The Penguin, steering a sou-sou’westerly course, slipped day by day into warmer and bluer seas. Wolff, recovering from his first unpleasantness, appeared on deck, cigar in mouth; and Shiner, with nothing better to do, would be seen lounging on the after gratings with a novel in his hand.

The Captain and Harman worked the ship, and had little to do with the others, meeting them chiefly at table, where, needless to say, the Captain took the head. Wolff had given him a chart of the Pacific whereon was laid down the exact position of the cable they were going to attend to.

“This is the chart,” Wolff had said. “You will see, there is the cable. It is plainly marked. I wish you to bring us to it about here.” He made a pencil mark on the cable line. “And when you have brought us to that point, then I will explain to you the object of this expedition.”

“Right!” said the Captain.

They were steering now for the cable line through days of sapphire and nights wonderful with stars. Now and then they would raise an island, a peak with a turban of clouds, or an atoll, just a green ring of palms and breadfruits surrounded by a white ring of foam, and peak and atoll would heave in sight and sink from sight with nothing to tell of the legerdemain at work but the pounding of the screw and the throb of the engines.

Sometimes a sail would heave in sight, or the far-off smoke of a steamer hold the imagination for an hour or two, and then be painted out, leaving nothing but the sea, the sky, and the pearl-white trace of cloud draping the skirts of the warm trade wind.

There is no place in the world where grievances sprout so well and grow so rapidly as on board ship. The Captain had a grievance. It had come to his knowledge that Wolff had a private stock of Pilsener. Some had come in the cases that the wharf rat had carried after him on board, and there was more stowed away in some hole known only to Wolff and Shiner.

Those two worthies would forgather of a morning in Wolff’s cabin and drink Pilsener and then heave the bottles out of the porthole. The Captain had seen a Pilsener bottle going aft, bobbing and bowing to him in the wake, and his fury was excessive and ill contained.

Leaving aside the meanness of proclaiming the ship teetotal and then smuggling drink aboard for private consumption, there was something of cold-blooded inhospitality about the business that struck at the Irish heart.

He was very explicit about the matter to Harman:

“Swine—they and their lager beer! You wait! I’ll pay them out.”

“To think of them sitting there drinking, and we dry!” said the simple-minded Harman. “That’s what gets me. We dry and them chaps drinking. It makes me thirsty. I don’t care a dash about their sitting there and drinking, but when I think of it it makes me thirsty. That’s what gets me.”

“Well, you’ll have to think of something else,” said the Captain. “There’s no use in dwelling on things like that, and the voyage is not for long.”

“It’s long enough to be without a drink in,” said Harman.

Harman, despite his up-to-dateness on San Francisco roguery, was a most extraordinary child for all his manhood. The man part of him had grown up and grown crooked; the child part of him had remained virginal. The moment was everything to him. He could just read and write his name, and sometimes, when he was off duty, you would see him spelling over a San Francisco paper. Houses to let, governess wanted—it was all the same to him. He only read the advertisement columns. They satisfied his craving for literature, and he could understand them. The rest of the paper, from the poetry corner to the foreign-news column, was arid ground for him.

Yet this same man had made money out of ward politics and in twenty other ways in which one would have fancied education necessary to success.

They left Fanning and Christmas Island three hundred miles to starboard, passed the equator, and, entering the great, empty space of sea bounded by the Phoenix Islands on the north and the Penrhyns on the southeast, headed toward the Navigators.

One sweltering morning, the Captain, coming up to Wolff, who was seated in his pajamas under the double awning that had been rigged up, said:

“We’re just on the cable line.”

Wolff rose up, called for the steward, and, having sent for his panama, put it on and came up on the bridge.

The sea was smooth, surface smooth, but underrun by the long, endless swell of the Pacific.

“This is the spot,” said the Captain, who had been poring over the cable chart which he had brought up on the bridge. “And it’s pretty deep. All a mile.”

“Good!” said Wolff. “With this calm sea, we ought to work well and quickly. We are in luck; and now, if you will come into the chart house, we will talk for one moment.”

They went into the chart house, and Wolff shut the door.

“This is a purely business proposition,” began Wolff, “and I must tell you, to begin with, that it is not a business which a man of a certain type of mind would call on the square. But, my dear Captain, can you show me any business proposition that is truly on the square? Not one. I want the use of a cable, and I am going to take it for business purposes. That is all there is to it, you understand.”

“Look here,” said Blood, “this is all I know of the business. You want me to fish this cable up?”

“Precisely.”

“Cut it?”

“Just so.”

“Connect both ends with the electrical testing room, and let you talk through it and send messages through it from both or one of the cut ends?”

“That is exactly the position.”

“Well, after that?”

“After I have had my use of the cable, you can drop both ends overboard. We will sail away, and no one the wiser. Of course, the cable company will recognise that their cable is broken, and send a ship to mend it; but we will be far away by that time.”

“I see,” went on the Captain, “that it runs from the American coast here to the Australian coast here, but I don’t know the name of the company it belongs to; I don’t know what in the nation your game is. I am as innocent as a baa lamb on the whole affair, and I simply obey your orders, not knowing that you yourself may not own the cable and that this mayn’t be a repairing job. If we are caught, will you bear me out in that statement?—not that your evidence will be much good, I expect, but, still, it’s better than nothing.”

“If you obey our instructions,” said Wolff, “I will do as you say; and, to prove that I am playing fair with you, I will even now give you a detail of the commercial speculation that is behind all this business.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” said the Captain. “I’d much sooner remain innocent. I’m just an ordinary sailor signed on to do an ordinary job. I’ll work freer in mind if I know nothing about the inside of the affair; it’s black enough on the out.”

“Well, we will leave it at that,” said Wolff, “and we will now set to work, if you please.”

They came on to the bridge, and the Captain gave orders for the main engines to be stopped and the Kelvin sounder to be set to work. The donkey man had been allotted to this job, and presently the furious, sewing-machine whir of the sounder hauling up the lead came through the silence that had supervened on the stopping of the engines, and the result was shouted forward: “Eight hundred fathoms, coral rock.”

Blood, on this result being given to him, left the bridge and came down to the bow balks to superintend the lowering of the first buoy. He had not only to act as cable engineer, but he had also to instruct the hands in the details of this work absolutely new to them. A big, red-painted buoy was swung up against the burning blue of the sky, a rope with a mushroom anchor attached to it was fastened to the buoy; then the anchor was cast overboard, taking the rope with it, and the buoy, swung outboard, was dropped. It rode off, bobbing and ducking on the swell, and the Penguin steamed on to a point a mile ahead, where another buoy was dropped in a precisely similar manner.

The Captain had now his position and his marks laid down. Somewhere between those two buoys lay the cable, like a black snake on the floor of the sea, waiting to be grappled for.

The grapnel rope was now lowered over the clanking drum of the picking-up gear and the wheel in the bow. This business took half an hour, and then the Penguin, going dead slow, began to steam back to the first-mark buoy, dragging the grapnel after her across the floor of the sea.

Wolff and Shiner took a great deal of interest in this part of the business. They stood at the bow watching the pointer of the dynamometer, which gave the pull on the rope in hundredweights; every lump of coral, every tuft of weed travelled over by the grapnel made the pointer of the dynamometer jump and joggle; and at every jump the idea “Cable!” would leap into the minds of the speculators and show itself in their eyes.

But the Penguin passed from one mark buoy to the other without a show of the real thing; and then she turned and steamed back on an equally fruitless course.

She was making ready for a third grapple when the bell went for dinner, and Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain turned aft and went below to the saloon.

The Wolff gang were in a bad temper, and the meal had scarcely begun when a discussion broke out.

“It’s a funny thing,” said Shiner, “that we have not hit the thing yet.”

“We have been twice over the ground,” said Wolff.

“Sure you haven’t made a mistake in the spot, Captain?” said Shiner.

The Captain put down the glass of mineral water he was raising to his lips.

“Why can’t you say what you mean?” said he. “Why can’t you ask me right out if I haven’t muddled the navigation and missed the job? Well, I haven’t. Is that plain? Some men may doubt their own work, and there are some men who would be put off by suspicions flung at them and would say, ‘Maybe I am wrong,’ and pick up his buoys and move off to another ground and make fools of themselves. I’m not that sort. Can’t you see that a cable may be passed over by a grapnel half a dozen times without the grapnel catching? It may be glued down with coral.”

“Just so, just so!” said Shiner, anxious to pacify. “We never doubted your capacity, Captain.”

“Never, I’m sure,” said Wolff.

The Captain, somewhat mollified, went on with his meal, and he was raising the glass of mineral water for the second time to his lips when the dead, slow tramp of the engines ceased.

Immediately on their cessation, through the open skylight came the clanking sound of the picking-up gear, and right on that came Harman’s voice, roaring down the saloon companionway: “Below, there! We’ve got the cable!”

In a minute or less, Wolff, Shiner, and the Captain were in the bows; the Captain on the bow balks, Shiner and Wolff on the deck.

The great drum, rotating slowly, was hauling in the grapnel rope, dripping and taut; the dynamometer registered a strain of seven tons, and the strain was slowly increasing.

Nothing else could give this result but cable.

“Are you sure we have got it, Captain?” asked Wolff.

The Captain looked down at him.

“If that rope was to break under this strain,” said he, “it would mushroom out like an open umbrella and cut you to pieces. Better get up on the bridge. You’re safe there. Yes, I’m sure we’ve got cable, unless we’ve grappled a dead whale.”

Wolff and Shiner went up the ladder to the bridge, and the Captain, relieved of their presence, continued his work.

It was worth watching.

He was a true-born cable man, and they are as rare as good violinists. Knowing the depth, and the length of rope out, and its weight in sea water, and the weight of the grapnel, he could tell approximately what was going on down below; he knew that he was lifting heavier stuff than ordinary cable, and the weight could only come from coral incrustations on it. He knew that the cable must be glued down here and there, and that haste would mean a break. Sometimes he stopped the picking-gear altogether and trusted to the rise and fall of the ship on the swell to break the thing gently up from its attachments. And still the grapnel rope came in, dripping and endless, till at last the grapnel itself appeared with what seemed the bight of a sea serpent gripped in its unholy claws.

The thing was crusted here and there with coral, it is true, but it was comparatively new and sound, and a genuine, straight-going cable man would have shuddered at the sacrilege that was going on. Even the Captain felt qualms. To cut this thing was like murder; it would mean a dead loss of ten or fifteen thousand dollars to the company that owned it. An expedition would have to be fitted out to repair it, and if bad weather were to come on, it might be three months before the repairs were effected.

The Captain thought of all this even as he was ordering the stoppers to be got ready and the sling for the man who would do the cutting. He drowned remorse in the recollection that the injury would be done to a company, not to an individual. He would not have injured an individual of his own free will for worlds, but he did not mind much injuring a company. A company was a many-headed beast, and, in his experience, it always dealt hardly with its employÉs.

The cable was high out of the water now, in the form of an inverted V, with the grapnel at the apex. He ordered each limb of the bight to be secured with a stopper, and then, unable to trust any one else with the delicate business, he himself descended in a sling to do the cutting. Shouting his directions to the fellows who were lowering him, he came just level with the grapnel and began the business with a file. Halfway through, he ordered the grapnel to be eased away, finished the business, and left the two cable ends hanging by the stoppers.

Then he came aboard, and the starboard end of the cable was hauled in. It did not take long to connect it up with the electrical testing room, where Shiner was already installed before the mirror galvanometer.

The end they had hauled on board was the American end; the testing-room door was shut, the blinds of the windows drawn, for a subdued light is necessary to the proper working of the mirror galvanometer; and Shiner and Wolff were left alone with the American continent to work their dark schemes.

Said Harman, as he paced the deck with the Captain:

“I wonder what those two guys are doin’ now? Carryin’ out some of their malpraxises, no doubt. I ain’t a particular man, but this thing’s beginnin’ to get on my spine. It didn’t seem much at the start, just foolin’ with a cable; but now it seems somehow a durned sight worse, now that the thing’s cut. I tell you, Cap, it went to my heart to see it cut. I couldn’t ’a’ felt worse if it’d squealed and blood run out of it. I guess I wouldn’t have joined the expedition if I hadn’t been tempted. I remember my old mother warning me that if sinners tempted me, not to consent.”

“Confound you and your warnings!” said the Captain. “Who tempted me? You, and no one else. But I’m not the man to go back on you and talk about warnings. We’re in for it, and there’s no going back, and we can’t do anything but pray that a cruiser doesn’t heave in sight before we get away.”

“Amen to that!” said Harman.

They continued pacing the deck in silence, till suddenly the testing-room opened and Wolff appeared.

The black-bearded Wolff was ghastly white. He had the look of a man who had received a blow in the stomach. He held up a finger to the Captain, who came toward him.

“Come in here,” said Wolff.

Shiner was off his stool and sitting on the couch that ran along the port side of the room. His hands were in his hair, and the dot of the mirror galvanometer was spilling from side to side of the scale unnoticed. Disaster was in the air.

“What’s up?” asked the Captain.

“Up!” cried Shiner, coming out of his lair as one might fancy a cockatrice coming out of its hole. “Everything is up! Our speculation is done for! War has been declared.”

“War been declared? What war?”

“England and Germany and France,” replied Shiner.

“How did you hear it?”

“How did I hear it? Why, the first message I tapped was a Press Association special to Sydney. They began cursing me for having been held up for half an hour while we were cutting the cable. They thought we were Sydney. They don’t know the cable is cut yet. They’re still jabbering. Anyhow, there it is—war! And war spells ruin to the business we were on.”

“We must cut losses,” said Wolff, who was walking up and down. “The expedition is off. We must get to a Chile port at once—Valparaiso for choice.”

“And my bonus?” said the Captain.

“I guess you may whistle for your bonus,” said Shiner. “Can’t you see we are bust—B-U-S-T?”

“But we can do one thing,” said Wolff. “We can hit the cursed English; we can haul in twenty, forty miles of the cable and cut. The thing is cut, in any case; but a long break like that will make it the worse for them; then Sydney will have one cable the less to talk to her mother with. Yes, we can do that.”

“Curse them!” said Shiner. “Yes, we can do that.”

“So my bonus is gone?” said the Captain. “Well, may I ask one question of you: Who’s fighting who? Is it France and England against Germany?”

“It is Germany against France and England,” said Wolff.

“And you are Germans, and this is a German-owned vessel?”

“Precisely,” said Wolff. “You have touched the matter on the head.”

The Captain ruminated.

Then, said he: “Well, gentlemen, this is a serious matter for me. I lose my bonus, and I lose my pay, I expect; for if you are as badly broke as you say, when you land at Valparaiso or some southern port—and you daren’t go back to Frisco—there’ll be precious few dibs to go round unless you manage to sell the old Penguin, which isn’t very likely in war time. Well, gentlemen, I’ve thought of a plan by which I may get my bonus, and my pay, too; and if you’ll come down to the saloon with me, I’ll show you it.”

“Why not tell us here?” said Shiner.

“I cannot explain it here. Come down, gentlemen. When all’s said and done, it won’t take a minute, and there’s a lot of importance attaching to what I have to explain to you. It’s worth a minute.”

He left the testing-room, and they followed him to the saloon. He led the way into his cabin, and they followed him like lambs. He asked them to be seated on the couch opposite the bunk; then he took the key from the inside of the door and inserted it in the lock on the outside.

“What are you doing that for?” said Shiner.

“I’ll show you in one minute,” replied the Captain.

He stepped swiftly out into the saloon, banged the door to, and locked it.

It was Shiner who woke to the situation first, and it was Shiner’s voice that came now as he clung to the handle of the door and punctuated his remarks with kicks on the paneling.

The Captain waited a moment till the other gave pause. Then he said:

“There’s no use in kicking and squealing. You’re prisoners of war, that’s how you stand. The ship’s mine now, a lawful prize. What’s that you say? An Irishman? Of course I’m an Irishman. What’s that you say? I’m a traitor to my country? B’gosh, if you say that again, I’ll open the door and give you a taste of my quality. Say it again, will you! Say it again, will you!”

He shook the door handle at each invitation, but Shiner was dumb. He evidently had no desire to taste the Captain’s quality. It was Wolff’s voice that came instead, muted and murmurous:

“Make terms, make terms; there is no use in arguing. Make terms!”

“You won’t make any terms with me,” said the Captain, “but you’ll be treated well and transhipped as quick as possible.”

“But, see here, Captain!” came Shiner’s voice.

The Captain did not hear him; he had left the saloon, and next moment was on deck. He was a man of swift decision, and he had fixed in his mind that the first thing to be done was to make the crew his own, and the next to dump the cable and be gone. He could not mend it. They had no skilled artificer on board. To mend it, he would have to bring both ends on board and connect them. If you have ever examined a deep-sea cable, with its water coat of wire, its inner coat of rubber, and its core, you will quite understand the complexity of the task.

It was impossible, and he recognized the fact as he walked forward.

Harman was standing by the dynamometer, waiting for orders, and the bos’n near Harman. The Captain ordered the bos’n to pipe the whole crew on deck, and presently, like a kicked beehive, the fo’c’sle gave up its contents, the stokers off duty appeared, and even MacBean himself rose like a seal from the engine-room hatch.

“Boys,” said the Captain, addressing the dingy crowd, “is there ever a German among you?”

Dead silence for a moment, as though the hands were consulting their own hearts, and then a voice from back near the starboard alleyway: “No, there ain’t no Germans here.”

“Sam’s a Dutchman,” came another voice, and then the voice of Sam, protesting: “You lie! I vas a New Yorker.”

“Shut your mouths!” said Blood. “I’m an Englishman, or pretty near the same thing, and I’m captain of this hooker, which is owned by a German firm. In other words, it is owned by Mr. Wolff and Mr. Shiner, who are Germans. Well, my lads, news has just come over that cable we have picked up that war has been declared between England and Germany, so I have taken possession of the ship in the name of England, d’ye see? Which means that there’s lots of prize money for all of us if we can bring her safe into an English port.”

He waited for a moment after this announcement, but not a sound came from the crowd in front of them. It was filtering down through the thickness of their intelligences. It was an entirely new proposition that he had laid before them, and required time to find a response. They knew—God help them!—as little as he did of the horrible problems of international and maritime law that the Penguin was about to wind round herself as the silkworm winds a cocoon; but they knew the meaning of the word “money,” and it didn’t matter to them a rap whether it was prize money or not, as long as it could be changed for whisky and tobacco.

A little, wiry Nova Scotian was the first to respond.

“Go to it!” cried he. “Here’s to England and a pocketful of money!” He flung up his cap, and the action touched the rest off. They cheered—Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Latins, and Slavs—for such was their mixture. All joined in the shout.

MacBean alone, cautious and cool, made any question.

“Are you sure,” said he, when the shouting had ceased, “are you sure we’re in the right of this? I’m as willin’ as ony man to fight for England, but I’m no so sure about our poseetion as regards the ship.”

“Well, you will be soon,” said Blood. “This is my position: I’m not only going to take the ship, but I’m going to take anything German I come across on the high seas. Away back in the American Spanish War, I put out in a mud dredger from the Florida coast and took a mail steamer. We pretended we were a dynamite boat. There were seven thousand dollars in gold coin on board her, and we took it. Never mind where it went to——” A wild yell from the crowd. “We took it just as we are going to take any German money we come across. A chance like this doesn’t come in most lifetimes, and I’m not going to lose it.” Applause.

MacBean went back to his engine room.

“May I ax, Captain,” said one of the fellows, “what’s to become of the owners?”

“Meaning Mr. Wolff and Mr. Shiner?” replied the Captain. “Why, they are prisoners of war, and they will be treated as such without a hair of their heads being touched. But we can’t keep them on board. We’ll land them somewhere, or put them on a German ship, if we find one. Now, then, look lively and get the cable away. Mr. Harman, get it aft from the testing-room, and then cast loose the stoppers; dump both ends.”

He went on the bridge while Harman cast the cable loose; then he rang up the engines, and, giving the fellow at the wheel a sou’westerly course to steer by, put the engine telegraph to full speed ahead.

He wanted to get away from that spot in a hurry. He had not yet fixed on any point to make for—north, south, east, or west did not matter for the moment to him. He wanted to be somewhere else and to put as many long leagues as possible between the Penguin and the scene of her crime.

Harman presently joined him on the bridge.

Said Harman: “Well, this is a rum joke, ain’t it, Captain? ’Pears to me it’s the rummest joke ever I seen. We’ve took the ship, and we’ve took the owners—and how about our bonuses and pay?”

“We’ll have to take the bonuses out of the first Dutchman we can lay hands on,” said the Captain. “We’ll never get a cent from Wolff and Shiner. Their game is up. If I can lay alongside of a German trader—and there are plenty in these waters—I’ll take all she’s got.”

“And suppose they show fight?” said Harman.

“Traders don’t fight—we have eight rifles—without ammunition, but that doesn’t matter, for we’d only be spoofing. The sight of the rifles is enough. Still, I wouldn’t mind fighting if we have to.”

“I heard a chap yarning once,” said Harman. “It was at a meetin’ a fellow give me a ticket for, and this chap was sayin’ there was no use in war; he was sayin’ no one was any the better off for war, and all suchlike. Well, it ’pears to me it’s a durned good thing, for you can go and rob the chaps that’s against you, and it’s all on the square. I’ve all my life been wantin’ to rob people open,” continued Mr. Harman, “not poor people, you understand, for there wouldn’t be no fun in that, and, besides, they have nothing worth takin’—but rich folk. Them’s the chaps. My idea would be to be goin’ round Nob Hill with a hand barrow and collecting jewelry, or callin’ at the Bank of California with a cart and a shovel. I never expected in my life I’d have a chance like this.”

“It’s not all too rosy,” said the Captain. “I’m not clear what a German cruiser could do to us if they found us skinning a German ship. I’ve heard that privateering is going to be allowed in the next war—which is this—but then we haven’t a letter of marque.”

“What’s that?”

“A license to rob. But, license or no license, we can’t pick and choose. We have to make good. We’re done out of our bonuses and our salary. D’ye think I’m going back to Frisco as poor as I left it, and maybe poorer? For I’ll tell you one thing, Billy Harman: What we’ve done to that cable is a penitentiary job to start with, and if it tricks America any over this war, supposing she takes a hand in it, it may mean a hanging job.”

“I wish you’d not go on talkin’ like that,” said Harman. “What on earth’s the use of going on talkin’ like that? Who’s to catch us?”

“I don’t know,” replied the Captain. “The only one thing I do know is the bedrock fact that our position couldn’t be worse than it is, and that we may as well play for as big a figure as possible. Between you and me, it’s just this—piracy pure and simple; that’s our game, under shelter of the pretence that we’re English and doing all in our power to help our native land; then if we are caught by an English ship with our holds full of boodle and our scuppers full of gold all we have to say is: ‘Please, sir, we have been fighting the Germans for the good of our native land.’”

“And suppose we are caught by a German ship?”

“Then it will be all the worse for us; but come along into the chart room, for I have an idea, and I want your opinion on it.”

They left the bridge, and went into the chart room, where the Captain, having closed the door, brought out a chart of the Pacific, placed it on the table, and sat down before it.

“Here we are,” said he, making a pencil mark on the spot. “And here,” making another mark, “lies Christobal.”

“Why, Christoval Island lies in the Solomons,” said Harman. “I’ve been there.”

“I said Christobal, not Christoval. This is a German island, and a pretty rich one, too. I know it, and cause I have to know it, for a chap there named Sprengel let me down badly once over a deal. I hope he’s there still. It’s a rich island, lots of copra and trade. I’m going there.”

“And what are you going to do there?” asked Harman.

“Well, you see,” said the Captain, “the place is only just a trading station; it’s not armed; there are only half a dozen whites, and—I’m going to take it.”

“Take it?”

“Hoist the Union Jack there, scoop all the boodle I can find, up anchor, and bunk for Valparaiso. That’s my idea.”

“Lord, that would be lovely!” said Harman. “But suppose they show any sort of fight?”

“Not they. We’ll rig up a dummy gun, and we can arm a landing party with these blessed old rifles and cutlasses there. But the dummy guns will do them. You see, they won’t know what to make of the cut of the Penguin. They’ll never have seen a cable ship, most likely. We’ll tell them we are a volunteer cruiser. Good name, that.”

A knock came to the door, and the bos’n appeared.

“Please, Captain,” said that individual, “them guys you’ve locked up in the after cabin are tryin’ to beat the door down and threat’nin’ to fire the ship.”

“I’ll come and attend to them,” said the Captain grimly. But first he went on the bridge and gave the helmsman the course for Christobal.