CHAPTER IV
TODD THE TURTLER
TOM TODD lived on Green Key. Most of the turtlers only existed but Tom lived, for he was not alone. A maid from the Carolinas loved him well enough to consider that with Todd the lonely islet would be Paradise enow and their honeymoon on their sea-girt Eden was only three weeks old.
Todd dried the turtle flesh and stripped the shell and sometimes took a sloop-load of live tortugas to Puerto Rico or even to Jamaica for trade. The Green Key, rank with wild cabbage and palmetto, with here and there pines lifting graceful crests above the lower growth, was worthy of its name. The bill of fare of the married lovers, besides turtle steaks and fins and eggs, was varied.
There were agoutis, wild-hogs and opossum in plenty, besides the pigeons and sea-food. Humming-birds and parrots supplied their aviary. The climate was equable, save in July and the rainy season, when Todd planned to take his bride back to Carolina. She was tiny and tawny-haired, golden of skin from the sun, curvingly lithesome and sweet and Todd was tall and lean, sun-dried almost to the texture and color of his strips of turtle-flesh. And they were very much in love.
The turtles only came with the tides, and, betweenwhiles, they paddled or bathed or lay in grass hammocks beneath a palmetto shelter. They lived out-of-doors night and day and were seldom out of sight of each other. She—her name was Mary—adored Todd and Tom worshiped Mary. He loved to pick her up in his arms and go striding off with her, laughing at her talk of weight.
Todd was thirty-five and Mary twenty-two. Todd knew the Bahamas as a woods man knows his forest and Mary knew only Todd. He had given up his pilotage to turn turtler again so that he might be always with her and, in the rains, they were going to upbuild a tiny farm in Carolina for—some day. Life was all ahead of them and very pleasant.
The Key was three miles long and about half that width. Close to it were two smaller keys that could be reached by wading at the ebb. The nearer, densely wooded, was as thick with agoutis as a dog’s hide with fleas and Mary made wonderful stews out of the rabbit-like flesh.
On the twenty-second day of their honeymoon—they still reckoned it diurnally—they had their first quarrel. Mary pouted and Tom sulked and, by the time the quarrel was ripe, neither could remember how it started. Yet Mary held it for the joy of bringing Todd back to her repentant and he left her still pouting when he strode off, gun on shoulder, to get agoutis as a peace offering.
He did not see the kiss she blew him when she was sure he was out of sight among the palmettos and she did not hear the sigh he gave but both sensed in their hearts that the breach was only serious enough to serve for a yet stronger cementing.
Todd’s stubborn mood held hard enough for him to brave the current between the two keys, already surging to the swift flood, and he waded it hip-deep between the weeded rocks and plunged into the thick scrub. Mary took their simple duck garments to the tiny spring and beat at them on a coral slab with a wooden paddle, venting her displeasure—mostly for herself—in the blows.
Up from the sea in the early afternoon came a rakish brigantine of thirty guns, outside of fore and stern chasers, and one hundred and forty men. Her hull was painted black with a narrow red streak that accented the sweetness of her lines, her masts that seemed too lofty for her build, slanted aft, her canvas, from studding-sail to main, showed snowy white, yet marred here and there with unpatched holes where round shot had torn through. She sailed fast, low of freeboard but buoyant, and her topsails rose swiftly against the sky.
Bane’s luck had held. The Neptune had given place to a better ship and playing the part of merchantman, he had come close enough to a Spanish brigantine to board and take her after a desperate skirmish in which he lost nine men and the Spaniards seventeen. He had rechristened her the Venture and found her the fastest keel of his knowledge.
At fifteen knots he had outrun two sail of the vice-admiral’s flotilla, especially commissioned to his capture since his escape from Providence Harbor. They had caught him between them as he had come out of an inlet and he had run their gantlet, broadside for broadside, bringing down the top mast of one and standing off the other in a running fight.
Now he was in a hurry, for the men-of-war had interrupted his taking on wood and water after careening. The wood might go, water he must have, and Scarry-Dick had promised them they would find a spring on Green Key near which the chase had led them.
“A turtler lives there, or did,” said Denton. “A splint-bone by the name of Todd. I landed there three years ago and he shot pigs for us. We were lootfull and we paid him with cloth, so he will hunt for us again with a good will.”
“Aye, or a bad one, for that matter,” said Bane. A bullet had bitten his forearm and he was in an ugly temper. “We have little time to spare. The king’s ship may have guessed our tack. Get the water-breakers ready for a landing. I’ll go ashore. For once spring-water sounds better to me than brandy. That cursed crease burns like fire.”
MARY TODD, looking up from her laundrying, gazed with delight at the picture of the brigantine, brilliantly enameled by the sunshine against the blue sky and bluer sea, rising and falling on the long billow with a grace that was all her own. Even when it was evident that the ship was heading directly for the Key she felt no alarm save a vague wish that Tom would come back before they landed.
Other ships had called there for water, Tom had told her. She held no thought of pirates. They had heard from another turtler, passing on the news, that the freebooters had all surrendered, or were about to surrender, at the Island of Old Providence. The brigantine came up into the wind, held there while two boats put off and rowed swiftly toward shore, and then cruised off-and-on, awaiting their return.
The girl supposed that the men would know where-to look for the spring. They could easily find it. Her newly-wedded shyness dominated her curiosity. She did not wish to meet them without Tom beside her. If she stayed they might give some thing in exchange for the water, a bolt of print-stuff, perhaps, and there might be news. She might send home her half-completed letter.
But she was Tom’s wife and a delicacy she could not express held her back. She slipped off into the palmettos, unaware of the mark her lightly going figure made in its white gown against the vivid green. The boats divided, one coming straight for a landing near the spring, the other with quickened stroke, racing toward a little cape. Bane urging on the rowers.
“A partridge and a sweet one,” he said to his second in command. “Ye should have seen her through the glass, man, bending over the clothes she was washing. Slender and supple as a bow. A young one and alone. ’Tis not often we see the likes of her. She’ll be the turtler’s woman.”
He spoke the last sentence softly and his companion looked at him curiously. There was an unspoken rule against women aboard Bane’s ships. “They raised the devil among the men,” he said. But a commander could break his own rules and there was a gleam in Bane’s eyes and a flush in his face that showed passion long repressed by force of circumstance, suddenly aroused.
It was none of his business if the captain sought a plaything. He would break it and cast it aside presently. A discarded woman among seven score conscienceless devils would have a hard time of it but his own soul was cankered with the rest. Decency as a pirate’s attribute was a thing to be mocked at.
The first boat, towing a long string of empty water-casks, touched the beach and the men sprang ashore, eager to fill and get back to the ship before the slower but heavier-metaled king’s ship should appear and cut them off. The shot-holes in the sails were not the only ones the Venture had suffered. There were a dozen or more cursing, wounded men aboard, swearing at the rude surgery, and five had “given up the keys to their lockers.”
Bane’s boat touched sand. He jumped into the shallows, followed by all but two of the men, who paddled the boat back to join the watermen. The pirates ran through the palmettos at an angle, eager to herd the “white doe” of the skipper’s fancy. Bane was in the lead when Mary Todd caught sight of the line and sensed the nature of their quest.
Her face paled and her heart began to beat in a wild tattoo of alarm that suddenly gripped and possessed her. She turned to run deeper into the woods, seeking Tom, calling his name as she fled. A grinning ruffian rose from back of a bush, his arms outspread, giving the view-halloa! Others were closing in from right and left. Bane, his teeth showing through his beard, sprang forward to grasp her.
She doubled, frantic with fear. Where was Tom? Again she called his name, though it taxed her scanty breath, and the pirates took up the cry.
“Tom! Tom!” they yelled derisively after her until her fear included his danger. These men were pirates! There was a pistol in their little thatched hut, hidden in the trees. Perhaps she could reach it before those others by the shore noticed it.
The men ran whooping behind her, crashing through the undergrowth. She plunged into the thicket and sped through the flimsy door of their tiny house. There was no effective fastening. In one corner was her trunk that she had brought from home in Tom’s sloop. The pistol was in it. She had asked Tom for it—he had a pair of them—and he had shown her how to oil and load it for their target practise at floating bottles in their playtimes.
She tossed back the lid, kneeling at the trunk, found the weapon and turned, desperate, as Bane flung back the door and entered, the leering faces of his fellows close behind him.
“No partridge, but a hawk,” said Bane, panting with his run. “Nay, pretty, put up that pistol. Hell and fury!”
The pistol roared, the tiny room was filled with the acrid gas of the discharge and Bane staggered back, a bullet in his upper arm, while the girl stood at bay against the wall. The pirate captain lurched forward, his eyes relentless and Mary Todd struck at him wildly as he beat aside her arms with bruising blows and swept her off her feet.
“I’ll tame you, my beauty,” he cried. “Aye, and trim you to my liking before I’m through with you.”
He heard the guffaws of his men as he roughly handled her. Her clutching hand caught his arm where she had wounded it and he swore as the imbedded bullet grated against the bone. The next second he flung her from him. She had found the knife in his belt and struck at him, the blade glancing off a rib.
She crouched in the angle of the wall, her eyes filled with the blaze of madness, her torn dress showing her heaving bosom, the knife still in her hand. As Bane, blind with pain and fury, strode toward her and the rest closed in, she clutched the handle with both hands and drove the steel into her own flesh. A gush of blood stained her gown, she gasped and wilted into a pitiful, crumpled heap.
There was a shout from outside. A man blocked the sunshine in the open doorway.
“The king’s ship is in the offing,” he cried.
With an oath Bane swung out of the hut. The men were gathering about the boats, rolling the filled and empty breakers. The man-of-war was coming up rapidly under press of sail. Already her topgallants and royals showed. The dull boom of a gun came faintly as she signaled to her consort that the chase was sighted. The oars of the pirate’s boats bent as they raced back to the brigantine. In ten minutes they were aboard and the vessel sliding through the water, striving to gain the windward gage of the pursuit.
A few relinquished casks dotted the beach and bobbed in the shallows. An hour passed before Tom Todd came back, unconscious of what awaited him, half a dozen agoutis in one hand, his gun in another.
He stopped for a moment in a clearing, watching a brigantine that slashed through the seas at a long angle, puffs of smoke coming from the Long Tom at her stern and the after guns of her larboard battery, while a ship, smothered in canvas, replied, heading in to intercept the other. The topsails of another vessel showed on the horizon.
“Pirates,” commented Tom aloud. “I thought they had all surrendered. She sails like a witch. She’ll clear if nothing carries. Mary! Oh, Mary lass. Come up to me and see the fight.”
There was no answer. He caught sight of the casks and trouble leaped to his eyes as he rushed down toward the hut.
Midnight found him piling the last coral slab above a mound in the clearing. The cairn was high to thwart the land-crabs and rooting beasts.
Dawn saw the turtler’s sloop making across the Bahama Channel toward Cuba, Todd at the tiller with rigid face and eyes that held an introspective gaze. Once he looked back toward Green Key, an Eden no longer. Then he hauled in the sheet and brought the sloop a point closer to the wind.