“It must be a cunning drug or that devil Hart will note it in his liquor. And one that acts swiftly. With him down I will drive the rest of them until they beg for me to forgive them. Have ye such a drug, Folsom? Look ye,” he clapped the leech upon the back. “I have gold and jewels here aboard the Scourge. I’ll share the gold with ye and give ye the pick of the jewels. Gems to win a woman’s favor with, Folsom, gold to buy it.”
“Where is it?” asked Folsom, still with the malice cold in his eyes, though now it was tinged with greed.
“There is a false bottom to the locker in my room cabin below floor-level. Slip for’ard and take the drug, put it in Hart’s drink and then come back to me. Art game for it?”
The leech nodded and pushed Pugh’s second toddy toward him.
“Ye’ll pledge me your word?” he asked.
Pugh picked up the rummer and gulped down its contents.
“I’ll play fair with ye,” he said.
Suddenly his face contracted, his mouth drew back in a snarl, and he set an uncertain hand to his head, looking at Folsom through a thickening haze. His voice came in a husky growl that choked in his dry throat as his staring eyes began to glaze.
“Double-dealing knave, I’ll—”
He lurched heavily against the table and groaned as Folsom watched him with fascinated gaze. Then Pugh squared himself with a mighty effort and stood erect, a dirk in his hand.
“Drug me, would ye? I’ll slit thy weasand!”
Folsom made a sudden dive for the companionway, but Pugh towered between him and escape. With the dose that the leech had mixed in the second toddy it seemed incredible that the pirate chief could keep his senses. He dodged behind the table and Pugh came toward him with a certain grim dexterity, wedging him in a corner of the main cabin behind the table and reaching for him, his head nodding as if with the palsy, dry lips apart, eyes protruding with the effort of the will back of them.
Pugh’s fingers closed, twisting the medico’s cravat, and dragged him across the table, turning him on his back, wind and speech cut off, weak and limp from semi-suffocation, gaze goggling at the blade that descended in inexorable jerks that marked the failing co-ordinations of Pugh’s mind and body, descended until its sharp edge broke the skin and gashed flesh and windpipe while the air from Folsom’s lungs rushed whistling out with his escaping soul, his half-severed head fell back across the table’s edge, and Pugh, groping toward the sealed companionway, bolted and barred it before he slumped and lay inert.
Pugh came back to consciousness with a frightful, pounding pain in his head, a searing almost unendurable torment. His mouth was foul and dry, when, with an effort, he opened his gummy eyes. The vertical rays of the sun glared into them and added torture to the pulsating agony of his brain.
He was lying in the bottom of a small boat, his bulk wedged and crumpled between the thwarts. The boat floated on even keel in a dead calm. There were little sucking noises at the bow that sounded to him like drum-strokes. Along the thwarts lay a mast with its sail wrapped about it, together with two oars. In the stern were two kegs and a baling pannikin.
Pugh managed to get one arm across his face to shade the furnace of the sun. Slowly recollection came back to him in disjointed fragments as it had registered. He remembered the drugging and the killing of Folsom—that was a deed well deserved and well done—then the breaking of the skylight, the battering down of a door, with himself rising and fighting like a man in his sleep. He remembered the taunting face of Simon Hart, then he had fired at it and missed, but had hit some one, for a face back of Hart had changed from a triumphant grin to a mask of pain. Some one had struck him on the head from behind—and that had been the end.
And they had not killed him. Why? He lifted his head and exquisite agony spread from a spot above his right ear until it surged like a white flame through his consciousness. The blow must have laid bare his brain. He feared to touch the place. It seemed to him he would feel the pulsing matter oozing at the contact. As an egg when the shell is broken but the membrane holds intact and dimly shows the yolk. That was how his head must be, and the sun was frying his brains! Yet he could use them. He was still alive! It was the remnant of the cursed drug that bound him. Presently he would get up, make an effort, plan the future.
He lapsed again. When he revived he lay in shadow. The sky was a bowl of jade above him and the boat was moving, tossing to one side and another unevenly as if in the jobble of a tide-rip. The pain in his brain was less, the vitality seemed to have come back to him somewhat, though he was terribly cramped and terribly weak, so that the best he could do was to crawl and twist himself to a huddle in the stern close to the two kegs.
There was no wind, no tide-rip, no motion on the placid sea of peacock-blue.
Blunt muzzles reared above the surface, gray forms rubbed against the planks like great cats that arch and scrape their backs while waiting to be fed. The boat swayed and swerved as the sharks forged under the keel and lifted it. There were two score of them or more, silently, persistently striving to upset the thing that kept from them the food they sensed and craved.
It was cooler. It had rained yesterday, tomorrow it would likely rain again, since the rains were fairly started. But meantime, with his partial revival, there came a craving for food and water, principally for water. Pugh knew what was in the kegs beside him before he made certain of it. They had given him “Pugh’s Provender,” the same brandy and salt-meat he had devised for those he had marooned. If he could only strike land somewhere and find puddles and pools of yesterday’s downpour. He seemed partly paralyzed from the drug, and he hitched himself up with elbows and hands to a higher position.
Far to the south he thought he glimpsed the blue phantom of a sail. That would be the Scourge. There must have been a breeze when they had put him overboard. Pugh prayed that one of the king’s ships might come up and demolish the schooner and hang Simon Hart to the yardarm, kicking and jerking like an impaled crab.
The sun dropped and evening swiftly fled before night. Pugh could no longer quite control his mind. He was still afraid to touch the wound he had received. It must have been from belaying pin or marlinspike, he thought, and he held the belief that only a thin integument lay between his brain and the air. Once let that be pierced and he would die.
All night gray sharks trailed with the boat, muzzling, nudging each other in a ghastly cortège. Sooner or later what was in the boat would come to them. Sooner—or later. Once Pugh thought he heard the boom of guns across the watery sounding board, but he could not be sure.
Soon after that he began to see shapes, seated on thwart and gunwales, some with their dried arms folded and their desiccated bodies in the water. There were others who grinned at him from the bows. Folsom, the leech, with his severed throat, and Simon Hart! Good—if that was Simon’s ghost Simon was dead and he, Pugh, was still alive, very weak, but alive! And therefore still the better man.
The shapes were those of men and women. Vaguely he remembered some of them. He had marooned them. There was one phantom of a girl with great black eyes. She had died by her own hand—after… And there were the four men he had left on the cay. He had left three there just recently. Where were they? Ah, there—there on the next thwart! One was bald-headed. Priest-face he had called him.
The boat began to slide along in the grip of some mysterious current, for there was no breeze, no veil in the sky to herald rain. Water! There it was, a hidden stream running underneath the keel. And he too weak to dig for it. Once he had seen a man with divining rods.…
Dawn rushed up and the phantoms disappeared. The boat rocked. The gray shapes were breaking water now. Pugh essayed to pick up an oar and batted feebly at the snouts that showed. The boat swerved. They were trying to capsize it. The boat moved on, grounded and now the blood-beat in his brain grew louder. It was surf breaking on low land. Pugh craned his head painfully. He was being carried fast by flood and current to a sandy beach dotted with gray shrubs.
Land! And somewhere in some rock crevice there must be water. The boat bumped, dragged, lifted and bumped on again. A swell tilted the stern and swept the boat on to strand it on the shore. The gray shapes were cheated, left behind in deeper water. He was ashore.
Somehow he got out and collapsed on the wet sand. Then some vital spark brightened and he began to crawl mechanically up the slope. There were no rocks about that his bleary eyes could see, but there were marks that showed that turtles had been there. How fresh the trail he could not tell. He could no longer reason, his moves were instinctive. Some low mounds loomed ahead. They should be where the turtles had covered their eggs. He clawed with painful effort and unearthed a grinning skull.
He tried to scramble from the place and bones grasped at him from the loosened sand. With a prodigious effort he got to his knees and so to tottering feet. Out of the palmetto scrub three grisly figures came toward him, ragged, thin—one of them had a bald head. The others.…
Pugh turned and lurched down the slope. He was blind and dizzy, his brain afire. He could not see his boat, and staggered on with outspread arms, pursued by the phantoms. He heard the lap of water. It was the old swimming pool! He would dive and escape. There was a gap behind an old root. Waist-deep he splashed into the lagoon, scooping up the salt sea and thinking it nectar. Then he struck the verge of a tide-swept gulf and plunged forward.
A gray shape, followed swiftly by another and yet another, rose, swirled and lunged. There was a commotion under the surface that sent long ripples diverging on the top, ripples stained with crimson that rapidly dissolved to streamers of pink.
“’Twas Pugh himself!” cried Alec Graeme. “The sharks have got him!”
“He has left his boat,” said Will Graeme hoarsely. “He has left his boat! See, there are mast and sail. Come Alec, come John. We’ve won through. Margaret!”
He fell to his knees on the sand in thankfulness, and his brothers dragged up the boat.
“We’ll broach the kegs and clean them,” said Alec. “It is clouding for rain. With these and the two others filled with water we can essay the trip.”
Will Graeme came up.
“We start now,” he said fiercely.
Alec set an arm about his shoulders.
“Tonight, lad,” he said. “’Tis an uncertain trip. Pray God there be stars to set our course.”
VII
The End of the Chase
In the gray of the dawn Captain Thorne of His Majesty’s sloop-of-war Thetis chuckled as he picked up the pirate schooner that he had fought at long range as they drifted through the starlit, almost breeze-less night. Now the wind strengthened with the dawn, the canvas filled and they bore down upon the Scourge.
It was the end of the long chase. The schooner sailed but sluggishly compared with the sloop, and while her stern-chaser fired intermittently, the aim was bad and the shot fell short.
“They are saving on the charges. Powder’s low,” he said to his lieutenant, “We’ve got them now, Blair.”
The woman standing by the rail moved over to him. Her sleepless eyes were brilliant. Captain Thorne nodded to her.
“We’ll have them inside of an hour, Mrs. Graeme,” he said kindly. “Thanks, in great measure to you.”
“Pugh must know the island where he left them. You’ll get it from him, Captain.”
“Aye, we’ll persuade him to tell all he knows.” As she moved back to the rail where she had watched ever since the first shot had been fired, Thorne added in an undertone to his junior. “If we get him alive. We’ll keep bargain with her and seek the island, but they can hardly be alive for all her faith. Look—look at their flag! They are surrendering.”
The black flag of the pirate was fluttering down its halyards. Then it stopped and through his glass Captain Thorne noted a commotion on her decks. A figure broke from a mob of men and fled down a hatchway. But the flag came on down to the deck. “Cease firing!” ordered Thorne. Suddenly the schooner seemed to split apart as a gush of black smoke rushed up from her amidships. A dull roar came over the water and the smoke spread above a flash of red while fragments of spars fell slowly. There was a momentary vision of the stern and bow of the schooner plunging beneath the waves and then, as the smoke drifted off before the wind, a few blackened scraps of floating timber, a struggling speck or two that vanished, and the career of the Scourge was ended. Simon Hart, cheating the gallows, had broken through his spirit-crushed men and fired the remnants of the magazine.
Margaret Graeme, pale-faced, gazed horror-struck at the spot where the Scourge had vanished. Now the last hope of finding Will was surely gone. Slowly, with hanging head, she went below to the cabin Thorne had assigned her, where the negress sat with the babe.
She was still there, sick, despairing, when a cry came from the masthead.
Hardly discernible, a black dot showed against the salmon of the sunset sky. The Thetis shifted course and soon the dot became a boat making steady headway to the northwest under a lugsail. Closer and closer the sloop came toward the tiny craft until all aboard could see three men in the stern and then a waving cloth.
“Mrs. Graeme, a miracle has happened,” said Captain Thorne. “Your husband and his brothers are alongside.”
Margaret rose with shining eyes.
“An answer to prayer is not a miracle, Captain Thorne,” she said. And, with her babe in her arms, she went on deck.
“There must have been a hurricane somewhere,” said Alec Graeme, “the kind that comes before the rains arrive. Probably it destroyed the growth on some isle, and it’s to be hoped there were none living on it, but the drift brought the uprooted palms to us and scattered five of them along the beach. Two more we got by wading off the point. Seven in all, close to two hundred nuts, with nigh to half a pint of life-saving liquor in each of them. That saved us. Sheer luck, I call it.”
“Plus sheer pluck,” said Captain Thorne.
But Margaret Graeme, safe in her husband’s wasted arms, knew otherwise.
TREASURE ISLAND, by Robert Louis Stevenson (Parts 1-3)
PART ONE: THE OLD BUCCANEER
1
The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.
“This is a handy cove,” says he at length; “and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?”
My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.
“Well, then,” said he, “this is the berth for me. Here you, matey,” he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; “bring up alongside and help up my chest. I’ll stay here a bit,” he continued. “I’m a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is
what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you’re at—there”; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. “You can tell me when I’ve worked through that,” says he, looking as fierce as a commander.
And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.
He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove or upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came about our house soon learned to let him be. Every day when he came back from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid them. When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow (as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present. For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my “weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg” and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough when the first of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my four-penny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for “the seafaring man with one leg.”
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 98