Plundered Cargo/Chapter 10

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter X

WHERE A WATER TRAIL LED

The situation which was wrought aboard the Lonney Lee by the headstrong Spike Horn's taking a flyer at a hint of fortune was one wherein interesting possibilities inhered. For now the schooner drifted over the seething Vermilion Sea under the piratical flag of the Double Cross.

At one o'clock in the morning the craft had been in mutiny, with the master beaten and bound in his bunk by one of the crew; another of that crew overawing the deck by the threat of a rifle. At sun-up the captain was restored to limited authority, free to con his craft on its appointed course but subject to reversal at any minute. Two loaded rifles and his own revolver still remained in the hands of the twain that had mutinied. In those three steel tubes rested tricky balance of power.

Needless to say that Captain Judah Storrs, who had put his signature to a contract drawn by Horn as the price of salvaging his own mysterious schemes from total wreck, was this dawn perhaps the most dangerous man in any cranny of Pacific waters. He was a muzzled tiger biding opportunity to rend the man who had mastered him. Convinced now beyond a shadow of a doubt that Spike Horn had contrived the night's violence only to coerce him into a division of spoils, the nature and value of which Horn must know full well, Skipper Storrs trod his quarterdeck in a cold killing fury. Give him so much as a hair of advantage and he would wipe out the contract by destroying the man who drew it.

As for Doctor Chitterly, from the moment he saw Captain Judah and Mr. Hansen escorted by Spike back to freedom he moved in a gray haze. Still in that haze he appended his signature alongside that of the mate as witness to a document Horn brusquely had bidden him sign. He knew nothing of its purport; nor in his confusion could he muster enough curiosity to ask about it.

Old Doctor Chitterly was grievously hurt. He had been doublecrossed by Spike Horn. He had been left somehow holding the bag. He had been made the victim of a shell game.

Above all, the discoverer of Squaw Root Tonic was fear-ridden. Here he had been bullied into rising against Captain Judah that he might escape fighting with unknowns somewhere ahead of the Lonney Lee's cutwater, and of a sudden the schooner itself had become a death trap. Menace was right at his elbow. He read it in the cold blue eye of Storrs. He felt the presence of violence lurking behind the masts and hiding in the black hole of the fo'c's'le. But for his rifle, which he kept glued into the angle of his left elbow, the doctor felt he walked naked in a rattlesnake den.

He strode moodily to the rail in the schooner's waist and stood looking out over the magic of dawn's revelations. What with absence of sleep and twittering of nerves, a dreadful unreality clothed everything he saw. Near at hand the sea smoked with low hanging mists, oily and sluggish as engine room steam. A little off to westward these mist serpents wound their fat folds about the bulk of an island rising bare as an elephant's back over a white surf line. The mountain peak of another island behind appeared to float on dirty cotton wool. Over against the horizon the sierra of the peninsula burned rose-pink from a hidden sun; mysterious, aloof, like the furnace grids of hell.

Emptiness! A cold sea awaiting the day's scourge of heat. Islands of the moon. Dim land of nightmare.

“Oh, God, Thou seest me!” groaned Doctor Chitterly. His call to divinity was that of a little boy on dark stairs.

Spike Horn came swaggering up to him. His silk shirt was held together only by the neckband and gapped over his naked middle. He carried Captain Judah's revolver stuck behind the waistband of his trousers and the second rifle of the late mutiny armament slung hunter-wise in the crook of his left arm—as untidy a pirate as one could well expect to find in the end of the nineteenth century.

“Well, Doc, how goes it?” This with forced cordiality. Doctor Chitterly gave him a distant sweep of the eyes and turned again to watch the fat mist serpents strangling the nearby island. Spike grunted a chopped-off laugh.

“I'm not sore, Doc? 'S all for the best, as the cat said when she swallered the goldfish.”

All the sense of outrage in the worthy practitioner's soul boiled up at the affront of the other's breeziness. He turned upon the rag-tag Horn, cocked his hoary beard at him truculently and whiffled through his nose like an exasperated horse.

“Young fellow, I do not care to have anything more to do with you. You have betrayed my trust in you, outraged every principle of honor. Last night I risked my life at your suggestion, sir. I—um—did my not unworthy part in seizing control of this vessel so that we might quit her at first opportunity and return to—ah—our normal walks of life.

“And what do you do behind my back—and for some wretched motive I have not the least interest in learning? What do you do, young fellow, but turn loose a man who will kill us both first chance he gets and who now is free again to carry the unfortunate men aboard this schooner into lurking dangers. Why——”

“Say, looky here——!” Spike began: but Doctor Chitterly was not to be stopped. Under their heavy white thatches his little eyes were striking fire. His beard crinkled with wrath.

“You do not know, of course,” the doctor ramped on, “that before we'd been out a week from that place where we were kidnapped this man Storrs approached me with a dishonorable proposal which involved my shooting you. His very words: 'Horn will be the first you'll have to drill with a lead slug.' For shooting you I was to share with him in some dirty thousands of dollars—doubtless the same blood money which he has used to tempt you to betrayal of your companions. And I scorned him, sir—scorned him!”

The oratorical opportunities of the moment were tempting Doctor Chitterly into taking some latitude with facts, a minor circumstance with him. He thought he saw the other's features fall in shame and thundered on.

“Now, sir, I make no requests of one of your stamp. I—um—demand that if you think you are master of this ship you put me ashore. I will have none of your rotten conspiracies—will be no party to them. I—ah——”

Doctor Chitterly's jaw hung open on his last word. He stared stupefiedly at Horn. The latter had dropped his rifle to clamp it between his knees so as to give his arms play for a violent flapping motion. He bent swiftly forward and back from the waist with a strange mechanical. jerk, and with each forward ducking he uttered a burbling note, “Cuckoo—cuckoo—cuckoo!”

“You're a—a pip!” the doctor snorted. “A hyperborean pip!”

He turned and strode down the deck.

At seven bells of the morning watch, a scant two hours after Captain Judah found himself again master, with reservations, of the Lonney Lee, destination of this mystery voyage suddenly loomed before the eyes of the landsmen aboard. The island which Doctor Chitterly had watched under the strangling coils of the mist serpents and along the shore had been drifting since first streak of dawn, lifted its contour to a bald headland at its northern end. Captain Judah, at the wheel, brought the head of the schooner around a few points so that her course was laid straight for the rocky foot of that headland cliff. He sent a Chinaman for'ard to heave a line from the cathead.

Tension settled upon every man aboard at these signs of imminent anchorage. The yellow men gathered at the foot of the foremast, shading their eyes under the brims of their wicker hats, like rank toadstools, to peer shoreward. Angelo and the Iron Man ducked out of the galley with dishrags in hands. Doctor Chitterly ceased his lonely pacing to stare at the forbidding shore line.

Storrs bawled orders which galvanized the Chinamen into action. Sail was shortened until only a jib and reefed mains'l caught the light airs stirring. All preparations were made for dropping anchor. Mr. Hansen took the tarpaulin off the auxiliary gasoline engine.

Horn the irrepressible took his stand behind Captain Judah, his rifle still ostentatiously at the ready. His was the thrill of the man at the green baize table who draws one card to fill a straight. Spike had taken a wild gamble on a blind hand and now the hidden card was about to be revealed.

The Lonney Lee crept by inches nearer to the line of lazy surf churning against the shore rocks. The high hump of the island towered above her, a mountain slope burned cinder brown by the sun and utterly barren—not so much as a clump of sage to break the dun monotony.

The cliff suddenly felt back revealing a cove perhaps a half-mile deep. Squarely in the middle of the shallow dish of blue water a steamer was stranded, bow high against the sands where the first line of rollers broke.

There was something startling in this sudden revelation. After a fortnight of vacant ocean—not so much as a plume of steamer smoke south of Sam Diego—to plump upon a ship here in this outland cove. Here was a Crusoe of craft desolate in its desert harbor.

Save for the canting of its bow the steamer might have been snugly at anchor awaiting passengers and cargo so far as the eyes of the Lonney Lee could determine. Only Captain Judah's practiced eye, reinforced by binoculars, could detect the sagging of stays betokening masts loosened by the waves' pounding, and a cant to the funnel. The steamer was of the common coastwise type plying Pacific ports; around two thousand tons; engines set aft; grubby looking with its black hull and dingy green superstructure—a tramp in every line.

The Stars and Stripes floated, union down, from the main truck.

The Lonney Lee crept into the shallow cove and dropped anchor in shoal water about a hundred yards away from the abandoned ship.

Once the hook was down and the schooner rode on a short cable, Captain Judah ordered the yawl overside. Two Chinamen lowered away and scrambled down to take their places at the oars. The skipper had one foot on the rail prepared to swing down when Spike, timing his casual stride down the deck, intercepted him.

“Figurin' on takin' a little trip, Cap?” Storrs gave him a flicker from baleful eyes and nodded curtly.

“I don't hear any invites to go long.” Spike thrust out his chin provocatively.

“None has been offered,” was the curt reply.

“Thanks, just the same; I'll go.” He dropped overside with his rifle, plumped himself in the stern sheets and indicated where Captain Judah should sit forward of the Chinese oarsmen. The yawl pushed off.