“It’s the _Port of Amsterdam_,” cried Harman. “It’s the salvage ship; she’s there droppin’ her anchor. We’re done, we’re dished--and we foolin’ like this and they crawlin’ up on us.”
“And you said she’d only do eight knots!” cried Blood.
Ginnell flung the revolver on the floor. Every trace of the recent occurrence had vanished, and the three men thought no more of one another than a man thinks of petty matters in the face of dissolution. Gunderman was outside; that was enough for them.
“Boys,” said Ginnell, “ain’t there no way out with them dollars? S’pose we howk them ashore?”
“Cliffs two hundred foot high!” said Harman. “Not a chanst. We’re dished.”
Said Blood: “There’s only one thing left. We’ll walk the dollars down to the boat and row off with them. Of course we’ll be stopped, still there’s the chance that Gunderman may be drunk or something. It’s one chance in a hundred billion; it’s the only one.”
But Gunderman was not drunk, nor were his boat party, and the court-martial he held on the beach in broken English and with the sack of coin beside him as chief witness would form a bright page of literature had one time to record it.
Ginnell, as owner of the _Heart of Ireland_, received the whole brunt of the storm--there was no hearing for him when, true to himself, he tried to cast the onus of the business on Blood and Harman. He was told to get out and be thankful he was not brought back to Frisco in irons, and he obeyed instructions, rowing off to the schooner, he and Harman and Blood, a melancholy party with the exception of Blood, who was talking to Harman with extreme animation on the subject of beam engines.
On deck, it was Blood who gave orders for hauling up the anchor and setting sail. He had recaptured the revolver.
Billy Meersam, an old sailor friend in Frisco, told me this story as I was sitting one day on Rafferty’s wharf, contemplating the green water, and smoking. Billy chewed and spat between paragraphs. We were discussing Captain Pat Ginnell and his ways; and Billy, who had served his time on hard ships, and, as a young man, on the _Three Brothers_, that tragedy of the sea which now lies a coal hulk in Gibraltar harbour, had quite a lot to say on hazing captains in general and Captain Pat Ginnell in particular.