Black Thunder

by Max Brand

  When they stepped on the deck, Larry said: “You boys take Nelly down to my cabin. Nelly, you’ll find there what you want. You’ll find him sleeping, but he’s all right. There’s no harm done to him.”

  She started off, almost running, with the two men showing her the way. As they turned down the companionway, Big Ed Graem seemed to come out of a trance and started to follow them.

  “Here, you,” snapped Larry. “You stay back here!”

  “I’ll see you dead first,” said Graem.

  “You’re on my ship, and my word’s law on this deck,” said Larry. “Will you go on shore?”

  “I’ll not budge till Nelly goes with me,” said Graem, “and White-Water Sam along with her. I’m going to show you the end of your rope, you fool.”

  “Are you?” Larry said softly.

  “I am!” roared Graem, his old temper taking him and filling his throat.

  “Here’s something to show you an end of your own,” Larry said, and, stepping in, he tapped Graem alongside of the head with the barrel of the Colt, which had flicked out into his hand again.

  I heard the hollow, metal barrel ring as though it had been struck on a stone; Graem sagged at the knees and slipped down to his hands. The shotgun, falling too, toppled over the side, slipped under the rail, and splashed into the water.

  Larry turned on me and handed me the gun.

  “Take this big fool below and lock him in a cabin,” he said. “And if he makes any trouble on the way, shoot him full of lead.”

  I did what was told me. It was impossible for me, I don’t know why, to oppose the will of Larry Decatur just then. Larry helped that more than half stunned man to his feet, and Graem, muttering, staggering, all at sea, only had sense enough to realize that the muzzle of a gun was between his ribs and that he was getting his marching orders.

  What should I have done if he had come to, fully, and started struggling? Well, certainly I should never have pulled the trigger, but I might have clubbed that big head with the weight of the gun.

  There was no need. Graem was only recovered enough to hold a hand to his head and curse as I pushed him into a cabin and locked the door on him.

  That door seemed a flimsy barrier against the burly shoulders of the giant, but at least I had obeyed orders.

  Then I came on deck, and saw the lines being taken off the mooring posts along the dock.

  The news of what was happening had traveled along shore, and through the fog I saw many forms, dimly appearing, all shouting and calling out to one another.

  Jay Weston, an old river man, was in the pilot house, and Steve Mannock was in the engine room. We were pretty well equipped to handle the Thomas Drayton—or the Denver Belle, to give her new name.

  Now a bell chimed twice, and the engines, in reverse, began to pound with a long, easy rhythm, and the paddle wheel churned the water, splashing the paddles with a great slapping against the face of the lake. So we pulled out and back from the dock, and far off, losing sight of the shore. Then her nose turned downstream.

  Beside the entrance to the pilot house, I found Larry Decatur. The shouting and the cheering still came to us from the unseen shore, along with laugher at this foolish, blind adventure. But these sounds were momently growing fainter, as I said to Larry: “Why didn’t you put Ed Graem on shore?”

  “He might have come to before we got the boat away,” said Larry. “Besides, he’s tangled himself up in whatever fate lies ahead for me, the boat, and Nelly, and White-Water. I can feel that in my blood and bones.”

  I said nothing. The pulse of my blood was a sickening hammer stroke in my temples. I’ve never felt as I felt then. Heaven forbid that I ever should again.

  He said: “Be useful, Joe. There are some things, just now, that only you can help me with.”

  “How can I help you,” I asked, “unless I know where you’re taking the boat?”

  “I’m taking her to the upper mouth of Miles Cañon,” he said. “Now you know that much. Go below to my cabin, and see what’s happening there. Say anything that comes into your head.”

  I went down to the cabin, not at all wanting to be there, and, when I went in, I found that old White-Water was just opening his eyes, and Nelly, white-faced, her eyes swollen with tears, was bathing his head with cold water.

  She turned her head and looked at me. “What’s happening?” she said.

  I answered frankly: “We’re going down to the head of Miles Cañon. I don’t know what’s the matter with Larry. He must be crazy. I never heard of a man acting the way that he’s doing.”

  “He’s not crazy,” she said. “He means what he says. He has something in his mind.”

  I thought that there was something strange in that remark.

  “Can I help?” I said.

  “You can’t help,” she said. “Not here. I’ll take care of Father. Go back on deck and be useful for Larry, if you can. I’ve an idea that he needs help, now, more than he ever needed it before in his life.”

  Mind you, this was the way that she talked about a man who had drugged and kidnapped her father!

  Well, I saw the explanation at a glance. She loved that vagabond of a lazy tramp, Decatur. She loved him so much that she could not criticize his actions.

  XV

  We ran down to the head of Miles Cañon, and two different things happened on the way.

  The first was when big Graem smashed down the door that held him and came raging onto the deck. Larry, his revolver and the white bull terrier, Docile, met him.

  Larry said: “You’re going to get a chance to get off this boat before long, if you want to. But as long as you stay on board, if you lift a hand to make trouble of any kind, I’ll kill you, Graem.”

  There was no misunderstanding that sort of talk.

  Graem looked at him with a sort of baffled savagery in his eyes, and nodded. “You’ve got me again, for the time being,” he said. “But the end of the game hasn’t come.”

  “That’s all right,” said Larry. “But your part of it will have to be played out on shore.”

  That was the end of Graem for the time being.

  The other thing that happened was when White-Water Sam came on deck, not half an hour before we arrived just above the cañon.

  He strolled about the deck with Nelly, laughing and happy, hailing me and Larry, and apparently not realizing in the least how he came aboard the ship, but very glad to be there.

  Nelly showed the effects of the strain, but she tried to smile. I went forward with them, when Sam insisted on leaning over the rail and watching the bow waves rising and come hissing back from the cut water.

  There he leaned, and then recovered himself with a wild cry. He turned about on us with staring, terrible eyes, and shouted: “She’s the Denver Belle! She’s the Denver Belle!”

  He’d seen the name painted there by Larry, of course. I had forgotten about that.

  Nelly gripped his arm and started talking to him, but he shook his head at her. I never saw such a baffled look as that which came in his eyes.

  He said: “But I thought the Denver Belle . . . I thought . . . I mean, I heard a story about her. And the story was about a slick pilot, a regular white-water man, that decided to run her. . .”

  He broke off as the voice of Larry broke in on us. He had come forward, and he was as calm as could be, the rascal. He said: “People are always making up names. But this is the real Denver Belle. There’s no other Denver Belle than this one.”

  “But I thought . . .” said old Sam.

  “You had a dream about her, maybe,” said Larry. “People are always having dreams, and then getting them mixed up with real daylight.”

  “A dream?” Sam said slowly. “A dream? Yes, maybe it was a bad dream. I’ve got to sit down and think.”

  He did as he said, sitting down in a corner on a stool, with his eyes straining far away into time, trying to see something. Nelly sat beside him, still as stone, watching his tormented face.

  I s
aid to Larry: “What d’you mean by it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Larry, shaking his head. “It’s an idea. I may be wrong, but I’m going to try it.”

  I knew better than to ask him what the idea was. I could see by the look of him that he was already in a torment of doubt and of pain.

  We came close up to the mouth of the cañon, so close that the roaring of the water came to us out of the mouth of the gorge, so close that the powerful current began to suck at us, and we had to put the paddle wheel full steam astern in order to get up to the bank and tie up. The bow kept wavering out toward the center of the current, and being knocked back again, and the mooring rope groaned with the strain that was put on it.

  Then, with everybody on deck, Larry said to us, just loud enough for everyone to hear: “Boys, I’m going to run the cañon, and the White Horse Rapids. If any of you’ll stay with me, good. If you won’t, I’ll pilot her through myself, or try to. I suppose that most of you will want to go ashore. You’re welcome to.”

  Go ashore? Of course, they wanted to go ashore. From the pilot down, the whole lot cleaned out at once, and left only Steve Mannock and me on board. And there was Nelly and her father, and Graem trying to get the old man to follow onto the safe land.

  But old man Bridgeman kept shaking his head.

  “There’s something about it. It ain’t all a dream,” he said. “Seems to me like there was once a Denver Belle, and I was the pilot of her, and there was men. . .”

  He stared wildly about him and shook his head again.

  Then Larry said: “Graem, here’s a chance for you to do something. Will you take Nelly on shore, please? Then we’ll get her father to follow her.”

  Graem suddenly pointed a finger at Larry and cursed him.

  “I see through the scheme, now,” he said. “You want to get White-Water Sam to pilot you through. You murdering sneak, that’s your idea.”

  I had guessed at the thing before. But I was surprised by the voice of Mannock at my shoulder, saying: “And maybe the old boy could do it. He’s lived through Miles Cañon once without a boat under him . . . maybe he could take the second boat straight through.” He added: “I’m going to stay and see it through.”

  “You’re a fool . . . you’re chucking yourself away,” I said.

  “And what about you?” he said.

  “I’ve sort of got to stay with the ship and Larry,” I said, for I felt that way—sick with fear, but tied to the job.

  Larry was saying: “He’s right. White-Water, you’re the best river pilot in Alaska. This is your boat to take through the cañon, and you can do it. If you want to go up there in the pilot house, you’re the boss. Will you go?”

  “Why, where else would I go?” said White-Water Sam. “I’m the pilot on the Denver Belle, ain’t I? And this is the Denver Belle, ain’t it? I’ll have full steam up, Larry.”

  And he turned and started to climb to the top deck.

  Graem would have gone after him, with the cry of Nelly Bridgeman in his ear, but Larry and his gun stopped the try.

  “You go back and get Nelly on shore,” said Larry. “You can’t have Sam.”

  Graem roared out like a bull. He left Nelly standing, dazed and helpless, and, running to the rear of the boat, he called out: “Boys, Decatur has gone mad! He’s going to try to run the cañon and the White Horse with poor old Sam for a pilot. Will you come aboard and help me to get Sam off?”

  Would they come? You bet they would come, and boiling. I never saw men so hot and angry. Then, as Larry saw them start on board, he knew that there was only one trick left for him to play. He swung a double-bitted axe, and, with one blow, he cut the mooring line so deep that the pull of the current did the rest. The cable parted with a pop like the explosion of a gun, and the new Denver Belle shot well out into the current.

  XVI

  There was no gun in the hand of Larry now and, with only the axe against him, I think Graem would have rushed straight in and taken his chances of killing or of being killed, but he was able to hear the cry of Nelly, as she called: “Ed, Ed! There’s nothing to be done, but all help. We’re lost unless we all pull together!” There was sense enough in that.

  The current was swinging the ship around and sweeping it down the stream, broadside on, to wedge at the mouth of Miles Cañon. From the pilot house, old White-Water Sam was ringing vain orders, because there was no one, for the moment, in the engine room. But Mannock was there the next moment, yelling as he went below: “One of you get to the fires. I’ll handle the engines!”

  It was Graem who did the firing on that run. Mannock handled the engines and handled them wonderfully well. The pilot was White-Water Sam. The deck crew was composed of Larry Decatur, who had thrown us all down at death’s door, and Nelly and me.

  But what was a deck crew to do?

  We were picking up and now we flung forward. The churning wheel and the rudder, pulled clear over, barely straightened her out so that her bow hit the opening of the channel in the center.

  Nothing could help us now, nothing except the hands and the brain of the old man in the pilot house.

  We saw him leaning out, and there was on his face the same look that I had seen before in the saloon, when he was talking about the run of the first Denver Belle. He was smiling, I mean to say, and he was looking down on that shooting flume of water as though it were the still water of a harbor, a home harbor, after a long, long voyage.

  Mind you, that was the poor madman who we had all pitied so, and now Larry Decatur had cast us all into the hollow of his hand. The least faltering, and we were gone!

  Two hundred men had died, trying to shoot through the cañon and the White Horse Rapids beyond. Two hundred men! Not on steamers, mind you, but in small boats that could be handed through with ropes, now and then, in tight places. But even they, no matter how built and how handled, could not always get through. Two hundred men had been beaten by that water, and it was ready to eat as many more.

  Have you ever seen the Miles Cañon?

  Imagine rock walls, standing up straight and flat as the palm of your hand, sometimes two hundred feet high, with a dark fringing of evergreens along the tops. Imagine between those walls a gorge only eighty feet wide; only eighty feet wide, and yet containing the whole flow of a great river!

  How could such a narrow gap hold the water? It never could in the world, except that the descent is so sharp that the water goes hurling through faster than you’d believe. Like running horses it flows, and the fury of the current piles it in a foaming, shuddering ridge in the center, away from the walls on each side.

  That was the task of White-Water Sam, to ride the exact center of that ridge of boiling water; if the prow slipped off even a yard or so, we were almost sure to swing broadside on, just exactly as the first Denver Belle had done. In that case, a miracle had enabled one life to be saved; two such miracles could never happen.

  I stood out there on the prow for a minute, but I could not stand it, with the whole body of the ship trembling under me, the keel sliding this way and that, and the kick of the rudder as plainly felt, now and then, as a slap on the face.

  I went back and climbed to the pilot house, and there were Larry and the girl, she standing behind her father at the wheel, her hands folded behind her back and pressing against the wall; on her face, strangely enough, just the same expression that was in the face of her father.

  I mean to say, there was a sort of brooding and mysterious content in her look, and there was the same thing in the face of White-Water Sam.

  She was not looking that way for the same reason. He was once more back in his element, steering a ship through white water. That was why he looked like a dreaming artist, as he steadied the keel on the ridge of the churning, leaping water.

  But she? Well, she was making a voyage through some region of the mind.

  And then I saw a strange thing. It was Larry Decatur, never giving a glance to his ship, but keeping his eyes steadily riveted on the
face of the old pilot.

  It was as though he could see in that face a reflection of all the dangers that were rushing before them down the stream. But he was doing more than that.

  He was looking upon the face of White-Water, I tell you, not so much in the hope that the old fellow could bring them through, but with a sort of half-devout and half-childish hope that White-Water Sam himself might arrive at some great goal before that river run was ended.

  I had rather liked Larry for a long time, but I had always suspected him a good deal, and put him down for a fox, which no doubt he was, in part. But now my suspicion and my distrust all vanished, for it was pretty plain to see what he meant by this experiment.

  He might get the new Denver Belle through the cañon. Yes, there was that possibility. But there was another possibility. I could not help remembering what he had said about the fellow who feared snakes, until he was bitten a second time.

  Yes, that must be the great idea that had come into the wild brain of Larry, and now he was putting it to the test. That, in the testing, he should risk five lives, including his own, besides the life of old White-Water himself—well, that was simply part of the character of Larry Decatur.

  And now, forgetful of himself, the ship, and the girl, he studied the face of Sam Bridgeman and seemed striving to read his soul. A sort of grim joy—yes, that was what I would call the expression of Larry Decatur as he watched the pilot.

  That little tableau inside the pilot house was enough for me. Nobody cared about the progress of the new Denver Belle, except the pilot himself and me.

  But was I watching?

  I tell you, a combination of a city on fire, a prize fight, and a three-ringed circus was nothing compared to the shooting of that boat down through the cañon, with the walls running by and blurred.

  We seemed to be gathering speed all the time. I don’t suppose that we were, but it seemed so to me, as though the old boat were getting a better hold of the water, gaining and gaining, until I found myself down on my knees, braced, with a strong grip on the rail, with the wind shooting back into my face as it shoots and tears when you’re on the back of a running horse.