A Deal in Wheat
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Frank Norris >> A Deal in Wheat
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"Were you asleep? Is that why you saw her so suddenly?"
It is now five years since I asked the question. I am still waiting for
Strokher's answer.
Well, our shaft was broken. That was flat. We went down into the
engine-room and saw the jagged fracture that was the symbol of our
broken hopes. And in the course of the next five minutes' conversation
with the chief we found that, as we had not provided against such a
contingency, there was to be no mending of it. We said nothing about the
mishap coinciding with the appearance of the Other Ship. But I know we
did not consider the break with any degree of surprise after a few
moments.
We came up from the engine-room and sat down to the cabin table.
"Now what?" said Hardenberg, by way of beginning.
Nobody answered at first.
It was by now three in the morning. I recall it all perfectly. The ports
opposite where I sat were open and I could see. The moon was all but
full set. The dawn was coming up with a copper murkiness over the edge
of the world. All the stars were yet out. The sea, for all the red moon
and copper dawn, was gray, and there, less than half a mile away, still
lay our consort. I could see her through the portholes with each slow
careening of the _Glarus_.
"I vote for the island," cried Ally Bazan, "shaft or no shaft. We rigs a
bit o' syle, y'know----" and thereat the discussion began.
For upward of two hours it raged, with loud words and shaken
forefingers, and great noisy bangings of the table, and how it would
have ended I do not know, but at last--it was then maybe five in the
morning--the lookout passed word down to the cabin:
"Will you come on deck, gentlemen?" It was the mate who spoke, and the
man was shaken--I could see that--to the very vitals of him. We started
and stared at one another, and I watched little Ally Bazan go slowly
white to the lips. And even then no word of the ship, except as it might
be this from Hardenberg:
"What is it? Good God Almighty, I'm no coward, but this thing is getting
one too many for me."
Then without further speech he went on deck.
The air was cool. The sun was not yet up. It was that strange, queer
mid-period between dark and dawn, when the night is over and the day not
yet come, just the gray that is neither light nor dark, the dim dead
blink as of the refracted light from extinct worlds.
We stood at the rail. We did not speak; we stood watching. It was so
still that the drip of steam from some loosened pipe far below was
plainly audible, and it sounded in that lifeless, silent grayness
like--God knows what--a death tick.
"You see," said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, "there's no
mistake about it. She is moving--this way."
"Oh, a current, of course," Strokher tried to say cheerfully, "sets her
toward us."
Would the morning never come?
Ally Bazan--his parents were Catholic--began to mutter to himself.
Then Hardenberg spoke aloud.
"I particularly don't want--that--out--there--to cross our bows. I don't
want it to come to that. We must get some sails on her."
"And I put it to you as man to man," said Strokher, "where might be your
wind."
He was right. The _Glarus_ floated in absolute calm. On all that slab of
ocean nothing moved but the Dead Ship.
She came on slowly; her bows, the high, clumsy bows pointed toward us,
the water turning from her forefoot. She came on; she was near at hand.
We saw her plainly--saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, the
rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I could
imagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluent
wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean. She made no sound. No
single thing stirred aboard the hulk of her--but she moved.
We were helpless. The _Glarus_ could stir no boat in any direction; we
were chained to the spot. Nobody had thought to put out our lights, and
they still burned on through the dawn, strangely out of place in their
red-and-green garishness, like maskers surprised by daylight.
And in the silence of that empty ocean, in that queer half-light between
dawn and day, at six o'clock, silent as the settling of the dead to the
bottomless bottom of the ocean, gray as fog, lonely, blind, soulless,
voiceless, the Dead Ship crossed our bows.
I do not know how long after this the Ship disappeared, or what was the
time of day when we at last pulled ourselves together. But we came to
some sort of decision at last. This was to go on--under sail. We were
too close to the island now to turn back for--for a broken shaft.
The afternoon was spent fitting on the sails to her, and when after
nightfall the wind at length came up fresh and favourable, I believe we
all felt heartened and a deal more hardy--until the last canvas went
aloft, and Hardenberg took the wheel.
We had drifted a good deal since the morning, and the bows of the
_Glarus_ were pointed homeward, but as soon as the breeze blew strong
enough to get steerageway Hardenberg put the wheel over and, as the
booms swung across the deck, headed for the island again.
We had not gone on this course half an hour--no, not twenty
minutes--before the wind shifted a whole quarter of the compass and took
the _Glarus_ square in the teeth, so that there was nothing for it but
to tack. And then the strangest thing befell.
I will make allowance for the fact that there was no centre-board nor
keel to speak of to the _Glarus_. I will admit that the sails upon a
nine-hundred-ton freighter are not calculated to speed her, nor steady
her. I will even admit the possibility of a current that set from the
island toward us. All this may be true, yet the _Glarus_ should have
advanced. We should have made a wake.
And instead of this, our stolid, steady, trusty old boat was--what shall
I say?
I will say that no man may thoroughly understand a ship--after all. I
will say that new ships are cranky and unsteady; that old and seasoned
ships have their little crochets, their little fussinesses that their
skippers must learn and humour if they are to get anything out of them;
that even the best ships may sulk at times, shirk their work, grow
unstable, perverse, and refuse to answer helm and handling. And I will
say that some ships that for years have sailed blue water as soberly and
as docilely as a street-car horse has plodded the treadmill of the
'tween-tracks, have been known to balk, as stubbornly and as
conclusively as any old Bay Billy that ever wore a bell. I know this has
happened, because I have seen it. I saw, for instance, the _Glarus_ do
it.
Quite literally and truly we could do nothing with her. We will say, if
you like, that that great jar and wrench when the shaft gave way shook
her and crippled her. It is true, however, that whatever the cause may
have been, we could not force her toward the island. Of course, we all
said "current"; but why didn't the log-line trail?
For three days and three nights we tried it. And the _Glarus_ heaved and
plunged and shook herself just as you have seen a horse plunge and rear
when his rider tries to force him at the steam-roller.
I tell you I could feel the fabric of her tremble and shudder from bow
to stern-post, as though she were in a storm; I tell you she fell off
from the wind, and broad-on drifted back from her course till the
sensation of her shrinking was as plain as her own staring lights and a
thing pitiful to see.
We roweled her, and we crowded sail upon her, and we coaxed and bullied
and humoured her, till the Three Crows, their fortune only a plain sail
two days ahead, raved and swore like insensate brutes, or shall we say
like mahouts trying to drive their stricken elephant upon the tiger--and
all to no purpose. "Damn the damned current and the damned luck and the
damned shaft and all," Hardenberg would exclaim, as from the wheel he
would catch the _Glarus_ falling off. "Go on, you old hooker--you tub of
junk! My God, you'd think she was scared!"
Perhaps the _Glarus_ was scared, perhaps not; that point is debatable.
But it was beyond doubt of debate that Hardenberg was scared.
A ship that will not obey is only one degree less terrible than a
mutinous crew. And we were in a fair way to have both. The stokers, whom
we had impressed into duty as A.B.'s, were of course superstitious; and
they knew how the _Glarus_ was acting, and it was only a question of
time before they got out of hand.
That was the end. We held a final conference in the cabin and decided
that there was no help for it--we must turn back.
And back we accordingly turned, and at once the wind followed us, and
the "current" helped us, and the water churned under the forefoot of the
_Glarus_, and the wake whitened under her stern, and the log-line ran
out from the trail and strained back as the ship worked homeward.
We had never a mishap from the time we finally swung her about; and,
considering the circumstances, the voyage back to San Francisco was
propitious.
But an incident happened just after we had started back. We were perhaps
some five miles on the homeward track. It was early evening and Strokher
had the watch. At about seven o'clock he called me up on the bridge.
"See her?" he said.
And there, far behind us, in the shadow of the twilight, loomed the
Other Ship again, desolate, lonely beyond words. We were leaving her
rapidly astern. Strokher and I stood looking at her till she dwindled to
a dot. Then Strokher said:
"She's on post again."
And when months afterward we limped into the Golden Gate and cast anchor
off the "Front" our crew went ashore as soon as discharged, and in half
a dozen hours the legend was in every sailors' boarding-house and in
every seaman's dive, from Barbary Coast to Black Tom's.
It is still there, and that is why no pilot will take the _Glarus_ out,
no captain will navigate her, no stoker feed her fires, no sailor walk
her decks. The _Glarus_ is suspect. She will never smell blue water
again, nor taste the trades. She has seen a Ghost.
THE GHOST IN THE CROSSTREES
I
Cyrus Ryder, the President of the South Pacific Exploitation Company,
had at last got hold of a "proposition"--all Ryder's schemes were, in
his vernacular, "propositions"--that was not only profitable beyond
precedent or belief, but that also was, wonderful to say, more or less
legitimate. He had got an "island." He had not discovered it. Ryder had
not felt a deck under his shoes for twenty years other than the
promenade deck of the ferry-boat _San Rafael_, that takes him home to
Berkeley every evening after "business hours." He had not discovered it,
but "Old Rosemary," captain of the barkentine _Scottish Chief_, of
Blyth, had done that very thing, and, dying before he was able to
perfect the title, had made over his interest in it to his best friend
and old comrade, Cyrus Ryder.
"Old Rosemary," I am told, first landed on the island--it is called
Paa--in the later '60's.
He established its location and took its latitude and longitude, but as
minutes and degrees mean nothing to the lay reader, let it be said that
the Island of Paa lies just below the equator, some 200 miles west of
the Gilberts and 1,600 miles due east from Brisbane, in Australia. It is
six miles long, three wide, and because of the prevailing winds and
precipitous character of the coast can only be approached from the west
during December and January.
"Old Rosemary" landed on the island, raised the American flag, had the
crew witness the document by virtue of which he made himself the
possessor, and then, returning to San Francisco, forwarded to the
Secretary of State, at Washington, application for title. This was
withheld till it could be shown that no other nation had a prior claim.
While "Old Rosemary" was working out the proof, he died, and the whole
matter was left in abeyance till Cyrus Ryder took it up. By then there
was a new Secretary in Washington and times were changed, so that the
Government of Ryder's native land was not so averse toward acquiring
Eastern possessions. The Secretary of State wrote to Ryder to say that
the application would be granted upon furnishing a bond for $50,000; and
you may believe that the bond was forthcoming.
For in the first report upon Paa, "Old Rosemary" had used the magic word
"guano."
He averred, and his crew attested over their sworn statements, that Paa
was covered to an average depth of six feet with the stuff, so that this
last and biggest of "Cy" Ryder's propositions was a vast slab of an
extremely marketable product six feet thick, three miles wide and six
miles long.
But no sooner had the title been granted when there came a dislocation
in the proceedings that until then had been going forward so smoothly.
Ryder called the Three Black Crows to him at this juncture, one certain
afternoon in the month of April. They were his best agents. The plums
that the "Company" had at its disposal generally went to the trio, and
if any man could "put through" a dangerous and desperate piece of work,
Strokher, Hardenberg and Ally Bazan were those men.
Of late they had been unlucky, and the affair of the contraband arms,
which had ended in failure of cataclysmic proportions, yet rankled in
Ryder's memory, but he had no one else to whom he could intrust the
present proposition and he still believed Hardenberg to be the best boss
on his list.
If Paa was to be fought for, Hardenberg, backed by Strokher and Ally
Bazan, was the man of all men for the job, for it looked as though Ryder
would not get the Island of Paa without a fight after all, and nitrate
beds were worth fighting for.
"You see, boys, it's this way," Ryder explained to the three as they sat
around the spavined table in the grimy back room of Ryder's "office."
"It's this way. There's a scoovy after Paa, I'm told; he says he was
there before 'Rosemary,' which is a lie, and that his Gov'ment has given
him title. He's got a kind of dough-dish up Portland way and starts for
Paa as soon as ever he kin fit out. He's got no title, in course, but if
he gits there afore we do and takes possession it'll take fifty years o'
lawing an' injunctioning to git him off. So hustle is the word for you
from the word 'go.' We got a good start o' the scoovy. He can't put to
sea within a week, while over yonder in Oakland Basin there's the _Idaho
Lass_, as good a schooner, boys, as ever wore paint, all ready but to
fit her new sails on her. Ye kin do it in less than no time. The stores
will be goin' into her while ye're workin', and within the week I expect
to see the _Idaho Lass_ showing her heels to the Presidio. You see the
point now, boys. If ye beat the scoovy--his name is Petersen, and his
boat is called the _Elftruda_--we're to the wind'ard of a pretty pot o'
money. If he gets away before you do--well, there's no telling; we
prob'ly lose the island."
II
About ten days before the morning set for their departure I went over to
the Oakland Basin to see how the Three Black Crows were getting on.
Hardenberg welcomed me as my boat bumped alongside, and extending a
great tarry paw, hauled me over the rail. The schooner was a wilderness
of confusion, with the sails covering, apparently, nine-tenths of the
decks, the remaining tenth encumbered by spars, cordage, tangled
rigging, chains, cables and the like, all helter-skeltered together in
such a haze of entanglements that my heart misgave me as I looked on it.
Surely order would not issue from this chaos in four days' time with
only three men to speed the work.
But Hardenberg was reassuring, and little Ally Bazan, the colonial, told
me they would "snatch her shipshape in the shorter end o' two days, if
so be they must."
I stayed with the Three Crows all that day and shared their dinner with
them on the quarterdeck when, wearied to death with the strain of
wrestling with the slatting canvas and ponderous boom, they at last
threw themselves upon the hamper of "cold snack" I had brought off with
me and pledged the success of the venture in tin dippers full of
Pilsener.
"And I'm thinking," said Ally Bazan, "as 'ow ye might as well turn in
along o' us on board 'ere, instead o' hykin' back to town to-night.
There's a fairish set o' currents up and daown 'ere about this time o'
dye, and ye'd find it a stiff bit o' rowing."
"We'll sling a hammick for you on the quarterdeck, m'son," urged
Hardenberg.
And so it happened that I passed my first night aboard the _Idaho Lass_.
We turned in early. The Three Crows were very tired, and only Ally Bazan
and I were left awake at the time when we saw the 8:30 ferryboat
negotiating for her slip on the Oakland side. Then we also went to bed.
And now it becomes necessary, for a better understanding of what is to
follow, to mention with some degree of particularization the places and
manners in which my three friends elected to take their sleep, as well
as the condition and berth of the schooner _Idaho Lass_.
Hardenberg slept upon the quarterdeck, rolled up in an army blanket and
a tarpaulin. Strokher turned in below in the cabin upon the fixed lounge
by the dining-table, while Ally Bazan stretched himself in one of the
bunks in the fo'c's'le.
As for the location of the schooner, she lay out in the stream, some
three or four cables' length off the yards and docks of a ship-building
concern. No other ship or boat of any description was anchored nearer
than at least 300 yards. She was a fine, roomy vessel, three-masted,
about 150 feet in length overall. She lay head up stream, and from where
I lay by Hardenberg on the quarterdeck I could see her tops sharply
outlined against the sky above the Golden Gate before I went to sleep.
I suppose it was very early in the morning--nearer two than three--when
I awoke. Some movement on the part of Hardenberg--as I afterward found
out--had aroused me. But I lay inert for a long minute trying to find
out why I was not in my own bed, in my own home, and to account for the
rushing, rippling sound of the tide eddies sucking and chuckling around
the _Lass's_ rudder-post.
Then I became aware that Hardenberg was awake. I lay in my hammock,
facing the stern of the schooner, and as Hardenberg had made up his bed
between me and the wheel he was directly in my line of vision when I
opened my eyes, and I could see him without any other movement than that
of raising the eyelids. Just now, as I drifted more and more into
wakefulness, I grew proportionately puzzled and perplexed to account for
a singularly strange demeanour and conduct on the part of my friend.
He was sitting up in his place, his knees drawn up under the blanket,
one arm thrown around both, the hand of the other arm resting on the
neck and supporting the weight of his body. He was broad awake. I could
see the green shine of our riding lantern in his wide-open eyes, and
from time to time I could hear him muttering to himself, "What is it?
What is it? What the devil is it, anyhow?" But it was not his attitude,
nor the fact of his being so broad awake at the unseasonable hour, nor
yet his unaccountable words, that puzzled me the most. It was the man's
eyes and the direction in which they looked that startled me.
His gaze was directed not upon anything on the deck of the boat, nor
upon the surface of the water near it, but upon something behind me and
at a great height in the air. I was not long in getting myself broad
awake.
III
I rolled out on the deck and crossed over to where Hardenberg sat
huddled in his blankets.
"What the devil--" I began.
He jumped suddenly at the sound of my voice, then raised an arm and
pointed toward the top of the foremast.
"D'ye see it?" he muttered. "Say, huh? D'ye see it? I thought I saw it
last night, but I wasn't sure. But there's no mistake now. D'ye see it,
Mr. Dixon?"
I looked where he pointed. The schooner was riding easily to anchor, the
surface of the bay was calm, but overhead the high white sea-fog was
rolling in. Against it the foremast stood out like the hand of an
illuminated town clock, and not a detail of its rigging that was not as
distinct as if etched against the sky.
And yet I saw nothing.
"Where?" I demanded, and again and again "where?"
"In the crosstrees," whispered Hardenberg. "Ah, look there."
He was right. Something was stirring there, something that I had
mistaken for the furled tops'l. At first it was but a formless bundle,
but as Hardenberg spoke it stretched itself, it grew upright, it assumed
an erect attitude, it took the outlines of a human being. From head to
heel a casing housed it in, a casing that might have been anything at
that hour of the night and in that strange place--a shroud, if you like,
a winding-sheet--anything; and it is without shame that I confess to a
creep of the most disagreeable sensation I have ever known as I stood at
Hardenberg's side on that still, foggy night and watched the stirring of
that nameless, formless shape standing gaunt and tall and grisly and
wrapped in its winding-sheet upon the crosstrees of the foremast of the
_Idaho Lass_.
We watched and waited breathless for an instant. Then the creature on
the foremast laid a hand upon the lashings of the tops'l and undid them.
Then it turned, slid to the deck by I know not what strange process,
and, still hooded, still shrouded, still lapped about by its
mummy-wrappings, seized a rope's end. In an instant the jib was set and
stood on hard and billowing against the night wind. The tops'l followed.
Then the figure moved forward and passed behind the companionway of the
fo'c's'le.
We looked for it to appear upon the other side, but looked in vain. We
saw it no more that night.
What Hardenberg and I told each other between the time of the
disappearing and the hour of breakfast I am now ashamed to recall. But
at last we agreed to say nothing to the others--for the time being. Just
after breakfast, however, we two had a few words by the wheel on the
quarterdeck. Ally Bazan and Strokher were forward.
"The proper thing to do," said I--it was a glorious, exhilarating
morning, and the sunlight was flooding every angle and corner of the
schooner--"the proper thing to do is to sleep on deck by the foremast
to-night with our pistols handy and interview the--party if it walks
again."
"Oh, yes," cried Hardenberg heartily. "Oh, yes; that's the proper thing.
Of course it is. No manner o' doubt about that, Mr. Dixon. Watch for the
party--yes, with pistols. Of course it's the proper thing. But I know
one man that ain't going to do no such thing."
"Well," I remember to have said reflectively, "well--I guess I know
another."
But for all our resolutions to say nothing to the others about the
night's occurrences, we forgot that the tops'l and jib were both set and
both drawing.
"An' w'at might be the bloomin' notion o' setting the bloomin' kite and
jib?" demanded Ally Bazan not half an hour after breakfast. Shamelessly
Hardenberg, at a loss for an answer, feigned an interest in the grummets
of the life-boat cover and left me to lie as best I might.
But it is not easy to explain why one should raise the sails of an
anchored ship during the night, and Ally Bazan grew very suspicious.
Strokher, too, had something to say, and in the end the whole matter
came out.
Trust a sailor to give full value to anything savouring of the
supernatural. Strokher promptly voted the ship a "queer old hooker
anyhow, and about as seaworthy as a hen-coop." He held forth at great
length upon the subject.
"You mark my words, now," he said. "There's been some fishy doin's in
this 'ere vessel, and it's like somebody done to death crool hard, an'
'e wants to git away from the smell o' land, just like them as is killed
on blue water. That's w'y 'e takes an' sets the sails between dark an'
dawn."
But Ally Bazan was thoroughly and wholly upset, so much so that at first
he could not speak. He went pale and paler while we stood talking it
over, and crossed himself--he was a Catholic--furtively behind the
water-butt.
"I ain't never 'a' been keen on ha'nts anyhow, Mr. Dixon," he told me
aggrievedly at dinner that evening. "I got no use for 'em. I ain't never
known any good to come o' anything with a ha'nt tagged to it, an' we're
makin' a ill beginnin' o' this island business, Mr. Dixon--a blyme ill
beginnin'. I mean to stye awyke to-night."
But if he was awake the little colonial was keeping close to his bunk at
the time when Strokher and Hardenberg woke me at about three in the
morning.
I rolled out and joined them on the quarterdeck and stood beside them
watching. The same figure again towered, as before, gray and ominous in
the crosstrees. As before, it set the tops'l; as before, it came down to
the deck and raised the jib; as before, it passed out of sight amid the
confusion of the forward deck.
But this time we all ran toward where we last had seen it, stumbling
over the encumbered decks, jostling and tripping, but keeping
wonderfully close together. It was not twenty seconds from the time the
creature had disappeared before we stood panting upon the exact spot we
had last seen it. We searched every corner of the forward deck in vain.
We looked over the side. The moon was up. This night there was no fog.
We could see for miles each side of us, but never a trace of a boat was
visible, and it was impossible that any swimmer could have escaped the
merciless scrutiny to which we subjected the waters of the bay in every
direction.
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