he could get a note to the captain recommending me. I asked him to
get the note.

Good old Mac! The sea was calling me, true enough, but only dire
necessity was driving me to ship before the mast--necessity and perhaps
what, for want of a better name, we call destiny. For what is fate but
inevitable law, inevitable consequence.

The stirring of my blood, generations removed from a seafaring
ancestor; my illness, not a cause, but a result; McWhirter, filling
prescriptions behind the glass screen of a pharmacy, and fitting out,
in porcelain jars, the medicine-closet of the Ella; Turner and his
wife, Schwartz, the mulatto Tom, Singleton, and Elsa Lee; all thrown
together, a hodge-podge of characters, motives, passions, and
hereditary tendencies, through an inevitable law working together
toward that terrible night of August 22, when hell seemed loose on a
painted sea.

CHAPTER II

THE PAINTED SHIP

The Ella had been a coasting-vessel, carrying dressed lumber to South
America, and on her return trip bringing a miscellaneous cargo--hides
and wool, sugar from Pernambuco, whatever offered. The firm of Turner
and Sons owned the line of which the Ella was one of the smallest
vessels.

The gradual elimination of sailing ships and the substitution of
steamers in the coasting trade, left the Ella, with others, out of
commission. She was still seaworthy, rather fast, as such vessels go,
and steady. Marshall Turner, the oldest son of old Elias Turner, the
founder of the business, bought it in at a nominal sum, with the
intention of using it as a private yacht. And, since it was a
superstition of the house never to change the name of one of its
vessels, the schooner Ella, odorous of fresh lumber or raw rubber, as
the case might be, dingy gray in color, with slovenly decks on which
lines of seamen's clothing were generally hanging to dry, remained, in
her metamorphosis, still the Ella.

Marshall Turner was a wealthy man, but he equipped his new
pleasure-boat very modestly. As few changes as were possible were
made. He increased the size of the forward house, adding quarters for
the captain and the two mates, and thus kept the after house for
himself and his friends. He fumigated the hold and the forecastle--a
precaution that kept all the crew coughing for two days, and drove them
out of the odor of formaldehyde to the deck to sleep. He installed an
electric lighting and refrigerating plant, put a bath in th