The Secret of the Reef. Harold Bindloss
much daunted by the difficulties he must face.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose we have some chance; but I don’t quite see what made you so keen on taking up the thing.”
“It’s explainable,” Bethune drawled, picking up a pebble and lazily flipping it out over the water. “Victoria’s a handsome city, and the views from it are good. For all that, when you can find no occupation, and have spent some years lounging about the waterfront and the bars of cheap hotels, the place, to put it mildly, loses its charm.”
“You could leave it. As a matter of fact, I met you at Vancouver.”
“Oh, yes. I could leave it for a maximum period of thirty days, because, with the exception of Sundays and one or two holidays, I was required to present myself at a lawyer’s office on the first of every month. Then I was paid enough to keep me, with rigid economy, for the next four weeks; but on the first occasion I failed to come up to time the allowance was to stop for good. It’s a system that has some advantages for the people who provide the funds in the old country, since it assures the payee’s stopping where he is—but it has its drawbacks for the latter. How can a man get a job and hold it anywhere outside the town if he must return at a fixed hour every month? When I was in Vancouver it cost me a large share of the allowance to collect it.”
“And now, by going north, you throw it up?”
“Exactly,” said Bethune. “It should have been done before, but, as I had never been taught to work or go without my dinner, the course I am at last taking needed some moral courage. It’s sink or swim now.”
Jimmy made a sign of agreement. All the money he possessed had been sunk in the undertaking; and now, in order to get it back, he must succeed where a well-equipped salvage expedition had failed. Though the wreck had since changed her position, the prospects were not very encouraging.
“Well,” he said, “we must do the best we can; but I wish our funds had run to a better supply of stores.”
“Hank can fish,” grinned Bethune. “In fact, he’ll have to whenever there’s anything to catch. Fortunately, fish is wholesome and sustaining. However, as this job must be finished to-morrow, we had better get to sleep early.”
Jimmy sat smoking for a few minutes after the others went on board the sloop. It was getting dark, but a band of pure green light still glimmered along the crest of the black ridge to the west. The air was cold and very still, and gray wood smoke hung in gauzy wreaths above the roofs of the town. The tall pines were growing blurred, but their keen, sweet fragrance hung about the beach, and the smooth swell lapped with a drowsy murmur upon the shingle.
Jimmy loved the sea; and now he was to go afloat again, in his own vessel, bound by no restrictions except the necessity for making the voyage pay. This would not be easy; but there was a romance about the undertaking that gave it a zest.
CHAPTER III—THE FURY OF THE SEA
In the evening of the day on which they saw the last of Vancouver Island, Jimmy sat in the Cetacea’s cockpit with a chart of the North Pacific spread out before him on the cabin hatch. It showed the tortuous straits, thickly sprinkled with islands of all sizes, through which they had somehow threaded their way during the last week, in spite of baffling head winds and racing tides, and though Jimmy was a navigator he felt some surprise at their having accomplished the feat without touching bottom. Now he had their course to the north plotted out along the deeply fretted coast of British Columbia, and rolling up the chart he rose to look about.
It was nine o’clock, but the light was clear, and a long, slate-green swell slightly crisped with ripples rolled up out of the south; to the northwest a broad stripe of angry saffron, against which the sea-tops cut, glowed along the horizon; but the east was dim, and steeped in a hard, cold blue. Shadowy mountains were faintly visible high up against the sky; and, below, a few rocky islets rose, blurred by blue haze, out of the heaving sea.
The sloop rolled lazily, her boom groaning and the tall, white mainsail alternately swelling out and emptying with a harsh slapping of canvas and a clatter of shaken blocks. Above it the topsail raked in a wide arc across the sky. Silky lines of water ran back from the stern, there was a soft gurgle at the bows; Jimmy computed that she was slipping along at about three miles an hour.
“What do you think of the weather?” Bethune asked, as he lounged at the steering wheel.
“It doesn’t look promising,” Jimmy answered. “If time wasn’t an object, I’d like the topsail down. We’ll have wind before morning.”
“That’s my opinion; but time is an object. When the cost of every day out is an item to be considered, we must drive her. Have you reckoned up what we’re paying every week to the ship-chandler fellow who found us the cables and diving gear?”
“I haven’t; his terms were daunting enough as a whole without analyzing them. Have you?”
Bethune chuckled.
“I have the cost of everything down in my notebook; although I will confess that I was mildly surprised at myself for taking the trouble. If I’d occasionally made a few simple calculations at home and acted on them, the chances are that I shouldn’t be here now.” Bethune made a gesture of disgust. “Halibut boiled and halibut fried begins to pall on one; but this is far better than our quarters in Vancouver, and they were a big improvement on those I had in Victoria. I daresay it was natural I should stick to the few monthly dollars as long as possible, but it will be some time before I forget that hotel. I never quite got used to the two wet public towels beside the row of sloppy wash-basins, and the gramophone going full blast in the dirty dining-room; and the long evening to be dawdled through in the lounge was worst of all. You have, perhaps, seen the hard-faced toughs lolling back with their feet on the radiator pipes before the windows, the heaps of dead flies that are seldom swept up, the dreary, comfortless squalor. Imagine three or four hours of it every night, with only a last-week’s Colonist to while away the time!”
“I should imagine things would be better in a railroad or logging camp.”
“Very much so, though they’re not hotbeds of luxury. The trouble was that I couldn’t come down to Victoria and hold my job. Once or twice when the pay days approximated, I ran it pretty fine; and I’ve a vivid memory of walking seventy miles in two days over a newly made wagon trail. The softer parts had been graded with ragged stones from the hillside, the drier bits were rutted soil—it needed a surgical operation to get my stockings off.”
“It might have paid you better to forfeit your allowance,” Jimmy suggested.
“That’s true,” said Bethune. “I can see it now, but I had a daunting experience of clearing land and laying railroad track. Dragging forty-foot rails about through melting snow, with the fumes of giant-powder hanging among the rocks and nauseating you, is exhausting work, and handspiking giant logs up skids in rain that never stops is worse. The logs have a way of slipping back and smashing the tenderfoot’s ribs. I suppose this made me a coward; and, in a sense, the allowance was less of a favor than a right. The money that provided it has been a long time in the family; I am the oldest son; and while I can’t claim to have been a model, I had no serious vices and had committed no crime. If my relatives chose to banish me, there seemed no reason why they shouldn’t pay for the privilege.”
Jimmy agreed that something might be said for his comrade’s point of view.
“Now I stand on my own feet,” Bethune went on, with a carefree laugh; “and while it’s hard to predict the end of this adventure, the present state of things is good enough for me. Is anything better than being afloat in a staunch craft that’s entirely at your command?”
Jimmy acquiesced heartily as he glanced about. Sitting to windward, he could see the gently rounded deck run forward to the curve of the lifted bows, and, above them, the tall, hollowed triangle of the jib. The arched cabin-top led forward