Plundered Cargo/Chapter 16

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter XVI

THE “SIERRA PARK'S” CARGO

Karelia's first words after the joining of truce were disconcerting. “I think,” she said, “you are a great fool but honest. A fool to believe any compact you made with Cap'n Judah Storrs was worth the paper it's written on. Honest—well, because you don't know better than blab your affairs to a stranger.”

Spike, taken aback, could do naught but scratch his head and grin sheepishly. “Guess you said it, lady.”

“Call me Karelia,” the girl corrected.

Spike suspected a joke and made a quick appraisal of her features. Absolute soberness there; black eyes regarding him levelly under their oddly tiptilted brows, eyes full of a vast hardihood but with no room in their irises for life's thistledown moments.

“Mighty fine of you,” the velvety contralto purled on. “Mighty decent, I say, to want to take me away from Sabina. When you talked about that I knew you were playing straight with me. But why do you suppose I've been waiting alone here a month and more, living here on the island away from the stench of the Sierra Park?”

“Looks to me like you've stayed here because you couldn't get away—no boat or anything,” Spike heard himself saying.

“Bosh! A good sized raft with a sail; I could have made it if I'd wanted to—with the port of Miraflores on the peninsula about seventy miles nor'west.

“No, Mate, I've waited here to pay off my score with Cap'n Storrs and a man named Hoskin, first officer aboard the Sierra Park—the man who shot my father. I knew both would come here. Bound to. Cap'n Storrs happens to be the first of the two to arrive.”

The girl seated herself on a jutting rock, her chin in her cupped palm, and seemed to be in a deep study which took no accounting of Spike's presence. Finally she spoke, not to him but to the heat quivers that wavered from the stone spine running down into the sea:

“Go your way, Mate; you and your schooner you've stolen from Storrs. I stay here.”

Spike swept the prospect of thorn hedge and beach, the utterly barren brown shoulder of the mountain behind. The desolation of it all! He looked at the girl in a new wonder.

“But K-Karelia, there's where the joker comes in,” he ruefully admitted. “We can't go away without you. Get a sail up and down: the doc and I can do that. But this business of lookin' at the sun through a cockeyed surveyor's transit and figurin' where you are; we're not there on that stuff, him an' I.”

“Ho-ho!” The black head went back in a gust of hearty laughter. “So you need a navigator. That's why you felt so tenderly about leaving an unprotected woman alone on Sabina!”

Spike's face flamed red. He was mad, he told himself—mad clear through.

“Look here! You can't play horse with Spike Horn, girl or no girl.” He made a first stride toward the top of the dike, quite ready to leave this Karelia girl “cold,” as he would have phrased it. A strong hand shot out to grip his wrist. He heard her voice, mollifying.

“Wait a minute, Mate. No use flying off at loose ends. When you know me better you'll find out you have to get used to my speaking my mind. Sit down. I want to talk. Haven't talked to anything but little rock crabs and sea gulls for five weeks.” A pause. “What's more, I like you.”

He suffered his offended dignity to be salved—not so difficult a concession since Karelia Lofgren had unerringly penetrated to the real motive of his visit. With an elaborate show of magnanimity Spike selected a jutting lava shelf for a seat.

“Shoot!” he said.

Karelia let her eyes run down to the yellow sickle of beach where the slow pulse of the waves sent yeasty surges climbing a slope and sucked them back with a snoring of the shingle.

“Opium,” she said as if continuing revelations already begun. “Two thousand cans of Ispahan opium stowed away in cotton bales out there in the Sierra Park's hold. Worth $125 a can laid down in San Francisco's Chinatown.”

“Glory be!” Spike drew in a whistling breathy “And I——”

“For that,” the girl continued in an even voice, “my father has been murdered, a steamer has been wrecked, you and your friends have been shanghaied—and no telling where all the devilment will stop.” Spike saw her features suddenly stiffen into cold lines of fury even as they had been first revealed to him the minute she came over the Sierra Park's rail. “But this devilment won't stop until Karelia Lofgren has had a hand in it. I had my chance at Cap'n Storrs out there this morning,” she continued. “You spoiled it. Maybe I'm glad you did. There's a better way of paying him off than just shooting him. When Hoskin comes back——”

Karelia broke off her reverie and gave the man a quick smile, half apologetic. “What you want to hear is not my grudges but the story of how opium got into those cotton bales and how the bales happen to be here in a beached steamer. I'll give you all I know of it, Mate.”

Gone was the look of a stalking tigress that had tensed Karelia Lofgren's features. Once more her chin was cupped in her propped hand and her eyes were following a little dreamily the wash of waves on the shining beach. Her voice came lazily.

“Cap'n Lofgren, my father, knew Cap'n Storrs many years ago. I knew him, too, when a child on my father's ships plying the Far Eastern tracks. Cap'n Storrs lied this morning when he said he didn't know me—never had seen me before. He saw me no less than three months ago.

“That was when he came to our little ranch in the San Joaquin—such a little ranch as every seafaring man longs to have for a snug berth after years of hard work. He came there, this Judah Storrs, to let his old friend Cap'n Lofgren into a piece of big business. Those were his words—'big business'—but he wouldn't talk more before me. I who had been more pal than daughter to Cap'n Lofgren since I was old enough to hold a match to his pipe had to leave them alone with this big business.

“But I knew it was crooked, Mate, this affair into which Cap'n Lofgren let himself be drawn, because when Cap'n Storrs went away with my father's promise to whack in with him, not a word of it all would he tell me. Only that he was to take out a steamer under Chinese charter—Frisco Chinamen—load her with cotton and hides in West Coast Mexican ports and bring her back to San Francisco.

“Cap'n Storrs' excuse for not taking the job himself was good enough; he'd lost his ticket running foul of the laws against barratry up in British Columbia waters and couldn't get his rating back. He told Cap'n Lofgren his only interest in the matter was the commission he'd get from the Chinks for finding them a steamer, a skipper and a crew. At least, so much my father told me.

“I tell you I knew Cap'n Lofgren had been let in for some crooked business—was certain of it when Cap'n Storrs insisted on signing up Hoskin as my father's first officer. The same Hoskin who'd been Cap'n Storrs' first over ten years and had nearly lost his ticket when the inspectors came down on Storrs. Putting this and that together, I said I was going to make the voyage as supercargo.

“Cap'n Lofgren went into a storm over my going. Hoskin was nasty about it. But let me tell you, Mate, when Karelia Lofgren says she'll do a thing nothing from North Star to Southern Cross can stop her. I went.

“The Sierra Park, a crippled old tramp, sailed in ballast through the Golden Gate a little more than two months ago. First was Mazatlan where we loaded cotton. Cap'n Lofgren told me the Chimamen who'd chartered the steamer raised and ginned the stuff up yonder in Sinaloa. Then across the gulf to La Paz for green hides atop the cotton. All regular and shipshape so far as I could see. No hint of crooked business.

“Then that night——” She gave her shoulders a shrug as if to ward off nightmare recollections.

“It was about the end of the middle watch. Cap'n Lofgren had turned in early after setting the south'ard course beyond Pechilingue. I was in my cabin behind his. I don't know what awoke me—just one of these calls in the dark—maybe from the spirits.

“I heard the gurgle of water somewhere forward. I tip-toed out on deck. Nobody stirring, yet that splash and swash of running water.

“First thing I saw, Mate, was that the Sierra Park was headed north—the stars told me that—when Cap'n Lofgren had set the course for Hoskin due south to clear Cape San Lucas. Then I kept to the shadow of the boats following the sound of splashing water and stumbled over a hose. It led through the trap in the main cargo hatch. Gallons of water pouring on hides and cotton stowed tight in the hold. Do you know what that meant?”

Spike nodded sagely. “Ole Storrs explained aboard the Sierra Park before you came. Like soaking dried apples, huh?”

“Exactly,” the girl concurred. “In other words, wrecking the ship. Who couldn't swear before a court the vessel had sprung a plate and shipped enough water to start the cotton swelling? Who but I had seen that hose at work?”

“Looks like somebody figured on double-crossing your old man,” Spike filled in an interval of silence.

“Somebody?” Karelia echoed. “Who but Judah Storrs through his man Hoskin? The Chinamen who owned the opium in those cotton bales, Cap'n Lofgren who'd lent himself to the crooked business: both to be duped. All arranged for by Cap'n Storrs before ever the Sierra Park left Frisco.

“Wreck the ship and come back for the opium in all good time: that was Storrs' game.” The girl delivered this deduction with a recurrence of her fierce intensity.

“But wait a minute! How 'bout ole Storrs figurin' me for a double-crosser; his saying somebody slipped me the coin to head him off from the plunder?” Spike's objection made no impress on Karelia's solidly built hypothesis.

“I went and woke up my father,” she continued, “told him what I had seen. But before I would let him go up on the bridge where Hoskin held the watch I made Cap'n Lofgren tell me all he knew about what lay behind this voyage. How a syndicate of wealthy Chinamen in 'Frisco had smuggled two thousand cans of opium from the Straits Settlements through Mazatlan and had ginned them in cotton bales to get them past government inspectors at 'Frisco.

“Storrs had persuaded him, so my father whispered there in the dark of his cabin—the merciful dark—to join with him in a scheme to steal that opium. Instead of making San Francisco, Cap'n Lofgren was to slip into Magdalena Bay, a desert haven where nobody lives, and there cache the cotton. Storrs would come down with a schooner to break out the opium and run it overland across the Border near San Diego. The Sierra Park would be abandoned.”

Her voice trailed off to silence. A blue and yellow lizard had crept to the top of a nearby rock and there crouched poised, with the slack skin about his throat puffing and retracting in a tremor of alarm. Karelia's eyes, all lack-lustre, fixed upon the creature.

“Why am I telling this man the shame of my father?” she asked the lizard. Then unexpectedly she turned upon Spike the full battery of smoldering eyes. “Not a word from you! Don't you dare breathe a word against Cap'n Lofgren!”

Spike, thoroughly startled, batted his eyes with nervous rapidity. “You don't hear me sayin' anythin'.”

She appeared to set herself for the next words:

“Cap'n Lofgren went to the bridge. In the first light of dawn I saw Hoskin standing there. I heard Cap'n Lofgren ask the meaning of the changed course.

“'Cap'n Judah Storrs' orders,' Hoskin said. And when Cap'n Lofgren made a motion to draw his revolver—for this was mutiny, Mate—Hoskin shot him.”

For long Spike did not dare break the silence which fell upon the girl's last words.

“After that——?” he finally whispered.

“The Sierra Park began going down by the head before the sun was two hours in the sky,” came the dead answer. “Hoskin beached her where you see her now around eight bells of the morning watch. He and the crew quit the ship in three boats, after staving in the fourth so I could not use it. They made nor'eastward in the direction of Guaymas over on the mainland. They left me alone on that stinking wreck.

“Just before he went over-side Hoskin came to me with a wolf's grin on his ugly face—I hadn't yet found Cap'n Lofgren's revolver or I would have shot him then.

“'Sorry to leave you here alone, Miss Lofgren,' he sneered. 'But I don't want you at the end of a wire when I report this wreck to the owners. You'll see me back again just as soon as I can pick up a craft to fetch me.'”