For Jacinta

"When you come to think of it, that isn't very long to make forty thousand dollars in," said Austin.

He said nothing further, for he had met other Americans in his time, and knew the cheerful optimism that not infrequently characterises them.

Jefferson looked at him steadily with the little glow still in his eyes. "You stopped the Estremedura, and, in one respect, you're not quite the same as most Englishmen. They're hide-bound. It takes a month to find out what they're thinking, and then, quite often, it isn't worth while. Any way, I'm going to talk. I feel I've got to. Wouldn't you consider Miss Gascoyne was worth taking a big risk for?"

"Yes," said Austin, remembering what he had seen in the girl's face. "I should almost think she was."

"You would almost think!" and Jefferson gazed at him a moment in astonishment. "Well, I guess you were made that way, and you can't help it. Now, I'm open to tell anybody who cares to listen that that girl was a revelation to me. She's good all through, there's not a thought in her that isn't clean and wholesome. After all, that's what a man wants to fall back upon. Then she's dainty, clever, and refined, with sweetness and graciousness just oozing out of her. It's all round her like an atmosphere."

Austin was slightly amused, though he would not for his life have shown it. It occurred to him that an excess of the qualities his companion admired in Miss Gascoyne might prove monotonous, especially if they were, as in her case, a little too obtrusive. He also fancied that this was the first time anybody had called her clever. Still, Jefferson's supreme belief in the woman he loved appealed to him in spite of its somewhat too vehement expression, and he reflected that there was probably some truth in Jacinta's observation that the woman whose lover credited her with all the graces might, at least, acquire some of them. It seemed that a simple and somewhat narrow-minded English girl, without imagination, such as Miss Gascoyne was in reality, might still hear what Jacinta called the celestial music, and, listening, become transformed. After all, it was not mere passion which vibrated in Jefferson's voice and had shone in Muriel Gascoyne's eyes, and Austin vaguely realised that the faith that can believe in the apparently impossible and the charity that sees no shortcomings are not altogether of this earth. Then he brushed these thoughts aside and turned to his companion with a little smile.

"How did you ever come to be here, Jefferson?" he asked, irrelevantly. "It's rather a long way from the land of progress and liberty."

Jefferson laughed in a somewhat curious fashion. "Well," he said, "others have asked me, but I'll tell you, and I've told Miss Gascoyne. I had a good education, and I'm thankful for it now. There is money in the family, but it was born in most of us to go to sea. I went because I had to, and it made trouble. The man who had the money had plotted out quite a different course for me. Still, I did well enough until the night the Sachem– there are several of them, but I guess you know the one I mean – went down. I was mate, but it wasn't in my watch the Dutchman struck her."

"Ah!" said Austin softly, "that explains a good deal! It wasn't exactly a pleasant story."

He eat looking at his companion with grave sympathy as the details of a certain grim tragedy in which the brutally handled crew had turned upon their persecutors when the ship was sinking under them came back to him. Knowing tolerably well what usually happens when official enquiry follows upon a disaster at sea, he had a suspicion that the truth had never become altogether apparent, though the affair had made a sensation two or three years earlier. Still, while Jefferson had not mentioned his part in it, he had already exonerated him.

"It was so unpleasant that I couldn't find a shipping company on our side who had any use for the Sachem's mate," he said, and his voice sank a little. "Of course, it never all came out, but there were more than two of the men who went down that night who weren't drowned. Well, what could you expect of a man with a pistol when the one friend he had in that floating hell dropped at his feet with his head adzed open. That left me and Nolan aft. He was a brute – a murdering, pitiless devil; but there were he and I with our backs to the jigger-mast, and a few of the rest left who meant that we should never get into the quarter-boat."

Austin was a trifle startled. "You told Miss Gascoyne that?" he said. "How did she take it?"

Jefferson made a curious little gesture. "Of course," he said simply. "I had to. She believed in me; but do you think I'm going to tell – you – how it hurt her?"

It was borne in upon Austin that, after all, he understood very little about women. A few days earlier it would have seemed impossible to him that a girl with Muriel Gascoyne's straitened views should ever have linked her life with one who had played a leading part in that revolting tragedy. Now, however, it was evident that there was very little she would not do for the man who loved her.

"I'm sorry! You'll excuse it," he said. "Still, that scarcely explains how you came to Las Palmas."

"I came as deck-hand on board a barque bringing tomato boxes over. They were busy at the coaling wharf just then, and I got put on. You know the rest of it. I was left forty thousand dollars."

"You haven't told me yet how you're going to turn them into eighty thousand."

"I'm coming to it. You know we coaled the Cumbria before she went out to West Africa. A nearly new 1,500-ton tramp she was, light draught at that, or she'd never have gone where she did. You could put her down at £15,000 sterling. She went up into the half-charted creeks behind the shoals and islands south of Senegal, and was lost there. Among other things, it was a new gum she went for. It appears the niggers find gums worth up to £5 the hundredweight in the bush behind that country. A Frenchman chartered her, but he's dead now, as is almost everybody connected with the Cumbria. They've fevers that will wipe you out in a week or two yonder – more fever, in fact, than anywhere else in Africa. Well, as everybody knows, they got oil and sundries and a little gum, and went down with fever while they crawled about those creeks loading her. She got hard in the mud up one of them, and half of the boys were buried before they pulled her out at all, and then she hit something that started a plate or two in her. They couldn't keep the water down, and they rammed her into a mangrove forest to save her. More of them died there, and the salvage expedition lost three or four men before they turned up their contract."

"That," said Austin, "is what might be termed the official version."

Jefferson nodded. "What everybody doesn't know is that the skipper played the Frenchman a crooked game," he said. "There was more gum put into her than was ever shown in her papers; while they had got at the trade gin before she went ashore. In fact, I have a notion that it wasn't very unlike the Sachem affair. I can't quite figure how they came to start those plates in the soft mud of a mangrove creek. Any way, the carpenter, who died there, was a countryman of mine. You may remember I did a few things for him, and the man was grateful. Well, the result is I know there's a good deal more than £20,000 sterling in the Cumbria."

Austin surmised that this was possible. It was not, he knew, seafarers of unexceptional character who usually ventured into the still little known creeks of Western Africa, which the coast mailboats' skippers left alone. He was also aware that more or less responsible white men are apt to go a trifle off their balance and give their passions free rein when under the influence of cheap spirits in that land of pestilence.

"Well?" he said.

"I've bought her, as she lies, for £6,000."

Austin gasped. "You will probably die off in two or three weeks after you put your foot in her."

"I'm not quite sure. I was at Panama, and never had a touch of fever. Any way, I'm going, and if you'll stand in with me, I'll put you down a quarter-share for a dollar."

It was in one respect a generous offer, but Austin shook his head. "No," he said decisively. "Have you forgotten that Miss Gascoyne expects you to marry her?"

Jefferson's eyes glowed. "I'm remembering it all the time. That's why I'm going. Would you take a refined and cultured girl and drag her through all the hard places men of my kind make money in up and down the world? Has she to give up everything and come down to me? No, sir! It seems to me, the man who wants to marry a girl of that kind has got to do something to show he knows her value before he gets her, and it would be way better for both of us that she should be sorry for me dead than that I should live to drag her down."

It seemed to Austin that there was a good deal to be said for this point of view, and it also occurred to him that there was in this latter-day American, who had still the grime of the coaling wharf upon him, something of the spirit which had sent the knight-errant out in the days of chivalry. Still, he naturally did not say so, for he was, after all, what Jefferson called a hide-bound Englishman.

"Well," he said, "you're taking a big risk, but perhaps you are right."

Jefferson rose with the abruptness which usually characterised his movements.

"You're not coming?"

"No. I haven't your inducement, and I'm afraid the contract's too big for me."

"You have a week to consider it in," said Jefferson, who opened the door. "In the meanwhile there's another fellow ready for his coal, and I'm going along."

CHAPTER V

THE TOMATO FINCA

Three weeks had passed since his interview with Austin before Jefferson was ready to sail, and he spent most of the time in strenuous activity. He had cabled to England for a big centrifugal pump and a second-hand locomotive-type boiler, while, when they arrived, Macallister said that five hundred pounds would not tempt him to raise full steam on the latter. He also purchased a broken-down launch, and, though she was cheap, the cost of her and the pump, with other necessaries, made a considerable hole in his remaining £2,000. It was for this reason he undertook to make the needful repairs himself, with the help of a steamer's donkey-man who had somehow got left behind, while Austin and Macallister spent most of the week during which the Estremedura lay at Las Palmas in the workshop he had extemporised. He appeared to know a little about machinery, and could, at least, handle hack-saw and file in a fashion which moved Macallister to approbation, while Austin noticed that the latter's sardonic smile became less frequent as he and the American worked together.

Jefferson was grimly in earnest, and it was evident that his thoroughness, which overlooked nothing, compelled the engineer's admiration. It also occurred to Austin that, while there are many ways in which a lover may prove his devotion, few other men would probably have cared for the one Jefferson had undertaken. He was not a very knightly figure when he emerged, smeared with rust and scale, from the second-hand boiler, or crawled about the launch's engines with blackened face and hands; but Austin, who remembered it was for Muriel Gascoyne he had staked all his little capital in that desperate venture, forebore to smile. He knew rather better than Jefferson did that it was a very forlorn hope indeed the latter was venturing on. One cannot heave a stranded steamer off without strenuous physical exertion, and the white man who attempts the latter in a good many parts of Western Africa incontinently dies.

At last all was ready, and one night Jefferson steamed off to the African liner from Las Palmas mole, taking with him the steamboat donkey-man and another English seafarer, who were at the time disgracefully drunk, as well as six Spaniards from the coasting schooners. He said that when he reached the Cumbria he would hire niggers, who would be quite as reliable, and considerably cheaper. As it happened, the Estremedura was going to sea that night, bound for the eastern islands, and Mrs. Hatherly, who was never seasick, and had heard that the climate of one of them where it scarcely ever rained was good for rheumatic affections, had determined to visit it in her. Jacinta, for no very apparent reason, decided to go with her, and it accordingly came about that most of her few acquaintances were with Muriel Gascoyne when she said good-bye to Jefferson at the head of the mole. She kissed him unblushingly, and then, when the launch panted away across the harbour, turned, a little pale in face, but with a firm step, towards the Estremedura, and an hour later stood with Jacinta on the saloon deck, watching the liner's black hull slide down the harbour. Then as the steamer lurched out past the mole, with a blast of her whistle throbbing across the dusky heave, Muriel shivered a little.

"I don't know whether we shall ever meet here again, but I think I could bear that now, and it really couldn't be so very hard, after all," she said. "It would have been horrible if he had gone and had not told me."

Jacinta looked thoughtful, as in fact she was. She was of a more complex, and, in some respects, more refined nature than her companion, while her knowledge of the world was almost startlingly extensive; but wisdom carries one no further than simplicity when one approaches the barriers that divide man's little life from the hereafter. Indeed, there is warrant for believing that when at last they are rolled away, it is not the wise who will see with clearest vision.

"I am not – quite – sure I understand," she said.

There was a trace of moisture on Muriel Gascoyne's cheek, but she held herself erect, and she was tall and large of frame, as well as a reposeful young woman. Though she probably did not know it, there was a suggestion of steadfast unchangeableness in her unconscious pose.

"Now," she said, very simply, "he belongs to me and I to him. If he dies out there – and I know that is possible – it can only be a question of waiting."

Jacinta was a little astonished. She felt that there had been a great and almost incomprehensible change in Muriel Gascoyne since she fell very simply and naturally in love with Jefferson. It was also very evident that she was not consoling herself with empty phrases, or repeating commendable sentiments just because they appealed to her fancy, as some women will. She seemed to be stating what she felt and knew.

"Ah!" said Jacinta, "you knew he might die there, and you could let him go?"

Muriel smiled. "My dear, I could not have stopped him, and now he is gone I think I am in one way glad that it was so. I do not want money – I have always had very little – but, feeling as he did, it was best that he should go. He would not have blamed me afterwards – of that I am certain – but I think I know what he would have felt if hardship came, and I wanted to spare it him." Then, with a faint smile, which seemed to show that she recognised the anti-climax, she became prosaic again. "One has to think of such things. Eight thousand pounds will not go so very far, you know."

Jacinta left her presently, and, as it happened, came upon Austin soon after the Estremedura steamed out to sea. He was leaning on the forward rails while the little, yacht-like vessel – she was only some 600 tons or so – swung over the long, smooth-backed undulations with slanted spars and funnel. There was an azure vault above them, strewn with the lights of heaven, and a sea of deeper blue which heaved oilily below, for, that night, at least, the trade breeze was almost still.

"The liner will be clear of the land by now," she said. "I suppose you are glad you did not go with Jefferson? You never told me that he had asked you to!"

Austin, who ignored the last remark, laughed in a somewhat curious fashion.

"Well," he said, reflectively, "in one respect Jefferson is, perhaps, to be envied. He is, at least, attempting a big thing, and if he gets wiped out over it, which I think is quite likely, he will be beyond further trouble, and Miss Gascoyne will be proud of him. In fact, it is she I should be sorry for. She seems really fond of him."