"Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea Part 12

Todd," he said to the listening mate, "steward told me he was out of coffee, so we'll break a bag out o' the lazarette. It's a heavy lift--two hundred pounds and over--'bout the weight of a man; so we'll hoist it up. Let Tom, here, rig a whip to the spanker-gaff. He can see."

"Aye, aye, sir," answered the mate. "Get a single block and a strap and a gant-line out o' the bo's'n's locker, Tom."

"Is it all right, capt'n?" asked Tom, lowering his hands with a deep sigh of relief. "I did what seemed right, you know."

"Rig that whip," said Swarth, turning his back and ascending the p.o.o.p.

Tom secured the gear, and climbing aloft and out the gaff, fastened the block directly over the lazarette-hatch, just forward of the binnacle.

Then he overhauled the rope until it reached the deck, and descended.

"Come up here on the p.o.o.p," called the captain; and he came.

"Shall I go down and hook on, sir?" he asked zealously.

"Make a hangman's noose in the end of the rope," said Swarth.

"Eh--what--a runnin' bowline--a timber-hitch? No, no," he yelled, as he read the captain's face. "You can't do it. The men----"

"Make a hangman's knot in the end of the rope," thundered the captain, his pistol at Tom's ear.

With a face like that of a death's-head he tied the knot.

"Pa.s.s it round your neck and draw it tight."

Hoa.r.s.e, inarticulate screams burst from the throat of the man, ended by a blow on the side of his face by the captain's iron-hard fist. He fell, and lay quiet, while Swarth himself adjusted the noose and bound the hands with his own handkerchief. The men at the wheel strained their necks this way and that, with tense waves of conflicting expressions flitting across their weary faces, and the men forward, aroused by the screams, stood about in anxious expectancy until they heard Swarth's roar: "Lay aft here, the watch!"

They came, feeling their way along by rail and hatch.

"Clap on to that gant-line at the main fife-rail, and lift this bag of coffee out o' the lazarette," sang out the captain.

They found the loose rope, tautened it, hooked the bight into an open sheave in the stanchion, and listlessly walked forward with it. When they had hoisted the unconscious Tom to the gaff, Swarth ordered: "Belay, coil up the fall, and go forrard."

They obeyed, listlessly as ever, with no wondering voice raised to inquire why they had not lowered the coffee they had hoisted.

Captain Swarth looked at the square-rigged s.h.i.+p, now on the port quarter--an ill-defined blur to his imperfect vision. "Fine chance we'd have had," he muttered, "if that happened to be a bulldog. Angel," he said, as the mate drew near, "hot coffee is good for moon-blindness, taken externally, as a blistering agent--a counter-irritant. We have no fly-blisters in the medicine-chest, but smoking-hot grease must be just as good, if not better than either. Have the cook heat up a potful, and you get me out a nice small paint-brush."

Forty-eight hours later, when the last wakening vision among the twenty men had taken cognizance of the grisly object aloft, the gaff was guyed outboard, the rope cut at the fife-rail, and the body of Tom Plate dropped, feet first, to the sea.

Then when Captain Swarth's eyes permitted he took an observation or two, and, after a short lecture to his crew on the danger of sleeping in tropic moonlight, shaped his course for Barbados Island, to take up the burden of his battle with fate where the blindness had forced him to lay it down; to scheme and to plan, to dare and to do, to war and to destroy, against the inevitable coming of the time when fate should prove the stronger--when he would lose in a game where one must always win or die.

SALVAGE

She had a large crew, abnormally large hawse-pipes, and a bad reputation--the last attribute born of the first. Registered as the _Rosebud_, this innocent name was painted on her stern and on her sixteen dories; but she was known among the fis.h.i.+ng-fleet as the _Ishmaelite_, and the name fitted her. Secretive and unfriendly, she fished alone, avoided company, answered few hails, and, seldom filling her hold, disposed of her catch as her needs required, in out-of-the-way ports, often as far south as Charleston. And she usually left behind her such bitter memories of her visit as placed the last port at the bottom of her list of markets.

No s.h.i.+p-chandler or provision-dealer ever showed her receipted bills, and not a few of them openly averred that certain burglaries of their goods had plausible connection with her presence in port. Be this as it may, the fact stood that farmers on the coast who saw her high bow and unmistakable hawse-pipes when she ran in for bait invariably double-locked their barns and chicken-coops, and turned loose all tied dogs when night descended, often to find both dogs and chickens gone in the morning.

Once, too, three small schooners had come home with empty holds, and complained of the appearance, while anch.o.r.ed in the fog, of a flotilla of dories manned by masked men, who overpowered and locked all hands in cabin or forecastle, and then removed the cargoes of fish to their own craft, hidden in the fog. Shortly after this, the _Ishmaelite_ disposed of a large catch in Baltimore, and the piracy was believed of her, but never proved.

Her luck at finding things was remarkable. Drifting dories, spars, oars, and trawl-tubs sought her unsavory company, as though impelled by the inanimate perversity which had sent them drifting. They were sold in port, or returned to their owners, when paid for. In the early part of her career she had towed a whistling buoy into Boston and claimed salvage of the government, showing her logbook to prove that she had picked it up far at sea. The salvage was paid; but, as her reputation spread, there were those who declared that she herself had sent the buoy adrift.

As poets and sailors believe that s.h.i.+ps have souls, it may be that she gloried in her shame, like other fallen creatures; for her large, slanting oval hawse-pipes and boot-top stripe gave a fine, Oriental sneer to her face-like bow, and there was slur and insult to respectable craft in the lazy dignity with which she would swash through the fleet on the port tack, compelling vessels on the starboard tack to give up their right of way or be rammed; for she was a large craft, and there was menace in her solid, one-piece jib-boom, thick as an ordinary mainmast. An outward-bound coasting-schooner, resenting this lawlessness on one occasion, attempted to a.s.sert her rights, and being on the lawful starboard tack, bore steadily down on the _Ishmaelite_,--who budged not a quarter-point,--and, losing heart at the last moment, luffed up, all shaking, in just the position to allow the ring of her port anchor to catch on the bill of the _Ishmaelite's_ starboard anchor. As her own ring-stopper and shank-painter were weak, the patent windla.s.s unlocked, and the end of the cable not secured in the chain-locker, the _Ishmaelite_ walked calmly away with the anchor and a hundred fathoms of chain, which, at the next port, she sold as legitimate spoil of the sea.

As her reputation increased, so did the hatred of men, while the number of ports on the coast which she could safely enter became painfully small. To avoid conflict with local authority, she had hurried to sea without clearing at the custom-house from Boston, Bangor, Portland, and Gloucester. She had carried local authority in the persons of distressed United States marshals to sea with her from three other ports, and landed it on some outlying point before the next meal-hour.

With her blunt jib-boom she had prodded a hole in the side of a lighthouse supply-boat, and sailed away without answering questions.

The government was taking cognizance, and her description was written on the fly-leaves of several revenue cutters' log-books, while Sunday newspapers in the large cities began a series of special articles about the mysterious schooner-rigged pirate of the fis.h.i.+ng-fleet.

The future looked dark for her, and when the time came that she was chased away from Plymouth harbor--which she had entered for provisions--by a police launch, it seemed that the end was at hand; for she had done no wrong in Plymouth, and the police boat was evidently acting on general principles and instructions, which were vital enough to extend the pursuit to the three-mile limit. Her trips had become necessarily longer, and there was but two weeks' supply of food in the lazarette. The New England coast was an enemy's country, but in the crowded harbor of New York was a chance to lie un.o.bserved at anchor long enough to secure the stores she needed, which only a large city can supply. So Cape Cod was doubled on the way to New York; but the brisk offsh.o.r.e wind, which had helped her in escaping the police boat, developed to a gale that blew her to sea, and increased in force as the hours pa.s.sed by.

Hard-headed, reckless fellows were these men who owned the _Rosebud_ and ran her on shares and under laws of their own making. Had they been of larger, broader minds, with no change of ethics they would have acquired a larger, faster craft with guns, hoisted the black flag, and sailed southward to more fruitful fields. Being what they were,--fishermen gone wrong,--they labored within their limitations and gleaned upon known ground.

They were eighteen in number, and they typified the maritime nations of the world. Americans predominated, of course, but English, French, German, Portuguese, Scandinavian, and Russian were among them. The cook was a West India negro, and the captain--or their nearest approach to a captain--a Portland Yankee. Both were large men, and held their positions by reason of special knowledge and a certain magnetic mastery of soul which dominated the others against their rules; for in this social democracy captains and bosses were forbidden. The cook was an expert in the galley and a thorough seaman; the other as able a seaman, and a navigator past the criticism of the rest.

His navigation had its limits, however, and this gale defined them. He could find his lat.i.tude by meridian observation, and his longitude by morning sights and chronometer time; his dead-reckoning was trustworthy, and he possessed a fair working conception of the set and force of the Atlantic currents and the heave of the sea in a blow. But his studies had not given him more than a rudimentary knowledge of meteorology and the laws of storms. A gale was a gale to him, and he knew that it would usually change its direction as a clock's hands will in moving over the dial; and if, by chance, it should back around to its former point, he prepared for heavier trouble, with no reference to the fluctuations of the barometer, which instrument to him was merely a weather-gla.s.s--about as valuable as a rheumatic big toe.

So, in the case we are considering, not knowing that he was caught by the southern fringe of a St. Lawrence valley storm, with its center of low barometer to the northwest and coming toward him, he hove to on the port tack to avoid Cape Cod, and drifted to sea, shortening sail as the wind increased, until, with nothing set but a small storm-mainsail, he found himself in the sudden calm of the storm-center, which had overtaken him. Here, in a tumultuous cross-sea, fifty miles off the sh.o.r.e, deceived by the light, s.h.i.+fty airs and the patches of blue sky showing between the rus.h.i.+ng clouds, he made all sail and headed west, only to have the masts whipped out as the whistling fury of wind on the opposite side of the vortex caught and jibed the canvas.

It was manifestly a judgment of a displeased Providence; and, glad that the hull was still tight, they cut away the wreck and rode out the gale,--now blowing out of the north,--hanging to the tangle of spar and cordage which had once been the foremast and its gear. It made a fairly good sea-anchor, with the forestay--strong as any chain--for a cable, and she lay snug under the haphazard breakwater and benefited by the protection, as the seas must first break their heads over the wreckage before reaching her. The mainmast was far away, with all that pertained to it; but the solid, hard-pine jib-boom was still intact, and not one of the sixteen dories piled spoon-fas.h.i.+on in the four nests had been injured when the spars went by the board. So they were content to smoke, sleep, and kill time as they could, until the gale and sea should moderate, and they could rig a jury-foremast of the wreck.

But before they could begin,--while there was still wind enough to curl the head of an occasional sea into foam,--a speck which had been showing on the shortened horizon to windward, when the schooner lifted out of the hollows, took form and ident.i.ty--a two-masted steamer, with English colors, union down, at the gaff. High out of water, her broadside drift was faster than that of the dismasted craft riding to her wreckage, and in a few hours she was dangerously near, directly ahead, rolling heavily in the trough of the sea. They could see shreds of canvas hanging from masts and gaffs.

"Wunner what's wrong wid her," said the cook, as he relinquished the gla.s.ses to the next man. "Amos," he called to another, "you've been in the ingine-room, you say. Is her ingine bus' down?"

"Dunno," answered Amos. "Steam's all right; see the jet comin' out o'

the stack? There! she's turnin' over--kickin' ahead. 'Bout time if she wants to clear us. She's signalin'. What's that say, Elisha?"

The ensign was fluttering down, and a string of small flags going aloft on the other part of the signal-halyards, while the steamer, heading west, pushed ahead about a length under the impulse of her propeller.

Elisha, the navigator, went below, and returned with a couple of books, which he consulted.

"Her number," he said. "She's the _Afghan Prince_ o' London." As the schooner carried no signal-flags, he waved his sou'wester in answer, and the flags came down, to be replaced by others.

"Rudder carried away," he read, and then looked with the gla.s.ses.

"Rudder seems all right; must mean his steerin'-gear. Why don't they rig up suthin', or a drag over the stern?"

"Don't know enough," said an expatriated Englishman of the crew. "She's one o' them bloomin', undermanned tramps, run by apprentices an' Thames watermen. They're drivin' sailors an' sailin'-s.h.i.+ps off the sea blarst 'em!"

"Martin," said Elisha to the cook, "what's the matter with our bein' a drag for her?"

"Dead easy, if we kin git his line an' he knows how to rig a bridle."

"We can show him, if it comes to it. What ye say, boys? If we steer her into port we're ent.i.tled to salvage. She's helpless; we're not, for we've got a jury-rig under the bows. h.e.l.lo! what's he sayin' now?"

Other flags had gone aloft on the steamer, which asked for the longitude. Then followed others which said that the chronometer was broken.

"Better 'n ever!" exclaimed Elisha, excitedly. "Can't navigate. Our chronometer's all right; we never needed it, an' don't now, but it's a big help in a salvage claim. What ye say? Can't we get our hemp cable to him with a dory?"

Why not? They were fishermen, accustomed to dory work. A short confab settled this point; a dory was thrown over, and Elisha and Amos pulled to the steamer, which was now abreast, near enough for the name which Elisha had read to be seen plainly on the stern, but not near enough for the men shouting from her taffrail to make themselves heard on the schooner. Elisha and Amos, in the dory, conferred with these men and then returned.