W E sat on the wheel-box of the Mary E. Timms, smoking our pipes in the glitter of California sunshine. The schooner lay before us empty and deserted. Up the gaping main hatch came soft sounds of water gurgling along the planks of the hull. My companion took his pipe out of his mouth, cuddled it in his huge fist and shook his head at a straw-haired man who peered down at us from the wharf. "Don't know where she's bound for!" he rumbled. The man nodded and retired, sinking behind the edge of the wharf till only a round hat bobbed within view. When this, after several erratic movements along our wooden horizon, disappeared too, the mate resumed his pipe. "Sailors always want to know where you're going," he remarked. "That's natural," I suggested. "It is," was the reply. "But I remember when young fellows weren't so curious about where the vessel was cleared for. But sail ing was sport those days. Now it's business. There aren't many strange ports left, so to speak." The phrase caught my ear. "Strange ports? You talk like a sailor out of one of Magellan's ships. Who ever thinks of setting sail for strange ports nowadays?" "Oh, well," the mate answered with some signs of embarrassment, "that's just a manner of speaking. Only I was thinking of Silas Everett and the voyage of the El Dorado." "Did you go to strange ports?" I demanded. The mate sought the mizzen truck with dreamy eyes. We sailed for 'em," he answered me slowly. "You see Captain Silas Everett quit the Pacific Mail line, and a first-class ship, one day about ten years ago. Nobody could exactly make out why he left the San Juan, for Everett was a steady, skilful, quiet skipper, not more than middle-aged, and he would sooner or later COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED have been given one of the crack express steamers. But one day I was third mate with him he went to the superintendent and resigned. Then he came back to the San Juan, emptied his lockers, told the steward to hang a fresh towel over the mirror and came up on the bridge where I was fixing the compass. "Just hand me out those glasses of mine, Grindley," he said. "I've left the ship." I got him his binoculars and that was all there was to it. Naturally, I was surprised; but Thompson took the steamer and I didn't think much more about it till next trip into San Francisco, when Everett hunted me up. "Would you like to go mate with me in the El Dorado?" says he. hove in sight just as I set my coffee cup down and he had two more hands in tow. He shoved them up the plank, gave them a twist toward the fo'c'sle and came up to me, rubbing his fingers together. "Three more men will fill us up," he remarked. Now I had had a good, fair look at the hands already signed on, and I had a glance at the two he had just brought. I spoke my mind. "Of all the rough, rum, piratical, filibustering, throat-cutting, knife-eating, nailchewing, impolite sons of Neptune that I ever laid eyes on you've got the pick, cream and eelight," I said. "The very largest sized cussword wouldn't half go round with 'em." Everett smiled, apparently much pleased with himself. "Can you handle them?" he "El Dorado?" says I. "I don't know her." inquired very civilly. Everett just looked at me with his steady eyes and said, "Are you game for a voyage anywhere?" Funny, wasn't it? But I climbed right down, so to speak, and said, "Anything for a change. I'm sick of the smell of steam and the same old road year in and year out." "I thought so," he said. "I stuck to that route for twenty-three years. Come over to Meiggs' Wharf and have a look at the El Dorado." So I went and drew my pay and turned in the buttons and badges on my uniform and we walked down to Meiggs' Wharf and I had a look at my new ship. She wasn't very big, and was old-fashioned as a whaler. She was about five hundred tons burden, heavily built, with good lines, and a half deck. She was oversparred, and the canvas was all new, I could see. Brasswork shining, decks like cream and new dowells looking up like bright dollars out of the low quarter-deck. "There doesn't seem to be much for a mate to do," I remarked, and Everett nodded. "I've tended her myself," he told me. "She's all ready for sea. I've got half a crew, and I reckon we can pick up the rest in a day or so." That night I threw my blankets into my bunk on the El Dorado, cut up some tobacco into the soap dish and felt at home for the first time in six years. It's pretty fine to step out on deck of a nice evening and smell no steam and see no passengers and not feel that from six to sixteen ventilators are swung the wrong way. I turned in and slept like a full bottle -without a gurgle. Next morning I turned what hands were aboard out at dawn and scrubbed the decks. Then I drank my coffee and wondered where Everett was. I hadn't heard him come aboard the night before. He "I've been third officer and kindergartner on a mail boat for six years," I said. "My hands are soft. But I once sailed with a Nova Scotia crew out of Pictou and I had callouses on my shoes. I understand I am mate of this brig.” No more was said or was needful to say, though the last three seamen that Everett signed on struck me as being fellows that no skipper in his wits would have more than one of in a crew-tall, hairy, scowling, sullen chaps, the biggest of whom Everett made. bos'n on the spot. I merely pondered to myself the probability that the El Dorado was going as a pirate or on a sealing voyage in the Jap islands. But it was none of my business and I kept my mouth shut. We sailed the next day, without any fuss, and twenty-one days later I came up during my watch below and tackled Everett to know where we were bound for. "We've toddled out into the Pacific a thousand miles and dropped down toward the Equator another thousand and now, as I understand it, we are rocking along into the places where the maps are plain blue without any specks on them. I've spent my days licking the crew and my nights trying to get up strength enough to lick them again the next day, You have twelve hands on this brig and each of the twelve would occupy the entire time and attention of three policemen. Look at your second mate over there; he hasn't knuckles left to wipe his eyes with. How many days more ?" Everett took all this in and then invited me into the cabin where he called the boy and ordered him to bring glasses. He reached out a large bottle himself and presently we were discussing it without too much ceremony while the shadow of the spanker swept back and forth across the open skylight. "I might as well explain some things to you," the skipper told me, brushing his hair down on both sides of his head. "But possibly even then you won't understand. You will see that I am trying to make up for my lack of advantages in my youth." Everett stared at me anxiously. "I'm listening, sir," I said encouragingly. "I suppose you ran away to sea?" he inquired. "I did," I said. "I perspire when I think of it." He nodded his head vigorously. "Now there you have it-real adventure, Mr. Grindley. As a boy you ran away to sea." He smacked his lips. "Now I had no such luck. My father apprenticed me when I was fourteen years old, and I spent five years in the same ship trading across the Atlantic. Then I was offered, through my father's interest, a berth in the Pacific Mail, and I stayed on the Panama run for twenty-three years, one month and eight days. When I quit the San Juan I had had no more experience on the sea than one of the steward's boys,-not so much. I resolved that when I had the money I would do what I longed to do when I was a lad and-" Here he looked at me in a scared way and brushed his hair down again. 66 "And what, sir?" I helped him along. And run away to sea," he finished hastily. Well, I stared at him for an hour or so and he stared back, a prim, clean-faced, neat whiskered captain with a gold watch chain strung across his stomach. Odd, wasn't it? So I stared and all the foolish thoughts that I ever thought came up over the horizon of my mind and settled in the sky like peculiar, impudent stars. Were you ever eleven hundred and sixty-five miles from land with a lunatic? And yet Captain Silas Everett wasn't a lunatic. You could see that he had been thinking of this thing for years and years while he was taking his sights from the San Juan and telling the chief officer to be sure and not load coffee and sheep-dip in the same hold. He was sane, all right. But it occurred to me that one of us was crazy and it was evident that I was it. So after a long while I managed to say, "And you're running away to sea now?" "Exactly, Mr. Grindley." "But where are you going?" I demanded. He came back at me with another question. "Did you know where you were bound for when you ran away to sea?" "I did not, and I was an "Of course you didn't," he announced, cheering up. "Neither do I. Lord, Grindley, haven't I earned this? I slaved on a steamer for twenty-three years. Now I'm going to have what all you chaps had and I never did. I'm going to have a little adventure. Just fancy"-he combed his hair up this time-"just fancy: here we are with a tight little brig, free as air and with the whole world before us. Why, man, it's the real thing." A thought struck me and I kept quiet and let him talk, which he did very sensibly except for his notion about running away to sea, which was all rot and I wished I had never done it. But that night when I saw the chance I sneaked out the ship's papers and looked up her clearance. I'll bet no other vessel ever cleared from San Francisco like the El Dorado did. But there it was all written out-" for Strange Ports." Then I went topside and stared at the chart a while. The El Dorado was blowing down into the blank South Pacific. There was one thing, however, that I was entitled to know and I went right to the skipper about it. "It's all right about where we're bound for," I told him. "If you're yachting it suits me. Kindly enlighten me as to the reason you had for raking the cinders of hell for your crew." He gave me no satisfaction, though I found out afterward and I'll tell you about that when I get to it. In the meantime please consider me conducting a free fight through several thousand miles of latitude and longitude, up one side of the world and down the other, cross all the tropics, through every oceanic current and thwartships of the mundane sphere for eight months. Have you looked in your geography lately? Well, the surface of the earth is said to be two-thirds water. That is a lie. It is nine-tenths water. We didn't sight even an island from the time we left the Golden Gate till nine months later, when Everett looked up at me from the chart and said quietly, "I wish you'd correct this course here. I make it sixteen hundred and eight miles." I jumped. "To where?" I asked. "To Hué," he said. I re "Hué? That's a new one to me," marked, planting my fists on the chart. "But land is land and a port is a port the world over." When my eye lit on Hué, I felt funny. Look for it on any chart of Indian waters. It is in Cochin China, not so far from Saigon. The El Dorado was swinging along in the southern equatorial current and ahead of her lay a mess of islands. Well, time enough to tell about it when we get there Did you ever sail in those waters? Don't. Just a week later than the day that Everett handed me his figures, our little brig was plunging bows under in broken water. I swear that all the water in the world piles up on the shoals and into the channels off that coast. It swirls up from the bottom, rides down in smoking rollers, whirls in vast pools that suck and suck and suck at the fringes of smelly islands. Lord, what a seaman Everett was! Day after day we rocked along among these currents and tides. Now and then I could see the exact place where the great stream of water forked and divided. Moon and stars and sun together pulled and hauled and drew and drove that hot, scented sea amid the flocking islands. One hour we were racing on the crest of a tidal wave; the following hour we were close hauled and beating up into the thrust of a torrent of water pouring round some headland. Not a watch passed but what the men threw themselves down where they stood and panted and slept till eight bells struck again. Everett and I didn't sleep at all, conning that little, staunch brig through the welter of rocks and water and shoals and whirlpools and long reaches where the waves ran ruddy tipped into the flaming sun. Once in a while we would sight a steamer coasting carefully into some hidden bay, or a native craft boiling along in a tide-rip. But we won through, and the monsoon silenced the sails and we drove across the China Sea toward Hué. Everett was jubilant, like a boy out of school. He would smile like a father on the sullen, sweating, cursing crew and then his face would light up and he would draw in a long breath of the spicy air as much as to say, "I'll have another of the same, please." Right here occurred a small incident. It was a first-class mutiny. Sun, warm water, hard work and nine months at sea took the frazzled loose ends of our piratical crew and twisted them into a knot that was like to have finished us all. We all knew it was coming as soon as we fetched smooth seas and open going. It broke at midnight when the bos'n didn't relieve the wheel. The man steering quietly left his post and the brig came banging up into the fresh wind. I was just turning things over to the second mate when this happened and the skipper was standing in the stairway to the cabin in his pajamas. Of course one of them jumped for the wheel while I ran forward. I got exactly as far as the corner of the deck house when a long hairy arm shot across my shoulder and a knife tickled my windpipe. But Everett was too smart. Something burned my cheek, and the man who held the knife seemed to lose his balance and went down, grabbing at my legs. I ran back, the report of a revolver in my ears. It was a night of velvet set with spangled stars that shone with a sort of splendid blue flame. The wind was fresh and the sea smooth. You could see a man's bulk plainly, but you couldn't see his face or his hands. That made it bad. But Everett simply walked forward, with his revolver in his hand, and the second mate and myself back of him. I shall never forget that walk down the jumping deck of the old El Dorado. It seemed hours that we were stepping through the clinging darkness under the thundering sails, and all that time Everett was whistling gently to himself. The second mate's head was rocking regularly on his shoulders as he peered first over one of the skipper's raised arms and then over the other. Our slow advance must have scattered the wits of the men, who likely expected to end it all in a rush. At any rate they didn't break in a body, but slithered here and there like men dodging bricks. But the bos'n-and he was a man indeed-saw that this wouldn't do, and slipped out and drove his big knife full at the old man's throat. Everett let out a loud, surprised whistle and his gun went off. The bos'n's knife clattered against the bulwark and he himself clapped down on the deck like a board. The old man fired again, stared at the threshing yards and let out a yell, “Man the braces!" Yes, sir, they turned to like little children with their thumbs in their mouths, leaving their dead on the deck where the hauling queues of men trampled them to the tune of Sant' Anna. And when the dawn burnt up the darkness the crew was done for. Everett looked 'em all over carefully and then told the sailmaker to sew the corpses up in canvas. Then he drank his coffee and smiled. That afternoon we buried them, the two dead men, with prayer book and all. When the brig was on her course again Everett went down into his cabin and called me. "I hope I did what was right, Mr. Grindley," said he. "In a way I am responsible for this outbreak." "I told you these hands would make trouble," I said. "That's one reason I signed on such men," he remarked quietly. "In all my time at sea. I never had any such trouble, and I wondered whether-whether I could handle such a crowd. It was an experiment of mine. Remember Ferguson? He quelled five mutinies, |