“But the twenty-five thousand dollars I won from you--” Joey began, but Cappy held up a rigid finger, enjoining silence.
“I am going to stick your dub of a father for that, as a penance for his sins of omission, Joey; for by the Holy Pink-Toed Prophet, if ever a boy won a bet and was entitled to it, you're that young man. In-fer-nal young scoundrel! Keep it and split fifty-fifty with your wife. You won a straight bet from a crooked gambler, and if I haven't had a million dollars' worth of fun out of this transaction I hope I may marry a hula-hula woman--and I've passed my three score and ten and ought to know better!”
“Don't worry about him. The Scotch are a hardy race and Mac is a sailor. Joey, I know sailors. The scoundrels have a wife in every port!”
During the period when Joey Gurney was busy doing all that Cappy Ricks desired him to do and some things that were slightly off Cappy's program, the president emeritus of the Blue Star Navigation Company and allied interests was discovering that it is one thing to declare for the simple life and quite another to live it. The Great War challenged so much of the Ricks interest that he could not bear to live far from morning and evening editions--and he wanted them red hot off the presses. Things were doing in the shipping world. The most inconceivable trades were being consummated daily, freights were soaring, lumber prices had reached an unprecedentedly high level and promised to go higher; there was something doing every minute and not enough minutes in a working day to accommodate half of these somethings. What more natural, therefore, than that Cappy presently should find himself caught in the maelstrom, even though he told himself daily that, come what might _he_ would keep out of it.
The first indefinite evidence that he was about to be engulfed came in the form of a newspaper story, ex the steamer _Timaru_, from Sydney, via Tahiti. There it was, as big as a church--a paragraph of it, tucked away in a column-and-a-half story of the bombardment of Papeete by the German Pacific fleet early in September of 1914:
“An incident of the bombardment was the sinking of the German freight steamer _Valkyrie_ by shells from the German fleet. The vessel had been captured by the French gunboat _Zeile_ some weeks previous and was at anchor in the harbor, under the guns of the _Zeile_, when the German squadron appeared off the entrance. The gunboat immediately was made the target for the German guns, and sunk. During the attack, however, a wild shell missed the _Zeile_ and struck the _Valkyrie_, tearing a great hole in her hull and causing her to sink in ten fathoms at her anchorage.”