Plundered Cargo/Chapter 12

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter XII

KARELIA LOFGREN

Spike Horn, on the very split-second of that shot which turned Captain Judah's cap on his head, in two bounds was at the rail where sat the mystery woman come from nowhere. Her forefinger was pressing the trigger for a second shot at Storrs when Spike's rifle barrel made a swift upward sweep toward the girls wrist. A bullet went singing toward the masthead as the revolver spun an arc and dropped far forward near the ragged hole in the deckboards.

Perhaps Spike saved Storrs' life. If he did, that was, however, no great concern of his.

What followed upon that swift diverting of a bullet was decidedly Spike's concern. A body launched itself from the rail full at him. A stinging blow from a fist rocked his head backward. As he stumbled back he had an eye-filling vision of a face contorted by fury; eyes blazing like a black panther's; black braids of hair whipping about like striking serpents.

Surprisingly strong hands were laid on the rifle to wrench it from him. He felt hot breath against his face as the girl cried, “Give me that! Give me! I'll kill both of you!”

Spike's backward shuffling feet struck against the edge of a box and he went down. His breath was knocked from him as the girl fell upon him. Once they rolled over together on the deck, then Spike got a leverage for one foot against the butt of the mast and broke the hold she had upon him. Swiftly he rolled out of reach and scrambled to his feet, grinning delightedly. The rifle still was his.

The fighting lady remained in a sitting position on the deck, fists doubled, furious eyes jumping from Horn to Storrs. But for the incongruous shirt and trousers, she could have been easily a model for some sculptor wishing to imprison in bronze the figure of a perfectly formed modern outdoor girl. She was of good height for a woman, and her neck, which rose full and round from the opened flap of the shirt, carried her head imperiously.

Spike Horn was sure he never had seen a woman with a face like hers. It was more the face of a boy, and flushed with the vitality of youth. Very oval in contour, with narrow, pointed chin and broad forehead under the heavy V marking of the blue-black hair. The eyes had a slight Mongolian up-turn made more exotic by the slant of black brows tilted like the brows of a lady on a mandarin fan. The scowl she wore gathered the broader ends of those brows into a knot where her lustrous black eyes burned in rage.

Spike saw those eyes give a sideways slant toward where the revolver lay many feet away on the deck. He anticipated her intent on the instant, strode over, picked up the weapon, broke it and dropped the unexploded cartridges into his pocket. He clamped the barrel shut again and advanced the butt toward the girl.

“Lady, you dropped something,” he snickered with a low bow. With no abatement of her furious frown the girl took the weapon, stuck it in the waistband of her trousers and came up standing.

Storrs, who had been a little shaken by the flight of a bullet across his hair-line, made a quick recovery during the brief hand-to-hand go between the strange girl and his roughneck captor. Now, smiling broadly, he received the full battery fire from her eyes.

“So, Cap'n Judah Storrs, you've come to get the loot from the Sierra Park!” Again that huskiness in the timbre of her voice, a little like the low wood notes from an oboe. Storrs bowed his head for answer.

“But you didn't expect to find me aboard, eh?” This with a challenging out-thrust of the pointed chin.

“Madam, I could hardly expect that since I never saw or heard of you before.”

“Never heard of me?” She took a quick step which brought her so close to the Lonney Lee's skipper that her breath stirred his beard. “Never heard of Karelia Lofgren? Then why did you give orders that when your man Hoskin beached this ship here Cap'n Lofgren was to be killed and I left behind on the wreck to die?”

The girl who called herself Karelia was all the picture of a Greek Nemesis this instant. Her features, almost on a level with the skipper's, were drawn into a hard mask of devilishness, the strangely oblique brows giving it a satanic cast. Her fists were held rigidly across her breast.

Storrs fell back at her accusation of murder and marooning. His face, usually so well controlled, betrayed genuine surprise.

“I order Cap'n Lofgren's death? No!” he stoutly denied. “I fully believed he was alive, and——”

“You lie! You lie!” She whirled, took a few hurried steps away and then almost ran back to bring her bared teeth, narrow and gleaming, close to Captain Judah's face. Every inch of her lithe body was consumed by fury as by a winding sheet of flame.

“There, om that bridge—” she pointed—“he shot my father, your man Hoskin did. Then he held me to the rail, your man Hoskin, to see what happened when my father's body was dropped overboard—to see the black fins come rushing—the foam which their tails lashed. Ah-h Look at me, Cap'n Judah Storrs. See these eyes of mine! I tell you these eyes of Karelia Lofgren will again see that rush of black fins—that bloody foam. But you will be down there this next time—yours the body the sharks will tear!”

For a frozen minute they stood with stares locked, Storrs' saturnine face inches away from the flushed and passionate features of Karelia Lofgren. The man's voice came low and measured.

“Young woman, Hoskin is not 'my man' as you call him. If he murdered Skipper Lofgren and left you marooned here it was without my knowledge. I give you my word until this minute I thought your father had sold me out; thought that I would have to fight him and the men he'd sold out to for what lies under this deck here.”

A sudden gleam of inspiration lighted the skipper's cold eye. He turned to indicate Spike Horn.

“Here's the man you can settle with. Ask him what he knows about Hoskin. You'll notice he carries a rifle when he's with me. He's no friend of mine.”

Storrs' deft attempt to turn the girl's berserker wrath onto the innocent Spike Horn was made an instant too late. For the throes of her rage were unsupportable for long and the mood was passing from her. She turned smoldering eyes to meet a most engaging smile set in a comedian's face.

“After that chummy trick let me pull one o' my own, Miss Ka—Karelia.” Spike jammed a fist into one pants pocket and brought out four cartridges he'd taken from the girl's revolver. He offered them om his spread palm with a clumsy attempt at a bow.

“Horn, you goat!” Sharp alarm sounded in Captain Judah's exclamation.

“Y' aren't worried, are yow Cap?” He made a clown's face at Storrs.

The girl slowly put out a hand for the cartridges. Storrs took a sudden step forward, but Spike's rifle waved him back with an authoritative command. The master stood tight-lipped and with eyes narrowed for the least flicker of action.

Karelia Lofgren broke the breech of her weapon and slipped the cartridges into the chambers one by one. The forward sag of her head and slow movements of her hand betokened a lassitude following nerve storm. She clicked the breech shut, spun the chamber until a load was under the hammer.

Then her eyes slowly traveled along a seam of the deck to where Captain Judah's feet were planted, up the legs of his trousers to his waistband, to his face. It was held immovable as of carved wood. She searched his eyes while Storrs battled to match her gaze.

She tucked the revolver behind the belt about her waist.

“Cap'n Storrs, you'd better go away from the Sierra Park,” was the admonition given in a husky voice. “You'd better go away, because if you stay here I'll surely kill you—and the sharks will pull you to pieces.”

The extraordinary Karelia Lofgren turned abruptly and strode to the lee rail where they first had seen her. She mounted the rail, her bare toes curling over the edge, then swung out on one of the davit ropes and disappeared.

Spike made a run for the rail to look down. He saw the girl seat herself om a box athwart some bound spars making a crazy raft and take up a paddle. Slowly the rude craft headed for the shore line a hundred yards away.

And from three directions, came hurrying the grim black triangles which mark the sea-tigers. They came cutting the water in lines of white to form a wary convoy into shoal water.