  “Do you mean to say,” said the magnate who had been taken on board the North Star, “that this ship is loaded with bananas from Central America, and that it is not chartered by our Company?” “Bananas and grapefruit.” Johnny was gaining control of himself. What if this were a millionaire? What if it was in his power to make or break them? He couldn’t very well do that before they arrived in New York, and that metropolis was a long way off. “Then, sir,” said the capitalist, “you have been trespassing. This is forbidden cargo.” “Who forbids it?” Without answering the man stared at him for a moment. His next remark was guarded. “You couldn’t get a cargo anywhere along the coast without bribing some one or taking the cargo by force.” Hot words leaped to Johnny’s lips. He was no thief. He had bribed no one. He left them unsaid. Instead, he watched the sailing boat, from which the man had been taken, fade in the distance. “We’ll let it stand at that,” he said quietly. “In the meantime, where were you going?” “Going from Bacaray to Belize in that worthless sailboat manned by spotted Caribs. My motor boat was wrecked in the storm. The sail boat was becalmed, and there we were. Lay there for ten hours.” “Belize?” Johnny wrinkled his brow. He did not wish to touch at this capitol of British Honduras. The Fruit Company was strong there. Who could tell but that fruit inspectors or health inspectors, in sympathy with the Fruit Company, perhaps bribed by them, would hold his ship off those shores until his bananas were overripe and ruined. “Having him on board makes it worse,” he told himself. Again his brow wrinkled. A happy thought struck him. “You are planning to stay in Belize for some time?” “Going back to New York on our boat the Arion. She was to touch at Belize. Took on her load at Puerte Baras.” Johnny heaved a sigh of relief. “The Arion sailed six hours ago. It gives me great pleasure to offer you my stateroom and a passage to New York.” Johnny’s smile irritated the man. His face turned red. He seemed about to choke. “You—you’ll touch at Belize!” he stormed. “Belize,” said Johnny calmly, “is four hours off our course. We are headed for the open sea, and eventually for New York. I don’t like to seem pig-headed, nor over important, but we are not going to alter our course.” In this he was wrong. He was destined to alter his course in a manner that was pleasing to no one. “You will take me to Belize or I will have you up in the Marine Court.” “You’ll not have much of a case,” said Johnny. “You were adrift. We picked you up at your own request. The law allows us to charge you for your passage to our own port. We’ll pass that up. You may as well make yourself comfortable. We will dock at New York in good time.” “A very cold day when you dock in New York with this—” The man checked his speech with difficulty, then turning on his heel, went stamping down the deck. He had said enough. Johnny guessed that he had a scorpion on board. “When the time comes he’ll bite,” he told himself. For a moment he considered turning about and heading for Belize. This thought was dismissed in a moment. “Won’t do it,” he told himself shortly. “That would double his chances of defeating us. If he didn’t tie us up in Belize, he’d wire New York and his entire pack would be upon us. As it is he can’t get off a word before he reaches New York. That gives us a fighting chance.” “Looks as if Providence was kind in sending him to us,” he added. He turned and hurried forward to prepare his stateroom for the Unwilling Guest, and there was a smile on his face. * * * * * * * * “It really isn’t necessary to tell all you know.” Kennedy said this in a friendly drawl, as he sat beside Johnny on the forward deck. Madge Kennedy was there too. Johnny had persuaded the old man to come along with him on the North Star. “The passage,” he had argued, “will cost you nothing. Captain Jorgensen is coming back for that cargo of cocoanuts and chicle. He’ll be glad to bring you down. You may be able to help me a lot in disposing of the fruit. Anyway, the trip will do you good.” So here they were, three good pals, an old man, a young man and a girl. Johnny did not reply to Kennedy’s remark about not telling all you know. “I told a man once the location of a mahogany tract I meant to buy,” Kennedy went on. “It was good mahogany, some of it six feet through, five thousand feet to the tree. I told that man and he went before me and bought it. I talked too much then. I’ve learned better.” “That Unwilling Guest of yours,” he drawled after a time, “that President of the Fruit Company, has been on board twenty-four hours and has never showed his head out of his stateroom. Even pays the steward to bring his meals to him. That right?” Johnny nodded. “Nice, friendly sort of a millionaire. That right? Perhaps he thinks we’re not worth talking to.” “Johnny,” the old man laid a hand gently on the boy’s knee, “any man is worth talking to—the poorest and most degraded has something to say. If he can’t tell you how to live, he can tell you how not to live, and that’s sometimes most important.” Leaning forward, he shaded his eyes to scan the horizon. Johnny did not so much as wonder what he saw there. The sea was perfectly calm. Bits of seaweed floated here and there. A seagull skimmed low to drop like a single feather upon the water, then to rise and float away in the air. Johnny’s eyes lingered first upon the sea, then upon the girl, Madge Kennedy, who sat close beside him. He thought he had never known a finer girl. Brave and strong, good color, clear eyes, a clearer skin, strong as a man, yet tender hearted and kind, giving her spare hours to her grandfather, yet alert and alive to every sport and joy of life, she seemed worthy of a place in a great drama or a book. “That friend of ours,” said Kennedy, resuming his seat, “he will come out of his hole sooner or later. Then he’s going to talk. Who will he talk to? To an old man. That’s me. Everyone talks to an old man if he has a chance. Did you ever notice that, Johnny?” “No, I—” “Fact, nevertheless. You watch. Natural enough, I guess. When a man gets old, he loses the burning desire he might have had to become rich or famous. He gets to feeling that he’s about done his bit, and that it would be nice and pleasant to sit beside the road and give the younger ones a little advice. Don’t you ever forget that, Johnny. When an old man talks, you listen. It’s just as I said, if he can’t tell you how to live, he can tell you how not to live.” Again he paused to stare at the sky. Wetting a finger, he held it up to the air. “Wind’s changed,” he muttered to himself. “When he comes out,” he went on as if he had been talking all the time, “when this exclusive sort of millionaire President of the Fruit Company talks, I’m not going to tell him I’m part owner of this cargo. And you needn’t either. That way he’ll think me a harmless old man with a fair young granddaughter, and he may tell me things we need to know. “Johnny!” he exclaimed, springing suddenly to his feet. “I think we better run for it.” “Ru—run for it,” Johnny stammered in astonishment. “Run from what?” “The storm.” “What storm? The sea’s calm, smooth as a floor.” “Can’t you see? Can’t you smell it?” The old man sniffed the air. “But then, of course, you wouldn’t. Me, I’ve lived here on this sea always. I know things in advance. We’re going to have a storm, a regular humdinger, a mahogany splitter, and if we don’t run, if we can’t convince the captain we ought to run, I don’t know what’s to come of us.” “Look!” said Madge, springing up. “There’s a steamer. See the smoke. You can make her out too.” Kennedy unslung his binoculars. “That,” he said after a moment of close scrutiny, “is the Arion. She’s the Company’s steamer that our Unwilling Guest was to sail on.” “He’ll be all excited if he sees her,” said Johnny. “Little good it will do him,” grumbled Kennedy. “We’ll be far enough from the Arion by night.” He hurried away to impart his all but miraculous knowledge of the coming storm to the captain. The sea was still calm, though here and there, racing away with the speed of the wind, like hurried messengers, dark ripples sped across its surface. It was then that the Unwilling Guest left his stateroom for the first time. Perhaps he was so well accustomed to sea travel that he could guess that their course had been altered. However that may be, he went at once to the bridge. There, after studying the instruments for a moment, he turned an angry face toward the stocky skipper. “What sort of course is this for New York,” he stormed. “You are not headed for New York.” “Maybe not,” said the skipper, unperturbed. “Storm’s coming. We were due for the center of it. We’re running.” “Running! And not a ripple!” The magnate’s voice was full of scorn. As for the sturdy captain, he knew the sea. The scorn of the millionaire meant nothing to him. Quite unperturbed, he paced the deck and watched the roll of the storm clouds that mounted higher and higher along the horizon. At the bottom of the companionway the capitalist found Kennedy sitting placidly looking away at the sea. Like Captain Jorgensen, he had lived long. One storm more or less did not matter. True to Kennedy’s prophesy, the rich man sat down beside him and began to talk. Who can face a storm without a companion? “Going to storm, the captain tells me.” “Yes,” rumbled Kennedy. “Be a mighty tough one over there.” He poked a thumb toward the west. “Over there where the Arion is travelling.” The other man started. “That’s our ship.” “She didn’t change her course. Kept straight on. Good ship, though. May weather it all right.” “Do you mean to say,” the rich man squirmed uneasily in his chair, “that it will be as bad as that?” “Might be—over there.” Again Kennedy’s thumb jerked. The topic of a man’s conversation is very frequently determined by his surroundings and by the events that are transpiring about him. Was it thought of the storm and what it might mean to him that directed this rich man’s conversation, or was it a casual remark thrown out by the strange old man who sat beside him? “See those two bits of seaweed out yonder, tossing on the waves?” Kennedy drawled. “Well, supposing one was you and the other me, and there wasn’t any ship. Supposing I had houses and banks and bonds and you were a plain ordinary seaman with nothing but a chest full of old clothes. Do you suppose I’d have any better chance with the sea than you? Sort of strange, isn’t it, when you think about it? Makes you feel unimportant and, and futile, you might say.” For a long time the man who owned buildings and banks, bonds and many ships upon the sea did not answer. When he did speak the thoughts he gave utterance to might not seem to have been an answer, and then again they might have. “Our times,” he said in a tone he had not used before, low, well modulated, modest and slow, “are very strange. Men, many men, most men perhaps, have come to think of capital as a great monster that always crushes the weak. “But is that true? Take this Central America. It is true that we, the Fruit Company, have a monopoly of the banana importing business. But what was Central America before we came? Where miles on miles of bananas grow there was wilderness. Where naked half-savage people hunted deer and wild pigs, or sucked the milk from cocoanuts, there now lives a happy, reasonably prosperous and contented people. Who changed it all? Did not the Fruit Company do it? “I suppose,” he said after a moment, “that our young friend, this Johnny Thompson who has somehow stolen a march on us and gotten hold of a cargo of fruit, thinks he’s a young hero, a benefactor to mankind. I wonder if he is right.” “I wonder,” rumbled Kennedy. Time had been when Kennedy would have engaged this rich man of the world in sharp debate. He was old now. He had learned the futility of debate. Besides, he was greatly interested in the approaching storm. At midnight Johnny Thompson found himself wrapped in a blanket and lying upon a plank, endeavoring in vain to snatch a few winks of sleep. He found himself now standing almost upright on his feet and now tilted in the other direction until his very pockets seemed about to turn wrongside out. “Some storm!” he muttered. Canvas boomed above him. The seamen had stretched a canvas over the hatch to keep out the spray. He was lying on that part of the hatch that had not been uncovered. Having given up his stateroom to the Unwilling Guest, he had been obliged to take a bunk below. During such a storm as they were now weathering, the air below was not to be endured. Unable to sleep, he allowed his mind to wander. Had they indeed missed the heart of the storm, or were they in it now? How was the storm to end? He thought of the black rolling waves, and shuddered. “If we weather the storm safely, what then? Will we come to dock safely in New York? Will we be able to sell our cargo? Or will we once more face defeat? And what of the Arion?” Scrambling to his feet, he plunged off the hatch, rolled to the deck, got caught in a dash of foam, struggled to his feet, caught the spray in his face, outrode a wave that threatened to carry him overboard, then made a dash for the wireless room. “Had—had any message from the Arion?” He struggled to gain his breath. “About ten minutes ago,” said the young wireless operator. “Here it is.” “Arion laboring hard,” Johnny read. “That all?” “All but—Wait. Listen!” He thrust a head set over the boy’s ears. Then his face went white. “Arion leaking amidship. Settling by the bow.” For ten minutes, with the ship leaping up and down beneath them, with the thud of waves shaking her from stem to stern, they waited. “She’s gone; the Arion’s gone down!” said the young wireless man at last, mopping his brow. “Say!” He started as if struck by a ball. “That pick up we made, that rich man was going on that boat, wasn’t he?” “He didn’t,” said Johnny. “He’s in luck.” For a moment there was silence. “I suppose you know,” said Johnny, “that the Captain must be notified. We couldn’t have helped them; too far away. Have to tell him. But our Unwilling Guest, no use telling him, not just yet. No use to disturb folks needlessly.” “No,” said the young wireless man, “no use.” Then for a time they sat catching the crash of the storm and wondering what ship would be next. |
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