Short Stories (magazine)/Plundered Cargo/Chapter 21

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter XXI

AS THE CARDS FALL

When Captain Judah ordered the hatch cover dropped he thought he had effectively removed Karelia Lofgren and the fiery Spike Horn from a situation quite delicate enough without being complicated by their intervention. But just there lay a fatal flaw in his reasoning.

So while the parleys between the grizzled Machiavelli on the bridge and the armed spokesmen of the Celestials progressed a capricious Fate moved to drive at the last slender prop of Judah Storrs' security.

When they found themselves in Egyptian darkness and with the dank atmosphere of the hold tightening an unseen bandage about their throats, the man and the girl sat stunned on their island of cotton. Wordless. Only their hands crept gropingly out, like hands of children on dark stairs, to meet and join in a grip of mutual heartening. Their plunge into the abyss, the writhing struggle with ape-like creatures, the clangor of doom in that falling hatch cover: all these flickers of action, confused, inchoate, made the ensuing darkness and silence the more terrible by contrast.

Karelia spoke first. “It's up to us, Mate. We can't expect any favors from Cap'n Storrs.”

“Who wants any?” was Spike's valiant sally against the deadening depression he felt creeping around his heart. “I've coppered every ace ole Storrs has played so far. Guess I can do it again.”

And far back in some obscure recess of his brain the beginnings of a thought pushed up like the swelling of a germinating seed. Hardly a thought, perhaps; rather that vague and pestiferous feeling that an idea is there ready to be released if only will power concentrate upon it. Something to do with light; there should be light somewhere in this water-logged abyss of blackness.

“Glory!” The exclamation came explosively. “The hole in the deck—you know: where the deck was blown through, like Storrs said yesterday when he an' me rowed over to have a look at this wreck. Look, girl! Look hard all round. There must be a hole where light shines through.”

They strained their eyes to pierce the darkness which was like a muffling mass of wool under which they sat buried. No points for orientation existed. They could not know where bow and stern lay; which way was longitude in the steel vault entombing them. Finally the girl's hand tightened over his.

“Look! Up there!” She lifted his arm to point direction. “Just a spot of half-dark—not so black as the rest.”

Spike concentrated all his will to see. Yes, there was a place where the blackness thinned ever so slightly. Almost he could call it light. Resolution was formed instantly.

“I'm goin' to take a swim, or walk, up there and have a look-see.”

“Oh, Mate!” for just a split second the heart of her quailed before the hazard of such adventure. Then, “Go and good luck,” she said.

Spike slipped off his shoes and gave her hand a squeeze for farewell. “You keep saying, 'Here I am, Spike,' so's I can find my way back. Anyway, it'll help just to hear you say it.”

He felt his way to the edge of the island of bales and let himself drop. His feet touched a submerged foundation of burlap below his depth and he came up swimming. Two strokes and he struck a dank wall from which soggy hanks of cotton came away in his exploring grip.

“Here I am, Mate,” came low reassurance from the blackness behind him.

Now he could not see the thin patch in the blanket of dark which was his goal. He could see nothing. Only he felt a wall of slimy burlap, smooth, without even handholds. His feet were treading water. With every agitation of his legs bubbles of foul smelling gas arose to burst about him.

Hand over hand, from right to left, he pulled himself along the unseen wall. His thrashing feet struck a submerged ledge and he was able to lift head and shoulders out of water. The ledge broadened and ascended at a cant, indicating a submerged bale dislodged and forced upward until, as he crawled, nearly the whole of him was free of the slime.

“Here I am, Mate,” tolled the voice far—so far—back in limbo.

Now he saw his objective plainly; even the vague shoulders of stacked cargo were suggested by the filtered light. But his way was no longer over cotton. Instead, slimy bundles of hides which stank abominably, The bundles were like so many corpses, slick and with the feel of putrescence about them. They rolled sluggishly when he put his weight upon them, threatened to topple over on his head.

Now in water to his knees, he crawled until he was directly below the hole in the deck, perhaps ten feet over his head as he knelt. Light through it was dimmed where burlap from one of the bales opened on deck had dropped over the hole to screen it.

There was no way he could lift his head through the jagged aperture even if he had dared. But with two there, one giving the other a back up, it could be done.

Spike began retracing his perilous trail. From hide bundles to cotton and from cotton to water. Furiously he strove to print unseeable landmarks on his mind; to point a chart by this handhold and that crevice. Ever and again a strong voice out of the dark served to guide him.

At last he pulled himself up on the island. He felt a hand wavering through the dark. In his exultation he let his own dripping hand travel up Karelia's arm to the shoulder, to the neck. He laid his palm on a smooth cheek with a light touch of caress.

“Karelia girl, you can make it. But it's mighty tough. Together we can——”

Spike felt a strong arm circle his neck, felt his head drawn over. Lips brushed his cheek, then rested for one delirious instant upon his lips.

“I thought—I was afraid you'd not come back,” she whispered.

Ten minutes later one on the deck of the Sierra Park might have seen a breadth of burlap strewn there stir strangely, then very slowly lift. A pair of black eyes under streaming wisps of hair appeared under the burlap cowl. They swept the length of the deck. Deserted. Not the figure of a man in sight.

Karelia lifted herself through the hole which the burlap had covered, knelt and gave a hand to Spike below. Together they stood blinking in blinding sunlight. The prodigy of an untenanted hulk was not easily realized by two who had set themselves to meet the hazard of a rush by six angry Chinamen.

A shot!

They bounded to the rail. There on the flat water was a crowded yaw! midway between the hulk and the Lonney Lee. A puff of smoke was just shredding away from the rail midway of the schooner's shoreward side. The watchers on the Sierra Park could distinguish the black hat of old Doctor Chitterly cocked behind the slender spear of steel jutting out from his shoulder.

Even as they looked the doctor's rifle jetted smoke again and a tiny spout of spray sprang up from the yawl's waterline. A figure arose in the yawl and pointed a finger at the rifleman aboard the schooner. The finger launched a thin smoke pencil.

An idea burst in Spike's brain with the explosiveness of a shrapnel shell. He whirled upon the girl.

“The ole doc—too tender hearted—won't shoot to kill! We've gotta get Storrs back here. Where do they keep the kerosene—paint—any kind of oil that'll burn?”

Karelia's eyes questioned him, but already he had started on a run down the deck toward the quarters behind the bridge. The girl left a second trail of water where she followed.

“Fire!” the man called over his shoulder. “Start a fire anywhere! What do we care what burns? Storrs'll come rar'in' back here when he sees smoke!”

“But we—what will happen when——”

“I've got all that arranged,” was the confident assurance as Horn turned into the paint closet Karelia designated. “Go to the kitchen and find some dry matches.”

She found him sloshing kerosene out of a can where he had dragged it forward. Onto the strewn cotton; onto the deck indiscriminately. Whatever her fears over the plan half revealed to her, Karelia was not one to doubt the ultimate worth of Spike's judgment. Not after that blind groping and battle toward the light he had made first alone and then at her shoulder so short a time ago. The simplicity of her mind was wax to strong impressions. Spike Horn had put his imprint there indelibly. He had proved himself a man—first man to whom Karelia ever had deferred.

He threw a lighted match into the oil steeped cotton. Flame leaped up, and a thick column of black smoke.

“Now the reception committee gets busy,” Spike shouted boyishly and dashed back to the paint closet. He returned with a quart can of linseed oil in either hand. These he placed out of danger from the fire and raced back to the paint closet. Two cans of gasoline were added to his store of inflammables.

They went to the rail to look out over the water where a naval battle in miniature had been going on. The yawl was now racing back toward the Sierra Park, spray flying from two sets of oars. The heavy figure of Captain Judah, half raised from a seat in the stern, was bent in objurgations for speed.

And over yonder where the Lonney Lee lay anchored could be seen the figure of Doctor Chitterly hastily scrambling down the ladder to where the Iron Man held the second yawl close alongside.

“Good old Doc!” Spike chuckled. “I knew this would fetch him, too. The old boy is playing the rescuin' hero part right now.”

Behind where the twain, screened by ratlines from observation of the approaching yawl, were discreetly observing the approach of the boat, a spreading pillar of flame roared upward. The deck boards of the Sierra Park, long bleached in the tropic sun, were fair tinder. Horn's emergency measure had written the doom of the steamer and her outlaw cargo.

The yawl drew under a sea ladder which had been lowered overside to accommodate the descent of the crippled Storrs on his sally to recover the Lonney Lee. Spike with set features ran crouching along the rail, an uncovered can of linseed oil between his palms. He paused where the ladder came over the rail, lifted himself for an appraising squint at a line of trajectory over and down.

A bellow from Captain Storrs who had seen the shock head at its instant appearance above the rail.

Flicker of a match—quick lifting of a flaming meteor overside—a tumbling cascade of fire.

Doctor Chitterly and the Iron Man, straining at their oars not fifty yards behind, looked over-shoulder at the sound of hideous shouting.

They saw a boat, all aflame, shoved madly off from the steamer's side; saw a white man—it proved to be Hansen—make a wild spring for the ladder and cling there, saved. Then commenced the leaping of living firebrands into the sea.

Madly they bent to their oars on rescue bound. Their yawl leaped through the water. But faster than the yawl, faster almost than the eye could follow came rushing and ravenous the thin black fins.

A hand was laid on the yawl's gunnel—a white hand. Doctor Chitterly saw it and dropped his oars to reach for it. He saw a strange trepidation run through the fingers—a fluttering as they loosened their hold. The hand disappeared.