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Updated: May 19, 2025
He fell hastily to rearranging the camp chairs. "Hush!" he warned. "Look out!" Gaylor and Rainey had but time to move apart, when Winthrop entered. He regarded the three men with a smile of understanding. "I beg pardon," he exclaimed, "I am interrupting?" Gaylor greeted him with exaggerated heartiness. "Ah, it is Mr. Winthrop!" he cried. "Have you come to help us find out the truth this evening?"
Carlsen left the cabin. The main room was empty when Rainey entered, but there was a place set at the table. Through the skylight he noted, as he glanced at the telltale compass in the ceiling, that the sun was low toward the west. The main cabin was well appointed in hardwood, with red cushions on the transoms and a creeping plant or so hanging here and there.
It was the other man the western towns are full of General Lighters who did the talking. An attorney from Seattle, he had come up in the July rush with very little but boundless assurance, fell in with an old miner who had been grubstaked by Captain Rainey out of the Oklahoma's supplies, and got to Minóok before the river went to sleep.
Given eyes, Rainey could imagine him agile as a panther, strong as a bear. His weight was made up of thews and sinews, spare and solid flesh without an ounce of waste, upon a mighty skeleton. His face was heavy-bearded in hair of flaming, curling red, from high cheek-bones down out of sight below the soft loose collar of his shirt.
If he can talk when they git here," he added ominously, standing half-way between the table and the door to the corridor, his hand opening and closing suggestively. "The crew'd settle his hash if I didn't. They ain't fools. They know what's ahead of 'em in Japan. You, Rainey, git busy with that log. That gunboat'll have a boat alongside this floe inside of ninety minnits."
Rainey tingled with contempt of his own hesitancy. The Karluk was bowling along northward toward landfall and the crisis between Lund and Carlsen at good speed. The weather had subsided and the half gale now served the schooner instead of hindering her. Rainey turned over the wheel to a seaman and paced the deck.
It was not a clever opening, but she seemed to rob him of wit, to an extent. He had yet to know how she stood concerning his presence aboard. Did she countenance the forcible kidnapping of him as a possible tattler? Or ? "My father tells me you have decided to go with us," she said, pleasantly enough, but none too cordially, Rainey thought. "Doctor Carlsen helped me to my decision."
She stopped at some slight sound that Rainey did not catch. But he saw the face of Carlsen framed in the shadow of the companion, his mouth open in the wolf grin, and the man's eyes were gleaming crimson. He held up a hand for the girl. She passed down without taking it. Lund came over to Rainey. "Clear weather, they tell me?" he said. "That's unusual.
The captain did not make his appearance for that day, the next, or the next. The men began to roll eyes at one another when they asked after his health. Carlsen kept his own counsel, and Peggy Simms spent most of her time in the main cabin with her eyes always roving to her father's door. Rainey noticed that Tamada brought no food for the sick man.
"Ba-ack that jib to win'ard! Ba-ck it, you swabs!" The Karluk came about more smartly this time, swinging on the upheaval of a wave and rushing off with ever-increasing speed. Lund bent over him, asking him with a note that Rainey, for all his exhaustion, interpreted as one of real anxiety: "How is it with you, matey? Did ye git lunged up?"
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