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THE TYPHOON’S SECRET



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THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY


ASTUR. LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS
B d l




“Out of the red flame that covered all the sea and sky asleTn 0f
the Lurline, the burning steamer rushed on into the darkness that
loomed ahead ”
--_.. 5







The
Typhoon ’5 Secret
BY
SOL. N. fiHERIDAN
T


FRONTISPIECE BY
RALPH FALLEN COLEMAN
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1920




THE NEW YORK
' PUBLIC LIBRARY
1361383
AF-TQR. XEROX mm
TILRLIZN FM'NIIATIONI
R 1an L


COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN


A,“ a nit-U
/”‘i i, \
.5.<25Fl
VII.
VIII.
IX.
Zia
XIV.
XV.
XVII.
XVIII.
lH/
CONTENTS
A Great Smash—and a Six-Cylinder
Green Flyer . . .
A Friend Out of the Dark
The Face of the World .
There Are Bad People in This World
And Likewise There Are Good People
ANewWayofLife . . . . .
A Red Rose and the Old Life Ends
The Wreck of the Halcyon
The Man Who Was Saved
The Englishman . . . . . . .
Being a, Letter from Mr. Frederick Dent
Upson to Mr. John Wentworth, Writ-
ten to the City of Manila
At the End of the World
The Man and the Hour
A Friend—and His Conscience
The Green Yacht .
Followed to Sea . . . . .
The Way of a Man—and the Way of a
Maid . . . . . .
“Let Her Follow Her Way”
PAGE
14
23
30
42
49
60
71
97
110
116
lQl
131
144
153
157
162


CONTENTS
GBAP‘I'EB
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI.
XXVII.
XXVIH.
XXIX .
XXXI.
XXXII.
Alone upon a Storm-tossed Sea
A Lurid Light upon the Sea
The Steamer on Fire
Into the Darkness . . .
The Menace:of the Sea and Safety
An Artist in Cocktails .
On Board the Green Yacht
“The Naval Supports Are Coming Up
It is the Neried . .
The Battle with the Formosans
“ His Name Is Norman Ainsworth ”
A Spy-—and a Game Chicken .
Shadow and Sunshine . .
The Wicked Cease from Troubling
,9
PM)!
168
176
181
188
193
204
210
216
222
226
231
238
243
246


THE TYPHOON’S SECRET





The Typhoon’s Secret
CHAPTER I
A GREAT SMASH—AND A SIX-CYLINDER GREEN FLYER
F A man can get through college, and the world,
I in a six-cylinder Green Flyer,” said Wentworth,
“I will manage.”
“There is nothing left, then?” queried Allison.
“There is a rather complete wardrobe besides the
Green Flyer. And I have a couple of hundred dollars
in my pocket at this moment. I do not know of
anything else.”
He laughed a little, because—well, because a man
must laugh when he has come to the jumping-off
place. Then he blew a cloud of smoke from his
cigarette out into the moonlight.
“Anyway, it is up to me to go and see,” he went
on. “I never knew much about the Dad’s affairs.
There was always plenty. But the Green Flyer
will take me as far as San Francisco, and with any-
thing like luck I should make the run in something
under twenty hours. That will land me there before
sunset to-morrow.”
“You mean to go to-night? ” exclaimed Allison.
s


4 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
“Surest thing you know, my boy! I must find
out for myself. And the place i, r my father’s son
is there. The Los Angeles paper will be here to-
morrow, full of the thing. It isn’t. my job to face
a few gossiping gazabos in a tourist hotel when there
is the whole world to stand against.”
He waved one hand, as he spoke, toward the
whirling crowd of beautifully gowned women and
black-garbed men one-stepping under the electric
lights of the wide oflice and wider dining room of the
Foothills Hotel, thrown into one for the evening. It
was the night of the annual tennis hop—and the
tennis hoppers were hopping briskly to sobbing music
played on a violin, a bandurria, and two guitars,
with drums to beat out the time.
There was a minor wail in the music which it is
likely the dancers missed. The art of one-stepping
is altogether muscular, very heating when followed
with enthusiasm, and so may well be lacking the
element of the spirituelle. But the wail came plainly
to the heart of John Wentworth. He was conscious
of the nameless despair of it when he called Frank
Allison to the porch.
Wentworth held in his hand a telegram, just
brought to the hotel by a special messenger, and he
showed it to Allison at once. It was short enough,
but it brought John Wentworth’s world about him
crashing in ruins. The Bank of the Pacific had
closed its doors. The President, Elliot Wentworth,
had swum out into the sea from a bathing place at


A GREAT SMASH 5
North Beach—and had not come back. That was
all.
As Wentworth had said that they would be, the
Los Angeles papers next day were full of it. Allison
read the whole story; and faced the little world of the
hotel for his friend—as a fraternity brother should.
That night in the moonlight the young men,
seated in big rocking chairs under the shadow of
the roses that flung a golden glory over the wide
front porch of the Foothills, had between themselves
alone the knowledge carried in the curt telegram from
Elliot Wentworth’s lawyer. And being young, the
impulse of both was to go out and meet and fight
the trouble.
The sobbing Spanish music floated over them from
the room where the dancers were and out into the
April moonlight that covered all the Ojai Valley with
a radiance of silver. As they sat on the porch, with
only the plaint of the music to steal across the sym-
pathetic silence that had fallen between them for the
moment, they could look down into the wide reaches
of the valley, where the sturdy live oaks broke up
the moonlight to dapple with its shining paint the
young grain in the fields, dark purple where the
shadows were. Right at hand, as it seemed, the
bare double swales of the golf links ran down to the
trees—and, still closer, the feathery bloom of the
Colorado camisa lay like a light fall of snow on the
branches of the mountain redwoods.
Only there could be no snow in that warm valley


6 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
although the moon showed a dazzling bank of it,
drift on drift, high on the far-away summit of the
Sisar Mountain, as \Ventworth rose, at last, followed
by Allison, threw away his cigarette, and stepped
down from the porch to the driveway in front of the
hotel. They were both in evening dress, and were
fine, upstanding lads as the moon shone down on
them.
“Come on,” said Wentworth. “I suppose you
will see the last of me, Frank. I must get out of these
togs, and make the Green Flyer ready. We can
get around to my room the back way.”
He started around the corner of the house, Allison
beside him.
“You are really going to-night, John?” the latter
asked.
“ To-night—no less.”
“And—and Miss Graeme?”
“This was our dance; I had forgotten.”
He stopped, his hand on the knob of the door lead-
ing to the back corridor and billiard room.
“But you need not bother to make my excuses,
Frank. They will not be needed to-morrow.”
He opened the door and passed through, traversing
rapidly the length of the short hallway. Wentworth
had a front room; the door was unlocked, and he
entered and snapped on the light. It showed the
usual interior of a man’s hotel room, an open steamer
trunk in one corner and two suitcases lying half
under the bed.


A GREAT SMASH 7
Allison, following him, naturally had more thought
for his friend than the friend himself had. More-
over, there was a strange look on his face which the
other was too preoccupied to notice, perhaps.
“You will not go without seeing her, John?” he
asked.
“Margaret Graeme?” rejoined Wentworth. “My
dear boy, the son of a banker might follow an heiress
from Coronadoto this place. The son of my father_
—is of a different world.”
He spoke bitterly enough—and yet with a kind
of gentleness, too. And upon that gentleness, Allison
took a friend’s liberty.
“But about her feelings, John?”
“She—she is the heiress, my boy.”
Allison, closer to him than any man that lived,
left the matter there.
“And college?” he queried.
“Goes with the rest.”
“You have only one semester to get your degree.
Man, think of it!”
“And what good will the degree do me? I cannot
live upon it. If I had been a poor man from the
first, and specialized! But what is the use, now?”
“I have enough money, my friend,” ventured
Allison.
Wentworth had been throwing off his dress suit
as they talked and, half undressed, he reached out
and grasped Allison’s hand.
“Pack my things, like a good fellow,” he said,


8 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“while I get into my motor togs and go out and wake
up the Green Flyer.”
Man fashion, Allison began to gather up his
friend’s belongings and throw them into the suit-
cases and the steamer trunk, saying nothing more.
Wentworth got into heavy boots and khaki trousers
and leathern coat and cap. Then he went out, leav-
ing Allison still packing, and presently there was
heard a soft chug-chugging as the Green Flyer drew
up beside the stoop at the back door.
Wentworth came back into the room a moment
afterward, touched the bell for a porter, and lighted
a. cigarette. Allison had the trunk packed and
strapped by that time, and the suitcases closed.
“Sorry to have troubled you, old man,” Went—
worth said, “but I did not want to call Brooks. I
imagine my day for valets and all vanities is at an
end, now. Want him yourself? You are most sel-
fishly unprovided.”
“Brooks?” queried Allison, in reply.
“The same. You must not judge him from the
disorder of my room. He dressed after I did—
having an affair of his own on hand, perhaps. He is
really a good creature, in the main orderly, when
sober—and he can wear your shirts quite as well as
mine.”
Allison laughed, and Wentworth went on:
“Anyway, I leave you to pay and dismiss him.
I don’t owe him anything, really, but he will probably
want his wages.”


A GREAT SMASH 9
The hotel porter came and carried out the steamer
trunk, which he lashed to the trunk rack behind the
tonneau of the Green Flyer—making a second trip
to bring out and throw in the suitcases. Then he
went away, with an order to bring the manager.
That personage, all bows and smiles, had little time
to express surprise at the sudden departure of his
guest. But he was conventionally courteous.
“Your bill is not made out, Mr. Wentworth,” he
said, in reply to John’s question, “and the book-
keeper has gone to bed, leaving the books locked up.
Shall I send it after you?”
“Give it to my friend, Mr. Allison,” replied Went-
worth, after a moment’s thought. “You will see
to that for me also, Frank?”
“Of course,” and then, following down from the
stoop as Wentworth stepped into the car, “I think
you might let me do more, John.”
“Not another thing, dear boy! But I appreciate
your kindness—and I will see you in the city.
Good-bye!” I
He reached out his hand—and withdrew it quickly,
looking to his control. Allison stepped back. The
manager waved his hand and cried farewell. The
Green Flyer, starting smoothly and slowly, glided
around the corner of the building, and was gone.
“Rather a sudden departure, Mr. Allison,” said
the manager, politely.
“Yes; a telegram called him to San Francisco
to-night.”


10 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“He will have a beautiful moonlight ride,” said
the manager.
Allison turned and walked back around the house
toward the front verandah. The sobbing music
of the Spanish hIazourka had followed the Green
F lyer down the hill road until it was lost by the driver
in the moonlight—and had ended. The dancers
were coming out into the night, laughing and chatter-
ing. A little apart, in the shadow, Margaret
Graeme’s partner, the man who had stepped into
her dance when Wentworth failed her, seated her,
and was sent for an ice. Allison, as he stepped on
the porch, saw her white face peering out into the
moonlight as though her eyes searched for someone.
And then, from far down along the road that led
men out into the distant world, came the wild shriek
of the horn of the Green Flyer—like the voice of a
lost human soul calling back to the quick from the
dead. Allison saw Margaret’s face sink back into
the shadow as he stepped forward and took a vacant
seat beside her.
Shadows are very kindly things. He told her,
there, of Wentworth’s call to duty—making the
excuses he had been hidden not to make. And she
sighed—and listened—and said very little. There
may have been, in his heart, an answering sigh to hers
but he repressed it. A man is loyal, in the first trial
at least, if he has red blood in him. Her partner
came back with the ice in a moment, and she rose,
and took his arm.


A GREAT SMASH 11
Allison had felt a pressure, the merest touch, of
one of her hands on his as she went away, thrilling
him. And the words seemed breathed to him, so
softly that he was hardly sure that he heard them at
all: “A woman watches—and pursues!”
The last word was like an echo, it came so faintly.
And then, on her partner’s arm, she swept into the
lighted room. And she was smiling radiantly.
Assuredly, shadows are very kindly things.
And the Green Flyer swept on down the long hill
road, under the live oaks that stand all about in the
little town of Nordhofi', and along where the moon-
light fell in broken showers over the stretches of the
mountain stream that marks the line of the Creek
Road. The lights blazed from the machine like the
gleaming of demon’s eyes. It shrieked, as it turned
the dark corners under the trees, with a wail that
might have been the plaint of a lost soul in the night.
Wentworth had released the muffler as he raced
down the slope, to try his cylinders, and the beating
of the powerful engine sent a roar of sound into the
silence that frightened the coyotes, crouching under
the live oaks on the distant slope of Sulphur Mountain
and gave pause to the California lion slipping down
through the shadows to steal a lamb from the flock of
the Basque shepherd, corraled in the scrub oak
thicket beyond the uplands of the Santa Ana. And
the sea air sang in Wentworth’s ears, and the Green
Flyer answered to each touch of his firm hand on
the steering wheel like a sentient thing.


12 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
His thoughts flew as the machine flew. Under
the visor of his cap his face was set and hard: the
fighting face of a long line of Wentworths, each one
of whom had met and conquered the world in his time.
All but his own father, he thought. All but his own
father! And that man he had deemed so strong.
Well, he did not know that any of the old Wentworths
had met and conquered disgrace. He did not know
that there had ever been a Wentworth called to
face his kind with his own honour in ruins about him.
But it had been a fighting line—and it culminated
in him. And he would do battle.
The Green Flyer crossed the last little bridge under
the hill marking the course of the San Antonio Creek,
and swept out into a wide and sandy valley between
high mountain ranges. It was bad going, but the
good machine scarcely paused. It climbed Adobe
Hill, now dry and dusty, and ran down fast toward
the Wishing Tree—that stately sycamore standing
beside the Ojai road in whose shadow Indian super-
stition places a spirit that is malevolent only on
moonlight nights.
Wentworth smiled as he whirled by the tree. The
old tale that no man might pass that tree on such
a night without mishap went through his mind as
quickly as the tree itself came, and was gone. Then
the Green Flyer, for an instant, faced the Old Mission
Bell that marks the running of the Camino Real of
the Padres, and swept around the curve leading to
the Casitas Pass bridge across the Ventura River—


'A GREAT SMASH 13
and, suddenly, a man seemed to rise up in the middle
of the road. He seemed, too, to stagger to get out
of the way, but there was a dull crunching sound,
he went down, and the front wheels passed over his
body. At the same instant, so it seemed, there was a
report like the discharge of a pistol; and the heavy
car swerved, and wobbled, and all but went over.
Instinctively, Wentworth had thrown out the
clutch. The Green Flyer, checked in its speed,
staggered and stopped. In another moment the
driver had leaped out, and was dragging the body
of a man, unconscious, from between the front and
rear wheels of the car.
“A dead man likely; and a punctured tire!”
muttered Wentworth, straightening up. “Bad
enough, for a starter! Lucky I got that extra tire in
Los Angeles! But what the devil will I do with this
fellow?”
He stood, for a moment, scratching his head, and
looking on the body prostrate in the road. Then he
knelt down, putting one hand upon the man’s breast,
and holding it there for a long time. He caught, at
last, a faint pulsation, growing stronger, and rose to
step over to the car and reach into the door pocket
for his brandy flask.
“He lives!" Wentworth said, aloud. “Thank
God!”


CHAPTER H
A FRIEND OUT OF THE DARK
HE WAS back again beside the prostrate
man in a moment, just moistening his lips
with a little of the liquor. There was the
faintest fluttering of the man’s eyelids as he did
so, as Wentworth could see when he turned his flash-
light into the other’s face.
“He will come to himself, now,” he said. “I
wonder if he is badly hurt? And I wonder what evil
chance brought him into the road of the Green Flyer
just as I came around the curve?”
He straightened himself once more, standing above
the man in the dust. His situation was serious
enough, in all conscience. His own affairs called
him to San Francisco, and that as speedily as might
be. Yet here he was, hardly started on his way, his
destination four hundred miles distant—held up
by an injured man, he did not know how badly in-
jured, and a punctured tire. The tire, of course,
he could take care of. The injured man! How was
he to be sure that he would not have to run down to
Ventura, losing several hours, to get the help the man
might need?
“All this,” said Wentworth, at last, aloud, waving
14


A FRIEND OUT OF THE DARK 15
his hands widely and with a manner of politeness,
“comes of that Indian devil who lives in the tree!”
And then, just as he spoke, the man stirred a little,
sat up, and tried to regain his feet, but was too weak
for the moment. Wentworth caught a muttered
question as he leaned down to help him rise.
“Did the—did the Indian hit anybody else, mate?”
.the man asked, putting his whole weight upon Went-
worth’s shoulder.
“The Indian?” Wentworth repeated, puzzled
for a moment—and then smiled. “Oh, yes; he has
hit me rather a facer. But you went down too sud-
denly to notice that.”
The man had gathered himself together now, and
stood away from the support of Wentworth’s shoul-
der. He was a big, loose-jointed fellow with a strag-
gling beard of a week’s growth perhaps. His khaki
coat and trousers were in tatters. There was about
him, whether in the set of his clothes or in his carriage
as he stood, a nameless suggestion of the salt sea.
And his every line showed strength and muscular
activity, as does the loose, shambling build of the
panther. It is a kind of tense repression under a
misfitting skin.
The man, as he stood, gathered his wits, slowly.
He began to feel his body, tentatively, here and there,
as though to try the muscles one after the other——
arms first, and then legs and body. Wentworth
thought, as he noted these actions, of the athlete
in the ring who takes bodily account of himself be-


16 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
fore battle. And he thought that here was a gladi-
ator who would put up a good man’s fight, should
occasion come. He realized, also, that he himself
had a most vital interest in this self-appraisement
of the wayfarer. For Wentworth was in a hurry.
His own concerns called him. The Green Flyer
needed his immediate attention. It was no light
job to put on a new tire without efficient help. And
here he might be held up with a badly injured man
on his hands. And so it was with even more than
the interest of the agent of the injury that he asked,
seeing the big fellow feeling all his muscles:
“Anything seriously amiss?”
“Why, I think not, sir,” replied the other, slowly,
and then, with a half-foolish grin: “ The Indian jarred
me a bit, but nothing to hurt. And there do not
Seem to be any bones broken.”
“Thank the Lord for that!” said Wentworth,
fervently.
“Amen, sir!”
“All the same, I suppose you are pretty badly
jarred,” Wentworth said.
“That’s right, sir,” agreed the wayfarer. “I
have had worse knocks in my time, but not many.
You surely came around that corner with a rush,
sir!”
“I was in something of a hurry,” replied Went-
worth, “and am yet. But I did not see you—until
the car struck you."
“And I did not see you until I was struck, sir.


A FRIEND OUT OF THE DARK 17
But I had heard your horn, two or three times, before
that. It seemed a long way off, and I did not pay
much attention.”
“Next time you hear a horn at night, you would
better keep out of the middle of the road,” said Went-
worth, smiling a little.
“Do they all rush through here like bats out of
Hades?” asked the wayfarer, grinning in his turn.
“They are apt to, when they are running at this
time in the night. But, as long as you are not badly
hurt, I suppose there is not a great deal of harm done.
And I am still in a hurry.”
He turned toward the Green Flyer as he spoke,
opening the tool chest and taking out his jack and
the hand air pump. It was a rear tire that had been
punctured. Working like an expert, Wentworth
jacked up the axle and in a moment was busily en-
gaged in taking off the injured tire, the wayfarer
standing by, still tentatively feeling of his muscles.
“I am something of a mechanic, sir,” he said, at
last. “What is it that has carried away?”
“Tire punctured!” replied Wentworth, briefly.
“Know anything about these machines?”
“Not a thing, sir. But I am strong—and two
can do any job quicker than one; where both are
willing.”
He stooped beside Wentworth as he spoke, and
his greater strength was applied to the loosening of
the tire so effectively that it came away very quickly.
In another moment the new tire had been taken from


18 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
the rack on the running board of the Green Flyer,
adjusted in place, and the pump brought into action.
Here, once more, the greater strength of the stranger
showed itself—although Wentworth was himself
an athlete. More quickly than the thing had ever
been done before with the Green Flyer, the tire was
hard and tested, and Wentworth had gathered his
tools and thrown them back into the chest.
“And now,” he said, preparing to crank the Green
Flyer, “what is to be done with you?”
“Haven’t you done enough to me?” asked the
wayfarer at this, in a kind of whimsical tone. “Want
me to stand up in the road and be hit again?”
Wentworth laughed at this and it did him good.
“I did not mean that,” he said, at last. “But if
you are badly hurt, it would be my duty to take you
to the hospital at Ventura—and that would mean
delay, when I am in a great hurry.”
“You need not bother about me,” said the other,
earnestly. “I am not hurt at all, only jarred a little.
And I will shape my course to the next port, just
the same as I would have done if I had not met you
—and the Indian, sir.”
“Did you expect to find a port here in the moun-
tains?” asked Wentworth.
“Why, no, sir; but they told me that this was the
road to Santa Barbara, and I was making a course
that way. Of course I could not make the same way
that you make in the machine here, and so I was
casting about for a place to turn in and get a bit of
. 44


A FRIEND OUT OF THE DARK 19
sleep, when you came along so fast that I could not
get out of the way.”
Wentworth cranked the machine, and came back
to step into the driver’s seat. The man puzzled him
a little, although it was of course plain enough that
he was a seafarer. But there was that about him
which led Wentworth to think, somehow, that he was
from a position aft the mast—not a common sailor.
If that impression were well founded, what had
turned the man into a tramp? Seafaring men with
officers’ papers were not found in the ranks of tramps
ashore; at least not often. And they seldom showed
the hard usage that was evident in the appearance
of this stranger. Wentworth turned, his foot on
the running board, as he would have stepped into
the car.
“What did you leave your ship for, anyway?”
he asked, plu-mping the question at the other sud-
denly.
“My ship?” parried the stranger. It was clear
enough that he did not like the question.
“Sure! Your ship? You are a sailor, plain
enough. Why did you turn hobo, then? You will
never succeed at that trade.”
“ Too many Indians about, eh, sir?”
“Well, too many Indians, and motor cars. It is
sometimes difficult for a man unused to shore roads
to keep out of the way.”
“I don’t much believe I ever will make a go of this
business of tramping ashore,” admitted the stranger.


20 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“Of course you won’t. But why did you leave
your ship?”
The sailor saw that it was useless to fence any more.
“That is rather a long story, sir,” he replied. “But
she was hell ship, in a perfectly polite way, sir. That
is, the Captain in her was adevil—a kid-gloved devil—s
expecting the mates to do his dirty work, and seeing
that they did it. And I dropped over the side one
night, down in Pedro, and swam for it. Then, be-
cause I must strike away from that port, first I began
to tramp it, heading up for Santa Barbara, where I
might get a coaster to San Francisco. And here I
am. But the land is harder than the sea, sir, at
that.”
“This is your first try at tramping it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Got any money?”
“No, sir, and no dunnage. Of course I forfeited
my pay when I went over the side—and left all my
clothes aboar .”
“How did you live?”
“Well, a woman put me to chopping wood for
my breakfast this morning, back there in Ventura—
and I lifted a few carrots out of a field along the road.
But it was slim picking, and they keep a lot of big
dogs in this country. A fellow isn’t safe to walk any-
where but along the railroad track.”
“I don’t suppose you want me to carry you back
to Ventura?” asked Wentworth, tentatively.
“No, sir; that would not gain me anything. I


A FRIEND OUT OF THE DARK 21
will just east about here a bit for a barn or shed of
some kind, and, if the dog will let me in, will make
shift to sleep this watch out.”
Wentworth smiled a little. “What is your name?”
he asked. ~
“Felix McGreal, sir.”
It was so plainly an honest answer that Wentworth
accepted it at once.
“You say that you want to get to Santa Barbara?”
was the next question.
' “I stand a chance to get a coaster out of there for
San Francisco,” replied McGreal.
“You would not have done better to stay in San
Pedro; would it not be better, even now, for you to
head back that way?”
“They would have hauled me up for a deserter,
as long as the ship was there, sir. She is gone, now;
and to San Francisco, at that. But she will be out
of there before ever I can make a landfall on the Bay.
And a man stands a better chance of a ship in the
north. Pedro is not much more than acoastwise port,
sir, when all is said.”
“Hm!” exclaimed Wentworth. “My present
course runs to San Francisco. You are sure you
are not badly hurt?”
“Certain sure, sir.”
Wentworth was seated at the wheel of the Green
Flyerand the engine was purring, impatientto be away.
“Jump into the tonneau, there,” he said. “It is
the duty of one poor man to help another, and I owe


22 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
you a good turn, anyway. I will take you with
me.” I
The sailor walked around to the opposite side of
the Green Flyer and stepped into the vacant seat
beside the driver.
“It isn’t seeme that I should man the quarter-
deck when the skipper is forward,” he said. '
“Well, the front seat rides easier,” said Wentworth,
with a smile.


24 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
the narrow canon of Casitas Creek into the broad
and fertile orchard lands of the Carpenteria Valley.
Santa Barbara went by in the night, blinking with a.
thousand electric lights, and the long, steep pass of
Gaviota, and the wind-swept reaches that lie beyond
Point Concepcion. They saw the sea break white
there in the waning moonlight; and the red rim of
Santa Rosa Island lying behind them across the
channel in the pathway of the dawn.
They breakfasted, very early, at the hotel of Paso
Robles, under the spreading white oaks, and then ran
down the long valley of Soledad and the Salinas to
come into the low hills that would open to them the
Santa Clara Valley and the San Francisco Bay region.
Neither slept all through the night, and, as the day
strengthened, sending over the mountains a flood
of imperial purple sunshine, they fell into desultory
talk although for the most part both seemed to have
enough of thought to keep them silent. It was in
one of these scraps of talk that Wentworth, harping
back to how the other had happened to turn tramp,
said to the sailor:
“What was the story of leaving your ship?”
“She was a hell ship, sir; every way.”
“A hell ship? I have heard of hell ships. The
Captain beat you, I suppose, and the food was poor,
and all the rest of it?”
“The food was bad enough, sir. And she was
black-birding, and contraband trading, and fifty
things against the law. There was none of us in any


THE FACE OF THE WORLD 25
way particular about small matters so long as we
did not have to take the blame for anything but obey-
ing orders. And the Captain did not beat me. I
was the second mate in her, d’ye see, sir! But that
Captain was a kid-gloved devil, with the capacity
for murder in his soul, and it is my opinion that no
man could go officer in that ship who was not willing
to take the same burden on himself. I couldn’t do
all he wanted anyway, sir.”
“So you left him, and turned tramp to get another
ship? I suppose you will make it in San Francisco,
all right. But you must know by this that a sailor
has no place on shore roads.”
“Not with Indian devils and gasolene devils loose
in the moonlight, sir.”
Wentworth laughed, giving the wheel a quick turn
to miss a boulder. “The Captain wanted you to
abuse the sailors, I suppose?” he said.
“That was part of it—although he was a full hand
at that himself, sir.”
“What ship was it?”
“She was a steamer, a tramp out of Glasgow.
The Halcyon.”
“And the master’s name?”
“Captain Robert Graeme, sir.”
“She is not in Pedro now, you say?”
“N o, sir; she sailed for the north a week ago. And
that was a start on a cruise of a kind that I want no
hand in, sir.”
“What kind?” asked Wentworth.


THE FACE OF THE WORLD 27
likewise noticed that the sailor ventured no comment
on the matter that he read with such interest, it
was not for him to open the subject. The Green
Flyer was running very swiftly, and the mahout
might well be busy with his car.
At five o’clock in the afternoon, nineteen hours out
from the Ojai, the Green Flyer rolled through the
doors of that public garage in lower Golden Gate
Avenue which Wentworth had theretofore favoured
with his casual patronage when he did not want to
take the car home.
“Hullo, Mr. Wentworth!” cried the proprietor,
coming forward and rubbing his hands together.
That was John Wentworth’s very first meeting with
this Chinese form of salutation in his own city.
Many fair-weather friends would shake their own
hands, from that time forward, in place of shaking
his. And there was a sting in it the first time.
Wentworth saw, also, that the two or three dissolute
looking loungers about the place started at the men-
tion of his name, looked at him, and then looked
away again quickly. But he did not see that the
sailor, McGreal, turned and gave him one swift
glance. It all passed in a second.
“Hullo, Sprocket!” he said, answering the pro-
prietor very quickly, after his own manner.
“Shall I put up the Green Flyer, sir?” asked
Sprocket.
“For the present. I won’t want the car again
this afternoon. And I will send for the things.”


28 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“Brooks, sir?”
“No. The hotel people will come for them, likely.”
“Had a long drive, sir?”
“Four hundred miles. From Ventura.”
“And the car never heated, sir. I heard you were
in the south.”
“Yes; the town seems to have been pretty well
advised as to my movements—up to last night.”
Wentworth had stepped out of the car and started
for the street as he spoke. McGreal followed him.
One of the loungers, as they passed through the big
doors, fairly leaped for the telephone booth, and the
sailor coming back to get one of the morning papers
from the tonneau saw the action. McGreal heard
the man in the booth ask for a newspaper office, and
went out again at once, overtaking Wentworth at
the corner of Polk Street. He touched him on the
. shoulder as he came close to him.
“I suppose that we go about, each on his own
course, here, sir,” he said, as Wentworth turned
quickly to face him.
“Why, yes,” agreed Wentworth. He put his hand
in his pocket as he spoke, and took out a five-dollar
gold piece, which he handed to the sailor. “That
will see you to a ship,” he said.
“Yes, sir; thank you!” replied McGreal.
“And so, good-bye!” Wentworth went on. “I
suppose it isn’t any use to warn you again against
the hobo business. You must know you can never
succeed in that trade. As we part courses, I will


THE FACE OF THE WORLD 29
wish you luck, and hope that you will keep to a trade
that you can make a go of.”
“And I wish you luck, sir,” the sailor said. “I
thank you for everything, sir; and, if you would let
me make a suggestion, Mr. Wentworth, take a new
lodging. Do not go home to-night.”
“ Why?”
“I saw one of those seedy chaps in the auto dock
jump for a telephone as soon as we left the place and
the connection he asked for was a newspaper office,
s1r.”
It seemed to Wentworth that the sailor looked at
him somewhat wistfully as he spoke, as if he would
have said something more, and did not exactly know
how to go about the saying of it. But the impression
—it was no more than an impression—passed. He
shook hands with McGreal, thanked him, and turned
away.
“So! So!” he exclaimed to himself. “They
are on my track already! Well, my sailor friend,
I did not come here to hide. The sooner the hounds
find me, the better I will like it.”


CHAPTER IV
THERE ARE BAD PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD
ENTWORTH walked rapidly down Golden
K; Gate Avenue, leaped on a car at Market
Street, and rode, standing amidst the crowd
in the open part, to the corner of Montgomery.
He could catch glimpses of the flaring headlines of the
evening papers being read by the people in the car—
headlines telling the story of the bank failure. The
men in the crowd about him spoke of it, in discon-
nected fashion, after the manner of men in crowds.
It seemed as if the whole atmosphere of the city
were full of it.
And, indeed, San Francisco had reason to be in-
terested in the smash of the great bank. The failure
had been for millions and there were more than hints
of dishonour in it. Elliot Wentworth, a pillar of
high finance on the Pacific Coast and in the nation,
philanthropist and reputed plutocrat, was gone.
The thousand stricken with poverty because of his
going had not even the satisfaction of facing him,
man to man, to cry their losses.
It had been his daily habit, after banking hours,
to take a dip in the bay, patronizing a certain bath-
ing establishment at North Beach where he had his
so


32 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
shouting, gesticulating crowds of madmen. The
Stock Market had closed for the day at noon, but
the brokers gathered on the curb, and mining shares
went crashing down. Everything was thrown away!
Thousands were ruined. Other thousands saw them-
selves saved only by the circumstance that the banks
closed early.
There was a run on the Bank of the Pacific, and
nothing but the coming of the usual closing hour
saved the institution for that day. The directors
were summoned hastily. The bank’s vaults were
found absolutely bare of coin save for the few thou-
sands used in the daily transactions. Securities
that should have counted for millions were gone, none
could tell whither. Nothing could be done to pre-
vent the next day’s disaster, and only the efforts
of a score of policemen kept back the yelling maniacs
who seemed about to tear the massive building stone
from stone when the heavy bronze doors were closed
for the night in the faces of the crowd. The city
Went to bed that night in such deep gloom as might
have followed another earthquake disaster. Indeed,
it was a deeper gloom. There was a certain grim
kind of humour iii the mood after the earthquake.
It seemed to John Wentworth, alone in the crowd
on that car, that the atmosphere of the failure was
pressing upon him, smothering him. It would have
been a relief, at the moment, to meet a man he knew,
to stand up and make a physical effort against the
moral force that was bearing him down. But at


THERE ARE BAD PEOPLE 33
that hour there would be no one he knew on a car
bound toward the ferries. His world was going up
town to the Club, pulsing along the lighted streets
toward the haunts of the pleasure loving.
He must begin his fight as soon as he could, facing
the world on behalf of that father who was so
strangely gone; and he would begin it with his father’s
lawyer, who was likewise the attorney for the bank
and likely to have retained that connection by pref-
erence. The lawyer, ordinarily at his home on
Pacific Heights at that hour of the day, would, in
the present stress, be more likely, Wentworth felt,
to stay late at his office.
Leaving the car at the corner of Montgomery,
Wentworth strode along that narrow thoroughfare
toward the lofty l\{[ills Building. He was in the
financial district now. He rubbed shoulders, as he
made his way against the set of the crowd, with many
men who knew him. Some of these even stopped,
for a second or two, to look after him as he plunged
along. But he had drawn his cap over his eyes,
dressing his soul for battle, and had picked the field
on which he would fight. He walked swiftly, with
bent head, intent on pushing forward against the keen
wind that set along the street from the northwest,
bearing ghostly streamers of fog that were only partly
distinguishable from the dust clouds whirling before
it. And so he saw nobody.
Once he was hailed. A youngster, aping the real
men who swam along the Cocktail Route every even-


34 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
ing, and who had been a teller in the bank, paused
on entering the elaborately scrolled screen doors of
a saloon to shout his name, and an invitation to drink.
But Wentworth only looked backward, waved his
hand, and went on.
As he had surmised, the big suite of offices of
Chester, Wiley & Chester, occupying the entire
seventh floor of the Mills Building, was alight, alive,
and busy. The boy in the anteroom took his card,
and came back almost at once to inform him that
Mr. Chester the elder, Mr. William Chester, was
within and would see him. As he had been there
often, and knew the way, Wentworth then passed
through the door leading to the corridor from which
opened the private offices of the firm. He was going
straight to Mr. William Chester’s particular den
when the old gentleman himself came out quickly
and led him into another room, one of the consulta-
tion rooms of the firm.
Wentworth was close enough to the door of the
old lawyer’s private office as that gentleman came
out to catch a glimpse of a group of men seated there
in some sort of conference. Several of them he knew
—elderly men who had been his father’s financial
and social intimates, men whose names were a power
in the money world and of weight in the Pacific Union
Club.
Then the door was closed, and in another moment
Wentworth found himself alone in an apartment
with Mr. Chester. The lawyer was a short, cold,


THERE ARE BAD PEOPLE 35
gray man—he might have been sixty or more—clean
shaVen, perfectly appointed, with a waxy white face
that was like a stone mask. You would have said
that Father Time must have taken a sharp chisel
to grave the lines in it, and at that, the lines were
few, and not deeply graven. And yet, despite its
lack of lines, the face was not devoid of expression.
It was not a kindly face, certainly. Nothing that
came from it, no ray from the cold gray eyes nor any
trembling geniality in the thin lips or the firm chin,
touched any chord of human sympathy. But neither
was it coldly repellent. It was the face of a man who
bade the world stand and give the countersign.
It was entirely characteristic of this man that he
did not offer to shake hands with his young visitor.
He sat down in a revolving chair behind a flat-topped
desk standing in the room to which he had led Went-
worth, and, being thus entrenched after his custom-
ary fashion, motioned toward another chair for his
caller.
“I hardly looked for you until to-morrow,” he said.
“I got your wire at the Foothills last night, sir,”
replied Wentworth, “ and came up in my car at once.”
“Ah!”
Wentworth was young, and not easily chilled.
The monosyllable and the stone face might have
stopped an older man. He made a desperate effort
to get past it.
“Oh, Mr. Chester!” he cried. “My father! Tell
me everything, sir!”


36 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
It was a pity that, the son of his father, he lacked
the countersign. It may have been a pity, too, that
his father had not at the last possessed the means
of enlisting on the side of the lawyer, or tried to enlist
the lawyer on his. The coldest man living has his
vanity.
“You have read the newspapers, I suppose?”
said the lawyer, coldly.
“I have seen them, sir.”
“I would recommend them to your careful perusal.
Their accounts of what happened are pretty complete
—-—and fairly accurate.”
Wentworth felt the repulse. But he would not
be dashed—not yet.
“You were my father’s lawyer, Mr. Chester,”
he said, with a touch of manly reproach. “You
wired me of this disaster. And I have come to you!”
“It is true that your father retained me through
many years. But a client who withholds confidence
betrays his attorney, sir.”
“That is a serious charge, Mr. Chester. And do
you know nothing of my father?”
Wentworth, regarding the lawyer closely, was not
quite sure but that a faint smile crossed the stone
face at his question. It was no more than a breath
crossing a mirror.
“No more than the dead—or the sea!” replied
the lawyer.
It was baffling, still, Wentworth would not give
up.


THERE ARE BAD PEOPLE 37
“If my father is dead,” he said, solemnly, “it
was the hand of God in this thing. I will never be-
lieve that he swam out into the sea with no purpose
to come back.”
Again across the lawyer’s face there flickered that
faint suggestion of a smile, the breath upon the mir-
ror. When he spoke, after that, Wentworth fancied
that there was in his tone just a hint of pity.
“Men incline,” said Mr. Chester, “to credit God
with many a neat stroke of the devil’s handiwork.
But I have nothing to do with your beliefs, Mr.
Wentworth; and the world will hold to its own. A
command may come from the grave, sir! It is
usually better to let dead men lie.” '
“What do you mean by that?” asked Wentworth,
half starting up.
The lawyer sat for a moment, regarding him
keenly. In those crises when it becomes professional
to cut the heart out of a man, the operator may well
pause at the start to contemplate with some care the
making of the first incision. When Mr. Chester
spoke again there was a cold precision in his voice
that told Wentworth every word was well considered
—-and was believed by the speaker to be irrefutable.
“Your father,” he said, “is gone. I believe——
and I knew him better than any man living, although
of late years I have reason to know that he kept much
from me—that when he struck out from that pier
at the North Beach bathing establishment he did
not mean to come back. Ten millions in securities,


38 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
that were supposed to lie safely in the vaults of the
Bank of the Pacific, are gone likewise. Where those
securities are we know no more than we know where-
abouts in the dark seas that run about the Heads
outside the Bay the beaten body of Elliot Wentworth
may be tossing at this moment.
“The securities that I speak of seem to have been
thrown into the financial sea long, long ago. That
could not have been done without the privity and—
Keep your seat, young man!” For Wentworth had
made as if to rise.
“That could not have been done without the
privity, the dishonest privity, of the President of
the Bank of the Pacific. You have said that I was
your father’s lawyer. For many years I was. I
may have been led to think that I was, up to the
last. But I have found that, latterly, he took other
advice than mine. Do you think that I would advise
a client to forge, sir, and to steal? Your father, it
has been found, was in the mining stock market
much more heavily and for many more years than
anybody supposed. I never advised a man to specu-
late in stocks in my life, young man. And it was
only when a demand was made for a great part of the
securities now missing, to finance a big industrial pro-
ject, that discovery became inevitable—and the crash
came. I would recommend you to leave it at that.”
After that one start to repel the arraignment of
his father, Wentworth bowed his head in his hands
and heard the lawyer out in silence. Mr. Chester


THERE ARE BAD PEOPLE 39
spoke coldly and without any trace of passion. The
very manner of his speaking was calculated to carry
conviction. The despair of youth, swift as youth’s
recovery from despair, bowed the younger man down.
Yet he made no more effort.
“But my father had many large interests!”
he said.
“None that would save the situation. Even those
that he had are in the formative stage: a new hotel,
an electric railway still building, a great power pro-
ject. These must all be financed, and heavily, to
be carried through to any one’s profit. Your father
began many things—and completed few.”
“There is nothing left, then, sir? ”
“Less than nothing. But I may say that I am
authorized, as to yoursel ”
“I was not thinking of myself,” interrupted Went-
worth.
“Nevertheless, it seems to me that that is the most
important thing for you to think of, at the moment.
Others have given you some thought, sir! Your
fortunes were a subject of discussion among the
gentlemen in my room even as you came in.”
“ The gentlemen in your room, sir?”
“The Directors of the Bank of the Pacific, yes. It
was their idea that you would be permitted to finish at
Berkeley, if you liked, and would then be given work
in the bank—or in some equally eligible situation.”
“The bank?” queried Wentworth. He was all
at sea.


40 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“The Bank of the Pacific,” explained Mr. Chester.
“They propose to come forward with the millions
necessary to rehabilitate it. The decision is not half
an hour old. The bank could not be permitted to go
down. That would be a disaster national in scope.
This action of the Directors is merely that of men
who run to fight a fire. Of course there will be heavy
losses by depositors and trust funds—or, rather,
there will be delay in settlements. But the situation
will be saved.”
“The bank will reopen, then?”
“ To-morrow morning. There is no secret about it.
The newspapers will have the statements to-night.
Your late father’s enterprises go into the pot with
the rest.”
“I should have supposed that. And the gentle-
men who do all this would make my fortunes their
care, likewise?”
Wentworth could not have told what it was that
prompted the bitterness in his words. But he was
beginning to feel something of the recovery of youth.
Indeed, he was still over-young to question the mo-
tives of any man. He may merely have desired,
instinctively, to stand alone.
“They could not well do otherwise,” said Mr.
Chester. “You must live—and make your liv-
ing. And most of these men liked your father.
That liking would prompt them to give you a
chance.”
“ I think I would rather make my living somewhere


THERE ARE BAD PEOPLE 41
else than behind the counter of the ba ,” said
Wentworth.
“That is, perhaps, a natural feeling. I dare say
there will be other clerkships to be found, after you
shall have finished with your schooling.”
“I have finished with my schooling,” said Went-
worth, rising as he spoke. “And I mean, sir, to
take my future into my own hands.”
“It isn’t much to take!” murmured the lawyer—
as if rather to himself.
“Little or much, it is mine,” replied Wentworth.
If Mr. Chester, who should have known the fighting
blood of the Wentworths, wanted to rouse it to ac-
tion, he had taken a very sure way. But it may be
that he only indulged the lawyer’s passion for playing
upon a human instrument.”
“You reject the help of your father’s friends?”
he asked.
“Oh, my father’s—friends? Yes, sir.”
“You will at least go in and see these gentlemen?”
“What is the good of quarrelling with a crowd when
I have been sufficiently accommodated by one, sir?
Their time is valuable! Why waste it on me? I
know what I do not want, at least.”
“I am to assume that you will take—your fortunes
—away from San Francisco?” queried the lawyer.
Wentworth leaped to his feet, starting to leave
the office. “You may assume whatever you like,
sir,” he said, “but it is my purpose to fight the battle
out on this field.” '


CHAP I‘ER V
AND, LIKEWISE, THERE ARE GOOD PEOPLE
UT it was not written that Wentworth should
B fight his battle in San Francisco, firm as his
purpose was to do that when he left the
lawyer’s office. He turned and passed out through
the door of the consultation room, and so on across
the anteroom into the main hallway of the big build-
ing. He was not sure, by the time he had tramped
down six flights of stairs to the street—the elevators
having stopped running—that matters were alto-
gether so hopeless as the lawyer had represented.
But he had no more than the resiliency natural
to youth as a basis for this recovery of faith. He had
never, really, become well acquainted with his father.
Once, several years before, the elder Wentworth had
been seriously hurt about the head in an auto ac-
cident in the Park. He had been carried home un-
conscious and his son called hastily from his college
duties to his bedside. The papers had been full of
the accident at the time—a financial magnate of the
size of the President of the Bank of the Pacific could
not be thus stricken without causing something of a
flurry. Young Wentworth had sat beside his father’s
sick bed through that illness, and the elder man had
42


THERE ARE GOOD PEOPLE 43
presently come back to what had seemed to be com-
plete recovery. The incident had long ago passed
entirely out of young Wentworth’s mind. For the
rest, there were just the two of them in the big
marble palace on Pacific Heights. The elder man
was buried in gold, the younger absorbed in the more
healthful preoccupations of youth. There had al-
ways been plenty of everything in the house, espe-
cially money; but that is not good ground for father
and son to meet on if they come together on no
other. But Elliot Wentworth had lost his wife when
the boy was born, and at that loss had immersed
himself the more deeply in financial affairs. Pos-
sibly the loss had turned him against the child, sub-
consciously. There are such strange mysteries in
human relationships. Young Wentworth, at all
events, had grown to manhood almost in his own way
——and, with manhood, came honour. He could not,
having honour himself, believe his father devoid of it.
Of course, if there had been dishonour, he could
understand how there should also be inevitable death.
Little as he had known his father, he had known him
to be a proud man, and sensitive. Maybe, if he had
been less proud and self-contained, the elder man
might have touched his son’s life more nearly. But
the fact that Wentworth held to his faith in his
father’s honour, after the first effect of the lawyer’s
relation wore off, made him reject—not the fact
of death, for that seemed beyond doubt—but the
theory of suicide.


44 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
It would be a part of his work in life, therefore,
to rehabilitate the good name of his father. This
much, at least, had been clear to his mind when he
rejected, on his own behalf, the help of the men who
had determined to reopen the bank. If he did clear
his father’s name it must be at somebody’s expense.
Whatever part they might have had in wrecking the
bank—if any of them had a part—the men who were
to open a new bank on the ruins of the old one could
have no sympathy with any such purpose as he cher-
ished. If any of them had had any part in wrecking
the bank, Wentworth’s purpose would be one which
they would stop at nothing to defeat.
It was a maze as yet, and Wentworth was groping
somewhat blindly in it—but, if his father had been
driven to his ruin, the driver or drivers must have been
big in the world of finance. A man of his father’s
stamp could not be cast into the abyss save to the
profit of somebody, and it might well chance that
the driver, having seen the father ruined, would be
willing or even anxious to help the son to live. It is
not the government alone that keeps a conscience fund.
These thoughts formed themselves vaguely as
Wentworth plunged along Montgomery Street now
with only the wind and fog for company, and turned
into a place he knew in order to get the evening
papers and the last details of the calamity in which
he was involved. That much of Mr. Chester’s talk
had been sound, anyhow. He must know all that
there was to know of the catastrophe.


THERE ARE GOOD PEOPLE 45
It was a place on the Cocktail Route that he en-
tered, about the first station; and so, of course, the
current setting up town had swept the crowd on an
hour before. The one man left on the late watch—
which might catch a stray sailorman from the front
or a belated Oaklander hurrying to the ferry, no
more than that—knew him and greeted him.
“How do, Mr. Wentworth?” said the barkeeper,
extending his hand across the bar, and smoothing
down his white apron.
It often happens that a barkeeper’s hand is the
last held out to a falling man and the first to a rising.
“Hullo, Charlie! Make me a cocktail, will you?
And I would like to look at the evening papers.”
There was a row of little stalls along one side of the
place that could be shut in by red plush curtains
swung from brass rods, and into one of these Went-
worth went, sinking on the red plush seat beside the
mahogany table that took up most of the space.
The evening papers lay spread out there, left by the
last occupant. On the top of the pile was the
Bulletin, a scare headline right away across the top
of the first page, and following it a full story of the
financial disaster and the tragedy of the fate of Elliot
Wentworth. It was a plain tale, plainly set down.
The most fervid reporter had no need to draw on his
imagination to heighten interest in a story like that.
Wentworth was sitting with his head upon his
hands, reading the tale, when the barkeeper came
across softly, and placed the red drink at his elbow.


46 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
The man did not go away again at once. The two
were alone in the place, and the barkeeper was stirred
by the practical sympathy of the poor. Also, he
had been a loser by the failure of the bank. Went-
worth, looking up for a moment, saw the kindness
in the servitor’s eye, and smiled at him. It needed
no more than that.
“This is hell, Mr. Wentworth, ain’t it?” said the
barkeeper.
“And then some!” Wentworth replied, and went
back to his newspaper.
He rose, at last, knowing all of the story that the
world knew. Crossing to the bar, where the bar-
keeper was busily polishing glasses, whistling softly
as he worked, Wentworth said, “Make me another
cocktail, Charlich—and one for yourself!”
The man mixed the drinks at once, and they drank.
Then Charlie said, as they set down their glasses,
“Have one on the house, sir?”
“N o more, thanks,” replied Wentworth.
“Well,” said Charlie, sighing as he put the glasses
away, “this is hell, Mr. Wentworth, ain’t it? I lose
five hundred bones, myself, on the play!”
“I am sorry for that,” replied Wentworth. “I
have lost everything.”
“I know!” said the barkeeper. “It is a pretty
hard deal—and, say, Mr. Wentworth, it ain’t much,
but if a twenty or so. should come anyways handy,
I’ve always got it in the safe, here.”
“Thanks, old man,” replied Wentworth. “After


THERE ARE GOOD PEOPLE 47
all, there are many good people in the world. I
will remember. And so, good-night!”
“Good-night!” replied the barkeeper. “But this
is hell, ain’t it?”
He went back to wiping glasses, whistling softly.
Wentworth passed out into the fog of the night,
caught a Sutter Street car, and transferred to Polk
for Pacific Heights. But he might as Well have spared
himself that trouble. The marble palace of the
Wentworths’ was already boarded up, front door and
windows, and the caretaker whom he aroused at last
in the back premises looked upon him clearly with
the gravest suspicion.
“You may be young Mr. Wentworth,” the old
woman said, peering out at him from the servants’
door—she only opened it the least little way—“but
it’s a queer time 0’ night to be comin’ ’round. That’s
all I says!”
Then she slammed the door in his face. He heard
it bolted on the inside, moreover. He had not
thought about the house being closed up so quickly,
but, on reflection, saw that it was natural enough
that it should be. The house servants would go at
the first hint of calamity. Rats do not abide a ship
that is about to founder—Chinese rats, least of all.
And, of course, he could not blame the caretaker for
not knowing him.
If he was to be permitted to look at his father’s
papers, and allowed to get some things left in his own
room, he could procure an order the next day from


48 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
whoever had control of the place. Moreover, it
occurred to him, at this moment, that he was faint;
that he had eaten nothing since morning. And he
must have a place where he could stay the night.
Old habits being still strong, he caught the next
car that passed on the way down town, transferred
to Sutter, and took a room at the St. Francis. As
he registered, he asked the clerk to have his steamer
trunk and suitcases sent for from the garage in
Golden Gate Avenue, and then he turned and went
downstairs to the grill.
And he found himself seated at a small table, meant
to accommodate two, shaking hands across the white
cloth with Fred Upson, a fraternity brother of last
year who had taken honours at Hastings Law School
and was just beginning to attract some notice at the
Bar.


50 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
It was the crystallization into clarity of the chaos
of Wentworth’s own thoughts.
“There is something behind it,” he agreed.
“But what?”
“You knew nothing of your father’s affairs?”
queried Upson.
“Nothing.”
“Nor of his business associates——and associa-
tions?”
“Not much more than everyone knew. The big
guns of Pine Street used to come to the house oc-
casionally. He frequented the Pacific Union Club,
and I suppose found them all there. If there was one
that seemed closer than another, it was old Harran,
but I do not know that he was much closer. Chester
sometimes seemed to be more intimate. The papers
were always full of the doings of the Wentworth
crowd on ’Change, or of the Baldwin crowd, or the
Harran crowd. My father, I gathered, was more
nearly identified with the Harran lot than with any
other—although I never seriously gave the thing
much thought—for the Harran crowd and the Went-
worth seemed frequently to be made by the news-
paper fellows to mean the same thing. Han-an was
always a big man at the bank. I saw him, among
others, when I caught a glimpse of the lot in Chester’s
office. But the whole world of money is like a great
kaleidoscope to me, turning and shifting.”
“As to the rest of us,” agreed Upson. “You
merely saw the shining colours as they changed.”


A NEW WAY OF LIFE 51
“And took joy in them,” said Wentworth.
“Naturally! You could reach out and seize any
colour that you fancied. The balance of us must
be content to look through the tube—and keep hands
off.”
“That was about the size of it,” said Wentworth.
“Well,” said Upson, after a little silence, “it took
some considerable manipulation to keep the colours
constantly changing. I suppose you always un-
derstood that?”
“I suppose that I did. But I am not conscious
of ever having thought much about it.”
“You would not, the whole game being so much
a matter of every day,” said Upson. “Your father’s
hand was probably doing most of the manipulating,
during all the time after you were old enough to
take notice. But there seems to have come a hand,
at last, that snatched the tube away from his, and
then he was thrown on the screen among the atoms,
and winked out.”
Wentworth had steadied, more and more, as they
talked. Moreover, the dinner had begun to move
across the table in orderly procession, and the sanity
of this presentation of food, as much as the strength-
ening quality of the viands themselves, refreshed
him.
“You mean that it was necessary to eliminate my
father in someone’s interest?” he asked.
“Exactly that. He stood in the way of some pre-
datory plutocrat’s accumulation of more millions.


52 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
His wide operations, sooner or later, would lay him
open to the squeeze. Your father, my boy, had some-
thing of the plunger’s reputation—~in the large, con-
structive way. The stronger hand closed on him
at the chance, and he went out.”
“That may all be true,” said Wentworth, mus-
ingly.
“It is true,” Upson asserted, with conviction.
“And whose was the stronger hand?”
“I do not know enough of your father’s concerns
to justify a conclusion. For choice, if I were to
hazard a guess, I would say Harran’s.”
“People have told me that I was like my father,”
said Wentworth. “I did not know him well enough
to be certain that that was the fact. But I do not
believe that any loss of money would drive me to
deat .”
“Do you know that your father is dead?” asked
Upson.
“Do you realize what is implied by that ques-
tion?” flashed Wentworth.
“Not what you seem to think,” replied Upson,
as quickly.
“It is death—or dishonour, Fred. God help me,
it may be both!”
The shadow with which Wentworth had been
struggling for a day and a night rose, darkly, to
confront him. But he fought it away. “I will
not believe it!” he cried. “I will not believe it!”
“And you need not,” said Upson. “Look here,


A NEW WAY OF LIFE 53
John! Your father was a promoter, therefore a man
sanguine by temperament, and imaginative, in other
words, a dreamer. Every great promoter is a dreamer-
And the man who succeeds at the trade is the man
who makes his dreams come true. He builds in
the world of high finance, and his building tools are
men and money. Your father was carried, say, a
thought beyond himself in one of his great construc-
tive dreams. There may have been some accidental
slip, some sudden contingency whose liability to occur
was overlooked and not provided for. He may have
been tempted. God alone knows! We all are, at
times.”
He fell silent for a moment, while the other sat
watching him.
“And then? ” asked Wentworth.
“He may have been tempted. The world, John,
is a wild beasts’ den. I tell you that, as a lawyer. I
have seen the beasts in it with their masks off.”
“I do not believe that all men are bad,” protested
Wentworth. Even amidst the darkness in which he
was groping, he would not go that far.”
“Believe what you like—but listen! The world
is a den of wild beasts; or, if you prefer it that way,
the world of money is a den of wild beasts. They
are more ravenous in that world than in any other,
anyhow. I grant you that, freely. The dreamer
was in the den among the beasts, and laid himself in
some way open to attack from the most ferocious
of them. We cannot tell what weakened joint there


54 TIE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
may have been in the dreamer’s armour. You say
that your father recovered completely from the effect
of his injury in that automobile accident—but, did
he? You have no more than the word of a doctor
and his own apparent recovery to go upon. And
we are dealing with that subtlest of all things, the
human brain! Did the beasts find the flaw, and
pierce the armour? We must manage to learn that,
somehow.
“That your father fought against his foes, and
fought manfully, I do not doubt. That he fought
to lose, the whole world knows. I believe that,
knowing where he was weak, they leaped upon the
dreamer to devour him. That he may have been
led, in the desperation of his resistance and in his
weakness, to do the thing too much, is at least pos-
sible. And then, awakened, he fell into the dream-
er’s panic. He would fear, as he ran, that every-
thing was gone; that all that was left for him was
to get away, to hide from the world. Later—and
when he might even deem it too late——he would come
to see that he could still have stayed and fought;
that this or that chance to retrieve himself had been
overlooked. But the panic flight would then stand
forever between him and his return and rehabilita-
tion.”
“ There could be no coming back,” said Wentworth.
“I do not go that far,” protested Upson. “But
that thought would be in the dreamer’s mind. To
drop metaphor, John, it is my opinion that some of


A NEW WAY OF LIFE 55
the big fellows down there on the Street got your
father into a corner, put him into a position from
which he could see no way out at the moment, and
squeezed him. Whether this was done by some sup-
pression; whether he was led into signing obligations
he could not meet; whether securities that could not
at that moment be replaced were swallowed by a
swiftly manipulated and disastrous turn in stocks
I do not know. But the thing is done every day.
It is a mere incident in life with those fellows. And
generally each one takes his turn, and they are all
going continually up and down like an eternal and
infernal seesaw. Your father was a bigger man than
usually falls; and the profit was greater to those
who ruined him. Also, his fall made more com-
motion. I believe that the man, or men, responsible
knew him, temperamentally, better than you did.
They counted upon what would follow on their
act. It is possible that they know where he is
now, and have a fear that you may come to sus-
pect them. Why should they offer to care for you,
otherwise?”
Wentworth put the point as to himself aside, for
the moment, although Upson’s words had strongly
borne out his own fleeting notion of a conscience
fund.
“You honestly do not believe that my father is
dead?” he asked.
“I will believe that he is dead when the Bay gives
up his body—not before.”


56 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“I cannot think that he would run away from a
mere money loss,” said Wentworth, insistently.
“Nor does it follow that he has. Understand me,
John! I do not imply, knowing you, I do not believe,
that your father has run away because of dishonour.
But that he may have been led to think that dis-
honour impended is certainly within the possibilities.
We do not know what moments of weakness he may
have had; what promises may have been made to
him; what his condition may have been as to sanity;
what pressure may have been brought to bear; what
power of coercion may have been in the hands of his
enemies at the psychological moment. But that
he was driven to flight, I am most firmly persuaded.”
“And you think that Harran ”
“I have named Harran for choice. There may
have been, and probably were, others in it as well.
The pickings would be large enough to share. How-
ever his afiairs were tangled, your father had mil-
lions. And the fellows who took his fleece would
have more than enough to make all his projects good.”
“Mr. Chester said that there was nothing left that
belonged to my father.”
“Ah, the lawyer! Well, at that point come in the
ethics of the profession, my son. As your father’s
representative, to say the least possible of it, Mr.
Chester has taken a peculiar position. I would
not go any further than that at this time.”
“If all this be true,” said Wentworth, and his
mental state as he said it was more hopeful than it


A NEW WAY OF LIFE 57
had been at any time since his arrival in San Fran-
cisco, “the first thing needful is to find my father!”
“That is the thing needful—but it cannot be done
first.”
“What, then?”
“We must get a line on the operation in the Street
that led to the disaster. If your father is alive as I
believe, he is somewhere safe, and as well as a man
may be who carries his load.”
“It should be my first duty to set him right,”
protested Wentworth. “To get him out of his false
position!”
“Certainly. But it is a point of method. It is
very doubtful whether you can do anything at all
by commencing an immediate search for him. If
there had been a deal, the men who were behind it will
make it their business to watch you, and to thwart
any efforts you may make calculated to jeopardize
their security. Your talk with Chester may already
have put them on guard. You scorned his proposals
and he seems deep in their confidence. And, re-
member, they have money at command and a long
reach.”
Upson paused for a moment, to light a cigarette.
“I incline to think, John,” he went on, “that it
would have been wiser for you to stay with the
University.”
“And feed from the hands of the men who ruined
my father?” asked Wentworth, so completely had
he accepted the theories of Upson.


58 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“It would have thrown them ofl" their guard more
completely,” the other replied. “And they would
not have credited you even with a suspicion.”
“Well, it is done, now,” said Wentworth. “I
have rejected their help, and with something of scorn.
And I am glad that I did,” he added, reflectively.
“Yes; I suppose that I am, too,” said Upson.
“Nevertheless, the absence of suspicion from the
minds of those estimable gentlemen would have been
a desirable thing at this moment. That condition
being out of the question, the next best thing is for
you to get work somewhere, anywhere, at anything,
it does not matter what. You should appear to be
so completely occupied in making your living as
to leave no time at all for other matters. That is to
blind your watchful enemy as to your real purpose.”
“And the appearance of making my living may
well run into the reality,” said Wentworth, grimly.
“But you surely do not mean that I must abandon,
even for the time being, all effort to get at the bottom
of this thing?”
“Not at all. You must do your investigating with
adroitness, which is a different thing. You have
shrewd men and powerful agencies opposed to you.
I will take your interest in charge, as your lawyer.
It will be the obvious thing for you to have a lawyer.
In that position, it is possible that I may get a line
that you would never find. Working together—
for I mean that you shall work, although as yet we
have not thought out a campaign—we are certain


A NEW WAY OF LIFE 59
to get the clue, sooner or later. If either of us dis-
covers anything, when either of us discovers anything
we will act. In the meantime, you work, work,
work! That is the best anodyne for a weary mind
the Lord ever devised.”


CHAPTER VII
A RED ROSE—AND THE OLD LIFE ENDS
HE waiter brought the rum omelet, and
l Upson began to spoon the blazing liquor over
the dish, cooking it after the manner approved
by the worldly.
“The thing for you now, John,” he said, “is to
put yourself entirely in my hands as your legal ad-
viser. Let the law feel its way, first.”
“I will be honest with you, Fred,” replied Went-
worth. He had in his mind a keen remembrance _
of Mr. Chester the elder. “I don’t like law, nor
yet, as a class, lawyers.”
Upson smiled, divining the thought behind the
words. “You must have them, nevertheless—to
meet law, and other lawyers,” he said.
“There is a good deal of the idea of enlisting mer-
cenary troops in it.”
“The mercenaries volunteer in your interest this
time, old man. Hullo! There is Allison!”
Wentworth looked across the room, and saw the man
he had left on the back stoop of the Foothills Hotel
making his way toward them from the Grill entrance.
“I thought I had abandoned you in the south,”
he said, rising to greet his friend.
60


A RED ROSE 61
“So you did, dear boy,” replied Allison, shaking
hands with one and then the other. “How are you,
Upson? But Brooks and I caught the Coaster this
morning at Ventura, after staying long enough to
give ease of mind to a number of your dear friends,
disturbed by stories in the Los Angeles papers, and
followed after. I could not desert Brooks as you
did me. I find he is a valuable asset to me, if only
in the way of an awful example of what follows on
human frailty. But do you know that it is after
midnight, you two owls? And I am as hungry as a
wolf.”
The waiter, at a nod from Upson, had drawn a
third chair to the little table, and Allison sat down
and called for a steak and a bottle of Burgundy.
Waiting for his service, he was taken into the talk
at once.
“I have just been telling this youth," explained
Upson, after a short recital of Wentworth’s expe-
rience with the lawyer, “ that he must let me represent
his interests in these matters.”
“ Surely ! ” agreed Allison.
“And I have been telling Upson that I like neither
law nor the genus lawyer,” said Wentworth; “that
the notion of employing mercenaries in warfare is
very repugnant to me.”
“It seems to me that the mercenaries volunteer,”
suggested Allison. “And it takes a lawyer to fight
lawyers.”
This somewhat whimsical repetition by the new-


62 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
comer of almost the very words that Upson had used
put the three into that humorous vein that is to be
found in almost everything human—and so on a better
footing as to the tragic business they were discussing.
“I suppose that I will have to let you fellows
have your way of it,” said Wentworth, under this
better influence.
“Of course you will,” agreed Upson, cheerfully.
“And now, where are you stopping?”
“Here,” replied Wentworth.
“At the St. Francis!” exclaimed Upson.
“Pretty high, isn’t it, all things considered? I’ll
move to-morrow.”
“Come up to the University Club with me!”
cried Allison.
“And Brooks? Thanks, old man. But that
would be pretty high, too. I must make my own
living, now, you know. My lawyer here tells me
that, and, indeed, I know it without any telling.”
“And that will be enough of the battle for you
to undertake at first,” said Upson.
“All the same,” insisted Wentworth, “I do not
intend to give up the field to you altogether.”
“The legal end of it, at all events,” said Upson.
“And now, about making your living?”
“I might get a clerkship somewhere?” suggested
Wentworth.
“A form of slavery!” murmured Allison.
“Not bad, as tending to take all the time a man
has,” said Upson.


A RED ROSE 63
“Nevertheless, I didn’t believe that it is good for
any man to become a mere drudge,” said Allison,
speaking with an earnestness unusual to him. “I
think it would be better if you could find something
that would give you a chance to do some of the fight-
ing. And, anyway, how do you propose to live until
you get your clerkship?”
“I still have most of the two hundred I left the
Foothills with. And I can sell the Green Flyer,”
said Wentworth. “It cost me $5,000. I should
get half that.”
“Give you three thousand for it!” said Allison.
“What do you want with it? You never drove a
car in your life.”
“I am possessed of a wild desire to begin. And,
dear boy, think how eligible it will be for Brooks to
break his neck with on joy rides! Do you take it?”
“Of course I take it. Send me a check in the
morning.”
“Good enough!” said Allison.
“Three thousand ought to keep me, even at the
St. Francis, for a day or two,” said Wentworth.
“As your legal adviser, I still think it will be better
for you to find an occupation,” put in Upson. “The
three thousand is a very good nest-egg, and might be
needed to buy powder. A war chest is a very good
thing to have, when war impends.” '
“Right you are!” exclaimed Wentworth. “What
a blessing it is that my poor, old dad would never
permit me to go into debt. I don’t owe a soul!”


64 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
He was silent, downcast for just a moment. And
then his cheerfulness came back. “I’ll bank the
three thousand, and find a room in the Western
Addition to-morrow,” he said. “Then I’ll look for
a job.”
“Ever do newspaper work?” asked Upson.
“Not a line. Why?”
“Well, there’s Charlie Stringham, managing editor
of the Call, over there. I know him pretty well. I
used to do a turn or two at it myself, in my college
days. And they are always giving fellows tryouts
on the newspapers. Want to take a chance?”
He did not say, although he knew it to be the fact,
that if Wentworth became interested, the trade would
take all that he had to give, body and brain. The
fact that he wanted a clear field to work in was one
that he could not bring out too clearly.
“I’ll take any chance :” replied Wentworth. And
then he went on, eagerly, “It would be the best thing
I could do. The reporters go everywhere.”
“So they do,” agreed Upson. He rose at that.
“ Stay here a minute, you fellows,” he said.
He went straight across the Grill to where there
sat at a table alone a square-j awed, clean-shaven man,
not old, but with the lines in his face that great
responsibility graves more deeply than the years.
This man looked up and nodded, and Upson sat
down opposite him. The lawyer seemed to lay the
matter in hand before the square-jawed man in a
Very earnest manner indeed. Wentworth, watching,


A RED ROSE ' 65
caught one swift glance from a pair of clear, blue eyes
that just swept over him in a look that seemed to take
in instantly everything in the Grill—the lights,
the flowers, the men and women babbling in time
to the music, everything. And Wentworth knew,
meeting the blue eyes, that he had been measured.
Presently Upson rose, Stringham set down his
wine glass, empty, and followed him. They came
over to the table where Allison was now attacking
his steak and Burgundy, and Upson introduced the
editor. Stringham came to the point like a man
who meets, and passes, everything.
“Upson tells me that you want to try your hand
at newspaper work, Mr. Wentworth,” he said.
“I want to work,” replied Wentworth.
“There is work for men who want it,” replied the
editor. “But it is real work. Anewspaper demands
everything. Come to my oflEice to-morrow at one
o’clock, and we’ll talk it over. I dare say we can
arrange something, if you really want it.”
“Thank you!” said Wentworth.
“Not at all. Good-night,” said the editor.
“Good-night, Mr. Allison. I’m glad to have met
you. I will see you about that other matter any
time you like, Upson. Good-night.”
The three young men gave him good-night, and
he went his way out of the Grill. And' the next
day John Wentworth was regularly enrolled on the
City Staff of the Call, with orders to report for duty
the following afternoon, and a salary of twenty


66 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
dollars a week as a beginner. He had been accus-
tomed to spend several times that amount in a day,
if it suited his humour, but this small stipend was a
healthy one for a man to begin the world on. He
found a room, too, away out on Bush Street, beyond
Fillmore; and for this he paid ten dollars a month
in advance, with the privilege of the bath.
To this place he sent his steamer trunk from the
St. Francis; and later, a larger trunk from the marble
palace on Pacific Heights filled with such of his
personal belongings as it suited him to keep. A
few trinkets, his father’s repeater which he found in
his own old room by some strange chance, and his
private papers. He got this trunk by favour of
Upson, who procured an order from the receiver in
bankruptcy. Bankruptcy proceedings had already
been commenced when Wentworth reached San
Francisco. The receiver it was who had taken pos-
session of the marble palace as the only tangible
thing left by the elder Wentworth. Otherwise,
there was in sight only the promoter’s interest in
various projected enterprises, and these the receiver
might hope to realize on only by an amicable arrange-
ment with the people who were to revive the Bank.
After he had removed his luggage to his new quar-
ters, Wentworth banked the three thousand Allison
paid him for the Green Flyer, and was ready to report
for duty to the City Editor. Upson, of course, had
already begun to look out for his interests. But
it was a hopeless task enough. There really did not


A RED ROSE 6’7.
seem to be any material interests to look out for.
No line appeared anywhere that could be followed
to any tangible result.
The new Bank of the Pacific had opened its doors
with five millions in gold coin in sight. It was an-
nounced that all agreements made by the late Presi-
dent of the Bank would be carried out to the letter.
His big industrial projects would be financed and
completed. The old depositors would be taken care
of, in time, out of the realized assets of the Bank,
and trust funds would be cared for.
And as the men who were behind the Bank were
known to be the heaviest capitalists in the city, after
a flurry or two in the stock market the Street settled
quickly. Money began to be paid into the Bank,
before the close of business, faster than it had ever
come in before. The Directors, who had saved the
situation in the city with the help of the Clearing
Houswwhich announced its alliance with the new
management at the opening of business-were hailed
as the financial regenerators of the Pacific Coast.
The mining stock market took a strong bullish tone.
Money rates eased up. The city, in a word, accepted
the new condition. And the fall of Elliot VVent-
worth became, almost in a day, a vanishing mile-
stone in the mad American race for money. He was
down—and passed. The field swept on.
John Wentworth dined with Allison at the Uni-
versity Club that night, He took it as the last taste
of a life that might never behis again—and was not


68 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
conscious of any keen regret on that score. Allison,
of course, had in his mind a purpose to hold his friend,
despite his changed position. And in some measure,
whatever might chance, he would probably be able
to do that. A newspaper man has associates every-
where.
On his side, Wentworth realized how it would per-
haps come that in the real interests of their lives they
would drift apart. But he ate his dinner, and drank
his wine, and let nothing of his realization appear.
After dinner they went to the Majestic and saw John
Drew in a couple of acts of “The Master.” After-
ward they tooka taxi for Tait’s to get a bite of
supper.
And as they sat over it there was the bustle of the
entrance of a theatre party, and Wentworth, forget-
ting for a moment, rose to answer the smile and bow
that Margaret Graeme gave him as she passed with
a gay following of young men and women. Only,
she had paused in passing for the least fraction of a
second, her hand going to the cluster of red roses at
her corsage. And a rose, a single rose, seemed to
detach itself to fall at Wentworth’s feet.
He stooped quickly, picked it from the floor, and
thrust it into the flap of his coat. She had swept
on into the inner room, with no more than the smile
and the bow. Allison, rising to bow in return, had
not seemed to notice the rose, although it may well
be that friendship is sometimes blind, as well as love.
Wentworth had his prize, at all events—and it was


A RED ROSE 69
not much. A silence fell between the two friends,
for a little, after the other party had entered.
Wentworth was the first to break it. “It is time
for working people to be in bed,” he said. “It is
long past midnight.”
If Allison had expected that the silence would have
been broken in another way he said nothing. “News-
paper people run all night,” was his only protest
at the parting. '
“Not beginners. And the others do not keep
honest people up just for the fun of the thing, dear
boy. Good-night.”
He left Allison still lounging at the table, under
the lights and the palms, with the soft music rising
and falling across the chatter of the theatre crowds.
Allison would probably join the other party when he
was gone. Wentworth felt no bitterness on that ac-
count. Allison’s place was with the other party.
And he would be whimsical, and winning, and the
women would be—well, his friend deserved to win
any woman. Allison was too good a fellow to care
whether a man who had dropped out of that old life
took down with him into the other and harder world
a memory of a sweet perfume—and a faded rose.
Wentworth held the rose in his hand as he made
his way into the street, and the music followed him
as the doors closed behind him. It was Hawaiian,
the music, and Wentworth had a throbbing in his
brain in unison with the half-barbaric beat of it.
Once, in his early college days, he had taken a vaca-


'70 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
tion run to the Islands. It all came back to him in
the music. The sensuous strains brought to his
ears the soft grating of the palm trees stirred by the
trade winds, the murmur of breaking seas on far-
off reefs, the sighing of warm gales among spice
islands. And he saw the islands that night in his
dreams, and a woman beckoned to him there, hold-
ing a warm red rose in her hand.


72 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
one of them would take an unfair advantage of the
rest. He would have been sent to Coventry if he
had, but the fear of that was not the deterrent. It
was much more the ethics of the thing. They played
the game honestly.
These men, while they were all willing to lend a
hand to the beginner, and to do it in genuine friendli-
ness, without the least taint of patronage, began by
assuming that Wentworth knew the ropes that held
the players of the game safely within bounds. And,
under the influence of this assumption, tending inevi-
tably to create self-confidence, Wentworth played
boldly—and found the ropes where he expected to
find them. A man of fair intelligence, with the
knack of writing a plain newspaper story with some
slight touches of whimsical humour here and there, he
found after that first day that he got on. More,
having a deeper purpose below his work, Wentworth
saw very quickly how familiarity with policemen
and police methods might come to be of material
help to him in the working out of his purpose.
Now, it is the practice in every good newspaper
office to pile all the work on a clever and willing man
that he will do without protest. Wentworth was
both clever and willing; and was made to earn his
twenty dollars a week. Likewise he found that in
earning it he was so absorbed in each day’s happen-
ings, so occupied with the labour of the passing hour,
that he had but little time left to think on his own
concerns—and no time at all for brooding. He never


THE WRECK OF THE “HALCYON” 73
really lost sight altogether of the purpose that had been
behind his every act since the disappearance of his
father, but the daily call of the daily work kept his
mind from dwelling upon it. And that was healthful.
Secret design is never good for the heart of youth.
Wentworth went to his little room in Bush Street
every night, honestly tired, and slept the sleep that
attends on physical fatigue. And he arose refreshed,
along about noon, to go down for his morning coffee
to a little place he found handy in Fillmore Street.
It was coffee and rolls, mostly, or coffee and
“sinkers,” which is the San Francisco argot for the
cheap and filling doughnut of city consumption.
And the coffee was the coffee-house decoction of the
ground berry and milk boiled together. Wentworth,
after the first few times of drinking, found that he
really began to have a taste for this beverage of the
poor. Also, with this kind of breakfast, a seventy-
five-cent table d’hote dinner at Paul’s at seven, and
coffee and rolls—with a couple of eggs, or fried sau-
sage, or corned beef hash, or pork and beans—at the
Fillmore Street place on his way home, he could live
very well within his twenty a week.
And he could save a dollar or two a week to buy
beer for the boys at the Press Club, too. But he
cut that out very soon, finding that it was more
profitable to his line of work to buy beer for the police-
men and small politicians. The whole thing gave
him life in a new and not unattractive aspect.
For two months Wentworth lived his life thus,


THE WRECK OF THE “HALCYON” 75
there, Wentworth found the Call’s marine expert,
a master in his line, seated before a desk telephone,
the receiver at his ear, in a little wooden shed on a
place on Peterson’s boat wharf. As it happened,
the expert was alone in the room, although there were-
a few tarry-looking loungers just outside the door.
Wentworth stood quiet for a moment waiting for
the other to finish with the telephone. But the
expert, as it appeared, could talk to one man over
the phone and to another at his side at the same time,
a common talent among newspaper men.
“Oh, you are Wentworth?” he said, turning, with
the receiver still held to his ear. “Hullo! That.
you, Jim? Is the Korea passing in? This is Hanna.”
Then, again speaking to Wentworth: “I suppose
you saw the cable a few weeks ago about the wreck.
of the tramp freighter Halcyon on Guam? Only
the captain and two men saved? Well, you’ll find
one of the survivors, a sailor, on board another ship
just docked at Spreckles’ wharf. Go over there and.
get the full story, will you, please? And report back
to me. It ought to be a good yarn.”
He turned back to the phone, over the mouth-
piece of which he had held one hand while he was
talking to Wentworth. “Yes; I am listening. All
right, Jim. I’ll go out with you. I ‘am coming-
right over.”
“All right, sir!” said Wentworth, as soon as he
thought politeness permitted him to break in.
“Not gone yet?” asked the other, turning from


76 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
the phone. “Better get a wiggle on! The sailor
might leave the ship.”
He went out the door, at that, and was gone.
Wentworth, more slowly, made his way along the
Embarcadero toward Broadway wharf, and heard
himself hailed by name as he was picking his way
over the narrow, uneven footpath that lies between
the roadway and a high board fence shutting in the
wharves. He turned, just as his friend the sailor,
McGreal, came across to meet him from the open
door of one of the many groggeries standing all along
there. Having interest in his work, it occurred to
Wentworth that this man had been the third mate
of the Halcyon, and so might give him points about
the ship that would do to feature in his story. And,
anyhow, he would be interested.
“Hullo, McGreal!” he said. “Found a ship yet?”
“Yes, sir; I got a berth on the transport Sherman.
. Fourth oflicer, sir. She sails to-morrow.” -
Wentworth noted then, for the first time, that th
sailor had on a blue uniform, with neat cap, and that
there was about him a general air of nautical nattiness
that sat pleasantly on his loose strength. It seemed,
indeed, that the man had grown to a sense of some
responsibility, and that he had possibilities for growth
in reserve. It was an impression of the moment,
merely, Wentworth’s own immediate duty taking
possession of him.
“Can you come along with me for an hour or two?”
asked the newspaper man.


THE WRECK OF THE “HALCYON” 77
“Surely, sir. My watch on deck does not begin
until eight bells to-night. How you headed, sir?”
“For Spreckels’ wharf. There’s a ship lying
therehwith a survivor of the Halcyon on board.”
“The Halcyon, sir?” McGreal had stopped in his
tracks. “I had not heard she was lost.”
“The Halcyon,” repeated Wentworth. “The loss
was cabled weeks ago.”
“I missed it!” gasped McGreal, still standing
with his eyes grown large. “The Halcyon! Why,
that was my ship, sir!”
“So it was,” agreed Wentworth. “She was
wrecked on the island of Guam, and I am going to
get the story.”
“The story!” exclaimed McGreal. “Oh, I see.
You are on a newspaper. Was—was anybody lost,
sir?”
“ Captain and two men saved,” replied Wentworth.
“ Come along.”
He started forward as he spoke, and McGreal
came stumbling at his heels. The sailor seemed to be
a bit dazed, striking his feet against the rough stones
of the street, now and then lurching over against
the high board fence, and paying no heed. Once,
turning sharply around, Wentworth drew him literally
out from under the feet of a heavy truck team that
otherwise would most assuredly have walked him
down.
“Wake up, man!” cried Wentworth. “Didn’t
you ever heard of a shipwreck before?”


78 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“The Halcyon, sir!” said McGreal, feebly. “All
of them gone! And you—to be sent to get the story
of the H alcyonl ”
“What’s the matter with you? ” asked Wentworth,
sharply.
“I don’t know, sir,” replied McGreal, in helpless
fashion.
“I think you must be drunk!” said Wentworth
at that, looking at the sailor more sharply than he
had done yet.
McGreal braced up with an apparent effort.
“Not me,” he said. “I’ve had nothing more than a
glass or two of steam beer. It was the shock, sir.”
However, he came along very much better after
that. Wentworth found the survivor of the Halcyon
right enough, and, sailorwise, entirely willing to talk
to a newspaper man. The man was seated on the
edge of a bunk in the forecastle smoking a short
briar pipe. With a sailor’s limitless patience he
was just waiting for the next turn of the wheel. He
would go, it was likely, with the first crimp that
came on board looking for men. And as he sat, the
purser pointed him out to Wentworth.
“ Well,d’ye see, sir, it was this way,” said the sailor,
when Wentworth questioned him, after he had
greeted McGreal as a former officer by touching
his forelock. “It had been blowing like hell out
of the southwest for three days; and the old tub
labouring in the biggest seas I ever saw, as if every-
one of them would roll the engines out of her. I


THE WRECK OF THE “HALCYON” 79
don’t know what possessed the old man—that was
Captain Graeme, sir—to run down to Guam, unless
it was the passenger.”
“The passenger?” exclaimed Wentworth.
“He came aboard after you left the ship, Mr.
McGrea ,” said the sailor. “He was the only man
that got safe ashore, the passenger, excepting the
old man and me, sir. My name, as Mr. McGreal
here knows, is Oleson—Arvad Oleson, sir.”
“Who was the passenger?” asked Wentworth.
“He called himself Norman Ainsworth, sir.”
“Where’d you get him?”
“Well, I think it was in this port, sir, but I don’t
rightly know. It was my watch below when we
were passing into San Francisco, and we went out
of the port in a fog. And~and, when I came aboard,
sir—well, I had had a bit to drink—and the old man
gave me a jolt with a marlin spike and another watch
below. When I came on deck again, outside the
Farallones, there was the passenger, talking to the
old man on the after deck. A good sailor he was,
sir, and a gentleman. Sent a case of beer forward
the first Sunday out of port, and every Sunday after
that until the very last.”
“What do you know about this passenger, Mc-
Greal?” asked Wentworth, turning suddenly to his
sailor footpad friend. \
“M-me, sir? Nothing!”
“I thought you seemed to, a bit ago. Did the
Halcyon carry passengers?”


80 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“She carried one that voyage, anyway,” said
Oleson. McGreal was mute.
“There is a touch of mystery here,” said Went-
worth. “That makes it a better story. But go
on and tell us how the wreck occurred, Oleson.”
“As I was a-saying, sir,” resumed the sailor, “I
don’t know what it was possessed the old man to
rim down to Guam. She had cleared for Nagasaki,
out of this port. But there was the island, right
enough, standing up rocky and black out of those
big seas. And I don’t think the old man was glad
of a landfall, one time. Still, it might have been all
right, even then, if she could have got under the lee
of the long point of San Luis d’Apra, to run inside.
The sea was a fright, sir, and the wind howled like
the tail of a tropic hurricane; but she was fighting her
way in for the headland, and a little more than hold-
ing her own, when, snap! the propeller dropped
clear away from her—broken short off by a green sea,
and she just fell over on her side, the shaft racing
and smashing things to hash in the belly of her.
“They got the engines stopped in a minute; but
the seas were running her right in on the reef outside
the harbour, sir. You could see the white spray
thrown over a hundred feet every time that one of
them curled over and broke. And there must have
been a strong set of the current in toward the island,
too, because we went drifting right down on it at
better speed than the Halcyon had ever made since
she was engined.


THE WRECK OF THE “HALCYON” 81
“Of course it wasn’t any use to make sail. Those
tramps don’t carry a rag to bless themselves that is
worth a damn. And it wasn’t any use to try to leave
her, because a boat couldn’t have lived in that sea.
We just had to drift in to destruction and take our
chance. It was near about three o’clock in the after-
noon when we made the landfall, sir. It was just
gone dark when she struck, once and again! We
could see the lights of a big transport inside as we
came on, and a searchlight was held on us. It
gave them the sight of our poor fellows drowning, sir.
They couldn’t help us. Nothing afloat could have
come out into that wind and sea.
“And so she struck, once and again, and there was
an awful grinding and smashing noise; and the wild
shriek of the steam to the top of that. And then I
was in the water, sir, with a smother of white foam
all about me; and a queer kind of light all through
it, like the green flames of hell.
“I don’t know how I got over the reef; nor how any
man could have passed it with those ferocious seas
beating straight down, and lived. I saw the black
rocks all about me in the shining water, and got
a badly scratched knee and arm, sir. Wet coral
rocks are nasty. And then a straight line of water
stood up over me, like the cutting edge of a long knife,
sir, and a wave threw me over into still water, and
just seemed to lift me above the rocks. Some
Chimorros in a canoe picked me up and took me
aboard the transport. I found the old man and the


82 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
passenger there. They had been picked up, as I had
been, by the niggers. And that is all, sir.”
“What became of Captain Graeme—and the
passenger? ”
“Well, sir, they were offered passage on the
H ancock—that’s the transport that was in San
Luis d’Apra, storm bound—and we all came to
Honolulu in her. They would not carry us beyond
the first regular port, sir. The old man paid me off
at Honolulu, and I came on in this ship. They
stayed there.”
“In Honolulu?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where is the Hancock?” asked Wentworth, next.
“On the way up from the island, sir. She left
a, day ahead of us, but the transports are slow, sir.”
“Gee! It’s a great story!” exclaimed Wentworth.
“ The Halcyon was a total loss?”
“No more than the bones of her left by this,”
replied Oleson.
“What was her lading? ”
“She cleared this port in ballast, sir. She was
bound for Nagasaki to coal, and then to Hankow
for tea.”
“She was a long way out of her course, at Guam.”
“Five or six hundred miles,” agreed Oleson.
“But we laid it to the passenger, sir.”
“ ”
“Well, sir, there wasn’t any special reason—and
the passenger didn’t stay at Guam after he got there.


CHAPTER IX
THE MAN WHO WAS SAVED
HAT the devil have you got to do with
my story of the Halcyon’s passenger?”
flashed Wentworth.
His purpose to get points from McGreal as to the
career of the tramp steamer that had laid her bones
on the reef outside the harbour of San Luis d’Apra
was lost sight of in a moment, and with the quick
instinct of the newspaper man he resented this
interference by an outsider with the manner of his
work.
McGreal, on his part, took no offence at the tone
of the question. He looked into the face of Went-
worth, and there was real sorrow in his eyes.
“It is as I say, sir,” with a strange manner of in-
sistence. “If I were you, I wouldn’t make too much
of a story about the H alcyon’s passenger.”
“By God; you’ve got to tell me what you mean
cried Wentworth.
“Why, yes, sir; I’ll do that,” replied McGreal.
“Come over to the Blue Wind, sir. We can get a
room to talk in, there.”
He led the way across the wide road along the
waterfront, dodging trucks and electric cars, to
'9!
.
85


THE MAN WHO WAS SAVED 87
sounded hollow to the tread of men. It seemed to
have been the floor of a wharf at one time and to
cover, now, an obscene cavity wherein might abide
nameless horrors. And, indeed, it is likely that it was
a section of some old wharf. All that part of the
front is built on made land.
The walls of the room were splotched with mildew,
breaking out in impolite places on the pictures, mostly
of ladies in scant attire, or no attire at all, cut from
illustrated gutter weeklies, and pasted up by way
of mural decoration. The years had dimmed the
pictures, too, the years and the damp, and Jack’s
gross familiarity with these questionable female pre-
sentments had not always been happy.
McGreal sat down at the round table. Oleson,
who seemed at home here just as he had seemed at
home in the forecastle of the ship, dropped his bundle
on the rough floor and sat down likewise. Went-
worth, snifiing, rolled and lighted a cigarette by
way of fumigation and self-defence before following
the example of his companions. And by the time
he had done that, the bar boy had come in with his
tray, had set three foaming glasses of steam beer
on the table, pocketed the three nickels laid down by
McGreal, and gone out again.
“Now, McGreal!” said Wentworth, reaching out
for his glass of beer. “Out with it!”
The fourth mate of the Sherman blew the foam off
his beer, and sipped it slowly. Oleson had gulped
his down at once and set the empty glass back on the


88 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
table; seeing which, Wentworth slid toward the
sailor his own measure of the beverage. But
McGreal seemed in no hurry to begin. He sipped
his beer, still slowly, but, at that, probably not so
slowly as his thoughts shaped themselves for speech.
Wentworth found a button on the table, pressed it,
ordered, and paid for three more glasses of steam
beer, and the silence in the Glory Hole was not
broken.
“Take all day if you need it, McGreal!” Went-
worth said, as he rolled himself a second cigarette.
“Of course I’m in no hurry!”
“Well, sir,” said the fourth mate at last, “I don’t
know as it’s much to tell, or whether it will strike
you as it does me, sir. But it was a thought that
crossed me when I first heard your name—that day
we came up from the south in your devil wagon.”
“And what has this thought, whatever it is, got
to do with my story of the Halcyon’s passenger?”
asked Wentworth.
“Why, thereiit is, sir! The thought crossed me
again to-day, when I heard you say the passenger
was the story. I believe that the passenger is the
story. But it is not a story you may write.”
“I’ll be damned,” cried Wentworth, starting as
if he would get up from his chair, “if I can tell what
the man is driving at!”
“Hold on a second!” cried McGreal. “Let me
get my bearings; I have not told you yet.”
“That is the first sensible thing you have said


THE MAN WHO WAS SAVED 89
since we arrived. You have not told me yet. Do
you intend to tell me? ”
“Yes, sir,” replied the fourth mate, seriously. “I
do. The Halcyon came to San Francisco solely to
get that passenger. Do you mind when I told you
why I left the steamer at Pedro?”
“You said something about helping a robber to
get away with the loot of widows and orphans,” re-
plied Wentworth—and in a lower key than he had
heretofore used. He had gone white as that memory
came back to him with another associated memory:
his own thoughts at the time.
“That was it, sir,” said McGreal. “I don’t like
to go on from that—but it looks like it was my duty.
The old man, Captain Graeme, sir, did not tell me
who his passenger was to be. We were to receive him
aboard ship after we came to anchor. He wanted
the man on watch to do that and stow him away—
not wishing to appear in the thing directly himself.
A captain would better be able to carry a straight
yarn to the owners, in case of things happening.
Of course he couldn’t throw a man overboard after
he was on deck and she was outside, d’you see?
And his duty to his owners would not permit him
to turn back, excepting for grave cause, when he had
cleared the port, and got outside. Besides, the pas-
senger would not want to go back.
“But a man might be carried out of his course by
wind and current far enough, sir, once he was at
sea, to land a man who wanted to leave the ship at


90 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
Guam—or even at Yap, say. The man on the deck
watch had only to receive the man on board and
hide him in an empty cabin—and then keep up a
pretence of ignorance, whatever he might see, to
earn a thousand dollars. I am not better than an-
other man, and I agreed to the scheme that far.
But I did say a thousand dollars was a pretty fancy
- price to pay—just for helping. And it was then that
the old man blurted out that a stowaway who was
put aboard by a man who had probably got away
with the savings of most of the widows, and had
robbed a lot of the orphans of San Francisco, could
afford to buy all the sailors running out of the port,
body and breeches.”
“And—and, then?” asked Wentworth. He had
to take a long drink of the steam beer before he could
get that much out. His lips, when he tried to speak,
felt as though a swift flame had seared them.
“Well, sir, I’ve done a lot of things in my time,
and I don’t have to make any treaty with my con-
science in the ordinary run of every day, but taking
the money of women and children, or helping away
the man who takes it, is one too strong for me. And
so I went over the side at Pedro. It was the only
way out. I knew the old man, sir. He would never
consent to my discharge; and, after what he had
told me, it was possible that I might make the voy-
age to San Francisco in irons; and lie in them until
the steamer cleared again from there.”
“And—and, the Halcyon’s passenger?” whispered


THE MAN WHO WAS SAVED 91
Wentworth. He knew what the answer to his ques-
tion would be, what it must be, but something that
seemed apart from himself impelled him to force
the sailor to frame the words. All that Upson had
said to him in justification of his father came back
to him, but seemed feeble in the face of McGreal’s
plain relation. With that realization, a load of
guilt seemed to form itself on Wentworth’s own shoul-
ders, bearing him down. He looked around the room
always away from McGreal, taking in the dark
interior, and the sailor Oleson asleep in his chair.
And he came back to his question with a strange
insistence, whispering it once more.
“There was only one man—who fitted the case—
who slipped out of San Francisco on the day the
Halcyon sailed,” whispered McGreal, leaning across
the table with his face close to Wentworth’s.
Still Wentworth would spare neither the sailor
nor himself. “And that man was?” he asked.
“Hush!” whispered McGreal, warningly. “Cap-
tain Greame never told me the name of his passenger,
sir. The Halcyon passed out through the Heads on
the evening of the very day that the Bank of the
Pacific closed its doors.”
Thus the sailor slipped away from the utterance
of the name. And Wentworth sat dazed, like a man
whose life is stricken all at once. McGreal, still
leaning across the table, went on:
“I felt it, sir, on that day at the garage, when I
first heard your name spoken. It came over me all


96 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
talk after dinner that Wentworth would have earned
a strong rebuke, if not something worse, at the hands
of the City Editor for his failure to show up for his
night assignment, if it had not been that the course
of the talk soon put him beyond caring for the office
at all. How far he had gone beyond caring was
shown in his parting words to Upson.
“It will suit me down to the ground, old man,
if you can manage transportation on the Sherman.
If that is impossible, the Hortense sails in three days.
She will land me in Honolulu in six from that. The
transport will only beat that by a couple of days.”
“I can manage it without any trouble at all,”
replied Upson. “Come to my office the first thing
in the morning, and we will go down and see the
Quartermaster. You can attend to your letter of
credit afterward.”


CHAPTER X
THE ENGLISHMAN
clouds lying all along the southern horizon
leaped, upon a rainy morning, a point of blue
that did not change its shape as the outlines of the
cloud pictures changed. So the U. S. Transport
Sherman, faring steadily for seven days and nights
into the southwest across a sea that seemed the most
lonely in the world, made her landfall on Makapuu
Point on the morning of the eighth day. She had
passed and spoken the Hancock one day out of San
Francisco.
John Wentworth, standing on the bridge alongside
the Quartermaster-Captain, saw the outline of the
blue point rise and strengthen, while the cloud pic-
tures were ceaselessly dissolving and building up
again beyond it, until at last the whole black and
rugged coast of Windward Oahu stood out from the
sea; and, on either hand, Molokai and the Hana
Coast of Maui loomed dimly.
Following that Windward Coast, the white line
of the breaking seas arose and changed and fell at
the base of the tall cathedral cliffs. Rabbitt Island
broke from the larger land mass at last, and then
OUT of the massed pictures of the trade wind
97


98 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
there were the pallid green cane fields of Waimanalo,
with a rugged ridge of bars, brown craters towering
behind them. And the Sherman floated into the
sheltered water around Coco Head; and Diamond
Head, old and massive and hoary, leaped into the
picture, with many white villas peeping out from
the massed foliage of the algaroba thickets at its
base.
Just at half speed, as a white ship glides across a
stage picture, the Sherman moved along in front of
beautiful Waikiki; and the graceful cocoanut trees
held themselves like stars against the bit of clear
sky that curved down to fill the space of Waialae
Gap, between the hills.
Honolulu stood revealed, white houses with red
roofs, in a wilderness of tropical foliage. Beyond
the city the green hills curved from Tantalus to
Round Top, with the Nuuanu and Manoa valleys run-
ning far back; and the endless procession of the rain-
bows moved in stately gorgeousness across the
forested highlands under the cloud masses that cling,
always, holding the rain, to the summits of the high-
est peaks.
The Sherman was one of those outworn iron tubs,
rechristened, which were unloaded in numbers on
the Government by their owners in the hurry to pro-
cure transports which marked the panicky first
days of the Spanish War. She had been, when new,
one of the first of the “Atlantic Greyhounds,” and
in her day capable of fair speed. She had become


102 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
Street car to King Street. His own newspaper ex-
perience, short as it had been, had taught him that
in any American city which breasts the outer seas
a man must seek first among newspaper men for
light on the things which come up out of the deep.
The conductor of the car stopped it at King Street
for him, and obligingly told him that it was so short
a walk to the ofice of the Commercial Advertiser that
it would hardly be worth his while to wait for the con-
necting car, to which he had given him a transfer.
Following the man’s directions, Wentworth walked
rapidly along east on King Street—Ewa, they call
that direction in the islands—and found the place
he sought up one flight of steps in a low brick build-
ing. It was then just early luncheon time. The
Commercial Advertiser is the morning paper of Hono-
lulu, and at that hour none of the staff had reported
for duty. But an obliging man in the business office
told Wentworth that he would probably find Mr.
Pray, the marine reporter, at breakfast in the Union
Grill, next door, and went down on the street with
the stranger to point him out.
Mr. Pray was at breakfast. He was eating papaia,
with cracked ice in it, at a little table facing the street
right in the front of the Grill. Furthermore, as the
luncheon crowd had not yet begun to come in from
the business ofl‘ices round about, he was alone in
the place save for the presence of a white-clad waiter
or two hovering in the background; and of a tall
man, with a face like that of Mephistopheles and in


106 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“This is Mr. Wentworth of San Francisco,” re-
marked Pray. “He wants to find out something
about Ainsworth, the Halcyon survivor, you know.
This is George Lycurgus, l\Ir. Wentworth. He is
one of the celebrities of Honolulu.”
hIephistopheles bowed, and Wentworth bowed.
The smile of the piratical gentleman grew even more
amiany devilish.
“Ainsworth?” he repeated. “Oh, the English-
man! The man who wore a pongee every day,
and who was always with Captain Graeme?”
“ That is the man,” agreed Pray.
“A gentleman, too!” cried Mephistopheles. “With
a fine taste in hook, and a weakness for the best we
had in cigars—not that a palate cultivated to good
tobacco is weakness! Was he a friend of yours, sir?”
with a warmer smile than ever toward Wentworth, as
if the friend of a man with a fine taste in wine and
cigars was himself a person entitled to consideration.
And yet, even under this warmth, Wentworth seemed
to be conscious of that lurking shadow of mockery.
“I am not sure,” Wentworth said, replying to the
question. “He may be a friend for whom I am seek-
ing, or it may be that I am on the wrong track al-
together. I am most anxious to know. And what
is wrong with him?”
The mockery that seemed to lurk in the manner
of this man forced the question.
“Wrong with him?” echoed Lycurgus. “Why,
nothing in the world so far as I know!”


108 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
the day we left San Francisco. Reading it, and read-
ing that—Ainsworth—had left the Hancock here,
I thought to look him up if he were still in town.”
Pray looked at him curiously. There was a story
here his trained intelligence told him easily enough.
Whether he could land it was another thing. And, in
the meantime, there was always a commonplace.
“You are going through on the Sherman .9” he
asked, politely. “ I see she made port this morning.”
“Yes,” replied Wentworth, with slow deliberation.
“I am going through on the Sherman.”
He had made up his mind to do that at the mo-
ment of speaking. It was the only thing for him to
do. Whether or no, he must run this Norman Ains-
worth to earth. The doubt in his mind but made
that the more imperative.
“You will find Ainsworth in Manila, then,” said
Pray. “The Tenyu will beat you to it, of course, but
it is likely that he will stick around for a week or two
after he gets there.”
“That is true,” agreed Wentworth.
And then Pray, who was accustomed in his position
to meet all kinds of men intent upon all manner of
business, pressed Wentworth to have something more
by way of changing the breakfast into a luncheon,
and, upon refusal, called a taxi and rode down to
the Navy Wharf with him. The island newspaper
man did not seek any confidence, hoping, it might
have been, to get a line on Wentworth’s story aboard
the Sherman, and Wentworth did not volunteer


CHAPTER XI
BEING A LETTER FROM MR. FREDERICK DENT UPSON
TO MR- JOHN WENTWORTH, WRITTEN TO THE CITY OF
MANILA
MY DEAR WENTWORTH z—Your sudden departure
on the Sherman caused something of a flutter in the
Pine Street dove cote. And, by the same token,
there is reason to believc that you are on the right
track. Stringham put me wise to it. The incident
took place on the very day that the Sherman sailed—
which shows a very marked degree of vigilance
indeed, and may indicate an interest more than
passing in the wreck of the Halcyon—but I did not
see Stringham until nearly a week afterward; and
then the thing came out casually. It was this way:
I met Stringham in the St. Francis Grill, and had a
drink with him, and in the course of the talk he asked
me what had become of you.
I knew that you had not told them at the office
where you were going, although it was likely enough
that their waterfront man would find out. But
Stringham is discreet, and, anyway, there was no
good making a mystery of the plain fact of your
sailing. So I told him that you were off to the islands
110


LETTER FROM FREDERICK UPSON 113
Graeme to a. bank in Honolulu, which passed them
to New York in regular course. They must have
gone straight east, and been found by Allison almost
on the day of their arrival.
But that is not all. Like all the world, I had seen
the published list of securities reported missing when
the Bank of the Pacific failed. Unlike most of the
world, I had saved a copy of that list. So had
Allison. He called my attention to the numbers of
these bonds, and I ran for my copy of the list. These
debentures were among those that it was reported
could not be found when the bank closed its doors.
They had been listed as lost by William Chester.
Yet here they were, and with William Chester’s
endorsement to the captain of the Halcyon! What
had William Chester to do with the captain of the
Halcyon, who came to San Francisco only to pick up
a passenger, in defiance of the law? Was the en-
dorsement on the bonds a forgery—and, if so, by
whom forged? If no forgery has been committed,
if William Chester passed the bonds to Robert
Graeme after the failure of the Bank, as the endorse-
ment shows, our enemy has put his foot in the trap.
Clever, cold, calculating as we know him to be,
Chester has shown the weakness common to all great
criminals. He has made the fatal and almost in-
evitable mistake of leaving open one door to detec-
tion while thinking he has closed all roads behind
him. The chance was about one in a million that
this door would be found at that. How could any one


114.- THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
foresee that Graeme would dispose of the debentures
at once; and, Graeme disposing of them, how could
any one then foresee that Allison would happen along
and buy them? Surely, the devil has served his
friend a scurvy trick in this.
So much the better for us. The mistake of Ches-
ter is colossal, like the miscalculations of Napoleon
before Waterloo. You will see, in the light of this
development, how essential to victory for our side it
is that you should find Captain Graemchand his
passenger. Never mind about money. We will
take care of that at this end. Follow your men to
the end of the world. And you will probably have
Allison to help you by the time you get this letter.
At all events, he is going out to Hongkong in the
Korea, and will join you from there. I have not
tried to hold him back. I have not seen him so keen
on anything since he left college—and the interest
will do him good.
I think I have told you everything there is to
know that will interest you, excepting that the papers
this morning announce the election of William
Chester to the Presidency of the Bank of the Pacific.
It was done at a directors’ meeting yesterday.
Somebody has been made to come across sure. I
wonder what the new President would say, in the
event that those debenture bonds Allison brought
from New York should be presented for negotiation?
We will find out, too, one of these days—when our
battle line is made.


LETTER FROM FREDERICK UPSON 115
Oh, yes; and there is talk, in high political quarters,
of sending Harran to the United States Senate.
It is under the rose, as yet, but the thing will break
in due time. “The man who saved the financial
situation in the state,” and all the rest of it, you know.
Well, good-bye, and good luck to you. Allison will
give any details I have omitted or overlooked in
this. And don’t either of you hesitate to use the
cable, if it becomes necessary to tell me anything
in a hurry.
Faithfully yours,
FREDERICK DENT UPSON.


CHAPTER XII
AT THE END OF THE WORLD
ND having followed my man to the end of
the world,” said Wentworth, making a ges-
ture with both hands, as one who politely ad-
mits an opponent’s promise, “I suppose that it
is up to me to jump off. For this place is the end of
the world—if it is not Tophet.”
He drummed impatiently with Upson’s letter,
which had fallen folded into his hands after perusal,
on the side of his wicker steamer chair in time with
the shuffling of thousands of slippered feet along
the sun-baked pavements in the Tondo Quarter of
Manila. Looking down upon the strangely dressed
throng out there in the glaring sunshine from the
shaded verandah of the Hotel Oriente, Wentworth
wondered in vague fashion how any human energy
could rise to activity in that breathless heat? Over
his head a creaking punkah just puddled the stag-
nant air of the verandah, and from the dark of his room
came the tiresome buzzing of an electric fan that
could no more than send a lukewarm eddy as far as
the fluttering ends of its own crepe paper streamers.
Wentworth had been in Manila just one day.
That letter from Fred Upson had waited for him at
116


AT THE END OF THE WORLD 117
the Hotel Oriente for several days while the Sherman
plowed her way slowly across that sea of summer
calms in which the island of Guam sleeps between
Honolulu and Cape Angana.
He had seen the bones of the Halcyon in the clear
deeps without the reefs that shelter San Luis d’Apra
from the strong swell of the Pacific, a native taking
him across from the transport in company with
McGreal and Oleson. And Oleson, under the pouring
of the tropic rain that came down upon the waves like
the running of a river from the upper air, had gone
over the story of the wreck.
The stop at Guam was to no other profit so far
as his quest was concerned. The naval officers
on the station could tell little. Neither Captain
Graeme nor his passenger had gone ashore on the
island, so far as the Governor-General knew. Cer-
tainly neither of them had taken the trouble to call
on that puissant personage. Taken at once from
the water on board the Hancock, which left for
Honolulu on the day following the shipwreck, their
casting away had been to the islanders an incident
as fleeting as the alighting of a tropic bird in passage.
And then the Sherman, after a couple of days in
the island harbour, put out across the Nero Deep,
rounded the northern point of Luzon, breasted the
usual half gale in the China Sea, and, in the early
daylight of the thirty-second day out of San Fran-
cisco, ran under the shelter of the sea wall that
carries the waters of the Pasig out into the bay of
/


118 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
Manila, and dropped her anchor squarely in front of
the walled city.
Thence at once in a native banca, Wentworth
landed in front of the old Custom House in the
Binondo Quarter, and turned on the top of the stone
wall holding the yellow current of the river to shake
hands with McGreal, who had come ashore on some
ship’s business in the same boat.
“You will have shore leave to-night?” he asked
the sailor, at the same time making a motion with
one hand to stop a passing cochero.
“Yes, sir,” replied McGreal.
“Look me up at the Hotel Oriente,” said Went-
worth. “And if you can bring Oleson, so much the'
better.”
These two, in the voyage across the Pacific, he had
come to look upon as enlisted in his quest, gaining
much comfort in his talks with either as the ship fared
on across the still seas. He relied on them for active
help, too, now that he had reached the port for which
the men he sought were thought to be bound. And if
the sailors were to help him, of course it was needful
to have a consultation with them. Their investi-
gations must be directed to those parts of the town
which their eyes could reach, and his own, most
likely, could not. That was to the end that they
might see intelligently. The more ground that
could be covered, the better was the chance for
success. Moreover, both the sailors knew Captain
Graeme; and Wentworth had never seen him. He


AT THE END OF THE WORLD 119
thought, grimly, that he would be likely to know
Ainsworth.
“ If Oleson gets shore leave, we will both be there,
sir,” replied McGreal. “I will come myself, any-
how.”
“ So long until then!” said Wentworth. He
stepped into the waiting carromata, and went plung-
ing away at a furious rate toward the Hotel Oriente,
the only guest place of which he knew the name in
that thronged city. He found quarters there, a
long, low, dark room,opening out into a verandah with
shutters of latticed mother-of-pearl shell, and sent
to the transport for his luggage. Also, he found
Upson’s letter waiting him. He read the letter lying
in a big wicker chair out in the verandah, with the
noise of the shuffling of countless slippered feet and
of the strange cries of the natives chafiering in the
Tondo Market floating up to him. He felt, as he
read, that helpless loneliness a man will feel who sits
amidst a throng of his fellows, all strangers to him.
He could have shrieked aloud, but the momentary
energy of that madness died in him. For, lonely
as he was, the climate had him. The languor of
the deadly tropical heat was wrapping him about
as a miasmatic garment, endowed with the quality
of paralyzing that which it touched.
“ I suppose,” he repeated aloud, still tapping the
side of his wicker chair with the letter, “that it is up
to me to jump off!”
He knew that he ought to be in action. He felt


120 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
the shadow of the impulse. Certainly lying on his
back in a shaded hotel porch was never the way to
arrive at any definite achievement. He should be
out making inquiry at banks or consulates, shipping
offices or clubs, for Captain Graeme; striving, some—
where down in that busy crowd, to find trace of
the “Englishman” Norman Ainsworth. There were
many English in Manila. If the Halcyon survivor
were still in the town, it would be easy enough to get
some track of him. Nothing draws an Englishman
in an outland place like another Englishman.
But Wentworth’s shadow of an impulse to action was
not strong enough to stir him. It needed something
from the outside. The cloak of paralysis woven in that
deadly heat was wrapping him fold on fold.
“ I suppose it is up to me to jump off,” he said to
himself aloud, and for the third time. “ I have come
to the end of the world. Well, then! Which way to
jump? I wish Frank Allison were here!”
“And, behold! He enters at the word!”


122 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
“You don’t mean to tell me that you brought the
Sea Spray across the Pacific?” cried Wentworth.
“Nothing so foolish. I made my escape from
Brooks and came over in the Korea. But I found a
little beauty of a yacht for sale cheap in Hongkong.
Clyde built! Steel hull! Bronze keel! Designed
by Watson! Schooner rigged! Eighty feet over all!
With auxiliary engines and tankage for one thousand
gallons of gas! For sale cheap, by a gentleman who
is unexpectedly called home by reason of important
private affairs! Rated A1 at Lloyd’s! Doesn’t
that sound like an advertisement from a real, live Eng-
lish newspaper published in Asia? Well, the Lurline
is a beauty, my boy, with comfortable cabins, and a
turn of speed that really surprised me, considering
that she is English built. More than that, she is pro-
visioned for a cruise around the world. I took ac-
count of the stores, running down here—and that was
a labour, without a cabin steward. My fellow left at
Hongkong. The stores are English, and so of the
best. And if the men we seek have gone to the end
of the world and stepped off why we can float down
into the abyss more comfortably with a good ship un—
der us than in any other possible way.”
“In a search among islands we would have to have
a boat, too,” said Wentworth. “ The passages would
be wet, inevitably.”
“ That being the nature of island channels,” agreed
Allison, politely.
“ And of course,” went on Wentworth, getting back


124 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
ively, and if not offensively, at least amusingly, Eng-
lish. It was the most noticeable thing about him.
Even in Honolulu, where they are relatively common,
it was noted, and, I gathered, would have been, even
if he had not always and insistently asserted the fact
of his nationality.”
“Why, then,” said Allison, ruefully, “he cannot
be our man!”
“But,” went on Wentworth, “in spite of this very
notable and noticeable Anglicism, the sailor Oleson
did not observe it while he was aboard ship with the
man. The sailor thought his shipmate was an
American. Maybe it did not occur to Ainsworth
to assert his nationality sooner.”
“The devil!” cried Allison. “Then you think~”
“Nothing, my son! If Norman Ainsworth is an
Englishman, he is likely to be in Manila. If he is
only assuming to be English, then it is my view that
you would better begin to get the Lurline ready for
sea.”
“Which will not take a day’s time,” said Allison.
“So much the better,” replied Wentworth. “If he
is gone, we must follow on. Of course, if it comes
to that, an Englishman could go away from Manila,
too, but we must still follow on.”
“Right you are!” cried Allison. “And now to
find out! An Englishman in Manila—”
“Would have his name put up,first rattle out of the
box, at the English Club,” interrupted Wentworth.
“Let us call a carromata and go down at once to


THE MAN AND THE HOUR 125
the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. I have to de-
posit my letter of credit, and so have you. The
cashier will be a big man in the club and he will give
us a line.”
It was really astonishing, once Wentworth shook
off the lassitude of the country with the coming of
his friend, how quick he was to spring into action.
Within ten minutes after the appearance of Allison
at the Hotel Oriente the friends were inside a closed
caliso, tearing through the narrow streets and around
the sharp corners in the Binondo Quarter at a gait
that perilled the life of every passer in the roadway.
“These cocheros missed their destiny in not being
born auto speed maniacs,” said Allison, as their driv-
er drew up his panting pony in front of the bank.
“Think of having a racer in these narrow streets,
without a sidewalk to give a pedestrian any chance
at all—-——and a Filipino devil grinning at the Wheel!”
They stepped into the bank, and another closed
caliso, which had followed them from the hotel at
speed, drew up to the door. The man who got out
of it descended slowly, looking first to make sure
that the two friends had gone in. This man had an
air of furtive jauntiness about him, as if a rat were to
turn dude. And he was a little, sallow, smoothly
shaven man with a subtle something about his car-
riage, or his manner, or his face expressive of the deep
and old, old craft of Asia.
More, this little furtive dandy of a man had
taken a room at the Hotel Oriente the day before,


126 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
after spending some hours of the morning lounging
about the Custom House—a room adjoining that occu-
pied by Wentworth. And that spite of the fact that
he had a den and a family in a hut in a nipa row in
the outskirts of the Quarter of Sampaloc. In that
quarter he was respectfully spoken of by the neigh-
bours as the Sefior Don Miguel di Sousa, and known
to have influence in quarters which the neighbourhood
regarded with some awe. He enjoyed considera-
tion there, likewise, as the proud father of as promis-
ing a litter of young rats as was to be found in any
nest in the quarter; and, what was a matter of
greater personal pride to him, as the owner of a red
game cock which, at three years old, had never been
whipped.
The dark little man slipped into the bank imme-
diately behind the two Americans. He was very close
to the cashier’s desk when that obliging young Eng-
lishman said that he himself had put up Norman
Ainsworth and Captain Graeme at the club at Malate
a week before. They had done some business with
the bank. And they had taken a house at 32 Calle
San Pedro, in the Quarter of Guiapo. Mr. Ains-
worth was an Englishman, of course.
“And he need not have kept on asserting it all the
time, either,” said the cashier, with a quiet smile.
It was the same kind of thing Wentworth had met
at Honolulu, and he looked at Allison.
“Are the gentlemen here now?” he asked.
“Why, no,” replied the cashier. “Captain Graeme
Q


THE MAN AND THE HOUR 127
received cabled orders from his people in London
to take over the command of the N cried, of the same
line as the Halcyon, which had limped into port from
the Archipelago a week or two earlier. Her cap-
tain passed out down Iloilo way. Black cholera!
Mr. Ainsworth told me at the club he would go with
his friend. They sailed three days ago.”
“Do you know for what port?” asked Wentworth.
“I did not inquire. But they would know OVer
at the Consulate,” replied the cashier. “I will give
you a note to the Consul, if you like.”
“You are very kind,” said Wentworth. “The
Ner'ied belonged to the same people as the Halcyon,
you say?”
“They have a lot of those tramp freighters,
Clarke, Wyse & Compton, of London,” replied, the
cashier.
He penned the note of introduction to the British
Consul as he spoke and called a Chinese boy to show
the gentlemen the way to the Consulate. It was
but a few steps, just around the corner. And the
Consul was most obliging. A clerk found, very
quickly, that the Named had cleared for Iloilo, in
ballast, to get a cargo of hemp for Nagasaki.
“You can cable to see if she is still at Iloilo,” said
the Consul. “She may be clear away on the other
side of the world in a couple of months. If you want
to catch her, I should say the surest way would be to
head her off at Nagasaki.”
Wentworth and Allison thanked the official for his


128 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
courtesy, and went back to their caliso, which they
had kept waiting.
“I suppose it wouldn’t do any good to look up the
address in the Guiapo Quarter?” queried Allison, as
they went whirling back toward the Hotel Oriente.
“Why, it might be wise to go out there before we
leave,” replied Wentworth. “We may get some
points. But, in my opinion, the first thing is to get
the Lurline ready for sea. And we should cable to
Iloilo. I suppose that the yacht can follow any-
where that a tramp can go?”
“Around the world,” answered Allison. “But
I wish I had a sailing master. It is so much more
comfortable to have a man to stand your watch.”
“Why don’t you get my friend McGreal?"
“ The sailor-highwayman? Could he sail a yacht?”
asked Allison.
“I should think so. ”
“ How are we to get him off the transport?”
“I don’t suppose he would have any sentiment
about holding to that job if he could get anything
better. You have only to offer higher pay. And it
might be a good scheme to get the sailor Oleson,
too.”
“That would give us a couple of men we could de-
pend on, surely,” said Allison. “That is rather a
desirable thing in seas on whose beaches you pick up
the rifi-raff of the world. I haven’t seen a thing out
of the way with any of the mixed lot I have but I
swear to you, John, that I wouldn’t bank on a single


THE MAN AND THE HOUR 129
man on the Lurline not being safe to cut my throat
and turn pirate if he saw his profit in it. ”
“A cheerful crew!” said Wentworth. “We will
get the two men, if we have to steal them from Uncle
Sam, but I think we may manage it without that.
Anyway, they are both due here to see me to-night,
and we will find out.”
Their caliso set them down in front of the Hotel
Oriente, and Allison took a room next to Wentworth’s,
the two being thrown into a suite communicating by
way of the front verandah. And, on the other side,
the dark little Eurasian, crouching behind a shutter
whose removal would have made the suite still
larger, listened for anything that might be let drop.
He had not, unfortunately for the cheese and bread he
was expected to provide for that nest of young rats
in the Quarter of Sampaloc, been able to worm as
much as he would have liked out of the friend of his
who was a kind of under clerk in the British Consu-
late. Nor could he know what talk had taken place
between Wentworth and Allison in the caliso on the
way to the hotel.
Neither was he aware of the sending of a cable-
gram to Iloilo in the middle of the afternoon; which
cablegram brought an answer from the British Con-
sular officer to the effect that the N cried had loaded
hemp at that port and sailed that very morning for
Nagasaki. But the watcher did know that a cable-
gram was received. That was the extent of his finding
on the afternoon watch. The Mestizo boy who de-


CHAPTER XIV
A FRIEND—AND HIS CONSCIENCE
the Hotel Oriente did not think to lower their
voices from the ordinary conversational tone
Mr. Miguel di Sousa found, that evening, that the
spy who waits gains many things. The old rat only
left his post to slip out to the family nest in the Quart—
er of Sampaloc for a bite of fish and rice while the
Americans were at dinner in the ordinary of the hotel.
He was on watch again long before they had finished
eating, and heard them come back to the verandah
and settle themselves, overlooking the night bustle
of the street, for their after-dinner cigars.
“I only brought up the subject because you had
not asked me a word about it, and because I wanted
to discharge my conscience,” said Allison, after a
bit, as though coming back to a matter which had
been in their table talk.
Silence followed for a moment, and then Went-
worth said: “How do you connect your conscience
with Margaret Graeme?”
The name caught the attention of the rat at once.
It might be, of course, that it was not a name with
which he would ever have anything to do, but it
3. ND because the Americans in the verandah, of
131


132 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
was a woman’s name; and in women there are in-
finite capacities for complication. Mr. Di Sousa had
been in the spy business long enough to know some-
thing of its possibilities.
Wentworth, apparently, was willing to let the
matter of Allison’s conscience drop when that gentle-
man did not at once reply to his question.
“Where was the good of letting my thoughts
linger on Margaret?” he asked, taking up another
phase of the subject. “A woman may dwell in a
star. No man can draw her down by looking at her.
You left her in San Francisco, I suppose?”
“But I had found her in Paris, and again in San
Francisco. She had crossed from Boulogne while I
was coming over from Southampton. The old
dragon—the aunt, you know, Mrs. Penworthy—
was with her both times.”
“Bad for you!” and Wentworth smiled. “I
had my bout with Mrs. Penworthy at the Coronado.
Being unexceptionally rich at the moment, I finally
got past the guard.”
“She thinks that you are the greatest man on
earth!” exclaimed Allison.
“Mrs. Penworthy? That is strange, and not in
character. But you should be able to disarm her,
old man. You are richer than I ever was.”
“It would do no good,” replied Allison, just a
shade gloomily.
“You are young, passany good looking, have
plenty of money, and good table manners, do not


A FRIEND—AND HIS CONSCIENCE 133
make any bad breaks in dress. At what point do
you fail?” asked Wentworth.
There was a tinge of bitterness in the grim humour
of that. Allison brought the talk to the sanity of
earnestness. '
“Margaret Graeme loves you, John Wentworth,”
he said.
“ Nonsense!”
“It is the truth.”
“Man!” cried Wentworth, “I am hopelessly out
of her class. That I—that I—that she was more to
me than any other woman can ever be, I grant you.”
It was difficult for him to find words, but he went
on after a bit: “If poverty had not come; and, well,
dishonour, I would have tried for my happiness as
a man may. I do not mind admitting that to you.
But not now! Not now!” -
“Nevertheless, and in spite of everything, I tell
you that Margaret Graeme loves you, John.”
“How do you know that she does?”
It was Allison’s turn to hesitate at that. “Maybe
I have tried!” he said, at last, speaking very slowly,
and looking down into the street. “It may be that
that is a part of the burden on my conscience. I do
not pretend to more probity than another, John.
I had the right to try.”
“God knows you had!” And then, more slowly,
and in a lowered tone: “And it is your right to
try again.”
“It would do me no good,” said Allison. “When


134 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
a woman talks of one man to another; when she is
interested in the movements of a man only so far
as they concern another man, when her eyes fill
at the thought of one man’s absence, and silence—
well, the thing is sufficiently obvious. Love stricken
to its death is no longer blind, John.”
“Margaret Graeme would never wear her heart
on her sleeve!” cried Wentworth, with a manner of
resentment that drew a smile in the dark from his
friend.
“Not where the world might see,” agreed Allison.
“I should say she would be much more likely to do
things to gain her heart’s desire. She is a young
woman of action, most emphatically. But I was
your friend, remember. Through me lay the only
road she knew to any knowledge of your movements.”
“And you told her?”
“That is the other part of the burden on my
conscience, John. I did.”
“ Everything? ”
“She seemed greatly interested—and, well, I sup-
pose that she got the whole thing out of me.”
“That I sailed on the Sherman, and the purpose
of the trip, and all?”
“ That would be about the size of it, old man!”
“That was thoughtful of you,” said Wentworth,
with just the least fine shade of sarcasm. “I hope
that she may prove more discreet than you have
been.”
“She will never tell anything that will hurt you,


A FRIEND—AND HIS CONSCIENCE 135
John,” said Allilon, eagerly. “Be sure of that!
But what could she tell? Your intimate enemies
in San Francisco do not seem to have any trouble in
following your movements, if it comes to that.”
“I have nothing to hide—yet! ” said Wentworth.
“Surely you have nothing! And what did it
matter if she knew? But have I told you that
Margaret Graeme seemed strangely familiar with
the story of the wreck of the Halcyon? I do not
believe that women read the shipping news at all,
as a rule. And did it ever occur to you that the
captain of the Halcyon is of the same name?”
“Often,” replied Wentworth, answering the last
question. “But what of that? It is a common
name enough, and I have never, in my thoughts,
coupled the two together. This Captain Robert
Graeme, coming out of the Clyde and spelling his
name that way, is most likely Scotch.”
“As Margaret is by birth. Didn’t you know
that?”
“I know little of her family.”
“It is the fact. Old Donald Graeme, her father,
quit the sea to find the Yellow Aster mine, and sold
it for a million. He went back to Scotland for a wife.
Both the children were born in Edinborough. The old
man came back to San Francisco when his wife died,
and devoted himself to the making of more millions.”
“Were there two children?” asked Wentworth. “I
thought that Margaret came in for all the millions. ”
“So she did. But there were two children. The


136 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
boy was much older, and he went wild and ran away.
That was before you and I had begun to take much
notice. But the brother was eight to ten years senior
to Margaret. My mother told me about the Graemes
a long time ago, when Margaret and I went to the
Denman Primary together. I was in love with her
even when I was in knickers. The families were
neighbours on Nob Hill, you know.”
“And the brother? Why did he leave home?”
“Some difficulty about government. Old Donald
was a tartar, and maybe the boy was like him.”
“ Did you ever hear the brother’s name?”
“If I ever did, I have forgotten it.”
“I wonder~—” began Wentworth, and then broke
off. “Harran was Margaret’s guardian, wasn’t he?”
“Only a trustee,” replied Allison. “She came into
the money a year or two ago.”
“But Harran would have known the family his-
tory. And he may have kept track of the boy.”
“It is probable enough,” agreed Allison. “At all
events, it is sufficiently remarkable that Margaret
should read the shipping news in the papers. And
her interest in the Halcyon story is at least notice-
able.”
“There are strange things under the sun,’ said
Wentworth, musingly, but more to himself than to
his friend. Then, turning to Allison: “You say
that the elder Graeme was a sailor?”
“He was Scotch. There was probably seafaring
blood in the family for a hundred years. But here
Q


A FRIEND—AND HIS CONSCIENCE 137
are our sailor friends, I believe. I suppose that it is
settled that we shape a course for Nagasaki?”
K‘Yesl,’
A Chinese boy, in a long, white gown knocked
at and opened the door of Wentworth’s room, and
the two sailors from the transport, hats in hand,
came forward slowly on to the verandah. Oleson was
knuckling his forehead as he came stumbling along
through the half darkness. A torrential rush of
tropic rain roared across the light of the stars at the
same instant, driving the people from the street
below into temporary shelter, and drowning the
greetings of the party with its thunder on the cor-
rugated iron roof of the hotel. The houseboy pushed
out two more reclining chairs from the room, and
McGreal and the sailor sat down, the last named
just touching the edge of the cane seat, and holding
his white duck hat in his hand as he sat. Also,
they both took cigars when the boy passed them at
a sign from Wentworth. Then the boy went out.
“When did you come ashore?” asked Wentworth,
by way of putting the two at ease, as soon as they
were seated, and the roar of the rain had passed, and
after he had presented Allison in form to the visitors.
“We landed half an hour ago, sir, at the Custom
House,” replied McGreal, “and took a carromata
on. She was unloading, sir, and we could not get
away from the ship any earlier.”
“Then, of course, you have seen nothing of Captain
Graeme—or his passenger?” said Wentworth.


138 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“We have been nowhere, sir,” replied McGreal.
“But we have twenty-four hours’ leave, the both
of us, and we’ll scour this town to-night and to-
morrow, sir.”
“It will not be necessary,” said Wentworth, to
this, “although I’m obliged to you just the same.
The men are not here.”
“ Not here, sir?” exclaimed McGreal.
“We got track of them to-day, Mr. Allison and I.
They went to Iloilo in the Ne'ried.”
“Why, that is one of Clarke, Wyse & Compton’s
boats, sir,” cried McGreal.
“Just so. Captain Graeme is in command of
her. Ever been in her?”
“I made the run to Good Hope as a ’prentice in
her,” said McGreal. “That was my first service
with the company.”
“Well, you may see her again. We propose to
go after her in Mr. Allison’s yacht.”
“To Iloilo, sir?”
“To Nagasaki. She has already sailed for that
port.”
“You say I may see her, sir,” went on McGreal;
“but I am signed on for the whole voyage of the
Sherman.”
“Can’t you get a discharge?”
“I might be able to get it, sir. It is not usual.”
“What will it be worth to take it?” asked Allison.
“ That is a different matter,” replied McGreal.
“And Oleson, here, too?” went on Allison, eagerly.


140 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
if he is in the Lurl'ine when she leaves here,’ said
Allison. “And I will pay him $50 a month in gold.”
“What do you think of that, Arvad?” asked
McGreal.
“I can do a good deal for $100 advance, and fifty
a month in gold,” said the sailor, with a grin that was
lost in the dark.
“Then I’ll expect you,” said Allison.
“Is the yacht here, sir?” asked McGreal.
“I sailed her down from Hongkong myself,” re-
plied Allison. “She lies behind the seawall, about
200 yards outside the Sherman.”
“Which one of them is it, sir? ” asked Oleson.
“Which one of them?” repeated Allison. “The
Lurl'ine was the only yacht in sight when she dropped
her hook in the mud this morning. She is a schooner
yacht, painted white, with a gold figurehead. And
the prettiest lines you ever saw in a yacht built
outside of America.”
“Well, sir,” said Oleson, knuckling his forehead,
“there is another of them lying twenty yards to
seaward of her, only this one is painted green, and
the figurehead of her is silver, sir.”
Allison turned to McGreal. “Did you see the
other one?” he asked.
“I saw the two of them lying out there at dusk,
sir,” replied the future sailing master of the Lurline.
“They looked very chummy and comfortable when
we left the transport. Two of a kind. The white
yacht is a beauty; but the green one seems a bit more
!


A FRIEND—AND HIS CONSCIENCE 143
build, and with the air of the cabin steward in every
line of him, from his natty white hat to his white
duck trousers, red sash, and canvas shoes, sipping
frozen absinthe, and emitting deep sighs the while,
at the very next table to them. From his sighing,
and the general air of depression upon him, he was
evidently a cabin steward most decidedly down on his
luck. McGreal watched him for a moment, caught
his eye, and beckoned to him, after the manner of
the quarterdeck. And the doleful one came. He
would have been no cabin steward, else.
“Got a ship, mate?” asked McGreal, patronizingly.
“Not any, sar,” replied the Eurasian. “And I
am on this beach many weeks. We got laid ofi’ at
the end of charter here, sar; and nothing I can find
to do it any more. M adre di Dias! I can find no
ship, it is two or t’ree days and I can not eat, sar! ”
“Well, I’ll fix you,” cried McGreal. “Finest
yacht in these waters. Ever sail in a yacht?”
“Sar, many time!”
“We lost our cabin boy at Hongkong. Didn’t
know when he had a good thing! Forty dollars,
gold, a month, and twenty advance if you’ll see me
at the Custom House at ten to-morrow morning.”
“I will be there, sar!” said the Eurasian, grate-
fully. “I will be there. Madre di Dias! Never
be to fear on account for me, sar! ”
So Mr. Miguel di Sousa, making a late report at the
office in the Escolta, had obeyed orders, and secured his
berth aboard the Lurline. The rat will find the ship.


CHAPTER XV
THE GREEN YACHT
MR. MIGUEL DI SOUSA squatted beside a
very small camphor-wood chest set on the
edge of the seawall just in front of the Manila
Custom House, a figure of patience in the midst of
the hurry and bustle of the quay alongside the Pasig.
He held, under one arm, a red game rooster, and
soothed the nervousness of the bird now and again
by a gentle touch on its slim and shapely head. It
was well enough, in the way of duty, to separate him-
self by the width of the city from this passion of his
life. He could not have borne separation overseas.
And he waited because it was not for him to be late
for his appointment with Captain McGreal.
Presently, breaking through the swarm of caribou
carts and carromatas, squat Tagals, and naked, shin-
ing Chinese coolies, the spy saw the tall form of Mc-
Greal come surging on, like a great liner that plows a
way amidst many lesser craft to get into dock. And,
at the same moment, Allison leaped out of a closed
caliso that had stopped just in front of where Mr. Di
Sousa sat beside his camphor-wood chest.
“We are both on time, Captain McGrea ,
Allison, shaking hands with the sailor.
” said
144


THE GREEN YACHT 145
“Yes, sir; and here is the new cabin steward of the
Lurline.”
Di Sousa had risen quickly as the two came up,
and now touched his hat.
“This the man?” queried Allison. And then, to
Di Sousa: “What are you doing with the chicken?”
“ Sar! ” replied Di Sousa, his point of pride touched
at once, “it is el Rio Rey. Never yet has this
bird been beaten.”
He spoke in a soft, sibilant voice, and with an ac-
cent Allison could not place—an elusive, musical in-
tonation, suggestive at once of the tongue of the
Latin and of some older Asian people.
“ What is your name?” asked Allison next, looking
at the man in puzzled fashion. There was a vague
impression that he had seen him or heard his voice
before, but it passed.
“Miguel di Sousa, sar!”
“You have served as cabin boy?”
“Sar, many times, in many ships.”
“ You are Eurasian, I think?” said Allison.
“I am born in Macao, sar.”
“ I thought so. What ship were you in last?”
“Sar, it is the Montrose Castle; port of London.
We are laid off on this beach for the end of charter,
sar.”
“Well, I guess you’ll do,” said Allison, “if Cap-
tain McGreal is satisfied. Are you ready to go on
board?”
“ Sar, here is el Rio Rey. I am ready.”


146 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
Allison smiled, and, stepping to the end of the sea-
wall, motioned to the Tagal in one of the many ban-
cas lying tied alongside.
“Here, you! ” he cried. “We want two bancas!”
Half a dozen little brown men in their waiting
canoes sprang into swift activity, paddles in hand and
each contributing his share to that clamour which
attends on any labour done or attempted by Asiatics.
“Come on!” said Allison to McGreal, stepping
into the first banca that came under him. Then,
turning to the waiting Eurasian, “You take the
next boat, NIiguel, and follow on. Get the nigger to
tumble your chest in.”
The loading of the chest was a noisy business, too,
but it was done at last, and then the two bancas,
one behind the other, shot out into the stream and
Went swiftly down with the tawny current of the
Pasig.
They swept thus around the edge of the seawall,
the boatmen scarcely using their paddles excepting
for the purposes of steering, as long as they were in
the river. But once they breasted the waters of the
bay, the two Tagals in each boat dipped their broad
blades in furiously. In twenty minutes after leav-
ing the Custom House the bancas drew up, one after
the other, to the gangway hanging down from the
port side of the Lurline.
They had passed close under the stern of the green
yacht as they came along and Allison read the name
of her, set in silver letters, “Petrel, New York.”


THE GREEN YACHT 149
a couple more were hoisting Di Sousa’s camphor-wood
chest aboard—the game cock was carried up very
tenderly by its owner—Allison took his new sailing
master into the cabin of the yacht. It was all in
white, picked out in gold beading, and the furnish-
ings were of bird’s-eye maple. Six roomy cabins
fitted with brass beds and stationary washstands
opened from the main saloon, three on either side,
and there was a roomy tiled bathroom, with hot and
cold taps, away aft.
Running forward from the cabin to give access to
the main deck, a narrow passageway opened to two
large rooms, one on either hand; that on the star-
board side for the captain and on the port for the mate.
And, still forward of these, were two cabins of smaller
size. The one on the port side was filled with a general
litter of sails and cordage, and was used as a sew-
ing room by the crew in mending sails. The star-
board cabin, adjoining the captain’s, was fitted
for the use of the cabin steward, with a sideboard
handy. Di Sousa was already in the place when Alli-
son showed it to the captain, his camphor-wood chest
under the bunk and the game chicken tethered by a
soft leather holdfast to a staple behind the door.
Returning to the saloon, Allison touched an elec-
tric button set in the head of the cabin table, and,
in a moment, Di Sousa came in softly from the ’mid-
ships passageway.
“ Ready for duty, Miguel?” asked the owner.
“Sar, I am ready!”


150 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“Very well; the captain is going on a little expedi-
tion of his own, and while he is away, I will show you
where the things are kept.”
Turning to McGreal, he went on: “ I will wait here
until you come back from the transport. Then we
we will go ashore together and get ready to clear the
yacht.”
McGreal left him with the new steward, and, with-
in the hour, was back again. A couple of the crew
hoisted aboard the Lurline a second camphor-wood
chest, much larger than Di Sousa’s, which was stowed
away in the captain’s cabin.
“ Have any trouble, Captain?” asked Allison.
“ Not a great deal, sir. The Old Man stormed
about a bit at first, but he let me go.”
“Well,” said Allison, “ I am glad that is settled, so
far. Now for the shore, and clearance. We will
take the gig, this time, and bring Wentworth ofl’
with us. Then we can drop down the harbour at day-
light.”
The few formalities needed to clear the yacht for
Nagasaki were got through with very quickly, al-
though the business involved a second and formal
visit to the British Consulate. Allison telephoned to
Wentworth at the Oriente from the Custom House,
and the two friends went together to the Hongkong
and Shanghai Bank for their letters of credit, and after—
ward to the Consulate. The cashier and the Consul
both regretted, politely, that they could not have the
pleasure of showing the Americans the hospitalities


THE GREEN YACHT 151
of the club. The Consul readily gave McGreal a
license on his American papers.
Late in the afternoon Wentworth and Allison, with
McGreal, went off to the yacht, again passing close
to the Petrel, and again seeing no one on board that
craft but the lounging members of her crew. The
four absent members of the Lurline’s crew, a Jap, two
Lascars, and a Portuguese Negro, came tumbling
aboard from a banca after dark. Their white duck
uniforms were pretty badly soiled, but they all seemed
sober, which was a blessing. And, away along in the
night, while Allison and Wentworth sat smoking un-
der the poop deck awning, there was a subdued hail
from the water, and another man came over the side
out of a banca, was received with a few whispers at the
head of the gangway by McGreal, and slunk away
forward.
“Oleson, I suppose?” muttered Allison in a low
tone.
Wentworth kept on smoking for a little. “ It seems
to me we have rather a mixed crew, Frank,” he said,
at last.
“Rather,” agreed Allison. “I rely upon the last
two ingredients added to hold the mixture stable.”
“McGreal and Oleson? ”
“That’s right! A Dane and an Irishman. We
can depend upon them, backs to our backs. And I
believe that the mate is an honest man.”
“Andressen, is it, you call him? Yes; I like An-
dressen. He is a splendid specimen of manhood.”


152 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“Magnificent! Looks like a Norse god—but may
be a Norse devil.”
“A devil, depend upon it, can be a very serviceable
friend,” said Wentworth. “But there are many kinds
of devils. And, apropos, your new cabin boy has a face
that is not calculated to inspire confidence, although
his notion of bringing the game cock along pleases me.”
“I rather like that myself,” agreed Allison. “Al—
though it is no proof of probity. I have known a
murderer make a pet of a canary bird. This fellow is
a rat.”
“He looks like a rat,” said Wentworth. “On the
whole, it is a queer gang. I saw the four that came
aboard to-night. What are the others like?”
“One is a Firm and there are two Chinese. I do
not know what the fourth one is, some kind of mix-
ture from down Celebes way. The cook claims to be
a Solomon Islander. They are cannibals, you know,
and he looks the part. He is the ugliest devil I ever
saw, out of a jail.”
“ There are possibilities in the lot,” said Wentworth.
“The very diversity of the elements may make for
peace, but it is a lucky thing the inducements are
rather to serve us than to cut our throats. You keep
the arms aft, I suppose?”
“All but the brass four-pounder. And the powder
for that is in the magazine aft. There are a couple
of dozen cutlasses on the rack in my cabin, and six
Lee-Metford carbines in the bathroom cuddy. And we
have our revolvers. Those are all the arms aboard.”


CHAPTER XVI
FOLLOWED T0 sm
HE mixed crew worked with a will in the early
gray of the morning to get the Lurline’s anchor
out of the mud, and long before the sunbeams
began to redden the sky behind the white city the
yacht dropped down across the glassy waters of
the bay, past Marrivales, and out through the
Boca Chica into the short chop of the China Sea.
There had not been, as she ran down with the engines
working smoothly, the faintest ripple of wind. Cor-
regidor lay mirrored in the sea like a picture of two
islands, one upon the other; and every banca moored
beside the pier before the village of nipa huts, every
native that moved along shore or about his boat, found
his reflected double following his movement in the un-
derworld of the water.
Yet out at sea the short waves ran under the sun
that rose from the red and golden glory of its crimsoned
couch in the clouds, each wave tipped with a twinkling
cascade of shining jewels as the long gusts of wind
out of the northeast reached down to touch the sur-
face of the water.
“It will be blowing strongly enough by the time we
are abreast of Lingayon Gulf,” said Allison, turning
15s


154 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
from contemplation of the shore line of Luzon to
speak to Wentworth.
They stood together at the stern rail, watching the
steep shores recede and the strong waves as they ran,
while Captain McGreal, well forward on the poop,
kept the crew jumping to get sail on her.
“ I hope it will not turn to a typhoon,” replied Went-
worth, “at least until we are clear of Cape Angana.”
“No danger of that, so long as this wind holds,”
said Allison. “If a typhoon should strike us, with
no more offing than this, we would not be likely to
get even as far as Lingayon. McGreal handles her ,
well, doesn’t he?”
“And himself better. He is going to make good
in his first command. He is getting sail on her now
to save gas.”
“That’s what!”
And. the new captain was showing himself a master
hand in the handling of a schooner—which is a
different trick from sailing a square rigger. He had
put the engine at half speed and got the jibs on her
the moment she was clear of the little mouth of the
harbour. In a little more the foresail was shaken out,
and then the main. And, as Allison spoke, he called
two men forward and two aft to go aloft and break
out the topsails. Then only he stopped the engine.
The schooner was standing straight out on the wind,
and it was evident that McGreal wanted to get every
inch there was in it out of her while the breeze held
fair. The green and rugged shores of Luzon were


158 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
position astern, had attained, of course, the same ad-
vantage.
“That fellow is heading up for Hongkong, I sup-
pose,” said Wentworth, coming on deck after his
morning coffee.
“Why, yes, sir,” replied the captain. “But I
do not make out why he did not run away from us
in the night.”
“ Could he have done that? ”
“It’s plain enough you are no sailor, sir. Do you
not see that we have about everything on her that it
is wise to carry in cruising, topsails and all? And
everything we have drawing? Well, we have carried
on all through the night, and got everything out of
her that the wind would give us. And that fellow is
running close hauled, and without his topsails. At
that, he has held his place all night long!”
“You think the green yacht the better sailor,
then?” asked Wentworth.
“She could sail rings around us, sir.”
“Why, then,” said Allison, who came on deck at
the moment, “it is perhaps just as well that I did not
challenge her people to a race.”
“You would have been beaten hollow, sir,”
said McGreal.
“You mean to say she has kept up with us close-
hauled while we have been carrying on?” asked
Allison.
“Just that, sir!” replied the sailing master.
Allison whistled.


THE WAY OF A MAN AND A MAID 159
“Do you think,” asked Wentworth, the notion
of the day before coming back to him, “that they are
following us? ”
“I do not think that I have enough to go upon to
say that, sir,” replied McGreal, slowly. “But we
will find out to-day, or, at the latest, to-morrow
morning.”
“How?” asked Allison.
“Why, sir, do you see, we will be high enough up
by dark for that fellow to begin to shape a course in
for the China coast; if he is bound for Hongkong.
With this breeze of wind, indeed, he could make better
time now by bearing away to the westward. But
some captains like to keep plenty of sea room, and it
may suit his notion to get more northing and then run
down for the island on the wind. If he holds the same
course all night to-night that he held last night—why,
then we will see.”
“How will we see?” persisted Wentworth.
“Why, sir,” replied McGreal, “to-morrow mom-
ing should put us well up toward the entrance to For-
mosa Channel if this slant of wind holds. EVen if
the wind falls off, and we haVe to trust to the engine,
we can do it, bar a big blow. Well, then! If that
fellow is still following us to-morrow morning, I
intend to put about and run down and speak to
him",
“He may still be making for a port above Hong-
kong,” suggested Allison.
“No harm done if he is,” replied McGreal. “But


160 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
if he is following us he will never permit us to come
within hailing distance of him.”
“That seems likely, too,” said Wentworth.
“Surest thing you know, sir,” said McGreal,
stepping away at the same moment to speak to the
man at the wheel.
The Lurline held on her course all day; and the
green yacht attended her as closely as any consort.
Allison and Wentworth, indeed, began to feel a kind
of sea friendliness for the beautiful craft, and that
despite the possibility, recognized by both, that she
might be dangerously hostile to them and their pur-
pose. She was so fine to look upon! She held her
place with such a mastery of sea craft—as though
the soul in her ruled and spurned the running waves!
Even in waters that bore so much of man’s treachery
as the China Sea, it did not seem possible that so fair
an exterior as that of the green yacht could cover a
menace.
Those on the Lurline could see the people on the
deck of the other yacht very plainly: two women in
reclining chairs aft, as there had been the day before,
and the man in uniform of white trimmed with green,
and with a sparkle of gold at his cuffs. This man
seemed to be full of the cares of his vessel. Although
there was a chair placed for him aft, close to the
the chairs of the women, he sat in it but little. Us-
ually he was up and about the deck, giving quick
orders to the men who moved about forward, speak-
ing to the man at the wheel, studying the sea or the


THE WAY OF A MAN AND A MAID 161
horizon, watchful, alert, as a sailing master should
be.
The women, on the other hand, took matters very
easily. Perhaps they had full faith in the skill of
their sailing master. They were in white and green,
and one of them seemed intent upon some fancywork
in her hands. The other sat reading, or looking idly
on the changing beauty of the sea. Through the
glass, indeed, Allison and Wentworth could see that
the book took but little of her attention, lying neg-
lected, for the most part, in her lap.
Once she rose, a tall, graceful figure, and picked up
a marine glass from the cabin skylight. Wentworth,
lying back in his steamer chair, was watching her
through a glass at the moment himself. And some-
thing seemed to flash across to him as she looked, an
electric shock. The meeting in space of human
thought waves it might have been.
“By God!” he exclaimed, springing to his feet,
and still holding the glass to his eye. “By the
living God!”
“What is it? ” asked Allison, looking up quickly.
“The woman!” cried Wentworth. “It is not
possible! I must be crazy! Yet I would swear it
to be the figure of Margaret Graeme!”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Allison.
“ Do I not say that I must be crazy?” replied Went-
worth. “But take the glass and look.”


CHAPTER XVIII
“LET HER FOLLOW HER WAY”
EN TWORTH handed the binocular to his
friend as he spoke, and Allison, who had
risen, focussed the glass to his sight.
“It does resemble her,” he admitted, after a long,
slow look. “I cannot distinguish the face plainly
at this distance, but it does look like her. Could
Margaret Graeme, by any possibility, be here?”
“You told her of my plans,” said Wentworth, in
reply. “You may have been putting into her hands
more than you dreamed. If Captain Robert Graeme
is her brother? By George! We must find out
about this!”
“We are not sure that it is Margaret Graeme,”
said Allison.
“I believe that it is,” said Wentworth. “The
first thing is to make sure.”
He motioned McGreal toward him as he spoke.
“Captain,” he asked, “when did you mean to find
out whether the yacht out there is following us?”
“To-morrow morning, sir, when we are well up to-
ward the entrance to Formosa Channel.”
“I think that we can prove it earlier,” said Went-
worth.
162


“LET HER FOLLOW HER WAY” 165
And we will not have given our own hand away,
either.”
“I suppose that is so,” said Wentworth.
“It is so,” went on McGreal. “And if they are
following us, and the lady on board is a friend of
yours, I should say that the yacht is more likely to
drop alongside at a critical moment and lend a hand
than to hurt us.”
“Much more likely” agreed Allison.
“It comes around to the same thing, then,” said
the captain. “It will pay us not to let on at any time
that we suspect we are being followed. Even if that
yacht runs up into Formosa Channel behind us, it is
no particular harm, that I can see—that is, always
provided that the green yacht carries your friends.
“And, on the other hand,” continued McGreal,
“if the yacht is following us with her movements di-
rected by those who are not friends I do not see how
we are to shake her off. And what the devil are you
doing here?”
He broke Off, suddenly, to hurl his question at the
steward, Di Sousa, who had crept up on deck and had
been standing, none of them could say how long, very -
close to the three men as they talked.
“Sar,” responded the Eurasian, “I come to say
that the breakfast, she is serve!”
“Come up in front of me, and speak out, then!”
said McGreal, sternly. “Go on below!”
And as the Eurasian bowed and efi'aced himself,
the captain turned to Allison and Wentworth.


166 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
“There are times when that chap reminds me of a
rat, with his sneaking ways,” he said. “As I was
saying, sir, if that yacht is an enemy I do not well
see how we are to shake her off. She has the heels
of us. And it is possible for her to do a lot of harm
too.”
“In case we should sight the Ner'ied out here?”
suggested Allison.
“That’s one thing, sir. She could run down ahead
of us to cut the tramp off and give warning. And at
the last, she could beat us into Nagasaki and do the
same thing.”
“Which is what she will be more likely to do,”
remarked Wentworth.
“I am not so sure,” replied the captain, who had
been glancing all around the horizon as he talked,
after the manner of seamen. “There is a steamer
now off to windward.”
He pointed, as he spoke, to a long smudge of smoke
lying low along the eastern horizon. And then he
trained his glass, and studied the point for a mo-
ment or two where the smoke seemed densest.
“I may be wrong,” he went on, “but she is cer-
tainly heading up the coast. These seas are much
frequented, still, that may be the N en'ed bound north
from Iloilo. If we are to see her at all it should be
somewhere along about here that we would pick her
up.”
Allison and Wentworth had both looked at the
smudge of smoke as soon as McGreal pointed it out.


“LET HER FOLLOW HER WAY” 167
And with about as much satisfaction as untrained
men usually get from such things at sea. Away off
there to windward, maybe five miles distant, a
steamer was passing. They could make out her two
sticks and a double funnel through the glass. And
that was all.
“The Neried has two sticks and a double funnel,”
said McGreal.
“Will you head out toward her?” asked Allison.
“I do not see the good, sir,” replied the captain.
“We are safe to cross her, going as we are; and we are
making better weather on this course. If that is the
Neried, she cannot get away from us now, and we
will just about run her down in Formosa Channel.
Those tramps are slow tubs.”
The interest of the two friends came back again
to the Petrel and the woman in her. She had seated
herself again in the deck chair, but through the glass
Wentworth could see that she still studied the group
on the after deck of the Lurline. Agreeing in the
entire reasonableness of the proposition of letting a
woman and her purposes alone, neither Allison nor
Wentworth, as they went below to breakfast, was yet
ready to give up the purpose to come at last, in some
way, to close quarters with the Petrel.


CHAPTER XIX
ALONE UPON A STORM-TOSSED SEA
CRUISE at sea is like the life of a man in
this: that day by day routine duties arise
and are performed; and work is left lying,
half forgotten, along the course which yet leads surely
to the crisis of man’s performance. The routine
duties hold the day’s interest, no more. Men, other
men, contemplate the catastrophe and point out, one
to another, how the avoidance of this one error, or the
better performance of that task, would have changed
the sum total. And yet no man avoids the error or
betters the performance in the work of his own life.
For three days the Lurline stood up along the
China coast, well out at sea, heading for the For-
mosa Channel to the leeward of Patas on her course
for Nagasaki. For three days the Petrel followed
approximately on the same course, sometimes far to
Windward, sometimes almost out of sight, but always
giving those on the Lm'line to know that they were
not to be permitted to get out of view. With the
slant of wind out of the northeast, which held steady,
this was easy enough for the faster boat to do.
The people in the two yachts saw many smudges of
smoke along the horizon. Those be populous seas.
\
168


UPON A STORM-TOSSED SEA 169
Great numbers of the crowded junks of Hangchau,
running down the coast on the wind and with their
painted eyes staring dead ahead, passed them. Once
the Lurline went close to a big P. & O. liner, holding
down from Shanghai with a bone in her teeth; and
again, one day, a beautiful white cruiser of the
American navy raced past, bound north, spurning the
waves like some swift sea bird, and dipped her colours
in salute. And in the many vessels sighted, far off and
close at hand, and in the passing of the nights, it
happened, naturally, that the particular smudge that
had been thought to mark the passing of the Nem'ed
was lost. It did not make a great deal of difference.
It might have been difficult to deal with the tramp
at sea. Her next port of call was known, and the
Lurline people counted on beating her to it. The
chance of an encounter before reaching Nagasaki
had hardly been more than reckoned on as among
the possibilities.
In the afternoon of the third day, with the two
yachts well up into the Channel, the slant of wind
that had held on for so long died in long, wailing
gusts. The breeze became fitful, chopping all around
the compass. The sails of the Lurline falling over
against the booms slatted with the roll of the sea,
cracking as a pistol cracks. The long booms
creaked dismally as they swung over, catching with a
sickening jerk at the end of the swing, and every
block in her rigging groaned. It seemed, momentarily,
as if the slatting would jerk the sticks out of her.


170 THE TYPHOO."S SECRET
“We are in the lee of Formosa, I suppose,” said
Allison to McGreal, catching the after rail quickly, as
he spoke, to keep his steamer chair from sliding clear
away across the deck.
“Aye,” replied the captain, casting a long look
astern. “That is like enough. But I don’t like the
look of the sky, sir; and the glass is running down.”
Wentworth, who sat in another chair alongside
that of Allison, rose at that and went into the cabin
companionway to consult the aneroid kept hanging
there.
“Gee!” he exclaimed, as he came back and sat
down again. “It is going down with a run.”
“It will come on for a good blow out of the south,
and I wouldn’t wonder,” said Captain McGreal.
“A typhoon?” asked Allison.
“It would be hard to say, sir. But this Channel
is in their regular course, blowing out to sea.”
“Not exactly the best place to be caught?” sug—
gested Allison.
“Why,” replied McGreal, “there are better places.
I thought that the slant of wind that has failed would
have carried us through, but we must even make
shift anyway not to be caught in here, if we can help
it.”
He stepped to the break of the poop as he spoke.
“Forrard there, Mr. Andressen!”
The mate, who was stirring up the men to the
polishing of brasses and the general painting and
brightening of things forward, after the manner of


172 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
alive and quivering. And it changed its shape as it
went down until it became a fiery, giant, humming
top that seemed to spin dizzily before it plunged,
point foremost, into the sea.
All along the southern horizon, as the sun sank,
a mountain range of clouds was growing out of the
ocean. It was a fair range of golden hills at first,
but it darkened, deep ravines and then towering
summits, through copper and bronze to blue-black
as the day died. And, in the red afterglow, it shone
with soft rose colour in all the changing depths of its
peaks and valleys.
Then, as the red faded out, streams of fire darted
from peak to peak across the deep black canons of
cloudland, and the thunder crashed and echoed and
rumbled amidst the summits as when a summer
tempest rolls among the mountains of the earth.
“I wish we were well out of this damned Channel!”
said Captain McGreal, standing to watch the clouds
as they climbed, high and higher, into the fast-dark-
ening sky.
“Why, after all, there is some room in here,” ex-
claimed Allison.
“Ha!” replied the sailor. “Some room? With
the shallows, and Panghi Island close aboard, it is
likely; and every sea a trap! Some room! There
is more in the Yellow Sea, to the north’ard!”
“The other fellow is in the same case,” remarked
Wentworth, indicating the yacht astern with a
gesture.


174 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
of hell. And it died away as it came, rippling the
dark face of the sea as though the touch of it had
made the water boil.
Then McGreal leaped to the break of the poop.
For the first time in that cruise he had caught from
its rack in the cabin companionway the silver trum-
pet that went with the master’s ofiice.
“Forrard there!” he cried. “Mr. Andressen!
Get the fore and main on her! Break out the jibs!
Let us get all we can out of the wind while it is just
feeling its way, like.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” came the reply; and the men
leaped to the falls and ran the sails up, only to have
them slat over and over, banging the booms about to
the creaking of the blocks, and actually, for the mo-
ment, making her lose way on the roll.
But it was only for that instant. Out of the south
once more came the sob of the hot wind, longer than
before. The Lm'line was ready, and it caught her
sails and drove her through the water hissing. Then
the gusts came fast and faster, while the black clouds
rolled clear away across the heavens, and darkness
was on all the deep. Great waves rushed on before
the wind, rolling high and higher. The sails, holding
a good full, strained at their braces, and the taut
ropes sang of storm and wreck, and of that under-
world where fishes sport over white bones in deep
sea caves.
Allison and Wentworth held the deck of the
Lurline while the wind increased to a steady gale,


UPON A STORM—TOSSED SEA 175
but they had called the cabin steward to put their
steamer chairs below. The two friends stood, each
holding by a stanchion, to look upon the waves that
ran by in the darkness with an angrier hissing each
moment, breaking into little flashes of pale-green
flame where their crests were caught and scattered
by the wind. At rare intervals they caught glimpses,
far astern, of dancing lights which they knew to be on
board the Petrel. But the lights seemed to bear
away, more and more, toward the eastward. And, at
last, they could be seen no more. The Lurline might
have been alone upon that storm-tossed sea.


A LURID LIGHT UPON THE SEA 177
“Aye! She is worth all that she cost,” shouted
Allison, in reply.
“If we can hold her so, sir, with just this way upon
her, she will ride it out!” cried McGreal.
“If it comes on to blow no harder!” shrieked
Wentworth.
McGreal shook his head at that. And then, as if
to change the subject: “That fellow behind is
gone!” he yelled. “Maybe he wants to try for
Changwa! The lee of the point in there would give
some protection, and I wouldn’t wonder!”
“Could we make it?” cried Allison.
“I’ll keep to the open!” shouted McGreal, to that.
“It is bad holding ground anywhere inside here,
and hard to get in without a pilot. As long as this
holds as it is, we’ll do.”
“But I think it is getting worse!” yelled Allison.
“Worse? Of course. But, at that, it is better
than failing to make around the point, or dragging
on a lee shore. God help him if he does not give
himself plenty of room as he runs in!”
The captain was turning away when he caught
these words from Wentworth, “And God help the
women!”
“The women? I believe you! God have mercy
on all women at sea in a typhoon!”
For the gale had become a typhoon. There was
no longer any doubt of that. No other wind that
blows across the globe could have been strong enough
to raise those sullen, angry seas, rushing on like ranges


178 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
of mountains in swift motion, and roaring as they
ran. No other wind could have held in its belly so
much of shrieking and wailing as of lost souls; no
other wind could have made men in a stanch ship
cling to ropes and stanchions as for their lives; whip—
ping them, as they clung, with a thousand furious
lashes; stinging their faces and hands with the cut-
ting edges of blown water drops that pierced like
little knives, driving them to shelter in any nook of
cover that offered even the slightest protection.
Wentworth, as the fury of the wind beat upon him,
sent up a prayer to his God for the safety of the
woman that he loved, abroad on the sea somewhere
in that storm, sent up a prayer because he loved her
although in his heart he was not sure whether she
loved or hated him. It was all that he could do for
her. And no more could any man have done amidst
that elemental fury. For a man is very helpless in a
storm at sea.
The Lurline, stripped bare, her engines working
at half speed, and, at that, with her screw racing
madly more than half the time, was in the storm’s
grasp. She had not the power to lie to and face it;
and any attempt to get canvas on her would have
been an invitation to disaster. The men in her could
do no more. They must even let her drive as she
would, and pray that she might be driven into the
open sea to the northward, where lay their surest
warrant of safety.
Both Allison and Wentworth, grasping stanchions


A LURID LIGHT UPON THE SEA 179
aft that had held up the cabin awning, stood close
beside the steersman in awed wonder at the running
of the wind and the waves. They stood there, un-
conscious of the passage of the time, with no thought
of weariness, for hours. The whole black darkness
of the wide world was about them. They could
scarcely make out each other’s forms as they stood,
save when a luminous wave, greater than the rest,
arose and ran behind them for a moment, threat-
ening, as it mounted high and higher, to fall upon the
yacht’s deck.
It was by one of these pale flashes from the sea
that Wentworth noted the steward, Di Sousa. The
man stood on deck, pallid with fear, clinging to a
stanchion as a dying man clings to his last hope of
life. Wentworth could see that his face, ghastly
green in that weird light, was working strangely;
that his lips moved, trembling, as one who says
prayers for the dying when the hand of the White
Terror reaches out to grip his own heart.
And then, with a quick revulsion, Wentworth
smiled, even in the face of the man’s terror, and
amidst that appalling commotion of wind and sea.
For he could see that Di Sousa had loosened the
tether of his red game cock and now held the bird
fast under one arm even while the grim terror for
his own life held him.
Out of the darkness forward, at that instant, the
captain came staggering, clinging to the rail for sup-
port.


180 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
“We can do no more, sir!” he screamed, close to
Wentworth’s ear. “Pray that the engine does not
buck!”
Then, in a second afterward: “God Almighty!”
he shrieked, in a voice audible even above the roar-
ing of the typhoon. “God Almighty! What is
that?” ,
Close astern of the yacht at that moment, almost,
as if it came to devour the Lurline, a great sheet of
flame leaped out of the black depths of the sea.


182 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
Wentworth, looking about him at the little group
gathered on the after deck, Allison, McGreal, Di
Sousa with the chicken under his arm, the man at the
wheel, noted that each stood with white terror on his
face, with mouth half open, like men who strain their
bodies to the point of physical exhaustion, and pant
for breath. Forward, where every bolt and rope and
pulley in the Lurline’s rigging was marked out
plainly, the men on deck had caught the same expres-
sion; so they stood, fixed, in the attitude in which the
light of the fire had found them. One who had
lashed himself face down along the main boom, in fear
that some sea more mountainous than the rest would
sweep him overboard, had lifted his head and now
stared astern with open mouth and protruding eyes.
He looked as a turtle might to which something inex-
pressibly surprising had happened.
Wentworth, glancing hastily at Allison after one
look at this man, saw the answering smile that told
him the same absurd notion had crossed the mind of
ais friend in the thick of that tragic moment, and
yet Wentworth had never for one instant lost con-
sciousness of that baleful fire which came rushing on
across the sea; nor lost one jot of the terror that
swept his soul as the flames came nearer. He had
caught Allison’s smile, the manner and expression
of the lashed sailor, merely as in a flash. He was,
and knew himself to be, a component part of the
same picture. Allison’s whimsical smile, answering
to his own, was as fleeting as the rest. The realities


186 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
the wheel through the open window, seen in a frame
of whirling vapour. And there was a long row of
the faces of men lining the low rail of the vessel amid-
ships in the semi-darkness abaft the blaze. They
leaned along the rail, pale, motionless, with a set
rigidity of feature.
One of them held a short pipe between his teeth,
although there were none of the lip motions of the
smoker to be seen. And their faces were like the
faces of a row of the dead in a picture.
And then, on a coil of heavy rope at the very stern
of her, farthest away from the fire, a small boy sat,
alonchand raised his face to look down with a speech-
less appeal for pity from the men on the deck of the
yacht as the burning ship swept along. He had been
weeping. The men on the Lurline could see so
much, even in the shadow that half covered him.
And that mercy of facile expression that is given to
a child prompted him to hold out his feeble hands
and, as he was swept onward with the rush of the
burning steamer, to wave one gesture as of a last
farewell. Then he dropped his face once more.
So the bits in the fire picture shifted, and the gaze
of the Lurline’s crew must be set forward now to
follow the panorama. They failed, in the shadow,
to make out the name on the ship’s stern. But they
heard, as the steamer passed them, the beating of
her screw against the waters. Her double funnels
vomited dense masses of smoke that were swept
forward to mingle with the smoke from her own burn-


THE STEAMER ON FIRE 187
ing. And she was driving with the storm and being
driven by her own engines—whither?
They watched her while the light that she threw
ahead on sea and sky seemed opening for her a path
into hell through the storm’s darkness. And then
McGreal turned to the two friends who stood close
together on the yacht’s deck in that time of tragedy.
He raised the silver speaking trumpet to his lips as a
man who performs some solemn right associated with
the dead.
“That was the N en'ed ! ” he shouted.


CHAPTER XXH
INTO THE DARKNESS
ENTWORTH, grasping the awning stanch-
ion by which he had held on during the
fury of the storm, still grasping it during
the time that the burning ship was hurried by, all but
fainted at the words. But Allison turned on McGreal
savagely.
“You lie!” he screamed. “You did not see the
name!”
“I know the ship, sir.” McGreal said no more
than that.
The N eried! Then one of those men on her bridge
had been Captain Graeme! And the other? Went-
worth felt a wild desire to laugh, and knew that mad-
ness lay beyond that. The other man must have
been his father—or the Englishman? The Ner'ied!
And she was on fire, and driving fast to her doom
before the fury of the tempest! Hope, then, was
dead. What did it all matter, now? His father
gone! The yacht that he believed held the woman
that he loved carried away in the storm! Disgrace,
love, sorrow, his own honour, and his father’s good
name—all would be swallowed up in the catastrophe
that was hastening to its conclusion; that was all but
188


190 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
be seen marked out black against the flames as she
swept on, fast followed by the fiery seas. And the
Lurline followed likewise, although the steamer
gained. The powerful engines of the Nem'ed, kept
at full speed for very desperation, had the greater
driving power, and her larger hull gave sea and Wind
more surface for their play. But to those who
watched from the Lurline it seemed that a rope of
glowing flame was drawing the larger vessel fast and
faster away from them. The yacht held after the
red glare in sea and sky, but it grew fainter.
And then, suddenly, with one great leap of flame
almost to the zenith, it flickered and went out, as
the flame leaves a candle extinguished by the wind.
For several minutes the glare of the fire, as seen from
the yacht, had been perceptibly lessening. That
was the natural effect of the burning ship running
away fast across the sea. But this sudden quench-
ing of the fire was no natural part of any such running.
It was, rather, as if some monster wave had whelmed
the steamer, a startling thing, leaving in the eyes
of those who watched a momentary sensation of
pain.
For a little time no one in the group on the after
deck of the Lurline made any movement or remark.
They stood staring into the darkness, where the light
had vanished. And then Allison, with some effort,
struggled across the deck to where McGreal and
Wentworth stood close together. The heads of all
three were bared to the storm.


192 THE TYHPOON ’S SECRET
He caught the sound, at last, and there was con-
tagion in it, for every soul aboard the Lurline heard
it in the next second. It was a deep, sullen roaring,
falling at intervals into the storm's clamour, as the
booming of great guns in a distant battle will make
itself heard across the lighter and sharper rattle of
the volley firing. And there came a hail from the
lookout forward, heard but indistinctly, and Mc-
Greal pointed ahead into the darkness to where a
long, irregular, changing line of white ran right
away across the inky surface of the sea in the
yacht’s path. He shouted, as he pointed, one
word: “Breakers!”


194 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
And each man stood—waiting! It was as though
each felt resting on him the touch of death, and
would face the destroyer with the courage of quick
manhood strung to tension. There could be no
escape! In the hands of a power greater than human
they were borne onward swiftly to their destruction.
It was a part of the sublime sarcasm which is en—
wrapped about the destinies of men that while they
were thus carried forward swiftly to their doom by
the restless invisible, the feeble throbbing of the
yacht’s own engine beat steadily to help them along
the appointed way.
The steersman, straining with all his muscular
might to ease the yacht among the running seas,
as by an instinct continued to perform the duty
laid on him. The little group on the after deck,
silent, expectant, watchful, noted this. They might
have caught inspiration from the mere mechanics
of it. Wentworth, at last, reached out his right
hand—and it met the right hand of Allison. The
Eurasian, Di Sousa, smoothed the feathers on the
head and neck of his red game cock, and soothed
it with a low, affectionate crooning in Portu-
guese.
McGreal still stood at the break of the poop, where
he had leaped to touch the engine bell, shading his
eyes, straining them forward into the darkness beyond
the breakers. He waited, as they all did, for the
crash that would tell him that the Lm‘line had found
her grave. But, like a true sailor, he still sought a


THE MENACE OF THE SEA 195
way to safety while relentless danger seemed closing
every avenue against him.
The yacht rushed on. Almost, it seemed, the
white line of the phosphorescent surf was under her
forefoot. They could see the foam running back-
ward as the great waves broke, spreading a fiery
pattern as of hell’s carpet over the black surface
of the sea. And still rushing out of the darkness
behind them the tremendous seas drove the Lurline
on; and the wind was the spur of the powers of the
upper air. It seemed as if the demons of the under
sea and of the gale, holding the yacht in their grasp,
shook her in the madness of their Wicked glee, with
such tremendous ferocity did the wind and the waves
tear at her; hurl her forward; raise her aloft; beat her
down, down in smothers of white foam.
And now they were so close to the line of breakers
that any one might catch and toss their frail vessel
into that seething white cauldron that set a boundary
to their lives.
And then! So quickly did the change come that
the extremity of peril was met and passed before
either Wentworth or Allison realized that death
had swooped, and missed the stroke. It was only
McGreal, who leaped backward from the poop rail,
put his silver trumpet to his lips and bawled an order
almost into the ear of the man at the wheel.
“Port!” he yelled.
The yacht, rushing on through the water, trembled,
but answered to the touch. Her sheer side just


THE MENACE OF THE SEA 197
the words were taken up by the strong voice of the
mate, and so carried backward to the group on the
after deck.
“N-o-o-o bottom!”
“No bottom, sir.”
“Fifteen fathom!”
“Fifteen fathom, sir.”
“ Sca-a-ant tWelve ! ”
“Scant twelve, sir.”
“Six fathom!”
“Six it is, sir.”
“Five fathom! Easy five, and shoaling, sir!”
“Forrard there!” yelled the captain at that, with-
out waiting for the mate’s voice, and touching the
bell at the same time to stop the engine. “Get out
that port anchor, Mr. Andressen! Lively, now!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The chugging of the exhaust ceased. There was a
sharp rattling of chains. And the Lurline, in the
next moment, swung around by the port side and
came easily to a stop with the full sweep of the wind
hitting her in the nose. But the gale had lost much
of the force that it had outside; she was in shoal
water, with a sand bottom, and the sea was running
down.
“Get the starboard anchor over, Mr. Andressen!”
cried the captain.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Again the chains rattled out. The second mud
hook caught. And the Lw'line was as safe as a church.


198 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“She will do, now,” said McGreal, coming aft
to where Wentworth and Allison still stood, their
right hands clasped. Only at that moment did
they break the clasp, with some slight feeling of
shame it might have been, and stand apart.
“By God!” the captain said, as he came up,
“ that was a close call, all right!”
“There did not seem to be a lot to spare!” replied
Allison.
He reached out and shook hands with the captain
as he spoke, and Wentworth did the same thing im-
mediately afterward. Those three men had just
passed, together, through the only break in the line
that death had laid down in their path. Out of
the storm and the sea and the darkness the Lurline
had come, straight as the arrow flies,to the one breach
in the reef through which a vessel could have passed.
No power below God’s Providence had guided her in
the time of danger. Wentworth, after the hand-
shake, turned to the Eurasian steward.
“ Go below and make us a cocktail!” he said.
So men cover the stirring of the primal emotions
with outward manifestation of the commonplace.
After that no one spoke for a little. Then Allison
asked: “Where are we?”
“God only knows!” replied McGreal. “And He
won’t tell till daylight—after which, He won’t have
to. But I should say we were somewhere close in to
the foreshore of the Island of Formosa. We may
be half a mile from land, and we may be ten miles.”


THE MENACE OF THE SEA 199
“We are inside the reef?” queried Allison.
“We are in the lee of it, anyhow,” said the captain,
“and in some kind of shelter. There’s a vessel’s
riding light off the port bow there. We must have
just missed running her down.”
The two friends looked in the direction indicated
and, sure enough, a light was dancing there at a little
distance as the seas rose and fell. It must have been,
as McGreal said, that the Lurline passed her close
as she came rushing in to safety. Other men had
been in peril on their account.
The mate, Mr. Andressen, came on the poop deck
at the moment and saluted. “I have sent the watch
below to turn in, sir,” he said. “There won’t be
much doing here till morning.”
“That is right,” answered the captain. “Where
do you make out we are, Mr. Andressen? You would
be more used to these seas.”
“I can’t rightly say, sir. But there’s a reef like
that runs out from Tali Point. I have seen the break-
ers on it, passing close in here on the P. & O. boats.”
“That is on Formosa?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We are safe to ride here till morning, then?”
queried the captain.
“She is riding easily enough now, with both hooks
holding,” replied the mate. “And the wind is blow-
ing itself out.”
“I note that. We seem to have found port in a
storm.”


200 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“It can’t be much of a port, sir, at that. And
it won’t be safe to get too close inshore. The natives
are a pretty savage lot hereabouts.”
“Japs haven’t got ’em tamed yet, eh?” asked
Wentworth.
“Why, sir,” replied the mate, “the Japs hold
the towns, and the camphor camps close in fast
enough. There would be a garrison in Tali, it is
likely. But five miles outside the town a man would
not be safe. And anywhere alongshore between
military posts there is danger. The native pirates
are as like as not to come swooping offshore in their
sampans if a vessel gets too close in and falls into
stays.”
“Well, we could run out with our engine,” said
Allison.
“True enough, sir,” agreed the mate, “but I’d
not want my life to hang on the working of a petrol
engine. The natives are not likely to come off in
this wind.”
He turned, as he spoke, to go below, and McGreal
addressed Allison and Wentworth:
“I would advise you gentlemen to get some sleep,
too,” he said, holding his watch to the binnacle light
to note the time. “It is past midnight, and we can’t
do a thing until day breaks and we find out where
we are. I will stand watch, and guard the ship.”
“You will ride here until morning, of course?”
queried Allison.
“Sure!” answered McGreal. “There isn’t any-


THE MENACE OF THE SEA 203
for shelter before the wind came on to blow too
hard.”
Then, in a moment, those on the Lm-line noted a
movement among the seamen on the green yacht.
They had, up to that time, been hanging over the
rail of her, idly looking at the vessel which had been
swept into the haven on the wings of the storm.
Her captain had come on deck, and given an order
which was followed by a boatswain’s whistle that
sent half a dozen men scuttling down the port gang-4
way of her and into the yawl which swung idly in
the water there. The captain himself had followed
directly after them, and had taken his place at the
tiller of the small boat.
“She is sending a boat to board us,” said Captain
McGreal.


CHAPTER XXIV
AN ARTIST IN COCKTAILS
ROPELLED by six oars, the yawl came
through the still water very swiftly. Al-
most, as it seemed, in a moment after leav-
ing the side of the Petrel it was passing around by
the stern of the Lurline.
“Forrard there!” cried McGreal. “Get that port
gangway down! Lively, now!”
The sailors leaped to obey, just as a hail came from
the man in the stern of the yawl.
“Lurline, ahoy!”
“Ahoy!” replied McGreal, man-of-war fashion.
“I want to come aboard you, sir!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
It was all very ship-shape and proper. With that
answering shout from McGreal as a signal the yawl
shot alongside and the captain of the Petrel leaped
lightly to the platform and ran up the gangway. He
touched his cap to Captain McGreal as he stepped
on deck, and the two shook hands.
“Good morning, Captain McGreal!” the stranger
said.
“Very glad to see you, sir,” answered McGreal,
“although you have a little the best of me.”

204


AN ARTIST IN COCKTAILS 205
“Ah!” replied the stranger, smiling. “I cleared
from Manila after you, you see. I am Captain
Stoddard, sir, sailing master of the Petrel.”
Wentworth and Allison had come down over the
break of the poop, and McGreal introduced them
in due form.
“I am come aboard to congratulate you on your
escape out of the typhoon,” said Captain Stoddard.
“It was a close call,” murmured McGreal.
“Aye, sir, it was that. And I want to invite
you gentlemen to breakfast on board the Petrel,”
went on Captain Stoddard. “You must be weary,
after the night of stress, and may be willing to let
your fellows try to cheer you up a bit. I thought
you had been safe to pass the Channel and run out
into the open sea when we saw you come in last
night. You just missed running us down by a hair,
sir; and you came so suddenly that I had no time to
burn a flare. It was a wonder of seamanship that
you made the passage of the reef in that gale.”
“It was the hand of God!” replied McGreal,
lifting his cap as he spoke.
“Ha!” exclaimed the visitor. “The burning
steamer was in the devil’s hands, likely, when she
tried the passage. She struck, with a crash, a mile
below the opening—and winked out.”
“That was the N cried,” said McGreal.
“The Neried!” repeated Captain Stoddard, and
then, slowly, as if to himself: “The Ne'ried! It is
ended, then?”


AN ARTIST IN COCKTAILS 207
poop. The visitor was thus first on the Lurline’s
quarterdeck, and led the way into her cabin. So
it fell out that neither of his three hosts saw his ex-
pression change, nor noted the start he gave when
he caught sight of the steward, Di Sousa, standing
at the head of the cabin table, nor did either notice
the momentary hesitancy of his step as he put his
foot into the cabin. And, if they had been noticed,
the start and the hesitation would have been ascribed
naturally to the sudden coming into a strange place.
If the appearance of Stoddard there had any
effect on Di Sousa, the steward had better command
of himself and did not show it. It seemed to Went?
worth and Allison, indeed, that the Eurasian ex-
celled himself in the mixture that he achieVed that
morning. And it may have been that the agitation
of Captain Stoddard found the safety valve of an
outlet in the remark with which he set down his
glass after draining it.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is the most seductive
that I ever tasted!”
He drank another on invitation, but would have
no more. “It would not be safe,” he said. “After
three of them a man might go home and steal his
own chronometer.”
Moreover, he spoke of his duty to return to the
ladies with an acceptance of their invitation to
breakfast.
“Speaking of the ladies, Captain Stoddard,” said
Allison, “ will you give them our apologies for remiss-


208 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
ness for failing to call while we were in Manila? We
were greatly hurried, and we were not aware, until
we got Well up into the China Sea, that the Petrel
was Miss Graeme’s yacht.”
It was a shot with a purpose, and it went home.
Captain Stoddard started, and lost countenance.
Then he got his face back, laughing a little.
“You know the Petrel is Miss Graeme’s yacht?”
he exclaimed. “ That was intended to be a surprise.”
“We saw Miss Graeme and Mrs. Penworthy on
the deck of her after you put to sea,” replied Allison.
“We will be very glad to get a nearer view of them.
The ladies are old friends of ours.”
“Well,” said Captain Stoddard, still smiling, “I
haven’t told you anything. And it may be that the
ladies will still have a surprise for you on board the
Petrel ! ”
“It will be pleasant, naturally,” said Allison,
politely.
“Being in the hands of the ladies,” agreed McGreal,
with the gallantry of a true sailor.
Captain Stoddard smiled, and bowed. “I must
leave you, gentlemen,” he said, leading the way to
the deck. And the next moment he turned to shake
hands at the head of the yacht’s gangway, at the
foot of which his yawl rode lazily.
“I want to know,” he said to McGreal in a low
tone, almost at the moment of leaving, “whether
that chap has his red game cock with him?”
“Di Sousa? Why, yes,” replied the sailing master


AN ARTIST IN COCKTAILS 209
of the Lurline. And then, gathering that the ques-
tion was a rather peculiar one, he asked in his turn:
“Why do you want to know?”
But Captain Stoddard had run down the gangway,
and leaped lightly into his yawl. To himself, as he
took the tiller ropes and ordered the men to give way,
he muttered: “I’ll fix that damned spy, anyhow!”


CHAPTER XXV
ON BOARD THE GREEN YACHT
APTAIN STODDARD left the people on
‘ the Lurline in a very considerable flutter.
Although neither Allison nor Wentworth
had heard his last question, each had enough from
the visit to ripple his placidity, and McGreal, who
was puzzling himself principally over the matter of
the game cock, had no light upon it. And in the
bustle of preparation for the breakfast he would
have no time to question Di Sousa. Also, there was _
left by Stoddard’s manner something of a doubt
in the captain’s mind which would have made him
chary of speaking to his steward.
“What do you know about that?” asked Went-
worth of Allison, as they turned to go down into the
cabin for their bath and to dress.
“Yachting courtesy, maybe!” laughed Allison.
“Rot!”
“That’s what it would be, under ordinary cir-
cumstances,” agreed Allison. “In this case, it
may have the added touch of a pretty woman’s de- A
sire to be agreeable to people she likes.” - ' i
“It is a great deal more,” insisted Wentworth.
“Why should she follow us to disclose herself here,
210


ON BOARD THE GREEN YACHT 211
when she could have done that so much more easily
at Manila?”
“My dear boy,” said Allison, “being at this writing
of sound and disposing mind, I tell you, with all
solemnity and earnestness, that when it comes to
attempting to fathom the motives of a woman, I
am always and altogether out of my depth. But
we did not give the lady much of a chance at
Manila.”
“There was chance enough, if she had wanted us
to know that she was in that part of the world,”
insisted Wentworth.
Allison smiled, noting here an unconscious as-
sertion of a right to criticize. “I suppose there was,”
he said. “And there is this supposition: She left
us at sea, thought to be safe and following the Neried.
She does not know what happened last night:
whether we have lost the N eried, or whether we are
ourselves in condition to continue the chase. And
it may have occurred to her—it would be obvious
to you and me—that when people are hunting the
same quarry success is more apt to crown united
effort made with understanding.”
“It depends upon the purpose of each hunter’s
_ hunting, does it not?”
“Somewhat. But even hunters who hunt with
different purposes may agree up to the time of
finding.”
“Anyway, the Nem'ed is gone
worth.
,9
!
exclaimed Went-


212 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“Which fact is not known to the lady or will not
be until Captain Stoddard tells her.”
Each went to his own cabin at that, and within
half an hour both were rowed with McGreal to the
Petrel in the Lurline’s yawl, hailed, and were re-
ceived at the head of the gangway by Captain
Stoddard. Margaret Graeme and her aunt, Mrs.
Penworthy, waited for them on the after deck
where the yacht’s sailors had already spread the
awning, and the breakfast was served there in the
open air.
“Good morning, Miss Graeme!” said Wentworth
and Allison together, removing their hats as they
stepped over the break of the poop.
“Welcome on board the Petrel ! ” she said, coming
forward with extended hand, to Allison first, and
smiling most graciously. Very plainly Captain
Stoddard had said nothing to her of the loss of the
Nen'ed. So the wise man spoils no breakfast but his
own.
Margaret merely shook hands, as with old friends,
with Allison and Wentworth. Her greeting of
McGreal had something more in it, something of
graciousness, something of true womanly sweetness
which put the sailorman at his ease at once, awaken-
ing in his mind that sense of the superiority of the
male creature a woman knows so well how to arouse.
It was very cleverly done. Allison, watching her,
smiled at the art of it. But it was in her manner
more than in her words, for this was all that“ she


ON BOARD THE GREEN YACHT 213
said: “ I am very glad to meet you, Captain McGreal.
We saw how you ran the Lurline in last night.
A master of the sea rules the world, sir.”
Mrs. Penworthy was a little more precise in her
greeting, but it was nothing to hurt. Indeed, the
slightly formal manner of the elder woman, as a foil,
enabled the younger to carry off the situation better.
And maybe there was art in that, too.
“Captain Stoddard tells me that you recognized
us at sea,” Margaret said, turning to Allison. “I
think you were most impolite not to signal as much
to us.”
“The lady speaks first,” replied Allison, laughing.
“I would know you anywhere in the world,” said
Wentworth in a low tone, going very close to her.
And she smiled at him, saying nothing.
“Come, gentlemen,” she said to the others, as
the steward set a silver coffee urn on the table, “let
us sit down. I have heard that all men are bears
before they have broken their fast. And we are
most curious to hear how you escaped the fury of
that appalling storm.”
She took the head of the table, motioning McGreal
to the foot. And then as they sat she had Wentworth
on her right hand and Allison on her left. Captain
Stoddard sat next to Wentworth, and Mrs. Pen-
worthy was beside Allison.
And it fell to Wentworth, as it seemed, naturally,
although it may have been because his powers of
description were the best, to tell the story of the


914 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET '
storm and the escape, and the thrilling incident of
the burning of the Nen'ed. At that, indeed, the
breakfast was all forgotten, and the breakfast table
became a mere ground for the play of the primal
human emotions leaping out through the torn veil
of the conventions.
To the three guests it was an old tale. Told
at that table solemnly, and with the feeling of a man
who fears that he speaks of the tragic death of his
own father, who brings to a sister’s heart the knowl-
edge that her brother has been swallowed up in the
uncontrollable fury of the elements, it affected those
who knew the tale with a deep and quiet sadness.
But to those on board the Petrel it was as the
tearing aside of the curtain of doom, a glimpse
into that abyss which waits always on the feet of
men.
Wentworth, speaking in low tones, looking about
him as he spoke with his own eyes dimmed, saw
Margaret Graeme go white, and grasp at the top
of the table as if for support. He saw Mrs. Pen-
worthy slip down into her chair, gasping~—for the
first time in her life showing in public that she felt
the burden of her years. He saw Captain Stoddard,
who had himself said nothing of the loss of the N en'ed,
half start up, as though he would have stopped the
relation, and then subside into his chair, gathering
understanding that the tale was on the lips of the
right man to tell it.
Margaret recovered self-command first. She was


ON BOARD THE GREEN YACHT 215
the hostess, trained to the part, and the younger of
the two women.
“The N er'ied gone!” she exclaimed. And then, in
a tone so low that Wentworth scarcely caught the
words: “Poor Robert!”
Her eyes dropped. It seemed that, for a moment,
she breathed a prayer. And then she looked, with
level brow, at Wentworth.
“Our quest is at an end, John,” she said.
In those few words she told him the tale of how
she had followed him across the sea to help him,
the one man in the world who had made to her the
deep appeal of the man to her womanhood. For
the moment those others at the table had no ex-
istence, for her or for Wentworth.
“It is at an end,” replied Wentworth. “My
father and your brother! They are gone to their
account, Margaret.”
It was the first time he had called her by that
name, as it had been the first time she had addressed
him by his.
“May God have mercy!” she said.
“Amen!” answered Wentworth.


CHAPTER XXVI
“THE NAVAL SUPPORTS ARE COMING UP”
HE shock of the disregard of the conventions
by Margaret and Wentworth caused Mrs.
Penworthy to gather her wits together a little.
She came to the rescue of the situation at the break-
fast table with a commonplace, the chaperon’s
instinct.
“I think, dear,” she said to Margaret, in a faint
voice which she yet contrived, plucky old woman
that she was, to hold fairly steady, “that I will have
another cup of coffee.”
The lqok of admiration that the old lady got at
that from McGreal should have repaid, and did help,
her.
“The old one is a peach, by God!” muttered the
sailor, under his breath. And then aloud, with
something of a feeling that the diversion should be
helped: “There seems to be something doing among
our Japanese friends on shore!”
It completed the diversion, as a matter of fact.
Every one at the breakfast table, even Margaret and
Wentworth for a moment, glanced toward the village
on the beach, and saw the people and the soldiers
buzzing about there as bees buzz around a hive dis-
216


“SUPPORTS ARE COMING UP” 217
turbed. The villagers were running in and out of
their huts; the soldiers were tumbling out of their
quarters in the village houses and arming hastily
to gather near the guns on the beach; a trumpet was
sounding the alarm; and, presently, a trooper riding
one shaggy pony in harness, and leading a second,
galloped along the strand toward the brass field
piece. He leaped to the ground as he reached the
gun and, with the help of some of his fellows, hur-
riedly hitched the team to the piece. Meanwhile,
a company of troops was hastily forming, and from
the forest on the hills behind the town the camphor
cutters could be seen running to the cover of the
village, some throwing their axes behind them as they
ran. And the next moment there came a scattering
volley from the covert of the trees.
“By jove!” cried Allison, “an outbreak of the
natives! And we can watch it as from a box in the
theatre!”
“And take a hand in it, too,” cried Captain Stod-
dard, leaping up from the table and stepping to
the poop rail. “ I want nothing better than a chance
at these Formosan pirates!”
“For’ard there, Mr. Wilson!” he yelled. “Get
the jacket off that gun, and hoist some ammunition
from the forehold! Tumble it up lively, now!”
“Aye, aye, sir!” the reply came, as the mate bustled
the men about to obey orders.
“I can supply you gentlemen with Lee-Metford
rifles,” said Stoddard, turning to Margaret’s guests.


218 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
“They have a range of three thousand yards. That
should just about put a bullet into the front of that
line of trees. It may be possible to pick off a savage
or two.”
“If you will put me aboard the Lurline, Captain
Stoddard,” said McGreal, who had sent his yawl back
to his own yacht, “I will get the jacket off her gun,
and arm her men. It would be too bad not to give
the pirates all the squadron has. Miss Graeme
will excuse me, I am sure? ”—with a bow in Margaret’s
direction.
“I have always wanted to see men in battle,”
she said, looking at him with shining eyes.
“It might be a good notion to get our hooks up and
run in closer,” said Allison, and Wentworth, who had
risen from the table, drew nearer to the side of Mar-
garet. Both young men had the battle light in
their eyes although each held himself in strong
repression.
“Good!” cried Captain Stoddard. “And we’ll
show our colours, too, by God! Honest flags will
give the little Japs assurance of sympathy and help
it may be.”
They had all risen from the breakfast table now,
of course. McGreal, turning to leave them, said
to Allison, who was closest to him: “You two will
stay with the ladies, I suppose?”
Allison, by a gesture, indicated Wentworth and
Margaret, left standing together, a little apart, and
McGreal, followed to the head of the gangway by


“SUPPORTS ARE COMING UP” 219
Captain Stoddard, went over the side into the Petrel’s
yawl, manned to carry him to his own vessel.
“Oh, before you go, Captain McGreal,” said the
sailing master of the Petrel, “don’t tell Di Sousa I
asked about his game chicken, will you?”
McGreal stopped before taking his seat in the
stern of the yawl. “Why did you ask about that
game cock, anyway?” he queried. “I wanted to
ask you.”
“Another time I will explain. I have had my
eye on that chicken for some time.” Then, to the
men in the yawl: “Give way there, men!”
The yawl drew away, giving McGreal no chance
to press the question, and Captain Stoddard went
back to his own quarterdeck. He saw there, first
of all Margaret and Wentworth standing apart, with
clasped hands, regardless now of all that went on
around them. They would have stood thus, the
man and the woman, if the whole world had been
there to look on.
“You followed me—because you loved me, Mar-
garet?” Wentworth said, while Mrs. Penworthy
nearly fainted, and all the bustle of the preparation
for battle went on aboard the yacht. But the man
and the woman were at the supreme moment.
“Yes,” she said.
He took one step nearer.
“You still love me?”
“Would I be here, John?” She blushed as she
said it, but she went on, bravely: “Would I have


220 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
dared to ask you on board? I followed you, be-
cause I loved you, to help you save your father from
my brother. And in that I have failed.”
“It was the will of God!” he said, solemnly. “ You
havetfailed in nothing else. And we have each other. ”
“If you will have my brother’s sister?”
“Or you, my father’s son?”
It may have been merely a fortunate chance that,
at the moment of the meeting of their lips, Allison
shouted to draw attention to a movement on shore.
Or it may have been that the fortunate chance was
taken advantage of. The friendship of men goes
far. And it served, at all events. Even Mrs.
Penworthy looked away, at the shout from the couple
who were recklessly rough riding over all the fences of
her chaperonage. It is a real mercy, when an elderly
and precise woman can thus be spared.
This, it was, Allison had shouted:
“Look! The battle! It develops on the right!”
There, on the beach, the company of Japanese
soldiers was moving around toward the low, wooded
point shutting in the little harbour on the southward,
and the ponies were drawing the brass field piece
in the same direction. Under the whips of the
officers, too, a lot of the natives of the town had taken
hold by long ropes and were helping to get the gun
forward, while there was a huddle of the black men
moving along in straggling groups, behind the soldiers.
Captain Stoddard touched a bell, the engines of
the Petrel began to cough, and the yacht swung


224 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
deck of the Petrel, how he had followed the man he
believed to be his father—although there was still
a baffling doubt—across the world; and of his motive
in that pursuit. And she told him how, knowing
of his quest, and knowing that her own wayward
brother had been in command of the Halcyon, she
had determined to follow, too, and give her help to
the man she loved. That was the woman’s first
purpose.
Her plan had been easy enough to carry out. She
was her own mistress, the mistress of her own fortune,
and there was her aunt to play propriety. When
Allison sailed on the Korea, she went north to Van-
couver and took the Empress of India. Sailing four
days later, she had beaten him by three days into
Hongkong.
When he bought the Lurline, she purchased the
Petrel, which arrived in the port about the same time.
Allison did not know that he was being followed, and
money procured her the services of a local detective
agency to keep her advised as to his movements.
Captain Stoddard, an old school friend of Mrs.
Penworthy but long a vagrant adventurer in the
China Seas, had been found by a fortunate chance
in the Hongkong Hotel and readily took command
of the Petrel, with a commission to get her ready for
sea.
It was a simple matter enough, after following the
Lurline to Manila, to find out about Captain Graeme’s
orders to take command of the Nen'ed, and then to


IT IS THE “NERIED” 225
follow the Lurline again, knowing that her people
would keep track of the tramp steamer. Margaret’s
point of ignorance was as to the position of her
brother in the affair. It had been her purpose to be
present when the steamer was overtaken, to save her
brother, it might be, or her lover. And she had not
meant to reveal the fact that she was in pursuit until
that time. In the position of being the element un-
expected, she would gain strength.
But the storm, and the Lurline’s unexpected ar-
rival in the port of refuge, and her own anxiety lest
something should have happened to Wentworth, led
to a change in her plan in that regard. And she
had revealed herself.
Little time as these mutual explanations had taken,
that interval had sufficed to put the Petrel well up
to go around the point. Naturally, the two yachts
being out from the shore some hundred yards, those
on board would get a glimpse into the next bight
of the coast before the soldiers on the beach could see
what it was that they were advancing against. And
with a mighty sailor oath Captain Stoddard saw,
and leaped in his excitement to point ahead.
“By the living God!” he cried. “By the living
God! The Neried!”


CHAPTER XXVIII
THE BATTLE WITH THE FORMOSANS
HE words thrilled every heart on board
I the Petrel. Margaret and Wentworth, ab-
sorbed as they were in the wondrous selfish-
ness of their love, looked away, each from the other,
to that point in the common view that had suddenly
become the centre of the human interest of all.
A great iron steamer, painted dull black, splotched
here and there with big daubs of red, having a double
funnel and two sticks and with the marks of fierce
flames all about her forward hull, lay stranded on the
rocks of the reef at a little distance from the shore in
the shallows. The reef ran close in here, marking
the entrance to a bight sheltered by high, rocky
points; and terrific seas must have run in the storm
just at the place where the steamer struck. Whelmed
in these seas, the fire in her had been all but extin-
guished, but little wreaths of smoke eddying upward
from the forward hatch showed where the embers
in her still smouldered.
Resting on the rocks close in, she had a strong
list to the port side. And from the line of trees
fringing the beach, and from a hundred sampans
that clustered and ran backward and forward in
226 '


THE BATTLE WITH FORMOSANS 227
the shallows between the ship and the shore, a thou-
sand frantic, yelling Formosans were attacking her.
Those on shore ran out into the still water for a little
way and fired at close range from their nondescript
guns, and ran back, screaming, to the cover of the
trees. Those in the sampans sent their craft dash-
ing forward to fire at will in running volleys, and
sought to clamber up the high, smooth hill of her as
she lay. Beaten, they fell back to gather courage
for new assaults while making room for other boats.
And of those who ran out from the cover of the
trees down into the water many did not come back
again, but lay writhing in screaming agony, or quite
stark and silent on the sand. And the deck of more
than one sampan was slippery with blood which
dripped down and reddened the lagoon and the line
of foam on the reef where the lazy billows broke.
For the men in the steamer, although they did
not fire one shot to a hundred of their assailants,
yet had been so placed for the defence by a master
of tactics that every shot told. Rifles blazed, now
and again, from her open ports and from the shelter of
her bulwarks. Two men, skilled marksmen, crouched
in the forward crosstrees, and two more in the main.
And the men on the deck were so changed and shifted
to cover threatened points as to make the small crew,
reserving fire until the shots could tell, seem on the de-
fensive at every spot and in sufficient numbers. In-
deed, it seemed that every shot from the steamer was
followed by the scream of a stricken savage.


230 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
trees for the better part of the day. But the For-
mosans knew their own country, and it is likely that
most of them got away.
The Japanese captain, after the retreat of the
savages, met Allison and Wentworth and the cap-
tains of the two yachts on the deck of the wrecked
steamer, and thanked them handsomely for the help
given him in routing the islanders. And then, being
a Japanese and a gentleman, he desired his respects
paid to the ladies, secluded with their sorrow, and
sent his post surgeon to look after the two men
wounded on the bridge of the Nem'ed. He would
hold his men at the place for several days to hunt
down the savages, he said, and asked that the two
yachts might remain near the Nem'ed during that
time.
At once on boarding the steamer Wentworth
had had his wounded father carried to his own cabin
on board the Lurline. He lay there, pale and un-
conscious, and Wentworth, sitting beside him, chafing
his cold hands and waiting for the closed eyes to
open, could doubt no longer. This man, the man
who had posed as an Englishman, this fugitive with
bandaged head who had fled so far to meet, the bullet
that, striking his skull, had yet glanced without
penetrating the brain; this wreck who lay uncon-
conscious now, with all his troubles left behind in
the night into which his soul was wandering, was the
great banker, the public-spirited citizen, his father.


“HIS NAME—NORMAN AINSWORTH” 233
cisco after Ainsworth. I was to deliver him where-
ever he wanted to go. He seemed only to want
to go with me—to travel. He had no money, as far
as I could find out, but, as I had been well paid, I .
let him go. I wish I hadn’t, now. He might have
been alive yet if he had stopped at some port. And
he was a good fellow, although he was crazy in the
head. That is, he was a bit absent at times, and
he thought he was an Englishman. That was his
one delusion. He was entirely harmless. And he
stood by me like a man in storm, and fire, and battle.”
“Mr. Harran!” she repeated, and, again, “Mr.
Harran? Are you strong enough, Robert, to tell me
how it was that Mr. Harran got you your passenger?”
“I have told you!” he said, a little peevishly.
“ Can’t a woman even let a man die in peace? Harran
wired me at Pedro to come up and get a passenger
for the Halcyon. There was to be $5,000 in it for
me. But I knew the old fox, and I wanted specifica-
tions. And it was to help a man away with the loot
of widows and orphans—a bank defaulter. I knew
that Harran was making his profit of the loot, too,
but that was nothing to me.”
Margaret was weeping softly, still holding his hand
and still smoothing his hair. He looked at her, but
he did not falter. There came a strange look into
his eyes, as though his soul, loathing itself, yet
scorned to hold anything back from her condemna-
tion. And she only wept for him.
“You would have the tale,” he said. “It was


234 THE TYPHOON ’S SECRET
nothing to me, a crime the more in a lawless life!
I have thought, since then, watching Ainsworth,
that he was the gentlest criminal that I had ever seen,
and I have lived with sinners. But it made no
difference to me when Harran made his offer. He
knew what my life had been, and I knew. And I had
served him before. I was simply to let a man stow
away, so as not to become involved with the law and
her owners, and to carry the passenger wherever he
wanted to go.”
He paused, groaning, and lay silent, yet still with
his naked soul in his eyes.
“Robert,” she said, at last, forcing her tears down,
“did you know of the failure of the Bank of the
Pacific?”
“The Bank of the Pacific? I may have known.
Of course some bank had failed. I do not remember
that I heard the name.”
He was silent again, and she waited. When he
resumed the relation it was with the set purpose ap—
parent in his tone to go on with it to the end.
“We had a good run up from Pedro,” he said,
“although I lost a man there whom I had depended
on. Running in past Alcatraz, we picked up a swim-
mer close to the island, nearly spent and delirious
when taken from the water, and laid him in my cabin.
When I dropped anchor in the stream, Harran came
off in a launch to tell me that I was too late, that my
passenger had drowned himself in the bay. I didn’t
care a great deal about that, being more concerned


“HIS NALIE—NORMAN AINSWORTH” 237
Once again he lay silent, only groaning at in-
tervals. And Margaret, stooping over him, weeping
for him, bent still lower to whisper: “And your
passenger, Robert? Forgive me, dear, but I have a
reason for wanting to be Very sure. You never
knew him by any other name?”
“I am dying,” replied Robert Graeme, looking
up at her. “His name is Norman Ainsworth.”
He closed his eyes, and all around them there
drifted a light fall, as of ashes. Only once did he seem
to revive. Margaret, from time to time, put the stimu-
lating draught to his lips, and he took it, and his flut-
tering breath showed that life still lingered. But over
his whole face that light fell as if ashes had sifted down.
It was after the administration of the stimulant
that he started up in bed, throwing Margaret’s hand
from him, and seeming to grope for a moment, as one
in the dark. Then his eyes cleared. He stared at the
woman sitting beside him, clear-eyed, now, facing the
death of a wayward loved one. And recognition came
back slowly into the face of the one who was passing.
“Margie!” he cried, going back once more to the
childish name he had used to call her. “Sister
Margie! You here? And Aunty Pen? Then, it
was a dream! And I will not be a naughty boy any
more, Aunty Pen! Sure and honest I will not!”
He settled back on his pillow very slowly, with a
long, tremulous sigh. And the tangled hair that
Margaret Graeme still smoothed and smoothed was
a dead man’s hair.


CHAPTER XXX
A SPY—AND A GAME CHICKEN
THEY buried him under a wide-branching
camphor tree on the shore of that wild island
near where he had fought his last fight. And a
platoon of the Japanese soldiers fired a military salute
over his grave. That was fitting. He had died like
a soldier, and he had lived at war with mankind.
Turning from the grave, where Wentworth stood
with bared head supporting the woman he loved
while Allison gave his attention to Mrs. Penworthy,
Captain Stoddard of the Petrel noted the spy, Di
Sousa, in earnest consultation with the Japanese
captain. And a moment later the Eurasian went
tracking through the forest from the spot where the
grave was toward the village. At once the captain
hurried his people aboard the Petrel. He had a
purpose in that. It was in furtherance of his purpose
that he asked Captain McGreal, as he shoved off from
the shore, to send aboard to him from the Lurlz'ne
Di Sousa’s prized game chicken. This McGreal
readily agreed to do. He would have done it without
Captain Stoddard’s assurance that possession of the
bird was necessary to the success of a play which
would be explained later.
238


A SPY—AND A GAME CHICKEN 239
The yachts had gone back to their anchorage
in the little harbour at once after the funeral, and
when he got the game cock Captain Stoddard carried
it ashore with him in his yawl, carefully hidden in a
burlap sack. Using expedition in his movements,
he beat Di Sousa into the village easily enough. And
he waited for his man with full confidence at the door
of the hut where the Japanese had set up their tele-
graphic instruments in connection with the cable
from Formosa to Nagasaki.
“Hi, Di Sousa!” he exclaimed, as the spy, warm
with walking, came trudging up to the door of the
hut. “You know me? ”
“Sar, yes,” replied the Eurasian. “I know you.
You beat me at Macao, it is ten years ago, because
that I did report to the officer of the French of your
smuggling arms to the Black Flags.”
“And would have got me shot if I had not been
smart enough to get away!” said Stoddard.
“Sar, that was my duty. But, sar, I know you!
My bones hurt, sometimes, when I sleep.”
“Very good,” said Captain Stoddard to that, not
the least disturbed. “Then you know what I can
do. I will, if you please, take that cablegram that
you are about to send to your employers in Manila.
And you will come aboard the Petrel with me.”
“Sar,” replied Di Sousa, “I am free mans. And
I will not. I will report to Japanese officer.”
“Oh, will you?” cried Stoddard, opening the sack
as he spoke, and drawing out from it the red game


CHAPTER XXXI
SHADOW AND SUNSHINE
HAT evening, after the unmasking of the
l spy, Margaret and Wentworth sat together
on the deck of the Petrel, and Margaret told
her lover all that her dying brother had said with
reference to his passenger.
“He gave no other name than Norman Ainsworth,
dear,” Margaret said. “Robert was told that he
was a fugitive, a defaulter whom Harran, for a pur-
pose of his own, wanted kept out of the way. Har-
ran and Chester were to have put him on board the
H alcyon in San Francisco Bay, but by a most strange
coincidence Robert picked him up, swimming but
near spent, off Alcatraz. Harran found him there,
in Robert’s cabin, and hurried the steamer to sea.
Robert discovered, when his passenger came to him-
self, that his mind was enfeebled.”
“What was it that destroyed his mental poise,
I wonder?” mused Wentworth.
“Could it have been the result of that auto ac-
cident? They must have played upon him shame-
fully.”
“Has he recovered consciousness?” asked Mar-
garet.
243


SHADOW AND SUNSHINE 245
though he did not know a cocktail from soft toddy,
as Allison said, plaintively. Each sailor in the crew
of the burned ship had a wonderful tale to tell of how
the steamer—all afire in her forward hold, driven on
before the storm and driving with her engines in a
mad effort to reach the beach—had struck the sharp
reef and been caught and whelmed in the tremen-
dous seas that drove clear over her, flooding the open
hatches, and all but extinguishing the flames. They
were seas such as not even the oldest seaman among
them had ever seen before, and their force had left
the N en'ed stranded where the ,natives had found
and attacked her next morning.


THE WICKED CEASE TROUBLING 247
Stoddard, used a game rooster to hold up a cable-
gram to the private detective agency in Manila, and
then kidnapped the detective 0n the ground bodily.
Di Sousa sails for the Far East in the China next
Wednesday, and if a golden salve may heal a wounded
spirit, he will go away happy. I regret that the
real artistry of mixing cocktails must go back to
that far country with him. I tried to get him to
teach Brooks, who seems to have fastened himself
upon me for my sins, but that villain never could
catch the knack of mixing and drinking in reason-
able moderation at the same time. And so Di Sousa
carries his art across the seas. They seem to have
all the delights of life beyond Suez. You will be
glad to hear that the game chicken, which Di Sousa
is taking home with him, is pert and cocky. And so,
let the pair of them go!
With the weapons that Allison put into my hands,
coming back to more serious concerns, my game was
easy. The fact that E.W. was alive, and apparently
on the road to complete recovery of reason, made
a strong card. The information E. W. had already
given relative to the sequestration of certain trust
securities, in which Harran and Chester figured,
put the proof into our hands that these two, and
these two alone, had known and traded upon E. W.’s
failing mentality following that hurt on the head in
the Park auto accident from which all the balance
of his friends thought he had made complete re-
covery.


250 THE TYPHOON’S SECRET
Harran alone for the present, unless I hear some more
talk about that United States senatorship. If that
comes up again, something is likely to happen.
There is nothing else here; except that Allison has
gone back to Honolulu in the Lurl'ine.
And, so, sail on, you turtle doves, across the sunny
waves! If E. WV. fully recovers health and strength,
with the sea air, and the restful life on the yacht, and
the contemplation of the peaceful picture of the hap-
piness of his children, it will be time enough to talk
then of bringing him back to the battlefield.
But it is a matter for John to decide, or for E. W.
himself, perhaps. I have things in line at this end.
The decision can wait. It would be nothing new,
nor very surprising, for this t0wn to have its gods
pulled down about its ears with a run. San Fran-
cisco has set up many gods—and will set up many
more.
THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK