Plundered Cargo

Front matter

PLUNDERED CARGO

By ROBERT WELLES RITCHIE

Author of “Light Ridin' Durry,” “Rat-Tail Spills the Beans,” etc.

I. Introducing a Ferris Wheel

Chapter I

INTRODUCING A FERRIS WHEEL

Before-The-Fire-San Francisco was the Land of Romance for a continent. The seven seas brought mysteries to be unladen at her wharves. Mountains and deserts of the hinterland sent silent men to play strange games in her places of business and of pleasure. The city behind the Golden Gate was vibrant with the pulse of life, a little raw but spiced for strong palates.

There, in those times, a mahogany-colored monarch of the South Seas could launch a sugar king on his career by so small a circumstance as losing to him a third of his kingdom over jackpots in a hotel room. An untutored negress might make herself mistress of a fortune by voodoo magic. A black-birder and pirate wanted by three great powers could pass the collection plate of a Sunday ashore.

This tale, one whereon murder will be done and barratry—with shipwreck, and villainy finally unmasked—finds its beginning in that city of enchanted hills in those days of its earlier glory. And it is in tone that so trivial a circumstance as the breaking of the driving machinery of a Ferris wheel near the Cliff House should start something destined to come to its climax in the Vermilion Sea.

A shrill whistle squeak told that the manager of the Ferris wheel had duly delivered to his customers five cents' worth of revolutions. The great swinging circle of lights slowed down to discharge passengers, car by descending car, on the platform between the giant struts supporting the axle. A man in a yachting cap and with a roll of tickets conveniently under his arm stood at the point of debarkation to urge another voyage.

“Hey, Bill, 'nother swing around the circle for you?” The ticket seller leaned through the gap in a swinging gondola's side to touch its single passenger on the elbow.

The one thus addressed roused himself from a doze. He lifted the rim of a hard derby from the bridge of his nose and gave the ticket vendor a searching look.

“You guarantee this's good for loss o' memory, spots before the eyes an' that tired feeling in the morning?”

“All of that and then some, Bill.”

“Give me fi' dollars' worth, then.”

This magnificent deal having been arranged, the passenger settled himself in his private gondola—paid for certainty for the rest of the night—and tilted the rim of his derby back to the bridge of his nose to indicate that conversation was finished. His car swung upward. The Ferris wheel was merrily on its way. From over to the right of the revolving wheel, from the blazing windows of the Cliff House a hint of gay band music came winging down the keen north breeze. Nearer at hand, stretching from horizon to horizon north and south, the moon-dimpled Pacific floated its dishes of gold on changing waves. A lace of surf drew patterns along the shore far as the eye carried.

The giant wheel had made, say, three complete revolutions when a link in the endless chain drive between engine and axle snapped. The wheel stopped. It happened that with the stopping of the wheel the man who had bought five dollars' worth of rides was marooned in his gondola at the very top of the wheel's swing, a full seventy-five feet above the peanut shells on the beach. That circumstance meant nothing to him, at the moment, for he slept. But he presently awoke. It was cool up there, and the north wind blew into his ears and stirred the cobwebs which had stretched themselves across his brain. He pushed his derby up from his eyes and fixed his gaze on the box of light which was the distant Cliff House.

“Guess the old skip's stalled 'round the five hundred level,” he murmured, and his hand automatically went out to find the hoist signal and give it a tug. Then he caught a glimpse of the ocean and knew he was not back in the Gold Lode mine shaft. He hooked his chin on the edge of the car and looked down. He saw the tops of the other cars ranged in a springing curve below him. A man's arm dangled from the one next down the rank.

“Hullo, down there!”

A wide brimmed black hat with a high creased crown was poked out from beneath the eaves of the car. The hat turned. A heavily bearded face twisted upward.

“Take your foot off the brake, Gran'paw!” bawled the young man in the car above.

“I have no foot on the brake, young fellow,” the bearded one answered with great dignity.

Feeling a sociable need for further conversation, the young man of the upper car leaned swiftly out from the gondola, seized the roof edge and swung himself over it. Like a monkey he worked his way down amid steel struts until his feet plumped on the roof of the gondola he sought. A final swing and he was inside.

“Good even', Gran'paw,” he said with a wide grin. “How's tricks?”

The elderly gentleman allowed his eyes to travel slowly over the vivid checks of the intruder's spring suit enwrapping an athletic figure until they came to rest on his features. Surprisingly blue eyes with a hint of the devil in them; wide mouth of a comedian and a sturdy chin thrusting out over a choker collar and cerise puff tie: that was the sum of them.

“Good evening to you, sir,” the elderly gentleman finally replied with no visible excess of enthusiasm.

“There speaks a scholar and a gentleman!” The visitor clapped the venerable one on the knee with a resounding thwack. “Kind of man 'at makes the grade with ole Spike Horn—that's me; Spike for short. Put 'er there with ole Spike Horn!” Mr. Horn thrust out a paw in infectious camaraderie. The whiskered one was constrained to return the clasp.

“My name is Chitterly,” he said, and his voice had a fine rumbling resonance as from long public speaking. “Old Doctor Chitterly is the title given me in affectionate testimony to my long and varied practice of medicine along the shores of the Pacific Slope from Vancouver to Ensenada; and if I do say it myself2”

“Doc, you're worth climbing down here just for a look-see.” The younger man drew back in exaggerated pleasure of a connoisseur before a rare work of art.

An eye-filling picture indeed he saw. A gentleman of the old-school was Doctor Chitterly; big bodied, lusty, competent. Massive shoulders stretched the Prince Albert coat of ancient cut. His generous white beard flowed down over a hard shirt bosom wherein a single diamond glimmered through the fog of the ultimate hairs. His eyes, innocent of specs, had a touch of humor under the heavy thatch of white brows. White hair cascaded down from beneath the wide brim of his old style hat to curl rakishly over the velvet collar of his coat. One would have said here was a railroad builder of the West's roaring Sixties miraculously preserved beyond the time of his contemporaries.

Had young Mr. Horn but known it, the worthy doctor in his way was quite as great a citizen as any golden spike driver on a trans-continental railroad. From the tail-board of his black and gold medicine wagon, last surviving chariot of a golden age of quackery, Old Doctor Chitterly had studied the world of men and women from a penetrating angle. He had conned the heart of mankind through its every gullible weakness. Pain, real or imaginary, had stood folk before him stripped of all play masks of sham and pretense. Perhaps that is the reason a ripe humor lodged in his eyes.

Yes, a seasoned old gentleman was Doctor Chitterly.

“How come you all by your lone in this big wheel, Doc?” inquired Mr. Horn vivaciously.

“Mr.—um—Spike, this is a custom of mine, riding in a public wheel on Saturday night. If I find myself on a Saturday night in a city which boasts one of these—ah—conveniences I ride in it. Change, you know. I've ridden horizontally in pursuit of my profession so many thousand miles it's a real novelty to ride—shall we say perpendicularly.”

For all young Horn's boisterous humor—not untinged by stimulus alcoholic—and despite his taking of liberties with one's dignity, the good doctor began to find himself drawn to the gaudy rapscallion before him. Before the pounding and tinkering noises below gave way to the creaking of the repaired wheel Doctor Chitterly learned that his young friend Spike had sold his interest in the Golden Lode mine at Goldfield for one hundred thousand dollars; that he'd come to San Francisco to “build a fire under the town”; that he had a private trolley car carrying an Italian stringed orchestra of five pieces and a colored bottle opener waiting his pleasure on a spur track over by the Casino.

And the good Doc had gotta come along! Just gotta! No fr'ens in town, Horn hadn't.

Vainly did Doctor Chitterly protest that a private sightseeing car with a five-piece stringed orchestra and a negro butler was a bit gaudy for one of his profession. When their car was once on earth Doctor Chitterly found his arm imprisoned by Spike's arm, and he was rushed through the pleasure grounds to where a brilliantly lighted car stood on a rusty spur behind the dancing pavilion, an admiring and expectant throng about it. With the air of an emperor Mr. Horn shouldered a way for himself and his patriarchal friend through the crowd at the steps. He pushed Doctor Chitterly, resisting feebly, through the door into the luxurious interior. An obsequious colored man popped into a cubby as if on a signal and reappeared with a napkin wrapped about the neck of an opulent bottle.

“Where now, Mr. Horn?” A motorman in special uniform entered from the front platform. “Can switch to any track in the city.”

“Le's play all the switches then. No fav'rites, mind you. Let 'er rollick!”

They trundled away from the Casino to a derisive cheer from the envious. Doctor Chitterly took the fizzing glass offered him diffidently and against the promptings of long conviction.

Spike called his attention to the mountainous figure of a man asleep in a chair behind the musicians' palms.

“See that li'l fellah?” Spike whispered as if in the presence of the great. “Great lil man, eh? That's Walla-Walla, the Iron Man! Found him in Thalia—you know: vaudeville theatre. Let you hit him in the rear with billiard cue, ball bat, anything. Hit him hard's you can for only two bits—that's Walla-Walla, the Iron Man. There's talent for you!”

II. Fate amid the Cabbages

Chapter II

FATE AMID THE CABBAGES

The motorman of the chartered car gave Spike Horn's sailing orders the widest interpretation, doubtless arguing to himself that there was little use getting back on the more crowded network of the traction system where he would have to arrange for meeting and passing other cars on regular schedule. He chose, therefore, to follow the most roundabout way back to the city from the playgrounds around the Cliff House; traveling along the new line around Twin Peaks. At this hour, which was approaching midnight, he would not meet an outgoing trolley, on these sand dune wastes, oftener than once in thirty minutes. He knew the location of the brief intervals of double track where he could draw aside to make the passing.

So a frame of blazing light went rocketing through a fog wilderness, trailing fugitive strains of music.

Within the snug security of the palace car all was well. Though Doctor Chitterly did not believe in spirituous liquors, ardent waters in a square bottle once having been responsible for his being marooned in his nightshirt on an equatorial dot in the Pacific, yet his soul of politeness would not permit a refusal.

The second glass did not give so serious a wrench to his convictions. The third still less.

Doctor Chitterly suddenly recalled that in the brave days of the Seventies when he was a young buck in the Mother Lode country of Plumas he was counted no slouch of a singer. He set his glass on a table, arose and motioned the orchestra to quiet. He caroled lustily:

In a valley—peaceful valley—of the mountings Where twines the colum-bine, A maiden—beut-chous maiden—had a2

The car floor arose in a mustang leap—plumped down. Crash of glass—a single wild call from harp strings. Darkness.

Doctor Chitterly and Spike were thrown together in a clawing heap when the car vaulted. For a half minute the latter was content to feel himself over for broken limbs, cursing volubly. Finally he managed to light a match. Its feeble flame revealed a narrow area of confusion: overturned tables, a guitar speared through the sounding board by a champagne bottle, one of the orchestra plucking fronds of palm from his collar.

The voice of the motorman called from up forward where the control platform was: “All right, gents! Just jumped the track an plowed into a sandbank. Soon's I can get the trolley pole over to the wire we'll have some light.”

The scrambled passengers did not await that event. Host, guests, musicians and colored attendant groped their way to the rear platform and so out into a clammy world of fog. Even the somnolent Iron Man, Walla-Walla, had been wrenched back to life by the accident.

A cursory hand-groping around the stalled car revealed more than a casual track-jumping. All the conductor's attempts to re-establish current connection by way of the trolley pole were vain. In brief, the palace car would stay there until a wrecking crew arrived.

“Where are we, Bill?” Spike Horn put the question to the motorman in a voice of restored good humor.

“Down below Ingleside, I guess,” the other answered.

“How long before a reg'lar car comes along to take us back to the city?”

“First car due here 'bout seven in the mornin'. Passed the last owl car back at No. 2 switch.”

“How far t' nearest telephone, Bill? Maybe we can catch a brace of hacks to come fetch the outfit into town.”

The motorman, hardly visible in the swirling smoke wreathes of fog, waved an indefinite direction down the track.

“Maybe half mile from here y'oughta hit the Four Corners. Wake up the little pill-roller whose red and yellow lamps burn all night. Me, I gotta stay with the car.”

Spike organized his relief expedition. The colored man refused to budge; no “prowlin' 'round” for him. One only of the five musicians consented to accompany Spike, the doctor and the Iron Man on the hunt for a 'phone. Promising the motorman that he would send in a call to the car barns for a wrecking crew, Spike and the three set out over the shifty footing of the sand between the rails.

A ghostly pilgrimage. The fog was pressing down so densely it entered the lungs like wood smoke—slightly stinging. To the left a suggested row of eucalyptus trees marched with them; a ghostly pat-pat of condensed moisture falling from their rags of foliage kept time to their pace. On the right an unseen cabbage field distilled a rancid odor. The sand clung to their feet like muck. Occasionally one of the quartette stubbed a toe on a projecting tie and pitched against a fellow before him.

They had progressed thus perhaps fifteen minutes away from the wrecked car when a vagrant gust of wind tore a rent in the fog curtain. For the space of half a minute a light shone, startlingly near, off in the direction of the odorous cabbages.

“That's our drugstore,” Spike shouted and turned abruptly down the bank upon which the rails ran. The others followed. They came to a barbed wire fence and scrambled under and over. Then the fog closed as suddenly as it had parted and the light was snuffed out.

“Well, anyway, we know where that light was,” Spike cheered and he kicked over a cabbage head with his first stride into the field. Then a neat game of guess-work: finding a place where a light had shone.

They blundered and they back-tracked. Once again the fog shredded to reveal a smear of yellow behind them. They about-faced for the new position. Suddenly a dog yapped in the gray fluff ahead. The sound of a slammed door came to their ears.

Spike, in the lead, plumped against a crazy picket fence, half fallen. Beyond that he could discern the dim outline of a house with ghostly finger dabs representing windows. But no light.

“I should say,” ventured Doctor Chitterly, “that whoever lives here was mighty unsociable. That light we saw was in one of windows not two minutes ago.”

A shaggy black dog came bullying out to bay and snap at their heels. Spike strode to the door, the others in a hesitant knot a few paces behind him.

The man from Goldfield thundered on the door with his fist. “Hey, inside there!” he challenged. Silence. He beat again with impatient knuckles.

“Open up in there!”

Suddenly came to the ears of the adventurers in the dooryard the pad-pad of running feet. They heard the dog, whom they had beaten off, vent a triumphant bay. Before they could turn in their tracks a half dozen shadowy shapes had swept down on them, coming around either corner of the house. These were the shapes of men carrying rifles.

A scream from the Italian musician as he turned to run. A rifle butt thudded on the back of his neck and he went down. After that no sound but the labored breathing of men in combat, fists against clubbed rifles and revolver butts short-hafted for hammer blows.

There could be but one result of so one-sided a struggle. In no time Spike Horn, the dizzy spender, a worthy vendor of Squaw Root Tonic, an Iron Man and a flute player were triced like fowls.

“Bring them inside the house,” commanded a voice as gentle as a woman's.

III. Shanghaied

Chapter III

SHANGHAIED

The four individuals whose fortunes thus brought them to a bleak house in the cabbage fields would have to be considerably less than human if what occurred there did not leave them with their reasoning faculties decidedly scrambled. The four found themselves bound with ropes, dumped in a pitch dark and unfurnished chamber within the house, dumped unceremoniously like so many potato sacks. They heard a door close and the sound of a key in the lock. Then absolute silence. For a long minute each prisoner was busy with his own menial machinery, adjusting himself to the results of overwhelming surprise.

“Well,” in a growl from Spike Horn, “I'll say this takes the cake!”

“A much more serious matter than a cake appears to be involved here, my young friend,” spoke the measured thought of the doctor. “I for one feel that I have a rising somewhere on my head, though I can't get my hands up to feel it. People do not produce risings on other people's heads with blows of some blunt instrument without reason. Now if we only knew the reason2”

“Aw, you make me tired, whoever you are,” came brusque interruption of a soft tenor voice somewhere near. “Don't you know a hold-up when you see it—or feel it? Cripes, I guess my arm's broke from the way it feels!”

A chuckle from the irrepressible Spike. “The Iron Man! Walla-Walla, who lets you hit him in the pants with a ball bat, gets a wallop out of bounds an' yells about it! Oh, Mama!”

“You crazy drunk!” the disembodied tenor retorted. “Wait'll I get my hands untied and we'll see who's an Iron Man! 'F I hadn't met up with you and fallen for your dizzy talk I'd be settin' in a peaceful game of pinochle in the back room of Barney Moore's right now, 'stead of2”

A footfall sounded outside the door of their prison chamber. A thin ray of light shone under the bottom of the door. The key grated in the lock. Back swung the door and a man entered the room. He carried a ship's lantern: a squat, black affair with light streaming through a corded round of glass Jens. By a curious trick the spray of light revealed no more than the boot toes of him who carried it; not even the hand holding the bale of the lantern was visible. The light danced. like some illuminated feather duster over the figures of the four propped against the wall: the flute player, Spike Horn, the Iron Man and finally in a far corner, Old Doctor Chitterly.

“Well, well!” It was again that soft voice the prisoners had heard at the conclusion of the brief battle outside the house.

“Well, well, gentlemen, here we are! I've been expecting this visit and so was ready to receive you.”

“You received us all right,” was the doughty Spike's rejoinder given with light truculence. “My watch is in my right vest pocket an' you'll find a handful of gold down my pants pocket, you cheap lead pipe artist!”

A quiet laugh sounded behind the lantern. “Pretty bluff! The people who hire you, young man, know very well I'm not in the footpad business.”

Once more the whiskbroom of light slowly brushed the faces of the four prisoners, ranged backs against the wall. It crossed the patriarchal beard of the doctor and then returned to linger upon his features.

“Aren't you rather an elderly man to be mixed up in this sort of game?” asked the voice.

“Not too old to thrash you thoroughly if you'll give me the use of my hands,” the valiant Chitterly replied. “I don't know what business you have in mind. I don't know who you are nor what may be your wretched reason for assault upon my person, I am a physician and known from Vancouver to Ensenada as Old2”

“An' I playa da flute—me,” came the hurried interjection from an unlighted space along the wall. Instantly the round eye of light bored the features of the unfortunate musician: the tight curled, high-glossed mustache, the staring eyes in olive slits.

“A-ha! A physician and a flute player, eh? I see that the Lonney Lee won't lack for talent. Now gentlemen—your pardon!”

The invisible speaker knelt before the doctor and, keeping the lantern light dazzlingly on his face, searched his pockets with careful thoroughness. What he found therein—a memorandum book, an old-fashioned wallet of vast proportions, some printed dodgers extolling the merits of Squaw Root Tonic—he carefully perused under the lantern ray, then returned everything intact. The others, watching these proceedings intently, could see the play of heavy hands wherein strength was proclaimed by the stubbed fingers and breadth of back; but of the rest of their inquisitor not a vestige showed.

Each of the other three was subjected to this search, The man behind the lantern chuckled when the Iron Man's intimate possessions showed several pawn tickets and a Chinese lottery chance stamped in red and black lozenges like our present day crossword puzzle. He bunched the pledges and the lottery ticket significantly.

“Cause and effect,” he laughed.

Spike kept up a running fire of provocatory comment when the big hands were pawing over his treasures—a gold and purple garter, a cigarette picture of Jimmy Britt, pugilist. The hands opened the pages of a new bank book which showed a deposit of $100,000 dated but two days back.

“Ah, yes!” came the satisfied exclamation, “But a hundred thousand! They were not at all stingy in providing funds, now were they?”

“Why, you big Swede, my interest was worth twice that,” was Spike's bullying rejoinder. He had the feel of unseen eyes boring him.

“Your interest, eh? So you're the mysterious third party in this business? Well, let me tell you, young fellow, now that you're where you are and I'm where I am, your interest isn't worth a plugged Mexican peso. I had thought a minute ago maybe I'd made a mistake—thought perhaps you four men blundered onto us here by mistake. But this little item of a hundred thousand, and what you say about 'your interest'—well, I don't need to know more.”

“My dear sir!” Doctor Chitterly's agitated voice came booming from the dark flank. “We came here just to find a telephone. Our car—our pleasure car suffered an accident. This young man, Mr. Horn, whom I scarcely know, told me he'd sold2”

“Aw, shut up, Doc!” Spike muttered. “More you talk to this gazabo the nuttier he gets.”

The voice behind the lantern purled on as if no interruption had come: “Of course, you know, gentlemen, I could do away with you. But I only consider murder when there's no other course. Out-of-hand murder never pays. Luckily for you, it will serve my purpose just as well to take you along with me on the Lonney Lee; we're short handed anyway. I think we'll get along very well together provided you discover at the start I am master,”

The light lifted from the floor and began to back toward the door.

“And I would advise you, gentlemen, to make that discovery as to who's master without any prompting from me. I can be a hard man, and lay to that!”

“Meester!” came the despairing wail from the musician; “Meester, I swear I on'y playa da flute—me!”

“So much the better,” purled the voice, and the door shut behind it.

Before the prisoners had a chance to collect their wits men came in to lift them, bound as they still were, and carry them like so much cordwood to be loaded into a farm wagon outside the house. On their backs on the hard wagon bed, with the fog pressing down on their faces, they were jolted and tortured by the ruts of a country road for three endless hours. Where the fringe of truck gardens tributary to the city markets ceased wilderness commenced—a wilderness of crags overhanging the sea, of bald mountains and marshes where inlets of salt water backed into the land.

It must have been at Abalone Cove just north of the broad swing of Halfmoon Bay that the wagon stopped. Those on the floor saw the driver above them light a lantern and, standing on the seat, wave it up and down in slow arcs. The sound of the sea on a beach was very nigh.

After what seemed an interminable time, Chinamen appeared at the wagon tail and cut the ropes which bound the prisoners' feet. They were dragged out to the ground and, each with a guard, were bidden to hoof it. A short cut through furze, the feel of yielding sand, and at the end of a brief journey unceremonious booting over the gunnel of a yawl pulled half way out of the reach of waves. The boat was shoved off.

Before many minutes the loom of a hull suddenly cut out of the thinning fog. A rancid smell of fish oil and opium—typical Chinatown smell—stung their nostrils. The yawl drew alongside, and bare yellow arms stretched down to receive the prisoners, half lifted over-side by the rowers. A Chinaman directed they stand over against a mast.

Sound of a second boat approaching. The shanghaied ones saw a heavy shouldered man in blue sea-jacket and vizored cap come over-side. Instantly he turned to a group of slattern, yellow men showing in the light of a lantern fixed to the mainmast and called with a voice of authority: “Hoist those boats aboard! Be spry about it!”

There was a creaking of fall-blocks.

The nian in the sea-jacket called back into the darkness of the after-deck: “Turn over your engine, Mr. Hansen.” Then once more to the Chinamen: “Man the windlass! On the jump!”

From the darkness forward came the mutter of anchor chain crawling through the hawse-holes. Aft a gasoline engine was put-putting fretfully.

“Quarter speed ahead, Mr. Hansen. For'ard there, heave in!”

All this with not so much as a look from the skipper toward the group of bound wretches under the mainmast lantern. But for their arms triced at their backs, the luckless four might have been willing passengers for all they seemed to count.

They heard the anchor come dripping up to the cathead. They felt the throb of the gasoline kicker under the stern. With creak of tackle and swish of canvas the sails were set. The schooner slowly began to nose her way seaward where a streaky dawn had commenced to show behind floating rags of fog.

Suddenly, bound as he was, Spike Horn made a dash for the side. He had mounted the gunnel of the yawl lately dropped in its chocks there and was poised for a desperate leap overboard when the skipper intervened. A cat-like bound brought him below Spike's vantage. One hand caught the tail of his jacket and jerked him backward. Even as he toppled a stinging blow from the skipper's right smashed under his ear. Spike spun around in midair and fell on his face along the deck.

His miserable companions saw the fingers of the boy's bound hands twitch convulsively as if in a signal.

IV. Quarterdeck Law

Chapter IV

QUARTERDECK LAW

A bleary sun with shreds of cold scud driven across its face by a boisterous north wind. Great gray seas tipped with spindrift heaving and tumbling in a pantomime of resistless force. Landward and miles off a succession of bleak mountains marching in line like elephants, whose feet came straight down to kick a froth of surf at the ocean's edge. Alone in the water waste the hundred and twenty ton schooner Lonney Lee, trim of line and rig, was running close- hauled to the wind with mainsail, foresail and both jibs rock-hard under the thrust of the breeze. Her forefoot turned up a wound of white water which sang along her counter and went streaming out in a troubled trail behind.