Moran of the Lady Letty

The junk had come in overnight, and was about a mile and a half from shore.

“The deuce!” exclaimed Wilbur. “What are they after?”

“Fresh water, I guess,” said Moran, knotting the end of a braid. “We’d better have breakfast in a hurry, and turn to on the ‘Bertha.’ The tide is going out fast.”

While they breakfasted they kept an eye on the schooner, watching her sides and flanks as the water fell slowly away.

“Don’t see anything very bad yet,” said Wilbur.

“It’s somewhere in her stern,” remarked Moran.

In an hour’s time the “Bertha Millner” was high and dry, and they could examine her at their leisure. It was Moran who found the leak.

“Pshaw!” she exclaimed, with a half-laugh, “we can stick that up in half an hour.”

A single plank had started away from the stern-post; that was all. Otherwise the schooner was as sound as the day she left San Francisco. Moran and Wilbur had the damage repaired by noon, nailing the plank into its place and caulking the seams with lamp-wick. Nor could their most careful search discover any further injury.

“We’re ready to go,” said Moran, “so soon as she’ll float. We can dig away around the bows here, make fast a line to that rock out yonder, and warp her off at next high tide. Hello! who’s this?”

It was Charlie. While the two had been at work, he had come around the shore unobserved, and now stood at some little distance, smiling at them calmly.

“Well, what do you want?” cried Moran angrily. “If you had your rights, my friend, you’d be keelhauled.”

“I tink um velly hot day.”

“You didn’t come here to say that. What do you want?”

“I come hab talkee-talk.”

“We don’t want to have any talkee-talk with such vermin as you. Get out!”

Charlie sat down on the beach and wiped his forehead.

“I come buy one-piecee bacon. China boy no hab got.”

“We aren’t selling bacon to deserters,” cried Moran; “and I’ll tell you this, you filthy little monkey: Mr. Wilbur and I are going home—back to ‘Frisco—this afternoon; and we’re going to leave you and the rest of your vipers to rot on this beach, or to be murdered by beach-combers,” and she pointed out toward the junk. Charlie did not even follow the direction of her gesture, and from this very indifference Wilbur guessed that it was precisely because of the beach-combers that the Machiavellian Chinaman had wished to treat with his old officers.

“No hab got bacon?” he queried, lifting his eyebrows in surprise.

“Plenty; but not for you.”

Charlie took a buckskin bag from his blouse and counted out a handful of silver and gold.

“I buy um nisi two-piecee tobacco.”

“Look here,” said Wilbur deliberately; “don’t you try to flim-flam us, Charlie. We know you too well. You don’t want bacon and you don’t want tobacco.”

“China boy heap plenty much sick. Two boy velly sick. I tink um die pretty soon to-molla. You catch um slop-chest; you gib me five, seven liver pill. Sabe?”

“I’ll tell you what you want,” cried Moran, aiming a forefinger at him, pistol fashion; “you’ve got a blue funk because those Kai-gingh beach-combers have come into the bay, and you’re more frightened of them than you are of the schooner; and now you want us to take you home.”

“How muchee?”

“A thousand dollars.”

Wilbur looked at her in surprise. He had expected a refusal.

“You no hab got liver pill?” inquired Charlie blandly.

Moran turned her back on him. She and Wilbur conferred in a low voice.

“We’d better take them back, if we decently can,” said Moran. “The schooner is known, of course, in ‘Frisco. She went out with Kitchell and a crew of coolies, and she comes back with you and I aboard, and if we tell the truth about it, it will sound like a lie, and we’ll have no end of trouble. Then again, can just you and I work the ‘Bertha’ into port? In these kind of airs it’s plain work, but suppose we have dirty weather? I’m not so sure.”

“I gib you ten dollah fo’ ten liver pill,” said Charlie.

“Will you give us a thousand dollars to set you down in San Francisco?”

Charlie rose. “I go back. I tell um China boy what you say ‘bout liver pill. Bime-by I come back.”

“That means he’ll take our offer back to his friends,” said Wilbur, in a low voice. “You best hurry chop-chop,” he called after Charlie; “we go home pretty soon!”

“He knows very well we can’t get away before high tide to-morrow,” said Moran. “He’ll take his time.”

Later on in the afternoon Moran and Wilbur saw a small boat put off from the junk and make a landing by the creek. The beach-combers were taking on water. The boat made three trips before evening, but the beach-combers made no show of molesting the undefended schooner, or in any way interfering with Charlie’s camp on the other side of the bay.

“No!” exclaimed Moran between her teeth, as she and Wilbur were cooking supper; “no, they don’t need to; they’ve got about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of loot on board—OUR loot, too! Good God! it goes against the grain!”

The moon rose considerably earlier that night, and by twelve o’clock the bay was flooded with its electrical whiteness. Wilbur and Moran could plainly make out the junk tied up to the kelp off-shore. But toward one o’clock Wilbur was awakened by Moran shaking his arm.

“There’s something wrong out there,” she whispered; “something wrong with the junk. Hear ‘em squealing? Look! look! look!” she cried of a sudden; “it’s their turn now!”

Wilbur could see the crank junk, with its staring red eyes, high stern and prow, as distinctly as though at noonday. As he watched, it seemed as if a great wave caught her suddenly underfoot. She heaved up bodily out of the water, dropped again with a splash, rose again, and again fell back into her own ripples, that, widening from her sides, broke crisply on the sand at Wilbur’s feet.

Then the commotion ceased abruptly. The bay was quiet again. An hour passed, then two. The moon began to set. Moran and Wilbur, wearied of watching, had turned in again, when they were startled to wakefulness by the creak of oarlocks and the sound of a boat grounding in the sand.

The coolies—the deserters from the “Bertha Millner”—were there. Charlie came forward.

“Ge’ lup! Ge’ lup!” he said. “Junk all smash! Kai-gingh come ashore. I tink him want catch um schooner.”

IX. THE CAPTURE OF HOANG

“What smashed the junk? What wrecked her?” demanded Moran.

The deserting Chinamen huddled around Charlie, drawing close, as if finding comfort in the feel of each other’s elbows.

“No can tell,” answered Charlie. “Him shake, then lif’ up all the same as we. Bime-by too much lif’ up; him smash all to—Four-piecee Chinamen dlown.”

“Drown! Did any of them drown?” exclaimed Moran.