Society in Sarnia admitted that Captain Pierpoint was really quite an acquisition. An English gentleman by birth, well educated, and of pleasant manners, he had made a little money out west by mining, it was understood, and had now retired to the City of Sarnia, in the Province of Ontario and Dominion of Canada, to increase it by a quiet bit of speculative grain trading. He had been in the grain trade already, and[Pg 153] people on the lake remembered him well; for Captain Pierpoint, in his honest, straightforward fashion, disdained the vulgar trickiness of an alias, and bore throughout the string of names which he had originally received from his godfathers and godmothers at his baptism. A thorough good fellow Captain Pierpoint had been at Aylmer\'s Pike; a perfect gentleman he was at Sarnia. As a matter of fact, indeed, the Captain was decently well-born, the son of an English country clergyman, educated at a respectable grammar school, and capable of being all things to all men in whatever station of life it might please Providence to place him. Society at Sarnia had no prejudice against the grain trade; if it had, the prejudice would have been distinctly self-regarding, for everybody in the little town did something in grain; and if Captain Pierpoint chose sometimes to navigate his own vessels, that was a fad which struck nobody as out of the way in an easy-going, money-getting, Canadian city.
Somehow or other, everything seemed to go wrong with Captain Pierpoint\'s cargoes. He was always losing a scow laden with best fall wheat from Chicago for Buffalo; or running a lumber vessel ashore on the shoals of Lake Erie; or getting a four-master jammed in the ice packs on the St. Clair river: and though the insurance companies continually declared that Captain Pierpoint had got the better of them, the Captain himself was wont to complain that no insurance could ever possibly cover the losses he sustained by the carelessness of his subordinates or the constant perversity of wind and waters. He was obliged to take his own ships down, he would have it, because nobody else could take them safely for him; and though he met with quite as many accidents himself as many of his deputies did, he continued to convey his grain in person, hoping, as he said, that luck would turn some day, and that a good speculation[Pg 154] would finally enable him honourably to retrieve his shattered fortunes.
However this might be, it happened curiously enough that, in spite of all his losses, Captain Pierpoint seemed to grow richer and richer, visibly to the naked eye, with each reverse of his trading efforts. He took a handsome house, set up a carriage and pair, and made love to the prettiest and sweetest girl in all Sarnia. The prettiest and sweetest girl was not proof against Captain Pierpoint\'s suave tongue and handsome house; and she married him in very good faith, honestly believing in him as a good woman will in a scoundrel, and clinging to him fervently with all her heart and soul. No happier and more loving pair in all Sarnia than Captain and Mrs. Pierpoint.
Some months after the marriage, Captain Pierpoint arranged to take down a scow or flat-bottomed boat, laden with grain, from Milwaukee for the Erie Canal. He took up the scow himself, and before he started for the voyage, it was a curious fact that he went in person down into the hold, bored eight large holes right through the bottom, and filled each up, as he drew out the auger, with a caulked plug made exactly to fit it, and hammered firmly into place with a wooden mallet. There was a ring in each plug, by which it could be pulled out again without much difficulty; and the whole eight were all placed along the gangway of the hold, where no cargo would lie on top of them. The scow\'s name was the Fortuna: "sit faustum omen et felix," murmured Captain Pierpoint to himself; for among his other accomplishments he had not wholly neglected nor entirely forgotten the classical languages.
It took only two men and the skipper to navigate the scow; for lake craft towed by steam propellers are always very lightly manned: and when Captain Pierpoint reached Milwaukee, where he was to take in cargo, he dismissed the two sailors who had come with him from Sarnia, and[Pg 155] engaged two fresh hands at the harbour. Rough, miner-looking men they were, with very little of the sailor about them; but Captain Pierpoint\'s sharp eye soon told him they were the right sort of men for his purpose, and he engaged them on the spot, without a moment\'s hesitation. Pete and Hiram had had some difficulty in tracking him, for they never thought he would return to the lakes, but they had tracked him at last, and were ready now to take their revenge.
They had disguised themselves as well as they were able, and in their clumsy knavery they thought they had completely deceived the Captain. But almost from the moment the Captain saw them, he knew who they were, and he took his measures accordingly. "Stupid louts," he said to himself, with the fine contempt of an educated scoundrel for the unsophisticated natural ruffian: "here\'s a fine chance of killing two birds with one stone!" And when the Captain said the word "killing," he said it in his own mind with a delicate sinister emphasis which meant business.
The scow was duly loaded, and with a heavy cargo of grain aboard, she proceeded to make her way slowly, by the aid of a tug, out of Milwaukee Harbour.
As soon as she was once clear of the wharf, and while the busy shipping of the great port still surrounded them on every side, Captain Pierpoint calmly drew his revolver, and took his stand beside the hatches. "Pete and Hiram," he said quietly to his two assistants, "I want to have a little serious talk with you two before we go any further."
If he had fired upon them outright instead of merely calling them by their own names, the two common conspirators could not have started more unfeignedly, or looked more unspeakably cowed, than they did at that moment. Their first impulse was to draw their own revolvers in return; but they saw in a second that the Captain was beforehand with them, and[Pg 156] that they had better not try to shoot him before the very eyes of all Milwaukee.
"Now, boys," the Captain went on steadily, with his finger on the trigger and his eye fixed straight on the men\'s faces, "we three quite understand one another. I took your savings for reasons of my own; and you have shipped here to-day to murder me on the voyage. But I recognized you before I engaged you: and I have left word at Milwaukee that if anything happens to me on this journey, you two have a grudge against me, and must be hanged for it. I\'ve taken care that if this scow comes into any port along the lakes without me aboard, you two are to be promptly arrested." (This was false, of course; but to Captain Pierpoint a small matter like that was a mere trifle.) "And I\'ve shipped myself along with you, just to show you I\'m not afraid of you. But if either of you disobeys my orders in anything for one minute, I shoot at once, and no jury in Canada or the States will touch a hair of my head for doing it. I\'m a respectable shipowner and grain merchant, you\'re a pair of disreputable skulking miners, pretending to be sailors, and you\'ve shipped aboard here on purpose to murder and rob me. If you shoot me, it\'s murder: if I shoot you, it\'s justifiable homicide. Now, boys, do you understand that?"
Pete looked at Hiram and was beginning to speak, when the ca............