CHAPTER IX.
THE LAST OF THE “VESTA.”
I was hoping very earnestly that the Jeffreys crew of searchers hadn't seen us. The tackle by which the whaleboat had been launched was sufficient evidence of the means of our departure, of course, but I thought there might be some small advantage accruing to us if the raiders didn't learn that we had just left and were hardly out of sight along the shore. On the other hand, if they had seen us and marked the crowded condition of our boat they would know that we couldn't venture very far from land.
As we went on we found the outer reef drawing nearer to the shore, finally coming to a place where the lagoon itself was so narrow and bestudded with the coral growth as to compel us to take to the open water beyond the barrier. Here the ground swell was pretty heavy but the whaleboat, even laden as it was, performed very well under Brill's skillful juggling and we were soon rounding the northeastern end of the islet and jibing to lay a course down its farther side.
In a short time we came in sight of the Waikiki. She was standing head toward the land, with a little list to starboard, and but for the leaning position might have seemed to be quietly at anchor. As we approached I scanned the shore through Brill's binoculars. There was no sign of life anywhere and I saw that one of the bay headlands shut off the view of the yacht from the camp the survivors had pitched in the glade. It occurred to me at once that here was another of the small advantages. Unless some of the campers should follow the beach around the headland our presence on the yacht would go undiscoverd.
To hold this advantage for what it might be worth I directed Brill to bring the boat up under the yacht's counter on the seaward side where it couldn't be seen from any point on the beach. This was done and the list of the yacht let us climb aboard with out difficulty. Once on the deck we saw that the sea had mishandled the smart little liner shamefully. The after-deck awning was gone and its iron stanchions were bent or broken. The lounge furniture, settees, lounges and chairs, were all gone of course, and the ornamental brass rail which had surmounted the ordinary wooden one had been carried away. The glass in the windows of the cabin had disappeared and the handsome gold-and-white dining saloon looked as if a crew of madmen had been holding an orgy in it.
Seeing all this wreckage, I supposed, of course, that the yacht's hold would be full of water; and, indeed we soon discovered that she had taken in a lot of it. Oddly enough the flooding was confined chiefly to the forward compartments of the hold, the bulkheading cross partitions having kept it from submerging the boiler and engine rooms. In the latter the water was only ankle deep over the floor; in the boiler space there was more—it had risen high enough to flood the grates.
Naturally, with the water six or eight feet deep in the forehold, we could not tell how much damage had been done to her under body at the bows when she struck; that is, whether or not she was stove and leaking. But there was reason to hope that her substantial steel skin was unbroken; a hope that was strengthened when we found that she was hung up on a sand shoal and not on a reef. For a pleasure craft she was built very stanchly and while her top works were badly knocked about, as they would be by the hammering of the giant seas breaking over her, she was by no means the total wreck we had been expecting to find her.
While Brill and Dorgan and I were looking the hull over Alison and the Swedish young woman investigated the pantry and storerooms. In these they found a plentiful supply of provisions, much of it still undamaged. So far as food was concerned there was subsistence for weeks, not only for us, but for the other castaways if we chose to divide with them. As to the dividing I fancy the same thought came to both Alison and me a little later when we were checking over the ample food stock.
“Those people on shore,” she said: “goodness knows, I have no reason to be especially generous to them. But it is rather dreadful to think of them starving on coconuts and shellfish when we have plenty of civilized food.”
“I was thinking of that, too,” I admitted. “For the sake of the women they have with them we'll find a way to divide; though as for Wickham Jeffreys I'd be quite willing to let him chew on the nuts and sea worms for the remainder of his days.”
“But how can you divide with them without running into danger?”
“Easily. We'll wait until after dark and then take the whaleboat and set a cargo of this stuff ashore. They'll find it if we leave it on the beach in plain sight.”
“We are going to stay here in the yacht?” she asked.
“It is the safest place for the present and while the weather holds good. Those people can't reach us without a boat; and besides, the wreck of the yacht will be much more likely to attract the attention of some passing vessel than will our beached schooner on the other side of the island.”
Throughout that day, during which we busied ourselves industriously in making the yacht habitable, cleaning up the storm mess, drying the bedding in the sun, and—José and I, at least—making a swimming pool of the forehold in an effort to find out if any of the bow plates had been started in the grounding, we saw no signs, of life on shore and I wondered if it hadn't yet occurred to Jeffreys or some of the others that we had forsaken the schooner for the Waikiki.
There was the hoisting tackle on board the Vesta to show that we had launched a boat and the hot galley stove to prove that the time of our departure must have very nearly coincided with that of their discovery of the schooner. But in these speculations I failed to consider one important factor, namely, the Vesta's cargo and the nature of it. As the event proved the finding of the liquor in the schooner's hold had been the introduction to a day-long carouse and it was this that gave us our temporary immunity. But of this, more in its place.
As may be imagined I did not let the “redding-up” of the dismantled yacht pause with the mere job of making it habitable for the time being. I did not need Brill's assurance that another storm, or even the threat of one, would, if the yacht remained in its present position, force us to take refuge on the island again. As the little ship lay on the shoal she would be swept by a very moderate sea, to say nothing of the danger of her breaking up. So with the two Minorcans to help and the whaleboat for a working stage I made a thorough examination of the hull on the outside, taking soundings all around and making rough measurements to ascertain just how badly we were stranded.
The results were rather encouraging. The shoal was much like a river sand bar and though the yacht was firmly embedded for ward there was deep water under her stern—five fathoms as we measured it with the lead line. I was confident that if she could be freed of the heavy burden of water in the holds there was an even chance that she might be floated.
Next, I overhauled the machinery. So far as I could determine this was all intact. Here again it was only the water that had come aboard that prevented its use and even with that handicap I thought we might still be able to bail the fire room and so be in shape to get steam on the boilers; enough, at least, to permit us to run the steam bilge pumps.
Summing up the total of these pryings for Dorgan and Brill I told them that if we had lost a schooner I was of the opinion that we stood a fair chance of finding a yacht. If all other means of rescue failed we could turn ourselves into a wrecking crew and try to get the Waikiki afloat.
“Huh!” sniffed Brill. “What you goin' to do with her if you do float her?”
“Go back to the world in her, of course!” I retorted.
“Where's your ingineer?”
“I can handle that end of it if you can take the bridge.”
“I dunno,” he grumbled. “I never sailed nothin' bigger than a coastin' schooner.”
“Well, if we get this baby in commission you'll never learn any younger how to handle a steamer,” I told him. “But that is a future. I have just remembered something that I ought never to have forgotten. You had some rifles and ammunition aboard the Vesta.”
“Yes; and by cripes, you took 'em out o' the cabin locker and hid 'em,” Brill complained.
“Ah?” said I; “you went after them, did you? That was what I expected and it was why I took them away. We've got to go back and get those guns.”
“What for?” It was Dorgan who wanted to know.
“Because they are high-powered rifles and we are not out of range from the beach. I don't know the temper of those men on shore or how far they will go, but I do know that their leader's one decent accomplishment is the ability to shoot straight. He was once a member of a crack rifle team in New York and I've seen him at the butts. He's an expert marksman.”
At this they both agreed with me that we'd have to go back to the schooner; Dorgan heartily enough and Brill morosely. And it was Brill, and not Dorgan, who objected surlily when I said we'd kill two birds with one stone and set some provisions ashore for the Waikiki's castaways while we had the whaleboat manned.
“I don't see no use a-doin' that,” he growled. “Let 'em starve, by grapples! If the shoe was on t'other foot they'd see us in hell afore they'd split with us. Besides, we may need all there is ourselves.”
At this Dorgan called him down savagely.
“You ain't fit to live on the same earth with human bein's, Isra'l,” he ripped out. “Ain't Cap'n Ainsley done told you they got wimmen with 'em? But you wouldn't mind starvin' a lot of wimmen, you wouldn't!”
The plans for the expedition were soon formulated. As soon as it grew dark we would load the boat with provisions, and blankets and clothing for the women, and let the two Minorcans row it ashore and un load it. That done we would sail around the head of the island and under cover of the darkness reconnoiter the Vesta. If the enemy were not in possession we'd go aboard and search for the weapons.
The first part of this program was carried out without incident. The boatload of stuff was taken ashore and piled up on the beach where in daylight it could not fail to be seen from the camp, and the two sailors pulled back to the yacht. For the descent upon the schooner I decided to take the two women along. Alison gravely offered to stay in the yacht with Hedda for a companion and there seemed to be little reason to fear that the two of them wouldn't be safe enough; but I was not taking any chances. So, with the same boat's company we had had in the retreat from the Vesta we set out to redouble the island head.
Of all the risks we had taken thus far, this voyage in the starlight along a reef-studded shore was perhaps the most hazardous. The land breeze of the forenoon had shifted to a sea breeze and that was in our favor; but while there was not wind enough to put the sea up there was a heavier ground swell than that we had encountered in the morning and in any hands less skillful than Israel Brill's I am convinced that the whale boat, driven by the clumsy lugsail, would speedily have come to grief in the breakers. As it was we had some pretty narrow escapes before we won to the shelter of the western lagoon; but we made it finally with no more than a few bucketfuls of water to slosh around in the bottom of the boat to remind us of the danger past.
Once in the lagoon and stealing along in the shadow of the beach-crowding jungle we began to look ahead to pick out the dark bulk of the Vesta. It seemed to me that we had gone fully twice the distance traversed in the morning before Brill suddenly put his steering-oar helm hard down and gave José an order that made the Minorcan quickly spill the wind out of our sail and so bring the whaleboat to a stand. In the distance we could hear voices, a confused medley of them as of men shouting. It was Dorgan who corrected that impression.
“Drunk and disorderly,” he chuckled. “They're still there and they're singin'. They can't break loose fr'm the booze.”
There was something inexpressibly weird and uncanny in the discordant racket that floated out to us upon the breeze; tuneless songs that were shouted rather than sung. I was sitting next to Alison in the boat, and I could feel her shudder of repugnance and disgust. “Beasts!” she said. “It was coming to that on the yacht, at the last. There were times when Hedda and I had to lock ourselves in our stateroom.”
At another order from Brill the two sailors got out the oars and pulled us slowly around the point of land that was cutting off our view of the Vesta's grounding beach. A single glance showed us that we were out of the picture so far as any chance of boarding the schooner was concerned. The drunken crew had built a fire on the beach, apparently with dry lumber chopped out of the vessel, and around it a dozen half-clad figures were reeling and dancing like a mob of crazy savages. And there were women in the whirling circle. Alison was shuddering again and she drew closer to me.
“Do you wonder that I was ready to walk into the sea last night?” she whispered shakenly; then: “And at home those people would call themselves civilized.”
Plainly we had no business on that side of the island; none whatever; and there was certainly nothing in this disgraceful spectacle of a lot of our fellow human beings gone mad to hold us. But when I would have given the order to retreat, or did give it, Brill hesitated.
“Wait a minute,” he urged. “Let's see what's comin' next.”
As he spoke the reeling figures around the fire began to snatch up blazing brands, whirling them over their heads as they danced. By the light of these waving torches we could see that they had made some sort of a plank runway from the schooner's deck to the sands. While we looked a single figure broke out of the whirling-dervish circle and flaming torch in hand ran up the plank gangway to disappear, torch and all, into the Vesta's hold.
“He's gone after more o' the Scotch,” said Dorgan and his guess was immediately confirmed when the hold diver reappeared with an armful of objects that we took to be bottles—but without the torch!
“Blast his soul!” gritted Brill. “He's gone and left that fire stick in the hold! That'll be the last o' the old Vesta!”
It scarcely asked for a prophet or the son of a prophet thus to foretell the result of the liquor carrier's negligence. While the maniacs around the bonfire were knocking the necks from the bottles a column of smoke began to pour up out of the schooner's hatchway. Nobody saw it or heeded it until the smoke column turned to a lurid pillar of flame to go licking up into the ship's rigging with a roar like that of a blast furnace. So far as anything could do so the spectacle sobered the maniacs for the moment, at least. Four or five of the men rushed up the gangplank to the schooner's deck but were immediately driven back by the violence of the flames.
Beyond this, two of them tried again, climbing to the deck and essaying to clap the hatch upon the spouting volcano; did get it part way on before the fire reached the alcoholic mixtures in the hold and began to explode them in jets and geyser bursts of many-colored flame. When that happened there was nothing more to be done and we could see the fire-illumined figures driven by the furnacelike heat stumbling and reeling along the beach in our direction.
It was our signal to vanish. Brill, cursing bitterly at the wanton destruction both of his vessel and her costly cargo, flung himself upon the steering oar and brought the boat around while the two sailors bent manfully to their job on the thwarts. A few quick strokes carried the whaleboat out far enough to let us get the breeze and the oars were shipped and the sail spread.
Looking back as we gathered headway we could see the whole heavens lighted balefully with the glare of the burning vessel, the red reflection of it reaching far out to sea. Nobody spoke until after Brill had negotiated the dangerous passages through the reef and we were once more swaying and swinging on the uneasy bosom of the ground swell outside. Then Dorgan said, with his hoarse chuckle: “All I'm hopin' is that they're burnin' up them rifles and that box o' shells along with the bug juice.” And I, for one, was fervently echoing the big man's pious hope.
In due time we reached the yacht and climbed aboard. From her deck we could still see the red glare in the sky. Whatever faint hope any of us might have been cherishing of making the Vesta carry us back to civilization was going up in smoke and flames: our only resources now were a water-logged yacht fast aground and an open boat.