A Master of Fortune Part 32

"A skipper on one of the bigger pa.s.senger lines would be just as keen as you could be not to have his ship mixed up with anything discreditable.

But pa.s.sengers are an impious lot. They are just bursting for want of a job, most of them; they revel in anything like an accident to break the monotony; and if they can spot a bit of foul play--or say they helped to spot it--why, there they are, supplied with one good solid never-stale yarn for all the rest of their natural lives. So you see they've every inducement to do a lot of ferreting that a ship's officers (with other work on hand) would not dream about."

Captain Kettle pulled thoughtfully at his neat red pointed beard.

"You're putting the thing in a new light, sir, and I thank you for what you've said. I see my course plain before me. So soon as we have dropped the pilot, I shall go straight to this Mr. Cranze, and tell him that from information received I hear he's going to put Mr. Hamilton over the side. And then I shall say: 'Into irons you go, my man, so soon as ever Hamilton's missing.'"

Lupton laughed rather angrily. "And what would be the result of that, do you think?"

"Cranze will get mad. He'll probably talk a good deal, and that I shall allow within limits. But he'll not hit me. I'm not the kind of a man that other people see fit to raise their hands to."

"You don't look it. But, my good sir, don't you see that if you speak out like that, you'll probably scare the beggar off his game altogether?"

"And why not? Do you think my ship's a blessed detective novel that's to be run just for your amus.e.m.e.nt?"

Lupton tapped the table slowly with his fingers. "Now look here, Captain," he said, "there's a chance here of our putting a stop to a murderous game that's been going on too long, by catching a rogue red-handed. It's to our interest to get a conviction and make an example. It's to your interest to keep your ship free from a fuss."

"All the way."

"Quite so. My Company's prepared to buy your interest up."

"You must put it plainer than that."

"I'll put it as definitely as you like. I'll give you 20 to keep your eye on these men, and say nothing about what I've told you, but just watch. If you catch Cranze so clearly trying it on that the Courts give a conviction, the Company will pay you 200."

"It's a lot of money."

"My Company will find it a lot cheaper than paying out 20,000, and that's what Hamilton's insured for."

"Phew! I didn't know we were dealing with such big figures. Well, Mr.

Cranze has got his inducements to murder the man, anyway."

"I told you that from the first. Now, Captain, are you going to take my check for that preliminary 20?"

"Hand it over," said Kettle. "I see no objections. And you may as well give me a bit of a letter about the balance."

"I'll do both," said Lupton, and took out his stylograph, and called a waiter to bring him hotel writing paper.

Now Captain Owen Kettle, once he had taken up this piece of employment, entered into it with a kind of chastened joy. The Life Insurance Company's agent had rather sneered at ship-captains as a cla.s.s (so he considered), and though the man did his best to be outwardly civil, it was plain that he considered a mob of pa.s.sengers the intellectual superiors of any master mariner. So Kettle intended to prove himself the "complete detective" out of sheer _esprit de corps_.

As he had surmised, Messrs. Hamilton and Cranze remained the _Flamingo's_ only two pa.s.sengers, and so he considered he might devote full attention to them without being remarkable. If he had been a steward making sure of his tips he could not have been more solicitous for their welfare; and to say he watched them like a cat is putting the thing feebly. Any man with an uneasy conscience must have grasped from the very first that the plot had been guessed at, and that this awkward little skipper, with his oppressive civilities, was merely waiting his chance to act as Nemesis.

But either Mr. Cranze had an easy mind, and Lupton had unjustly maligned him, or he was a fellow of the most brazen a.s.surance. He refused to take the least vestige of a warning. He came on board with a dozen cases of champagne and four of liqueur brandy as a part of his personal luggage, and his first question to every official he came across was how much he would have to pay per bottle for corkage.

As he made these inquiries from a donkey-man, two deck hands, three mates, a trimmer, the third engineer, two stewards, and Captain Kettle himself, the answers he received were various, and some of them were profane. He seemed to take a delight in advertising his chronic drunkenness, and between-whiles he made a silly show of the fact that he carried a loaded revolver in his hip pocket. "Lots fellows do't now," he explained. "Never know who-you-may-meet. S' a mos' useful habit."

Now Captain Kettle, in his inmost heart, considered that Cranze was nerving himself up with drink to the committal of his horrid deed, and so he took a very natural precaution. Before they had dropped the Irish coast he had managed to borrow the revolver, unbeknown to its owner, and carefully extracted the powder from the cartridges, replacing the bullets for the sake of appearances. And as it happened, the chief engineer, who was a married man as well as a humorist, though working independently of his skipper, carried the matter still further. He, too, got hold of the weapon, and brazed up the breech-block immovably, so that it could not be surrept.i.tiously reloaded. He said that his wife had instructed him to take no chances, and that meanwhile, as a fool's pendant, the revolver was as good as ever it had been.

The revolver became the joke of the ship. Cranze kept up a steady soak on king's peg--putting in a good three fingers of the liqueur brandy before filling up the tumbler with champagne--and was naturally inclined to be argumentative. Any one of the ship's company who happened to be near him with a little time to spare would get up a discussion on any matter that came to his mind, work things gently to a climax, and then contradict Cranze flatly. Upon which, out would come the revolver, and down would go the humorist on his knees, pitifully begging for pardon and life, to the vast amus.e.m.e.nt of the onlookers.

Pratt, the chief engineer, was the inventor of this game, but he openly renounced all patent rights. He said that everybody on board ought to take the stage in turn--he himself was quite content to retire on his early laurels. So all hands took pains to contradict Cranze and to cower with a fine show of dramatic fright before his spiked revolver.

All the _Flamingo's_ company except one man, that is. Frivolity of this sort in no way suited the appet.i.te of Captain Owen Kettle. He talked with Cranze with a certain dry cordiality. And at times he contradicted him. In fact the little sailor contradicted most pa.s.sengers if he talked to them for long. He was a man with strong opinions, and he regarded tolerance as mere weakness. Moreover, Cranze's chronic soaking nauseated him. But at the same time, if his civility was scant, Cranze never lugged out the foolish weapon in his presence. There was a something in the shipmaster's eye which daunted him. The utmost height to which his resentment could reach with Captain Kettle was a folding of the arms and a scowl which was intended to be majestic, but which was frequently spoiled by a hiccough.

In pleasant contrast to this weak, contemptible knave was the man Hamilton, his dupe and prospective victim. For him Kettle formed a liking at once, though for the first days of the voyage it was little enough he saw of his actual presence. Hamilton was a bad sailor and a lover of warmth, and as the Western Ocean was just then in one of its cold and noisy moods, this pa.s.senger went shudderingly out of the cabin when meals came on, and returned shudderingly from the cold on deck as soon they were over.

But when the _Flamingo_ began to make her southing, and the yellow tangles of weed floating in emerald waves bore evidence that they were steaming against the warm current of the Gulf Stream, then Hamilton came into view. He found a spot on the top of the fiddley under the lee of a tank where a chair could stand, and sat there in the glow of sun and boilers, and basked complacently.

He was a shy, nervous little man, and though Kettle had usually a fine contempt for all weakness, somehow his heart went out to this retiring pa.s.senger almost at first sight. Myself, I am inclined to think it was because he knew him to be hunted, knew him to be the object of a murderous conspiracy, and loathed most thoroughly the vulgar rogue who was his treacherous enemy. But Captain Kettle scouts the idea that he was stirred by any such feeble, womanish motives. Kettle was a poet himself, and with the kinship of species he felt the poetic fire glowing out from the person of this Mr. Hamilton. At least, so he says; and if he has deceived himself on the matter, which, from an outsider's point of view, seems likely, I am sure the error is quite unconscious. The little sailor may have his faults, as the index of these pages has shown; but untruthfulness has never been set down to his tally, and I am not going to accuse him of it now.

Still, it is a sure thing that talk on the subject of verse making did not come at once. Kettle was immensely sensitive about his accomplishment, and had writhed under brutal scoffs and polished ridicule at his poetry more times than he cared to count. With pa.s.sengers especially he kept it scrupulously in the background, even as he did his talent for making sweet music on the accordion.

But somehow he and Hamilton, after a few days' acquaintance, seemed to glide into the subject imperceptibly. Mutual confidences followed in the course of nature. It seemed that Hamilton too, like Kettle, was a devotee of the stiller forms of verse.

"You see, Skipper," he said, "I've been a pretty bad lot, and I've made things hum most of my time, and so I suppose I get my hankerings after restfulness as the natural result of contrast."

"Same here, sir. Ash.o.r.e I can respect myself, and in our chapel circle, though I say it myself, you'll find few more respected men. But at sea I shouldn't like to tell you what I've done; I shouldn't like to tell any one. If a saint has to come down and skipper the brutes we have to ship as sailormen nowadays, he'd wear out his halo flinging it at them. And when matters have been worst, and I've been bashing the hands about, or doing things to carry out an owner's order that I'd blush even to think of ash.o.r.e, why then, sir, gentle verse, to tunes I know, seems to bubble up inside me like springs in a barren land."

"Well, I don't know about that," said Hamilton doubtfully, "but when I get thoroughly sick of myself, and wish I was dead, I sometimes stave off putting a shot through my silly head by getting a pencil and paper, and shifting my thoughts out of the beastly world I know, into--well, it's hard to explain. But I get sort of notions, don't you see, and they seem to run best in verse. I write 'em when the fit's on me, and I burn 'em when the fit's through; and you'll hardly think it, but I never told a living soul I ever did such a thing till I told you this minute. My set--I mean, I couldn't bear to be laughed at. But you seem to be a fellow that's been in much the same sort of box yourself."

"I don't know quite that. At any rate, I've never thought of shooting myself."

"Oh, I didn't mean to suggest we were alike at all in detail. I was only thinking we had both seen rough times. Lord forbid that any man should ever be half the fool that I have been." He sighed heavily.--"However, sufficient for the day. Look out over yonder; there's a bit of color for you."

A shoal of flying-fish got up out of the warm, shining water and ran away over the ripples like so many silver rats; yellow tangles of Gulf-weed swam in close squadron on the emerald sea; and on the western horizon screw-pile lighthouses stood up out of the water, marking the nearness of the low-lying Floridan beaches, and reminding one of mysterious Everglades beyond.

"A man, they tell me," said Hamilton, "can go into that country at the back there, and be a hermit, and live honestly on his own fish and fruit. I believe I'd like that life. I could go there, and be decent, and perhaps in time I should forget things."

"Don't you try it. The mosquitoes are shocking."

"There are worse devils than mosquitoes. Now I should have thought there was something about those Everglades that would have appealed to you, Skipper?"

"There isn't, and I've been there. You want a shot-gun in Florida to shoot callers with, not eatables. I've written verse there, and good verse, but it was the same old tale, sir, that brought it up to my fingers' ends. I'd been having trouble just then--yes, bad trouble. No, Mr. Hamilton, you go home, sir, to England and find a country place, and get on a farm, and watch the corn growing, and hear the birds sing, and get hold of the smells of the fields, and the colors of the trees, and then you'll enjoy life and turn out poetry you can be proud of."

"Doesn't appeal to me. You see you look upon the country with a countryman's eye."

"Me," said Kettle. "I'm seaport and sea bred and brought up, and all I know of fields and a farm is what I've seen from a railway-carriage window. No, I've had to work too hard for my living, and for a living for Mrs. Kettle and the youngsters, to have any time for that sort of enjoyment; but a man can't help knowing what he wants, sir, can he? And that's what I'm aiming at, and it's for that I'm scratching together every sixpence of money I can lay hands on."

But here a sudden outcry below broke in upon their talk. "That's Mr.

Cranze," said Kettle. "He'll be going too far in one of his tantrums one of these days."

"I'm piously hoping the drunken brute will tumble overboard," Hamilton muttered; "it would save a lot of trouble for everybody. Eh, well," he said, "I suppose I'd better go and look after him," and got up and went below.

Captain Kettle sat where he was, musing. He had no fear that Cranze, the ship's b.u.t.t and drunkard, would murder his man in broad, staring daylight, especially as, judging from the sounds, others of the ship's company were at present baiting him. But he did not see his way to earning that extra 200, which he would very much like to have fingered.

To let this vulgar, drunken ruffian commit some overt act against Hamilton's life, without doing him actual damage, seemed an impossibility. He had taken far to great a fancy for Hamilton to allow him to be hurt. He was beginning to be mystified by the whole thing. The case was by no means so simple and straightforward as it had looked when Lupton put it to him in the hotel smoking-room ash.o.r.e.

Had Cranze been any other pa.s.senger, he would have stopped his drunken riotings by taking away the drink, and by giving strict orders that the man was to be supplied with no further intoxicants. But Cranze sober might be dangerous, while Cranze tipsy was merely a figure of ridicule; so he submitted, very much against his grain, to having his ship made into a bear-garden, and anxiously awaited developments.

The _Flamingo_ cleared the south of Florida, sighted the high land of Cuba, and stood across through the Yucatan channel to commence her peddling business in Honduras, and at some twenty ports she came to an anchor six miles off sh.o.r.e, and hooted with her siren till lighters came off through the surf and the shallows.

Machinery they sent ash.o.r.e at these little-known stations, coal, powder, dress-goods, and pianos, receiving in return a varied a.s.sortment of hides, mahogany, dyewoods, and some parcels of ore. There was a small ferrying business done also between neighboring ports in unclean native pa.s.sengers, who harbored on the foredeck, and complained of want of deference from the crew.