Читать книгу Sea Plunder - H. De Vere Stacpoole - Страница 8

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It was noon when the hawsers were cast off and Captain Blood, in all the glory of command, standing on the bridge, rang up the engines and put the telegraph to half speed ahead.

It was a glorious day, not a cloud in the sky, and scarcely a ripple of breeze on the water. The breeze, just sufficient to shake the trade flags of the shipping, brought with it the whistling of ferryboats, the hammering of boiler iron from the shipyards, and a thousand voices from the multitude of ships.

They nearly scraped the stern wheel off a Stockton river boat, and then, as if sheering off from the blasphemy of the Stocktonites, nosed round and passed the buoy that marks the shoal water west of Hennessy’s Wharf. Then down the bay they went with the sunlight on Alcatraz and the Contre Costa shore, and away ahead the Golden Gate and a vision of the blue Pacific.

They passed Lime Point and took the middle channel, where the first heave of the outer sea striding over the bar met them with a keener touch of wind to back it. The Cliff House and Point Bonita fell astern, and now, right ahead, the Farallons sketched themselves away across the lonely blue of the sea.

The Penguin, bow on to the swell, was behaving admirably, so well, indeed, that Wolff, with a cigar in his mouth, had appeared on deck and climbed onto the bridge. But now, clear of the land and with a shift of helm, the beam sea produced its effect, and her rolling capacities became evident.

Wolff descended, leaving the bridge to its lawful occupants, and even Shiner, who had taken his place on the after gratings with an account book and stylograph pen, retired after a very little while.

The Penguin was built to hold a thousand miles of cable in her fore end and after tanks, and, loaded like that, the effect of her top-hamper in the way of picking-up gear, picking-up engine, derricks, and buoys would be corrected. But she had no cable in her now, only water ballast, and she rolled after her natural bent, and rolled and rolled till cries of “Steward!” came faintly through the saloon hatch, followed by other sounds and the clinking of basins.

Blood walked the bridge with Harman, casting now and then an eye at the compass card and the fellow at the wheel, and now and then an eye at the forward deck lumbered with the gear and four or five new-painted buoys, each numbered and each with a lamp socket.

“They haven’t spared expense in fitting her out,” said Harman.

“No, they haven’t,” replied the Captain. “And why? Simply because I’ve been at Shiner all the past week with a rope’s end, so to say. I’m blessed if the blighter didn’t want to economise on buoys! ‘Two will be enough,’ says he; ‘it’s only a short job we are on, and they are three hundred dollars apiece.’ He said that right to my face. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘it’s none of my business, but if you want to drop the job, whatever it is, in the middle, and run a thousand miles to the nearest port for a ten-cent buoy, you’ll find your economy has been misplaced. You will that.’ So he caved in on the buoys. Then we had an argument over the grapnel rope. He wanted to take two miles of all hemp. I wanted five miles of wire wove. I got it, but only after a mighty tough struggle. The grapnels are good, but they went with the ship, and they’d been properly laid up in paraffin; not a speck on them. Then the Kelvin sounder was out of order. Yes, they’d have sailed with it like that only for me, and it cost them something to have it put right.”

“What I’m thinking,” said Harman, “is that this expedition is costing a good deal of money.”

“It’s costing all of five hundred dollars a day.”

“What I’m thinking,” went on Harman, “is that the profits to come out of whatever they are going to do must be huge, big profits to cover the expenses, and I’ve taken notice that when chaps are ketched going on the crooked where money is concerned, they always gets a bigger doing from the law the bigger the money is. It’s this way: if a chap nails a suit of clothes, or a ham, he don’t get as much as a chap that nicks a motor boat, shall we say, and the chap that nicks a motor boat don’t——”

“Oh, shut up!” said the Captain. “We’re in for it, whatever it is, and our only hope’s our innocence if we’re caught. We don’t know anything; we are only obeying the orders of the owners. Not that that will have much weight if we are caught, but we’re not going to be. I’ve a firm belief in that slippery eel of a Shiner, much as I dislike him; and this chap Wolff doesn’t seem a fool, either. They’re not the sort of fellows to run their skins into much danger.”

“What do you think it is?” asked Harman.

“Think what is?”

“This game of theirs.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think they are going to pick up a cable, cut it, and tap it.”

“Whatcha mean by tapping it?”

“Sucking the news out of it. Or maybe they’re going to use it for sending some lying message that’ll upset the stock markets, or grain markets, or railway people. Lord bless you, there’s a hundred things to be done if one has the business end of a real deep-sea cable with a big city like Frisco or maybe Sydney at the other end.”

“Well, maybe there is,” said Harman. “There’s a good many things to be done in Frisco off the square, without a cable, and there’s no sayin’ what mightn’t be done with one.”

“I reckon you’re a judge of that,” laughed the Captain.

“Oh, I’m pretty well up to the tricks of Frisco,” said the other complacently. “But this is a new traverse, fooling folk from the middle of the ocean, one might say. I reckon Wolff is a German, ain’t he?”

“Yes, he’s a Dutchman, all right; so’s Shiner, I reckon. German Jew. It lands me how those sort of chaps get on and make money, and the likes of us has to take their orders and their leavings. I’d like to get even with them once.”

“Well, maybe you will,” said Harman.

The Captain grunted.

There was a fellow on board named Bowers. He had been given the post of bos’n, and he knew something of navigation and could keep a watch on the bridge.

The Captain called for him now and gave the bridge over to him, as all was plain sailing with the California coast away on the port quarter, the Farallons on the starboard bow, and the whole blue Pacific Ocean right ahead.

He and Harman, leaving the bridge, sought the chart room and went in there for a smoke. It was a pleasant place, full of light, and with a couch running along one side. By the door stood a rack of rifles, eight in number, and for every rifle a cutlass.

Cable ships go armed. They never know, when they leave port to do a job, what new job may not suddenly call them to the Patagonian beaches or the fogs of the Yellow Sea. The rifles and cutlasses were part of the fixtures belonging to the Penguin and taken over by the new owners, just as fixtures are taken over with a house. To use them for their proper purpose could never have occurred to the minds of Shiner, Wolff & Co. They were not men of violence. The strange thing, indeed, about this expedition, organised and manned for lawless work on the deep sea, was the fact that the chiefs were, to use Harman’s phrase, “sure-enough city men,” and that they were even now down below dead sick with the Pacific’s first fringe of swell.

Harman took a rifle down and examined it, while Blood, extending his leg on the couch, lit a pipe.

“Say,” said Harman, “are you any good as a shot?”

“Not with a thing like that,” replied the Captain. “I can hit a man with a revolver at ten paces, and that’s all the good shooting I want. Put that thing down and don’t be fooling with it.”

“It’s not loaded,” replied Harman, who had opened the breech.

“And it’s not likely to be,” replied the other, “for there’s no ammunition on board and no need for it. If we’re caught, there must be no fighting.”

“Why, I thought you was a fighting man,” said Harman, putting the rifle back. “You have the name for it.”

“And so I am, when fighting is to be had on the square; but there’s fighting and fighting. Can’t you see, if we were caught tinkering at some cable we had no right to be meddling with, and if we were chased by some gunboat, and if we were to fight and draw blood—can’t you see we’d be hanged without benefit of clergy? No, I never fight against the law. Never have and never will.”

“Suppose a cruiser overhauled her when we was at work?” said Harman.

“Well, what’s easier to say than that we were sent to mend? We are a sure-enough cable ship, and how’s a cruiser to know whether the cable we are fishing for or tinkering with isn’t broken? Oh, no; you may make your mind easy on that. Our position is sound and safe, on the outside. Inside it’s as rotten as punk.”