"Boys," said Ryder, "I'll tell you. Nickerson--yes, I know the yarns about him. It was this way--y'see, I ain't keeping anything from you, boys. Two years ago he was a Methody preacher in Santa Clara. Well, he was what they call a revivalist, and he was holding forth one blazin' hot day out in the sun when all to once he goes down, _flat,_ an' don't come round for the better part o' two days. When he wakes up he's _another person;_ he'd forgot his name, forgot his job, forgot the whole blamed shooting-match. _And he ain't never remembered them since._ The doctors have names for that kind o' thing. It seems it does happen now and again. Well, he turned to an' began sailoring first off--soon as the hospitals and medicos were done with him--an' him not having any friends as you might say, he was let go his own gait. He got to be third mate of some kind o' dough-dish down Mexico way; and then I got hold o' him an' took him into the Comp'ny. He's been with me ever since. He ain't got the faintest kind o' recollection o' his Methody days, an' believes he's always been a sailorman. Well, that's _his_ business, ain't it? If he takes my orders an' walks chalk, what do I care about his Methody game? There, boys, is the origin, history and development of Slick Dick Nickerson. If you take up this sea-otter deal and go to Point Barrow, naturally Nick has got to go as owner's agent and representative of the Comp'ny. But I couldn't send a easier fellow to get along with. Honest, now, I couldn't. Boys, you think over the proposition between now and tomorrow an' then come around and let me know." And the upshot of the whole matter was that one month later the _Bertha Millner_, with Nickerson, Hardenberg, Strokher and Ally Bazan on board, cleared from San Francisco, bound--the papers were beautifully precise--for Seattle and Tacoma with a cargo of general merchandise. As a matter of fact, the bulk of her cargo consisted of some odd hundreds of very fine lumps of rock--which as ballast is cheap by the ton--and some odd dozen cases of conspicuously labeled champagne. The Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company made this champagne out of Rhine wine, effervescent salts, raisins, rock candy and alcohol. It was from the same stock of wine of which Ryder had sold some thousand cases to the Coreans the year before. II "Not that I care a curse," said Strokher, the Englishman. "But I put it to you squarely that this voyage lacks that certain indescribable charm." The _Bertha Millner_ was a fortnight out, and the four adventurers--or, rather, the three adventurers and Nickerson--were lame in every joint, red-eyed from lack of sleep, half-starved, wholly wet and unequivocally disgusted. They had had heavy weather from the day they bade farewell to the whistling buoy off San Francisco Bay until the moment when even patient, docile, taciturn Strokher had at last--in his own fashion--rebelled.