The Treasure Trail by Frank Lillie Pollock - HTML preview

CHAPTER XX. THE RAINBOW ROAD

“What’s your plan for getting home with all this gold, Henninger?” asked Elliott “I hardly dared to think of that till we’d got away from the island.”

It was almost eleven o’clock at night, and the moonlight broke intermittently from a cloudy sky. The dhow was beating in long tacks down the Mozambique Channel, with a fresh, warm wind blowing from the southeast. Elliott was on guard duty at the after-hatch, sitting on an inverted bucket with a Mauser across his knees; Henninger and Bennett were lingering about the quarter-deck before turning in, and Hawke stood sentinel over the door of the strong-room and talked up the companionway. Day and night two men were always on duty over the treasure; it had been so ever since the gold had come aboard, and the system would not be relaxed while the voyage lasted. This would not be much longer, however, for they were already six days from the latitude of the battle and wreck, where Sullivan lay in deep water, with three firebars sewn up in his canvas coffin.

“We can’t sail this craft to England, let alone to America,” Bennett remarked.

In spite of success, a certain depression seemed to have settled upon them all. Perhaps it was due to the oppressive heat; perhaps it was the inevitable reaction from excitement and victory. In the faint rays of the deck lantern Elliott could scarcely see his comrades’ faces, but by daylight they looked ten years older.

“This is the plan I had thought of,” replied Henninger, “though I hardly dared to mention it, as you say, till we had really won out. We’ll run into Durban and divide the gold on board. Some of it we will deposit in the banks there; some we’ll deposit in Cape Town, a little at a time, so as not to attract attention. We can express some of it to New York, and one or two of us can sail for England on the mail-steamer and take some of it along. The important thing is to scatter it, and I think we can get off quite unnoticed, if we are careful.”

“Just how much did we make of it?” asked Hawke, from the bottom of the companion-ladder.

“One million, seven hundred thousand, and odd,” replied Henninger, in an uninterested tone. “Nearly three hundred and fifty thousand apiece. Of course, if we can find anything of any of Sullivan’s relatives we’ll fix them up with his share.”

“What are you going to do with your share of it?” Bennett inquired, curiously.

Henninger gave a short laugh. “How do I know? Blow it in, I suppose, in some fool way, and go out looking for more. What I imagine I’m going to do is to live on it for the rest of my life, but I know myself better than that. It means an income of say fourteen thousand a year, doesn’t it? I’ve seen that much put on the turn of a card.”

“Don’t go and be a fool,” said Elliott “I’ve lived for most of my years on about one-tenth of fourteen thousand.”

“And I’ve lived for months on nothing at all. No, it’s no use handing out nice, sensible motherly advice, for there’s only one kind of life for me. I’ve got the fever in me, and I’ll be looking for the road to the end of the rainbow as long as I live, I fancy. Do you remember our conversation on the Atlantic liner, Elliott? I never said so much for myself before or since, and I won’t do it now, thanks. Talk to Hawke and Bennett; they haven’t been on the rainbow road so long.”

“You said that night that you wanted to win this game so as to get out of grafting,” Elliott retorted.

“Well, so I do—only I know I won’t,” said Henninger.

“Do you know what I’m going to do?” remarked Hawke. “You’ll laugh, but I’m going to buy a half-interest in a big bee ranch in California. It’s an ideal life. The bees do all the work, and all you have to do is to lie in the shade and collect profits once in awhile. You can run a fruit farm on the side, and there’s big money in it.”

“That’s what I should like above all things,” said Margaret, who came aft at that moment.

“What will you do, Elliott?” queried Henninger, half-ironically.

“I don’t know,” said Elliott, vaguely, glancing up at the girl, who leaned against the rail, balancing herself easily as the dhow rolled. “The first thing is to make sure of getting away with the stuff. Henninger thinks we had better put in at Durban, Miss Laurie, and divide the gold and scatter it as much as possible.”

“What for? Will any one rob us?” asked Margaret, quickly.

“Yes—the government police,” said Bennett.

“But I thought—Haven’t we a right to the gold? Isn’t it ours?”

“Heaven knows it ought to be, after all we’ve gone through,” remarked Elliott.

“But isn’t it?” Margaret insisted.

“You’re not sophisticated enough, Miss Laurie,” said Henninger. “There’s always a claimant for as much money as this. The gold seems to have been stolen from the Transvaal government, and it’s certain that the English government will claim it—if they hear that it’s been recovered. But we don’t intend that they shall hear.”

“Then this gold belongs to the English government?”

“I thought you understood the situation. Legally, perhaps, it does, but—”

“Then I shall not take an atom of it,” said Margaret.

“But you must!” exclaimed Elliott. “We’re injuring no one—”

“I’m not a thief,” Margaret interrupted again, and walked forward.

The adventurers looked at one another, disconcerted, and Hawke climbed up the ladder to look with an alarmed countenance over the deck.

“She’s got to take it,” said Bennett.

“Yes, of course she must take her share,” agreed Henninger. “Gad, she’s the pluckiest woman I ever saw. She’s been a regular brick all through this thing.”

“She’ll take it or not, as she pleases,” said Elliott, in an unusually aggressive tone, and failing to grasp the humour of the situation.

“Maybe you won’t take any of it yourself,” Hawke satirized.

“There’ll be all the more for the rest of you if I don’t,” returned Elliott.

“The fact is, we’re all getting nervous and morbid,” Henninger remarked. “A good sleep is the best antidote, and I’m going to turn in.”

Bennett also swathed himself in his blanket and sought a soft plank by the lee rail, with the prospect of being rolled across the deck when the dhow should go upon the other tack. Hawke retired out of sight below, and Elliott was left to silence.

Under the stiffly drawn sails he could see Margaret still leaning over the bow. Behind him an Arab bore heavily upon the tiller-head, holding her steady, and it occurred to Elliott that the man could stab him in the back with the greatest ease. It would not be an unfitting conclusion for the adventure that was stained with so much blood already; and he imagined the sudden rising of the Moslem crew, the brief melée, the flash of pistols and knives, the massacre on the reeling deck. But he continued to sit on the keg, with his back to the helmsman, and did not trouble to turn around.

A yard beneath his feet were nearly two million dollars in hard gold; the treasure that had spun so much intrigue and mystery over three continents was in his power at last. But the price had been paid; there had been blood enough spilled to redden every sovereign or louis or double-eagle that might ever be minted from the metal. Elliott fancied he heard the crash of the Clara McClay on the reefs when all but two of her company had perished. He remembered the revolver drawn on the platform of the St. Louis train, and the bleeding figure of Bennett beside the rails. He saw vividly the gambling-rooms; he saw the missionary reeling back from the red knife; he saw Sullivan with the widening scarlet stain on his breast, and he heard again the fierce hail from Sevier’s steamer, and heard the crash as she rammed the rocks where the Clara McClay had perished months before. And, as he brooded there in the dark, there arose in him a loathing and a horror of the gold that had worked like a potent poison in the heart of every man who had known of it.

In the whole adventure there was but one period that had left no bitter taste. He remembered the interlude from the treasure hunt at Hongkong, and the bungalow on the Peak, where for a month there was neither the bewilderment of tangled mysteries nor the feverish excitement of greed. The heat, the rain, the miseries that had tortured him, he had already forgotten, or he remembered them only dimly as the discomforts that emphasized more keenly the graceful and domestic charm of such a home as he had never known before.

The Arab steersman droned softly to himself as he leaned on the creaking tiller behind. Margaret had not yet gone to her hammock. He could see her still at the bow, looking forward over the sweeping seas in the cloudy moonlight. She thought him a thief; she had as good as said so; and he watched her, feeling strangely as if everything depended upon her staying there till he was released from duty.

Bennett came up at midnight to relieve him, and Elliott went forward at once. But he could think of nothing in the manner of what he wanted to say, and after a few commonplaces he fell silent, and they leaned over the prow together, listening to the sucking gurgle and the hissing crash as the cutwater split the seas.

“I want you to see clearly just why I insisted on coming with you,” said Margaret, breaking the silence at last. “I didn’t understand it at all, then. My father had spoken of recovering this gold—he couldn’t have known that it was government money—and I supposed that it was right to do it. In fact, I felt almost as if he had left it to me. Then I had no money—nothing. I knew that I was dependent on you for everything. It was even your money that brought me from China; I know it was, though the consul said he advanced it to me. It nearly maddened me with shame, and—I didn’t know what to do. Only I knew that I couldn’t take anything more from you. I thought I had a right to a share of this gold, but I couldn’t even let you go and do the work for me. I had to help, and do my part—and so I did it.

“But now it’s all over. I understand it all as I didn’t before, and you see that I can’t take a cent of this money. I should feel myself a criminal as long as I lived. But I don’t blame you for taking it, if you feel that you can.”

“I’m not going to take any of it, either,” Elliott interrupted.

She was silent for nearly a minute, and then said, in a curious, almost harsh, voice, “Why not?”

“Because there are other things I value more—your good opinion, for instance,” said Elliott, with difficulty, feeling all the painful joys of renunciation. He wanted to say more; he struggled vainly for words, but after an ineffectual effort he fell back upon a practical question.

“What will you do, then?”

“I’ve been thinking of that,” she said. “I shall try to get something to do at the Cape. I can always make a living. I can do almost anything.”

“Oh, heavens! You mustn’t do that. You sha’n’t!” groaned Elliott.

“Why not?” she said, with a smile. “Do you know, it is almost a relief to have the weight of that terrible treasure taken away. It has been a sort of curse to every one, I think. But it seems a pity, doesn’t it, that we should get nothing at all for having worked so hard and travelled so far and risked so much. The government ought to refund our expenses, anyway.”

“Salvage! I should think so!” cried Elliott, smiting his hand on the rail. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Of course we have a claim for our trouble and expense, and we can collect it, too, if we turn in our share of the stuff to the Crown.”

“But I suppose they would allow us only a trifle, after all,” said Margaret.

“Not a bit of it. Twenty to fifty per cent. of the value is always paid for salvaging a cargo. Your share now is nearly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and at least a hundred thousand of that will be honestly, lawfully yours. Any court will award it to you.”

“But will Mr. Henninger—”

“Henninger and the others will never give up a cent of their share; I know that. We mustn’t spoil their plans, I suppose, so we will give them time to get safely clear. Then we will surrender our part of it, and present our bill for expenses, and say nothing about any more having been recovered. The Crown will be glad enough to get any of it back.”

“This is the best news of all!” said Margaret, with a long breath. “A hundred thousand dollars! That will be fabulous wealth to me! I can have all the things, and see all the things, and do all the things that I dreamed of all my life and never expected to realize. Now I believe I’m really glad to be rich again. Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Elliott muttered.

“I think we ought to try to use this money so as to justify having it,” Margaret went on. “It has cost so much misery and so many lives, and I want to spend it so as to make it clean again. I want to make others happy with it, as well as be happy myself. What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Elliott burst out. “I don’t value this money, whether it’s a hundred thousand or a million, not a straw. I’d throw it away; I’d blow it in, like Henninger—God knows what I’ll do with it. There’s only one thing that I really want I told you what it was at that hotel in New York, and you ordered me never to speak of it again. If I can’t have that I don’t care much what becomes of the money, or of anything else.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t speak of that—not now!” murmured Margaret; and as he hesitated she turned quickly away and slipped toward the stern companionway. “You won’t lose by waiting,” was what she left in a semi-audible whisper as she vanished, and Elliott had this to ponder on as he stood watching the heavy swell rolling blackly toward Africa, toward Durban, where the dhow was due in another day.

But it was really two days before she glided up the port and anchored innocently in the bay, looking anything but the treasure-ship she was. And now the most harassing, the most anxious and delicate part of the whole adventure was begun.

Margaret went on to Cape Town at once, with instructions to secure a maid in that city as a travelling companion and to sail direct for London. And in her absence the gold was taken ashore piece-meal, in pockets and travelling-bags and hat-boxes, and little by little exchanged for clean Bank of England notes and shiny sovereigns. Over $150,000 was sold in Durban, and then the party proceeded to Cape Town, where, following the same procedure, nearly twice as much was passed over to the banks for specie.

The rest, Henninger decided, could best be disposed of in America, and he was, besides, anxious to get out of British territory as soon as possible. Accordingly the dhow was dismantled, the crew paid off, the reis given a present of two hundred sovereigns above his salary, and Henninger, Hawke, and Bennett sailed for New York direct, with a mountain of trunks, each containing a few gold blocks packed among unnecessary clothing. And two days afterward Elliott took passage for England with six hundred and forty thousand dollars, being his own and Margaret’s share of the cargo of the Clara McClay.

Margaret was prepared for his coming, and between them the treasure was safely deposited in the bank, at which Elliott felt an incubus lifted from his mind. The next step was to secure an experienced marine lawyer to forward their salvage claims.

This gentleman, after passing through a stage of stupefaction at their unexampled scrupulosity, advised that a claim of forty per cent. of the value be made, in consideration of the circumstances of the case. They made it, and then there was long to wait. Red tape, Treasury tape, Admiralty tape, civil tape was unrolled to a disheartening length, and the new Transvaal Crown Colony even put in its claim, as the original owner of the bullion. In the midst of the delay Elliott received a message from Henninger:

“We have disposed of all our goods,” he wrote. “Go ahead and make the best terms you can. Hawke has gone to California to start his bee farm, but he thinks he will look into a few mining deals in Nevada before he gets there. Bennett is playing the races on a system. I am saving my money at present, but I see a chance to double my money in Venezuela. The treasure trail is a long trail, and we’re not at the end of the rainbow yet.”

And in England Elliott and Margaret were finding the latter stages of the treasure trail long indeed. The salvage case took a great deal of deciding; the courts appeared to be convinced that some occult dishonesty must be concealed beneath the offer to restore any part of the lost treasure, and haggled over the percentage in a manner, it appeared to Elliott, highly unworthy of the traditions of a mighty nation. Ultimately, however, a compromise was arrived at. The government would pay thirty-three per cent.; and Elliott surrendered the bullion and received back two hundred and twelve thousand dollars, which he divided equally with Margaret. Six days later they were at sea, bound out of Southampton for New York.

Surely, Elliott thought, this was the last of the long trail, as he listened to the regular “swish—crash!” on her bows that had become so odiously familiar; and he determined that all should be settled before he sighted American land.

“If I ever get ashore again,” he remarked to Margaret, “I’m going to the quietest, sleepiest country town I can find, and never set eyes on a steamer or a railway train again as long as I live.”

They were looking over the stern, where night had fallen on the heaving swell. It had rained hard, but was clearing; an obscured moon faintly lit the sea.

“And do some sort of good work,” said Margaret. “You’ve got ability, money, and every chance of a happy life.”

“It’s in your hands,” Elliott declared, feeling his opportunity.

“It’s not!” she cried, vehemently. “It’s in your own. You’re too strong to depend on any one else for your life’s success. I don’t like to hear that!”

“Listen,” said Elliott. “You wouldn’t let me say this when you were poor; perhaps you’ll hear it now when you are rich. I was going to give up every cent of my share of the gold to try to please you—to do what you thought was square. I’d have given up the whole ship-load—no, that’s absurdly small, for there simply isn’t anything in the world, past, present, or future, that I wouldn’t give up and call it a good bargain if it would make you care for me a little. The best time I ever had was when I was luckily able to help you, and now I could almost find it in my heart to be sorry that you have all you need, and don’t need me any more.”

She touched his arm ever so gently, and he turned and looked squarely at her.

“Not need you!—you!” was all she said.

The sudden throb of his heart made him gasp. The deck was full of people, but he put his hand hard down upon hers as it lay on the rail, and he felt her fingers curl up into his palm.

“Be careful,” said she, with a new, subtle thrill in her voice. “Oh, look!”

From the clearing sky astern the moon was now pouring a full, glorious flood upon the heaving Atlantic, where the heavy swell ran in ivory-crested combers. In the pure white light the foam glittered with prismatic colours, wave after wave, like a long broken rainbow fallen upon the sea, and sparkling with the streaks of phosphorescence of the steamer’s wake.

“The rainbow road,” as Henninger calls it; “the treasure trail,” said Elliott. “The trail’s ended.”

But Margaret shook her head. “No,” she said. “The rainbow road has just begun.”

THE END.