Moran of the Lady Letty

“Where, then?”

Wilbur smote the table with his fist.

“Cuba!” he cried. “I’ve got a crack little schooner out in the bay here, and I’ve got a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of loot aboard of her. I’ve tried beach-combing for a while, and now I’ll try filibustering. It may be a crazy idea, but it’s better than dancing. I’d rather lead an expedition than a german, and you can chew on that, Nathaniel Ridgeway.”

Jerry looked at him as he stood there before them in the filthy, reeking blouse and jeans, the ragged boots, and the mane of hair and tangled beard, and remembered the Wilbur he used to know—the Wilbur of the carefully creased trousers, the satin scarfs and fancy waistcoats.

“You’re a different sort than when you went away, Ross,” said Jerry.

“Right you are,” answered Wilbur.

“But I will venture a prophecy,” continued Jerry, looking keenly at him.

“Ross, you are a born-and-bred city man. It’s in the blood of you and the bones of you. I’ll give you three years for this new notion of yours to wear itself out. You think just now you’re going to spend the rest of your life as an amateur buccaneer. In three years, at the outside, you’ll be using your ‘loot,’ as you call it, or the interest of it, to pay your taxes and your tailor, your pew rent and your club dues, and you’ll be what the biographers call ‘a respectable member of the community.’”

“Did you ever kill a man, Jerry?” asked Wilbur. “No? Well, you kill one some day—kill him in a fair give-and-take fight—and see how it makes you feel, and what influence it has on you, and then come back and talk to me.”

It was long after midnight. Wilbur rose.

“We’ll ring for a boy,” said Ridgeway, “and get you a room. I can fix you out with clothes enough in the morning.”

Wilbur stared in some surprise, and then said:

“Why, I’ve got the schooner to look after. I can’t leave those coolies alone all night.”

“You don’t mean to say you’re going on board at this time in the morning?”

“Of course!”

“Why—but—but you’ll catch your death of cold.”

Wilbur stared at Ridgeway, then nodded helplessly, and, scratching his head, said, half aloud:

“No, what’s the use; I can’t make ‘em understand. Good-night I’ll see you in the morning.”

“We’ll all come out and visit you on your yacht,” Ridgeway called after him; but Wilbur did not hear.

In answer to Wilbur’s whistle, Jim came in with the dory and took him off to the schooner. Moran met him as he came over the side.

“I took the watch myself to-night and let the boy turn in,” she said. “How is it ashore, mate?”

“We’ve come back to the world of little things, Moran,” said Wilbur. “But we’ll pull out of here in the morning and get back to the places where things are real.”

“And that’s a good hearing, mate.”

“Let’s get up here on the quarterdeck,” added Wilbur. “I’ve something to propose to you.”

Moran laid an arm across his shoulder, and the two walked aft. For half an hour Wilbur talked to her earnestly about his new idea of filibustering; and as he told her of the war he warmed to the subject, his face glowing, his eyes sparkling. Suddenly, however, he broke off.

“But no!” he exclaimed. “You don’t understand, Moran. How can you—you’re foreign-born. It’s no affair of yours!”

“Mate! mate!” cried Moran, her hands upon his shoulders. “It’s you who don’t understand—don’t understand me. Don’t you know—can’t you see? Your people are mine now. I’m happy only in your happiness. You were right—the best happiness is the happiness one shares. And your sorrows belong to me, just as I belong to you, dear. Your enemies are mine, and your quarrels are my quarrels.” She drew his head quickly toward her and kissed him.

In the morning the two had made up their minds to a certain vague course of action. To get away—anywhere—was their one aim. Moran was by nature a creature unfit for civilization, and the love of adventure and the desire for action had suddenly leaped to life in Wilbur’s blood and was not to be resisted. They would get up to San Francisco, dispose of their “loot,” outfit the “Bertha Millner” as a filibuster, and put to sea again. They had discussed the advisability of rounding the Horn in so small a ship as the “Bertha Millner,” but Moran had settled that at once.

“I’ve got to know her pretty well,” she told Wilbur. “She’s sound as a nut. Only let’s get away from this place.”

But toward ten o’clock on the morning after their arrival off Coronado, and just as they were preparing to get under way, Hoang touched Wilbur’s elbow.

“Seeum lil one-piece smoke-boat; him come chop-chop.”

In fact, a little steam-launch was rapidly approaching the schooner. In another instant she was alongside. Jerry, Nat Ridgeway, Josie Herrick, and an elderly woman, whom Wilbur barely knew as Miss Herrick’s married sister, were aboard.

“We’ve come off to see your yacht!” cried Miss Herrick to Wilbur as the launch bumped along the schooner’s counter. “Can we come aboard?” She looked very pretty in her crisp pink shirt-waist her white duck skirt, and white kid shoes, her sailor hat tilted at a barely perceptible angle. The men were in white flannels and smart yachting suits. “Can we come aboard?” she repeated.

Wilbur gasped and stared. “Good Lord!” he muttered. “Oh, come along,” he added, desperately.

The party came over the side.

“Oh, my!” said Miss Herrick blankly, stopping short.

The decks, masts, and rails of the schooner were shiny with a black coating of dirt and grease; the sails were gray with grime; a strangling odor of oil and tar, of cooking and of opium, of Chinese punk and drying fish, pervaded all the air. In the waist, Hoang and Jim, bare to the belt, their queues looped around their necks to be out of the way, were stowing the dory and exchanging high-pitched monosyllables. Miss Herrick’s sister had not come aboard. The three visitors—Jerry, Ridgeway, and Josie—stood nervously huddled together, their elbows close in, as if to avoid contact with the prevailing filth, their immaculate white outing-clothes detaching themselves violently against the squalor and sordid grime of the schooner’s background.

“Oh, my!” repeated Miss Herrick in dismay, half closing her eyes. “To think of what you must have been through! I thought you had some kind of a yacht. I had no idea it would be like this.” And as she spoke, Moran came suddenly upon the group from behind the foresail, and paused in abrupt surprise, her thumbs in her belt.

She still wore men’s clothes and was booted to the knee. The heavy blue woolen shirt was open at the throat, the sleeves rolled half-way up her large white arms. In her belt she carried her haftless Scandinavian dirk. She was hatless as ever, and her heavy, fragrant cables of rye-hued hair fell over her shoulders and breast to far below her belt.

Miss Herrick started sharply, and Moran turned an inquiring glance upon Wilbur. Wilbur took his resolution in both hands.

“Miss Herrick,” he said, “this is Moran—Moran Sternersen.”

Moran took a step forward, holding out her hand. Josie, all bewildered, put her tight-gloved fingers into the calloused palm, looking up nervously into Moran’s face.

“I’m sure,” she said feebly, almost breathlessly, “I—I’m sure I’m very pleased to meet Miss Sternersen.”

It was long before the picture left Wilbur’s imagination. Josie Herrick, petite, gowned in white, crisp from her maid’s grooming; and Moran, sea-rover and daughter of a hundred Vikings, towering above her, booted and belted, gravely clasping Josie’s hand in her own huge fist.

XIII. MORAN STERNERSEN

San Francisco once more! For two days the “Bertha Millner” had been beating up the coast, fighting her way against northerly winds, butting into head seas.

The warmth, the stillness, the placid, drowsing quiet of Magdalena Bay, steaming under the golden eye of a tropic heaven, the white, baked beach, the bay-heads, striated with the mirage in the morning, the coruscating sunset, the enchanted mystery of the purple night, with its sheen of stars and riding moon, were now replaced by the hale and vigorous snorting of the Trades, the roll of breakers to landward, and the unremitting gallop of the unnumbered multitudes of gray-green seas, careering silently past the schooner, their crests occasionally hissing into brusque eruptions of white froth, or smiting broad on under her counter, showering her decks with a sprout of icy spray. It was cold; at times thick fogs cloaked all the world of water. To the east a procession of bleak hills defiled slowly southward; lighthouses were passed; streamers of smoke on the western horizon marked the passage of steamships; and once they met and passed close by a huge Cape Horner, a great deep-sea tramp, all sails set and drawing, rolling slowly and leisurely in seas that made the schooner dance.

At last the Farallones looked over the ocean’s edge to the north; then came the whistling-buoy, the Seal Rocks, the Heads, Point Reyes, the Golden Gate flanked with the old red Presidio, Lime Point with its watching cannon; and by noon of a gray and boisterous day, under a lusty wind and a slant of rain, just five months after her departure, the “Bertha Millner” let go her anchor in San Francisco Bay some few hundred yards off the Lifeboat Station.

In this berth the schooner was still three or four miles from the city and the water-front. But Moran detested any nearer approach to civilization, and Wilbur himself was willing to avoid, at least for one day, the publicity which he believed the “Bertha’s” reappearance was sure to attract. He remembered, too, that the little boat carried with her a fortune of $100,000, and decided that until it could be safely landed and stored it was not desirable that its existence should be known along “the Front.”

For days, weeks even, Wilbur had looked eagerly forward to this return to his home. He had seen himself again in his former haunts, in his club, and in the houses along Pacific avenue where he was received; but no sooner had the anchor-chain ceased rattling in the “Bertha’s” hawse-pipe than a strange revulsion came upon him. The new man that seemed to have so suddenly sprung to life within him, the Wilbur who was the mate of the “Bertha Millner,” the Wilbur who belonged to Moran, believed that he could see nothing to be desired in city life. For him was the unsteady deck of a schooner, and the great winds and the tremendous wheel of the ocean’s rim, and the horizon that ever fled before his following prow; so he told himself, so he believed. What attractions could the city offer him? What amusements? what excitements? He had been flung off the smoothly spinning circumference of well-ordered life out into the void.