Transcribed from the 1919 Harper and Brothers edition by David
Price, email [email protected]

THE PURSUIT OF THE

HOUSE-BOAT

BEING SOME FURTHER

ACCOUNT OF THE DOINGS

OF THE ASSOCIATED SHADES,

UNDER THE LEADERSHIP

OF SHERLOCK HOLMES ESQ.

BY

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS

AUTHOR OF “A HOUSE-BOAT ON THE
STYX,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

LONDON AND NEW YORK

HARPER AND BROTHERS

45, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1919

FOURTEENTH
IMPRESSION

p.
vCONTENTS

p.
viiILLUSTRATIONS

p. 1I

THE ASSOCIATED SHADES TAKE
ACTION

The House-boat of the Associated
Shades, formerly located upon the River Styx, as the reader may
possibly remember, had been torn from its moorings and navigated
out into unknown seas by that vengeful pirate Captain Kidd, aided
and abetted by some of the most ruffianly inhabitants of
Hades.  Like a thief in the night had they come, and for no
better reason than that the Captain had been unanimously voted a
shade too shady to associate with self-respecting spirits had
they made off with the happy floating club-house of their
betters; and worst of all, with them, by force of circumstances
over which they had no control, had sailed also the fair Queen
Elizabeth, the spirited Xanthippe, and every other strong-minded
and beautiful woman of Erebean society, whereby the men thereof
were rendered desolate.

“I can’t stand it!” cried Raleigh,
desperately, as with his accustomed grace he presided over a
special meeting of the club, called on the bank of the inky
Stygian stream, at the point where the missing boat had been
moored.  “Think of it, gentlemen, Elizabeth of
England, Calpurnia of Rome, Ophelia of Denmark, and every
precious jewel in our social diadem gone, vanished completely;
and with whom?  Kidd, of all men in the universe! 
Kidd, the pirate, the ruffian—”

“Don’t take on so, my dear Sir Walter,” said
Socrates, cheerfully.  “What’s the use of going
into hysterics?  You are not a woman, and should eschew that
luxury.  Xanthippe is with them, and I’ll warrant you
that when that cherished spouse of mine has recovered from the
effects of the sea, say the third day out, Kidd and his crew will
be walking the plank, and voluntarily at that.”

“But the House-boat itself,” murmured Noah,
sadly.  “That was my delight.  It reminded me in
some respects of the Ark.”

“The law of compensation enters in there, my dear
Commodore,” retorted Socrates.  “For me, with
Xanthippe abroad I do not need a club to go to; I can stay at
home and take my hemlock in peace and straight.  Xanthippe
always compelled me to dilute it at the rate of one quart of
water to the finger.”

“Well, we didn’t all marry Xanthippe,” put
in Cæsar firmly, “therefore we are not all satisfied
with the situation.  I, for one, quite agree with Sir Walter
that something must be done, and quickly.  Are we to sit
here and do nothing, allowing that fiend to kidnap our wives with
impunity?”

“Not at all,” interposed Bonaparte. 
“The time for action has arrived.  All things
considered, he is welcome to Marie Louise, but the idea of
Josephine going off on a cruise of that kind breaks my
heart.”

“No question about it,” observed Dr.
Johnson.  “We’ve got to do something if it is
only for the sake of appearances.  The question really is,
what shall be done first?”

“I am in favor of taking a drink as the first step, and
considering the matter of further action afterwards,”
suggested Shakespeare, and it was this suggestion that made the
members unanimous upon the necessity for immediate action, for
when the assembled spirits called for their various favorite
beverages it was found that there were none to be had, it being
Sunday, and all the establishments wherein liquid refreshments
were licensed to be sold being closed—for at the time of
writing the local government of Hades was in the hands of the
reform party.

“What!” cried Socrates.  “Nothing but
Styx water and vitriol, Sundays?  Then the House-boat must
be recovered whether Xanthippe comes with it or not.  Sir
Walter, I am for immediate action, after all.  This ruffian
should be captured at once and made an example of.”

“Excuse me, Socrates,” put in Lindley Murray,
“but, ah—pray speak in Greek hereafter, will you,
please?  When you attempt English you have a beastly way of
working up to climatic prepositions which are offensive to the
ear of a purist.”

“This is no time to discuss style, Murray,”
interposed Sir Walter.  “Socrates may speak and spell
like Chaucer if he pleases; he may even part his infinitives in
the middle, for all I care.  We have affairs of greater
moment in hand.”

“We must ransack the earth,” cried Socrates,
“until we find that boat.  I’m dry as a
fish.”

“There he goes again!” growled Murray. 
“Dry as a fish!  What fish, I’d like to know, is
dry?”

“Red herrings,” retorted Socrates; and there was a
great laugh at the expense of the purist, in which even Hamlet,
who had grown more and more melancholy and morbid since the
abduction of Ophelia, joined.

“Then it is settled,” said Raleigh;
“something must be done.  And now the point is,
what?”

“Relief expeditions have a way of finding things,”
suggested Dr. Livingstone.  “Or rather of being found
by the things they go out to relieve.  I propose that we
send out a number of them.  I will take Africa; Bonaparte
can lead an expedition into Europe; General Washington may have
North America; and—”

“I beg pardon,” put in Dr. Johnson, “but
have you any idea, Dr. Livingstone, that Captain Kidd has put
wheels on this House-boat of ours, and is having it dragged
across the Sahara by mules or camels?”

“No such absurd idea ever entered my head,”
retorted the Doctor.

“Do you, then, believe that he has put runners on it,
and is engaged in the pleasurable pastime of taking the ladies
tobogganing down the Alps?” persisted the philosopher.

“Not at all.  Why do you ask?” queried the
African explorer, irritably.

“Because I wish to know,” said Johnson. 
“That is always my motive in asking questions.  You
propose to go looking for a house-boat in Central Africa; you
suggest that Bonaparte lead an expedition in search of it through
Europe—all of which strikes me as nonsense.  This
search is the work of sea-dogs, not of landlubbers.  You
might as well ask Confucius to look for it in the heart of
China.  What earthly use there is in ransacking the earth I
fail to see.  What we need is a navel expedition to scour
the sea, unless it is pretty well understood in advance that we
believe Kidd has hauled the boat out of the water, and is now
using it for a roller-skating rink or a bicycle academy in Ohio,
or for some other purpose for which neither he nor it was
designed.”

“Dr. Johnson’s point is well taken,” said a
stranger who had been sitting upon the string-piece of the pier,
quietly, but with very evident interest, listening to the
discussion.  He was a tall and excessively slender shade,
“like a spirt of steam out of a teapot,” as Johnson
put it afterwards, so slight he seemed.  “I have not
the honor of being a member of this association,” the
stranger continued, “but, like all well-ordered shades, I
aspire to the distinction, and I hold myself and my talents at
the disposal of this club.  I fancy it will not take us long
to establish our initial point, which is that the gross person
who has so foully appropriated your property to his own base uses
does not contemplate removing it from its keel and placing it
somewhere inland.  All the evidence in hand points to a
radically different conclusion, which is my sole reason for
doubting the value of that conclusion.  Captain Kidd is a
seafarer by instinct, not a landsman.  The House-boat is not
a house, but a boat; therefore the place to look for it is not,
as Dr. Johnson so well says, in the Sahara Desert, or on the
Alps, or in the State of Ohio, but upon the high sea, or upon the
waterfront of some one of the world’s great
cities.”

“And what, then, would be your plan?” asked Sir
Walter, impressed by the stranger’s manner as well as by
the very manifest reason in all that he had said.

“The chartering of a suitable vessel, fully armed and
equipped for the purpose of pursuit.  Ascertain whither the
House-boat has sailed, for what port, and start at once. 
Have you a model of the House-boat within reach?” returned
the stranger.

“I think not; we have the architect’s plans,
however,” said the chairman.

“We had, Mr. Chairman,” said Demosthenes, who was
secretary of the House Committee, rising, “but they are
gone with the House-boat itself.  They were kept in the safe
in the hold.”

A look of annoyance came into the face of the stranger.

“That’s too bad,” he said.  “It
was a most important part of my plan that we should know about
how fast the House-boat was.”

“Humph!” ejaculated Socrates, with ill-concealed
sarcasm.  “If you’ll take Xanthippe’s word
for it, the House-boat was the fastest yacht afloat.”

“I refer to the matter of speed in sailing,”
returned the stranger, quietly.  “The question of its
ethical speed has nothing to do with it.”

“The designer of the craft is here,” said Sir
Walter, fixing his eyes upon Sir Christopher Wren. 
“It is possible that he may be of assistance in settling
that point.”

“What has all this got to do with the question, anyhow,
Mr. Chairman?” asked Solomon, rising impatiently and
addressing Sir Walter.  “We aren’t preparing for
a yacht-race, that I know of.  Nobody’s after a cup,
or a championship of any kind.  What we do want is to get
our wives back.  The Captain hasn’t taken more than
half of mine along with him, but I am interested none the
less.  The Queen of Sheba is on board, and I am somewhat
interested in her fate.  So I ask you what earthly or
unearthly use there is in discussing this question of speed in
the House-boat.  It strikes me as a woful waste of time, and
rather unprecedented too, that we should suspend all rules and
listen to the talk of an entire stranger.”

“I do not venture to doubt the wisdom of Solomon,”
said Johnson, dryly, “but I must say that the
gentleman’s remarks rather interest me.”

“Of course they do,” ejaculated Solomon. 
“He agreed with you.  That ought to make him
interesting to everybody.  Freaks usually are.”

“That is not the reason at all,” retorted Dr.
Johnson.  “Cold water agrees with me, but it
doesn’t interest me.  What I do think, however, is
that our unknown friend seems to have a grasp on the situation by
which we are confronted, and he’s going at the matter in
hand in a very comprehensive fashion.  I move, therefore,
that Solomon be laid on the table, and that the privileges of
the—ah—of the wharf be extended indefinitely to our
friend on the string-piece.”

The motion, having been seconded, was duly carried, and the
stranger resumed.

“I will explain for the benefit of his Majesty King
Solomon, whose wisdom I have always admired, and whose endurance
as the husband of three hundred wives has filled me with
wonder,” he said, “that before starting in pursuit of
the stolen vessel we must select a craft of some sort for the
purpose, and that in selecting the pursuer it is quite essential
that we should choose a vessel of greater speed than the one we
desire to overtake.  It would hardly be proper, I think, if
the House-boat can sail four knots an hour to attempt to overhaul
her with a launch, or other nautical craft, with a maximum speed
of two knots an hour.”

“Hear! hear!” ejaculated Cæsar.

“That is my reason, your Majesty, for inquiring as to
the speed of your late club-house,” said the stranger,
bowing courteously to Solomon.  “Now, if Sir
Christopher Wren can give me her measurements, we can very soon
determine at about what rate she is leaving us behind under
favorable circumstances.”

“’Tisn’t necessary for Sir Christopher to do
anything of the sort,” said Noah, rising and manifesting
somewhat more heat than the occasion seemed to require. 
“As long as we are discussing the question I will take the
liberty of stating what I have never mentioned before, that the
designer of the House-boat merely appropriated the lines of the
Ark.  Shem, Ham, and Japhet will bear testimony to the truth
of that statement.”

“There can be no quarrel on that score, Mr.
Chairman,” assented Sir Christopher, with cutting
frigidity.  “I am perfectly willing to admit that
practically the two vessels were built on the same lines, but
with modifications which would enable my boat to sail twenty
miles to windward and back in six days’ less time than it
would have taken the Ark to cover the same distance, and it could
have taken all the wash of the excursion steamers into the
bargain.”

“Bosh!” ejaculated Noah, angrily. 
“Strip your old tub down to a flying balloon-jib and a
marline-spike, and ballast the Ark with elephants until every
inch of her reeked with ivory and peanuts, and she’d
outfoot you on every leg, in a cyclone or a zephyr.  Give me
the Ark and a breeze, and your House-boat wouldn’t be
within hailing distance of her five minutes after the start if
she had 40,000 square yards of canvas spread before a
gale.”

“This discussion is waxing very unprofitable,”
observed Confucius.  “If these gentlemen cannot be
made to confine themselves to the subject that is agitating this
body, I move we call in the authorities and have them confined in
the bottomless pit.”

“I did not precipitate the quarrel,” said
Noah.  “I was merely trying to assist our friend on
the string-piece.  I was going to say that as the Ark was
probably a hundred times faster than Sir Christopher
Wren’s—tub, which he himself says can take care of
all the wash of the excursion boats, thereby becoming on his own
admission a wash-tub—”

“Order! order!” cried Sir Christopher.

“I was going to say that this wash-tub could be
overhauled by a launch or any other craft with a speed of thirty
knots a mouth,” continued Noah, ignoring the
interruption.

“Took him forty days to get to Mount Ararat!”
sneered Sir Christopher.

“Well, your boat would have got there two weeks sooner,
I’ll admit,” retorted Noah, “if she’d
sprung a leak at the right time.”

“Granting the truth of Noah’s statement,”
said Sir Walter, motioning to the angry architect to be
quiet—“not that we take any side in the issue between
the two gentlemen, but merely for the sake of argument—I
wish to ask the stranger who has been good enough to interest
himself in our trouble what he proposes to do—how can you
establish your course in case a boat were provided?”

“Also vot vill be dher gost, if any?” put in
Shylock.

A murmur of disapprobation greeted this remark.

“The cost need not trouble you, sir,” said Sir
Walter, indignantly, addressing the stranger; “you will
have carte blanche.”

“Den ve are ruint!” cried Shylock, displaying his
palms, and showing by that act a select assortment of diamond
rings.

“Oh,” laughed the stranger, “that is a
simple matter.  Captain Kidd has gone to London.”

“To London!” cried several members at once. 
“How do you know that?”

“By this,” said the stranger, holding up the tiny
stub end of a cigar.

“Tut-tut!” ejaculated Solomon.  “What
child’s play is this!”

“No, your Majesty,” observed the stranger,
“it is not child’s play; it is fact.  That cigar
end was thrown aside here on the wharf by Captain Kidd just
before he stepped on board the House-boat.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Raleigh. 
“And granting the truth of the assertion, what does it
prove?”

“I will tell you,” said the stranger.  And he
at once proceeded as follows.

p. 19II

THE STRANGER UNRAVELS A MYSTERY AND
REVEALS HIMSELF

“I have made a hobby of the
study of cigar ends,” said the stranger, as the Associated
Shades settled back to hear his account of himself. 
“From my earliest youth, when I used surreptitiously to
remove the unsmoked ends of my father’s cigars and break
them up, and, in hiding, smoke them in an old clay pipe which I
had presented to me by an ancient sea-captain of my acquaintance,
I have been interested in tobacco in all forms, even including
these self-same despised unsmoked ends; for they convey to my
mind messages, sentiments, farces, comedies, and tragedies which
to your minds would never become manifest through their
agency.”

The company drew closer together and formed themselves in a
more compact mass about the speaker.  It was evident that
they were beginning to feel an unusual interest in this
extraordinary person, who had come among them unheralded and
unknown.  Even Shylock stopped calculating percentages for
an instant to listen.

“Do you mean to tell us,” demanded Shakespeare,
“that the unsmoked stub of a cigar will suggest the story
of him who smoked it to your mind?”

“I do,” replied the stranger, with a confident
smile.  “Take this one, for instance, that I have
picked up here upon the wharf; it tells me the whole story of the
intentions of Captain Kidd at the moment when, in utter disregard
of your rights, he stepped aboard your House-boat, and, in his
usual piratical fashion, made off with it into unknown
seas.”

“But how do you know he smoked it?” asked Solomon,
who deemed it the part of wisdom to be suspicious of the
stranger.

“There are two curious indentations in it which prove
that.  The marks of two teeth, with a hiatus between, which
you will see if you look closely,” said the stranger,
handing the small bit of tobacco to Sir Walter, “make that
point evident beyond peradventure.  The Captain lost an
eye-tooth in one of his later raids; it was knocked out by a
marine-spike which had been hurled at him by one of the crew of
the treasure-ship he and his followers had attacked.  The
adjacent teeth were broken, but not removed.  The cigar end
bears the marks of those two jagged molars, with the hiatus,
which, as I have indicated, is due to the destruction of the
eye-tooth between them.  It is not likely that there was
another man in the pirate’s crew with teeth exactly like
the commander’s, therefore I say there can be no doubt that
the cigar end was that of the Captain himself.”

“Very interesting indeed,” observed Blackstone,
removing his wig and fanning himself with it; “but I must
confess, Mr. Chairman, that in any properly constituted law court
this evidence would long since have been ruled out as irrelevant
and absurd.  The idea of two or three hundred dignified
spirits like ourselves, gathered together to devise a means for
the recovery of our property and the rescue of our wives,
yielding the floor to the delivering of a lecture by an entire
stranger on ‘Cigar Ends He Has Met,’ strikes me as
ridiculous in the extreme.  Of what earthly interest is it
to us to know that this or that cigar was smoked by Captain
Kidd?”

“Merely that it will help us on, your honor, to discover
the whereabouts of the said Kidd,” interposed the
stranger.  “It is by trifles, seeming trifles, that
the greatest detective work is done.  My friends Le Coq,
Hawkshaw, and Old Sleuth will bear me out in this, I think,
however much in other respects our methods may have
differed.  They left no stone unturned in the pursuit of a
criminal; no detail, however trifling, uncared for.  No more
should we in the present instance overlook the minutest bit of
evidence, however irrelevant and absurd at first blush it may
appear to be.  The truth of what I say was very effectually
proven in the strange case of the Brokedale tiara, in which I
figured somewhat conspicuously, but which have never made public,
because it involves a secret affecting the integrity of one of
the noblest families in the British Empire.  I really
believe that mystery was solved easily and at once because I
happened to remember that the number of my watch was
86507B.  How trivial and yet how important it was, to what
then transpired, you will realize when I tell you the
incident.”

The stranger’s manner was so impressive that there was a
unanimous and simultaneous movement upon the part of all present
to get up closer, so as the more readily to hear what he said, as
a result of which poor old Boswell was pushed overboard, and
fell, with a loud splash into the Styx.  Fortunately,
however, one of Charon’s pleasure-boats was close at hand,
and in a short while the dripping, sputtering spirit was drawn
into it, wrung out, and sent home to dry.  The excitement
attending this diversion having subsided, Solomon asked:

“What was the incident of the lost tiara?”

“I am about to tell you,” returned the stranger;
“and it must be understood that you are told in the
strictest confidence, for, as I say, the incident involves a
state secret of great magnitude.  In life—in the
mortal life—gentlemen, I was a detective by profession,
and, if I do say it, who perhaps should not, I was one of the
most interesting for purely literary purposes that has ever been
known.  I did not find it necessary to go about saying
‘Ha! ha!’ as M. Le Coq was accustomed to do to
advertise his cleverness; neither did I disguise myself as a
drum-major and hide under a kitchen-table for the purpose of
solving a mystery involving the abduction of a parlor stove,
after the manner of the talented Hawkshaw.  By mental
concentration alone, without fireworks or orchestral
accompaniment of any sort whatsoever, did I go about my business,
and for that very reason many of my fellow-sleuths were forced to
go out of real detective work into that line of the business with
which the stage has familiarized the most of us—a line in
which nothing but stupidity, luck, and a yellow wig is required
of him who pursues it.”

“This man is an impostor,” whispered Le Coq to
Hawkshaw.

“I’ve known that all along by the mole on his left
wrist,” returned Hawkshaw, contemptuously.

“I suspected it the minute I saw he was not
disguised,” returned Le Coq, knowingly.  “I have
observed that the greatest villains latterly have discarded
disguises, as being too easily penetrated, and therefore of no
avail, and merely a useless expense.”

“Silence!” cried Confucius, impatiently. 
“How can the gentleman proceed, with all this conversation
going on in the rear?”

Hawkshaw and Le Coq immediately subsided, and the stranger
went on.

“It was in this way that I treated the strange case of
the lost tiara,” resumed the stranger.  “Mental
concentration upon seemingly insignificant details alone enabled
me to bring about the desired results in that instance.  A
brief outline of the case is as follows: It was late one evening
in the early spring of 1894.  The London season was at its
height.  Dances, fêtes of all kinds, opera, and the
theatres were in full blast, when all of a sudden society was
paralyzed by a most audacious robbery.  A diamond tiara
valued at £50,000 sterling had been stolen from the Duchess
of Brokedale, and under circumstances which threw society itself
and every individual in it under suspicion—even his Royal
Highness the Prince himself, for he had danced frequently with
the Duchess, and was known to be a great admirer of her
tiara.  It was at half-past eleven o’clock at night
that the news of the robbery first came to my ears.  I had
been spending the evening alone in my library making notes for a
second volume of my memoirs, and, feeling somewhat depressed, I
was on the point of going out for my usual midnight walk on
Hampstead Heath, when one of my servants, hastily entering,
informed me of the robbery.  I changed my mind in respect to
my midnight walk immediately upon receipt of the news, for I knew
that before one o’clock some one would call upon me at my
lodgings with reference to this robbery.  It could not be
otherwise.  Any mystery of such magnitude could no more be
taken to another bureau than elephants could
fly—”

“They used to,” said Adam.  “I once had
a whole aviary full of winged elephants.  They flew from
flower to flower, and thrusting their probabilities deep
into—”

“Their what?” queried Johnson, with a frown.

“Probabilities—isn’t that the word? 
Their trunks,” said Adam.

“Probosces, I imagine you mean,” suggested
Johnson.

“Yes—that was it.  Their probosces,”
said Adam.  “They were great honey-gatherers, those
elephants—far better than the bees, because they could make
so much more of it in a given time.”

Munchausen shook his head sadly.  “I’m afraid
I’m outclassed by these antediluvians,” he said.

“Gentlemen! gentlemen!” cried Sir Walter. 
“These interruptions are inexcusable!”

“That’s what I think,” said the stranger,
with some asperity.  “I’m having about as hard a
time getting this story out as I would if it were a serial. 
Of course, if you gentlemen do not wish to hear it, I can stop;
but it must be understood that when I do stop I stop finally,
once and for all, because the tale has not a sufficiency of
dramatic climaxes to warrant its prolongation over the usual
magazine period of twelve months.”

“Go on! go on!” cried some.

“Shut up!” cried others—addressing the
interrupting members, of course.

“As I was saying,” resumed the stranger, “I
felt confident that within an hour, in some way or other, that
case would be placed in my hands.  It would be mine either
positively or negatively—that is to say, either the person
robbed would employ me to ferret out the mystery and recover the
diamonds, or the robber himself, actuated by motives of
self-preservation, would endeavor to direct my energies into
other channels until he should have the time to dispose of his
ill-gotten booty.  A mental discussion of the probabilities
inclined me to believe that the latter would be the case.  I
reasoned in this fashion: The person robbed is of exalted
rank.  She cannot move rapidly because she is so. 
Great bodies move slowly.  It is probable that it will be a
week before, according to the etiquette by which she is hedged
about, she can communicate with me.  In the first place, she
must inform one of her attendants that she has been robbed. 
He must communicate the news to the functionary in charge of her
residence, who will communicate with the Home Secretary, and from
him will issue the orders to the police, who, baffled at every
step, will finally address themselves to me. 
‘I’ll give that side two weeks,’ I said. 
On the other hand, the robber: will he allow himself to be lulled
into a false sense of security by counting on this delay, or will
he not, noting my habit of occasionally entering upon detective
enterprises of this nature of my own volition, come to me at once
and set me to work ferreting out some crime that has never been
committed?  My feeling was that this would happen, and I
pulled out my watch to see if it were not nearly time for him to
arrive.  The robbery had taken place at a state ball at the
Buckingham Palace.  ‘H’m!’ I mused. 
‘He has had an hour and forty minutes to get here.  It
is now twelve-twenty.  He should be here by
twelve-forty-five.  I will wait.’  And hastily
swallowing a cocaine tablet to nerve myself up for the meeting, I
sat down and began to read my Schopenhauer.  Hardly had I
perused a page when there came a tap upon my door.  I rose
with a smile, for I thought I knew what was to happen, opened the
door, and there stood, much to my surprise, the husband of the
lady whose tiara was missing.  It was the Duke of Brokedale
himself.  It is true he was disguised.  His beard was
powdered until it looked like snow, and he wore a wig and a pair
of green goggles; but I recognized him at once by his lack of
manners, which is an unmistakable sign of nobility.  As I
opened the door, he began:

“‘You are Mr. —’

“‘I am,’ I replied.  ‘Come
in.  You have come to see me about your stolen watch. 
It is a gold hunting-case watch with a Swiss movement; loses five
minutes a day; stem-winder; and the back cover, which does not
bear any inscription, has upon it the indentations made by the
molars of your son Willie when that interesting youth was cutting
his teeth upon it.’”

“Wonderful!” cried Johnson.

“May I ask how you knew all that?” asked Solomon,
deeply impressed.  “Such penetration strikes me as
marvellous.”

“I didn’t know it,” replied the stranger,
with a smile.  “What I said was intended to be
jocular, and to put Brokedale at his ease.  The Americans
present, with their usual astuteness, would term it bluff. 
It was.  I merely rattled on.  I simply did not wish to
offend the gentleman by letting him know that I had penetrated
his disguise.  Imagine my surprise, however, when his eye
brightened as I spoke, and he entered my room with such alacrity
that half the powder which he thought disguised his beard was
shaken off on to the floor.  Sitting down in the chair I had
just vacated, he quietly remarked:

“‘You are a wonderful man, sir.  How did you
know that I had lost my watch?’

“For a moment I was nonplussed; more than that, I was
completely staggered.  I had expected him to say at once
that he had not lost his watch, but had come to see me about the
tiara; and to have him take my words seriously was entirely
unexpected and overwhelmingly surprising.  However, in view
of his rank, I deemed it well to fall in with his humour. 
‘Oh, as for that,’ I replied, ‘that is a part
of my business.  It is the detective’s place to know
everything; and generally, if he reveals the machinery by means
of which he reaches his conclusions, he is a fool, since his
method is his secret, and his secret his stock-in-trade.  I
do not mind telling you, however, that I knew your watch was
stolen by your anxious glance at my clock, which showed that you
wished to know the time.  Now most rich Americans have
watches for that purpose, and have no hesitation about showing
them.  If you’d had a watch, you’d have looked
at it, not at my clock.’

“My visitor laughed, and repeated what he had said about
my being a wonderful man.

“‘And the dents which my son made cutting his
teeth?’ he added.

“‘Invariably go with an American’s
watch.  Rubber or ivory rings aren’t good enough for
American babies to chew on,’ said I.  ‘They must
have gold watches or nothing.’

“‘And finally, how did you know I was a rich
American?’ he asked.

“‘Because no other can afford to stop at hotels
like the Savoy in the height of the season,’ I replied,
thinking that the jest would end there, and that he would now
reveal his identity and speak of the tiara.  To my surprise,
however, he did nothing of the sort.

“‘You have an almost supernatural gift,’ he
said.  ‘My name is Bunker.  I am stopping at the
Savoy.  I am an American.  I was rich
when I arrived here, but I’m not quite so bloated with
wealth as I was, now that I have paid my first week’s
bill.  I have lost my watch; such a watch, too, as
you describe, even to the dents.  Your only mistake was that
the dents were made by my son John, and not Willie; but even
there I cannot but wonder at you, for John and Willie are twins,
and so much alike that it sometimes baffles even their mother to
tell them apart.  The watch has no very great value
intrinsically, but the associations are such that I want it back,
and I will pay £200 for its recovery.  I have no clew
as to who took it.  It was numbered—’

“Here a happy thought struck me.  In all my
description of the watch I had merely described my own, a very
cheap affair which I had won at a raffle.  My visitor was
deceiving me, though for what purpose I did not on the instant
divine.  No one would like to suspect him of having
purloined his wife’s tiara.  Why should I not deceive
him, and at the same time get rid of my poor chronometer for a
sum that exceeded its value a hundredfold?”

“Good business!” cried Shylock.

The stranger smiled and bowed.

“Excellent,” he said.  “I took the
words right out of his mouth.  ‘It was numbered
86507B!’ I cried, giving, of course, the number of my own
watch.

“He gazed at me narrowly for a moment, and then he
smiled.  ‘You grow more marvellous at every
step.  That was indeed the number.  Are you a
demon?’

“‘No,’ I replied.  ‘Only
something of a mind-reader.’

“Well, to be brief, the bargain was struck.  I was
to look for a watch that I knew he hadn’t lost, and was to
receive £200 if I found it.  It seemed to him to be a
very good bargain, as, indeed, it was, from his point of view,
feeling, as he did, that there never having been any such watch,
it could not be recovered, and little suspecting that two could
play at his little game of deception, and that under any
circumstances I could foist a ten-shilling watch upon him for two
hundred pounds.  This business concluded, he started to
go.

“‘Won’t you have a little Scotch?’ I
asked, as he started, feeling, with all that prospective profit
in view, I could well afford the expense.  ‘It is a
stormy night.’

“‘Thanks, I will,’ said he, returning and
seating himself by my table—still, to my surprise, keeping
his hat on.

“‘Let me take your hat,’ I said, little
thinking that my courtesy would reveal the true state of
affairs.  The mere mention of the word hat brought about a
terrible change in my visitor; his knees trembled, his face grew
ghastly, and he clutched the brim of his beaver until it
cracked.  He then nervously removed it, and I noticed a dull
red mark running about his forehead, just as there would be on
the forehead of a man whose hat fitted too tightly; and that
mark, gentlemen, had the undulating outline of nothing more nor
less than a tiara, and on the apex of the uttermost extremity was
a deep indentation about the size of a shilling, that could have
been made only by some adamantine substance!  The mystery
was solved!  The robber of the Duchess of Brokedale stood
before me.”

A suppressed murmur of excitement went through the assembled
spirits, and even Messrs. Hawkshaw and Le Coq were silent in the
presence of such genius.

“My plan of action was immediately formulated.  The
man was completely at my mercy.  He had stolen the tiara,
and had it concealed in the lining of his hat.  I rose and
locked the door.  My visitor sank with a groan into my
chair.

“‘Why did you do that?’ he stammered, as I
turned the key in the lock.

“‘To keep my Scotch whiskey from
evaporating,’ I said, dryly.  ‘Now, my
lord,’ I added, ‘it will pay your Grace to let me
have your hat.  I know who you are.  You are the Duke
of Brokedale.  The Duchess of Brokedale has lost a valuable
tiara of diamonds, and you have not lost your watch. 
Somebody has stolen the diamonds, and it may be that somewhere
there is a Bunker who has lost such a watch as I have
described.  The queer part of it all is,’ I continued,
handing him the decanter, and taking a couple of loaded
six-shooters out of my escritoire—‘the queer part of
it all is that I have the watch and you have the tiara. 
We’ll swap the swag.  Hand over the bauble,
please.’

“‘But—’ he began.

“‘We won’t have any butting, your
Grace,’ said I.  ‘I’ll give you the watch,
and you needn’t mind the £200; and you must give me
the tiara, or I’ll accompany you forthwith to the police,
and have a search made of your hat.  It won’t pay you
to defy me.  Give it up.’

“He gave up the hat at once, and, as I suspected, there
lay the tiara, snugly stowed away behind the head-band.

“‘You are a great fellow,’ said I, as I held
the tiara up to the light and watched with pleasure the flashing
brilliance of its gems.

“‘I beg you’ll not expose me,’ he
moaned.  ‘I was driven to it by necessity.’

“‘Not I,’ I replied.  ‘As long as
you play fair it will be all right.  I’m not going to
keep this thing.  I’m not married, and so have no use
for such a trifle; but what I do intend is simply to wait until
your wife retains me to find it, and then I’ll find it and
get the reward.  If you keep perfectly still, I’ll
have it found in such a fashion that you’ll never be
suspected.  If, on the other hand, you say a word about
to-night’s events, I’ll hand you over to the
police.’

“‘Humph!’ he said.  ‘You
couldn’t prove a case against me.’

“‘I can prove any case against anybody,’ I
retorted.  ‘If you don’t believe it, read my
book,’ I added, and I handed him a copy of my memoirs.

“‘I’ve read it,’ he answered,
‘and I ought to have known better than to come here. 
I thought you were only a literary success.’  And with
a deep-drawn sigh he took the watch and went out.  Ten days
later I was retained by the Duchess, and after a pretended search
of ten days more I found the tiara, restored it to the noble
lady, and received the £5000 reward.  The Duke kept
perfectly quiet about our little encounter, and afterwards we
became stanch friends; for he was a good fellow, and was driven
to his desperate deed only by the demands of his creditors, and
the following Christmas he sent me the watch I had given him,
with the best wishes of the season.

“So, you see, gentlemen, in a moment, by quick wit and a
mental concentration of no mean order, combined with strict
observance of the pettiest details, I ferreted out what bade fair
to become a great diamond mystery; and when I say that this cigar
end proves certain things to my mind, it does not become you to
doubt the value of my conclusions.”

“Hear! hear!” cried Raleigh, growing tumultuous
with enthusiasm.

“Your name? your name?” came from all parts of the
wharf.

The stranger, putting his hand into the folds of his coat,
drew forth a bundle of business cards, which he tossed, as the
prestidigitator tosses playing-cards, out among the audience, and
on each of them was found printed the words:

“I think he made a mistake in not taking the £200
for the watch.  Such carelessness destroys my confidence in
him,” said Shylock, who was the first to recover from the
surprise of the revelation.

p. 42III

THE SEARCH-PARTY IS ORGANIZED

“Well, Mr. Holmes,”
said Sir Walter Raleigh, after three rousing cheers, led by
Hamlet, had been given with a will by the assembled spirits,
“after this demonstration in your honor I think it is
hardly necessary for me to assure you of our hearty co-operation
in anything you may venture to suggest.  There is still
manifest, however, some desire on the part of the ever-wise King
Solomon and my friend Confucius to know how you deduce that Kidd
has sailed for London, from the cigar end which you hold in your
hand.”

“I can easily satisfy their curiosity,” said
Sherlock Holmes, genially.  “I believe I have already
proven that it is the end of Kidd’s cigar.  The marks
of the teeth have shown that.  Now observe how closely it is
smoked—there is barely enough of it left for one to insert
between his teeth.  Now Captain Kidd would hardly have
risked the edges of his mustache and the comfort of his lips by
smoking a cigar down to the very light if he had had another; nor
would he under any circumstances have smoked it that far unless
he were passionately addicted to this particular brand of the
weed.  Therefore I say to you, first, this was his cigar;
second, it was the last one he had; third, he is a confirmed
smoker.  The result, he has gone to the one place in the
world where these Connecticut hand-rolled Havana cigars—for
I recognize this as one of them—have a real popularity, and
are therefore more certainly obtainable, and that is at
London.  You cannot get so vile a cigar as that outside of a
London hotel.  If I could have seen a quarter-inch more of
it, I should have been able definitely to locate the hotel
itself.  The wrappers unroll to a degree that varies
perceptibly as between the different hotels.  The Fortuna
cigar can be smoked a quarter through before its wrapper gives
way; the Felix wrapper goes as soon as you light the cigar;
whereas the River, fronting on the Thames, is surrounded by a
moister atmosphere than the others, and, as a consequence, the
wrapper will hold really until most people are willing to throw
the whole thing away.”

“It is really a wonderful art!” said Solomon.

“The making of a Connecticut Havana cigar?”
laughed Holmes.  “Not at all.  Give me a head of
lettuce and a straw, and I’ll make you a box.”

“I referred to your art—that of detection,”
said Solomon.  “Your logic is perfect; step by step we
have been led to the irresistible conclusion that Kidd has made
for London, and can be found at one of these hotels.”

“And only until next Tuesday, when he will take a house
in the neighborhood of Scotland Yard,” put in Holmes,
quickly, observing a sneer on Hawkshaw’s lips, and
hastening to overwhelm him by further evidence of his
ingenuity.  “When he gets his bill he will open his
piratical eyes so wide that he will be seized with jealousy to
think of how much more refined his profession has become since he
left it, and out of mere pique he will leave the hotel, and, to
show himself still cleverer than his modern prototypes, he will
leave his account unpaid, with the result that the affair will be
put in the hands of the police, under which circumstances a house
in the immediate vicinity of the famous police headquarters will
be the safest hiding-place he can find, as was instanced by the
remarkable case of the famous Penstock bond robbery.  A
certain churchwarden named Hinkley, having been appointed cashier
thereof, robbed the Penstock Imperial Bank of £1,000,000 in
bonds, and, fleeing to London, actually joined the detective
force at Scotland Yard, and was detailed to find himself, which
of course he never did, nor would he ever have been found had he
not crossed my path.”

Hawkshaw gazed mournfully off into space, and Le Coq muttered
profane words under his breath.

“We’re not in the same class with this fellow,
Hawkshaw,” said Le Coq.  “You could tap your
forehead knowingly eight hours a day through all eternity with a
sledge-hammer without loosening an idea like that.”

“Nevertheless I’ll confound him yet,”
growled the jealous detective.  “I shall myself go to
London, and, disguised as Captain Kidd, will lead this visionary
on until he comes there to arrest me, and when these club members
discover that it is Hawkshaw and not Kidd he has run to earth,
we’ll have a great laugh on Sherlock Holmes.”

“I am anxious to hear how you solved the bond-robbery
mystery,” said Socrates, wrapping his toga closely about
him and settling back against one of the spiles of the wharf.

“So are we all,” said Sir Walter.  “But
meantime the House-boat is getting farther away.”

“Not unless she’s sailing backwards,”
sneered Noah, who was still nursing his resentment against Sir
Christopher Wren for his reflections upon the speed of the
Ark.

“What’s the hurry?” asked Socrates. 
“I believe in making haste slowly; and on the admission of
our two eminent naval architects, Sir Christopher and Noah,
neither of their vessels can travel more than a mile a week, and
if we charter the Flying Dutchman to go in pursuit of her
we can catch her before she gets out of the Styx into the
Atlantic.”

“Jonah might lend us his whale, if the beast is in
commission,” suggested Munchausen, dryly.  “I
for one would rather take a state-room in Jonah’s whale
than go aboard the Flying Dutchman again.  I made one
trip on the Dutchman, and she’s worse than a dory
for comfort; further—I don’t see what good it would
do us to charter a boat that can’t land oftener than once
in seven years, and spends most of her time trying to double the
Cape of Good Hope.”

“My whale is in commission,” said Jonah, with
dignity.  “But Baron Munchausen need not consider the
question of taking a state-room aboard of her.  She
doesn’t carry second-class passengers.  And if I took
any stock in the idea of a trip on the Flying Dutchman
amounting to a seven years’ exile, I would cheerfully pay
the Baron’s expenses for a round trip.”

“We are losing time, gentlemen,” suggested
Sherlock Holmes.  “This is a moment, I think, when you
should lay aside personal differences and personal preferences
for immediate action.  I have examined the wake of the
House-boat, and I judge from the condition of what, for want of a
better term, I may call the suds, when she left us the House-boat
was making ten knots a day.  Almost any craft we can find
suitably manned ought to be able to do better than that; and if
you could summon Charon and ascertain what boats he has at hand,
it would be for the good of all concerned.”

“That’s a good plan,” said Johnson. 
“Boswell, see if you can find Charon.”

“I am here already, sir,” returned the ferryman,
rising.  “Most of my boats have gone into winter
quarters, your Honor.  The Mayflower went into dry
dock last week to be calked up; the Pinta and the Santa
Maria are slow and cranky; the Monitor and the
Merrimac I haven’t really had time to patch up; and
the Valkyrie is two months overdue.  I cannot make up
my mind whether she is lost or kept back by excursion
steamers.  Hence I really don’t know what I can lend
you.  Any of these boat I have named you could have had for
nothing; but my others are actively employed, and I
couldn’t let them go without a serious interference with my
business.”

The old man blinked sorrowfully across the waters at the
opposite shore.  It was quite evident that he realized what
a dreadful expense the club was about to be put to, and while of
course there would be profit in it for him, he was sincerely
sorry for them.

“I repeat,” he added, “those boats you could
have had for nothing, but the others I’d have to charge you
for, though of course I’ll give you a discount.”

And he blinked again, as he meditated upon whether that
discount should be an eighth or one-quarter of one per cent.

“The Flying Dutchman,” he pursued,
“ain’t no good for your purposes.  She’s
too fast.  She’s built to fly by, not to stop. 
You’d catch up with the House-boat in a minute with her,
but you’d go right on and disappear like a visionary; and
as for the Ark, she’d never do—with all respect to
Mr. Noah.  She’s just about as suitable as any other
waterlogged cattle-steamer’d be, and no
more—first-rate for elephants and kangaroos, but no good
for cruiser-work, and so slow she wouldn’t make a ripple
high enough to drown a gnat going at the top of her speed. 
Furthermore, she’s got a great big hole in her bottom,
where she was stove in by running afoul of—Mount
Arrus-root, I believe it was called when Captain Noah went
cruising with that menagerie of his.”

“That’s an unmitigated falsehood!” cried
Noah, angrily.  “This man talks like a professional
amateur yachtsman.  He has no regard for facts, but simply
goes ahead and makes statements with an utter disregard of the
truth.  The Ark was not stove in.  We beached her very
successfully.  I say this in defence of my seamanship, which
was top-notch for my day.”

“Couldn’t sail six weeks without fouling a
mountain-peak!” sneered Wren, perceiving a chance to get
even.

“The hole’s there, just the same,” said
Charon.  “Maybe she was a centreboard, sad
that’s where you kept the board.”

“The hole is there because it was worn there by one of
the elephants,” retorted Noah.  “You get a beast
like the elephant shuffling one of his fore-feet up and down, up
and down, a plank for twenty-four hours a day for forty days in
one of your boats, and see where your boat would be.”

“Thanks,” said Charon, calmly.  “But
the elephants don’t patronize my line.  All the
elephants I’ve ever seen in Hades waded over, except Jumbo,
and he reached his trunk across, fastened on to a tree limb with
it, and swung himself over.  However, the Ark isn’t at
all what you want, unless you are going to man her with a lot of
centaurs.  If that’s your intention, I’d charter
her; the accommodations are just the thing for a crew of that
kind.”

“Well, what do you suggest?” asked Raleigh,
somewhat impatiently.  “You’ve told us what we
can’t do.  Now tell us what we can do.”

“I’d stay right here,” said Charon,
“and let the ladies rescue themselves.  That’s
what I’d do.  I’ve had the honor of bringing
’em over here, and I think I know ’em pretty
well.  I’ve watched ’em close, and it’s my
private opinion that before many days you’ll see your
club-house sailing back here, with Queen Elizabeth at the hellum,
and the other ladies on the for’ard deck knittin’ and
crochetin’, and tearin’ each other to pieces in a
conversational way, as happy as if there never had been any
Captain Kidd and his pirate crew.”

“That suggestion is impossible,” said Blackstone,
rising.  “Whether the relief expedition amounts to
anything or not, it’s good to be set going.  The
ladies would never forgive us if we sat here inactive, even if
they were capable of rescuing themselves.  It is an accepted
principle of law that this climate hath no fury like a woman left
to herself, and we’ve got enough professional furies
hereabouts without our aiding in augmenting the ranks.  We
must have a boat.”

“It’ll cost you a thousand dollars a week,”
said Charon.

“I’ll subscribe fifty,” cried Hamlet.

“I’ll consult my secretary,” said Solomon,
“and find out how many of my wives have been abducted, and
I’ll pay ten dollars apiece for their recovery.”

“That’s liberal,” said Hawkshaw. 
“There are sixty-three of ’em on board, together with
eighty of his fiancées.  What’s the quotation
on fiancées, King Solomon?”

“Nothing,” said Solomon. 
“They’re not mine yet, and it’s their
father’s business to get ’em back.  Not
mine.”

Other subscriptions came pouring in, and it was not long
before everybody save Shylock had put his name down for
something.  This some one of the more quick-witted of the
spirits soon observed, and, with reckless disregard of the
feelings of the Merchant of Venice, began to call,
“Shylock!  Shylock!  How much?”

The Merchant tried to leave the pier, but his path was
blocked.

“Subscribe, subscribe!” was the cry. 
“How much?”

“Order, gentlemen, order!” said Sir Walter, rising
and holding a bottle aloft.  “A black person by the
name of Friday, a valet of our friend Mr. Crusoe, has just handed
me this bottle, which he picked up ten minutes ago on the bank of
the river a few miles distant.  It contains a bit of paper,
and may perhaps give us a clew based upon something more
substantial than even the wonderful theories of our new brother
Holmes.”

A deathly silence followed the chairman’s words, as Sir
Walter drew a corkscrew from his pocket and opened the
bottle.  He extracted the paper, and, as he had surmised, it
proved to be a message from the missing vessel.  His face
brightening with a smile of relief, Sir Walter read, aloud:

“Have just emerged into the Atlantic Club in hands of
Kidd and forty ruffians.  One hundred and eighty-three
ladies on board.  Headed for the Azores.  Send aid at
once.  All well except Xanthippe, who is seasick in the
billiard-room.  (Signed) Portia.”

“Aha!” cried Hawkshaw.  “That shows how
valuable the Holmes theory is.”

“Precisely,” said Holmes.  “No woman
knows anything about seafaring, but Portia is right.  The
ship is headed for the Azores, which is the first tack needed in
a windward sail for London under the present
conditions.”

The reply was greeted with cheers, and when they subsided the
cry for Shylock’s subscription began again, but he
declined.

“I had intended to put up a thousand ducats,” he
said, defiantly, “but with that woman Portia on board I
won’t give a red obolus!” and with that he wrapped
his cloak about him and stalked off into the gathering shadows of
the wood.

And so the funds were raised without the aid of Shylock, and
the shapely twin-screw steamer the Gehenna was chartered
of Charon, and put under the command of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who,
after he had thanked the company for their confidence, walked
abstractedly away, observing in strictest confidence to himself
that he had done well to prepare that bottle beforehand and bribe
Crusoe’s man to find it.

“For now,” he said, with a chuckle, “I can
get back to earth again free of cost on my own hook, whether my
eminent inventor wants me there or not.  I never approved of
his killing me off as he did at the very height of my
popularity.”

p. 58IV

ON BOARD THE HOUSE-BOAT

Meanwhile the ladies were not
having such a bad time, after all.  Once having gained
possession of the House-boat, they were loath to think of ever
having to give it up again, and it is an open question in my mind
if they would not have made off with it themselves had Captain
Kidd and his men not done it for them.

“I’ll never forgive these men for their
selfishness in monopolizing all this,” said Elizabeth, with
a vicious stroke of a billiard-cue, which missed the cue-ball and
tore a right angle in the cloth.  “It is not
right.”

“No,” said Portia.  “It is all wrong;
and when we get back home I’m going to give my beloved
Bassanio a piece of my mind; and if he doesn’t give in to
me, I’ll reverse my decision in the famous case of
Shylock versus Antonio.”

“Then I sincerely hope he doesn’t give in,”
retorted Cleopatra, “for I swear by all my auburn locks
that that was the very worst bit of injustice ever
perpetrated.  Mr. Shakespeare confided to me one night, at
one of Mrs. Cæsar’s card-parties, that he regarded
that as the biggest joke he ever wrote, and Judge Blackstone
observed to Antony that the decision wouldn’t have held in
any court of equity outside of Venice.  If you owe a man a
thousand ducats, and it costs you three thousand to get them,
that’s your affair, not his.  If it cost Antonio every
drop of his bluest blood to pay the pound of flesh, it was
Antonio’s affair, not Shylock’s.  However, the
world applauds you as a great jurist, when you have nothing more
than a woman’s keen instinct for sentimental
technicalities.”

“It would have made a horrid play, though, if it had
gone on,” shuddered Elizabeth.

“That may be, but, carried out realistically, it would
have done away with a raft of bad actors,” said
Cleopatra.  “I’m half sorry it didn’t go
on, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have been any worse than
compelling Brutus to fall on his sword until he resembles a
chicken liver en brochette, as is done in that Julius
Cæsar play.”

“Well, I’m very glad I did it,” snapped
Portia.

“I should think you would be,” said
Cleopatra.  “If you hadn’t done it, you’d
never have been known.  What was that?”

The boat had given a slight lurch.

“Didn’t you hear a shuffling noise up on deck,
Portia?” asked the Egyptian Queen.

“I thought I did, and it seemed as if the vessel had
moved a bit,” returned Portia, nervously; for, like most
women in an advanced state of development, she had become a
martyr to her nerves.

“It was merely the wash from one of Charon’s new
ferry-boats, I fancy,” said Elizabeth, calmly. 
“It’s disgusting, the way that old fellow allows
these modern innovations to be brought in here!  As if the
old paddle-boats he used to carry shades in weren’t good
enough for the immigrants of this age!  Really this Styx
River is losing a great deal of its charm.  Sir Walter and I
were upset, while out rowing one day last summer, by the waves
kicked up by one of Charon’s excursion steamers going up
the river with a party of picnickers from the city—the
Greater Gehenna Chowder Club, I believe it was—on board of
her.  One might just as well live in the midst of the
turmoil of a great city as try to get uninterrupted quiet here in
the suburbs in these days.  Charon isn’t content to
get rich slowly; he must make money by the barrelful, if he has
to sacrifice all the comfort of everybody living on this
river.  Anybody’d think he was an American, the way he
goes on; and everybody else here is the same way.  The
Erebeans are getting to be a race of shopkeepers.”

“I think myself,” sighed Cleopatra, “that
Hades is being spoiled by the introduction of American
ideas—it is getting by far too democratic for my tastes;
and if it isn’t stopped, it’s my belief that the best
people will stop coming here.  Take Madame
Récamier’s salon as it is now and compare it with
what it used to be!  In the early days, after her arrival
here, everybody went because it was the swell thing, and
you’d be sure of meeting the intellectually elect.  On
the one hand you’d find Sophocles; on the other, Cicero;
across the room would be Horace chatting gayly with some such
person as myself.  Great warriors, from Alexander to
Bonaparte, were there, and glad of the opportunity to be there,
too; statesmen like Macchiavelli; artists like Cellini or
Tintoretto.  You couldn’t move without stepping on the
toes of genius.  But now all is different.  The
money-getting instinct has been aroused within them all, with the
result that when I invited Mozart to meet a few friends at dinner
at my place last autumn, he sent me a card stating his terms for
dinners.  Let me see, I think I have it with me; I’ve
kept it by me for fear of losing it, it is such a complete
revelation of the actual condition of affairs in this
locality.  Ah! this is it,” she added, taking a small
bit of pasteboard from her card-case.  “Read
that.”

The card was passed about, and all the ladies were much
astonished—and naturally so, for it ran this wise:

NOTICE TO
HOSTESSES.

Owing to the very great, constantly growing, and at times
vexatious demands upon his time socially,

HERR WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

takes this method of announcing to his friends that on and
after January 1, 1897, his terms for functions will be as
follows:

Positively no Invitations for Five-o’Clock
Teas or Morning Musicales considered.

“Well, I declare!” tittered Elizabeth, as she
read.  “Isn’t that extraordinary? 
He’s got the three-name craze, too!”

“It’s perfectly ridiculous,” said
Cleopatra.  “But it’s fairer than Artemus
Ward’s plan.  Mozart gives notice of his intentions to
charge you; but with Ward it’s different.  He comes,
and afterwards sends a bill for his fun.  Why, only last
week I got a ‘quarterly statement’ from him showing a
charge against me of thirty-eight dollars for humorous remarks
made to my guests at a little chafing-dish party I gave in honor
of Balzac, and, worst of all, he had marked it ‘Please
remit.’  Even Antony, when he wrote a sonnet to my
eyebrow, wouldn’t let me have it until he had heard whether
or not Boswell wanted it for publication in the
Gossip.  With Rubens giving chalk-talks for pay,
Phidias doing ‘Five-minute Masterpieces in Putty’ for
suburban lyceums, and all the illustrious in other lines turning
their genius to account through the entertainment bureaus,
it’s impossible to have a salon now.”

“You are indeed right,” said Madame
Récamier, sadly.  “Those were palmy days when
genius was satisfied with chicken salad and lemonade.  I
shall never forget those nights when the wit and wisdom of all
time were—ah—were on tap at my house, if I may so
speak, at a cost to me of lights and supper.  Now the only
people who will come for nothing are those we used to think of
paying to stay away.  Boswell is always ready, but you
can’t run a salon on Boswell.”

“Well,” said Portia, “I sincerely hope that
you won’t give up the functions altogether, because I have
always found them most delightful.  It is still possible to
have lights and supper.”

“I have a plan for next winter,” said Madame
Récamier, “but I suppose I shall be accused of going
into the commercial side of it if I adopt it.  The plan is,
briefly, to incorporate my salon.  That’s an idea
worthy of an American, I admit; but if I don’t do it
I’ll have to give it up entirely, which, as you intimate,
would be too bad.  An incorporated salon, however, would be
a grand thing, if only because it would perpetuate the
salon.  ‘The Récamier Salon
(Limited)’ would be a most excellent title, and, suitably
capitalized would enable us to pay our lions sufficiently. 
Private enterprise is powerless under modern conditions. 
It’s as much as I can afford to pay for a dinner, without
running up an expensive account for guests; and unless we get up
a salon-trust, as it were, the whole affair must go to the
wall.”

“How would you make it pay?” asked Portia. 
“I can’t see where your dividends would come
from.”

“That is simple enough,” said Madame
Récamier.  “We could put up a large
reception-hall with a portion of our capital, and advertise a
series of nights—say one a week throughout the
season.  These would be Warriors’ Night,
Story-tellers’ Night, Poets’ Night, Chafing-dish
Night under the charge of Brillat-Savarin, and so on.  It
would be understood that on these particular evenings the most
interesting people in certain lines would be present, and would
mix with outsiders, who should be admitted only on payment of a
certain sum of money.  The commonplace inhabitants of this
country could thus meet the truly great; and if I know them well,
as I think I do, they’ll pay readily for the
privilege.  The obscure love to rub up against the famous
here as well as they do on earth.”

“You’d run a sort of Social Zoo?” suggested
Elizabeth.

“Precisely; and provide entertainment for private
residences too.  An advertisement in Boswell’s paper,
which everybody buys—”

“And which nobody reads,” said Portia.

“They read the advertisements,” retorted Madame
Récamier.  “As I was saying, an advertisement
could be placed in Boswell’s paper as follows: ‘Are
you giving a Function?  Do you want Talent?  Get your
Genius at the Récamier Salon (Limited).’  It
would be simply magnificent as a business enterprise.  The
common herd would be tickled to death if they could get great
people at their homes, even if they had to pay roundly for
them.”

“It would look well in the society notes, wouldn’t
it, if Mr. John Boggs gave a reception, and at the close of the
account it said, ‘The supper was furnished by Calizetti,
and the genius by the Récamier Salon
(Limited)’?” suggested Elizabeth, scornfully.

“I must admit,” replied the French lady,
“that you call up an unpleasant possibility, but I
don’t really see what else we can do if we want to preserve
the salon idea.  Somebody has told these talented people
that they have a commercial value, and they are availing
themselves of the demand.”

“It is a sad age!” sighed Elizabeth.

“Well, all I’ve got to say is just this,”
put in Xanthippe: “You people who get up functions have
brought this condition of affairs on yourselves.  You were
not satisfied to go ahead and indulge your passion for lions in a
moderate fashion.  Take the case of Demosthenes last winter,
for instance.  His wife told me that he dined at home three
times during the winter.  The rest of the time he was out,
here, there, and everywhere, making after-dinner speeches. 
The saving on his dinner bills didn’t pay his pebble
account, much less remunerate him for his time, and the fearful
expense of nervous energy to which he was subjected.  It was
as much as she could do, she said, to keep him from shaving one
side of his head, so that he couldn’t go out, the way he
used to do in Athens when he was afraid he would be invited out
and couldn’t scare up a decent excuse for
refusing.”

“Did he do that?” cried Elizabeth, with a roar of
laughter.

“So the cyclopædias say.  It’s a good
plan, too,” said Xanthippe.  “Though Socrates
never had to do it.  When I got the notion Socrates was
going out too much, I used to hide his dress clothes.  Then
there was the case of Rubens.  He gave a Carbon Talk at the
Sforza’s Thursday Night Club, merely to oblige Madame
Sforza, and three weeks later discovered that she had sold his
pictures to pay for her gown!  You people simply run it into
the ground.  You kill the goose that when taken at the flood
leads on to fortune.  It advertises you, does the lion no
good, and he is expected to be satisfied with confectionery,
material and theoretical.  If they are getting tired of
candy and compliments, it’s because you have forced too
much of it upon them.”

“They like it, just the same,” retorted
Récamier.  “A genius likes nothing better than
the sound of his own voice, when he feels that it is falling on
aristocratic ears.  The social laurel rests pleasantly on
many a noble brow.”

“True,” said Xanthippe.  “But when a
man gets a pile of Christmas wreaths a mile high on his head, he
begins to wonder what they will bring on the market.  An
occasional wreath is very nice, but by the ton they are apt to
weigh on his mind.  Up to a certain point notoriety is like
a woman, and a man is apt to love it; but when it becomes
exacting, demanding instead of permitting itself to be courted,
it loses its charm.”

“That is Socratic in its wisdom,” smiled
Portia.

“But Xanthippic in its origin,” returned
Xanthippe.  “No man ever gave me my ideas.”

As Xanthippe spoke, Lucretia Borgia burst into the room.

“Hurry and save yourselves!” she cried. 
“The boat has broken loose from her moorings, and is
floating down the stream.  If we don’t hurry up and do
something, we’ll drift out to sea!”

“What!” cried Cleopatra, dropping her cue in
terror, and rushing for the stairs.  “I was certain I
felt a slight motion.  You said it was the wash from one of
Charon’s barges, Elizabeth.”

“I thought it was,” said Elizabeth, following
closely after.

“Well, it wasn’t,” moaned Lucretia
Borgia.  “Calpurnia just looked out of the window and
discovered that we were in mid-stream.”

The ladies crowded anxiously about the stair and attempted to
ascend, Cleopatra in the van; but as the Egyptian Queen reached
the doorway to the upper deck, the door opened, and the hard
features of Captain Kidd were thrust roughly through, and his
strident voice rang out through the gathering gloom. 
“Pipe my eye for a sardine if we haven’t captured a
female seminary!” he cried.

And one by one the ladies, in terror, shrank back into the
billiard-room, while Kidd, overcome by surprise, slammed the door
to, and retreated into the darkness of the forward deck to
consult with his followers as to “what next.”

p. 73V

A CONFERENCE ON DECK

“Here’s a kettle of
fish!” said Kidd, pulling his chin whisker in perplexity as
he and his fellow-pirates gathered about the captain to discuss
the situation.  “I’m blessed if in all my
experience I ever sailed athwart anything like it afore! 
Pirating with a lot of low-down ruffians like you gentlemen is
bad enough, but on a craft loaded to the water’s edge with
advanced women—I’ve half a mind to turn
back.”

“If you do, you swim—we’ll not turn back
with you,” retorted Abeuchapeta, whom, in honor of his
prowess, Kidd had appointed executive officer of the
House-boat.  “I have no desire to be mutinous, Captain
Kidd, but I have not embarked upon this enterprise for a pleasure
sail down the Styx.  I am out for business.  If you had
thirty thousand women on board, still should I not turn
back.”

“But what shall we do with ’em?” pleaded
Kidd.  “Where can we go without attracting
attention?  Who’s going to feed ’em? 
Who’s going to dress ’em?  Who’s going to
keep ’em in bonnets?  You don’t know anything
about these creatures, my dear Abeuchapeta; and, by-the-way,
can’t we arbitrate that name of yours?  It would be
fearful to remember in the excitement of a fight.”

“Call him Ab,” suggested Sir Henry Morgan, with an
ill-concealed sneer, for he was deeply jealous of
Abeuchapeta’s preferral.

“If you do I’ll call you Morgue, and change your
appearance to fit,” retorted Abeuchapeta, angrily.

“By the beards of all my sainted Buccaneers,”
began Morgan, springing angrily to his feet, “I’ll
have your life!”

“Gentlemen!  Gentlemen—my noble
ruffians!” expostulated Kidd.  “Come, come; this
will never do!  I must have no quarrelling among my
aides.  This is no time for divisions in our councils. 
An entirely unexpected element has entered into our affairs, and
it behooveth us to act in concert.  It is no light
matter—”

“Excuse me, captain,” said Abeuchapeta, “but
that is where you and I do not agree.  We’ve got our
ship and we’ve got our crew, and in addition we find that
the Fates have thrown in a hundred or more women to act as
ballast.  Now I, for one, do not fear a woman.  We can
set them to work.  There is plenty for them to do keeping
things tidy; and if we get into a very hard fight, and come out
of the mêlée somewhat the worse for wear, it will be
a blessing to have ’em along to mend our togas, sew buttons
on our uniforms, and darn our hosiery.”

Morgan laughed sarcastically.  “When did you
flourish, if ever, colonel?” he asked.

“Do you refer to me?” queried Abeuchapeta, with a
frown.

“You have guessed correctly,” replied Morgan,
icily.  “I have quite forgotten your date; were you a
success in the year one, or when?”

“Admiral Abeuchapeta, Sir Henry,” interposed Kidd,
fearing a further outbreak of hostilities—“Admiral
Abeuchapeta was the terror of the seas in the seventh century,
and what he undertook to do he did, and his piratical enterprises
were carried on on a scale of magnificence which is without
parallel off the comic-opera stage.  He never went forth
without at least seventy galleys and a hundred other
vessels.”

Abeuchapeta drew himself up proudly. 
“Six-ninety-eight was my great year,” he said.

“That’s what I thought,” said Morgan. 
“That is to say, you got your ideas of women twelve hundred
years ago, and the ladies have changed somewhat since that
time.  I have great respect for you, sir, as a
ruffian.  I have no doubt that as a ruffian you are a
complete success, but when it comes to ‘feminology’
you are sailing in unknown waters.  The study of women, my
dear Abeuchadnezzar—”

“Peta,” retorted Abeuchapeta, irritably.

“I stand corrected.  The study of women, my dear
Peter,” said Morgan, with a wink at Conrad, which
fortunately the seventh-century pirate did not see, else there
would have been an open break—“the study of women is
more difficult than that of astronomy; there may be two stars
alike, but all women are unique.  Because she was this,
that, or the other thing in your day does not prove that she is
any one of those things in our day—in fact, it proves the
contrary.  Why, I venture even to say that no individual
woman is alike.”

“That’s rather a hazy thought,” said Kidd,
scratching his head in a puzzled sort of way.

“I mean that she’s different from herself at
different times,” said Morgan.  “What is it the
poet called her?—‘an infinite variety show,’ or
something of that sort; a perpetual vaudeville—a continuous
performance, as it were, from twelve to twelve.”

“Morgan is right, admiral!” put in Conrad the
corsair, acting temporarily as bo’sun.  “The
times are sadly changed, and woman is no longer what she
was.  She is hardly what she is, much less what she
was.  The Roman Gynæceum would be an impossibility
to-day.  You might as well expect Delilah to open a
barber-shop on board this boat as ask any of these advanced
females below-stairs to sew buttons on a pirate’s uniform
after a fray, or to keep the fringe on his epaulets curled. 
They’re no longer sewing-machines—they are Keeley
motors for mystery and perpetual motion.  Women have views
now they are no longer content to be looked at merely; they must
see for themselves; and the more they see, the more they wish to
domesticate man and emancipate woman.  It’s my private
opinion that if we are to get along with them at all the best
thing to do is to let ’em alone.  I have always found
I was better off in the abstract, and if this question is going
to be settled in a purely democratic fashion by submitting it to
a vote, I’ll vote for any measure which involves leaving
them strictly to themselves.  They’re nothing but a
lot of ghosts anyhow, like ourselves, and we can pretend we
don’t see them.”

“If that could be, it would be excellent,” said
Morgan; “but it is impossible.  For a pirate of the
Byronic order, my dear Conrad, you are strangely unversed in the
ways of the sex which cheers but not inebriates.  We can no
more ignore their presence upon this boat than we can expect
whales to spout kerosene.  In the first place, it would be
excessively impolite of us to cut them—to decline to speak
to them if they should address us.  We may be pirates,
ruffians, cutthroats, but I hope we shall never forget that we
are gentlemen.”

“The whole situation is rather contrary to etiquette,
don’t you think?” suggested Conrad. 
“There’s nobody to introduce us, and I can’t
really see how we can do otherwise than ignore them.  I
certainly am not going to stand on deck and make eyes at them, to
try and pick up an acquaintance with them, even if I am of a
Byronic strain.”

“You forget,” said Kidd, “two essential
features of the situation.  These women are at
present—or shortly will be, when they realize their
situation—in distress, and a true gentleman may always fly
to the rescue of a distressed female; and, the second point, we
shall soon be on the seas, and I understand that on the
fashionable transatlantic lines it is now considered de
rigueur to speak to anybody you choose to.  The
introduction business isn’t going to stand in my
way.”

“Well, may I ask,” put in Abeuchapeta, “just
what it is that is worrying you?  You said something about
feeding them, and dressing them, and keeping them in
bonnets.  I fancy there’s fish enough in the sea to
feed ’em; and as for their gowns and hats, they can make
’em themselves.  Every woman is a milliner at
heart.”

“Exactly, and we’ll have to pay the
milliners.  That is what bothers me.  I was going to
lead this expedition to London, Paris, and New York,
admiral.  That is where the money is, and to get it
you’ve got to go ashore, to headquarters.  You cannot
nowadays find it on the high seas.  Modern
civilization,” said Kidd, “has ruined the
pirate’s business.  The latest news from the other
world has really opened my eyes to certain facts that I never
dreamed of.  The conditions of the day of which I speak are
interestingly shown in the experience of our friend Hawkins
here.  Captain Hawkins, would you have any objection to
stating to these gentlemen the condition of affairs which led you
to give up piracy on the high seas?”

“Not the slightest, Captain Kidd,” returned
Captain Hawkins, who was a recent arrival in Hades. 
“It is a sad little story, and it gives me a pain for to
think on it, but none the less I’ll tell it, since you ask
me.  When I were a mere boy, fellow-pirates, I had but one
ambition, due to my readin’, which was confined to stories
of a Sunday-school nater—to become somethin’
different from the little Willies an’ the clever Tommies
what I read about therein.  They was all good, an’
they went to their reward too soon in life for me, who even in
them days regarded death as a stuffy an’ unpleasant
diversion.  Learnin’ at an early period that virtue
was its only reward, an’ a-wish-in’ others, I says to
myself: ‘Jim,’ says I, ‘if you wishes to become
a magnet in this village, be sinful.  If so be as you are a
good boy, an’ kind to your sister an’ all other
animals, you’ll end up as a prosperous father with fifteen
hundred a year sure, with never no hope for no public preferment
beyond bein’ made the super-intendent of the Sunday-school;
but if so be as how you’re bad, you may become famous,
an’ go to Congress, an’ have your picture in the
Sunday noospapers.’  So I looks around for books
tellin’ how to get ‘Famous in Fifty Ways,’
an’ after due reflection I settles in my mind that to be a
pirate’s just the thing for me, seein’ as how
it’s both profitable an’ healthy. 
Pass-in’ over details, let me tell you that I became a
pirate.  I ran away to sea, an’ by dint of
perseverance, as the Sunday-school book useter say, in my badness
I soon became the centre of a evil lot; an’ when I says to
’em, ‘Boys, I wants to be a pirate chief,’ they
hollers back, loud like, ‘Jim, we’re with you,’
an’ they was.  For years I was the terror of the
Venezuelan Gulf, the Spanish Main, an’ the Pacific seas,
but there was precious little money into it.  The best pay I
got was from a Sunday noospaper which paid me well to sign an
article on ‘Modern Piracy’ which I didn’t
write.  Finally business got so bad the crew began to
murmur, an’ I was at my wits’ ends to please
’em; when one mornin’, havin’ passed a restless
night, I picks up a noospaper and sees in it that ‘Next
Saturday’s steamer is a weritable treasure-ship,
takin’ out twelve million dollars, and the jewels of a
certain prima donna valued at five hundred thousand.’ 
‘Here’s my chance,’ says I, an’ I goes to
sea and lies in wait for the steamer.  I captures her easy,
my crew bein’ hungry, an’ fightin according
like.  We steals the box a-hold-in’ the jewels
an’ the bag containin’ the millions, hustles back to
our own ship, an’ makes for our rondyvoo, me with two
bullets in my leg, four o’ my crew killed, and one
engin’ of my ship disabled by a shot—but happy. 
Twelve an’ a half millions at one break is enough to make
anybody happy.”

“I should say so,” said Abeuchapeta, with an
ecstatic shake of his head.  “I didn’t get that
in all my career.”

“Nor I,” sighed Kidd.  “But go on,
Hawkins.”

“Well, as I says,” continued Captain Hawkins,
“we goes to the rondyvoo to look over our booty. 
‘Captain ’Awkins,’ says my valet—for I
was a swell pirate, gents, an’ never travelled nowhere
without a man to keep my clothes brushed and the proper wrinkles
in my trousers—‘this ’ere twelve
millions,’ says he, ‘is werry light,’ says he,
carryin’ the bag ashore.  ‘I don’t care
how light it is, so long as it’s twelve millions,
Henderson,’ says I; but my heart sinks inside o’ me
at his words, an’ the minute we lands I sits down to
investigate right there on the beach.  I opens the bag,
an’ it’s the one I was after—but the twelve
millions!”

“Weren’t there?” cried Conrad.

“Yes, they was there,” sighed Hawkins, “but
every bloomin’ million was represented by a certified
check, an’ payable in London!”

“By Jingo!” cried Morgan.  “What
fearful luck!  But you had the prima donna’s
jewels.”

“Yes,” said Hawkins, with a moan.  “But
they was like all other prima donna’s jewels—for
advertisin’ purposes only, an’ made o’
gum-arabic!”

“Horrible!” said Abeuchapeta.  “And the
crew, what did they say?”

“They was a crew of a few words,” sighed
Hawkins.  “Werry few words, an’ not a civil word
in the lot—mostly adjectives of a profane kind.  When
I told ’em what had happened, they got mad at Fortune for
a-jiltin’ of ’em, an’—well, I came
here.  I was ’sas’inated that werry
night!”

“They killed you?” cried Morgan.

“A dozen times,” nodded Hawkins.  “They
always was a lavish lot.  I met death in all its most horrid
forms.  First they stabbed me, then they shot me, then they
clubbed me, and so on, endin’ up with a
lynchin’—but I didn’t mind much after the
first, which hurt a bit.  But now that I’m here
I’m glad it happened.  This life is sort of less
responsible than that other.  You can’t hurt a ghost
by shooting him, because there ain’t nothing to hurt,
an’ I must say I like bein’ a mere vision what
everybody can see through.”

“All of which interesting tale proves what?”
queried Abeuchapeta.

“That piracy on the sea is not profitable in these days
of the check banking system,” said Kidd.  “If
you can get a chance at real gold it’s all right, but
it’s of no earthly use to steal checks that people can stop
payment on.  Therefore it was my plan to visit the cities
and do a little freebooting there, where solid material wealth is
to be found.”

“Well?  Can’t we do it now?” asked
Abeuchapeta.

“Not with these women tagging after us,” returned
Kidd.  “If we went to London and lifted the whole Bank
of England, these women would have it spent on Regent Street
inside of twenty-four hours.”

“Then leave them on board,” said Abeuchapeta.

“And have them steal the ship!” retorted
Kidd.  “No.  There are but two things to
do.  Take ’em back, or land them in Paris.  Tell
them to spend a week on shore while we are provisioning. 
Tell ’em to shop to their hearts’ content, and while
they are doing it we can sneak off and leave them
stranded.”

“Splendid!” cried Morgan.

“But will they consent?” asked Abeuchapeta.

“Consent!  To shop?  In Paris?  For a
week?” cried Morgan.

“Ha, ha!” laughed Hawkins.  “Will they
consent!  Will a duck swim?”

And so it was decided, which was the first incident in the
career of the House-boat upon which the astute Mr. Sherlock
Holmes had failed to count.

p. 89VI

A CONFERENCE BELOW-STAIRS

When, with a resounding slam, the
door to the upper deck of the House-boat was shut in the faces of
queens Elizabeth and Cleopatra by the unmannerly Kidd, these
ladies turned and gazed at those who thronged the stairs behind
them in blank amazement, and the heart of Xanthippe, had one
chosen to gaze through that diaphanous person’s ribs, could
have been seen to beat angrily.

Queen Elizabeth was so excited at this wholly novel attitude
towards her regal self that, having turned, she sat down plump
upon the floor in the most unroyal fashion.

“Well!” she ejaculated.  “If this does
not surpass everything!  The idea of it!  Oh for one
hour of my olden power, one hour of the axe, one hour of the
block!”

“Get up,” retorted Cleopatra, “and let us
all return to the billiard-room and discuss this matter
calmly.  It is quite evident that something has happened of
which we wotted little when we came aboard this craft.”

“That is a good idea,” said Calpurnia, retreating
below.  “I can see through the window that we are in
motion.  The vessel has left her moorings, and is making
considerable headway down the stream, and the distinctly
masculine voices we have heard are indications to my mind that
the ship is manned, and that this is the result of design rather
than of accident.  Let us below.”

Elizabeth rose up and readjusted her ruff, which in the
excitement of the moment had been forced to assume a position
about her forehead which gave one the impression that its royal
wearer had suddenly donned a sombrero.

“Very well,” she said.  “Let us below;
but oh, for the axe!”

“Bring the lady an axe,” cried Xanthippe,
sarcastically.  “She wants to cut somebody.”

The sally was not greeted with applause.  The situation
was regarded as being too serious to admit of humor, and in
silence they filed back into the billiard-room, and, arranging
themselves in groups, stood about anxiously discussing the
situation.

“It’s getting rougher every minute,” sobbed
Ophelia.  “Look at those pool-balls!” 
These were in very truth chasing each other about the table in an
extraordinary fashion.  “And I wish I’d never
followed you horrid new creatures on board!” the poor girl
added, in an agony of despair.

“I believe we’ve crossed the bar already!”
said Cleopatra, gazing out of the window at a nasty choppy sea
that was adding somewhat to the disquietude of the fair
gathering.  “If this is merely a joke on the part of
the Associated Shades, it is a mighty poor one, and I think it is
time it should cease.”

“Oh, for an axe!” moaned Elizabeth, again.

“Excuse me, your Majesty,” put in Xanthippe. 
“You said that before, and I must say it is getting
tiresome.  You couldn’t do anything with an axe. 
Suppose you had one.  What earthly good would it do you, who
were accustomed to doing all your killing by proxy?  I
don’t believe, if you had the unmannerly person who slammed
the door in your face lying prostrate upon the billiard-table
here, you could hit him a square blow in the neck if you had a
hundred axes.  Delilah might as well cry for her scissors,
for all the good it would do us in our predicament.  If
Cleopatra had her asp with her it might be more to the
purpose.  One deadly little snake like that let loose on the
upper deck would doubtless drive these boors into the sea, and
even then our condition would not be bettered, for there
isn’t any of us that can sail a boat.  There
isn’t an old salt among us.”

“Too bad Mrs. Lot isn’t along,” giggled
Marguerite de Valois, whose Gallic spirits were by no means
overshadowed by the unhappy predicament in which she found
herself.

“I’m here,” piped up Mrs. Lot. 
“But I’m not that kind of a salt.”

“I am present,” said Mrs. Noah. 
“Though why I ever came I don’t know, for I vowed the
minute I set my foot on Ararat that dry land was good enough for
me, and that I’d never step aboard another boat as long as
I lived.  If, however, now that I am here, I can give you
the benefit of my nautical experience, you are all perfectly
welcome to it.”

“I’m sure we’re very much obliged for the
offer,” said Portia, “but in the emergency which has
arisen we cannot say how much obliged we are until we know what
your experience amounted to.  Before relying upon you we
ought to know how far that reliance can go—not that I lack
confidence in you, my dear madam, but that in an hour of peril
one must take care, to rely upon the oak, not upon the
reed.”

“The point is properly taken,” said Elizabeth,
“and I wish to say here that I am easier in my mind when I
realize that we have with us so level-headed a person as the lady
who has just spoken.  She has spoken truly and to the
point.  If I were to become queen again, I should make her
my attorney-general.  We must not go ahead impulsively, but
look at all things in a calm, judicial manner.”

“Which is pretty hard work with a sea like this
on,” remarked Ophelia, faintly, for she was getting a
trifle sallow, as indeed she might, for the House-boat was
beginning to roll tremendously with no alleviation save an
occasional pitch, which was an alleviation only in the sense that
it gave variety to their discomfort.  “I don’t
believe a chief-justice could look at things calmly and in a
judicial manner if he felt as I do.”

“Poor dear!” said the matronly Mrs. Noah,
sympathetically.  “I know exactly how you feel. 
I have been there myself.  The fourth day out I and my whole
family were in the same condition, except that Noah, my husband,
was so very far gone that I could not afford to yield.  I
nursed him for six days before he got his sea-legs on, and then
succumbed myself.”

“But,” gasped Ophelia, “that doesn’t
help me—

“It did my husband,” said Mrs. Noah.

“When he heard that the boys were seasick too, he
actually laughed and began to get better right away.  There
is really only one cure for the mal de mer, and that is
the fun of knowing that somebody else is suffering too.  If
some of you ladies would kindly yield to the seductions of the
sea, I think we could get this poor girl on her feet in an
instant.”

Unfortunately for poor Ophelia, there was no immediate
response to this appeal, and the unhappy young woman was forced
to suffer in solitude.

“We have no time for untimely diversions of this
sort,” snapped Xanthippe, with a scornful glance at the
suffering Ophelia, who, having retired to a comfortable lounge at
an end of the room, was evidently improving.  “I have
no sympathy with this habit some of my sex seem to have acquired
of succumbing to an immediate sensation of this
nature.”

“I hope to be pardoned for interrupting,” said
Mrs. Noah, with a great deal of firmness, “but I wish Mrs.
Socrates to understand that it is rather early in the voyage for
her to lay down any such broad principle as that, and for her own
sake to-morrow, I think it would be well if she withdrew the
sentiment.  There are certain things about a sea-voyage that
are more or less beyond the control of man or woman, and any one
who chides that poor suffering child on yonder sofa ought to be
more confident than Mrs. Socrates can possibly be that within an
hour she will not be as badly off.  People who live in glass
houses should not throw dice.”

“I shall never yield to anything so undignified as
seasickness, let me tell you that,” retorted
Xanthippe.  “Furthermore, the proverb is not as the
lady has quoted it.  ‘People who live in glass houses
should not throw stones’ is the proper version.”

“I was not quoting,” returned Mrs. Noah,
calmly.  “When I said that people who live in glass
houses should not throw dice, I meant precisely what I
said.  People who live in glass houses should not take
chances.  In assuming with such vainglorious positiveness
that she will not be seasick, the lady who has just spoken is
giving tremendous odds, as the boys used to say on the Ark when
we gathered about the table at night and began to make small
wagers on the day’s run.”

“I think we had better suspend this discussion,”
suggested Cleopatra.  “It is of no immediate interest
to any one but Ophelia, and I fancy she does not care to dwell
upon it at any great length.  It is more important that we
should decide upon our future course of action.  In the
first place, the question is who these people up on deck
are.  If they are the members of the club, we are all
right.  They will give us our scare, and land us safely
again at the pier.  In that event it is our womanly duty to
manifest no concern, and to seem to be aware of nothing unusual
in the proceeding.  It would never do to let them think that
their joke has been a good one.  If, on the other hand, as I
fear, we are the victims of some horde of ruffians, who have
pounced upon us unawares, and are going into the business of
abduction on a wholesale basis, we must meet treachery with
treachery, strategy with strategy.  I, for one, am perfectly
willing to make every man on board walk the plank; having
confidence in the seawomanship of Mrs. Noah and her ability to
steer us into port.”

“I am quite in accord with these views,” put in
Madame Récamier, “and I move you, Mrs. President,
that we organize a series of sub-committees—one on
treachery, with Lucretia Borgia and Delilah as members; one on
strategy, consisting of Portia and Queen Elizabeth; one on
navigation, headed by Mrs. Noah; with a final sub-committee on
reconnoitre, with Cassandra to look forward, and Mrs. Lot to look
aft—all of these subordinated to a central committee of
safety headed by Cleopatra and Calpurnia.  The rest of us
can then commit ourselves and our interests unreservedly to these
ladies, and proceed to enjoy ourselves without thought of the
morrow.”

“I second the motion,” said Ophelia, “with
the amendment that Madame Récamier be appointed chair-lady
of another sub-committee, on entertainment.”

The amendment was accepted, and the motion put.  It was
carried with an enthusiastic aye, and the organization was
complete.

The various committees retired to the several corners of the
room to discuss their individual lines of action, when a shadow
was observed to obscure the moonlight which had been streaming in
through the window.  The faces of Calpurnia and Cleopatra
blanched for an instant, as, immediately following upon this
apparition, a large bundle was hurled through the open port into
the middle of the room, and the shadow vanished.

“Is it a bomb?” cried several of the ladies at
once.

“Nonsense!” said Madame Récamier, jumping
lightly forward.  “A man doesn’t mind blowing a
woman up, but he’ll never blow himself up. 
We’re safe enough in that respect.  The thing looks to
me like a bundle of illustrated papers.”

“That’s what it is,” said Cleopatra who had
been investigating.  “It’s rather a discourteous
bit of courtesy, tossing them in through the window that way, I
think, but I presume they mean well.  Dear me,” she
added, as, having untied the bundle, she held one of the open
papers up before her, “how interesting!  All the
latest Paris fashions.  Humph!  Look at those sleeves,
Elizabeth.  What an impregnable fortress you would have been
with those sleeves added to your ruffs!”

“I should think they’d be very becoming,”
put in Cassandra, standing on her tip-toes and looking over
Cleopatra’s shoulder.  “That Watteau isn’t
bad, either, is it, now?”

“No,” remarked Calpurnia.  “I wonder
how a Watteau back like that would go on my blue
alpaca?”

“Very nicely,” said Elizabeth.  “How
many gores has it?”

“Five,” observed Calpurnia.  “One more
than Cæsar’s toga.  We had to have our costumes
distinct in some way.”

“A remarkable hat, that,” nodded Mrs. Lot, her eye
catching sight of a Virot creation at the top of the page.

“Reminds me of Eve’s description of an autumn
scene in the garden,” smiled Mrs. Noah. 
“Gorgeous in its foliage, beautiful thing; though I
shouldn’t have dared wear one in the Ark, with all those
hungry animals browsing about the upper and lower
decks.”

“I wonder,” remarked Cleopatra, as she cocked her
head to one side to take in the full effect of an attractive
summer gown—“I wonder how that waist would make up in
blue crépon, with a yoke of lace and a stylishly
contrasting stock of satin ribbon?”

“It would depend upon how you finished the
sleeves,” remarked Madame Récamier.  “If
you had a few puffs of rich brocaded satin set in with deeply
folded pleats it wouldn’t be bad.”

“I think it would be very effective,” observed
Mrs. Noah, “but a trifle too light for general wear. 
I should want some kind of a wrap with it.”

“It does need that,” assented Elizabeth. 
“A wrap made of passementerie and jet, with a mousseline de
soie ruche about the neck held by a chou, would make it
fascinating.”

“The committee on treachery is ready to report,”
said Delilah, rising from her corner, where she and Lucretia
Borgia had been having so animated a discussion that they had
failed to observe the others crowding about Cleopatra and the
papers.

“A little sombre,” said Cleopatra. 
“The corsage is effective, but I don’t like those
basque terminations.  I’ve never approved of those
full godets—”

“The committee on treachery,” remarked Delilah
again, raising her voice, “has a suggestion to
make.”

“I can’t get over those sleeves, though,”
laughed Helen of Troy.  “What is the use of
them?”

“They might be used to get Greeks into Troy,”
suggested Madame Récamier.

“The committee on treachery,” roared Delilah,
thoroughly angered by the absorption of the chairman and others,
“has a suggestion to make.  This is the third and last
call.”

“Oh, I beg pardon,” cried Cleopatra, rapping for
order.  “I had forgotten all about our
committees.  Excuse me, Delilah.  I—ah—was
absorbed in other matters.  Will you kindly lay your
pattern—I should say your plan—before us?”

“It is briefly this,” said Delilah. 
“It has been suggested that we invite the crew of this
vessel to a chafing-dish party, under the supervision of Lucretia
Borgia, and that she—”

The balance of the plan was not outlined, for at this point
the speaker was interrupted by a loud knocking at the door, its
instant opening, and the appearance in the doorway of that
ill-visaged ruffian Captain Kidd.

“Ladies,” he began, “I have come here to
explain to you the situation in which you find yourselves. 
Have I your permission to speak?”

The ladies started back, but the chairman was equal to the
occasion.

“Go on,” said Cleopatra, with queenly dignity,
turning to the interloper; and the pirate proceeded to take the
second step in the nefarious plan upon which he and his brother
ruffians had agreed, of which the tossing in through the window
of the bundle of fashion papers was the first.

p.
105VII

THE “GEHENNA” IS
CHARTERED

It was about twenty-four hours
after the events narrated in the preceding chapters that Mr.
Sherlock Holmes assumed command of the Gehenna, which was
nothing more nor less than the shadow of the ill-starred ocean
steamship City of Chicago, which tried some years ago to
reach Liverpool by taking the overland route through Ireland,
fortunately without detriment to her passengers and crew, who had
the pleasure of the experience of shipwreck without any of the
discomforts of drowning.  As will be remembered, the
obstructionist nature of the Irish soil prevented the City of
Chicago from proceeding farther inland than was necessary to
keep her well balanced amidships upon a convenient and not too
stony bed; and that after a brief sojourn on the rocks she was
finally disposed of to the Styx Navigation Company, under which
title Charon had had himself incorporated, is a matter of
nautical history.  The change of name to the Gehenna
was the act of Charon himself, and was prompted, no doubt, by a
desire to soften the jealous prejudices of the residents of the
Stygian capital against the flourishing and ever-growing
metropolis of Illinois.

The Associated Shades had had some trouble in getting this
craft.  Charon, through his constant association with life
on both sides of the dark river, had gained a knowledge, more or
less intimate, of modern business methods, and while as janitor
of the club he was subject to the will of the House-boat
Committee, and sympathized deeply with the members of the
association in their trouble, as president of the Styx Navigation
Company he was bound up in certain newly attained commercial
ideas which were embarrassing to those members of the association
to whose hands the chartering of a vessel had been committed.

“See here, Charon,” Sir Walter Raleigh had said,
after Charon had expressed himself as deeply sympathetic, but
unable to shave the terms upon which the vessel could be had,
“you are an infernal old hypocrite.  You go about
wringing your hands over our misfortunes until they’ve got
as dry and flabby as a pair of kid gloves, and yet when we ask
you for a ship of suitable size and speed to go out after those
pirates, you become a sort of twin brother to Shylock, without
his excuse.  His instincts are accidents of birth. 
Yours are cultivated, and you know it.”

“You are very much mistaken, Sir Walter,” Charon
had answered to this.  “You don’t understand my
position.  It is a very hard one.  As janitor of your
club I am really prostrated over the events of the past
twenty-four hours.  My occupation is gone, and my despair
over your loss is correspondingly greater, for I have time on my
hands to brood over it.  I was hysterical as a woman
yesterday afternoon—so hysterical that I came near
upsetting one of the Furies who engaged me to row her down to
Madame Medusa’s villa last evening; and right at the sluice
of the vitriol reservoir at that.”

“Then why the deuce don’t you do something to help
us?” pleaded Hamlet.

“How can I do any more than I have done? 
I’ve offered you the Gehenna,” retorted
Charon.

“But on what terms?” expostulated Raleigh. 
“If we had all the wealth of the Indies we’d have
difficulty in paying you the sums you demand.”

“But I am only president of the company,”
explained Charon.  “I’d like, as president, to
show you some courtesy, and I’m perfectly willing to do so;
but when it comes down to giving you a vessel like that,
I’m bound by my official oath to consider the interest of
the stockholders.  It isn’t as it used to be when I
had boats to hire in my own behalf alone.  In those days I
had nobody’s interest but my own to look after.  Now
the ships all belong to the Styx Navigation Company. 
Can’t you see the difference?”

“You own all the stock, don’t you?” insisted
Raleigh.

“I don’t know,” Charon answered,
blandly.  “I haven’t seen the transfer-books
lately.”

“But you know that you did own every share of it, and
that you haven’t sold any, don’t you?” put in
Hamlet.

Charon was puzzled for a moment, but shortly his face cleared,
and Sir Walter’s heart sank, for it was evident that the
old fellow could not be cornered.

“Well, it’s this way, Sir Walter, and your
Highness,” he said, “I—I can’t say
whether any of that stock has been transferred or not.  The
fact is, I’ve been speculating a little on margin, and
I’ve put up that stock as security, and, for all I know, I
may have been sold out by my brokers.  I’ve been so
upset by this unfortunate occurrence that I haven’t seen
the market reports for two days.  Really you’ll have
to be content with my offer or go without the
Gehenna.  There’s too much suspicion attached
to high corporate officials lately for me to yield a jot in the
position I have taken.  It would never do to get you all
ready to start, and then have an injunction clapped on you by
some unforeseen stockholder who was not satisfied with the terms
offered you; nor can I ever let it be said of me that to retain
my position as janitor of your organization I sacrificed a trust
committed to my charge.  I’ll gladly lend you my
private launch, though I don’t think it will aid you much,
because the naphtha-tank has exploded, and the screw slipped off
and went to the bottom two weeks ago.  Still, it is at your
service, and I’ve no doubt that either Phidias or Benvenuto
Cellini will carve out a paddle for you if you ask him
to.”

“Bah!” retorted Raleigh.  “You might as
well offer us a pair of skates.”

“I would, if I thought the river’d freeze,”
retorted Charon, blandly.

Raleigh and Hamlet turned away impatiently and left Charon to
his own devices, which for the time being consisted largely of
winking his other eye quietly and outwardly making a great show
of grief.

“He’s too canny for us, I am afraid,” said
Sir Walter.  “We’ll have to pay him his
money.”

“Let us first consult Sherlock Holmes,” suggested
Hamlet, and this they proceeded at once to do.

“There is but one thing to be done,” observed the
astute detective after he had heard Sir Walter’s statement
of the case.  “It is an old saying that one should
fight fire with fire.  We must meet modern business methods
with modern commercial ideas.  Charter his vessel at his own
price.”

“But we’d never be able to pay,” said
Hamlet.

“Ha-ha!” laughed Holmes.  “It is
evident that you know nothing of the laws of trade
nowadays.  Don’t pay!”

“But how can we?” asked Raleigh.

“The method is simple.  You haven’t anything
to pay with,” returned Holmes.  “Let him
sue.  Suppose he gets a verdict.  You haven’t
anything he can attach—if you have, make it over to your
wives or your fiancées.”

“Is that honest?” asked Hamlet, shaking his head
doubtfully.

“It’s business,” said Holmes.

“But suppose he wants an advance payment?” queried
Hamlet.

“Give him a check drawn to his own order. 
He’ll have to endorse it when he deposits it, and that will
make him responsible,” laughed Holmes.

“What a simple thing when you understand it!”
commented Raleigh.

“Very,” said Holmes.  “Business is
getting by slow degrees to be an exact science.  It reminds
me of the Brighton mystery, in which I played a modest part some
ten years ago, when I first took up ferreting as a
profession.  I was sitting one night in my room at one of
the Brighton hotels, which shall be nameless.  I never give
the name of any of the hotels at which I stop, because it might
give offence to the proprietors of other hotels, with the result
that my books would be excluded from sale therein.  Suffice
it to say that I was spending an early summer Sunday at Brighton
with my friend Watson.  We had dined well, and were enjoying
our evening smoke together upon a small balcony overlooking the
water, when there came a timid knock on the door of my room.

“‘Watson,’ said I, ‘here comes some
one for advice.  Do you wish to wager a small bottle upon
it?’

“‘Yes,’ he answered, with a smile. 
‘I am thirsty and I’d like a small bottle; and while
I do not expect to win, I’ll take the bet.  I should
like to know, though, how you know.’

“‘It is quite simple,’ said I. 
‘The timidity of the knock shows that my visitor is one of
two classes of persons—an autograph-hunter or a client, one
of the two.  You see I give you a chance to win.  It
may be an autograph-hunter, but I think it is a client.  If
it were a creditor, he would knock boldly, even ostentatiously;
if it were the maid, she would not knock at all; if it were the
hall-boy, he would not come until I had rung five times for
him.  None of these things has occurred; the knock is the
half-hearted knock which betokens either that the person who
knocked is in trouble, or is uncertain as to his reception. 
I am willing, however, considering the heat and my desire to
quench my thirst, to wager that it is a client.’

“‘Done,’ said Watson; and I immediately
remarked, ‘Come in.’

“The door opened, and a man of about thirty-five years
of age, in a bathing-suit, entered the room, and I saw at a
glance what had happened.

“‘Your name is Burgess,’ I said. 
‘You came here from London this morning, expecting to
return to-night.  You brought no luggage with you. 
After luncheon you went bathing.  You had machine No. 35,
and when you came out of the water you found that No. 35 had
disappeared, with your clothes and the silver watch your uncle
gave you on the day you succeeded to his business.’

“Of course, gentlemen,” observed the detective,
with a smile at Sir Walter and Hamlet—“of course the
man fairly gasped, and I continued: ‘You have been lying
face downward in the sand ever since, waiting for nightfall, so
that you could come to me for assistance, not considering it good
form to make an afternoon call upon a stranger at his hotel, clad
in a bathing-suit.  Am I correct?’

“‘Sir,’ he replied, with a look of wonder,
‘you have narrated my story exactly as it happened, and I
find I have made no mistake in coming to you.  Would you
mind telling me what is your course of reasoning?’

“‘It is plain as day,’ said I. 
‘I am the person with the red beard with whom you came down
third class from London this morning, and you told me your name
was Burgess and that you were a butcher.  When you looked to
see the time, I remarked upon the oddness of your watch, which
led to your telling me that it was the gift of your
uncle.’

“‘True,’ said Burgess, ‘but I did not
tell you I had no luggage.’

“‘No,’ said I, ‘but that you
hadn’t is plain; for if you had brought any other clothing
besides that you had on with you, you would have put it on to
come here.  That you have been robbed I deduce also from
your costume.’

“‘But the number of the machine?’ asked
Watson.

“‘Is on the tag on the key hanging about his
neck,’ said I.

“‘One more question,’ queried Burgess. 
‘How do you know I have been lying face downward on the
beach ever since?’

“‘By the sand in your eyebrows,’ I replied;
and Watson ordered up the small bottle.”

“I fail to see what it was in our conversation,
however,” observed Hamlet, somewhat impatient over the
delay caused by the narration of this tale, “that suggested
this train of thought to you.”

“The sequel will show,” returned Holmes.

“Oh, Lord!” put in Raleigh. 
“Can’t we put off the sequel until a later
issue?  Remember, Mr. Holmes, that we are constantly losing
time.”

“The sequel is brief, and I can narrate it on our way to
the office of the Navigation Company,” observed the
detective.  “When the bottle came I invited Mr.
Burgess to join us, which he did, and as the hour was late when
we came to separate, I offered him the use of my parlor
overnight.  This he accepted, and we retired.

“The next morning when I arose to dress, the mystery was
cleared.”

“You had dreamed its solution?” asked Raleigh.

“No,” replied Holmes.  “Burgess had
disappeared with all my clothing, my false-beard, my suit-case,
and my watch.  The only thing he had left me was the
bathing-suit and a few empty small bottles.”

“And why, may I ask,” put in Hamlet, as they drew
near to Charon’s office—“why does that case
remind you of business as it is conducted to-day?”

“In this, that it is a good thing to stay out of unless
you know it all,” explained Holmes.  “I omitted
in the case of Burgess to observe one thing about him.  Had
I observed that his nose was rectilinear, incurved, and with a
lifted base, and that his auricular temporal angle was between 96
and 97 degrees, I should have known at once that he was an
impostor Vide Ottolenghui on ‘Ears and Noses I Have
Met,’ pp. 631–640.”

“Do you mean to say that you can tell a criminal by his
ears?” demanded Hamlet.

“If he has any—yes; but I did not know that at the
time of the Brighton mystery.  Therefore I should have
stayed out of the case.  But here we are. 
Good-morning, Charon.”

By this time the trio had entered the private office of the
president of the Styx Navigation Company, and in a few moments
the vessel was chartered at a fabulous price.

On the return to the wharf, Sir Walter somewhat nervously
asked Holmes if he thought the plan they had settled upon would
work.

“Charon is a very shrewd old fellow,” said
he.  “He may outwit us yet.”

“The chances are just two and one-eighth degrees in your
favor,” observed Holmes, quietly, with a glance at
Raleigh’s ears.  “The temporal angle of your
ears is 93.125 degrees, whereas Charon’s stand out at 91,
by my otometer.  To that extent your criminal instincts are
superior to his.  If criminology is an exact science,
reasoning by your respective ears, you ought to beat him out by a
perceptible though possibly narrow margin.”

With which assurance Raleigh went ahead with his preparations,
and within twelve hours the Gehenna was under way,
carrying a full complement of crew and officers, with every
state-room on board occupied by some spirit of the more
illustrious kind.

Even Shylock was on board, though no one knew it, for in the
dead of night he had stolen quietly up the gang-plank and had
hidden himself in an empty water-cask in the forecastle.

“’Tisn’t Venice,” he said, as he sat
down and breathed heavily through the bung of the barrel,
“but it’s musty and damp enough, and, considering the
cost, I can’t complain.  You can’t get something
for nothing, even in Hades.”

p.
121VIII

ON BOARD THE
“GEHENNA”

When the Gehenna had passed
down the Styx and out through the beautiful Cimmerian Harbor into
the broad waters of the ocean, and everything was comparatively
safe for a while at least, Sherlock Holmes came down from the
bridge, where he had taken his place as the commander of the
expedition at the moment of departure.  His brow was
furrowed with anxiety, and through his massive forehead his brain
could be seen to be throbbing violently, and the corrugations of
his gray matter were not pleasant to witness as he tried vainly
to squeeze an idea out of them.

“What is the matter?” asked Demosthenes,
anxiously.  “We are not in any danger, are
we?”

“No,” replied Holmes.  “But I am
somewhat puzzled at the bubbles on the surface of the ocean, and
the ripples which we passed over an hour or two ago, barely
perceptible through the most powerful microscope, indicate to my
mind that for some reason at present unknown to me the House-boat
has changed her course.  Take that bubble floating by. 
It is the last expiring bit of aerial agitation of the
House-boat’s wake.  Observe whence it comes.  Not
from the Azores quarter, but as if instead of steering a straight
course thither the House-boat had taken a sharp turn to the
north-east, and was making for Havre; or, in other words, Paris
instead of London seems to have become their
destination.”

Demosthenes looked at Holmes with blank amazement, and, to
keep from stammering out the exclamation of wonder that rose to
his lips, he opened his bonbonnière and swallowed a
pebble.

“You don’t happen to have a cocaine tablet in your
box, do you?” queried Holmes.

“No,” returned the Greek.  “Cocaine
makes me flighty and nervous, but these pebbles sort of ballast
me and hold me down.  How on earth do you know that that
bubble comes from the wake of the House-boat?”

“By my chemical knowledge, merely,” replied
Holmes.  “A merely worldly vessel leaves a
phosphorescent bubble in its wake.  That one we have just
discovered is not so, but sulphurescent, if I may coin a word
which it seems to me the English language is very much in need
of.  It proves, then, that the bubble is a portion of the
wake of a Stygian craft, and the only Stygian craft that has
cleared the Cimmerian Harbor for years is the House-boat—Q.
E. D.”

“We can go back until we find the ripple again, and
follow that, I presume,” sneered Le Coq, who did not take
much stock in the theories of his great rival, largely because he
was a detective by intuition rather than by study of the
science.

“You can if you want to, but it is better not to,”
rejoined Holmes, simply, as though not observing the sneer,
“because the ripple represents the outer lines of the angle
of disturbance in the water; and as any one of the sides to an
angle is greater than the perpendicular from the hypothenuse to
the apex, you’d merely be going the long way.  This is
especially important when you consider the formation of the bow
of the House-boat, which is rounded like the stern of most
vessels, and comes near to making a pair of ripples at an angle
of ninety degrees.”

“Then,” observed Sir Walter, with a sigh of
disappointment, “we must change our course and sail for
Paris?”

“I am afraid so,” said Holmes; “but of
course it’s by no means certain as yet.  I think if
Columbus would go up into the mizzentop and look about him, he
might discover something either in confirmation or refutation of
the theory.”

“He couldn’t discover anything,” put in
Pinzon.  “He never did.”

“Well, I like that!” retorted Columbus. 
“I’d like to know who discovered America.”

“So should I,” observed Leif Ericson, with a wink
at Vespucci.

“Tut!” retorted Columbus.  “I did it,
and the world knows it, whether you claim it or not.”

“Yes, just as Noah discovered Ararat,” replied
Pinzon.  “You sat upon the deck until we ran plumb
into an island, after floating about for three months, and then
you couldn’t tell it from a continent, even when you had it
right before your eyes.  Noah might just as well have told
his family that he discovered a roof garden as for you to go back
to Spain telling ’em all that San Salvador was the United
States.”

“Well, I don’t care,” said Columbus, with a
short laugh.  “I’m the one they celebrate, so
what’s the odds?  I’d rather stay down here in
the smoking-room enjoying a small game, anyhow, than climb up
that mast and strain my eyes for ten or a dozen hours looking for
evidence to prove or disprove the correctness of another
man’s theory.  I wouldn’t know evidence when I
saw it, anyhow.  Send Judge Blackstone.”

“I draw the line at the mizzentop,” observed
Blackstone.  “The dignity of the bench must and shall
be preserved, and I’ll never consent to climb up that
rigging, getting pitch and paint on my ermine, no matter who asks
me to go.”

“Whomsoever I tell to go, shall go,” put in
Holmes, firmly.  “I am commander of this ship. 
It will pay you to remember that, Judge Blackstone.”

“And I am the Court of Appeals,” retorted
Blackstone, hotly.  “Bear that in mind, captain, when
you try to send me up.  I’ll issue a writ of habeas
corpus on my own body, and commit you for
contempt.”

“There’s no use of sending the Judge,
anyhow,” said Raleigh, fearing by the glitter that came
into the eye of the commander that trouble might ensue unless
pacificatory measures were resorted to.  “He’s
accustomed to weighing everything carefully, and cannot be rushed
into a decision.  If he saw any evidence, he’d have to
sit on it a week before reaching a conclusion.  What we need
here more than anything else is an expert seaman, a lookout, and
I nominate Shem.  He has sailed under his father, and I have
it on good authority that he is a nautical expert.”

Holmes hesitated for an instant.  He was considering the
necessity of disciplining the recalcitrant Blackstone, but he
finally yielded.

“Very well,” he said.  “Shem be
it.  Bo’sun, pipe Shem on deck, and tell him that
general order number one requires him to report at the mizzentop
right away, and that immediately he sees anything he shall come
below and make it known to me.  As for the rest of us,
having a very considerable appetite, I do now decree that it is
dinner-time.  Shall we go below?”

“I don’t think I care for any, thank you,”
said Raleigh.  “Fact is—ah—I dined last
week, and am not hungry.”

Noah laughed.  “Oh, come below and watch us eat,
then,” he said.  “It’ll do you
good.”

But there was no reply.  Raleigh had plunged head first
into his state-room, which fortunately happened to be on the
upper deck.  The rest of the spirits repaired below to the
saloon, where they were soon engaged in an animated discussion of
such viands as the larder provided.

“This,” said Dr. Johnson, from the head of the
table, “is what I call comfort.  I don’t know
that I am so anxious to recover the House-boat, after
all.”

“Nor I,” said Socrates, “with a ship like
this to go off cruising on, and with such a larder.  Look at
the thickness of that puree, Doctor—”

“Excuse me,” said Boswell, faintly, “but
I—I’ve left my note—bub—book upstairs,
Doctor, and I’d like to go up and get it.”

“Certainly,” said Dr. Johnson.  “I
judge from your color, which is highly suggestive of a modern
magazine poster, that it might be well too if you stayed on deck
for a little while and made a few entries in your commonplace
book.”

“Thank you,” said Boswell, gratefully. 
“Shall you say anything clever during dinner, sir?  If
so, I might be putting it down while I’m
up—”

“Get out!” roared the Doctor.  “Get up
as high as you can—get up with Shem on the
mizzentop—”

“Very good, sir,” replied Boswell, and he was
off.

“You ought to be more lenient with him, Doctor,”
said Bonaparte; “he means well.”

“I know it,” observed Johnson; “but
he’s so very previous.  Last winter, at
Chaucer’s dinner to Burns, I made a speech, which Boswell
printed a week before it was delivered, with the words
‘laughter’ and ‘uproarious applause’
interspersed through it.  It placed me in a false
position.”

“How did he know what you were going to say?”
queried Demosthenes.

“Don’t know,” replied Johnson. 
“Kind of mind-reader, I fancy,” he added, blushing a
trifle.  “But, Captain Holmes, what do you deduce from
your observation of the wake of the House-boat?  If
she’s going to Paris, why the change?”

“I have two theories,” replied the detective.

“Which is always safe,” said Le Coq.

“Always; it doubles your chances of success,”
acquiesced Holmes.  “Anyhow, it gives you a choice,
which makes it more interesting.  The change of her course
from Londonward to Parisward proves to me either that Kidd is not
satisfied with the extent of the revenge he has already taken,
and wishes to ruin you gentlemen financially by turning your
wives, daughters, and sisters loose on the Parisian shops, or
that the pirates have themselves been overthrown by the ladies,
who have decided to prolong their cruise and get some fun out of
their misfortune.”

“And where else than to Paris would any one in search of
pleasure go?” asked Bonaparte.

“I had more fun a few miles outside of Brussels,”
said Wellington, with a sly wink at Washington.

“Oh, let up on that!” retorted Bonaparte. 
“It wasn’t you beat me at Waterloo.  You
couldn’t have beaten me at a plain ordinary game of
old-maid with a stacked pack of cards, much less in the game of
war, if you hadn’t had the elements with you.”

“Tut!” snapped Wellington.  “It was
clear science laid you out, Boney.”

“Taisey-voo!” shouted the irate Corsican. 
“Clear science be hanged!  Wet science was what did
it.  If it hadn’t been for the rain, my little Duke, I
should have been in London within a week, my grenadiers would
have been camping in your Rue Peekadeely, and the Old Guard all
over everywhere else.”

“You must have had a gay army, then,” laughed
Cæsar.  “What are French soldiers made of, that
they can’t stand the wet—unshrunk linen or
flannel?”

“Bah!” observed Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders
and walking a few paces away.  “You do not understand
the French.  The Frenchman is not a pell-mell soldier like
you Romans; he is the poet of arms; he does not go in for glory
at the expense of his dignity; style, form, is dearer to him than
honor, and he has no use for fighting in the wet and coming out
of the fight conspicuous as a victor with the curl out of his
feathers and his epaulets rusted with the damp.  There is no
glory in water.  But if we had had umbrellas and
mackintoshes, as every Englishman who comes to the Continent
always has, and a bath-tub for everybody, then would your
Waterloo have been different again, and the great democracy of
Europe with a Bonaparte for emperor would have been founded for
what the Americans call the keeps; and as for your little Great
Britain, ha! she would have become the Blackwell’s Island
of the Greater France.”

“You’re almost as funny as Punch
isn’t,” drawled Wellington, with an angry gesture at
Bonaparte.  “You weren’t within telephoning
distance of victory all day.  We simply played with you, my
boy.  It was a regular game of golf for us.  We let you
keep up pretty close and win a few holes, but on the home drive
we had you beaten in one stroke.  Go to, my dear Bonaparte,
and stop talking about the flood.”

“It’s a lucky thing for us that Noah wasn’t
a Frenchman, eh?” said Frederick the Great. 
“How that rain would have fazed him if he had been! 
The human race would have been wiped out.”

“Oh, pshaw!” ejaculated Noah, deprecating the
unseemliness of the quarrel, and putting his arm affectionately
about Bonaparte’s shoulder.  “When you come down
to that, I was French—as French as one could be in those
days—and these Gallic subjects of my friend here were,
every one of ’em, my lineal descendants, and their hatred
of rain was inherited directly from me, their
ancestor.”

“Are not we English as much your descendants?”
queried Wellington, arching his eyebrows.

“You are,” said Noah, “but you take after
Mrs. Noah more than after me.  Water never fazes a woman,
and your delight in tubs is an essentially feminine trait. 
The first thing Mrs. Noah carried aboard was a laundry outfit,
and then she went back for rugs and coats and all sorts of
hand-baggage.  Gad, it makes me laugh to this day when I
think of it!  She looked for all the world like an
Englishman travelling on the Continent as she walked up the
gang-plank behind the elephants, each elephant with a Gladstone
bag in his trunk and a hat-box tied to his tail.” 
Here the venerable old weather-prophet winked at Munchausen, and
the little quarrel which had been imminent passed off in a
general laugh.

“Where’s Boswell?  He ought to get that
anecdote,” said Johnson.

“I’ve locked him up in the library,” said
Holmes.  “He’s in charge of the log, and as I
have a pretty good general idea as to what is about to happen, I
have mapped out a skeleton of the plot and set him to work
writing it up.”  Here the detective gave a sudden
start, placed his hand to his ear, listened intently for an
instant, and, taking out his watch and glancing at it, added,
quietly, “In three minutes Shem will be in here to announce
a discovery, and one of great importance, I judge, from the
squeak.”

The assemblage gazed earnestly at Holmes for a moment.

“The squeak?” queried Raleigh.

“Precisely,” said Holmes.  “The squeak
is what I said, and as I always say what I mean, it follows
logically that I meant what I said.”

“I heard no squeak,” observed Dr. Johnson;
“and, furthermore, I fail to see how a squeak, if I had
heard it, would have portended a discovery of
importance.”

“It would not—to you,” said Holmes;
“but with me it is different.  My hearing is unusually
acute.  I can hear the dropping of a pin through a stone
wall ten feet thick; any sound within a mile of my eardrum
vibrates thereon with an intensity which would surprise you, and
it is by the use of cocaine that I have acquired this wonderfully
acute sense.  A property which dulls the senses of most
people renders mine doubly apprehensive; therefore, gentlemen,
while to you there was no auricular disturbance, to me there
was.  I heard Shem sliding down the mast a minute
since.  The fact that he slid down the mast instead of
climbing down the rigging showed that he was in great haste,
therefore he must have something to communicate of great
importance.”

“Why isn’t he here already, then?  It
wouldn’t take him two minutes to get from the deck
here,” asked the ever-auspicious Le Coq.

“It is simple,” returned Holmes, calmly. 
“If you will go yourself and slide down that mast you will
see.  Shem has stopped for a little witch-hazel to soothe
his burns.  It is no cool matter sliding down a mast two
hundred feet in height.”

As Sherlock Holmes spoke the door burst open and Shem rushed
in.

“A signal of distress, captain!” he cried.

“From what quarter—to larboard?” asked
Holmes.

“No,” returned Shem, breathless.

“Then it must be dead ahead,” said Holmes.

“Why not to starboard?” asked Le Coq, dryly.

“Because,” answered Holmes, confidently, “it
never happens so.  If you had ever read a truly exciting
sea-tale, my dear Le Coq, you would have known that interesting
things, and particularly signals of distress, are never seen
except to larboard or dead ahead.”

A murmur of applause greeted this retort, and Le Coq
subsided.

“The nature of the signal?” demanded Holmes.

“A black flag, skull and cross-bones down, at
half-mast!” cried Shem, “and on a rock-bound
coast!”

“They’re marooned, by heavens!” shouted
Holmes, springing to his feet and rushing to the deck, where he
was joined immediately by Sir Walter, Dr. Johnson, Bonaparte, and
the others.

“Isn’t he a daisy?” whispered Demosthenes to
Diogenes as they climbed the stairs.

“He is more than that; he’s a blooming
orchid,” said Diogenes, with intense enthusiasm. 
“I think I’ll get my X-ray lantern and see if
he’s honest.”

p.
139IX

CAPTAIN KIDD MEETS WITH AN
OBSTACLE

“Excuse me, your
Majesty,” remarked Helen of Troy as Cleopatra accorded
permission to Captain Kidd to speak, “I have not been
introduced to this gentleman nor has he been presented to me, and
I really cannot consent to any proceeding so irregular as
this.  I do not speak to gentlemen I have not met, nor do I
permit them to address me.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Xanthippe.  “I
quite agree with the principle of my young friend from
Troy.  It may be that when we claimed for ourselves all the
rights of men that the right to speak and be spoken to by other
men without an introduction will included in the list, but I for
one have no desire to avail myself of the privilege, especially
when it’s a horrid-looking man like this.”

Kidd bowed politely, and smiled so terribly that several of
the ladies fainted.

“I will withdraw,” he said, turning to Cleopatra;
and it must be said that his suggestion was prompted by his
heartfelt wish, for now that he found himself thus conspicuously
brought before so many women, with falsehood on his lips, his
courage began to ooze.

“Not yet, please,” answered the chairlady. 
“I imagine we can get about this difficulty without much
trouble.”

“I think it a perfectly proper objection too,”
observed Delilah, rising.  “If we ever needed
etiquette we need it now.  But I have a plan which will
obviate any further difficulty.  If there is no one among us
who is sufficiently well acquainted with the gentleman to present
him formally to us, I will for the time being take upon myself
the office of ship’s barber and cut his hair.  I
understand that it is quite the proper thing for barbers to talk,
while cutting their hair, to persons to whom they have not been
introduced.  And, besides, he really needs a hair-cut
badly.  Thus I shall establish an acquaintance with the
captain, after which I can with propriety introduce him to the
rest of you.”

“Perhaps the gentleman himself might object to
that,” put in Queen Elizabeth.  “If I remember
rightly, your last customer was very much dissatisfied with the
trim you gave him.”

“It will be unnecessary to do what Delilah
proposes,” said Mrs. Noah, with a kindly smile, as she rose
up from the corner in which she had been sitting, an interested
listener.  “I can introduce the gentleman to you all
with perfect propriety.  He’s a member of my
family.  His grandfather was the great-grandson a thousand
and eight times removed of my son Shem’s great-grandnephew
on his father’s side.  His relationship to me is
therefore obvious, though from what I know of his reputation I
think he takes more after my husband’s ancestors than my
own.  Willie, dear, these ladies are friends of mine. 
Ladies, this young man is one of my most famous
descendants.  He has been a man of many adventures, and he
has been hanged once, which, far from making him undesirable as
an acquaintance, has served merely to render him harmless, and
therefore a safe person to know.  Now, my son, go ahead and
speak your piece.”

The good old spirit sat down, and the scruples of the
objectors having thus been satisfied, Captain Kidd began.

“Now that I know you all,” he remarked, as
pleasantly as he could under the circumstances, “I feel
that I can speak more freely, and certainly with a great deal
less embarrassment than if I were addressing a gathering of
entire strangers.  I am not much of a hand at speaking, and
have always felt somewhat nonplussed at finding myself in a
position of this nature.  In my whole career I never
experienced but one irresistible impulse to make a public address
of any length, and that was upon that unhappy occasion to which
the greatest and grandest of my great-grandmothers has alluded,
and that only as the chain by which I was suspended in mid-air
tightened about my vocal chords.  At that moment I could
have talked impromptu for a year, so fast and numerously did
thoughts of the uttermost import surge upward into my brain; but
circumstances over which I had no control prevented the utterance
of those thoughts, and that speech is therefore lost to the
world.”

“He has the gift of continuity,” observed Madame
Récamier.

“Ought to be in the United States Senate,” smiled
Elizabeth.

“I wish I could make up my mind as to whether he is
outrageously handsome or desperately ugly,” remarked Helen
of Troy.  “He fascinates me, but whether it is the
fascination of liking or of horror I can’t tell, and
it’s quite important.”

“Ladies,” resumed the captain, his uneasiness
increasing as he came to the point, “I am but the agent of
your respective husbands, fiancés, and other
masculine guardians.  The gentlemen who were previously the
tenants of this club-house have delegated to me the important,
and I may add highly agreeable, task of showing you the
world.  They have noted of late years the growth of that
feeling of unrest which is becoming every day more and more
conspicuous in feminine circles in all parts of the
universe—on the earth, where women are clamoring to vote,
and to be allowed to go out late at night without an escort, in
Hades, where, as you are no doubt aware, the management of the
government has fallen almost wholly into the hands of the Furies;
and even in the halls of Jupiter himself, where, I am credibly
informed, Juno has been taking private lessons in the art of
hurling thunderbolts—information which the extraordinary
quality of recent electrical storms on the earth would seem to
confirm.  Thunderbolts of late years have been cast hither
and yon in a most erratic fashion, striking where they were least
expected, as those of you who keep in touch with the outer world
must be fully aware.  Now, actuated by their usual broad and
liberal motives, the men of Hades wish to meet the views of you
ladies to just that extent that your views are based upon a wise
selection, in turn based upon experience, and they have come to
me and in so many words have said, ‘Mr. Kidd, we wish the
women of Hades to see the world.  We want them to be
satisfied.  We do not like this constantly increasing spirit
of unrest.  We, who have seen all the life that we care to
see, do not ourselves feel equal to the task of showing them
about.  We will pay you liberally if you will take our
House-boat, which they have always been anxious to enter, and
personally conduct our beloved ones to Paris, London, and
elsewhere.  Let them see as much of life as they can
stand.  Accord them every privilege.  Spare no expense;
only bring them back again to us safe and sound.’ 
These were their words, ladies.  I asked them why they
didn’t come along themselves, saying that even if they were
tired of it all, they should make some personal sacrifice to your
comfort; and they answered, reasonably and well, that they would
be only too glad to do so, but that they feared they might
unconsciously seem to exert a repressing influence upon
you.  ‘We want them to feel absolutely free, Captain
Kidd,’ said they, ‘and if we are along they may not
feel so.’  The answer was convincing, ladies, and I
accepted the commission.”

“But we knew nothing of all this,” interposed
Elizabeth.  “The subject was not broached to us by our
husbands, brothers, fiancés, or fathers.  My
brother, Sir Walter Raleigh—”

Cleopatra chuckled.  “Brother! 
Brother’s good,” she said.

“Well, that’s what he is,” retorted
Elizabeth, quickly.  “I promised to be a sister to
him, and I’m going to keep my word.  That’s the
kind of a queen I am.  I was about to remark,”
Elizabeth added, turning to the captain, “that my brother,
Sir Walter Raleigh, never even hinted at any such plan, and
usually he asked my advice in matters of so great
importance.”

“That is easily accounted for, madame,” retorted
Kidd.  “Sir Walter intended this as a little surprise
for you, that is all.  The arrangements were all placed in
his hands, and it was he who bound us all to secrecy.  None
of the ladies were to be informed of it.”

“It does not sound altogether plausible,”
interposed Portia.  “If you ladies do not object, I
should like to cross-examine
this—ah—gentleman.”

Kidd paled visibly.  He was not prepared for any such
trial; however, he put as good a face on the matter as he could,
and announced his willingness to answer any questions that he
might be asked.

“Shall we put him under oath?” asked
Cleopatra.

“As you please, ladies,” said the pirate. 
“A pirate’s word is as good as his bond; but
I’ll take an oath if you choose—a half-dozen of
’em, if need be.”

“I fancy we can get along without that,” said
Portia.  “Now, Captain Kidd, who first proposed this
plan?”

“Socrates,” said Kidd, unblushingly with a sly
glance at Xanthippe.

“What?” cried Xanthippe.  “My husband
propose anything that would contribute to my pleasure or
intellectual advancement?  Bah!  Your story is
transparently false at the outset.”

“Nevertheless,” said Kidd, “the scheme was
proposed by Socrates.  He said a trip of that kind for
Xanthippe would be very restful and health-giving.”

“For me?” cried Xanthippe, sceptically.

“No, madame, for him,” retorted Kidd.

“Ah—ho-ho!  That’s the way of it,
eh?” said Xanthippe, flushing to the roots of her
hair.  “Very likely.  You—ah—you will
excuse my doubting your word, Captain Kidd, a moment since. 
I withdraw my remark, and in order to make fullest reparation, I
beg to assure these ladies that I am now perfectly convinced that
you are telling the truth.  That last observation is just
like my husband, and when I get back home again, if I ever do,
well—ha, ha!—we’ll have a merry time,
that’s all.”

“And what was—ah—Bassanio’s connection
with this affair?” added Portia, hesitatingly.

“He was not informed of it,” said Kidd,
archly.  “I am not acquainted with Bassanio, my lady,
but I overheard Sir Walter enjoining upon the others the absolute
necessity of keeping the whole affair from Bassanio, because he
was afraid he would not consent to it.  ‘Bassanio has
a most beautiful wife, gentlemen,’ said Sir Walter,
‘and he wouldn’t think of parting with her under any
circumstances; therefore let us keep our intentions a secret from
him.’  I did not hear whom the gentleman married,
madame; but the others, Prince Hamlet, the Duke of Buckingham,
and Louis the Fourteenth, all agreed that Mrs. Bassanio was too
beautiful a person to be separated from, and that it was better,
therefore, to keep Bassanio in the dark as to their little
enterprise until it was too late for him to interfere.”

A pink glow of pleasure suffused the lovely countenance of the
cross-examiner, and it did not require a very sharp eye to see
that the wily Kidd had completely won her over to his side. 
On the other hand, Elizabeth’s brow became as corrugated as
her ruff, and the spirit of the pirate shivered to the core as he
turned and gazed upon that glowering face.

“Sir Walter agreed to that, did he?” snapped
Elizabeth.  “And yet he was willing to part
with—ah—his sister.”

“Well, your Majesty,” began Kidd, hesitatingly,
“you see it was this way: Sir Walter—er—did say
that, but—ah—he—ah—but he added that he
of course merely judged—er—this man Bassanio’s
feelings by his own in parting from his sister—”

“Did he say sister?” cried Elizabeth.

“Well—no—not in those words,” shuffled
Kidd, perceiving quickly wherein his error lay,
“but—ah—I jumped at the conclusion, seeing his
intense enthusiasm for the lady’s beauty
and—er—intellectual qualities, that he referred to
you, and it is from yourself that I have gained my knowledge as
to the fraternal, not to say sororal, relationship that exists
between you.”

“That man’s a diplomat from Diplomaville!”
muttered Sir Henry Morgan, who, with Abeuchapeta and Conrad, was
listening at the port without.

“He is that,” said Abeuchapeta, “but he
can’t last much longer.  He’s perspiring like a
pitcher of ice-water on a hot day, and a spirit of his size and
volatile nature can’t stand much of that without
evaporating.  If you will observe him closely you will see
that his left arm already has vanished into thin air.”

“By Jove!” whispered Conrad, “that’s a
fact!  If they don’t let up on him he’ll
vanish.  He’s getting excessively tenuous about the
top of his head.”

All of which was only too true.  Subjected to a scrutiny
which he had little expected, the deceitful ambassador of the
thieving band was rapidly dissipating, and, as those without had
so fearsomely noted, was in imminent danger of complete
sublimation, which, in the case of one possessed of so little
elementary purity, meant nothing short of annihilation. 
Fortunately for Kidd, however, his wonderful tact had stemmed the
tide of suspicion.  Elizabeth was satisfied with his
explanation, and in the minds of at least three of the most
influential ladies on board, Portia, Xanthippe, and Elizabeth, he
had become a creature worthy of credence, which meant that he had
nothing more to fear.

“I am prepared, your Majesty,” said Elizabeth,
addressing Cleopatra, “to accept from this time on the
gentleman’s word.  The little that he has already told
us is hall-marked with truth.  I should like to ask,
however, one more question, and that is how our gentleman friends
expected to embark us upon this voyage without letting us into
the secret?”

“Oh, as for that,” replied Kidd, with a deep-drawn
sigh of relief, for he too had noticed the gradual evaporation of
his arm and the incipient etherization of his
cranium—“as for that, it was simple enough. 
There was to have been a day set apart for ladies’ day at
the club, and when you were all on board we were quietly to weigh
anchor and start.  The fact that you had anticipated the
day, of your own volition, was telephoned by my scouts to me at
my headquarters, and that news was by me transmitted by messenger
to Sir Walter at Charon’s Glen Island, where the
long-talked-of fight between Samson and Goliath was taking
place.  Raleigh immediately replied,
‘Good!  Start at once.  Paris
first.  Unlimited credit.  Love to
Elizabeth.’  Wherefore, ladies,” he added,
rising from his chair and walking to the
door—“wherefore you are here and in my care. 
Make yourselves comfortable, and with the aid of the fashion
papers which you have already received prepare yourselves for the
joys that await you.  With the aid of Madame Récamier
and Baedeker’s Paris, which you will find in the
library, it will be your own fault if when you arrive there you
resemble a great many less fortunate women who don’t know
what they want.”

With these words Kidd disappeared through the door, and
fainted in the arms of Sir Henry Morgan.  The strain upon
him had been too great.

“A charming fellow,” said Portia, as the pirate
disappeared.

“Most attractive,” said Elizabeth.

“Handsome, too, don’t you think?” asked
Helen of Troy.

“And truthful beyond peradventure,” observed
Xanthippe, as she reflected upon the words the captain had
attributed to Socrates.  “I didn’t believe him
at first, but when he told me what my sweet-tempered philosopher
had said, I was convinced.”

“He’s a sweet child,” interposed Mrs. Noah,
fondly.  “One of my favorite grandchildren.”

“Which makes it embarrassing for me to say,” cried
Cassandra, starting up angrily, “that he is a base
caitiff!”

Had a bomb been dropped in the middle of the room, it could
not have created a greater sensation than the words of
Cassandra.

“What?” cried several voices at once. 
“A caitiff?”

“A caitiff with a capital K,” retorted
Cassandra.  “I know that, because while he was telling
his story I was listening to it with one ear and looking forward
into the middle of next week with the other—I mean the
other eye—and I saw—”

“Yes, you saw?” cried Cleopatra.

“I saw that he was deceiving us.  Mark my words,
ladies, he is a base caitiff,” replied
Cassandra—“a base caitiff.”

“What did you see?” cried Elizabeth,
excitedly.

“This,” said Cassandra, and she began a narration
of future events which I must defer to the next chapter. 
Meanwhile his associates were endeavoring to restore the
evaporated portions of the prostrated Kidd’s spirit anatomy
by the use of a steam-atomizer, but with indifferent
success.  Kidd’s training had not fitted him for an
intellectual combat with superior women, and he suffered
accordingly.

p. 157X

A WARNING ACCEPTED

“It is with no desire to
interrupt my friend Cassandra unnecessarily,” said Mrs.
Noah, as the prophetess was about to narrate her story,
“that I rise to beg her to remember that, as an ancestress
of Captain Kidd, I hope she will spare a grandmother’s
feelings, if anything in the story she is about to tell is
improper to be placed before the young.  I have been so
shocked by the stories of perfidy and baseness generally that
have been published of late years, that I would interpose a
protest while there is yet time if there is a line in
Cassandra’s story which ought to be withheld from the
public; a protest based upon my affection for posterity, and in
the interests of morality everywhere.”

“You may rest easy upon that score, my dear Mrs.
Noah,” said the prophetess.  “What I have to say
would commend itself, I am sure, even to the ears of a British
matron; and while it is as complete a demonstration of
man’s perfidy as ever was, it is none the less as harmless
a little tale as the Dottie Dimple books or any other more recent
study of New England character.”

“Thank you for the load your words have lifted from my
mind,” said Mrs. Noah, settling back in her chair, a
satisfied expression upon her gentle countenance.  “I
hope you will understand why I spoke, and withal why modern
literature generally has been so distressful to me.  When
you reflect that the world is satisfied that most of man’s
criminal instincts are the result of heredity, and that Mr. Noah
and I are unable to shift the responsibility for posterity to
other shoulders than our own, you will understand my
position.  We were about the most domestic old couple that
ever lived, and when we see the long and varied assortment of
crimes that are cropping out everywhere in our descendants it is
painful to us to realize what a pair of unconsciously wicked old
fogies we must have been.”

“We all understand that,” said Cleopatra, kindly;
“and we are all prepared to acquit you of any
responsibility for the advanced condition of wickedness
to-day.  Man has progressed since your time, my dear
grandma, and the modern improvements in the science of crime are
no more attributable to you than the invention of the telephone
or the oyster cocktail is attributable to your
husband.”

“Thank you kindly,” murmured the old lady, and she
resumed her knitting upon a phantom tam-o’-shanter, which
she was making as a Christmas surprise for her husband.

“When Captain Kidd began his story,” said
Cassandra, “he made one very bad mistake, and yet one which
was prompted by that courtesy which all men instinctively adopt
when addressing women.  When he entered the room he removed
his hat, and therein lay his fatal error, if he wished to
convince me of the truth of his story, for with his hat removed I
could see the workings of his mind.  While you ladies were
watching his lips or his eyes, some of you taking in the gorgeous
details of his dress, all of you hanging upon his every word, I
kept my eye fixed firmly upon his imagination, and I saw, what
you did not, that he was drawing wholly upon
that!”

“How extraordinary!” cried Elizabeth.

“Yes—and fortunate,” said Cassandra. 
“Had I not done so, a week hence we should, every one of
us, have been lost in the surging wickedness of the city of
Paris.”

“But, Cassandra,” said Trilby, who was anxious to
return once more to the beautiful city by the Seine, “he
told us we were going to Paris.”

“Of course he did,” said Madame Récamier,
“and in so many words.  Certainly he was not drawing
upon his imagination there.”

“And one might be lost in a very much worse
place,” put in Marguerite de Valois, “if, indeed, it
were possible to lose us in Paris at all.  I fancy that I
know enough about Paris to find my way about.”

“Humph!” ejaculated Cassandra.  “What a
foolish little thing you are!  You don’t imagine that
the Paris of to-day is the Paris of your time, or even the Paris
of that sweet child Trilby’s time, do you?  If you do
you are very much mistaken.  I almost wish I had not warned
you of your danger and had let you go, just to see those eyes of
yours open with amazement at the change.  You’d find
your Louvre a very different sort of a place from what it used to
be, my dear lady.  Those pleasing little windows through
which your relations were wont in olden times to indulge in
target practice at people who didn’t go to their church are
now kept closed; the galleries which used to swarm with people,
many of whom ought to have been hanged, now swarm with pictures,
many of which ought not to have been hung; the romance which
clung about its walls is as much a part of the dead past as
yourselves, and were you to materialize suddenly therein you
would find yourselves jostled and hustled and trodden upon by the
curious from other lands, with Argus eyes taking in five hundred
pictures a minute, and traversing those halls at a rate of speed
at which Mercury himself would stand aghast.”

“But my beloved Tuileries?” cried Marie
Antoinette.

“Has been swallowed up by a play-ground for the people,
my dear,” said Cassandra, gently.  “Paris is no
place for us, and it is the intention of these men, in whose
hands we are, to take us there and then desert us.  Can you
imagine anything worse than ourselves, the phantoms of a glorious
romantic past, basely deserted in the streets of a wholly
strange, superficial, material city of to-day?  What do you
think, Elizabeth, would be your fate if, faint and famished, you
begged for sustenance at an English door to-day, and when asked
your name and profession were to reply, ‘Elizabeth, Queen
of England’?”

“Insane asylum,” said Elizabeth, shortly.

“Precisely.  So in Paris with the rest of
us,” said Cassandra.

“How do you know all this?” asked Trilby, still
unconvinced.

“I know it just as you knew how to become a prima
donna,” said Cassandra.  “I am, however, my own
Svengali, which is rather preferable to the patent detachable
hypnotizer you had.  I hypnotize myself, and direct my mind
into the future.  I was a professional forecaster in the
days of ancient Troy, and if my revelations had been heeded the
Priam family would, I doubt not, still be doing business at the
old stand, and Mr. Æneas would not have grown
round-shouldered giving his poor father a picky-back ride on the
opening night of the horse-show, so graphically depicted by
Virgil.”

“I never heard about that,” said Trilby. 
“It sounds like a very funny story, though.”

“Well, it wasn’t so humorous for some as it was
for others,” said Cassandra, with a sly glance at
Helen.  “The fact is, until you mentioned it yourself,
it never occurred to me that there was much fun in any portion of
the Trojan incident, excepting perhaps the delirium tremens of
old Laocoon, who got no more than he deserved for stealing my
thunder.  I had warned Troy against the Greeks, and they all
laughed at me, and said my eye to the future was strabismatic;
that the Greeks couldn’t get into Troy at all, even if they
wanted to.  And then the Greeks made a great wooden horse as
a gift for the Trojans, and when I turned my X-ray gaze upon it I
saw that it contained about six brigades of infantry, three
artillery regiments, and sharp-shooters by the score.  It
was a sort of military Noah’s Ark; but I knew that the
prejudice against me was so strong that nobody would believe what
I told them.  So I said nothing.  My prophecies never
came true, they said, failing to observe that my warning as to
what would be was in itself the cause of their
non-fulfilment.  But desiring to save Troy, I sent for
Laocoon and told him all about it, and he went out and announced
it as his own private prophecy; and then, having tried to drown
his conscience in strong waters, he fell a victim to the usual
serpentine hallucination, and everybody said he wasn’t
sober, and therefore unworthy of belief.  The horse was
accepted, hauled into the city, and that night orders came from
hindquarters to the regiments concealed inside to march. 
They marched, and next morning Troy had been removed from the
map; ninety per cent of the Trojans died suddenly, and
Æneas, grabbing up his family in one hand and his gods in
the other, went yachting for several seasons, ultimately settling
down in Italy.  All of this could have been avoided if the
Trojans would have taken the hint from my prophecies.  They
preferred, however, not to do it, with the result that to-day no
one but Helen and myself knows even where Troy was, and
we’ll never tell.”

“It is all true,” said Helen, proudly. 
“I was the woman who was at the bottom of it all, and I can
testify that Cassandra always told the truth, which is why she
was always so unpopular.  When anything that was unpleasant
happened, after it was all over she would turn and say, sweetly,
‘I told you so.’  She was the original ‘I
told you so’ nuisance, and of course she had the
newspapyruses down on her, because she never left them any
sensation to spring upon the public.  If she had only told a
fib once in a while, the public would have had more confidence in
her.”

“Thank you for your endorsement,” said Cassandra,
with a nod at Helen.  “With such testimony I cannot
see how you can refrain from taking my advice in this matter; and
I tell you, ladies, that this man Kidd has made his story up out
of whole cloth; the men of Hades had no more to do with our being
here than we had; they were as much surprised as we are to find
us gone.  Kidd himself was not aware of our presence, and
his object in taking us to Paris is to leave us stranded there,
disembodied spirits, vagrant souls with no familiar haunts to
haunt, no place to rest, and nothing before us save perpetual
exile in a world that would have no sympathy for us in our
misfortune, and no belief in our continued existence.”

“But what, then, shall we do?” cried Ophelia,
wringing her hands in despair.

“It is a terrible problem,” said Cleopatra,
anxiously; “and yet it does seem as if our woman’s
instinct ought to show us some way out of our trouble.”

“The Committee on Treachery,” said Delilah,
“has already suggested a chafing-dish party, with Lucretia
Borgia in charge of the lobster Newberg.”

“That is true,” said Lucretia; “but I find,
in going through my reticule, that my maid, for some reason
unknown to me, has failed to renew my supply of poisons.  I
shall discharge her on my return home, for she knows that I never
go anywhere without them; but that does not help matters at this
juncture.  The sad fact remains that I could prepare a
thousand delicacies for these pirates without fatal
results.”

“You mean immediately fatal, do you not?”
suggested Xanthippe.  “I could myself prepare a cake
which would in time reduce our captors to a state of absolute
dependence, but of course the effect is not immediate.”

“We might give a musicale, and let Trilby sing
‘Ben Bolt’ to them,” suggested Marguerite de
Valois, with a giggle.

“Don’t be flippant, please,” said
Portia.  “We haven’t time to waste on flippant
suggestions.  Perhaps a court-martial of these pirates,
supplemented by a yard-arm, wouldn’t be a bad thing. 
I’ll prosecute the case.”

“You forget that you are dealing with immortal
spirits,” observed Cleopatra.  “If these
creatures were mortals, hanging them would be all right, and
comparatively easy, considering that we outnumber them ten to
one, and have many resources for getting them, more or less, in
our power, but they are not.  They have gone through the
refining process of dissolution once, and there’s an end to
that.  Our only resource is in the line of deception, and if
we cannot deceive them, then we have ceased to be
women.”

“That is truly said,” observed Elizabeth. 
“And inasmuch as we have already provided ourselves with a
suitable committee for the preparation of our plans of a
deceptive nature, I move, as the easiest possible solution of the
difficulty for the rest of us, that the Committee on Treachery be
requested to go at once into executive session, with orders not
to come out of it until they have suggested a plausible plan of
campaign against our abductors.  We must be rid of
them.  Let the Committee on Treachery say how.”

“Second the motion,” said Mrs. Noah. 
“You are a very clear-headed young woman, Lizzie, and your
grandmother is proud of you.”

The Committee on Treachery were about to protest, but the
chair refused to entertain any debate upon the question, which
was put and carried with a storm of approval.

Five minutes later a note was handed through the port,
addressed to Cleopatra, which read as follows:

“Dear
Madame,—Six bells has just struck, and the officers
and crew are hungry.  Will you and your fair companions
co-operate with us in our enterprise by having a hearty dinner
ready within two hours?  A speck has appeared on the horizon
which betokens a coming storm, else we would prepare our supper
ourselves.  As it is, we feel that your safety depends on
our remaining on deck.  If there is any beer on the ice, we
prefer it to tea.  Two cases will suffice.

“Yours respectfully,

“Henry
Morgan, Bart.; First Mate.”

“Hurrah!” cried Cleopatra, as she read this
communication.  “I have an idea.  Tell the
Committee on Treachery to appear before the full meeting at
once.”

The committee was summoned, and Cleopatra announced her plan
of operation, and it was unanimously adopted; but what it was we
shall have to wait for another chapter to learn.

p.
172XI

MAROONED

When Captain Holmes arrived upon
deck he seized his glass, and, gazing intently through it for a
moment, perceived that the faithful Shem had not deceived
him.  Flying at half-mast from a rude, roughly hewn pole set
upon a rocky height was the black flag, emblem of piracy, and, as
Artemus Ward put it, “with the second joints
reversed.”  It was in very truth a signal of
distress.

“I make it a point never to be surprised,”
observed Holmes, as he peered through the glass, “but this
beats me.  I didn’t know there was an island of this
nature in these latitudes.  Blackstone, go below and pipe
Captain Cook on deck.  Perhaps he knows what island that
is.”

“You’ll have to excuse me, Captain Holmes,”
replied the Judge.  “I didn’t ship on this
voyage as a cabin-boy or a messenger-boy.  Therefore
I—”

“Bonaparte, put the Judge in irons,” interrupted
Holmes, sternly.  “I expect to be obeyed, Judge
Blackstone, whether you shipped as a Lord Chief-Justice or a
state-room steward.  When I issue an order it must be
obeyed.  Step lively there, Bonaparte.  Get his honor
ironed and summon your marines.  We may have work to do
before night.  Hamlet, pipe Captain Cook on deck.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” replied Hamlet, with alacrity, as
he made off.

“That’s the way to obey orders,” said
Holmes, with a scornful glance at Blackstone.

“I was only jesting, Captain,” said the latter,
paling somewhat.

“That’s all right,” said Holmes, taking up
his glass again.  “So was I when I ordered you in
irons, and in order that you may appreciate the full force of the
joke I repeat it.  Bonaparte, do your duty.”

In an instant the order was obeyed, and the unhappy Judge
shortly found himself manacled and alone in the forecastle. 
Meanwhile Captain Cook, in response to the commander’s
order, repaired to the deck and scanned the distant coast.

“I can’t place it,” he said.  “It
can’t be Monte Cristo, can it?”

“No, it can’t,” said the Count, who stood
hard by.  “My island was in the Mediterranean, and
even if it dragged anchor it couldn’t have got out through
the Strait of Gibraltar.”

“Perhaps it’s Robinson Crusoe’s
island,” suggested Doctor Johnson.

“Not it,” observed De Foe.  “If it is,
the rest of you will please keep off.  It’s mine, and
I may want to use it again.  I’ve been having a number
of interviews with Crusoe latterly, and he’s given me a lot
of new points, which I intend incorporating in a sequel for the
Cimmerian Magazine.”

“Well, in the name of Atlas, what island is it,
then?” roared Holmes, angrily.  “What is the
matter with all you learned lubbers that I have brought along on
this trip?  Do you suppose I’ve brought you to whistle
up favorable winds?  Not by the beard of the Prophet! 
I brought you to give me information, and now when I ask for the
name of a simple little island like that in plain sight
there’s not one of you able so much as to guess at it
reasonably.  The next man I ask for information goes into
irons with Judge Blackstone if he doesn’t answer me
instantly with the information I want.  Munchausen, what
island is that?”

“Ahem! that?” replied Munchausen, trembling, as he
reflected upon the Captain’s threat. 
“What?  Nobody knows what island that is?  Why,
you surprise me—

“See here, Baron,” retorted Holmes, menacingly,
“I ask you a plain question, and I want a plain answer,
with no evasions to gain time.  Now it’s irons or an
answer.  What island is that?”

“It’s an island that doesn’t appear on any
chart, Captain,” Munchausen responded instantly, pulling
himself together for a mighty effort, “and it has never
been given a name; but as you insist upon having one, we’ll
call it Holmes Island, in your honor.  It is not
stationary.  It is a floating island of lava formation, and
is a menace to every craft that goes to sea.  I spent a year
of my life upon it once, and it is more barren than the desert of
Sahara, because you cannot raise even sand upon it, and it is
devoid of water of any sort, salt or fresh.”

“What did you live on during that year?” asked
Holmes, eying him narrowly.

“Canned food from wrecks,” replied the Baron,
feeling much easier now that he had got a fair
start—“canned food from wrecks, commander. 
There is a magnetic property in the upper stratum of this piece
of derelict real estate, sir, which attracts to it every bit of
canned substance that is lost overboard in all parts of the
world.  A ship is wrecked, say, in the Pacific Ocean, and
ultimately all the loose metal upon her will succumb to the
irresistible attraction of this magnetic upper stratum, and will
find its way to its shores.  So in any other part of the
earth.  Everything metallic turns up here sooner or later;
and when you consider that thousands of vessels go down every
year, vessels which are provisioned with tinned foods only, you
will begin to comprehend how many millions of pounds of preserved
salmon, sardines, pâté de foie gras, peaches,
and so on, can be found strewn along its coast.”

“Munchausen,” said Holmes, smiling, “by the
blush upon your cheek, coupled with an occasional uneasy glance
of the eye, I know that for once you are standing upon the, to
you, unfamiliar ground of truth, and I admire you for it. 
There is nothing to be ashamed of in telling the truth
occasionally.  You are a man after my own heart.  Come
below and have a cocktail.  Captain Cook, take command of
the Gehenna during my absence; head her straight for
Holmes Island, and when you discover anything new let me
know.  Bonaparte, in honor of Munchausen’s remarkable
genius, I proclaim general amnesty to our prisoners, and you may
release Blackstone from his dilemma; and if you have any tin
soldiers among your marines, see that they are lashed to the
rigging.  I don’t want this electric island of the
Baron’s to get a grip upon my military force at this
juncture.”

With this Holmes, followed by Munchausen, went below, and the
two worthies were soon deep in the mysteries of a phantom
cocktail, while Doctor Johnson and De Foe gazed mournfully out
over the ocean at the floating island.

“De Foe,” said Johnson “that ought to be a
lesson to you.  This realism that you tie up to is all right
when you are alone with your conscience; but when there are great
things afoot, an imagination and a broad view as to the
limitations of truth aren’t at all bad.  You or I
might now be drinking that cocktail with Holmes if we’d
only risen to the opportunity the way Munchausen did.”

“That is true,” said De Foe, sadly. 
“But I didn’t suppose he wanted that kind of
information.  I could have spun a better yarn than that of
Munchausen’s with my eyes shut.  I supposed he wanted
truth, and I gave it.”

“I’d like to know what has become of the
House-boat,” said Raleigh, anxiously gazing through the
glass at the island.  “I can see old Henry Morgan
sitting down there on the rocks with his elbows on his knees and
his chin in his hands, and Kidd and Abeuchapeta are standing back
of him, yelling like mad, but there isn’t a boat in
sight.”

“Who is that man, off to the right, dancing a
fandango?” asked Johnson.

“It looks like Conrad, but I can’t tell.  He
appears to have gone crazy.  He’s got that wild look
on his face which betokens insanity.  We’ll have to be
careful in our parleyings with these people,” said
Raleigh.

“Anything new?” asked Holmes, returning to the
deck, smacking his lips in enjoyment of the cocktail.

“No—except that we are almost within hailing
distance,” said Cook.

“Then give orders to cast anchor,” observed
Holmes.  “Bonaparte, take a crew of picked men ashore
and bring those pirates aboard.  Take the three musketeers
with you, and don’t let Kidd or Morgan give you any back
talk.  If they try any funny business, exorcise
them.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” replied Bonaparte, and in a
moment a boat had been lowered and a sturdy crew of sailors were
pulling for the shore.  As they came within ten feet of it
the pirates made a mad dash down the rough, rocky hillside and
clamored to be saved.

“What’s happened to you?” cried Bonaparte,
ordering the sailors to back water lest the pirates should too
hastily board the boat and swamp her.

“We are marooned,” replied Kidd, “and on an
island of a volcanic nature.  There isn’t a square
inch of it that isn’t heated up to 125 degrees, and
seventeen of us have already evaporated.  Conrad has lost
his reason; Abeuchapeta has become so tenuous that a child can
see through him.  As for myself, I am growing iridescent
with anxiety, and unless I get off this infernal furnace
I’ll disappear like a soap-bubble.  For Heaven’s
sake, then, General, take us off, on your own terms. 
We’ll accept anything.”

As if in confirmation of Kidd’s words, six of the pirate
crew collapsed and disappeared into thin air, and a glance at
Abeuchapeta was proof enough of his condition.  He had
become as clear as crystal, and had it not been for his rugged
outlines he would hardly have been visible even to his
fellow-spirits.  As for Kidd, he had taken on the aspect of
a rainbow, and it was patent that his fears for himself were all
too well founded.

Bonaparte embarked the leaders of the band first, returning
subsequently for the others, and repaired with them at once to
the Gehenna, where they were ushered into the presence of
Sherlock Holmes.  The first question he asked was as to the
whereabouts of the House-boat.

“That we do not know,” replied Kidd, mournfully,
gazing downward at the wreck of his former self.  “We
came ashore, sir, early yesterday morning, in search of
food.  It appears that when—acting in a wholly
inexcusable fashion, and influenced, I confess it, by motives of
revenge—I made off with your club-house, I neglected to
ascertain if it were well stocked with provisions, a fatal error;
for when we endeavored to get supper we discovered that the
larder contained but half a bottle of farcie olives, two salted
almonds, and a soda cracker—not a luxurious feast for
sixty-nine pirates and a hundred and eighty-three women to sit
down to.”

“That’s all nonsense,” said
Demosthenes.  “The House Committee had provided enough
supper for six hundred people, in anticipation of the appetite of
the members on their return from the fight.”

“Of course they did,” said Confucius; “and
it was a good one, too—salads, salmon glacé,
lobsters—every blessed thing a man can’t get at home
we had; and what is more, they’d been delivered on
board.  I saw to that before I went up the river.”

“Then,” moaned Kidd, “it is as I
suspected.  We were the victims of base treachery on the
part of those women.”

“Treachery?  Well, I like that.  Call it
reciprocity,” said Hamlet, dryly.

“We were informed by the ladies that there was nothing
for supper save the items I have already referred to,” said
Kidd.  “I see it all now.  We had tried to make
them comfortable, and I put myself to some considerable personal
inconvenience to make them easy in their minds, but they were
ungrateful.”

“Whatever induced you to take ’em along with
you?” asked Socrates.

“We didn’t want them,” said Kidd.

“We didn’t know they were on board until it was
too late to turn back.  They’d broken in, and were
having the club all to themselves in your absence.”

“It served you good and right,” said Socrates,
with a laugh.  “Next time you try to take things that
don’t belong to you, maybe you’ll be a trifle more
careful as to whose property you confiscate.”

“But the House-boat—you haven’t told us how
you lost her,” put in Raleigh, impatiently.

“Well, it was this way,” said Kidd. 
“When, in response to our polite request for supper, the
ladies said there was nothing to eat on board, something had to
be done, for we were all as hungry as bears, and we decided to go
ashore at the first port and provision.  Unfortunately the
crew got restive, and when this floating frying-pan loomed into
view, to keep them good-natured we decided to land and see if we
could beg, borrow, or steal some supplies.  We had to. 
Observations taken with the sextant showed that there was no port
within five hundred miles; the island looked as if it might be
inhabited at least by goats, and ashore we went, every man of us,
leaving the House-boat safely anchored in the harbor.  At
first we didn’t mind the heat, and we hunted and hunted and
hunted; but after three or four hours I began to notice that
three of my sailors were shrivelling up, and Conrad began to act
as if he were daft.  Hawkins burst right before my
eyes.  Then Abeuchapeta got prismatic around the eyes and
began to fade, and I noticed a slight iridescence about myself;
and as for Morgan, he had the misfortune to lie down to take a
nap in the sun, and when he waked up, his whole right side had
evaporated.  Then we saw what the trouble was. 
We’d struck this lava island, and were gradually succumbing
to its intense heat.  We rushed madly back to the harbor to
embark; and our ship, gentlemen, and your House-boat, was slowly
but surely disappearing over the horizon, and flying from the
flag-staff at the fore were signals of farewell, with an
unfeeling P.S. below to this effect: ‘Don’t wait
up for us.  We may not be back until
late.’”

There was a pause, during which Socrates laughed quietly to
himself, while Abeuchapeta and the one-sided Morgan wept
silently.

“That, gentlemen of the Associated Shades, is all I know
of the whereabouts of the House-boat,” continued Captain
Kidd.  “I have no doubt that the ladies practised a
deception, to our discomfiture, and I must say that I think it
was exceedingly clever—granting that it was desirable to be
rid of us, which I don’t, for we meant well by them, and
they would have enjoyed themselves.”

“But,” cried Hamlet, “may they not now be in
peril?  They cannot navigate that ship.”

“They got her out of the harbor all right,” said
Kidd.  “And I judged from the figure at the helm that
Mrs. Noah had taken charge.  What kind of a seaman she is I
don’t know.”

“Almighty bad,” ejaculated Shem, turning
pale.  “It was she who ran us ashore on
Ararat.”

“Well, wasn’t that what you wanted?” queried
Munchausen.

“What we wanted!” cried Shem.  “Well, I
guess not.  You don’t want your yacht stranded on a
mountain-top, do you?  She was a dead loss there, whereas if
mother hadn’t been in such a hurry to get ashore, we could
have waited a month and landed on the seaboard.”

“You might have turned her into a summer hotel,”
suggested Munchausen.

“Well, we must up anchor and away,” said
Holmes.  “Our pursuit has merely begun,
apparently.  We must overtake this vessel, and the question
to be answered is—where?”

“That’s easy,” said Artemus Ward. 
“From what Shem says, I think we’d better look for
her in the Himalayas.”

“And, meanwhile, what shall be done with Kidd?”
asked Holmes.

“He ought to be expelled from the club,” said
Johnson.

“We can’t expel him, because he’s not a
member,” replied Raleigh.

“Then elect him,” suggested Ward.

“What on earth for?” growled Johnson.

“So that we can expel him,” said Ward.  And
while Boswell’s hero was trying to get the value of this
notion through his head, the others repaired to the deck, and the
Gehenna was soon under way once more.  Meanwhile
Captain Kidd and his fellows were put in irons and stowed away in
the forecastle, alongside of the water-cask in which Shylock lay
in hiding.

p.
189XII

THE ESCAPE AND THE END

If there was anxiety on board of
the Gehenna as to the condition and whereabouts of the
House-boat, there was by no means less uneasiness upon that
vessel itself.  Cleopatra’s scheme for ridding herself
and her abducted sisters of the pirates had worked to a charm,
but, having worked thus, a new and hitherto undreamed-of problem,
full of perplexities bearing upon their immediate safety, now
confronted them.  The sole representative of a seafaring
family on board was Mrs. Noah, and it did not require much time
to see that her knowledge as to navigation was of an extremely
primitive order, limited indeed to the science of floating.

When the last pirate had disappeared behind the rocks of
Holmes Island, and all was in readiness for action, the good old
lady, who had hitherto been as calm and unruffled as a child,
began to get red in the face and to bustle about in a manner
which betrayed considerable perturbation of spirit.

“Now, Mrs. Noah,” said Cleopatra, as, peeping out
from the billiard-room window, she saw Morgan disappearing in the
distance, “the coast is clear, and I resign my position of
chairman to you.  We place the vessel in your hands, and
ourselves subject to your orders.  You are in command. 
What do you wish us to do?”

“Very well,” replied Mrs. Noah, putting down her
knitting and starting for the deck.  “I’m not
certain, but I think the first thing to do is to get her
moving.  Do you know, I’ve never discovered whether
this boat was a steamboat or a sailing-vessel?  Does anybody
know?”

“I think it has a naphtha tank and a propeller,”
said Elizabeth, “although I don’t know.  It
seems to me my brother Raleigh told me they’d had a naphtha
engine put in last winter after the freshet, when the House-boat
was carried ten miles down the river, and had to be towed back at
enormous expense.  They put it in so that if she were
carried away again she could get back of her own
power.”

“That’s unfortunate,” said Mrs. Noah,
“because I don’t know anything about these new
fangled notions.  If there’s any one here who knows
anything about naphtha engines, I wish they’d
speak.”

“I’m of the opinion,” said Portia,
“that I can study out the theory of it in a short
while.”

“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Noah, “you can
do it.  I’ll appoint you engineer, and give you all
your orders now, right away, in advance.  Set her going and
keep her going, and don’t stop without a written order
signed by me.  We might as well be very careful, and have
everything done properly, and it might happen that in the
excitement of our trip you would misunderstand my spoken orders
and make a fatal error.  Therefore, pay no attention to
unwritten orders.  That will do for you for the
present.  Xanthippe, you may take Ophelia and Madame
Récamier, and ten other ladies, and, every morning before
breakfast, swab the larboard deck.  Cassandra, Tuesdays you
will devote to polishing the brasses in the dining-room, and the
balance of your time I wish you to expend in dusting the
bric-a-brac.  Dido, you always were strong at building
fires.  I’ll make you chief stoker.  You will
also assist Lucretia Borgia in the kitchen.  Inasmuch as the
latter’s maid has neglected to supply her with the usual
line of poisons, I think we can safely entrust to
Lucretia’s hands the responsibilities of the culinary
department.”

“I’m perfectly willing to do anything I
can,” said Lucretia, “but I must confess that I
don’t approve of your methods of commanding a ship.  A
ship’s captain isn’t a domestic martinet, as you are
setting out to be.  We didn’t appoint you
housekeeper.”

“Now, my child,” said Mrs. Noah, firmly, “I
do not wish any words.  If I hear any more impudence from
you, I’ll put you ashore without a reference; and the rest
of you I would warn in all kindness that I will not tolerate
insubordination.  You may, all of you, have one night of the
week and alternate Sundays off, but your work must be done. 
The regimen I am adopting is precisely that in vogue on the Ark,
only I didn’t have the help I have now, and things got into
very bad shape.  We were out forty days, and, while the food
was poor and the service execrable, we never lost a
life.”

The boat gave a slight tremor.

“Hurrah!” cried Elizabeth, clapping her hands with
glee, “we are off!”

“I will repair to the deck and get our bearings,”
said Mrs. Noah, putting her shawl over her shoulders. 
“Meantime, Cleopatra, I appoint you first mate.  See
that things are tidied up a bit here before I return.  Have
the windows washed, and to-morrow I want all the rugs and carpets
taken up and shaken.”

Portia meanwhile had discovered the naphtha engine, and, after
experimenting several times with the various levers and
stop-cocks, had finally managed to move one of them in such a way
as to set the engine going, and the wheel began to revolve.

“Are we going all right?” she cried, from
below.

“I am afraid not,” said the gallant
commander.  “The wheel is roiling up the water at a
great rate, but we don’t seem to be going ahead very
fast—in fact, we’re simply moving round and round as
though we were on a pivot.”

“I’m afraid we’re aground amidships,”
said Xanthippe, gazing over the side of the House-boat
anxiously.  “She certainly acts that way—like a
merry-go-round.”

“Well, there’s something wrong,” said Mrs.
Noah; “and we’ve got to hurry and find out what it
is, or those men will be back and we shall be as badly off as
ever.”

“Maybe this has something to do with it,” observed
Mrs. Lot, pointing to the anchor rope.  “It looks to
me as if those horrid men had tied us fast.”

“That’s just what it is,” snapped Mrs.
Noah.  “They guessed our plan, and have fastened us to
a pole or something, but I imagine we can untie it.”

Portia, who had come on deck, gave a short little laugh.

“Why, of course we don’t move,” she
said—“we are anchored!”

“What’s that?” queried Mrs. Noah. 
“We never had an experience like that on the
Ark.”

Portia explained the science of the anchor.

“What nonsense!” ejaculated Mrs. Noah. 
“How can we get away from it?”

“We’ve got to pull it up,” said
Portia.  “Order all hands on deck and have it pulled
up.”

“It can’t be done, and, if it could, I
wouldn’t have it!” said Mrs. Noah, indignantly. 
“The idea!  Lifting heavy pieces of iron, my dear
Portia, is not a woman’s work.  Send for Delilah, and
let her cut the rope with her scissors.”

“It would take her a week to cut a hawser like
that,” said Elizabeth, who had been investigating. 
“It would be more to the purpose, I think, to chop it in
two with an axe.”

“Very well,” replied Mrs. Noah, satisfied. 
“I don’t care how it is done as long as it is done
quickly.  It would never do for us to be recaptured
now.”

The suggestion of Elizabeth was carried out, and the queen
herself cut the hawser with six well-directed strokes of the
axe.

“You are an expert with it, aren’t
you?” smiled Cleopatra.

“I am, indeed,” replied Elizabeth, grimly. 
“I had it suspended over my head for so long a time before
I got to the throne that I couldn’t help familiarizing
myself with some of its possibilities.”

“Ah!” cried Mrs. Noah, as the vessel began to
move.  “I begin to feel easier.  It looks now as
if we were really off.”

“It seems to me, though,” said Cleopatra, gazing
forward, “that we are going backward.”

“Oh, well, what if we are!” said Mrs. Noah. 
“We did that on the Ark half the time.  It
doesn’t make any difference which way we are going as long
as we go, does it?”

“Why, of course it does!” cried Elizabeth. 
“What can you be thinking of?  People who walk
backward are in great danger of running into other people. 
Why not the same with ships?  It seems to me, it’s a
very dangerous piece of business, sailing backward.”

“Oh, nonsense,” snapped Mrs. Noah. 
“You are as timid as a zebra.  During the Flood, we
sailed days and days and days, going backward.  It
didn’t make a particle of difference how we went—it
was as safe one way as another, and we got just as far away in
the end.  Our main object now is to get away from the
pirates, and that’s what we are doing.  Don’t
get emotional, Lizzie, and remember, too, that I am in
charge.  If I think the boat ought to go sideways, sideways
she shall go.  If you don’t like it, it is still not
too late to put you ashore.”

The threat calmed Elizabeth somewhat, and she was satisfied,
and all went well with them, even if Portia had started the
propeller revolving reverse fashion; so that the House-boat was,
as Elizabeth had said, backing her way through the ocean.

The day passed, and by slow degrees the island and the
marooned pirates faded from view, and the night came on, and with
it a dense fog.

“We’re going to have a nasty night, I am
afraid,” said Xanthippe, looking anxiously out of the
port.

“No doubt,” said Mrs. Noah, pleasantly. 
“I’m sorry for those who have to be out in
it.”

“That’s what I was thinking about,” observed
Xanthippe.  “It’s going to be very hard on us
keeping watch.”

“Watch for what?” demanded Mrs. Noah, looking over
the tops of her glasses at Xanthippe.

“Why, surely you are going to have lookouts stationed on
deck?” said Elizabeth.

“Not at all,” said Mrs. Noah. 
“Perfectly absurd.  We never did it on the Ark, and it
isn’t necessary now.  I want you all to go to bed at
ten o’clock.  I don’t think the night air is
good for you.  Besides, it isn’t proper for a woman to
be out after dark, whether she’s new or not.”

“But, my dear Mrs. Noah,” expostulated Cleopatra,
“what will become of the ship?”

“I guess she’ll float through the night whether we
are on deck or not,” said the commander.  “The
Ark did, why not this?  Now, girls, these new-fangled
yachting notions are all nonsense.  It’s night, and
there’s a fog as thick as a stone-wall all about us. 
If there were a hundred of you upon deck with ten eyes apiece,
you couldn’t see anything.  You might much better be
in bed.  As your captain, chaperon, and grandmother, I
command you to stay below.”

“But—who is to steer?” queried
Xanthippe.

“What’s the use of steering until we can see where
to steer to?” demanded Mrs. Noah.  “I certainly
don’t intend to bother with that tiller until some reason
for doing it arises.  We haven’t any place to steer to
yet; we don’t know where we are going.  Now, my dear
children, be reasonable, and don’t worry me. 
I’ve had a very hard day of it, and I feel my
responsibilities keenly.  Just let me manage, and
we’ll come out all right.  I’ve had more
experience than any of you, and if—”

A terrible crash interrupted the old lady’s
remarks.  The House-boat shivered and shook, careened way to
one side, and as quickly righted and stood still.  A mad
rush up the gangway followed, and in a moment a hundred and
eighty-three pale-faced, trembling women stood upon the deck,
gazing with horror at a great helpless hulk ten feet to the rear,
fastened by broken ropes and odd pieces of rigging to the
stern-posts of the House-boat, sinking slowly but surely into the
sea.

It was the Gehenna!

The House-boat had run her down and her last hour had come,
but, thanks to the stanchness of her build and wonderful beam,
the floating club-house had withstood the shock of the impact and
now rode the waters as gracefully as ever.

Portia was the first to realize the extent of the catastrophe,
and in a short while chairs and life-preservers and
tables—everything that could float—had been tossed
into the sea to the struggling immortals therein.  On board
the Gehenna, those who had not cast themselves into the
waters, under the cool direction of Holmes and Bonaparte, calmly
lowered the boats, and in a short while were not only able to
felicitate themselves upon their safety, but had likewise the
good fortune to rescue their more impetuous brethren who had
preferred to swim for it.  Ultimately, all were brought
aboard the House-boat in safety, and the men in Hades were once
more reunited to their wives, daughters, sisters, and
fiancées, and Elizabeth had the satisfaction of
once more saving the life of Raleigh by throwing him her ruff as
she had done a year or so previously, when she and her brother
had been upset in the swift current of the river Styx.

Order and happiness being restored, Holmes took command of the
House-boat and soon navigated her safely back into her old-time
berth.  The Gehenna went to the bottom and was never
seen again, and when the roll was called it was found that all
who had set out upon her had returned in safety save Shylock,
Kidd, Sir Henry Morgan, and Abeuchapeta; but even they were not
lost, for, five weeks later, these four worthies were found early
one morning drifting slowly up the river Styx, gazing anxiously
out from the top of a water-cask and yelling lustily for
help.

And here endeth the chronicle of the pursuit of the good old
House-boat.  Back to her moorings, the even tenor of her
ways was once more resumed, but with one slight difference.

The ladies became eligible for membership, and, availing
themselves of the privilege, began to think less and less of the
advantages of being men and to rejoice that, after all, they were
women; and even Xanthippe and Socrates, after that night of
peril, reconciled their differences, and no longer quarrel as to
which is the more entitled to wear the toga of authority. 
It has become for them a divided skirt.

As for Kidd and his fellows, they have never recovered from
the effects of their fearful, though short, exile upon Holmes
Island, and are but shadows of their former shades; whereas Mr.
Sherlock Holmes has so endeared himself to his new-found friends
that he is quite as popular with them as he is with us, who have
yet to cross the dark river and be subjected to the scrutiny of
the Committee on Membership at the House-boat on the Styx.

Even Hawkshaw has been able to detect his genius.

THE END

PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED

LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND