Frank Lillie Pollock

“ This was the city of the treasure-finders, of the searchers of easy millions, of the buccaneers. It was the place above all others where the strong is most absolutely the master, and the weak most utterly the slave; where the struggle, not so much for existence as for luxury, reaches its most terrific phase, evolving a new and formidable human type. Elliott felt himself of a sudden strangely in harmony with this city which he was leaving. ”

“ The train was now running fast, and the violent oscillation of the cars made the feat look even more difficult and dangerous than it was. But the idea that the conductor might come through and find him there stimulated Elliott amazingly, and he clambered nervously upon the wheel, and got his hands upon the grimy roof that was heaving like a boat on a stormy sea. Securing a firm hold, he attempted to spring up, but a violent lurch at that moment flung him aside, and he was left dangling perilously till Bennett scrambled to his relief and by strenuous efforts hauled him up to more security. ”

“ By the time he had finished a very English breakfast, for which he had no appetite, the rain had ceased, leaving the air even hotter than before. The sun shone dimly from a watery sky. Elliott felt oppressed with an aching languor, but he was deeply anxious to finish his work and get away, so he went out upon the hot streets.
This time he would not repeat the mistakes of Bombay, and he wasted no time in adventures about the harbour. He called a sedan-chair and, having ascertained the names of the leading hotels of the city, he proceeded to investigate them one by one. ”

“ A house there cost fifty guineas a month, but every one had it who pretended to comfort or distinction. It was damp even on the Peak, but it was cool; Hongkong Bay and Victoria lay almost perpendicularly below, veiled by a steamy haze, but on the summit fresh breezes played among the China pines, and Elliott always took the tramcar down the zigzag road again with fresh courage for an adventure that was daily growing more intolerably unadventurous.
The same desire for coolness at any cost led him to take the coasting-boat for Macao on the second Saturday of his stay. ”

“ There’s nobody in the world now who cares whether I live or die, or—what’s more important, I suppose—whether I’m ladylike or not.”
“How about me?” said Elliott. He hesitated, and then plunged desperately ahead. “Margaret, you’ve said that before, and I can’t stand your feeling like that. Look here, I may as well tell you now: all that gold is nothing to me in comparison with your unhappiness or danger. Let me look after you and think of you; you’ll find me better than nobody. I’m asking you to marry me, Margaret.” ”

“ They did not know whether Hawke had lost or won, and they did not look, but they heard the rattle of checks, and the whirr recommence. For a time that seemed endless—perhaps it was half an hour—this went on. Henninger and Elliott tried to interest themselves in the fortunes of the crap game. They glanced over the newspapers. They walked restlessly about, smoked, peeped through the curtains at the street, tried to talk, and fell silent at every sound from the table where destiny was being spun out for them at the gay roulette. ”

“ Elliott awoke several times during the night. The dhow was rushing forward at, it seemed to him, tremendous speed, and he was spattered occasionally by smart splashes of foam from over-side. Margaret’s hammock was swaying heavily in the roll, but she appeared to be asleep, and all was quiet on deck. At the stern he could see the white figure of the steersman leaning hard against the tiller, and there was a dark form beside the rail, undoubtedly one of his friends on the watch. ”

“ To landward Elliott beheld a wet, white city climbing irregularly up the sides of a long serrated mountain. The waterfront along the sea-wall swarmed with traffic, with rickshaws, sedan-chairs, carts, trucks, gay umbrellas, coolies, Lascars, Chinese, Indians, Japanese. The port was crowded with shipping, from war-steamers to high-sterned junks, as motley as the throng ashore, and it was shot through incessantly with darting tugs and launches, so that in its activity it reminded him more of New York bay than of any other roadstead he had ever seen. ”

“ A third bullet lodged in the mast, and another ploughed a deep furrow in the rail, and glanced again.
“Where did that come from?” yelled Hawke; and “Look!” shouted Elliott at the same moment, pointing shoreward.
The top of the hill upon the island was crowned with white smoke, and as they looked three or four fresh puffs of vapour bloomed out and blew down the wind, with a distant popping report. Zip! Thud! the bullets sang down and plunged into the planking.
“They’ve got to the hill. Scatter! Scatter! Lie down!” cried Henninger, flinging himself flat on the deck. ”

“ Every eye was fixed upon the little ivory sphere that rolled and rolled as if it would never stop—then gradually lost momentum, gravitated toward the bottom, and tripped on a barrier. The iron-nerved Henninger bit his cigar in two, and it dropped unnoticed from his lips. The ball jumped, rolled across an arc of the wheel, and dropped into a compartment with a click.
“By God, he hits it!” ejaculated a looker-on, irrepressibly.
“You win, sir. It’s the ace of diamonds for the third time!” said the croupier, with a nervous smile, glancing at Nolan. ”

“ But on the hill not a man was to be seen. The invaders had stowed themselves so snugly behind the irregular boulders that not so much as a rifle muzzle showed, and a plunging fire beat down upon the dhow’s exposed after-deck.
“Gee! this is hot!” exclaimed Hawke, as a bullet ploughed the deck not six inches from his shoulder.
“Too hot!” said Henninger. “We can’t stay up here.” He jumped up and dived for the hatch, and the others followed him, crouching low. They tumbled down the ladder almost in a heap, and found Margaret sitting on a locker in the cabin beside the door of the strong-room. ”

“ Occasionally a black victoria clove its slow way past him, bearing a white-clad Englishman, who gazed unseeingly over the swarming mass; and Elliott for the first time breathed the smell of the East, that compound of heat and dust and rancid butter and perspiring humanity that somehow strangely suggests the yellow marigold flowers that hang in limp clusters in the marketplaces of all Bengal.
At the hotel, a gigantic and imposing structure, he was received by a Eurasian in a frock coat and no shoes, who assigned him to a vast bedroom, cool and darkened and almost large enough to play tennis in. ”

“ He caught a glimpse of the ghostly outline of the rock-staked wreck, whitened with its filth—then there was a wild plunge, a tumult of waters all round them, and then the shock of the encounter with heavier breakers, the big rollers outside. Drenched, dizzy, and half-blinded, Elliott became aware that the dhow was running more freely to the southwest, and that the surf was booming on the starboard bow.
“We’re out!” yelled Henninger. “By Jove, I’ll give the reis an extra thousand for this!” ”

“ It would not be an unfitting conclusion for the adventure that was stained with so much blood already; and he imagined the sudden rising of the Moslem crew, the brief melée, the flash of pistols and knives, the massacre on the reeling deck. But he continued to sit on the keg, with his back to the helmsman, and did not trouble to turn around.
A yard beneath his feet were nearly two million dollars in hard gold; the treasure that had spun so much intrigue and mystery over three continents was in his power at last. ”

“ Sitting upon a stack of cotton-bales, he perceived a young man of rather less than his own age, smoking with something of the air of a busy man who finds a moment for relaxation. He was very much tanned; he wore a flannel shirt and a black tie, and his clothes were soiled with axle-grease and coal-dust. By these tokens Elliott recognized that he had been for some time in contact with the railways, but he did not look like a railway man, and his face wore a bright alertness that distinguished it unmistakably from that of the joyless hobo. Elliott took him for an amateur vagrant like himself. ”

“ He disappeared with a smile, and Elliott went back to the rail to smoke another cigar, filled with a painful mingling of affection and pity for this unrestful spirit. He foresaw what he himself might be like in ten years. Thus far, his memory held nothing worse than misfortune, nothing of dishonour; but dishonour is apt to be the second stage of misfortune. “Go back to work, and let this chasing easy money alone,” Henninger had said, and he was right. It was the advice that Margaret had given him, and that he had vowed to take. ”

“ He leaned over the rail and frowned at the creaming water. Perhaps he had been tactless,—but he could not forgive the ferocious rebuff that his sympathy had received. But as he stood there, the cool and calm of the mid-sea night began to work insensibly upon his temper, and he began to take a more lenient view of the offence. Glancing aft, he saw that Henninger had vanished. There was no one anywhere in sight but the officer on the bridge and a lookout on the forecastle-head; and no sound but the labouring beat of the propellers. ”

“ At daybreak the wind was much fresher, and it strengthened during the forenoon, veering more to the east. At noon the dhow was heeling over heavily, and an hour later the skipper ordered a reef taken in the mainsail. The good wind continued to smarten until by the middle of the afternoon it was difficult to maintain footing on the sloping and slippery deck. The sky was a flat, windy gray; the sea had not a tinge of blue, and was covered with sweeping white-crested rollers, through which the Omeyyah ploughed nobly. ”

“ There was a rush down the ladder to the cabin where the weapons had been left. When they returned to the deck it was almost certain that the steamer was really in pursuit. The gusts of flying sparks were growing continuous; she was forcing her speed, and it seemed to Elliott that he could almost distinguish her black, plunging hull, and hear the vibration of her engines above the charge and crash of the white-topped rollers.
“Haul in as close to the reef as you can,” commanded Henninger to the skipper. “We can sail in water where she daren’t go.” ”

“ The crush of the crowd had elbowed him into a corner beside a tiny second-hand clothes-stall near the landing-place of the coasting steamers, and he gazed idly at the foul-looking seamen’s clothing—caps, oilskins, sea boots, cotton trousers—that almost filled the recess in the wall that served for a shop. In the centre lounged the shopman, apparently half Eurasian and half English Jew, who looked as if he clothed himself from his own stock in trade.
As Elliott was trying to disengage himself from the crowd, he knocked down a suit of oilskins, and stooped to pick it up. ”

“ I was reading a letter just now from a man I know in South Africa telling of a theft of a million in gold from the Pretoria treasury during the confusion of the war. Do you know, I half-envied those thieves; I did, honour bright. A quick million is what I’ve always been chasing, and I’d almost steal it if I got the chance.”
“You wouldn’t do any thing of the sort. I know you better than that. You’re going to do something sensible and strong and brave. What is it to be?”
“But I don’t know,” cried Elliott. “There are heaps of things that I can do, but I tell you I feel sick of the whole game. ”

“ It is a long way from Southampton to Cape Town, even when one is not in a hurry. But when life and death, or money, which in modern life is the same thing, hangs upon the ship’s speed, the length of the passage is doubled and tripled, for the ordinary pastimes of sea life become impossible. Shuffleboard is frivolous; books are impertinent, and there is no interest in passing ships or monsters of the deep. The three adventurers hung together, talking little, but mutely sharing the strain of uncertainty. Late one night in the second week, Elliott suddenly proposed poker to Bennett. ”

“ For the first time an unwilling conviction began to invade Elliott that perhaps after all this expedition was better for her than to remain in America, brooding and waiting.
“We’ll have the cabin fixed up a little for you, with a wash-stand and a bit of a mirror,” said Henninger. “You can sleep in that hammock, if you like, but you’ll want some corner of your own. No one else will want to go into the cabin; it’s too hot. We live on deck.” ”

“ Go back to your place,” said Margaret, creeping up beside the fallen man.
“Get under cover yourself!” cried Elliott, furiously. “You can’t do anything. Why aren’t you below?”
But the concentrated, rapid fire had already done its work. The boat had drifted upon a reef, perforated undoubtedly in a dozen places. She capsized with a sudden lunge upon the rocks, and her crew went into the water, where a few swimming heads presently reappeared.
“Don’t fire at them,” said Henninger, grimly contemplating the swimmers. “They can’t hurt us; they’ve lost their rifles. How’s Sullivan?” ”