Short Stories (magazine)/Plundered Cargo/Chapter 6

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter VI

THE MATTER OF A BOILED CIGAR

Unconsidered trifles often have a trick of suddenly developing into circumstances of extraordinary importance. In the tiny world of the Lonney Lee so trivial an event as the theft of three cigars jarred all the bolts of security and put Captain Judah's supremacy to the test. Events befell in this way.

Among the many sterling vices the redoubtable Spike Horn owned to was a love for tobacco. He had learned to chew at ten, was whipped by his school principal for smoking a pipe at twelve and from that year on he leaned heavily upon the prop of the leaf.

When he was shanghaied aboard the Lonney Lee four cigars, or the remnants of four, remained in the pockets of his waistcoat to arouse memories of his gaudy party ashore. These perfectos had been sadly used in the fight before the house of the cabbage fields and the subsequent ride on the floor of the farm wagon down to Abalone Cove. One only was intact enough to smoke; the other three were mashed and frayed beyond any attempts at salvage.

Spike smoked the serviceable cigar the first night out, rashly and with a spendthrift carelessness. If he thought of replacements at all it was to assure himself he had money enough to buy more cigars. Next day he approached the wooden Mr. Hansen with a request to be shown the cigar stock. The first mate gave him a dead fish's stare.

“This is a schooner, not the Palace Hotel,” he grunted. “Ve don't sell seegars.”

The Iron Man had half a sack of flake tobacco and cigarette papers in his trousers pocket. He grudgingly gave Spike a few of the manila leaves from his little book. For four days the man from the mines eked out the shreds and crumbs of the ruined cigars in his waistcoat pocket by rolling them into cigarettes. Then even the lint from the bottoms of the pockets, turned inside out, was consumed. Spike Horn was tobaccoless.

This lack came when Captain Judah had set him at the anchor chain. The cruel job was doubly aggravated by the skipper's practice of mounting guard over him with a cigar in his teeth. The toiling Spike, on his hunkers by the line of chain, never looked up at his tormentor; but an occasional sly puff of wind would carry to his nostrils the delectable odor of Havana. More than once as his right arm rose and fell to the swinging of the maul the miserable Spike reckoned the possibility of a swift upward fling of that heavy instrument straight at the skipper's midriff—a dropped cigar—a few satisfying drags upon it, come hell or high water.

Here was he, Spike, sitting on gold and with gold raising welts on both feet; yet would he have had his right hand lopped off rather than ask Captain Judah to sell him some cigars.

There was no other way to relieve the tobacco hunger. What the Chinaman smoked looked and smelt like camel's hair; even a whiff of it in the stuffy fo'c's'le was enough to send Spike gasping to the deck. The Iron Man's sack was nearly empty, and he nursed what was left with flat refusal of a division. Angelo and Doctor Chitterly didn't smoke. Spike approached Mr. Hansen a second time with a goldpiece balanced on the tip of his forefinger. The mate, true to his Scandinavian stubbornness, would not consider selling any of his black plugs. In desperation Spike offered him all of ten dollars for one, only to get a curt; “Na!”

Three smokeless days, then the evil genius who had shunted the Goldfield miner from a Ferris wheel to a fo'c's'le baited still another trap for his feet.

Spike was at the early morning task of sluicing down and swabbing the decks; a job which he shared with three Chinamen. The hose had been stowed, and Spike was on the quarterdeck alone, working the slop down the planks with a squeegee. He saw the skipper's sea-jacket lying on the deck-house grating, evidently thrown there and forgotten the night before. The tips of three cigars peeped from the breast pocket. Those three brown tips could not have been more tempting had a diamond been set in each.

Spike cast an over-shoulder glance at the Chinaman at the wheel. The slant eyes were roving off to leeward. Spike maneuvred the overturned yawl, which was lashed to the house, between the helmsman and himself, made a quick pass at the coat pocket and then again bent to his work.

It was a dreary day of dripping heat made a little more tolerable by avid anticipation. At night with the skipper below over his game of dominoes with Doctor Chitterly, Spike slipped up to the bow of the schooner. Perched on a pile of anchor chain, he screened the flame of a match and lighted one of the stolen cigars. No boy with a pilfered watermelon could have found the delight in a first mouthful that was Spike's at the initial deep draught of fragrance. It searched his toes, that full-lunged inhalation.

As puff followed puff the chains of his slavery aboard the Lonney Lee slipped from him. The mystery of whither bound the craft might be and for what purpose, even his bitter blood feud with the skipper, these distractions were dimmed in the lulling narcotic of the smoke. Nor did the smoker hear a quiet footfall behind him when Captain Judah, following his nose along the trail of three stolen cigars, paused by the windlass for a final sniff of confirmation. The saturnine master of the Lonney Lee tiptoed back to the main deck without revealing his presence.

The morning following, Angelo received a surprise visit in the galley. Seizing a moment when the Iron Man, Angelo's scullion, was clearing away the breakfast dishes in the cabin, Captain Judah stepped over the galley sill. He held an unlighted cigar between his fingers.

“Listen to me,” he commanded. Angelo turned a sullen face up from his bread board. “You've got two coffee pots here.” The captain jerked a thumb to indicate where a reserve boiler hung on a peg over the sink. He pointed to the pot and then to the cigar. “When you cook your noon grub I want you to make two pots of coffee: one for the crew and the cabin mess and one for Horn for'ard. Put this cigar in Horn's pot when you boil his coffee; understand? Boil the cigar with his coffee.”

The startling whites of the flute player's eyes showed even wider. He looked from the cigar to the coffee pot.

“And leave the cigar in that pot when you've finished boiling,” added Judah. “I want Horn's coffee boiled with a cigar in it until further orders. And when that cigar wears out you come to me for another. And, mark you, Cookey; you pour Horn's coffee yourself. Don't let that swab, the Iron Man, handle the coffee and don't let him see you doctor Horn's pot. Understand these orders, now?”

Angelo nodded and turned back to his dough.

The weather suddenly became capricious enough to divert the skipper's mind from contemplation of the punishment he had ordered for the theft of his cigars. Before dawn the breathless sea began to be stirred by puffy winds from the sou'west. The sun had not been up two hours before it was more than evident that the past days of calm were broken. The winds came squally and in brief spells of violence. The sea assumed a dour, leaden hue, with whitecaps here and there giving portent of a troubled water waste. Captain Judah's glass registered a sudden drop.

The skipper cast an appraising glance at the shore line not fifteen miles off and gave orders to his helmsman to bear up a couple of points, which brought the Lonney Lee's bow almost into the teeth of the wind. He commanded the fore and main tops'ls taken in, greatly as he would have preferred to take the full advantage of the wind after the days of drifting. The schooner cut like a knife through the waves.

At eight bells the skipper and Doctor Chitterly sat down to their noon meal; Mr. Hansen remained on deck in charge of the changed watch. The Iron Man in his dirty apron set the beef stew and tomato slum before them and poured out the coffee.

The wraith of a smile stretched Captain Judah's ring of whisker as he ladled himself a generous portion of stew. He beamed at the doctor with a travesty of good humor which had marked all his assumption of fellowship with the physician; a sort of condescending patronage.

“Mr. Chitterly, perhaps you can tell me the effect upon the human system of nicotine taken in considerable quantities directly into the stomach.”

The doctor pawed his beard while he did some rapid stalling.

“Well, Captain Storrs, sir, the juice of the tobacco leaf is a powerful alkali, while nicotine—um—is an alkaloid. Now the difference between an alkali and——”

Doctor Chitterly paused, mouth ajar and eyes fixed upon the face of the skipper. It was set in lines of mixed surprise and horror. His hand plumped a coffee cup into its saucer; the surface of the liquid within had been dropped from the brim by a generous draught.

“That unholy swine of a flute player!” Captain Judah staggered to his feet, red napkin significantly clapped to his lips, and made for the companionway.

Just that instant the Lonney Lee heeled suddenly to port—over—over until all the dishes on the table went sliding and crashing to the floor and the swinging lamp spilled oil from banging against the cabin roof.

Trampling on the deck above—confused cries——

Doctor Chitterly scrambled madly to the deck, convinced that the schooner was sinking. What he saw was fully as exciting as a shipwreck.

First, the deck aslant at an angle steep as a church roof where a terrific squall had laid her down; the sky had shut down like a black pot. Next, a knot of men struggling hand to hand, waist deep in water by the lee rail; yellow men and white; yellow arms and white arms flailing savagely against the background of a wall of green-gray water rising almost perpendicularly above the rail.

Doctor Chitterly cast a swift glance back to the wheel—that much of a sailor ten days at sea had made him. He saw no man there—the wheel was wabbling sickly. He made the precipitous climb thither by scrambling over the canted deckhouse. Once his hands were on the spokes, he pushed with all his might against the unseen force of storm strength forcing the Lonney Lee under. Spoke by spoke the wheel came over while every muscle in the doctor's broad back and arms cracked under strain. Little by little the Lonney Lee's head came up out of the sea trough, where another boarding wave assuredly would have capsized her, and came around into the wind. The mains'l and single jib slatted furiously, then caught the lessening wind of the squall. The schooner was saved.

Old Doctor Chitterly felt tremendous exaltation. For once in his life he had done a job with no fake in it.

To get the whole picture of how the flute player's coffee affected the fortunes of the Lonney Lee we must go back to a moment when, with the skipper below at his dinner, Mr. Hansen had placed the afternoon watch with the sounding of eight bells, the watch of Spike Horn and three of the six Chinks. He took the wheel himself. A black cloud which he had been watching smear the western horizon suddenly broke away from its moorings where sky joined water and came ballooning over the heavens like a runaway blimp.

“All hands!” he shouted and he pointed to the fores'l halyards. The wind whipped his “Take in sail!” out of his mouth.

Spike Horn had been dallying by the galley door, lingering over his second cup of coffee—good coffee which Angelo himself had given him with a sly smile. That was the first smile Spike had seen on the flute player's face since the night Captain Judah pitched his instrument overboard. Just as he hastily passed the empty cup to Angelo, at the mate's hail, a chorus of shrieks sounded from up for'ard where three coolies had been squatting by the hatch over their cups of coffee and tub of stew.

One writhed on the deck holding his hands over his mid-region. One was being very honestly ill. All screamed falsetto imprecations.

Spike joined the three of his watch in taking in the fores'l. They had it half clewed down—a clumsy task in the rising gale—when the three Chinks whose screams had come at the same time as Mr. Hansen's summons came padding wild-eyed down the deck. They jabbered excitedly at their fellows and pointed to the opened half-door of the galley.

The vicious squall and mutiny struck the schooner at the same instant.

With reports like the barking of seventy-fives the jib carried away and the unfurled section of the fores'l bellowsed and split. The ship heeled over and took solid water over the rail.

“Cookee put-um one piecee poison by coffee,” the yellow man next to Spike at the fores'l boom bawled as he quit work and joined his fellows in a rush on the galley. Knives glittered in the fists of two of the attackers; windlass staves came out of their rack to arm the rest.

Mr. Hansen at the wheel permitted himself to slip into a Scandinavian panic, all the more complete because rare, and to quit his post with the wheel hastily and insecurely lashed. He charged bellowing down on the knot of coolies vainly trying to storm over the galley's half-door.

Spike leaped into the mêlée bare handed. No loyalty to Captain Judah or his schooner prompted him. Hardly the sense of race loyalty—defending a white man in the galley against yellow men storming his stronghold. Just the lure of a fight called him; primitive instinct to do battle.

The struggle at the galley door was necessarily brief. Angelo met the charging Chinamen with a pailful of scalding water. Even as he leaned over the half-door to get full swing with his pail a knife slit one arm from wrist to elbow. He spit like a cat, whirled and seized a meat cleaver from its rack over the chopping block.

Before he could wield it the heeling of the schooner sent the whole milling crew—Hansen, Spike and six Chinamen—sliding down into the waist-deep wash of a boarding wave. This was the scene Doctor Chitterly burst out upon. A clout on the head knocked out the mate—he would have drowned had not Spike with a mighty effort hooked one limp arm through the lanyards of the mainmast shrouds—and Spike was left to face alone six scalded Chinks gone wild.

There Captain Judah found him when he erupted on deck under the magic compulsion of a boiled cigar. His schooner wrecked, his crew in mutiny and this wolf pup Horn fighting for him, fighting like a fiend from the pit—that's the way the picture looked to Captain Judah.

One eye swiftly roved to catch the giant figure of Doctor Chitterly, now at the wheel. The skipper drew his revolver, clubbed it and slid hell-bent into the ruction. That finished it. The Celestials would not stand up against authority. They quit cold.

“Get for'ard, you swine, and hoist the stays! Horn, give Mr. Chitterly a hand at the wheel—steady as she goes.”

In ten minutes the last of the squall had blown. itself out, and the Lonney Lee under double reefed mains'l and with the single stays'l to steady her was running before a lively breeze mounting almost to a gale. Tattered canvas was stowed under gaskets. The vessel was shipshape.

Captain Judah beckoned Spike aft. Still bloodied from the fight and the old glint of defiance in his eyes, Horn stood before him.

“Horn,” began the skipper's mild voice, “any idea what started that ruckus with the Chinks?”

“Yes.” Spike steadfastly refused to append the “sir” of sea usage. “One of 'em said that crazy Dago cook put poison in the coffee.”

“Ah! Did you taste the coffee served at noon mess?”

“Yes,”

“Taste all right to you, Horn?”

“Sure; two cups worth of right.”

Captain Judah's eyes half closed as he put two and two together and came to the sum of a flute player's iniquity. He smiled at the battle stained youth before him.

“Do you smoke cigars, Horn?” he purred.

“When I cam get 'em.”

“Horn, I think yeu saved Mr. Hansen's life. Not worth much, but of course valuable to him. And you did a great deal to save my ship. Will you accept a box of my cigars and forget bygones?”

“No,” said Spike.