By H. De Vere Stacpoole Author of “Satan,” “The Blue Lagoon,” “The Beach of Dreams”, Etc.

NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1922

Copyright, 1922, by Robert M. McBride & Co.

Printed in the United States of America

Published, 1922

CHAPTER I THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

GEORGE DU CANE was writing a letter in the smoking room of the Bohemian Club, San Francisco.

George was an orphan with guardians. Twenty-four years and five months of age, his property would not be decontrolled for another seven months when, on his twenty-fifth birthday, he would find himself the actual possessor of something over two million, five hundred thousand dollars. Old Harley du Cane, George’s father, had made his money speculating. He had no healthy business to leave to his son and no very healthy reputation. He had ruined thousands of men whom he had never seen and never heard of, he had escaped ruin countless times by the skin of his teeth, he had wrecked railways; his life was, if logic counts, a long disgrace, and in a perfect civilization he would have been hanged. All the same he was a most lovable old man, generous, warm-hearted, hot-tempered, high-coloured, beautifully dressed; always with a cigar in his mouth and a flower in his buttonhole, his2 hat tilted on one side and his hand in his pocket for any unfortunate.

Only for his great battle with Jay Gould, he might have died worth ten million. He reckoned that he died poor, and, dying, he tied up his property in the hands of two trustees, as I have hinted. “To keep you from the sharks, George.”

George didn’t bother. Wannamaker and Thelusson, the two trustees, gave him all the money he wanted and the world all the fun. A juvenile replica of old Harley on the outside, he was not unlike him on the in; he had something better than wealth, than good looks, even than health, a radium quality inherited from his father that kept him far younger than his years. When Harley du Cane died at the age of seventy-six from a surfeit of ice cream following the excitement of a base-ball match, Cazenove, the broker, reading out the news to his family said the reporters had got the age wrong, for Harley wasn’t more than nine; and he was right. The Great Bear, to give him his name in the Stock Market, in many respects wasn’t more than nine.

George, having finished his letter, touched an electric bell. A waiter approached.

“Waiter,” said George, “bring me an—Oh, damn it!” Egg flip had been on his tongue and prohibition had risen in his mind. The waiter waited. He was used to orders like this of late. “Lemonade,” said George.

He got up and moved to where some men were3 seated near one of the windows. Cyrus Reid, the poet; Carolus, the musician; Abrahams, the artist. A few months ago these three would have been fighting, no doubt, over the merits of Henri, Matisse or the possibilities of Cubist music. Today they were just talking about how dry they were and of the great drought that had struck San Francisco. Reid was mostly a coffee drinker, an occasional glass of beer satisfied Carolus, and Abrahams was all but teetotal, yet they were filled with discontent. George sat down with them and listened to them and drank his lemonade and absorbed their gloom. Prohibition may be good or it may be bad, but there is one undoubted fact about it, it doesn’t improve the social life of a club. Whilst they were talking, Hank Fisher came in. Hank was twenty-three or so; thin, tanned, hollow-cheeked, he looked like the mixture of a red Indian and an East coast Yankee.

He had been born in New Hampshire, served in a whaler, driven an engine, waited in a café, hoboed, stoked a Stockton river boat, canned in a cannery. He had educated himself, in a wild sort of way that produced flowers of the mind in an extraordinary pattern; he was both a Socialist and an individualist. There was nothing that the hands of men could do that the hands of Hank couldn’t. He could make boots or a fishing-net or mend a watch, he had invented and patented a rat trap that brought him in a small income, and he had the specifications in hand of a clock that4 would go for forty-eight years without winding. He had, also, in the last year or two, made quite a sum of money speculating in real estate. But the crowning point of Hank, and the thing that had secured his entry to the Bohemian Club and endeared him to all imaginative people, was the fact that he was a little bit mad. Not crazy mad, but pleasantly mad. A madness so mixed with cold sanity and streaks of genius that you could scarcely call it madness.

“You can’t tell what he’ll do next,” was the best description of him, given by Cedarquist, barring Reid’s “He’s an opal.”

The opal sat down with scarcely a word and listened to Abrahams, who was holding forth. Said Abrahams:

“Yes, sir, you may talk and talk, but you haven’t got to the bed-rock of the subject. The fact is the world never struck universal unrest till it struck universal lime-juice. If you could dig up the Czar and make him talk, I’ll bet he’d back me. Talk of crime waves, when has crime ever waved before as it’s waving now? Look at the hold-ups, look at New York, look at Chicago, look at this town. Look at the things that are done in the broad light of day. Milligan’s raided yesterday by two gunmen and the place cleared of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stuff in fifteen minutes. Look at this chap Vanderdecken.”

“What’s he been doing?” asked Carolus.

“Doing! Don’t you read the papers?”

5

“No,” said Carolus.

“Doing. Why this chap’s been on the job for the last six months and there’s twenty-five thousand dollars reward out for him. Yacht raiding, that’s what he’s been doing, down the coast. Holding up pleasure yachts, comes along in a high power motor boat sometimes and sometimes he uses a fishing boat and no one knows where he changes ship or how he does it or how many are working with him.”

“Oh,” said Carolus. “Well he’s doing nothing new. If you were as old as I am, you’d remember Mullins, away back in the middle ’nineties, he used to do the same thing. Got caught and I forget what they gave him. There’s nothing new under the sun.”

“Well, they hadn’t wireless in the middle ’nineties,” said Abrahams, “and wireless doesn’t hold Vanderdecken, he skips over it or gets under it. Dutch Pete is his real name, they say, but someone labeled him Vanderdecken from the ‘Flying Dutchman’.”

“I know all about the fellow,” cut in Hank Fisher, “know him from his toe-nails up. He’s precious small potatoes, too. Lord, what a lot of misinformation manages to get about. Dutch Pete wasn’t his name to start with, either. Amsterdam Joe was his name. He came from Hamburg and started here loading grain at Brookland Creek, then he got loose on the front—in with McKay and that lot—managed a whisky6 joint and got in trouble over something or other, and squared it and got into the Fish Patrol and got fired for colluding with the Greeks in setting Chinese sturgeon lines. Then, after the war, he managed to get some sort of an old boat and cleared out of here. He’s down south and I could put my finger on him if I wanted to. Shark fishing is what he started on and he’s held up a two cent yacht or two, there’s no doubt about that, but as for motor boats and Flying Dutchmen, that’s all the newspaper talk. They’ve embroidered on him till he looks like a king. Dutch Pete was a different chap altogether, but he’s not about now. I

saw him shot. It was in a dust-up at San Leandro.”

“Have you seen the papers this morning?” asked Abrahams.

“Nope.”

“Well, Vanderdecken, or Amsterdam Joe, or whatever you call him, has held up the Satanita as she was coming up from Avalon. She’s no two cent yacht, she’s all of eight hundred tons. He went through her and skipped with ten thousand dollars’ worth of stuff.”

“Give us the yarn,” said Hank.

“Oh, it was as easy as pie. Connart was coming up in the Satanita—got his wife with him too—and somewhere off St. Luis Obispo they sighted a yawl. She wasn’t more than forty or fifty tons and was lying hove to with her flag half masted. They stopped the engines, like fools,7 and the yawl sent a boat on board. Two fellows came over the side. One fellow put an automatic pistol to Connart’s head and the other man with another automatic covered the officer on the bridge. There was nothing on board the Satanita but a deck gun and a nickel plated revolver, so she was helpless. Then two more fellows came on board from the boat and went through her. They smashed up the wireless first. Then they skipped and that old broken-down looking yawl went off to the south under an auxiliary engine.”

“And why the blazes didn’t they chase and ram her?” asked Hank.

“Couldn’t. The rudder was jammed. The fellows in the boat had done some tinkering work to it. It took them two days to get it right, and they can’t even give a full description of the men, for they wore caps with slits in them. Pulled the caps over their faces as they came aboard and looked through the slits.”

“I expect the Navy will take it in hand,” said George du Cane. “A couple of destroyers will soon run them down wherever they are hidden.”

Hank Fisher laughed. “You might as well go hunting for an honest man in Market Street with a couple of rat terriers,” said Hank. “First, you wouldn’t find him, second he wouldn’t be a rat. Why, that auxiliary yawl is either at the bottom by now, or converted into something else—and the guys on board her, do you think they’re traveling about the Pacific with their slit caps over their8 faces waiting for a destroyer to fetch them home? What did you say the reward was—twenty-five thousand? You wait one minute.”

He rose up and left the room.

“What’s the matter with Hank now?” asked George.

“Search me,” replied Abrahams, “unless he’s gone off to ’phone the police all about Vanderdecken being Amsterdam Joe and his description.”

“He’d never do that,” said Carolus. “He’s too chivalrous; you fellows don’t know Hank. I don’t rightly know him myself. He’s a contradiction, something as new as wireless and as old as Don Quixote, but the Don’s there all the time. I saw him giving his arm to an old woman in Market Street the other day; looked like a washerwoman. She’d tumbled down and hurt her leg or something and there was Hank handing her like a duchess on to a car. He believes in the sanctity of womanhood—told me so once.”

“And he believes in the rights of man,” said Abrahams, “but he’d beat you out of your back teeth in one of his infernal land speculations.”

“And then buy you a new set,” said Carolus, “and swindle the dentist out of a commission on the deal. Not that he cares for money.”

“Oh, no, he doesn’t care for money,” said Abrahams. “I’ll admit that, but he’s a pirate all the same. It’s his romantic temperament,9 maybe, mixed up with his New England ancestry. Here he is.”

“Boys,” said Hank, as he approached the group, “it’s true enough, I’ve been on the ’phone; there’s twenty-five thousand dollars reward out for the Dutchman, half put up by the Yacht Clubs. I’m out.”

“What do you mean?” asked Abrahams.

“To catch him,” said Hank.

10

CHAPTER II THE PROPOSITION

HE sat down and lit a cigarette. The others showed little surprise or interest, with the exception of George du Cane.

It seemed to George that this was a new kind of proposition coming in these dull times.

“Are you in earnest?” said he.

“I sure am,” said Hank.

Abrahams, who was over forty with an expanding waist-line, and Carolus, who was a creature dead when divorced from cities and the atmosphere of Art, laughed.

Hank cocked his eye at them. Then he rose to his feet. “I was joking,” said Hank, “believe I could make you ginks swallow anything. Well, I’m off, see you to-morrow.”

George du Cane followed him out.

In the street he linked arms with him.

“Where are you going?” asked Hank.

“Wherever you are,” said George.

“Well, I’m going to the office,” said Hank.

“I’ll go with you,” said George. “I’ve got an idea.”

11

“What’s your idea?” asked Hank.

“I’ll tell you when we get to your office,” replied George.

Fisher and Company’s offices were situated as near heaven as the ordinary American can hope to reach. An express elevator shot them out on a concrete-floored landing where the faint clacking of typewriters sounded from behind doors marked with the names of business firms. The Bolsover Trust Syndicate; Moss Muriatti and Moscovitch; Fisher and Co.

The Fisher offices consisted of two rooms, the outer room for a typewriter and an inner room for the company.

The company’s room contained four chairs and a desk-table, a roll-topped desk and a cuspidor. The bare walls were hung with maps of towns and places. There was a map of San Francisco and its environments reaching from Valego to Santa Clara. There were maps of Redwood and San Jose, Belmont and San Mateo, Oakland and San Rafael and others.

George looked at the maps, whilst Hank sat down and looked at the morning’s correspondence spread on the table by the office boy.

These maps and town plans, marked here and there with red ink, spoke of big dealings and a prosperous business; the trail of Fisher and Company was over them all. They interested George vastly. It was the first time he had been in the office.

12

“I say, old man,” said George, suddenly breaking silence and detaching himself from the maps. “I didn’t know you had a company attached to you. Where’s the company?”

“Well, I expect it’s in Europe by this,” said Hank, laying down the last of his letters. “Or sunning itself on Palm Beach, or listening to the band somewhere. It bolted with the cash box three weeks ago, leaving me a thousand dollars to carry on with.”

“Good Lord,” said George, horror-stricken, yet amazed at the coolness of the other and the way he had managed to keep his disaster concealed from all and sundry; for at the Club Hank was considered a man of substance, almost too much substance for a Bohemian.

“It’s true,” said Hank.

“How many men were in it?”

“No men, it was a woman.”

“You were in partnership with a woman?”

“Yep.”

“Well, she might have done worse,” said George, “she might have married you.”

Hank, by way of reply, took a photograph from a drawer in the table and handed it to George, who gazed at it for half a minute and handed it back.

“I see,” said he, “but what made you have anything to do with her?”

The town lot speculator tilted back in his chair and lit a cigarette.

13

“Driscoll was her name,” said he, “and she didn’t care about her looks, she used to boast she could put a whole potato in her mouth. She was my landlady when I lived in Polk Street and she ran a laundry and had a hand in ward politics and the whole of the Irish contingent at her back. She had a better business head on her than any man in ’Frisco, and when I made some money over that trap of mine, she started me in the real estate business. We were good partners and made big money—and now she’s bolted.”

“Have you set the police after her?”

“Gosh, no,” said Hank. “What do you take me for? She’s a woman.”

“But she’s boned your money.”

“Half of it was hers, and anyhow, she’s a woman. I’m not used to kicking women and I don’t propose to learn.”

George remembered what Carolus had said about the Female Sanctity business and did not pursue the subject.

Hank smoked, his chair tilted back, his heels on the desk. Ruin seemed to sit easy on the town lot speculator. His mind seemed a thousand miles away from San Francisco and worry.

Then George broke into his reverie. “Look here,” he said, “I told you in the street I had an idea. Are you going after this man Vanderdecken or not?”

“And what if I am?” asked the cautious Hank.

“Then I’ll join you, if you’ll let me.”

14

“Well,” said Hank, “I told those two ginks at the Club I wasn’t. They’ve no understanding, for one thing, and for another I don’t want them to be spreading the news. But I am. For one thing I want a holiday and for another I want that twenty-five thousand dollars. Twenty, I mean, for it will take me all of five thousand dollars to catch him.”

“How much have you?”

“One thousand, about, and then I’ve got my royalties for the trap coming in.”

“That rat trap thing?”

“Yep.”

“How much does it bring you a year, if it’s not rude to ask?”

“Well, I reckon to net in royalties about one thousand five hundred a quarter and the returns are rising. The British are taking to it and Seligmann’s had an order for five thousand traps only last week for London delivery. I can borrow from them in advance of royalties.”

George sat down on a chair and nursed his knee and contemplated the toe of his boot. George, despite his easy way of life was no fool in money matters.

“You are going to spend five thousand in trying to catch this pirate,” said he, “and if you fail, where will you be?”

“Ask me another,” said Hank.

George took his cigarette case from his pocket,15 chose a cigarette and lit it; the two sat for a moment in silence.

“Besides,” said George suddenly, “you’ll most likely get a bullet through your head.”

“Most like,” said Hank.

“To say nothing of weather. You know what Pacific weather is on the coast here, and you’ll have to lay up maybe months waiting for the fellow in a cramped boat with beastly grub.”

“Sure,” said Hank.

“Well, there it is, the whole thing’s mad, rotten mad, it hasn’t a sound plank in it. What did you mean dragging me here with that proposition for bait?”

“Me drag you!” cried the outraged Hank.

“Yes, you, doped me and dragged me here with your talk at the Club, turned my head till I’m sure not sane, for I’m in this business with you up to the neck. I’m as mad as yourself, I want to be off, I wouldn’t be out of it for ten thousand dollars, though I’m hanged if I know what the draw is.”

“Man hunting,” said Hank.

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CHAPTER III THE PLAN

THE town lot speculator took his feet down from the desk and George, flinging his cigarette away, got up, took a few paces, and altered his position by straddling his chair, leaning his arms on the back. It was a favourite trick of old Harley du Cane. When big things were on, and if there was a crisis and he was seated and talking to you, ten to one he’d get up, take a few paces, and then sit down again straddling his chair as if he were riding a horse.

“Well, that’s settled,” said George. “I’m with you. What’s your plan? You said you knew where this man is and could put your finger on him.”

“I guess I was talking through my hat,” said Hank. “It’s a way I have, times.”

“Then how the devil are you going to find him?”

“It’s a way I have, times,” said Hank, not seeming to hear the other, “but I’m never far wrong when I’m talking that way. I don’t know where the chap is any more than I know where17 Solomon’s aunt’s buried, but I’ve a feeling that his haunt’s round about the islands down Santa Catalina way. I know all the coast running from Monterey right to Cape St. Lucas. I had a tenth share in a shark boat once, and I’ve nosed into all the cricks and corners right to the end of Lower California, and I’ve got a feeling that the Dutchman’s using the Channel Islands and that we’ll fetch him somewhere about there, if we’re clever.”

“You’re sure it’s Amsterdam Joe we’re after?”

“No, I’m not.”

“But great Scott, you said you were sure.”