Part 9 (1/2)

But why make apologies? After all, every man that lives has his great adventure, whether it come garbed in drab or radiant with the glow of the sunrise. A prosaic, money-grubbing age we call this, but by the G.o.ds! romance hammers once in a lifetime at the door of every mother's son of us. There be those too n.i.g.g.ardly to let her in, there be those to whom the knock comes faintly; and there be a happy few who fling wide the door and embrace her like a lover.

For me, I am Irish, as I have said. I cried ”Aye!” and shook hands on the bargain. We would show Captain Boris Bothwell a thing or two. It would be odds but we would beat him to those chests hidden in the sand.

This was all very well, but one cannot charter and outfit a s.h.i.+p for a long cruise upon day-dreams. The moneyed men that I approached smiled and shook their wise gray heads. To them the whole story was no more than a castle in Spain. For two days I tramped the streets of San Francisco and haunted the offices of capitalists without profit to our enterprise.

On the afternoon of the third I retired, temporarily defeated, to my club, the Golden Gate. On my salary I had no business belonging to so expensive a club, but I had inherited from my college days a taste for good society and I gratified it at the expense of other desires.

In the billiard-room I ran across an acquaintance I had met for the first time on the Valdez trail some years earlier. His name was Samuel Blythe. By birth he was English, by choice cosmopolitan. Possessed of more money than he knew what to do with, he spent a great deal of time exploring unknown corners of the earth. He was as well known at Hong-Kong and Simla as in Paris and Vienna. Within the week he had returned to San Francisco, from an attempt to reach the summit of Mount McKinley.

He was knocking b.a.l.l.s about aimlessly.

”Shoot you a game of pool, Sedgwick,” he proposed.

Then I had an inspiration.

”I can give you more fun for your money another way. Come into the library, Blythe.”

There I told him the whole story. He heard me out without a smile. For that alone I could have thanked him. When I had finished he looked for a minute out of the window with a far-away expression in his eyes.

”It's a queer yarn,” he said at last.

”And of course you don't believe a word of it?” I challenged.

”Don't I? Let me tell you this, old man. There are a number of rum things in this old world. I've bucked up against two or three of them.

Let me see your map.”

I had made another copy of it, with the lat.i.tude and longitude omitted.

This I handed to him.

While he examined it his eyes shone.

”By Jove, this _is_ a lark. You can have the old tub if you want it.”

He was referring to his splendid steam yacht the _Argos_, in which he had made the trip to Alaska.

”I haven't the price to outfit her and pay your crew,” I explained.

”I have. You'll have to let me be your bank. But I say, Sedgwick, you'll need a sailing master. You're not a seaman.”

Our eyes met.

”Could Sam Blythe be persuaded to take the place?”

”Could I?” He got up and wrung my hand. ”That's what I wanted you to say. Of course I'll go--jump at the chance.”

”There's the chance of a nasty row. We're likely to meet Bothwell in that vicinity. If we do, there will be trouble.”

”So I gather from your description of the gentleman.”