Fire Mountain Part 26

Martin leaned over the capstan, peering into that baffling gloom. He stiffened tensely. He seemed to hear whispering; it came out of that black pit before him, the very ghost of a man's voice.

He strained his ears, but the sound, if sound it were, was not repeated. He was impatient for MacLean to appear with the lantern, but he could no longer hear MacLean's footfalls. Then his ears caught another sound; it was peculiar, like the patter of bare feet.

"MacLean! Where are you?" he called sharply. "Hurry with that lantern!"

Instead of MacLean's voice in reply, he heard a heavy breathing, the sound of a man taking several long, sobbing breaths. The breathing ceased immediately, but a light patter followed it, and then the sc.r.a.pe of a shod foot across the deck. The sounds came from just ahead, close by, but he could see nothing. But he sensed some kind of a struggle was taking place on the deck.

He started forward, and then stopped dead. Out of the black void before him came MacLean's voice--strangled words in a horrible, ascending pitch:

"Marty! Marty! My G.o.d! Ah-h-h!"

There, was the thud of a heavy, falling body striking the deck.

For a second Martin was anch.o.r.ed by horror. Then he leaped forward, giving voice as he did to a great, arousing, wordless bellow. And even as he ran blindly ahead those few paces, he heard a heavy voice give a shouted supplement to his call.

The darkness was suddenly alive with rus.h.i.+ng feet. A body hurled itself against him, an arm struck a sweeping blow, and he felt the knife rip through his flannel s.h.i.+rt and graze his shoulder near his neck.

He went reeling backward, his foot tripped on a ring-bolt in the deck, and he fell heavily. His head struck with stunning force against a bulwark stanchion.

The collision scattered his wits, and Martin lay in the scuppers, blinking at the dancing lights before his eyes. In his ears was a great humming. Then, after a moment, the humming broke into parts and became a babel of shouts.

He heard a harsh chatter--voices crying out in a foreign tongue. He heard a great booming voice that stirred memory. He heard a pistol-shot. He heard Ruth's voice, raised in a sharp, terror-stricken cry:

"Martin--Billy--Martin! Oh, help!"

The scream galvanized Martin to action. _She_ was calling him!

He struggled to arise, got upon his knees, reached upward and grasped a belaying-pin in the rail above. Clutching the pin, he drew himself erect.

He swayed drunkenly for a moment, still dizzied by his fall. The pandemonium of a moment agone was stilled. Ruth did not cry out again, but voices came from aft. The belaying-pin he grasped was loose in its hole and unenc.u.mbered by rope. Quite without reasoning, Martin drew it out, and, grasping it clublike, lurched aft.

Twice during his headlong flight toward the cabin, hands reached out of the darkness to stay him. And twice the stout, oaken club he wielded impacted against human skulls, and men dropped in their tracks.

Martin burst out of the gloom into the small half-circle of half light that came from the now open alleyway door. He rushed through, into the cabin.

He had time but for a glimpse of the scene in the cabin. One whirling glance that took in the scattered company--the bedraggled j.a.panese, Captain Dabney lying face down across the threshold of his room, his white hair bloodied, Wild Bob Carew lifting a startled face. And Carew was holding a squirming, fighting Ruth in his arms!

Martin hardly checked the stride of his entrance. He flung himself toward the man who held his woman, and his club cracked upon another skull.

A man hurtled against him and drove him against the wall. He saw Carew fall, and Ruth spill free of the encircling arms.

Then a hand took him by the throat, long, supple, muscular fingers stopping his wind. He saw a face upraised to his--an expressionless yellow face, with glittering, slanting eyes. He drew up his club for the blow. The slender fingers were probing upward, behind his jawbone, and he was choking.

Then, it seemed to Martin, a stream of liquid fire flooded his veins, searing his entire body. The belaying-pin dropped from his nerveless hand, his arms dropped, his knees sagged.

The terrible fingers squeezed tighter. He could feel his eyeb.a.l.l.s starting, his tongue swelling. The flame consumed his vitals. It was h.e.l.lish pain--quite the sharpest agony Martin had ever felt.

He was upon his back on the floor. The fingers were gone, but the awful pain continued. His wits were swimming. A pair of soft arms were about him. His reeling head was cus.h.i.+oned against a loved and fragrant breast; a dear voice spoke his name anxiously.

"Martin, Martin! What have they done? Oh, Martin, speak to me!" He tried to speak, but could not.

Then the loved presence was gone, and he was alone. A face bent over him!--a yellow face. It was a well-remembered face, the face of little Dr. Ichi. But what a towsled, bedraggled successor to the former dandy!

Ichi was smiling at him. It was all very strange to Martin, unreal, like the fancies of a delirium. A mist came before his eyes and blotted out the smiling face. But his senses left him with Ichi's courteously spoken words in his ears:

"Very, very sorry, Mr. Blake. You were of such roughness we were compelled to use the ju-jitsu!"

CHAPTER XV

IN THE LAZARET

It seemed to Martin he was wandering in a vast and thirsty desert. To the very core of his being he was dry. Drink! Drink! With his whole life he l.u.s.ted drink. He waded through that parched world, burning up with thirst.

Despite his efforts, his mouth sagged open, and his tongue, swollen to prodigious size, burst through its proper limits and hung down upon his breast, broiling in the rays of the hot sun. To make the keener his thirst, there lay before him a delectable oasis, a patch of moist green, with playing fountains and rippling cascades plainly visible to his tortured gaze. He struggled toward it, and always, as he neared it, some malign influence clutched his wrists--which unaccountably stuck out behind him--and jerked him back.

For ages and ages he waded through the dry sand toward the water, and ever the Evil One who controlled his wrists kept him from attaining his desire. Water! Water! He was in agony for water. Water! Would he never reach that blessed water?

Then something cold, slimy, horrible, ran over his face, and the loathful thrill he felt shocked him into reality.

The desert vanished. He tried to move and sat up. He heard a frenzied squeaking, and a light scampering on wood, and he knew that a rat had run over his body.

All the sensations of consciousness a.s.sailed him abruptly. He heard the rats, and a deep rumble near by; he saw dimly in the darkness; he smelled of mingled odors of provisions; he felt thirst. Though he was out of the desert, he was still consumed with thirst.

He sat quietly for a moment while his confused thoughts gradually arrayed themselves in orderly fas.h.i.+on. He knew where he was instantly--the jumble of casks, and kegs, and boxes, that surrounded him, and which he could dimly perceive in the gloom, and the smell, told him he was in the s.h.i.+p's lazaret. How he came to be there was as yet concealed behind a haze that clouded his memory.

Next, he became aware that something was the matter with his arms.

They ached cruelly. After a moment's experimenting and reflection the truth came to him with shocking force--his arms were drawn behind him, and his wrists were handcuffed together. The shock of that discovery dissipated the fog over his mind. He began to remember.

But while his wits groped, he was sharply conscious of his thirst. It blazed. His tongue felt like a piece of swollen leather. He felt pain. His throat was throbbing with pain. Water! Water was the pressing need, the most important thing in existence.

He tried to mouth his desire, to speak it aloud, and a weak and painful gurgle struggled outward from his throat.

There was a stir close by him, and a voice spoke up. Martin was then aware that the deep rumble he had been listening to was the sound of a man swearing deeply and softly. The man now spoke to him.

"Ow, lad, is that you? 'Ave you come to, Martin!"

Martin peered toward the voice, and saw a few feet ahead of him, beyond a circular stanchion, the shadowy outline of a man. He tried to speak, to say, "Bosun! Bosun!" But his misused throat and parched tongue refused to form the words. And with the other's voice came memory, complete and terrible. The past was arrayed before his mind's eye with a lightning flash of recollection. The dreadful present was clear to him in all its bitter truth.

He remembered the trip to the deck in search of Little Billy; the black, evil night, and MacLean's horrified outcry. He remembered the scene in the cabin, Captain Dabney lying inert on the floor, the hateful ring of yellow faces, and Carew--Carew clasping Ruth in his arms!

He remembered felling Carew, and being felled himself by the lethal clutch of the j.a.panese. He remembered Ichi, and even Ichi's words, "compelled to use the ju-jitsu." They had ju-jitsued him! That was what was wrong with his throat.

The sum of his memories was clear, and for the moment it crushed and terrified him. For it was evident that that which they had speculated upon as a remote almost impossible, contingency, had come to pa.s.s--the brig was in Carew's hands. They had been surprised in the fog, a piracy had occurred, murder had been done, and Wild Bob and his yellow followers had taken the s.h.i.+p.

He was a prisoner in the bowels of the s.h.i.+p, his hands chained behind his back, absolutely helpless. And Sails was dead! And Little Billy was dead! Captain Dabney was dead! The crew--G.o.d knew, perhaps--they were slaughtered too! And Ruth--Ruth was alive, in Carew's hands, at the mercy of the brute she so feared. Ruth was alive--to suffer what fate? And he--he who loved her--was chained and helpless.