by Anthology
I swept my hand toward the Shoshone. “From the future—” I began.
But his hand seized mine convulsively again.
“But you speak my own tongue, albeit somewhat strangely. You are English!” Shaking my head gravely I told him that we were not of his land, but of a people related in blood and tongue, now dwelling in a great country to the north.
“And in a great war of our times,” I went on, “my own land and that which is yours grown older, yet even more powerful, were allied in the cause of democracy.”
His eyes widened.
“Democracy? ’Tis a strange word, and savoreth to my mind of certain ungodly politics of the ancient Greek. Has Greece, then, returned to her old prominence in this growing world, and again attempting to elevate the peasantry to a position they cannot hold?”
I shook my head.
“The ancient Greece is long gone,” I answered. “And yet the modern Greece fought with us. Our cause was not that of a single nation, my friend. We fought for the liberty and happiness of all mankind.”
His eyes flashed to his fellows. Then returning, searched my face.
“Truly is the world upside down, fair deliverer. We fought for the queen.”
There was haughtiness in his tone and words.
“In our day,” I smiled, “the people are king.”
His brows wrinkled in perplexity. He drew himself up with an arrogance that touched my sense of humor again, and opened his mouth as though in scorn. Then came, the sputtering roar of an escape valve from the Shoshone, and to his eyes shot utter mystification once more. Slowly his glance roved over the destroyer, then quite suddenly fixed upon the bosun’s mate, who was still attempting, dictionary in hand, to illuminate the minds of the Spanish crew as our glaring searchlights brought their bodies into the light of day.
“ ’Tis black magic, and I understand not. The future you say you come from, and yet you know not how you came, or why. You say that you are of a new land and kin to my own, and yet that the people are king. And in fighting for the people, who are king, you say that you fight for this dream of ancient Greece, this insidious outrage they called democracy. Against whom, then, if not against another king—who could not well be if what you say be sooth—did you take arms?”
I could think of no other answer to his question than one which I felt he would best understand.
“We fought, England and we, against the Powers of Darkness.”
He fell back a step.
“Truly, then, you are in league with God.”
I nodded and told the truth.
“We know more of God than did your day. And understand more His powers, using them in that greater knowledge.”
A gasp from all five. I wondered if I had uttered blasphemy. The man before me, who seemed to be of higher rank than his comrades, stared in silence for a moment. Then stepped closer to me.
“Art thou priest, then? And all with you?”
“I am a doctor,” I replied.
He fell back again, as though my touch might contaminate.
“A chirurgeon! Nay, jest not. No doctor has knowledge of God. Yet that fellow there”—he indicated the bosun’s mate—“he readeth from a book. He, then, is a priest.”
I explained as best I could that all men of our day could read, and that all men, though not priests, had come to a greater and more intimate comprehension of the powers of God. But I could not make him understand, and shortly, when Lieutenant Wilson called me aft, I bowed and left them in their bewilderment.
The captain, it seemed, was in a deuced hurry to get away. He had decided, the exec informed me, not only to take the English on board the destroyer, but also the treasure the galleon carried. And this latter, our men, with the aid of some Spanish who had found themselves able to move, were bringing up from below and storing in the forward magazine of the Shoshone. One small chest had been opened on deck, and about it were gathered the gunnery officer, the engineer, and a number of the men.
It was full to the brim with virgin gold. Cowling was on his knees before it, running his hands through the coarse grains of the stuff as a man might in sifting wheat. I myself—I could not resist—had scooped up a handful of the heavy stuff, roughly calculating its value. The one chest alone would have made a third of our crew happily independent. How it glistened when the beams of the searchlight lingered upon it as the crowd about shifted and bent! The little professor was right: we could well be worth a “meellion each mans!”
“How many chests are there?”
“In all there are fourteen like this,” breathed Cowling with a sigh. “And a round dozen filled with bars of silver.”
Millions! Millions!
And ours, every bar of silver, every grain of gold.
In sudden thought I called to the tall Englishman: “Where did this gold come from? From what land?”
He drew himself up.
“These cursed Spaniards may lie, but I do not. The Spaniards took the gold from us.”
“From you!—The captain had probably been right in his conjecture. “Then—but from what land did it originally come?”
“That I do not know in sooth,” haughtily. “We stoop not to take it from the soil ourselves. We gained possession of the gold—from others.”
I jumped. He had taken it from the Spanish in the first case! I stared at him in amazement, all the stories of my boyhood coming in a rush.
“You are a pirate?”
His eyes flashed. “I seized it for my queen.”
Ha! Buccaneering for deft-conscienced Elizabeth. Little difference, thought I, though I kept the notion to myself.
It took well over half an hour to store the stuff in the magazine. And by that time the towlines had been lead out and all was ready for our return—if indeed we could return.
The English demurred somewhat at going aboard the fire devil that our destroyer must have seemed, but were prevailed upon to accept our hospitality by the captain, who told them that he would explain the modern mysteries of the Shoshone to them, and also that they were to have their share of the gold. Quickly, at that last, did they appear to forget that they had taken it for their queen.
And somewhat after midnight we cast off the mooring lines, and started at dead slow until the towline began to take up a strain. Then we came to standard speed of ten knots.
We figured that when we had sent that last message to the squadron commander, our distance from Colon was approximately one hundred and sixty miles. Following the Spaniard fleet might have added twenty more. Hence, we should make port by three in the afternoon, instead of the anticipated eight in the morning.
Three in the afternoon, I had better say, by our own clocks. If—and Heaven forbid that such a thing should come to pass—if we continued to remain in the year of 1564, with the three-hour difference in time of sunset, then we would reach Colon by high noon.
And reaching Colon—I confess I have dreamed of leaving the sea were fortune ever to come my way—the treasure stored below would in some part surely come to us. Then—gold, and silver, and a little home in a nook in the hills back of the bay at home. Life again with my wife.
And the youngster, cutting his teeth the last time I had seen him a year and a half ago.
The romance of it! Building a home with pirate gold. Chests of it! Gold. Silver! Even now, on our own ship, pirate treasure. Ours!
Chapter VII
BLACK MAGIC
When day came at last, young Rowland was out of danger.
And the captain was happy. Yet underneath his outward show of gayety was something else. This I could not entirely understand. But as we gathered at the table for breakfast, with our English guests, I thought I discovered the trouble.
He was grieving over the sinking of eleven galleons. Grieving that his own sorrow and rage at the hurt the Spaniards did Rowland had so taken him by force. Grieving, and yet—“wondering, too.
I confess that I also had wondered much as I tried to sleep during the da
rk hours after we got under way. I could yet see the great galleon in the glare of the after searchlight’s relentless eye and at the end of our steel wire tow. I could not understand how the thing had come to pass. I could hardly believe as I lay in my bunk that conditions were actually as they were. Time and time again I arose, and, donning a bathrobe, climbed up on deck and looked astern of us for the concrete proof. Each time I felt my heart beat hard again. The galleon was there, still there—it was not a dream. We men of the “present” were thrust back into the past.
It was true. It was awful to contemplate, hard to accept—but it was true. The deck force was repairing our foremast—shot down. And there rode the last of the twelve galleons in the fleet we had sent to the bottom of the sea.
The treasure was in our hold!
The English prisoners were eating breakfast with me now!
And Colon—Colon was ahead of us now.
A few hours more, four hours more when the sun reached its height—when the sun reached its height?
Hold on. I gripped myself. That would mean that we were still under the influence of the thing, that had sent us into the past. That would mean that if we came to land at all, Colon—as we knew it—would not be there—non-existent! Then what we do? What could we do? How long would this condition last?
Were we forever to remain in the past? Were we from now on to take up life from the year 1564 and go on, living a strange and perhaps horribly uncertain life in the day of our ancestors—centuries before our own grandfathers were born on earth? What—my heart beat unsteadily as I watched the Englishman awkwardly attempt manipulation of their forks.
Forks! We lived in a time when a fork was not invented. A little thing, a fork. And yet—idiocy! I gripped myself again.
And Colon—the canal—not yet a thing of life!
I showed the Englishmen over the ship in the broad light of day. And truly I think they believed. themselves bewitched. The glances they continually cast back upon the galleon following in our wake! The fearful manner in which they touched each new miracle—the simplest contrivances on deck!
At breakfast—the forks. Their childish surprise when we gave them coffee.
“Coffee!”
One of them exclaimed aloud; he had tasted the stuff in the land of the infidel Turk.
The glances they cast at each other! These demons of the future, these devils of the unknown seas—ate food and drank—coffee!
How they exclaimed even to see us light a cigarette. Then the pleasure that overcame their consternation when we prevailed upon them each to try one. More. And more!
On deck. The torpedo tubes—we had to show them prints of the torpedos themselves. How they shuddered in horror, and yet aroused to enthusiasm when we told them of their destructive power, and related how we had sunk eleven of the galleons with one torpedo each. Oh; yes, they had heard and felt the muffled detonations in their black hole below. How they shuddered again when we related how their ship had been saved by accident.
“The will of the good God!” they exclaimed.
I bowed my head. Perhaps it was. I wondered if it were by the will of God that we had been thus cast back into the past. I wondered. The great god—Time.
The engines—afraid to touch them. Carefully we explained. Showed them a coffeepot in the wardroom pantry. Let them see the lifting of the cover as the water boiled—Watt-like. They shook their heads—they could not understand.
Electric lights. How they marveled!
And leaped back at a slight shock we were able to give them, by the touch of a cigar lighter the black gang had rigged in the engine room. Magic! Black magic!
Like children. Then again like the men they must have been when they trod their own decks.
Officers all, and titled. I tried to explain to them our own system of examination for commission in our own navy. What? We were of the commons? Of the mass? Peasantry?
Unbelievable!
Yet, and I do not think it was entirely fancy on my part, I swear I detected a certain condescension toward us, despite their obvious awe, from then on. Poor devils!
The little suns? What were they? In the night they had made the galleon stand out as at noon of a brilliant day.
We showed them the searchlights; they fell back before the sputtering hiss as our electrician sent the current through the carbons. Little suns! Black magic!
I shuddered—that second setting of the sun, only the night before. It already seemed a month, an age. Four hundred years—four centuries back. Would the next setting of the sun find us still in mystery? Or—
And Colon. An hour more now, and we were due to raise land in the east. What would these sixteenth century Englishmen say of our canal? Or—would the canal be there? That was not yet even a dream. That was of the future. So were we. But somehow, in some way, good or evil—in our own past! With the blood, Heaven knows, of some of these very Englishmen in our own veins!
The compass! Yes, they knew what a compass did. But such a compass!
Noon came, and still they marveled. Still the condescension. And yet, also, still the awe, the reverence, the bewilderment.
Pathetic, tragic, comical—terrible. For them. And for us.
A bell rang on the bridge.
They stared in dumb astonishment as the officer of the deck sprang to the voice tube from the crow’s nest.
“Land, ho!”
“Where away?”
“Dead ahead, sir.”
The executive, in his capacity of navigator, nodded to the captain. I fancied he breathed a sigh of relief. I know that I did. At least, the land was where it ought to be. And sighted when expected. Land!
By the sun—high noon.
But by our ship’s clocks—unchanged to suit the new condition of the great white orb overhead—three o’clock in the afternoon.
Gradually the land rose to the east. Familiar, yet strange.
Binoculars, a long glass. Colon was not within our view. The executive took bearings upon prominent landmarks that showed above the monotony of the greening coastline.
Turned an amazed face to the captain.
“This mountain, and that, correspond with our charts, captain. Between them ought to be Colon. It isn’t there.”
We stared at the land.
We turned and saw the great galleon at the end of our steel wire.
We were within a mile of the beach. A signal fluttered to our foreyard. A man appeared in the towering bows of the galleon. Semaphore messages whipped back and forth. The man disappeared.
“Stop both!” the captain snapped.
The roar of the blowers diminished to a low drone. The English stared. Mystery again.
The fo’c’sle gang were ready forward. The bosun’s mate had the anchor bar under the fluke. The captain watched the galleon as it drifted on. A splash under her bows.
“They’ve cast the towline adrift, captain!” cried the officer of the deck.
“On the job,” returned the old man laconically.
A greater splash.
“Galleon’s anchored, sir,” came the report.
“Very well.”
The skipper leaned over the rail in the port wing of the bridge. The Englishmen stared with him. The way of the Shoshone was almost stopped. The after-gang were bending a heavy Manila mooring line to the eye in the steel hawser, preparatory to taking it to the anchor engine to haul in.
“Dead in the water, sir!” cried the leadsman from below.
The captain waved his hands to the fo’c’sle. “Let’s go!”
The bosun’s mate gave a great heave on the anchor bar, and with a rattling roar that set the ship a-shivering the chain leaped and jerked from below.
No word was spoken for some moments.
The officer of the deck made his noon reports, doubtfully.
“Twelve o’clock, sir—by the sun. Chronometers wound.”
“Very well.”
Nothing else.
We all stood and stared.
/> The general appearance of the land was the same as we had seen it when we left Colon two days before. The low, palm-fringed, white beach. The rising hills to right and left. The same indentations in the coast line. The same. There could be no doubt of that. And yet—not the same.
Time!
Four centuries were yet to pass before we might recognize all, and feel certain of ourselves again. Some one suggested that we leave the galleon and coast up and down the shore a bit. No answer was vouchsafed him. We knew where we were—geographically. We knew where we were—chronologically. But somehow we were in between. And the great god Time had played us a horrible trick.
One of the Englishmen suddenly pointed. “Darien! The Spaniard stronghold of these seas. Darien!”
We had known that. But the words did not arouse any enthusiasm. Darien—and four centuries later, Colon. Outcasts from our own land, our own civilization, our own time. God!
Came a sudden heart-jerking and nerve-rending crash from below.
The next second the sun blazed in our faces, mid-low in the western sky! A loud cry came from the fo’c’sle.
“Colon!”
We stared aghast. It was the change.
The land before us—Colon! We were back. By what marvelous accident, we did not know. But the sun had been jerked from directly above our heads to mid-afternoon, and the green land had given way to the white city, lying low before us.
Another exclamation. “Great Heavens! The galleon—”
I swung about, still stunned. The Spanish galleon had disappeared. A man called down in a high-pitched voice from the fire control platform.
“There are men struggling in the water where the galleon lay, sir!”
A sudden light came into the captain’s eyes.
“Great God! It must be—must be our own men. On the jump, there! Save those men!”
The motor sailer was hanging ready from the davits, a foot from the water, the smoke of its engine drifting up to the deck. Men tumbled into it. The boat shoved off.
In sudden recollection I dashed around the bridge.
Then to the captain: “Captain! The Englishmen—”
He nodded, looking me straight in the eye.