Occasionally his guardians heard from him. At one time he was owner
and master of a four-masted steel sailing ship that carried the
English flag and coals from Newcastle. They knew that much, because
they had been called upon for the purchase price, because they read
Dick's name in the papers as master when his ship rescued the
passengers of the ill-fated _Orion_, and because they collected
the insurance when Dick's ship was lost with most of all hands in the
great Fiji hurricane. In 1896, he was in the Klondike; in 1897, he was
in Kamchatka and scurvy-stricken; and, next, he erupted with the
American flag into the Philippines. Once, although they could never
learn how nor why, he was owner and master of a crazy tramp steamer,
long since rejected by Lloyd's, which sailed under the aegis of Siam.

From time to time business correspondence compelled them to hear from
him from various purple ports of the purple seas. Once, they had to
bring the entire political pressure of the Pacific Coast to bear upon
Washington in order to get him out of a scrape in Russia, of which
affair not one line appeared in the daily press, but which affair was
secretly provocative of ticklish joy and delight in all the
chancellories of Europe.

Incidentally, they knew that he lay wounded in Mafeking; that he
pulled through a bout with yellow fever in Guayaquil; and that he
stood trial for brutality on the high seas in New York City. Thrice
they read in the press dispatches that he was dead: once, in battle,
in Mexico; and twice, executed, in Venezuela. After such false
flutterings, his guardians refused longer to be thrilled when he
crossed the Yellow Sea in a sampan, was "rumored" to have died of
beri-beri, was captured from the Russians by the Japanese at Mukden,