Short Stories (magazine)/Plundered Cargo/Chapter 14

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter XIV

THE DOCTOR LEADS AN ACE

It can be easily realized that nothing short of extreme circumstances could have prompted the discoverer of Squaw Root Tonic to shoot anybody with, as the courts have a way of adding, “intent to kill.”

The good doctor, what time the yawl pulled away from the Lonney Lee headed for the wrecked steamer with Skipper Storrs and Spike Horn for passengers, had been left in a very low state of morale. He had just given the irresponsible Horn a generous piece of his mind. That the one so reproved should receive the dressing-down with the mechanical enthusiasm of a cuckoo in a clock did not tend to assure Doctor Chitterly that sweetness and light ruled the world. He was convinced to the contrary. He knew that of all miserable creatures on earth he could fight a Hottentot for lowest place.

Doctor Chitterly had proceeded to fetch a camp stool from the cabin and unlimbered it under the shade of the awning which had been carried stretched over the quarterdeck since torrid weather was encountered. There he sat alone, while Hansen fiddled with the gas engine, with his rifle between his knees. A complete picture of dejection he offered. He wore his sea rig, Chinese cotton trousers; rattan shoe-packs on his bare feet. His shore shirt, once washed during the trip and bearing a decidedly unironed appearance, still carried the yellow diamond on its bosom and the celluloid cuffs attached to the wristbands by metal tabs. His ceremonial slouch hat with the drooping brim rode his white locks somewhat jauntily. He fanned himself languidly with a copy of an old newspaper which Mr. Hansen had brought aboard—the worthy doctor knew its contents down to the last word on the last page.

Came to him there Angelo the flute player, carrying his home-made instrument. “I playa for you nice-a tune, wheech for name makes Conti 'Offman.”

Doctor Chitterly shuddered visibly and held up a restraining hand. He couched his protest in a bellow.

“Isn't it too soon after breakfast for music, Angelo? Maybe in an hour from now——”

Doubtfully Angelo lifted the bamboo broom-handle to his lips and sounded a few eldritch screeches. “Nice-a-tune that Conti 'Offman,” he urged; but he saw no answering light of enthusiasm in the elder man's eye. Angelo possessed the veneration for old men which was his racial heritage. He would not insist.

He plumped himself cross-legged on the deck at the doctor's feet. “Me, I ver' sad, too,” he sighed. Then suddenly and without preliminaries, “What 'appen that damn' revolution we 'ave these sheep las' night? Bang—bang! Beega fight thees devil Horn an' Cap-itan. Me, Angelo, ready for fighta damn' Chink, Then—'e's' all finish; nothin' appen.”

Doctor Chitterly, needing a confidant—even a flute player thought a little daft—straightway unburdened himself completely. He told, with some pardonable embroidery, how he had planned the mutiny with intention to sail the schooner to nearest port and there abandon her; how Spike Horn after a mysterious conference with the beaten enemy had double-crossed the whole outfit and signed some agreement with Captain Judah—doubtless a division of fabulous wealth which lay in that stranded steamer yonder.

“And now,” he finished lugubriously, “they've gone to get their rotten plunder, leaving us here to rot. I know we'll all be hanged or at best thrown in some jail before this wretched business. is over.”

A strange flicker of white in the flute player's eyes as he flashed them up to the doctor's face.

“W'at you theenk thees stuff they get—diamonds?”

“I don't know, Angelo. I only know I want none of it. All I want is to get back to San Francisco and the smell of the ocean winds through the Golden Gate.”

The flute player drummed with nervous fingers on the vents of his broom-handle; evidently he was conning the wisdom of voicing a thought which possessed him. Finally he said, “Yes, I theenk so. Wen they get those diamond—thees devil Horn, thees Cap-itan—w'en they breeng those diamond here an' we go for that San Francis', then I do it.”

Prick of some new terror spurred the physician. He turned frightened eyes on the Italian.

“Do what, Angelo?”

Now the flute player's voluble hands were flying in vivid gestures. The whites of his eyes flickered palely.

“One littla bottle; I find heem in that kitchen. I smell heem. I know—me, Angelo! One-a time before w'en I cooka de pasta in Fior ď'Italia I know that bottle. 'E's for make ver' seeck the rat.” Angelo bared narrow yellow teeth in a shocking grimace, clapped his hands over his stomach and squeaked like a fiddle in tuning.

“Wen we 'ave those diamond here on thees boat an' we start for San Francis', one day thees littla bottle in the soupa. Ah, then, Doct' Chit', you see sometheeng! Thees Cap-itan, thees Horn, all the dam' Chink they roll aroun'—they make squik like rat—they die. Sapristi! You an' me 'ave those diamond!”

The worthy Chitterly leaped from his chair as if spurred.

“Good Lord, man, you're talking wholesale murder!”

“Wy not?” was the childlike query.

Doctor Chitterly, shaken to his rattan shoe-packs, had just drawn himself to his full height prepared to give the flute player a sonorous lecture, when his eye caught a prodigy. A figure in blue was pushing out from the vacant shore line of the cove on a bundle of boards flush with the water. A human creature on this deserted island!

Without a word to Angelo, he rushed down into the cabin for Captain Judah's binoculars. He leveled them at the spot of blue upon the raft now heading for the stranded steamer.

“A woman, by the Lord Harry! Yes, sir, she's got her hair in braids.”

Angelo snatched the glasses and clapped them to his eyes.

“Yes—woman,” he murmured. “Now large-a trouble!”

Which was exactly Doctor Chitterly's diagnosis of the situation. An uncompromising bachelor, the good doctor had been permanently corraled in that unfortunate state by an ever-present awe of the softer sex. From the time, in his riotous youth amid the mines of the Mother Lode, when a chit sued him for breath of promise and won, up to the occasion—not many years back—when he had connived at a friend's attempt to escape from a termagant wife and had been pushed to the brink of ruin by that outraged lady, over these many years of experience, all of Doctor Chitterly's contacts with the fair sex had left him somehow the loser. Now another—and in this desolate sea!

By turns at the glass the two stupefied men aboard the Lonney Lee followed the progress of the raft toward the stranded steamer until it was hidden by the uptilted bow. Then Doctor Chitterly, possessing the binoculars for the moment, saw the figure in blue outlined against the sky as it balanced on the Sierra Park's rail; saw two puffs of smoke jet from her extended hand. Suddenly she slipped out of sight, for the elevation of the derelict's deck above that of the Lonney Lee denied observation of what transpired there.

“She is shooting at them!” the doctor whispered before Angelo could snatch the binoculars and vainly attempt to follow sequence of lively events across the water.

“Ah-ha, Doct' Chit'; how I tella you! Large-a troubles.”

“Hush!” Chitterly had heard faint sound of a voice across the flat water separating the two craft. They strained their ears to catch the sound of a woman's voice lifted in anger; it was punctuated now and again by Storrs' rejoinders. A most maddening business, this being in the wings when drama was unfolding, yet denied sight of action and actors. Just as everything on this wretched voyage had transpired, so Doctor Chitterly inwardly complained, things were happening under his nose and he not privy to them.

They saw the mysterious woman who was garbed as a man disappear over the rail and presently come into their ken again as she paddled her raft ashore. Some obscure prompting of relief caused the doctor to vent a sigh of satisfaction. He was expecting the lady to pay a similar complimentary visit to the Lonney Lee after her stormy invasion of the steamer; and he feared the worst would result from the call.

Some lingering fascination the strange woman exercised upon him kept Doctor Chitterly's glasses roving the length of the Sierra Park even after her departure. As if he suspected her of leaving a bomb with a time fuse behind her!

At any rate, the head of Captain Judah Storrs appeared in the double barrels of the instrument glued to the doctor's eyes; then the shoulders and lolling head of Spike Horn being hoisted to the ship's rail.

A single sweep of the eye told the doctor that Horn was helpless, perhaps from a bullet fired by the she-devil in trousers. But there was no waiting boat below where the skipper was heaving the nerveless figure. Storrs was not lowering away a wounded man to be brought back to the schooner. Dead, then! Spike Horn was dead and——

Out shot that arm in final desperate grab at a ratline; Chitterly caught the flicker of action and saw Storrs' hand come over to pry fingers from their life-hold.

Murder, then! Here was the cold-blooded killing of a man!

Doctor Chitterly took no reckoning of partisanship as between Captain Judah and Spike Horn; he had good reason to dislike them both. But he could not see any man done to death, brutally killed out of hand. A reflex of fine old morality sent his hand to snatch up the rifle he had propped against the schooner rail. He made instantaneous judgment of range and wind, for once Doctor Chitterly had been a mighty deer hunter, and fired.

As a puppet is knocked over in a shooting gallery, Storrs fell back out of sight. Doctor Chitterly and Angelo, both open-mouthed, watched the dangling figure of Horn swing for a minute over a horrid death ten feet below his heels, then painfully pull itself up and over the rail.

Mr. Hansen, the wooden mate, appeared at the foot of the companionway with a face that dully questioned a matter of shooting. The doctor turned on him with an air of authority.

“I've just killed your captain, Mr. Hansen, killed him to prevent a cold-blooded murder. Have the Chinamen get out another boat and row me over to that steamer.”

Hansen took the news as being naught but an expected part of the day's work. He went fora'rd to round up a boat's crew for the Lonney Lee's second yawl which was lashed to the gratings of the house. In a few minutes it was lowered away from the taffrail davits and in the water with two Chinamen at the oars. Doctor Chitterly accompanied by the flute player, whose excitement was at boiling point, was rowed across to the Sierra Park.

Spike Horn met the doctor as he swung himself heavily over the rail, followed by Angelo. The battered young man caught Chitterly's hand between his two.

“Doc, ole timer, any time, any place you need y'r li'l friend Spike Horn to lift you outa a tough jackpot, he'll be there!' Which was about the limit of sentiment of which the man from Goldfield was capable.

Doctor Chitterly's eyes roved over the deck to where the body of Storrs made an untidy bundle against the foremast. “I've never killed a man,” he began in a shaken voice. “I—um—confess I feel very——”

“Save your feelin's, Doc. Ole Storrs's a long way from dead, though not feelin' so prime as he might. You just drilled him through the shoulder.”

“God be praised!” was Chitterly's heartfelt thanks, and with the other two he strode over to where the skipper lay. The doctor knelt professionally and put his hand under the unbuttoned coat where a red stain crept down over Storrs' shirt. The wounded man's eyelids flickered open and the gray eyes looked up with their accustomed aloof stare tinged as always with cold irony. He said nothing; only when Spike Horn's face came within the languidly rolling field of the eyeballs the fetter of beard about the mouth tightened.

The doctor cut jacket and shirt away and exposed a blue-black hole just below the right shoulder socket. With a tenderness hardly to be expected he lifted and half rolled Storrs' body to discover a lump near the shoulder blade.

“Sea water's a good antiseptic,” he flung over his shoulder at the flute player. “Pick up that can with a rope to it and scoop up some.”

He brought out a pocket knife and selected the smallest blade to open. He fumbled for a match, struck it and passed the flame along the blade's keen edge. The wounded man's eyes followed fascinated the play of slender flame along tempered steel.

“Just as good as alcohol for cleansing,” spake the doctor in his best professional manner. “No bones broken, I think; maybe the shoulder blade's scraped a little. Now if I only had a bottle of Squaw Root Tonic——”

“Fine old fraud!” Captain Judah murmured through lips that hardly moved. Then, “I take it you were the one that put that bullet through me.”

Doctor Chitterly nodded and lifted the hairy back of a hand to his lips to wet it. He tried the keenness of the blade along the roots of the hairs. All his abhorrence of murder and of Captain Judah as a murderer checked in the act were lost in a professional enthusiasm. Angelo brought the canful of brine. The doctor turned Storrs over on his stomach.

“Cut, you white-whiskered old Mormon blank-of-a-blankness!” came the muffled objurgation.

Doctor Chitterly cut.

When the rude surgery was finished and a bandage of a sort had been contrived the doctor and Spike Horn walked out of earshot.

“Now tell me all about it—that woman in men's clothes and what happened between Storrs and yourself,” Chitterly demanded. Spike gave him a complete chronicle.

The doctor heard him through without comment. “And so that dad-blistered son of Hell tried to make shark-bait of me,” Spike finished.

“Hm-m-m!” Chitterly's hand was combing his generous beard in reflex of deep thought. “The young woman says Captain Storrs murdered her father. He tried his best to murder you. I should say his character is pretty well established.”

“'Bout as purty a household pet as a desert sidewinder.” Spike cast a baleful glance to where the late patient under Doctor Chitterly's surgery sat propped against the mast. He turned back to thwack a heavy hand on his companion's shoulder.

“Doc, ole horse, I guess I played you a dirty game this mornin' when I let Storrs have his schooner back again—all for a promise of fifty thousand which isn't worth the paper it's written on. I slipped you the double-cross, Doc, an' you turn 'round an' save my life. That makes me out a purty ornery skunk.”

“We'll forget that,” Chitterly interposed with a bland look in his eyes.

“We will not! An' what's more, we're going to do just what you figured on doin' when I propositioned you on the mutiny business. We're goin' cut loose from this whole damn' outfit—leave 'em rot here on this busted steamer with whatever plunder ole Storrs thinks is down in the cellar. Just like the girl says he ordered somebody to slip her the Robinson Crusoe stuff.”

“You mean sail away on the Lonney Lee—we shanghaied fellows?” The doctor's face was wreathed with a Santa Claus smile.

“You said it, Doc! We'll give a look-see 'round this ole gravy dish; find out if there's still grub an' water aboard—which there should be. 'F not we'll ferry some over here with Hansen an' the rest of the Chinks; enough to keep 'em goin' for a while until we tell somebody somewhere to come an' fetch 'em off.”

Doctor Chitterly's first elation gave way to doubts. “But suppose Hansen and the other Chinamen don't wish to leave the schooner?”

Spike gave him a grin and patted the barrel of the rifle which he had recovered from where folly had prompted him to prop it before his bare-handed engagement with Captain Judah.

“Li'l persuaders, Doc. You've got one. I've got one. Looks like the ayes have it, as they say in the Chamber of Commerce meeting.”

Spike started for the rear of the deck where the galley door swung open when an afterthought prompted him to fling over his shoulder: “'Course that Karelia girl goes with us. We can't run off an' leave her here with this curly wolf Storrs.”

The doctor was rooted in his tracks, appalled. The sunshine of a new hope suddenly was blotted out for him.