Adrift on the Pacific: A Boys [sic] Story of the Sea and its Perils. Ellis Edward Sylvester
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and you said that you lived with your Uncle Con in San Francisco, and that it was he and your Aunt Jemima that put you on board.”
“I didn’t say any such thing!” indignantly protested Inez. “I haven’t got any Aunt Jemima–it was my Aunt Letitia.”
The captain and mate smiled, for a little piece of strategy had succeeded. They had never before got the girl to give the name of her aunt, though she mentioned that of her uncle. But she now spoke it, her memory refreshed by the slight teasing to which she was subjected.
“That’s very good. I’m glad to learn that your uncle and aunt had two such pretty names as Con and Letitia Bumblebee.”
“Ain’t you ashamed of yourself?” demanded Inez, turning upon him with flashing eyes. “I never heard of such a funny name as that.”
“I beg pardon. What, then, is their name?”
The little head was bent and the fair brow wrinkled with thought. She had tried the same thing before, though it must be believed that she could not have tried very hard, or she would not have failed to remember the name of those with whom she lived but a short time before. But she used her brain to its utmost now, and it did not take her long to solve the question. In a few seconds she looked up and laughed.
“Of course I know their name. It was Hermann, though he sometimes called himself George Smith.”
“The other sounds German,” remarked Storms, in a lower voice. “Go ahead and get all you can from her.”
“How long did you live with them?”
“Let me see,” said Inez, as she turned her lustrous blue eyes toward the roof of the cabin, as if she expected to read the answer there. “I guess it was about two–three hundred years.”
She was in earnest, and Storms observed:
“She must be a little off on that; but take another tack.”
The captain did so.
“Do you remember living with any one excepting your Uncle George and Aunt Letitia?”
Inez thought hard again, and replied, after a few seconds:
“I don’t know. Sometimes he was Uncle George and sometimes Uncle Con. We lived in the city a good while, where there were, oh, such lots of houses! but there was a time before that when we come such a long, long way in the cars. We rode and rode, and I guess we must have come from the moon, for we was ten years on the road.”
“Do you remember what sort of looking place the moon was?”
“It was just like San Francisco–that is, it was full of houses.”
The officers looked at each other with a smile, and the mate said:
“It’s plain enough what that means. She has come from New York, over the Union Pacific, and her trip was probably the longest of her life.”
“Do you remember your father and mother?”
“I don’t know,” said Inez, with a look of perplexity on her young face which it was not pleasant to see. “Sometimes I remember or dream of them, before we took such a long ride on the cars. My mother used to hold me on her lap and kiss me, and so did my father, and then there was crying, and something dreadful happened in the house, and then I can’t remember anything more until I was on the cars.”
“It may be all right,” said Captain Bergen to his mate, “for this could occur without anything being amiss.”
“It is possible; but I have a conviction that there is something wrong about the whole business. I believe, in short, that the person who placed her on board the steamer Polynesia had no claim upon her at all.”
“That, in fact, the man stole her?”
“That’s it, exactly; and still further, I don’t believe she has any father or mother in Japan, and that if we had gone thither we should have lost all the time and accomplished nothing.”
“It may be, Abe, that you are right,” said the captain, who held a great admiration for his mate, “but I must say you can build a fraud and conspiracy on the smallest foundation of any man I ever knew. But, Abe, you may be right, I say, and if you are, it’s just as well that we didn’t go on a fool’s errand to Tokio, after all.”
“The truth will soon be known, captain.”
CHAPTER X
THE MUTINEERS
A few degrees south of the equator, the schooner Coral ran into a tempest of such fury that with all the skilful seamanship of her captain and crew, and the admirable qualities of the schooner itself, she narrowly escaped foundering.
There were two days when she was in such imminent peril that not an eye was closed in slumber, excepting in the case of little Inez Hawthorne, who felt the situation only to the extent that it compelled her to stay close in the cabin, while the vessel pitched and tossed from the crest of one tremendous billow, down, seemingly, into the fathomless depths between, and then laboriously climbed the mountain in front, with the spray and mist whirling about the deck and rigging like millions of fine shot. But the gallant Coral rode it out safely, and the steady breeze caught her and she sped swiftly in the direction of the Pearl Islands.
The little girl had run hither and thither, until, tired out, she had flung herself upon the berth in the cabin, where she was sleeping soundly, while the captain was doing the same; Abe Storms, the mate, being on deck at the wheel. It was yet early in the evening, and Hyde Brazzier and Alfredo Redvignez were sitting close together, forward, smoking their pipes and conversing in low tones. The breeze was almost directly abeam, so that the sails carried the craft along at a rapid rate, the water foaming and curling from the bow, while the rising and sinking of the schooner on the enormous swells were at such long intervals as almost to be imperceptible. As far as the eye could extend in every direction, no glimpse of a sail or light could be perceived, nor had any been observed through the day, which confirmed what Bill Grebbens, the sailor in the Boston hospital, said, to the effect that, despite the location of the Paumotu Islands, the approach to them from the direction of California took one in a section where the sails of commerce were rarely seen.
The captain and mate had been consulting their chart, and had taken their reckoning more frequently and with greater care than ever before. The conclusion at which they arrived was that they were already south of the northernmost island of the Paumotu group, and were close to the Coral Island, along whose shore were to be found the precious pearls which were to make them all, or rather the two, wealthy.
“It’s a curious business,” reflected Abe Storms, while holding the wheel motionless. “When I consider the matter fairly, I don’t see why the expedition should not succeed. But it is so different from the coasting business, in which the captain and I have been engaged for years, that it is hard to believe we’re going to make anything out of it.”
He listened a minute to the murmur of the voices forward, and then he added, pursuing the same train of thought:
“What an extraordinary thing it is that we should have this little girl for a passenger! Suppose we carry her back to Tokio after this pearl hunt, and fail to find her parents?”
He took but a minute to consider the question, when he answered:
“It can never make any difference to Inez herself, for her sweet face and winning ways will secure her a welcome and a home in a hundred different places.”
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