The Captain of the Kansas | Page 6

in Barcelona. Friendship, not
unaided by a good fee, induced him to travel by the Kansas.
He had been called on to attend Mr. Boyle and the wounded Chilean,
and he reported now that the chief officer's injury was trifling, but the
Chilean's wound might incapacitate him during the remainder of the
voyage.
"So far as I can gather," he said, "Mr. Boyle had a narrow escape.
These half-breeds have a nice anatomical knowledge of the situation of
the lung; they also know the easiest way to reach it with a sharp
instrument. Captain Courtenay fired as the knife fell, otherwise our first
mate would have attended his own funeral this evening."
"What was the cause of the affair?" Isobel asked.
"The man is not one of the ship's crew, I understand. His name is
Frascuelo, and it appears that he was engaged to place some bunker
coal aboard early this morning. He says that he was drugged, and his
clothes stolen; that he came off to the ship at a late hour, and that some
one flung him headlong into a hold which, luckily for him, was nearly
full of cotton bales. He was stunned by the fall, and were it not for
Captain Courtenay's custom of having all hatches taken off and a
thorough examination of the cargo made before the holds are finally
battened down for the voyage, Frascuelo might now be in a tight place
in more than one sense."
Dr. Christobal was proud of his idiomatic English. He spoke the
language with the careless freedom of a Londoner.
"Frascuelo seems to have passed an eventful day," said the little French
Comte, who had been waiting anxiously for a chance to join in the
conversation.
"But why should he want to kill poor Mr. Boyle?" inquired Isobel, after
giving the Frenchman an encouraging glance. Incidentally, she smiled
at Elsie. "Why puzzle one's brains over foreign tongues when all the

world speaks English?" she telegraphed.
"Mr. Boyle is a peculiar person," said the doctor dryly. "I happen to
have known him during some years. You and I might regard him as a
man of few words, but he has acquired a wonderful vocabulary for the
benefit of sailor-men. I believe he can swear in every known lingo. His
accomplishment in that direction no doubt annoyed Frascuelo, who
became frantic when he heard that the ship would not call at any South
American port. I imagine, too, that the unfortunate fellow is still
suffering from the drug which, he says, was administered to him.
Anyhow, you know how the affair terminated."
"I, for one, think some consideration might have been shown him," said
Elsie.
"There is no time for argument when a Chilean draws a knife, Miss
Maxwell."
"But, if his story is true--"
"There never yet was a stowaway who did not invent a plausible yarn.
Nevertheless, I believe, and Mr. Boyle agrees with me, that the man is
not lying."
They felt the ship swing round on a new course, and the rays of the
setting sun lit up the saloon table through the open starboard ports.
"Due south now, ladies!" cried Dr. Christobal cheerily. "We have
rounded Cape Cardones. We practically follow the seventy-sixth degree
until we approach Evangelistas Island. Thus far we are in the open sea.
Then we pick our way through the Straits discovered by that daring
Portuguese, Fernando de Magallanes, to whose memory I always drink
heartily once we are clear of the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins.
I never pass through that gloomy defile without marveling at his
courage, and thinking that he deserved a better fate than murder at the
hands of some painted savage in the Philippines. Peace be to his
ashes!"

And the doctor lifted his glass of red wine with a quasi-masonic ritual
which lent solemnity to his discourse.
"You are a long way ahead of your toast," said Isobel.
"Just as Magellan was ahead of his times," was the rejoinder.
"Yet he was a man of leisurely habit," put in Elsie, who found Dr.
Christobal's old-world manners full of charm and repose.
"How so?" said he, puzzled, for the worthy Portuguese navigator was
notoriously a swashbuckler.
"Otherwise he never could have christened any unhappy promontory by
such a long-winded name," she explained.
"Perhaps he met a contrary wind in that region," said Christobal,
laughing. "Monsieur de Poincilit here, were he in a very bad temper,
might exclaim, 'Mille diables!' Why should not our excellent Fernando
rail against the almost inconceivable fickleness which could be
displayed by eleven times as many young ladies?"
"I came out last time on the Orellana, and I don't even remember
passing such a place," said Isobel. She was a Chilean born and bred, but
she always affected European vagueness as to