The rub was that Bart could not swim a stroke. He held the old viewpoint of mariners that to be able to swim was only to prolong agony. That was for accidents at sea. This was different. He was only half a mile from shore. And he could see himself free as far as the rail. Then—
Bart clucked softly to himself. Among odds and ends of storage in this little room where they had stowed him he made out two large earthenware wine-jars in which liquor was exported from Spain. About each was a coarse net of cordage for convenience in handling. Bart knew such jars well, knew their buoyancy. If he had the luck to find some tarpaulin—
He felt the blood running more freely through his cramped limbs. Strength, reduced by the starvation of the trip up the coast, returned with new hope. Bart’s luck was still working. Now for the irons.
There came a gush of cooler air, and he glanced up to see the stars through the spars and rigging. Stars glittering in a sky of sapphire. Out there was freedom. He took a deep draft of the salty air, tonic to his resolve.
A soldier—not the sergeant—bore in a leather demi-bottle and a dish.
“Oh-ho! Bart’s luck was working well.”
The sergeant hangman had taken his hint that the star performer at the hanging might be but an indifferent actor without meat and drink. Or it might be orders. Bart did not care. His eager nose caught the savor of wine and cooked flesh.
“Eat hearty,” said the soldier. “’Twill be thy last meal. They are working tonight on the gallows. You can hear the strokes of ax and hammer across the water.”
“Thanks, friend. I am more interested in my supper.”
The hatch clamped down again and Bart fell to. The wine was fair; there was goat’s flesh, beans and corn pancakes. It was a feast. It was his freedom. With the steam drawn from this timely fuel he went at the irons. Some he twisted, some he forced apart, the locks he picked with a bent nail torn from a bulkhead. He had to work quietly, muffling the metal with his coat as soon as he could get that off. He heard the ship’s bell striking through the night. At two in the morning he was clear. There was toll of skin and blood on the metal; he was soaked in sweat and infinitely tired, but he was clear.
For the space of another bell he forced himself to rest, and when the five strokes sounded he started work on his jars. They were empty and they were sound, uncracked. He found the remnants of a hatch-cover and with the cords by which the jars were slung he drum-headed them, joined them together, making twin buoys. He finished the last of his stoup of wine and then adjusted himself to the hardest task of all—to wait, dependent on the actions of another, not knowing whether such actions would favor him.
He counted on the revengeful disposition of the sergeant. When the man thought his prisoner had slept sufficiently he would be almost sure to visit him alone and try to harrow him.
Eight bells struck at last. Then one. Half after four. It was close to dawn. He heard a shuffle of feet, felt the fresh wind come down the open hatch. He lay groaning at the ladder’s foot, his irons gathered about him. The sergeant came half down the steps and sat on the tread.
“Dost repent, pirate? Would’st confess thy sins? I am the only priest will visit you. You are beyond the Church. Half way to Hell already.”
“It is not my soul, fool,” Bart gasped laboriously. “It is my stomach. I have been poisoned. The wine, or the food. I am dying!”
He rolled over, careful not to displace his chains too much, breathing hoarsely, simulating a death-rattle. The sergeant, deceived, wondering if the prisoner had not poisoned himself to cheat the gallows, came down and stooped over him.
Bart promptly kicked him in the belly, driving him against the side and knocking all the wind out of him. Rising like a jaguar, straight into a spring, Bart leaped and brought down one of his fetters full upon the sergeant’s pate. The bone of the skull cracked dully and the man dropped.
With his jars Bart fled up the ladder. He had stripped himself down to shirt and drawers once more, shedding again the crimson suit that fate denied him. On deck he paused, glancing up and down. He heard voices forward, caught sight of the light of a lanthorn slung to a yard and half a dozen men beneath it, gossiping, their weapons set aside.
There was no time to lose. Light was gathering behind the hills, the stars were fading, or so his nervous vision fancied. Like a shadow he made the rail, climbed upon it and with a jar under either armpit, the connecting rope across his chest, leaped into the sea.
There was a resounding splash as he sank beneath the surface. The guards came running to the rail. Bart spat the water out of his mouth as he bobbed into the air once more. They were firing from the galleon; but now he was sure he was away, not to be captured. Not a bullet came near the jars. The other ships were not aroused.
The flood tide caught him and sped him landward, while he struck out with his legs for better speed. The east was gray when he crawled out upon the beach, patted the friendly jars farewell, felt for the charm in his waistband and plunged into the thick jungle.
They would be after him—hotfoot. Spaniards and Indian trailers and the famous bloodhounds kept and trained to follow escaped slaves. If they once struck his trail that was the end of it. He plunged on through the woods, thanking his stars for the meal that, gave him the energy.
Striking a morass in the midst of the forest he waded through the water and at last roosted in a tree, draped with curtains of moss, satisfied he had baffled the pursuit for the time at least.
Before noon he heard the baying of hounds on the edge of the swamps, the shouts of the trainers. He caught a glimpse of Indians gliding along the margins and lay quietly hidden in his tree.
To escape along the coast to Golfo Triste, more than half-way to Havana, some forty leagues of mangrove swamp, forest and jungle, through streams infested with caymans and crocodiles, through a wilderness where he must live on roots and shellfish, unarmed against jaguars and the giant boa—that was his objective.
Golfo Triste was a pirate rendezvous. Sooner or later he would find kindred spirits there. Sooner or later he would get the revenge already forming in his brain—nothing less than the capture of the very ship from which he had just escaped. Give him time—a week, ten days—and he would do this before it made up its complement and sailed. He was certain it was a rich prize, richer even than Montalvo’s ship.
And it would be a rare revenge—to come back under their noses and take the galleon. It could be done—with luck. He was forcing that luck now, with a will that must stretch it to the limit. He realized that; but Fortune favored the brave, and the brave had to use means according to the occasion.
All day he heard the baying of the hounds. At night, perched in his tree-fork, hammocked with thick folds of moss, he saw torches flickering in the search.
So for three days and three nights. Bart was weak in the knees when he made his way out of the morass at daylight. Such water-roots as he could scrabble in constant fear of being sighted had proved scanty provender. They had been bitter and had given him dysentery. Insects had stung him and he was in a fever. Out of the trees he mounted a hill and looked back over the deserted crescent of the beach toward the sleeping town. The ships lay at anchor, mirrored in the calm water. No figures moved on the waterfront. In the public square, deserted, he saw the gallows that had been set up for him.
Bart shook his fist at it—good-humoredly enough, if ironical.
“If you wait for me as your fruit,” he said, “you’ll be a long time ripening. Adios!”
He had brought out from the morass a half-rotting gourd that he had found there, relic of some former fugitive. This he used for water-canteen, knowing well that he would often have to carry his supply. It was a wretched substitute. He had to balance its precious content as he fought through stiff jungle where he had to worm his way between twisted trunks, thorny undergrowth and lianas. Food, as he could obtain it, was scarce. There were doves and rabbits, but they mocked his efforts.
Stones had to be picked up and carried. In
the muggy heat of the bush they were more than a nuisance. It is a hard thing to hit bird or beast with even a bullet in a primeval tangle.
Parrots, macaws and the yet more brilliant trogons flew through the glades, screaming at him. Humming-birds gleamed like jewels flung at random through the forest. At night the great fireflies with their greenish lamps seemed elfin spirits.
His main food was shellfish; but often the mangroves, with their hooped roots curving out of deep mire, blocked his progress along the coast. Sometimes he found oysters clinging to the mangroves, but only at the edge of the sea and so infrequently as to make the tedious, tiring trip out of his direct path unprofitable.
The mangroves were his greatest trial, growing thick from the ooze that stank under the sun and offering no footing, save at low tide. Through their thick groves he had to swing from bough to bough ape-fashion, his calabash tucked into his rag of shirt. Here the mosquitoes attacked in clouds that forced him to brush them away almost continually to prevent blindness. Every step was a drain on his strength. He never found food nourishing enough to replace the loss.
He grew gaunt, his eyes sunken, ribs protruding, arms and legs mere bones set with muscles held there by sinews. His belly was a pit between ribs and hips. The fever never left him. He went on in semi-delirium, automatically. It was as if he had lashed the tiller of his will as the last selective act of consciousness, the course set for Golfo Triste—forty—thirty—twenty and—at last—ten leagues away.
He looked like a dead man staggering through the thickets, a dead man dug up and driven on by an uneasy soul. His hair and beard were matted, his eyes bloodshot, all his skin ripped with thorns or spotted with swollen stings. Scorpions bit him and made sloughing wounds, and he did not notice them. Jiggers got into his feet for all their horny soles, and he kept on.
Every mile or so he would come to a stream, dreading always to find one too deep to ford. At his approach caymans would slide into the water, lurking in their favorite nooks. The heavy air reeked of musk. Up and down stream Bart wearily plodded, seeking infrequent stones. He flung them into the water with rasping cries and then risked passage in the hope that he had scared the brutes away.
On the seventh day he came to a little headland and surveyed the coast ahead. As far as he could see, league upon league, stretched nothing but mangroves, running far inland. Bart groaned aloud, but never faltered. They had to be crossed. He had made some sort of meal with mussels and a fish caught in a rock-pool. Some sapodillas, a paw-paw and an overripe alligator pear—last of a lucky gathering—made his dessert.
The phrase of Simon the Swivel-Eyed had grafted securely in some convolution of his brain and with his fever it began to bear strange blossoms. This was forced luck, indeed—this defiance of all danger, of hunger, thirst, fever, wild beasts, this rape of the jungle.
He began to see his luck as a vision of a woman flitting on before him in a mirage that held by day and turned to dream by night, or whenever he essayed to rest. A luring woman who looked at him seductively with eyes and lips that beckoned but never promised.
She formed out of the swamp mists, stirred in the jungle depths, laughed up at him out of the water. A wayward minx who had given him much and now tested him to the uttermost. As he withstood, so would be the reward. She was a woman—therefore she loved a strong man. And he would show her he was strong. He would bend her, force her to his will. Simon—dead and drowned Simon—was a fool. Fortune favored the brave.
He declaimed such resolutions aloud in a cracked voice, then plunged on, croaking a chantey, a specter fighting on the borderland of life and death and winning back.
For four leagues through the mangrove swamp he barely set foot to ground. It was clutch and swing and clutch again. Now and then he drew himself up to a stout bough and rested before he made his weary way along. The palms of his hands were raw, deeply cracked, swollen, festering. But he kept going—famished, with a temperature at which a doctor would have thrown up the game of life—clutch and swing and clutch again—a human pendulum.
It took him two days to cross. The second sunset, flaring through the thinning trees, revealed the fearsome sight of a whitish body, half-covered with matted hair, with bent knees, aswing at the end of bony arms that had hooks instead of hands, jerking from one elastic branch to another—the travesty of a man, the caricature of an ape; jerking on with set face and staring eyes under the rustling canopy of glossy leaves until at last it swung itself out upon the grassy margin of a river and lay there insensible.
The current ran deeply to the sea. And the sea itself was far away. To keep direction in that swinging flight had been impossible. Bart slumbered heavily through night and forenoon before he stirred and looked at the river cutting through the jungle. It was a full quarter-mile across, a turbid flood that would surely swarm with caymans, that showed without testing that it was too deep for fording. A soggy tree came lunging down the center of it, swirling, sucked down now and again by undertows.
His sunken, somber eyes held no light now, only a dull gleam that showed there was still fire left. It almost died out at sight of the watery barrier. He gazed round dully at the trees he could not chop down, whose lesser limbs, green and elastic, he lacked strength to tear away. They would not have helped him. He was at an end.
He dug his thumbs into his waistband at the hips, felt the charm and took it out. For a moment reason was dethroned, and Bart gazed at the little fetish with the face of a maniac. He raised his arm and flung the thing from him, watching with glazed eyes to see it spurt the water.
The golden chain looped about his wrist in the clumsy aim of his shapeless hand; the amulet fell, to strike against his knee and hang suspended. Bart looked at it stupidly; but reaction was coming. He had swung off-course, but the lashed tiller of his will brought him slowly back again. His broken lips parted; his eyes widened between their swollen lids.
To him it seemed as if a miracle had happened, though the thing must have been there from the first—an old board, a plank two inches thick, some four feet long, floated from some region far up-river. In it bristled some heavy spikes and nails, rusty—but of iron, malleable; tools!
He lugged at the prize with sudden strength, and even as he dragged it up the bank made another discovery. This was a clump of a species of croton, its broken leaves and juice capable of stupefying fish. That this rolling river held many was sure. He had but to find a pool. Inside of an hour he had five big fish chosen from the shadows of his pool, carried there in the eddy and stupefied—three guayacon, two viajocos.
A nail struck, sparks from a stone to moss-tinder. He had his fire, his belly full of cooked meat once more. It seemed as if the wheel of fortune, turning so long away from him, was coming his way again; as if the luck lady had relented. The river held no terrors now. He pounded at his nails with stones for hammer and anvil. He heated them and tempered them and made chisels out of the spikes, cutting-blades of the smaller nails.
He manufactured two efficient spears with hardwood shafts, spending the rest of the day in prodigious, inspired effort. To the plank he added branches that he hacked down and bound with withes, crossing on his raft triumphantly, poling, paddling himself over, his legs tucked under him for chance of caymans. That same night he speared a chameleon, then its mate, and feasted on their tender flesh with soursops for vegetable. He was coming through.
Vigor came back to him with better food and fortune—as a dried sponge sucks up water. He fought off the fever. The day—the fourteenth day—that he struck the open sea and saw the Golfo Triste gleaming in the sun, he cast off the subjective lashings and resumed full control of his mental tiller. There were no more mangroves, only grassy headlands for a while, with pleasant growths of timber that the sea-winds kept fairly cleared of brush on the scant soil.
Sucking in great breaths that filled his capacious chest, Bart strode on to the cliffs’ margin and looked down on the rendezvous, the mouth of the Rio Triste. Its name belied itself in that moment
. Here was no river of sadness, for a ship was careening, there were canvas shelters and palm arbors on the sand, figures with bright cloths about their heads moving here and there—Brethren of the Coast!
Bart let out a yell and began to run before he checked himself. He did not want to appear before his fellows like a frightened child running home out of the woods. He was still a leader. He wanted to impress some of these men into his service. He made a shrewd guess as to the ship that was laid up and, with it, the name of its buccaneer captain. They knew each other, had gamed together and drunk together; they respected each other’s prowess, though Bart, younger at the business, was the more famed.
He reached the higher reaches of the river—no need to cross it—and took stock of himself. There was little that he could mend; but he managed to comb out beard and hair, painfully enough, to suspend his chain and amulet about his neck, to wash away blood and dirt and to make the most of what rags were left. So with his chisels and his two spears he strolled toward the camp as carelessly as if he had merely left it for a walk in the forest.
The first who saw him was the buccaneer chief, superintending the scraping and calking of his ship from the beach. He hardly knew the distorted figure, at once shrunken and swollen. The altered voice held some link of recognition. Bart’s smile was wry, his bold eyes hidden by puffed lips and lids; but the amulet made the connection. It was Lucky Bart!
“They told me you were to be hanged at San Francisco Campeachy two weeks ago,” cried the other.
“I was never born to be hanged,” said Bart, “nor to be drowned either, methinks, though I can not swim. In the name of fellowship give me some wine and meat. I stink like a fish and I am sick of chameleons.”
“You came by the coast—afoot?”
“By the coast, and, since I can neither fly nor swim, afoot; yet for a while I traveled through the air.”
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 245