CHAPTER VI
THE TAKING OF THE MARIANA
THE story of the iron bark for which the Heraldr was on a treasure-hunt was known and discussed in every part of the Pacific. She had been owned by her captain, formerly a German trading skipper, named Gunmeyer. He had got a fortune out of rich shell and pearls, then bought the Mariana, intending after one voyage from Sydney to England to put her under the German flag and engage in South American trade from Europe. He was done with the South Pacific.
Loaded with a general cargo of wool, wheat, timber, a small gold shipment, eight passengers, eighteen men and three mates, she had put out of Sydney and never touched at Hobart, where she was expected the following Tuesday.
A storm had come up her first night out. Ships were knocked about and aground as in every storm off the Australian coast. Shipping men then recalled that Gunmeyer was a bullheaded “Dutchman” who would stick to bad judgment rather than admit that he had made a mistake, so perhaps the Mariana had gone on the rocks.
Later a little trading-schooner came in with the Mariana's passengers, most of the crew and the three mates; and their story was quickly scattered to all ports, where it curled the hair of master mariners and gave ship-owners a feeling not unlike chills and fever.
Mr. Butler, who had been first mate on the Mariana, had the most to tell.
The officers, he said, had discovered before the moorings were cast that Captain Gunmeyer was superstitiously fearful. Gunmeyer was a short dumpy man with bulging cheeks and many bright buttons on his coat. As he had walked up and down the poop a monstrous black cat was leisurely crossing his path when he glanced down. He yelled as though he had seen the devil:
“Gid dot tam ding off! Gid him off! Ow, Gott, a blag cat!”
Mr. Butler swung a foot at the animal. Without looking around, it trotted a little faster, lightly bounded into the companionway and disappeared. The steward and a galley-helper searched high and low, but could not find so much as a black hair.
Captain Gunmeyer explained that he had never liked cats.
“Schreklich! Id vas a pad omen.”
The Officers soon found that there was worse than cats the matter with Gunmeyer. No matter how he had got hold of master's papers, his seamanship had scarcely expanded with his good fortune from the little schooner to the bark; and matters were “worsed” by his not being willing to take advice or make up his own mind.
Mr. Butler knew that a storm was coming almost as soon as the barometer did, and all afternoon had the crew jumping to bend on storm canvas and getting out preventer gear.
The clouds came on swiftly, but there was scarcely any wind, though the seas rolled heavily from the east. Far-away thunder drummed echoingly. Sails flapped, listless, with barely enough wind to give the bark a helm.
Mr. Butler warned the captain that he had better not heave to, for if the wind should veer and get behind that beam sea they would all be scrambling over the rocks next morning, looking for a breakfast of barnacles.
Passengers huddled about on the quarterdeck. They were filled with the depression of the windless evening, full of ghastly light shot by the dying sun into the murky northward heaven from whence the clouds with heavy tramp of thunder and flicker of lightning came on with great smoke-like heads, slowly tumbling and writhing across the sky. Children cried.
At eight o'clock the watches were set, but Gunmeyer asked Mr. Butler to keep the deck.
The bark rolled heavily. A dead calm fell.
The storm broke with a gust of wind that jarred the backstays, then died away. The lightning was as bright as any that Mr. Butler had ever seen; the thunder as loud as he had heard. The first drops of rain that came to the deck left big splotches of wet as though half a goblet had been emptied there. A downpour followed.
The wind came in flurries. Canvas slapped gustily. The sea tossed and beat the rolling bark. Thunder crashed with renewed violence; lightning flared.
The lightning seemed to unnerve Gunmeyer. Again and again he threw his hands to his eyes to shut out the sweeping fire that lanced zigzaggedly across the sky, tore clouds to fragments and showed white-headed waves frantically tumbling. Gleaming trickles of fire played along the gaffs, down shrouds and stays, glimmering through the rigging.
“I vill lose mine shib—mine shib!” Gunmeyer cried.
Mr. Butler told him that the Mariana, being iron, could be hit by lightning forty times without loosening a rivet; and that made the captain angry. He called Mr. Butler a fool and began to bellow about the amount of canvas set. He ordered the flying jib taken in and reefs put in the mainsail.
“But there's wind coming,” Mr. Butler cried. “A gale of it—and there—there's the rocks you'll be on in the morning if you don't claw off.”
The wind came and came hard. The rain had stopped. The clouds were flying by, and the wind hauled quickly about two points to the east. The Mariana began to plunge sluggishly and make leeway.
By midnight the wind had increased and hauled another point to the east. The yards were braced up sharp, but the bark did not have enough canvas on her and was making leeway. She rolled drunkenly; seas broke over the bulwarks, a boat was staved in. Gunmeyer said that he was going to heave to and ride out the blow.
“Heave to! Heave to, sir!” Mr. Butler cried. “The time's gone when we can heave to. We are making leeway—an there's the mainland! We need more canvas—ought to take the reefs out of the mainsail. We have to get out to sea!”
But Gunmeyer said that he would do it in his own way. He ordered all hands called; but even when both watches were on deck, Gunmeyer still hesitated.
The bark pitched desperately. The men, feeling that they could scarcely live in the waist, had started to come on to the poop; but Gunmeyer told them to keep off. They were standing by, clawing themselves out of the water, milk-white and sizzling, that overran the deck.
Gunmeyer shouted to the second mate to double-reef the fore and maintopsails.
The wind shrilled through the rigging, its high, sustained, interminable notes like the wail of witches. Gunmeyer stared into the wind, pouring fiercely from the compass-point of east by north. The seas beat, pounded, tossed and flooded the bark.
Two men, braced in holdfasts, held the wheel watchfully.
Mr. Butler steadied himself with an uplifted hand to a backstay and looked at the captain. It would be disastrous to try to heave to in that wind and sea; it would mean a wreck before morning if she were hove to off that lee shore.
It was mutinous to oppose a captain's orders, but Mr. Butler said he was just about ready to do that very thing; then, for some reason that he could not explain, he turned and stared at the top of the leeward ladder. He looked at nothing but darkness and spume, but stared on and on, his gaze held right there by he knew not what. And as he looked a half-naked figure came up the ladder—seemingly out of the cold, dark, milk-covered water and swiftly reached the poop deck.
With all the crew roused out, and as yet unfamiliar with many faces, Mr. Butler took him at first for one of the forecastle men and shouted at him to know what he wanted, coming aft like that.
The light was indistinct, but it was clear enough for Mr. Butler soon to see that this man had not been present at the muster. The face would have been remembered, if seen ever so quickly, anywhere. He had never, he said, seen such a face, such intensity.
The night was cold and water-soaked; inactive fingers would soon be numbed, but this man was bare to the waist, his canvas trousers were cut away at the knees; his hair flying, his feet bare, hands empty. He did not answer or look toward Mr. Butler, who started for him, but paused. The man seemed determinedly on business that he had a right to be about. He came to the skylight, where a glow outlined his features more distinctly as he stared at the captain.
Mr. Butler got the impression of great ferocity, and admitted quite frankly that he did have the quick disturbing feeling that this fellow had come up out of the sea.
Gunmeyer had turned his face indecisively upward toward the topmasts, quivering outward in short stiff bends as if jerked and released by a baby giant's playful fingers.
The man, looking across the skylight, said in a voice not loud, but sharp, metallic as the blow of iron on brass, propulsive as though the word was thrown:
“Gunmeyer!”
Mr. Butler, so he said, was about to spring with a punishing blow for such contemptuous and unseamanly approach of the captain; but he was turned to inaction by Gunmeyer's face. It exploded into fright. He sprang off the deck. His was a Smothered, inarticulate cry. The popping eyes thrust themselves forward, almost leaving their sockets. He screamed, but his hoarse voice cracked in the hopeless cry of, “Mein Gott! Mein Gott!”
Throwing his arms in an attitude of abject surrender, Gunmeyer backed away, shifting unsteadily with the reel of the deck. There was no question as to what his action meant; he knew that he was seeing a specter, one that had haunted him long before it became visible.
The wheelmen cried out warningly. Their shout was directed, or seemed to be, toward that half naked figure, even metallic in its poise, braced motionless against the skylight.
Glancing over his shoulder as he went, Mr. Butler fetched the mizzen rigging with a mighty bound. He explained that alarm, unbecoming in an officer, by the size of the wave; and his mind was a little confused because he thought the wheelmen had deliberately shifted the helm to sweep the deck.
At this point Mr. Butler could not perhaps wisely be taken as the most trustworthy of witnesses. By his own admission he was unsettled of mind. Wisps of ghost-thought had got into his brain. The size and deadliness of the wave was his defense against the suspicion of cowardice.
Anyway, the poop was boarded by a mountain, hissing with an army of tongues, splotched by patches of foam. The black mass had come up and up with a slow towering movement while the bark's stern sank helplessly; and with a long-drawn powerful shh-ua-a—loud as a chorus of screams—the wave eased itself on to the prostrate poop, overflowing, spreading, weighting it down and down. Voices amidship were flung aloft, and men aloft cried out:
“We're gone!” “The mizzen—cut!” “lost!”
Other voices answered with curses.
There was nothing, Mr. Butler said, but water below him. He felt it at his legs. The skylight glowed like a submerged phosphorescent rock. All else was blackness underneath.
With the sustained laboring tug and jerk of a man pulling himself out of quicksand, the ship rolled heavily, slowly, straining. She groaned in the voice of a nearly gone strong man, and the water rolled with ponderous rapidity to leeward, glancing tons with cataractal roar on to the main deck and snapping quarter boat and falls as it went over the side.
When he saw her wallowing up, the flood of a broken dam boiling to starboard, he hung peeringly like a man above a whirlpool into which his companions have vanished.
Coming out of the water, stationary as iron men, were the figures at the wheel. One was bare-headed.
An unfamiliar voice reached him in a slow unagitated: “Ease 'er now—ease 'er, Jake.”
Mr. Butler had the swift alarming suspicion that he was between warm blankets in the front room of the Sydney Haven; that there was no Mariana, no Gunmeyer, no naked figure out of the sea, no black mountain just drawing its foaming skirts off the poop, for the voice of that same weather helmsman went on:
“—a bloomin' mermaid stole my hat.”
It was incredible.
Holdfasts or not, the wheelmen would have been smothered if not torn loose and carried over the side.
But right there, too, hands free and body erect, not three feet from where he had disappeared under the water, that naked fellow stood. Captain Gunmeyer was not seen and was never seen again.
Hurricane Williams had taken over the Mariana. Without hesitation he gave orders and so they were accepted. Over and over his voice sang out, the hard tone carrying through shriek of rigging and pound of seas. He did not use an oath, but every word whipped like a curse, explosively, fierce.
The second mate, Mr. Edwins, was aloft at work on the topsail, when the strange voice reached him, saying to turn out the reefs. He obeyed because there was work to do and questions could be asked later.
Two Kanakas leaped the windward ladder and relieved the wheelmen; one of whom, a grim tall old fellow, told Mr. Butler to stand by the weather rail and keep quiet. Mr. Butler tried to ask questions and protest, but was soon sure that it would be death to refuse; and he believed that the entire crew was in the plot to seize the bark, for even when the men swarmed on to the poop at their work and could see Williams clearly, they did not falter.
The crew in turn had not really been familiar enough with the Dutch captain to know how he would behave in a storm with his clothes off; and when they got close enough to see that this man was a stranger they wondered, but thought it must be all right; for Mr. Butler was standing by, just as though the captain had taken the deck. Whoever he was, he was not afraid of canvas.
They were ordered to set the close-reefed foresail and to take the reefs from the mainsail. It took well over two hours to heave the sail up with halyards at the capstan, and all the while they were drenched by seas that threatened to sweep them overboard. They were kept so busy working they had no time to think.
Williams scarcely stirred though others were shunted to and fro by the deck's heave. He could not have appeared more indifferent toward the crew had he been their lawful captain.
The Mariana had three Kanakas in her crew, but there were more than that about the deck. They worked willingly and hard.
All the while the sail was being set, the bark shivered and plunged. Rigging screeched. Vibrant intensity was everywhere. The canvas bulged hard as granite. Only the stars, remote, cold, were at peace. All else was tumult and tossing, whining, roaring and shrill creaking; bulkheads groaned and every rivet whimpered. Backstays hummed the key of the breaking-point. The deck was a mill-race.
Forward there was clang and clatter as though some traitor had got adrift and was battering and signaling to the sea. The deck-house was partly wrecked. Men cried out about it.
The forecastle quarters were awash. Raffle was about the deck, under water. Rope-ends like long threshing snakes whipped about. Men in oilskins clawed themselves along their rigged life-lines, browsing tacks and hauling clewlines, tightening stays, wearily pulling themselves aloft.
That madman seemed determined to set every stitch of canvas. The confusion over the decks, the wind's howl and eldritch orchestration of rigging, the heeling and pitching of the bark, gave the im pression of impending disaster. Men expected the masts to go or at least that sails would cannonade off from bolt-ropes. Something had to go.
Canvas was being piled on and on. Stays whanged like fiddle-strings under rapid awkward fingers. Torrential rain seemed to be falling under the starry sky—spray fell so thickly. Blobs of water flew, white with foam. Canvas leaned from stays and yards like the swollen breasts of great birds. Something under that pressure had to go.
The heavy chest that had battered the deck-house was swishing, thumping, knocking at bulwarks, threatening men's legs. It became an elusive, feared thing. Mr. Edwins and three men had gone after it. In a leeward roll they were knocked and flung away, swirled by the shipped sea. The thing hid under the frothing water—as though knowing men were in pursuit, it sneaked off, was not to be found, and lay like a feared animal in ambush. They heard it blundering in an alley, seeking cover.
That voice—men began to think of him as a voice—had said to make it fast. A Kanaka went in after it with a line. The line saved him when the rail dipped. Had he got his hands on the chest he could have done nothing with it. Told to go, he went.
“That chest—fast!” The voice, touched with impatience for an order repeated, went like a blow through trumpeted hands.
“Yes, sir, fast!” Mr. Edwins shouted.
There had been an ominous bump, like a muffled treacherous blow, as the chest furtively drifted down into the waist and brought up against the starboard bulwarks. It would have been a good thing had it knocked through; but it was the part of seamen to do as told.
Dark figures dropped from the mainmast windward rigging, grasping rope-ends as a hill's angle came up under their feet, then with the roll to star board they scooted, converging in a cluster at the mast, grasping pins to hold by.
Water surged and slapped about them, hissed and boiled at them. More difficult than dangerous, their task awaited them somewhere near by. The chest, partly filled, submerged but afloat—a miniature derelict—swished heavily. Water was sweeping into it. The lee rail was awash or under at every roll; and the roll's tilt to windward that sent water and chest inboard would, seemingly with powerful magnetic attraction, pull the men back and hold them from jumping for their iron-bound prey.
They waited, clinging about the mast; peering, strained, silent as if saving life. They were full of anger at a hated, baffling, sneaky thing with iron corners that might smash a man.
A bearded shellback saw it or thought that he did. He cried out and pointed. Eyes strained into the sizzling snow-froth as though from a raft for a sail's speck; five seamen, ocean-battlers, hunting down a chest that had gone adrift. Out it came, swirling heavily.
“Le's go!” cried Mr. Edwins, bending forward, fighting against gravity.
With the slow turn of the deck as the Mariana settled in the plunge down another mountain slope, the men dropped away, gravity with them, anger in their hearts. The water fled before them, pulling at the chest, saving it from the hands of men. The chest struggled, submerged. It did not want to fight, only to get away. Men clawed it, pounded it, lay on it. They forgot the ocean, the ship, everything. They would have ridden it over the rail and into the sea. They were slewed back and forth from mainmast to bulwark. They would not give up. The frenzy of beating something that baffled was on them. There was nothing to grip it by. The shackles had snapped when it broke from lashings. The lid was locked.
They fell on it, sank with it, were slewed around with it, knocked over, rose with it, grunted and cursed it. Hands slipped off. Arms embraced it with faces buried in water. They shouted from salt-scalded mouths to water-plugged ears—battling with a chest that had gone adrift!
They were knocked about, jerked around, struck painfully, tossed; but they would not give up, clawing and tugging on that iron-bound chest, filled with the devil.
With ropes they bound it top and bottom, around and around; and the feeling of capture was on them, of triumph, as they paid off and stumbled swimmingly to the mast. They braced themselves and hauled. The chest, full of sluggish fighting weight, pulled back in the leeward roll. They jeered it: loud, derisive, they scorned it. The fight was over.
“Chest all fast, sir!” said Mr. Edwins, short of breath.
“The foresail—shake out the reefs!”
Mr. Edwins gasped, all breath gone. Then he passed the word with a roar. Dark shapes stirred with clumsy quickness, calling the order, one to another.
And the Mariana took it. Something had to give way under that terrific press of sail, and it was the big seas that beat her. Close-hauled, she bounded, plunging her bows deep and rising swiftly—leaping to smash the wave ahead, rising to beat back the boarders that flashed up at her side.
At daybreak the crew hung motionless, cramped hands at pin-rails and ropes. Silent, cold, tired, they watched nothing at all with the glazed steadiness of sick men.
Their second mate, Mr. Edwins, had been called aft. That voice had spoken. Mr. Edwins went by them, his oilskins swishing. They never saw him on deck again.
Brundage was recognized, loitering erect on the poop. The men stared and mumbled, then grew agitated. What had happened? It must be all right—the officers were on deck through the night. But the man with that voice had not been their captain.
A whisper: Have the mates taken the ship—are they running away with her? The mates and that fellow?
Uneasiness touched them. They remembered the many Kanakas.
If the officers had seized the ship the crew would be asked to join and offered a share. Rumor instantly jumped for the gold-chest and said that it held a “harf-million.”
“Hever' man-jack hov hus'll look through knotted rope for this,” a voice piped wailingly.
One brawny sea-serf, scarred at the corner of an eye that had a cast, was feverish with the thought of loot, rum, wild freedom.
“A harf-million on this hooker 'f there's a shillin'! Don't ye see she's headin' sou'east? Makin' for Sout' America—get away easy.”
“They got ropes in Sydney what reach to Sout' America.”
“Slant-Eye” Murphy, inattentive to the length of Sydney ropes, said that the first thing to do was to make the mates pass out rum.
Chilled fellows quickened at the words. Tongues licked salt-stung lips.
“Aye, 'f there's rum—” said a heavy voice.
Other men protested. They were not mutineers, wouldn't be mutineers.
McGuire strolled out of the cabin, coming forward.
The men called him by another name, the one he had shipped under, and asked questions rapidly, bunching about him.
McGuire answered carelessly, in a matter-of-fact sort of way:
“Oh, Hurricane Williams just took 'er over on an old debt.”
Men stared doubtfully.
Williams was the half-mythic figure of shanty bar legends and forecastle stories. It was said that he had actually been hanged once, even buried; then got away and joined cannibals.
More questions came at McGuire.
“Officers? All restin' quiet an easy.”
“What's your ratin'?” demanded Slant-Eye Murphy with a remote envious accent.
“On his ship 'fore this I was galley-helper.”
Other questions were thrown at him.
“Can't say where he's goin' or what he's goin' do—he doesn't talk much. What about Thrasher? Oh, Jake's very sickly. Can hardly get about. Sometimes uses a knife to help him. Nice quiet fellow though.”
“What chancet f'r some o us to sign on—wit' Williams?” Slant-Eye Murphy half-whispered, jerking his shaggy head sidewise.
The cocked eye, nearly closed, quivered confidentially. Murphy waited, convinced of a welcome. He was bold, rough, ready. The ultimate gibbet was beyond his imagination.
McGuire's eyes from their corners met the eager stare, saw the lust, greed and thirst.
He said:
“I'd wait a little while 'fore I tried it.”
“Just one man—like me?” Murphy straightened up, putting himself on show. “These others,” he added scornfully, “ain't mut'neers.”
Others were listening eagerly and shuffling closer.
McGuire looked deliberately from face to face. His smile was gone. His eyes returned to Murphy's bearded, ragged face, as he said earnestly:
“Don't try that with him.”
They heard, but did not understand, did not believe. They felt that they were being fooled and were mystified as to why.
Brundage appeared in the waist. Kanakas came too. It was his slow, cold, hard voice now giving orders. It was not easy to think of him as the man who had come on board with them, fished from the same kid. He added to the mystery by being remote, menacing without speaking threats.
McGuire slipped away.
Williams sat at the chart-room table with a figure-covered paper under his pencil. He was sensitive to sound, but he did not look up as McGuire came in. Nothing but his lack of interest indicated that he knew who had come, and though McGuire rummaged in a drawer that crowded Williams's knees in opening it, he did not appear to notice.
McGuire filled his hands with candy and lay down on the couch, drawing a blanket over him from feet to breast. He stared at Williams's muscular brown back and slowly chewed.
Off and on for many years he had followed the fortune of that naked outlaw, perversely half-clothed as if to keep his body stung with heat or cold and ever aware that he was outcast from the men whose civilization, perhaps more strongly than by any other thing, is symbolized by clothes. He was indifferent to comforts of any kind.
He had gray narrowed eyes with the look of madness in them, a short roughly trimmed beard and long unevenly cut hair. The jaws were heavily muscled. He was strong, but behind the muscles was another sort of strength. His presence vibrated the senses that warn one of danger; and he was neither cruel nor kind, but in an unemotional and lawless way was unmovably just. Whatever he thought should be done was done; and natives who had never seen him or many other white men told stories in their gamal houses of how he had punished kidnaping {{wg:blackbirder|blackbirders}}.
In those days much of the South Seas was only vaguely charted, and Williams knew the islands and their reefs better than any of the men that went out looking for him. Planters, who needed the natives for slaves, especially wanted to wipe him off the map. He had captured and kept more than one blackbird schooner and used it for pearling, and had piled up a fortune in pearls and fine shell. Gunmeyer stole it.
Williams, who stopped at nothing, came right into Sydney itself with a handful of natives, Brundage and McGuire; and part of them signed on with the Mariana's crew and helped to stow him and the others away down in the forepeak. Williams had had no use for his pearls; he had less for a big iron bark, but he felt that she was his and he took her.
McGuire smiled, really drowsy, thinking of what the crew would learn by offering to turn pirate with him. His eyes seemed full of dust. He closed them. His head became lead and went to the pillow.
An hour later Williams spoke without looking around:
“McGuire!”
McGuire came up automatically, pushing the blanket from him as though fighting a nightmare. He was dead for sleep, but answered as he lifted his head.
Williams's glance was running swiftly up and down figures. The Mariana's compasses had been found erratic, as compasses are likely to be on an iron ship after a storm; and they had to be watched and checked by sun and stars. He would not permit himself the leeway of an occasional mistake, and did everything with intensity. If crossed or aroused he was sudden and dangerous. He would not be thwarted, by men, compasses, or anything.
McGuire gouged his eyes with hard knuckles.
“The officers?”
“Well,” said McGuire with the impudence of a court jester, “Edwins was cryin'. He's young an' thinks somebody ought to be hit over the head. I put Kabuloo in his room. Let 'im start on Kabuloo.”
Kabuloo was seven feet tall with a chest like a ship's bows.
“Butler's quiet after usin' up all the sea-words learned in twenty years. Thinkin' of some more, maybe. He's got a plenty.”
McGuire hardly ever knew if Williams listened. Sometimes he had seen the bronze face relax a little, but there was never an answering smile. Almost always when he spoke his tone was edged with fierceness that alarmed or angered strangers and made them think that they were threatened. Usually they were.
Williams swept the papers aside and looked down at the blue-print chart. He stood up, a thumb hooked at the parceled ivory handle of his sheath knife; the other hand was poised lightly on the tip of a forefinger that tried to mark the exact spot in the sea space where the Mariana was.
The passengers were detached from the life of the ship, given a little world of their own and made to feel imperiled by a suspended unvoiced menace more disturbing than threats would have been.
Always a black shadow, two or three at times, lay across them in the saloon. The natives would appear and stand about for a while, then vanish in barefoot silence. It gave an air of sinister mystery, depressing as it was probably intended to be.
The women soon saw they were not to be raffled off pirate-fashion, their husbands were being well fed, so they gradually recovered from their terror.
The children, wide-eyed, silent, fascinated by the half-naked man on deck, always on deck, soon got acquainted with McGuire and developed the habit of running to pry into his fingers as he lazily drifted through the cabin. He had discovered an inexhaustible cache of candy.
Whenever Brundage appeared a visible shudder touched the passengers as his dark eyes searched their faces.
“Mister,” said one of the women—being a woman she ventured to skirmish with questions just to see what would happen—“what has become of the captain?”
“Overboard,” said Brundage coldly, looking at her as though he had pitched Gunmeyer into the waves, and would throw her or anybody else into the sea if they got in his way. There were no more questions.
The crew worked and grumbled. The idea, strong as superstition, got among them that any one who slacked was likely to go over the side in the dark, throat gripped by Kanaka hands.
McGuire had set the vague fear afloat to keep them from sulking, for their own good; and Brundage's watchful cold eyes encouraged the notion.
Only the Finnish seaman seemed unconcerned. He scarcely knew enough English to understand what had happened, and appeared not to care.
Old Billy, a mild patriarch of the sea, set a good example by advising everybody to make the best of it and leave well enough alone.
Some of the ten or twelve stalwart natives seemed always behind Brundage's back; but Williams came off the poop day or night alone, walked among the crew, turned his back, stooped without regard for who was near, and said nothing but the briefest words.
They wondered greatly that he trusted them, and were made a little uneasy by the contempt implied in turning his back on men that wore sheath-knives.
The crew lost its sleep many nights, discussing things. Men who had turned in, leaned out to curse the sea-lawyers, wrangling below them in the light of a slush lamp; then paused to listen, chipped in with a word or two. After that they would scratch a pipe from under the mattress, borrow a bit of tobacco or lend a slab, and talk, talk, talk.
“—think they got us prayin' f'r 'em with them rags out o' the slop-chest what never cost 'em nothing nohow. An a harf-million we're helpin' 'em to get off wit'!”
Murphy said it to the Finn, bovine, slow, with the gaze of his dull eyes always above other men's heads.
He seemed lost in a daze.
“—ought 'o have our whack.”
The Finn sat on a sea-chest, arms folded. Murphy, by his side, jabbed with an elbow. The Finn grunted. Murphy was methodically trying to win every man over to his way of thinking.
Jorgan, a big, slow, thoughtful fellow, laborious of speech, sat with his legs swinging from the edge of a bunk. He sat in meditation many hours of sleep-time, thinking over words shoved into his brain by a quick, restless little fellow.
Old Billy always gave argument to Murphy's discontent. Old Billy hated “mut'neers an pirates.” No matter who had the ship, 'twas a sailor's duty to do his work.
“Ow hell!” said Murphy, disgusted, drawing back his bearded lips as though to bite.
He frankly wanted lawlessness and its luxuries. An inner anger grew from the notion that Williams did not think him and others like him of strong enough fiber. Mental comparison of himself with the seemingly puny McGuire, lazy, careless, inflamingly suggested injustice, a bad kink in the scheme of things. He urged the others into discontent about their rights. As for the blacks that Williams counted on so much—“a bunch o' niggers,” he thought them. White men have despised them, ridden them, broken them, beaten them from the day of the curse on Noah's son.
And at last, one day, the men came aft, shuffling along, nervously determined. Onlookers followed ringleaders who had bullied them into the part. Their caps came respectfully into their hands as they huddled below the break of the poop. Their bodies sagged awkwardly. They stood looking up, symbolic perhaps of their hard-handed caste—always they must look up, resentfully, hoping to get the men of the high places into their hands.
McGuire lazily hung over the poop rail still like a court jester, permitted liberties. Good-naturedly he asked what they wanted. He had known for a week what they would want when they overrode the small group that believed in letting pretty good alone.
Murphy, spokesman, contemptuous of cap and bells, said they wanted to talk with the captain.
“Captain? What captain? You mean the Dutchman?”
Jorgan, with thick arms folded on his stomach, glared up with stolid thoughtfulness.
Thin vicious faces, rough hard faces, weak and bold, they ranged; upturned, intent, nervous as if learning to gamble.
Murphy, who had contempt and nothing else for McGuire, said:
“None o' your talk. We come t'see t' cap'n. Cap'n Williams.”
“Oh,” said McGuire in innocent surprise.
Williams appeared; half-naked, sun-blackened, he walked right into their eyes and waited.
They were used to the impression that he was about to spring at something. Even then a few of the men shuffled back slightly, responding to impulse that his tenseness gave them.
McGuire leaned on the rail, half-smiling. He did not move, but lay along it seemingly too lazy for stirring.
Murphy's set speech left him. His cap ran through his fingers as though he were coiling down rope. One leg, then the other, bore his weight. Faces turned on him expectantly. There were whispers, low words, nudges.
He tried to smile with the pleasantness of one bringing a welcome surprise. The cocked eye quivered. He began to speak, stutteringly.
He thought, he did, as there was some of 'em that had no calling but the sea, no place to go but where the winds took 'em, that as he an' some of 'em—good sailormen—might take on wit Williams, take his luck. There was nought they feared. They'd stand fast. They'd help 'im get away with the bark. Take 'er any place. Tell any story to help 'im. All they wanted was their whack—a good hones' share.
His ragged face glowed with eager cunning. Greed and lust smirked through his eyes, through one, for the cocked eye quivered as though winking with immoral intimacy and putting true meaning into the husks of words. Confidently vicious, he looked up, waiting.
McGuire read his face as easily as a Gilbert Islander reads weather signs; knew him through and through. But, uninterested, seemingly so any how, McGuire looked at the tips of his fingers and grinned.
Stolid faces with something alert behind them, like stone heads with reptilian animals peering through the holes, were turned with hypnotic passivity toward Williams.
The Finn only seemed to be looking into distance, half-way up the sky-bowl.
The bark moved with long, gentle swaying bounds, the breath of a west wind on her. Ships care nothing for the morals of men; like other womanish things, they ask only for mastery.
Williams ran his gaze back and forth over the upturned faces as a stockman flecks his whip over the back of a drove, ready to lash out with a cut that stings, breaks, tears the hide brutally. The evilness of what they wanted stared up at him through the holes in their heads: they would make him chief, to give them blood-covered gold, looted liquors.
His right hand grasped the rail. McGuire, leaning on it eight feet away, felt it vibrate under the weight of his grip.
“You do as I tell you?” he asked slowly, deep-throated as far-away thunder, remote, ominously reverberant. McGuire looked at him quickly.
Something of a doubtful, puzzled affirmation came back from Murphy.
Jorgan dropped his arms, the big knot of a fist replacing each hand. He seemed expectant.
“Aw he won't jump,” a thin voice squeaked reassuringly in an undertone. “W'at yer 'fraid of?”
McGuire casually, idly, searched out the speaker.
The Finn, dream-like, stood as a blind man listens with eyes vague and focused at nothing. He turned his head slightly sidewise as though hearing the inaudible coming of a storm.
Williams's silence might mean anything. No man can be day after day inactively menacing, no matter what his reputation, without the suspicion, a little fearful but insistent, taking hold of those about him that it is all a mask.
Still Williams said nothing.
The men shuffled, uneasily; they muttered from the corners of mouths without turning heads. They expected at least curses. It was, in a way, their right. Sailormen understand storms and always have hated calms, queasy, tedious, indefinite, putting no strain on muscles.
All that they heard was:
“GO for'ard.”
It was milder than anything they had heard, more quietly spoken. He did not even look toward them as he said it. “Go for'ard.” It suggested to some the wavering of a request; but McGuire drew back from the railing with a quick startled glance at Williams.
Below, a thin vemonous voice jeered shrilly; and as though it were a signal, voices broke loose in a squall-like flurry of mocking laughter and phrases. They had been fools before to let that man ride them.
Murphy's unmistakable bellow, contemptuous, carried something about a “harf-million.” Jorgan grinned, muttering contentedly and looking at his big fists. The strain of weeks had snapped. They had been afraid of a bogie, bluffed, baffled, beaten by a pose.
“Go for'ard,” was whined in imitation.
“Go to hell!” roared answeringly, triumphantly.
Their few seconds, scarcely more, of hilarity came and passed as a squall moves over the sea. McGuire, quickened to alarm by something he saw and knew, flung himself against the railing; and leaning down frantically with outthrust hand as though to reach and close the loosened mouth, cried:
“Shut up, you fools!”
Silence followed as by magic though his words were unheard. A shadow had appeared over their heads; then Williams struck the deck, fell to knee and hand. He left the deck with a bound, straight at Jorgan.
Jorgan went down with a fist at the side of the jaw where head and neck meet.
They had never imagined quickness like that in a man. One arm struck with a knotted hand, the other with a knife, and both went right and left. Murphy loosened a sheath-knife and sprang; but stopped in mid-air and fell to the deck, writhing in a gush of blood. Jorgan staggered to his feet, clawing at Williams's back. In a flash he was shaken off, his chest ripped.
The crew fled, amazed. It was not a coolie behind the bronze mask; and men who estimated him by the naked muscles did not see at all the source of his strength. In some way, Somehow, he had a sense of unvulnerability.
There was no more trouble out of the crew.
Whenever in future days there might be ears to listen, they would add their words to the evil told of him. The crew had gone aft, respectfully. He had jumped into them, cutting and stabbing; and they could do nothing but try to get away. Murphy had not been one of those to get away. He was dead. Jorgan, slashed by a blow meant for his heart, got no attention at all except such as his shipmates could give him. But two days later when that Finn, bucked from a yard, fell, smashing his shoulder—why, that “lousy for'ner was carried aft, put in a stateroom, had niggers to wait on him!”
If the Finn had been knocked down for shirking work, then another instance of brutal inattention to a hurt sailor might have been marked down in the unwritten log kept by the forecastle.