The Bungalow Boys in the Great Northwest

“If we could make them – yes,” rejoined Mr. Chillingworth, “but you don’t suppose, do you, that they would give us such an opportunity? Why the minute one of us sprang on that rail to wave for help we would be knocked down and perhaps badly injured.”

“Just the same I’m going to make a try for it,” thought Tom to himself, “if any opportunity offers.”

Simon Lake himself, and his scrubby-haired first mate, had now emerged from the cabin companionway, and were pacing the inclined stern deck. Every now and again, Lake crossed to the side of the man at the wheel and peered into the compass. From time to time he cast an eye aloft at the canvas. The schooner was carrying every bit of plainsail, despite the smart wind that was humming through her rigging. Evidently, Lake did not believe in allowing his ship to loaf along. He carried an amount of canvas which would have given an old-fashioned skipper heart disease. The schooner showed the strain, too. Every now and again, she would give a heel that sent her lee rail under and the yeasty foam boiling and swirling along the scuppers.

At last, shortly before noon, the opportunity for which Tom had been waiting presented itself. Dead ahead, across the tumbling blue water, could be seen the heeling, rolling form of a steamer. She was coming toward them and if she held her present course, would be bound to pass them a short distance to lee. When she did so, Tom made up his mind that he was going to try to attract her attention.

On came the vessel, black smoke pouring from her funnel and her masts cutting crazy arcs against the sky. Now and then the sun flashed on her wet plates as she rolled. She was a black craft with towering white upper decks, which showed her to be a passenger craft. On board her was safety, law, and order. Tom’s heart fairly ached to attract her attention. The case was no different with the rancher, but what with anxiety over the worry his wife would be feeling, and general trouble over their position, Mr. Chillingworth had had little to say for the last hour or two. He had sat silently at the foot of the foremast, his head in his hands and lost in the dismal trend of his thoughts.

The steamer was now almost abeam of them. So close was she that Tom could catch the glint of brass buttons on her bridge and the gay colors of the ladies’ dresses as they walked along the promenade decks, and no doubt remarked to their escorts on the beauty of the little schooner heading out to the open sea.

As the two ships drew abeam, Tom leaped into the lee rigging, hanging on by one of the fore shrouds. His cap – an old sea affair, given him by Bully Banjo – was in his hand, and he was raising his arm to wave it.

“Ahoy! Steamer, ahoy!” he yelled.

The wind bore his cries down toward the other vessel and a commotion could be seen on her bridge. Presently there came a gush of white steam from her whistle and her way decreased noticeably. But Tom had hardly had time to take in these details before a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and the next instant Zeb Hunt’s rough fist had felled him to the deck.

“You young shark!” snarled the mate, “this is the worst day’s work you’ve ever done. You keep off there, Chillingworth,” he went on truculently, as the rancher came forward protesting. “This is our affair.”

The rancher glanced helplessly about him. The entire crew had gathered about the prostrate boy. It would have been worse than madness to have resisted any of Hunt’s mandates just then. Suddenly a voice hailed from the stern.

“Good work thar, Mister Hunt. Jes’ keep that young catamount down thar while I untangle this yar mess.”

It was Simon Lake. As he spoke, he took a megaphone from its rack just inside the companionway.

“Schooner, ahoy! What’s the trouble on board you?” came a hail from the steamer.

“Ain’t nawthin’ wrong here as I’m awares on,” hailed back Simon, his downeast drawl more pronounced than ever.

“Nothing wrong, you deep sea vagabond, then what in the name of Neptune do you mean by stopping us this way? Don’t you know we carry the mails?”

“Sorry,” shouted Simon apologetically, “but, yer see, we’ve got a kind uv a poor looney bye aboard. He thought, poor critter, it ’ud be er joke ter hail yer.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” shouted back the commander of the steamer. “Well, you’d better keep your looney under lock and key when mail boats are passing. Come ahead there.”

Deep down in the engine room of the steamer the bells jangled and she raced off once more, bound Seattleward. But as it so happened the vessel, which was the “Islander” of the Seattle-Hawaii Line, had a record for punctuality, and her slight delay following Tom’s hail was used by the captain as an excuse for some hours he had lost at sea in bad weather. It, therefore, received more space in the Seattle papers than it would have done otherwise. In fact, quite an item appeared about the “crazy boy” on board the outward-bound schooner, who had delayed the “Islander” by his antics. In course of events the paper with this news in it reached Sam Hartley.

This was two days after the “Islander” had docked. But, nothing daunted, Sam set out for Seattle that same night with the bottle-nosed man as a companion.

He was anxious to find the captain of the “Islander,” and get from him a description of that schooner. If she was the Chinese runner’s vessel, the bottle-nosed man would recognize her from the steamer skipper’s description. At least, Sam hoped so.

At any rate, it looked like the only likely clew to the fate of Mr. Chillingworth and Tom, and was, therefore, worth looking into, for after an examination of the sloop Sam had soon come to the conclusion that there were unusual circumstances connected with her abandonment.

For one thing, he had found that the rope attached to her bow had been cut – and with a keen knife, too. This was the rope, it will be recalled, that was thrown to the capsized mariners from the deck of the schooner, and had been cut when the sloop was set adrift.

But in the meantime Mr. Chillingworth and Tom were encountering a series of adventures stranger than any that had yet befallen the Bungalow Boy, and we must leave Sam and follow their fortunes in the hands of Bully Banjo and his men.

CHAPTER XVI.

AN ATTEMPT AT FOUL PLAY

As might have been expected, Tom’s outburst was followed by confinement to the cabin. But this he did not mind so much, as Mr. Chillingworth was his companion, and they found more opportunities to talk over their position thus than was the case on deck, where they were constantly under observation.

The cabin of the schooner was plainly furnished. In the center was a swinging table, oilcloth covered, with four plain swivel chairs at each side, and one at each end. On the floor was some gaudy matting. Above the board hung a big brass lamp. It depended from the crossbars under a skylight opening on deck. At the farther end of the cabin was a flight of ladder-like stairs, leading to the deck. On each side were doors, opening on small staterooms. The wood was pine – of no very good quality – and varnished. At the forward end was a bulkhead of the same material, along which ran a lounge covered with leather, or an imitation of it.

They had been almost two days at sea now, and still no intimation had come from Simon Lake as to what his intentions were in regard to them. But even Tom’s attempt to signal the schooner was not punished with any violence, except Zeb Hunt’s knock-down blow.

“Reckin you’ll be safer in the cabin arter this, by Juniper,” Simon Lake had said, helping the recumbent boy to his feet, and that had been all, except that Tom had deemed it prudent to carry out the hint conveyed in Lake’s words to the letter.

It would be wearisome and useless to detail the conversations between Mr. Chillingworth and his young companion. They were all on one subject, and that was: how were they to escape from their predicament. But they all ended in the same place. That is to say – nowhere. Night and day the schooner swarmed with men, so to try to cut away one of the boats, as Tom had suggested, was soon declared to be manifestly impossible.

At meals Simon Lake and Zeb Hunt shared the table with them, but at other times they had the cabin to themselves, except for the occasional ghost-like goings and comings of the tall Chinaman. In this connection it may be interesting to note that since coming on board Tom had seen the recreant Fu. The former employee of Mr. Chillingworth was working on a sail with the crew when his eyes met Tom’s. But whatever he may have felt, no expression appeared on the yellow mask that did duty for his face. Tom surmised that, in exchange for a promise of loyalty to the gang, he had been made one of them. But of the status of the tall Chinaman, who seemed to be a man of some influence with both crew and officers, it was more difficult to guess. Mr. Chillingworth was inclined to think he was some sort of a priest. He based this theory on the veneration which Fu had shown on the night he had seen his big countryman at the burial of the dead in the cove. For the rest, the tall Mongolian ate by himself and had his own cabin. Not by word or sign, since they had been on board, had he conveyed a hint that he had ever seen Tom before, although he must have recognized the boy he had conducted to Simon Lake at the camp in the canyon.

Hitherto the schooner had had fair weather, although the wind had been strong. But this afternoon the sky began to grow overcast and there was an ominous feeling in the air that betokened the coming of a storm. By supper time, in fact, the schooner was laboring along in a heavy sea and under much reduced canvas. But even the reefing which had been done was against Lake’s will. In her cabin they could hear his voice coming down through the skylight in angry argument with Zeb Hunt.

“By Chowder, it’s my way to clap on all she’ll carry.”

“But you’ll have the sticks out of her by sundown,” Zeb had protested.

“All right, then, shorten up if you want to. But not more than one reef in the main sail, mind yer. I’m a downeast sailorman, and we don’t b’lieve in sailing ships ter suit young ladies’ seminaries.”

By sundown the wind had developed into a screeching gale. Every timber and bolt in the schooner cried out and complained with a different voice. Under the heavy sail that Simon Lake obstinately insisted on carrying, she was being heavily racked.

From the way in which things in the cabin were tumbled about, the gale must have been terrific, but when Mr. Chillingworth tried to go on deck to see what sort of a night it was, he was met by a stern order from Simon Lake.

“Go back thar in ther cabin, Chillingworth,” he ordered. “The deck ain’t no place fer you ternight.”

Soon after, he came down and entered his cabin. He emerged in oilskins. Zeb Hunt followed his example. What, with the trampling of feet as the crew ran about the decks, the increasing motion of the ship, and the cruel uproar the creaking timbers kept up, there was no sleep for the castaways, and till long after the usual hour for going to their cabin they sat up. A certain amount of apprehension mingled with their other feelings. It is one thing to be upon deck, active and alert, in a big storm, and quite another pair of shoes to be confined in a stuffy cabin, not knowing what is happening above and whether at any moment you may not see green water come tumbling down the companionway.

Shortly before midnight the rancher and Tom Dacre turned in. But it was not to sleep. The storm was decidedly increasing in fury every minute. The little vessel seemed fairly to stand on its head one instant and the next to be rearing upward, pointing toward the stars.

What time it was Tom had no idea, but he figured afterward that it must have been about two hours after they turned in when he was awakened from a troubled doze by loud voices in the cabin outside, and a trampling of feet, as if several persons were there. Opening the door a crack, he peered out.

He saw Simon Lake, very pale, and bleeding from a big cut in his head, laid out on the forward lounge, while Zeb Hunt and several of the others bent over him.

“It all comes of crackin’ on so,” Hunt was saying. “If we hadn’t carried all that canvas, we wouldn’t never have had that sail rip loose, and then Bully here wouldn’t have got hit with that block.”

“Is it a bad cut, Zeb?” asked one of them.

“Well, it’s purty deep,” said Zeb, who by this time had opened a locker and was selecting some bandages from it. “But I reckon we kin fix it. How d’yer feel now, Bully?”

The injured man gave a groan. It was evident that he was partially stunned by what Tom guessed, from what he had overheard, was a falling block. Soon after he was carried into his cabin, the tall Chinaman being left to watch him.

After that the hours wore on somehow. From time to time Tom fell into an uneasy nap to awaken with a start of alarm and a horrible fear that the schooner was at last going to the bottom.

There was a clock in the cabin, affixed to the forward bulkhead, and after one of these sudden awakenings he decided to peep out and see what time it was. He longed for the coming of day with every nerve within him. If the schooner was to sink, he felt that it would be better in the daylight than in the pitchy darkness.

Steadying himself by the side of the bunk in which Mr. Chillingworth lay sleeping as peacefully as if he were at home, Tom peered out. He caught his breath with a start as he did so, and saw the figure of the tall Chinaman standing upright above the table in the center of the cabin.