

We had left the Scilly Light two days; the _Celsis_ steamed steadily on the great broad of the Atlantic. Night had fallen, and Mary had gone below, leaving me with Roderick upon the aft-deck, watching the veriest rim of a moon which gave no pretence of a picture, no ornament to the deck.

It was Paolo's watch; and the skipper had turned in, so that, save for the occasional ringing of a bell, or a call from the look-out, no sound but the whirring of the screw and the surge of the swell fell upon our ear. A night for dreamy thoughts of home, of kinsfolk, of the more tender things of life; but for us a night for the talk of that great "might be" which was then so powerful a source of speculation for both of us. And we were eager to talk, eager then as ever since the beginning of it all; eager, above all things for the moment, to know when we should next hear of Captain Black or of the nameless ship.

"I shouldn't wonder," said Roderick, after twenty surmises of the sort, "if we heard something of her as we cross. I have given York orders to keep well in the track of steamers; and if your friend Hall be right, that is just where the unknown ship will keep. I would give a thousand pounds to know the story of the man Black. What can he be? Is he mad? Is it possible that a man could commit piracy, to-day, in the Atlantic, where is the traffic of the world; where, if the Powers once learnt of it, they could hunt him down in a day? And yet, put into plain English, that is the tale your friend tells."

"It is; I have never doubted that from the first. Captain Black is either the most original villain living, or the whole story is a silly dream--besides, we have yet to learn if he is the commander of the nameless ship: we have also to learn if the nameless ship is not a myth. Time alone will tell, and our wits."

"If they are not knocked out of us in the attempt, for, see you, Mark, a man with a hole in his head is a precious poor person, and, of course, you are prepared either way, success or the other thing."

"For either; but I trust one of us may come out of it, for Mary's sake."

The thought made him very silent, and presently he turned in. I remained above for half an hour, gazing over the great sweep of the Atlantic. Paolo was on the bridge, as I have said, and, in accordance with my design, I took all opportunity of watching him. That night some inexplicable impulse held me awake when all others slept. I made pretence, first of all, to go to my cabin; and bawled a good-night to the mate as I went; but it was only to put on felt slippers and to get a warm coat, and, with these secured, I made my way stealthily amidships; and took a stand aft of the skipper's cabin, where I could pry, yet not be seen. Not that I got much for my pains; but I heard Paolo address several of the men forward, and it seemed to me that his mode of speech was not quite that which should be between officer and seaman. Perchance he was guilty of nothing more than common affability; but yet I would rather have had him gruff and meddlesome than free and intimate.

It chanced that in this watch the new men were on deck, my old crew being in the port watch, or I would have questioned them there and then. As it was, I let the matter go, and smoked; and, indeed, when another bell had struck, I was more than rewarded for my pains. Suddenly, on the far horizon over the starboard bow, I saw the flare of a blue light, bright over the water; and showing as it flared, the dark hull of a great ship. The light was unmistakably, I thought, the signal of an ocean-going steamer which had sighted another of her company still far away from us; but I had no more than time to come to this conclusion when, to my profound amazement, Paolo himself struck light to a flare which he had with him on the bridge, and answered the signal, our own light showing far out, and lighting the great moving sea on which we rode so that one could count every crest about it.

The action completely staggered me. Without a thought I rushed up the ladder to the hurricane deck and stood beside him. He started as he saw me, and I could see him biting his lips, while an ugly look came into his eyes. But I charged him at once.

"Good-evening, Mister Mate," I said; "will you kindly tell me why you burnt that blue light?"

His excuse came readily.

"I burnt it to answer the signal yonder."

"But that was no affair of ours!"

He shrugged his shoulders, and muttered something about custom and something else, which he meant to be impudent. Yet in another moment he made effort to recall himself, and met me with an open, smiling face which covered anger. I began to upbraid myself for the folly of it, bursting out thus when there was no call for show; and I turned the talk to other things, searching to learn about him and his past; yet it was without reward, for he fenced in speech with all the point of a close Scotsman. But we came down the bridge together when the new watch was set; and he took a glass of wine with me in the saloon.

It was all well acted, a fine pretence of common civility, yet I believe that we two then took acquaintance of each other in the fullest measure; and he learnt, though he did not show it, that in the game of eavesdropping there may be two that play.

When I turned in at last, the little wind there was had fallen away, so that the yacht was almost without motion; save, indeed, that long roll from which an ocean-going ship is rarely free. I had the electric light in my cabin with a tap on the end of my bunk, mighty convenient for reading and waking; but I was full of sleep in spite of what had been above, and I turned out the lamp directly I fell upon my bed.

I think I must have slept very heavily for an hour, when a great sense of unrest and waking weariness took me, and I lay, now dozing, now dreaming, so that in all my dreams I saw the face of Paolo. I seemed to walk the deck of the _Celsis_, yet was Paolo there more strong and masterful than I; again I went to the stoke-hole, and he was charging the men with much authority; I hurried thence to the saloon, and in my silly dream I thought to see Captain Black upon the one hand and Paolo on the other, and a great friendship of manner and discourse between them.

Again I slept the black sleep; but it passed into other visions, so that in one of them I seemed to be lying awake in my own cabin, and the man Paolo stood over me, looking straight into my eyes; and when I would have risen up to question him I was powerless, held still in every limb, living, yet without life or speech--a horrid dream from which I seemed to rouse myself only at the touch of something cold upon my outstretched hand; and then at last I opened my eyes and saw, during the veriest reality of time, that others looked down into mine. I saw them for some small part of a second, yet in the faint light that came from the port I recognised the face and the form, and was certain of them; for the man who had been watching me as I slept was Paolo.

A quick sense of danger waked me thoroughly then. I put my hand to the tap of the electric light and the white rays flooded the cabin. But the cabin was empty and Roderick's dog sat by my trunk, and had, I could see, been licking my hand as I lay.

I knew not how to make out the meaning of it; but I was trembling from the horror of the dream, and went above in my flannels. It was dawn then; and day was coming up out of the sea, cold and bearing mists, which lay low over the long restful waves. Dan was aft on the quarter-deck, and the first officer was on the bridge, but I looked into Paolo's bunk, and he slept there, in so heavy a sleep that I began to doubt altogether the truth of what I had believed. How could this man have left my cabin as he had done, and yet now be berthed in his own? The dream had cheated me, as dreams often do.

But more sleep was not to be thought of. I fell to talk with Dan, and paced the deck with him, asking what was his opinion of our new second mate.

He scratched his head before he answered, and looked wise, as he loved to look--

"Lord, sir, it's not for me to be spoutin' about them as is above me; but you ask me a fair question, and I'll give you a fair answer. In course, I ain't the party to be thinking ill of any man--not Dan, which is plain and English, though some as is scholars say it should be Dan'el; but what I do know, I know--you won't be contradictin' that, will you?"

I told him to get on with it; but he was woefully deliberate, cutting tobacco to chew, and hitching himself up before he was under weigh again.

"Now," he said at last, "the fact about our second is this, in my opinion--which ain't mine, but the whole of 'em--he's no more'n a ship with a voice under the fore-hatch----"

I laughed at him as I asked, "And what's the matter with a ship like that? Why shouldn't there be a voice under the fore-hatch, Dan?"

He lit his pipe behind the aft skylight, and then answered, as he puffed clouds of smoke to the lee-side--

"Well, you see, sir, as there ain't nobody a-livin' in that perticler place, you don't go for to look to hearin' of voices, or, in plain lingo, there's something queer about it."

"And that's your opinion, Dan?"

"As true as this fog's a-liftin' to windward."

I looked as he jerked his thumb to port, and, sure enough, the curtain of the fog was drawn up from the sea as the wind's wand scattered it. Glorious and joy-giving the sun arose, and the whole horizon-bound expanse of rolling, green water lay beneath us. There is something of God in every daybreak, as most men admit, but I know nothing against the glory of a morn upon the Atlantic for bringing home to a man the delight in mere existence. The very sense of strength which the breeze bears, the limitless deep green of the unmeasured seas, the great arch of the zenith, the clear view of the sun's march, the purity and the stillness and the mastery of it all, the consciousness of the puny power of man, the mind message recalling the sublimity and the awe of the unseen Power beyond--all these things impress you, move in you the deepest thoughts, turn you from the little estimates of self as Nature only can in the holiest of her moods, which are sought yet never found in the cities. Nor can I ever welcome the breath of the great sea's vigour and refuse to listen to her voice, which comes with so powerful a message, even as a message from the great Unknown, whose hand controls, and whose spirit is on, the waters.

The sound of a gun-shot to leeward awoke me from my thoughts. The fog was yet lying there upon the sea, and for some while none of us, expectant as we were, could discern aught. But, fearing that some vessel lay in distress, we put the helm up and went half-speed for a time. We had cruised thus for five minutes or more when a terrific report burst upon our ears, and this time to the alarm of every man who trod deck. For this second report was not that of a small gun such as crippled ships may use, but the thunderous echoing of a great weapon which a man-of-war only could carry.

The sound died away slowly; but in the same minute the fog lifted; and I saw, away a mile on the starboard bow, a spectacle which brought a great flush upon my face, and let me hear the sound of my own heart beating.

CHAPTER IX.

I FALL IN WITH THE NAMELESS SHIP.

There were two great ships abreast of each other, and they were steaming with so great a pressure of steam that the dark green water was cleaved into two huge waves of foam before their bows; and the spray ran right over their fo'castles and fell in tons upon their decks.

The more distant of the two ships was long in shape and dark in colour; she had four masts upon which topsails and staysails were set, and two funnels painted white, but marked with the anchor which clearly set her down to be one of the famous Black Anchor fleet. My powerful spyglass gave me a full view of her decks, which I saw to be dark with the figures of passengers and crew all crowding to the port side, wherefrom the other ship was approaching her.

Yet was it this other ship which drew our gaze rather than the great steamer which seemed to be pursued. Almost of the same length as the passenger steamer, which she now approached obliquely, she rode the long swell with perfect grace, and many of her deck-houses and part of her prow shone with the brightness of pure gold. Full the sun fell upon her in a sheen of shimmering splendour, throwing great reflected lights which dazzled the eye so that it could scarce hold any continued gaze upon her. And, indeed, every ornament on her seemed to be made of the precious metal, now glowing to exceeding brilliance in the full power of the sunlight.

She was a very big ship, as I have said, and she had all the shape of a ship of war, while the turrets fore and aft of her capacious funnel showed the muzzles of two big guns. I could see by my glass a whole wealth of armament in the foretop of her short mast forward; and high points in her fo'castle marked the spot where many other machine guns were ready for action. At her towering and lofty prow there was indicated clearly the curve of the ram which now ploughed the dark water and curdled it into the fountains of foam which fell upon her decks; while amidships, the outline of a conning-tower showed more clearly for what aggressive purpose she had been designed. There was at this spot, too, a great deck erection, with a gallery and a bridge for navigation; but no men showed upon the platform, and, for the matter of that, no soul trod her decks, so far as our observation went. Yet her speed was such as I do not believe any ship achieved before. I have spent many years upon the sea; have crossed the Atlantic in some of the most speedy of those cruisers which are the just pride of a later-day shipbuilding art; I have raced in torpedo-boats over known miles; but of this I have no measure of doubt, that the speed of which that extraordinary vessel then proved herself capable was such as no other that ever swam could for one moment cope with. Now rising majestically on the long roll of the swell, now falling into the concave of the sea, she rushed onward towards the steamer she was evidently pursuing as though driven by all the furies of the deep.

As we watched her, held rooted to our places as men who are looking upon some strange and uncanny picture, the gun in her foremost turret belched out flame and smoke, and we observed the rise and fall of a shell, which cut the water a cable's length ahead of the straining steamer and sank hissing beneath the sea. At that moment she ran up a flag upon her signal mast, and, as I read it with my glass, I saw that it was the flag of the Chilian Republic.

Now, indeed, the pursuit became so engrossing that my own men began to sing out, and this reminded me that every soul aboard the _Celsis_ had watched with me when I first set eyes on the nameless ship. I turned to our skipper, who stood near on the hurricane deck, and saw that he in turn was looking hard at me. Roderick had come up from his cabin, but rested at the top of the companion ladder in so dazed a mood that no speech came from him. The first officer had scarce his wits about him to steer our own course, and the whole of the hands forward in a little group upon the fo'castle now called out their views, then turned to ask what it meant.

It was a matter of satisfaction to me that Mary still slept, and I looked for the appearance of Paolo with some question. But he remained below through it all. And at that I wondered more.

The skipper was the first to speak.

"That ship yonder," said he, jerking his thumb to starboard; "is it any business of ours?"

"None that I know of," I replied; "but it's a mighty fine sight, skipper, don't you think, a Chilian warship running after a liner in broad daylight? What's your opinion?"

He shrugged his shoulders disdainfully, and took another sight through his glass. Then he answered me--

"It's a fine sight enough, God knows, but I would give half I'm worth to be a hundred miles away from it"; and here he suddenly wheeled, and, facing me roughly, he asked--

"Do you want me to get this boat into port again?"

"Of course. Is there any great need to answer a question like that?"

"At the moment, yes; for, with your pleasure, I'm going to put up the helm and sheer off. I'm not a man that loves fighting myself, and, with a ship and crew to look after, I've no business in any affair of that sort; but it's for you to say."

Before I could answer him, Roderick moved from his place and came up on the bridge where we stood.

"Hold on a bit, skipper," he cried, "as we are, if you please; why, man, it's a sight I wouldn't miss for a fortune."

The skipper searched him with his eyes with a keen, lasting gaze, that implied his doubt of the pair of us. His voice had a fine ring of sarcasm in it when he replied after the silence; but all he said was, "It's your affair," and then turned to the first officer.

"Don't you think he was right?" I asked Roderick in a low voice, when the chief's back was turned, but he whispered again--

"Not yet--we must see more of it; and they're too much occupied to hunt after us. We'll be away long before those two have settled accounts; and, look now, I can see a man on the bridge of the yellow ship. Do you mark him?"

I had my glass to my eye in a moment, and the light was so full upon the vessel, which must then have been a mile and a half away from us, that I could prove his words; for, sure enough, there was now someone moving upon the bridge, and, as I fixed my powerful lens, I thought that I could recognise the shape of a man; but I would not speak my mind to Roderick until I had a nearer view.

"You are right," I answered; "but what sort of a man I will tell you presently. Did you ever see anything like the pace that big ship is showing? She must be moving at twenty-five knots."

"Yes, it's amazing; and what's more, there isn't a show of smoke at her funnel."

This was true, but I had not noticed it. Throughout the strange scene we saw, this vessel of mystery never gave one sign that men worked at her furnaces below. Neither steam nor smoke came from her, no evidence, even the most trifling, of that terrible power which was then driving her through the seas at such a fearful speed.

But of the activity of her human crew we had speedily further sign; for, almost as I answered, there was some belching of flame from her turret, and this time the shell, hurtling through the air with that hissing song which every gunner knows so well, crashed full upon the fore-part of the great liner, and we heard the shout of terror which rose from those upon her decks. The men appeared at the signal-mast of the pursuer, and rapidly made signals in the common code.

"Skipper, do you see that?--they're signalling," I cried out. "Get your glass up and take a sight"; but he had already done so.

"It's the signal to lie to, and wait a boat," he said; "there's someone going aboard."

The fulfilment of the reading was instant. While yet we had not realised that the onward rush of the two boats was stayed the foam fell away from their bows; and they rode the seas superbly, sitting the long swells with a beautiful ease. But there was activity on the deck of the nameless ship, the men were at the davits on the starboard side swinging off a launch, which dropped presently into the sea with a crew of some half-a-dozen men. For ourselves, we were now quite close up to them, but so busily were they occupied that I believed we had escaped all notice. Yet I got my glass full upon the man who walked the bridge; and I knew him.

He was the man I had met in the Rue Joubert at Paris, the one styled Captain Black by my friend Hall.

The last link in the long chain was welded then. The whole truth of that weird document, so fantastical, so seemingly wild, so fearful, was made manifest; the dead man's words were vindicated, his every deduction was unanswerable. There on the great Atlantic waste, I had lived to see one of those terrible pictures which he had conceived in his long dreaming; and through all the excitement, above all the noise, I thought that I heard his voice, and the grim "Ahoys!" of my own seamen on the night he died.

This strange recognition was unknown to Roderick, who had never seen Captain Black, nor had any notion of his appearance. But he waited for some remark from me; yet, fearing to be heard, I only looked at him, and in that look he read all.

"Mark," he said, "it's time to go; we'll be the next when that ship's at the bottom."

"My God!" I answered, "he can't do such a thing as that. If I thought so, I would stand by here at the risk of a thousand lives----"

"That's wild talk. What can we do? He would shiver us up with one of his machine guns--and, besides, we have Mary on board."

Indeed, she stood by us as we spoke, very pale and quiet, looking where the two ships lay motionless, the boat from the one now at the very side of the black steamer, whose name, the _Ocean King_, we could plainly read. She had, unnoticed by us, seen the work of the last shell, which splintered the groaning vessel, and made her reel upon the water, and Mary's instinct told her that we stood where danger was.

"Don't you think you're better below, Mary?" asked Roderick; but she had her old answer--

"Not until you go; and why should I make any difference? I overheard what you said. Am I to stand between you and those men's lives?"

She clung to my arm as she spoke, and her boldness gave us new courage.

"I am for standing by to the end," said I; "if we save one soul, it's an English work to do, anyway."

Roderick looked at Mary, and then he turned to the skipper--

"Do you wish to go on the other tack now?" he asked; but the skipper was himself again.

"Gentlemen," he said, "it's your yacht, and these are your men; if you care to keep them afloat, keep them. If it's your fancy to do the other thing, why, do it. It's a matter of indifference to me."

His words were heard by all the hands, and from that time there was something of a clamour amongst them; but I stepped forward to have out what was in my mind, and they heard me quietly.

"Men," I said, "there's ugly work over there, work which I make nothing of; but it's clear that an English ship is running from a foreigner, and may want help. Shall we leave her, or shall we stand by?"

They gave a great shout at this, and the skipper touched the bell, which stopped the engines. We lay then quite near both to the pursued and the pursuer, and there was no longer any doubt that we had been seen.

Glasses were turned upon us from the decks of the yellow ship, and from the poop of the _Ocean King_, whose men were still busy with the signal flags, and this time, as we made out, in a direct request to us that we should stand by.

I doubt not that the excitement and the danger of the position alone nerved us to this work of amazing foolhardiness, which was so like to have ended in our complete undoing; and, as I watched the captain of the steamer parleying with the men in the launch below him, I could but ask--What next? when will our turn be?

But the scene was destined to end in a way altogether different from what we had anticipated.

While a tall man with fair hair--my glass gave me the impression that he was the fellow known as "Roaring John"--stood in the bows of the launch, and appeared to be gesticulating wildly to the skipper of the _Ocean King_, the nameless ship set up of a sudden a great shrieking with her deck whistle, which she blew three times with terrific power; and at the third sound of it the launch, which had been holding to the side of the steamer, let go, running rapidly back to the armed vessel, where it was taken aboard again.

The whole thing was done in so short a space of time that our men had scarce an opportunity to express surprise when the launch was hanging at the davits again. The great activity that we had observed on the decks of the war-vessel ceased as mysteriously as it had begun. Again there was no sign of living being about her; but she moved at once, and bounded past us at a speed the like of which I had never seen upon the deep.

So remarkable a face-about seemed to dumbfound our men. They stood staring at each other like those amazed, and seeking explanation. But the key to the riddle was given, not by one of them, but by Paolo, whom I now found at my elbow, his usually placid face all aglow with excitement.

"Ha!" he cried, "she's American!"

He made a wild point at the far horizon over our stern; and then I saw what troubled him. There was a great white steamer coming up at a high speed, and I knew the form of her at once, and of two others that followed her. She was one of the American navy, crossing to her own country from Europe, whither she had been to watch the British manoeuvres. The secret of the flight was no longer inexplicable; the yellow ship had fled from the trap into which she was so nearly falling.

"You have sharp eyes, Paolo," said I; "I imagine it's lucky for the pair of us."

He shrugged his shoulders angrily, and then said very meaningly--

"Perhaps."

I had no time to reckon with him, for I was as much absorbed as he was in the scene which followed. The nameless ship, of a sudden, ceased her flight, and came almost to a stand some half a mile away on our port-bow. For a moment her purpose was hidden, yet only for a moment. As she swung round to head the seas, I saw at once that another cruiser, long and white, and seemingly well-armed had come up upon that side, and now barred her passage. At last, she was to cope with one worthy of her, and at the promise of battle, a hush, awful in its intensity, fell upon all of us.

For some minutes the two vessels lay, the one broadside to the other, the Americans making signals which were unanswered; but the nameless ship had now hundreds of men about her decks, and these were at the machine-guns and elsewhere active in preparation. It became plain that her captain had made up his mind to some plan, for the great hull swung round slowly, and passed at a moderate speed past the bow of the other. When she was nearly clear, her two great guns were fired almost simultaneously, and, as the shells swept along the deck of the cruiser, they carried men and masts and deck-houses with them, in one devilish confusion of wreckage and of death. To such an onslaught there was no answer. The cruiser was utterly unprepared for the treachery, and lay reeling on the sea; screams and fearful cries coming from her decks, now quivering under a torrent of fire as her opponent treated her to the hail of her machine-guns.

The battle could have ended but in one way, had not the other American warships now come so close to us that they opened fire with their great guns. The huge shells hissed over our heads, and all about us, plunging into the sea with such mighty concussions that fountains of green water arose in twenty places, and the near surface of the Atlantic became turbulent with foam. Such a powerful onslaught could have been resisted by no single vessel, and, seeing that he was like to be surrounded, the captain of the nameless ship, which had already been struck three times in her armour, fired twice from his turrets, and then headed off at that prodigious speed he had shown in the beginning of his flight. In five minutes he was out of gun-shot; in ten, the American vessels were taking men from their crippled cruiser, whose antagonists had almost disappeared on the horizon!

Upon our own decks the noise and hubbub were almost deafening. From a state of nervous tension and doubt our men had passed to a state of joy. Half of them were for going aboard the damaged vessels at once; half for getting under weigh and moving from such dangerous waters. Our talk upon the quarter-deck soon brought us to the first-named course, and we put out a boat with ease upon the still sea, and hailed the passenger steamer after twenty minutes' stout rowing. She was yet a pitiful spectacle; for as we drew near to her, I could see women weeping hysterically on the seats aft, and men alternately helping them and looking over in the direction whence the three American ironclads steamed. Indeed, it was a picture of great confusion and distress, and we hailed those on her bridge three times before we got any answer. When we did get up on her main-deck, Captain Ross, her commander, greeted us with great thanks; but he was a sorry spectacle of a man, being white as his own ensign with anger, and his voice trembled as the voice of a man suffering some great emotion. He took us to his chart-room, for he would have all particulars about us, both our names and addresses, with those of our officers, for a witness when he should call the British Government to take action.

"Twenty years," he said, with tears of anger in his eyes, "twenty years I have crossed the Atlantic, but this is the first time that I ever heard the like. Good God, sirs! it's nothing less than piracy on the high seas; and they shall swing, every man Jack of them, as high as Haman! What think ye? They signal me to lie to--me that has the mails and a hundred thousand pounds in specie aboard; they fire a shot across my bows, and when I signal that I'll see them in hell before I bate a knot, why--you watched it yourselves--they struck me in the fo'castle, and there's two of my dead men below now; but they shall swing"--and he brought his fist upon the table with a mighty thud--"they shall swing, if there's only one rope in Europe."

I had sorrow for the man who was thus moved--for the most part, I could see, at the loss of his two men. Then I went forward with the others to the place of wreckage, and for the first time in my life I observed the colossal havoc which a shell may leave in its path. The single shot which had struck the steamer had cut her two skins of steel as though they had been skins of cheese: had splintered the wood of the men's bunks, so that it lay in match-like fragments which a fine knife might have hewed; had passed again through the steel on the starboard side, and so burst, leaving the fo'castle one tumbled mass of torn blankets, little rags of linen, fragments of wood, of steel, of clothes which had been in the men's chests; and, more horrible to recount, particles of human flesh. Three men were below when the crash came, and two of them had their limbs torn apart; while, by one of the miracles which oft attend the passage of a shot, the third, being in a low bunk when the shell struck, escaped almost uninjured. This desolate and wrecked cabin was shown to us by Captain Ross, whose anger mounted at every step.

"What does it mean?" he kept asking. "Are we at war? You saw the Chilian flag. Is there no Treaty of Paris, then? Does he go out to filch every ship he meets? Will he do this, and our Government take no steps? Can't you answer me that?" But he poured out his questions with such rapidity, and he was so overcome, that we followed him in silence as he walked beneath the awnings of the upper decks, and showed us women still talking hysterically, men unnerved and witless as children, seamen yet finding curses for the atrocity that had been. By this time, the first of the American ships had come up with us, and the commander of her put out a boat, and having gone aboard the maimed cruiser, he came afterwards to the Black Anchor ship, and joined us in the chart-room. I will make no attempt to set down for you his surprise nor his incredulity. I believe that the scene in the fo'castle alone convinced him that we were not all raving madmen; but, when once he grasped our story, he was not a whit behind us, either in intensity of expression or of sympathy.

"It's an international question, I guess," he said; "and if he doesn't pay with his neck for the twenty men dead on my cruiser, to say nothing of the twenty thousand pounds or more damage to her, I will--why, we'll run her down in four-and-twenty hours. You took his course?"

"West by south-west, almost dead," said the captain; and I heard it agreed between them that the second cruiser of the American fleet should start at once in pursuit, while the iron-clads should accompany us to New York, so making a little convoy for safety's sake.

With this arrangement we left the ship and regained the _Celsis_. Paolo stood at the top of the ladder as I came on deck, and listened, I thought, to our protestations that the danger was over with something of a sneer on his face.

Indeed, I thought that I heard him mutter, as he went to his cabin, "_Vedremo_--" but I did not know then how much the laugh was to be against us, and that we should leave the convoy long before we reached New York.

CHAPTER X.

THE SPREAD OF THE TERROR.

For full five days we steamed with the other vessels, under no stress to keep the sea with them, since they made no more than twelve knots, for the sake of the cruiser which had been so fearfully maimed in the short action with the nameless ship. During this time there was little power of wind; and the breeze continuing soft from the north-east, it was easy business to hold sight of the convoy, which we did to the satisfaction of every man aboard us. But I could not put away from myself the knowledge that the events of the first three days had made much talk in the fo'castle and that a feeling akin to terror prevailed amongst the men.

This came home to me with some force on the early morning of the fifth day. I found myself unable to sleep restfully in my bunk, and went above at daybreak, to see the white hulls of the American war-vessels a mile away on the port-quarter and the long line of the Black Anchor boat a few cables'-lengths ahead of them. Paolo was on the bridge, but I did not hail him, thinking it better to give the man few words until we sighted Sandy Hook. He, in turn, maintained his sullen mood; but he did not neglect to be much amongst the hands, and his intimacy with them increased from day to day.

Now, when I came on deck this morning, I found that the breeze, strong and fresh though it was, put me in that soporific state I had sought unavailingly in my bunk. There was a deck-chair well placed behind the shelter of the saloon skylight, and upon this I made myself at ease, drawing my peaked hat upon my eyes, and getting the sleep-music from the swish of the sea, as it ran upon us, and sprinted from the tiller right away to the bob-stay. But no sleep could I get; for scarce was I set upon the chair when I heard Dan the other side of the skylight, and he was holding forth with much fine phrase to Roderick's dog, Belle.

"Yes," he said, apparently treating the beast as though possessed of all human attributes. "Yes, you don't go for to say nothing, but you're a Christian dog, I don't doubt; and yer heart's in the right place; or it's not me as would be wasting me time talking to yer. Now, what I says is, you're comfortable enough, with Missie a-makin' as much of yer as if good fresh beef weren't tenpence a pound, and yer mouth warn't large enough to take in a hundredweight; but that ain't the way with the rest of us--no, my old woman, not by a cable's-length; we're afloat on a rum job, old lady; and some of us won't go for to pipe when it's the day for payin' off--not by a long way. So you hear; and don't get answerin' of me, for what I spoke's logic, and there's an end of it."

I called him to me, and had it out with him there and then.

"What's in the wind now, Dan," I asked, "that you're preaching to the dog?"

"Ay, that's it," he replied, putting his hand into his pocket for his tobacco-box. "What's in the wind?--why, you'd have to be askin' of it to learn, I fancy."

"Is there any more nonsense amongst the men forward?"

"There's a good deal of talk--maybe more than there should be."

"And what do they talk about? Tell me straight, Dan."

"Well, I've got nothing, for my part, to hide away, and I don't know as they should have; but you know this ship is a dead man's!"

"Who told you that stuff?"

"No other than our second mate, sir, as sure as I cut this quid. Not as yarns like that affect me; but, you see, some skulls is thick as plate-armour, and some is thin as egg-shells: and when the thin 'uns gets afloat with corpses, why, it's a chest of shiners to a handspike as they cracks--now, ain't it?"

"Dan, this is the most astounding story that I have yet heard. Would you make it plainer? for, upon my life, I can't read your course!"

He sat down on the edge of the skylight--long service had given him a claim to familiarity--and filled his pipe from my tobacco-pouch before he answered, and then was mighty deliberate.

"Plain yarns, Mister Mark, is best told in the fo'castle, and not by hands upon the quarter-deck; but, asking pardon for the liberty, I feel more like a father to you gentlemen than if I was nat'ral born to it; and this I do say--What's this trip mean; what's in yer papers? and why ain't it the pleasure vige we struck flag for? For it ain't a pleasure vige, _that_ a shoreman could see; and you ain't come across the Atlantic for the seein' of it, nor for merchandise nor barter, nor because you wanted to come. That's what the hands say at night when the second's a-talkin' to 'em over the grog he finds 'em. 'Where's it going to end?' says he; 'what is yer wages for takin' yer lives where they shouldn't be took? and,' says he, 'in a ship what the last skipper died aboard of it,' says he, 'died so sudden, and was so fond of his old place as who knows where he is now, afloat or ashore, p'r'aps a-walking this very cabin, and not bringing no luck for the vige, neither,' says he. And what follows?--why, white-livered jawings, and this man afeard to go here, and that man afeard to go there, and the Old One amongst 'em, so that half of 'em says, 'We was took false,' and the other half, 'Why not 'bout ship and home again?' No, and you ain't done with it, not by a long day, and you won't have done with it until you drop anchor in Yankee-land, if ever you do drop anchor there, which I take leave to give no word upon."

"It's a curious state of things. You mean to say, I suppose, that there's terror amongst them--plain terror, and nothing else?"

"Ay, sure!"

"Then it remains for us to face them. What's your opinion on that?"

"My opinion is, as you won't go for to do it, but will take your victuals, and play your music in the aft parlour, and skeer away the Old One with the singing, as ye've skeered him already--that's what ye'll do afore Missie and the skipper--but by yourself, you won't have two eyes shut when you sleep, and you won't have two eyes open when you're above; and when you're wanted you won't be an hour getting yourself nor Mr. Roderick under weigh--and that's the end of it, for there goes the bell."

The watch changed as he spoke, and I went below to the bathroom; thence, not thinking much of Dan's terror, nor of the men's petty grumbling, I joined the others at breakfast. We were now well towards the end of the journey, and I itched to set foot in America. The new safety in the presence of the warships had given us light hearts; and that fifth day we passed in great games of deck-quoits and cricket, with a soft ball which the bo'sun made for us out of tow and linen. The men worked cheerfully enough, giving the lie direct to Dan; and when Mary played to us after dinner at night I began to think that, all said and done, we should touch shore with no further happening; and that then I could make all use of the man Paolo and his knavery. So I went to bed at ten o'clock, and for an hour or two I slept with the deep forgetfulness which is the reward of a weary man.

At what hour Dan awoke me I cannot tell you. He shook me twice in the effort, he said, and when I would have turned up the electric light, he seized my hand roughly, muttering in a great whisper, "Hold steady." I knew then that mischief was afloat, and asked him what to do.

"Crawl above," he said, "and lie low a-deck"; and he went up the companion ladder when I got my flannels and rubber-shod shoes upon me. But at the topmost step he stood awhile, and then he fell flat on his hands, and backed again down the stairway, so that he came almost on top of me; but I saw what prompted his action, for, as he moved, there was a shadow thrown from the deck light down to where we lay; and then a man stepped upon the stair and descended slowly, his feet naked, but in his hand an iron bar; for he had no other weapon. At the sight of him, we had backed to the foot of the stairway; and, as the man crept down, we lay still, so that you could hear every quiver of the glass upon the table of the saloon; and we watched the fellow drop step by step until he was quite close to us in the dark, and his breath was hot upon us. Swiftly then and silently he entered the place; and, going to my cabin door, he slipped a wedge under it, serving the other doors around the big cabin in the same way. The success seemed to please him; he chuckled softly, and came again to the ladder, where, with a quick motion, Dan brought his pistol-butt (for I had armed him) full upon the fellow's forehead, and he went down like a dead thing at the foot of the swinging table.

There we left him, after we had bound his hands with my scarf; and with a hurried knock got Roderick from his berth. He, in turn, aroused his sister, and in five minutes we all stood in the big saloon and discussed our plan.

Dan's whispered tale was this. The watch was Paolo's, who had persuaded four stokers and six of the forward hands to his opinion. These men, the dupes of the second officer, had determined on this much--that the voyage to New York should be stopped abruptly, come what might, and that our intent should go for nothing. We, being locked in our cabins, were to have no voice in the affair; or, if waked, then we should be knocked on the head, and so quieted to reason.

It was a desperate endeavour, wrought of fear; but at that moment the true hands of the fo'castle were battened down, and Dan, who had seen the thing coming, escaped only by his foresight. That night he had felt danger, and had wrapped himself up in a tarpaulin, and lain concealed on deck.

As it was, Paolo stood at the door of the skipper's room; there were three men guarding the fo'castle, and five at the foot of the hurricane deck. One man we had settled with; but we were three, and eight men stood between us and the true hands.

Roderick was the first to get his wits, and plan a course.

"We must act now," he said, "before they miss their man. They've stopped the engines, and we shall drop behind the others. There's only one chance, and that is to surprise them. Let's rush it and take the odds."

"You can't rush it," I replied; "they're looking for that; and if one now went forward they would shoot him down straight--and what's to follow? They come aft, and how can we hold them? But we must get the skipper awake, or they'll knock him on the head while he sleeps."

Mary had listened, shivering with the night cold; but she had a word to add, and its wisdom was no matter for dispute.

"If I went," she said, "what could they do to me?"

We were all silent.

"I'm going now," she said; "while I'm talking to them they won't be looking for you."

"Certainly, we could follow up," I added, "and might get them down if you held them in talk; but don't you fear?"

She laughed, and gave answer by running up the companion-way, and standing at the top; while we cocked our pistols, and crept after her. Then we lay flat to the deck, as she ran noiselessly amidships, and into the very centre of the five men. To our astonishment, they gave a great howl of terror at the sight of her--for it lay so dark that she seemed but a thing of shadow hovering upon the ship--and bolted headlong forward; while we rushed in a body to the hurricane deck, and faced Paolo. He turned very white, and would have opened his lips; but Dan served him as the other; and hit him with his pistol, so that he rolled senseless off the narrow bridge, and we heard the thud of his head against the iron of the engine-room hatch. He had scarce fallen when Mary, with the laugh still upon her lips, reeled at the sight of him, and fell fainting in my arms. I knocked at the skipper's door, but he was already on his feet, and passed me to the bridge, where I laid the swooning girl on the sofa in the chart-room.

The skipper got the whole situation at the first look, and acted in his usual silence. He re-entered his own cabin, and came to us again with a couple of rifles, which he loaded. We were now all crouching together by the wheel amidships, for Mary had recovered, and insisted that I should leave her, and we waited for the heavy black clouds to lift off the moon; but the fore-deck lay dark ahead of us; and we could not tell whether the men who had fled had gone below, or were crouching behind the galley, and the skylights of the fore-cabins. Nor could we hear any sound of them, although the skipper hailed them twice. He was for going forward at once; but we held back until the light came, and then by the full moon we saw dark shadows across the hatch. The men were behind the galley, as we thought--the eight of them.

The skipper hailed them again.

"You, Karl, Williams--are you coming out now, for me to flog you; or will you swing at New York?"

I could see their whole performance in shadow, as they heard the hail. One of them cocked a pistol, and the rest huddled more closely together.

"Very well," continued the skipper, ironically deliberate. "You've got a couple of planks between you and eternity. I'm going to fire through that galley."

He raised his rifle at the word, and let go straight at the corner of the light wood erection. A dull groan followed, and by the shadow on the deck I saw one man fall forward amongst the others, who held him up with their shoulders; but his blood ran in a thick stream out to the top of the hatchway, and then ran back as the ship heaved to the seas.

For the fifth time the skipper hailed them.

"There's one down amongst you," he said; "and that's the beginning of it; I'm going to blow that shanty to hell, and you with it."

He raised his rifle, but as he did so one of them answered for the first time with his revolver, and the bullet sang above our heads. The skipper's shot was quick in reply; and the wood of the shanty flew in splinters as the bullet shivered it. A second man sprang to his feet with a shout, and then fell across the deck, lying full to be seen in the moonlight.

"That's two of you," continued the skipper, as calm as ever he was in Portsmouth harbour; "we'll make it three for luck." But at the suggestion they all made a run forward, and lay flat right out by the cable. There we could hear them blubbering like children.

The skipper was of a mind to end the thing there and then. He sprang down the ladder to the deck, and we followed him. They fired three shots as we rushed on them; but the butt ends of the two muskets did the rest. Three of them went down straight as felled poplars. The others fell upon their knees and implored mercy; and they got it, but not until the skipper, who now seemed roused to all the fury of great anger, set to kicking them lustily, and with no discrimination--for they all had their full share of it.

We had the other hands up by this, and, despite the tragedy and horror of the thing, a smile came to me as the true men set to binding the others at the skipper's order; for Piping Jack and Planks, and the whole ten of them, fell into such a train of swearing as would have done your heart good to hear. They got them below at the first break of dawn, and the dead they covered; while Paolo, who lay groaning, we carried to a cabin in the saloon, and did for his broken head that which our elementary knowledge of surgery permitted us.

As the day brought light upon the rising sea, I looked to the far horizon, but the rolling crests of an empty waste met my gaze. Again we were alone. The night's work had lost us the welcome company.

CHAPTER XI.

THE SHIP IN THE BLACK CLOAK.

The day that broke was glorious enough for Nature's making, but sad upon our ship, in that the folly of eight poor fellows should have cost the life of two, with three more lying near to death in the fo'castle. The sea had risen a good deal when we got under steam again, and clouds scudded over the sun; but we set stay-sails and jibs, and made a fine pace towards the shores of America. It was near noon when we had buried the two stokers shot by the skipper, and more on in the afternoon before the decks were made straight, and the traces of the scuffle quite obliterated. But Paolo lay all day in a delirium, and Mary went in and out, bearing a gentle hand to the wounded, who alternately cried with the pain of it, and begged grace for their insanity. The second officer's case was worse than theirs, and I thought at noon that the total of the dead would have been three; for he raved incessantly, crying "Ice, Ice!" almost with every breath, while we had all difficulty possible to hold him in his bunk. His words I could not get the meaning of; but I had them later, and in circumstances I had never looked for.

After the hour of lunch the skipper called Roderick and me into his cabin, and there he discussed the position with us.

"One thing is clear," he said; "you've brought me on more than a pleasure trip, and, while I don't complain, it will be necessary at New York for me to know something more--or, maybe to leave this ship. Last night's work must be made plain, of course; and this second officer of yours must stand to his trial. The men I would willingly let go, for they're no more than lubberly fools whose heads have been turned. But one thing I now make bold to claim--I take this yacht straight from here to Sandy Hook; and we poke our noses into no business on the way."

"Of course," said Roderick somewhat sarcastically, "you've every right to do what you like with my ship; but I seem to remember having engaged you to obey my orders."

"Fair orders and plain sailing," replied Captain York, bringing his fist down on the table with emphasis; "not running after war-ships that could blow us out of the water without thinking of it. Fair orders I took, and fair orders I'll obey."

"That's quite right, Roderick," I said; "there's no reason now why we shouldn't go straight on--if we don't meet with anyone to ask questions on the way; of that I'm not so sure, though."

"Nor I," said the skipper meaningly, and waiting for me to add more; but I did not mean to gratify him, and we all went out on deck again after we had agreed to let him have his will. We found the first officer on the bridge, looking away to the south-east, where the black hull of a steamer was now showing full. I do not know that the distant sight of a ship was anything to cause remark, but as I looked at her, I noticed that she steamed at a fearful speed, and she showed no smoke from her funnels.

"Skipper," I said, "will you look at that hull? Isn't the boat making uncommon headway?"

He took a long gaze, and then he spoke--

"You're right. She's going more than twenty knots."

"And straight towards us."

"As you say."

"Is there anything remarkable about that?"

He took another sight, and when he turned to me again he had no colour in his face.

"I've seen that ship before," he said.

"Where?" asked Roderick laconically.

"Five days ago, when she fired a shell into the _Ocean King_."

"In that case," said I, "there isn't much doubt about her intentions: she's chasing us!"

"That may or may not be," he replied, as he raised his glass again, "but she's the same ship, I'll wager my life. Look at the rake of her--and the lubbers, they've left some of their bright metal showing amidships!"

He indicated the deck-house by the bridge, where my glass showed me a shining spot in the cloak of black, for the sun fell upon the place, and reflected from it as from a mirror of gold. There was no longer any doubt: we were pursued by the nameless ship, and, if no help fell to us, I shuddered to think what the end might be.

"What are you going to do, skipper?" asked Roderick, as gloom fell upon the three of us; and we stood together, each man afraid to tell the others all he thought.

"What, am I going to do?" said he. "I'm going to see the boats cleared, and all hands in the stoke-hole that have the right there"; and then he sang out, "Stand by!" and the men swarmed up from below, and heard the order to clear the boats. They obeyed unquestioningly; but I doubt not that they were no less uneasy than we were; and, as these things cannot be concealed, the whisper was soon amongst them that the danger lay in the black steamer, which had been five days ago the ship of gold. Yet they went to the work with a right good will; and presently, when a canopy of our own smoke lay over us, and the yacht bounded forward under the generosity of the stoking, they set up a great cheer spontaneously, and were ready for anything. Yet I, myself, could not share their honest bravado. The black ship which had been but a mark on the horizon now showed her lines fully; there could be no two opinions of her speed, or of the way in which she gained upon us. Indeed, one could not look upon her advance without envy of her form, or of the terrifying manner in which she cut the seas. Churning the foam until it mounted its banks on each side of her great ram, she rode the Atlantic like a beautiful yacht, with no vapour of smoke to float above her; and not so much as a sign that any engines forced her onward with a velocity unknown, I believe, in the whole history of navigation. And so she came straight in our wake, and I knew that we should have little breathing time before we should hear the barking of her guns.

The skipper did not like to see my idleness or this display of inactive indifference.

"Don't you think you might help?" he asked.

"Help--what help can I give? You don't suppose we can outsteam them, do you?"

"That's a child's question; they'll run us to a stand in four hours--any man with one eye should see that; but are you going down like a sheep, or will you give them a touch of your claws? I will, so help me Heaven, if there's not another hand breathing!"

"The skipper's right, by Jove!" said Roderick; "if it's coming to close quarters, I'll mark one man anyway," and with that he tumbled down the ladder, and into his cabin. I followed him, and got all the arms I could lay hands on, a couple of revolvers and a long duck-gun amongst the number. There were two rifles--the two we had used in the trouble with the men--in the chart-room, and these we brought on deck, with all the other pistols we had amongst us. We made a distribution of them amongst the old hands, giving Dan the duck-gun, which pleased him mightily.

"I generally shoots 'em sittin'," he said, "but I'll go for to make a bag, and willin'. You're keepin' the Missie out of it, sir?"

"Of course; she's looking after the sick hands downstairs. You go forward, Dan, and wait for the word, then blaze away your hardest."

"Ay, ay," replied he; and I took myself off to see after the others, whom we posted in the stern to keep a closer look-out; while Roderick, the first officer, and myself went above to the bridge.

The men now fell to work in right good earnest. They had all the grit of the old sea-dogs in them--how, I know not, except in this, that their lives had been given to the one mistress. The thought of a brush-up put dash and daring into them; they had the boats cleared, the water-barrels filled, and the life-belts free, with an activity that was remarkable. Then they stood to watch the oncoming of the nameless ship; and when we hoisted our ensign, they burst again into that hoarse roar of applause which rolled across the water-waste, and must have sounded as a vaunting mockery to the men behind the walls of metal. But they answered us in turn, running up an ensign, and a cry came from all of us as we saw its colour, for it was the blue saltire on a white ground.

"Russian, or I'm blind," said the skipper, and I looked twice and knew that his sight was safe to him; for the nameless ship, which five days ago showed her heels under a Chilian mask, now made straight towards us in Russian guise.

"Are you sure she's the same ship?" asked Roderick, when his amazement let him speak.

"Am I sure that my voice comes out of my throat?" said the old fellow testily. "Did you ever see but one hull shaped like that? And now she signals."

So rapidly had she drawn towards us that she was, indeed, then within gun-shot of us. After the first enthusiasm the men had stood, held under the spell of her amazing approach, and no soul had spoken. Even with their plain reckoning and hazy notion of it all, they seemed conscious of the peril; but not as I was conscious of it, for in my own heart I believed that no man amongst us would see to-morrow. There we stood alone, with no prospect but to face the men who openly declared war against us. I turned my eyes away to the crimson arch which marked the sun's decline; I looked again to the east, whence black harbingers of night hung low upon the darkened sea; I searched the horizon in every quarter, but it lay barren of ships, and soon the last light would leave us, and with the ebb of day there was no security against an enemy whose intentions were no longer disguised. I say no longer disguised--but of this the skipper made me cognisant. He pointed to the mast on the nameless ship, where the Russian ensign had hung ten minutes before. It was there no longer; the black flag took its place.

"Pirates, by the very devil!" said the skipper; and then he whistled long and loud and shrilly as a man who has solved a sum.

"Gentlemen," he added very slowly, "I said I would resign this ship at New York: with your permission I will withdraw that. I will sail with you wherever you go."

He shook our hands heartily, as though the discovery of our purpose had unclouded his mind. But we had no time for fuller understanding, for at that moment the air itself seemed torn apart by a great concussion, and a shell burst in the water no more than fifty yards ahead of us. When the knowledge that we were not hit was sure on the men's part, they bellowed lustily; and old Dan fired his gun into the air with a great shout. Yet we knew that all this was the cheapest bravado; and when the skipper touched the bell to stop our engines, I was sure that he was wise.

"That's the end of it, then," I said. "Well, it's pretty ignominious, isn't it, to be shot down like fools on our own quarter-deck?"

"Wait awhile," he answered, looking anxiously behind him, where a mist gathered on the sea; "let 'em lower a boat, the lubbers!"

By this time the great vessel rode still some quarter of a mile away from us; but the glass showed me the men upon her decks, and conspicuous amongst them I saw the form of Captain Black standing by the steam steering gear. Others below were moving at the davits, so that in a small space a launch was riding in a still sea, and was making for us. I watched her with nerves strained and lips dry; she seemed to me the message boat from Death itself.

"Stand steady, and wait for me!" suddenly yelled the skipper, his fingers moving nervously, and his look continually turning to the banks of mist behind us. "When I sing 'Fire!' pick your men!"

The boat was so near that you could see the faces in it; and three of the five I recognised, for I had seen them in the room of the Rue Joubert. The others were not known to me, but had rascally countenances; and one of them was a Chinaman's. The man who was in command was the fellow "Roaring John"; and when he was within hail he stood and bawled--

"What ship?"

"My ship!" roared back the skipper, again looking at the mist-clouds, and my heart gave a bound when I read his purpose: we were drifting into them.

"And who may you be?" bawled the fellow again, growing more insolent with every advance.

"I'm one that'll give you the best hiding you ever had, if you'll step up here a minute!" yelled the skipper, as cool as a man in Hyde Park.

"Oh, I guess," said the man; "you're a tarnation fine talker, ain't you? But you'll talk less when I come aboard you, oh, I reckon!"

They came a couple of oars' lengths nearer, when Captain York made his reply. There was a fine roll of confidence in his voice; and he almost laughed when he cried--

"You're coming aboard, are you? And which of you shall I have the pleasure of kicking first?"

The hulking ruffian roared with pleasant laughter at the sally.

"Oh, you're a funny cuss, ain't you, and pretty with your jaw, by thunder! But it's me that you'll have the pleasure of speaking to, and right quick, my mate, oh, you bet!"

"In that case," said the skipper, with his calmness well at zero; "in that case--you, Dan! introduce yourself to the gentleman."

Dan's reply was instantaneous. He leant well over the bulwark, and his cheery old face beamed as he bellowed--

"Ahoy, you there that it's me pleasure to be runnin' against so far from me old country. Will you have it hot, or will you have it the other way for a parcel of cold-livered lubbers? By the Old 'Un, how's that for salt 'oss!"

He had up with his shot gun, and the long ruffian, who had reached forward with his boat-hook, got the dose full in his face as it seemed to me. At the same moment the skipper called "Fire!" and the heavy crack of the rifles and the sharp report of the pistols rang out together. The very launch itself seemed to reel under the volley; but the Chinaman gave a great shout, and jumped into the sea with the agony of his wound; while two of the others were stretched out in death as they sat.

"Full steam ahead!" roared Captain York, as the nameless ship replied with a shell that grazed our chart-room. "Full speed ahead!" Then, shaking his fist to the war-ship, he almost screamed--"Bested for a parcel of cut-throats, by the Powers!"

There was no doubt about it at all. The moment the yacht answered to the screw the fog rolled round us like a sheet, in thick wet clouds, steaming damp on the decks; and twenty yards ahead or astern of us you could not see the long waves themselves. But the sensations of that five minutes I shall never forget. Shot after shot hissed and splashed ahead of us, behind us; now dull, heavy, yet penetrating, and we knew that the ship lay close on our track; then farther off and deadened, and we hoped that she had lost us. Again dreadfully close, so that a shell struck the chart-room full, and crushed it into splinters not bigger than your finger, then dying away to leave the stillness of the mist behind it. An awful chase, enduring many minutes; a chase when I went hot and cold, now filled with hope, then seeming to stand on the very brink of death. But at last the firing ceased. We left our course, steaming for some hours due south across the very track of the nameless ship; and we went headlong into the fog, the men standing yet at their posts, no soul giving a thought to the lesser danger that was begotten of our speed; every one of us held in that strange after-tension which follows upon calamity.

When I left the bridge it was midnight. I was soaked to the skin and nigh frozen, and the water ran even from my hair; but a hot hand was put into mine as I entered the cabin, and then a thousand questions rained upon me.

"I'll tell you by-and-by, Mary. Were you very much afraid?"

She tossed her head and seemed to think.

"I was a bit afraid, Mark--a--a--little bit!"

"And what did you do all the time?"

"I--oh, I nursed Paolo--he's dying."

The man truly lay almost at death's door; but his delirium had passed; and he slept, muttering in his dream, "I can't go to the City--Black; you know it--let me get aboard. Hands off! I told you the job was risky"; and he tossed and turned and fell into troubled slumber. And I could not help a thought of sorrow, for I feared that he would hang if ever we set foot ashore.

I returned to the saloon sadly, though all was now brightness there. We served out grog liberally for the forward hands, and broke champagne amongst us.

"Gentlemen," said the skipper, giving us the toast, "you owe your lives to the Banks; and, please God, I'll see you all in New York before three days."

And he kept his word; for we sighted Sandy Hook, and harm had come to no man that fought the unequal fight.

CHAPTER XII.

THE DRINKING HOLE IN THE BOWERY.

The beauty of the entrance to the bay of New York, the amazing medley of shipping activity and glorious scenery, have often been described. Even to one who comes upon the capital of the New World, having seen many cities and many men, there is a charm in the sweeping woods and the distant heights, in the group of islets, and the massive buildings, that is hardly rivalled by the fascinations of any other harbour, that of San Francisco and the Golden Gates alone excepted. If you grant that the mere material of man's making is all very new, its power and dignity is no less impressive. Nor in any other city of the world that I know does the grandeur of the natural environment force itself so close to the very gates, as in this bay which Hudson claimed, and a Dutch colony took possession of so long ago as 1614.

It was about six o'clock in the evening when we brought the _Celsis_ through the Narrows between Staten and Long Islands, and passed Forts Wandsworth and Hamilton. Then the greater harbour before the city itself rolled out upon our view; and as we steamed slowly into it the Customs took possession of us, and made their search. It was a short business, for we satisfied them that Paolo suffered from no malignant disease, although one small and singularly objectionable fellow seemed suspicious of everything aboard us. I do not wonder that he made the men angry, or that Dan had a word with him.

"Look here, sir," he whispered, making pretence to great honesty; "I won't go for to deceive you--p'r'aps that dog's stuffed wi' di'monds."

"Do you reckon I'm a fool?" asked the man.

"Well," said old Dan, "I never was good at calcerlations; but you search that dog, and p'r'aps you'll find somethin'."

The man seemed to think a moment; but Dan looked so very solemn, and Belle came sniffing up at the officer's legs; so he passed his hand over her back, and lost some of his leg in return.

"Didn't I tell you," said Dan, "as you'd get something if you searched that dog?--well, don't you go for to doubt me word next time we're meetin'. Good-day to yer honour. Is there any other animal as I could oblige you with?"

The officer went off, the men howling with laughter; and a short while after we had made fast at the landing-stage, and were ready to go ashore.

Paolo still lay very sick in his cabin, and we determined in common charity to take no action until he had his health again; but we set the men to keep a watch about the place, and for ourselves went off to dine at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. There, before a sumptuous dinner, and with all the novelty of the new scene, we nigh forgot all that happened since the previous month; when, without thought of adventure or of future, we had gone to Paris with the aimless purpose of the idle traveller. And, indeed, I did my best to encourage this spirit of forgetfulness, since through all the new enjoyment I could not but feel that danger surrounded us on every hand, and that I was but just embarked on that great mission I had undertaken.

In this mood, when dinner was done, I suggested that Roderick should take Mary through the city awhile, and that I should get back to the _Celsis_, there to secure what papers were left for me, and to arrange, after thought, what my next step in the following of Captain Black should be. The skipper had friends to see in New York, and agreed that he would follow me to the yacht in a couple of hours, and that he would meet the others in the hotel after they had come from their excursion. This plan fell in with my own, and I said "Good-bye" cheerfully enough to the three men as I buttoned up my coat; and sent for a coach. If I had known then that the next time I should meet them would be after weeks of danger and of peril, of sojourn in strange places, and of life amongst terrible men!

I was driven to the wharf very quickly, and got aboard the yacht with no trouble. There was a man keeping watch upon her decks; and Dan had been in the sick man's cabin taking drink to him. He told me that he was more easy, and spoke with the full use of his senses; and that he had fallen off into a comfortable sleep "since an hour." I was glad at the news, and went to my own cabin, getting my papers, my revolver, and other things that I might have need of ashore.

This work occupied me forty minutes or more; but as I was ready to go back to the others I looked into Paolo's cabin, and, somewhat to my surprise, I saw that he was dressed, and seemingly about to quit the yacht. This discovery set me aglow with expectation. If the man were going ashore, whither could he go except to his associates, to those who were connected with Black and his crew? Was not that the very clue I had been hoping to get since I knew that we had a spy aboard us? Otherwise, I might wait a year and hear no more of the man or of his work except such tidings as should come from the sea. Indeed, my mind was made up in a moment: I would follow Paolo, at any risk, even of my life.

This thought sent me forward again into the fo'castle, where Dan was.

"Hist, Dan!" said I, "give me a man's rig-out--a jersey and some breeches and a cap--quick," and, while the old fellow stared and whistled softly, I helped to ransack his box; and in a trice I had dressed myself, putting my pistols, my papers, and my money in my new clothes; but leaving everything else in a heap on the floor.

"Dan," I said, "that Italian is going ashore, and I'm going to follow him. No, you mustn't come, or the thing will be spoilt. Tell the forward lookout to see nothing if the fellow passes, and get my rubber shoes from my trunk."

Dan scratched his head again, and must have thought that I was qualifying in lunacy; but he got the shoes, and not a moment too soon, for, as I came on deck, I saw a shadow on the gangway. The man was leaving the yacht at that moment, and I followed him, drawing my cap right over my eyes, and lurking behind every inch of cover.

Once out into the city, and having turned two or three times to satisfy himself that he had no one after him, Paolo struck for Broadway; thence with staggering gait, the result of his weakness, he made straight for the City Hall, at which point he turned and so got into Chatham Street and the Bowery. At last, after a long walk, and when the man himself was almost failing from the exertion of it, he stopped before an open door in the dirtiest of the streets through which we had come, and disappeared instantly. I came up to the door almost as soon as he had passed through; and found myself before a steep flight of steps, at the bottom of which through a glass partition I could see men smoking and drinking, and hear them bawling uncouth songs.

It was a fearful hole, peopled by fearful men; all nations and all sorts of villains were represented there: low Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, even niggers and Chinamen; yet into that hole must I go if I would follow Paolo to the end.

You may forgive me if I hesitated a moment; waited to balance up the odds upon my recognition. I might have decided even then that the risk was too great, the certainty of discovery too palpable; but at that moment a party of six hulking seamen descended the steps before me, and, taking advantage of the cover of their shoulders, I pulled my cap right over my face and passed through the swinging door with them into the most dangerous-looking place I have ever set foot in.

The room was long and narrow; banked its whole length by benches that had once been covered with red velvet, but now showed torn patches and the protruding wool of the stuffing. Mirrors were raised from the dado of the ragged seats to the frieze of the smoke-blackened ceiling; but they were for the most part cracked, and some had lost much of their glass. The accommodation for drinkers consisted of marble-topped tables, old and worn and stained with the dirt which was characteristic everywhere of the foul den; but there was nothing but boards beneath one's feet; and the wretched bar at the uppermost end of the chamber was no more than a plain deal bin with a high stool behind it for the serving man; he being a great negro, grotesquely attired as a man of fashion. Indeed, had not the whole place been so threatening, I should have paused to laugh at this dusky scoundrel, whose white hat sat jauntily on the side of his woolly head, and whose well-cut black coat was ornamented with a great bunch of white flowers. But there was evil in this man's face, and in the faces of the others who sat close-packed on the faded couches; and when I had paused for a moment to take reckoning of the room, I passed quickly to a bench near the door, and there sat wedged against a fair-haired seaman, whose look stamped him to be a Russian.

The scene was very new to me. I had heard of these drinking dens in that low quarter of New York called the Bowery; but my American friends had cautioned me often to have no truck with them should I visit their city. They spoke of the poor regard for life which prevailed there; of murders committed with an impunity which was as astounding as it was impossible for the police to suppress; of mysterious disappearances, mysterious alone in the lack of knowledge as to the victim's end; and they conjured me, if I would see such things, at least to go under the escort of the police. All this I had paid scant attention to at the time; but the reality was before me with its grim terror. The room was filled with the scum of sea-going humanity; foul smoke from foul pipes floated in choking clouds to the dirt-begrimed ceiling; great brown pots of strong drink were emptied as though their contents had been milk; horrid blasphemies were uttered as choice dishes of speech; ribald songs rose in giant discord as the spirit moved the singers. Now and again, betwixt the shouting and the singing, a young girl, whose presence in such a company turned my heart sick, played upon a harp, while to serve the crew with liquor there was a mahogany-faced hag whom the men addressed as "Mother Catch." An old crone, bent and doubled like a bow, yet vigorous in her work, and shuffling with quick steps as she laid down the jugs, or took the uncouth orders so freely given to her, she seemed to have the eye of a hawk; nor did I escape her glance, for I had not been seated before the marble table a moment when she shuffled up to me and stood glaring with her shining eyes, the very presentment of an old-time witch.

"Ha!" she said sharply, "ha! a sailor boy in proper sailor clothes; ho, little man, will ye wet yer throat for a pretty gentleman?"

I did not like her mock courtesy, or the way in which she pronounced the word "gentleman"; but I called for some beer to get her away, and when she brought it I remembered that I had no American money; but I put an English florin before her and waited for the change. She hissed at the sight of it like a serpent about to strike.

"Ha! Englishman! and no money; ho! ho! ye've got to find it, little man. Mother Catch likes you; but she spits on it!"

She spoke the last words in such a loud voice that several men near me turned to look, and I feared to become the centre of a brawl. This would have defeated everything, so I threw her a half-sovereign, and, feigning her own savage merriment, I said--

"Gold, little woman, English gold; spit on it for luck, little woman"; and I am bound to say that she did so, hobbling out of the room with the gold piece clenched in her nut-cracker jaws. Then I began to search with my eyes for Paolo; and, although the smoke was very thick, I saw him seated near the drinking-bar, a tumbler of brandy before him, his arms resting on the edge of the counter where the liquor was sold. I judged then that he had made no idle visit to this place; and in a quarter of an hour or so my surmise was proved. The glass door again swung open; three men entered through it, and I recognised the three of them in a moment. The first was the Irishman, "Four Eyes"; the second-was the lantern-jawed Scotsman, who had been addressed in Paris as "Dick the Ranter"; the third was "Roaring John," into whose face Dan had emptied the contents of his duck-gun three days before. The ruffian had his mouth all bound in a bloody rag, so I hugged myself with the knowledge that he had been well hit; but he was in nowise depressed; and, although the gun had stopped his speech, he smacked Paolo on the back when he greeted him, and the others soon had their faces in the great brown jugs.

The sight of this company warmed me to the work. I seemed to stand on the threshold of discovery. If only I could follow them hence to Black's house the whole aim of my journey would be fulfilled. And why not? I said; they will leave this place and go to their leader some time--if not now, at least to-morrow; and why should I lose touch with them? So far it was certain that my presence was undiscovered. The hag had suspicion of me, but not in their way; the men were too busy, I thought, talking of their own affairs to meddle even with their neighbours. Dan knew on what business I had left the ship, and would quieten Roderick's alarm for me. It was plain that fortune had turned kindly eyes on me.

I sat sipping the beer and smoking an old clay pipe, which I found in the breast-pocket of Dan's garment, doing these things to escape the remarks which the neglect of them would have occasioned, when there was some change in the bibulous entertainment as yet provided for us in the drink-hole. The hag raised her voice, worn to a croak with long scolding, and shrieked--

"Jack's a-going to dance for ye! Silence, pretty boys. Ho! ho! Jack the Fire-Devil, will ye listen, then? And it's help me move the tables ye will, Master Dick, or ye're no minister that I took ye for. Back, my pretty gentlemen, lest I throw me vitriol on ye. Ha! but they love me like their own mother!"

She poked round with her stick at the seamen's feet, compelling them to fall back, and to make a ring for the dancer in the centre; and I saw with no satisfaction that the foul-mouthed villain who was called the "Ranter" came to give her his help to the work.

"Hoots, mither," he cried in his broadest Scots, "did ye mistake that I was a gentleman frae the Hielands o' bonnie Scotland? And I'll be verra glad to throttle some for a wee cup o' yer pretty poison. So ho! ye lubbers, it's an ower-fine discoors for a summer Sawbath that my boot will teach you. Mak' way, mak' way!"

Thus, with unctuous mockery and rough menace, the fellow followed the fury round the room, and forced the drunken crew to the wall. He came to my seat; but I buried my head in my hands, lest he should have carried the memory of my face from Paris; and he passed, having taken no notice of me as I hoped. Soon he had made a great ring for the dancing; and one of the long mirrors opened, showing a door, whose existence I had not suspected; and a great negro with a flaming firepot entered the room. His entry brought applause; but he was a common quack of a performer at the beginning, for he made pretence to eat the fire, and to bring it up again from his vitals. Then, to some wild music from a fiddler, he bound coils of the flaming stuff about his head; and, the lamps being lowered, he gave us a weird picture of a man dancing, all circled with flame; working himself up until I recalled pictures of the dervishes I had seen in the old quarter of Cairo. It was an extraordinary exhibition, and it pleased the men about so that they roared with delight. I was watching it at last as intent as they were; but my attention was suddenly diverted by the sense that something under the marble table at which I was sitting was pulling at my leg. I looked down quickly, and saw a strange sight: it was the black face of the lad Splinters, who had been treated so brutally in Paris. He, crouching under the table, was making signs to me, earnest, meaning signs, so that without any betrayal I leant my head down as though upon my hands, and spoke to him--

"What is it, lad?" I asked in a whisper. "What do you want to say?"

"Don't stop here, sir!" he answered in a state of great agitation. "They know you, and are going to kill you!"

He said no more, crawling away at once; but he left me hot with fear. The mad dance was still going on, and the room was quite dark save for the glow cast by the spirit flames about the huge negro. It occurred to me at once that the darkness might save me if only I could reach the door unobserved; and I left my seat, and pushed amongst the men, passing nearer and nearer to the street, until at last I was at the very portal itself. Then I saw that a change had been made while I had been sitting. The doors of glass were wide open, but the way to the street without was no longer clear--an iron curtain had been drawn across the entrance, and a hundred men could not have forced it.

This was a terrible discovery. It seemed to me that the iron door had been closed for an especial purpose. I knew, however, that when the dance was over some of the audience would wish to go out, and so I waited by the curtain until the lamps were turned up, and the negro had disappeared. The men were then about to push their tables to the centre again, but the hag raised her voice and cried--

"As you are, my pretty gentleman; it's only the first part ye've been treated to. No, no; ye don't have the door drawn till ye've seen yer mother dance awhile. Good boys, all of ye, there's work to do; ho! ho! work to do, and Mother Catch will do it!"

At the words "work to do" a strange silence, which I did not then understand, fell on the company. Somehow, all the men immediately around me slunk away, and I found myself standing quite alone, with many staring at me. The four men whom most I feared had turned their backs, and were busy with their mugs; but the rest of the assembly had eyes only for the terrible woman and for myself. Presently the discordant music began again. The hag, who had been bent double, reared herself up with a "Ho!" after the fashion of a Scottish sword-dancer, and began to make a wretched shuffle with her feet. Then she moved with a hobble and a jig to the far end of the room; and she called out, beginning to come straight down to the door whereby I stood. I know not what presentiment forewarned me to beware as the creature drew near; but yet I felt the danger, and the throbbing of my heart. That I could hope for help amongst such a crew was out of the question. I had my revolver in my pocket, but had I shown it twenty barrels would have answered the folly. There was nothing to do but to face the screeching woman; and this I did as the unearthly music became louder, and the stillness of the men was speaking in its depth.

At the last, the old witch, who had danced for some moments at a distance of ten paces from the spot where I stood, became as one possessed. She made a few dreadful antics, uttered a piercing shriek, and hurled herself almost on me. In that instant I remember seeing the three men with Paolo suddenly rise to their feet, while the others in the room called out in their excitement. But the hag herself drew from her breast something that she had concealed there; and, as she stood within a yard of me, she brought it crash upon my head, and all my senses left me.

CHAPTER XIII.

ASTERN OF THE "LABRADOR."

Complete unconsciousness is a blessing, I think, which comes rarely to us. Sleep, they say, is akin to death; yet I have often questioned if there be an absolute void of existence in sleep; and I am sure that in few cases where a blow robs us of sense does the brain cease to be active or to bring dreams in its working. I have been struck down unconscious twice in my life; but in each instance I have suffered much during the after-days from that trouble of mind which is akin to the feverish dream of an exhausted system. Horrid sights does the brain then bear to us; terrible situations; weird phantoms known to the opium-eater; wild struggles with unnatural enemies; wrestlings even for existence itself. All these I knew during the days that followed my rash visit to the drinking den. How long I lay, or where, I know not to this hour; but my dreams were very terrible, and there was a fever at my head which the ice of a great lake scarce could have cooled. Often I would know that I had consciousness, and yet I could not move hand or foot, so that the terror moved me to frenzies of agony, though my lips were sealed, and I felt myself passing to death. Or I would live again through the night when Martin Hall died, and from the boat where I watched the holocaust, I climbed to the shrouds of the cutter, and stood with my poor friend in the very shelter of the spreading flames. Or I struggled with Black, having hunted him to his own quarter-deck, and there with great force of men I sought to lay hands on him; but he escaped me with a mocking laugh, and when I looked again the deck was empty.

For short moments the delirium must have left me. Once I opened my eyes, and knew that the sun shone upon me, and that the breeze which cooled my forehead blew from the sea; but my fatigue was so great that I fell asleep in the next instant, and enjoyed pure rest during many hours. When I regained consciousness for the second time, it was because rain beat upon my face, a drizzling warm rain of late summer, and there was spray from a fresh sea. For some minutes I set myself to ask where I was; but I knew that I was bound at the left hand and at my feet, and, to my unutterable astonishment, when I raised my head, I saw that I lay in an open boat which was moving very slowly, but my feet were towards the stern of it, and, as my head lay below the level of the gunwale, I could see nothing of the power which moved the boat or of the scene about us.

It was a long time before my throbbing head let me put together a chain of thought to account for my position. The scene at the drinking den would not at first come back to me, think as I would; but when it did, the clue which was lacking came with it. There could be no doubt that I had walked into a trap, and that the hag who had struck me had been in the pay of Paolo and his crew. These men must have taken me as I lay, and so brought me to this boat; but what time had intervened, or where I was, I knew no better than the dead. Only this was sure, that I was in the hands of one of the greatest scoundrels living, and that, if his past were any precedent, my hours of life would be few.

I cannot tell you why it was, but, strange to say, this reflection did not give me very great alarm at the moment. Perhaps I suffered too much from bodily weakness, and would have welcomed any release, even death; perhaps I was buoyed up with that eternal hope which bears its most generous blossom in the springtime of life. In either case, I put away the thought of danger, and set to the task of conning my position a little more closely. The boat in which I lay was painted white, and was of elegant build. She had all the fine lines of a yacht's jolly-boat; and when I raised my head I could see that her fittings had been put in only at great expense. She was not a large boat, but the centre seat had been removed from her to let me lie on a tarpaulin which covered her keel, and the stern seat had been used to bind my feet. A second tarpaulin, folded twice, had been propped under my head, but my left hand was bound close to the boat thwart, and there was a rope doubled round my right forearm so that I could not raise myself an inch, though my right hand was free. The meaning of this apparent neglect I soon learnt. There was a flask on the edge of the tarpaulin which supported my head, and by it half a dozen rather fine captain's biscuits. I had a prodigious thirst on me, and I drank from the flask; but found it to contain weak brandy, and would willingly have exchanged thrice its contents for a long draught of pure water. But the biscuits I could not touch; and I began to be chilled with the rain which fell copiously, and with the sea which sent spray in fountains upon my body.

Up to this time, I had heard no sound of human voices, but the silence was broken at last by a shout, and the boat ceased to move.

"All hands, make sail!" cried someone, apparently above me; and after that I heard the "yo-heave" of the men hauling, as I judged, at a main-sail. The second order, "Sheets home!" proved to me that I was behind a sailing ship, perhaps a yacht which these men had secured, as they got _La France_--and burnt her. I shuddered at the second thought, and my head began to burn again despite the wet. Did they mean to leave me there until the end of it, when the cold and my wound should do their work? Had they forgotten me? Had they any reason for keeping me alive? My questions were in part answered by a sudden shout from the deck of the ship.

"Ho, Bill, is the young un gone?"

"No, my hearty, he's gone about!"

"Getting his spirits damped, I reckon."

"Some, you bet."

And then I heard a voice I knew, the voice of the Irishman, "Four-Eyes."

"Is it the boi ye're mindin', bedad?"

"Ay, sir, he's moved a point."

"The poor divil. Throw him a sheet, one av yer; it's meself that's not bringing the guv'ner a dead body when he wants a live one, be Saint Pathrick!"

They tried to throw me a sheet as the man had ordered, but we had begun to move rapidly again, and I heard it fall in the water by my head. Though there was more hailing, the thud of the choppy sea against the boat forbade any more hearing, and the sheet never reached me. Yet the men had told me something with their words, and I pondered long on the remark of the Irishman, that the "guv'ner" wanted me alive. It explained much; and it put beyond doubt the reason why I had not been killed in the drinking den. It was quite clear that my life was safe from these men until they reached their chief; but where he was I had no notion, except he were on the nameless ship; and, if that were so, to the nameless ship I was going--that ship of horror and of mystery. Nor could I remember anything in what I knew of Captain Black to lead me to the hope that such a voyage was other than one to death, and perhaps to that which might be worse than death itself.

When this strange procession had lasted about an hour, the rain ceased and the sun shone again with renewed power, drying my clothes upon me and giving me prodigious thirst. I struggled to reach the flask, and in doing so I found that the ropes binding my right arm were tied with common hitches, such as any sailor could force; and my experience as a yachtsman let me get free of them with very little trouble. I did not sit up at once, for I feared to be seen from the decks; but I turned my head to look at the boat which towed me, and saw that she was a barque-rigged yacht after the American fashion; her name _Labrador_ being conspicuous across her stern. My boat, which was no larger than I had thought, was towed by a double hawser; but no man watched me from the poop, and I lay down again reassured. The hope of escape was already in my head, for I judged that we could not be far out from New York, although no land was visible on the horizon. It occurred to me that if they would only let me be until night I could get my left hand and my feet free; and, as the hawser was passed through a ring at the bow, I needed but a knife to complete the business. But I had no knife, for a search in my pockets proved that I had been relieved of all my valuables and trifles; and I knew that another way must be found, and that ingenuity alone would help me. So I sat thinking; and all the long afternoon--I knew it was afternoon, as I saw the sun sinking in the horizon and heard the bells, moreover--I examined such devices as came to me, only to reject them and to seek for others.

Towards the second bell in the second "dog" there was a change in the monotony of the scene. I heard an order to heave the barque to, and presently I made haste to put the ropes back in their places and to await the happening. I felt all motion cease, and then someone hauling at the hawser, so that the jolly-boat was pulled against the side of the bigger ship; and, looking up, I saw half-a-dozen of Black's gang watching me from the quarter-deck. Then a ladder was put over the bulwark, and Four-Eyes himself cried out not in an unkindly tone--

"Gi-me the soop, bhoys, and let's get it in him; begorra, the divil 'll have him afore the skipper if it's no mate you're givin' him!"

He came down the ladder with a great can of steaming stuff; and the sea having fallen away with the sun to a dead calm, he stepped off the ladder to the stern seat, and then bent over me. But I saw this only, that he had a knife in his belt; and I made up my mind in a moment to get it from him.

"The young 'un from Paris," he cried, as he took a long look at me, "and near to axin' for a priest, by the houly saints; but I was tellin' ye to stop where ye was, and it's no thanks ye were giving me. Bedad, and a pretty place ye're going to, sorr, at your own wish--the divil knows what's the end av it--but sup a bit, for it's fastin' ye are by the luk av ye, and long gone at that!"

Kindly words he gave me; and he held to the rope with one hand while he put the can of hot stuff to my lips with the other. I drank half of it with great gulps, feeling the warmth spread through my body to my very toes as the broth went down; and a great hope consoled me, for I had his knife, having snatched it from him when first he stooped, and it lay in the tarpaulin beneath me. The good luck of the theft made me quick to empty the pot of gravy; and when I had returned the can, Four-Eyes went over the side again, and the yacht moved onward lazily in the softest of breezes from the west. But my boat lay behind her again; and I did not stir from my restful position until it was full dark; though the going down of the sun had left a clear night and a zenith richly set with a shimmer of stars, which did not give any great promise to my thoughts of coming freedom.

When I deemed that I had waited long enough, and had assured myself that the later night would not be more auspicious for the attempt, I cut away the remaining ropes at my feet, and crouched unbound in the boat. There was good watch upon the ship, I knew, for I could hear the "All's well!" as the bells were struck, and the passing of the orders from the poop to the fo'castle. This did not deter me; and, being determined to stake all rather than face the terrors of the nameless ship, I crawled to the bow, and began to cut the strands of the hawser one by one. The rope was very thick and hard, and the knife which I had stolen was blunt, so that the work was prodigiously slow and difficult; and when I had been at it for half an hour or more, I was interrupted in a way that sent my heart almost into my mouth. There was a man standing on the poop of the _Labrador_, and he seemed to be watching my occupation. I threw myself flat instantly, and listened to his hail.

"Ahoy, there, young 'un, are you getting a chill?" cried a bluff voice, which I did not recognise; but presently the man Four-Eyes hailed also, and I heard him say--

"If it's dead ye are, will ye be sending word up to us?" and, seeing the mood, I bawled with all my strength--

"I'm all right; but I'll call out for some more of that soup of yours just now."

They gave a great shout, and one of them said--

"You ken calcerlate ez you will be gettin' it all nice en' hot when you meet the old 'un in the mornin'"; and the crew roared with laughter at the sally, and disappeared one by one from the poop. Then I whipped out my knife again, and with a few vigorous strokes I cut the rope clean through, and felt my boat go swirling away on the backwash. It was a moment of supreme excitement, and I lay quite flat, waiting to hear if I were missed; but I heard no sound, and looking round presently, I saw the yacht away a mile, and I knew that I was a free man.

The delight of the enterprise would have been intense if my unexpected success had not allowed me to forget one thing when I had made my hasty plans. _There were no oars in the boat._ The terrible truth came to me as I fixed the seat and prepared to put greater distance between the _Labrador_ and myself. But one look round convinced me that the position was hopeless. With the exception of the tarpaulins, the seats, and the tiller, the boat was unfurnished. As I thought of these things, and remembered that I was some hundreds of miles from land, that I had a couple of biscuits for food, and a half a flask of brandy and water for drink, I experienced a terror greater than any I have known; and so weak was I with sickness and so low with the disappointment of it, that I put my head between my hands and sobbed like a great child who had known a childish sorrow. Only when the tears had dried upon my face, and there was that after-sense of resignation which follows a nervous outbreak, did I upbraid myself for a weakling, and set to think out plans for my release. I had no compass, but, taking the north through the "pointers," I tried to make out the course in which I was drifting; yet this, I must confess, was a hopeless task. I thought that the boat was being carried by a steady current; yet whether the current set towards the land or away from it, I could not tell.

When a couple of hours had passed, and I could see the yacht no longer, I took a new consolation in the thought that I must, after all, be in the track of steamers bound out from, or to, New York; and in this hope I covered myself in the tarpaulins and lay down again to shield myself from the wind which blew with much sharpness as the night grew. I did not sleep, but lay half-dazed for an hour or more, and was roused only at a curious light which flashed above me in the sky. Its first aspect led me to the conclusion that I saw a reflection of the Aurora; but the second flash altered the opinion. The light was clearly focussed, being a volume of intensely bright, white rays which passed right above me with slow and guided motion, and then stopped altogether, almost fixed upon the jolly-boat. I knew then what it was, and I sat up to see the great beams of a man-of-war's search-light, showing an arc of the water almost as clear as by the sun's power. The vessel itself I could not make out; but I feared at once that fate had sent me straight to the nameless ship; and that the very misfortune I had thought to have undone was brought home to me. Yet I could not take one step to defend myself, and must perforce drift on, to what end I knew not.

The light shone in all its brightness for some five minutes; then it died away suddenly, and on the spot whence it had come I could just distinguish the dark hull of a steamer. To my vast consolation, she had two funnels and three masts, and