f action. To get away--anywhere--was their one aim. Moran was by nature
a creature unfit for civilization, and the love of adventure and the
desire for action had suddenly leaped to life in Wilbur's blood and was
not to be resisted. They would get up to San Francisco, dispose of their
"loot," outfit the "Bertha Millner" as a filibuster, and put to sea
again. They had discussed the advisability of rounding the Horn in so
small a ship as the "Bertha Millner," but Moran had settled that at
once.

"I've got to know her pretty well," she told Wilbur. "She's sound as a
nut. Only let's get away from this place."

But toward ten o'clock on the morning after their arrival off Coronado,
and just as they were preparing to get under way, Hoang touched Wilbur's
elbow.

"Seeum lil one-piece smoke-boat; him come chop-chop."

In fact, a little steam-launch was rapidly approaching the schooner. In
another instant she was alongside. Jerry, Nat Ridgeway, Josie Herrick,
and an elderly woman, whom Wilbur barely knew as Miss Herrick's married
sister, were aboard.

"We've come off to see your yacht!" cried Miss Herrick to Wilbur as the
launch bumped along the schooner's counter. "Can we come aboard?" She
looked very pretty in her crisp pink shirt-waist her white duck skirt,
and white kid shoes, her sailor hat tilted at a barely perceptible
angle. The men were in white flannels and smart yachting suits. "Can we
come aboard?" she repeated.

Wilbur gasped and stared. "Good Lord!" he muttered. "Oh, come along," he
added, desperately.

The party came over the side.

"Oh, my!" said Miss Herrick blankly, stopping short.

The decks, masts, and rails of the schooner were shiny with a black
coating of dirt and grease; the sails were gray with grime; a strangling
odor of oil and tar, of cooking and of opium, of Chinese punk and drying
fish, pervaded all the air. In the waist, Hoang and Jim, bare to the
belt, their queues looped around their necks to be out of the way,
were stowing the dory and exchanging high-pitched monosyllables.
Miss Herrick's sister had not come aboard. The three visitors--Jerry,
Ridgeway, and Josie--stood nervously huddled together, their elbows
close in, as if to avoid contact with the prevailing filth, their
immaculate white outing-clothes detaching themselves violently against
the squalor and sordid grime of the schooner's background.

"Oh, my!" repeated Miss Herrick in dismay, half closing her eyes. "To
think of wh