Short Stories (magazine)/Plundered Cargo/Chapter 13

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter XIII

“MAN IS LIKE TO VANITY”

Arms akimbo on the rail, Spike Horn watched the progress of this strange mariner on a stranger craft until it grounded on the beach. He saw the girl bound ashore and tether the raft by a rope noosed around a rock. Then without so much as a backward look she climbed a low ridge of rocks, which ran like the spine of some buried monster down the seaward flank of the mountain, and disappeared.

Even after she was gone from sight the man from Goldfield held to his place and let his eyes strain over every swale and hummock of the barren island headland, hoping for another glimpse of the blue shirt and those two black ropes of hair swinging like strong cables over her shoulders. He had been more profoundly stirred by this girl than he would have m cared to admit even to himself. Never in his life had Spike Horn encountered so vivid a fury.

His steady stare against the yellow mountain side seemed to conjure her out of the rocks. He saw again her free stride; the boyish swing of her shoulders; the white flashes of her bare feet peeping out from the flapping vents of blue trousers.

“Karelia—Karelia Lofgren.” Sounded queer and sorta like a big bell ringing. Foreign.

His mind swung from conning the physical attributes of the visitor aboard the wrecked Sierra Park to the surprising substance of the charges she had flung so furiously at Captain Judah. Murder, no less; the murder of the master of this wrecked ship, her father. Yes, and worse than murder, the leaving of a woman alone on a derelict here in this God-forsaken sea bang up against a desert island!

Spike Horn was not a squeamish man. Life's rough hand had larruped him aplenty. He had played the game of men hard and ruthlessly; but he'd played it straight. No taking of life. No fighting foul, much less with a woman.

Of a sudden this cruise of the Lonney Lee down here into a white-hot sea away from the eyes of the world was revealed to him in a sinister light undreamt of before. A steamship deliberately wrecked. Captain Storrs knew just how it was wrecked even though he was not aboard it. Collusion there! He was in on the game. Then he must have been in on the murder of this Karelia girl's father and the vicious trick of leaving her alone to rot on a stinking hulk.

By God, that fighting fury was right when she called Storrs a murderer!

He turned from the rail to search out the captain. He found him kneeling by the side of the donkey engine at the foremast foot, tinkering a nut with a monkey wrench.

“Stand up, Storrs, we're goin' to have a show-down, you an' me.”

The skipper looked over his shoulder with an assumed air of patience.

“I think there's been enough palaver for one morning,” he said shortly.

“Not till you've heard me,” Spike snapped. “Listen to me: I think that girl's got you cold to rights. You did give somebody aboard this ship orders to croak her old man an' leave her to die alone on a wreck.”

Captain Judah slowly arose and let his amused glance rest on the flushed face of the younger man before him. His lips slipped sideways into a sneer.

“Is this gallery play, Horn; or when did you become converted at the mourner's bench?”

“Me, I never tied into any game where murder's at the end of it,” came explosively from Spike.

“Horn, you're a two-faced liar. You knew when I shanghaied you aboard the Lonney Lee that murder'd been done down here, which was more than I knew. I thought Cap'n Lofgren was the one who'd double-crossed me and was hiring you to jump me before I could get away from San Francisco. You knew all the time Hoskin, Lofgren's first officer, had given him the double-cross as well as a bullet. Hoskin, then, was the man who put money in your bank for you.”

A surprising move on Horn's part. He walked to the bridge ladder twenty feet away and rested his rifle there. He came back, hands free and swinging lightly by his side.

“Drop that monkey wrench, Storrs, and stand up. I'm goin' to trim you all over again. What you got from me early 'smornin' was just a teaser.”

The Lonney Lee's skipper did not lay down the heavy wrench; but he assumed no belligerent attitude.

“Grand stand play, Horn,” he said; “you've caught the notion from that crazy Finn girl. I should say this is no time for you and me to be battering each other when our business is to get a fortune out of the hold here before——”

Spike leaped. With a lightning jerk of the hand Storrs brought the monkey wrench up from his waist. It did not travel more than half a foot, but the blunt face of the thing smacked dully against the lowered forehead of the charging man. Spike dropped like a grain sack and lay twitching at Storrs' feet.

The skipper stood looking down at the sprawled figure. The suddenness of his mastery stunned him a little. His eye traveled from the unconscious Horn over to the rifle laid against the bridge ladder. A slow smile parted the ring of whisker about the man's mouth, then in an instant the smile was wiped away in a flooding of animal savagery. For the full value of that chance blow was borne in upon Judah Storrs; he could wipe out an obligation to which he had set his hand under compulsion not ten hours ago: a promise to pay fifty thousand dollars—and unfortunate publicity certain to follow his welching on the contract.

But he would do it in a manner most painful to the party of the first part.

Storrs looked around the deck and spied an empty oil can with a wire bale to it. He seized a length of rope, tied one end to the bale and flung the can overboard. Up it came, filled, to be sloshed over the head and shoulders of the unconscious man. Again and again water was sluiced upon him.

The one giving first aid wanted his man to be conscious before the next move in the drama was set afoot. He knelt and shook Horn.

“Horn! Come around. You're going on a long journey and you want to meet some people who'll go with you.”

Spike stirred and opened his eyes. He saw the solicitous face of his enemy bent over him.

“Ah, that's good, Horn.” Captain Judah leaned nearer and slipped an arm under prone shoulders. “Horn, remember what that crazy girl said about the sharks—how they churned up a bloody foam? She said, as I remember, that I was the next one who was slated to go to the sharks from this ship.”

Storrs was half erect now, and he was dragging Horn by a grip on his shoulders. Nearer the rail!

“Horn, the lady was half right. In her hysterical condition she could not be expected to do the prophet business wholly ship-shape. Somebody's going to the sharks, Horn; but it isn't Judah Storrs, Esquire.”

In that shadow gulf between unconsciousness and full reason the submerged spirit which was Spike Horn was battling upward through fathoms of blackness, like a diver with bursting lungs who yearns for the air and free sunlight. Faintly and as the tolling of a sunken bell, Skipper Storrs' words came to the ears of that swimming spirit. At first they were just words, mumbled and meaningless. Then one stood out—“Sharks!”

“A lot of old fogies say, Horn, sharks won't attack a living man.” Storrs had him by the rail now and was slowly heaving him shoulders-over. “All bosh, Horn! You'll see for yourself—ah, they're waiting for you, Horn—one—no, three, by George! And there'll be others!”

The swimming spirit now was out of the depths. Horn shot out a desperately grappling hand to seize the ratlines which came down to anchorage on the rail just where his shoulder was slipping—slipping. Storrs twisted his body so that his legs hung overside. One of the skipper's hands freed itself to drop over and pry at the gripping fingers.

“Tut-tut, Horn! Why this reluctance? 'Man is like to vanity,' the blessed Psalms say; 'his days are as a shadow.' And so, good-by, Horn—good——”

Captain Storrs' prying at the gripping fingers suddenly ceased. He half spun round and staggered back to crumple against the foremast.

Over across flat water where the Lonney Lee lay anchored a dab of white smoke drifted away from the bow. Old Doctor Chitterly dropped a rifle from his shoulder with a heartfelt call of thanks to his Maker.