He got it. Lying in San Francisco Bay was the British ship Sea Wanderer, of Liverpool, a vessel of 2,000 tons, old and rather disreputable in appearance, ready to carry such cargo as she could get and make a precarious profit for her owners. Soon she would be scrapped. That is, if she did not go to pieces first.

And yet despite the clumsiness of her outline, with all her sail set, she was a beauty, a perfect swan of a ship; a swan with a streaked and dark and dirty breast and body. She had loaded with grain at Port Costa and now lay anchored in midstream waiting to get a crew. The skipper, a Welshman of Cardiff, had a charter to fulfil and was rapidly growing frantic. He was shipping anything and anybody who offered. He took a sharp look at Guy Vanton, noted the fact that here was a man no longer young, noted the further fact that this man no longer young was a person of intelligence and education, found out that Guy had had no sea experience, cursed a little, computed wages, remembered[251] that Guy would be so many added pounds of beef on a rope and took him.

The passage was from San Francisco to Leith in Scotland. In the course of it Guy put on fifteen pounds and came to a clear understanding with himself and at least one man of the crew.

They fought, he and this other man, in the waist, surrounded by a ring of seamen whose sympathy was entirely against Guy and with the Scotchman, named Macpherson. Macpherson was about ten pounds heavier than Guy but made the mistake of clinching. Whereupon Guy turned the fight into a wrestling match and threw his opponent. Macpherson’s head striking on an iron butt, there was no more battle in him that da............