Van Cleve and His Friends

CHAPTER XIV

KEY WEST (continued)

IF Tampa had been in a seething hubbub, it was nothing to Key West, which felt itself in all but hallooing distance of the seat of war, and, in the mediæval phrase, stood within the Spanish danger; the little town of foreign-looking houses and brilliant tropical shrubbery, among which one might recognize many old friends of the conservatory uncannily grown and naturalized, was incredibly crowded; the hot, white streets swarmed with people; the harbor was jammed with shipping; the quays in a roaring turmoil. Somebody pointed out to Van Cleve the Spanish prizes anchored here and there, a piebald collection of steam and sailingvessels, and told him they were to be auctioned off at public outcry that very morning. ‘Some of ’em ought to go cheap, by their looks,’ said Van; and the other man laughed. In truth, they were a dirty and down-at-heel set. The transport had touched five hours earlier, and gone on without delay; another big liner now in the government hire was just standing out to sea, loaded with supplies and the army mail, as Van was informed. Every one was eager to talk and answer all his questions, the young fellow found; there was the same extraordinary feeling of kinship and ready-made acquaintance in the crowds which he had noticed in Tampa.

In the meanwhile, Mr. Takuhira had entered upon what promised to be a difficult and complicated negotiation with the authorities over his passage to Cuba, which it appeared even the accredited representative of a foreign power could not accomplish without the consent or connivance of every official in the place, and a truly bewildering display of red tape. Van Cleve left him at the beginning of it, and took his own way to the office of the Key West Sentinel; he could think of no better starting-point for his haphazard search, and here, for once, chance befriended him.

The Sentinel was housed and served in much the same style as the Tampa newspapers; it might have been the same flimsy wooden building, the same cluttered little office-room, opening full on the street, with a white awning over the door, and a manila-paper broadside with ‘LATEST NEWS FROM THE SEAT OF WAR,’ skewered on the lamp-post opposite. The same crowd jostled in and out; the same men chewing unlighted cigars, perspiring in shirt-sleeves with handkerchiefs tucked inside their collars, hammered on the typewriters, or dictated to other hammerers. As Van had more than half expected, nobody knew anything about a Robert Gilbert, or had ever heard of him, or had any time to listen to or answer questions about war-correspondents. He was turning away, when there came in a thin, slow-moving man dressed in soiled white ducks, with a thin, yellow, scrubby-bearded, and inexpressibly tired face, who took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a languid gesture, as he leaned against one of the tables, and asked if there was any mail for him. Van Cleve, who could not get by in the higgledy-piggledy little place without dislodging him, hesitated an instant, wondering, with that slight inward recoil which most people would have felt at this date, if the other might not be just coming out of an attack of the fever; he had plainly been very sick recently —was sick still, for that matter. The typewriter-girl recognized him, and got up to search a pigeon-hole in the desk alongside her. ‘You don’t look very good yet, Mr. Schreiber,’ she said kindly; ‘I don’t believe you ought to be out in the sun. It brings it on again sometimes.’

‘Oh, I’ve had my dose,’ said the visitor, with a kind of haggard jauntiness. He was a young fellow, about Van’s own age. ‘Anyway, you might as well be good and sick as half-up and half-down this way. It’s more interesting. Is n’t that mine?’

She handed him a yellow envelope with Gulf States Monthly printed in the corner of it, remarking amiably, ‘Say, that’s a dandy good magazine. I buy a number every now and then — only ten cents, you know, and I can’t see but what it’s got every bit as good stuff in it as Century or any of the high-up ones. Are you going to have something in pretty soon?’

‘I sent ’em an article and some photographs just before I was taken sick, — don’t know when they’ll be out, of course, but I should n’t wonder if it was in the next issue. They want all the war news to be right up to the minute,’ he said not without some importance; and added in a slightly lowered and confidential tone, ‘Want a news-item? For the society column?’

‘Sure we do. Always. What is it?’

‘Well, then,’ said the convalescent, unsmiling, with ironic impressiveness, ‘you may just say that I leave for Cuba to-night or early to-morrow morning on my private yacht, the Milton D. Bowers, which is now coaling up and laying in a store of provisions, wines, etcetera, my special extra dry champagne, and my own brand of cigars, at Wharf 8, foot of Cadoodle Street, or whatever the name of it is — down here three squares to the right, I mean. Now don’t make any mistake; I don’t want to have that telegraphed all over the country with my name spelled wrong. I’d nevah be able to show my face in Newport or Tuxedo again, don’t you know, they’d all make so much fun of me. Beastly bore, don’t you know!’

The stenographer did not laugh, however. ‘Oh, my, Mr. Schreiber, you ain’t honestly going, are you?’ she said with concern. ‘Why, you ain’t near well enough yet. I think that’s awful reckless.’

Van Cleve did not hear her remonstrances; he was busy trying to remember where he had heard before of the Milton D. Bowers; it must be the same vessel, for no two that ever sailed the seas would have been christened with such a name. Suddenly he recollected. He spoke to the other young man abruptly. ‘I beg pardon, are you one of the war-correspondents?’

At this unexpected attack, the stenographer jumped, with a little scream; Mr. Schreiber faced about with his fatigued movements, bracing himself by the desk, and eyed Van Cleve inquiringly, a species of jocular hostility or wariness showing on his fever-stricken youthful face.

‘Yes, I’m a correspondent. Aren’t you the speedy little guesser though!’ he said lightly, still with an indescribable air of being on his guard.

‘I heard you mention the Milton D. Bowers. That’s one of the newspaper boats, is n’t it?’ Van pursued.

‘Yes.’ And before Van Cleve could open his mouth for his next question, the other stuck out a hand and, grabbing Van’s, pumped it up and down with exaggerated warmth, exclaiming, ‘WHY, if it is n’t my dear old friend, Chauncey Pipp from Hayville, Michigan! Howdo, Chauncey? How’s the folks?’

It took Van Cleve a moment or two to perceive what this fantastic performance implied. When he did, he frowned. ‘Oh, come off! Do I look like a green-goods man?’ he said impatiently. ‘I just want to ask you something. I ’m looking for a man that’s been on that boat — a correspondent, you understand. I thought you might have met. His name’s Gilbert — R. D. Gilbert.’

Mr. Schreiber became another man on the instant; he relinquished Van Clove’s hand, entirely businesslike and serious. ‘Why, yes, I know a Gilbert. We were on a cruise together on the Milton D. We got to knowing each other very well,’ he said, interested; ‘I don’t know what his first name was, though; I never happened to ask him. What’s your Gilbert, like? Tall, lighthaired fellow? This one was reporting for a Cleveland paper, I think.’

‘No, Cincinnati. My man is from Cincinnati.’

‘Well, maybe it was Cincinnati — I don’t recollect — it was Ohio, anyhow. You say you’re looking for him?’

‘Yes. It must be the same man. He—’ Van Cleve stopped himself, glancing at the stenographer, who was an open-eyed spectator. ‘Here, let’s go outside and talk. We’re in the way here,’ he suggested.

‘Well, I call that a funny coincidence!’ the young lady ejaculated as they left.

Outside, in chairs under another awning in front of the saloon across the way, Schreiber said, ‘You are n’t a brother of Gilbert’s, are you?’

‘No, just a friend of his and the family’s. The man I mean is a heavy drinker. You ’d know it even if he kept sober while he was down here,’ said Van Cleve, bluntly. ‘I did n’t want to talk about it before that girl. You saw that.’

‘Yes,’ Schreiber said at once, ‘ that’s the same Gilbert; he’s all right, if it was n’t for that. Good fellow, if it was n’t for that. Just can’t let it alone, that’s all. I don’t mind a man taking a drink once in a while — Here now, don’t do that, that was n’t a hint; I could n’t take anything but mineral water, anyhow — I say I don’t mind a man taking a. drink once in a while, but Gilbert —!’ he made a gesture — ‘he just can’t let it alone. Were you expecting to meet him here?’

Van Cleve explained. ‘I’ve been looking for him for a week. His paper has let him go and the family want him to come home. They don’t know where he is, nor what’s happening to him.’

The newspaper-man nodded with full comprehension of what these statements left unsaid. ‘Well — all right, apollinaris — I’m afraid you’re going to have a hard time finding him because the last I knew he was going to Cuba. I had it all fixed to go myself, only I came down with this blankety-blanked fever instead!’

‘Yellow?’

‘No, it’s what they call calenture. It’s nothing like so serious as yellow, but you certainly do feel rotten after it. What day of the month is it, do you know? I’ve lost count — one day’s so much like another when you ’re sick.’

Van Cleve himself had forgotten, and was obliged to refer to the Sentinel which he was still carrying in his pocket. It was the 30th of June. ‘Three weeks since I began to feel so bum I had to go to bed! The army left the next day,’ said Schreiber, dolefully.

‘However —!’ He shrugged away his disappointment with one shoulder. ‘We’ve all got to take what’s coming to us. I will now proceed to drown my woes in drink!’ he announced, reverting to his attitude of defiant levity, and took up the mild tumbler of mineral water with a flourish. ‘Here’s your good health, Mr.—?’

‘Kendrick — my name’s Kendrick.’ Van Cleve got out a card and gave it to him, with a word of half-humorous apology. ‘I suppose you’re used to a lot of wild-eyed cranks butting in on you the way I did, though. Is n’t that so? Newspaper men have the name of being ready for almost anything.’

‘Well, I don’t call it particularly the act of a wild-eyed crank to take me out and buy me a drink,’ said the other, good-naturedly. He looked at the card and read aloud, ‘Mr. Van Cleve Kendrick,’ and repeated his toast, ‘Here’s looking toward you, Mr. Kendrick. I have n’t got any cards with me, or I’d exchange with you. My name’s Schreiber, however, — if you ’ll take my word for it, — and I’m here for the Gulf States Magazine partly, and partly on my own. If there’s anything I can do for you, I’d be glad to.’

Van said that he was much obliged; and they finished, one his apollinaris, the other his Baccardi rum, in extraordinary amity. It was a great place and time for these hit-or-miss fellowships.

‘Funny you should happen to ask me about Gilbert,’ the correspondent commented; ‘no, thanks, I can’t smoke yet. Oh, wait till you have calenture; you’ll understand! — I say it’s funny you should have picked out me to ask about Gilbert, because I ’m probably the one, single, solitary man in the whole place that could tell you!'

Van Cleve explained about the Milton D. Bowers. ‘If I had n’t heard you say that, I’d have gone on without speaking. But I just happened to remember Bob — Gilbert, you know — mentioning that as the name of the dispatch-boat he’d been on, in one of his letters home. It’s an absurd sort of name and stuck in my head on that account, no doubt.’

‘It is a queer name, I suppose,’ said Schreiber, reflectively; ‘I don’t know why, I never noticed that it was queer before. Yes, Gilbert and I were on the Milton D. together. It was an interesting cruise. She is n’t a dispatch-boat, however; the dispatch-boats have these big, high-powered engines, and they get over the ground, or the sea rather, like an express-train. The Milton D.’s nothing but a sea-going tug — kind of a little bull-tug, you know, very stout and strong, but not at all fast. She could get along well enough to keep up with the transports, and that’s all that’s necessary.’

‘Is that so? How long were you on that trip?’

‘Why, a week or more. We went down by the Isle of Pines, keeping out a good way from Havana on account of the fleet, you know. And then we came around by the east end of Cuba. We must have been very near where the army landed the other day. It’s a wonderful coast, tall cliffs right to the edge of the sea, no beach at all, and a whacking big surf piling up all around the bases of ’em. The mountains are all over thick woods, and every now and then you can see a little white streak of a waterfall tottering out like a ghost between them. The sea’s almost always very blue, and the surf’s white, and the mountains deep-green — George!’ he shook his head in admiration ; ‘ it’s beautiful, only it does n’t look real, somehow. It makes you think of a drop-curtain.’

‘Must have been a great sight,’ said Van Cleve, with full appreciation. ‘I did n’t think you’d have time to look at scenery, on account of dodging Spanish gunboats and so on.’

Schreiber laughed. ‘Spanish gunboats never bothered us. We had to keep on the hop to dodge our own. They’d have eaten us up in a minute.’ And seeing the incredulity on Van’s face, he added with emphasis, ‘ Yes, they would. The fleet’s not a very safe neighborhood for little Milton D. Bowerses, or any other non-combatants. They don’t know who you are, and they can’t risk stopping to find out. Shoot first and explain afterwards — that’s their motto! Those big warships just loaf around the ocean all night long without a sound or a light, and if they run across you—Bing! Dead bird! They have to, you know. You might be a torpedo-boat sneaking up on ’em.’

Van Cleve pondered this information with a certain stirring of the adventurous longings he had had in boyhood, and had thought long since dead and buried. What St. Louis soap-factory, what distillery, what office-stool and desk, might be their tombstone! With something of an effort, he got back to the business of the hour.

‘You say you think Gilbert went to Cuba when the troops did?’

‘Oh, yes, positive. They all went. Everybody went but me.’

‘How did they get there — the newspaper men, I mean? Did they have their own boat?’

‘Well, yes, some of them. Some were on the Associated Press boats, the Goldenrod and the Wanda and the others — you’ve probably seen their names in the papers. There were a good many on one of the transports. You can get to Cuba any old way; it’s easier than going from here to New York! I was to have been on the Milton D., but of course that all had to be put off. They took the route by the north coast, and the Milton D. could do that nicely.

It’s shorter, and does n’t take so much coal. Coal’s a very serious item with these little tin tea-pots.’

Van Cleve surveyed him thoughtfully. ‘Were you in earnest just now when you were talking about going to-night?’

The other nodded. ‘ Of course I was in earnest—of course I ’m going. What made you ask?’

‘Why, you’re too sick still, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, sick — thunder!’ said Schreiber, in genuine irritation. ‘No, I’m not sick any more. I ’ll be all right in a day or two, anyhow. Besides, I can’t stay loafing here. There’s something doing every minute over there, and I don’t want to miss any more of it. The war is n’t going to last forever, you know — a few months, or a year maybe, and we may never have another, not in our time, anyway. If you knew anything about the newspaper game, you’d know a person can’t worry around over every little pain and ache, when he might be out getting a good story.’

He spoke with a vehemence for which Van Cleve, who was not given to vehemence or excitement himself, rather warmed to him; Van thought it might be foolish and exaggerated, but it showed at least the proper spirit with which any man ought to regard his work. ‘If everybody felt that way about their job, there’d be a good deal more done, Mr. Schreiber,’ he said; ‘the reason I asked you, though, was that I was wondering if I could make an arrangement to go with you. Would there be room on the Milton D. Bowers for one more?’

Schreiber stared. ‘ You want to go to Cuba? Why, look here, are you in the newspaper business, after all?’ he asked ingenuously.

‘No, I just thought I’d like to go if I got a chance. I’d like to see it. If we should happen to run across Gilbert, I’d get him to come back with me,’ said Van Cleve, in as casual a manner as he could put on; it was not well done, for he had no talent for that sort of deception, but Schreiber noticed nothing.

CHAPTER XV

ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER!

The correspondent’s full name was Herman Schreiber, and he came originally from Blucher, Illinois, as he informed Van Cleve in the course of the negotiations, adding, with extreme seriousness, that he was of Irish descent, Although he knew nothing of Mr. Kendrick’s character and antecedents, he made no difficulty about accepting him for a companion on the voyage. ‘Why, if you want to go, I’m sure it’s all right as far as I’m concerned,’ he said with genial indifference. ‘You ’ll have to speak to Captain Bowers, but I don’t believe he’ll object, provided you can rustle the price. He’s a Yankee; comes from New Bedford, or Gloucester, or somewhere down east, and he’s about as mellow as a salt cod. Of course, it’ll be rough; you don’t need to be told that. But if you don’t mind sleeping with a lump of coal in your ear, and eating hard-tack and canned stuff, and going without a shave or clean clothes for a while, why, it’s a good deal of fun. The thing is, you sec it all, you know. That’s the thing, you see it all!’

He went back to the hotel — Key West has, or had at that date, but one — with Van Cleve, and there the first person they encountered was Mr. Takuhira, whom the journalist already knew, and saluted as Take-your-hairoff, in a cheerfully informal style. Takuhira’s own prospects, as he told them, with his equable smile, were very dubious. ‘I should have gone by the mail-boat that left this morning. Arrangements had been made, they say,’ he said; and permitted himself a slight shrug. ‘Unfortunately they omitted one rather desirable arrangement, that is, to tell me. I did not know anything about it. And now nobody knows anything about me. The government of Uncle Sam has troubles of his own, as you say, without to bother about one Japan attaché.’

‘D ’ye have to get there?’ inquired Schreiber.

The Oriental gentleman shrugged again. The other two men could not help exchanging a glance, each one wondering and knowing that the other was wondering whether this Japanese would not be quite capable of committing harakiri to satisfy his fanatical Eastern standards of honor, if he failed in his mission. Almost simultaneously they proposed to him their own vessel as a way out of his difficulties.

‘And he won’t be the funniest traveler the old tub’s carried, either,’ Schreiber said, after they had, all three, completed the bargain with Captain Bowers, who had been willing enough to take Van Cleve, but inquired a little austerely why it was necessary to ship the Chink? He was won over, however, by an argument which Schreiber assured the others in private was always irresistible with him; give Captain Bowers enough (he said) and he’d sail his namesake to a very much warmer place than Cuba — which Mr. Schreiber specified. And he hinted at a sinister past, and at various desperate exploits of the Captain’s in the way of blockade-running during the Civil War, filibustering in the Caribbean, and so on, which Van Cleve inwardly decided to discount a trifle.

Captain Bowers was a lean, leathery, hard-featured man, upwards of sixty, who, indeed, looked quite capable of the dark deeds attributed to him; at some stage of his career, he had lost two fingers off his right hand, which, some way or other, strengthened the grim impression. But Van was shrewd enough to know that to the landsman the sea and those who follow it will always be a mystery, attractive and forbidding, in the same breath; pirate or preacher, the Captain would probably have looked the same to him, he thought, with a laugh; and what difference did it make, anyhow?

Their craft, Captain Bowers announced, would sail at midnight, a choice of hours which, of itself, savored of deep-sea secrecy and danger, but which, Van Cleve vaguely supposed, had something to do with the tide. It left them all the rest of the day for preparation, but somehow Van never can remember nowadays exactly how he spent that time. He wrote to his Aunt Myra and to the bank, and a long letter to Lorrie. Takuhira was writing, too, on the other side of the desk in the hotel lounging-room, filling page after page with Japanese characters, with what might be called an unnaturally natural rapidity, as facile as Van himself. The latter wondered whether their letters might not be a good deal alike. There they sat, each one a parcel of memories and associations as different as possible, yet doubtless fundamentally the same. Some slant-eyed little lady in a sash might be Takuhira’s Lorrie; and instead of Van’s great, muddy river, and bricked, noisy, sooty, well-loved town, the Japanese must be calling up some fantastic vista of bamboos, cock-roofed temples, and ricefields, and naming it, with as strong a feeling, home.

Afterwards, to the best of Van’s recollection, they went together and got some express checks cashed, and visited a shop where they bought apparel which they dimly conjectured to be suitable for the trip — flannel shirts, canvas shoes, a blanket apiece — they had no idea what they would need. The little Japanese in a sou’wester and jersey, with a bandanna knotted around his neck, cowboy fashion, was a sight for gods and men, but it must be said to Van’s credit that he refrained from laughter. He fell too much of a clown in his own seafarer’s haberdashery. One of the last things he remembers doing was going with Schreiber to buy a revolver, which the newspaper-man insisted upon as an indispensable part of his outfit. ‘Got to have a gun,’ he said seriously. ‘It’s war-times where you’re going, you know. Even if you only needed it once, you’d need it mighty bad.’

‘Well, but I never handled one of ’em in my life — I don’t know which end they go off at,’ Van Cleve objected. ‘I’m not going to mix into any fight anyhow — not if traveling’s good in the opposite direction, I know that.’

‘Makes no difference. You’ve got to put up a good, strong bluff just the same,’ said his new friend sententiously. Van had to yield at length.

‘All right,’ he said, gingerly stowing the weapon in his hip-pocket; ‘this is where it’s considered good form to carry it, I suppose? You ’ll change your mind about my needing it after I’ve blown your ear off, or plugged a hole in the boiler. Come on, fellows.’

They went down to the pier.

As the compiler of these records knows next to nothing of the sea, and as it has always been difficult to get anything out of Van Cleve Kendrick about this experience, it is plain that we cannot be going to enter upon any thrilling nautical adventures. I could not invent them, and Van never will admit that there were any. It seems that nothing of much moment happened during the first half of the voyage, at least; their tug was not a rapid traveler, and she labored along prosaically off the northern coasts of Cuba, which were sometimes in sight at a prudent distance for fully forty-eight hours, day and night, without storms or warships or sensational encounters of any kind. The population of the Milton D. Bowers, meanwhile, crew and passengers alike, lived at inconceivably close quarters, in democratic freedom and astonishing harmony, and with a disregard of dirt, discomfort, and inconvenience, which any lady who reads these lines would have looked upon with shuddering horror.

What would Van Cleve’s aunt, what would any of his female relatives, have said to the more than dubious bunk and the species of dog-house wherein he slept of a night, to the greasy bench amidships at which he sat down to meals, to the terrific tea and coffee and ships’-biscuit and canned tomatoes and sizzling fried onions which he consumed (with thorough relish!) out of tin plates and mugs and unspeakable skillets? What would they have thought of his shipmates than whom no stranger company were ever assembled on a boat, since Noah went aboard the Ark? Van Cleve himself got along admirably with them. ‘They were all right. They were just man, you know, just plain man,’ he once rather obscurely said, in an effort to describe them; the astute tolerance of the phrase better describes himself. There was only one of them whom Van felt he never would understand, and that was Takuhira, between whom and these American men there would forever hang the impalpable veil of race, and of habits of mind, unconquerably alien. ‘You can’t get on the inside of him, somehow; you can’t think his thoughts. It would n’t make any difference how long you were with him, you ’d never know him,’ Van Cleve remarked to Schreiber one day.

The reporter stared. ‘What! Little Take-your-hair-off? Why, he’s easy enough to know. Why, I’ve never had any trouble knowing him,’ he declared; ‘he’s just as white as any man I ever met, if he is a Jap.’

‘I didn’t mean anything against him,’ said Van Cleve. And, seeing that it would be impossible to make Schreiber comprehend what he did mean, he gave up the subject. He had observed Schreiber’s character, at least, to some purpose. In fact, the newspaper man afforded a curious and entertaining study. Writing was his profession, yet he was no more capable of a page of good English than of a page of Choctaw; but what he wrote commanded a price, and was sufficiently readable. He was a perfectly upright man, yet he would sacrifice or distort beyond recognition any fact to make a ‘good story,’ a trait of his which Van had been quick to discover. ‘Get out and get news. If you can’t get it, make it !’ Schreiber enthusiastically quoted to him as one of the imperishable maxims of an editorial celebrity under whom he had worked; he was eternally quoting this authority. And with all his cheap standards, his bondage to catch-words, his jingo patriotism, he displayed not a few of the qualities which we associate with very high and strong characters, among them a devotion to his duty of ‘getting out and getting news’ — or making it — which touched the heroic. Barely recovered from a dangerous and wearing illness, he undertook these not inconsiderable hardships for the sake of his magazine, single-mindedly, as if there were no other course to pursue; he was distressingly seasick, he could scarcely eat or sleep, the fever came back upon him intermittently, he suffered tortures from sunburn, —and he bore it all without a murmur.

Van Cleve, for his part, had never felt better; and, moreover, turned out a good sailor and acceptable shipmate, lending a hand to the management of the vessel when extra strength was needed, and frankly interested in all her workings, and in the crew, whom he found to be not in the least like the sailormen about whom he had read. They were neither so profane nor so simple nor so blackguardly nor so sublimely honest as the pages of Captain Marryat and Mr. Clark Russell had led him to expect. The engineer had been a motorman in Chicago, then shipped for a couple of seasons — so he told Van — on a Duluth freighter, then drifted to New York, and worked for a while on the Staten Island boats, etcetera, etcetera. His helper was some sort of half-breed Cuban. The cook hailed from somewhere in Connecticut, ho said; and he also said that he had once cooked in a Maine moose-camp for Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Van thought he might possibly be telling the truth, although he was not wholly reliable, either with the cook-stove or the whiskey bottle.

‘In every sea-story I ever read the cook was a Lascar,’ Van Clove said to him one day; ‘I feel as if you ought to be, by rights.’

‘Well, I ain’t. I ’m Connecticut from the ground up — never was farther west than Milwaukee in my life,’ retorted the other. ‘Though I did think some of going to the Klondike last year when the rush was on,’he added, pensively turning the bacon. ‘But I ain’t Alasker, not me.’

Captain Bowers, who was standing near, smiled grimly. He afterwards told Van Cleve that he had seen Lascars— ‘plenty of ’em, in the China Seas, and ’round the Straits. They wa’ n’t doing any cooking, though,’ he said, gazing off to the horizon reminiscently. Van longed to ask what they were doing? Boarding his ship with cutlasses between their teeth, in some onslaught of demoniac pirate junks?

Whatever the captain’s experiences in that line, he had no tales to tell about them; he was a taciturn man. His taciturnity even extended to their chief recreation on board the Milton D. Bowers, a game of cards, which, whenever the skipper took a hand, invariably had to be whist. Unfortunately the ace of spades went over the side in a light blow the morning of the second day out, and thereafter they were obliged to play euchre and call the deuce the ace, which was awkward but effective.

The next day was Sunday, a fact which would have escaped Van’s notice had it not been for certain Sabbathday observances on board; the engineer’s helper washed his shirt; and Captain Bowers shaved in front of six inches of looking-glass tacked up in the cabin, balancing himself nicely to the roll of the boat, and wielding the razor with uncanny dexterity, between his thumb and two remaining fingers. Already in the early morning it was beginning to be unbelievably hot; the horizon, where no land was just now visible and not another sail or smokestack, swam in a glare of sea and sky intolerable to the vision. ‘We’re good and tropical now,’ Schreiber said, rearing painfully up from his favorite recumbent posture along the decks, to look at it. ‘We ought to make Baiquiri to-night, is n’t that so, Captain?’

‘’T ain’t Baiquiri, it’s Daiquiri,’ said Bowers, over his shoulder, as he walked forward. ‘Yes, I guess so, if we have luck.’

‘Is that where we land?’ Van Cleve asked.

‘That’s where the army landed,’ said the captain, non-committally. Van felt startled at the sudden nearness of the journey’s end.

However, man proposes! It was only a short while after this conversation that the engines of the Milton D. Bowers, to the surprise and consternation of her passengers, began perceptibly to lag; they slowed down; they ceased utterly! A great pow-wowing arose between the engineer and his assistant; Captain Bowers took a hand; the engineer disappeared into the bowels of his machine, and erelong boiler-factory hammerings and clinkings resounded. Van Cleve and the attaché, after offering their help, thought it best to keep out of the way, and refrain from annoying questions; but Schreiber had no such scruples. He made repeated trips to the seat of trouble and at last brought back the doleful information that they were going to be held up for the Lord knew how long! ‘ I believe it is n’t anything very bad, because he says he can fix it, only he does n’t know how long it’ll take. This is grand, is n’t it? This just suits us. We’re not in any hurry to get there; we don’t give a darn if we never see Cuba. I’d like to spend a summer vacation right on this spot. The bathing facilities are so good, you know.’

‘How far are we out, anyhow?’

‘Too far to swim, that’s all I know,’ said the correspondent. He resumed his lounge. They all sat awhile in disconcerted silence, until at length somebody proposed the cards to pass time away; and they were on the seventh hand of cutthroat, when Captain Bowers came and joined them. For a moment, this looked encouraging; but to their eager inquiry about the prospects, he would only say that he did n’t know — it might be two or three hours yet — perhaps more — he could n’t say —depended on what Tom found when he got the jacket off — he couldn’t say — ‘It’s your deal, ain’t it, Kendrick? My cut.’

As they were sitting, Van having just dealt, and turned the queen of diamonds, on a sudden, they heard, a good way to the southwest, a dull rolling and booming sound that paused and presently broke out again.

‘Hello!’ said Schreiber, looking up and around; ‘storm somewhere?’

Captain Bowers laid down his hand of cards and said, ‘Boys, that’s cannon ! ’

In a minute the engineer, chancing to stick out his head for a breath of air, stopped in the act of mopping the sweat from his forehead and arms with a handful of waste, and called in surprise, ‘What’s the matter? D’ye see anything? What did you fellows all jump up that way for?’ He had heard nothing in the midst of his own noise and clanging. The rest looked at one another shamefacedly; they discovered that they had all, on the same unconscious impulse, scrambled to their feet, and were crowding and staring in the direction of the cannonading, as if they might expect to see it, or get nearer to it by the action. In fact, by some illusion, the next detonations seemed to them for an instant much louder. It kept on. They stood a long while listening. Once Schreiber said in a subdued voice, ‘My Lord, fellows, that sounds like the Fourth of July back home, and it’s killing men right along! ’ Van Cleve, too,had been thinking of that; and of that evening, scarcely three weeks ago, when he had sat with Lorrie on the porch, and they wondered what cannon sounded like.

The captain looked at his watch and said it was ten o’clock; and one of them asked him where he thought the battle might be going on — if they were shelling the city, would we hear it? He shook his head. ‘Don’t know. Them guns are firing at sea, though, whichever way they’re being p’inted. The sound comes quicker to you on the water — leastways that’s what I’ve always been told,’ he said circumspectly.

‘Do you believe the fleet’s trying to come out?’ Van Cleve and the newspaper man chorused in one excited breath.

‘I presume likely,’ said Captain Bowers.

He went to speak to the engineer, and Schreiber watched him with a certain admiration. ‘If he was in a book now, you would n’t believe in him; you’d think he was ridiculously overdrawn,’ he said to Van; ‘he does n’t seem possible, somehow, with his tugboat and his chin-beard, and that funny down-east drawl. “ Presume likely!” Like any old New England deacon! You notice he never swears? You can’t faze him — nothing fazes him!’

The day wore on. The cannon ceased, and the silence left them all at a higher tension than ever. The cook fished out from somewhere an old battered pair of glasses with a flawed lens, and from that on somebody was constantly on the lookout (though the thing would scarcely carry a hundred yards), sweeping the seas round and round in expectation of no one knew what. At some time in the afternoon they sat down to a belated and half-cooked meal whereat the engineer complained loud and bitterly. He wanted to know what all you dubs (and sundry other unamiable designations) were doing, anyhow? He opined that he was the only man within sight or hearing who was on his job. He intimated highly uncomplimentary doubts as to the mind, morals, parentage, and previous career of everybody on board, especially the cook, which the latter gentleman naturally resented. Captain Bowers had to intervene; and in the middle of it all somebody cried that the guns were going again, producing peace on the instant, as if by magic! Afterwards, realizing that there was some justice in his point of view, one or other of them volunteered as engineer’s helper, and held a candle, or passed tools, or hung on a wrench at intervals the rest of the day. Van Cleve, for one, was glad of any employment ; his nerves, like everybody’s, were feeling the strain. It was dark before they got started.

It was night, in fact, which came on them with the startling suddenness of the tropics, clouded over, with no stars or moonlight. The little tug, crowding on all steam, ploughed through the vast, black, watery silence with as much commotion as leviathan, reckless of consequences. Excepting Captain Bowers and the Japanese, both of whom contrived to keep an appearance, at least, of stolidity, everybody was very much excited, and there was a good deal of random talk and laughing at nothing; also the cook wanted to sing, and wept when Bowers forbade it and sternly took away his bottle of whiskey.

Schreiber expostulated sympathetically. ‘Why, with all the noise we’re making, what’s the odds if he does sing, Captain? Nobody could hear him.’

‘We could hear him,’ said the captain, with epigrammatic force. They all thought this was a prodigiously good joke on the cook; Van Cleve never remembered to have laughed so heartily!

‘I suppose if we should run into a Spanish ship, they would n’t do a thing to us?’ he said to Schreiber in ironical gayety.

‘Not a thing!’ agreed the other. Then he added more seriously, ‘But they won’t be coming this way, you know. They’ll make for Havana most likely — if they get away at all.’ That the Spanish might have won in the contest did not occur to either of them.

Some while after this, Van Cleve observed a small, steady star, very low down near what should have been the horizon, as he judged, if they had been able to distinguish sea from sky; he pointed it out casually to the captain, who threw a perfunctory glance in the direction and grunted.

‘That’s the land,’ he said; ‘that’s a light somewhere on shore. You could ’a’ heard the surf if you’d listened. Hear it now?’

Van strained his ears, but could make out nothing; the throbbing of their machinery and the loud rush of water alongside overpowered his landsman’s senses; Schreiber affirmed that he could see the coast in black outline against the lesser blackness, but perhaps his fancy helped him. In a little the light vanished, blotted out, no doubt, by some reach of land, for they were both quite sure they felt the vessel veer sharply and change her course. And now, all at once, there came to them a great, hot, sighing breath, off-shore, laden (or so they imagined) with earth odors, strange and familiar; then a cool puff; then another warm. The feeling of it was curiously welcome; land is good after the sea. The Milton D. Bowers slacked up; she had a grotesque air of suddenly remembering something.

‘Guess the old man thinks we’d better go slow here,’ Schreiber suggested in an undertone; ‘he does n’t quite know where he is — no lights nor anything. We must be somewhere off Guantanamo, I think.’

He had not finished speaking when there roared up out of the darkness a huge devastating bulk, a thing of terror coming at them like the end of the world. There was a light. Van Cleve for one appalling second beheld a mighty gray shoulder towering above them, imminent, unescapable. ‘It looked as high as the Union Trust Building,’ he said afterwards. It was in reality the bow of the torpedo-boat destroyer, Inverness, not considered by naval judges at all a large or powerful vessel. She thundered upon them; the Milton D. Bowers raised a wild screech as from one throat, and went astern in a frenzy; and the Inverness must have sheered just in the nick of time, or they would all, herself included, have been at the bottom of the sea, and this tale need never have been written. As it was, the glancing blow she struck them sent the poor tug staggering, and there was a bloodcurdling noise of splintered wood. When Van got his breath, he found himself in the foolish attitude of clinging to the far rail, and ‘holding back ’ with might and main! They were still afloat; they were still on an even keel. Near him Schreiber sprawled on the deck, clutching one ankle and cursing voluminously; he had sprained it, falling over a pile of coal, and was in severe pain. Extraordinary sounds arose from every part of the boat; somebody was praying in a loud, rapid, fervent voice like a camp-meeting preacher. There was a hail from above.

‘Goldenrod, ahoy! Are you much hurt?’

‘This ain’t no Goldenrod. This is the Milton D. Bowers,’ shouted the captain, crossly; and in a moment Van saw him aft with a lantern over the side, studying the damage. The prayers ceased abruptly; Van Cleve had a suspicion they proceeded from the cook, but he never knew. Takuhira appeared from nowhere, and helped Schreiber take off his shoe. Up overhead an invisible power manipulated the light this way and that, until the tug lay within its zone; they could see faces, kindly and concerned and inquiring, peering down at them. A man whom Van, in his ignorance of naval matters, supposed to be a ‘petty officer,’ whatever that might mean, repeated the former question. ‘Are you much hurt? Need any help?’ he asked.

Captain Bowers, after further scrutiny, pronounced the Milton D. in no danger. ‘She ain’t started anywhere, fur’s I kin see, jest her side planed off some,’ he said; and, walking to the engine-house, called in, ‘All right there, Tom? ’

‘I guess so,’ said the engineer from the depths.

‘You ought to have kept out of the way, Captain. We can’t have anybody gum-shoeing around here, you know that,’ remarked the Inverness, and made another offer of standing by in case they discovered trouble. Captain Bowers grumpily declining, the officer turned away, probably to report to a superior. Some of the heads disappeared from the rail; one of those remaining facetiously invited his mates to come and see the bunch of Weary-Willies in the cup-defender. Another wanted to know who the reverend conducting services was? Van Cleve stared up at them in wonder; he had supposed that everybody — of the rank and file, at least—had to keep mum as a mouse on board a warship. They could hear an order given; the big hull vibrated; the Inverness began deliberately and impressively to back away. Even in the midst of his suffering, professional zeal awoke in the newspaper correspondent; he hobbled upright, clinging to Takuhira’s shoulder, and hailed desperately.

‘Hi! Wait, will you? What’s happened? We heard cannon. What’s doing? Was there a fight?’

The Inverness did not answer; silence had suddenly fallen on board of her, and all the faces retreated. In a moment the man who had spoken to them first came back, making way at the rail for a tall gentleman in a beautiful, clean, snowy-white, tropical uniform, at once cool and radiant in the half-light. He could be seen to look them over with good-natured condescension, while the subordinate pointed and explained; then he nodded, gave the other an order (as it seemed), and walked away. Schreiber witnessed the pantomime in an agony of curiosity. The first man stepped again to the side; he set a hand to his mouth and cried out, ‘Newspaper boat?’

‘ Yes. Gulf States Magazine, Jacksonville Telegraph, Atlanta Post, Charleston Mail!’ the correspondent roared back impatiently. None of the lastnamed papers had any existence outside of his own imagination, as he later informed Van Cleve. ‘That ought to be enough for you,’ he added under his breath. ‘ Newspaper boat! Take us for a party of Episcopal bishops?’

‘Well, you can tell ’em the fleet came out!’

‘Where are they? What became of ’em? What — who — which — ?’ Schreiber was fairly inarticulate from excitement; he hopped madly on one leg.

‘Sunk — beached — burned up — the whole shootin’ match!’ bawled their informant, succinctly. He made a dramatic pause. ‘Had to chase one of ’em down the coast a good piece, but we nipped her, too!’ The Inverness gathered way, moving off, and the wash she kicked up slapped against the tug, causing it to rock violently. He raised his voice, making a trumpet of both hands this time. ‘Pity you missed it. It’s all over but the shouting. There ain’t any more Spanish Fleet!’

(To be continued.)