by Anthology
“And I will not unmindful be Of this, My cov’nant, passed Twixt Me and you and every flesh Whiles that the world should last,” sang Bligh, rapt . . .
But as a dreamer, even in his dreams, will scratch upon the wall by his couch some key or word to put him in mind of his vision on the morrow when it has left him, so Abel Keeling found himself seeking some sign to be a proof to those to whom no vision is vouchsafed. Even Bligh sought that—could not be silent in his bliss, but lay on the deck there, uttering great passionate Amens and praising his Maker, as he said, upon an harp and an instrument of ten strings. So with Abel Keeling. It would be the Amen of his life to have praised God, not upon a harp, but upon a ship that should carry her own power, that should store wind or its equivalent as she stored her victuals, that should be something wrested from the chaos of uninvention and ordered and disciplined and subordinated to Abel Keeling’s will . . . And there she was, that ship-shaped thing of spirit-grey, with the four pipes that resembled a phantom organ now broadside and of equal length. And the ghost-crew of that ship were speaking again . . .
The interrupted silver chain by the quarter-deck balustrade had now become continuous, and the balusters made a herring-bone over their own motionless reflections. The spilt water from the pipkin had dried, and the pipkin was not to be seen. Abel Keeling stood beside the mast, erect as God made man to go. With his leathery hand he smote upon the bell. He waited for the space of a minute, and then cried:
“Ahoy! . . . Ship ahoy! . . . What ship’s that?”
3
We are not conscious in a dream that we are playing a game the beginning and end of which are in ourselves. In this dream of Abel Keeling’s a voice replied:
“Hallo, it’s found its tongue . . . Ahoy there! What are you?”
Loudly and in a clear voice Abel Keeling called: “Are you a ship?”
With a nervous giggle the answer came:
“We are a ship, aren’t we, Ward? I hardly feel sure . . . Yes, of course, we’re a ship. No question about us. The question is what the dickens you are.”
Not all the words these voices used were intelligible to Abel Keeling, and he knew not what it was in the tone of these last words that reminded him of the honour due to the Mary of the Tower. Blister-white and at the end of her life as she was, Abel Keeling was still jealous of her dignity; the voice had a youngish ring; and it was not fitting that young chins should be wagged about his galleon. He spoke curtly.
“You that spoke—are you the master of that ship?”
“Officer of the watch” the words floated back; “the captain’s below.”
“Then send for him. It is with masters that masters hold speech,” Abel Keeling replied.
He could see the two shapes, flat and without relief, standing on a high narrow structure with rails. One of them gave a low whistle, and seemed to be fanning his face; but the other rumbled something into a sort of funnel. Presently the two shapes became three. There was a murmuring, as of a consultation, and then suddenly a new voice spoke. At its thrill and tone a sudden tremor ran through Abel Keeling’s frame. He wondered what response it was that that voice found in the forgotten recesses of his memory . . .
“Ahoy!” seemed to call this new yet faintly remembered voice. “What’s all this about? Listen. We’re His Majesty’s destroyer Sea-pink, out of Devonport last October, and nothing particular the matter with us. Now who are you?”
“The Mary of the Tower, out of the Port of Rye on the day of Saint Anne, and only two men—”
A gasp interrupted him.
“Out of where?” that voice that so strangely moved Abel Keeling said unsteadily, while Bligh broke into groans of renewed rapture.
“Out of the Port of Rye, in the County of Sussex . . . nay, give ear, else I cannot make you hear me while this man’s spirit and flesh wrestle so together! . . . Ahoy! Are you gone?” For the voices had become a low murmur, and the ship-shape had faded before Abel Keeling’s eyes. Again and again he called. He wished to be informed of the disposition and economy of the wind-chamber . . .
“The wind-chamber!” he called, in an agony lest the knowledge almost within his grasp should be lost. “I would know about the wind-chamber . . .”
Like an echo, there came back the words, uncomprehendingly uttered, “The wind-chamber? . . .”
“. . . that driveth the vessel—perchance ‘tis not wind—a steel bow that is bent also conserveth force—the force you store, to move at will through calm and storm . . .”
“Can you make out what it’s driving at?”
“Oh, we shall all wake up in a minute . . .”
“Quiet, I have it; the engines; it wants to know about our engines. It’ll be wanting to see out papers presently. Rye Port! . . . Well, no harm in humoring it; let’s see what it can make of this. Ahoy there!” came the voice to Abel Keeling, a little strongly, as if a shifting wind carried it, and speaking faster and faster as it went on. “Not wind; but steam; d’you hear? Steam, steam. Steam, in eight Yarrow water-tube boilers. S-t-e-a-m, steam. Got it? And we’ve twin-screw triple expansion engines, indicated horsepower four thousand, and we can do 430 revolutions per minute; sawy? Is there anything your phantomhood would like to know about our armament? . . .”
Abel Keeling was muttering fretfully to himself. It annoyed him that words in his own vision should have no meaning for him. How did words come to him in a dream that he had no knowledge of when wide awake? The Seapink—that was the name of this ship; but a pink was long and narrow, low-carged and square-built aft . . .
“And as for our armament,” the voice with the tones that so profoundly troubled Abel Keeling’s memory continued, “we’ve two revolving Whitehead torpedo-tubes, three six-pounders on the upper deck, and that’s a twelve-pounder forward there by the conning-tower. I forgot to mention that we’re nickel steel, with a coal capacity of sixty tons in most damnably placed bunkers, and that thirty and a quarter knots is about our top. Care to come aboard?”
But the voice was speaking still more rapidly and feverishly, as if to fill a silence with no matter what, and the shape that was uttering it was straining forward anxiously over the rail.
“Ugh! But I’m glad this happened in the daylight,” another voice was muttering.
“I wish I was sure it was happening at all . . . Poor old spook!”
“I suppose it would keep its feet if her deck was quite vertical. Think she’ll go down, or just melt?”
“Kind of go down . . . without wash . . .”
“Listen—here’s the other one now—”
For Bligh was singing again:
“For, Lord, Thou know’st our nature such
If we great things obtain And in the getting of the same
Do feel no grief or pain, We little do esteem thereof;
But, hardly brought to pass, A thousand times we do esteem More than the other was—”
“But oh, look—look—look at the other! . . . Oh, I say, wasn’t he a grand old boy! Look!”
For, transfiguring Abel Keeling’s form as a prophet’s form is transfigured in the instant of his rapture, flooding his brain with the white eureka-light of perfect knowledge, that for which he and his dream had been at a standstill had come. He knew her, this ship of the future, as if God’s Finger had bitten her lines into his brain. He knew her as those already sinking into the grave know things, miraculously, completely, accepting Life’s impossibilities with a nodded “Of course.” From the ardent mouths of her eight furnaces to the last drip from her lubricators, from her bed-plates to the breeches of her quick-firers, he knew her—read her gauges, thumbed her bearings, gave the ranges from her range-finders, and lived the life he lived who was in command of her. And he would not forget on the morrow, as he had forgotten on many morrows, for at last he had seen the water about his feet, and knew that there would be no morrow for him in this world . . .
And even in that moment, with but a sand or two to run in his glass, indomitable, insatiable, dre
aming dream on dream, he could not die until he knew more. He had two questions to ask, and a master-question; and but a moment remained. Sharply his voice rang out.
“Ho, there! . . . This ancient ship, the Mary of the Tower, cannot steam thirty and a quarter knots, but yet she can sail the waters. What more does your ship? Can she soar above them, as the fowls of the air soar?”
“Lord, he thinks we’re an aeroplane.’ . . . No, she can’t . . .”
“And can you dive, even as the fishes of the deep?”
“No . . . Those are submarines . . . we aren’t a submarine . . .”
But Abel Keeling waited for no more. He gave an exulting chuckle.
“Oho, oho—thirty knots, and but on the face of the waters—no more than that? Oho! . . . Now my ship, the ship I see as a mother sees full-grown the child she has but conceived—my ship I say—oho!—my ship . . . Below there—trip that gun!”
The cry came suddenly and alertly, as a muffled sound came from below and an ominous tremor shook the galleon.
“By Jove, her guns are breaking loose below—that’s her finish—”
“Trip that gun, and double-breech the others!” Abel Keeling’s voice rang out, as if there had been any to obey him. He had braced himself within the belfry frame; and then in the middle of the next order his voice suddenly failed him. His ship-shape, that for the moment he had forgotten, rode once more before his eyes. This was the end, and his master-question, apprehension for the answer to which was now torturing his face and well-nigh bursting his heart, was still unasked.
“Ho—he that spoke with me—the master,” he cried in a voice that ran high, “is he there?”
“Yes, yes!” came the other voice across the water, sick with suspense. “Oh, be quick!”
There was a moment in which hoarse cries from many voices, a heavy thud and rumble on wood, and a crash of timbers and a gurgle and a splash were indescribably mingled; the gun under which Abel Keeling had lain had snapped her rotten breechings and plunged down the deck, carrying Bligh’s unconscious form with it. The deck came up vertical, and for one instant longer Abel Keeling clung to the belfry.
“I cannot see your face,” he screamed, “but meseems your voice is a voice I know. What is your name?”
In a torn sob the answer came across the water:
“Keeling—Abel Keeling . . . Oh, my God!”
And Abel Keeling’s cry of triumph, that mounted to a victorious “Huzza!” was lost in the downward plunge of the Mary of the Tower, that left the strait empty save for the sun’s fiery blaze and the last smoke-like evaporation of the mists.
PRAIRIE SUN
Edward Bryant
They plundered the past and returned to their own time with a trophy they would never forget.
Stillness.
Except for the boy, nothing moved on the prairie. The hawks did not hunt this morning. Not even the vultures circled in the empty sky. The birds evidently were waiting until Micah Taverner made his kill.
The heat hung like a heavy curtain over the world. All motion seemed suspended. The thought entered Micah’s mind that on these plains anything at all could happen. His was a sudden and early maturity, and not one he relished.
Thirteen-year-old Micah moved quietly—perhaps not so silently as an Indian, but still disturbing the saw-toothed grass with less noise than most others in the company. He balanced his father’s long muzzle-loader carefully, thumb ready to take the hammer off half-cock. A small antelope would be welcome. A young white-tailed deer would be even better. A large jackrabbit would suffice.
To Micah’s right the river Platte wound slowly east by south, the direction from which the company had come. At this point the road followed a straighter path than the river. The boy’s present course took him up a gentle rise so that he had now attained an elevation of a hundred yards above the river. Within a rod of the Platte, all was lush and green. The grass and the trees grew luxuriantly. Beyond them the world turned to shades of brown and tan and yellow.
The world seemed to contain little more than the river and the prairie. And the road. Had the boy wished to stand in the ruts made by countless passing wheels, he would have found them waist-deep.
Micah heard a sound in the dead air. He froze, waiting. He heard something again. Glass breaking! The mutter of words. The sounds came from beyond the low rise ahead. Two voices. Whoever they were who were speaking, they were close by the trail.
The boy slowly cocked the hammer of the rifle. It seemed to him the click echoed out across the parched land like the gunshot itself. Again he heard words too distant and indistinct to be understood. But the tone did not sound alarmed.
White men? he thought. Pawnee had been the first word in his mind. Or Sioux. Or Blackfeet. He had heard the tales of slaughter and torture from the talkers around the fire. He had listened then with eyes wide and the breath catching in his throat, even though his father had laughed and suggested wryly that the red tribes were no more monsters than were the men of the company. And, after all, men of other companies had given deadlier gifts than bullets to the Indians.
Micah gripped his father’s rifle tighter and stealthily approached the summit, Sounds again—this time a rattle as if iron articles and wood were being placed together in a bag. Outcroppings of porous stone afforded the boy some cover as he reached the hill’s crest.
White! At least the strangers were not red men, though they appeared odd to Micah’s eyes. There were two of them, and they were poking through the heaps of discards beside the trail. The road was lined with all manner of belongings thrown away by the exhausted, overburdened men and women barely halfway along their arduous journey. The wagons, the oxen, the horses and mules, the people—all could carry only so much.
Micah had seen the jettisoned tools and household goods start to appear beside the wagon ruts not long after Fort Kearney, many miles even before reaching the ford of the South Platte. Before the sickness began, his lather had tried keeping a running tally of what he saw for just a mile or two.
“There must be ten thousand dollars’ worth of goods there,” he had said, “All for the picking, had one the time or the desire.”
But few struggling toward California or Oregon, of course, had the time or the desire. So the prized New England heirloom furniture, the discarded barrels of flour and sacks of white beans, the Franklin stoves and the printing presses, all lay rotting beneath the prairie sun.
And now Micah saw the two strange while men rooting like hogs among the once-prized belongings scattered beside the road. Their backs were to him, so for a while he watched without their knowledge. Both men were tall, each easily attaining a height of over six feet. Though one had dark hair and the other’s hair was as light as the dried grass, they seemed much alike in appearance. The pair wore similar clothing: plaid shirts with suspenders, brown cloth trousers, and thick-soled boots. The towhead’s shirt was red; the darker man’s was green. But Micah saw there was something not quite right about the clothing. For one thing, the cloth was slick, and it gleamed under the direct sun. For another, he abruptly realized that as the men flexed to pick up objects, each man’s outfit was all of-one piece of material. It was as if each were wearing a set of long Johns colored to appear to be real clothing.
The towhead was showing the other a New England hooked rug much like the treasure Micah’s mother still packed deep in the wagon after adamantly refusing to discard it at the Platte River crossing.
Micah wondered whether he should accost them or whether it would be wiser simply to backtrack along the trail and forage in another direction. Then the darker man turned slightly, glanced up and looked straight at Micah. He said something to his companion. Both of them stared at the boy.
Finally, one of them, the towhead, said, “Come on down here, young man.” He put down the hooked rug and stood there quietly with empty hands. The other man slowly spread his hands, palms outward.
Micah realized they were both looking at his father’s muzzl
e-loader.
He warily approached the pair, then looked beyond them. The muzzle of the rifle came up. “Don’t—” said the dark-haired man.
Whatever else he was going to say was interrupted by the black-powder explosion.
Two yards of decapitated prairie rattler jerked and flopped in death throes close by their feet as each man yelled and leaped aside. They looked from the snake to Micah and back to the snake again.
“Thank you, boy.” said the towhead.
“Mighty big one,” said Micah. He felt very pleased with the shot and tried not to grin. He started to reload the rifle. “Probably the biggest one I’ve seen.”
The men exchanged glances. “What’s your name, son?” the darker man asked. Micah told them.
“Well now, Master Micah Taverner,” said the towhead, “please call me John. My friend here is Droos.” Droos inclined his head. “We both of us truly do appreciate your eliminating the serpent.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” Micah said, ramming wadding down the barrel. “Just glad to help.”
There was silence. The men seemed trying to communicate with each other by sharp looks. Micah paid attention only to the muzzle-loader.
Finally, John said, “I suppose you’re wondering what the two of us are doing out here.”
“None of my business,” said Micah. “Admirable,” said Droos, turning away. “His mouth isn’t as extraordinarily loose as yours, John. Now let’s get back to work and see if we can find any more East Middle-bury bottles like the one you so carelessly dropped.”
But John seemed fascinated by the boy. “May I ask what you’re doing out here?” he said. “I believe the last train passed by here nearly a week ago, and the next wagons aren’t due for days.”