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Page 10
And Tom!--with a bigger pack of bear dogs ranging the mountains and
sleeping out a week at a time. Frederick remembered the final conference
in the kitchen--Tom, and he, and Eliza Travers, who still cooked and
baked and washed dishes on an estate that carried a hundred and eighty
thousand dollars in mortgages.
"Don't divide," Eliza Travers had pleaded, resting her soap-flecked,
parboiled arms. "Isaac was right. It will be worth millions. The country
is opening up. We must all pull together."
"I don't want the estate," Tom cried. "Let Frederick have it. What I
want...."
He never completed the sentence, but all the vision of the world burned
in his eyes.
"I can't wait," he went on. "You can have the millions when they come.
In the meantime let me have ten thousand. I'll sign off quitclaim to
everything. And give me the old schooner, and some day I'll be back with
a pot of money to help you out."
Frederick could see himself, in that far past day, throwing up his arms
in horror and crying:
"Ten thousand!--when I'm strained to the breaking point to raise this
quarter's interest!"
"There's the block of land next to the court house," Tom had urged. "I
know the bank has a standing offer for ten thousand."
"But it will be worth a hundred thousand in ten years," Frederick had
objected.
"Call it so. Say I quitclaim everything for a hundred thousand. Sell it
for ten and let me have it. It's all I want, and I want it now. You can
have the rest."
And Tom had had his will as usual (the block had been mortgaged instead
of sold), and sailed away in the old schooner, the benediction of the
town upon his head, for he had carried away in his crew half the
riff-raff of the beach.
The bones of the schooner had been left on the coast of Java. That had
been when Eliza Travers was being operated on for her eyes, and
Frederick had kept it from her until indubitable proof came that Tom was
still alive.
Frederick went over to his files and drew out a drawer labelled "Thomas
Travers." In it were packets, methodically arranged. He went over the
letters. They were from everywhere--China, Rangoon, Australia, South
Africa, the Gold Coast, Patagonia, Armenia, Alaska. Briefly and
infrequently written, they epitomised the wanderer's life. Frederick ran
over in his mind a few of the glimpsed highlights of Tom's career. He
had fought in some sort of foreign troubles in Armenia. He had been an
officer in the Chinese army, and it was a certainty that the trade he
later drove in the China Seas was illicit. He had been caught running
arms into Cuba. It seemed he had always been running something somewhere
that it ought not to have been run. And he had never outgrown it. One
letter, on crinkly tissue paper, showed that as late as the
Japanese-Russian War he had been caught running coal into Port Arthur
and been taken to the prize court at Sasebo, where his steamer was
confiscated and he remained a prisoner until the end of the war.
Frederick smiled as he read a paragraph: "_How do you prosper? Let me
know any time a few thousands will help you_." He looked at the date,
April 18, 1883, and opened another packet. "_May 5th_," 1883, was the
dated sheet he drew out. "_Five thousand will put me on my feet again.
If you can, and love me, send it along pronto--that's Spanish for
rush_."
He glanced again at the two dates. It was evident that somewhere between
April 18th and May 5th Tom had come a cropper. With a smile, half
bitter, Frederick skimmed on through the correspondence: "_There's a
wreck on Midway Island. A fortune in it, salvage you know. Auction in
two days. Cable me four thousand_." The last he examined, ran: "_A deal
I can swing with a little cash. It's big, I tell you. It's so big I
don't dare tell you_." He remembered that deal--a Latin-American
revolution. He had sent the cash, and Tom had swung it, and himself as
well, into a prison cell and a death sentence.
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