The Pirate Story Megapack. R.M. Ballantyne

must let me help with the supplies.”

      “Of course.” Jim appreciated the fact with which she had spoken in a manner entirely businesslike of his own lack of clothes and money. He had paid out his last change for the ferry crossings and he could hardly go to sea in command with his one suit of tailor-darned readymades.

      “I’ll talk the bond over with Newton,” she said. “I have no securities, but of course I can put up half in cash, I wish we could buy the Seamew.”

      “What would you do with her after the trip is over?” asked Lynda Warner.

      “Keep on sailing. Round the world. I’d love to.” She spoke with genuine enthusiasm, in high spirits. Jim wished she might have her heart’s desire—and that he might be of the party as sailing master, if not in a more intimate capacity that he merely hinted at to himself.

      At the hotel, the two women went straight to the elevators, Jim to the desk for a directory from which to obtain addresses of ship-chandlers. As he passed the telegraph booth he saw Newton Foster handing in a dispatch. He passed on, thoughtful, wondering why and where Newton was sending a cable. There was no mistaking the form of the message. A few minutes later Newton clapped him on the shoulder.

      “Wondering where you all were. Girl’s back? Good. Let’s go to lunch. I’m ravenous. Say, I’ve got a pile of good books on the South Seas. And I met a fine fellow through one of dad’s letters. Invited me up for dinner tonight at the Bohemian Club. He belongs to the San Francisco Yacht Club too. He says we’ll be able to get what we want without any trouble. There’s a man named Rickard who owns a schooner and who has tried to horn into the club and run things. A bit of a roughneck—used to be a mate one time and now his swollen pockets have affected his head. He thinks he’s a gentleman.”

      “I suppose it’s possible.”

      Newton hesitated, flushed. “I didn’t mean to be offensive, Lyman. The point is that this chap doesn’t fit with the crowd. And he’s stuck on a widow who hates sailing.”

      “Owns the Seamew?”

      “Yes. How did you know?”

      “We’ve seen her, agreed to charter her.” Newton did not take the news exactly as Jim had expected. He was interested enough, but he whistled softly rather than make the exclamation Jim expected.

      “You’re quick workers,” he said. “That’s news. I’ll have to wire the old man. He’s more worked up over this trip than he lets on. I wired him already that we had arrived safely. When do you figure we can get away?”

      “That’s hard to tell. We have men to get; supplies; get our clearance; supply a satisfactory bond of cash or securities.”

      “How much?”

      “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

      “I’ve got that in Telephone stock. I imagine he’ll take that. Could we get away in a week?”

      “With luck.”

      “And Honolulu’ll be our first port of call?”

      “Yes.” The questions were natural enough and now Newton was all eagerness. But Jim wondered if this supplementary message was also going on a cable form. No one had said anything of Stephen Foster’s being away from the United States. It seemed a small matter as he turned it over in his mind, and young Foster had offered to take over the matter of the bond willingly enough, but Jim had not yet shaken off the idea that Newton was on the trip as his father’s representative despite Stephen’s assertion that he washed his hands of the affair. And he was not at all sure that the elder Foster wanted the trip to be made. Jim mentally shrugged off all complexities. The main fact was that they were going. It was up to him to see that they duly arrived. He had full confidence in himself to accomplish that.

      The eighth day saw the Seamew passing out of the Golden Gate under her own power, heading south and west for her first leg of twenty-one hundred miles. The call at Honolulu Jim determined upon for several varying reasons. For the first, the diary log with the position of the Golden Dolphin island had been mailed there care of the Young Hotel, a precautionary measure that, to Jim, showed the ingenious wit of Kitty. While he had the figures well in his mind, it was vital that they should somewhere be set down in case of accident. They had been posted at Foxfield, and were now waiting in the island capital, carried by the mail steamer that had left the day they arrived in San Francisco.

      They would take the opportunity to get fresh meats, ice for a day or two, fruit, water, gasoline, and sundry supplies. The stopover would take about twenty-four hours and there would be scant time for sightseeing if anyone wanted to do so. The important thing was to keep going, to clear up the dual mystery of Captain Whiting and his pearls as soon as possible. Probably the two women would want to do a little shopping; there would be letters to be mailed; perhaps Newton might have another cablegram to send.

      The crew of the Seamew was made up as follows: James Lyman, captain; Joseph Baker, mate, a capable man of middle age whose chief lack seemed imagination, anxious for the job, with a family ashore, painstaking, reliable, a good navigator and familiar with South Seas work, discharged from a sugar bark from illness and since unable to gain a footing; Jared Sanders, engineer, a sandy-haired Scot who was a queer mixture of caution and desire for adventure, taking the trip purely for the latter reason, careful as to the quality and economic as to the price of his supplies, willing to act in general capacities when the engine was not needed; Emil Wiltz, steward, once assistant on a trans-Pacific liner, ousted from his job by the war, sick of being a waiter in cheaper restaurants, unable to get into the Waiters’ Union and secure a better position, a handy, willing man; Olaf Neilson, Henrik Hamsun, Carl Vogt, three Norwegian sailors, stolid men with small initiative but powerful and willing, the first two recruited from Rickard, the third picked up on the water-front with two other sailors, out of work, out of money, out of tobacco, out of luck until Jim happened along, sized them up and offered them the job. These two were a Yankee named Henry Wood and a Britisher named William Walker, both undersized, underfed, inclined to cringe, the type that under a weak skipper and mate prove malingerers, yet seamen understanding their business, with Walker able to relieve Sanders at the engine upon occasion. These five, with the third original member of the Seamew crew, a redheaded Sinn Feiner, his name Douglas Moore, made up the six sailors Jim deemed necessary.

      The cook proved a more difficult matter. Jim would have been content with ordinary cabin fare, but he wanted something better for the ladies. He interviewed a dozen possibilities and passed them up on the grounds of dirt, incompetence, and lack of sea-service. A seasick cook could not be contemplated. Disappointed at the last moment, he shipped a Greek who had come up from Honolulu as second cook on a steamship and was anxious to return. But he assured Jim there would be no difficulty in getting one at the latter port, and Jim, with the idea of a Chinaman in his head, was inclined to agree with him. Newton Foster, confessedly a novice, was more passenger than anything else, though avowing determination to acquire knowledge and ability.

      The trade, that blows north instead of northeast down the California coast, struck them abeam as they laid their southwesterly course across the blue waters that seethed about the bows of the Seamew. Lyman was glad of every chance to save gasoline and the schooner justified the praise bestowed upon it by Rickard, reeling off ten knots hour after hour with a run of two hundred and twenty miles logged for the first day.

      The weather was more kindly than obstructive. They used the engine less than fourteen hours on the entire trip. For two days only the wind was fitful. The twelfth morning, Jim on deck by sunrise, Baker in charge of the deck, Hamsun at the wheel, picked up the loom of Molokai. By mid-afternoon they had passed inspection and were anchored off Honolulu. While they were still gazing at the town, with its big modern buildings, substantial wharves, naval slips and green-lawned station, its old palace amid the palms with the chocolate colored cone of Punchbowl immediately behind, backed by the blue green splendors of Mount Tantalus, a reporter came alongside in a launch.

      He got little from them save their names and the information that they were on a pleasure trip through the South Seas. Such voyages were nothing out of the ordinary these latter days; the reporter was