The Cruise of the Dry Dock/Caradoc Wins His Fight
CHAPTER XIV
CARADOC WINS HIS FIGHT
Trembling all over, Madden gained the barrel and stepped through a niche in its side. He stared through the brilliant, hot colors, but no rushing horde of monsters met his eyes.
“Which way?” he asked breathlessly.
Caradoc looked around at him in uncomprehending misery. There was just room for the two in the barrel. Smith seemed to put his mind to Madden's question with an effort.
“Which—what did you say?”
“Which way?”
“What do you mean?”
“The dragons, man, the dragons!”
“Dragons—right here!” Smith beat his broad chest, then waved his long arms about. “Everywhere—don't you smell it?”
The idea of smelling dragons confused the American. “Smell what?”
“The whiskey!” shivered Caradoc. “I came up here to get away from it.”
“Oh—so you didn't see—I understand!”
“It's tantalizing—horrible!” he shivered again, as if the superheated air chilled him.
The American's own foolish fancies vanished in the face of his friend's real trouble. Caradoc had met a dragon more terrible than the Sargasso could conjure up, and its fangs were in his heart. His flight to the crow's nest had been an effort to escape its fury, but it had followed him there. Leonard put a hand on his friend's shoulder. He was at a loss what to say. Indeed there was nothing to say.
“Habit—queer thing, Leonard—I thought I was all right.”
“Yes?”
“You see, in college I used to take an alcohol rub-down after my bouts, and a drink. And now, after my fight at noon—smelling this—you don't know how it brings it back, appetite, recollections, everything——” he waved his hands hopelessly again.
“Don't think of it. Put your mind on something else.”
Caradoc gave a short mirthless laugh. “Stand in a fire—and consider the lilies?”
“We've got to consider how we'll ever get out of here, if we can't run this tug's engines…”
“We're stuck! We're stuck!” declared the Englishman miserably. “I don't see why I don't go down and be a hog again… we'll finally starve… Somehow I had a mind to die sober… God knows why I ever came on such a junket.”
“Starve nothing. We'll get out somehow. We can fish and eat seaweed and distill our own water. I can make a still. And you'll get over that appetite. Bound to—can't last always.”
Smith relapsed into silence, staring over the dying colors of the sea. Madden tried to think of simple remedies to abate a drunkard's appetite for alcohol. He had heard of apples, lemon juice, but both were as unobtainable as the gold cure itself.
“How long have you been like this?” he asked at last.
“Been bad two or three years. Drank some all my life. My governor taught it to me when I was a baby. Then when I got older if I went too far he kicked. Naturally I intended to stop in time, till I slipped in deep.”
Leonard nodded understandingly. “It always gets a nervous high-strung fellow. The better stuff you are the harder it hits you.”
Caradoc stared moodily seaward as he continued his recollections.
“The governor kept warning me. I don't believe he'd ever have kicked me out, but he died. Then they cashiered me—took my commission—and my family let me go, too… Well, I can't blame 'em.”
“Your commission—in the army?”
“Navy.”
“What were you?”
“Second lieutenant.”
Madden looked at his friend curiously. Here was a queer pass for an English naval officer. This revelation explained a good deal about Smith, his autocratic manner, his many-sided education, his emotion at leaving England. It even explained why he had expected Malone to place him in charge of the dock.
“Is there any hope of getting back in?” asked Leonard sympathetically.
“Instauration! Never knew of such a thing in our navy. If I ever get out of here I'll go in trade somewhere.”
“In South America?”
“I had British Honduras in mind, or Canada. I'd like to keep in the Empire.”
A noise below interrupted the conversation. The two youths looked down. The deck plan of the tug lay flat and empty save for the inert form of Gaskin. The noise came from inside the cabin and arose to a shouting. It was a drunken ribald sound. A suspicion flashed on Leonard's mind.
“Those pigs below are wasting the stores,” he declared.
“They ought to be stopped.”
“I couldn't stop them without a fight. They were about to court martial me when they happened to think of something else.”
Caradoc stared down in the direction of the noise, “I might talk them into sense if Greer isn't drunk and wanting to fight again.”
“He said he never drank—I don't know.”
Caradoc nodded, “I'll go down and send them forward,” he asserted with conviction, and started to climb out of the barrel.
Madden looked at the Englishman with a certain apprehension, “Caradoc, if you go down there where they are drinking, won't you——”
“No, I'm not going to drink.”
“It will be a temptation.”
“I have myself in hand now. This talk has done me good. No, I'm all right.” He swung out of the barrel and started down the ratlines.
Leonard watched him anxiously, not at all sure of the outcome of his mission, not at all sure that the hot smell of rum in the galley would not again overcome his resistance.
The sun was just dipping into the sea and its last light spread out of the west to the zenith like a huge red-gold fan. Purplish shadows had already begun to dim the tug and dock and ocean.
Fifteen or twenty degrees above the sunset shone a pale crescent moon in the burnished sky. The sight of the moon somehow cheered Madden. He recalled a childish superstition that it was good luck to see the new moon clear. At any rate, as the sky darkened, the clear new moon brought Leonard comfort and renewed hope.
With a grateful feeling of the providence of an Almighty that hung out moon and stars, the youth glanced around the darkening horizon and presently observed a tiny light far to the south. He stared at it quite surprised, and then he chanced to see a star just above it. It was the reflection of Sirius in Canis Major.
The beam of a star must lead any thoughtful soul into endless reveries. Beneath its calm and infinite light, all human troubles fade to the brief complaining of a child in the night. Death becomes a small, unfeared thing, and life itself, the trail of a finger writing an unknown message upon water.
Filled with such musings, the American noted with surprise that the light on the sea which he had fancied to be the reflection of Sirius was moving. It was not the reflection of a star.
It was a light moving in the gathering darkness.
What sort of light could it be? A Will o' the Wisp? A Jack o' Lantern, some phosphoric phenomenon rising in the exhalations of rotting seaweed?
Ten minutes before, his excited imagination would have conjured up hydras and dragons; now he scrutinized the mysterious illumination unexcitedly. It winked out occasionally, then presently reappeared. But it did not move in an aimless fashion, after the manner of gaseous or electrical phenomena. It pursued a straight line toward the Vulcan. That was why Madden had not observed its movement sooner.
Although it had crept only a little way down from the horizon, the wondering boy could discern its progress plainly among the dark masses of seaweed that blotched the graying water. The light was moving toward the Vulcan and at a high rate of speed.
As he watched it, the enigmatical light suddenly disappeared. The youth blinked his eyes, looked again. It was gone. Then he became a little uncertain whether or not he had ever observed any such phenomenon. He glanced down on the dark deck and could faintly discern the form of the cook.
“Gaskin!” he called sharply, “Gaskin!”
To his surprise the drunken fellow stirred and made some mumbling reply.
“Get up. I want to know whether or not you can see anything.”
Came a sluggish stirring from below, and then Gaskin's voice, in which deference struggled with a bad headache, “Yes, sor, I can see hever'thing as usual, sor.”
“I thought I saw a light to the south. Just take a look in that quarter, will you?”
The dopy cook scuffled to his feet and stumbled over to the rail, hung there, peering intently southward. At that moment, there burst out of the sea a brilliant illumination that fairly blinded Madden. Shocked into spasmodic action, the American jumped from barrel to ratlines.
He hardly knew how he got down, as much of a fall as a climb. Strange fearsome thoughts chased through his head. The men were right about something attacking the Minnie B. Now the same thing had attacked the Vulcan. The Vulcan would be sunk. He must rush the men out of the galley into the small boat. He must race back to the dock. The dock apparently was safe. What the startling apparition was, he had no time to speculate. When he touched the deck he sprinted for the cabin.
As he passed Gaskin the light vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared, and left the tug in inky darkness.
Madden heard the cook give a deferential cough and then say, “Yes, sor, Hi saw it, Mr. Madden, saw it quite plainly, sor.”
A moment before Leonard reached the cabin door, someone flung the shutter open violently and shouted his name in the utmost alarm.
“Mister Madden! Mister Madden! Come quick, sir!”
The American lunged through the dark aperture straight into the fellow's arms. In the darkness he could not make out who it was.
“Don't be afraid! Did you see it? Where are the rest of the men?”
“In the galley, sir, with him!” stammered the sailor,
“Are they in a funk?” gasped Madden, feeling that he himself was in one.
“Oh, they are that, sir.”
“Why don't they come on out? We must get 'em out!”
“They're with him, sir, 'fraid to touch 'im!”
“With who?”
“Mr. Caradoc, sir.”
“Afraid to touch him—why, what's the matter?”
“'E's dead, sir.”
A feeling as if ice water had been dashed over his body shivered through Leonard. The black cabin seemed to swing under his feet. His arms dropped down and he stood perfectly still staring into the blackness from whence came the sailor's voice.
“You—you don't mean he's dead?” he asked in a shocking whisper.
“That I do, sir, dead as a lump o' seaweed.”
Madden turned and walked with a queer light feeling toward the galley. He was in no hurry now. If that strange light sank them, drowned them, it made little difference. An idea came into his mind.
“Did—did you fellows kill him—murder, him?” he asked in a hard undertone.
The tenseness of his voice seemed to scare the sailor, “No, sir, no, sir, no, sir!” repeated the cockney over and over.
“For I'll shoot the man down like a dog! I'll hang him! I'll—I'll——”
“We—we didn't touch 'im!” cried the sailor in hoarse alarm. “'E done it 'isself, sir. Went clean crazy, kilt hisself—'orrible!” As the sailor gasped out “horrible” they entered the cook's galley where a dim light burned and a group of silent, sobering men stood in a knot over some object.
Madden shoved through to where two men stooped over a long body, dimly seen on the decking. The two men were Hogan and Deschaillon.
With his strange feeling still strong upon him, Madden knelt between the two. Caradoc lay limp and motionless, with a dark stain slowly spreading on the boards under his head.
“Tell me about this,” commanded Leonard, thrusting a hand under the prostrate man's shirt and feeling for his heart. The request set loose a babble.
“'E did it 'isself, sor!” “Split hopen 'is own 'ead, right enough!” “W'ack, 'e took 'isself, w'ack!” “Aye, that 'e did, sor!” “It sounds queer, an' it looked queerer, but 'e did, sor!”
Madden made a sharp angry gesture for silence, “One at a time. Mulcher, what happened?”
“'E comes in, Mr. Madden,” began the cockney more composedly, “an' says, 'Forward, men, lively now,' an' Galton 'e turns an' says, 'Ye may take that, ye—'”
Again came the irrepressible chorus, “Aye, that 'e did, sor!”
“If a man speaks before I address him, I'll brain him!” shouted Madden. “Hogan, what happened?”
“If you plaze, Misther Madden, Misther Smith came in and asked iv'rybody to stip forward and quit atin' up th' grub. Galton was mad innyway, an' had a glass o' whiskey in his hand. 'Quit atin'!' yills Galton. 'A officer niver wants nobody to ate but himself.' Then, 'Take thot!' he yills, and flings his whiskey straight into Smith's face.
“Av cour-rse, we ixpected to see him smash Galton to smithereens, him being dhrunk—Galton, I mane—but he stood still as a post, sir, and tur-rned white as a sheet. I filt sorry for th' gintilmin—him putting up sich a good foight this avening—so Oi thought if he didn't want to fight, I'd help him pass it off aisy. I had a glass o' liquor in me own hand. I offers it to him. Says I, 'Pay no attention to th' spalpeen at all, Misther Smith,' says I; 'he's a fool to be throwin' away good liquor loike that; and have this dhrink on me, and if he does it again Oi'll pitch him out o' the port.' With that I handed him me glass.
“Well, sir, he took it, an' I belave there was niver another face on earth loike his, whin he hild up that glass to th' lamp. His hand shook so some of the sthuff shpilled. His face was loike a corpse. He shtarted to dhrink. Put it to his lips. Thin of a suddint, loike it had shtung him, he yills out, 'God 'a' mercy!' flings down th' glass, which smashes all over th' floor, lowers his head an' plunges loike a football tackle, head fir-rst, roight into th' sharp edge o' that locker there where ye see th' blood an' hairs stickin'. Down he wint, loike he's hit wid an axe, wid his skull broke in siv'ral pieces no doubt. Mad as a hatter, sir, fr-rom th' hate. Though it's sich an onrasonable tale, sir, I won't raysint it if ye call me a liar to me teeth.”
Madden had found the Englishman's heart still beating. He pressed his fingers in the long bloody wound on his head and the skull appeared sound enough under the long gash.
“Get him out on deck,” he ordered sharply, in an effort to keep his voice from choking in his throat.
“Out on deck! He's not dead! Get him in fresh air!”
Hogan, Deschaillon, and two navvies caught him by the legs and arms. Madden lifted the bleeding head from which the blood still ran in a steady trickle. The crowd gave back and the five men with their grewsome burden passed through the galley's door into the dark passage.
Just then a sudden vibration went through the whole ship, as if the Vulcan had been struck by some enormous force. The men carrying Smith staggered. There burst out a blare of confusion, amazed cries, shouts of terror. There was a stampede in the narrow passage. Flying men bumped into the bearers of the sick man. They were shrieking, “We're struck! We're foundering! Th' sea sorpint's got us!”
“Launch the small boat and stand by till we get there!” bellowed Madden.
All the carriers dropped Smith's body and bolted in the panic. Madden braced himself against the rush of the crew and held up the senseless man lest he be trampled on in the blackness. The uproar in the passage was terrific as the men tried to squeeze through all together. Every moment Madden expected a rush of sea water down the passageway. Just then, he felt someone else lift at Caradoc.
“Go on,” said Farnol Greer's voice. “Let's get him out, sir.”