With the body slung over his shoulder Rex was leading, but he had only one hand free and the sudden exertion was causing the wound in his leg to pain him badly. Marie Lou had slipped into the group just behind him so that Richard and de Richleau ran on either side of her. As the two Negroes came at them Rex sent one of them reeling with a sudden, violent push in the face with his free hand; the Duke tackled the other by a kick on the shin which caused him to yowl, spin round and go sprawling on the cobbles.
For a moment there was a clear space in front of them, but a hail of missiles whizzed at them as they ran. Marie Lou got a lemon in her right eye, which half-blinded her, and a stone tore the knuckles of de Richleau’s left hand. A dozen other oddments bounced from their bodies after giving them as many painful buffets.
Behind, to each side and in front of them the crowd were giving tongue; a loud, angry roar filled the whole street. Twenty yards ahead there was a side-turning which was only thinly covered by half a dozen people who were running out of it towards them. Rex swung right and headed for it.
A great Negress with a meat-chopper lifted it to slash at him as he passed, but Rex had been a rugger-player in his Harvard days, and in spite of the handicap of his game leg he swerved with amazing speed just in time to escape the blow. Richard crashed full-tilt into another Negro, knocking him over. Then they were through into the side-turning. But it was much narrower than the street, and scores more people, roused by the shouting, were streaming into it from the teaming courts and alleys which lay behind the docks.
A thick-lipped, yellow-haired Mulatto clawed at de Richleau and managed to drag him back for a moment, but the Duke’s fist crunched on the bone of the fellow’s nose and he released his hold with a yelp of pain.
Almost blinded by the shower of missiles and deafened by the shouting, they covered another hundred yards and came out into a wider street. Keeping his head, Rex turned left along it, making once more for the harbour; but a great portion of the crowd appeared to have guessed their intention and had taken a short cut for the purpose of heading them off. Fifty yards in front of them, men, women and children were tumbling over one another as they charged helter-skelter out of an alleyway.
The Duke groaned and glanced swiftly back. Another hundred or more shiny-faced people people were following hard upon their heels. Escape seemed utterly impossible. Within a few moments they must be dragged down. Then, a little way ahead of them on the left side of the road, he caught sight of a small church. There seemed just a chance that they might succeed in obtaining sanctuary there if only they could reach it.
‘The church!’ he yelled above the din. ‘Make for the church!’ But the way was blocked by half a hundred angry, glistening faces. Richard was still brandishing his automatic. He knew that now had come the time when he must use it.
Whipping up the pistol, he fired two shots above the heads of the crowd. With a shout of panic they cowered away and scattered. The little party of Whites raced on, reached the church and dashed up the steps to its porch.
At that very moment, attracted by the noise, a tall, sandy-haired Roman Catholic priest came hurrying out of the big arched door. He had had no time to discover what the tumult was about and saw only that the mob was pursuing five Europeans, one of whom carried a large sheeted bundle.
Instantly he strode out on to steps and sternly raised his hand, forbidding the rabble to follow its prey further. De Richleau knew then that, temporarily at all events, the Powers of Light had intervened on behalf of himself and his friends by directing them to the church and sending the priest to their assistance at that critical moment.
Without pausing to see the outcome of this check to their pursuers de Richleau thrust the others through the door of the church and ran behind them down the nave. At its end they darted along a side-aisle to a curtained opening and through it into the vestry. There, bruised and breathless, they halted for a moment to get fresh wind.
‘How long d’you think we’ll be safe here?’ panted Richard.
We daren’t stay; even if the priest could hold off the mob,’ replied de Richleau quickly. ‘Directly he learns why they’re after us he’ll insist on our surrendering Philippa’s body; and that I refuse to do.’
As he spoke he was already turning the knob of the door of the vestry, which led into the street. He opened it a crack so that he could peer out.
‘The coast is fairly clear,’ he whispered. ‘Come on— quick! We must make the most of the lead we’ve got, before some of the mob come round to this entrance.’
Slipping out of the door, they covered another hundred yards towards the water-front before they were spotted. A small boy began to yell after them in a piercing treble, and within two minutes the hunt was in full cry again. But now, at the end of the narrow alley down which they were running they could see the masts of the ships in the harbour, less than four hundred yards away.
It sounded as though a thousand feet were pounding upon the hot, shiny cobbles behind them, but the way ahead remained unblocked. Suddenly a man darted from a doorway and, thrusting out his leg, tripped de Richleau, who fell full-length on to a pile of stinking garbage in the gutter.
Richard swung round and hit the man a stinging body-blow, which made him gasp and choke. De Richleau stumbled to his feet; but their leading pursuers were now almost on top of them.
Lifting his automatic, Richard fired again, sending another shot over the heads of the packed mass of shouting men and women.
At the report of the pistol the eyes of the leaders started with terror and rolled in their black faces. Pulling up with a jerk, they tried to scramble away from the menace of the gun into the nearby doorways of the alley. But the charging crowd behind forced them on.
Nevertheless, the single shot had given the hunted one more brief respite. Rex, limping badly now, with Marie Lou beside him, had reached the open and they were running diagonally across the wharf to the steps beside which the launch was moored. De Richleau and Richard pelted after them with every ounce of speed that they could muster.
As they shot out of the end of the alleyway they saw that they still had two hundred paces to cover and that scores of men who had been lounging in the bars and cafes along the waterfront were now tumbling out of them as reinforcements for the mob; and ugly reinforcements, as most of them were sailors, all of whom had knives.
Rex and Marie Lou were both shouting to Simon and as de Richleau and Rex caught up with them Simon suddenly appeared from the cabin of the launch. In an instant he had grasped the situation and was giving swift orders to the three Jamaica boys who formed the crew to be ready to cast off. Then, seizing a hatchet, he jumped ashore to help his friends.
Five hundred superstition-maddened folk were now half-filling the wharf and more were crowding on to it from every street and alley. The angry shouting was so loud that it was difficult to hear individual voices, but above the roar the hard-pressed Whites could catch the French equivalents of ‘Ghouls!’ ‘Body-snatchers!’ and ‘Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!’
In those last few yards they were almost overcome. A thrown knife pierced the calf of Richard’s leg and as he stopped for an instant to pull it out he was grabbed by two burly stevedores. De Richleau was seized by a third, and Marie Lou fell at Simon’s feet. But having reached the wharf-edge Rex just pitched the body into the launch and swung round to their help. With those mighty fists, like ten-pound weights, he laid out right and left about him until he had cleared a little space and both Richard’s and the Duke’s attackers lay writhing on the ground from his hammer-blows.
Marie Lou wriggled up again and jumped on to the fore-deck of the launch, where one of the Jamaica boys had already untied the painter. Another was at the wheel and had the engine running. The third had gone to Simon’s assistance and with a boathook was striking out at the mob. ‘Theirs not to reason why …’ They were British subjects and Jamaicans who despised the riff-raff of the Negro Republic, and they gave loyal service to their white employers.
Somehow the rest of the party freed themselves from the scores of hands that clutched at them and strove to drag them back. Still striking, kicking and struggling, they fumbled into the boat. The moment they were all on board the launch shot away. Three Haitians, who had leapt on to the deck at the last moment, were attacked simultaneously and heaved overboard into the water.
But the chase was not yet over. While the frustrated crowd, a thousand strong, now lined the whole wharfside shrieking imprecations at them, hundreds more were piling into water craft of every description to continue the pursuit, and several boats, which were already manned in the harbour, altered course to try to head them off.
In the next few minutes the Jamacian boy at the wheel performed miracles of steersmanship as he dodged one craft after another, but at the mouth of the harbour it was only by Richard’s firing two more shots from his automatic across her bows that they prevented a customs launch, officered by a Negro in an admiral’s uniform which had already done fifty years’ service, from ramming them.
At last they were out in the open sea, and although thirty or forty boats of varying sizes were strung out behind them they felt reasonably confident that their own powerful craft could outdistance the others. As they tended their most serious hurts they saw their pursuers gradually dropping behind, but de Richleau’s face was still grave. The Haitian Republic possessed a small Navy, consisting of coastal-patrol gunboats. These were almost obsolete but they were armed after a fashion, and in view of the major riot which they had brought about it was quite on the cards that one of these might be sent after them.
When Rex had picked up Philippa’s body and carried it into the cabin, the Duke said: ‘We must lose no time in burying her. Marie Lou had better attend to that nasty wound in Richard’s leg, on deck. They can keep watch and see that the Jamaica boys don’t come down. You others can stay here and give me a hand in what I have to do.’
As Richard and Marie Lou left the cabin the rest of the party took the body, unwrapped it from the sheet and laid it out on the floor. De Richleau then went into the tiny gallery which formed the forepart of the cabin and returned with a skewer, a hammer and a long cook’s-knife. Placing the skewer over Philippa’s heart, he murmured some words that the others did not understand, and gave it two swift blows with the hammer, which drove it right through her chest.
‘The next part of the business is rather horrible,’ he said in a low voice, ‘so you needn’t look if you’d rather not.’ But Simon and Rex were so fascinated by the macabre scene that they remained staring down at the blistered, unresisting corpse.
De Richleau then took up the sharp cook’s-knife and, murmuring more words in an ancient tongue, bore down on it with all his weight until it had severed Philippa’s head from her trunk.
To Simon’s horror, as the head was severed he saw the full lips draw back into a smile; then the eyes flickered open for a second, and he distinctly caught the whispered words: ‘Merci, Monsieur.’
The effect of that dead face smiling and the voice from beyond the grave was so utterly terrifying that he fainted.
Having set him up on one of the settees, with his head dangling between his knees, the other two rewrapped the girl’s body and head in a sheet; then the Duke sent Rex to the flag locker. He could not find a Haitian or French flag so returned with an old Union Jack, which they wound round the corpse.
‘Thank God that’s over!’ murmured the Duke. ‘Fetch Marie Lou now. We must get her to sew up the shroud.’
But at that moment Marie Lou came into the cabin to report with an anxious face that although the other boats had nearly all given up the chase a small grey-painted steamer, which looked like a warship, had left the harbour.
Simon had just come-too and said that he must have air, so de Richleau told Marie Lou what he wanted done and, leaving Rex to help her, assisted his still groggy friend on deck.
Rex found a length of chain which he tied round the ankles of the corpse to weight it, and Marie Lou hunted about until she discovered some twine and a sailmaker’s pad and needle in one of the lockers of the cabin. She then sewed up the edges of the Union Jack so that it formed a sack for the remains, and Rex went up to tell the Duke that the dead girl was ready for burial.
When Rex reached the deck he saw that the Haitian gunboat, a sea-going tug, a small yacht and two small motor-boats, all having fair speeds, were bunched together about a mile and a half astern; and the Duke said that he feared that this smaller but more powerful armada, which had left the harbour some time after he and his friends had put to sea, was gradually gaining on them. The tug’s hooter blared out an almost continious succession of short, piercing blasts, evidently intended as calls on them to stop, and now and again the gunboat joined in with a shrill whistle.
Ignoring these signals for the moment, the four men went down to the cabin and carried up Philippa’s remains. They were well out at sea now, so de Richleau felt certain that there was no chance whatever of the weighted body being recovered. He said a short prayer of his own devising, that he considered appropriate to the occasion, then the flag-covered corpse was cast over the launch’s side, disappearing with a loud splash into the water.
The Jamaica boys had only just realised that the sheeted bundle brought aboard by Rex had been a corpse. They were looking askance at their passengers and the three of them gathered in the stern to jabber excitedly in their own dialect. Apparently they supposed that murder had been committed and that their white employers had chosen this manner of disposing of the body of their victim. In consequence, they were now alarmed by the possibility that they might be accused of assisting a gang of murderers to escape from justice. Their obvious fear for themselves was considerably increased a few moments later—and with better reason. There came a bright flash on the foredeck of the gunboat followed almost instantly by a loud report, and a shell screamed overhead.
It exploded more than half a mile in advance of the launch, sending up a great column of water, so it appeared that the master gunner was not much of a marksman; unless his first shot was intended only as a warning and he meant to make quite certain that it fell nowhere near them.
The Jamaica boys suddenly began a chorus of protest to Rex, who had hired them. They hadn’t done anything— they didn’t want to get killed. The launch must stop and the white folk must give themselves up. Then the one who was at the wheel shut off the engine.
Richard felt intensely sorry for them, but all the same, he produced his automatic and, taking a few steps aft, drove them, still clamouring, out of the engine pit. Then Rex grabbed the wheel and switched on the power again.
A second shell from the gunboat splashed into the water four hundred yards away, but it proved to be a dud. The pursuing armada had, however, gained a good quarter of a mile on them during that brief interval in which they had been slowed up by the temporary cutting-off of the engine. A third shell whistled over and sent up a column of foam only a hundred yards to starboard, and de Richleau yelled to Rex:
‘Head for the shore! We’ll beach her and take to the forest—if we can get there in time.’
As Rex turned the wheel and the launch swung round, a fourth shell burst in the air some twenty feet behind them. A splinter ploughed up the deck within three inches of Simon’s feet, another smashed one of the cabin windows, de Richleau and Marie Lou were thrown to their knees and one of the Jamaica boys was knocked overboard by the force of the blast.
However dire their own extremity they could not leave the poor fellow to drown or to be eaten by the sharks which they knew infested the channel; neither could they abandon him to the chance of being picked up by the Haitians and lynched as one of the pursued party. With a curse, Rex swung the wheel again and, turning in a wide circle, put back. In frantic haste they hauled the dripping Negro on board, but by the time they had done so the gunboat with its accompanying flotilla had decreased its distance to within half a mile of them, and the nearest point of the coast, upon which de Richlea
u had hoped to beach the launch, was well over a mile distant.
Just as they turned towards the shore again two more shells came in rapid succession; one was a wide miss, but the explosion of the other, under-water, gave the launch such a buffet that it nearly capsized. As it righted and raced on, with them now drenched to the skin from the flying spray and crouching flat on the deck, they saw that the tug had altered course to endeavour to head them off. It was nearer to them than any of the other vessels and now that they were in closer range it opened fire with a machine-gun.
Bullets spattered the water and the gun cracked again, its report echoing across the bay. They had now only half a mile to cover to reach the beach, but the machine-gun lifted and a spate of bullets from it thudded into the launch, holing and tearing its woodwork. Almost at the same moment the engine stopped as a shell splinter from another high burst struck a part of the machinery with a metallic clatter.
The game was up; and de Richleau knew it. Without power they could not possibly reach the shore, and he suddenly realised that the launch was sinking from unseen hits which had holed her below the water-line. To attempt to swim for it only meant the possibility of having to face the sharks or the additional indignity of being dragged from the water, as within a few minutes the pursuing flotilla was bound to come up with them. Rising to his feet, he pulled out his white handkerchief and waved it in token of surrender.
Five minutes later they were surrounded by the Haitian flotilla and a hundred angry, indignant men were staring curiously at them. A Mulatto in a sky-blue uniform, with a sash and tassels of tarnished silver lace, shouted at them through a megaphone in French, from the gunboat, to catch the rope that would be thrown and haul themselves alongside with it.
Strange Conflict Page 30