The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
THE PRIMORDIAL HOUR
It was nothing but an eye-glance that passed between Alicia and McKinnon. Yet in that fraction of a second intimacies flashed between them, a message was delivered and received, the encouragement of one lonely soul offering its help to another was cryptically given and taken. It showed her, too, that judgment and intelligence were once more on their throne with her ally, that he was no longer beating and threshing his way about on the primordial sloughs of mere assault and defence. He was a thinking being once more, with his own secret ends and his own secret means to them. And she was sick of the primordial; every woman's fibre in her body was offended and felt degraded by that caveman's hand-to-hand fight through which she had passed.
The shaking-limbed captain had swung about on McKinnon.
"Have you picked up anything about fightin' in there?" he demanded, with his guttural running obligate of mariner's oaths. "Or have you been too taken up with your own fightin'?"
"I've picked up nothing," was McKinnon's answer.
"Then why can't you get Guariqui?"
The ship's master was still slow in grasping the situation.
"I tell you we're cut off from everything! My responder's gone!"
"Can't you fix it?"
"No!"
"You can't?"
"Not unless there's a De Forest responder brought aboard from Puerto Locombia."
"Can't you shift without it?"
"No more than you can live without a heart."
The captain turned on the strangely placid-eyed and listening Ganley. The latter's indifference seemed to sting him into a renewed ecstasy of anger.
"You'll cool your heels in the Puerto Locombia quartel for this," he declared, with another of his explosive oaths. "I'll damned soon hand you over where you belong!"
His threat had no ponderable effect on his placid-eyed listener. The gun-runner's heavy face, with its houndlike, pendulous jaws, and the drooping-lidded, deep-set eyes, with their misleading look of pathos, seemed to show nothing but a patient forbearance.
"I want you to get that couple where they belong," he calmly and slowly replied. "I want that woman put where she won't be taking potshots at every passenger she doesn't like!"
The waiting and wide-eyed group at the door had increased by this time, until their bodies, pressing close, shut all air from the crowded cabin. The captain shouldered them back savagely. That his authority should be overridden, in his own ship, on his own deck, was more than he could endure.
"Get out o' here!" he cried, in his arbitrary and inconsequential rage. "Get out o' this cabin, or I'll throw you out!"
The ship's mate, a wiry Costa Rican with the hungry and predaceous face of a pirate, made an effort to forestall his superior officer's intention. He dropped the leather-covered bridge-telescope which in his haste he had carried with him, and caught the rebellious passenger by the right arm, as though to drag him forth.
But one sweep of that huge right arm sent the mate stumbling and falling over the ruins of the steamer-chair.
Captain Yandel beheld that offence, and it left him no longer a reasoning being. His last instinctive sense of order and right had been outraged. He caught up the leather-covered bridge-telescope. He swung it circlingly back, above his head, as a blacksmith swings a sledge. He would have brought that poised cylinder of glass and steel blindly down on the other man's skull, had the ship's mate not caught the end of the telescope and stopped the murderous blow.
"You coward!" said Ganley, without moving. The two ship's officers still stood there, automatically and blindly and grotesquely contending for the cylinder of leather-covered steel.
"Not that way," cried the mate. "Don't kill him!"
"Yes, I'll kill him!" raged the captain. "I'll kill him any way he wants!"
"Then fight it out on deck—fight it out like men!"
"Fight it out!" echoed a half-caste deck-hand, shrilly, carried away by his feelings, as the crowd surged out into the open spaces of the star-lit deck.
"Yes, fight it out, by God!" bellowed the infuriated and unreasoning ship's captain, peeling off his coat and waving back the circle of onlookers. "Fight it out, like men!"
Heilig, the chief-engineer, pushed through the protesting crowd.
"Captain," he said in his slow and gloomy monotone, "what call've yuh got to go prize-fightin on your own ship?"
"Shut up!" howled back his superior officer. "Get back!"
"Why're yuh fightin with a he-rhinoceros like him?" persisted the other.
"Get back! Gi' me room!"
The gloomy misanthrope of the engine-room did not move. He stood regarding the circle with calm and scoffing eyes.
"It ain't fittin'," he slowly objected. "And it ain't right!"
"Right? I know my rights!" yelped back Captain Yandel, waving the interloper aside.
He rolled up his sleeves, with shaking hands, disclosing strangely fashioned tattooed figures on his thick and hirsute forearms.
McKinnon closed the door, that the woman in the cabin might not see. There was the sound of a boatswain's whistle, a murmur of voices, a quick shuffling of feet. A space was cleared on the deck, promptly, solemnly, as though for the despatch of some casual and duly appointed ship's business. Then the circle re-formed, watching and silent, waiting with set faces, for what was to come. And McKinnon saw that it was indeed to come, that there was no escaping it.
For one moment only did Ganley hesitate. Just once did the deepset and malicious little eyes shift in one sidelong glance of hesitancy. McKinnon, from his cabin door, could see that look. He could see the change of colour that crept slowly up through the gun-runner's flaccid face. It did not blanch, but it merged from a brick-dust tint to the dead-brown hue of untanned leather. It became cadaverous, and horrible to look at. Even then he must have seen and known that it was all madness, that it was more than useless, that it solved no problems and settled no issues. But he had no choice left to him.
McKinnon's first thought, as he watched, was that Ganley would never fight fair. Then he beheld the close-packed circle of rough and waiting faces, of bare-armed and hard-eyed watchers—for even the stokers' hole had vomited forth its soot-streaked, naked-shouldered children of wonder—and he knew that the gun-runner could gain nothing by trickery. The ferine and active brain housed in the great sun-browned skull would be of no use to him in this. The adroit and vulpine intelligence beyond its screening frontal bone could now flash out no path of deliverance. He was confronted by passions that were adamitic in their primitiveness, by forces that belonged to the world of claws and tusks and talons.
Then the two men fought.
It seemed grotesque, at first, to the wearied and indifferently watching McKinnon. It made him think of a combat between two butchers, two gross butchers clad in white. There was something ludicrous in the two heavy and lurching and staggering bodies, lunging at each other, like Pleistocene beasts from the twilight of time, like primordial monsters in the bitter and brutal combat of bitter and brutal ages. The sweat oozed out on their skins. It diamonded their faces. Then the beads of moisture ran together, and gathered into slow runnels that smarted in their eyes and moistened their necks and dripped on their clothing, mottled more and more with splashes of red.
Then it became brutish. It became blind and ponderous, like a bull-fight. It impressed McKinnon as something wordlessly pathetic, it was so useless and unreasoning, so futile and foolish, in the face of all the vaster problems that confronted that lonely steamship and the lives she carried. It did not horrify him, for by this time he was beyond horror, as a swimmer is beyond thought of a passing rain-shower.
Then it became sickening. The impact of bone and flesh on flesh and bone seemed demeaning and dehumanising to the dazed and shrinking onlooker. The hot night air, which left breathing a burden to even the untaxed lungs, made the gasping of the two combatants audible and vocal, made it pitiful, like the gasps of the drowning, made it short and guttural, like the tongue-choked chest heaves of an anæsthetised patient. The fighters became two vaguely heaving and gasping white hulks blotched with blood. There seemed something more than sinister in their dogged persistence. It became satanic. It grew into an affront to manhood, an insult to the quiet stars that looked down on it. It became a living nightmare, in which two coiled and striking and threshing Hates emerged from a slime that was antediluvian.
McKinnon turned away, sick and faint. For he had seen one of the red-blotched hulks fall back and lie full length on the deck. He had seen the Laminian's captain lean over that prostrate figure, weakly, swaying forward and then backward, where he would surely have fallen, had one of his sailors not caught him under the armpits and held him up. It was over.
McKinnon heard the guttering yelp of triumph, the unreasoning and vapid snarl of success, of the ship's master who had re-established his disputed mastership.