The Great Quest Part 22

And how, I wondered, had an ordinary rat, such as might slink along the wharves at Boston, come to live on that lonely island? Before an answer occurred to me, I saw another running away in a different direction, and another and another. I stopped short and looked about me. Here, there, everywhere were rats. The island was peopled with them. With big gray rats! Then I looked at the bones of that wrecked s.h.i.+p, which stuck up out of the water, and knew that I had found the answer to my question. They were rats from that s.h.i.+p; they had come ash.o.r.e when she was wrecked.

What they lived on, I never knew; but there they had flourished and multiplied and formed in the midst of those blue seas a great rat empire.

"Rats!" I heard Gleazen exclaim. "Pfaw! How I hate them!"

Throwing sticks ahead of him to drive away the lean, gray vermin, he started across the marshy land toward the old wreck, and the rest of us fell in behind him.

Of us all, Matterson showed the least repugnance for the mult.i.tude of snaky little beasts that swarmed around us at a distance and watched us with angry eyes as black as shoe b.u.t.tons.

And now we came to the wreck and saw a sight that filled me with horror. In the hold, into which we could look through holes between the ribs and between the beams where the waves had torn away the spar deck, there were five human skeletons chained by their ankle-bones to the timbers. Yet, so far as there was any outward sign, I was the only one to see the skeletons.

Matterson and Gleazen looked long and sadly at the old hulk, and Gleazen finally said, "She's done for and gone, Molly. There's not a thing left about her that's worth salving."

Matterson gloomily nodded. "Mr. Upham," said he, "we lost two hundred prime n.i.g.g.e.rs that night."

I turned away from them, as they stood there talking, and went back to the boat. It would be good, I thought while I waited, to leave the island forever.

Whatever the outcome of their talk may have been, the rising wind presently brought them back to the boat in a hurry. We launched her, and tumbled aboard, drenched from head to foot, and after a lively struggle came up alee of the brig. It was plain that we must soon seek shelter, for already the storm was blowing up and the waves came charging down upon us in fierce, racing lines.

"Yonder island," Matterson was saying, at the same time marking a diagram on the palm of one hand with the forefinger of the other, "yonder island is part of the delta of the Rio Polo. It runs so--and so--and all but the island is washed away. You see, do you not, gentlemen? If Captain North will run straight so,--northeast by east, say,--holding his bearings by the angle of ripples where you see the current veer, and when we are four cables' lengths from the breakers give me the wheel, I will take her over the bar."

"Mr. Matterson--"

"The responsibility is mine, Captain North, by the owner's orders."

"Ah, Mr. Upham," said the captain, with a wry smile, "and is this the kind of support you give me?"

Not one word did my uncle say.

I had seen Pedro's monkey for a while playfully swinging from rope to rope and later scratching its ear as it sat on the companion hatch; but I had not seen it go below, nor had any of the others. To this day no one knows just how it evaded us, for it was forbidden the cabin, and every man on board had orders to head it off if it showed any inclination to go there. Yet the mischievous beast did slip below, and for once succeeded in catching Willie MacDougald off his guard.

Willie, it seems, had been engaged in the praiseworthy occupation of spying on Neil Gleazen, and had one eye firmly fixed to the keyhole of the cabin door when the monkey calmly jabbed teeth and claws into the luckless boy's leg.

His yell startled every man on deck; but far more than it startled us did it startle the man in the cabin, who had thought himself safe from peeping eyes.

First we heard Willie yelling with all the power of his brazen little throat; then the cabin door was flung open with a bang; then suddenly Willie and the monkey literally flew out of the companionway and alighted on deck.

The fall was short and neither was much hurt. But when each tried to escape from the other, both started to run in the same direction and Willie, tripping, fell on the monkey. At that, the monkey grabbed Willie's head with its front claws, raked its hind claws across his face, then s.n.a.t.c.hing out two good handfuls of hair, fled triumphantly aloft.

Gleazen burst out on deck at that very instant, and seeing nothing of Willie who--luckily for him!--had fallen out of sight round the corner of the cabin, started into the rigging, swearing to skin the monkey alive.

Meanwhile Matterson was like to have died laughing at Willie MacDougald,--and, indeed, so were the rest of us!--for between anger and fear, and with half a dozen long scratches across his cheeks, he was in a sad state of mind. I tell you, any ideas of his innocent childhood that we may have entertained completely vanished before the flood of oaths that the little wretch was pouring out, when Gideon North collared him and sent him below with stinging ears.

And now, since all that takes so long to tell happened quickly, the breakers were close aboard, when Gleazen, who had followed the scapegrace monkey to the mizzen royal yard, roared in that great voice of his:--

"Sail ho! By heaven, there's a cruiser in the offing."

He came down the rigging like a cat, bawling orders as he came, and at the same time Gideon North was giving counter-orders. It seemed for a moment that in that scene of confusion, which suddenly from comedy had changed to the grimmest of grim earnest, we should go on beam-ends into the surf.

Seas such as I had never dreamed of were breaking on the bar before us. Overhead a storm was gathering. In the offing, it was reported, there sailed a strange and hostile s.h.i.+p. And in the brig Adventure there were contradictory orders and tangled ropes and men working at cross purposes.

Say what you will against Matterson in most respects, in that emergency he was the man who saved us. Throwing the helmsman from the wheel so violently that he fell clean over the companion ladder and down to the spar-deck, he seized the wheel and cried in a voice as hard as steel, "Gleazen, be still! Be still, I say! Now, Captain North, with head yards aback and after yards braced for the starboard tack, we'll make it."

Captain North, with an able man at the wheel,--to pay the devil his due,--gave orders in swift succession and the brig came back on her course and rose to meet the breakers. How Matterson so surely and confidently found the exact channel, I do not know. But this I do know: he took the brig in through the breakers without the error of as much as a hair's breadth, straight in along the channel, with never a mark to guide him that I could see, except the belt of tidal chop and the eddies of the intermingling currents, to the comparative quiet of the mouth of a river that led away before us into the mazes of vast swamps and tangled waterways, where mangroves and huge interweaving, overhanging vines and sickly sweet flowers grew in all the riotous luxury of tropical vegetation.

To me the calm river seemed an amazing haven from every danger that we had encountered outside. But not so to Matterson.

Looking back at the thundering breakers, he thoughtfully shook his head.

"Well," said Gleazen significantly, "if worst comes to worst, we can fight."

"If worst comes to worst."

"Well?"

Matterson shook himself like a dog. "It's the n.i.g.g.e.rs," he said in a low voice. "If them infernal witch doctors get wind of us!"

Gleazen stared a long time into the mangroves.

"It ain't as if we could take an army," Matterson continued. "We've got to take only them we _know_--_know_, mind you. What'd our lives be worth if all these here--" he waved his hand at the crew forward--"if all these here knew. It would pay 'em well to knock us on the head."

Still Gleazen stared silently into the tangled swamp.

"It would pay 'em well," Matterson repeated.

CHAPTER XVI

STRANGEST OF ALL

Even had I not suspected already that Matterson had brought vessels into the mouth of that river many times before, I could not have doubted it after seeing him bring the Adventure through the narrow channel across the bar, and up to the mouth of the river itself. I marveled that, having been more than a year away from it,--how much more than a year I did not know,--he dared even attempt the pa.s.sage.

But whatever his faults, indecision and fear were not among them, and he had justified his bold course by bringing us safely within the sheltering bar, where the lookouts reported minute by minute every movement of the suspicious distant sail, which approached until from the deck we could see her courses, and then wore s.h.i.+p to haul off sh.o.r.e before the storm caught her.

"Bah! The cruising curs!" Matterson scornfully exclaimed. "Captain North, shall I continue to serve as pilot and take the brig up the river?"

"Since up the river it seems we are to go," Captain North returned stiffly, "I place the helm and all responsibility in your hands, Mr.

Matterson." With that he folded his arms and, with a nod to Seth Upham, withdrew to the weather-rail.

My poor uncle!

Never was there merer figurehead than he as owner of the brig Adventure. It was pathetic to see him try to maintain his dignity and speak and answer smartly, even sharply as of old, when every man on board knew that if that reckless, high-handed pair, Gleazen and Matterson were at any time to cease tolerating him, his life would be worth no more than the flame of a snuffed candle. He must have been perfectly well aware of the weak part he had played, yet he held up his head and boldly returned Gideon North's glance and nod.

Meanwhile Matterson had climbed to the masthead and with gla.s.s at eye was studying the stranger. Now he came slowly down again, and said to Gleazen, "She's bearing off in good faith to ride out the storm, Neil. What say? Shall we anchor here behind the bar?"