Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 7, 1922 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

DIRTY WEATHER. Three quarters of an hour later all search parties had reported to Hendriks. There was no one to be found. CHAPTER V. FLICKERING LIGHTS. UPPER that evening was a brilliant af- S fair—socially. There was something to talk about, and every one talked, and ate, at the same time. Woman, her virtues, her bewilderments, her bedevil- ments, took a back seat. ‘‘ Who is the man with the scarred hand?” was the burn- ing, the all-absorbing topic of the moment. For the first time on record the food was swallowed without comment—derogatory comment. Sparks, with pad, pencil, and profuse dia- grams—he had drawn a hasty plan of the deck—was attempting to prove to his opin- ionative, talkative, and inattentive mess- mates the futility of the search that had just been conducted. The conditions had been one hundred per cent in favor of the fugitive. The fog for one thing; the small number of pur- suers for another. He pointed out several places he personally would have taken ad- vantage of under similar circumstances. Had Mr. Harris examined the hawse pipes? Mr. Harris had not. Had Mr. Harris leaned over the bow and looked for the fu- gitive to be seated athwart a fluke of one of the anchors themselves? Again Mr. Har- ris had not. Had Mr. Harris actually climbed the masts, not alone as far as the crosstrees, but to a point from where the tops themselves could be seen? A man, shrouded in fog, could easily—Mr. Harris really had no idea how easily—remain con- cealed aloft until the search— Harris, by then bordering upon a fine state of apoplexy, burst forth in a torrent of invectives against all newfangled con- traptions of the sea—wireless, and its oper- ators particularly. Hendriks stopped the pretty brangle by calling the mess boy. “‘ Boy,” he said, “ turn on the lights.” The saloon was lighted by four clusters set in the overhead. A slight flickering of the filaments marked the whirling of the 173 commutator across the brushes of the ship’s dynamo. For an instant talk was suspended as each man glanced up at the lights, an in- voluntary habit probably handed down from prehistoric ages when bright things were marvels to gape at. The different dis- cussions—monologues rather—then broke out again with renewed vigor. “What I don’t see ”—Harris forced his voice a peg higher up, a peg high enough to command a momentary attention from all of them—‘ about this here mutiny the- ory is, where’s your motive?” He would have liked to have paused a second for emphasis. He realized that to do so would be to be lost. There were too many fermenting opinions, waiting to froth emo- tionally into the first gap of silence. He hastened on. ‘“There’s nothing of immense value on board like jewels, or gold or that—just a general cargo of steel rails, machinery, and bulky stuff. Of course, it’s valuable as a cargo; shouldn’t wonder if the whole lot represented well over a million dollars, but you can’t walk into a pawn shop with a couple of steel rails over your shoulder and say, ‘how much on this?’ and this isn’t the sort of a ship that could be run into a small cove or up a creek, is it now?” He had to breathe. “ Now I—” The question was fatal. Every one plunged headlong into the fractional gap between the “ nows.” Hendriks achieved the conquering peg. “Mutiny, Mr. Harris, is only a possi- bility, not a probability.” Hendriks gave a precautionary glance to assure himself that the mess boy had left the saloon. “ As for the unwieldiness of the cargo, I should imagine that that would have very little to do with the matter. It would be the ship herself that they would want. With her tonnage at their disposal one successful landing of, say whisky, for instance, would yield them riches beyond the dreams of a La Fitte. “But no. The solution, as Sparks says, lies in that statement on that slip of paper. ‘I am not dead.’ It is as absurd and as unbelievable in its way as this theory of mutiny, but I am convinced that it holds the true solution to our problem. I am go- comicboooks C©