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Updated: May 13, 2025
The "Bertha Millner's" crew, in a long line, Moran at one end, Wilbur at the other, and Charlie in the centre, came on toward the beach-combers, step by step. There was little outcry. Each contestant singled out his enemy, and made slowly for him with eyes fixed and weapon ready, regardless of the movements of his mates.
Millner, accustomed on such occasions to exist merely as a function, sat waiting for the click of the spring that should set him in action; but the pressure not being applied, he finally hazarded: "Are we to go on with the Investigator, sir?" Mr. Spence, who had been pacing up and down between the desk and the fireplace, threw himself into his usual seat at Millner's elbow.
In a theoretical statement of the case the banker would have figured as being at Millner's mercy; but one of the queerest things about experience was the way it made light of theory. Millner felt now as though he were being crushed by some inexorable engine of which he had been playing with the lever. ...
The water dripped like the ticking of a clock from the "Bertha Millner's" stern, which with the rising of the bow had sunk almost to the rail. There was no other sound. "Strange," muttered Moran, her brows contracting. Charlie broke the silence with a wail: "No likee, no likee!" he cried at top voice.
As he went on talking, this surprised sense of mastery was like wine in his veins. Mr. Spence was at his mercy, after all that was what it came to; but this new view of the case did not lessen Millner's sense of Mr. Spence's strength, it merely revealed to him his own superiority. Mr. Spence was even stronger than he had suspected.
Since the first thrill of initiation into its complicated comforts the shower-bath, the telephone, the many-jointed reading-lamp and the vast mirrored presses through which he was always hunting his scant outfit Millner's room had interested him no more than a railway-carriage in which he might have been travelling.
Through the ensuing interchange of concise and rapid speech there sounded in Millner's ears the refrain to which he had walked down Fifth Avenue after his first talk with Mr. Spence: "It's too easy it's too easy it's too easy." Yes, it was even easier than he had expected. His sensation was that of the skilful carver who feels his good blade sink into a tender joint.
But all around the house the sand had been scooped and piled to form a low barricade, and behind this barricade Wilbur saw the beach-combers. There were eight of them. They were alert and ready, their hatchets in their hands. The gaze of each of them was fixed directly upon the sand-break which sheltered the "Bertha Millner's" officers and crew.
Spence's part was also a significant symptom. Obviously, Millner's original conception of his employer's character had suffered extensive modification; but no final outline had replaced the first conjectural image. The two years spent in Mr.
"Don't you think, mate," said Moran, "we'd better take him up to 'Frisco with us? We've had enough fighting and killing." So it was arranged that the defeated beach-comber, the whipped buccaneer, who had "lost face" and no longer dared look his men in the eye, should be taken aboard. By four o'clock next morning Wilbur had the hands at work digging the sand from around the "Bertha Millner's" bow.
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