What For?

by Ralph Stock

WHAT FOR?

By RALPH STOCK

TROAR felt his arm seized as in a trap, and himself jerked into the deeper shadows of Wattle Street.

He stifled the cry that rose to his lips, and began to think as rapidly and coherently as the pain in his arm allowed. Police? The idea of police in Wattle Street, Wooloomooloo, died at birth. Escape? To move was anguish. Resistance? Futile! His thoughts completed the small circle of possibilities and, finding no outlet, reverted to the ever-growing pain in his arm.

The hand that held him thus, by sheer pressure, must belong to someone of prodigious strength. His glance travelled upward, encountering in turn a pair of large and dilapidated shoes, blue trousers seemingly overfull of leg, a swelling expanse of grey jersey, and an unkempt, bullet-shaped head set on a neck like a stallion's.

"Hold-up, eh?" Troar inquired evenly.

"You've said it," admitted his captor. "Price of a doss; that's all I want."

There was no violence in the tone, no threat. Here was a man making a perfectly legitimate statement of his requirements.

"Why?" said Troar.

"Why what?"

"Why is that all you want? Why not take all I've got while you're about it?"

There was a pause before the other answered.

"I'm not like that," he said; "but I don't stand for no monkey tricks, neither. What about it?"

The steel fingers bit deeper into Troar's arm.

"That's for you to say," he jerked out between clenched teeth. "This is a hold-up, isn't it? Well, get on with it, because if you—don't let go—of—my arm——"

"Cripes!" muttered the man, and caught Troar as he fell.

"That easy!" he exclaimed, kneeling over the frail form skimped against the wall. "Who'd a-thought that easy?"

Troar opened his eyes on the giant standing over him.

"I don't think you can have any idea of the grip you've got on you," he said faintly; "and—and there's something up with my heart," he added apologetically.

The other said nothing at the moment, but stood looming immense in the shadows of Wattle Street. Troar stirred and grimaced with pain.

"Can't be broke," said the giant judicially.

"Lor, no," agreed Troar. "There's something on me somewhere. Do you mean to say you haven't gone through me?"

"I meant yer arm," corrected the other. "Can't break 'em that way."

Troar's body commenced to shake. The giant peered closer in alarm, and saw that the convulsions were caused by mirth. He drew back and stood with his stocky legs slightly apart.

"Well, if you ain't a corker!" he breathed.

"Let me return the compliment," laughed Troar. "This must be the quaintest hold-up on record. I can't move my arm yet, and the money's in my right pocket. You'll have to fish for it."

And that is what the giant did, carefully selecting the requisite amount from the handful that he brought to light. After which he helped Troar to his feet with the gentleness of a woman, and together the diverse pair passed through the dingy portals of Duggan's Doss House.

Protruding from his ticket office window like an obese gargoyle, Mr. Duggan was directing a sluggish stream of humanity along the passage and up the stairs, at the head of which it dispersed amongst a battered honeycomb of cubicles.

It was July, and the park and a newspaper are not quite proof against Sydney's mid-winter. During this month, and perhaps the ones on either hand, the otherwise fortunate Antipodean "down-and-out" is forced to seek the shelter of roofs such as Mr. Duggan's, which flourish like fungus in Wooloomooloo. (Yes, there is such a place, and that is how it is spelt.) Here he pays his pence and takes his choice. There are beds of every epoch and in every stage of decay, each complete with straw mattress and blanket as near clean as the previous occupant has seen fit to leave them. There is a looking-glass, should he wish to consult it, which is unlikely, and there are boards, broken and dangling from their nails, which in a distant and more resplendent past afforded a certain amount of privacy.

With experienced eye the giant chose the least dilapidated cubicle in the place. It mattered not that an Italian oyster-opener was already in possession and removing his boots. "Vamoose, dago!" uttered in a nasal drawl, and entirely without animus, caused him to smile ingratiatingly and retire, boot in hand.

"That'll do you," he advised, indicating the better bed of the two, and Troar took it without question. He was not in a condition to question anything. After the antics his heart had taken to performing of late, he was in the habit of lying supine until that eccentric organ readjusted itself.

So he lay, watching his companion. Troar found him more entertaining than anyone he had met for a long time. The fellow's undressing was a revelation. Under his shabby exterior lay a physique to ponder on, and he was evidently in the habit of pondering on it. Slowly he closed his right fist, bent the arm to display biceps and forearm to advantage, and executed a devastating upper-cut for Troar's benefit.

"That's what does it," he announced amiably.

"I should think it would," encouraged Troar.

"And that's what did it," added the other enigmatically, casting his splendid length upon the bed.

"It doesn't surprise me," said Troar.

"Oh, it don't?" The giant reared himself on an elbow with an air of affront. "Takes a good bit to surprise you, don't it?"

"Perhaps it does," admitted Troar.

"So you wouldn't lose sleep over it if I was to tell you I'm—if I was to tell you who I am?"

"I shan't sleep in any case, but no, I don't think I should."

"Maybe you've guessed already?"

"I haven't tried."

A look of child-like disappointment ruffled the giant's heavy features.

"And you don't care one way or another?" he suggested.

"I can't say I do."

"There, now," mused the other, "that's how much good publicity is. Can't make people take notice. Posters, press—what are they? Whisk by one while you're thinking about the missus and kids, and give the other the 'go by' for the race results; I dunno." He swung on to the edge of the bed, and sat with his massive shoulders hunched dejectedly. "Then when you don't want it—— There'll be columns about me to-morrow morning—columns!"

Troar refrained from comment, which in itself seemed to impress his companion.

"You're a queer one," he observed. "Don't know as I've met your sort before. Is there anything you do happen to care about?"

Troar contemplated the grimy ceiling with half-closed eyes for a space.

"Not that I can think of at the moment," he said, which simple confession extracted a shout of laughter from the giant.

"You're doing me good, anyway," he said. "My name's Ponsonby; what's yours?"

"Smith," said Troar.

"Good enough to be goin' on with, ain't they?" grinned Mr. Ponsonby. "And now what about your boots and the rest of it?"

Troar suffered himself to be "put to bed" in expert fashion. Mr. Ponsonby had not been a "second" half his life for nothing, he pointed out.

"But what d'you call those?" he demanded, regarding Troar's nether limbs with mingled pity and contempt.

"Poor things, but mine own," murmured Troar. "Better cover 'em up if you don't like them."

Instead, Mr. Ponsonby drew back a pace and subjected his patient's anatomy to the critical survey of an expert.

"It beats me," he muttered reflectively.

"Well, that's something, isn't it?" suggested Troar.

"It beats me what a feller like you is for," ended Mr. Ponsonby on a note of frank perplexity.

"So it does me," said Troar; "but I shouldn't let it worry you. Perhaps I was created for no other purpose than to provide you with a night's lodging."

"That's so," agreed the other on reflection. "You never know, do you?" He retired to his less-favoured, couch, and lay pondering a while. "You never know in this funny old world. Just a tap, and they're after you—— Columns about it to-morrow—columns!" He turned on his side, and the words trailed off into heavy breathing. Mr. Ponsonby slept.

Troar did not. Consequently he both saw and heard a man enter the cubicle about an hour later. He was a large man, and there was little diffidence about his movements as he approached Troar's bed and ripped the blankets from it in one forceful jerk.

"Cold," he was good enough to explain.

"It is," agreed Troar pleasantly.

"And that's all you've got to say."

"That's all," beamed Troar.

"Well, you know best."

"Not much good saying things if you can't back them up, is it?"

The nocturnal visitor peered closer through the gloom.

"Sick?" he barked.

"Fair to medium, thanks. But if you want to carry on any further conversation, I should advise you to speak lower, or you'll wake my friend yonder."

"Oh"—the other turned in the direction indicated—"and if this friend of yours is woke up, what does he do?" he inquired significantly.

A demonstration was immediately forthcoming, for at that moment Mr. Ponsonby opened his eyes. They were rather small, but wonderfully quick eyes, and in the murky glow of a turned-down gas-jet they glinted unpleasantly. Their owner uttered no word, made no movement, yet such was the effect of his homely face, framed in a coarse grey blanket, that the intruder appeared stricken with apoplexy.

"Kinks!" he gasped.

"That's what," drawled Mr. Ponsonby; "so now you know what to do."

Of this there could be no doubt. Without a moment's hesitation the visitor dropped Troar's blankets as though they had been red-hot coals, and tip-toed gingerly from the room, his ungainly shadow lurching before him.

Mr. Ponsonby grinned.

"That's what I'm for," he pointed out with an air of quiet self-satisfaction, "and don't you forget it, kid."

Troar was not likely to. It was a quaint, rather cruel coincidence that on this night of all others his own futility should be so vividly demonstrated. Place him amongst real live men, and he was helpless. He found himself envying such a perfect animal as Mr. Ponsonby with all the bitterness of a frail intellectual. Intellect! What was it but a flail with which a man thrashes himself to death? How much did it make for happiness compared with health, strength, and a simple mind? We were deforming ourselves.

He was awakened by Mr. Ponsonby tugging at his sleeve. It was still dark, save for the sickly gas-jet, but time to be up and doing, by the burden of his friend's remarks.

"Four o'clock. Are you coming?"

"I suppose so," said Troar dazedly. "Why?"

"You know best as to that," snapped Mr. Ponsonby. "But if you've got to make yourself as scarce as I have, and want to do it with me, you'll have to get a move on."

Troar dressed under the vague impulse that it was undesirable to be separated from Mr. Ponsonby, and for the same indefinite reason he followed his guardian down the stairs and into the street.

Outside the door and leaning negligently against the wall was a girl muffled in a shawl.

"Lil!" exclaimed Mr. Ponsonby at sight of her.

"Better come in here," she advised, and kicked open a swinging door labelled "Restaurant," which gave access to a wilderness of sawdust and tea urns. "Who's this?" she demanded, scrutinising Troar across a yard of soiled tablecloth with a pair of soft yet searching brown eyes.

"Mate," said Mr. Ponsonby. "He's all right."

The brown eyes were temporarily appeased.

"I thought you'd make for Duggan's," said the girl in rapid undertones. "Whatever made you do it, Kinks?"

"Do it?" Mr. Ponsonby flung out his enormous hands in a gesture of protest. "What was I there for? It's the game, ain't it? It's what they pay for. Well, I earned my money fair and square. Is it my fault if the other feller dies of a clean knock-out?"

"It's not that," the girl broke in. "What made you clear out?"

"Clear out?" echoed Mr. Ponsonby, still on a note of energetic protest. "I didn't clear out. They cleared me out like so much dirt the minute the news come through. Said it was the best till things blew over. Set me adrift without a cent, they did. If it hadn't been for 'his nibs' here——"

The girl could not wait for explanations. Her hand went out across the table and rested on Mr. Ponsonby's arm.

"Anyway, you did it, Kinks," she said. "And now you'll have to keep right on. Two came last night, one plain, one coloured."^[1]

"To you?"

"Of course. Where d'you suppose they'd come?"

"Ain't it wonderful?" mused Mr. Ponsonby. He was slumped back in his chair, gazing wistfully across the table. "And we was to have been married after this fight, Lil."

"What's the good of talking?" demanded the girl, cutting into her lover's reverie like cold steel. "You've got to clear. You can send for me after if—if you like. Listen, I brought a few things. They're upstairs with Mother Duggan. Go and get them."

Mr. Ponsonby leant across the table, his homely features transformed with tenderness into something almost beautiful.

"Lil!" he said.

"Go get them," repeated the girl

Mr. Ponsonby obeyed, and Troar found himself confronted by a pair of soft brown eyes that seemed to be searching for his soul. It was embarrassing. He shifted his position uneasily. But the girl relieved him of any necessity to make conversation.

"You'll look after him, won't you?" she said.

"I?" Troar was startled into self-consciousness. "Isn't it more a case of his looking after me?"

The girl shook her head slowly.

"He's nothing but a kid," she said, mother-love welling in her eyes; "just a kid. It isn't all here, you know," she added, indicating the muscles of her firm, rounded arm.

"Isn't it?" Troar smiled whimsically. "I've come to think the best part of a man is, anyhow. Do you know what he said?"

The girl shook her head.

"He said it beat him what I was for."

"It would," she said; "but it doesn't me."

Troar leant forward despite himself.

"If only you could tell me——" he began.

"I can," said the girl. "You're meant to look after my boy—to bring him back to me." Her head was bowed over the table. "You've got to bring him back," she added, so low as to be hardly audible.

Something took hold of Troar, robbing him of his sense of the ridiculous. At that moment there seemed nothing ludicrous in a wisp of human inefficacy such as he deemed himself being asked to mount guard over a six-foot-two pugilist. Someone depended on Troar, believed in him; that was the reason.

"I'll do my best," he promised, and their hands met across the table in a clasp of mutual understanding.

There was the leave-taking of Mr. Ponsonby, a short practical affair of a few low-spoken words and a caress, and the two men were in the street, walking unhurriedly and by devious ways towards the outskirts of the city.

"Not the country," advised Troar. "They'd get us easier there."

"Reckon they would," agreed Mr. Ponsonby; "but where else is there to go?"

"One of the beaches. We can lie doggo for a bit, and think."

So toward noon they lay in the shadow of some scrub oaks on the cliff-top overlooking Emerald Bay.

Below them a pigmy fleet of yachts rode at their moorings, and Troar lay staring down at them, lost in reverie. Mr. Ponsonby was engaged in examining a sack that held Lil's "few things," and expatiating on the catholic nature of its contents.

"Ain't women wonderful? "he remarked, laying reverently on the grass a "hussif" complete with needles, thread and buttons, a cold pie, and a well-known brand of alleged cough cure.

Troar nodded.

"Have you ever been to sea?" he inquired irrelevantly.

Mr. Ponsonby confessed to a year before the mast aboard a coasting schooner in his youth, but what really interested him at the moment was the grain sack.

"Good enough," said Troar, "because I've been thinking."

"Oh, you have." His partner brought to light a tin of bully beef and some peppermints. "Always did like peppermints," he added reflectively.

"And it seems to me," continued Troar, "that the only thing left for us to do is to take one of those yachts and set sail."

Mr. Ponsonby paused in the mastication of peppermints, and regarded Troar with sudden interest.

"Now, that's what I call an idee," he admitted.

It was. Moreover, it was an idea carried into execution that very evening. There were certain obstacles, but one after another they crumbled before the practical onslaughts of Mr. Ponsonby. There was a watchman in charge of the yachts, so that to approach them by boat was out of the question, and Troar confessed his inability to swim more than thirty strokes, much less the good quarter of a mile that separated them from the craft of his choice. Then how to get under way without attracting attention? And, having got under way—— But the rest was left on the accommodating lap of the gods.

Under cover of darkness a weird object slid from the rocks of Emerald Bay and progressed slowly but surely towards an auxiliary cutter of some twenty tons register looming dimly white in its path. It was composed of Mr. Ponsonby, with a bulgent grain sack on his head, and Troar clinging limpet-like to his shoulders.

A little while, and the two men stood naked and shivering with cold in the snug saloon of the Minx.

"Rub down and get into something, or you'll die," asserted Mr. Ponsonby, and, knowing this to be nothing less than the truth, Troar obeyed. Meanwhile, and still in a state of Nature save for his trousers, Mr. Ponsonby proceeded to get under way. He had driven cars, he informed the universe, and if he couldn't extract an answer from the junk that constituted the average marine motor-engine, he would want to know why. He persisted in his inquiries—an immense white figure lurching and straining at the flywheel—until an answer was forthcoming, at first hesitant, then more coherent as the engine picked up and settled into the rhythmic cadence dear to the heart of the engineer.

"Shove in the clutch," he ordered, after the patter of his feet on deck, a rattle of chain, and the plash of water told that the mooring was cast off, and Troar obeyed.

"There!" said Mr. Ponsonby, snuggling the tiller under his arm, and steering for the lights of Sydney Heads. "Now they can talk."

II.

Intense languor and a splitting headache had seized on Troar. He lay on one of the saloon settees, shivering and burning by turns. Throughout the night Mr. Ponsonby sat at the tiller, or lashed it, and descended to tend the clattering engine. Then, some time after dawn, it stopped abruptly, calling Troar back to consciousness by sheer cessation of noise, so that he heard his partner's forceful expressions of displeasure on discovering that the fuel had run out, and his herculean efforts on deck to hoist the mainsail single-handed.

Somehow he must have succeeded, for there followed the ripple of water past the yacht's side, and a gentle list told that she was under way. Snatches of song came from the cockpit. Mr. Ponsonby was satisfied with his work. Presently he came below.

"Wind's abeam," he announced. "She's steering herself, bless 'er!"

"Where for?" muttered Troar.

"The Fijis," grinned Mr. Ponsonby. "May as well make a clean break while we're at it. Bound to hit something heading north-east."

Troar lay with closed eyes, while a spasm of pain contorted his face.

"I'm sorry——" he began.

"What for?" demanded Mr. Ponsonby.

"For being such a wash-out. I—it takes me like this sometimes. It'll pass—or I shall, one of the two—and——"

"'Ere"—his partner leant forward and spoke through a mouthful of cold pie—"don't you talk like that. I didn't bring you along because you was likely to be useful."

"Then why did you?"

Mr. Ponsonby stared at his patient during a gastronomic pause.

"Maybe I like something to look after," he explained, with a hint of diffidence.

"Well, you've got it," said Troar.

"Try some of Lil's dope," suggested Mr. Ponsonby, producing the miraculous cough cure, and Troar resigned himself without a murmur.

"We're doin' all right," soothed his partner. "Seen any charts about?"

"You'll find them in the starboard locker," said Troar, "next to the sideboard."

Mr. Ponsonby had turned in the direction indicated, when he whipped round with the unexpected swiftness of his kind.

"How in 'ell did you know that?" he demanded.

"One thing I can do is nose around," replied Troar. "And here's something more for your information: the freshwater tank's empty."

"Empty?"

"Yes. They were cleaning it out for a fill-up, by the look of things. But don't worry; there's a beaker in the fo'castle that ought to last, with luck."

But Mr. Ponsonby was already immersed in the charts.

"Can't say as I know much about these pictures," he confessed. "Looks to me as if they only take in the coast. 'Owever——"

A report like a pistol-shot came from above—the slatting of a slack mainsail—and an uneasy motion told that the Minx had come into the wind.

It was the first contrary gust of a gale that blew for three days.

Hove to, the yacht rode it bravely. Mr. Ponsonby was perfectly cheery about it. This was a fight, and he liked fights. So much was evident when after each spell on deck he staggered into the saloon a dripping, exultant figure.

"Third round!" he would bawl, and make himself a mug of tea over the gymballed oil stove for'ard.

As for Troar, he ate little, drank less, and thought frantically. He found it a physical impossibility to move, and lay staring at the wildly-swaying white-enamelled beams overhead with a fixed smirk on his pinched face.

Once, when his partner was on deck wrestling with sheet and halyard, he laughed aloud—if it could be called a laugh. The sound escaped him at thought of the words "You'll take care of him, won't you?" What a jest! Yet at the time she had meant it. He was sure of that. She must have seen something—— He slid from the settee to the floor—Heaven knows with what intent—and was flung headlong into a corner. With clenched teeth he gathered himself for another effort that met with a like fate, and finally felt himself caught up like a wayward infant and gently deposited in the deep bunk of the owner's cabin.

There he lay, still thinking. The Minx was drifting. For three days and three nights she had drifted, and might continue so to do for another three, or another ten, for that matter. Where to? What lay between themselves and the desert of the South Pacific? Even if the gale moderated in the next hour, how would they steer? How much water was there in the beaker? Ah, he did know that—possibly a gallon.

His self-communings were disturbed at intervals by the appearance of Mr. Ponsonby with a steaming mug of tea in his hand, which Troar invariably refused on the ground that he had just had some. He could do that! His ability to do it, in spite of Nature's violent dictates to the contrary, gave him unwonted satisfaction. For he had long since come to a definite and clear-cut resolve in relation to this partner of his. If either of them lived, it must be Mr. Ponsonby. This decision was not a matter of conscious self-sacrifice on Troar's part. It was an obvious conclusion based on the requirements of Nature, and backed by a promise given with clasped hands in a Wooloomooloo restaurant. Troar was like that. Perhaps it was what the girl bad seen.…

He began to wonder when his happy-go-lucky partner would appreciate their position, and what would happen when he did. It was evident that up to the present Mr. Ponsonby had hardly given it a thought. He had been otherwise engaged, which was as well. But now that the gale was spent, and there was little to do but sit at the tiller and whistle for a fair wind, it was equally apparent, from his puckered brow and air of abstraction, that he had begun to think.

"I reckon we drifted south most of the time," he mused. "Anyway, I'm heading N.N.E. D'you see anything better?"

Troar admitted that he did not, and there followed a long and silent interval, during which the Minx pounded her way at a bare two knots through a still lumpy sea.

"Cripes!" shouted Mr. Ponsonby of a sudden. "We'll never get nowhere this way!"

It was coming, Troar told himself. A full realisation of his plight was dawning on this genial giant, who, within a week, and failing rain or a landfall, would be a raving madman at his partner's throat. Already he was seeing all that he had to lose, and the likelihood of losing it.

"We've got to get out of this," he muttered, staring stonily over the heaving wilderness about them. "You don't know all; I just got to——" Troar noted the change in the pronoun without the flicker of an eyelash. "We was crazy to do this thing."

Troar did not answer, which seemed to annoy Mr. Ponsonby.

"It was your idee," he accused. Then, after another interval of thought: "And it was all right—for you. No ties—nothing. Ain't that so?" he demanded petulantly.

Troar nodded.

Mr. Ponsonby laughed suddenly whole-heartedly.

"Darned if I wasn't getting my dander up with you," he railed, giving Troar a playful pat on the back that shook his frail body to the bone. "You! As if it's your fault!"

But this lightsome interlude did not deceive Troar. It was a flash of sunlight between gathering clouds.

"I donno," wailed Mr. Ponsonby later in the day. "Wind don't seem to shift. With this abeam we'd be doing eight, but what's the good of heading for South America? Lor', couldn't I do with a pint! Where in 'ell are we?" They were the cries of a lost child.

"Seems funny to me," he went on presently. "Those old coves with whiskers and a sextant can find out where they are, and I can't. But I can't, and that's that. The bare sight of figures is a knock-out to me.…"

Troar heard no more. His partner's last utterance had lit a train of thought that blinded him to all else. It is doubtful if Mr. Ponsonby had ever made such an illuminating remark. It had been in Troar's mind to forestall the inevitable that night, or at latest the next. It was the best he could do, and would save considerable trouble. But now, and if he could do this thing—if he could do it.…

He went below. There was a sextant in a highly varnished case on one of the shelves, as he had thought, and a nautical epitome amongst the books. He examined them. He knew nothing of deep-sea navigation, but a quick brain and a leaning towards mathematics soon placed him in possession of the rudiments. There was no chronometer aboard, and a log would have been useless during the gale, even if they had thought of such a thing, so that longitude was out of the question, but there were latitude and judgment, and those were something—as much as our ancestors found necessary to circumnavigate the globe. With an artificial horizon he took sights. With paper and pencil he worked out examples, and behold, latitude leapt at him. Was this the conjuring trick of the sea—the finding of a ship's position on a waste of waters—that so impressed the landsman? Why, it was child's play!

With flushed cheeks and unnaturally bright eyes, Troar went on deck that morning and prayed for the sun. His prayer was answered, and for over an hour he stood wedged in the shrouds, taking sights in spite of every interruption. Mr. Ponsonby wanted to know what he was "playing at," since when he had acquired his "skipper's ticket," and if he didn't think it more use to "take the tiller for a spell." But Troar had found something to do. He was a deaf and dumb mute, chasing latitude.

Mr. Ponsonby was getting really annoyed when a stifled exclamation escaped Troar, and, screwing down the sextant with an air of finality, he dived below.

Mr. Ponsonby waited with commendable patience an hour, two hours, before his partner again appeared in the hatchway.

"We're all wrong," he jerked out. "I've got our latitude, and we're wrong."

"That so?" said Mr. Ponsonby, with the air of one humouring a child.

"Yes. We can't have drifted as far as we thought. She must have reached a bit while we were hove to. We're a hundred miles or less south of Lord Howe Island."

"Who says so?"

"I do."

"Oh, you do!" Mr. Ponsonby stared down at his partner and shook his bullet head slowly.

"But I've proved it," protested Troar. "It's as simple as falling off a log. I've proved it, man!"

"And you want to tell me you've learnt in a few hours what takes a grown man half his life to get hold of?"

"Yes," said Troar, "if the grown man's a fool."

Mr. Ponsonby laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound, and there was a glint in his small eyes.

"Well, you don't tell me," he observed. "You come and take the tiller, and give me a spell, that's what you've got to do, kid."

"Right," said Troar. "The course is east by north, as near as I can make it, which brings this breeze abeam, and if we don't sight Lord Howe to-morrow——"

"The course is north by east," corrected Mr. Ponsonby heavily, "that's what the course is. I can smell land ahead, and that's better than all your fandanglements. North by east, young feller, and don't you forget it."

The futility of further argument silenced Troar. With the tiller under his arm, and Mr. Ponsonby sleeping audibly in the saloon, he wondered what it was best to do. He felt little resentment at his partner's disbelief. It was to be expected. The aggravation of the situation lay in the fact that if the present course were held, they would miss the nearest land by a comfortable margin, and raise no more for at least five hundred miles, which meant they would never raise it. Yet how was it possible to convince Mr. Ponsonby of that? As well argue with an elephant.

On the other hand, if they steered east by north at approximately eight knots for six hours, the Minx would be in the neighbourhood of Lord Howe's latitude, and probably in sight of the island itself, considering that sailing directions gave it as three thousand feet height, and visible at sixty miles in clear weather.… As to what Mr. Ponsonby would do when he found his precious course changed. … Troar eased the main sheet, and watched the compass needle swing to east by north, whereat the Minx surged into the encroaching darkness as though freed of a restraining hand.

And Mr. Ponsonby still slept. For nine providential hours, while speeding under a star-pricked sky with a steady breeze abeam, he slept the sleep of the dead.

At dawn he thrust a tousled, bullet head into the cockpit, blinked at his benumbed partner, and consulted the compass. On the instant the muscles of his face became rigid. His small eyes narrowed to mere slits.

"You're headin' east by north," he exploded, and his devastating arm was upraised.

So was Troar's. It pointed directly behind Mr. Ponsonby's head. He turned, and out of the sea, not ten miles distant, towered the mighty pyramid of Lord Howe Island.

III.

It was on Lord Howe that Troar came upon a week-old newspaper containing the information that in the matter of Buck Ingram's demise during a recent prize fight, a verdict of accidental death was returned, and his opponent, one Kinks Conolly, was exonerated of all blame.

Troar read it aloud, which caused Mr. Ponsonby to execute an elephantine edition of the Highland "fling," and lapse into thought.

"All for nothin'," he mused. "Think o' that, would you?"

Troar was thinking of it.

"And it's me for Sydney town by the next boat," chanted Mr. Ponsonby. "But what about the yacht? Plain theft, ain't it?"

Troar lit a cigarette.

"I imagine it is," he said. "But she happens to belong to my uncle, so I ought to be able to do something about it."

"Your uncle?" Mr. Ponsonby regarded him with frank incredulity.

"Yes. You needn't believe me unless you like, of course, but there it is. That's why I chose her."

"And you? What had you done?"

"Nothing," said Troar. "That was my main trouble."

"Then why in 'ell did you clear out?" blurted Mr. Ponsonby.

Troar flicked his cigarette ash over the verandah rail.

"I wanted to find out what I was for," he said.

"And did you?"

"Yes, I rather fancy I did."

"And what was that?"

"To steer east by north," said Troar.

There was a long pause, during which Mr. Ponsonby stared over the sea with his bullet head at an angle. Then—

"What's your Christian name?" he asked irrelevantly.

"James," said Troar. "Why?"

"It's goin' to be his," said Ponsonby; "that's all."

1. Meaning officers of the law, one in plain clothes, the other in uniform.