



Produced by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer. HTML
version by Al Haines.










The After House


by

Mary Roberts Rinehart



CONTENTS

      I  I PLAN A VOYAGE
     II  THE PAINTED SHIP
    III  I UNCLENCH MY HANDS
     IV  I RECEIVE A WARNING
      V  A TERRIBLE NIGHT
     VI  IN THE AFTER HOUSE
    VII  WE FIND THE AXE
   VIII  THE STEWARDESS'S STORY
     IX  PRISONERS
      X  "THAT'S MUTINY"
     XI  THE DEAD LINE
    XII  THE FIRST MATE TALKS
   XIII  THE WHITE LIGHT
    XIV  FROM THE CROW'S NEST
     XV  A KNOCKING IN THE HOLD
    XVI  JONES STUMBLES OVER SOMETHING
   XVII  THE AXE IS GONE
  XVIII  A BAD COMBINATION
    XIX  I TAKE THE STAND
     XX  OLESON'S STORY
    XXI  "A BAD WOMAN"
   XXII  TURNER'S STORY
  XXIII  FREE AGAIN
   XXIV  THE THING
    XXV  THE SEA AGAIN




CHAPTER I

I PLAN A VOYAGE


By the bequest of an elder brother, I was left enough money to see me
through a small college in Ohio, and to secure me four years in a
medical school in the East.  Why I chose medicine I hardly know.
Possibly the career of a surgeon attracted the adventurous element in
me.  Perhaps, coming of a family of doctors, I merely followed the line
of least resistance.  It may be, indirectly but inevitably, that I
might be on the yacht Ella on that terrible night of August 12, more
than a year ago.

I got through somehow.  I played quarterback on the football team, and
made some money coaching.  In summer I did whatever came to hand, from
chartering a sail-boat at a summer resort and taking passengers, at so
much a head, to checking up cucumbers in Indiana for a Western pickle
house.

I was practically alone.  Commencement left me with a diploma, a new
dress-suit, an out-of-date medical library, a box of surgical
instruments of the same date as the books, and an incipient case of
typhoid fever.

I was twenty-four, six feet tall, and forty inches around the chest.
Also, I had lived clean, and worked and played hard.  I got over the
fever finally, pretty much all bone and appetite; but--alive. Thanks to
the college, my hospital care had cost nothing.  It was a good thing: I
had just seven dollars in the world.

The yacht Ella lay in the river not far from my hospital windows. She
was not a yacht when I first saw her, nor at any time, technically,
unless I use the word in the broad sense of a pleasure-boat.  She was a
two-master, and, when I saw her first, as dirty and disreputable as are
most coasting-vessels.  Her rejuvenation was the history of my
convalescence.  On the day she stood forth in her first coat of white
paint, I exchanged my dressing-gown for clothing that, however loosely
it hung, was still clothing.  Her new sails marked my promotion to
beefsteak, her brass rails and awnings my first independent excursion
up and down the corridor outside my door, and, incidentally, my return
to a collar and tie.

The river shipping appealed to me, to my imagination, clean washed by
my illness and ready as a child's for new impressions: liners gliding
down to the bay and the open sea; shrewish, scolding tugs; dirty but
picturesque tramps.  My enthusiasm amused the nurses, whose ideas of
adventure consisted of little jaunts of exploration into the abdominal
cavity, and whose aseptic minds revolted at the sight of dirty sails.

One day I pointed out to one of them an old schooner, red and brown,
with patched canvas spread, moving swiftly down the river before a
stiff breeze.

"Look at her!" I exclaimed.  "There goes adventure, mystery, romance!
I should like to be sailing on her."

"You would have to boil the drinking-water," she replied dryly.  "And
the ship is probably swarming with rats."

"Rats," I affirmed, "add to the local color.  Ships are their native
habitat.  Only sinking ships don't have them."

But her answer was to retort that rats carried bubonic plague, and to
exit, carrying the sugar-bowl.  I was ravenous, as are all convalescent
