V. A Girl Captain
When Wilbur came on deck the morning after the sinking of the bark hewas surprised to find the schooner under way again. Wilbur and Charliehad berthed forward during that night--Charlie with the hands, Wilbur inthe Captain's hammock. The reason for this change of quarters hadbeen found in a peremptory order from Moran during the dog-watch thepreceding evening.
She had looked squarely at Wilbur from under her scowl, and had saidbriefly and in a fine contralto voice, that he had for the firsttime noted: "I berth aft, in the cabin; you and the Chinaman forward.Understand?"
Moran had only forestalled Wilbur's intention; while after her almostmiraculous piece of seamanship in the rescue of the schooner,Charlie and the Chinese crew accorded her a respect that was almostsuperstitious.
Wilbur met her again at breakfast. She was still wearing men'sclothing--part of Kitchell's outfit--and was booted to the knee; but nowshe wore no hat, and her enormous mane of rye-colored hair was braidedinto long strands near to the thickness of a man's arm. The redness ofher face gave a startling effect to her pale blue eyes and sandy, heavyeyebrows, that easily lowered to a frown. She ate with her knife, andafter pushing away her plate Wilbur observed that she drank half atumbler of whiskey and water.
The conversation between the two was tame enough. There was no commonground upon which they could meet. To her father's death--no doubt anold matter even before her rescue--she made no allusion. Her attitudetoward Wilbur was one of defiance and suspicion. Only once did sherelax:
"How did you come to be aboard here with these rat-eaters--you're nosailor?" she said abruptly.
"Huh!" laughed Wilbur, mirthlessly; "huh! I was shanghaied."
Moran smote the table with a red fist, and shouted with sonorous,bell-toned laughter.
"Shanghaied?--you? Now, that is really good. And what are you going todo now?"
"What are you going to do?"
"Signal the first home-bound vessel and be taken into Frisco. I've myinsurance to collect (Wilbur had given her the 'Letty's' papers) and thedisaster to report."
"Well, I'm not keen on shark-hunting myself," said Wilbur. But Moranshowed no interest in his plans.
However, they soon found that they were not to be permitted to signal.At noon the same day the schooner sighted a steamship's smoke on thehorizon, and began to raise her rapidly. Moran immediately bound on theensign, union down, and broke it out at the peak.
Charlie, who was at the wheel, spoke a sentence in Chinese, and one ofthe hands drew his knife across the halyards and brought the distresssignal to the deck. Moran turned upon Charlie with an oath, her browsknitted.
"No! No!" sang Charlie, closing his eyes and wagging his head. "No!Too muchee los' time; no can stop. You come downside cabin; you an'one-piece boss number two (this was Wilbur) have um chin-chin."
The odd conclave assembled about Kitchell's table--the club-man, thehalf-masculine girl in men's clothes, and the Chinaman. The conferencewas an angry one, Wilbur and Moran insisting that they be put aboard thesteamship, Charlie refusing with calm obstinacy.
"I have um chin-chin with China boys las' nigh'. China boy heap flaid,no can stop um steamship. Heap flaid too much talkee-talkee. No stop; gofish now; go fish chop-chop. Los' heap time; go fish. I no savvy sailum boat, China boy no savvy sail um boat. I tink um you savvy (and hepointed to Moran). I tink um you savvy plenty heap much disa bay. Bossnumber two, him no savvy sail um boat, but him savvy plenty many allsame.'
"And we're to stop on board your dough-dish and navigate her for you?"shouted Moran, her face blazing.
Charlie nodded blandly: "I tink um yass."
"And when we get back to port," exclaimed Wilbur, "you think, perhapsI--we won't make it interesting for you?"
Charlie smiled.
"I tink um Six Company heap rich."
"Well, get along," ordered Moran, as though the schooner was herproperty, "and we'll talk it over."
"China boy like you heap pretty big," said Charlie to Moran, as he wentout. "You savvy sail um boat all light; wanta you fo' captain. But," headded, suddenly dropping his bland passivity as though he wore a mask,and for an instant allowing the wicked malevolent Cantonese to come tothe surface, "China boy no likee funnee business, savvy?" Then with asmile of a Talleyrand he disappeared.
Moran and Wilbur were helpless for the present. They were but twoagainst seven Chinamen. They must stay on board, if the coolies wishedit; and if they were to stay it was a matter of their own personalsafety that the "Bertha Millner" should be properly navigated.
"I'll captain her," concluded Moran, sullenly, at the end of their talk."You must act as mate, Mr. Wilbur. And don't get any mistaken idea intoyour head that, because I'm a young girl and alone, you are going to runthings your way. I don't like funny business any better than Charlie."
"Look here," said Wilbur, complaining, "don't think I'm altogether avillain. I think you're a ripping fine girl. You're different from anykind of girl I ever met, of course, but you, by jingo, you're--you'resplendid. There in the squall last evening, when you stood at the wheel,with your hair--"
"Oh, drop that!" said the girl, contemptuously, and went up on deck.Wilbur followed, scratching an ear.
Charlie was called aft and their decision announced. Moran wouldnavigate the "Bertha Millner," Wilbur and she taking the watches.Charlie promised that he would answer for the obedience of the men.
Their first concern now was to shape their course for Magdalena Bay.Moran and Wilbur looked over Kitchell's charts and log-book, but thegirl flung them aside disdainfully.
"He's been sailing by the dead reckoning, and his navigation is drivel.Why, a cabin-boy would know better; and, to end with, the chronometeris run down. I'll have to get Green'ich time by taking the altitude ofa star to-night, and figure out our longitude. Did you bring off oursextant?"
Wilbur shook his head. "Only the papers," he said.
"There's only an old ebony quadrant here," said Moran, "but it will haveto do."
That night, lying flat on her back on the deck with a quadrant to hereye, she "got a star and brought it down to the horizon," and sat upunder the reeking lamp in the cabin nearly the whole night ciphering andciphering till she had filled up the four sides of the log-slate withher calculations. However, by daylight she had obtained the correctGreenwich time and worked the schooner's longitude.
Two days passed, then a third. Moran set the schooner's course. She keptalmost entirely to herself, and when not at the wheel or taking the sunor writing up the log, gloomed over the after-rail into the schooner'swake. Wilbur knew not what to think of her. Never in his life had hemet with any girl like this. So accustomed had she been to the rough,give-and-take, direct associations of a seafaring life that shemisinterpreted well-meant politeness--the only respect he knew howto pay her--to mean insidious advances. She was suspicious ofhim--distrusted him utterly, and openly ridiculed his abortiveseamanship. Pretty she was not, but she soon began to have a certainamount of attraction for Wilbur. He liked her splendid ropes of hair,her heavy contralto voice, her fine animal strength of bone and muscle(admittedly greater than his own); he admired her indomitable courageand self-reliance, while her positive genius in the matters ofseamanship and navigation filled him with speechless wonder. The girlshe had been used to were clever only in their knowledge of the amenitiesof an afternoon call or the formalities of a paper german. A girl oftwo-and-twenty who could calculate longitude from the altitude of astar was outside his experience. The more he saw of her the more heknew himself to have been right in his first estimate. She drankwhiskey after her meals, and when angry, which was often, swore like abuccaneer. As yet she was almost, as one might say, without sex--savage,unconquered, untamed, glorying in her own independence, her sullenisolation. Her neck was thick, strong, and very white, her handsroughened and calloused. In her men's clothes she looked tall, vigorous,and unrestrained, and on more than one occasion, as Wilbur passedclose to her, he was made aware that her hair, her neck, h
er entirepersonality exhaled a fine, sweet, natural redolence that savored of theocean and great winds.
One day, as he saw her handling a huge water-barrel by the chines only,with a strength he knew to be greater than his own, her brows contractedwith the effort, her hair curling about her thick neck, her large, roundarms bare to the elbow, a sudden thrill of enthusiasm smote through him,and between his teeth he exclaimed to himself:
"By Jove, you're a woman!"
The "Bertha Millner" continued to the southward, gliding quietly overthe oil-smoothness of the ocean under airs so light as hardly to rufflethe surface. Sometimes at high noon the shimmer of the ocean floorblended into the shimmer of the sky at the horizon, and then it was nolonger water and blue heavens; the little craft seemed to be poised ina vast crystalline sphere, where there was neither height nordepth--poised motionless in warm, coruscating, opalescent space, alonewith the sun.
At length one morning the schooner, which for the preceding twenty-fourhours had been heading eastward, raised the land, and by the middleof the afternoon had come up to within a mile of a low, sandy shore,quivering with heat, and had tied up to the kelp in Magdalena Bay.
Charlie now took over entire charge of operations. For two days previousthe Chinese hands had been getting out the deck-tubs, tackles, gaffs,spades, and the other shark-fishing gear that had been stowedforward. The sails were lowered and gasketed, the decks cleared of allimpedimenta, hogsheads and huge vats stood ready in the waist, and thelazy indolence of the previous week was replaced by an extraordinaryactivity.
The day after their arrival in the bay was occupied by all hands incatching bait. This bait was a kind of rock-fish, of a beautiful redgold color, and about the size of an ordinary cod. They bit readilyenough, but out of every ten hooked three were taken off the lines bythe sharks before they could be brought aboard. Another difficulty layin the fact that, either because of the excessive heat in the air or thepercentage of alkali in the water, they spoiled almost immediately ifleft in the air.
Turtle were everywhere--floating gray-green disks just under thesurface. Sea-birds in clouds clamored all day long about the shore andsand-pits. At long intervals flying-fish skittered over the water likeskipping-stones. Shoals of porpoises came in from outside, leapingclumsily along the edges of the kelp. Bewildered land-birds perched onthe schooner's rigging, and in the early morning the whistling of quailcould be heard on shore near where a little fresh-water stream ran downto meet the ocean.
It was Wilbur who caught the first shark on the second morning ofthe "Bertha's" advent in Magdalena Bay. A store of bait had beenaccumulated, split and halved into chunks for the shark-hooks, andWilbur, baiting one of the huge lines that had been brought up on deckthe evening before, flung it overboard, and watched the glimmer of thewhite fish-meat turning to a silvery green as it sank down among thekelp. Almost instantly a long moving shadow, just darker than theblue-green mass of the water, identified itself at a little distance.
Enormous flukes proceeded from either side, an erect dorsal fin, likean enormous cock's crest, rose from the back, while immediately over thehead swam the two pilot-fish, following so closely the movement of theshark as to give the impression of actually adhering to his body. Twiceand three times the great man-eater twelve feet from snout to tail-tip,circled slowly about the bait, the flukes moving fan-like through thewater. Once he came up, touched the bait with his nose, and backedeasily away. He disappeared, returned, and poised himself motionless inthe schooner's shadow, feeling the water with his flukes.
Moran was looking over Wilbur's shoulder. "He's as good as caught," shemuttered; "once let them get sight of meat, and--Steady now!" The sharkmoved forward. Suddenly, with a long, easy roll, he turned completelyupon his back. His white belly flashed like silver in the water--thebait disappeared.
"You've got him!" shouted Moran.
The rope slid through Wilbur's palms, burning the skin as the hugesea-wolf sounded. Moran laid hold. The heavy, sullen wrenching frombelow twitched and swayed their bodies and threw them against eachother. Her bare, cool arm was pressed close over his knuckles.
"Heave!" she cried, laughing with the excitement of the moment. "Heaveall!"--she began the chant of sailors hauling at the ropes. Together,and bracing their feet against the schooner's rail, they fought out thefight with the great fish. In a swirl of lather the head and shoulderscame above the surface, the flukes churning the water till it boiledlike the wake of a screw steamship. But as soon as these great fins wereclear of the surface the shark fell quiet and helpless.
Charlie came up with the cutting-in spade, and as the fish hung stillover the side, cut him open from neck to belly with a single movement.Another Chinaman stood by with a long-handled gaff, hooked out thepurple-black liver, brought it over the side, and dropped it into one ofthe deck-tubs. The shark thrashed and writhed, his flukes quivering andhis gills distended. Wilbur could not restrain an exclamation.
"Brutal business!" he muttered.
"Hoh!" exclaimed Moran, scornfully, "cutting-in is too good for him.Sailor-folk are no friends of such carrion as that."
Other lines were baited and dropped overboard, and the hands settledthemselves to the real business of the expedition. There was no skillin the matter. The sharks bit ravenously, and soon swarmed about theschooner in hundreds. Hardly a half minute passed that one of the fourChinamen that were fishing did not signal a catch, and Charlie and Jimwere kept busy with spade and gaff. By noon the deck-tubs were full. Thelines were hauled in, and the hands set the tubs in the sun to try outthe oil. Under the tropical heat the shark livers almost visibly meltedaway, and by four o'clock in the afternoon the tubs were full of athick, yellow oil, the reek of which instantly recalled to Wilbur'smind the rancid smell of the schooner on the day when he had first comeaboard of her. The deck-tubs were emptied into the hogsheads and vatsthat stood in the waist of the "Bertha," the tubs scoured, and the linesand bent shark-hooks overhauled. Charlie disappeared in the galley,supper was cooked, and eaten upon deck under the conflagration of thesunset; the lights were set, the Chinamen foregathered in the fo'c'stlehead, smoking opium, and by eight o'clock the routine of the day was atan end.
So the time passed. In a short time Wilbur could not have said whetherthe day was Wednesday or Sunday. He soon tired of the unsportsmanlikework of killing the sluggish brutes, and turned shoreward to relieve themonotony of the succeeding days. He and Moran were left a good deal totheir own devices. Charlie was the master of the men now. "Mate," saidMoran to Wilbur one day, after a dinner of turtle steaks and fish, eatenin the open air on the quarterdeck; "mate, this is slow work, and theschooner smells terribly foul. We'll have the dory out and go ashore. Wecan tumble a cask into her and get some water. The butt's three-quartersempty. Let's see how it feels to be in Mexico."
"Mexico?" said Wilbur. "That's so--Lower California is Mexico. I'dforgotten that!"
They went ashore and spent the afternoon in filling the water-cask fromthe fresh-water stream and in gathering abalones, which Moran declaredwere delicious eating, from the rocks left bare by the tide. Butnothing could have exceeded the loneliness of that shore and backland,palpitating under the flogging of a tropical sun. Low hills of sand,covered with brush, stretched back from the shore. On the easternhorizon, leagues distant, blue masses of mountain striated with miragesswam in the scorching air.
The sand was like fire to the touch. Far out in the bay the schoonerhung motionless under bare sticks, resting apparently upon her invertedshadow only. And that was all--the flat, heat-ridden land, the sheen ofthe open Pacific, and the lonely schooner.
"Quiet enough," said Wilbur, in a low voice, wondering if there was sucha place as San Francisco, with its paved streets and cable cars, and ifpeople who had been his friends there had ever had any real existence.
"Do you like it?" asked Moran quickly, facing him, her thumbs in herbelt.
"It's good fun--how about you?"
"It's no different than the only life I've known. I su
ppose you thinkit s a queer kind of life for a girl. I've lived by doing things, notby thinking things, or reading about what other people have done orthought; and I guess it's what you do that counts, rather than what youthink or read about. Where's that pinch-bar? We'll get a couple moreabalones for supper, and then put off."
That was the only talk of moment they had during the afternoon. All therest of their conversation had been of those things that immediatelyoccupied their attention.
They regained the schooner toward five o'clock, to find the Chinamenperplexed and mystified. No explanation was forthcoming, and Charliegave them supper in preoccupied silence. As they were eating theabalones, which Moran had fried in batter, Charlie said:
"Shark all gone! No more catch um--him all gone."
"Gone--why?"
"No savvy," said Charlie. "No likee, no likee. China boy tink um heapfunny, too much heap funny."
It was true. During all the next day not a shark was in sight, andthough the crew fished assiduously till dark, they were rewarded by notso much as a bite. No one could offer any explanation.
"'Tis strange," said Moran. "Never heard of shark leaving this feedbefore. And you can see with half an eye that the hands don't likethe looks of it. Superstitious beggars! they need to be clumped in thehead."
That same night Wilbur woke in his hammock on the fo'c'stle head abouthalf-past two. The moon was down, the sky one powder of stars. There wasnot a breath of wind. It was so still that he could hear some largefish playing and breaking off toward the shore. Then, without the leastwarning, he felt the schooner begin to lift under him. He rolled out ofhis hammock and stood on the deck. There could be no doubt of it--thewhole forepart was rising beneath him. He could see the bowsprit movingupward from star to star. Still the schooner lifted; objects on deckbegan to slide aft; the oil in the deck-tubs washed over; then, as therecame a wild scrambling of the Chinese crew up the fo'c'stle hatch, shesettled again gradually at first, then, with an abrupt lurch that almostthrew him from his feet, regained her level. Moran met him in the waist.Charlie came running aft.
"What was that? Are we grounding? Has she struck?"
"No, no; we're still fast to the kelp. Was it a tidal wave?"
"Nonsense. It wouldn't have handled us that way."
"Well, what was it? Listen! For God's sake keep quiet there forward!"
Wilbur looked over the side into the water. The ripples were stillchasing themselves away from the schooner. There was nothing else. Thestillness shut down again. There was not a sound.