Nick Carter Stories No. 152, August 7, 1915: The Forced Crime; or, Nick Carter's Brazen Clew.Carter, Nicholas (House name)
General
Nick Carter Stories No. 152, August 7, 1915: The Forced Crime; or, Nick Carter's Brazen Clew.
Carter, Nicholas (House name)
Detective and mystery stories, American -- Periodicals; Popular literature -- Periodicals
If MacMillan has to be awaited for or search made for him, the long
winter will make neither task easy. The ship will then find herself
encompassed with leagues of ice. Eskimo huts will spring up around her
like mushrooms, and in the long arctic night it would be difficult to
identify the little _Cluett_ with the picture of her taken at New York
the other day.
But a closer acquaintance with Captain Pickels and the _Cluett_ helps
one’s imagination to bridge the gap. Ever since she was built, four
years ago, for the Grenfell mission service on the Labrador coast,
Pickels has commanded her. She was designed for work in Northern waters.
As the bronze plate in the captain’s cabin sets forth, she was presented
to Doctor Wilfred Grenfell in July, 1911, by George B. Cluett. That she
went to sea with purposes other than those of the ordinary trading
schooner, the plate makes plain in these few words: “The Sea is His and
He Made It.” The inscription in the brass band which binds the wheel,
“Jesus saith I will make you fishers of men,” serves to distinguish her
from the run of fishing craft which infest the Labrador waters. But for
these symbols of a higher vocation she is just like them, save that she
is much more stanch.
Although the proved nimbleness of the _Cluett_ leads her charterers to
hope that she may slip in and out with the rescued MacMillan party in
time to get back to New York in November, the way food supplies have
been poured into her show that no chances are to be taken in a locality
where, as the captain remarked, “ye can’t fetch stuff from a grocery
’round the corner.’” He shed light upon what for a dozen men might be
considered a two years’ food supply. Some two thousand pounds of beef,
nearly half of it canned and the rest pickled in brine, and an almost
equal quantity of mutton and pork, formed the backbone of the stores.
Beans and potatoes and barrel on barrel of pilot bread set off this
impressive meat supply, which winter hunting is to vary with fresh
steaks and roasts.
Several hundred pounds of coffee and a hundred of tea, onions, and many
gallons of lime juice to ward off scurvy, were important items;
strangely enough, not a particle of chocolate or coco. A comment upon
the rather small supply of milk--condensed, of course--as compared with,
for one thing, three hundred pounds of rolled oats, drew from the hardy
captain the explanation that crews in the North preferred molasses with
their oatmeal, and of molasses he had nearly a hundred gallons.
When the schooner starts on the last leg of the journey north, with
decks piled high with barrels of kerosene--the _Cluett_ is to be stocked
with nearly five thousand gallons of kerosene and nine hundred gallons
of gasoline for her engines--the only persons aboard beside the crew of
eight hardy Nova Scotians, will be the representative of the Natural
History Museum. Captain Pickels’ Newfoundland dog, “Chum,” completes the
list.
“Belled” Buzzard Appears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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