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reason why they couldn't have negotiated the submerged tunnel beneath the
barrier cliffs and made good their escape."
"
I don't like 'em," said the assistant secretary; "but sometimes you got to hand it
to 'em."
"Yes," I growled, "and there's nothing I'd enjoy more than handing it to them!"
And then the telephone-bell rang.
The assistant secretary answered, and as I watched him, I saw his jaw drop and
his face go white. "My God!" he exclaimed as he hung up the receiver as one in a
trance. "It can't be!"
"
"
What?" I asked.
Mr. Tyler is dead," he answered in a dull voice. "He died at sea, suddenly,
yesterday."
The next ten days were occupied in burying Mr. Bowen J. Tyler, Sr., and
arranging plans for the succor of his son. Mr. Tom Billings, the late Mr. Tyler's
secretary, did it all. He is force, energy, initiative and good judgment combined
and personified. I never have beheld a more dynamic young man. He handled
lawyers, courts and executors as a sculptor handles his modeling clay. He
formed, fashioned and forced them to his will. He had been a classmate of Bowen
Tyler at college, and a fraternity brother, and before, that he had been an
impoverished and improvident cow-puncher on one of the great Tyler ranches.
Tyler, Sr., had picked him out of thousands of employees and made him; or
rather Tyler had given him the opportunity, and then Billings had made himself.
Tyler, Jr., as good a judge of men as his father, had taken him into his friendship,
and between the two of them they had turned out a man who would have died for
a Tyler as quickly as he would have for his flag. Yet there was none of the
sycophant or fawner in Billings; ordinarily I do not wax enthusiastic about men,
but this man Billings comes as close to my conception of what a regular man
should be as any I have ever met. I venture to say that before Bowen J. Tyler
sent him to college he had never heard the word ethics, and yet I am equally sure
that in all his life he never has transgressed a single tenet of the code of ethics of
an American gentleman.
Ten days after they brought Mr. Tyler's body off the Toreador, we steamed out
into the Pacific in search of Caprona. There were forty in the party, including the
master and crew of the Toreador; and Billings the indomitable was in command.
We had a long and uninteresting search for Caprona, for the old map upon which
the assistant secretary had finally located it was most inaccurate. When its grim
walls finally rose out of the ocean's mists before us, we were so far south that it
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