A Master of Fortune Part 19

"She'll have carried a big boat on the top of that house amidships, and that's gone, too. Well, I hope her crew have got to dry land somewhere, or been picked up, poor beggars. Nasty things, those old wind-jammers, Mr. Strake. Give me steam."

"But there's a pile of money in her still," said the third mate, following up his own thoughts. "She's an iron ship, and she'll be two thousand tons, good. Likely enough in the 'Frisco grain trade. Seems to me a new ship, too; anyway, she's got those humbugging patent tops'ls."

"And you're thinking she'd be a nice plum if we could pluck her in anywhere?" said Image, reading what was in his mind.

"Well, me lad, I know that as well as you, and no one would be pleaseder to pocket 300. But the old _M'poso's_ a mailboat, and because she's got about a quarter of a hundredweight of badly spelt letters on board, she can't do that sort of salvage work if there's no life-saving thrown in as an extra reason. Besides, we're behind time as it is, with smelling round for so much cargo, and though I shall draw my two and a-half per cent, on that, I shall have it all to pay away again, and more to boot, in fines for being late. No, I tell you it isn't all sheer profit and delight in being skipper on one of those West African coast boats. And there's another thing: the Chief was telling me only this morning that they've figured it very close on the coal. We only have what'll take us to Liverpool ourselves, without trying to pull a yawing, heavy, towing thing like that on behind us."

Strake drummed at the white rail of the bridge. He was a very young man, and he was very keen on getting the chance of distinguishing himself; and here, on the warm, windless swells abeam, the chance seemed to sit beckoning him. "I've been thinking, sir, if you can lend me half a dozen men, I could take her in somewhere myself."

"I'm as likely to lend you half a dozen angels. Look at the deck hands; look at the sickly trip this has been. We've had to put some of them on double tricks at the wheel already, and as for getting any painting done, or having the ship cleaned up a bit, why, I can see we shall go into Liverpool as dirty as a Geordie collier. Besides, Mr. Strake, I believe I've told you once or twice already that you're not much use yourself, but anyway you're the best that's left, and I'm having to stand watch and watch with you as it is. If the mate gets out of his bed between here and home, it'll be to go over the side, and the second mate's nearly as bad with that nasty blackwater fever only just off him; and there you are. Mr. Strake, if you have a penn'oth of brains stowed away anywhere, I wish to whiskers you'd show 'em sometimes."

"Old man's mad at losing a nice lump of salvage," thought Strake.

"Natural, I guess." So he said quietly: "Ay, ay, sir," and walked away to the other end of the bridge.

Captain Image followed him half-way, but stopped irresolutely with his hand on the engine-room telegraph. On the fore main deck below him his old friend, Captain Owen Kettle, was leaning on the rail, staring wistfully at the derelict.

"Poor beggar," Image mused, "'tisn't hard to guess what he's thinking about. I wonder if I could fix it for him to take her home. It might set him on his legs again, and he's come low enough, Lord knows. If I hadn't given him a room in the first-cla.s.s for old times' sake, he'd have had to go home, after his trouble on the West Coast, as a distressed seaman, and touch his cap to me when I pa.s.sed. I've not done badly by him, but I shall have to pay for that room in the first-cla.s.s out of my own pocket, and if he was to take that old wind-jammer in somewhere, he'd fork out, and very like give me a dash besides.

"Yes, I will say that about Kettle; he's honest as a barkeeper, and generous besides. He's a steamer sailor, of course, and has been most of these years, and how he'll do the white wings business again, Lord only knows. Forget he hasn't got engines till it's too late, and then drown himself probably. However, that's his palaver. Where we're going to scratch him up a crew from's the thing that bothers me. Well, we'll see." He leaned down over the bridge rail, and called.

Kettle looked up.

"Here a minute, Captain."

Poor Kettle's eye lit, and he came up the ladders with a boy's quickness.

Image nodded toward the deserted vessel. "Fine full-rigger, hasn't she been? What do you make her out for?"

"'Frisco grain ship. Stuff in bulk. And it's shifted."

"Looks that way. Have you forgotten all your 'mainsail haul' and the square-rig gymnastics?"

"I'm hard enough pushed now to remember even the theory-sums they taught at navigation school if I thought they would serve me."

"I know. And I'm as sorry for you, Captain, as I can hold. But you see, it's this: I'm short of sailormen; I've barely enough to steer and keep the decks clean; anyway I've none to spare."

"I don't ask for fancy goods," said Kettle eagerly. "Give me anything with hands on it--apes, n.i.g.g.e.rs, stokers, what you like, and I'll soon teach them their dancing steps."

Captain Image pulled at his moustache. "The trouble of it is, we are short everywhere. It's been a sickly voyage, this. I couldn't let you have more than two out of the stokehold, and even if we take those, the old Chief will be fit to eat me. You could do nothing with that big vessel with only two beside yourself."

"Let me go round and see. I believe I can rake up enough hands somehow."

"Well, you must be quick about it," said Image. "I've wasted more than enough time already. I can only give you five minutes, Captain. Oh, by the way, there's a n.i.g.g.e.r stowaway from Sarry Leone you can take if you like. He's a stonemason or some such foolishness, and I don't mind having him drowned. If you hammer him enough, probably he'll learn how to put some weight on a brace."

"That stonemason's just the man I can use," said Kettle. "Get him for me. I'll never forget your kindness over this, Captain, and you may depend upon me to do the square thing by you if I get her home."

Captain Kettle ran off down the bridge and was quickly out of sight, and hard at his quest for volunteers. Captain Image waited a minute, and he turned to his third mate. "Now, me lad," he said, "I know you're disappointed; but with the other mates sick like they are, it's just impossible for me to let you go. If I did, the Company would sack me, and the dirty Board of Trade would probably take away my ticket. So you may as well do the kind, and help poor old Cappie Kettle. You see what he's come down to, through no fault of his own. You're young, and you're full to the coamings with confidence. I'm older, and I know that luck may very well get up and hit me, and I'll be wanting a helping hand myself. It's a rotten, undependable trade, this sailoring. You might just call the carpenter, and get the cover off that smaller lifeboat."

"You think he'll get a crew, then, sir, and not our deckhands?"

"Him? He'll get some things with legs and arms to them, if he has to whittle 'em out of kindling-wood. It's not that that'll stop Cappie Kettle now, me lad."

The third mate went off, sent for the carpenter, and started to get a lifeboat cleared and ready for launching. Captain Image fell to anxiously pacing the upper bridge, and presently Kettle came back to him.

"Well, Captain," he said, "I got a fine crew to volunteer, if you can see your way to let me have them. There's a fireman and a trimmer, both English; there's a third-cla.s.s pa.s.senger--a Dago of some sort, I think he is, that was a ganger on the Congo railway--and there's Mr.

Dayton-Philipps; and if you send me along your n.i.g.g.e.r stonemason, that'll make a good, strong ship's company."

"Dayton-Philipps!" said Image. "Why, he's an officer in the English Army, and he's been in command of Haussa troops on the Gold Coast, and he's been some sort of a Resident, or political thing up in one of those n.i.g.g.e.r towns at the back there. What's he want to go for?"

"Said he'd come for the fun of the thing."

Captain Image gave a grim laugh. "Well, I think he'll find all the fun he's any use for before he's ash.o.r.e again. Extraordinary thing some people can't see they're well off when they've got a job ash.o.r.e. Now, Mr. Strake, hurry with that boat and get her lowered away. You're to take charge and bring her back; and mind, you're not to leave the captain here and his gang aboard if the vessel's too badly wrecked to be safe."

He turned to Kettle. "Excuse my giving that last order, old man, but I know how keen you are, and I'm not going to let you go off to try and navigate a sieve. You're far too good a man to be drowned uselessly."

The word was "Hurry," now that the final decision had been given, and the davit tackles squeaked out as the lifeboat jerked down toward the water. She rode there at the end of her painter, and the three rowers and the third mate fended her off, while Kettle's crew of nondescripts scrambled unhandily down to take their places. The negro stowaway refused stubbornly to leave the steamer, and so was lowered ignominiously in a bowline, and then, as he still objected loudly that he came from Sa' Leone, and was a free British subject, some one crammed a bucket over his head, amidst the uproarious laughter of the onlookers.

Captain Kettle swung himself down the swaying Jacob's ladder, and the boat's painter was cast off; and under three oars she moved slowly off over the hot sun-kissed swells. Advice and farewells boomed like a thunderstorm from the steamer, and an animated frieze of faces and figures and waving headgear decorated her rail.

Ahead of them, the quiet ship shouldered clumsily over the rollers, now gushing down till she dipped her martingale, now swooping up again, sending whole cataracts of water swirling along her waist.

The men in the boat regarded her with curious eyes as they drew nearer.

Even the three rowers turned their heads, and were called to order therefor by the mate at the tiller. A red ensign was seized jack downward in her main rigging, the highest note of the sailorman's agony of distress. On its wooden case, in her starboard fore-rigging, a dioptric lens sent out the faint green glow of a lamp's light into the sunshine.

The third mate drew attention to this last "Lot of oil in that lamp," he said, "or it means they haven't deserted her very long. To my mind, it must have been in yesterday's breeze her cargo shifted, and scared her people into leaving her."

"We shall see," said Kettle, still staring intently ahead.

The boat was run up cannily alongside, and Kettle jumped into the main chains and clambered on board over the bulwarks. "Now, pa.s.s up my crew, Mr. Strake," said he.

"I'm coming myself next, if you don't mind," said the third mate, and did so. "Must obey the old man's orders," he explained, as they stood together on the sloping decks. "You heard yourself what he said, Captain."

"Well, Mr. Mate," said Kettle grimly, "I hope you'll decide she's seaworthy, because, whatever view you take of it, as I've got this far, here I'm going to stay."

The mate frowned. He was a young man; he was here in authority, and he had a great notion of making his authority felt. Captain Kettle was to him merely a down-on-his-luck free-pa.s.sage n.o.body, and as the mate was large and l.u.s.ty he did not antic.i.p.ate trouble. So he remarked rather crabbedly that he was going to obey his orders, and went aft along the slanting deck.

It was clear that the vessel had been swept--badly swept. Ropes-ends streamed here and there and overboard in every direction, and everything movable had been carried away eternally by the sea. A goodly part of the starboard bulwarks had vanished, and the swells gushed in and out as they chose. But the hatch tarpaulins and companions were still in place; and though it was clear from the list (which was so great that they could not walk without holding on) that her cargo was badly shifted, there was no evidence so far that she was otherwise than sound.

The third mate led the way on to the p.o.o.p, opened the companion doors and slide, and went below. Kettle followed. There was a cabin with state rooms off it, littered, but dry. Strake went down on his knees beneath the table, searching for something. "Lazaret hatch ought to be down here," he explained. "I want to see in there. Ah, it is."

He got his fingers in the ring and pulled it back. Then he whistled.

"Half-full of water," he said. "I thought so from the way she floated.

It's up to the beams down here. Likely enough she'll have started a plate somewhere. 'Fraid it's no go for you, Captain. Why, if a breeze was to come on, half the side of her might drop out, and she'd go down like a stone."

Now to Kettle's honor be it said (seeing what he had in his mind) he did not tackle the man as he knelt there peering into the lazaret. Instead he waited till he stood up again, and then made his statement coldly and deliberately.

"This ship's not too dangerous for me, and I choose to judge. And if she'll do for me, she's good enough for the crew I've got in your boat.

Now I want them on deck, and at work without any more palaver."