A Deal in Wheat

F >> Frank Norris >> A Deal in Wheat

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

"'Orfficer, I am a min'ster o' the gospel, o' the Methodis'
denomineye-tion, an' I'm deteyined agin my will along o' a pirate ship
which has robbed certain parties o' val-able goods. Which syme I'm
pre-pared to attest afore a no'try publick, an' lodge informeye-tion o'
crime. An',' s'ys he, 'I demand the protection o' the authorities an'
arsk to be directed to the American consul.'

"S'y, we never wyted to hear no more, but hyked awye hot foot. S'y, wot
all now. Oh, mee Gord! eyen't it a rum gao for fair? S'y, let's get
aout o' here, Hardy, dear."

"Look there," said Hardenberg, jerking his head toward the cutter, "how
far'd we get before the customs would 'a' passed the tip to _her_ and
she'd started to overhaul us? That's what they feed her for--to round up
the likes o' us."

"We got to do something rather soon," put in Strokher. "Here comes the
custom house dinghy now."

As a matter of fact, a boat was putting off from the dock. At her stern
fluttered the custom house flag.

"Bitched--bitched for fair!" cried Ally Bazan.

[Illustration: "'ERE'S 'ELL TO PAY!"

From a drawing by Lucius Hitchcock _Courtesy of Collier's Weekly_.]

"Quick, now!" exclaimed Hardenberg. "On the jump! Overboard with that
loot!--or no. Steady! That won't do. There's that dam' cutter. They'd
see it go. Here!--into the galley. There's a fire in the stove. Get a
move on!"

"Wot!" wailed Ally Bazan. "Burn the little joker. Gord, I _can't,_
Hardy, I _can't._ It's agin human nature."

"You can do time in San Quentin, then, for felony," retorted Strokher as
he and Hardenberg dashed by him, their arms full of the skins. "You can
do time in San Quentin else. Make your choice. I put it to you as
between man and man."

With set teeth, and ever and again glancing over the rail at the
oncoming boat, the two fed their fortune to the fire. The pelts,
partially cured and still fatty, blazed like crude oil, the hair
crisping, the hides melting into rivulets of grease. For a minute the
schooner reeked of the smell and a stifling smoke poured from the galley
stack. Then the embers of the fire guttered and a long whiff of sea wind
blew away the reek. A single skin, fallen in the scramble, still
remained on the floor of the galley. Hardenberg snatched it up, tossed
it into the flames and clapped the door to. "Now, let him squeal," he
declared. "You fellows, when that boat gets here, let _me_ talk; keep
your mouths shut or, by God, we'll all wear stripes."

The Three Crows watched the boat's approach in a silence broken only
once by a long whimper from Ally Bazan. "An' it was a-workin' out as
lovely as Billy-oh," he said, "till that syme underbred costermonger's
swipe remembered he was Methody--an' him who, only a few d'ys back, went
raound s'yin' 'scrag the "Boomskys"!' A couple o' thousand pounds gone
as quick as look at it. Oh, I eyn't never goin' to git over this."

The boat came up and the Three Crows were puzzled to note that no
brass-buttoned personage sat in the stern-sheets, no harbour police
glowered at them from the bow, no officer of the law fixed them with the
eye of suspicion. The boat was manned only by a couple of
freight-handlers in woolen Jerseys, upon the breasts of which were
affixed the two letters "C.H."

"Say," called one of the freight-handlers, "is this the _Bertha
Millner?"_

"Yes," answered Hardenberg, his voice at a growl. "An' what might you
want with her, my friend?"

"Well, look here," said the other, "one of your hands came ashore mad as
a coot and broke into the house of the American Consul, and resisted
arrest and raised hell generally. The inspector says you got to send a
provost guard or something ashore to take him off. There's been several
mix-ups among ships' crews lately and the town----"

The tide drifted the boat out of hearing, and Hardenberg sat down on the
capstan head, turning his back to his comrades. There was a long
silence. Then he said:

"Boys, let's go home. I--I want to have a talk with President Ryder."

THE SHIP THAT SAW A GHOST

Very much of this story must remain untold, for the reason that if it
were definitely known what business I had aboard the tramp
steam-freighter _Glarus_, three hundred miles off the South American
coast on a certain summer's day, some few years ago, I would very likely
be obliged to answer a great many personal and direct questions put by
fussy and impertinent experts in maritime law--who are paid to be
inquisitive. Also, I would get "Ally Bazan," Strokher and Hardenberg
into trouble.

Suppose on that certain summer's day, you had asked of Lloyds' agency
where the _Glarus_ was, and what was her destination and cargo. You
would have been told that she was twenty days out from Callao, bound
north to San Francisco in ballast; that she had been spoken by the bark
_Medea_ and the steamer _Benevento_; that she was reported to have blown
out a cylinder head, but being manageable was proceeding on her way
under sail.

That is what Lloyds would have answered.

If you know something of the ways of ships and what is expected of them,
you will understand that the _Glarus_, to be some half a dozen hundred
miles south of where Lloyds' would have her, and to be still going
south, under full steam, was a scandal that would have made her brothers
and sisters ostracize her finally and forever.

And that is curious, too. Humans may indulge in vagaries innumerable,
and may go far afield in the way of lying; but a ship may not so much as
quibble without suspicion. The least lapse of "regularity," the least
difficulty in squaring performance with intuition, and behold she is on
the black list, and her captain, owners, officers, agents and
consignors, and even supercargoes, are asked to explain.

And the _Glarus_ was already on the black list. From the beginning her
stars had been malign. As the _Breda_, she had first lost her
reputation, seduced into a filibustering escapade down the South
American coast, where in the end a plain-clothes United States
detective--that is to say, a revenue cutter--arrested her off Buenos
Ayres and brought her home, a prodigal daughter, besmirched and
disgraced.

After that she was in some dreadful black-birding business in a far
quarter of the South Pacific; and after that--her name changed finally
to the _Glarus_--poached seals for a syndicate of Dutchmen who lived in
Tacoma, and who afterward built a club-house out of what she earned.

And after that we got her.

We got her, I say, through Ryder's South Pacific Exploitation Company.
The "President" had picked out a lovely little deal for Hardenberg,
Strokher and Ally Bazan (the Three Black Crows), which he swore would
make them "independent rich" the rest of their respective lives. It is a
promising deal (B. 300 it is on Ryder's map), and if you want to know
more about it you may write to ask Ryder what B. 300 is. If he chooses
to tell you, that is his affair.

For B. 300--let us confess it--is, as Hardenberg puts it, as crooked as
a dog's hind leg. It is as risky as barratry. If you pull it off you
may--after paying Ryder his share--divide sixty-five, or possibly
sixty-seven, thousand dollars between you and your associates. If you
fail, and you are perilously like to fail, you will be sure to have a
man or two of your companions shot, maybe yourself obliged to pistol
certain people, and in the end fetch up at Tahiti, prisoner in a French
patrol-boat.

Observe that B. 300 is spoken of as still open. It is so, for the reason
that the Three Black Crows did not pull it off. It still stands marked
up in red ink on the map that hangs over Ryder's desk in the San
Francisco office; and any one can have a chance at it who will meet
Cyrus Ryder's terms. Only he can't get the _Glarus_ for the attempt.

For the trip to the island after B. 300 was the last occasion on which
the _Glarus_ will smell blue water or taste the trades. She will never
clear again. She is lumber.

And yet the _Glarus_ on this very blessed day of 1902 is riding to her
buoys off Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, complete in every detail (bar
a broken propeller shaft), not a rope missing, not a screw loose, not a
plank started--a perfectly equipped steam-freighter.

But you may go along the "Front" in San Francisco from Fisherman's Wharf
to the China steamships' docks and shake your dollars under the seamen's
noses, and if you so much as whisper _Glarus_ they will edge suddenly
off and look at you with scared suspicion, and then, as like as not,
walk away without another word. No pilot will take the _Glarus_ out; no
captain will navigate her; no stoker will feed her fires; no sailor will
walk her decks. The _Glarus_ is suspect. She has seen a ghost.

* * * * *

It happened on our voyage to the island after this same B. 300. We had
stood well off from shore for day after day, and Hardenberg had shaped
our course so far from the track of navigation that since the
_Benevento_ had hulled down and vanished over the horizon no stitch of
canvas nor smudge of smoke had we seen. We had passed the equator long
since, and would fetch a long circuit to the southard, and bear up
against the island by a circuitous route. This to avoid being spoken. It
was tremendously essential that the _Glarus_ should not be spoken.

I suppose, no doubt, that it was the knowledge of our isolation that
impressed me with the dreadful remoteness of our position. Certainly the
sea in itself looks no different at a thousand than at a hundred miles
from shore. But as day after day I came out on deck at noon, after
ascertaining our position on the chart (a mere pin-point in a reach of
empty paper), the sight of the ocean weighed down upon me with an
infinitely great awesomeness--and I was no new hand to the high seas
even then.

But at such times the _Glarus_ seemed to me to be threading a loneliness
beyond all worlds and beyond all conception desolate. Even in more
populous waters, when no sail notches the line of the horizon, the
propinquity of one's kind is nevertheless a thing understood, and to an
unappreciated degree comforting. Here, however, I knew we were out, far
out in the desert. Never a keel for years upon years before us had
parted these waters; never a sail had bellied to these winds.
Perfunctorily, day in and day out we turned our eyes through long habit
toward the horizon. But we knew, before the look, that the searching
would be bootless. Forever and forever, under the pitiless sun and cold
blue sky stretched the indigo of the ocean floor. The ether between the
planets can be no less empty, no less void.

I never, till that moment, could have so much as conceived the
imagination of such loneliness, such utter stagnant abomination of
desolation. In an open boat, bereft of comrades, I should have gone mad
in thirty minutes.

I remember to have approximated the impression of such empty immensity
only once before, in my younger days, when I lay on my back on a
treeless, bushless mountainside and stared up into the sky for the
better part of an hour.

You probably know the trick. If you do not, you must understand that if
you look up at the blue long enough, the flatness of the thing begins
little by little to expand, to give here and there; and the eye travels
on and on and up and up, till at length (well for you that it lasts but
the fraction of a second), you all at once see space. You generally stop
there and cry out, and--your hands over your eyes--are only too glad to
grovel close to the good old solid earth again. Just as I, so often on
short voyage, was glad to wrench my eyes away from that horrid vacancy,
to fasten them upon our sailless masts and stack, or to lay my grip upon
the sooty smudged taffrail of the only thing that stood between me and
the Outer Dark.

For we had come at last to that region of the Great Seas where no ship
goes, the silent sea of Coleridge and the Ancient One, the unplumbed,
untracked, uncharted Dreadfulness, primordial, hushed, and we were as
much alone as a grain of star-dust whirling in the empty space beyond
Uranus and the ken of the greater telescopes.

So the _Glarus_ plodded and churned her way onward. Every day and all
day the same pale-blue sky and the unwinking sun bent over that moving
speck. Every day and all day the same black-blue water-world, untouched
by any known wind, smooth as a slab of syenite, colourful as an opal,
stretched out and around and beyond and before and behind us, forever,
illimitable, empty. Every day the smoke of our fires veiled the streaked
whiteness of our wake. Every day Hardenberg (our skipper) at noon
pricked a pin-hole in the chart that hung in the wheel-house, and that
showed we were so much farther into the wilderness. Every day the world
of men, of civilization, of newspapers, policemen and street-railways
receded, and we steamed on alone, lost and forgotten in that silent sea.

"Jolly lot o' room to turn raound in," observed Ally Bazan, the
colonial, "withaout steppin' on y'r neighbour's toes."

"We're clean, clean out o' the track o' navigation," Hardenberg told
him. "An' a blessed good thing for us, too. Nobody ever comes down into
these waters. Ye couldn't pick no course here. Everything leads to
nowhere."

"Might as well be in a bally balloon," said Strokher.

I shall not tell of the nature of the venture on which the _Glarus_ was
bound, further than to say it was not legitimate. It had to do with an
ill thing done more than two centuries ago. There was money in the
venture, but it was not to be gained by a violation of metes and bounds
which are better left intact.

The island toward which we were heading is associated in the minds of
men with a Horror.

A ship had called there once, two hundred years in advance of the
_Glarus_--a ship not much unlike the crank high-prowed caravel of
Hudson, and her company had landed, and having accomplished the evil
they had set out to do, made shift to sail away. And then, just after
the palms of the island had sunk from sight below the water's edge, the
unspeakable had happened. The Death that was not Death had arisen from
out the sea and stood before the ship, and over it, and the blight of
the thing lay along the decks like mould, and the ship sweated in the
terror of that which is yet without a name.

Twenty men died in the first week, all but six in the second. These six,
with the shadow of insanity upon them, made out to launch a boat,
returned to the island and died there, after leaving a record of what
had happened.

The six left the ship exactly as she was, sails all set, lanterns all
lit--left her in the shadow of the Death that was not Death.

She stood there, becalmed, and watched them go. She was never heard of
again.

Or was she--well, that's as may be.

But the main point of the whole affair, to my notion, has always been
this. The ship was the last friend of those six poor wretches who made
back for the island with their poor chests of plunder. She was their
guardian, as it were, would have defended and befriended them to the
last; and also we, the Three Black Crows and myself, had no right under
heaven, nor before the law of men, to come prying and peeping into this
business--into this affair of the dead and buried past. There was
sacrilege in it. We were no better than body-snatchers.

* * * * *

When I heard the others complaining of the loneliness of our
surroundings, I said nothing at first. I was no sailor man, and I was on
board only by tolerance. But I looked again at the maddening sameness of
the horizon--the same vacant, void horizon that we had seen now for
sixteen days on end, and felt in my wits and in my nerves that same
formless rebellion and protest such as comes when the same note is
reiterated over and over again.

It may seem a little thing that the mere fact of meeting with no other
ship should have ground down the edge of the spirit. But let the
incredulous--bound upon such a hazard as ours--sail straight into
nothingness for sixteen days on end, seeing nothing but the sun, hearing
nothing but the thresh of his own screw, and then put the question.

And yet, of all things, we desired no company. Stealth was our one great
aim. But I think there were moments--toward the last--when the Three
Crows would have welcomed even a cruiser.

Besides, there was more cause for depression, after all, than mere
isolation.

On the seventh day Hardenberg and I were forward by the cat-head,
adjusting the grain with some half-formed intent of spearing the
porpoises that of late had begun to appear under our bows, and
Hardenberg had been computing the number of days we were yet to run.

"We are some five hundred odd miles off that island by now," he said,
"and she's doing her thirteen knots handsome. All's well so far--but do
you know, I'd just as soon raise that point o' land as soon as
convenient."

"How so?" said I, bending on the line. "Expect some weather?"

"Mr. Dixon," said he, giving me a curious glance, "the sea is a queer
proposition, put it any ways. I've been a seafarin' man since I was big
as a minute, and I know the sea, and what's more, the Feel o' the sea.
Now, look out yonder. Nothin', hey? Nothin' but the same ol' skyline
we've watched all the way out. The glass is as steady as a steeple, and
this ol' hooker, I reckon, is as sound as the day she went off the ways.
But just the same if I were to home now, a-foolin' about Gloucester way
in my little dough-dish--d'ye know what? I'd put into port. I sure
would. Because why? Because I got the Feel o' the Sea, Mr. Dixon. I got
the Feel o' the Sea."

I had heard old skippers say something of this before, and I cited to
Hardenberg the experience of a skipper captain I once knew who had
turned turtle in a calm sea off Trincomalee. I ask him what this Feel of
the Sea was warning him against just now (for on the high sea any
premonition is a premonition of evil, not of good). But he was not
explicit.

"I don't know," he answered moodily, and as if in great perplexity,
coiling the rope as he spoke. "I don't know. There's some blame thing or
other close to us, I'll bet a hat. I don't know the name of it, but
there's a big Bird in the air, just out of sight som'eres, and," he
suddenly exclaimed, smacking his knee and leaning forward,
"I--don't--like--it--one--dam'--bit."

The same thing came up in our talk in the cabin that night, after the
dinner was taken off and we settled down to tobacco. Only, at this time,
Hardenberg was on duty on the bridge. It was Ally Bazan who spoke
instead.

"Seems to me," he hazarded, "as haow they's somethin' or other a-goin'
to bump up pretty blyme soon. I shouldn't be surprised, naow, y'know, if
we piled her up on some bally uncharted reef along o' to-night and went
strite daown afore we'd had a bloomin' charnce to s'y 'So long,
gen'lemen all.'"

He laughed as he spoke, but when, just at that moment, a pan clattered
in the galley, he jumped suddenly with an oath, and looked hard about
the cabin.

Then Strokher confessed to a sense of distress also. He'd been having it
since day before yesterday, it seemed.

"And I put it to you the glass is lovely," he said, "so it's no blow. I
guess," he continued, "we're all a bit seedy and ship-sore."

And whether or not this talk worked upon my own nerves, or whether in
very truth the Feel of the Sea had found me also, I do not know; but I
do know that after dinner that night, just before going to bed, a queer
sense of apprehension came upon me, and that when I had come to my
stateroom, after my turn upon deck, I became furiously angry with nobody
in particular, because I could not at once find the matches. But here
was a difference. The other man had been merely vaguely uncomfortable.

I could put a name to my uneasiness. I felt that we were being watched.

* * * * *

It was a strange ship's company we made after that. I speak only of the
Crows and myself. We carried a scant crew of stokers, and there was also
a chief engineer. But we saw so little of him that he did not count. The
Crows and I gloomed on the quarterdeck from dawn to dark, silent,
irritable, working upon each other's nerves till the creak of a block
would make a man jump like cold steel laid to his flesh. We quarreled
over absolute nothings, glowered at each other for half a word, and each
one of us, at different times, was at some pains to declare that never
in the course of his career had he been associated with such a
disagreeable trio of brutes. Yet we were always together, and sought
each other's company with painful insistence.

Only once were we all agreed, and that was when the cook, a Chinaman,
spoiled a certain batch of biscuits. Unanimously we fell foul of the
creature with so much vociferation as fishwives till he fled the cabin
in actual fear of mishandling, leaving us suddenly seized with noisy
hilarity--for the first time in a week. Hardenberg proposed a round of
drinks from our single remaining case of beer. We stood up and formed an
Elk's chain and then drained our glasses to each other's health with
profound seriousness.

That same evening, I remember, we all sat on the quarterdeck till late
and--oddly enough--related each one his life's history up to date; and
then went down to the cabin for a game of euchre before turning in.

We had left Strokher on the bridge--it was his watch--and had forgotten
all about him in the interest of the game, when--I suppose it was about
one in the morning--I heard him whistle long and shrill. I laid down my
cards and said:

"Hark!"

In the silence that followed we heard at first only the muffled lope of
our engines, the cadenced snorting of the exhaust, and the ticking of
Hardenberg's big watch in his waistcoat that he had hung by the arm-hole
to the back of his chair. Then from the bridge, above our deck,
prolonged, intoned--a wailing cry in the night--came Strokher's voice:

"Sail oh-h-h."

And the cards fell from our hands, and, like men turned to stone, we sat
looking at each other across the soiled red cloth for what seemed an
immeasurably long minute.

Then stumbling and swearing, in a hysteria of hurry, we gained the deck.

There was a moon, very low and reddish, but no wind. The sea beyond the
taffrail was as smooth as lava, and so still that the swells from the
cutwater of the _Glarus_ did not break as they rolled away from the
bows.

I remember that I stood staring and blinking at the empty ocean--where
the moonlight lay like a painted stripe reaching to the horizon--stupid
and frowning, till Hardenberg, who had gone on ahead, cried:

"Not here--on the bridge!"

We joined Strokher, and as I came up the others were asking:

"Where? Where?"

And there, before he had pointed, I saw--we all of us saw--And I heard
Hardenberg's teeth come together like a spring trap, while Ally Bazan
ducked as though to a blow, muttering:

"Gord 'a' mercy, what nyme do ye put to' a ship like that?"

And after that no one spoke for a long minute, and we stood there,
moveless black shadows, huddled together for the sake of the blessed
elbow touch that means so incalculably much, looking off over our port
quarter.

For the ship that we saw there--oh, she was not a half-mile distant--was
unlike any ship known to present day construction.

She was short, and high-pooped, and her stern, which was turned a little
toward us, we could see, was set with curious windows, not unlike a
house. And on either side of this stern were two great iron cressets
such as once were used to burn signal-fires in. She had three masts with
mighty yards swung 'thwart ship, but bare of all sails save a few
rotting streamers. Here and there about her a tangled mass of rigging
drooped and sagged.

And there she lay, in the red eye of the setting moon, in that solitary
ocean, shadowy, antique, forlorn, a thing the most abandoned, the most
sinister I ever remember to have seen.

Then Strokher began to explain volubly and with many repetitions.

"A derelict, of course. I was asleep; yes, I was asleep. Gross neglect
of duty. I say I was asleep--on watch. And we worked up to her. When I
woke, why--you see, when I woke, there she was," he gave a weak little
laugh, "and--and now, why, there she is, you see. I turned around and
saw her sudden like--when I woke up, that is."

He laughed again, and as he laughed the engines far below our feet gave
a sudden hiccough. Something crashed and struck the ship's sides till we
lurched as we stood. There was a shriek of steam, a shout--and then
silence.

The noise of the machinery ceased; the _Glarus_ slid through the still
water, moving only by her own decreasing momentum.

Hardenberg sang, "Stand by!" and called down the tube to the
engine-room.

"What's up?"

I was standing close enough to him to hear the answer in a small, faint
voice:

"Shaft gone, sir."

"Broke?"

"Yes, sir."

Hardenberg faced about.

"Come below. We must talk." I do not think any of us cast a glance at
the Other Ship again. Certainly I kept my eyes away from her. But as we
started down the companion-way I laid my hand on Strokher's shoulder.
The rest were ahead. I looked him straight between the eyes as I asked:

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11