CHAPTER XV. THE OTHER WAY ROUND THE WORLD
Before the train left Elliott cabled again to Henninger, this time using the usual code for abbreviation’s sake:
“Found what we wanted. Am coming with Bennett. Have expedition ready at Delagoa Bay, not Zanzibar. Buy arms. Wire American Line, New York.”
He also telegraphed to New York for berths on the Southampton steamer sailing on the eighth day from that time. He reserved three berths, though he was resolved that only two should be used. “She may as well come on to Chicago,” he reflected, “or even to New York. The East is a better place than the West to leave her.” But somewhere on the cross-continent journey he intended to convince her of the folly of her resolution.
But somehow he did not feel equal to the endeavour at present, so he established Margaret comfortably in a chair-car, and went to smoke with Bennett.
“This is a nice state of things,” he said, biting a cigar irritably in two. “Why didn’t you back me up? I thought you were against having women in a man’s game.”
“So I am,” replied Bennett, who did not appear dissatisfied. “But I never argue with a woman when she’s made up her mind. Give her time and she’ll change it herself. Miss Laurie will give us the map all right, and if she won’t—”
“Then she’ll have to go with us.”
“No. We can take it”
“Take it? Do you mean by force?”
“Yes, if necessary. Of course we’ll give her a square divvy.”
“By heavens, Bennett!” said Elliott, “if you ever try to lay a hand on that girl I’ll shoot you. Yes, I will. So there’s your plan of robbing her, and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it. That map’s her own, and I’m here to see that she does as she likes with it.”
“All right; have it your own way,” said Bennett, easily. “I don’t care a twopenny hang if she does sail with us. She seems to be a sensible sort of girl who wouldn’t bother. It was you who kicked about it.”
“I know it was, and you’ll see that I’ll convince her yet,” replied Elliott, gloomily. After a long pause, “What do you think of her?” he demanded, almost uncontrollably.
“Oh, I don’t know,” responded Bennett, between puffs. “Regular Western type, isn’t she? Sensible, nice girl, I guess. I didn’t see much in her.”
Elliott stared in amazement at such lack of penetration, threw down his cigar, and went back to the car where Margaret was settled with a heap of magazines, which she was not reading. Bennett meanwhile smiled thoughtfully at the approaching foot-hills with the air of a man for whom life has no more surprises.
There was plenty of time now to argue the question of Margaret’s accompanying the expedition, and Elliott argued it. The girl did little more than listen, sometimes smiling at the floods of polemic that were poured upon her all the way across the foot-hills, through the gorges and tunnels and trestles of the mountains, and down the slope to the desert. She would listen, but she would not discuss. She would talk of any other subject but that one. It seemed to Elliott’s watchful eye, however, that she was becoming a little more cheerful, that she was beginning to recuperate a little from the terrible strain of her experiences, and he said, mentally, that it was perhaps a good thing, after all, that she should go as far as New York.
Bennett absolutely refused to assist him, and remained for the most part in the smoking-car while the train skated down the eastern slope and roared out upon the great desert. At Ogden Elliott noted with satisfaction that they were maintaining schedule time. At Denver they were only an hour late. The country was becoming level, so that there were no topographical obstacles to speed.
“This is my country!” exclaimed Margaret. She was watching the gray-green rolling plain slowly revolve upon the middle distance. A couple of horsemen in wide hats and chaparejos were loping across it half a mile away. “How I should like to get off, get a horse, and just tear across those plains!”
“Do it, for goodness’ sake,” said Elliott. “We’ll be in Kansas City to-morrow, and you can wait there or in Lincoln till we come back with your share of the plunder.”
“No, I’ve something else to think of. Are we going to catch the steamer, do you think?”
“You are not,” Elliott retorted.
She smiled rather wearily, trying to see the cow-punchers, who were out of sight.
“How on earth can I convince you of your foolishness? You seem to have no idea of the rough sort of a trip it will be, nor the gang of cutthroats we may ship for a crew. Why, you don’t even know what sort of men my partners are.”
“I suppose they’re like you and Mr. Bennett. I’m not afraid of them, nor of anything else.”
“But can’t you trust us—can’t you trust me?—to look after your interests?”
“You know it isn’t that,” cried Margaret. “It’s unkind of you to put it that way. Oh, don’t harass me!” she appealed. “I am wretched enough as it is. Don’t you see that I have to do something to keep myself from thinking?”
Against such an argument a man is always defenceless, and Elliott abandoned the attack, baffled again. But he was not the less determined that she should not leave America, and he reserved himself for a final struggle at New York.
They arrived at Omaha on Thursday night, and on the following morning they were in Chicago. They had just thirty-five minutes for a hurried breakfast and a brief walk up and down the vast, smoky platform before they left for Buffalo. It was almost the last stage of the land journey.
“We’ll make it without a hitch,” said Bennett, cheerfully. “This is better than the way I raced across the continent before on this job. Do you remember that?”
But they missed connections at Buffalo for the first time on the transcontinental journey, and were obliged to wait for several hours for the New York express. But Buffalo was left behind that night, and on the next morning they arrived at Jersey City, and crossed the ferry. New York harbour, sparkling in the mild September sunshine, seemed to congratulate them. It was Sunday morning, and there was plenty of time, for the St. Paul did not sail till Monday noon.
Margaret went to a quiet, but expensive hotel, which Elliott selected for her, while he lodged himself with Bennett at the same house where the party had made rendezvous with Sullivan four months ago. The place looked the same as ever, and it was hard to realize that he had circled the globe since that time, and it was not pleasant to remember that he did not seem to be appreciably nearer the lost treasure. However, they had a definite clue at last,—or, rather, Margaret had one. It was now only a question of time, and of obtaining this clue from its possessor, who must go no further eastward.
At the offices of the American Line, Elliott found a cablegram from Henninger awaiting him. It read:
“Wire directions. Dangerous to wait.”
Elliott showed this message to Margaret. “This settles it, you see,” he said. “Henninger probably has his expedition all ready to sail, and we’ll all have to stay here till the work is done.”
“Are you going to stay, too?” she interrogated.
“Well,” Elliott hesitated, having no such intention. “I guess Bennett and I will go on, though I don’t expect we can get there in time to join the boys before they sail. But you’ll stay here, of course. Would you rather stay in New York, or go into the country?”
“I’m going to South Africa,” remarked Margaret, looking out the window.
“You’ve gone just as far as you are going.”
“I haven’t. You need me. Now, don’t rehearse all your arguments to me; I’ve heard them all, and they’re all sound. But I know the one you are thinking of, but daren’t mention—that it would be unladylike and not respectable for me to go.”
Elliott laughed. “I must confess that that argument hadn’t entered my mind.”
“Then I’m not going to give up what I want to do, just because I happen to be a girl. I expect I’d be as useful as any one of your party. I’m strong; and I can outride you and outshoot you, as you know very well. Do you think I care what any one will say? Nobody in the world takes interest in me enough to say anything. Do you want me to remind myself again that I have no money? I’ve been living on you; I know it. But I can endure that because I shall soon be able to pay back every cent, but I’m not going to sit here and wait till you come back from your adventures and give me what you think my secret is worth. I’m going to share in it all, whatever comes—fortune or fighting. There’s nobody in the world now who cares whether I live or die, or—what’s more important, I suppose—whether I’m ladylike or not.”
“How about me?” said Elliott. He hesitated, and then plunged desperately ahead. “Margaret, you’ve said that before, and I can’t stand your feeling like that. Look here, I may as well tell you now: all that gold is nothing to me in comparison with your unhappiness or danger. Let me look after you and think of you; you’ll find me better than nobody. I’m asking you to marry me, Margaret.”
He felt at once conscious of having blundered, but it was too late.
“Oh, how dare you!” she flashed. She jumped up, and stood vibrating in every nerve. “Do you think that I would marry you because you pity me? Perhaps you thought that I was trying to work on your feelings, so that you had to say that to me! Don’t be afraid; I’m not going to accept you. I’m not going to South Africa merely to be in your society. I suppose you thought that! How dared you?”
She sank down on the sofa again and burst into passionate sobbing, with her face buried in the cushions.
“Margaret—” ventured Elliott, approaching her.
“Go away!” she cried, lifting a face in which the eyes still blazed behind the tears. “I will go with you—I will—now more than ever—but I’ll never speak to you!”
Elliott went away as he was ordered, sore and angry at Margaret, at himself. He could not understand how she could so have misconceived him. He felt almost disposed to let her go her own way and take her own chances; and yet he felt that he must be always at her side to see that she suffered nothing. He walked over to Broadway, inwardly fuming, and stopped at a cable agency, where he sent another message to Henninger:
“Can’t wire clue. Am bringing it. Be ready at Delagoa.”
He had considerable trepidation in calling for Margaret the next morning, but he found her cold and calm. Her pallor had returned, and she looked as if she had not slept.
“Are you still determined to go?” he asked.
“Certainly.”
“It’s time to go, then. The ship sails at noon. There’s a cab down-stairs for you.”
Her valise was already packed and strapped; so was her small steamer trunk, and she had nothing to do but put on her hat. She had been expecting him, and in half an hour they were on board the great liner, and had been shown their staterooms. Bennett was waiting for them at the wharf, and the big ship swung majestically from her moorings and moved down the bay, past the rugged sierra skyline of brick and granite that had stimulated Elliott’s fancy when he last sailed from this port on the apparently endless trail of gold.
During the first half of the voyage he did not find Margaret conversational; she appeared to endure his presence with bare patience. She had plenty of other society on board, but neither did she seem to care much for the men who tried to scrape acquaintance with her with the relaxed etiquette of travel. She appeared to take a fancy for Bennett, however, and spent hours in long talks with him when she was not reading or gazing meditatively from her deck-chair across the dark, unstable sea.
Elliott perceived that he had done wrong, but he did not see how to remedy it. He had indeed been tactless and brutal; he had, or it looked as if he had, tried to force himself upon her while she was virtually his guest. Still, he thought that she might have misunderstood him less violently; and, while he admitted that he had been served rightfully, he felt aggrieved that he had not been served more mercifully. However, since she appeared to have no taste for his conversation, he was prepared, for the present, to dispose of it elsewhere.
But she called him to her that afternoon on deck, and pointed to an unoccupied chair beside her own. He sat down and looked at her with an expression that he tried to make severe, but which failed in the face of her smile.
“Don’t you think it’s very absurd for fellow passengers not to be friends?” she asked.
“Very,” he replied, a little stiffly.
“Come, you see I’m making the advances. You were rude and unkind to me, and you haven’t apologized as you should. Are you sorry?”
“In one way—yes.”
She made a little face. “That’s not good enough. But I’ll let you off. I’ll forget what you said, on condition that you make no more objection to my going where I please. Is it a bargain?”
“I suppose so—for my objections have no effect anyway.”
“Not a bit. They only spoil everything. Don’t you understand,” she went on, earnestly, “that I had to do this? If I had stayed at home, or wherever I tried to make a home, I would have died; I would have gone mad with loneliness and trouble. You don’t know what I have suffered. Perhaps you think I am forgetting it, but it follows me night and day. I daren’t think of it, or speak of it. I have to do something—anything. Don’t you understand?”
“Perhaps not altogether. But you shall go where you like, without let or hindrance,” said Elliott, gravely.
“We’re friends again, then?”
“I think so.”
“Ah, but you must be sure,” she insisted.
“Well, then, I am sure,” he said, laughingly; though in his heart he felt no such certainty. But he saw clearly that friendship would have to do till the treasure-hunt were finished. On that expedition they were comrades and fellow adventurers, and nothing more.
During the remainder of the passage he therefore endeavoured to return as far as possible to the easy spirit of the Hongkong days, though Hongkong was a place of which neither cared to speak. Margaret appeared to welcome this regained camaraderie, and her spirits seemed to grow brighter than at her landing in America. They talked of many things, but they avoided the subject of the treasure-ship; that was dangerous to touch; it was too near their hearts. Yet in the intervals of silence there was an image upon Elliott’s inward eye, an image that came to be almost permanent, of another steamer, this one ploughing through the heated blue of the Indian Ocean, and of two men leaning over her bow, with their faces and thoughts running forward to the same spot as his own. The same sort of vision must have presented itself to Margaret, for she once, though only once, exclaimed:
“Do you think we’ll be in time?”
“I don’t know. It would have been safer if you had let us cable the directions. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve somehow felt that the game was up,” responded Elliott.
“It’s not!” she cried. “I know it. We will be in time. We must.”
“Well, we’re doing all we can,” said Elliott. “We’re due to reach Southampton to-morrow at ten in the forenoon, and the Cape Town steamer sails the next day at noon. We’re cutting it pretty fine.”
The St. Paul arrived punctually at her dock, and her passengers scattered, most of them taking the steamer special train for London. Elliott saw Margaret established in a comfortable hotel for the day and night, and went down to the steamer offices with Bennett to see if by chance there was any telegram. There was one, and Elliott ripped it open:
“For God’s sake,” it read, “wire clue immediately. Other party at Zanzibar. Can’t wait.
“HENNINGER.”
Bennett read the message, and whistled low. The two men looked at each other.
“Can’t you persuade her to tell us?” Bennett asked.
“No. She’s determined to go.”
“Well, she’ll make us lose the whole thing.” He reflected a moment. “We’ll have to take it from her.”
“I told you what I would do if you tried that,” said Elliott, in an even voice. “I’ll do it; you can count on me. I’m just as keen on getting that stuff as you are, but by fair play. After all, Sevier and Carlton can’t be so much ahead of us, and they don’t know where to look.”
“I expect I’m as quick as you are, if it came to shooting,” said Bennett. “But a row would spoil everything, bring in the police and all sorts of nastiness. But look there—that’s what I’ve been looking at.” He indicated a large placard bearing the sailing dates of the ships of the Union Castle Line for South Africa. “Didn’t you say that our ship sailed Tuesday noon? That card says Monday noon, and that’s to-day, and it’s eleven-forty now.”
“By Jove, that’s so!” said Elliott, looking hard at the card. “The agent in New York certainly said Tuesday. Here,” he called to a clerk. “Is that sailing list right? Does the Avon Castle sail to-day?”
“Sails at noon sharp, sir,” the clerk assured him.
Elliott exploded an ejaculation and shot out of the office. Luckily there was a cab within a few yards; luckily again, it was a four-wheeler.
“Hotel Surry, quick as you know how!” shouted Bennett, and the driver whipped up his horses. There was just eighteen minutes, and to miss the steamer would entail a delay of three or four days, when every hour was worth red gold.
“Won’t you hear reason?” said Bennett. “Won’t you help me to make her give up that map? Everything may depend on this minute.”
“No, I won’t,” countered Elliott, flatly.
“You’re as bad as she is. If I had Henninger here, we’d coerce you; and by Jove, you’d better think what you’ll say to the boys when they hear that you’ve queered the whole game.”
“I’ll take the blame,” said Elliott; though in his heart he disliked the situation almost as much as his companion did.
Fortunately Margaret had not yet unpacked anything, and Elliott brought her down the stairs with a rush, and hurried her into the cab. It was only a few hundred yards to the dock, but as they neared it they heard the gruff warning whistle of the liner.
“Oh, is it too late?” gasped Margaret, who was very pale.
The gangplank was being cleared as the party rushed down the platform; the plank was drawn ashore almost before they had reached the deck. There was another hoarse blast from the great whistle; a shout of “All clear aft!” and then the space between the wharf and the ship’s side began to widen.
“Safe!” said Bennett. “It’s an omen.”
But Elliott pulled the crumpled telegram from his pocket where he had crammed it, and showed it to Margaret.
“I don’t care,” said she, still breathing hard from the race. “We will be there before them. I feel it.”
“Heaven send you’re right. You’re taking a big responsibility,” replied Elliott, gravely.
“That reminds me that we didn’t have time to answer that cable,” Bennett put in. “Never mind. Henninger will be wild, but we had nothing to say.”
It is a long way from Southampton to Cape Town, even when one is not in a hurry. But when life and death, or money, which in modern life is the same thing, hangs upon the ship’s speed, the length of the passage is doubled and tripled, for the ordinary pastimes of sea life become impossible. Shuffleboard is frivolous; books are impertinent, and there is no interest in passing ships or monsters of the deep. The three adventurers hung together, talking little, but mutely sharing the strain of uncertainty. Late one night in the second week, Elliott suddenly proposed poker to Bennett.
“Big stakes,” he said, “payable from our profits later? It’ll kill the cursed time.”
But Bennett shook his head. “I’ve just sense enough left to keep away from gambling now. If we started we wouldn’t stop till we’d won or lost every cent we’ll ever have.”
Elliott acquiesced moodily. The strain was wearing on his nerves, and he went out of the smoking-room and walked along the deserted deck. It was a brilliant blue night; the stars overhead blazed like torches, and the dark line of the foremast plunged through the Southern Cross as the bows rose and fell. The steamer shook with the pulsations of the screws, and the water foamed and thundered back upon her sides, but to Elliott she seemed barely to crawl. It occurred to him that the treasure must be then almost directly east of him, on the other side of Africa.
The Avon Castle ran into a gale off Cape Frio which kept most of the passengers below decks for a day or two. Thence the weather was fresh to the latitude of the Cape, where it became equinoctially blustering. It was not sufficiently rough to affect the speed materially, however, and at last the cloud swathed head of Table Mountain loomed in sight above the long-desired harbour. It seemed as if the long trail was almost done, for success or failure.
Cape Town was swarming with uniforms and campaign khaki, and animated with just renewed peace and the business of peace, but they stayed there only six hours before they caught the boat for Durban.
Here was a check. There was no railroad to Lorenzo Marques, unless they took the long détour through Pretoria, over a line choked with military service, and there was no regular steamer plying. After the two men had spent a fevered day of searching the harbour, however, Bennett discovered a decayed freighter which would sail the next day, and he promptly engaged three passages at an exorbitant figure.
Then there was a day to wait, and two days more at sea, and these proved the most trying days of all. It was so near the goal,—a goal which, perhaps, they would never reach! The sun blazed down hotly on the unshaded decks as the rusty steamer wallowed along at the speed of a horse-car, while they all three leaned over the bows, watching for the first glimpse of the Portuguese harbour.
They reached it just before sunset. A white British gunboat was lying in the English River, and there was little shipping in the bay except native craft. A flock of shore-boats swarmed about the steamer as she dropped anchor, the customs launch having already come aboard.
“See that! By thunder, that’s Henninger!” cried Bennett, pointing to a good-sized and very dirty Arab dhow lying some fifteen fathoms away. She was the nearest craft in the harbour, and there were a dozen or more men moving about her decks. Standing in the stern with a glass to his eye, which was turned on the steamer, was a white man who looked familiar to Elliott as well.
“I believe you’re right. That’ll be his ship. Yes, I caught a flash of eye-glasses on another fellow—that’ll be Sullivan,” exclaimed Elliott, excitedly, and Bennett sent a long hail over the water.
“Ahoy! The dhow! Hen-ning-er! How-oop!”
The man with the glass waved his hat, and two other men hurried up to the dhow’s stern.
“Come along. Let’s go aboard her now,” Bennett exclaimed, on fire with impatience.
Elliott looked sharply at Margaret. She was flushed with excitement, as he could see in the quick tropic twilight, and her lips were set in a determined line. Her baggage was hurried on deck and sent down into a shore-boat at the end of a line, and in another minute they were being ferried to the dhow.