Pirates' Hope

But for one member of the party I was conscious of a great and growing contempt. In former days we of the younger set had known Holly Barclay as a sort of reincarnation of the Beau Brummell type; an idler of the clubs who lived upon his wife's money, and who was much too indolent to be even manfully vicious. Good-looking, in a way, self-centered, and even more finically careful for the creature comforts and luxuries than Major Terwilliger, I remember it had seemed grossly incredible to us younger folk that he could be the father of the thoughtful, high-minded and convincingly beautiful young woman who paid him the compliment of being his daughter.

From the beginning of the voyage Barclay's attitude had been sufficiently apparent to me, or I thought it was. I decided that he was somewhat anxiously weighing the pros and cons as between Van Dyck and Ingerson in the matrimonial scale; weighing them strictly with reference to the results as they might affect him, individually, and quite without concern for his daughter's future happiness. That Bonteck was a clean man and a gentleman, while his rival was everything that Van Dyck was not, appeared to cut no figure.

It was hugely farcical, if one could but shut his eyes to the possible tragedies involved. Holly Barclay had joined the Andromeda's company to dispose of his daughter. Ingerson had come as a cold-blooded buyer to the market. Miss Mehitable was hoping to corner the major and Gerald Dupuyster; and Mrs. Van Tromp, yielding precedence, of course, to Barclay and his schemings, had come on the chance of dividing the spoils, since one of the two chief matrimonial prizes would be left after Madeleine – or rather Madeleine's father – had secured the other.

That Mrs. Van Tromp's armament was only a secondary battery might have been denied by some. Alicia, the oldest of the trio, was, as I may have said, an attractive young woman of the athletic type, a rider to hounds, a champion swimmer, and a good comrade where men were concerned. In the modern meaning of the term she was a man's woman, with a sort of compelling charm that was all her own.

Beatrice, the second daughter, had, as has been noted, a bookish turn. If she had chosen to study surgery she would have been a ruthless vivisector. As a result of this inquiring bent, she had an astonishing, and sometimes rather disconcerting, knowledge of things as they are. But to offset the touch of the blue-stocking, she owned a pair of long-lashed eyes that kindled quickly at any torch of sentiment, and they were set in a face of uncommon sweetness – winsomeness, one would say, if the word were not so desperately outworn.

Edith, for whose sake Billy Grisdale was cutting a good half of his Sophomore year, was a replica, in rounder lines and easier curves, of her sister Alicia. Having been carefully held back to give her older sisters a clear field, she was still something of a tomboy, but her very roughnesses were lovable, and Billy's callow folly found, it must be admitted, its full and sufficient excuse in its object.

It was Edie Van Tromp, roaming the yacht like a restless bit of misdirected energy, as was her custom, who came to fling herself into the steamer chair next to mine; this in the afternoon of the day when John Grey had given me still less cause to love Miss Mehitable Gilmore.

"I'm bored, Mr. Richard Preble – bored to extinction!" she gasped, fanning herself with a vigor that was all her own. "Is nothing ever going to happen on this tiresome ship?"

"There are things happening all the time, if we only have eyes to perceive them," I told her, laughing. "In your own case, for example, there is Billy Grisdale. To an interested and sympathetic onlooker like myself it would seem that he is constantly happening in as many different ways as he can devise."

"Oh, Billy – yes," she admitted, with pouting emphasis. Then, with a great show of confidence: "Uncle Dick – I may call you Uncle Dick, if I want to, mayn't I? – if you were only a little older and grayer I might tell you something."

"Tell me anyhow," I urged. "I am old enough to be perfectly safe, don't you think?"

"It's Billy, and you started it," she went on pertly. "That boy is fairly worrying the life out of me. Positively, I'm getting the dreadful habit of carrying my head on my shoulder. He – he's always just there, you know, if I look around."

"Is that why you are bored?"

"I suppose it is; it must be. Nothing can ever come of it, of course. Billy is nothing but just a handsome, good-natured, sweet-tempered boy. It would be years and years, and then more years before – "

"So it would," I agreed. "And, besides, Billy has three brothers and two sisters coming along, and Grisdale père is only moderately well-to-do, as fortunes go nowadays."

Instantly Miss Edith's straight-browed eyes flashed blue fire.

"Money – always and forever money!" she flamed out. "I haven't heard anything else all my life! One would think that heaven itself was paved with it and that the angels wear gold coins for charmstrings. I hate it!"

"Oh, no, you don't," I hastened to say. "It's a good, broad-backed little beast, and you can always count upon it for carrying the load. And Billy will probably have to make his own way, without even so much as a loan of the little beast."

"I don't care! I think it is perfectly frightful the way we bow down and kowtow to your beast – the great god Cash! I'd rather wash dishes and make bread – for two!"

This seemed to be verging toward the edge of things serious. I knew that Mrs. Van Tromp was suffering Billy only because he was so absurdly young as to be supposedly harmless. But if Edith, the healthy-bodied and strong-willed, were even beginning to take notice, there was trouble ahead.

"We can none of us afford to defy the conventions, my dear girl," I cautioned, taking the avuncular rôle she had tried to thrust upon me. "And we mustn't let ourselves get into narrow little ruts. The play's the thing, and we are only a part of the audience – you and I."

"The play?" she echoed doubtfully. "You mean the – the – "

"I mean the great human comedy, of course. It is going on all around us, all the time."

"I don't get you," she said, in the free phrase which may have been her own, or may have been a Billy Grisdale transplantation.

"You are too young and inexperienced," I asserted in mock gravity. "Otherwise you could hardly have lived a week in the Andromeda without realizing that the stage is set, with the call-boy making his last hasty round, beating upon the doors of the dressing-rooms and summoning the people of the play to come and take their places."

"I can't understand a word you say!" she protested petulantly. "Do you mean Conetta and Jerry Dupuyster?"

"Miss Kincaide and Jerry are only two, and the cast of characters is large. Wait patiently, Edie, and you shall see. Meanwhile, if I am not mistaken, that long, low streak in the west – you can just make it out if you shade your eyes from the sun glare on the water – is land."

She was up and gone at the word, flying to the bridge and crying her discovery – or mine. What the land was, I could not tell. Van Dyck had made a joking mystery of the yacht's course, which, naturally, none of us could determine with any degree of accuracy merely by looking now and then at the telltale compass in the cabin ceiling. I fancied that Van Dyck's object in keeping us in the dark was chiefly to add something to the zest of the cruise, the interest lying in the uncertainty as to what landfall we should first make. As to this, however, nobody seemed to care greatly where we were going, or when we should arrive, so, as one may say, the small mystery had hitherto fallen flat.

But now there was a stir among the after-deck idlers, and Major Terwilliger, thrifty grasper at opportunity, immediately made a pool upon the name of the landfall – with Jack Grey whispering to me that the major had already fortified himself by casually questioning the hard-faced sailing-master as to the yacht's latest quadrant-reading – from which he had doubtless been able privately to prick off the latitude and approximate position of the Andromeda upon the cabin chart.

V

ANY PORT IN A STORM

As an easy matter of course, Major Terwilliger won the pool. The land sighted proved to be Cape Gracias á Dios, the easternmost point of Nicaragua. It would say itself that the Mosquito Coast, low, swampy, and with only three practicable harbors along its three-hundred-mile sweep, could have no attractions for a party of winter pleasurers, and we were leaving Cape Gracias astern when the Andromeda's course was suddenly changed and she was headed for land.

Climbing to the bridge a little later, where I found Van Dyck setting the course for the Madeira-man who had the wheel, I learned the reason for the unannounced change.

"Trouble in the engine-room," Van Dyck explained. "The port propeller shaft is running hot and threatening to quit on us. We'll have to lay up for a few hours until Haskell can find out what has gone wrong."

"The shaft hasn't been giving any trouble heretofore, has it?" I asked.

"No; Haskell says it began to heat all at once, shortly after we sighted land."

"You'll put in at Gracias?"

He nodded. "The harbor isn't much, and the town is still less. But we don't need anything but an anchorage. Haskell thinks we won't be held up very long."

That was a cheering prediction, but the event proved it to be too optimistic. The mechanical trouble turned out to be in the thrust bearing of the propeller shaft, and it was more serious than Haskell, chief of the engine-room squad, had supposed it would be. The bearing which, like everything else on the yacht, had been cared for with warship thoroughness, had apparently run dry and it was badly scored and "cut," as a machinist would say. The repair called for hours of patient scraping and filing, and Haskell, who had served as an assistant engineer in the Navy, was properly humiliated.

"It sure gets my goat, Mr. Preble," he confided to me when I climbed down into his bailiwick some three or four hours after we had dropped anchor in Gracias á Dios harbor. "It looks as if it was on me, and maybe it is, but I've never had anything like this happen to me before – not since I began as an oiler on one of the old Cunarders. We have automatic lubrication; all the latest wrinkles; and yet that cussed shaft's tore up like it had been runnin' dry for a week. You're an engineer – I just wish you'd look at it."

To oblige him I donned overalls and crawled down into the shaft tunnel. A glance at the excoriated bearing showed that Haskell hadn't exaggerated. Quinby, Haskell's first assistant, was scraping and smoothing in a space that was too confined to let a man take the kinks out of his back, and in which there was no room for two men to work.

"That is no hurry job," I told Haskell, after I had crawled out. "I think I may safely tell our people that they may have shore leave, if they want it."

"You can that," Haskell grinned. "We'll be right here to-morrow morning, and blamed lucky if we can heave up the mud hook by some time to-morrow afternoon."

It was too late to spread the news after I left the engine-room. When I reached the main deck all of our ship's company had apparently turned in, though there were lights in the smoking-room to hint that the card-players were still at their favorite pastime. But as I went aft to smoke a bed-time pipe I found Madeleine Barclay curled up in one of the deep wicker chairs.

"Pardon me," I said; "I didn't know there was any one here. Don't let me disturb your maiden meditations. I'll vanish."

"You needn't," she returned quite amiably; then, seeing the pipe: "And you may smoke if you want to. You know well enough that I don't mind. How long do we stay here?"

"That is upon the knees of the gods. I've just been below, and I should say we are good for twenty-four hours, or maybe more, though Haskell thinks we may get out by to-morrow afternoon."

"Do we go ashore?"

I shook my head. "The others may if they want to; I shan't."

"Why not?"