Plundered Cargo/Chapter 22

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter XXII

CURTAIN

Evening, and with the passing of the sun a fresh offshore breeze stealing across the tepid waters of the Vermilion Sea. To the west peninsular mountains carried along their summits the last fiery stripes of the sunset; below that, purple velvet. First stars winked palely from the opposite field of the heavens.

With a creaking of blocks and gurgling forefoot the schooner Lonney Lee breezed along a course north and east of what had been her anchorage in a cove of storm and passion. Guaymas bound she was; Guaymas on the Mexican mainland, where Pullman cars come down from Arizona to lift folk over an imaginary line and into a land where life's viands are not burning with too much chile.

Affairs aboard the Lonney Lee were running very sweetly. At the wheel was the wooden faced Hansen; he who never bothered about what number was going to turn up on Fortune's wheel, who presented always to the world's rough toe so indifferent a mark that there was nothing sporting in that toe's delivering a kick. Hansen, sole survivor of the Sierra Park's last crew, was following a course set for him by a new captain, Karelia Lofgren, and was reasonably content.

In the galley the Iron Man found himself at the strange business of assembling a meal of sorts. For the first time since that night of bad luck in San Francisco when a roistering mining man named Horn, down from Goldfield, took him away from the Thalia and his art, a strange snatch of song bubbled to the Iron Man's lips. Home! At last he was bound home where once more he could sing “Asleep on the Deep” between spoonfuls of beer for an enthralled audience.

Under the awning which spread over the quarterdeck good Doctor Chitterly sat on a camp stool intent upon several little domestic jobs. First with a pair of scissors found in the late Judah Storrs' cabin he trimmed the frays on his left cuff. Then he trimmed the frays on his right cuff. Next he unscrewed the yellow diamond from its resting place in a sadly soiled shirt, blew gently upon it and polished it on his knee.

As he worked the worthy discoverer of Squaw Root Tonic rocked gently back and forth. From the depths of his great chest came a rumble almost resembling a purr.

“And now consider the liver, lad-ees and gentlemen: how it works to hurl deadly poisons into all the unsuspecting members of the human frame. Of the liver Titus Aldivius Seneca, the great Roman physician, said——”

Two figures far up in the bow where the belly of the jib screened them from casual glances of anyone behind. They stood, hands locked, looking over the back course to where the low hump of Sabina Island showed against the lesser dark of the peninsula range. Low on the island's shore burned a single red eye—the Sierra Park in her last winding sheet.

They talked in muted voices, these two, of those mysteries of life and love which when first discovered carry such profound significance to the discoverers. Said she: “I did not know; I could not believe that love comes so suddenly. It is funny.”

“Not funny,” he put in reverently, “It's well—um—funny.”

“Funny,” she mused on, “how one day I fight you for a rifle so I may shoot you with it. Next day when I see you risk your life for me I—I kiss you. How do you account for that, Mate?”

He gave a boyish laugh and leaned to bring his lips very near her ear.

“You couldn't help it, girl,” he hoarsely whispered. “What I go after I get, pronto!”