VII
THE day passed.
The crew, naturally, got drunk.
It was quiet weather, scarcely more than a breath on the ocean—and no reason for staying sober. The sails were drooped, the wheel made fast, and the Jessie Darling meandered lazily.
Tyler was drunk, too. I suppose he had had to show good fellowship with the mutineers. But my private opinion is that he did not try very hard to evade drunkenness.
I was patient. When there is no need for hurry, I can be extraordinarily patient. Besides, I had a headache and my body was sore. I waited for night.
Night came.
Yang Li led the way, but he remained behind me when the door opened and once more I stood waiting for Thrope to recognize me.
Thrope and Swanson were drinking together. What agreements and plans they were making I have no way of knowing. They sprang up, Swanson with a yell, as he saw me, half naked and bandaged—a big cleaver in my hand.
I was in earnest, and I meant it when I said—
"Up with your hands."
Why people think it is only a gun that commands the respect of uplifted hands, I do not know. A sober man would have had better sense than Swanson. Thrope, drunk as he was, raised his hands. But Swanson attempted to pull a gun—my gun—from the holster he had fastened on his hip.
He was slow as though untying a knot. I leaned forward to strike—but a streak of steel z-zz-zzzipped past my head. The thirsty point of that flexible blade went into Swanson's throat and pierced through his neck; whence the thin wrists of Yang Li got such driving power I do not know.
Swanson went over backward, his hands clawing at the knife. His head, in falling, struck the bulkhead, and he scarcely moved.
Thrope gasped something about it being me—again.
I told him that neither jails nor Davy Jones' locker seemed able to hold me.
"They hang men for aiding a mutiny," I told him. "The Federal Government—not the tenderloin judges."
I knew there was no chance of him ever being hanged, but I might as well give him something to think over when he would be alone. I wanted him to do much thinking, because I had an idea that this affair would have to end in a compromise all the way round.
I trussed Thrope up tightly, painfully tight in fact. I wanted him to have plenty to think of. Something more than mere deviltry.
From that time on I worked quick.
The man who stood a drunken guard over Captain Whibley's door, and no doubt kept awake only by cursing the captain and making remarks unfit for the ears of any woman, especially of her who was on the other side of the door, went down with a hole in his head. He happened to have been one of those who had pounded me, or he might have fared better.
The two mates left, Johnson and a young fellow by the name of Robbins, were alarmed by the shot and came to investigate. Robbins was the fuller of fight—and there was a chance of his surviving if he should be removed directly to a hospital as soon as we reached San Francisco.
Johnson did the discreet thing and surrendered.
With a rope end in one hand and the gun in the other I went on deck. Yang and the cook followed, but they carried water. A form that the rope could bring sufficiently to consciousness to understand what had happened was doused with water.
Three fellows of the drunken group around the capstan were sober enough to fight. No time was wasted in argument. It was stand to attention with a respectful "sir" or get hurt, and the man who threw a marlin-spike at me from the rear served as an object lesson for those sober enough to realize what happened to him.
I found Tyler peacefully snoozing with his head in a bucket; no doubt the bucket had originally served as a pillow. I gave him some attention from the rope end and knocked him down with the butt of the gun when he came up fighting mad.
"Thank Gord it's you! I wouldn't take it off no other feller," he said as he sat on the deck and rubbed his head to see how big the bump was.
I told him that I did not know any more about working a ship than I knew of ping-pong, but if he would give the orders, I would see that they were carried out.
It was a drunken and sullen lot that turned to; but they knew very well that I did not carry a gun as an ornament. When they seemed sober enough to understand that what I was saying was not out of any fear of them, I let it be known that the chances of their being prosecuted for mutiny when they reached port—if they did their work well in the meantime—were rather slim.
I was perhaps taking a good deal on to myself in holding out that hope; but I have been accustomed to taking a good deal on to myself at various times, and I knew very well what I was about on the Jessie Darling.
Then—but not until the ship was under discipline—I went to the captain's cabin. I made myself known through the door, and with some hesitancy it was opened by Helen. The captain was rather badly wounded and lay on the bed, covering the door with a gun.
I told him that I had made a mistake in refusing to give up my gun to him; that the mutineers had taken it anyway so I had been reduced to a cleaver, reinforced by a very clever knife-fighter.
WHIBLEY had a broken thigh—I think it was the thigh. Anyway it was something above his knee that overcame even his saturnine determination to stand upright and walk. He did not complain. He did not make a whimper, and though he pushed away Helen when she offered help in the futile solicitious way of a woman touched by the sight of pain, he did it with a strange gentleness. There was no doubt as to how she regarded him.
He asked bluntly if I had killed Thrope.
I told him my story. Helen had already told him hers. I do not think she told him the contents of the letter—but she mentioned it in my presence.
I left the cabin so abruptly that they must have thought I had suddenly gone mad.
High and low I searched for that letter. It contained a secret, a woman's secret—more than a woman's secret, really the destiny of more than one person. It is an awful thing to find the decisive factor of a person's destiny put down on a little bit of paper that may be shifted from hand to hand, and I was determined to get it if possible.
It was not possible. The body of Swanson had been put overboard. The seamen had plundered his pockets—as is not unusual, I believe, among such men as will try a mutiny when one of their number goes down; but there was no getting trace of the letter.
I questioned Thrope, who writhed in pain, in obvious pain. But he denied all knowledge of the letter. For one of the few times in my life, I was deceived by a man's lies—deceived when I looked right at him. But I was deceived, though not so much that I neglected to search him and to search his cabin. However, I believed the letter was gone. There was every reason to think that it had gone, either overboard with Swanson or been cast aside unthinkingly by any one of the crew that chanced to find it.
I had a talk with Thrope, and we came to an understanding.
He was to forget that I shot and killed his imported gunman, Smith; a gambler and dead-shot from Seattle brought down for the express purpose of running me out of San Francisco. As an aid to his forgetfulness he wrote out and signed a statement to the effect that he had often heard Smith say he would kill me. That Thrope had paid Smith to do this did not appear in the statement, but it was a sufficiently strong statement to give me evidence of self-defense.
Of course, its real importance lay in the fact that so long as I had it, Thrope would bring pressure to bear to keep me from being arrested and tried—or at least convicted.
In return, I was to say nothing about his damnable conduct toward Helen Curwen. I was tempted to this less for my own safety than on her own behalf, though I also had Captain Whibley in mind.
The situation was simply this: Helen was not only a fine girl, tinctured with the folly congenital to all girls, but any exploitation of her shame would rebound to Mrs. Curwen and strike again at Congressman Bryan—Thrope's rival for the governorship. So in making the scandal public to injure Thrope's candidacy, that of Bryan's would also be—if not blackened, at least hurt.
The letter which had caused so much concern, and about which all events had pivoted, was from Congressman Bryan to Mrs. Curwen. The letter was not clear, by any means. It had evidently been written for Mrs. Curwen's birthday, and it was a letter of gratitude and love from a son to a mother, who appreciated her great love and sacrifices on behalf of his career; to a mother who had deliberately kept herself in the shadows, secretly, almost furtively, cheering and aiding her boy, willing—the letter said—"to make all of the sacrifices of motherhood, without publicly claiming any of the honors."
I judged, and the author, Congressman Bryan, evidently believed, that he had been born fatherless, and that Mrs. Curwen, rather than let such stigma cling to him had made arrangements for putting him into the world as a foundling.
I did not understand this at all. But it was not my business to understand. I could not see why, since she called herself a Mrs. and acknowledged Helen as a daughter, this brilliant son had not been given a home and name.
But people work out their own lives in their own way, and some of them do not make such mistakes as some of us, catching only furtive and half-revealed glances, think.
For another thing, in our compromise, Thrope agreed to hold no grudge against Whibley. I impressed upon him that this last was an agreement in which I had taken a very strong personal interest. Whibley was the type of man I will go far from my path any time to help. I intimated to Thrope that any interference with Whibley's career would be pressure on my toes, and he knew that I very much resented having my feet stepped on.
I let him up and he sat at the table caressing his bottle of whisky between glasses, feeling not at all ashamed of what he had gone through with and been exposed in, but rather pleased to think an "amiable" understanding had been reached that protected every one.
Without anger, but with evident distaste, I tried to tell Thrope just what manner of man he was and what I thought of him. It is needless to repeat: I simply said in a few words what I have been making clear. But even I did not know, did not suspect the worst about him. Had I done so, I believe I would have killed him.
I know that I would have killed him—tossed him a gun and invited him to try to shoot first. I might have let him fire the first shot. I have done so on rare occasions when I was perfectly willing to go down in return for the satisfaction of being able, honorably, to murder a ruffian.
The man does not live who can shoot so quick or hit me in a spot so deadly that, in such a duel as I mention, I can not—if with nothing more than muscular reflex action—shoot in return; and there are seconds when I can not miss.
I must qualify that slightly: there is one spot which would be fatal to me in such circumstances, but it is not head or heart. It is the wrist, for a broken wrist would cut off the muscular reaction: that is one reason I have broken more gun-men's wrists than probably any other so-called gun-fighter on the Coast. Some people think that I have broken wrists because I hesitated to kill even human vermin.
But to return to Thrope. In the light of subsequent events, I will be bold enough to say that I would even have stooped to shoot him in the back, if in no other way I could have prevented what presently came to pass. That is, of course, if I had had prophetic vision and known what was going to happen.
He kept faith with me regarding the agreements about myself and Captain Whibley. It was something else, something ten times more inconceivably vile; nor did it directly concern Helen Curwen.
Thrope had reasons for keeping his eye on Mrs. Curwen. She was really Mrs. Curwen, and Curwen was less than five years dead.
Helen was her daughter. Thrope had remarked the beauty of Helen. He had insidiously and secretly become acquainted with her, flattered her, turned her head, promised—I don't know what all—and explained in some ingeniously specious way why Mrs. Curwen hated him so much.
Helen Curwen did not know the truth—not until after she had, at Thrope's instigation, stolen the letter which I returned to Mrs. Curwen. She had read it but not understood, scarcely suspected what it really meant until on board the Jessie Darling, when Thrope, gleefully, had made it clear.
Helen had been frightfully shocked; the idea that her mother had a "past" cut so deeply that it awakened her to her own folly, and in desperation she had appealed—for lack of any one else to whom she could appeal—to Yang Li; and that wily, wise old Chinaman showed himself a human being.
Being a reader of character, as most if not all Chinamen are, he thrust the girl unannounced under my protection; and that I came near failing in giving her the needed protection was not the fault of Yang Li.
The hardest part of the effort to effect a general compromise and secrecy of what had happened was with Captain Whibley. He swore by all the gods of a seaman that Thrope should be brought to the bar for his wickedness toward Helen.
A simple-hearted old sea captain—he believed in justice and the honor of courts. It was with difficulty I impressed the truth upon him; then he was incredulous. But he yielded to the appeal of protecting Helen, her name, her future. That touched him. He agreed.
So I helped Captain Whibley on to the quarter-deck; and Tyler—as good a man as could be found in the forecastle on any ship for holding a course—took the wheel; Thrope stood by himself at the windward sail, and Helen and I remained by the captain—and we came back through the Golden Gate.