The fifth in the line of the fourth chain-gang was of a different type from the others. He was a much larger man, with a great spread and thickness to his shoulders. He was more of a blond, with a mat of tangled golden-brown hair and a heavy tawny beard and mustache, in contrast with the straggling black growths of his fellows. His eyes were blue-gray, and, although they scowled and were drawn narrow as though with continual fretting, their expression was not cowed and frightened and sidelong, as was that of the dark eyes of the others. His arms, tanned to a deep brown, exhibited a definition and a sharpness of muscle due to continual heavy work. Biceps and triceps in the upper arm, the digitations of the flexors and extensors in the forearm were all clear and defined, unmasked by subcutaneous fat or rudimentary hair growth. With his magnificent muscular development and his scowling, narrow forehead he looked, as he tramped sullenly along, pickax on shoulder, like some living bronze replica of Rodin’s Thinker. Where neck and shoulder met was an angry red stripe blotched with blackened blood, an unfailing lure to a host of flies; the gang-corporal had been bad tempered that morning.
Life on Birds Island was absurdly simple, as simple as Eguia’s well-thought-out regulations could make it. Twenty men chained together can not hope to rebel successfully—a bullet or two sent into the mass of them would cumber them with corpses even if they could all resolve to act together. Their very pickaxes and spades were chained to them on a four-foot chain which did not hamper their digging, but made it impossible (as had occurred before the innovation was made) for a desperate man to fling his tool at a guard and earn the summary execution which would end his troubles.
The fourth gang proceeded according to rule. It marched to its allocated area, extended in line at the point where it had left off that morning, laid down its sacks and began to dig. The shovel men rested on their spades; the pickax men swung their picks stolidly, breaking up the soil. For the first few inches the work was easy, but lower down the phosphate was almost flintlike in its hardness, and the picks struck against it with a hard metallic clatter which was audible from a considerable distance. For ten minutes the noise went on, the clash and thump of the picks, the grunts and heavy breathing of the workers, and as the pace inevitably slackened, the zip-crack of the látigo wielded by the gang-corporal. But when this latter official decided that enough had been broken up a curt order ended the pickax men’s labor for the time. All they had to do next was to hold open the sacks while the shovel men filled them with the broken soil. Then, when all the fragments were cleared off, they fell to their pick work again.
From this it will seem obvious that the spade men had the easier task, and so it was. That was why the sergeant at the gate had to have a long memory, because he had to see that a man who wielded a pick one day wielded a shovel the next—unless the sergeant took a dislike to a man and caused him to be put on pick work out of his turn.
Pick succeeded shovel and shovel succeeded pick until the sacks were full, and then both sections enjoyed a change of task. At a command from the corporal each man endeavored and succeeded, after a struggle, to hoist a full sack upon his shoulders. Thus they marched the half-mile down to the jetty, each man staggering and gasping under his load of one hundred and fifty pounds of phosphate. They picked their steps with care, for were a man to stumble or fall, chained as he was to his companions, the latter might be pulled off their feet also; it was not unknown for the whole overburdened twenty to be dragged to the ground together, with sacks rolling hither and thither, and the exasperated gang-corporal’s látigo taking off flakes of skin from all and sundry.
It would, of course, have been easy for Eguia to supply some kind of light railway with hand trucks to lessen this labor, and any ordinary employer would have found that it paid to do so; but not so Eguia. He paid absolutely nothing for his labor, so that it was bound to be cheaper to use men instead of machines. Nineteen sacks a day was the daily amount Eguia demanded per man, so that nineteen times a day each man carried a full sack some half-mile to the jetty and marched the half-mile back—nine and a half miles loaded and nine and a half miles light, besides the digging. Eguia’s estimate of the maximum to be demanded of a man was a very close one, even if a trifle exaggerated.
It was a dreary monotonous life on Birds Island. Dig, dig, dig, shovel, shovel, shovel, carry sacks, feed (lightly), sleep like animals, and start again next day. Every few days would come a slight change for some of them when the cargo lighters had to be filled for the loading of the ships, but that was the only source of variety—that and the gang-corporal’s látigo. Sometimes the sky would change from its usual polished turquoise to a shade of deeper blue; sometimes white clouds, even, would throng up from the horizon; for five minutes every six months it would even rain slightly. Through it all, hour by hour, the great Pacific swell would break, at ninety-second intervals, against the cliffs to the westward, and during the hours of daylight the gulls kept up their monotonous piping—but the gulls were gradually leaving the place now that men had established themselves there. Birds Island would soon be silent save for the surf and the din of men’s labor.
The guards were as unhappy—almost—as the prisoners. The monotony of their existence palled eventually even upon such minds as they possessed, despite the fact of occasional distractions—issues of ardent spirits and regular permits to enter the womens’ compound. For the female prisoners, as was only to be expected, did double duty; they made sacks by day and rejoiced the hearts of the soldiers by night, although, prematurely aged and hideous as they were, bowed, toothless and scarred, they hardly seemed especially adapted for this latter function. Most of the soldiers, inevitably, cast longing eyes upon the officers’ wives and their maids, in the gleaming, whitewashed, adobe buildings beyond the jetty.
So that it is easy to think of possible reasons for the ill temper of Corporal Barroso, in command of the fourth chain-gang, and why his eyes flashed viciously at his laboring slaves, and why he snarled his orders with a gleam of white teeth under his black mustache, and why his látigo bit so deep into the wincing flesh of the pickax men.
Henry Dawkins suffered Barroso’s little attentions mutely. A year of Birds Island had taught him to hold back his fierce temper with a large hand. A gang-corporal with a sense of humor could enliven a whole day by goading a desperate convict with jeers and lashes, and could find huge delight in his victim’s cries and grimaces. With luck he might even stimulate him into open mutiny, resulting, of course, in a full-dress flogging—one hundred lashes before the assembled convicts and probable resultant death from gangrene or shock. Henry Dawkins was one of the few men on the island who had survived even fifty lashes (his back was corrugated, criss-cross, with the white scars of them), and he had no intention of suffering that again. He did what he could to keep the corporal’s attention from him: he worked really hard; he picked his steps carefully when marching back loaded (hitching the sack to his other shoulder so that the coarse sacking and the lumps inside would not chafe his new wound) and never by look or by gesture did he let Barroso know how he was fuming internally. He flung his pick into the ringing soil with a fierce effort; he wrenched the point loose, swung it up again, and brought it down once more—hips, thighs, shoulders and arms all working in unison and contributing their share of the labor; to the eye of a sculptor or an artist the rippling play of the muscles under the skin would have been sheer joy. Corporal Barroso noticed nothing to grow enthusiastic about.
Dully through Dawkins’ mind passed his usual train of thought as he swung his pick—the same old thoughts drifting backward and forward without progress like a tiger in a cage. He was glad the Hawk had never lived to suffer this, for he had loved the Hawk. And the Hawk would never have borne forced labor; he would have refused from the first and died, dumb-mad, at the flogging triangles. His slim white body would have been slashed and torn by the whips of plaited hide, while the sergeants stood round and grinned at the spectacle. Better was it that he had died of starvation and gangrene in the Cordill
eras. Henry Dawkins came to the same conclusion twice an hour, every day at Birds Island, but he found no comfort in it. Then his thoughts drifted on, to the weariness of his muscles, the foulness of the food he had eaten, to the possibility of making his way, some moonless night, through the barbed wire of the enclosure, past the sentries, to the motor-boat at the jetty and freedom. Henry Dawkins knew the fate of those who had tried. He decided, for the thousandth time, not to make the attempt until chance made the possibilities more favorable—or until he could bear his life no longer. He sent his pick crashing into the stony phosphate with desperate venom.
It was then that Henry Dawkins noticed something unusual about the soil he was digging. He was turning up big oblong lumps of a size and shape he was not used to, and of a white color as distinct from the grayish-brown phosphate. And these lumps were heavy, and his pick rang against them with a more metallic sound than was quite natural. At his next blow the white coating of a lump flaked away, revealing a white metallic luster. Dawkins checked in his swing in surprise. He stooped and looked. Lead? Perhaps—but most likely silver! His frantic gesticulation actually had the effect of arresting Corporal Barroso’s arm in mid-air so that the látigo cressed his shoulder rather than cut it again. Dawkins picked up the lump; surely enough it was an ingot of silver, and there were half a dozen others lying at his feet. They were coated with a thin layer of silver phosphate, as a result of much time in that soil, but there was no doubting their value. The one word “silver” had the effect of calming Barroso’s fiendish rage at the delay, and it sped back and forth in an excited buzz along the chain-gang. Barroso took the ingot in his hands, and his expression changed to one of desperate greed. His surprise had been great enough to carry him momentarily within range of the picks and shovels of half a dozen of the gang, although he backed away at once as soon as he remembered.
“More?” he demanded, and Dawkins handed over to him the four or five ingots he had turned up. Corporal Barroso piled them before him, and motioned to Dawkins to go on digging. So Dawkins’ pick swung up and down again, up and down, and at every few strokes the spadesmen at his left or right stooped hurriedly and pulled from the deepening hole a fresh lump of silver. The other members of the gang stood idle, staring fascinated at the treasure which was being unearthed before their eyes, and even Barroso forgot to order them to recommence digging.
Up and down went Dawkins’ pick, and ingot after ingot was lifted from the hole. Suddenly the note of the pick upon the ground changed somewhat, and at the next stroke a splintering crash was heard and the pick head half buried itself unexpectedly. Dawkins wrenched it free, and he and Barroso stooped to look. The rest of the gang tried to gather round, gesticulating and chattering in amazement, but Barroso turned on them with a snarl and drove them back, and a sharp order to the dumfounded private of the guard close at hand saw to it that they would not be permitted to approach again. The spadesmen on Dawkins’ left and right cleared away the debris, cautiously, and once more Dawkins brought down his pick with a shattering crash. At this low level a big iron-bound chest had once been sunk, but the passage of centuries had eaten away both iron and wood, and it was only a thin weakly shell which Dawkins’ pick smashed into fragments.
But the chest had held good up till then, had prevented the phosphate from tarnishing the contents. The sun was reflected, dazzlingly, from a thousand surfaces of bright gold. Gold coins there were, any number of them, massed in one compartment of the chest. The other half of the chest was full of gold plate—chalices, pyxes, crucifixes, the plunder seemingly of a dozen of the cathedrals of the mainland in the days when El Dorado was not obviously a wild fragment of a dream. At the spectacle even Barroso forgot the need to keep himself out of reach of the gang; he sprang forward and knelt grotesquely in the hole on the lumps of phosphate; he plunged his hands greedily in the heap of coins; he picked up and turned forward and back a broad gold pyx which reflected the sunlight in a wide arc of ruddy gold. He uttered broken, loving foolishnesses as he caressed this mass of wealth. A heavy gold reliquary, gaudily carved and enameled, came into his hands, and emitted a curious stony chink as he turned it over—a sound which has no counterpart on earth. He fumbled it open; it was the size and much the shape of a long flat pencil box. As the lid lifted the sun was reflected in a new fashion and from a thousand new facets, for the box was filled with precious stones.
Dawkins’ startled eyes gaped at this new wonder as he bent over Barroso’s kneeling form. Dawkins was the unworthy scion of a younger branch of the great Dawkins family of pawnbrokers; he had been in the business himself before the untimely incident which had driven him hurriedly to South America. He knew, as he peered into the box, that he was gazing at the equivalent of scores of thousands of pounds. Diamonds were there, mostly cut but many of them uncut. There were big, milky white pearls there in dozens. Here and there was the red fire of a ruby, or the calm green of an emerald. But most of the stones were diamonds, big white glittering diamonds, and with the trembling of Barroso’s hands the sunlight shot hither and thither from the facets with a shimmering sparkle which held Dawkins fascinated.
It was in fact Barroso who roused himself first. With a wild effort he pulled himself upright and stepped backward out of the hole, the box still in his hands. He faced the chain-gang with a snarl, and he glowered sidelong at the stupid private who stood rifle in hand at his elbow. To Dawkins it was obvious that his mind was working furiously, and immediately it was just as obvious that he had hit on a plan.
“Go fetch the captain,” snapped Barroso to the private.
“The captain?” repeated the private, stupid as ever.
“Yes, fool. El Capitan Vergara. Who else? Go, you fool! Run!”
The private hastened off at a shambling trot. Barroso closed the reliquary, put it beneath his arm, and seized and cocked his rifle with obvious menace.
“About turn,” said he to the gang, and they obeyed, helpless as ever.
“March!” he said; then, when they had gone a dozen paces, “Halt!”
To the dull minds of the chain-gang this might have seemed a mere precaution to keep them away from the treasure, but Dawkins’ straining ears (he dared not turn to look) caught the sound of the box being reopened; he heard the stones cascade out of the box—into Barroso’s pocket, he shrewdly guessed—and he heard the box closed again. Minute by minute passed. Some one in the gang stirred uneasily, and tried to turn, but a fierce growl from Barroso froze him stiff again. The gang stood patiently still, with the sun beating into their eyes.
Then Dawkins heard hurried footsteps; it was the private returning with Captain Vergara and others of the staff. He heard their exclamations of astonishment, and their hurried debate on what should be done. Then came a sharp order from the captain.
“March your men back to the compound, Corporal.”
And back to their dreary ten acres of barbed-wire enclosure went the fourth chain-gang; from it they could see corpulent old General Aranguren hastening across from his house to the scene of the discovery, while from all over the island the other gangs were marched hurriedly back to the compound, to be locked safely away behind the barbed-wire. Dawkins’ discovery had at least gained for every convict on the island a cessation of labor two hours before time.
Chapter IV
In the prisoners’ compound the spectacle was little different from what was usual. Most of the prisoners lay huddled like exhausted animals, many of them in little hollows which they had scraped in the phosphate, and which, if needs were, they would defend against their fellows with teeth and claws like animals. A few of the less apathetic sat in a chattering group discussing the wonderful find of the afternoon.
One man alone was on his feet, tramping up and down against the bars of his cage, and that man was Henry Dawkins. His mind was in a turmoil quite unusual, his fists were clenched, and even his heart was beating with a distressing violence. Somehow the recent event had roused him to a wild panicky desire for freedom, in contra
st to his more usual dull, aching hatred of Birds Island, of the forced labor and of his jailers. He knew—he knew—that Corporal Barroso had a pocketful of jewels worth a king’s ransom, but his dull mind could not work out a scheme by which he could make use of his knowledge. He might tell some one higher in authority—and that would be none too easy to contrive—but it would only result in Barroso’s punishment and the confiscation of the jewels. They would not set free in exchange the Hawk’s lieutenant-general, condemned to forced labor for life on Birds Island. Barroso would see to that. Dawkins continued to rage impotently up and down the edge of the tangled barbed-wire which hemmed him in, up and down, up and down, until night fell gloomy over the purple sea and over the misery of the island.
Dawkins never knew how the next development came about. He never really had the chance of finding out, but the explanation was quite simple. Captain Vergara, the company officer who had come to inspect the treasure on its first discovery, was a man of bold ambition and vast greed. He had seen two hundredweights of gold and half a ton of silver borne off at General Aranguren’s orders up to the adobe house which represented the seat of government. The general, poor spiritless fool, had no other thought than to turn over this heaped-up pirate treasure to his government—to President Eguia, in other words. Captain Vergara could not conceive of such folly. If the captain had had charge of such a mass of treasure Eguia would never see a ha’p’orth of it; the captain would not stay an hour on the island longer than was necessary to transfer the gold to the motor-boat which rocked beside the jetty. It was a prize worth fighting for, Vergara had decided, and before night fell he was already cautiously sounding his company to discover whether they thought so, too.
The Daughter of the Hawk Page 2