Next they went into the old dining-saloon below the lounge, which since their return to the Gafelborg after she had been abandoned in the hurricane had been used as a mess by the crew. In it they found the body of Gietto Nudäa, the half-caste seaman, spreadeagled on his back; a native spear thrust right through his body pinned him to the deck.
Appalled by the carnage, and the cloying, sickly scent of blood, they made their way up to the deck again and towards the stern of the ship. Five more Negroes lay there lifeless; wounded in various parts of their bodies and, yet again, a mystery that intrigued the three searchers even in the midst of their horror, the throats of all five blacks were gashed from ear to ear.
Two of them had their gas bladders still strapped to their backs, but under the poop there was a number of balloons tethered, and evidently the Negroes had used that place as a rallying-point at which to disembarrass themselves of their equipment before their final attack upon the centre of the ship. The big, dark, skin envelopes, piled high and hitched together, billowed up like a great stack of sausages.
A visit to the poop-house, where the wounded natives had been quartered after the first attack, disclosed three empty bunks. The two who had died had, De Brissac supposed, been cast into the weed the previous day. There was no trace of the Negro who had received a bullet under the scalp, but the fourth, who had been wounded in the thigh, still lay there. He had been slain by a great gash that gaped open, red and horrible, in his throat. Pints of his blood soaked the sheets and pillow which were dark and stiff; they judged that he had been dead for several hours at least.
Sadly, in grim silence, they made their way to the bridge. Behind the canvas windscreen they found young Largertöf. He had accounted for two more savages before some of the others had succeeded in braining him.
The chart-room was empty. De Brissac, led the way down the steep ladder from it to the captain’s cabin which Luvia had been occupying since they had reboarded the ship.
As the Frenchman stepped on to the deck he gave an exclamation of surprise. Luvia was stretched out in the bunk, carefully tucked up with the sheets neatly folded below his chin.
His head was bandaged and they ran to him, fearing at first that he, too, was dead, but, to their relief, his heavy breathing soon showed that he was only asleep. With eager hands they tried to rouse him, but he slumbered on utterly unresponsive to their shouts and shakings.
‘What the devil does it mean?’ De Brissac growled. ‘All these blacks, some dead from wounds, but others only winged by bullets, and every single one of them with his throat cut. Now, here is Luvia with, apparently, no more than a rap over the head, dressed in pyjamas, sound asleep in his bunk. It is a riddle in a nightmare.’
‘God knows its answer,’ Basil groaned. ‘But the girls! Where are the girls? We’ve got to find them.’
De Brissac already had a shrewd idea what must have happened to them, from their smashed and empty cabins, but he did not like to voice his thoughts before the distracted Basil. They went below again to make a thorough search of the ship. No trace of the girls could be found or any other that would help to clear up the mystery of the cut throats and Luvia’s coma, until they visited the galley. There, curled up on the floor asleep, they discovered Li Foo.
At the first touch he woke and, scrambling to his knees, began to jabber excitedly. He was pathetically glad to see them, but it was a good ten minutes before they could get a coherent account out of him of what had happened.
His version, pieced together, conveyed the main facts. There had been bad trouble two nights before between Luvia and Vicente. The Venezuelan had smashed the Finnish engineer over the head with a water carafe in Synolda’s cabin. The crew, coming on the scene, had endeavoured to seize Vicente, but he had shot the old carpenter Jansen before they had been able to secure him. Luvia, it appeared, had been moody and silent when he came on deck the following morning. He had kept both Synolda and Vicente locked in their cabins, and apart from giving brief orders had spoken to no one except Unity.
In the meantime, after the scrap it seemed that Harlem, knowing Luvia to be out of action, had decided to desert the ship. He had gone off at daybreak with the Negro who had been shot through the scalp, using two more of the balloons that had been left on the ship after the first attack, unobserved by the others until he was a mile away. The day had passed uneventfully although they had been anxious about De Brissac and Basil until they had picked up the signals from the island just before sundown the previous evening. They had turned in at the usual hour, but Li Foo had been up very early that morning and, in the dawn, had seen at least three hundred Negroes crossing the weed towards the ship. He had roused Luvia and Largertöf in time for them to reach the bridge, but Hansie and Nudäa had been unable to get on deck before the blacks were swarming on board so they had endeavoured to hold the lounge.
Li Foo had no firearm and was cut off on his way to Synolda, but eluded his pursuers and took refuge in the for’ard galley. He witnessed part of the massacre but knew that he would be throwing away his life to no purpose if he went out into the crowd with nothing but his knife. Through the galley skylight he saw the Negroes storm the bridge and Luvia scramble up to the top of the chart-house with his rifle. From there he managed to swing himself on to the ladder of the funnel and climbing to its top perched on it with the whole ship under his view. He shot down a number of the Negroes but some of them had spears and one hurled with good aim caught him on the head and knocked him backwards so that he fell down inside the funnel.
Li Foo had succeeded in saving himself by wrenching out the plate of the galley ventilator, climbing up into it, and remaining there while the savages looted the ship. When all was quiet again he had crawled out and watched them hopping along half-way to their island with the two girls, balloons strapped to their backs, being carried away as prisoners amongst them. On the decks they had left a number of their dead and all those who were too seriously wounded to be helped across the weed. Li Foo had gone round conscientiously and carefully slitting the throats of every black on board, dead or alive, to make quite certain of them.
It had occurred to him that every ship’s funnel had struts across its interior to strengthen it and hold its sections firmly in place. There was a chance that Luvia had been caught on one of these and could not get up or down. Climbing the funnel ladder Li Foo had found his officer lying doubled up across one of the struts. The spear had knocked him out but he was still very much alive by the time Li Foo had managed to get a bowline round his body and haul him up. The Chinaman had tried to persuade him to go to bed but he was in such a state of excited despair about the women that he flatly refused. Seeing him shivering and exhausted the cunning Li Foo had suggested a hot grog and doctored the drink with a strong dose of smuggled opium. It sent him off very soon after he had swallowed it. The Chinaman had then undressed his officer, washed him, rebandaged his head, and put him to bed.
‘How soon will he wake?’ De Brissac inquired.
‘We go see ’um,’ Li Foo replied. ‘Dissa fella give plenty dream dope in his drink, but he sleep long time, ten hour now.’
They went along to Luvia’s cabin and found him still comatose but the Chinaman smiled blandly and produced a small phial from the inner pocket of his blue linen coat.
‘You won’ wake ’um,’ he lisped. ‘Me makeum plentee betteh soon,’ and he dissolved a couple of pellets from the little bottle in half a glass of water.
They opened Luvia’s mouth and forced the drug down his throat. ‘Prap ten minute now,’ said Li Foo, ‘prap half-hour—we see. Dissa veh good for fella wantum wakeup for duty watch.’ My flen givum me, I givum my flen, plentee time.’
‘We’ll have to wait a bit then,’ remarked De Brissac, ‘until he comes round.’
‘But what the hell are we going to do?’ moaned Basil. ‘Unity—Synolda—just think of it, God knows what those swine’ll do to them.’
Deveril placed a hand kindly on his shoulder. ‘You have all
my sympathy, sir. I well recall my sufferings the day before yesterday, and all through the night you spent on the island of the giant crabs, when I believed that those fiends had dearest Yonita at their mercy in their Marriage House.’
‘Oh God, I shall go mad!’ Basil exclaimed. ‘What can we do? We must do something! We can’t stand here!’
‘I fear that there is little we can do,’ Sir Deveril said sadly.
‘On the contrary,’ De Brissac took him up quickly, ‘we have the balloons of all the blacks who have been killed. There’s a great stack of them by the poop; we’re going after those devils like smoke as soon as poor Luvia comes round.’
Basil’s face suddenly lit up. ‘Bless you for that. I’d forgotten the balloons. For heaven’s sake let’s get going.’
‘Try to be patient for a little,’ De Brissac said softly. ‘Luvia will be as anxious about the girls as you are, and it would not be right or sensible to go without him. We shall need every gun we can get.’
Sir Deveril slowly shook his head. ‘I fear you will only be throwing your lives away. It is true that they have no firearms, but how can three of you, however brave, hope to overcome such scores of them?’
‘Frankly, I was counting on your help.’ The Frenchman gave him a sharp glance.
‘Gad, yes! I will accompany you willingly if you can devise a plan which shows some prospect of our succouring your ladies, but there’s little sense in throwing our lives away to no purpose. If the four of us land on Satan’s Island, what chance have we against such odds?’
‘This is my plan,’ De Brissac announced. ‘It came to me immediately we found the girls’ cabins were empty. I felt certain they had been carried off. There must be anything from fifteen to twenty freshly filled gas bladders in that great stack on the after-deck of the ship. I see no reason why each of them should not be weighed down so that it floats about ten feet above the weed. You could then tow a whole string of them back to your island carrying the ski-sticks and stilts strapped across your shoulders. If you could take a dozen balloons they would transport eleven of your friends or relatives and yourself across the channel to Satan’s Island. One of you could tow the string back again and so bring over another eleven men. The process could be repeated until we had assembled all your people, who are capable of bearing arms, on the enemy’s shore. Even then we should be nothing like equal in numbers to the blacks, but we have firearms and they have not. If we march on their village in a body and make a surprise attack I think we may succeed in rescuing the women.’
‘Why, stap me!’ exclaimed Sir Deveril, ‘but ’tis a marvellous notion. Our ancestors have suffered for nearly eighty years from the Negro raids. There’s not a man among us who would not welcome the chance of having a cut at these heathens. We would have wiped them out long since had it not been that never before have we captured more than a couple of their balloons at one time.’
‘The plan’s sound enough,’ Basil agreed, ‘but I was looking at a rough sketch map of Satan’s Island this afternoon. The village is miles away—nearly at its other end—and if our attack succeeds we’ve got to get the girls away.’
‘You mean the blacks will surround us and cut us off before we can get back to the shore?’ De Brissac asked.
‘Yes. I’m game, anyhow, but it’s going to be a pretty desperate business even if Sir Deveril can muster three or four dozen men with guns or rifles.’
‘Is there no way in which we can spread terror among them so that we can get a clear start after our rescue?’ Sir Deveril suggested.
‘Ciel! I have it!’ cried De Brissac. ‘My machine-gun! My invention which is packed up down in the hold. With it there are a thousand rounds of ammunition supplied to me to make my quick-firing tests for heat, which I had no time to do before leaving Madagascar. The gun is light, and it will take me no great time to assemble it. If we could transport that to the island we should have a weapon as good as a hundred bayonets with which to spread the terror you speak of.’
Basil started for the doorway. ‘Come on, let’s get it!’
‘Wait!’ called Sir Deveril. ‘None of my people will be able to do aught until I return. Surely the first thing is for me to set forth with these balloons.’
‘You’re right,’ De Brissac agreed quickly. ‘Quick—to the after-deck!’
Working with frantic speed they sorted out the great tangle of gas-filled bladders and found that, including the two which were still strapped to the backs of the dead natives, they had altogether twenty-one, but two of them had been shot through and were useless. De Brissac tethered six of them. The largest was strapped on to Sir Deveril’s back and the remaining twelve were hitched one to another, on to long lengths of line and each weighted down with sacks of potatoes from the store. They were a little uncertain whether Sir Deveril’s weight and that of the potatoes would be sufficient to keep the whole string down, but tried out the arrangement along the length of the ship and after adjusting the contents of some of the sacks found that it worked well enough.
The evening mist was now rising from the weed and they hurried forward their preparations with the utmost speed, but no cloud obscured the sun this evening and the ship had come so much nearer to Yonita’s island in the past two days that there did not seem any risk of Sir Deveril becoming lost on his way ashore as the others had been two nights before.
It was agreed that the machine-gun party should take lanterns with them and place these at a point well up from the weed and above the mist on the shore of Satan’s Island to show Sir Deveril where they were, so that he could land his men without having to hunt a mile of coast to find the advance-guard.
An hour and a half had slipped by since they had reached the Gafelborg but by half past six all was ready and Deveril launched himself out on to the weed with the long string of balloons trailing behind him. At first they feared that he would lose his balance owing to the extra buoyancy which the additional balloons gave him, but there was no wind upon the silent sea to carry him off his course, and he soon adjusted his strokes with stilts and ski-sticks to suit the slower motion necessitated by the long chain of bladders.
Directly they had assured themselves that he was progressing safely, Basil and De Brissac hurried back with Li Foo to Luvia’s cabin. He had woken in their absence and was sitting on the edge of his bunk with his head buried in his hands. As they came in he started up and grabbed at a revolver that lay on a shelf at his bunk side, but immediately he realised who it was a look of immeasurable relief spread over his tired face.
They told him, as briefly as possible, what had occurred since he had been knocked out and fallen down the funnel, while he berated himself miserably; cursing at his own folly at having been the cause of all the terrible events which had taken place since they left the ship.
Basil tried to hearten him by saying that Harlem had probably intended to make off to Satan’s Island in any case, but Luvia was difficult to cheer. He felt that Jansen’s death lay at his door and that he would have been in a better case to defend the ship if he had not been suffering from such an appalling hang-over.
While Luvia was dressing, De Brissac and Li Foo went down to the hold to get the machine-gun and ammunition, but Basil remained to learn further particulars of the raid.
Juhani had little to add to Li Foo’s version of the massacre, but in jerky sentences gave an account of events the night of the scrap. He blamed himself entirely for the row with Vicente although it seemed to Basil that Synolda was really the cause of the trouble through having led both men on to such a pitch of jealousy. Luvia could give no explanation of her conduct as he had not seen or spoken to her the following day.
‘I don’t wonder you were sick,’ Basil remarked: ‘she seems to have behaved abominably.’
Luvia looked up suddenly from pulling on a sock. ‘What the dame’s done doesn’t matter two hoots now. She’s right to amuse herself her own way I reckon, and anyhow I was the mug. The thing that’s been biting me ever since I came up for
air is what they’ll do to her tonight. I’d risk my neck to get any dame out of their clutches however much dirt she’d done me.’
‘I know, I know,’ moaned Basil. ‘For God’s sake don’t talk of it. Unity’s there too.’
They fell into a miserable silence until De Brissac and Li Foo joined them. The Frenchman rapidly set about assembling the parts of his gun while Li Foo went down again with Basil into the hold to bring up the ammunition. They all worked with feverish haste but it was a quarter to eight before the gun was assembled, and darkness had fallen by the time they got out on deck again.
There was one balloon left for each of the four men and two over, to which they tethered the heavy cases containing the belts of machine-gun bullets. De Brissac decided to carry the precious gun himself and the others lashed it across his shoulders under the balloon. The two bladders supporting the ammunition were attached by lines to Luvia and Basil, who, with Li Foo, each took two of the six rifles and a knife or cutlass from one of the dead Negroes on the deck. It was pitch dark now except for the bright patch of light made by the two lanterns which Li Foo had strapped to his waist.
De Brissac told the Chinaman to put them out so that any of the savages watching from the island should not be warned of their approach. They had no fear of being lost in the mist and darkness this time as Satan’s Island presented a much longer stretch of coastline than the promontory at the foot of the cross that formed Yonita’s island, and the Gafelborg had now drifted to within half a mile of the entrance of the channel that separated the two.
About the ship was all the silence of the night with only an occasional plop to show that some vile creature was stirring in the weed beneath them. After a last look round to see that nothing had been forgotten they left the deck of the Gafelborg with its cargo of dead men.
It was half past eight when they landed on Satan’s Island and they had a mile of dark foreshore to cover in rounding the curve of the island until they could reach the beach nearest to the promontory from which Deveril’s people would set off. Keeping as far as possible from the water-line, from fear of giant crabs that might come up out of it, they struggled forward over the rough ground in single file; by nine they had reached the beach where they hoped that Deveril’s force would be able to land. Scrambling up the slope away from the weed De Brissac chose a promontory well above the mist. They weighed down their balloons and showed a light.
Uncharted Seas Page 28