Suppose on that certain summer's day, you had asked of Lloyds' agency
where the _Glarus_ was, and what was her destination and cargo. You
would have been told that she was twenty days out from Callao, bound
north to San Francisco in ballast; that she had been spoken by the bark
_Medea_ and the steamer _Benevento_; that she was reported to have blown
out a cylinder head, but being manageable was proceeding on her way
under sail.
That is what Lloyds would have answered.
If you know something of the ways of ships and what is expected of them,
you will understand that the _Glarus_, to be some half a dozen hundred
miles south of where Lloyds' would have her, and to be still going
south, under full steam, was a scandal that would have made her brothers
and sisters ostracize her finally and forever.
And that is curious, too. Humans may indulge in vagaries innumerable,
and may go far afield in the way of lying; but a ship may not so much as
quibble without suspicion. The least lapse of "regularity," the least
difficulty in squaring performance with intuition, and behold she is on
the black list, and her captain, owners, officers, agents and
consignors, and even supercargoes, are asked to explain.
And the _Glarus_ was already on the black list. From the beginning her
stars had been malign. As the _Breda_, she had first lost her
reputation, seduced into a filibustering escapade down the South
American coast, where in the end a plain-clothes United States
detective--that is to say, a revenue cutter--arrested her off Buenos
Ayres and brought her home, a prodigal daughter, besmirched and
disgraced.
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