Part 13

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 to do now?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Signal the first home-bound vessel and be taken into Frisco. I've my insurance to collect (Wilbur had given her the 'Letty's' papers) and the disaster to report.”

“Well, I'm not keen on shark-hunting myself,” said Wilbur. But Moran showed 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 the horizon, and began to raise her rapidly. Moran immediately bound on the ensign, union down, and broke it out at the peak.

Charlie, who was at the wheel, spoke a sentence in Chinese, and one of the hands drew his knife across the halyards and brought the distress signal to the deck. Moran turned upon Charlie with an oath, her brows knitted.

“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, the half-masculine girl in men's clothes, and the Chinaman. The conference was an angry one, Wilbur and Moran insisting that they be put aboard the steamship, 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; go fish now; go fish chop-chop. Los' heap time; go fish. I no savvy sail um boat, China boy no savvy sail um boat. I tink um you savvy (and he pointed to Moran). I tink um you savvy plenty heap much disa bay. Boss number two, him no savvy sail um boat, but him savvy plenty many all same.'

“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, perhaps I--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 her property, “and we'll talk it over.”

“China boy like you heap pretty big,” said Charlie to Moran, as he went out. “You savvy sail um boat all light; wanta you fo' captain. But,” he added, suddenly dropping his bland passivity as though he wore a mask, and for an instant allowing the wicked malevolent Cantonese to come to the surface, “China boy no likee funnee business, savvy?” Then with a smile of a Talleyrand he disappeared.

Moran and Wilbur were helpless for the present. They were but two against seven Chinamen. They must stay on board, if the coolies wished it; and if they were to stay it was a matter of their own personal safety 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 into your head that, because I'm a young girl and alone, you are going to run things your way. I don't like funny business any better than Charlie.”

“Look here,” said Wilbur, complaining, “don't think I'm altogether a villain. I think you're a ripping fine girl. You're different from any kind of girl I ever met, of course, but you, by jingo, you're--you're splendid. 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 would navigate 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 the girl 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 chronometer is run down. I'll have to get Green'ich time by taking the altitude of a star to-night, and figure out our longitude. Did you bring off our sextant?”

Wilbur shook his head. “Only the papers,” he said.

“There's only an old ebony quadrant here,” said Moran, “but it will have to do.”

That night, lying flat on her back on the deck with a quadrant to her eye, she “got a star and brought it down to the horizon,” and sat up under the reeking lamp in the cabin nearly the whole night ciphering and ciphering till she had filled up the four sides of the log-slate with her calculations. However, by daylight she had obtained the correct Greenwich time and worked the schooner's longitude.

Two days passed, then a third. Moran set the schooner's course. She kept almost entirely to herself, and when not at the wheel or taking the sun or writing up the log, gloomed over the after-rail into the schooner's wake. Wilbur knew not what to think of her. Never in his life had he met with any girl like this. So accustomed had she been to the rough, give-and-take, direct associations of a seafaring life that she misinterpreted well-meant politeness--the only respect he knew how to pay her--to mean insidious advances. She was suspicious of him--distrusted him utterly, and openly ridiculed his abortive seamanship. Pretty she was not, but she soon began to have a certain amount 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 courage and self-reliance, while her positive genius in the matters of seamanship and navigation filled him with speechless wonder. The girls he had been used to were clever only in their knowledge of the amenities of an afternoon call or the formalities of a paper german. A girl of two-and-twenty who could calculate longitude from the altitude of a star was outside his experience. The more he saw of her the more he knew himself to have been right in his first estimate. She drank whiskey after her meals, and when angry, which was often, swore like a buccaneer. As yet she was almost, as one might say, without sex--savage, unconquered, untamed, glorying in her own independence, her sullen isolation. Her neck was thick, strong, and very white, her hands roughened and calloused. In her men's clothes she looked tall, vigorous, and unrestrained, and on more than one occasion, as Wilbur passed close to her, he was made aware that her hair, her neck, her entire personality exhaled a fine, sweet, natural redolence that savored of the ocean and great winds.