Part 9
For once Johnny Kent refused to follow the lead of his skipper. He was graciously pleased to take the quarters allotted him, and proposed to mingle with the passengers. Early next morning he wallowed in a tub, summoned the ship’s barber, and arrayed himself in clothes borrowed from the chief engineer of the _Caronic_, who chanced to be a person of ample dimensions. Thus transformed, Johnny Kent was no longer a ruffian of the high-seas. He had an aspect of dignified, mellowed respectability. His brick-red countenance radiated kindly interest and benevolence. Small children ran to him and instantly became his friends. The blustering note had gone from his voice. He checked his worst grammatical blunders and his shrewd eyes were quick to observe the manners of his fellow-passengers, which he sedulously set himself to copy. Strolling forward after breakfast, he discovered Captain O’Shea and confided:
“This touch of high life suits me down to the heels, Cap’n Mike. And I’m not such a bull in a china-shop as you might think. The passengers are crazy to meet you. They want to hear about your adventures.”
“I am comfortable right here, Johnny. You are welcome to the bouquets. Have ye seen Miss Hollister this morning?”
“No, she’s still abed, but the ship’s doctor says she will come around all right. I’ll surprise her some, won’t I? Honestly, Cap’n Mike, after I make two or three more voyages with you, if they’re risky enough to pay big wages, I’m goin’ to pick out that farm down in Maine and hand over a first payment on it.”
“Have ye consulted with Miss Hollister?”
“Of course. She’s my right bower when it comes to good advice. Not that she is personally interested--I was just dreamin’ dreams, you understand--but if I had the farm maybe I could see her again and talk about pigs and hens, and gardens and flowers.”
“You are not as down-hearted as when ye were on the key, Johnny,” smilingly quoth Captain O’Shea.
“It’s the clothes and the refined surroundin’s, Cap’n Mike. I take to ’em somehow more than I ever did before. I seem sort of changed.”
“’Tis likely a first-class marine engineer will be spoiled to make a lubber of a farmer,” returned O’Shea.
“It’s a rough life we lead, Cap’n Mike, and a man of my age hadn’t ought to stick to it too long.”
Jack Gorham joined them, looking even leaner and sadder than when he had been in the _Fearless_.
“And what will you be doing with yourself?” cordially inquired O’Shea.
“Mr. Van Steen offers me an easy job in New York, sir, and a salary, whether I work or not. But I’m on nobody’s pension-roll. I shall get out of Jamaica in a sail-boat and sneak over to Cuba and join the rebels.”
“And will big Jiminez go with ye?”
“He is sort of tore up in his mind, sir, between following you on the chance of another fancy voyage and duckin’ into the jungle with me.”
“Tell him to go with you, Jack.”
“Well, Captain O’Shea, I hope I’ll have the pleasure of sailing with you again. I’ve enjoyed it,” exclaimed the soldier.
“If you need money, Jack, what I have is yours. I have a bit stowed away for emergencies.”
“You can stake Jiminez and me to a meal-ticket in Jamaica and the price of a little boat, sir, and I’ll pay the loan out of the first Spanish officer I pot with the old Springfield.”
When the stately _Caronic_ steamed into the harbor of Kingston the passengers crowded her rail to admire the verdure-clad mountains and the lovely vales lush with palms and bananas. The excursionists planned to spend the day ashore, and after they had disembarked, the crew of the _Fearless_ and Colonel Calvo’s Cubans filed down the gangway. Miss Hollister, Nora Forbes, and Gerald Van Steen were waiting to bid them farewell and God-speed. They had lived and suffered so many things together that it was difficult to realize that this was the journey’s end.
Gerald Van Steen spoke awkwardly and with much feeling.
“You have been very good to us, Captain O’Shea. I shall not make an ass of myself by offering you money. But perhaps I can help you to find another ship, and the house of Van Steen & Van Steen will always be at your service.”
“I have me doubts that a highly respectable banking-house will care to back my enterprises,” replied O’Shea. “But now that Johnny Kent has violent symptoms of mendin’ his ways there may be hope for me. You were a good shipmate, Mr. Van Steen. If ever ye want a job, I will be glad to sign you on as a stoker.”
“Will you dine with us at the hotel to-day?”
“Thank you, but I must look after my men.”
The farewell between Nora Forbes and Captain O’Shea had been said on the beach in the starlight. Now their glances met.
“Good-by and God bless ye,” said he. “The voyage seems like a dream, no doubt.”
“Perhaps it may some day, but not yet,” she told him.
“My dear friends, that voyage was the realest thing that ever happened,” was the earnest declaration of Johnny Kent, and no dissent was heard from that shipwrecked and marooned spinster, Miss Katharine Hollister.
THE KING OF TRINADARO
I
Captain Michael O’Shea and Johnny Kent sat by a window of the Jolly Mermaid tavern at Blackwall on the Thames below London. These two leisurely drank mugs of bitter-beer and gazed with professional interest at the crowded shipping of that great seaport thoroughfare which sailor-folk call London River.
The Jolly Mermaid was one of a jostling row of ancient buildings with bow-windows and balconies painted in bright hues which overhung the tide at Blackwall, to remind one of the maritime London of towering frigates and high-pooped galleons and stout seamen of Devon. The near-by shore was filled with ship-yards and weedy wharves, and a little way down river was the entrance of the vast inland basin called the East India Docks, where soared a wonderful confusion of spars and rigging, and the red funnels of the Union Castle liners lay side by side.
On the turbid river moved in procession a singular variety of craft: drifting Thames barges with dyed sails, square-riggers in tow, Norwegian tramps half hidden beneath uncouth deck-loads of lumber, rusty Spanish fruiters, coastwise schooners, spray-stained steam-trawlers from the Dogger Bank, stubby Dutch eel-schuits, stately mail-boats homeward bound from the tropics, sooty colliers from Cardiff.
They slid past with an incessant din of whistles which, warning, expostulating, shouted the rules of the road in the language of the sea.
These familiar sights and sounds pleased Captain O’Shea, and he was contented with his seat by the window of the Jolly Mermaid and the excellent brew dispensed by the apple-cheeked young woman behind the bar. Amphibious loafers drifted in and out or cast anchor on the wharf alongside, riggers, watermen, dock-laborers, sailors, who seemed to have a world of time on their hands. Their gait was slouching, their attire careless, and their conversation peppered with sanguinary references to their eyes.
“’Tis a restful place, Johnny, and as diverting as a theatre,” observed O’Shea.
The chief engineer returned rather fretfully:
“I’m willing to be idle in this bit of slack-water for a while, and sort of pull myself together, Cap’n Mike. But this don’t earn wages, and I ain’t makin’ much headway toward buyin’ that farm down in the State o’ Maine.”
Whimsical amusement lighted O’Shea’s bold, smooth-shaven features as he replied:
“I am not a man to seek a humdrum life afloat or ashore, you impatient old pirate. There was a lot of fuss kicked up at home about that Cuban voyage of ours, as ye well know. And there was a strong chance that we would be laid by the heels in one of Uncle Sam’s jails for breaking the laws between nations. We are better off where we are.”
“That Spanish gun-boat got in our way and her intentions was plain blood-thirsty,” grumbled Johnny Kent. “What if we did ram her and then blow her up? She interfered with men who were tryin’ to make an honest livin’ on the high-seas.”
“Argue as far as ye like, Johnny. It won’t alter the fact that it was healthier for you and me to make ourselves hard to find.”
“But it’s discouragin’ to look for another ship here in England, Cap’n Mike. We’re fish out of water.”
“’Tis not easy to find our kind of a ship anywhere,” O’Shea reminded him. “There are no revolutions poppin’ the lid off in Central or South America, and we will sit tight and trust in me lucky star. I have a gold piece or two left in the toe of the sock where I stowed it against times like this. And we have not sunk so low that we must sign on for a lawful voyage.”
Johnny Kent crooked a finger at the bar-maid and sought consolation in another mug of bitter, while Captain O’Shea turned to a morning newspaper and ran his eye down the ship-news column to note the arrivals and departures. Then he cast a cursory glance at the foreign despatches, which might, perchance, disclose some disturbance of the world’s peace and an opportunity for venturesome men used to alarms and stratagems.
Johnny Kent was moved to begin an aimless yarn about a certain wicked skipper of Yankee clipper fame who fetched his second mate all the way home from Cape Town doubled up in a hen-coop as a punishment for impertinence. O’Shea listened politely, but with a manner slightly absent-minded, having heard the tale of the unfortunate second mate and the hen-coop in at least five different ports.
The yarn was cut short, and the two men screwed around in their chairs to stare at a visitor whose presence in the humble longshore tavern of the Jolly Mermaid was most extraordinary.
He was an elderly and very dignified gentleman, of a spare figure and the stiffly erect carriage of an army officer. His features, thin and rather refined than forceful, were given an air of distinction by a white mustache and imperial. From the silk hat and frock-coat, with the ribbon of an order in the lapel, to the tan gaiters and patent-leather shoes, he was dressed with fastidious nicety. In the dingy tap-room of the Jolly Mermaid he was startlingly incongruous.
The stranger had the grand manner and it fitted him like a glove. He was not offensively self-important, but one conjectured him to be a personage who expected the world to show him deference. The bar-maid, who was no dunce at reading human nature, bobbed a courtesy and withheld the flippant persiflage which was wont to delight the nautical patrons of the place.
A moment later there entered the tavern a brisk young man with a sandy complexion and a roving eye, who was smartly but showily attired, a keen, up-to-snuff young man who knew his way about. With a respectful bow he addressed the impressive elderly gentleman.
“I told him to meet us here, if Your Majesty pleases.”
The apple-cheeked bar-maid was threatened with a fainting spell at the intimation that royalty stood within the tavern walls, but rallied bravely to suggest in a fluttered voice:
“There’s a tidy little back room, your royal ’ighness, where you can set down private-like without common folks starin’ and gawkin’ at your Worship.”
“Thanks. I am rather tired after tramping about the docks,” amiably replied the personage in the pleasantly modulated accents of the cultivated Englishman. To the brisk young man he said:
“Let us sit down, my dear baron, and look over some of the memoranda while we are waiting.”
“Certainly, Your Majesty,” quoth the young man, and with this they passed into the little back room and closed the door. A dock-laborer ripped out an oath of amazement and clattered from the bar to tell his friends that “one o’ them blighted, bleedin’ kings was in the Jolly Mermaid, large as life, so ’elp me Gawd.”
That brace of exiled mariners, Captain O’Shea and Johnny Kent, gazed blankly at each other, and tacitly agreed to wait and try to fathom the riddle. They had dealt with presidents of uneasy republics near the equator, but a real king, to be surveyed at close range, was a fascinating novelty.
Johnny Kent had carefully adjusted his spectacles to survey this rare object, and he now shoved them up beyond his bushy brows before he hoarsely confided to his comrade:
“I thought they went about disguised, Cap’n Mike, same as we run a blockade with no lights and the steamer’s name-boards covered up. Is he the real thing or is it just play-actin’?”
“Europe is full of kings that have been kicked out of their berths,” answered O’Shea. “Maybe this one is a has-been, but he doesn’t look to me like a counterfeit. And I would not set him down for a lunatic out for a stroll with his keeper.”
“He handles himself as sane as you or me,” agreed the chief engineer. “But this is surely a doggoned queer place to find a stray king.”
“’Tis worth watching, Johnny. I’m on me beam-ends for puzzlement.”
Ere long there appeared from the street a bow-legged, barrel-chested, hairy-fisted man with a rolling gait, whom a landlubber might have classified as a rough-and-hearty British seaman accustomed to command vessels in the merchant trade. A captious critic would have perhaps surmised that he had been pickled in rum as well as in brine. Glancing at a card held between a grimy thumb and finger, he asked the bar-maid:
“Is Baron Frederick Martin Strothers hereabouts, my girl? Captain Handy’s compliments.”
“If you mean the dashin’ young man with a red weskit, ’e is settin’ in yonder with His Majesty.”
“Right you are!” exclaimed Captain Handy. “My business is with His Majesty, but the baron has charge of the arrangements as minister of finance. A nipper of Scotch whiskey, neat, miss, before I talk to ’em.”
“What sort of a king is ’e, and what’s his bloomin’ handle?” she eagerly besought him. “Are you makin’ gyme of me?”
The hearty British shipmaster looked inscrutable, tossed the whiskey into his heated coppers, and slowly assured her:
“Women’s curiosity is the fatal weakness of the sex, my dear. A king is a king wherever you find him. And my advice to you is not to go braggin’ about and telling all hands that His Majesty has patronized the Jolly Mermaid.”
He trudged to the rear room, hat in hand, and timidly knocked on the door. As it was opened, the quick ear of Captain O’Shea heard the mysterious personage saying to the brisk young man:
“A steamer of the tonnage of this _Tyneshire Glen_ is what I wish. If your investigation has satisfied you that she is thoroughly sea-worthy and in good repair and Captain Handy also recommends her----”
The door closed behind Captain Handy, and O’Shea, glancing in that direction, smiled cynically and observed to Johnny Kent:
“Did ye size up this Handy man? You know the kind. Every big port has them: broken shipmasters, disrated mates, that aren’t fit to take a scow to sea.”
“Sure! They’ve borrowed money off me from Baltimore to Singapore. This Captain Handy must have sighted an easy mark in the offing.”
O’Shea pondered for a moment and asked:
“Did ye hear mention of the _Tyneshire Glen_ steamer just now? Do you happen to know the vessel? I can’t place her.”
Johnny Kent grunted as if he had sat upon a tack and answered with heated emphasis:
“Maybe it’s the old _Tyneshire Glen_ that was carryin’ cotton out of Savannah years ago. I went aboard to see her chief once and her plates was rusted so thin that I could have thrown a wrench through ’em.”
Captain Handy had left the door of the back room unlatched and a gusty draught of sea-breeze blew it partly open. The watchful pair in the tap-room had a glimpse of Captain Handy standing stolidly between His Majesty and the minister of finance, and heard him huskily declaim:
“The _Tyneshire Glen_ is a bargain at thirty thousand pounds, and you needn’t take my word for it. Baron Strothers here has interviewed the brokers that have her for sale, and he knows the price they put on her.”
“I have full confidence in the judgment of my minister of finance, with Captain Handy’s expert opinion to assist him,” easily replied His Majesty.
“Most of my papers were lost at sea,” hastily put in Captain Handy, as if to forestall an awkward question. “They were tied up together, your Royal ’ighness, when the _Falls of Clyde_ steamer went down and I saved the lives of forty-seven passengers and was the last man to leave her when she foundered under my feet. The newspapers praised me so that a modest man ’ud blush to repeat it.”
“Baron Strothers has investigated your record, so he informs me, and he advises me that you are to be depended upon,” was the warm assurance.
In the tap-room O’Shea chuckled skeptically and said to Johnny Kent:
“’Tis likely enough he lost his papers, but I mistrust his version of the story. What kind of a flim-flam is this, anyhow? The king and the minister of finance are discussing a rotten ship and a rotten skipper as if the both of them were to be taken seriously.”
After more conversation which the listeners failed to catch, the trio in the back room ended the session and prepared to leave the tavern. As they walked out past the bar Captain Handy was arguing with awkward gestures, the elderly personage was listening courteously, and the brisk young man alertly kept an eye on both, as though he had an absorbing interest in the interview. In front of the tavern they parted, Captain Handy to turn in the direction of the East India Docks, the puzzling pair of notables to seek the railroad station to London.
Upon O’Shea and Johnny Kent there fell a prolonged spell of silence. Each was piecing theories together and discarding them as unsatisfactory. Of one thing they were convinced. This royal visitation had not been an elaborate hoax, and the explanation of lunacy was finally and emphatically dismissed.
“’Tis no case of barnacles on the intellect,” was the verdict of O’Shea, “barrin’ the fact that he ought to have more sense than to listen to the palaver of a rascal like this Captain Handy. Why didn’t we think to follow them up and see where they went?”
“I’m too short-winded to make a good sleuth-hound, Cap’n Mike, and it ain’t dignified for a man of my years.”
“Well, then, who is this Captain Handy?” demanded O’Shea. “We’ll try another tack.”
He questioned the bar-maid, who was disappointing.
“The man never showed hisself in ’ere before,” said she. “You’re more likely to find out about ’im at the docks.”
“Say, Cap’n Mike,” exclaimed Johnny Kent with puckered brow, “ain’t there some kind of a book written about kings, their habits and their names, and the various breeds of ’em? And where you’re most apt to find ’em? Do they generally run around loose?”
“I’m not personally acquainted with a whole lot of them, Johnny; but as a rule ’tis safe to bet they don’t come wanderin’ into sailors’ taverns convoyed by the minister of finance.”
“Suppose we take his word for it,” was the suggestion. “Call him a king. He’s lookin’ for a ship and a captain, ain’t he?”
“Now you talk hard sense, Johnny. That’s where I pricked up my ears. Maybe we can cross his bows again if we look sharp.”
Next morning they carefully scrutinized the “Court Circular” of the London _Times_, and were more at sea than ever at discovering that the only visiting royalty comprised an unimportant cousin of the house of Hanover from a German duchy and the dusky ruler of a native state of India. That a full-fledged king and a minister of his cabinet, both indubitably Englishmen, could be strolling about London unnoticed by the newspapers and unknown to the public was fairly incredible, and yet no mention could anywhere be found of the illustrious patrons of the Jolly Mermaid, although O’Shea bought the morning journals by the fistful.
It occurred to him to pay a call at a ship-brokers’ office down in Leadenhall Street, and Johnny Kent rode with him on top of a ’bus. They had made the acquaintance of the managing partner of the firm under the palms of a Venezuelan seaport, and he cherished a strong friendship for this pair of adventurous rovers. He was anxious to find a ship for O’Shea, and the latter dropped in now and then in search of news.
The comrades twain were about to dodge through the traffic of Leadenhall Street and enter the office of their friend when O’Shea plucked Johnny Kent by the sleeve and pulled him back into an adjacent door-way. A brisk, sandy-haired young man was also doubling among the stream of vehicles which roared from curb to curb and aiming his course for the ship-brokers’ office.
“’Tis the minister of finance, Johnny,” cautiously spoke O’Shea. “Look at him. There he goes, right into Tavistock & Huntley’s, the same destination as ours.”
“Why not go in and meet him, Cap’n Mike? Maybe George Huntley will introduce us and we can slip in a few questions.”
“Because I do not like this sprightly right bower of royalty, Johnny. I took a violent dislike to the Baron Frederick Martin Strothers at first sight. And me hunches about people are worth heeding when they take hold of me as strong as this one did.”
They surmised that the brisk young man with the red waistcoat must have business to transact with Tavistock & Huntley, for he remained inside a good half-hour. Then the watchers caught no more than a farewell glimpse of him as he hastily emerged and popped into a passing hansom. Thereupon they sauntered into the ship-brokers’ office and were cordially greeted by George Huntley, managing partner, a stocky, bald-headed person who looked as substantial as a brick house. The spirit of romance was in him, however, and he secretly envied O’Shea his illogical pursuit of hazards for sheer love of them.
Steering them into a small private room, he plumped himself into the chair at the desk, waved them to a leather-covered lounge, and inquired with much gusto:
“And how are my disreputable friends this morning? Anything in the wind?”
“’Tis still blowing dead calm for us, but the weather is suspicious in one quarter of the compass,” answered O’Shea. “Tell me, George, what do you know about the young man that just now whisked out of here--the fancy lad with the loud vest and the high-steppin’ manner?”
Huntley tilted his chair, clasped his hands across a comfortable waistband, and replied in his deliberate way:
“I have laid eyes on him only twice. His name is Strothers, I believe, and he calls himself a baron. One of those Continental titles, I fancy. You buy them, you know. This day of last week he came into our place with Captain Handy, who used to sail in the Blue Anchor service.”
“Got into trouble with his owners, didn’t he?” interrupted O’Shea, at a guess.