The Harvesting (Rowland)

by Henry C. Rowland

Illustration: “Gentle with the lady.”

 

THE HARVESTING

By Henry C. Rowland

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. J. PECK

“Say,” said the ex-clerk Lansing, alias “Danny the Rat,” as his soft, white hands closed numbly around the frost rimmed butts of the oars, “this second-story work from two to four, wind and tide permittin', ain't what I'm used to; I quit after this job, that's right—” he was grumbling on when Murphy interrupted him with a jolt between his shoulders.

“Shut up,—here' s somebody a-comin'!”

Both men crouched lower in the boat, and Murphy, gripping an icy spile, passed them beneath the planking of the jetty. The ebbing tide made fine crackling sounds as it oozed from the rotten timbers, and the only other noise was the hiss of Murphy's breath, blown in quick steam-jets through his freezing moustache.

Hurrying footsteps clattered like castenets on the frost-shrunk planking of the pier; overhead the full moon hung high in the zenith; beneath it a roaring wind cut its icy way through the clear, glittering atmosphere. The water of the inlet, tourmaline in the lee of the shore, was farther out like snow on sapphires.

The swift footsteps slapped louder on the frozen boards; men hurrying flat-footedly and panting beneath a heavy burden; accompanying there were lighter footfalls.

“There's somebody with 'em,” whispered the sharp-sensed clerk. He raised his ferret face cautiously above the rim of the plank-walk.

“Gee,” he whispered, “where 'd ye ketch the fairy?”

“Huh,” panted the larger of the men, “Huh, git the boat 'longside, can't ye—huh,” he was breathing fast and heavily, and the sweat on his thick-muscled face glistened in the moonlight. One hand gripped several parts of tarred rope slung about a small safe carried between the two men; with the other hand he clutched the arm of a woman, half dragged behind the two, and in danger of being crowded into the water.

Lansing drew back. “Hol' on,” he snarled, “I ain't in for no kidnappin'.”

“You'll be in fer ten years, you fool, if you ain't quick with that boat—huh,” panted Salters.

Murphy, quietly ready, slid the boat from under the jetty.

“Take the girl—huh—,” wheezed Salters, and swung her down by the arm to Murphy, who coolly tossed her into the bow.

“Gentle with the lady!” snapped a hard voice from above.

“Oh, she's all right,” panted Salters. “Now, then, matey—hell, but she's heavy,—now, Masters,—heave-o—huh, heave-o—luk out below.”

Down came the safe with a crash, ripping out part of the gunnel and splintering a thwart; the noise had scarcely died away when sharp footsteps rang out on the shoreward end of the jetty. Four dark figures slipped from behind the oar-locker, and frozen moonlight glinted from polished metal. Salters saw it first, slipped a revolver from the pocket of his overcoat, aimed carefully and fired.

A man whirled sideways, and would have fallen into the water had not the others grasped his arm; holding his companion, he began to shoot; Salters fired twice again and missed, and then there came at his shoulder four reports, and the assailants were down to a man each with a wound between knee and ankle.

“Come on,” cried Salters, and followed Masters into the boat. “Here, gimme them oars,—here comes some more—touch 'em up again, matey.”

Lights had begun to flash from windows near by; men were running swiftly along the water-side; the wounded on the jetty were shooting from where they lay, and their bullets were cutting the water close to the boat; one knocked a splinter from the blade of an oar, but beneath the bull-like strength of Salters the boat was swiftly drawing away. She cleared the lee of the shore, and the first gusts of the roaring north wind smote down over the the drab, vacant caravanseries; the greenly silver moon painted objects in vivid pallor, uncouth outlines of the shore, the damaged boat, the cruel faces of the men, all with sinister exaggeration.

The alarm was now general, and they saw black figures streaking moonlit spaces and swallowed in the shadows beyond. Ahead of them, a black hull blotted the bridge of the moon.

“Huh,—huh,—huh,” panted with each heavy stroke, and from somewhere in the shadow he was answered by a series of staccato coughs.

“Huh!” panted Salters, in an altered tone, an ugly tone, and broke into labored profanities, “they got a gasoline boat.”

“Ah, so have we,—and we got our guns, too!” snarled Murphy. “Masters can use his'n all right-o; you got them fellers in one, two, three order.”

“Oh, they ain't hurt much,” Masters. “I didn't shoot to kill; jes' winged 'em like.”

The beat of the distant engine grew louder; farther up the inlet a moving white object flashed in the moonlight.

“One o' them oyster tugs,” said Murphy, in a tone of relief.

The grip of the ebb tide whirled them down swiftly to along black hull which was edging back and forth, tugging at her hawser, impatient to be off with the tide and the gale; she was an able vessel, built to carry sail beneath such breezes as then blew. Her spars were naked of canvas, and a raised wheel-house showed that she carried power. Fifty or sixty bushels of frozen oysters were still strewn about her ample decks.

“One o' you fellers cut her loose,” gasped Salters, gripping the high bulwarks in his gorilla hand. “Lansing, hitch the boat while I start the ingyne—”

Murphy ran forward, Lansing seizing the stiff painter let the small boat slew astern, and Masters, reaching down, lifted the woman in his muscular arms and swung her to the deck.

“Gee!” sniggered Lansing, “I'd fergot the canary!”

“Jes' cinch up that mug o' yours, pardner,” said Masters quickly, and his words carried the dangerous drawl of the Southwest. “Set here a minute, miss,” he said in a voice of such gentleness that the Rat began to snigger again.

“Hey, there, gimme a hand to cut this — — rope,” snarled Murphy from forward. Masters leaped to his aid. “Me hands is that numb I can't open me knife,” said Murphy. Masters whipped a blade from his belt and drew it across the tense hawser, which parted, a strand wiping the skin from Murphy's jaw. Less than a quarter of a mile up stream the oyster tug was racing down on the brim of the ebb tide.

“Chug-chug, chug-chug, chug-chug,” thumped their own engine, as Salters set in motion the heavy flywheel, and successive explosions began to heat the powerful cylinders. Salters leaped into the wheelhouse and began to shove down the spokes, the sloop turned in a wide arc and a moment later was racing out to sea,

Masters glanced astern toward the pursuers, almost indifferently; he started ahead with a leaping heart; the ocean was there; the ocean of which he had heard so much, dreamed so many times, and never seen! Then his roving eye fell upon the huddled figure of the girl and his face lost its eager intensity and became kind. He stepped quickly to her.

“Come down in the cabin, miss,” he said. “It's right cold out here.”

A pallid face was turned up to him and Masters grew suddenly embarrassed at something which the moonlight showed him there; he had been on guard at the doorway when she had surprised Salters in the study; “French maid,” Salters had growled, as he emerged from the house with the woman, terrified to muteness. “If we leave her here all hands gets nabbed.” Now, as he looked down at her, whatever of chivalry there was in Masters recognized the caste and felt the blood in his face.

He began to stammer, '“I—er—Salters said you was a French maid, ma'am. You know,” he went on eagerly, “we didn't want to carry you off none, but we was afraid to leave you behind.”

“Where are you taking me?” she asked in a trembling voice.

“Oh, we're jes' runnin' away, I reckon,” said Masters reassuringly. “Don't worry, ma'am, you'll be all right; you come down in the cabin now. I reckon this boat has a cabin, hain't she?”

He spied the companionway and led her below. Striking a match, he discovered a lamp slung in gimbles from the bulkhead; a small stove, which glowed a dull red, made the cabin more than comfortably warm but not disagreeable to one coming from a temperature of perhaps ten degrees.

Masters lit the lamp and looked about with involuntary interest.

“Say,” he cried impulsively, “this is right cosy, ain't it?”

The note of unmistakable interest aroused the woman from herself. She stared at the young man curiously. A hoarse voice came down from above.

“Hey, Masters, come on up. Them fellers is a-gainin' on us.”

“'Xcuse me, ma'am,” said Masters and climbed to the deck. Murphy pointed astern; in the blaze of the moonlight the vessel pursuing seemed very close; at the least she had shortened the separating distance.

Masters regarded her with a cool, calculating eye; often he had shot coyotes in the lambent moonlight of the plains, and now it seemed to his skilled estimation that the black cluster on her forward deck loomed larger than any coyote. Yet animosity was lost in interest; he noted how the full moon hung right above her derrick, how the churning waves on either side crumbled astern as she clove them in a widening mass of snowy foam, how she crowded ahead, overtaking those fleeing waves, and rode them down as one might ride down a flock of fleeing sheep. He did not want to kill; he wanted to watch, to observe, to admire! And then, as his gray eyes swept rapturously over the scene, he noticed a slim tower of inestimable height which clove the milky blackness of the sky astern and from the top of which there gleamed a flash which seemed to dazzle the eyes of the moon.

Salters had come on deck to stare astern with lurid eyes. Masters turned to him.

“Say,” he cried, “what's that bright light atop o' that chimney?” For the slimness of the tower was less, it seemed to him, than many of the smelting flues which he had seen.

“Huh!” panted Salters, for Salters was of the panting type and would always pant whether he rode or raced or turned the slow wheels of his mental machinery. “Huh!” said he contemptuously, pausing to add with falling inflection an accent of contempt, “Huh!”

Six reports from the pursuers came in quick succession, splinters flew; Murphy, at the wheel, cursed; Salters stepped behind the wheelhouse, coveting the cover of seven-eighths-inch pine. Masters, a fine target in the full blaze of the moon, spun his forty-four by the trigger guard on his index finger and measured the distance again.

“Them fellers is gainin',” snarled Salters, “the ingyne ain't workin' like she'd oughter. Why don't you open up on 'em, Masters, you're such a dandy with a gun?”

“All right, old pard—” answered Masters indifferently. He sauntered aft and stood by the taffrail, reckless, light-hearted, in a rollicking mood born of this new, strange, exhilarating experience, the salt icy spray, the tumbling tide-rip through which they swashed; he threw his weapon above his head and stood a sharp target against the glaring white of the deckhouse.

Three shots from the tug cut close. “Look out boys!” called Masters and began to shoot “into the bunch,” as he would have said. Men dropped behind the bulwarks, some of their own accord, some of his; then, when he had emptied his big revolver he noticed that the beat of his own engine had altered in rhythm, Previously it had sung: “Juba-this, Juba-that, Juba-had-yellow-cat.” What it now said was: “Juba-this, Juba-that Juba-this, Juba-that,” and no mention whatever was made of the yellow cat. Interested in this phenomenon, Masters looked at the engine room and saw Salters hovering over the machine, spanner in one hand, can in the other, scraping wires with his knife, and soon he noticed that the oyster tug, whatever that might be, got no nearer.

“She ain't sparkin' right—them dynamos is on the bum—” he heard Salters complaining below, and then it occurred to him that the woman in the cabin might be frightened at the sound of firing and he hastened to reassure her.

As he went below she shrunk away from him; it was an imperceptible movement but his frontiersman's sensibilities had in many ways the keen edge of a child's.

“Don't you be afraid, ma'am,” he said comfortingly, “that shootin' was just a little fun. There's some boys a-chasin' us on a sort of little tug boat and since they got shootin' I kinder returned the compliment.”

“Was—was any one hurt?” she asked tremulously.

“I reckon not, I wa'an't tryin' very hard. It's most too pretty a night to kill people,” he continued cheerfully. “Too bad it's so cold, though; you'd ought set up there and see them big waves! Why even this ship's beginnin' to rock! There 'd you feel that?” he cried excitedly. “Did you feel her tip? There she goes agen!” He leaned toward her, his eyes sparkling like a boy's, one hand steadying himself against the bulkhead. The woman stared at him curiously.

“You are not used to the sea?” she asked, and her voice had lost its tremble.

Masters laughed. “Me? I never saw it until to-day. I declare, I never did think they was that much water in the world!” He laughed again. His face darkened suddenly and he turned away, embarrassed.

“I'm a cattleman,” he said “I got in some trouble out there and then met up with Salters who was layin' low down in Sonora. He got me into this, not that I'm kickin' any,” he went on hastily, “only I wouldn't ha' stood for carryin' off any ladies if I'd knowed it in time. But never mind, ma'am, don't you worry none, I'll make it my partic'lar business to see that you get back home all right and mighty soon at that!”

“Listen!” she cried suddenly, raising her hand. Six quick reports came down on the rush of the icy wind and the last brought with it a scream, muffled but shocking. Masters sprang for the ladder and reached the deck in time to see Murphy pitched headforemost through the open door of the wheel house to the deck. Salters was peering at him from the shelter of the hatch. Masters rolled the prostrate man on his back.

“Cashed in,” he observed to Salters.

“Now who's goin' to steer!” growled Salters angrily. “Lansing's sick as a fool an' I got to run the engyne.”

Master's eyes sparkled. “Don't ye reckon I could if you showed me how to do it?” he asked with eager diffidence. There were four bullet holes through the light structure of the wheel house; Masters felt that to stand there, the wheel in his hands, successfully directing the course of that great vessel, would be the proudest achievement of his life.

“Come in an' try then,” grunted Salters and leaped across the deck and up to the wheel with a nimbleness surprising in a man of his burly size. Masters followed eagerly.

“Git a-hold of her—huh,” panted Salters, breathless again. “Now twist her the way you want her to go—head for that star where she's pintin' now.”

“Over-top o' that pole on the front of her?”

“Huh—that's it, now twist her a leetle this way—huh—you don't need to twist the wheel offen her—huh!”

Satisfied that the man's intelligence was equal to the novel task, Salters climbed below to the warm engine room; Masters, grinning with delight, utterly unmindful of occasional bullets ripping past him, held the wheel in an ecstacy. A few minutes later the firing grew more distant, when Salters returned to see how the raw helmsman fared.

“Why it's easy as ropin' a steer,” cried Masters, proudly delighted.

“Huh—she's beginnin' to go,” grumbled Salters. “Oncet them engynes gits het up she'll run like a scart dog,” he added.

“Lord o' love!” cried Masters, “jes' luk at them waves! Ain't they dandies?” he glanced over the starboard bow and almost yelled with excitement at what loomed suddenly on the sky line.

“Hey, Salters—what's that thing?—iceberg?”

“Huh—schooner tackin' in-shore here where it's still water,” answered the other, and climbed below to the hot, oily comfort of the engine room. Lansing was there, all but comatose from nausea.

Masters gripped the little wheel in a glory of achievement. He had awaited the charge of a grizzly on foot, with a rifle in his hands; he had fled across the bad lands with a sheriff and a posse at his heels. He had helped to hold up the “Limited,” and had “rustled” many a cow ... but this, ah, this was different! This was life! This soaring through the glittering, star-flecked, spray-flown night with the white seas crashing on either side, and a vast, vague, limitless expanse of ocean ahead! This ocean, previously to him a myth, a term, now encompassed him; his little life lay in its great grasp; here before him there loomed a ship, a great ocean-traversing ship; he looked at her as much as he dared to lift mind and eye from his task. Perhaps she was coming from Africa, from Asia, from South America, dreamwords all, mere names, yet to-night sharp and real; he glanced toward her again; she was nearer now, and he could see her gossamer rigging and black sails silhouetted against the bright sky; in the shadow her port light glowed like a ruby,—ah, it was all so sharp and real that it sent quivers down his spine and under his shoulder-blades,—and then, mindful of his charge, his keen eyes swept back to the bow of his own vessel as it wove figures on the white horizon. His straight brows came lower, and the thin lips compressed from the intensity of his effort to hold a true course; it was not that he dreaded capture or the shots which had ceased without his observance; it was the desire to do the thing well in the face of this great, watchful element to whom he was a stranger.

And this criticism was far from friendly; the waves rolled higher as he drove on seaward; there was a fantastic motion to his vessel which delighted him. He suffered from no nausea. He had heard tales of ships and the sea, of huge fabrics tossed like chips in a rain barrel, seas mountains high; he had pictured them far higher than these, but quite different, less substantial, less steep, less swift and vindictive; he had never reckoned the ponderosity of mere water. He felt no fear, only an intense concern for his responsibility.

A little later Salters came into the wheelhouse.

Illustration: Salters came into the wheelhouse.

“What's all this you been tellin' that fairy about seein' her safe home?” he demanded roughly of Masters, who had rather expected a little appreciation of his skill as a helmsman.

The cowboy's head revolved slowly until his face was almost against that of the older man, and all that was criminal in him lurked in the lines about the hard mouth, narrowed eyes and high cheek bones. It was his fate, had been in the past his fate to hear the wrong words just at the wrong time; many a dog is spoiled in this way.

“That's somethin' we'll discuss when we get to the aidge of the timber, Mr. Salters, sir.” He answered in a dry voice of ill-omened politeness.

“That's somethin' we'll discuss right now,” blustered Salters, beginning to pant.

“All right, Mr. Salters,” said the cowboy. “Go ahead an' discuss then, an' be d— to you.” He looked a slightly twisted the wheel, but his vision was to the side as well as the fore. Salters began to sound. Master's face was now purely criminal.

“Lansing says he heard you promisin' her to see she got back home.”

“Lansing's got years like a jack rabbit, hain't he?” said Masters pleasantly. “They sort o' pint up and give away his location. He oughter be careful though thet what goes in his years don't get lost out o' his mouth.”

“Huh,” panted Salters, watching him from his red little eyes.

“She ain't no French maid, Salters; she's the lady of that there house,” continued the cow-boy, on whom the witchery of the night acted for pacification.

“Huh,” said Salters, mistaking the motive of friendliness, “huh, you just find that out? You're a green guy, all right.”

Again Masters turned in that slow manner and looked at the other quietly and at close range, then returned to his scrutiny of the sea ahead.

“Maybe, Mr. Salters,—maybe,—but bein' that green, would you mind tellin' me your plans for the lady?” The thin voice was honey-sweet; the criminal face homicidal.

“My plans is to hang onto her as long as there's any danger of gettin' pinched,” growled Salters. “To-morrow night if we ain't took we c'n slip into the sounds and up some crik where we c'n lie quiet and peaceful; then maybe after a while if the lady's friends want to pay the freight they c'n have her back, and if they don't—”

“Say,” said Masters, in a pleasant tone of admiring interest, “was this your plan the whole time?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” Master's voice was cheerfully reminiscent. “I have known some stinkers in my time, but if you ain't the boss hydrophoby cat o' the bunch, I'll eat my gun! Why you ornery, low-down, female-stealin' thief, is this what you brought me all the way from Sonora for?” He turned suddenly, and even Salters, mud-brain that he was, read the expression of his face. He backed hurriedly down the ladder, and, with one foot on the last rung, half-turned and slid his right hand into his side pocket and cuddled the revolver. The cow-boy was facing him, both hands still gripping the spokes of the wheel, but the keen eyes were watching for the muscular contraction which in a man of Salter's massive strength must precede any effort; when it came, the long Colt was out before the revolver of the other man was pointed, but the two reports blended in one. Salters' bullet passed through the roof of the wheel house; Master's powder burned Salters' eyebrows, but the splash of the big body as it went backwards over the rail was lost in the crash of the seas under the full bilges, and for a moment Masters pondered the circumstance with thoughtful interest.

“Which leaves me and the green-gilled tenderfoot,” he mused, and was turning the situation in his mind and wondering how long the engine would run untended when the door of the wheelhouse was shoved gently back and he looked down to see the lady standing at the foot of the ladder.

“Come in, ma'am,” he said, hospitably, and clinging to his precious wheel with one sinewy hand, reached to assist her with the other. “'Xcuse me, but you see I got to keep her pintin' like she is or you can't tell what might happen. Them waves is gettin' awful big.”

She stepped in, swinging the door behind her. “You need not be so anxious,” said she, and Masters was puzzled at the irony of her tone. “They have turned back.”

“Who? Oh, you mean the tug?” He laughed. “I declare, I fergot all about her!” He stared ahead.

“Where are you going?” she asked presently.

“That's what I'd like to know!” His voice was jocosely frank. “I've got to keep her goin' like she is or she might swamp.”

“What nonsense!” she answered sharply. “This is a big, able boat; a little sea like this could do her no harm!”

“It can't!” cried the cowboy in amazement. “Little sea—ah, you're jokin'.”

“Indeed I am not! I am used to boats; my husband has a yacht about the size of this. The waves seem big to you because you have never been on deep water; as a matter of fact they are not at all dangerous.”

Masters stared at her in sheepish dismay. To see the delicate woman at his side view the appalling surroundings not only with utter lack of fear but even with familiarity smote him with amazement and respect.

“I reckon you're right, ma'am,” he answered with a shamefaced laugh. “I kinder thought this was right dangerous. One of these big waves might come on board like—” he glanced at her hopefully and with an odd shyness; it had never been his part to magnify a possible danger.

“It would do no harm if one did,” she answered, “indeed, I expect that a good many may break aboard when you turn around.” She looked him steadily in the face.

Masters did not meet her eyes; he stared straight out across the combing crests of the waves towards the crimson glow fast brightening in the eastern sky; then he turned to her slowly, and the ruddy lights ahead shone full on his swarthy weatherbeaten cheeks; the cold gray eyes in their criminal setting met hers quite steadily and the merciless, homicidal mouth was twisted into a wry smile.

“I hadn't thought much about goin' back. It seems like runnin' a fellow's head into a noose ca'am and deliberate; I reckon I got a couple of them fellows last night, maybe,” he pondered the lights on the sea painted by the growing day.

“You will not be running your head into a noose if you go back of your own accord,” she said. “I can testify that you did not attempt to escape—that you refused to have any part in kidnapping a woman. Now that one of these men has been killed.”

“Two,” corrected Masters laconically. “The big fellow, him we called Salters tried to get gay—wanted to lug you off up some crik and keep you there until your folks unloosened. I wouldn't stand for that,—we fit, and he got the worst of it. My! ain't that pretty in front of us!”

The woman shivered. “I ought to thank you,” she said feverishly, “but the other man—there were four, were there not? Can't you persuade him to go back too?”

“Oh, he don't need no persuadin'; he ain't no account anyhow; why, he's sea sick down there in the engine room,” answered the cow-boy with infinite scorn. “He's just a ornery sort of sneak thief; he was tellin' last night how he yanked some earrings out of a pretty gal's years while she was a-wearin' them. Where I come from a boy that owned up to a thing like that wouldn't last as long as a snake on a hog ranch. Say ma'am—just look yonder. Ain't that a sight.”

The high north wind had been falling rapidly since the dawn, far seaward a lee set of haze was hung like a veil to dim the edge of the horizon; through this the great, crimson sun hauled out in sharp and lurid outline and stretched across to paint the dying breeze a rosy pink. Above it, giant rays shot to the zenith.

Masters stared in silent awe until the great disk had lifted clear of the sea; then he turned quietly to his companion

“Say,” his voice was slightly hushed, “this thing is bigger than I am—makes me feel kinder mean and ornery and count. Say, I'm a-goin' to take you straight back home.”

 

Lansing, the ex-clerk, listening at little trap through which the wheelman might communicate with the engineer, heard the decision with a snarl upon his white, drawn face. Thanks to the falling sea he was convalescent of his sea sickness but a fresh paroxysm overcame him as the boat turned to meet the heavy swell head-on.

In a few minutes he returned, cold to the bone, pallid, a-quiver to the seats of his feeble strength with fright of every racking impulse, loose nerves a-jangle, yet sustained by the rat-like courage vouchsafed to the cornered coward.

He slunk back now to his former position, although there was slight need of slinking. Lansing nevertheless slipped with stealth and a shaking diaphragm to a position which brought his face against the little aperture. The wheel house was above and just forward of the engine room, and to maintain the proper elevation Lansing stood with one foot upon the starboard bed plate and the other resting by the rim of the boot sole against the nut on one of the bolts which held the engine to its frame.

Through this trap he was able to see the ankles of the woman who was nearer to him than the cowboy; the latter fell within his vision as high as the lower rim of the shoulder blade. It was just at this point, where Master's serge cloak hung slack, and well to the left, that Lansing fired.

The smoke of the first shot obscured his view; then through the bluish haze he caught a glimpse of a vague figure reeling to the heave of the boat, and fired again; perhaps he might have fired at the woman also, crazed as he was, but here the vibration of the engine jarred his boot sole from the nut.

The upward thrust of the pump eccentric rod let the life out of him as he fell; the reversing clutch gathered him in—and although his first bullet had found the cowboy's heart, it is doubtful if his mistaken soul was garnered the sooner.

It was nearly noon when the disabled vessel was boarded by the mate of a coasting steamer; in the cabin he found a nerve strained woman huddled in a little heap, her head between her hands.