Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26)

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

  As he had explained it to Billy Byrne the idea was to permit Mr. Harding to believe that Theriere and his companions had been duped by Skipper Simms — that they had had no idea of the work that they were to be called upon to perform until the last moment and that then they had done the only thing they could to protect the passengers and crew of the Lotus.

  “And then,” Theriere had concluded, “when they think we are a band of heroes, and the best friends they have on earth we’ll just naturally be in a position to grab the whole lot of them, and collect ransoms on ten or fifteen instead of just one.”

  “Bully!” exclaimed the mucker. “You sure got some bean, mate.”

  As a matter of fact Theriere had had no intention of carrying the matter as far as he had intimated to Billy except as a last resort. He had been mightily smitten by the face and fortune of Barbara Harding and had seen in the trend of events a possible opportunity of so deeply obligating her father and herself that when he paid court to her she might fall a willing victim to his wiles. In this case he would be obliged to risk nothing, and could make away with his accomplices by explaining to Mr. Harding that he had been compelled to concoct this other scheme to obtain their assistance against Simms and Ward; then they could throw the three into irons and all would be lovely; but now that fool Ward had upset the whole thing by hitting upon this asinine fire hoax as an excuse for boarding the Lotus in force, and had further dampened Theriere’s pet scheme by suggesting to Skipper Simms the danger of Theriere being recognized as they were boarding the Lotus and bringing suspicion upon them all immediately.

  They all knew that a pleasure yacht like the Lotus was well supplied with small arms, and that at the first intimation of danger there would be plenty of men aboard to repel assault, and, in all probability, with entire success.

  That there were excellent grounds for Theriere’s belief that he could win Barbara Harding’s hand with such a flying start as his daring plan would have assured him may not be questioned, for the man was cultivated, polished and, in a sinister way, good-looking. The title that he had borne upon the occasion of his visit to the yacht, was, all unknown to his accomplices, his by right of birth, so that there was nothing other than a long-dead scandal in the French Navy that might have proved a bar to an affiance such as he dreamed of. And now to be thwarted at the last moment! It was unendurable. That pig of a Ward had sealed his own death warrant, of that Theriere was convinced.

  The boats were now quite close to the yacht, which had slowed down almost to a dead stop. In answer to the query of the Lotus’ captain Skipper Simms was explaining their trouble.

  “I’m Captain Jones,” he shouted, “of the brigantine Clarinda, Frisco to Yokohama with dynamite. We disabled our rudder yesterday, an’ this afternoon fire started in the hold. It’s makin’ headway fast now, an’ll reach the dynamite most any time. You’d better take us aboard, an’ get away from here as quick as you can. ‘Tain’t safe nowhere within five hun’erd fathom of her.”

  “You’d better make haste, Captain, hadn’t you?” suggested Mr. Harding.

  “I don’t like the looks of things, sir,” replied that officer. “She ain’t flyin’ any dynamite flag, an’ if she was an’ had a hold full there wouldn’t be any particular danger to us, an’ anyone that has ever shipped dynamite would know it, or ought to. It’s not fire that detonates dynamite, it’s concussion. No sir, Mr. Harding, there’s something queer here — I don’t like the looks of it. Why just take a good look at the faces of those men. Did you ever see such an ugly-looking pack of unhung murderers in your life, sir?”

  “I must admit that they’re not an overly prepossessing crowd, Norris,” replied Mr. Harding. “But it’s not always either fair or safe to judge strangers entirely by appearances. I’m afraid that there’s nothing else for it in the name of common humanity than to take them aboard, Norris. I’m sure your fears are entirely groundless.”

  “Then it’s your orders, sir, to take them aboard?” asked Captain Norris.

  “Yes, Captain, I think you’d better,” said Mr. Harding.

  “Very good, sir,” replied the officer, turning to give the necessary commands.

  The officers and men of the Halfmoon swarmed up the sides of the Lotus, dark-visaged, fierce, and forbidding.

  “Reminds me of a boarding party of pirates,” remarked Billy Mallory, as he watched Blanco, the last to throw a leg over the rail, reach the deck.

  “They’re not very pretty, are they?” murmured Barbara Harding, instinctively shrinking closer to her companion.

  “‘Pretty’ scarcely describes them, Barbara,” said Billy; “and do you know that somehow I am having difficulty in imagining them on their knees giving up thanks to the Lord for their rescue — that was your recent idea of ‘em, you will recall.”

  “If you have purposely set yourself the task of being more than ordinarily disagreeable today, Billy,” said Barbara sweetly, “I’m sure it will please you to know that you are succeeding.”

  “I’m glad I’m successful at something then,” laughed the man. “I’ve certainly been unsuccessful enough in another matter.”

  “What, for example?” asked Barbara, innocently.

  “Why in trying to make myself so agreeable heretofore that you’d finally consent to say ‘yes’ for a change.”

  “Now you are going to make it all the worse by being stupid,” cried the girl petulantly. “Why can’t you be nice, as you used to be before you got this silly notion into your head?”

  “I don’t think it’s a silly notion to be head over heels in love with the sweetest girl on earth,” cried Billy.

  “Hush! Someone will hear you.”

  “I don’t care if they do. I’d like to advertise it to the whole world. I’m proud of the fact that I love you; and you don’t care enough about it to realize how really hard I’m hit — why I’d die for you, Barbara, and welcome the chance; why — My God! What’s that?”

  “O Billy! What are those men doing?” cried the girl. “They’re shooting. They’re shooting at papa! Quick, Billy! Do something. For heaven’s sake do something.”

  On the deck below them the “rescued” crew of the “Clarinda” had surrounded Mr. Harding, Captain Norris, and most of the crew of the Lotus, flashing quick-drawn revolvers from beneath shirts and coats, and firing at two of the yacht’s men who showed fight.

  “Keep quiet,” commanded Skipper Simms, “an’ there won’t none of you get hurted.”

  “What do you want of us?” cried Mr. Harding. “If it’s money, take what you can find aboard us, and go on your way. No one will hinder you.”

  Skipper Simms paid no attention to him. His eyes swept aloft to the upper deck. There he saw a wide-eyed girl and a man looking down upon them. He wondered if she was the one they sought. There were other women aboard. He could see them, huddled frightened behind Harding and Norris. Some of them were young and beautiful; but there was something about the girl above him that assured him she could be none other than Barbara Harding. To discover the truth Simms resorted to a ruse, for he knew that were he to ask Harding outright if the girl were his daughter the chances were more than even that the old man would suspect something of the nature of their visit and deny her identity.

  “Who is that woman you have on board here?” he cried in an accusing tone of voice. “That’s what we’re a-here to find out.”

  “Why she’s my daughter, man!” blurted Harding. “Who did you—”

  “Thanks,” said Skipper Simms, with a self-satisfied grin. “That’s what I wanted to be sure of. Hey, you, Byrne! You’re nearest the companionway — fetch the girl.”

  At the command the mucker turned and leaped up the stairway to the upper deck. Billy Mallory had overheard the conversation below and Simms’ command to Byrne. Disengaging himself from Barbara Harding who in her terror had clutched his arm, he ran forward to the head of the stairway.

  The men of the Lotus looked on in mute and helpless rage. All were covered by
the guns of the boarding party — the still forms of two of their companions bearing eloquent witness to the slenderness of provocation necessary to tighten the trigger fingers of the beasts standing guard over them.

  Billy Byrne never hesitated in his rush for the upper deck. The sight of the man awaiting him above but whetted his appetite for battle. The trim flannels, the white shoes, the natty cap, were to the mucker as sufficient cause for justifiable homicide as is an orange ribbon in certain portions of the West Side of Chicago on St. Patrick’s Day. As were “Remember the Alamo,” and “Remember the Maine” to the fighting men of the days that they were live things so were the habiliments of gentility to Billy Byrne at all times.

  Billy Mallory was an older man than the mucker — twenty-four perhaps — and fully as large. For four years he had played right guard on a great eastern team, and for three he had pulled stroke upon the crew. During the two years since his graduation he had prided himself upon the maintenance of the physical supremacy that had made the name of Mallory famous in collegiate athletics; but in one vital essential he was hopelessly handicapped in combat with such as Billy Byrne, for Mallory was a gentleman.

  As the mucker rushed upward toward him Mallory had all the advantage of position and preparedness, and had he done what Billy Byrne would have done under like circumstances he would have planted a kick in the midst of the mucker’s facial beauties with all the power and weight and energy at his command; but Billy Mallory could no more have perpetrated a cowardly trick such as this than he could have struck a woman.

  Instead, he waited, and as the mucker came on an even footing with him Mallory swung a vicious right for the man’s jaw. Byrne ducked beneath the blow, came up inside Mallory’s guard, and struck him three times with trip-hammer velocity and pile-driver effectiveness — once upon the jaw and twice — below the belt!

  The girl, clinging to the rail, riveted by the paralysis of fright, saw her champion stagger back and half crumple to the deck. Then she saw him make a brave and desperate rally, as, though torn with agony, he lurched forward in an endeavor to clinch with the brute before him. Again the mucker struck his victim — quick choppy hooks that rocked Mallory’s head from side to side, and again the brutal blow below the belt; but with the tenacity of a bulldog the man fought for a hold upon his foe, and at last, notwithstanding Byrne’s best efforts, he succeeded in closing with the mucker and dragging him to the deck.

  Here the two men rolled and tumbled, Byrne biting, gouging, and kicking while Mallory devoted all of his fast-waning strength to an effort to close his fingers upon the throat of his antagonist. But the terrible punishment which the mucker had inflicted upon him overcame him at last, and as Byrne felt the man’s efforts weakening he partially disengaged himself and raising himself upon one arm dealt his now almost unconscious enemy a half-dozen frightful blows upon the face.

  With a shriek Barbara Harding turned from the awful sight as Billy Mallory’s bloody and swollen eyes rolled up and set, while the mucker threw the inert form roughly from him. Quick to the girl’s memory sprang Mallory’s recent declaration, which she had thought at the time but the empty, and vainglorious boasting of the man in love— “Why I’d die for you, Barbara, and welcome the chance!”

  “Poor boy! How soon, and how terribly has the chance come!” moaned the girl.

  Then a rough hand fell upon her arm.

  “Here, youse,” a coarse voice yelled in her ear. “Come out o’ de trance,” and at the same time she was jerked roughly toward the companionway.

  Instinctively the girl held back, and then the mucker, true to his training, true to himself, gave her arm a sudden twist that wrenched a scream of agony from her white lips.

  “Den come along,” growled Billy Byrne, “an’ quit dis monkey business, or I’ll sure twist yer flipper clean off’n yeh.”

  With an oath, Anthony Harding sprang forward to protect his daughter; but the butt of Ward’s pistol brought him unconscious to the deck.

  “Go easy there, Byrne,” shouted Skipper Simms; “there ain’t no call to injure the hussy — a corpse won’t be worth nothing to us.”

  In mute terror the girl now permitted herself to be led to the deck below. Quickly she was lowered into a waiting boat. Then Skipper Simms ordered Ward to search the yacht and remove all firearms, after which he was to engage himself to navigate the vessel with her own crew under armed guard of half a dozen of the Halfmoon’s cutthroats.

  These things attended to, Skipper Simms with the balance of his own crew and six of the crew of the Lotus to take the places upon the brigantine of those left as a prize crew aboard the yacht returned with the girl to the Halfmoon.

  The sailing vessel’s sails were soon hoisted and trimmed, and in half an hour, followed by the Lotus, she was scudding briskly southward. For forty-eight hours this course was held until Simms felt assured that they were well out of the lane of regular trans-Pacific traffic.

  During this time Barbara Harding had been kept below, locked in a small, untidy cabin. She had seen no one other than a great Negro who brought her meals to her three times daily — meals that she returned scarcely touched.

  Now the Halfmoon was brought up into the wind where she lay with flapping canvas while Skipper Simms returned to the Lotus with the six men of the yacht’s crew that he had brought aboard the brigantine with him two days before, and as many more of his own men.

  Once aboard the Lotus the men were put to work with those already on the yacht. The boat’s rudder was unshipped and dropped into the ocean; her fires were put out; her engines were attacked with sledges until they were little better than so much junk, and to make the slender chances of pursuit that remained to her entirely nil every ounce of coal upon her was shoveled into the Pacific. Her extra masts and spare sails followed the way of the coal and the rudder, so that when Skipper Simms and First Officer Ward left her with their own men that had been aboard her she was little better than a drifting derelict.

  From her cabin window Barbara Harding had witnessed the wanton wrecking of her father’s yacht, and when it was over and the crew of the brigantine had returned to their own ship she presently felt the movement of the vessel as it got under way, and soon the Lotus dropped to the stern and beyond the range of her tiny port. With a moan of hopelessness and terror the girl sank prostrate across the hard berth that spanned one end of her prison cell.

  How long she lay there she did not know, but finally she was aroused by the opening of her cabin door. As she sprang to her feet ready to defend herself against what she felt might easily be some new form of danger her eyes went wide in astonishment as they rested on the face of the man who stood framed in the doorway of her cabin.

  “You?” she cried.

  CHAPTER V. LARRY DIVINE UNMASKED

  “YES, Barbara, it is I,” said Mr. Divine; “and thank God that I am here to do what little any man may do against this band of murdering pirates.”

  “But, Larry,” cried the girl, in evident bewilderment, “how did you come to be aboard this ship? How did you get here? What are you doing amongst such as these?”

  “I am a prisoner,” replied the man, “just as are you. I think they intend holding us for ransom. They got me in San Francisco. Slugged me and hustled me aboard the night before they sailed.”

  “Where are they going to take us?” she asked.

  “I do not know,” he replied, “although from something I have overheard of their conversations I imagine that they have in mind some distant island far from the beaten track of commerce. There are thousands such in the Pacific that are visited by vessels scarce once in a century. There they will hold us until they can proceed with the ship to some point where they can get into communication with their agents in the States. When the ransom is paid over to these agents they will return for us and land us upon some other island where our friends can find us, or leaving us where we can divulge the location of our whereabouts to those who pay the ransom.”

  The girl had b
een looking intently at Mr. Divine during their conversation.

  “They cannot have treated you very badly, Larry,” she said. “You are as well groomed and well fed, apparently, as ever.”

  A slight flush mounting to the man’s face made the girl wonder a bit though it aroused no suspicion in her mind.

  “Oh, no,” he hastened to assure her, “they have not treated me at all badly — why should they? If I die they can collect no ransom on me. It is the same with you, Barbara, so I think you need apprehend no harsh treatment.”

  “I hope you are right, Larry,” she said, but the hopelessness of her air rather belied any belief that aught but harm could come from captivity with such as those who officered and manned the Halfmoon.

  “It seems so remarkable,” she went on, “that you should be a prisoner upon the same boat. I cannot understand it. Why only a few days ago we received and entertained a friend of yours who brought a letter from you to papa — the Count de Cadenet.”

  Again that telltale flush mantled the man’s cheek. He cursed himself inwardly for his lack of self-control. The girl would have his whole secret out of him in another half-hour if he were not more careful.

  “They made me do that,” he said, jerking his thumb in the general direction of Skipper Simms’ cabin. “Maybe that accounts for their bringing me along. The ‘Count de Cadenet’ is a fellow named Theriere, second mate of this ship. They sent him to learn your plans; when you expected sailing from Honolulu and your course. They are all crooks and villains. If I hadn’t done as they bid they would have killed me.”

  The girl made no comment, but Divine saw the contempt in her face.

  “I didn’t know that they were going to do this. If I had I’d have died before I’d have written that note,” he added rather lamely.

  The girl was suddenly looking very sad. She was thinking of Billy Mallory who had died in an effort to save her. The mental comparison she was making between him and Mr. Divine was not overly flattering to the latter gentleman.