elliott found the atmosphere on the big peninsular and oriental liner different from anything he had ever encountered before. the ship was full of anglo-indian people, army officers, civil servants, and merchants returning to the east, and whose conversation was composed of english slang and exotic phrases of a foreign tongue. the crew were mostly lascars of intolerable filthiness, and there were innumerable indian maids—ayahs, elliott supposed them to be—whom he met continually about the ship on mysterious errands of comfort to their mistresses. there were queer dishes at dinner, where elliott made himself disagreeably conspicuous on the first evening by wearing a sack coat; and the talk ran upon subjects which he had previously encountered only in the works of mr. kipling.
most of these passengers had come on board at southampton and had settled so comfortably together that elliott felt himself an intruder. he was distinctly an “outsider;” and he found it hard to scrape acquaintance with these healthy, well-set-up and apparently simple-minded young englishmen, who seemed too candid to be natural. it was even more impossible to know how to approach the peppery veterans, who nevertheless were seen to converse jovially enough with folk of their own sort. he was distinctly lonely; he was almost homesick. his mind was perplexed with the object of his voyage, of which he felt the responsibility to a painful degree, so there were few things in his life which he ever enjoyed less than the passage from brindisi to alexandria.
at port said another half-dozen passengers came on board. elliott took them all to be english, apparently of the tourist class, travelling around the world on circular tickets. one of them was sent to share elliott’s stateroom, much to his annoyance, but the man proved to be entirely inoffensive, a dull, respectable green-grocer with the strict principles of his london suburb, who was taking his daughter on a long southern sea voyage by medical advice. his sole desire was to return to his early radishes, and he spent almost all his waking hours in sitting dumbly beside his daughter on the after deck, a slight, pale girl of twenty, whose incessant cough sounded as if sea air had been prescribed too late.
it was very hot as the steamer pushed at a snail’s pace through the canal. the illimitable reaches of honey-coloured sand seemed to gather up the fierce sun-rays and focus them on the ship. the awnings from stem to stern afforded little relief, and the frilled punkahs sweeping the saloon tables only stirred the heated air. at night the ship threw a portentous glare ahead from the gigantic search-light furnished by the canal company, and in the close staterooms it was impossible to sleep. many of the men walked the deck or dozed in long chairs, and at daybreak there was an undress parade when the imperturbable lascars turned the hose on a couple of dozen passengers lined against the rail. then there was a little coolness and it was possible to think of breakfast, before the african sun became again a flaming menace.
it was scarcely better when they reached the red sea, where, however, they were able to move at better speed. they had nearly completed this biblical transit, when a mirage of white-capped mountains floating aerially upside down appeared over the red desert in the south, and all the passengers crowded to the starboard rail to look at it. elliott had moved to the bow, and was staring idly at the strangely coloured low coast, red and pink and orange, spotted with crags of basalt as black as iron.
“it would remind a man of arizona, wouldn’t it?” a voice drawled languidly at his elbow.
elliott wheeled, a little startled. leaning on the rail beside him was a young man whom he remembered as having come aboard at port said with the globe-trotters. he was attired in white flannels and wore a peaked cap, but the voice was unmistakably american, and elliott felt certain that it had been developed south of the ohio river.
“i never was in arizona, but i’ve seen the same kind of thing in new mexico,” he answered. “how did you know that i had been in the southwest?”
“there’s nothing but the bad lands that’ll give a man that far-away pucker about the eyes,” said the other. “and anybody could pick you out for an american among all these britishers. we’re the only yankees on board, i reckon. i don’t mind calling myself a yankee here, but i wouldn’t at home. i’m from alabama, sir.”
“i thought you were from the south. i’m a marylander myself,” replied elliott.
“is that so? i’m mighty glad to hear it. we’ll have to moisten that—two southerners so far from home. my name is sevier.”
elliott gave his name in return, and permitted himself to be led aft. he looked more closely at his new acquaintance as they sat down at a table in the stuffy cubby-hole that passes for a smoking-room on the indian mail-steamers. sevier was a boyish-looking fellow of perhaps thirty, short, slight, and dark, with a small dark moustache, and a manner that was inexpressibly candid and ingratiating. in time it might come to seem smooth to the point of nausea; at present it appeared offhand enough, and yet courteous—a manner of which the south alone has preserved the secret—and elliott in his growing loneliness was delighted to find so agreeable a fellow traveller.
the talk naturally fell upon southern matters, drifted to the west and south again to mexico and the gulf. sevier seemed to display an unusual knowledge of these localities, though elliott was unable to check his statements, and he explained that he had been a newspaper correspondent in central america for a new orleans daily, the globe.
“the globe?” exclaimed elliott, recollecting almost forgotten names. “then you must know jackson, the night editor. i used to work with him in denver.”
“i’ve met him. but, you see, i was hardly ever in the office, nor in the city, either. i always worked on the outside.”
“the globe had a man in san salvador last year, named wilcox, i think,” elliott continued, recalling another fact.
“yes. i reckon he was before me. san salvador—i sunk a heap of money there!”
“mining?”
“yes—or not exactly actually mining. i got a concession for a sulphur mine, and i was going to sell it in new york. it was a mighty good mine, too. there would have been dollars in it, and it cost me five thousand to get it. you know how concessions are got down there, i expect?”
“how did it pan out?”
“it never panned out at all, sir. there was a revolution next month, and the new government annulled everything the old one had done. i hadn’t the money to go through the business over again, but i did make something out of the revolution, after all.”
“how?”
“selling rifles to the revolutionists. i didn’t think at the time that i was helping to beat my own game. there’s money in revolutionizing, too. down there a man can’t keep clear of graft, you know; it’s in the air.”
in spite of the apologetic tone of the last sentence, elliott recognized the mental attitude of the adventurer, which was becoming very familiar to him. he had heard a good deal from henninger of the business of supplying a revolution with war material, in which henninger had participated more than once. as often as not, it is done by buying up the officers of a ragged government regiment, and transferring, sometimes not only the rifles and cartridges but also the officers and men as well, to the equally ragged force in opposition.
but if sevier were an adventurer he was certainly the smoothest specimen of the fraternity that elliott had yet encountered. and why should such a man be going to india, surely a most unpromising field for the industrious chevalier. as if in answer to the mental inquiry, sevier announced that he was going to obtain material for a series of magazine articles upon the east, as well as for a number of newspaper letters which he proposed to “syndicate” to half a dozen dailies as special correspondence.
“and i’ll have to spend the next six months mixing up with this sort of fellows,” he lamented, waving his hand toward a group of anglo-indians with seasoned complexions who were deep in “bridge” at a neighbouring table. “i’m too american, or too southern, or something, to know how to get on with those chaps. i reckon it’s the fault of my education. i can’t drink their drinks, and i never learned to play whist right, and i’ve told them my best stories, and they took about as well as the declaration of independence. i expect i’ll be right glad when i get back where i can see a game of baseball and play poker. do you play poker at all?”
“not on shipboard. i find it’s liable to make me seasick,” replied elliott, a trifle grimly.
the last apparently careless question had, he thought, given him the clue to the secret of his companion’s presence on board, though professional gamblers seldom operate upon the eastern steamship lines.
“i’ll give you a bit of advice, too,” he added. “don’t start any little game on board, unless it’s a very little one, indeed. these boats aren’t as sporty as the atlantic liners.”
sevier stared a moment, and then burst out laughing.
“oh, i’m no card crook,” he said, without showing any offence. “i didn’t want to skin you. i’m the worst poker player you ever saw, but i felt somehow like opening jackpots. i’ll play penny-ante with you all the evenin’, and donate the proceeds to a seaman’s home, if you like.”
elliott declined this invitation to charity, but he sat chatting for a long time with the young alabaman. his suspicions were by no means lulled, but, after all, as he reflected, he would be neither sevier’s victim nor his confederate, and, though he did not know it, he was acquiring something of the adventurer’s lax notions of morality.
but it was pleasant to talk again on american matters, and to hear the familiar southern opinions, couched in the familiar southern drawl. it would, besides, have been difficult to find anywhere a more pleasant fellow traveller than sevier. he possessed a fund of reminiscence and anecdote of an experience that seemed, in spite of his youth, to have been almost universal, and of a world in which he appeared to have played many parts. newspaper work was his latest part, and he spoke little of it. indeed, he was anything but autobiographical, and his tales were almost wholly of the adventures of other men, whose irregularities he viewed with the purely objective and unmoral interest of the man of the world who is at once a cynic and an optimist. above all, he seemed to have an eye for opportunities of easy money which was more like a down-easter than a man from the gulf coast, though he confessed frankly that he was just then in hard luck.
“i’ve made fortunes,” he said. “if i had half the money that i’ve blown in like a fool, i wouldn’t be a penny-a-liner now.”
this remark forcibly appealed to elliott; he had said the same thing many times to himself.
it became a trifle cooler after the steamer passed the dessicated headland of aden and put out upon the broad indian ocean. the weather remained fine, and there was every prospect of a quick passage to bombay. with the lowering of the temperature, the irrepressible british instinct for games reappeared, and there were deck quoits, deck cricket, blindfold races, and a violent sort of tournament in which the combatants aimed to knock one another with pillows from a spar which they sat astride. under the humanizing influence of these diversions elliott found his fellow passengers less unapproachable than they had seemed, but he still spent many hours with sevier, for whom he had conceived a genuine liking. the two americans were further bound together by a common conviction of the absurdity of violent exertion with the thermometer in the eighties.
on the third day after leaving the red sea, elliott happened to pass down the main stairway as the third officer was putting up the daily chart of the ship’s progress. he paused to look at it. the steamer was then, it occurred to him, close to the point where the italian ship had picked up the mate of the clara mcclay.
he took from his pocket a map which he had made, and consulted it. this map showed the hypothetical course of the wrecked gold-ship in a red line, with dotted lines indicating the probable course of the driftings of both the mate’s boat and bennett’s raft. as nearly as he could judge, the liner must indeed be at that moment almost upon the spot where the secret of the position of the wrecked treasure was saved, in the person of the irishman.
he was still looking at the map when sevier came quietly down the stairs, paused on the step above him, and glanced over his shoulder. elliott dropped the map to his side, and then, ashamed of this childish attempt at concealment, raised it again boldly.
“layin’ off a chart of your voyages?” inquired sevier. “ever been down there?” putting his finger on the mozambique channel.
“no, i never was,” answered elliott, somewhat startled at the question.
“neither was i. i’ve been told that there’s no more dangerous water in the world. they say the currents run like a mill-race through that channel, in different directions, according to the tides. the coast’s covered with wreckage. i thought you might have sailed along that red line you’ve marked.”
“no, i don’t know anything about the place,” elliott denied again, putting the map in his pocket.
“thinking of going there?”
“not at present.”
“i wish i could find out something definite about the islands in that channel. nobody knows anything about them at all except the arab coast pirates, and they keep all the pickings there are to themselves.”
“you’ll find better pickings in india, you vulture,” cried elliott, with an easy laugh.
he was far from feeling easy, however, and for a time he was sharply suspicious of the alabaman. yet it was highly improbable that any one else knew the secret of the clara mcclay’s cargo and of her end; and it was practically impossible that any one knew more of the wreck than he did himself. certainly sevier could have no more definite information, or he would be sailing to the madagascar coast instead of to india. elliott persuaded himself that the young alabaman’s questions had been prompted by mere curiosity, and that their startling appositeness was the result of coincidence. still, the incident revived his sense of the need for haste, and renewed his eagerness to discover the traces of burke, the brutal mate, the one man living who knew the whole secret of the drowned millions.
rapidly as the good ship rolled off the knots, her slowness irritated him. he counted the hours, almost the minutes, and it was hard to contain his impatience till they came at last in sight of the low, green-brown indian shore.
bombay came in sight on the port bow that evening, a strange sky-line of domes and squares. heat lightning flickered low on the landward horizon, casting the city into sharp silhouette against the sky, and from some festival ashore the clash and boom of cymbals and the terrific blare of conches rolled softened across the water.
for hours after the steamer had anchored, the english civil and military servants stayed on deck to look at the field of their coming labours, and all night long the ship resounded with the clacking roar of the derricks clearing the baggage hold.
“poor devils!” murmured sevier, looking at the english clustered along the rail. “i wonder how many of the passengers on this boat will ever see england again—or america, either.”
and elliott, thinking of his perilous mission, wondered also.
