Adventure, November 1915 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

I2 “Five sharks waitin’ for five men,” re- peated Fellowes. “Well, they got ’em, three of ’em, in the next ten days. Pto- maines, it was, only we didn’t know the name of it those days. Then another went. He was in his bunk for a day before any one got away from the cards long enough to get rid of him. This is.a pretty rough yarn for a woman to listen to, miss?” He turned to Peggy. ‘No, no. Goon,” she said. “It’s really happened and I’m not afraid to hear of such things, or see them if I have to.” Fellowes looked at her admiringly. “Tt happened, all right,” he said grimly. “Henley went on winning till he owned pretty nigh half the gold, outside the skip- per’s share. A chap we knew as Zeb, a Southerner, thought he caught him slipping an ace—an’ he told him so. I was on deck ~an’ didn’t see what happened, but I heard the shot, an’ that night Zeb went to Doctor Shark. Gh the skipper—Henley, Chappell the convict, an’ me. I had held on to most of my share an’ I wouldn’t play cards any more. Chappell an’ Henley kept at it for a bit an’ then they quit. Henley tried to make up to me an’ pretty soon proposed we get rid of Chappell who, he claimed, wanted to do me up so’s there’d be more to share. - “T was in a funk by this time—as we used to call it—a blue funk. I was only a kid, sick of the whole trip an’ scared of Henley. He was just plain devil. I used to see him lookin’ at me an’ at Chappell, stealthy, an’ I knew if we ever got our fingers on any of the gold it wouldn’t be his fault. He quar- reled with the skipper, too, but he couldn’t bluff Ellersby. Then Chappell an’ Henley sulked. Ellersby was a wonder. He was drinkin’ steady, but it didn’t seem to have any effect on him, ’cept that his eyes looked sometimes like a mad dog’s, with a red light in them. He watched Henley all the time with a snarl on his lips, just like a dog that’s suspicious of ye. “We got to the last of the good water— you use up a lot of it in that kind of weather —an’ things looked pretty bad when we run into a rain-squall, at last, an’ filled up every- thing we could. Then a roarin’ monsoon come up out of the South an’ whirled us away on the fringe of it, ’way off the course. “THAT left three of us, not countin’ Adventure All four of us did what we could to work the schooner, but you can’t do much with a monsoon. When it threw us off its track an’ left us, the schooner was leakin’ badly — an’ the two main boats, whalers, was smash- ed to bits. That left only a little square- sterned dingey, hardly big enough to carry four men, let alone the gold. “‘An’ it looked as if we’d have to take to the boat. The foremast had sprung a steady leak. The skipper thought a butt had started somewhere else, an’ the best we could do at the pumps couldn’t keep the water from rising.- At last you could hear it sloshing about in the hold where the gold was stowed. “Ellersby talked it over with us. There was an island reported by whalers once in a while, an’ known to the natives, that was somewhere near where we was. But he wasn’t sure that it was really there or that we could find it. He didn’t have its posi- tion an’ the South Pacific is full of islands that are reported an’ can’t be found when they’re looked for. “Tf we could reach it, he proposed to ca- reen the schooner an’ fix the leak. We could do that or take a chance in the boat without the gold, or we could bury the gold on the island if we found it an’ couldn’t fix the leak, an’ make for Hawaii in the dingey from there, a trip of about eight hundred miles, he told us. “We took votes on it. I voted for the island. That gave me another chance that I knew I’d lose if it came to a question of leaving the gold out of the boat rather than me. My weight in gold was worth a whole lot more than I was, right then. The skip- pet voted with me, wantin’ to save his ship, an’ then Chappell sided i in. He argued that a small boat arrivin’ at Honolulu, with or without gold, was goin’ to be an object of more curiosity than we was lookin’ for. So we agreed to try for the island an’ do what we could with the ship. “Tt was touch an’ go. The water came up till the schooner slogged roun’ like a water-soaked log. Any kind of a sea would have finished us. It was the tenth of Au- gust, thirty-nine days since Sacramento, when I saw a little speck on the horizon, early in the afternoon. “We slapped each other on the back, all except the skipper who was surly with the responsibility. We got the sodden schooner close-hauled to the course at last, under jib COME NOOKS (E@) S|