Ainslee's Magazine/Salvage Claims

by Henry C. Rowland

Salvage Claims

By Henry C. Rowland

Author of “Filling His Own Shoes,”
“Doing Good,” etc.

Chapter I.

IN going South to the great winter resort John Paul was merely following the line of least resistance. If half a dozen doctors had examined him in half a dozen days, not in consultation, but each one making his own diagnosis, there would have been half a dozen opinions on his case, and like Kipling's “Tribal Lays,” each one would probably have been right.

Nothing of this sort had happened to John Paul, first because he was himself enough of a scientist to feel that it was scarcely worth while making a bad job worse by trying to follow orthodox lines of treatment for his relief. He knew that his trouble was about the worst which could happen to a man, which is nervous collapse; with no taint of actual insanity to give it either excuse or something to use as a handle. He could not plead shell shock because his service in the war, while severe, had been in the nature of a physical athletic event and should have left him, by all rights, more fit than worse for the experience, as it should any good fighting man.

Through no distinct wrongdoing John Paul had found himself, his name, and his personality the joke of the nation through its press. He might have changed his name and gone to some other country, but to do so would have been the admission of a shame and disgrace which he felt to be undeserved.

Nor was there any especial stigma to be feared or criminal procedure, or even just cause for society's grin. But his exposure had been so sweeping, so ridiculous, so devoid of any heroic gesture which might relieve it, that he felt himself to be standing bare upon a bleak place exposed to a gusty gale of cruel mirth.

So for the present he desired merely to live on as decently as possible and let the circumstance spend itself. Being possessed of sufficient means, with a future prospect of greater ones, he decided to go where he might be at least as comfortable physically as possible until he was able to gather himself together sufficiently to show the world that he was not the fool. it thought him. He felt that he could not now grapple with such abysmal silliness so widely disseminated, for the world has a silly, senseless way of judging a man from the standpoint of its press publicity. He doubted even that it was worth while to grapple with it as dealt him by individuals, his friends, and family and the casual man upon the street.

Then, arriving at the great hotel, he found, not to his surprise, that his notoriety had preceded him. The clerk smiled upon glancing at his name, John Paul Jones, on the register. There was no lack of politeness or consideration in his reception—merely grins, as if all surrounding human nature wore a grin for him. He felt that if he should pick up a stray dog on the street, it would loll its tongue and survey him with canine ridicule.

Previous to his going South he had not slept very much. Sitting on a window seat, many stories up, in the great hotel, he had looked out upon the twinkling lights of the darkening city and felt them to be mean, glinting, little eyes from great couchant monsters which could find nothing better to do than amuse themselves with his derision. The noises of traffic came up to him in shrill giggles, or hoarse bellows and blabs of discordant mirth, and when the day came it appeared to survey him with that bland, contemptuous disregard of suffering which great, strong, busy creatures might feel for squirming, suffering insects grounded in the mire of their tread.

From this it may be seen that John Paul was actually in a pretty desperate way, principally because this thing had preyed upon his mind until its peace was totally disrupted. And he had sense enough to see the impossibility of fighting it back, so there was nothing for him to do except grin back and, being no buffoon, his grin was unconvincing even to himself.

Just what might have developed from such reactions as these, too long continued, one can hardly say. A man can come to some sort of understanding with his conscience, and if he be a criminal, he has at least the focal point of eluding pursuit. A great many men will say, with more or less arrogance, that their regard for public opinion is nil, and this may be true in respect to some particular quality of esteem for which they feel contempt. But no sane person can face the blatant ridicule of a whole great country's press, especially if he be one of the elect, which is to say one of birth and breeding and honorable record, and with that fastidiousness which is the birthright of any well-bred animal, whether he be a human or a hound or hunter, or even a lion.

The erosion of this stigma was etching into John Paul pretty deeply when, at the end of his first week at the place, a big woman in a bathing suit, generally voluptuous of build, but with steady, gray eyes under rather overhanging brows, her cheek bones strongly pronounced, gave him a level look as she was walking down into the water. There was something curious about this look, and it was directed toward him in response to a titter and some fugitive words which had reached her ear in passing a group of young men and girls, all more or less unclad.

“I'm going to introduce myself,” said she, “but not right away. I think I know something that might do you some good.”

John Paul got up wearily.

“I don't believe you,” said he, “but all the same, at this day and hour we're living in, it's so extraordinary to receive a proffer of friendship or even common courtesy that it makes one feel as if there must be some wonderful accident. I ought to warn you, though, that I'm the national joke.”

She rested one hand on her wide hip and looked at him with a quizzical smile.

“Well, it's some distinction to be a national anything,” said she. “A cartoon in a Sunday supplement is usually the first thing a newspaper reader turns to, especially if he's a man. Besides, there's another thing to remember—that a disgrace or any sort of undesired. publicity would cost you about a million dollars, to make lasting even for a week, You didn't do anything bad, anyhow.”

“That's just the trouble,” said John Paul.

She turned away with a sort of casual beckoning, and it struck him as strange that he could be talking and looking at such a superb creature with so little masculine emotion. She was older than he, John Paul thought, by five or six years perhaps, and yet there was a sort of agelessness about her which goes less with the human species than with certain of the lower animals, like deer or panthers, which are apt to be splendidly strong and supple almost up to the moment of their allotted span of years and which, unlike humans, have not imposed upon them the necessity of passing through years of juvenility which gives way with startling abruptness to another long span of senile decay. He had the peculiar feeling that this woman, who had seen fit to speak to him for some reason best known to herself, must have been a beautiful, full-powered creature from about the age of fourteen, and that she would keep on being one until the curfew rang for her to quench her fires at advanced age.

He followed her down to the water's edge and waded out after her, wondering a little if she were real and if she might not swim straight out until the brine took her and him into a sort of elemental solution and hoping a little bit that it would. Then, as they swam onward he noticed for the first time a yacht, a full-powered house boat of luxurious appointments, toward which his new friend was heading in an objective way.

It flashed, then, across John Paul's mind that while lunching on the terrace the previous day he had overheard, from a table ajoining, some comment on this yacht and that this comment Was not flattering. But the half-flippant, half-contemptuous references, which some months before would have stirred him to a sort of militant concern, had left him cold, made no permanent impression on his mind. He did not think that anything could ever affect him again or stir a fever in his blood any more than might the blood of a patient convalescing from yellow fever or cholera be rendered febrile by the proximity of a fresh case of either disease.

Swimming easily through the pellucid brine of a temperature and quality which seemed not only to rinse through his system with sweetening, purifying cleanliness, but to exercise upon it an exquisite massage, he found himself presently, and for the first time in many months, quietly amused. There was a quality so singular to this adventure, if such it promised, and addressed to himself of all persons! It was as if a battered prophet were being soothed wholesomely by the ministrations of a siren. Yet there had been no mockery or hint of malice in her casual, kindly, and scarcely-more-than-tacit invitation. He was convinced that she must know all about him, but to make sure of this, as they swam easily seaward, side by side, he asked:

“I suppose, of course, you know who I am.”

Her slight, answering smile showed a strong row of even teeth, and something in the greenish-gray eyes and slightly retroussé nose, with its delicately formed nostrils, suggested the full-bodied mermaids with which certain ancient marine artists were wont to decorate their impossible seas—less artistically, perhaps, for the delectation of strong sailor men—and which were sometimes to be found inscribed on early charts with galleasses and spouting dolphins.

“That's the reason I asked you to come out aboard and have a little chat, and drink a cup of tea.”

“Out aboard?” he asked. “Like this?”

“Why, yes,” she answered. “I fancy you've rather got over most of your ideas.”

John Paul gave a short laugh.

“You're right,” he answered. “I have.”

They swam on, then, in silence and came presently alongside the accommodation ladder of the house boat. John Paul's guide swung herself up strongly and with calm indifference to her swimming suit, which might have served in these days for a young girl of athletic habit, but seemed outrageous as a public costume for such a maturity of womanhood.

John Paul followed, curious to learn what it was all about while yet indifferent to the answer. The spring sunshine of the tropic latitude beat down with the mellow richness of some soft, sensuous world where the rigors of climate are not to be regarded. Nobody was in evidence aboard the house boat, and John Paul's guide led him to the awninged upper deck, where she seated herself indifferently in a wicker chair and motioned him to take another. Then, without making any comment she regarded him for a moment, thoughtfully, from under her full brows, reached for a cigarette, lighted it, and thrust the box across the table to him.

“Now why,” said John Paul, “have you extended this kindly hospitality? Just to rub the business in a little more?”

“Why, no,” she answered. “That would be scarcely possible, would it? I'm rather a kind-hearted woman and I felt sorry for you. If I found a castaway on the beach of a desert island, I'd offer what I had in the way of helping his material needs, and I had a feeling that you were a castaway of sorts, but a mental one.”

“It cuts deeper than that,” said John Paul. “I'm a castaway to the depths of all previous ethics and ambitions and principles and illusions—whatever goes to make up the consciousness of one's personality.”

“How did you happen to let yourself in for such a hopeless experiment?” she asked.

“Because I didn't consider it hopeless. It seemed to me to be the big idea. I had no end of backing socially and financially, and I had a conviction that the thing ought to be tried by somebody and that it might as well be me. I suppose that my conception of it was a good deal the same as that of the late kaiser for world's supremacy or Bryan for prohibition or Wilson for the League of Nations.”

She nodded.

“I thought it must be something of that sort. And what was the chief reason for its falling down?”

“Because I wasn't a big enough man, nor did I have sense enough to see, until too late, that the whole business was being craftily exploited to make a fool of and smash a tremendously potential political reformer—not myself, but my uncle.”

She nodded.

“Something like the dove-of-peace fiasco.”

“Yes, but worse by about a million times,” John Paul admitted bitterly. “Worse, because it was on a so much larger scale. I had always been a purist since college days, and settlement worker and would-be redeemer of mistaken women and prison reformer and all that sort of thing, and besides my own considerable fortune, my uncle had given me unlimited backing. Perhaps he had his reasons for it, too, held back from me, as I was always the figurehead, the superintendent and publicity agent and all that sort of thing, my uncle had given me unlimited backing. Perhaps he had his reasons for it, too, held back from me, as I was always the figurehead, the superintendent and publicity agent and all that sort of thing, while Uncle Amos sat back and watched to see how it was going to work out. By the way, would you mind telling me by whom I have the honor of being entertained?”

“I am Mrs. Evelyn Ord.”

“Of course,” said John Paul. “I should have known, but somehow I thought you were much older, and if you don't mind my saying so, much less attractive.”

She gave a little nod.

“I owe you a good deal for unpaid publicity,” said she. “I must admit that no critic or minister of the gospel from his pulpit or even fellow craftswoman ever handled my novels quite as roughly, or perhaps ferociously would be the better word, as you.” She smiled. “You see, John Paul, you went at me with such a flaming ardor of youth.”

John Paul looked at her steadily.

“Then this, I take it,” said he, “is in the nature of revenge.”

“Not a bit of it,” she answered promptly. “No more revenge than when two conspicuous public people of ideas diametrically opposed, but natures having a certain depth and breadth may clash, and one of them come a cropper. I merely thought it might amuse us both to talk over the battle while our wounds are convalescing.”

“That,” said John Paul, “is an inept simile. I can't see any scars on you, and I am not yet convalescent. In fact, I doubt that I ever shall be.”

“Oh, yes, you will!” she answered. "You are young and strong and your shoulders are broad, and human beings are rather like the bandar log. They chatter and grin and throw down sticks and nuts and then dash off and forget all about it.” She considered him thoughtfully for a moment. “I admit, though, that it must have been pretty awful while it lasted.”

“Awful is scarcely the word, Mrs. Ord. You see, we established this big colony as a sort of nucleus, and collected, with no end of argument and propaganda and unlimited expense, so many whom I thought to be sincere, and I selected our crowd with a view to its—what shall I say?—attractiveness. No doddering, senile, whiskered ranters or catty old women or crazed, fanatical, lantern-jawed youths, but bright, young, attractive people. Then, when the colony was going strong for the induction of decency and clean living and inculcation of so many old-fashioned ideas of modesty and propriety, and we were organizing, as you might say, missionaries to send to other fields and State legislatures, I began for the first time to get some inkling of what was really going on.”

“And then,” said Mrs. Ord, “the bombshell burst and you were hoisted on the petard of your very own publicity.”

John Paul's face whitened, and there came an expression about his mouth and eyes which doctors dread to see on the faces of their nerve patients.

“It was so terrible,” said he, “that even now, numbed as I am to some extent, I can scarcely get hold of it. The profligacy of this transcendental colony of mine appears to have been something which would need a French or Russian writer to describe. Then, once the exposure was sprung, it was like the breaking of the Croton dam. I was not even the archhypocrite, which would have been bad enough, but the archfool. I doubt if there was a single town or city in which I was not cartooned with the tin halo and the wings and all that sort of thing. More than that, some few of us might have been sent to jail for the rest of our lives if it hadn't been that the whole business was so sublimely ridiculous that the authorities overlooked the Mann law in the gust of horse laughter which went over the country. Besides that, every one saw that it was just a great, big, carefully handled plot on the part of his political enemies to kill forever the hopes of my uncle for any national office or honors, and they held him to be a very dangerous man.”

“How did your uncle take it?”

“Like the grim old philosopher he is. Besides, his business sense helped him through. When I went to see him, nearly insane, he snapped his jaws together like an old turtle and said, 'Well, you may be able to stop gambling and drinking and licensed prostitution, but when you tackle the oldest form of misbehavior in the world, you are up against too many private backers of it to get more than a kick and a grin, so let's take our medicine and work the advertising for what it's worth.'”

“Good logic from his point of view, but not from yours,” said Mrs. Ord, and added, “unless you expect to inherit some day.”

“Oh, that's apt to happen, I suppose,” said John Paul indifferently, “because Uncle Amos is a family-first sort of man! But it doesn't matter much to me as I have all I'm ever apt to need, and would probably have merely the trouble of giving it away.” He stopped speaking suddenly and stared at her appalled. Something in the sanity, the cool voice, the perfect calm and poise of the woman to whom he was talking brought back one of his strongest instincts, which was that of a well-ordered conventionality. He saw the absurd incongruity of their positions. Here he was, sitting upon the spacious upper deck of a very modern, well-appointed, cruising house boat. All about were those evidences of a scrupulous housekeeping and management by virtue of which every article seems in its place of its own accord as though responding to the order of some unseen agency with the discipline become automatic from excellency of management. There was not even a sound from below which might indicate a steward about his duties or waiting for a call.

And the most distracting thing about it was that here was he, John Paul, who had focused his life's best efforts for the suppression of that of which his hostess was the exponent, talking to her with the first tranquillity of soul which he had experienced since the upheaval of his whole mental system and order of thought. He, John Paul, a young man fastidious always to the last degree, the enemy of mixed bathing, who had always regarded even his own plunge in the very ocean a good deal as he had regarded his plunge in his tub, sitting there half naked and wholly unashamed and discussing the most important things that life had ever held for him with a charming woman similarly unclad.

It did not flash across his mind that such a situation might have obtained through hazards of catastrophe, shipwreck, or earthquake, or the like. Neither did it occur to him that he might be the marionette of a self-willed woman possessed of a personality which enabled her to disregard all orthodoxy and established conventions,

No explanation flashed through John Paul's mind for the simple reason that this gangliated organ was numbed beyond the possibility of flashing.

But what forced itself most upon him was the contrast between their inherent points of view and the reposeful ease in which these were now being discussed, the first restful conversation which he could remember to have indulged in since the collapse of his high endeavor. Hitherto there had been a sense of antagonism even in discussions with persons who avowedly were allied with his cause. There mostly had been conducted in drawing-rooms or studies of palatial homes with a certain studied ceremony and an immaculate observance of good form. And yet, these conversations had been held invariably under the burden of self-consciousness on both sides and the consideration of diction and phraseology and the unmistakable hostility of those who seek less to express than to impress. Yet here, now, he was talking over the affair with a woman whose writings had been to him an abomination and against whose works he had railed with an invective compared to which it seemed to him that Cicero's invective of Cataline would be an extenuation. And he felt himself to be so entirely at ease. There was in him the conviction that her kindness was neither a beau geste nor the result of curiosity nor malice. And they were in their bathing suits, dripping ones at that, with little puddles of water forming under their feet and trickling away with the pitch of the deck. If also she might not have been given a unanimous verdict by sculptors as a woman of perfect physical beauty, there was that about her which was infinitely satisfying, such as one finds in a type depicted to ennoble the physical countenance of any epic idea of which the symbol is femininity.

As John Paul gradually was drawn under the influence of this impression there came a noisy interruption. The pretty house boat, this latter not in the English sense, but in the American one of a full-powered seagoing vessel, appeared about to be boarded by a band of sirens. There were cries and splashings alongside, and flashing arms and heads coifed with flaming kerchiefs, and a trim, mahogany launch which appeared to be convoying these mermaids under the direction of a blond Swede quartermaster, and in the stern a Japanese with a consignment of stores.

“Here come my guests,” said Mrs. Ord. “I've got a trio of pretty girls which are precisely the sort you've launched your crusade against—in, I should say at a pinch, all respects.”

John Paul made a gesture of indifference.

“They are the victors,” said he. “My crusade has gone to pieces, so that, I suppose, to judge by all historic precedent, it must have been based on a wrong idea.”

His hostess leaned forward.

“It was,” said she earnestly. “Any idea based on the coercion of mass morality is wrong. Because you see, John Paul, mass morality is not wrong. If it were, the world would go to smash, or rather it would have gone to smash ages and ages ago.”

John Paul shook his head.

“I don't agree with you,” said he, “but as a flattened proselyte, I am not in the position to dispute you.”

“Then why not have a real uncensored look at real uncensored people? Come out and be my guest for a few days, or if you don't feel up to that just yet, keep your quarters at the hotel and come out and play around with us. Start to-night for dinner, eight.”

John Paul rose.

“In my bathing suit?” he asked.

“No, in flannels. We change the uniform at sundown. Would you like to be set ashore in the launch or would you rather swim?”

“I'll swim, thanks,” said John Paul. “I'm just beginning to feel as if I'd grown some arms and legs.”

Chapter II.

When, two hours later, John Paul crossed the terrace on his way to the landing, he was conscious of a curious change of attitude toward surrounding people and things which, conversely, seemed to have wrought an even greater change in him.

Up to the time of his talk with Mrs. Ord he had passed through several phases—overwhelming horror, crushing shame, a frantic, impotent desire in some way to justify himself, and finally, a sort of cold, indifferent aloofness, turning a face of Oriental impassivity to such friends and acquaintances as he happened to meet.

But John Paul was now conscious of a sense of restored location, or, more properly, a new, strange, but definite location which seemed, in the slang of the day, to have “got him somewhere.” He was going over deliberately to the camp of the enemy. It is better to be a prisoner than an outcast. It was as if the soldier of some lost cause, who had been disarmed, then told to clear out, and left to wander about no-man's land, had been taken over by the enemy host. Perhaps the best of the business for John Paul lay in the fact that whereas he had suffered passively, he was now doing something active. He knew that his performance in becoming a guest and friend of Mrs. Ord would bring a storm of fresh, ironic ridicule, and he was rather glad of it, because, at least, he was acting with his eyes open where previously he had been a myopic dupe.

A harbinger of this was almost immediately presented to him, for, on his way down to the landing, he fell in with an acquaintance with whom he had already exchanged words at the resort. This was a man named Delancey Fisher, known generally as a clubman and sort of little brother to the rich, but whom John Paul, in his publicity campaign, had discovered to be a sort of keyhole listener and boudoir spy in the pay of a society publication, and he smiled a little grimly when Fisher asked him casually how he was managing to amuse himself.

“Not badly,” John Paul answered. “I'm just off to dine aboard the Lotus with Mrs. Ord.”

“My word!” gasped Fisher. “Then it was you, after all, I saw swimming out with the seductive Evelyn.”

“Why, yes,” John Paul answered; “she's taken me under her wing, in a manner of speaking.”

“Well,” Fisher answered, “I'll say it's some wing, but really, old chap, do you happen to know just the sort of crowd you're getting into?”

John Paul raised his eyebrow

“Do any of us ever know that? he asked. “You might mention, if it interests you, Fisher, that having found no great amount of good in uplifting work, I purpose to enjoy myself a little if I can manage it.”

Fisher looked at him reflectively.

“Well,” said he, “I don't know but that you're right. Whatever else may or not have been said of Evelyn Ord and her books, I've never heard her charged with any lack of courage in her broad convictions, and more wounded soldiers were cheered up in hospitals by reading her books than ever were by reading tracts. If you happen to be feeling sore from being made——” he paused.

“National fool?” asked John Paul smoothly. “Well, I don't any longer, and I think it will be amusing to look over the other side of the trenches.” And, with a brief nod, he passed on and got into the glittering launch and was carried swiftly out aboard the house boat.

It was a very different, detached segment of human activity. A gramophone was spraying the still air with dance music and on the spacious upper deck bright figures were weaving and coalescing like the chips of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. An Oriental steward went skimming past the rail with a tray from which came the flash of crystal. Two little Pekingese began to yap a welcome at the launch. Evelyn Ord gave John Paul a friendly little wave from the upper deck, then met him at the head of the companionway. She looked more slender in her evening gown, also a little older.

“You've sloughed off some of your despond already, John Paul,” said she approvingly, and tapped him on the arm. “Your face is not so drawn.”

“You did me good,” he answered. “I was thirsty for a little of the milk of human kindness.”

“Well, I've got the reputation for being a good provider in that respect,” she answered and glanced over her round, bare shoulder. The music stopped abruptly. “Come here, girls,” she called, “and get acquainted with the vanquished enemy to mirth.”

Three prettily gowned young women came smilingly to greet John Paul. His immediate impression of them was not important because they happened to be of the type as myriad in America as parrakeets in the jungle—bright, chattering, luxuriant, and gay. They inspected John Paul with a sort of bold but friendly curiosity.

“Were you really the enemy to mirth?” asked one of them, a dark, spectacular girl with violet eyes and a skin so fine that one could scarcely have felt its touch.

“From the amount of mirth of which I was the innocent cause,” John Paul answered, “I should say that my sentiment toward it was hardly worth considering.”

“And I should say,” broke in another of these damsels, “that you had an awful lot of it coming to you.”

“We three,” a fair-haired girl informed him in a voice which suggested one of the chorus saying her few, treasured lines, “are the Laugh Sisters. Evelyn is the source of supply and we dispense it, like waitresses.”

“I warn you, though, John Paul,” said Mrs. Ord, “that this is not a free dispensary.”

“Pay institutions are always best,” said John Paul. “Just what is the current tender here, the medium of exchange, and what is its unit? I want to pay my shot.”

“Well, I'll tell you, John Paul,” said Mrs. Ord. “To make you feel at home and simplify the situation to your tired mind, just consider everything about me and my crowd, habits, theories, behavior, point of view, to be all precisely opposite to what you've always advocated. Keeping that in mind and acting on it, you will never get in wrong.”

“A big, bold order,” said John Paul. “However, I'm on.”

“You are to consider yourself as seeing the whole picture in the negative from what your former vision has been in the positive,” said Mrs. Ord. “Think of it in this way. You have, in your charities and settlements and homes and asylums and things, taken many a poor, bruised butterfly and tried to bring her back to your idea of high morale by doctrines kind but rigid. Now you are to think of yourself from the reverse of the picture.”

“A bit bewildering,” said John Paul, “but I think I get you. In the present case I am the broken blossom, made brittle by the frost of virtue and with petals badly crumpled. Your effort is to be to restore me to a normal joie de vivre nearly destroyed from having been so damnably good.”

“Beautifully expressed,” said Mrs. Ord. “We want to warm you to life, by a sort of transfusion of what you have always considered wrong and forbidden. We do not consider anything to be wrong so long as it is kind and has the quality of beauty, nor anything forbidden which helps to make the world happier and to make people love to live in it.”

“An absolutely ample and joyous pagan program,” said John Paul. “I have the honor, herewith, to subscribe to the limit. Now where do we begin?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Ord, glancing over her splendid shoulder at the steward, “I think we might as well begin with dinner.”

If John Paul's Lucifer crash had not been so complete, so stunning, it is likely that the daring tenets of this new cult might have appalled him. His frankly stated doctrine was of a sort which might have been taken as a declaration of independence of all established convention, and perhaps it was. But, he reflected as he sipped his cold, green-turtle soup, there were two jokers in the deck—a zero and double zero. The carte blanche had a rider, the gyroscope of unlimited indulgence, a stabilizer. This ample-natured high priestess had declaimed that all must be controlled by kindness and beauty.

Well, then, here were a lot of trumps thrown into the discard at the start. The conditions spiked the guns of long-range libertinage, put a taboo on wild and reckless pleasure, double crossed most of the cardinal sins. They cut out drunkenness, though not drink, cut out gambling to a point where ugly wounds of loss might be inflicted, while yet permitting gaming to a degree where nobody would be hurt. There could be in this religion no threat of damning anybody, with hell-fire or anything else. Love, while in no way barred, must be controlled by kindness and beauty.

Turning these things quickly in his mind while the girls chattered and sipped champagne, and Mrs. Ord injected the talk with flashes of wit and humor, it struck John Paul that here was a sort of Arcadian religion which might be pretty nearly perfect if honestly observed, and yet a religion at which the clergymen of all religions, and even most well-ordered laymen, would hold up their hands with horror. And as the evening wore on and he found himself for the first time in his strictly ordered life having a really joyful, jolly, social time, he was seized by a wonderful idea. What if it should be the amazing truth that his former theories had been all wrong and that the outrageous collapse of his own ambitious effort to enforce them might not have been the very best thing the have happened him?

The talk, especially that of the hostess, was like her books, of a frank and startling breadth which sometimes made him gasp. But it also made him laugh. He drank enough wine to take the raw edge off his nerves and give such a relish to his food as he had never felt before. Some other guest came over from the shore, members, apparently, of Mrs. Ord's wide-open cult, and they played some bridge for reasonable stakes. They danced. They shimmied, but prettily, as fairies might shimmer in a dance. John Paul felt that a flirtation would not have been repulsed, but, though excited by this strange and new experience, he still preserved a sort of automatic decorum.

And then at midnight, with a great, yellow, tropic moon hanging like a lantern overhead, a swimming party was proposed. And the moon looked down on a revel which some months before would have made John Paul sick with furious revolt and aroused in him such a militant Puritanism and burning fervor of fanatical religious protest, that, had the power been vested in him, he would have been capable of placing these revelers behind prison bars for months, inflicting other penalties rigorous and cruel.

Mrs. Ord drew him aside.

“What do you think of it all,” she asked; “frankly and honestly?”

John Paul shook his head.

“I don't think I can tell you just yet,” said he. “My paralyzed faculties were open to possession by any sort of new beliefs, but all this makes them groggy.”

She nodded.

“I think I understand.”

“Until to-night,” said John Paul. “I had never drunk a drop of anything for pleasure or in a social way. I had never played for money, though that does not say much for me, as many of my legitimate investments have been gambles. I had never sported about nor scarcely even looked at slightly clad girls. My dancing had been rather like a funeral rite, in a stiff and formal way, and a social duty I detested. I had scarcely ever heard a risqué story. The people I frequented never told them. The whole thing confuses me more than anything else.”

“Do you like it?” asked Mrs. Ord.

“I can't even tell you that. I've had an awfully good time, but I doubt if this sort of thing could ever really appeal to me.”

“How about permitting it for other people?”

“That's the toughest question yet, but I'll say this much, that I am convinced that it's no use to try to suppress it and that to do so might make things worse.”

Her level gaze rested on him.

“Have you ever been in love?” she asked

“No; not even in a stately, virtuous fashion.”

“How in the world did you ever get that way?”

“I didn't get that way. I just always was that way. I was a good little boy, but husky and athletic, and when the other boys made fun of me I used to show them some pretty good scrapping. It seems to me that I've been scrapping all my life. I never knew any immediate family. My uncle brought me up, and he used to watch me curiously as if wondering always when I was going to break out. He approved my habits and trend of mind, but looking back I can see that it was not because he was a good man, but because he was a business man and he saw in me a safe successor and one not apt to throw away his money in foolish ways.”

“And then,” said Mrs. Ord, “you did.”

“Well,” said John Paul, “if it could have been done any more completely and on any more magnificent scale of the sublimely ridiculous, I'd like to hear about it.”

“What induced you to try such a thing?”

“Disappointment over the results of the war. I'd fought pretty hard and seen some fearful things and kept nerved up by telling myself that after all it was all going to be worth while and justified in teaching us thrift and honesty and cleanliness of life and all the best ideals of a purified humanity. And then what was the result? Insane extravagance, rampant thievery, rottenness of living, and a perfect tidal wave of debauchery and crime.”

“Quite so,” admitted Mrs. Ord cheerfully. “So you thought it up to you to start a nice little crusade of your own.”

“That's about the size of it. And I got badly bumped, and now as I look around your happy, floating home I am not quite sure but that it was the best thing that could have happened me.”

“I think so,” said Mrs. Ord. “The next thing to happen to you will be that you will fall in love. I believe that in trying to humanize the country that big beast turned around and did it to yourself.”

“That is a comforting way to look at it. It bucks up my self-respect to think that it needed the whole darned country to change my mind, and as for the falling in love—well, if you don't look out, you might find that your healing process has opened a deeper wound.”

Mrs. Ord gave her quiet little laugh.

“It doesn't do a kiddie any harm to fall in love with his nurse, if she's a good woman.”

Chapter III.

Fisher made it a point to fall in with John Paul the following day.

“Well, old chap,” he asked, “did you enjoy your party?”

“Yes,” answered John Paul, “I did. I suppose, Fisher, that you see coming to you quite a little fun and profit still out of my affairs.”

“I don't know,” said Fisher frankly. “To tell the truth, 1 am rather hesitating about whether or not to exploit them at all.”

“Is that a delicate way of hinting that if I'd rather not, you might be induced to leave them alone?” John Paul asked.

“Oh, no!” said Fisher. “So far I've never gone in for blackmail, though it seems to be a paying business these days. But the point is, John Paul, that I think you've been ridden hard enough and that everybody else probably feels the same about it. When a man's public ridicule has been on so sweeping a scale, there's a general tendency to lay off him for good. About a quarter of a century ago a naval lieutenant did a daring, brilliant act, and then because a swarm of fool girls flocked up and kissed him, he was made the laughing-stock of the country. But once the laughter had died away they dropped him like a joke that everybody knows.”

“Good press logic,” John Paul admitted. “I got it worse and so I suppose it will be over sooner.”

Fisher started to speak, then hesitated. John Paul noticed this pausing to consider and said:

“Let's have it, Fisher. I'm past being seriously offended now.”

“Well, now,” said Fisher slowly, “I hate to butt in, but I have still some decency left, though Heaven knows how it's lasted out. I think you've had about the rottenest deal of any man I ever knew, and I'd rather hate to see you get deeper in the bog. Now tell me, old chap, have you got any clear line on this crowd you've thrown in with?”

“Not very,” said John Paul, “but really, Fisher, it doesn't matter in the least. Looking at it from the viewpoint of personal feeling, it's worth a lot to a man who's been through what I have to get cheered up and taken away from himself, if only for a few hours. I'm quite ready and willing to stand the bill when presented.”

Fisher seemed to turn this over in his mind, then asked:

“What sort of bill?”

“Any sort.”

“That's a sporting proposition, but if you're thinking in terms of money, my boy, then I can tell you that none of that sort will be presented. Evelyn has scads and scads of it, and if you think that she might let you in for matrimony, then you're wrong again.”

“Well, what then?” John Paul asked.

“I don't know that I can quite explain what I mean, but, to put if roughly, her bill might be something of this sort—the annexing of you, not as a lover or fetch-and-carrier or anything of that sort, but as a sort of domestic familiar, a man to be in evidence about her premises and give some sort of countenance to some of the raw stuff she pulls off.”

“In other words,” said John Paul, “a guide, counselor, and friend.”

“Call it a friend,” said Fisher. “She'll do the guiding and counseling herself.”

“She's shown herself a good friend to me,” said John Paul.

“Precisely. Because she knows darned well that you happen to be that particular sort of typical American of pure old stock that can never rest quite easy in his bed or grave until convinced that he's paid his shot, and then some. This squaring of what you might feel to be your debt is apt to take a form that might, later on, be terribly inconvenient, to say the least, especially if you happen to be married. You might be able to square it with yourself, but never in this good, green world could you square it with your exclusive set.”

John Paul reflected for a moment. He had always rather despised Fisher while tolerating him with a quasi-friendliness, just as a well-bred young American with the courage to engage himself in the municipal politics of his town might feel a guarded friendliness with some political power for whom he should, according to all principles and knowledge of the individual, feel nothing but abomination. But now, for the first time, there rose in John Paul's sentiment a liking for Fisher, no matter what he was.

“I get you, Fisher,” said he. “The thing you're driving at, I take it, is that Mrs. Ord, with all her faults and virtues, might prove a jolly good woman to let alone.”

“That's about the size of it,” said Fisher. “I've said a little more than I really meant to, but you're a grown-up he-person and you can do as you like about it.

“Mind you, though,” he added, as though with a sudden afterthought of caution, “I haven't knocked her.”

“On the contrary,” said John Paul, “it strikes me that you've been paying her a series of very high compliments.”

“Well, that's one way of looking at it,” Fisher admitted. “And not that I care a hang, but just to gratify an idle curiosity, hasn't it ever struck you that the sort of gumshoe rubberneck you think me to be might really hate to see a good man go all to smash?”

“No,” said John Paul slowly, “I must admit that aspect of the case had never occurred to me at all.”

“That's just the trouble with you proud fellows,” Fisher complained. “It never seems to get through your highly educated domes that society reporters are often crooks of broken ideals who have got devilish and pessimistic because the folk who ought to be the arbiter elegantiæ fall down on the water jump. We have an idea, some darned few of us, of a system of preserving an aristocracy, and we hate to see rank outsiders bulging into it and rigging the race.”

“Quite so,” said John Paul. “You make it your high endeavor to keep the sheep and the goats apart.”

“Right. Our conscientious mission is to ride herd on the social drove and to prevent stampeding by gentle process of milling and free use of the quirt, and to stop efforts at brand changing and generally police the outfit and its range. But, of course, we can't be expected to do all this for nothing.”

“Of course not,” John Paul admitted. “Since you are the police force of social reputations, you are entitled to your little graft. By the way, I never see your illuminating sheet, but I suppose that Mrs. Ord is one of its stars.”

Fisher shook his head.

“Her name scarcely ever appears,” said he. “In the first place, it's hardly worth while to knock a woman who writes such books as hers and gets them past the censor by some sort of magic and sells about a million copies a year. To slap her for misbehavior would be rather like spanking the Venus de Milo for indecent exposure—sheer wested effort. And besides, nobody's ever been able to prove any actual misbehavior on her.”

John Paul was conscious of a certain relief.

“I rather imagined as much,” said he.

“Well,” said Fisher, “that “doesn't make her any the less dangerous or in danger. Socrates was a man of great personal rectitude, and yet they condemned him to death on the charge of corrupting the youth. By the way, John Paul, if you had taken the trouble to read my secret writings, you'd have found that you'd had one friend in an unexpected quarter.”

John Paul's face showed his keen surprise and a sudden pleasure.

“Really, Fisher? I must say that was decent of you. I took it for granted that you'd roasted me to the handle.”

“I didn't roast you at all. I always loved you purists about as much as a hobo loves his bath, but it roused some latent sense of fair play in me to see the rotten means they used to let you down. You may not know, John Paul, but some of our best people are such slimy, slinking Pharisees as to make us who check them up or squeeze them for a little blackmail look like ruddy angels of light.”

“It wouldn't take a special committee to convince me of that,” said John Paul with a smile. He glanced at his watch.

“I won't keep you longer from your date,” said Fisher, “but I wish you'd get me a bid out aboard, if you can see your way to it.”

“I can,” said John Paul promptly, “and I will.” His opinion of this man had undergone considerable change. “Provided, of course, the lady has nothing against you.”

“She's got no reason to,” said Fisher, “but I shall whisper once more in your ear that in my opinion it would be rather better for a chap like yourself, if she weren't to get to like you too well.”

“Now, see here!” said John Paul. “Just what are you trying to say?”

“Well,” said Fisher slowly, “let's put it this way. Unless I've got her wrong, she is a very capable absorber of personalities.”

“I see. But so far she's proved a shock absorber for me, and, as I've already remarked, that's worth a lot.”

“Right,” said Fisher, and with a nod moved off.

Chapter IV.

One day about a week later, John Paul got a boatman to set him out aboard the Lotus. He found Mrs. Ord alone, her three girl guests having gone ashore. To classify these young ladies was impossible for John Paul. They were of rather more than average intelligence, he thought, and gave all surface indications of good breeding and education, but he was unable to understand quite how the reputations of such girls could be maintained under the chaperonage of a woman who, by her writings and freedom of living, appeared to keep a perfect shower of bonnets going over the mill. Then Mrs. Ord enlightened him.

“These maids of honor of mine are what you might call social refugees,” said she. “They are girls of good family who, not through any error or indiscretion, have deliberately preferred to defy Mrs. Grundy and have a good time rather than obey her and have a fairly stupid one.”

“A good many got that habit during the war,” John Paul observed.

“Yes, and it's been a sort of stampede. How is your state of soul t0-day?”

“Strongly convalescent, but I wish I knew just why you so kindly undertook my case.”

She gave him her level look, that cool look which yet had a curious glow in it.

“Because,” said she, “I want you for a dear acquaintance.”

“Why not a dear friend?”

“There are too many strings on friendship. I prefer to have my courtiers foot-loose. There is no oath of allegiance to be taken or protection promised when I make a convert. Have I made one of you?”

“Yes, to yourself. But I'm not sure about your theories. I'll have to watch their working out a little. But as for you personally, I warn you now that I am in danger of growing very fond of you.”

“Why?”

“There are a number of reasons,” John Paul answered slowly, “but the big one is something which I can't quite get. I find about you some sort of comic all-womanness, and I can feel a richness and a sort of tremendous allure which is a bit upsetting. The working of your mind is like a gentle intellectual massage—what the Japs call lumi-lumi—and when you move you possess a flowing grace which is almost a caress. Physically, you are the type I most admire, with your perfectly rounded femininity draping a splendid strength. If 1 had to spend the rest of my life on a happy desert island and were given my choice of a dozen carefully selected female companions, or you, I should choose you.”

“You appear,” said Mrs. Ord, “to have the makings of the perfect lover.”

“And what is your idea of that?”

“One who would keep on loving, not as a friend or mate but as a lover.”

“And do you think,” asked John Paul, “that is would be possible to keep on being always a lover without the mate part of it?”

“I am convinced,” said Mrs. Ord, “that such is the only way in which it could possibly be managed. You see, John Paul, you have to keep on wanting to keep on loving.”

John Paul nodded.

“I see your point, which is, that one cannot preserve one's appetite immediately after a satisfying meal.”

“Precisely. The great poets and tragedians have always understood this,”

“Wouldn't that sort of lover or loving become a good deal of a strain, or a bit of nuisance?” asked John Paul.

She shook her head.

“No more than the constant yearning for an ideal.” Her eyes fastened upon his and at something in their depths, John Paul's heart raced off tumultuously. “I should like to have a lover like that, John Paul. I have always longed for such a lover—one whom I should always want in fullest measure and one who would always want me with equal ardor, so that we would both keep on yearning and yearning and yet never bring our love to consummation.”

“A big order,” muttered John Paul.

“It would only be possible to a thinker like myself and a thinker and purist like yourself. But one would have to make up one's mind resolutely at the first that there was to be no final culmination.”

“And how would you keep this ardor fed?” John Paul asked.

She tilted back her head and looked down at him along the line of her soft cheeks, and her lips, which were wide and delightfully full; the upper, curled, wore a baffling smile.

“Just as we are feeding it now,” said she.

John Paul drew a deep breath, then shook his head.

“I'm afraid I wouldn't be up to it,” said he. “It seems to me that what you describe belongs purely to a maternal or filial or fraternal love, but could scarcely exist between unmated lovers.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Ord, “it's being pretty constantly proved that it can't continue between mated ones.”

The conversation was interrupted at this moment in a very tawdry manner, as often happens in the case of lofty communions, a good deal as a man might get a violent cramp of the leg. when kneeling at his devotions.

John Paul, glancing idly toward the shore, saw approaching a little rowboat, the bow ridiculously out of water, the stern almost submerged from the considerable bulk of Fisher who was sitting there, his knees drawn up, his stick between them, cigarette in mouth, and hat tilted back on his head. The motive power of this shallop was a diminutive colored boy who appeared to be making gallant efforts to reach the water with the blades of his oars, so that the craft, as a whole, had somewhat the expression of a squat beetle with two legs staggering out painfully at an angle of forty-five degrees.

“Speaking of spiritual love,” said John Paul disgustedly, “here comes a chronicler of the carnal sort—the chief scandalmonger of the four hundred.”

Mrs. Ord looked in the direction of the boat, then laughed.

“I can never soar without getting a gnat in my eye,” said she. “It's 'Len' Fisher. Now what the devil does he want?”

“There's no great harm in Fisher,” said John Paul, “and his gig shows at least an admirable democracy.”

The flat skiff staggered alongside; then Fisher, without waiting for an invitation, came up the ladder. In no wise embarrassed at Mrs. Ord's cool bow, or John Paul's frown, he tossed away his cigarette and approached them with the peculiar jauntiness often to be found in heavy, flaccid men.

“I am sorry to intrude, Mrs. Ord,” said he, “but partly by accident and partly through my gumshoe affiliations I have just learned something which I thought you ought to know immediately.”

Mrs. Ord's brows straightened, and John Paul, watching her, saw that here, not far beneath the surface, lay masked a temperament of no small voltage.

“Really?” she answered in a purring quality of voice. “That is most kind of you, I'm sure.”

“Why, yes,” said Fisher, “it really is, because it's almost certain that the tip will be traced to me and not greatly to my profit. I've just learned that your house boat is to be raided shortly after dark.”

Mrs. Ord appeared to stiffen.

“Raided?” she asked.

“That is the only fitting word,” said Fisher. “There have been some complaints about the gayety of your parties and the considerable extent of your cellar, if a boat can be said to have a cellar, These buzzards are planning a swoop down on you to-night.”

Mrs. Ord did not look particularly disturbed. In fact, her face cleared a little.

“That's mighty good of you, Fisher,” said she. “You're dead sure about it, I suppose?”

“I wish I were as sure of getting a check in time to pay my laundry bill” said Fisher.

“Oh, don't let that bother you!” said Mrs. Ord. “I'll send you half an hour's income if worst comes to the worst. In fact, I've felt for some time that I owed you something for not knocking my crowd, and this would have been a perfectly beautiful scoop. The question is, what am I to do?”

“There's only one thing to do,” said Fisher, “and it's got to be done with wings on it. That's to pull up and out of here. Sometimes these joy killers can't wait.”

Mrs. Ord stamped upon the deck,

“But that's just the cursed part of it,” said she. “I can't get out. I gave my captain and engineer twenty-four hours' leave this morning, and not having enough seagoing joy riding, they've taken the Indian River trip and won't be back until to-morrow.”

“Well,” said John Paul, “I don't wear my name for nothing. I'm a perfectly good navigator, and could run this pleasure packet anywhere you like, if we could collar somebody to keep the wheels going round.”

“As for that,” said Fisher, “before I came a cropper in the Grand Box Cañon which abuts on Trinity Church, I did a lot of motor yachting and used to go in for the New York-Bermuda races. What I don't know about marine gas engines would fill a volume, not a large volume, but that same one about the size of 'Who's Who' with the same print. Small talk aside, though, I'm quite sure I could urge this one on its way after I'd felt its pulse and looked at its throat and taken its temperature.”

Mrs. Ord looked from one to the other a good deal as the Queen of Sheba might have eyed the messengers of good news. She laughed.

“Here's a situation,” said she. “Evelyn Ord, the infamous authoress of 'Wings of Gauze,' et cetera, et cetera, snatched from the clutches of the law about to fasten on her for wholesale booze running and operating a gambling joint within the three-mile limit, and snatched from the law by John Paul Jones, the purist prophet, and Delancey Fisher, the moral mentor of Town Troubles. Oh, dear—what fun!”

“It would be a great lay for me,” said Fisher, “because it would delay embarrassing explanations to that ten-acre hash and hold-up factory over in the shade of the sheltering palms.”

“It is all that's needed to put the finishing touches on me,” said John Paul, “and that's precisely what I'm looking for. But I think that I'd better run over and settle up for Fisher and myself. It is bad luck to go to sea without paying your laundry bill. Any sailor will tell you that. Besides, there's really no need for adding bad debts to our other crimes.”

“Then go,” said Mrs. Ord. “On your way as fast as the launch will carry you, and bring back the girls. They're at the Casino.”

“Are we all gassed up?” Fisher asked.

“We are all everything up. To tell the truth, I've rather wondered if something of this sort might not happen. Where shall we go?”

“Oh, that's the least of our cares!” said Fisher. “In fact, mine are already over.”

Mrs. Ord pressed a button and the steward appearing, told him to bid the quartermaster get away the launch.

When she had gone below Fisher looked at John Paul.

“Just tell the valet to throw my things into the bag, old man, will you?” said he. “And I say, I don't want to add to your chagrin, but this is actually your party.”

“My party?”

“'Fraid so. You see, a bunch of the old cats over there, toms as well as tabbies, have been watching you pretty close and buzzing about your fresh departure. So finally, they got their heads together and fixed it to put a fresh one over on you.”

The tensity of eyes and jaws which had marked the features of John Paul on his arrival and then been ironed away within the last ten days returned with grim emphasis at this bit of news.

“My word!” said he. “They thought I hadn't been scored off hard enough?”

“Well, I don't know as it was entirely that,” said Fisher with nicety, “but Evelyn has always been a sort of poisoned dart in their pure souls, and no doubt they saw the lovely chance of an enfilading fire to get two birds with the same stone. Very likely some of them may have looked at it from a different slant and felt sorry for you and wanted to rescue you from burning the little of your scorched soul that was left.”

“They mean to make a thorough job of it,” said John Paul, “so we've got to give them credit for that at least.”

“Yes,” said Fisher, “let's give everybody credit for everything they've got, but in the meantime let's see what we can do to fool them and be consistent with the spirit of the age.”

“Well, then,” said John Paul, “let's forehand it. To take an estimate of what we've got, can you really run the motors of this boat or are you simply stalling along?”

“I can run them,” said Fisher. “I always had a bit of knack at machinery and I spent about twelve hours patching up the engines on a New York-Bermuda motor-boat race when the mechanics were all laid out from a combination of gas fumes, raw eggs, whisky, and seasickness.”

“Well, then,” said John Paul, “go down and look things over and I'll be off ashore and get us cleared.”

Chapter V.

To John Paul, coming out from under the double awnings to get aboard the launch, there seemed to be something a little off with his eyes. As a matter of fact, it was merely because his eyes were uncommonly perceptive to color that they were conscious of certain subtle changes in the solar spectrum. The sun was still bright and doing its best to justify the statements of its perfection in that region, printed in the leaflets of railroads and hotels.

But, nevertheless, it was off color, and John Paul had not enough of sea experience to place the blame where it belonged. He had not boasted in stating himself to be a perfectly good navigator, but he had perfected and practiced this science on an arctic exploration in which he had taken part on leaving college, and since then most of his navigating had been on occasional big game-hunting expeditions. He actually possessed, however, some knowledge of boats acquired in yachting cruises and did not anticipate any difficulty in taking the Lotus wherever desired.

His errand ashore was quickly accomplished and he returned to where the launch was waiting, followed by porters with his own and Fisher's effects. The three girls he had already sent aboard. This maneuver did not pass entirely unobserved, and if John Paul had not been thoroughly inoculated against raised eyebrows, significant glances, and remarks in undertones, he might have been annoyed. But actually he was too much preoccupied to notice them at all.

He appreciated fully that this last act was such as must burn all his bridges behind him and put the final brand of infamy on his character as hypocrite and Pharisee.

Such few persons as might have thought him to be a scapegoat in the attempt to establish a National Purity Movement must now decide that it had been no more than a blatant gesture to cover personal indulgence on a gilded scale. Of course the circle of friends who knew him personally would conclude sadly that, in his rage and humiliation at what had happened, he had decided that there was no good in having the name without the game and concluded to run at large. John Paul did not care what they thought. His amour propre had been too thoroughly paralyzed.

On the contrary, his sense of humor, hitherto latent but recently burgeoning under gayety and laughter now responded to the bizarre situation of his undertaking to pilot out of the sweeping arm of the law a woman notorious for her risqué writings and absolute personal defiance of social conventions. And with her three young and pretty rebels and a rounder of broken fortunes, generally assumed to eke an uncertain livelihood through scandalmongering and blackmail! John Paul wondered what his grim old Uncle Amos would have to say about this démarche when it reached his, ears, but he thought it more than probable that the hard old financier would receive it with a sardonic chuckle.

On going aboard he heard the low pur of the powerful engines, twin engines of seventy-five horse power each, and he was relieved to know that Fisher had justified his claims.

Entering the pretty saloon, for the house boat like most of her type was spacious and luxurious of appointments, he found Mrs. Ord and the three girls examining a chart.

“Fisher seems to understand his job,” said Mrs. Ord over her shoulder. “You left my note for the skipper?”

“Yes,” said John Paul, “and I asked if anything had been seen of the other two men, but could get no line on them.”

“That leaves us only Larsen and the chef and Saki,” said Mrs. Ord.

“Well,” said John Paul, “that ought to be enough to go on for a simple getaway. Where do you want to get?”

“Fisher says it's no use putting in anywhere along this shore as the cabal against us is pretty vicious and we'd merely get collared wherever we fetched up. He thinks we'd better run to Nassau. That's only about two hundred miles. Do you think you could pilot us there?”

John Paul examined the chart, which was one from Cape Canaveral to Havana with the Straits of Florida and Bahama Banks.

“As easy as driving down Fifth Avenue,” said he, “with the present traffic signals. What speed can we do?”

“About twelve in smooth water without driving the engines.”

“Call it an easy eighteen-hour run. Your quartermaster and I can spell each other at the wheel, and Fisher can sleep with the engines.”

“I can steer by compass, myself,” said Mrs. Ord.

“If we get right away,” said John Paul, “we should be off the light on Southwest Point by midnight. It's a cinch. A schoolgirl could take the boat down.”

“Then let's start,” said Mrs. Ord. “You're in command.”

John Paul saluted with a flourish.

“Like most captains in the army, I always wanted to be one in the navy. It's so much cleaner. All hands, get the ship under way!”

He stepped outside and beckoned to the Swedish quartermaster.

“Larsen,” said he, “we've got to get out right off. They've cooked up a job ashore to raid us to-night when the party's in full swing.”

Larsen raised his white, bushy eyebrows. He was the usual type of Swede yacht sailor and looked honest and capable.

“Aye, zir,” said he, “I ban tink we get pinched some day.”

“Well, we'll try to fool them. Get up anchor as quick as you can. Drop the launch astern. If they see us hoisting her aboard they might whip out here and grab us.”

Larsen scratched his head.

“Mebbe we better wait until it commence to get dark, zir,” said he. “A fast police launch mide lay us aboard before we ged outside der tree-mile limit.”

“We'll take a chance on that,” said John Paul. “By the time they learn what's up, we ought to be well away.”

“Aye, aye, zir,” said Larsen. “I ban get cookee to bear a hand.”

John Paul went to the engine-room hatch.

“We're going to get right out, Fisher,” he called. “Everything all set in your department?”

“She seems to be clicking along like a sewing machine,” said Fisher. “There are a few dinkums here I haven't quite doped out, but I count on getting acquainted as we go along. How about your wheelhouse controls?”

“I can show you how they work,” said a throaty voice at John Paul's elbow. “It's all very simple and fool proof. This boat handles as easily as my big car. Larsen understands everything, anyhow.”

The fine, able boat, designed for offshore runs as well as shallow, sheltered waterways, quickly gathered way, and even if a pursuit had been launched almost immediately, it is doubtful if anything would have overhauled her before she had swum clear of the danger zone.

Mrs. Ord came into the wheelhouse where John Paul was cheerfully steering the course which he had laid to strike the middle of the Northwest Providence Channel.

“I hope,” said she, “that you quite realize what I'm letting you in for.”

“Quite so,” he answered cheerfully. “Your game is much more square than the last one I played. On the whole I find it far more satisfactory to be considered a villain than a fool.”

“Incidentally,” she answered, “it's a good deal safer. A villain has usually some idea of what he's up against. Whereas a fool does not.”

“He has more fun, too,” John Paul agreed, “It might surprise you to know that I'm having the time of my life. I can look back on a career of hard work and high endeavor and strife and a good deal of righteous wrath, or what I fondly fancied to be such, but I can't honestly say that I ever got any special pleasure out of it.”

“What is Uncle Amos going to say?”

“Not yet having acquired the habit of profanity,” said John Paul, “I shan't attempt to tell you. Yet I've a hunch that he will wear an inner grin.”

Larsen looked up from the little scrap of forward deck where he had been lashing at the anchor.

“I tink we ban ketch some dirty wedder,” said he.

John Paul glanced at the barometer and tapped it lightly with his fingers. The needle shifted backward a trifle to leave a space of three tenths between it and the register.

“Did you notice the glass this morning?” he asked Mrs. Ord.

“No,” she answered, “but it's apt to be low here at this season.”

“If that was set this morning,” said John Paul, “then 'I ban tink' Larsen is right. It would show a pretty sudden drop. Besides, it struck me when I was going ashore that there was a curious effect in the sunlight, but I thought it might be my eyes or liver or something. Notice those shadows!”

“They don't look quite right, do they?” she admitted. “We might get a squall or something before morning, but this boat is very able in spite of looking like such a box.”

“No trouble about the boat,” said John Paul. “But all things being equal, I'd as leave have clear weather to run down through this place. Rotten shoals and reefs and things. That reminds me that we're breaking another law or several. No licensed pilot or engineer aboard or papers or anything.”

“I don't think we're apt to be bothered,” said she. “They're far too glad to welcome rich Americans in the West Indies. I've usually found that money will clear most anything.”

“But a good name,” said John Paul.

“That,” said Mrs. Ord, “is, as Fisher says, the very least of our cares.”

John Paul looked at her curiously.

“Don't you ever really care at all?” he asked.

“Not two cents. If I were a mother I might, or even a member of a distinguished family like yourself, with relatives to be hurt. But nowadays everybody appears to be doing about what he can manage without getting arrested. Since they've put the ban on liberty and the pursuit of pleasure, we've most of us become sort of semioutlaws.”

“It does take a bit of doing,” John Paul admitted. “Now in Europe we'd all be considered merely a chic outfit and regarded with approval as contributing to the gayety and color of life and giving honest purveyors of such a chance to live. But here we're hounded, from a fashionable resort like a band of crooks, and not long ago I was one of the hounds,” he added thoughtfully.

“Well,” said Mrs. Ord, “it's all reactionary, I suppose, and history repeats itself. If we'd carried on the same way in Salem, Massachusetts, two hundred years ago, they'd have clapped us in the stocks.”

“And yet,” said John Paul, musingly, “I can't help feeling that there ought to be some reasonable limit, some middle course of moderation.”

Larsen looked up again.

“We mide hist der launch aboard, zir,” said he.

“All right,” said John Paul. “I'll lend you a hand. Do you think we're going to get some nasty weather?”

“Yas—no—mebbe so. I tink so, mebbe not,” was the quartermaster's illuminating answer. “Before morning I tink we ban catch a little vind and a r-r-rain. I tink I furl der awnings and mak all zecure.”

“He thinks we're going to catch something,” said John Paul, “and so do I. Perhaps it might be wiser to take the chance of getting nabbed and run down the beach into Hillsboro.”

“No,” said Mrs. Ord, “I'd rather finish what we've started.”

“You couldn't collect any insurance if we were to get slammed up on a shoal,” said John Paul.

“We're not going to get slammed up on these shoals or any others.” She moved a little closer to look into the binnacle so that her arm and upper shoulder pressed against John Paul's. He was wearing a silk shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the throat opened, but the air had grown intensely sultry with such little air as was stirring coming off the flat, sun-baked coast. “I'll steer while you help Larsen,” said she and took the wheel, her soft, strong hands disengaging his from the spokes in a scarcely perceptible manner which was yet caressing. From the very first it had seemed to John Paul that “caressing” was the proper adjective to qualify this woman, Her voice had first caressed him and her easy gestures had an enticement and a lure of which the caressing quality was in the future tense, as though they promised caresses if their significance was followed. But all was infinitely subtle and as impalpable as that steady, yet enveloping look which streamed often from her light-gray eyes, these latter of a slightly greenish tint, yet warm, like shoal sea water with the sun shining on the sand just under it. She seemed as limpid as water, yet possessing its profundity.

So far no detail of this caressing quality about her had been tangible except for the handclasp of welcome and parting and a little habit she possessed of tapping his shoulder when desiring to enforce some argument, but this touch was less intimate that persuasive. And after their first mutual portrayal of the positions in which they stood to the world she had made no effort at even a friendly intimacy, that is, since the time of her telling him her idea of what a perfect lover might be. There had been no detailed personalities.

Once or twice John Paul had reflected that if she were weaving any spell about him the process was too insidious to be so far realized. She had never even insisted on his presence at any of her parties or expeditions, and the present singular position was entirely of his making. He could form no idea of where it might be leading, nor had he thought about this much. He had allowed himself to drift.

As he now went aft to help Larsen hoist aboard the light launch, Fisher came out on deck wiping his dripping face on a handful of clean waste. He was in a sleeveless singlet, and John Paul was surprised at the contour and power of his corded muscles and the depth of his chest, for he had never seen Fisher in a bathing suit and had thought of him as thick and flaccid.

“My aunt, but it's hot!” said Fisher cheerfully, and removed some smudges on his big triceps. “You may observe, John Paul, that I am the real thing. When a machinist wipes his beak on a piece of waste, he belongs to the brotherhood.”

“You've got more in your box of tricks than I'd have given you credit for,” said John Paul. “I'm afraid that hitherto I've done you injustice.”

Fisher's face seemed to darken a little.

“Don't be too sure of that just yet, my boy,” said he.

“Well, all the same,” said John Paul, “I think you're a good chap, Fisher.”

“Shut up,” said Fisher sharply. “Let's bear a hand and get this dinky tub swung in and well lashed. I don't know how much of a sailor you are, but it's plain enough to even the sea-going chauffeur that I've been that we're going to get a bit of a twister, a hard squall I should say, and between now and morning. Have you looked at the glass?”

“It's dropping fast,” said John Paul. “Larsen doesn't seem to think it's going to amount to much, though.”

They turned their attention to the work in hand; then snugly furled and lashed the awnings.

“I think I'd like a drink,” said Fisher. “No, I'll stand it off until we get there. That used to be my trouble, you know.”

“I repeat,” said John Paul. “You certainly improve on acquaintance, old fellow.”

Fisher swung about with something of the gesture of a wild boar.

“Now see here, John Paul,” said he, “I want you to can that stuff.” At the tone of his voice John Paul stared at him, astonished. One might have thought that he had offered an insult instead of a friendly expression of esteem.

“Sorry,” said he a little shortly. “I didn't mean to be patronizing. I know that you like to drink and it strikes me as very decent that you should want to stand it off until you are quit of this responsibility.”

Fisher hooked his thumbs in his belt and, with his big muscles sagging and head a bit aslant, looked at John Paul with a frown.

“John Paul,” said he, “booze did for me, and it did for my brother Jack who was a damned sight better man. But he came back; thanks to you.”

“To me?” John Paul gasped.

“Jus' so. Jack was down and out, a bum, a sort of tout until he got too blurred even for graft. Then he fell into your hands down in one of your save-the-pieces joints, over against the Five Points, and you dragged him out of the mire and got him on his feet and staked him for a fresh start, and he's going strong now out in Colorado. That's the reason I've always laid off you and backed your plays.”

“Well,” said John Paul slowly, “I'm glad to know about that. If I could carry on with the rest of the family without seeming to play out of form with my new hand, it would please me a lot.”

“John Paul,” said Fisher, “take it from me, your new hand is rotten. It's not your class. I wish you'd shuffle the cards and cut and get back on your old game.”

John Paul looked at him with astonishment.

“What are you driving at now?” he asked. “What's the matter with this outfit?”

“I'll admit,” said Fisher, ignoring the question, “that you overplayed your last bet and got it in the neck. But all the same it was better than this.”

John Paul's face grew a little grim.

“Will you please answer my question? What's the matter with this crowd?”

Fisher shrugged his big shoulders.

“Oh, I suppose I might as well tell you!” said he. “I wouldn't otherwise be true to my own form which is straight and square, like a boomerang. About three steps in any one direction is my limit. Well, then, to answer your question, Evelyn is about what she advertises herself to be, I guess, and I've got nothing on the girls, but this whole damned-fool business is a plant.”

They were standing against the taffrail out of all possible earshot of any one, and under the stern the blind water was sucking away in whorls and eddies as the boat forged swiftly on her course. Fisher spat over the side, looked around the thickening horizon, then up at the bilious sky, which seemed now to begin directly over their heads.

“We're going to have a dirty night,” said he, “and I don't know how long the slam is going to last or how bad it may prove, or how much of a navigator you may be. Morning may find us in a hell of a mess. I know these waters pretty well. Take my advice, John Paul, and turn this thing around and go back while the going's good. It will be dark in half an hour, and once this thing breaks you're not going to be able to pick up your lights. It's apt to break most any minute, too. You see the way it's blackening in the northeast. She's coming, boy, and she's coming hell bent.”

“I think your advice is good,” said John Paul. “I've already suggested that to Mrs. Ord, but she says to hold on for Nassau, She says she'd rather take a chance with the weather than with getting pinched.”

Fisher swore.

“Pinched, hell!” said he. “She's in no danger of being pinched. She's got too much paid protection.”

“Then why,” asked John Paul, his pleasant voice gone suddenly hard, “did you come out and tell us that the boat was due to get raided to-night?”

Fisher drew down the corners of his mouth.

“Because she paid me to,” said he. “I was jammed up in the corner, flat broke, owed everybody, couldn't stay and didn't dare to leave, and looking always for a bit of graft when she put this deal up to me. She wanted you where she wanted you.” He paused, panting, and mopped his dripping face with the waste, then looked at John Paul with a sort of mocking challenge.

“Go on,” said John Paul quietly, “its all mighty interesting if a bit obscure. Why should she have wanted to abduct me, since that appears to be about the size of it, and when does the vamping begin?”

“Well,” said Fisher, “I can't promise you much about the vamping, because from what I know about Evelyn her methods are not of the classic movie sort. But she wanted to make you cut the last lines that held you to your own particular sort. Your merely coming out aboard for parties or taking a turn ashore with her was not enough. She wanted you to do just what you've done, pack your duffel and take up your quarters in her camp. She knew that that would finally cook your goose as far as any doubts might be left of your having been hitherto an innocent victim of cruel conspiracy. Now do you get it?”

“Not entirely,” said John Paul, with a return to his pleasant voice. “My sufferings must have made me thick. Granted that her amiable intention was such as you describe, what was then her motive? Is all this evidence of wealth and luxury a bluff? Is she merely the beautiful adventuress making a show on credit and blowing her book royalties before she gets them, and now at the end of her tether obliged to make some coup? Is it her desperate intention to entrap the rich young man and make him come across?”

Fisher shook his head, but there was an expression of uncertainty on his oily face which, like the face of John Paul, had a chromatic tint in the peculiar, viscid atmosphere.

“I don't think so,” he answered. “I can't be sure, but I doubt that money graft is her game. So far as I've been able to discover, Evelyn's got kale enough. She's supposed to be hauling down a big income from the estate of her husband who was a rich, wholesale-drug man. She put this thing across for some good reason of her own”—he glanced a little mockingly at the other—“and as I was so hard driven for a piece of money, I fell for it. For one thing, it appealed to my distorted, mangled sense of humor, and it didn't strike me there could be any great hardship or danger in a sound, sane man of thirty and odd being grabbed off by as pretty a woman as Evelyn Ord, as many a man would pay high for the privilege. Besides I'd already warned you what might happen. But”—he glanced around at the ominous and sinister changes which now seemed closing in like a pall—“I hadn't counted on this.”

John Paul glanced about him also, indifferently, as it seemed to Fisher who was closely watching him.

“Well,” said he in a tone a bit too light to be entirely a natural one, “if the weather's getting thicker every minute, then all I can say is, it's got nothing on me. Even now I can't see to the bottom of the glass.”

Fisher swung upon him almost in a rage.

“Good heavens, man!” said he savagely. Then he gave a despairing laugh and flung up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “If, by this time, you can't see the writing on the wall, then I'm not going to get a piece of chalk and figure it out for you on the deck. Take my advice and turn the boat around and beat it back.”

John Paul stared at the inky blue massing on the port helm, then looked at Fisher with a grim smile.

“No,” said he, “I think we'll hold on our course.”

Chapter VI.

John Paul went into the wheelhouse, glanced at the compass, then looked at Evelyn with a smile.

“You steer a very true, straight course,” said he.

She gave him an answering smile,

“Thanks. I've always tried to go straight to what I want, once I've made up my mind that I really want it.”

“Most people never get as far as that,” John Paul observed. “I've just been talking to Fisher. He seems to be more of a sailor than I'd ever have guessed. He tells me that he's pretty familiar with these waters and that in his opinion we're going to get a particularly wicked squall, and he advises that we put back.”

“It does look ugly,” she answered. “What do you think yourself?”

“Oh, I don't know,” John Paul answered, “but it seems to me that we might as well hold on! The boat is stanch and able and Fisher seems to understand the engines, and if we keep on steering straight I don't see why we shouldn't manage well enough.”

“Precisely my idea,” she agreed. “Besides, I've always had a superstition about turning back.”

“It's rather more than a superstition with me,” said John Paul, “it amounts to a principle. The turners back never seem to get anywhere.”

“Or if they do,” she amended, “it's not where they want to get, and they always have the discomforting reflection that they might have arrived, if they'd kept on. To tell the truth, John Paul, this seems to do me a lot of good. It satisfies a craving for adventure that I've neglected lately. I don't care if we do get into a cyclone or something and have to fight it out—together.” She turned and gave him such a look as he could not remember having seen in her eyes before. “You and I,” she murmured.

“And Fisher,” said John Paul dryly. “We mustn't forget Fisher, who is the real god from the machine.”

She stiffened a little.

“Oh, Fisher!” said she contemptuously. “These engines will run themselves, so long as the gas and oil hold out.”

“I hope so,” said John Paul, “Time was when it took a genius to keep a gas engine going, but I suppose that nowadays it takes a fool to interfere with its good action.”

Evelyn released the wheel, and John Paul took it, then reached up and tapped the barometer again.

“The bottom is dropping out of it,” said he, “but it's falling so fast that I think the squall won't last long. Your real, old, West Indies hurricane, with whiskers on, comes up more slowly. I'd like it better, though, if it had some fireworks about it. However, if the worst comes to the worst, we can run up under the lee of the beach somewhere and anchor. This boat can't draw more than three or four feet of water.”

Larsen's voice boomed out at their elbows.

“Here she come, zir,” said he. “Mebbe we ban best swing her oop to take it head on.”

“Right-o!” said John Paul. “Come in, Larsen.”

Larsen obeyed, then closed the heavy glass. Through this they now could see, at no great distance, what looked like a white wall of foaming water which, against the blue-black zone of sea and sky, between which there was no demarcation, suggested a thin band of tape passed around the middle of a globe of ink. This quickly broadened and and all at once the house boat seemed to check and pause as if struck back by repeated blows from great, soft, invisible hands, while hoarse, roaring voices urged them to increase the violence of impact. And this order was conscientiously obeyed, for these pawing hands became harder and faster and more furious and reached down scoop up the water in great furrows and fling it against the heavy, curved crown glass.

“Take her, Larsen,” said John Paul quietly. “You understand the handling of her better. I shall have to keep track of our course now so as not to get lost if this lasts very long.” And he called down through the tube to Fisher to look out for a knockdown.

Then the body of the squall struck and it seemed for the next few moments as if they were in the rush of a horizontal waterfall. With engines slowed to the point of merely holding steerageway, the Lotus nosed her way into the cyclonic burst, and John Paul was filled with admiration at the stolid Larsen's handling of her.

John Paul was no great seaman, but his engineering knowledge of varying stresses, backed by a certain amount of yachting experience, told him that even for a boat as stable and broad of beam as this the danger would lie from the windage of her high deck house. This, if it were to swing broadside on, might be enough to heave her over until the cabin windows coming awash, with no underbody to steady her, she might easily fill and founder. But Larsen, mindful of this danger more through nautical instinct than imagination, kept making of her bow a sort of weather vane which followed the terrific flaws back and forth and seemed to adjust their resultants.

This maneuvering continued for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, by which time the sea began to make, though not very greatly, as they were under the shelter of the little Bahama Bank and the scope was not broad enough to stir up more than a nasty chop. At the very first the violence of the wind was so great as merely to rip up the surface water and fling it horizontally in sheets with no great amount of undulation, but in half an hour's time the chop grew vicious, so that the scant foredeck was being washed with every plunge despite the bluff, high bows and slow speed.

Mrs. Ord had left the wheelhouse through the door in its after bulkhead which led down past the pantry to the saloon. John Paul, after watching Larsen's maneuvers for a little while and discovering that, so far as he could estimate, the boat was practically at a standstill in actual position, went down the ladder into the engine room where he found Fisher moving about like a sort of squat-setting troll, feeling bearings and carefully watching the lubrication. The atmosphere of the place was overpowering from the combination of fumes of gas and oil and heat from the engines, so that John Paul, accustomed to free air, wondered how Fisher could survive it.

“Some little hell, what?” asked Fisher cheerfully. “The ventilators blew off or else have been bent flat or something so that the air is sultry.” And he hummed a little song which had to do with the pleasures of a sailor's life.

“I suppose,” said John Paul, gripping a stanchion, “if I were to pay you a compliment on sticking to your job, you'd hit me with a spanner.”

“Oh, I'm used to vitiated air!” said Fisher. “Besides, I've been through this sort of thing before, in some of those early New York-Bermuda motor-boat races I spoke about this afternoon. But how about yours?”

“Larsen is holding mine down for the moment,” said John Paul. “Can't you come up and get some air?”

“Not just yet,” said Fisher. “There's a carburetor here that tries to flood every time I turn my back, and we can't afford to take any chances of a dead cylinder just this minute. This can't last long, though what I'm afraid of is that it may be just the overture for a hard young hurricane.”

The Lotus swashed stubbornly on her course. John Paul and Larsen spelled each other at the wheel. Fisher, having got the engines running to his satisfaction, paid them but occasional visits, spending most of the night in the saloon, napping or talking to Evelyn or John Paul. The three girls had succumbed to seasickness.

“Such a squall as this,” said Fisher languidly at about ten o'clock, “is rather like a lovers' quarrel, apt to whip around suddenly and blow back from the other direction. Therefore I'd advise sticking out in the middle of the channel. The good, old boat takes it like a Dutch fishwife in an April shower. But unless it blows over by six o'clock to-morrow morning, we'll have to run in for shelter behind the end of Great Abaco Island, as otherwise we catch the full sweep of it driving into Northeast Channel.”

“The glass is stationary,” said John Paul.

“Well, when it starts to rise,” said Fisher, “it will blow harder than ever, if that's possible, but I doubt if it lasts long.”

Mrs. Ord had very little to say, but it was evident to John Paul that she was deeply plunged in reflections entirely removed from the turmoil of surrounding conditions. The wind appeared to have settled down to a hard, steady gale, but the stanch house boat was making splendid weather of it despite the churning and crashing of the short, choppy sea. He had told Fisher not to betray the fact that he suspected any trick in their voyage, and he now waited curiously for its dénouement and to see what would be the next move of this strong-willed, inscrutable woman who wrote with such unrestrained license, yet seemed ready to stop at nothing to gain whatever end she might have in view. From the look in her gray eyes, when once or twice they rested on him as they sat alone in the saloon, steadying themselves against the lurching sling of the boat, he wondered if she were not on the verge of a confession. He neither invited nor repelled confession, but conducted himself precisely as if there were nothing out of place beyond the unexpected meteorological conditions. John Paul was astonished to find such splendid weatherly qualities in the vessel and, as the night wore on and they sighted and passed the light on Southwest Point of Bahama Island, he decided they were actually in no danger, so long as the engines continued to perform their duty.

His respect for Fisher rose hourly. A wrong one the man might be, unscrupulous and, by his own confession, a double traitor, first to John Paul for whom he had expressed a friendship which was the result of a fraternal obligation, and to Mrs. Ord whose bribe he had accepted to destroy the lingering vestiges of such respect as John Paul might still feel in his quality of reformer and uplift advocate. But now as he observed Fisher's dogged determination to play his hand through and serve his assumed duties in the asphyxiating atmosphere of the engine room and deny himself the stimulation of the spirits which evidently enough he was nearly wild for, John Paul could not but feel that there was in him still a great deal of a man.

So the night passed and the gray dawn came in obscurely to show a frightful chaos of tormented water in which one could not but be amazed at the splendid performance of the boat. No land was in sight and the lashing chop was superimposed on a big swell, heaving in directly ahead. The gray, dirty scud was driving at a terrific speed close overhead and John Paul, pricking off his position by dead reckoning at six o'clock, estimated this to be about halfway between Great Stirrup Cay and Cross Harbor, a bight near the extremity of Abaco. There was no rain, but the spindrift lashing along the surface of the water rendered the visibility extremely low, not more than half a mile at that.

And, then, as the three, John Paul, Fisher, and Evelyn, were studying the chart, and Fisher advocating that they had better change their course and nose into Cross Harbor rather than risk the passage of the Northeast Providence Channel where the gale swept in directly from open sea, Larsen looked out from the wheelhouse.

“Steamer whistle, zir,” he called. “I tink she ban to windward.”

John Paul went into the wheelhouse, the others following. It would have been useless to open a port on the weather side, as the rush of wind and dash of spray would have masked any noise, but the port on the lee side was open and now, as they listened tensely, there reached their ears at the end of a minute or so a series of short, staccato blasts, muffled in the clamor of wind and sea, yet faintly audible.

“That's distress!” said Fisher. “Some boat is out here, broken down or sinking or something, possibly a steamer on the passenger service from Nassau to Miami.”

John Paul glanced at the compass, then looked at the chart.

“If she's out of control,” said he, “this wind will carry her here, on to the shoals of the Berry Islands, and in that case God help her.”

He had scarcely spoken when again came the supplicating cry for help, which from its comparatively high pitch was the cry of a small steamer. Larsen corroborated this.

“Mebbe we head over dere,” said he, “but we can't do mooch.”

“Head over,” said John Paul, and as the boat began to swing to meet the gale he realized more fully the force of this and the weight of the sea. Here in mid-channel the water was very deep and the great swell swinging round the point of Abaco took them more abeam, while the chop was ahead, so that they found themselves wallowing in a vortex of fearful water.

For some minutes the squat Lotus forced herself stubbornly ahead, her scrap of forward deck awash with every plunge and the brine spouting up over the wheelhouse. Then, suddenly, the despairing blasts were borne down from close ahead and the next instant the stricken vessel loomed out of the spindrift directly in their course, so close that if Larsen had not quickly spun the wheel, the two might have collided.

They discovered her to be a small, white steamer of the usual passenger type. She was apparently drifting almost broadside to the wind and alarmingly listed, partly from its pressure and partly, as it looked, from a sinking condition, though of this they could not be sure. In any case, it was evident that she was out of all control, still with steam enough to sound the whistle, but whether through some mishap to engine or propeller she was unable to hold head to sea and make for the shelter of Abaco.

They passed her as close aboard as safety would permit, then close astern slowed down, noticing, as they did so, that she was flying her ensign reversed.

“In a bad fix,” said Fisher, “and the chances are that at this season she's full of passengers. If she washes up on the shoals with the swell that's running, then it's all up!”

John Paul had been thinking the same thing. He could imagine this none-too-stanch and rather shallow steamer drifting into the great surf of a lee shore at that moment and going to pieces like matchwood, to scatter her passengers in that indiscriminate way which the elements sometimes show in their disregard of the value of human lives. John Paul did not share in the popular idea of the value of human life as such, as he considered that the conduct of a life was far more important than its mere continuance.

But as he looked at this white-painted box, drifting down on the shoals like a crate full of live chickens struck adrift, it impressed him that a certain obligation of human brotherhood was placed upon them all, aboard the Lotus, to prevent this catastrophe if possible, and if not to make the effort. In such a situation there must be decided always the relative value between one's life lost or one's honor and duty lost and the necessity of facing ever afterward the consciousness of having shirked.

“What do you think about it, Fisher?” asked John Paul. “Could we get a line to them and tow them around under the lee of Great Stirrup Cay?”

“We might, unless she sinks before we get there,” Fisher answered. “What do you think, Larsen?”

The quartermaster shook his head, then nodded it according to his customary oracular method.

“Yas—no. Mebbe so. I don't tink so. Perhaps,” said he.

“Can you get a line to them?” asked John Paul.

“We can drift down a life buoy on a small line wen dey can bend on their hawser und we haul her aboard und make fast,” Larsen answered. “Den if our engines stand oop, I tink we mide tow dem around into shelter.”

“Well, then,” said John Paul, “we had better try to do that. No chance to take them off in a boat in this smother, and besides hers don't seem to be there.”

“Excuse me for asking, old man,” said Fisher, “but have you got a pretty good idea of just where we are?”

“I think we're here,” said John Paul, and laid the tip of his pencil about midway between Great Stirrup Cay and Southwest Point. “At any rate, once we get her in tow, all we've got to do is to head due west until we think we've given the Point a reasonably wide berth, then turn south and keep on going until we fetch up in sheltered water.”

Fisher went below to stand in his engines.

John Paul looked at Mrs. Ord.

“Don't you think I'm right?” he began, then paused, struck by the expression of her face.

For it had suddenly grown hard. It was the first time that John Paul had ever seen her wear such an expression. The gray-green eyes were steady enough, but there was no softness in them, no hint of compassion or solicitude for the people in hourly danger of drowning like caged fowls. Also the soft contours of the lower part of her face had become rigid. The whimsical and erstwhile tender mouth had a fixed, unyielding look.

“It seems to me,” said she, and even the quality of her throaty voice was changed, “that you are rather losing sight of your immediate responsibility, which is to get us safely out of this. We don't know just how near we may be to the shoals, and if our engines were suddenly to fail us, we should all be lost.”

John Paul stared.

“Good heavens!” said he. “You don't want us to beat it into safety and leave this outfit to drown like rats in a trap?”

“You must remember,” said she, “that you have four helpless women whom you are bound to get to a place of safety. There's no telling what may happen if we try to tow this big, clumsy tub.”

“The chances are, Mrs. Ord,” said John Paul coldly, “that there are many more helpless women aboard her, and that their whole salvation depends on us.”

“It is not our fault if they've broken down——” she began, when there came a startling interruption.

The disabled passenger steamer had drifted down until she was on the Lotus' quarter, while the house boat, bucking slowly into the smother, with every dip cascading the water over her bows, seemed almost stationary. The day had lightened a little, but the wind appeared, if anything, to have increased. But now, as the flying scud thinned, as it sometimes does for a few moments in such a violent, short-lived gale, Larsen, leaning out of the open window and staring to leeward, drew in his head and shoulders with a grunt.

“Dey are breakers under our lee,” said he.

John Paul thrust out his head. A mile astern and a little to port he could see a long line of spouting surf, and beyond it no land, but what appeared to be a stretch of white, churning water. The terrible truth about their situation was immediately apparent to him. He realized that although they had been steering a true-enough compass course, the leeway made by the light-draft boat had been far greater than he had calculated, and that instead of being well out in the middle of the Northwest Providence. Channel, their lateral drift had carried them down upon the eastern rim of the Berry Islands. It seemed to him that another half hour would find the disabled steamer in the breakers and all aboard her lost beyond any hope of rescue, as no anchors could have held her in such a sea.

The same thought had immediately occurred to Fisher. His flaccid face was set like a death mask as he looked at John Paul.

“It's touch and go, if we're to haul them clear, old man,” said he.

John Paul nodded, then turned to Larsen.

“Drift down your line and look sharp,” said he. “I'll put us dead to windward of the steamer, and it's up to them to get our line and send us a hawser.”

“Aye, zir,” said Larsen cheerfully. “I ban tink it's too late, but we gotta try.” He plunged out of the wheelhouse and made his way to the lazaret, hanging on as only sailors and cats can. Fisher ducked back into the engine room.

Evelyn turned furiously on John Paul, who had taken the wheel. Her eyes were blazing now, less with fear than fury; her face was chalky. Her face showed the abstraction of all softer feminine traits, as if a personality both spiritual and physical had been treated with some reagent to dissolve the tender, cosmetic filling which had relieved the harsh angularities of frame and character and to leave them in all the prominence of their harsh landmarks, which told of force unmodified by beauty, be it body or soul.

This transformation was shocking to John Paul because his previous experience with women had never shown him anything like this. He had seen beauty harrowed by fear and suffering and famine and illness and physical distress, until it could no longer be said to have any claim to beauty. But John Paul had never seen beauty stripped away by a sudden passion of ruthless selfishness, and hate developed like an evil transformation when this selfishness is balked.

Wherefore John Paul stared aghast at this cultured woman with whom his conversations had been of lofty, beautiful things, whose creed was for indulgence where it did not clash with kindness and beauty, whose professed ideals of love were set upon a plane which even John Paul, for all of his chimerical theories of abstract purity, could never have hoped to reach. Her professed gospel had been “live and help to live,” “love and let love,” and many other æsthetic hypocrisies. And now she proposed to save her pleasuring life at the cost of obvious duty to her kind, and glared at him like a hell-cat because of his intention to risk safety for the saving of lives no doubt more serviceable.

She gripped the wheel with a strength which he could never have guessed her to possess.

“You fool!” she snarled. “Do you want to drown us all, trying to save a boatload of rotten trippers?”

“Let go!” he answered sternly. “I'm going to drag that steamer clear if I have to wreck this flower boat of yours to do it.”

“You're not!” she screamed. “This is my boat and you are nothing but a guest aboard.”

“Rather more than that,” said John Paul. “You told me that I was in command, and I undertook to save you from arrest and the confiscation of the yacht.”

She lost her head.

“You were never in command,” said she, “any more than there was ever any danger of arrest and seizure. It was all a plant.” And she put out her strength against his to turn the wheel and head the boat away from the shoals. But John Paul braced his feet and forced the Lotus slowly in a direction which would place her in the desired position.

“Will you let go?” cried Evelyn. “Can't you see that it's too late?”

“Why, that's precisely the way it strikes me,” said John Paul. “It's too late for one selfish, pampered woman to scud away to safety and leave a lot of better people to drown. Now let go yourself or I shall have to be rough.”

Evelyn loosed one hand from the spoke and, grabbing a blinker light from the rack, struck viciously at his head. John Paul threw up his elbow and parried the blow. And then, in a spasm of disgust and because he heard Larsen bellowing some advice and directions, John Paul did that which he had never done before and of which he would never have believed himself capable. This was to lay violent hands upon a woman.

He seized Evelyn by her two bare elbows, whirled her vigorously about, thrust her through the door in the after bulkhead of the wheelhouse, and gave her a shove which sent her reeling against the handrail of the little alleyway leading to the pantry, and then, seeing that she had found her balance and was for the moment safely enough disposed of, John Paul slammed the door and bolted it, and took the wheel again.

Larsen was calling up to him.

“Vork yust ahead of her, zir, and I drift out der line.”

Chapter VII.

A few minutes later John Paul heard the roaring of the surf. He called down to Fisher.

“How are things, chief?”

“Fine and dandy,” came Fisher's cheerful voice. “How about your end?”

“They've got our line,” John Paul answered. “Larsen and the chef and Saki are hauling in their hawser.”

“Take the strain gently at first,” said Fisher.

“All right,” John Paul answered.

“And I say, John Paul,” said Fisher, “was I right about Evelyn?”

“Quite so,” John Paul answered. “We've drifted pretty close to the breaking water.”

“Oh, let her break,” said Fisher, “and don't bother about me! I'll stick here until the damned tub busts open.”

The next half hour saw a very critical lapse of time in the lives of a good many persons. As the hawser tautened and the full strain came upon the splendid engines of the Lotus, the helpless steamer in tow of her began to swing slowly head to sea. The question now to be decided was whether or not the house boat would have the power to haul her tow clear of the shoals under their lee and to lay a course which might carry them both to a haven of safety.

If John Paul had known precisely his position or been able to pick up any landmark through the welter, he might have saved them all a great deal of stress and strain by running straight in for the refuge of Great Harbor Cay. As it was, not knowing just where this might be located, he found it better to head back on the course which they had come and seek shelter behind Great Stirrup Cay which he knew could be at no great distance and on which he hoped to sight a lighthouse.

Leaving Larsen at the wheel, he went down into the engine room and told Fisher what he had decided and asked if he thought they might count on the engines for three or four hours at the top notch without faltering.

“I think so, old chap,” Fisher answered. “At any rate, it's the only thing to do. If you should try to run in and fail to hit your landfall on the nose, all hands of us would be in the broth before you could say knife. But if I were you I'd plug right out to windward, if you find you can make head against it, as there's no telling what our leeway might be.”

This also was Larsen's advice. Like all sailors, he hated nothing as much as a lee shore. So the Lotus settled down to a long, steady grind into the teeth of the gale. For some time John Paul could not have told whether they were making any headway or not, but Larsen reported that they were, though this was very slight. The water was too deep to drop a drift lead, but the Swede's sea instinct and experience told him that they were unquestionably gaining distance. What was more encouraging, the glass had started to rise, and although the force of the wind might be expected to increase, Larsen thought it likely that it would haul in the course of the day, which would remove the danger of the shoals under their lee.

It occurred to John Paul then that he had been rather rough with his hostess and, although he did not feel an apology to be in order under the circumstances, it would be no more than kind to reassure her fears about their immediate safety. So he went into the pretty saloon, where he found Evelyn crouched on a divan among a mass of silken cushions, and as she looked up at him he was, for the first time, struck by her feline traits. Heretofore she had been to him remarkable for the very absence of the catty quality to be found in so many women of luxurious or predatory natures. There had been, too, a steady levelness of gaze and a cool frankness of thought expressed in their many exchanges of ideas which had detached his mind, if not from her sex, at least from all association of many of its frailties.

He had come to think of her as a splendid feminine companion, and he had endowed her with a sort of semi-apotheosis as if she were a demigoddess, who might amuse herself in gay, human revelry without being in the least degraded by it. He had thought she possessed a calm and sound philosophy which might or might not be correct, but was at any rate consistent and sincere. Even her splendid physique had impressed him as rather superhuman, though at times, being very masculine, it thrilled him by its beauty.

His impression of her now was in the nature of a shock despite the fact of her picture having been so rudely changed, first by his learning of the cheap trickery to which she had lent herself, then by her unheroic selfishness in forbidding that they run any risk for the saving of a boatload of human lives, and her fury at his refusal to obey her orders. To John Paul, what made the last revelation the more shocking was the very fact that he was convinced it had not been the result of panic or terror at their situation. She had not impressed him as being very much afraid. It was more as if she coolly decided that the effort was not worth the risk, a good deal as a person might decide that it was not worth while to enter a burning house for the salvage of personal effects. He could have forgiven her the impulse of self-preservation, or cowardice, for that matter, but there had been a contemptuous cut to her voice in her reference to these unknown folk as a band of trippers of whom the aggregate value did not approach that of her own personal safety.

As his eyes now fell upon her, she looked at him precisely like that supreme egoist of the animal world, which is the cat. She resembled nothing so much as a beautiful, big cat in splendid fur, nestling sulkily in comfort and accepting a confinement which cannot be helped, with the stoicism of its species. Her eyes with their greenish tint, a little more pronounced in the gloom, rested on his as steadily as ever, and there was even the flicker of a smile upon her mobile lips as he stood there surveying her sternly.

“Well, John Paul,” said she, “you are a good deal more of a man I had thought.”

“And you are a good deal more of a woman than I had thought, though not precisely the sort of woman I had classified you.”

“Are we holding our own?” she asked almost indifferently.

“A little better than that,” John Paul answered. “We are making slow headway and should be out of danger in a couple of hours, if Fisher can keep his engines running full bore.”

“Fisher appears to have his qualities, too,” said Evelyn. She suppressed a little yawn. “Who'd ever have guessed it?”

John Paul sank wearily into a wicker chair.

“It sometimes takes a crisis to show up people for what they are,” said he.

“Quite true,” she admitted. “Since I am unmasked in all my glaring selfishness, I don't mind telling you that this escape of ours was all a fake.”

John Paul raised his eyebrows.

“Indeed?” He gave a yawn himself.

Evelyn roused herself and leaned forward, dropping her hands on her knees.

“There was never any danger of a raid,” said she. “I bribed our worthy Fisher to come off aboard and warn us. I wanted to commit you to my party beyond redemption. I had conceived a liking for you, John Paul, so I carried you off, a little in the fashion of an Amazon. I had better things in store for you than this.”

“You could not possibly have had anything better in store for me than this,” answered John Paul. “I have been permitted to assist in the saving of a good many lives. Heretofore I had bungled at trying merely to save souls.”

“Well,” said Evelyn, “you must at least admit that I hauled you out of the breakers of a pretty awful state of nervous prostration and collapse and set you on your feet again.”

“Freely admitted,” said John Paul, “and please don't think me lacking in gratitude and all due acknowledgment. You gave me the one treatment needed at the time.”

“And the beauty of it is,” said Evelyn, “that through this unanticipated climax, the treatment is not apt to do you any harm.”

“On the contrary,” said John Paul, “it has put me back where I belong, without any insidious after effects. It has restored my faith in former ideas, or ideals, which I carried to a point of excess. More than that, I believe that there is a good deal to be said for your own system, though I think that you also carry that to a dangerous excess.”

A wave of color came into her face.

“Well, now, John Paul, I think that is very decent of you,” said she. “Then you don't harbor any ill will?”

“None whatever, Evelyn,” said he. “Through my own ignorance of femininity, I stuck you up on an ivory tower in the middle of a quicksand. I thought you were a sort of oracle, a sibyl, a high priestess of pleasure in the abstract, but I find you now to be merely a very beautiful and kindly, if selfish and pampered, woman.”

“Thanks for the beautiful part of it, John Paul. But I can say rather more for you. I should say that this was rather a splendid thing that you and Fisher have managed to accomplish. When I looked back and saw those breakers so close, I couldn't believe it possible to succeed.”

“Sorry I had to handle you roughly,” muttered John Paul.

Her eyes glowed at him through the murk.

“Sometimes a woman likes to be handled roughly, my dear. It's worth it, if only to bring back a rather poor opinion of manhood. This thing ought to go far toward reinstating you in the public opinion.”

John Paul made a gesture of disgust.

“I don't care anything about that,” said he, “but I intend that you shall get full credit, Evelyn.”

“For what?”

“For what you would have done, but for your wrong sense of values. Our little difference of opinion is known to no one but ourselves, and need not be known by any other.”

She leaned forward eagerly and laid her hand on his arm.

“Would you really do that?” she asked.

“Of course I shall,” he answered. “Such a beau geste on the part of a woman like yourself is a good thing for the public morale. Besides, I think you merely lost your head for a second and thought we were foolishly throwing ourselves away in a vain effort and you had your three girls to consider. Let us assume that I am right.”

Evelyn drew a deep breath. She was quick to appreciate the réclame, the enormous credit to be reaped from such a deed as this. A knowledge of publicity, its ways and means, was flashed from the professional facet of her active mind. She could visualize the columns in the country's press. “Mrs. Evelyn Ord, the famous authoress, a Grace Darling,” and the flamboyant, yet actually truthful, description of how in a smothering gale, while making the run to Nassau in her full-powered house boat, she had gone to the rescue of a disabled passenger steamer and plucked it out of the very maw of the breakers at imminent risk of sharing its fate. And she knew that her glory would lack nothing from the testimony of those aboard the rescued craft.

As all of this swept through her brain, she stared at John Paul with glowing eyes which presently sank before his own direct and thoughtful gaze.

“You've taught me a lot, John Paul,” she muttered.

“It has been a fair exchange, I think, Evelyn. I'll say right now that I think your free-thought, free-acting, free-indulgence, free-loving theories are all wrong. But so, also, do I believe my own extreme censorship of all that you believe in carrying on to have been no less wrong. Hereafter I shall leave the regulation of the public morals and conduct to the conscience of the individual and confine myself trying to help those who suffer from the lack of a normal conscience just as one might suffer from the lack normal physical health.”

Evelyn drew closer with a moisture in her eyes and a note in her throaty voice which was perhaps the first truly honest one to accent it for many years.

“Oh, my dear,” she cried, “then can't you begin by helping me?”

But at that moment, the door to wheelhouse opened and the voice of Larsen interrupted, as it had at other crucial moments between these two.

“Der vind is shiftin', zir,” said he. “I ban tink it tryin' to clear.”

Chapter VIII.

The stanch quartermaster proved to be correct. The short, cyclonic gale was breaking almost as rapidly as it had swept down upon them. The sea was scattering to dissipate in smutty fringes and a band of clear blue appeared in the northwest.

But still the wind blew hard, though from a clearing quarter, and the Lotus pitching and flinging the spray from her bluff bows, plodded doggedly ahead for the more open water.

Then, about two hours later, there came from astern another series of short staccato blasts from the little steamer in tow, and a moment later the house boat seemed to gather speed as if in great measure relieved of her cumbersome drag. John Paul, looking out astern, saw that she was taking a slight sheer, and at the same moment Fisher, haggard of face, but jubilant of countenance, came up from his carefully nursed charges.

“What's this?” he cried. “Have they got her going again?”

“They must have,” said John Paul. “She's lightened the strain of the hawser and seems to be working up in our quarter.”

Larsen suddenly appeared on the forward deck.

“I ban tink dey got her turnin' over and vant us to cast off, zir,” he bawled.

“Very well,” John Paul called, “then cast her off.”

Larsen made his way aft. John Paul stepped into the saloon and roused Evelyn who was dozing on a divan. She looked up with a flushed face and raised both hands to thrust back her tumbled hair.

“Our guest has found herself again,” said John Paul. “You might come up on deck to answer their acknowledgments.”

Rather dazed, she obeyed. John Paul helped her up on to the top of the cabin house, Fisher being meantime at the wheel. Clinging to the awning stanchions, they watched Larsen cast the hawser off the quarter bitts, when it was hauled in by the deck hands of the steamer, now most evidently under her own power and forging up abeam.

The wind was roaring from the northwest, but despite its force, greater if anything than before, an entirely different aspect lay upon the face of the tormented waters. This was because the sun had blazed out suddenly and swept that troubled waste with such a deluge of color as to stagger the eyes. The indigo of the Gulf Stream smeared with its rifts of snowy foam, with its myriad effects of rainbow, seemed now rejoicing in a sort of boisterous gayety where not long before it had worn all the sullen aspects of violent death. On the horizon spouting waves were in a frenzy of dance revel, flung in one direction by the swell and tossed back in another by the blast of the new wind.

And this mad, but joyful turmoil was enhanced by the aspect of the late victim of this war between the elements. The little steamer, which they had encountered so sadly stricken, presented now an almost jaunty aspect, with bright paintwork glistening in the sunshine and the snowy steam contrasting with the black smoke pouring from her stack. She plunged up valiantly as closely as she dared and slightly to windward. Her reversed ensign had been reset, and from the groups clinging to her rail came the wavings of flags and handkerchiefs and hats and scarfs, anything at hand with which those so shortly redeemed from death might signal their glad deliverance and frenzied gratitude.

Close aboard, a man in her wheelhouse leveled a megaphone and his stentorian voice distinctly reached the ears of John Paul and his companion.

“We — can — now — proceed — to Miami,” it called. “Can—you—stand—by?”

John Paul signaled an affirmative. The clear voice began again.

“You — have — saved — sixty-three lives—from—certain — death. God — bless—you!”

Evelyn burst into a storm of tears, waving frantically. There came three blasts of the whistle and the little steamer began to swing off on its course. Fisher, who had heard the request, swung the Lotus in after her. John Paul looked at Evelyn with glowing eyes.

“I think,” said he, “that when we get to Miami you will have to hide out for a while. Those people are apt to eat you up.”

Evelyn got herself under control.

“You had better look out for yourself, John Paul,” said she.

“No,” said John Paul, “I think I'll go back to my old job of trying to look out for other people. Not their morals, but their lives. I think I'm more of a success at that sort of work.”

Larsen called up from beneath.

“Mr. Fisher ban fall asleep, zir,” said he. “I tink I better vatch der engines und you tak der vheel.”