THEY left the building and struck down Market Street. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and a blazing day. Market Street looked the same as ever—with a difference. It seemed to George that the whole world had somehow a different tinge, as though he were looking at it from the windows of a lunatic asylum.

The people in the street all seemed to be bent on business, serious and sane beyond ordinary; even the loafers and pleasure-seekers were bathed in this atmosphere.

Said Hank, as they crossed the street towards a block of buildings topped by a huge sky sign advising people to smoke Duke Orlando cigarettes:

“Did you ever read about the one horse shay?”

“Which?” asked George.

“The one that went a hundred years and then bust up.”

“No.”

“Well, it was made of such good stuff that it couldn’t break down, not one part before another, so when the time came it busted up all together.”

“What’s that got to do with our business?”

“Oh, I was just thinking,” said Hank.

They were in the building now. Hank gave a name to the elevator man, and they were whisked up to the fourth floor. Here, entering an office filled with the clatter of typewriters, Hank asked for Mr. Tyrebuck, and in a minute or two they were shown into a room where a man sat facing them at a desk table, a heavy-jowled, bulging-eyed, fresh-coloured man, with an unlighted cigar between his lips. He had just finished with a stenographer, but she was still standing waiting with a sheaf of notes in her hand, whilst Tyrebuck, as if engaged with some after-thought, sat, the cigar pushing out on his under lip and his prominent eyes staring straight at the newcomers without seeing them. He seemed to be looking at something a thousand miles away. He was. He was looking at Chicago and the dial of the Wheat Pit. Then he came to.

“That will do,” said he to the stenographer. “Well, Hank, how’s the world using you?”

George was introduced, cigars were handed round and they talked. George did the listening. Tyrebuck owned steamers and mines and was engaged just then on a wheat deal. He was one of the busiest men on the Pacific coast and one of the wealthiest, but he found time to talk to Hank. Tyrebuck talked as if he had absolutely nothing to do. They talked of the weather and President Wilson and Europe. Hank, who had been in England during the war, outlined a plan of his for taking over the British Empire, electrifying it, steam-heating it, fitting it with elevators, speaking tubes and American business methods. Then he rose. “Well, I must be going,” said Hank. “But say, what I came about was the Wear Jack. I saw her only day before yesterday down at Sullivan’s Wharf.”

“Oh, did you?” said Tyrebuck, “blessed if I hadn’t clean forgot her. Is she hanging together?”

“Well, she was, the day before yesterday. I’m open to hire her.”

“What’s your idea—put her on wheels?”

“Nope. I’ve got an expedition on down south. You’ve heard of this man Vanderdecken?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I’m going down to catch him.”

“Humph,” said Tyrebuck, “you’ll go down right enough in the Wear Jack if the putty gives.”

“That’s what I was telling Mr. du Cane,” said Hank. “She’s not so much a yacht as an optical delusion. She looks A 1, but isn’t, but we’re going to take a whale boat.”

“Why not go in the whale boat?” asked Tyrebuck. “What you want taking the Wear Jack along—for fun?”

“It’s part of my plan to have a yacht,” replied the other, “and she looks like a yacht—Oh, she’s not so bad—it was only my joke. I reckon she’ll hold together as long as we want her, the sticks look sound enough.”

“Well, she mayn’t be as bad as she’s painted,” agreed Tyrebuck. “I’ve been too busy to bother with her. I bought her as old junk, thinking to pull off a deal, and had her fixed up by Michelson and advertised her. Her lines are lovely, there’s no denying that. You remember last fall I took you down with Cookson to look at her and he went about prodding her with a knife. He offered four thousand for her.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” said Hank.

“Well, he was secretary of the Brookland Creek Yacht Club and they wanted her for a floating annex. When I refused, he got impudent and said the members wouldn’t have anything to do with the deal as they weren’t a suicide club. That joke got about.”

“I heard it,” said Hank.

“It crabbed her. All the smarties got busy guying her and me, and I got a letter from a chap calling himself Charon and offering ten dollars for her as a house boat on the Styx, and so it went on till everybody forgot her, but it has dished any chance of a deal. Mention her to any yachtsman and all those damned old jokes flutter up like moths; it’s like a woman’s reputation. Once it’s damaged, there’s no use in shaking it out of the window and putting new buttons on it—there’s no buyers.”

Hank agreed. “Well, what’s your terms?” said he at last.

“Ten thousand dollars,” said Tyrebuck.

“Is she insured?”

“She’s insured for ten thousand dollars. I pushed her through with the insurance agents that do my steamboat work.”

“But I don’t want to buy her. I want to charter her.”

“Well, I can’t charter boats, not even to you, Hank, it’s against my principles. Why, if I were to charter the old Wear Jack and the fact got round, I’d be guyed out of ’Frisco. Can’t you hear them at the Club asking me how the long-shore business was doing and what price the hire of canoes. No, sir, I’ve had enough of the joke business over that damned sieve. There she sticks till I sell her and the price is ten thousand, not a cent under.”

George du Cane felt the lifting of a weight from his mind. The deal was evidently off. He had only to put his hand in his pocket, so to say, and fetch out the ten thousand, but the idea of a cruise in the Wear Jack had begun to fill his mind with frank and honest alarm. Besides, he knew that Hank would accept no outside financial help or interference. This was his show, to be engineered and run by himself. Feeling safe, he indulged in a little show off.

“That’s a pity,” said he, “I shouldn’t have minded risking it; besides, we’d have had the whale boat, but I suppose it can’t be helped.”

He spoke without knowledge of the intricacy and subtlety of the rat trap inventor’s mental works.

“I’ve got it,” said Hank, “you can loan her to me.”

Tyrebuck, who seemed suddenly to remember that he had been smoking an unlighted cigar all this time, was in the act of striking a match. He lit the cigar, blew a cloud of smoke and placed the dead match carefully on a tray by the Billikin on his desk. Then he said:

“Well I’m damned, Hank, if you don’t take the cake. You do indeed, you do indeed, you take the cake with the cherry topknot. You come here to me in the temple, so to say, of business propositions—”

“That’s what I’m bringing you,” said Hank. “A business proposition on the hook, warranted sound, free from scab—it’s a buffalo.”

“Trot out your buffalo,” said Tyrebuck.

“Well, it’s this way,” said Hank. “You lend me the Wear Jack. If she busts up and never comes back, you get your insurance, don’t you? If we bring her back with the Dutchman on board, she’s a hero and you have the laugh over the whole waterside. Even if we don’t collar the Dutchman and come back, she’ll have proved herself seaworthy and I’ll give her a certificate all round the town that’ll sell her for you in two hours.”

“Gosh!” groaned Tyrebuck, “why didn’t I insure her for twenty thousand?” He wallowed in thought for a moment, then he said:

“Hank.”

“Yep?”

“D’you want a partnership in a shipping business?”

“Nope.”

“Well, if you do, I’ll take you on. I will, sure. Yes, you can have the loan of her. God help the Dutchman if you’re after him. Take her down south, take her to blazes, take her anywhere you like and now get out of my office for I’m busy. One moment, here’s my card, there’s a watchman on board her, show him this and he’ll let you go over her and I’ll send you a letter to-night confirming the loan.”

Outside Hank took George’s arm. “Say, Bud, you’re the right sort.”

“How so?” asked George.

“I don’t believe there’s another man in ’Frisco that would have gone in with me on this, not on that specification anyhow. D’y’ know the Wear Jack was built in ’sixty-seven.”

“What do you mean by ’sixty-seven?”

“Three years before the first German-French war. It’s on the shipwright’s plate on the after gratings. ‘Duncan Matheson, 1867,’ that’s her birth certificate. One of the first yacht-building firms to start in ’Frisco.”

George said nothing, but he was thinking a lot.

“I had it in my mind that he’d have chartered her,” went on Hank, “it’s lucky he shied at that idea for I hadn’t thought of the whale boat. Why, between the whale boat and provisions and crew, it’ll take nearly all that five thousand dollars.”

“You wouldn’t care to take a bigger boat?” said George. “I’ll finance the business or go shares.”

“Oh, she’s big enough,” said Hank, “and this is my show. I’m doing it on my own hook; otherwise I’d have no interest in it. I’m awfully lucky to have got you, for you’re a millionaire, aren’t you, Bud, and you won’t want a hand in the profits, besides being the only man in ’Frisco that’d take the risks for the fun of the thing.”

“I believe I am,” said George, unenthusiastically.