Wild Blood/Chapter 2

by Gordon Young

 

A BOTTLE OF GIN—OH-HO!

I FOUND Ben Hawkins with his back against a gum-stump, his legs spread before him, his hands folded across his belly. His head was bent forward as if in solemn contemplation of that imposing region inhabited by his stomach. But his eyes were shut.

Hawkins was a prodigious man. In weight he was elephantine; in appetite a python; in soporific tenacity he could have subbed for one of the Seven Sleepers. A wicked and slothful creature, who would eat and drink everything in sight if he wasn't watched.

He smoked an enormous pipe and other people's tobacco. His cheeks drooped; his abdomen bulged so overshadowingly that it was impossible for him to scratch his left knee with his right hand; and he was nearly as broad as he was tall.

Sometimes he combed his hair, but what was the use? It was curly. Occasionally he coaxed me to shave him because more than a four days' growth of beard made his face itch. Usually his face was thickly stubbed with short black hairs.

His voice was hoarse and subterranean. And I loved him as my brother from the first hour we met.

“Give me three pounds of tembac,” this strange mountain of a man had said to the nervous little blond cockney in a general store at the mines.

The tobacco was handed to him.

He weighed it studiously, then:

“Here, my man, I don't want this. Give me a square-face.”

The jumpy little clerk received the tobacco again and set a bottle of gin on the counter.

I was the other customer in the store.

“Red-Top, ever cheer your stomach with a drop of white-fire? From the looks o' you, you need one of my lamb stews. To make it proper you catch the lamb when the herder ain't lookin' an' hold him tight so the cussed thing won't baa-aa-a till you get a mile 'r so down the road. Best to bury head, hide and hoofs.

“If you'd move fast, I don't believe you'd cast a shadow! You need fattenin'.

“Bury head, hide and hoofs. Police 're awful nosey in this man's land. Then you dip up a little water, flavor same with a pint o' brandy borrowed from last station; cut up the two onions—nice fat fellows, borrowed from the same place; also the half dozen potatoes. Set the old iron kettle over a dry wood fire, and when she comes to a boil crumble in some o' that cheese borrowed from—don't make no difference what station.

“There's tucker for you! Look to me. My cookin' done that——”

And he tapped his noble belly in justifiable pride of large achievement.

“Start 'er, Red-Top, and take your fill. I never let go till bottom o' bottle, keg or barrel goes toward heaven.”

The clerk rather timidly offered a grimy cup, but the big man waved it away and pushed the bottle at me.

I drank and handed the bottle over to him. He was no idle boaster. He held the bottle at arm's length for a second or two like a fond lover anticipating the embrace, then raised it to his lips, took a mighty breath and drank, and drank, drank, and drank.

Slowly the bottom of that bottle crept upward and upward until, with him leaning far back as if trying to hide behind his own vast paunch, there was not a drop left. He straightened himself and puffed mightily, clapped the emptied bottle to counter and said:

“I like a bit of a swig 'fore dinner. Goin' down the street?”

We started off.

“Hi sye,” called the cockney, “w'at habout that gin?”

The mountainous man turned with stiffened shoulders, slowly, imposingly.

“Hyu dydn't pye me.”

“Pay you? Pay you?” said the strange fellow with deepening voice. “Didn't I give you the tembac for it?”

The cockney eyes and lips twitched for a moment in amazement; then—

“Hyu dydn't pye me for that!”

“Of course I didn't. I give it you for the square-face. Damn rotten stuff it was, too. Near gagged me. Think you tampered with it. Didn't you? Didn't you? I'll complain to the first trooper I see, an' you'll have to open another 'un and let him test it.

“My good freckled friend here'll testify I give you three pound o' tembac for a bad bottle o' gin. Rotten stuff, wasn't it?”

I affirmed that it was wretched stuff.

The poor cockney had a sort of cross-eyed expression on his face. He knew of course that someway he was being bilked, and he knew how, but he was just a little baffled as to the way to cut through and say so.

“Are you satisfied?” demanded my companion with a haughty depth of voice.

“Y-ice,” said the cockney. “Honly keep hout hof my plyce!”

“I will; indeed I will. No storekeeper can cheat me more than once,” Hawkins returned pompously.

Taking my arm forcibly, he strode out.

I murmured something of my admiration for his new and original method of evading the perils of thirst.

“No, no,” he rumbled. “Old Yankee trick. Useful in a pinch. I hadn't a shillin' and I had to have a drink. Good white-fire that.”

I agreed that it was.

“Shiver my jib-boom,” he said abruptly, stopping. “I'm a sea-captain. Avast the belayin'-pin and take two turns round the bobstay, lower away the ratlin' and—don't you believe it?”

From his pocket he pulled a flat oblong paper, neatly protected by fish skin.

“Here's a master's certificate to sail any ship he can get his feet on. Don't want 'o buy it, do you? I'm a starvin' man. Think o' the years I worked and toiled to get this little piece of paper I'm offering you for a guinea. You keep the paper for security. I couldn't part with it.

“You see b'fore you a perishin' fellow creature,” and he lowered his reverberant voice dolefully, at the same time endeavoring to draw his very fat face into an expression of despairing hunger.

But the strain was too great. He came out of his affected melancholy with a roar, a great internal explosion of laughter so that his body shook as if by an earthquake from within.

“Who did you steal this from?” I asked.

“Steal? Me? Sir!” Then, chuckling, “Taught a sailor to play poker and thought this might come in handy, seein' as he didn't have more money.”

I would guess that some seaman had robbed a skipper of his papers, probably for vengeance.

Having in mind that Douglas Moore might somehow find occasion to use that paper by way of credentials—though he never did—I promised the man a guinea, and added an invitation to eat with us. He had said he was broke. Besides I liked him.

“Take it,” he almost shouted with an impulsive gesture of two big hands. “Don't know one end of a ship from t'other. Just as soon go to hell as to sea.

“Shipped once. Boat went on a mud-bank. Captain had me running from one side t'other to work 'er off. Ever' time I go to sea, have to set on the main hatch to keep 'er from listin'.

“Went out on a yard—once. Got my feet wet. Hate ships. Never anything to eat on 'em. My name's Hawkins. Ben Hawkins. Burly Ben they call me—sometimes.

“I been called lots o' things. Sometimes I get excited an' set down on somebody. Silence.”

He said that last in a low, slow solemn voice, spreading his hands with a gesture, diminuendo.

“Got any tobacco?”

I offered him “niggerhead.”

Hawkins had been in the South Seas eighteen months or so, visited a few of the islands and come into Victoria to “look around.” So he said. But he was likely to say anything, with or without innocent intent. The zest of life was within him. He liked to talk, and with the breathless brevity of fat men made his sentences short.

Douglas Moore had thought it best to get far away from the place where he was known, at least for a while; so he came around to Melbourne and vicinity and brought me with him. Some years before when our acquaintanceship was new he had asked, “And will you keep sober?”

“I will not,” I told him.

“At least you are no liar,” he said with a queer gleam in his fierce eyes.

So in one way and another we had become something like friends. I asked no questions and he gave no information. He had a curious weakness for thinking I knew more than I did, and his orders were disconcertingly brief.

Tradition had it that Moore had amassed a fortune and hid it away—when he had to pay three prices for everything to anybody that would sell to him. Many men found it more profitable to be friendly with him than to snatch at the price on his head. For one thing it was convenient to have Moore to blame for their own crimes. For another, supposing he wasn't caught and learned who set officers in his wake? Moore stayed clear of white men as much as he could. He was called a renegade. Natives liked him. Plenty of natives would have given him up, but some would not. Many a chief lied for him, and native kings to a man almost were as his blood- brothers.

Gin and rifles? No doubt he did furnish those things more than was legal, perhaps more than was wise and proper. But he had overhauled more than one blackbirder and taken back the captives to their own beach.

To win favor with the natives? Perhaps. He knew, I knew, all who have been near them know, that natives are not innocent and guileless; not even the best of them. But the worst of them are loyal and generous—unless they have been too intimate with white men.

Time came when the devil seemed clamoring for pay, and Moore had got out of the islands and drifted like any other gold-hunter around to the bottom of Australia. I came along. So there we were when Hawkins loomed before the cockney clerk.

I brought Hawkins to our shack, and he ate everything in sight and called it a “snack.” Moore had looked him over hard and said nothing. Hawkins had stared at Moore and been quiet for an hour or so—perhaps because he had been eating.

I am about as thin as a hawser, and my joints are loose; so one evening when Moore was away two bushy roughs came by, and were not mistaken in thinking I was an easy one to dispose of, and that they might then plunder the shack.

Hawkins, inside in the dark, quietly, so he might accuse the rats of having made off with it, was eating a slab of “damper.” I had time to make one little squeak before a hangman's grip was around my neck—then a mountain came through the doorway. The two gentlemen who had thought to bail up our lonesome little place were spilled on the ground, and the weighty knee of Hawkins held first one and then the other while he proceeded to search.

Hawkins emptied their pockets and calmly appropriated the fair amount of dust he found on each. He called it “manna.” After which he hobbled the two gentleman together, and we marched them over the dark road three miles to a jail at the diggings.

The bushrangers protested indignantly that they had been robbed. Their mugs were against them. They were wanted men, and known to the constables.

And back we trudged, loaded down with gin, rum and tobacco; the necessities of life. We left to Moore the supplying of incidentals such as flour, sugar, mutton, bacon, butter and tea. Oh, yes; we each bought a candle apiece so we could see to use the corkscrew, in the dark. Hawkins ate his—the candle I mean. Many and merry were the songs we sang on the way.

Moore looked at us—looked grimly, hard, at us—as we rolled in at dawn. I was drunk. I know. But I heard what he said, and I remember how he said it; half to himself, but aloud, tense, earnestly, not sarcastically.

“God, how I envy you fools! I envy you!”

So that day when Moore had settled with Davenant and given me abrupt orders to find him a crew, I searched out Hawkins taking a nap against a stump.

By occasional tests I had discovered that Hawkins could not run—at least not far or fast. He could move fast simply by falling forward, and once within reach of his hands, one of which would almost hide a fair-sized sirloin, I was helpless as a corpse in the grip of a devil-fish.

I squatted down some fifteen feet away and tossed a light pebble at him. Then a fair-sized chip zipped at his head. A miss. I tossed a clod at the unmissable belly, and he stiffened up with an ox-like grunt and swore.

I stroked the bottle tenderly. A flash of interest passed over his face, but I told him to keep his seat.

“Water,” he said contemptuously.

Now and then I had poured water into an empty square-face to watch the eager expression as he placed the bottle at his lips slowly change to one of surprised disgust as about half the quart went down before he knew what he was drinking.

“Business,” I told him.

He drew a large bowl with a short stem to it from his pocket and demanded tobacco.

“Want to go to sea?”

“Me? I been to sea. Supposin' the boat runs out o' grub? An' me on 'er. Who's sure to be 'lected for supper? The cannibals! Give me a smoke.”

I filled my pipe with a watchful eye on him. He made a move as if to rise, but I was on my feet and ready to retreat, tobacco, gin and all.

He settled himself disconsolately and tipped the flabby brim of a shapeless hat over his head with one eye peeking out, hypnotically directed at the bottle.

“Think of a ship loaded to the scuppers with iced beef and mutton; a hundred cases of eggs; pork and sausages; biscuits and flour enough to feed all that heard the Sermon on the Mount; a mountain of fresh butter; coffee and rice; cabbages, potatoes and onions; too, live cows and a haystack on the fo'c'sle head—nice for drowsing on afternoons. A barrel of apples right by the forem'st with the head knocked in! Think! The hold full of ice, covered with bottled ale and porter, and forty kegs of beer in the waist, with a spigot, cup and no sentry; sherry, gin and rum, and three hundred pounds of books. And only eight good men besides yourself—to have it all.

“Northward we'll climb over the softly breathing breast of the ocean and take on a batch of Kanakas to do the work. Well find a little island and pick up pearls, and all come back rich as nabobs. But they must be good men, good sailormen—so you won't have to do any work yourself.”

Both of Hawkins's eyes were brightly visible and he was sitting up hungrily.

He commented on my imagination but made an elaborate effort to be less skeptical than he was.

“Listen,” I whispered. “Moore's made a stake. He wants a ship and crew. You're the man to get it. He's only a landlubber himself. You and I'll run the ship.

“You have the gift of eloquence, Ben. Pick out good husky sailor boys, or if they aren't sailors, good husky lads able to warp a schooner off a mud-bank. You don't want to heave back and forth to rock 'er off.

“Remember that iced hold and the layer of bottled ale. Go quietly up and down, whispering to this man and that. Talk pearls and don't forget the haystack.”

I moved a bit closer. He was interested, and whispered back to ask if Moore had made a stake. I assured him. But Ben eyed me dubiously when I again mentioned that Moore was a landsman, green as stale cheese.

“You get the crew. I'll find the ship. Moore pays. Have a pipe, old Leviathan.”

I tossed him my pouch.

“Didn't I mention cigars? A hundred boxes! And the pearls. Shh-h, but—we may have to poach a bit, but there are pearls!”

“By the cracked crown of Cleopatra!” he muttered, eagerly ramming his finger into the pipe-bowl.

“Have a drink.” I passed the bottle.

He sniffed it; then bent backward; but I salvaged a spoonful or so for myself by a desperate snatch.

“You're not leggin' me?”

Softly, confidingly: “Ben, old pal, how could you! Send 'em one at a time here to talk it over with me. Don't mention Moore. You and I are running this.”

“Is he goin'?” A quality of interest was in the question.

“Of course.”

“He's made a stake? How?”

“Don't be nosey. He's made a stake. By the way, ever' member of the crew gets a bit of an advance. But it has to be q.t. Very. Good strong drinkin' men.”

So for the next few days it was I who lay propped against the stump in the shade while fellows of all stripe and color drifted up uneasily to question, listen, doubt, wonder.

“Get me a crew,” Moore had said.

It wasn't the first time I had got him a crew, even of whites. I knew all that he wanted was eight or ten strong men, and no more than two or three needed to be sailors. He'd make sailors out of them. “Plenty quick, damyes” as a black boy of fair observation powers had remarked.

I served out gin and lies generously. Moore had gone to Melbourne with Davenant. I had a free hand. I talked of fresh milk and haystacks, bottled ale and a hold of ice; and fired some men, made others dubious, and convinced many that there was nothing to it.

Blame me for this and other things; I am offering a story, and not pointing a moral. And what could I have done with the truth? As it was a pair of constables called to squat at my feet and listen. I offered them the soft berths of cabin-boys, and spoke of a haystack on the fo'c'sle head. They went away tapping their heads significantly.

Hawkins talked with vast gestures and strange oaths, displayed his captain's papers, and sent recruits trudging to me. Whisper “Treasure” to the winds, and the feet of men follow the echo as children the Pied Piper. Pearls are nearly as potent as pirate's gold, or nature's. Beer, ale and a haystack—it is magic.

One by one I settled on a choice of men; one or two who knew something of work aloft, and others big- muscled and hard. And to these I put it more or less direct: “Do you want to go north on a hell-ship that'll pay double wages to good men? You'll be welcome to quit any time you see land, and there won't be complaints in port for mutineers.”

One by one they backed out, confused in mind between the two conflicting inducements; but now and then this fellow and that said he'd sign on for the Sulphur Lake itself. A bit of an air of mystery helped me, and for their own good I weeded the faint-hearted. I had sailed with Douglas Moore—under the name by which he was known from Manila to Port Said. Hawkins stewed and fussed as he saw the backsliders; but I cheered him up as best I could and waited.

All manner of rumors were in the air as to just how crazy we were. Was there ever a ship went out of port in those days, or these, where the truth was told to the forecastle? Perhaps—not.

Douglas Moore came back. He had nothing to say more than that I had done it in my own crazy way, as usual, and ask how many could reef and steer?

“Four say they can, but three are liars. One one-eyed little fellow wants off the mainland, bad. He's a sailor.”

For the next few days Moore had a desire to fish and he went out and around, and sometimes didn't come back with the night or dawn. As a skipper “reckless,” men called him. Not so, except when crowded. He knew tides and currents because they were life and death to him, and he hazarded no chance that foresight would evade. There is a powerful pull of tide on the southern coast, where the whole of the antarctic draws its breath; and an occasional land breeze; also sand-banks.

One evening after a moody, protracted silence about the lone wavering candle, jammed into a bottle-neck and dripping to the table, Hawkins said to me:

“I heard of a fellow once broke the hemp three times. What'd they do with a man o' my weight? And when 're you goin' 'o buy them cows?”

“Meaning?”

“The Lady Betty,” he whispered, folding his thick hands across his belly and staring at me.

“Who guessed it?”

“Raikes.”

“Well?”

“He said you was Dan McGuire.”

“And?”

Hawkins moistened his lips a time or two. He was reluctant to go on.

I looked at him lazily—as lazily as I could with my heart rising throatward.

“He said he'd seen you once at Apia. Pointed out as—as—as——”

He stopped.

“Yes. I've been there.”

With resolution: “Said he didn't really know”—the voice dropped—“Hurricane Williams.”

The candle wavered fretfully; a dingo wailed in lonesome anguish and a ghost-like breath passed through the uneasy forest behind our shack. The man called Moore was night-fishing out on the bay. It was moonless and he was alone.

I wondered how I could get word to him; and how we would get out. To take to the bush with native trackers put on the trail would be folly. He was no bush man.

“And he thinks I—I—am Williams?” I tried to laugh—a little.

“No. You're Dan McGuire, Raikes says. I've seen Hurricane Williams. Once.”

“Where?” I asked slowly.

“Bundy Bay. We was 'cruitin' niggers. Williams showed up. We didn't get our niggers.

“Come alongside. Told our captain to start a fight an' he'd blow him an' his old Fijian Maid high as heaven. Said it was the captain's only chance to get there. Put the niggers back on the beach.”

“Then why——”

But I checked myself. Perhaps after all the man was lying.

“Wouldn't mentioned it 'cept Raikes wondered who Moore might be. I said he was a landlubber—thought a sheet-anchor was something to keep beddin' from slippin' off o' nights. Raikes don't want to 'tract no 'tention to himself by informin' unless it is Williams. Thinks he'd get a pardon then.”

“He said that?”

“Not in words. I ain't big a fool as I look. I knowed it was Williams—that first day.”

I knocked my pipe against the edge of the table and scrutinized the inside of the bowl as I spoke—

“And the Lady Betty?”

“I guessed it was her. Seein' as how you an' him an' that black Englishman had your heads together—an' knowin' Williams.”

I arose carelessly, affected a yawn and threw myself on to my bunk; a revolver was under the pillow.

“We could divide the reward,” I suggested speculatively, casually, without emphasis one way or the other.

Hawkins stood up slowly, fingers in belt. His shadow blotted out the side of the shack, and he said simply:

“You ain't that kind. Nor me. We got to look out for Raikes, though.”

I wondered: Did this big fellow have blood on his own hands and think to shelter himself under the leadership of Hurricane Williams? Certainly no innocent, either of us. Certainly not villains either.

I was a wastrel and knew it and did not care—except perhaps when sober. Hawkins was not a ruffian. True, he was not such a simpleton as he appeared. Excitement, the zest for adventure, has made more villains than ever bad blood. Not so many perhaps as bad laws—laws hard to obey, and harder to make peace with when broken. And both together have made fewer no doubt than the lash and treadmill of early Australia.

But none of those were my excuse. Williams, indeed Williams had gone so far that the noose dangled above him; more than that he had once dangled from it. And I followed him in a way that probably did not greatly differ, if dogs could speak and explain, from the way a dog follows a master.

Williams was strange; ferocious at times, occasionally cruel; but someway, if one understood, never without a certain—not nobility, or dignity, so much as justification. He was almost always moved by something visibly deeper than mere anger; somehow there seemed a principle, sensed rather than thought about, from which he never was deflected.

What excuse could Hawkins have for loyalty to Williams? Williams had done a world of things for me. I put it to him bluntly:

“Moore is Williams. Why didn't you inform?”

Hawkins fumbled at my pouch on the table, awkwardly filled his mouth with tobacco, spat toward the doorway once or twice, pretended to adjust the candle and brushed to the floor a thick mess of dead and half-dead insects that littered the table. Then:

“Maybe I'm like Raikes. Only I know I wouldn't get a pardon.”

“I'm interested.” And I was.

“I killed the captain o' the Fijian Maid. Stretched me over the main hatch an' served rope-end.”

“That's a lie. Papers at Sydney carried an interview with him when he came back from Bundy Bay that time.”

Hawkins, unannoyed, unoffended, looked at me. He really seemed to have an absent-minded expression on his big, thick face.

“Just as bad not to kill 'm—since I tried. An' how d'you expect me to hide? If I's skinny I'd crawl in a snake-hole. What about Raikes?”

That was no time to quarrel with Hawkins. I did not exactly mistrust him; but it isn't restful to wake up and find a stranger has your secret.

We talked about Raikes. We knew where he was. We knew about what he would be doing. … When Douglas Moore, who might as well be called by his better known name, Williams—termed “Hurricane,” not so much to commemorate any experience with a wild blow, as because of certain personal characteristics—when he, I say, came in shortly before day he found his bunk occupied.

Williams was muddy, wet and two-thirds naked. Hawkins and I were drowsily playing seven-up with dirty dog-eared cards.

“You're Cerberus,” I said.

“Who's he?” demanded Hawkins.

“A big dog that guarded fellows like that.” I indicated the bunk at which Williams had been looking. He had then turned questioningly to me.

By agreement Hawkins and I were to play until Williams came. The loser at that time was to be Raike's guardian.

“He guessed it, Skipper,” I said to Williams, waving a hand toward the gagged and bound Raikes.

Williams stiffened, and without bending seemed to half-crouch. An attitude that I knew well; and one from which, as if shot by a spring, he could go across a room or deck. He looked at Hawkins, then at me. Hawkins did not notice.

“He was on the Fijian Maid,” I explained, a glance at Hawkins.

For a moment Williams seemed suspicious even of me. A thousand pounds is much money for a loafer, for two loafers, to have within arm's reach.

He turned toward Hawkins. His short questions jerked out answers:

“Her tonnage?”

“Hundred an' fifty,” said Hawkins.

“Captain?”

“Carp Taylor.”

“Where?”

“Bundy Bay.”

“What kind of ship's boat did I come longside in?”

“Native boat it was. Ten niggers. One of 'em had a coconut in his hand.”

Williams nearly smiled. He was satisfied that Hawkins had been at Bundy Bay. But it was no coconut the “nigger” held. Had anybody fired on the native boat as it lay alongside that fact would have been discovered, explosively.

Williams turned to the doorway through which the morning light came, and wrote in a little note-book.

“What shall I do with him?” Hawkins asked with accentuated helplessness.

“You know where my razor is?”

“Take off his ears first?”

I sat on a corner of the table and studied the problem. Raikes wasn't much of a problem; one of those men that seem made out of leather, and have been wet and shrunk. His lone eye glared viperously.

“No, I think I would take a chip off his nose. Too long for perfect beauty. Now yours is just about the right length, and shaped like a walnut.”

Hawkins lifted my razor from the tin tobacco-box and approached the bunk, took hold of Raikes's nose and held the razor hoveringly.

I stooped over and showed him where to begin cutting. Raikes had quit thinking it might be a joke.

Then Hawkin's big arm was knocked up, half-broken.

I found myself across the shack and sitting on my neck.

Hawkins struck back, but he might as well have hit at a shadow, except that no shadow would have returned such a blow as came to his chin. He went over slowly, weakeningly.

“You drunken idiots!” Williams said between hard-set teeth.

I closed the eye that he had not hit and assumed unconsciousness. Hawkins, not unconscious, blinked wonderingly, and looked from around the leg of a table at Williams, who turned again to the doorway and went on with his notes.

We were half-drunk, it is true. But Hawkins showed no anger and held no grudge. Anyway, who knew of Hurricane Williams knew pretty much what to expect at times.

We both turned into our bunks, were asleep, and were shaken out again in what seemed about ten minutes.

“We take her out to-night,” Williams said briefly.

There was much to do before then; much too much to do for two weary, sleepless men, one of whom had a headache and a blind eye.