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Four days later, one of the Almena’s boats, containing twelve men with sore heads, disfigured faces, and clothing ruined by oily wood-pulp,–ruined particularly about the knees of their trousers,–came wearily into the roadstead from the open sea, past the shipping, and up to the landing at the custom-house docks. From here the twelve proceeded to the American consul and entered bitter complaint of inhuman treatment received at the hands of sixteen mutinous sailors on board the Almena–treatment so cruel that they had welcomed being turned adrift in an open boat; whereat, the consul, deploring the absence of man-of-war or steamer to send in pursuit, took their individual affidavits; and these he sent to San Francisco, from which point the account of the crime, described as piracy, spread to every newspaper in Christendom.

PART III

A Northeast gale off Hatteras: immense gray combers, five to the mile, charging shoreward, occasionally breaking, again lifting their heads too high in the effort, truncated as by a knife, and the liquid apex shattered to spray; an expanse of leaden sky showing between the rain-squalls, across which heavy background rushed the darker scud and storm-clouds; a passenger-steamer rolling helplessly in the trough, and a square-rigged vessel, hove to on the port tack, two miles to windward of the steamer, and drifting south toward the storm-center. This is the picture that the sea-birds saw at daybreak on a September morning, and could the sea-birds have spoken they might have told that the square-rigged craft carried a navigator who had learned that a whirling fury of storm-center was less to be feared than the deadly Diamond Shoals–the outlying guard of Cape Hatteras toward which that steamer was drifting, broadside on.

Clad in yellow oilskins and sou’wester, he stood by the after-companionway, intently examining through a pair of glasses the wallowing steamer to leeward, barely distinguishable in the half-light and driving spindrift. On the main-deck a half-dozen men paced up and down, sheltered by the weather rail; forward, two others walked the deck by the side of the forward house, but never allowed their march to extend past the after-corner; and at the wheel stood a little man who sheltered a cheerful face under the lee of a big coat-collar, and occasionally peeped out at the navigator.

“Poop-deck,” he shouted above the noise of the wind, “take the wheel till I fire up.”

“Thought I was exempt from steering,” growled the other, good-humoredly, as he placed the glasses inside the companionway.

“You’re getting too fat and sassy; steer a little.”

Poop-deck relieved the little man, who descended the cabin stairs, and returned in a few moments, smoking a short pipe. He took the wheel, and Poop-deck again examined the steamer with the glasses.

“There goes his ensign, union down,” he exclaimed; “he’s in trouble. We’ll show ours.”

From a flag-locker inside the companionway he drew out the Stars and Stripes, which he ran up to the monkey-gaff. Then he looked again.

“Down goes his ensign; up goes the code pennant. He wants to signal. Come up here, boys,” called Poop-deck; “give me a hand.”

As the six men climbed the steps, he pulled out the corresponding code signal from the locker, and ran it up on the other part of the halyards as the ensign fluttered down. “Go down, one of you,” he said, “and get the signal-book and shipping-list. He’ll show his number next. Get ours ready–R. L. F. T.”

While a man sprang below for the books named, the others hooked together the signal-flags forming the ship’s number, and Poop-deck resumed the glasses.

“Q. T. F. N.,” he exclaimed. “Look it up.”

The books had arrived, and while one lowered and hoisted again the code signal, which was also the answering pennant, the others pored over the shipping-list.

“Steamer Aldebaran of New York,” they said.