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And the upshot of the whole matter was that one month later the Bertha Millner, with Nickerson, Hardenberg, Strokher and Ally Bazan on board, cleared from San Francisco, bound—the papers were beautifully precise—for Seattle and Tacoma with a cargo of general merchandise.

As a matter of fact, the bulk of her cargo consisted of some odd hundreds of very fine lumps of rock—which as ballast is cheap by the ton—and some odd dozen cases of conspicuously labeled champagne.

The Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company made this champagne out of Rhine wine, effervescent salts, raisins, rock candy and alcohol. It was from the same stock of wine of which Ryder had sold some thousand cases to the Coreans the year before.

II

“Not that I care a curse,” said Strokher, the Englishman. “But I put it to you squarely that this voyage lacks that certain indescribable charm. ”

TheBertha Millnerwas a fortnight out, and the four adventurers—or, rather, the three adventurers and Nickerson—were lame in every joint, red-eyed from lack of sleep, half-starved, wholly wet and unequivocally disgusted. They had had heavy weather from the day they bade farewell to the whistling buoy off San Francisco Bay until the moment when even patient, docile, taciturn Strokher had at last—in his own fashion—rebelled.

“Ain’t I a dam’ fool? Ain’t I a proper lot? Gard strike me if I don’t chuck fer fair after this. Wot’d I come to sea fer—an’ this ‘ere go is the worst Ieverknew—a baoat no bigger’n a bally bath-tub, head seas, livin’ gyles the clock ’round, wet food, wet clothes, wet bunks. Caold till, by cricky! I’ve lost the feel o’ mee feet. An’ wat for? For the bloomin’ good chanst o’ a slug in mee guts. That’s wat for. ” At little intervals the little vociferous colonial, Ally Bazan—he was red-haired and speckled—capered with rage, shaking his fists.

But Hardenberg only shifted his cigar to the other corner of his mouth. He knew Ally Bazan, and knew that the little fellow would have jeered at the offer of a first-cabin passage back to San Francisco in the swiftest, surest, steadiest passenger steamer that ever wore paint. So he remarked: “I ain’t ever billed this promenade as a Coney Island picnic, I guess. ”

Nickerson—Slick Dick, the supercargo—was all that Hardenberg, who captained the schooner, could expect. He never interfered, never questioned; never protested in the name or interests of the Company when Hardenberg “hung on” in the bleak, bitter squalls till the Berthawas rail under and the sails hard as iron.

If it was true that he had once been a Methody revivalist no one, to quote Alia Bazan, “could a’ smelled it off’n him. ” He was a black-bearded, scrawling six-footer, with a voice like a steam siren and a fist like a sledge. He carried two revolvers, spoke of the Russians at Point Barrow as the “Boomskys,” and boasted if it came to thathe’d engage to account for two of them, would shove their heads into their boot-legs and give them the running scrag, by God so he would!

Slowly, laboriously, beset in blinding fogs, swept with, icy rains, buffeted and mauled and man-handled by the unending assaults of the sea, theBertha Millnerworked her way northward up that iron coast—till suddenly she entered an elysium.

Overnight she seemed to have run into it: it was a world of green, wooded islands, of smooth channels, of warm and steady winds, of cloudless skies. Coming on deck upon the morning of theBertha’s first day in this new region, Ally Bazan gazed open-mouthed. Then: “I s’y!” he yelled. “Hey! By crickey! Look!” He slapped his thighs. “S’trewth! This is ‘eavenly. ”