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 naval 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 month,”
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 this is!”
“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.