But Hardenberg only shifted his cigar to the other corner of his mouth.
He knew Ally Bazan, and knew that the little fellow would have jeered at
the offer of a first-cabin passage back to San Francisco in the
swiftest, surest, steadiest passenger steamer that ever wore paint. So
he remarked: "I ain't ever billed this promenade as a Coney Island
picnic, I guess."

Nickerson--Slick Dick, the supercargo--was all that Hardenberg, who
captained the schooner, could expect. He never interfered, never
questioned; never protested in the name or interests of the Company when
Hardenberg "hung on" in the bleak, bitter squalls till the _Bertha_ was
rail under and the sails hard as iron.

If it was true that he had once been a Methody revivalist no one, to
quote Alia Bazan, "could a' smelled it off'n him." He was a
black-bearded, scrawling six-footer, with a voice like a steam siren and
a fist like a sledge. He carried two revolvers, spoke of the Russians at
Point Barrow as the "Boomskys," and boasted if it came to _that_ he'd
engage to account for two of them, would shove their heads into their
boot-legs and give them the running scrag, by God so he would!

Slowly, laboriously, beset in blinding fogs, swept with, icy rains,
buffeted and mauled and man-handled by the unending assaults of the sea,
the _Bertha Millner_ worked her way northward up that iron coast--till
suddenly she entered an elysium.

Overnight she seemed to have run into it: it was a world of green,
wooded islands, of smooth channels, of warm and steady winds, of
cloudless skies. Coming on deck upon the morning of the _Bertha's_ first