CHAPTER III
THE WOMAN, BLACK-ROBED AND VIVID
NIGHT came, and with it down the road a wagon creaked slowly and stopped before our shack. Two people got off and went into the house. The wagon drove on and followed the road down toward the bay.
At some remote period a hungry wave had taken a bite out of the coast-line, a small bite, and people called it a bay. In a nook of that bay the Lady Betty rode her moorings placidly and awaited the judgment of magistrates.
It was toward the bay that the wagon went.
I had no time to notice closely the wagon or the passengers.
I was busily acting as a host. Hawkins should have been assisting. But he was acting as a guest. When there was anything to eat and drink he slipped into that rôle and stayed there.
There was much to drink; there was more to eat. Whole legs of mutton were roasting on an open oven, and bottled ale was to be had by reaching out and tightening the fingers. More came than were invited, but there was plenty for all; that is, plenty to eat. I served no strong liquors. They were carefully packed in a small barrel, and that barrel, I thought, was going aboard the Lady Betty just as surely as I did.
So were our guests going aboard. They did not know it. Had the secret been whispered to them some if not many would have slipped away and babbled. They would learn in time. Now they were being pampered. Salt horse and biscuits were to follow.
Well fed and inwardly warmed, men are always easier to handle. They fall in with suggestions. Precious little good it would have done them to fall out. Williams had need of them.
Around on the ground a dozen men squatted. Rough fellows, rough of voice, manner, clothes and hands; loud and free with their words. Most of them were in boots. They puffed their pipes and drank, talked loud, and carved into the browned sweet, juicy legs dropped on the fresh plank before them.
All afternoon a cook, lured from a steady job by one day's high wage, had been at work. He was drunk as a cook should be; but his meat was done to the turn. A mound of sliced cabbage, soaked in soured wine and salted, was disappearing down voracious throats; and hot potatoes prodded out from under the ashes were opened and stuffed with butter.
I was to see that no man who might be useful on board the Lady Betty got uselessly drunk. I thought the cook was useful and he was already drunk; but he had been at it all afternoon.
Yet I was to see that no man noticed that he was not getting all he wanted to drink. I did it by being free with the ale and reserving the gin and rum for myself. Hawkins could die of thirst at sea before I would surrender a drop. He was entertaining himself with the story of his life, and relating how he worked up from cabin-boy to captain. Nobody believed him; but for all anybody knew he was paying for the feast, so many were attentive.
Others talked for themselves:
“Over on the Turon I washed out”
“I seed 'em niggers swim un'er ducks an' pull 'em down by the laigs”
“Believe me 'r not, them Burrendong nuggets was big as”
“The heller took it broadside an' carried away the pipe fr'm 'tween my teeth—an' me in the crow's-nest, mindju!”
Somebody was trying to sing, and that unfortunately reminded Hawkins. He had a voice. I had told him earnestly that it was like the braying of a bull. A deep, roaring voice it was, and he lifted it up—or rather lowered it, for the louder he talked the deeper it seemed to come from his cavernous belly—in a chorus of:
“An' when we go to hell—to hell—
An' when our souls they take,
We'll hoist the skull an' cross-b-on-es
An' sail the Sulphur Lake!”
“You'll get your neck hoisted to a yard-arm, you make any noise like that above some ships I know,” I mumbled into his ear.
“Say, Red-Top,” he retorted aloud, very much aloud, “how did you get that eye spotted?”
And many fellows laughed.
One caught at my arm and asked if I'd seen Raikes.
Raikes, for safe-keeping, was stored under a bunk inside the house. I had forgotten Raikes. Hawkins, encouraged by those about him who knew nothing of harmony, was singing again:
“Fill 'er t' th' brim or fill 'er higher,
Fill 'er with rum or fill 'er with fire,
An' I'll drink 'er down—drink 'er down!”
Under the noise I whispered confidentially:
“Shh-hh! Raikes met a couple of fellows yesterday. He's hiding out.”
The man nodded sympathetically.
That was how I came to be reminded that I had forgotten to feed Raikes.
I heaped up a tin plate with whatever was in sight. Williams—there never was such a man for remembering trifles—had told me to be sure to feed Raikes. I stuck a bottle of ale under each arm and went across, some hundred yards (for we didn't want the noisy barbecue too closely associated with our house) to the shack.
It was dark inside. Though I knew my way about as well as a rat knows a buttertub, I had my hands full and did stumble a bit just as I was saying, “Here, old Raikes, crawl out from—” and having stumbled, I swore a little.
A woman's voice, scornfully, bitterly—“Drunken beast!”
Holding a candle above my head I peered at the two dark, cloaked figures: the Englishman, Davenant, and his daughter, so-called.
Perhaps I was a little unsteady. For one thing it was a surprise; and maybe I was nervous.
And I had no way of knowing how I appeared to them; nor did I realize at the time that my brick-dust hair was thrusting itself at all angles. Throughout the afternoon I had been around a fire, all evening handling greasy meats, and as the mosquitoes were about my hands had been many times to my face. I was grimy and greased. Also my eyes were discolored, and one was quite closed.
Having only one eye to use, logically it took longer than it would otherwise. I had a hard time believing that one eye.
She was too—I shall not say beautiful. She was more distinctive than that. I had read some place—Williams contrived always to have books about, though most of them were worthless technical things—as I was saying, I had read some place that wicked women look best in artificial light. If that were true, then she must be a daughter of the devil himself.
Women were about as common as coconuts; one found them every place. All kinds, except such as she. Stockmen's wives and daughters; squatters' wives, daughters and aunts; in towns there were always the disdainful, corseted wives and daughters of officials; and not counting natives—who were often ugly as the white ladies—there were plenty of women besides those mentioned. “Unmentionables,” I believe they are sometimes called.
She differed from all of them.
She and Davenant in uneasy impatience had chosen to sit in the dark that they might the better be unnoticed until Williams returned.
The cloak enveloped her like folded raven wings. Her pale face with an imperious tilt met my stupid gaze. Black her eyes, and bright. Her fingers, lifted up and touching her cheek, were long, and rings glistened on them.
The face seemed rather long and the outline of the forehead, cheeks and chin was uneven, though her nose was straight and thin. The brows were straight and black, the lashes long. A delicate face, but not sickly.
I had thought that women's mouths were all alike until I saw hers; it was wide, and expressive even in repose. She looked at me unalarmed, unembarrassed; but she evidently decided that I would not grow tired of staring.
At last she asked with repressed, stinging bitterness if she were the first woman I had ever seen.
“Yes'um, the first houri!”
A faint ripple of disdainful amusement ran soundlessly along her lips. She was not displeased.
I turned toward Davenant. He was staring at me in a sort of detached, impersonal, chilly sullenness. It was his way.
I dabbed the table with grease and stuck the candle upright and became the affable host, telling them they should have made themselves at home, lighted up, or even come down to the banquet. No doubt they had heard it. She nodded remotely. She heard it, and evidently she would just as soon not have heard it.
I asked them to excuse me for a minute as I had to feed Raikes, and requested the lady to lift her legs or move across the room.
Slowly, as if questioning my senses, she gathered her skirts and raised her feet on to the bunk where she was sitting.
“Come on, Raikesy, old boy. We've got company. Too bad you had a rag in your mug.” And I rolled him out.
“Have to watch him,” I explained to her. “He might bite. Rather think he will. I forgot to feed 'im. Better not listen, 'cause he's likely to say awful swear-words.”
I loosened Raike's gag, but he was silent. He did not so much as look at the woman or man. I glanced at them. They were looking, each at the other; they had not known there was anybody within ear-shot.
I loosened Raikes's hands, and he began eating wolfishly. Before, every time the man had had a chance to talk he had done so with vicious threats and curses. Not the presence of a woman would humble him. I knew that.
We were all strainedly silent.
At last she asked who he was.
“We're shanghai-ing him. Only sailor in port. Isn't much to look at, but you ought to hear him cuss. A real sailor.”
She paid no attention to what I said, but looked intently at the blind profile of Raikes.
“That man shall not go with us,” Davenant declared firmly.
“Indeed not!” she added decisively, meaningly.
“That's something you'll have to talk over with somebody that knows something about it,” I said.
Raikes greedily guzzled from a bottle and, otherwise silent, kept his face averted.
There were other things for me to attend. I trussed Raikes up again. He did not resist as usual. I rolled him out of sight under the bunk, though there was really no need to—yet one could never tell who might drop in casually and ask questions.
In answer to Davenant's impatient demand to know when Douglas Moore would be back, I shook a noncommittal head. I went out into the warm night. Hawkins was still singing. There was much effort about it. I would have to remind him that vocal efforts on a loaded stomach were harmful to the voice.
But the world was not the same to me. I had looked upon Lilith—or somebody like her. I could not get that woman's face or voice out of my mind. I was bothered, fretted. I wished that I had been in Raikes's place, and listened.
Somebody was spinning a yarn. If there is truthfulness in wine I do not know what there is in ale. Perhaps the fellow was not wholly lying. Anyway, he had the attention of us all. He had been shipwrecked; there were five of them in the boat; they were dying of hunger and thirst; the usual rains had fallen from time to time, so that they sucked their shirts and eased parched tongues; as usual in stories of the kind somebody must be eaten, and he had discovered that by common consent he was to be the victim when—Williams appeared.
He was bare from the waist up. A long knife—and he knew how to use it—hung at his left side. He was wet.
“How many of you men want to go to sea, now?”
His voice was hard. He stood sternly looking from one to another in a way that wouldn't tempt many men to say “Yes,” but would make the perceptive ones cautious of saying “No.”
Three or four stood up, among them Hawkins.
“You fellows ain't goin' throw me down like this, are you?” Hawkins exclaimed.
I expected to hear from Williams at that. It was best to let him run things in his own way when he started. He said nothing. Two or three more stood up, mumbling something about not knowing it was Hawkins they were going with.
“Take them to the beach,” said Williams to Hawkins.
They stumbled away, Hawkins heartily in the lead.
“McGuire!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Armed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Shoot the man that moves.”
“Yes, sir.”
I pulled the revolver from under my shirt. Williams walked hurriedly toward the shack.
I told the men that I was sorry—which I wasn't—but that trouble was in the air:
“Ground's cold an' worms'll make their beds in your marrow-bones—if you move. Who'll be the first to doubt I can hit 'im in the back at twenty paces? No? Well, I can't—so I won't wait for anybody to get that far.”
It wasn't my presence, my armed attitude, my chatter, that kept them to the ground. They had heard Williams. He was convincing. Someway even I could do brave things if Williams told me to, or if he stood and watched.
Not that holding a few men, unarmed men, in a ragged circle was brave. Possibly they wouldn't have remained if they had known what was ahead for some of them during the next few months.
Presently came footsteps, and figures emerged from the shadows; Raikes in the lead, carrying the light bundle of personal effects of his own which Williams had had me make up for him: behind him, Williams, then Davenant and the woman.
“Stand up,” said Williams.
Some stood up at once; some dragged themselves up reluctantly. Two sat still. I tried to convey good advice by unobtrusive gestures, but the two stubborn men did not see or heed. Williams did not repeat orders.
He grabbed the man nearest to him by the hair and jerked him forward. The man got up quickly enough. He arose with his arms flying like flails; and went down—knocked flat to his back.
The other man was on his feet when Williams looked around.
It had happened in clipped seconds.
The first fellow arose sullenly, perhaps wondering if it had been a club.
Face to back they were placed, hands on the shoulders in front, and Williams by the side of the line and I at the rear. Raikes was front man. It seemed that Raikes was going on the Lady Betty.
Down to the beach at midnight we marched, silent except for heavy steps.
Experience had taught Williams how easily men could be cowed if one got the “jump” on them. Though I doubt if he gave a thought to what constituted the jump. When he wanted something done it had to be done.
He had already been on board the Lady Betty. The three watchmen—one, I believe, placed there by the court; one by some chandler; and one—I don't know whom he represented. Possibly the A. B. A. Anyway the three of them had met Williams, and were lying quietly alongside the galley listening to the gentle splash of the outward tide that pulled at the Lady Betty as if to take her with it.
For one flickering minute it looked as if the men would have trouble on the beach. They started in to talk, to ask questions, to protest.
Encouraged by Williams's ominous silence, they began to seem aggressive. They were freemen. They were British subjects—most of them. They were going to do this and not do that, and the constables, the troopers, the magistrates, the governor, the prime minister, the queen should hear of it!
“Stow that, you loons,” cried a hard, rasping voice. “He's Hurricane Williams!”
Raikes had told it. In a moment of excited, generous warning he had blurted the name.
A sudden hush, a craning of necks and bulging of eyes, came over them. Hurricane Williams, renegade, pirate, cannibal—anything at all—was another person than the mere bullying stranger they had thought him.
The woman in French exclaimed, “Mother of God!” Davenant exploded a “What!” and followed it with a “You don't say!”
Williams ignored the mention of his name. But I wonder whether he was not thrilled by its magic; secretly a little proud of the awe. After all, the man must have been more human than he appeared. Or else he was mad, mad.
There was no wharf. Boats landed on the beach. Williams “borrowed” the three in sight, including a large flat-bottom punt-like thing owned by some Chinamen. The wagon that had brought Davenant and the woman was just above the sand, where the driver camped. The wagon was filled with boxes and bundles, some of them taken on at our shack; and the men, herded by Williams, Hawkins and me, carried them to the beach and filled the boats.
Williams put men at the oars of the first boat and made off, towing the others. Hawkins was in the second. I was in the last with Davenant and the woman.
”Is that man really Hurricane Williams?” she asked in a way that conveyed strong personal interest.
”Can't say for sure. But I never heard him deny it.”
”What sort of man is he really?” asked Davenant.
”Asleep he's just like anybody else. Only he don't sleep much.”
”And awake?” she asked feverishly.
”He don't let nobody else sleep. Easy man to get acquainted with. Very. All you have to do is shake your head when he tells you to do something. But I got a flour-barrel half full of gin and rum hid over there, and how am I going to get it?”
She asked more questions. Questions are the easiest things in the world to ask. There was a kind of tense curiosity in her tones, but her manner was cold. She was interested, but she did not want to appear to be.
I told her something in confidence, strict confidence, for I didn't see any reason why she should sleep that night, any more than the rest of us. Yes, Williams was a terrible man. Had she noticed that knife? Look out for that knife. Williams had an idea that the knife would die of thirst if it didn't drink blood every few days. It was too dark or I would show scars of where the knife had bit me—while I was asleep.
I whispered that to her in the tone always used by the hero in furtively warning the pretty girl on the blood-drenched boards of Sydney theaters.
”McGuire, look out!” Williams called at me.
I gave the steering-oar a swirl and brought our boat gunwale to gunwale alongside of Hawkins, who laid by the overgrown sampan. Williams leaped up the low free-board of the Lady Betty and called four of the men. They went slowly.
“With a will there,” He warned them. “Man that windlass.”
He had not wasted his time when on the Lady Betty early in the evening. The gear was set, block and tackle bent to yard, and in no time at all the heavier boxes were jerked up to the deck. All was clear, and all of us were on deck.
In the hurly-burly of work somebody snatched at a file-rail and struck Williams a blow from behind. I saw it too late to interfere. It was the man who had first refused to move from the fire, and he struck with a belaying-pin.
Williams reeled forward, half-fell and came up, facing about—and hit, knife in hand; but it was the butt of the handle that he drove into the fellow's face. Seeing the fight was on, others had crouched to rush Williams.
I suppose I would have shot, but Hawkins got in my way. I could not see exactly what he did, for his back was the kind that cuts out all view of what goes on in front; but I had the impression that his two massive arms had reached in a sort of all-embracing circle; and the sharp crack as of husked coconuts striking together made me think that some heads had come one against another. Anyway quiet followed.
Williams stood for a moment above the groaning man he had knocked flat. He was half-stooping and trembled almost drunkenly as he looked down with distorted face. But he said nothing. He did nothing.
I was almost frozen for those five or six seconds, as I was always more or less frozen when I saw him in a temper. The temper that made him a thunderbolt of suddenness, once loosened, was—or would have been in any other man—uncontrollable.
He straightened and turned away; a hand lifted to his neck where the pin had caught him; then his hand dropped. It must have hurt. But there was work to do.
I was sent to the wheel, near where the woman and Davenant stood in lonesome uncertainty, made a little uneasy by the clatter and movement forward. Backs bent to the windlass, the anchors were pulled up, and the Lady Betty floated free in a strong outward tide. But she had yet to be warped clear of the bay, else likely as not she would put her nose into a sand-bank and hold us there for the enraged magistrates.
Williams lined the crew aft and talked to them for about forty seconds. In that time he told them he had nothing to offer but good wages and plenty of work, with the chance of their necks getting pulled by hemp if they stayed with him; but he would put down in the log that they were pressed men—which might do them some good. All who were willing to chance it, one step to the front.
One man stepped out. Raikes.
“I want at least eight men. Four pounds a month and five pounds bonus,” he said.
Three more stepped out, one of them Raulson, the cook, who had been caught in the general shanghai-ing.
The other four were forcibly selected.
“We'll be in Broome in two weeks,” he said carelessly, encouragingly.
There was never another captain like him. I have heard about many, read of some and sailed with a few. He always did most of the work. He would do almost anything but cook and scrub. He was all over the ship at all hours of the day and night, below and aloft, adjusting, inspecting, measuring.
Men said he was crazy. Perhaps that was because he never gave the wiliest a chance to soldier. He was a slave-driver and crank. Everything must be tidy and stout, veritably shipshape.
But there was method in his madness. When a reward is on a skipper's head every inch of canvas must catch wind and pull, every line, brace and clew hold, the running rigging render, and the standing rigging stand.
Williams had them break out a hundred-fathom hawser; and, bending an end to the kinghtheads, tumbled a dozen men—including the three watchmen, loosened from their bonds to assist their charge in running away from them—into the Chinese punt, and, getting in himself, revolver in hand, they rowed out to warp the ship on her way.
Raikes and another fellow who knew his fingers from a gasket were working aloft, making ready to sheet home, soon as we could catch the wind. A good land breeze usually came up about this time; and soon as Williams rounded a sand-bar that lay across the Lady Betty's bow—his fishing-lines had made good leads to give him soundings—he came, swimming and pulling himself along the hawser, on board and shook out the canvas, then took the wheel himself. But he kept that boat-load of towers at the end of the hawsers, and pulling.
They had warning to keep that hawser tight or a rifle would open on them; and if they cast off and tried to escape some of them would be shot. There wasn't much light, but they were frightened.
A mile or more out when the wind freshened stiffly we came atop them, and a frightened lot they were. Williams took back the four pressed men, who looked as if they might be, or be made into, sailors and turned the others loose to make their way to land. Against the tide: they would not be able to reach land and give the alarm for four or five hours.
So the Lady Betty was off, but there was no rest for the weary. Not even for me, who bemoaned my flour-barrel half full of good inspiriting liquor left on shore. Not even for Davenant, who found that an owner didn't amount to much on a ship with Williams as skipper. Ours was certainly a piratical-looking ship if ever one Went to sea, or rather piratical-acting.
A fellow was found who said he knew how to steer. He did a bit. Davenant was given a revolver and told to shoot him if he left that wheel or if any other man came on to the poop. Davenant sat on a case of rifles and took the situation composedly; and Miss Davenant refused to go below. Perhaps she was a bit alarmed. More likely, I came to know her a little better—she was fascinated by the grim romance of it all, the eery feeling of danger, the slapping and dash and oaths of the men at work in the darkness.
The ship was light ballasted, a little too light in fact, but he put on every yard of canvas that could be hung; and working in the dark on a strange ship it was no child's play to run out booms and clew down the studding-sails. And it was practically useless to give orders, for Raikes, Hawkins and I were about the only ones who knew what they meant. Hawkins could no more go aloft than he could go through the eye of a needle; but he was as good as a windlass.
It was a foolish thing to carry so much sail with a worthless crew, for if a blow had hit us we would have been left to swim for it. But Williams was in a hurry. The fellow wasn't human when it came to work.
There was no division into watches. The men slept on the decks, and I with them, jumping up—it seemed—every ten minutes to pull here and slacken there. Straight south we headed, which certainly wasn't toward Broome. He expected that he would be searched for in that direction.
I wish I might have nothing to remember of the next few weeks. I had heard of the Tasmanian sea, but it was my first meeting with it. None of us had been there before. I did my best to be seasick and some succeeded better than I. Except for the strain and danger it would have been unpleasantly amusing.
The brig bobbed along like a drunken sailor in an earthquake. We carried too much sail, and the Lady Betty was light-headed anyway; and we were caught in the ragged ends of the great waves that roll endlessly below Tasmania, waves that stormlessly rise to forty and fifty feet, and I have heard various liars estimate their length. A hundred miles, say some. As if they knew. There is nothing to stop either the waves or the liars.
And though we made headway in fine shape it seemed as if we were plowing through a war of mill-races. We bobbed like an egg-shell in a tub of boiling water; and were close-hauled at that. And because I was supposed to know how to steer, Williams shortly after dawn gave the wheel to me, snarling, “Full-and-by.”
The forecastle was awash, and it looked to me as if the Lady Betty was doing her best to head on for the bottom. Frustrated again and again, she dipped her nose under, and I would swear that I felt the rudder clear a time or two. The ballast wasn't right in the first place, and to take our thoughts from other troubles it shifted, and the star-board rail was awash.
That was too much for even Williams. Besides, we had raised land, and were well out of the path of the Bass Strait shipping. Sail was taken in forward and aft, and we drifted along under the mainsail; but it did not help much. The crank seemed determined to go to the bottom; if she couldn't go on her head she would go on her weather side. But there wasn't a chance. If she was too light to sail she was too light to sink, though she was about two-thirds under water a third of the time.
All about us and over the deck the sea boiled, churned and streaked. The water ran around over the deck as if looking for a low coaming to climb over.
With my bare toes gripping the grating I reflected that the law-abider has all the best of it. He has too. He may not have so much that is interesting to remember in his old age—but he stands a better chance of reaching old age.
Still, after a fashion we went on. Raulson, the cook, his long mustache adroop pathetically, brought me a can of coffee. I was touched by this attention—prematurely; for he whispered to know if I did not have a bit of bottle stowed some place.
I assured him that I did—in one of his fire-holes. He said that I did not. He had helped himself to a bottle or so when I wasn't looking; but later when he had gone for more, barrel and all had vanished.
“Then Williams spotted it,” I said to myself wonderingly.
Raulson tried to tell me the story of his life, probably seeking some sort of confessional and absolution, for he was convinced that the crazy buoy which some fool had named a Lady was never to reach land.
But there was the land off our port bow. Whole piles of it, rock-ribbed and lined with beaches as if they had been the burial ground for enormous giants, whose bones the vulturous waves had picked. The white-bodied, black-tipped albatross snooped friendily about as if to inspect us. They seemed to know that we were in a mess, and were disdainful of our company.
After inspection they floated off with broad, contemptuous flaps. Some sailors say they bring good luck; and I suppose when they wheel away they carry it with them.
Pigeons flocked overhead, bound northward as if to tell where the Lady Betty was. Fish would have made better messengers, as they could see more of her. It was chilly, too, with the wind from the tropics at our back, I could barely peep from my swollen eye.
Williams came up the companion and stood for a time slowly turning around the horizon. His face was worn. The muscles from his bare neck and jaw were tight, tense, standing out like braided leather. He looked at me, seemed to recognize me as somebody he knew and said bitterly:
“We're short of food. If you think this is bad, wait.”
It happened that plenty of provisions had been placed on the Lady Betty, but after she got into litigation the perishables were removed. And Williams had scant chance of provisioning a ship, especially in that part of the world. If he put into port he would likely be nabbed. All of us would be nabbed.
There are some things even worse than starving. I have my doubts, however, about a more distressing condition than thirst, my kind of a thirst.
Miss Davenant came on deck. She must have been having a time of it, for she was very pale. Seasickness makes a woman look her worst; but it hadn't succeeded with her. Her face was thin and peaked. But she was neat. Her black hair was brushed and caught low on the sides of her head and pendent earrings—green—swung defiantly from her half-hidden ears. She wore a long cloak. I was ignored.
She braced herself against the boom and stared forward. I watched her and learned nothing; merely confirmed the former impression that she was beautiful without looking at all like other beautiful women. Her face was too thin and uneven to be pretty, theoretically. There was a strangeness about it, as if the Maker of Women had fashioned a new type.
She had the quietness and poise that are disconcerting to me, the impenetrableness of one who lives behind a mask. She was watching the men housing the masts, or seemed to be. I came to know that she seldom watched any but one man.
Williams was after a beach to careen. It seemed to me, gazing at the hard, rocky cliffs, that he might as well have been looking tor a dry spot on the ocean's floor. The scenic effect was splendid and disquieting.
The west coast of Tasmania was, and probably still is, wild and unsettled. Perhaps it was then wild as when the first Dutchman found it, and scarcely more visited. Gunboats or steamers would never search for Williams there, because no man of sense would buck the Tasmanian seas in a wind-jammer.
South of Tasmania the great waves roll on, always toward the east. And Williams was supposed to want to beat his way westward. He would never have gone down in those seas to do it.
There is no use in telling what I thought. Williams did find a beach, exposed it is true, and very different from the long, gentle, hard slopes of the Samoans. It served his purpose. With men in boats casting leads and leading the way, he went up through a narrow channel of giants' bones at high tide; and then—we worked like dogs, like the convicts themselves formerly thrown on to the island and girdled with bloodhounds.
Breaming and boot-topping, Raikes called it—the cleaning of the Lady Betty's stomach. I called it something different. I raided the medicine-chest and found three bottles of whisky and some other stuff that smelled and tasted a little alcoholic. But it did not go far.
Chipping barnacles and smearing tallow and pounding copper is the sort of work bad sailors have to do when they die. Those who have had as much of it as men do who sailed with Williams will sit in heavenly taverns and work jaw-tackle, and the slated accounts will be wiped out by an invisible sponge.
I passed the bottles around—when Williams wasn't looking. He probably knew. There was little he didn't know about what went on; but there were times when he did not care what else was done as long as work went on.
Work did go on. He did most of it. Tireless and short-tongued, he kept at it—and kept us at it. The Lady Betty lost her name, but unfortunately not her sex. I don't believe she ever belonged to the A. B. A. O. P. Jones could never have acted like that. She became the Sally Martin, and was freshened with white paint; and black gun-ports were painted on. That was the usual trick of Williams. If hailed he would sing out that he was bound for or leaving some Chinese port. Painted ports were as good as guns in keeping off the pirates in Chinese waters, if they didn't come too close.
As usual, again, when he had got hold of a ship known to the authorities, he set about disguising her completely, and the brig was re-rigged into a fore-and-after. For one thing she would be easier manned; for another the Lady Betty had never any business being a hermaphrodite brig. Most important, however, was the disguise.
Williams was sailmaker, carpenter, bosun and captain all in one. From dark to dawn he worked.
It would not be truthful to say that the men came to like him. People never liked Williams. He seemed always repressedly truculent. He was seldom in a rage, and then was very quiet about it; but appeared always on the verge of blowing up. His temper was dangerous, but it was not a noisy temper. The fellows did admire him as well as fear him. He drove brutally but impersonally. And there were no favorites, which disappointed me.
Little Raikes was a surprise. Without having anybody give him the authority he gradually assumed the position of mate—and kept it. He would not have kept it had he not been a worker himself. He was, and a good one. He couldn't have done more if he had an interest in the boat.
But why, I wondered. I tried to talk with him. He had nothing to say. He did not appear to retain a grudge against me.
I would have given much of what little I had to know what he had overheard from his place under the bunk. But he denied having heard anything. This world is full of liars.
Hawkins, hearty and less awkward than he looked, did much to keep the fellows' spirits up; or rather to keep them from going lower. We lay under a wall of rock that had been broken and splintered as if from a Titan's hammer, and the sun did not touch us until afternoon, when he struck glittering and warmless; and falling farther westward, threw a dazzling sheen from the black wet rocks as if the rays struck mirrors.
At low tide the green-gray and blackened bulk of the larger boulders was exposed, cluttered with shell and weed-growth, and making the scene even more somber than when the tide had thrust itself up and around the sand, nosing between rocks and overspreading like a sentient invader. There was nothing to buoy the spirit in that drear, forlorn place, as for instance in warmer seas where sky and water and rocks wear colors, and flower-studded foliage thrusts out with prodigal eagerness to give radiance to the eyes; where the huge-topped coconuts droop their feathery leaves, and a soft warm purple haze lies like a misty mantle over the distant islands.
Here we lay at the foot of a bleak, wet cliff; over the brow shrubs and trees bent, many with roots adangle and groping as if frantically trying to save themselves from being crowded off and over. The forest above and behind us was impenetrable, thickly overgrown and matted with a hardy plant-life that had little of the generous nut-bearing and flower-offerings of the tropic foliage.
As the men worked their blows were cast back with hollow echoes from the cliff, and lifted voices returned to them with mocking repetition. Too, there was the disquieting fact of being about work against their wills; bound on a voyage to—they knew not where; and likely to suffer, they knew not what.
Moreover, there was not all anybody wanted to eat. Salt meat and biscuits, with a tincture of potato, now and then the flavor of boiled ham, and occasionally some canned stuff, with, as a special rarity, a bite of cheese, were about all we had. Coffee and tea were ready at all hours; and Williams said that they should be hot. They were.
Davenant had to eat the same fare. That made it taste a little better to the rest of us; and it made the work a bit lighter to me to discover him working a bit.
I overheard Williams telling him that he could, if he preferred, do no work; in which case he could tighten his belt for his breakfast. Davenant flared, and when he used up much of his temper he found the proposition unaltered. He protested that he was the owner; and was told—
“You are merely a fellow thief.”
The fact that Davenant did not own the Lady Betty, no matter how honest his original intentions may have been, put him in much the same state of piracy with Williams, and he had to earn his berth.
Miss Davenant moved about in a kind of stately isolation. She did not complain. She seemed interested. She watched with a sort of tense breathlessness when there was some hard, dangerous work going on; and most of the day alone, remote, she spent on deck and was somehow always out of the way.
Occasionally she would speak to some one of the men briefly, impersonally, just a word, a question; and maybe smile. But the smile meant nothing except a frank reward. Yet I wondered if she knew how much she did toward making the work easier for an hour or two. It is strange how much women do know.
I watched her at all times when I could steal a view. So quiet and so purposeful she seemed in her inaction.
There was nothing fretful in her attitude, no sour petulance, and still no lowering of reserve; and whatever I may have of intuition told me that she was a woman who had no scruples and no innocence; yet she was pleasant-voiced, steady of eyes.
“A daughter of the devil,” I repeated to myself, pleased with the alliteration and offering myself an explanation of the markedly strange personality that was not, for all of her reserve—or perhaps was heightened by it—without a certain deep, evasive, sinister suggestion.
I had not altogether heard her speak a hundred words; I had seen her, except for the minute or two in the light of the candle the first time we met, only in attitudes that were undistinctive. But there was something strange, fierce, audacious, inside of her that looked out through her black eyes—eyes black as if darkened by veils to hide the woman crouched alertly, patiently, behind the mask.
She ignored me altogether. Probably because without looking directly at me she knew that I watched her. Such detection is a gift peculiarly feminine.
Williams by neither word, gesture nor glance seemed to know that she was on the boat. But her eyes when he was on deck were seldom off him.