One-half the ship was converted into a gambling hall. Here every game of chance at Monte Carlo,--faro, roulette, poker, pinquette, fantan, and every other game by which a man can win a fortune or lose his all in a single night--was to be put in operation.
There was to be a bar where every known strong drink could be bought, and each man was to be the judge of when he had had enough. No waiter could inform him that the management refused to serve him anything more, and he would have to go elsewhere. Here one could swill brandy, absinthe, bhang, or any other nerve-destroying drink until his brain reeled; and as long as he had the money to pay for more no one would stop him.
Every drug and narcotic, whose sale is guarded by the laws of the United States and other civilized countries, was to be sold as freely as the chocolates of the confectioner. Cocaine, opium, laudanum, and morphine were laid in in bulk for the use of the passengers of the “Lawless,” without limit or restriction. In fact, there was wine for the drinker, women for him who wanted company, song for him who would sing, and each and every other evil thing ever devised by a wicked and lustful world was to be found somewhere between the two decks of this Palace of Sin.
The trips were to last one month, the “Lawless” merely getting into mid ocean and steaming slowly down to the Gulf of Mexico, remaining there until the month was up, when the passengers, saturated with vice and steeped in corruption, were to be returned to the place of starting. The crew was cut down to as small a number as possible, and consisted mostly of the riffraff to be found about the wharves of any large seaport city.
There was nothing about the scheme which could be punished by the laws of any country, nevertheless the arrangements were kept as quiet as possible, and nothing found its way into the papers.
On the night of June 16, 1885, the “Lawless,” as the boat was very appropriately rechristened, steamed away from New York. The passengers had begun to arrive in the evening as soon as it became dark, and at 12.30 every one who had engaged passage was on board. There was no one down to the pier to speed the departing voyager, or to wish him good luck. The sinister expedition set out without as much as the wave of a handkerchief from shore. She was a little longer in getting under way than had been anticipated, but at two o’clock in the morning of the seventeenth, the “Lawless” was well out to sea, and the great hull, which up till then, save for a few lights about deck, had been kept dark, burst suddenly into light. Down in the hold a big Westinghouse generator was whirling away, and, at a word from the captain, fifteen hundred electric lights were suddenly switched into circuit and the “Lawless” was on full blast. The limit was reached, and the ship had come to her own.