by Max Brand
Steve and me, we tidied up a little, and then came out and smoked our pipes on the forward deck. Tom Drayton sauntered out and sat on the lumber pile and talked to us a while.
“What kinda voyages you boys going to sail in that old boat?” he asked.
Steve Mannock, he took and tamped down the coal in the bowl of his pipe, and worked up a good head of smoke. Then he said through the white mist of it: “I’ll tell you, Tom. We’re aiming to make a great big kite, and we’re gonna make that kite with a frame of whole trees, joined together, and we’re going to stretch number one sailcloth all over the frame, and make a real kite of it, d’ye see?”
“And then?” says Drayton, grinning and waiting.
“Then we’re gonna wait for a stiff wind to blow up, like it does around here, now and then. And that wind will hoist up our kite and make it jump into the sky.”
“Go on,” said Tom Drayton. “And how you going to anchor that kite to the ground?”
“That’s the point, brother,” said Steve. “We don’t want to anchor it. We just want to get it flying high and strong, with a coupla strong cables hitched onto it, and then we’ll fasten those cables onto the old Thomas Drayton, and we’ll let the kite go, and it’ll lift this old ship right out of Lake Bennett and across the rapids. When we get above the open river on the farther side, we’ll cut the cables and the kite will go sailing on toward the infernal regions and the North Pole, and the Thomas Drayton, it’ll drive down easy and graceful, like a wild duck taking to the water, and there we’ll be floating in open water, and nothing to do but to make money.”
“That’s a good idea,” says Tom Drayton, “and it’s a blasted shame that I didn’t have it. Because it’s the only way that you’ll ever get the old boat into water where she’ll be worth her salt.”
“Yeah, it’s the only way,” said Mannock. “But you see that a gent can nearly always get what he wants, if he just puts his mind to it.”
“There’s few minds like yours, brother,” says Drayton.
This was true. There were not very many like old Steve Mannock.
Well, he chatted with us a while longer. Then, because it was getting along toward the right time for supper, he went back inland, and Steve suggested that we start up a fire in the galley and he’d be the fireman, while I went and got some provisions together for the cooking of supper.
It sounded like a good idea to me, because grub eaten on deck always tastes better than grub eaten on shore.
So I went over to the store and got some bacon and coffee and things. When I came out, with the package under my arms, I heard the voice of Nelly Bridgeman, laughing sort of sweet and low, as it says in the song. And there she was, saying good bye to Larry Decatur. He was laughing, too, and I never had heard him laugh like that before.
He went down the dock toward the boat, carrying something, and I met up with the girl as she started back toward her father’s saloon. She waved to me and hailed me, and I pulled up for to find out what she wanted.
“Uncle Joe,” she said, “he’s a wonderful fellow, isn’t he?”
“Who’s a wonderful fellow?” I said, knowing mighty well what she meant.
“You know,” she said. “It’s Larry that I mean.”
“You mean Decatur, do you?” I said.
“Of course, I mean him. And isn’t he wonderful?”
“I know Decatur,” I said, “but I don’t know anything about him being wonderful.”
She stepped up to me and hooked an arm through one of mine, and she said: “Stop scowling like that, Uncle Joe.”
“I’m plagued if I’m your uncle,” I said, “and I’m plagued if I stop scowling.”
“What’s the matter, Uncle Joe?” said Nelly.
“Are you going and getting yourself all dizzy about Larry Decatur?” I asked.
“Perhaps I am,” she replied. “And why not? What’s wrong with that?”
She was so frank and so straight about it, that I felt worse than ever, you can imagine, a girl like her and a clever, worldly fox like Larry Decatur!
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” I said. “It just goes to show that practice makes perfect, as the saying is.”
“What sort of practice?” she said.
“Why, with women,” I said. “No matter where he goes, he always leaves three or four girls breaking their hearts after him. He’s just that way. He’s learned the hang of ’em. He knows how to look at ’em, and how to speak at ’em so’s all their nerves go jumping together.”
“D’you know what he’s been talking to me about?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “but I can guess.”
“You’d guess wrong,” she said. “He’s been telling me about an old prospector he knew down in Mexico, and the way that they lived together and all of that.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve heard that yarn, too. There’s natural liars, and there’s improved natural liars. And he’s one of the improved kind.”
“Don’t you think it’s true?” she said.
“The truth don’t interest Larry,” I said. “Why should it, with the kind of a mind that he’s got, ready to improve on nature?”
“You don’t like him?” she said.
“Oh, he’s all right,” I said.
“Right down in your heart, I can see that you’re fond of him,” she said. “Now, you confess like a good fellow.”
“Dog-gone it, Nelly,” I said, “I’m scared of him, to tell you the truth. He’s a good fellow, but I’m scared of him. His mind works too far ahead of mine.”
XI
She wanted to talk to me some more about Larry, but I broke away, and told her that I wouldn’t stand there and waste my time on her.
Then, when I was a step away, I turned around, came back to her, and shook a finger at her, as I said: “Look here, young woman, and listen to me.”
“I’m listening, Uncle Joe,” she said.
She tried to swallow down the laughing and be serious, and she got rid of all the laughing, but not of the happy smile that was the tag end of it.
“Don’t you go playing around with Larry Decatur,” I warned. “Larry is all right. But he’s not all right for you. He wants to amuse himself a little. He hates lonely evenings, and all that. He wants to sit around and talk. No harm in that. Only, you watch out you don’t believe what he says.”
“All right. I’ll watch,” she said.
And she began to laugh again, and her eyes shone and brooded on me rather fondly, as if I was an old and foolish fellow, what they call a character in a book.
Well, I broke away from her again, at that, and I went out to the ship, where I found that a mist had gathered off the lake around her, and she looked wetter and more gloomy and more hopeless, except that now, out of one smokestack, there was a little thin twist of smoke rising and boring its way up through the air.
That gave life to her. It made you think of the big fires roaring and fuming under the boilers, with such a force of draft that the whole ship trembled with the whipping of the flames. I knew that no such thing was happening, and I knew that there was no chance for the Thomas Drayton to get away from her mooring. Just the same, I was interested, as I stood there in the fog, and looked up at the black pair of shadows that were the stacks, and saw the smoke spiral coming out of one of them.
Just the fire in the galley, of course, but it meant more than that to me. It meant the stir of the ghost of something in me.
When I went aboard, I found Larry and Steve at the galley door, and the fire booming and roaring in the stove inside. Larry was holding a big bucket and he was saying: “Mister Engineer, I hope you won’t mind going over the side and painting out the name of this boat, fore and aft?”
“Look here, Decatur,” the engineer said, “you know that it ain’t luck to sail on a ship that’s got no name?”
“Oh, she’s going to have a new name, all right,” said Larry. “Don’t you worry about that, brother. She’ll have a new name, and a beauty, too
.”
“Humph,” Steve said, and looked at him very suspicious.
But he went aft to rig a platform and drop it over the side, and, while I undid the chuck and began to fix for cooking it, Decatur, he hung around and sniffed and said that it looked pretty good to him and he’d join us at supper that night.
“She’ll cook better than I do,” I said. “You better go and eat with her.”
“I better go and eat with who?” Decatur asked.
“Why, with Nelly Bridgeman,” I responded.
“What are you driving at, brother?” he said.
“I’ve just been talking to her,” I said. “She wanted to stand and gossip about you. Asked me if I didn’t think that you’re wonderful, is what she asked me.”
He chuckled. “I can guess what you said,” he replied.
“I didn’t say much,” I said. “Only that I knew you pretty well and didn’t know anything wonderful about you. I told her some other things, but it didn’t make any difference. She kept on getting more and more of a calf look in her eyes. Look here, Larry, don’t you go and try any of your smooth ways on her. You take some of your lingo and check it in the freight room, will you?”
He only regarded me with a calm and critical eye. Then he said: “You’re all right, Joe. You’re a fellow to tie to.”
He said no more, and I thought that I’d talked my mind freely enough.
Well, we had supper, all three of us, and talked about river work and such things. Then Steve and me went over the side and painted out the name Thomas Drayton on the stern, and went forward and hooked the same platform over the bows and painted out the name there, too.
Big Larry Decatur, he walked up and down on the dock in the dim light with the fog rolling in thicker and thicker all the while.
He said, with the new name that he was going to put on that boat with his own hands, she’d become famous, and she’d bring in more money than you could shake a stick at.
“How’ll you make money with her?” asked Steve Mannock.
“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” he said.
Afterward, Steve said to me: “You think that he’s got any real idea of what he’s going to do with the Thomas Drayton?”
“She’s not the Thomas Drayton now,” I corrected. “She’s nothing but a boat waiting for a name. This morning, I don’t think that he had more than a ghost of an idea, when he bought her, I mean, but in the meantime I guess that his brain has been working overtime. He may have an idea, hazy and thin. Look at the way he’s walking back and forth. He’s got some scheme in his mind. That’s the way with him. Then, the painting out of this here name . . . I dunno what that means exactly, but it’s not just for fun. It’s done for a purpose, though perhaps he himself doesn’t exactly know yet where the idea will end. He’s fumbling his way along through the dark, but he’ll come out into the open before very long, I guess.”
We finished our job on deck again, hoisted up the painting platform, and stowed it. Then we washed the paint off our hands with turpentine and tried to get the stink of the turpentine off with soap and water.
Then we made our bunks down aft, in opposite cabins, one for the chief engineer and one for the mate. There was a narrow passage in between.
We opened the portholes, and a wind came down the lake and drove a steady stream of fog through them, filling the whole inside of the ship with mist. It was as white as the foam of milk in the lantern light.
We smoked a pipe apiece, yarning with one another through the open doors of our cabins, but after a time Steve failed to answer back, so I guess that he was asleep.
I put out the lantern and tried to go to sleep in my turn, but, just as I was shutting my eyes, I began to think of the fight between Larry and Big Ed, and that thought brought my eyes wide open again. I lay there and saw the whole fight through once more, from beginning to end, every blow that was struck.
After that, there were other things to think about—the walk and talk with Larry, the buying of the ship, the second meeting with Big Ed Graem, the retelling of White-Water Sam’s yarn, and a lot of other things, winding up with the bright, happy, foolish look that I had seen in the eyes of Nelly Bridgeman.
Well, when I got that far, I’d been twisting and turning back and forth so often on my bunk that the blankets were in ridges and knots, so I got up to straighten them. And, as I did this, the wind blew the fog into my lungs and my head, if you know what I mean, and I decided that I’d dress and go on deck for a turn.
I did that, and on deck found the wind singing and howling by turns, though not as loudly as it had done through the hull of the ship below. I took a few turns up and down, and then stood in the face of the gale near the paddle box and watched the fog thinning under the blast of the wind, then coming on again quite thicker than ever and dwindling once more.
I was still there, getting cold and stiff and about to start pacing once more, when I thought I saw, well forward, something gray, moving slower than the blowing of the fog, that came in over the rail from the dock side of the ship.
At that, I shook my head, and just as I was about to shrug the idea out of my mind, I saw another bundle of gray go over the rail from the dock, and made out, pretty accurately, the form of a man walking up the deck, going forward, and disappearing in a thicker gust of the blowing mist.
XII
Danger, I think, has all sorts of faces, but it has only one effect, and that’s a cold fist in the stomach and a cold wriggling up the center of the spine.
I had that fist in the stomach and that cold lightning up the spine and into the base of the brain as I saw the second form go forward. For one thing, the figure was moving at a stalking pace. I could make that out. It was bent over, and it went step by step, the way a man does when he’s listening in between his own footfalls.
I wished that I had a gun on me. But if I went below for one, it might be too late to look in on whatever mischief was on hand. Steve Mannock was an oldish chap, but I wished that I had him with me, too, if only for company’s sake. However, I couldn’t wait to get Steve any more than I could wait to get the gun; I had to sneak forward along the deck.
Where had they gone, and what were they doing? What was there to do on board the old Thomas Drayton at this hour and in this weather? There was not much on board that was worth the stealing. And there was nobody of any consequence on board, except, perhaps, big Larry Decatur, now probably soundly sleeping in the captain’s cabin.
Anyway, it was for the cabin that I went.
I pulled off my boots to make less noise. I pulled off my Mackinaw, too, because stiff cloth ties you up around the shoulders and elbows at a time when you may need all your strength and speed.
And now I sneaked forward and went down the companionway, shuddering not with the cold of the wind, but with the ice that had gathered around my own heart. I felt my forty years, too, and wished that I could throw ten of them, at least, over my shoulder.
I got down and forward along the narrow little passage in time to see a glint of light before me, and that light showed me two forms standing there more than half shrouded in the mist which, as I said before, had blown all through the ship, and seemed even thicker inside than outside. The light showed me that there were two men, and it showed me that they were standing outside the captain’s door.
The light went out and somehow I knew that the door had opened, and that the two of ’em had gone in together, or one right after the other.
That was enough for me. I let out a yell that half deafened me, being thrown back, as it was, from the walls of the passage on either side, and I started to run forward.
Another yell, like the roar of a lion, answered me, half stifled, then I heard a sharp, high-pitched screech. Just as I thought I had reached the captain’s door, a body smashed into me and knocked me flat. I grabbed a pair of legs that kicked and wriggled. I worked up higher and found myself grappling with the body and arms of a very sinewy, desperately twisting man, who cursed st
eadily, half under his breath.
He was not quite a match for me, though. I got a good grip, and, remembering some of the wrestling tricks of my school days, I slipped a half-nelson on him that made the bones of his neck fairly creak.
A light glimmered behind me. Then, I heard the voice of Larry—never anything so welcome!—saying: “It’s all right. Let him get up.”
So I stood up. I looked back, and saw Larry holding, by the nape of the neck, that rat of a Lefty, and there on the deck lay red-headed Denny Lawson.
The free hand of Larry held the hoop of a lantern, and a big Colt revolver.
When Denny Lawson got up, he stood twisting and turning, first toward Larry and then toward another gun that lay at a little distance from him. It must have jolted out of his hand when he bumped into me and went down.
“Stick up those hands, brother,” said Larry Decatur. “Joe, get that gun and poke the muzzle of it into redhead’s ribs, will you?”
I did what I was told to do, then we marched the pair up to the pilot house, where old Steve Mannock came running to meet us with a ship’s axe in his hand. He had heard the uproar, and had thought that he was waking up into a bad nightmare.
However, he had grabbed the axe and tracked down the disturbance by the shining of Larry’s lantern.
When Steve saw the two rats and heard how they’d been caught, I almost thought that he would brain the two of them with the axe.
You know, Steve was an old-timer, and the old-timers in Alaska were not ones to put up with crime. There was enough trouble with weather and starvation and all that, without having murder floating around in the air. They simply wouldn’t be bothered by such nuisances.
I managed to herd Steve away from the pair, but he had swung that axe high enough to throw a terrible chill into both of them. Lefty simply dropped to his knees and cowered in a corner.
Then Larry said: “Now, you two, what were you after? You had nothing against me, so far as I know. Somebody in the south send you on my trail for a price?”