Part 50

I said I was and told them my experience, and they all said what a pity my ship wasn't under the American flag so they could put it up to their captain and be sure he would send a party after Red Dick. And they would all like nothing better than to join that party, and an easy matter all 'round, as their ship was to be hanging around the straits for another week.

By this time the others of the party, who'd gone into the brush for wild geese, were coming back. They didn't get any geese, because geese, wild geese, anyway, aren't near so foolish as a lot of people think. They were hungry and sat right down to supper.

Among them, as I looked, was one I knew for Peter Lawson, an old shipmate. A warrant officer I saw he was now, but when I knew him he was a chief carpenter's mate on the old Missalama. We kept eying each other, and by and by he remembered, and we stood up and shook hands across the fire. In half a minute we were talking of old days in the navy.

By this time it was late day, with the sun going down below the hills on the other side of Pouvenir Bay. I remember it went down red as the heart of the fire we were sitting by. Through the little thin whiffs of the smoke of the fire it looked like that--all hot color and no flame. Nothing to that, of course, only pictures like that do start your brain to going. The little bay was there at our feet and the wide straits off to our elbow, and the water of that bay was smooth green where it shoaled on the pebbly spit; but the straits, as far as we could see them, were one long roll of tossing ridges and scooping hollows, and they were all black except where the williwaws, cutting across the tide, would whip the ridges to a marble white.

I saw the sun set red through the thin blue smoke of the fire, and almost in line with the sun and the smoke was the stranded bark with her deckload of lumber. A little farther off was my own little Svend Foyn. It was coming on dark by then and I could see them making ready the anchor light on the Svend Foyn. And it was coming colder, too, for the broad, warm north wind had changed to a thin little icy wind from the south.

And now the fiery-red reflection of the sun was gone from above the hills across the bay, and when that went all warmth went with it. Everybody drew nearer to the fire except the two apprentice boys, who were cleaning up the mess gear in water made hot at a little fire of their own. One of them was singing to himself little jiggly, ragtime songs while he wiped the dishes:

"Oh-h, ahm gwine down to Macon town Ter buy mah 'Liza Jane a gown-- Ah feel so happy 'n' ah don' know why, Mah bai-bie, mah hon-ie!"

Every time he stacked up a few plates he would stop to roll a few more cake-walk steps.

"I wish I was feeling as good as you!" I said to myself while I watched him.

And, watching him, I got to thinking of Hilda in the big front room in what was home for me--and of having to tell her what a failure my cruise had been. It did set me to thinking.

All at once it came to me, and "I've got it!" I said, not knowing I said it out loud until I saw that everybody around the fire was looking at me; and at last Peter said, "What's it you got?"

And I told them what I had in mind, and they all thought it was a great scheme--if I could carry it out. And the lieutenant in charge of the party said: "And we'll help you; but not to-night--the first thing in the morning after a good night's sleep."

We had a good sleep that night, sleeping till sunrise on the pebbly beach with the mainsail of the sailing cutter for a tent over us. And in the morning the first thing after breakfast I pulled the lumber bark off the beach and moored her in the bay. That was so she wouldn't break up and go to pieces the first gale of wind came along; and, as after that service I figured her owners wouldn't call it stealing, I helped myself to a few thousand feet of lumber off her deck, and we all set to work to make the Svend Foyn over into what her builder back in Norway certainly never intended her for.

First, we built up her topsides to make a superstructure, and then added the other things a first-class battle-ship ought to have. The Svend Foyn had two masts and one smoke-stack. The two masts were all right. We had only to set fighting-tops around them, but she would be a poor class of a battle-ship with only one smoke-stack. So we gave her two more. We painted her lower sides white and her topsides yellow-brown, and for turrets we had one to each end with what was intended for 12-inch gun muzzles sticking out of them. And we allowed the ends of what looked like twelve 7-inch black boys to peek through the sides of what we called her gun-deck. Two of those 7-inch muzzles were real muzzles, that is, black-tarred wood like the others, but they were hollow so we could train a bomb-lance whaling-gun through them, one to each side. When we got that far they said I would have to name her, and I called her the Cape Horn, and there being no flag that any of us had ever heard of for Terra del Fuego, we made one for her out of three pieces of green, red, and purple cloth, and broke it out to her main-peak.

And when that little round-bowed, fat-sterned whaler waddled out of Pouvenir Bay that afternoon there wasn't a thing that one lieutenant, one ensign, one doctor, a warrant carpenter, and sixteen enlisted men of the United States Navy could see she was shy of, except a wireless outfit, and we soon fixed that by stringing a stretch of old wire between her masts, with half a dozen old barrel hoops for a wireless plant, and for fear there was anybody of Red Dick's party who knew battle-ships only from pictures, I had the stokers keep feeding her fires with whale-oil. After that, with the clouds of smoke belching out of her, I felt sure nobody could doubt us--especially at a distance.

We gave three whistles and dipped the ensign to our navy friends, and for the rest of that day and night, and all next day and night, we steamed through the straits toward the Pacific. And on the second morning we turned north and ran in among the islands off the Chilean coast; and pretty soon we ran into the place I was bound for--a bottle-shaped passage with a narrow inlet to each end and the shadow of the Andes Mountains darkening all. And, laying to moorings there, was a cargo steamer of perhaps fifteen hundred tons. Even if she wasn't too big a steamer to be loafing there, I knew her of old. Red Dick was handy. I took a look around to the north'ard, and at the other end of the passage and jam in to the high rocks was a whaling steamer about our own tonnage. I also knew her of old.

I might as well say now that Red Dick and I weren't strangers. We used to be sort of friends, but not since the day we walked up the long timber pier in Punta 'renas together and met Hilda with her father. She was straight from school in Norway then, and 'twas the first time we'd seen her. We looked out together on the wonderful straits, and 'twas me she walked home with.

But that was a year back, and it was other business now. I had now to make an impression, and right away, to back up our battle-ship looks. So we cut loose and gave them, port and starboard, one after the other, twenty-one whaling bombs in good, regulation style. They made a terrible racket against the Andes Mountains, which come down here to the water's edge.

And Red Dick's gang must have thought we were some awful power, for there was soon great doings on the deck of the whaling steamer. Smoke began to come out of her, and pretty soon she began to move; but when we bore down, with a great white wave ahead of us and rolls of smoke over us, they quit. Two boats dropped over her side and headed for a bit of beach, and twenty men scurried off and lost themselves in holes between the rocks. We shot a few bombs over their heads just to let them know we were a rich nation with ammunition to spare. The echoes coming back sounded like a battle-fleet saluting port in foreign waters.

We boarded Red Dick's steamer, and there were our sealskins and ambergris. There were also four or five thousand other fine sealskins which weren't ours, but which we took along, knowing they weren't Red Dick's. And with Red Dick's steamer in charge of six of my crew behind us, we started back the way we came. In steaming past the cargo steamer we counted four long glasses levelled at us.

The first likely place we came to we hauled to and shifted Red Dick's cargo to the Svend Foyn. By this time, with the ambergris back and five thousand extra sealskins below, all hands were willing to take a moderate chance on almost anything. We swung away for the straits, but not making great headway. The little old Svend Foyn was never any wonder for steaming. At her best she could do perhaps ten miles an hour. Now, with all her battle-ship topgear and with the wind ahead, she was doing perhaps six.

It began to breeze up, but nothing for us to worry over until we saw a steamer's smoke coming up astern. We were then clear of the coast islands and into the straits, with wind and sea fighting each other.

I had another good look at the steamer coming up astern, and took my prize crew off Red Dick's whaler and turned her adrift. I hated to. Not alone the prize money, but to see a good ship go to loss any time is bad. I did it in hopes that the cargo steamer coming upon us would stop to get her, and while they were getting her--what with the gale and the dark coming--we would be able to slip away. But they didn't stop. Perhaps the little whaler was too close in to the cliffs for the big steamer to have a chance in the tide that was running. They let her pile up against the cliffs, and came on and ranged up abreast of us. Red Dick was on her bridge. She came so close to us that I could almost have jumped aboard. It was blowing pretty hard at the time, but she was making easy weather of it--a good sea-boat. We weren't. The williwaws, which are what they call the hard squalls off the high hills down there, were having a great time with out battle-ship topsides. She was something of a roller on her own account at any time, the Svend Foyn, but now she rolled her wooden turrets under and every once in a while her bridge.

Red Dick leaned over the bridge rail and laughed. He looked the Svend Foyn's top gear over and laughed again. "Blank shells and wooden guns!" he called out. "Fine! Any more left?"

"Oh," I said, "not all blanks and not all wooden, and a few left--yes."

"So?" he says, and gives an order. A man pulls a tarpaulin off a long needle-gun amidships. "Got anything like that in your battery?" he calls out.

I looked it over as if I was interested. At the same time I made a sign to my mate behind me. I'd long before this loaded my two whaling bomb-lance guns, but this time I put in them the lances, which were of steel, weighed eighty pounds, and were four and a half feet long--not a bad little projectile at all.

"What's it for?" I called out, pointing to his needle-gun.