Moran of the Lady Letty

He had known romance, and the spell of the great, simple, and primitive emotions; he had sat down to eat with buccaneers; he had seen the fierce, quick leap of unleashed passions, and had felt death swoop close at his nape and pass like a swift spurt of cold air. City life, his old life, had no charm for him now. Wilbur honestly believed that he was changed to his heart’s core. He thought that, like Moran, he was henceforth to be a sailor of the sea, a rover, and he saw the rest of his existence passed with her, aboard their faithful little schooner. They would have the whole round world as their playground; they held the earth and the great seas in fief; there was no one to let or to hinder. They two belonged to each other. Once outside the Heads again, and they swept the land of cities and of little things behind them, and they two were left alone once more; alone in the great world of romance.

About an hour after her arrival off the station, while Hoang and the hands were furling the jib and foresail and getting the dory over the side, Moran remarked to Wilbur:

“It’s good we came in when we did, mate; the glass is going down fast, and the wind’s breezing up from the west; we’re going to have a blow; the tide will be going out in a little while, and we never could have come in against wind and tide.”

“Moran,” said Wilbur, “I’m going ashore—into the station here; there’s a telephone line there; see the wires? I can’t so much as turn my hand over before I have some shore-going clothes. What do you suppose they would do to me if I appeared on Kearney Street in this outfit? I’ll ring up Langley & Michaels—they are the wholesale chemists in town—and have their agent come out here and talk business to us about our ambergris. We’ve got to pay the men their prize-money; then as soon as we get our own money in hand we can talk about overhauling and outfitting the ‘Bertha.’”

Moran refused to accompany him ashore and into the Lifeboat Station. Roofed houses were an object of suspicion to her. Already she had begun to be uneasy at the distant sight of the city of San Francisco, Nob, Telegraph, Russian, and Rincon hills, all swarming with buildings and grooved with streets; even the land-locked harbor fretted her. Wilbur could see she felt imprisoned, confined. When he had pointed out the Palace Hotel to her—a vast gray cube in the distance, overtopping the surrounding roofs—she had sworn under her breath.

“And people can live there, good heavens! Why not rabbit-burrows, and be done with it? Mate, how soon can we be out to sea again? I hate this place.”

Wilbur found the captain of the Lifeboat Station in the act of sitting down to a dinner of boiled beef and cabbage. He was a strongly built well-looking man, with the air more of a soldier than a sailor. He had already been studying the schooner through his front window and had recognized her, and at once asked Wilbur news of Captain Kitchell. Wilbur told him as much of his story as was necessary, but from the captain’s talk he gathered that the news of his return had long since been wired from Coronado, and that it would be impossible to avoid a nine days’ notoriety. The captain of the station (his name was Hodgson) made Wilbur royally welcome, insisted upon his dining with him, and himself called up Langley & Michaels as soon as the meal was over.

It was he who offered the only plausible solution of the mystery of the lifting and shaking of the schooner and the wrecking of the junk. Though Wilbur was not satisfied with Hodgson’s explanation, it was the only one he ever heard.

When he had spoken of the matter, Hodgson had nodded his head. “Sulphur-bottoms,” he said.

“Sulphur-bottoms?”

“Yes; they’re a kind of right-whale; they get barnacles and a kind of marine lice on their backs, and come up and scratch them selves against a ship’s keel, just like a hog under a fence.”

When Wilbur’s business was done, and he was making ready to return to the schooner, Hodgson remarked suddenly: “Hear you’ve got a strapping fine girl aboard with you. Where did you fall in with her?” and he winked and grinned.

Wilbur started as though struck, and took himself hurriedly away; but the man’s words had touched off in his brain a veritable mine of conjecture. Moran in Magdalena Bay was consistent, congruous, and fitted into her environment. But how—how was Wilbur to explain her to San Francisco, and how could his behavior seem else than ridiculous to the men of his club and to the women whose dinner invitations he was wont to receive? They could not understand the change that had been wrought in him; they did not know Moran, the savage, half-tamed Valkyrie so suddenly become a woman. Hurry as he would, the schooner could not be put to sea again within a fortnight. Even though he elected to live aboard in the meanwhile, the very business of her preparation would call him to the city again and again. Moran could not be kept a secret. As it was, all the world knew of her by now. On the other hand he could easily understand her position; to her it seemed simplicity itself that they two who loved each other should sail away and pass their lives together upon the sea, as she and her father had done before.

Like most men, Wilbur had to walk when he was thinking hard. He sent the dory back to the schooner with word to Moran that he would take a walk around the beach and return in an hour or two. He set off along the shore in the direction of Fort Mason, the old red-brick fort at the entrance to the Golden Gate. At this point in the Presidio Government reservation the land is solitary. Wilbur followed the line of the beach to the old fort; and there, on the very threshold of the Western world, at the very outpost of civilization, sat down in the lee of the crumbling fortification, and scene by scene reviewed the extraordinary events of the past six months.

In front of him ran the narrow channel of the Golden Gate; to his right was the bay and the city; at his left the open Pacific.

He saw himself the day of his advent aboard the “Bertha” in his top hat and frock coat; saw himself later “braking down” at the windlass, the “Petrel” within hailing distance.

Then the pictures began to thicken fast: the derelict bark “Lady Letty” rolling to her scuppers, abandoned and lonely; the “boy” in the wheel-box; Kitchell wrenching open the desk in the captain’s stateroom; Captain Sternersen buried at sea, his false teeth upside down; the black fury of the squall, and Moran at the wheel; Moran lying at full length on the deck, getting the altitude of a star; Magdalena Bay; the shark-fishing; the mysterious lifting and shuddering of the schooner; the beach-combers’ junk, with its staring red eyes; Hoang, naked to the waist, gleaming with sweat and whale-oil; the ambergris; the race to beach the sinking schooner; the never-to-be-forgotten night when he and Moran had camped together on the beach; Hoang taken prisoner, and the hideous filing of his teeth; the beach-combers, silent and watchful behind their sand breastworks; the Chinaman he had killed twitching and hic-coughing at his feet; Moran turned Berserker, bursting down upon him through a haze of smoke; Charlie dying in the hammock aboard the schooner, ordering his funeral with its “four-piecee horse”; Coronado; the incongruous scene in the ballroom; and, last of all, Josie Herrick in white duck and kid shoes, giving her hand to Moran in her boots and belt, hatless as ever, her sleeves rolled up to above the elbows, her white, strong arm extended, her ruddy face, and pale, milk-blue eyes gravely observant, her heavy braids, yellow as ripening rye, hanging over her shoulder and breast.

A sudden explosion of cold wind, striking down blanket-wise and bewildering from out the west, made Wilbur look up quickly. The gray sky seemed scudding along close overhead. The bay, the narrow channel of the Golden Gate, the outside ocean, were all whitening with crests of waves. At his feet the huge green ground-swells thundered to the attack of the fort’s granite foundations. Through the Gate, the bay seemed rushing out to the Pacific. A bewildered gull shot by, tacking and slanting against the gusts that would drive it out to sea. Evidently the storm was not far off. Wilbur rose to his feet, and saw the “Bertha Millner,” close in, unbridled and free as a runaway horse, headed directly for the open sea, and rushing on with all the impetus of wind and tide!

XIV. THE OCEAN IS CALLING FOR YOU

A little while after Wilbur had set off for the station, while Moran was making the last entries in the log-book, seated at the table in the cabin, Jim appeared at the door.

“Well,” she said, looking up.

“China boy him want go asho’ plenty big, seeum flen up Chinatown in um city.”

“Shore leave, is it?” said Moran. “You deserted once before without even saying good-by; and my hand in the fire, you’ll come back this time dotty with opium. Get away with you. We’ll have men aboard here in a few days.”

“Can go?” inquired Jim suavely.

“I said so. Report our arrival to your Six Companies.”

Hoang rowed Jim and the coolies ashore, and then returned to the schooner with the dory and streamed her astern. As he passed the cabin door on his way forward, Moran hailed him.

“I thought you went ashore?” she cried.

“Heap flaid,” he answered. “Him other boy go up Chinatown; him tell Sam Yup; I tink Sam Yup alla same killee me. I no leaveum ship two, thlee day; bimeby I go Olegon. I stay topside ship. You wantum cook. I cook plenty fine; standum watch for you.”

Indeed, ever since leaving Coronado the ex-beach-comber had made himself very useful about the schooner; had been, in fact, obsequiousness itself, and seemed to be particularly desirous of gaining the good-will of the “Bertha’s” officers. He understood pigeon English better than Jim, and spoke it even better than Charlie had done. He acted the part of interpreter between Wilbur and the hands; even turned to in the galley upon occasion; and of his own accord offered to give the vessel a coat of paint above the water-line. Moran turned back to her log, and Hoang went forward. Standing on the forward deck, he looked after the “Bertha’s” coolies until they disappeared behind a row of pine-trees on the Presidio Reservation, going cityward. Wilbur was nowhere in sight. For a longtime Hoang studied the Lifeboat Station narrowly, while he made a great show of coiling a length of rope. The station was just out of hailing distance. Nobody seemed stirring. The whole shore and back land thereabout was deserted; the edge of the city was four miles distant. Hoang returned to the forecastle-hatch and went below, groping under his bunk in his ditty-box.

“Well, what is it?” exclaimed Moran a moment later, as the beach-comber entered the cabin, and shut the door behind him.

Hoang did not answer; but she did not need to repeat the question. In an instant Moran knew very well what he had come for.

“God!” she exclaimed under her breath, springing to her feet. “Why didn’t we think of this!”

Hoang slipped his knife from the sleeve of his blouse. For an instant the old imperiousness, the old savage pride and anger, leaped again in Moran’s breast—then died away forever. She was no longer the same Moran of that first fight on board the schooner, when the beach-combers had plundered her of her “loot.” Only a few weeks ago, and she would have fought with Hoang without hesitation and without mercy; would have wrenched a leg from the table and brained him where he stood. But she had learned since to know what it meant to be dependent; to rely for protection upon some one who was stronger than she; to know her weakness; to know that she was at last a woman, and to be proud of it.

She did not fight; she had no thought of fighting. Instinctively she cried aloud, “Mate—mate!—Oh, mate, where are you? Help me!” and Hoang’s knife nailed the words within her throat.

The “loot” was in a brass-bound chest under one of the cabin’s bunks, stowed in two gunny-bags. Hoang drew them out, knotted the two together, and, slinging them over his shoulder, regained the deck.

He looked carefully at the angry sky and swelling seas, noting the direction of the wind and set of the tide; then went forward and cast the anchor-chains from the windlass in such a manner that the schooner must inevitably wrench free with the first heavy strain. The dory was still tugging at the line astern. Hoang dropped the sacks in the boat, swung himself over the side, and rowed calmly toward the station’s wharf. If any notion of putting to sea with the schooner had entered the obscure, perverted cunning of his mind, he had almost instantly rejected it. Chinatown was his aim; once there and under the protection of his Tong, Hoang knew that he was safe. He knew the hiding-places that the See Yup Association provided for its members—hiding places whose very existence was unknown to the police of the White Devil.

No one interrupted—no one even noticed—his passage to the station. At best, it was nothing more than a coolie carrying a couple of gunny-sacks across his shoulder. Two hours later, Hoang was lost in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

At the sight of the schooner sweeping out to sea, Wilbur was for an instant smitten rigid. What had happened? Where was Moran? Why was there nobody on board? A swift, sharp sense of some unnamed calamity leaped suddenly at his throat. Then he was aware of a crattering of hoofs along the road that led to the fort. Hodgson threw himself from one of the horses that were used in handling the surf-boat, and ran to him hatless and panting.

“My God!” he shouted. “Look, your schooner, do you see her? She broke away after I’d started to tell you—to tell you—to tell you—your girl there on board—It was horrible!”

“Is she all right?” cried Wilbur, at top voice, for the clamor of the gale was increasing every second.

“All right! No; they’ve killed her—somebody—the coolies, I think—knifed her! I went out to ask you people to come into the station to have supper with me—”

“Killed her—killed her! Who? I don’t believe you—”

“Wait—to have supper with me, and I found her there on the cabin floor. She was still breathing. I carried her up on deck—there was nobody else aboard. I carried her up and laid her on the deck—and she died there. Just now I came after you to tell you, and—”

“Good God Almighty, man! who killed her? Where is she? Oh—but of course it isn’t true! How did you know? Moran killed! Moran killed!”

“And the schooner broke away after I started!”

“Moran killed! But—but—she’s not dead yet; we’ll have to see—”

“She died on the deck; I brought her up and laid her on—”

“How do you know she’s dead? Where is she? Come on, we’ll go right back to her—to the station!”

“She’s on board—out there!”

“Where—where is she? My God, man, tell me where she is!”