Part 23 (1/2)

”You've the makin's of a smart sailor in you--I can see that,” pursued the Captain. ”And you say you've begun studying navigation?”

”I picked up some aboard the Scarboro, listening to Captain Hi and Ben Gibson.”

”We'll make a mate of you in a year or two,” said Captain Tugg, confidently.

But that speech shocked me. I had no intention of following the sea a year or two. I meant just then to sail down to this place Tugg told about and take a look at the Professor individual. That's all I wanted.

Then it would be ”homeward bound” for me.

We reached the schooner and I found her a nice looking craft, bright and s.h.i.+ning, with new sails bent on and a sc.r.a.ped and oiled deck and pretty sticks in her. She's been rigged new throughout and looked more like a yacht than a coasting vessel knocking about the southern trades.

I had left a note at Maria Debora's for old Tom, and another for him to give Ben Gibson. I had some things to buy, and several of them were by Captain Tugg's advice. He advanced me money for my purchases, and they included a second-hand Winchester and a revolver.

”We're going to a wild piece of airth, son,” said the animal trapper.

Then I saw the man (he was an American) with whom we had left my sloop.

He agreed to look after her and keep her in repair for her use, so _that_ matter was settled. And then I did something that my conscience told me I should have attended to the moment I arrived in Buenos Ayres.

I took five dollars of the sum I had drawn ahead on my wages and sent a short cable to my mother. It told her nothing but the fact that I was alive and well.

But that night, before it came time for me to hustle on deck and help get the Sea Spell under way, I spent writing letters to Ham Mayberry and Mr. Hounsditch. I gave them both the particulars of my treatment at the consul's office and my knowledge of Paul Downes' presence at Buenos Ayres and the trick I believed he had played upon me. Of the venture I had now started upon in the Sea Spell I spoke only in a general way. But I promised them I would be back in Buenos Ayres, or on my way home, within a very few months.

These letters went off to the mail on the tug that towed the schooner out of the tangle of s.h.i.+pping. We made sail in half an hour and the Sea Spell made a good leg to windward, beginning her voyage into the south--a voyage on which I was following the beckoning finger of a spectre.

CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH THE SEA SPELL GOES ASh.o.r.e ON A MOST UNFRIENDLY COAST

I learned a whole lot beside seamans.h.i.+p during those next few weeks as the schooner Sea Spell coasted Buenos Ayres Province and the vast Colonial Territory of Magellan. A stretch of nearly a thousand miles we had to sail to reach the Cape of the Virgins, behind which is the entrance to the Magellan Straits.

The coastwise trade between the ports below Buenos Ayres--Bahia Blanca, El Carmen on the Rio Negro, Port St. Antonio at at the head of the Gulf of St. Matias, San Josefpen, Por Malaspina, Santa Cruz, and clear around to the Pacific seaports of Chili--this coastwise trade, I say, is almost like the trade along our Atlantic seaboard. Inland, Tugg told me, there were vast pampa.s.ses empty of all but cattle and wild beasts and some tribes of wild men; but a strip of the seacoast south of the mouth of the Silver River is being rapidly developed.

There are great rivers emptying into the sea here,--the Cobu Leofu, Rio Negro, the Balchitas, the Chupat Desire and Rio Chico--all water-ways which are opening up the country. Argentina is as large as all Eastern and Central Europe together and is enormously rich in mineral and natural products.

This information was brought home to me as, day after day, and with favorable gales, the Sea Spell winged her way southward. She was a fairly fast sailing s.h.i.+p and Captain Adoniram Tugg evidently took pride in her. But her crew was all that he had given me reason to believe. A dirtier, more ungovernable gang of penny cut-throats I doubt never sailed on any honest s.h.i.+p!

I soon learned, beside all the above about Argentina's coast trade, that Tugg kept his seamen at work through fear. He never changed his drawl in speaking; but when he gave an order there was a grimness about his mouth and a flash in his gray-blue eyes that gave one a cold, creepy feeling in the region of the spine. I don't know that Captain Tugg went armed.

But if an order had been neglected by any man aboard I had the feeling that a weapon would appear in the skipper's hand and that the mutineer would have dropped in his tracks!

Pedro, the mate, was a snaky, dusky fellow, with huge rings of gold in his ears and a smile that showed altogether too many teeth to be pleasant--a regular alligator smile. As far as I could see, I would just as lief have Pedro's ill feeling as his friends.h.i.+p. Yet Tugg trusted him implicitly. But I--I locked my stateroom door whenever I lay down to sleep; and I kept the Winchester and the Colts revolver loaded all the time. Perhaps I was foolish; but I felt that we were in a state of war.

The routine duties of the schooner kept me at work, however, for I tried to earn my sixteen a month. Tugg was a good navigator himself. He handled his schooner like a professional yachtsman. Captain Rogers would have admired the man, for he was another skipper who did not believe in lying hove to no matter how hard the wind blew. There was a week at a stretch when I didn't get thoroughly dry between watches. The Sea Spell just about flew over the water instead of through it!

But a calm fell thereafter and we lay for eighteen hours in the Bay of St. George, the sails hanging dead with not a breath of wind, and the sea like gla.s.s. We were within two rifle shots of the sh.o.r.e at one point. Behind this point of rocks was an inlet and the pool made good anchorage without doubt, for there were several sail there, and a jumble of huts on the sh.o.r.e.

We had seen whales for several days and once pa.s.sed a whales.h.i.+p at work trying out; but it was not the Scarboro. Now a great whale swam calmly past the Sea Spell, nosing in toward the land, probably following some school of tiny fish upon which he was feeding.

”Wisht I had a crew of bully boys to go after that critter,” sighed Captain Tugg, behind his long cheroot. ”He'll make more'n a bucket o'

ile, you bet!”