The Sea Wolves/Chapter 8
The hour which the men had spent in the cabin witnessed but little change in the path of the hurricane. There was, perhaps, a slight abatement in the velocity of the wind, and the black banks of cloud had burst asunder into great masses of rolling humidity, which showed other masses, and these of a purer grey or white, in the distance beyond them. Yet there was scarce a glimmer of sun, save for a space of five or six minutes, when a fan of spectral light shot down upon the green of the sea, dazzling with hues of sparkling brightness; but promising no fall of the gale nor moderation of the raging tempest. Everywhere the whited wave-caps tumbled joyously upon one another; everywhere the gigantic rollers made hills and valleys of green water, which swept the yacht and her pursuer onward as they would have swept a faggot of sticks or a board of wood. It was a scene worthy of the mighty grandeur of the Atlantic, of all the traditions of tempests which sweep upon her; but it had little charm for those upon the Semiramis nor, as one may know, for the hands of the cruiser, which then bore the whole brunt of the seas in the work which had fallen to her.
Burke's first question, when he got upon the bridge, was one concerning the gun which had just been fired, and whose smoke still lay upon the sea.
"You, there !" he cried. "Was that shell, or was it blarney?"
"It was a shell, sir," said the mate, Parker; "it just cleared the life-boat davits, sir, may it please you,"
"By thunder, it don't please me!" cried Burke. "What are they doing down below, the scum?"
At the words, he shouted down the tube for more coal, though the men were already reeling under the work, and the furnaces were white hot with an irradiant heat, which was almost unbearable in the stoke-hole. To hope for greater speed was the dream of a dreamer; yet, despite all that was being done, the two vessels maintained their relative places, and it had already become clear that, if there was no coming-between of chance, the yacht must be taken.
When Burke had exhausted his breath in childish abuse to his engineers, the humble mate, Parker, ventured to speak again.
"May it please you, sir, they're signalling," said he.
"Let 'em signal till blazes!" replied Burke ironically. "Do you think ez I'm daft enough to parley with 'em? No, I reckon not!"
"They say—for I read their flags," continued the mate, disregarding his bluster—"that if you don't let them come aboard at once, they'll fire shell on you."
"They say that, do they?" replied Burke ironically. "Well, I guess I ain't a dictionary, but I've got a word to answer that. Clear the aft gun, there!"
The men rushed aft at his word and cleared the Nordenfelt quick-firing gun, seeming to find consolation in the work. There was not one among them that had yet seen an action, either afloat or ashore; and to such as these the fire from the Nero—for they now knew the name of the cruiser—was a terror which the excitement of reply alone could mitigate. Even the Scotchman breathed a breath of enthusiasm, and stood near the group of workers, shouting and gesticulating with an energy altogether foreign to his countrymen. And he was in the very throes of a wild speech of exhortation when the Nero fired, for the second time, as she rose upon a mighty wave, and her shell, striking the yacht abaft the engine-room, but well above the water-line, carried away the bulwarks and shivered the skylight of the saloon into countless atoms. For long moments after the loud report a cloud of thick choking smoke held down upon the deck of the yacht, but when it cleared away, three men lay dead of those about the gun, and the Scotchman was not to be seen. He had stood at the very point of contact, and the bursting shell had blown his body into the sea.
When the whole havoc and destruction following this—in one sense—lucky shot was to be reckoned, the fear of the crew passed quickly to wild rage. Men, roaring like beasts, began to work the Nordenfelt wildly, or shook their fists in savage rage, or begged for liquor in the moments when reaction brought a new terror. The very deck they worked on was all slippery with foam and wet, making passage difficult, and the splinters of the broken woodwork, splashed with the blood of the dead, washed about in little pools near the scuppers.
As for the poor fellows who had gone down, they let them lie where they fell, their protruding eyes looking up with a glassy and rigid gaze to the heaven they could not see; their bodies rolling with the way of the ship, or even being trodden upon by the maddened brutes over whom the pall of capture loomed so threateningly. All this time the bellowing of Burke upon the bridge was scarcely audible in the shriek of the wind, which seemed to gather new strength from its momentary rest. The scattered billows of cloud were now bound together by the hurricane in an arc of dense blackness, whence the rain descended, and whipped the faces of the men until both they and those upon the cruiser abandoned all attempts at further exchange of shell and shot, and went onward, onward, to the horizon of blackness and the very depths of the hurricane.
In this mutual truce before a greater power than man's the race went on until after one o'clock, at which time the Semiramis crossed the mouth of the English Channel, still running southward, having sighted the White Star liner Teutonic outward bound, and, at a later hour, the Cunarder Campania, making for Queenstown. Both ships were plunging into the huge seas in a way that betokened the strength of the west windy and were casting fountains of foaming spray from their prows, or being swept by the green water, which seemed to mount nearly to their hurricane-decks. But they stopped to exchange signals with the Nero and when Messenger saw it, he said—
"Burke, that's bad; we shall have a whole fleet at our heels in twenty-four hours."
"Maybe," said Burke; "but I dun know ez worse luck'll come of it. That ship yonder is the last thing the Britishers have done, or she'd never have kept her mark on me all these hours, I guess,"
"Wal, we've got to thank this handsome zephyr for something," interposed Kenner, who had been immovable at the door of the chart-room since he came upon the bridge; "if it hadn't blown wild cats since yesternight, I reckon there'd have been a swimming party."
"We'll fix it up yet if there's no more ideas among us than we've got now," said Messenger gloomily; but Burke took him up quickly, crying—
"I guess not. If there's eyes left in my head, she's tailing off. Which among you is bearing me witness?"
"Tailing off!" yelled Kenner. "Do you say so? God forgive you, I believe you're right!"
"He is right," said Messenger. "She's half-a-mile further off than she was an hour ago."
It is an old remark that in moments of great danger the least oscillation in the balance of fortune is construed by those whom it favours as a great victory. No sooner did the crew hear Hal's words than they shouted with a savage joy which was as repulsive as their ravings of an hour ago. Crowding upon the poop, in defiance of all discipline, they roared out wild defiance and brutal oaths, as though the wind would bear them to the distant vessel. Then, when they had run a signal upon the flag halyards, they lowered it and hoisted it to express their merriment; and a brute, exceeding the others in brutality, suggesting that they should show their dead, they triced up one of the bodies to the gaff and allowed it to swing in hideous mockery.
Through all this Burke was silent.
"They're letting the steam go," said he; "and if you don't want a scald, leave 'em be."
Meanwhile the fact that the yacht was distancing the Nero was indisputable. She must have been then three miles from her, and it seemed possible that before night she would have run right out of sight.
To Messenger the time looked more than opportune for the shoot from the shore; but Burke enlightened him with one of those surprises which he appeared to gloat over.
"You're a mighty smart talker ashore. Prince," said he; "but you ain't worth a dollar a month, let alone a dime, at this business. Do you think ez I'm going to shift for Montevideo with the matter of a hundred ton of coal aboard?"
"Then what are you going to do?" asked Messenger, a new fear seizing him.
"I'm going to coal at Corunna in Spain; and this fall of wind is going to help me."
"But you loaded up with enough for the passage!" cried Messenger. "That was all arranged!"
"At sixteen knots," answered Burke grimly, "not at twenty-two, d'ye see? And you've been having twenty-two since the middle of last night."
"I never thought of that," said the other. "It's one of the things I didn't take in."
"I should fancy not," said Burke, "We ain't all so clever, though our tongues is long. But you've got to think of it now."
"It's a bad business, any way," replied the Prince; and then, for the first time since he had come aboard, his face clouded, and he did not seem to hear what was said to him.