The Pirate Story Megapack. R.M. Ballantyne

by the sending of a wire. I shall do so and spend my last penny in the endeavor to follow up a clew that my heart tells me will lead me at last to my father.” Foster looked at her grimly, with tight lips, moving his head slightly from side to side as if to emphasize her folly. His son, gripped by the girl’s eloquence, by the restrained fire of her purpose, the beauty of her, was moved as Jim had been and was again. He went swiftly to her side.

      “Dad!” he exclaimed, protestingly. Then to his cousin. “Kitty, you and I have some measure of the same blood in us. You are a sport and a wonder. I will go with you.”

      “Not with my consent. Not with my money,” said his father coldly. The two faced each other. It seemed to Jim that a look of special meaning passed between them. The boy sat down, silenced but not crestfallen.

      “If I recover the pearls—” began the girl. Stephen Foster interrupted.

      “In the articles of partnership it is provided that a third interest in any profits of the expedition shall be mine in consideration of the money I advanced for building and outfitting. The name of my son, Newton, is mentioned as participant in that third. The duty of bringing back those pearls devolved upon your father, Captain Avery Whiting. It was part of his duty to use all due diligence and precaution in expenditures and the handling of his ship. According to his letters the pearls were secured. One third of them belongs now to me. If, by any miracle, they should be recovered, I should be prepared to stand my proportionate share of any extraordinary outlay—but I will not advance a cent.

      “The sale of your business is your own affair, but I can hardly see you, even under the able chaperonage of your cousin, Miss Warner, outfitting and handling an expedition. You have no conception of the difficulties and cost of doing so, the predestined failure. Doubtless this young man will be glad to give you the benefit of his experiences—for a compensation.” Jim’s furious glance beat against the ice of the older man’s expression as inadequately as the wintry sun tries to affect the polar planes. If only Foster had been younger, he thought. He had practically been called a liar, a cheap adventurer looking for a soft berth at the expense of a girl’s affection for her father.

      “I imagined,” Stephen Foster went on, “that you attached some weight to my judgment or you would not have asked me to come over here tonight. You are not conscious of that weight in the very natural flurry of your stirred-up emotions. But I beg of you to sleep over the matter. Tonight you will not sleep; you are too upset. Make no decision until the day after tomorrow. I, too, will give it further consideration. We will take it up again. If you still insist upon what I now believe to be an act of quixotic folly, though praiseworthy from a purely sentimental standpoint, and if I have not changed my mind at that time—say forty-eight hours from now—I will promise to give you every aid possible and wish you God-speed.”

      Jim discounted the suavity of the speech with his strong sense of Foster’s hypocrisy. He did not think the man had any human feelings. In place of a heart there was a cashbox; his brain was a filing system for commercial logic. He spoke as if he felt he had expressed himself too strongly, had struck more fire from his niece than he had expected, finding flinty indomitableness where he had expected wax. Yet the girl seemed softened.

      “I will think it over until then,” she replied. “I asked you here as a partner, Uncle. Without doubt you are entitled to your opinions and you have often practically demonstrated their value. But I do not think I shall change my mind. I thank you for your offer to help—for my father’s sake as well as my own.”

      It was said gracefully, but it held a dismissal. Kitty Whiting stood, and the visitors perforce stood with her. She had the poise of a woman twice her age. She commanded the situation with dignity and assurance. Stephen Foster bade her good night with urbanity, Lynda Warner with the suggestion that she was somewhat of an inferior, whereupon the light of humor showed in the spinster’s eyes and the twitch of her lip. Lyman he overlooked entirely. Newton pressed the girl’s hand.

      “Dad will come round,” he said. “I’m coming along, anyway.”

      She gave him a grateful glance. Jim registered the belief that Newton Foster meant to express his ardent admiration of his cousin rather than any conviction in the success of the trip. The two left; there was the whirr of a starting motor, the closing of a door and the girl returned to find Lyman looking for his hat.

      “You’re not going?” she asked him, a complimentary emphasis on the first word.

      “I think I had better,” Jim answered, his decision confirmed by a little nod given to him by Lynda Warner over the girl’s shoulder. He himself felt some of the strain Kitty Whiting must have been under. It was natural that they should want to be alone. He, too, wanted to think things over. “I’ll bring over my diary tomorrow,” he said.

      “In the afternoon?” suggested Lynda Warner. “Tomorrow is a holiday, you know. The Golden Dolphin will be closed and I’ve an idea its inmates will sleep late.” He caught the meaning, illustrated by the tiny brackets of tiredness about the girl’s mouth as she smiled, the faint purple shadows ringing her eyes.

      “I’ll be over about two?”

      “Just one question,” said Kitty Whiting. “I’ll worry about it unless you answer it. If you were in my position and going on such a quest, how would you set about it?”

      “I’d take train to California,” said Jim promptly. “To San Francisco. And I’d try to charter a power boat. I mean an auxiliary engine aboard a sailing vessel—a schooner or a ketch. Times are hard and they are selling off yachts and launches every day on the Eastern coast. I imagine it’s the same way out West. I’d rustle a crew out there. No difficulty about that. And it would save you time and money. But, if I was in your position, Miss Whiting, I am not at all sure I’d go. I don’t believe—”

      She broke in on him with a pathetic little gesture of her hands.

      “You, too?” she said. Lynda Warner suddenly stretched out her hand. “Good night, Mr. Lyman.”

      “Good night, and thank you,” the girl echoed. And Jim found himself out in the street walking toward his hotel. His room there, lacking conveniences, utterly lacking in elegance or true comfort, was a far cry from the place he had just left. It was long years since Lyman had been received as guest in such surroundings, and he carried the contrast to himself, as he turned in, after making sure his diary was in his grip and looking up the position he had copied from the log of the Whitewing.

      162° 37'w.

       37° 19' s.

      Cabalistic nine figures and two letters. One hundred and sixty-two degrees and thirty-seven minutes west from Greenwich, the longitude; thirty-seven degrees and nineteen minutes south from the equator, the latitude. Prick the spot on the charts and one would find vacancy—New Zealand a thousand miles to the west, the Cook Islands a thousand to the north, to the east nothing marked save the reefs of Legouve and Maria Theresa in all the long sea leagues to the South American coast opposite the isle of Juan Fernandez; to the south only the Sargasso Sea and the Antarctic drift. Yet those figures in hands no more competent that his could guide a vessel to where the Golden Dolphin lay stranded in the jungle with perhaps a million dollars in pearls aboard, with Captain Avery to be found, alive or dead; perhaps with nothing but what he had found and seen. Without the figures certainly nothing at all. Ships might search that ocean wilderness for years and never hit upon that beckoning mountain spur rending the mists, the shadowy highland in the offing.

      The whole thing would have seemed like a dream to him had he not the water-stained diary in which he had made entry of the Whitewing’s voyage, and memory of the fearful voyage of the open boat north and east, the men dying of exposure and thirst madness, and at last the rescue.

      And Stephen Foster had taken him for a sea tramp, with a ready lie coined out of a few printed facts made up to play upon the sentiments of a bereaved girl! His blood surged hot again as he sat on the bed reading over the log. The cold-blooded money grubber, counting his risks! Yet in his heart Lyman was influenced by the decision of the business man, coinciding with his own. It was a wild-goose chase. If he went he had nothing to lose, and he gained