his return to his vessel crept across the water. It was an adventure that required unusual strength and courage.
“Why didn’t you take your partner out with you?” he asked.
“I’d seen Jake play some low-down tricks when we traded for the few furs we got, and I suspicioned he wasn’t acting square with me. Anyhow, he allowed he didn’t take much count of abandoned wrecks, and when he saw I’d brought nothing back, he never asked me about her.”
“But if she was lost on the reef, how did she reach the bank a mile away?”
“I can’t tell you that, but I guess she shook her engines out after she broke her back, and then slipped off into deeper water. The stream and surge of sea may have worked her along the bottom.”
“It came out that she had only a little rock ballast in her,” Bethune explained. “There may not have been enough to pin her down; but the important point is that the strong-room was aft, and Hank says that part is sound.”
Jimmy nodded.
“Suppose you tell me all you know about the matter,” he said.
It was characteristic of both of them that when they first discussed the venture the one had been content with sketchily outlining his plans, and the other had not demanded many details. The project appealed to their imagination, and once they had decided upon it the necessary preparations had occupied all their attention.
Leaning back against a boulder, Bethune refilled and lighted his pipe. His clothes were far from new, and were freely stained with tar, but he spoke clean English, and his face suggested intelligence and refinement.
“Very well,” he said. “When Hank mentioned his discovery I thought I saw an opportunity of the kind I’d been waiting for; and I took some trouble to find out what I could about the vessel. She was an old wooden propeller that came round Cape Horn a good many years ago. When she couldn’t compete with modern steamboats, they strengthened her for a whaler, and she knocked about the Polar Sea; but she burned too much coal for that business, and wouldn’t work well under sail. It looked as if there wasn’t a trade in which she could make a living; but the Klondyke rush began, and somebody bought her cheap, and ran her up to Juneau, in Alaska, and afterward to Nome. There were better boats, but they were packed full, fore and aft, and the crowd going north was not fastidious: all it wanted was to get on the goldfields as soon as possible. Well, she made a number of trips all right, though I believe her owners had trouble when the pressure eased and the United States passenger-carrying regulations began to be properly applied. It was probably because no other boat was available that a small mining syndicate, which seems to have done pretty well, shipped a quantity of gold down from the north in her. Besides this, she brought out a number of miners, who had been more or less successful. Something went wrong with the engines when she had been a day or two at sea; but they got sail on her, and she drove south before a fresh gale until she struck the reef on a hazy night. It broke her back, and the after hold was flooded a few minutes after she struck. The strong-room was under water, there was no time to cut down to it; but they got the boats away, and after the crew and passengers were picked up, a San Francisco salvage company thought it worth while to attempt the recovery of the gold. It was late in the season when their tug reached the spot, and the ice drove her off the reef; the sea was generally heavy, and after a week or two they threw up the contract. The underwriters paid all losses, and that was the end of the matter. It is only the drifting of the stern half into shoal water that gives us our chance. Now I think you know as much as I do.”
Jimmy sat thoughtfully silent for a few minutes, realizing that it was a reckless venture he had undertaken. The wreck lay in unfrequented waters which were swept by angry currents that brought in the ice, vexed by sudden gales, and often wrapped in fog. The appliances the party had been able to procure were of the cheapest description, and there was a risk in making the long voyage in so small a vessel as the sloop. Still, Jimmy’s fortunes needed a desperate remedy, and he was not much daunted by the difficulties he must face.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose we have some chance; but I don’t quite see what made you so keen on taking up the thing.”
“It’s explainable,” Bethune drawled, picking up a pebble and lazily flipping it out over the water. “Victoria’s a handsome city, and the views from it are good. For all that, when you can find no occupation, and have spent some years lounging about the waterfront and the bars of cheap hotels, the place, to put it mildly, loses its charm.”
“You could leave it. As a matter of fact, I met you at Vancouver.”
“Oh, yes. I could leave it for a maximum period of thirty days, because, with the exception of Sundays and one or two holidays, I was required to present myself at a lawyer’s office on the first of every month. Then I was paid enough to keep me, with rigid economy, for the next four weeks; but on the first occasion I failed to come up to time the allowance was to stop for good. It’s a system that has some advantages for the people who provide the funds in the old country, since it assures the payee’s stopping where he is – but it has its drawbacks for the latter. How can a man get a job and hold it anywhere outside the town if he must return at a fixed hour every month? When I was in Vancouver it cost me a large share of the allowance to collect it.”
“And now, by going north, you throw it up?”
“Exactly,” said Bethune. “It should have been done before, but, as I had never been taught to work or go without my dinner, the course I am at last taking needed some moral courage. It’s sink or swim now.”
Jimmy made a sign of agreement. All the money he possessed had been sunk in the undertaking; and now, in order to get it back, he must succeed where a well-equipped salvage expedition had failed. Though the wreck had since changed her position, the prospects were not very encouraging.
“Well,” he said, “we must do the best we can; but I wish our funds had run to a better supply of stores.”
“Hank can fish,” grinned Bethune. “In fact, he’ll have to whenever there’s anything to catch. Fortunately, fish is wholesome and sustaining. However, as this job must be finished to-morrow, we had better get to sleep early.”
Jimmy sat smoking for a few minutes after the others went on board the sloop. It was getting dark, but a band of pure green light still glimmered along the crest of the black ridge to the west. The air was cold and very still, and gray wood smoke hung in gauzy wreaths above the roofs of the town. The tall pines were growing blurred, but their keen, sweet fragrance hung about the beach, and the smooth swell lapped with a drowsy murmur upon the shingle.
Jimmy loved the sea; and now he was to go afloat again, in his own vessel, bound by no restrictions except the necessity for making the voyage pay. This would not be easy; but there was a romance about the undertaking that gave it a zest.
CHAPTER III – THE FURY OF THE SEA
In the evening of the day on which they saw the last of Vancouver Island, Jimmy sat in theCetacea’s cockpit with a chart of the North Pacific spread out before him on the cabin hatch. It showed the tortuous straits, thickly sprinkled with islands of all sizes, through which they had somehow threaded their way during the last week, in spite of baffling head winds and racing tides, and though Jimmy was a navigator he felt some surprise at their having accomplished the feat without touching bottom. Now he had their course to the north plotted out along the deeply fretted coast of British Columbia, and rolling up the chart he rose to look about.
It was nine o’clock, but the light was clear, and a long, slate-green swell slightly crisped with ripples rolled up out of the south; to the northwest a broad stripe of angry saffron, against which the sea-tops cut, glowed along
