The Max Brand Megapack

by Max Brand

  The Scotchman glowered upon him.

  “I’ll tell her what I’ve just found out,” he answered coldly, and turned to Kate. “We were mistaken in what we thought when we overheard Hovey talking with Harrigan. Dan was simply playing a part with them— he was trying to learn their plans so as to use them against the mutineers when the time came.”

  There was a joyousness in her voice that cut McTee like a knife as she cried: “I knew! I knew! My instinct fought for you, Dan. I couldn’t believe what I heard!”

  “What you both heard?” he said bitterly. “I remember now. It was when I talked with Hovey in front of this cabin?”

  “Ask no more questions,” said McTee. “I’m seeing red now.”

  “Black! You see nothin’ but black, ye swine! The soot in your soul is a stain in your eyes, McTee.”

  They turned toward the door, but she sprang before it and set her shoulders against the boards.

  “Sit down—you too, Dan.”

  They obeyed slowly, McTee taking the edge of the bunk and Harrigan lowering his bulk to the little campstool, which groaned beneath his weight. She sat on a chair between them, while she looked from face to face.

  “When you came in you were friends,” she said, “and the only thing that could bring you to friendship was danger. There is danger. What?”

  They exchanged glances of wonder at this shrewd interpretation.

  “There is danger,” said McTee at length, “and it’s a danger which is something more than the mutiny, perhaps.”

  “I will tell it,” said Harrigan.

  He drew his chair closer to Kate and leaned over so that his face was near hers. She knew at once that he had forgotten all about the presence of McTee.

  “Kate, I will not lie to ye, colleen”—here McTee set his teeth, but Harrigan went on—“I hate McTee, and it’s for your sake that I hate him. And it’s for your sake that I’m goin’ to forget it for a while. There’s throuble abroad—there’s a cloud over this ship an’ a curse on it—”

  “What he means to say,” broke in McTee, and then he became aware that she had not heard him speak, and he saw her smiling as she drank in the musical brogue of the Irishman.

  “A curse on it, acushla, an’ a promise av death that only two shtrong men can save you from—an’ McTee is shtrong—so I’ve put away desire av killin’ him till we get you safe an’ sound to the shore, colleen, acushla; but ye must trust in us, an’ follow us as ye love your life an’ as I love ye!”

  She straightened in her chair and turned her eyes toward McTee.

  “And you cannot tell me what the danger is?”

  “We cannot,” he answered, “but you must pay no attention to anything that happens or to anything that is said to you by others. There are only two men on the Heron whom you can trust—and here we are. But there may be wild happenings on the Heron. Keep your courage and trust in Angus McTee and—”

  “And Harrigan,” broke in the Irishman quickly, with a glare at the captain.

  She reached an impulsive hand to both of them, and they met the clasp, keeping, as it were, one eye upon her and one eye of hate upon each other.

  She said, and her voice was low and musical with exultation: “I’ve no care what happens. I know we shall pull through safely. The three of us—Dan, Angus—we lived through the storm when the Mary Rogers sank, we lived on the island and survived, we reached the Heron in safety, and as long as we stay together, we’d be safe if the whole world were against us. Don’t you feel it?”

  She rose, and they stood up, towering above her, while she went on in a voice trembling somewhat: “But we must not be seen together if all these dangers threaten us; they must not know that the three of us are like one great heart.”

  They stepped back, and McTee pulled open the door, but still she retained their hands, and now she raised them both to her lips with a gesture so swift that they could not resist it.

  “Both of you,” she said; “God bless you both!”

  CHAPTER 31

  She released their hands; the door closed upon them; they stood facing each other on the deck in the dark.

  “McTee,” said Harrigan with deep emotion, “we’re swine. We were about to fight before—her.”

  “Harrigan,” said McTee, “we are swine. But when the time comes, we’ll make up for it to her. If you hear a word in the forecastle, let me know about it; if I hear a word in the captain’s cabin, I’ll send for you. I may be wrong. Henshaw may be in his right senses. We’ll see. In the meantime there are just the two of us, Harrigan, and against us there’s a mutinous crew on one side and a mad captain, I think, on the other.”

  “There’s no use in thinkin’,” said Harrigan; “when the time comes, we’ll fight. So long, Angus. When the trouble starts, our assemblin’ point is Kate.”

  And he went forward to the forecastle. In the morning he discovered what he wanted to know. The men were aloof from him. He was conscious of eyes upon him whenever his back was turned, but while he faced them, no one would meet his glance.

  In some way Hovey had learned that Harrigan was no longer to be trusted as a member of the mutineers, and he must have spread his tidings among the rest of the sailors. What he sensed in those covert glances, however, was not an immediate danger, but rather a waiting—an expectancy, and he deduced rightly that they would not attempt to lay a hand upon him until the mutiny was started. Then he would be reserved for some lingering death as a traitor doubly dyed.

  While they were eating breakfast, Hovey came in late with the word that during the night someone had tampered with the dynamo, and the result was that the ship must complete her voyage without electric lights and—far more important—without the use of the wireless. Sam Hall started to blurt a comment on this, but a glance from Hovey silenced him. It was plain that the bos’n would risk no conversation from his blunt sailors while Harrigan was in earshot. The Irishman hurried through his breakfast and took his bucket and scrubbing brush toward the bridge, for he had many questions to ask McTee. He had scarcely left the forecastle when Hovey said to Garry Cochrane: “Watch the door. I’ve got something important to say.”

  Cochrane took up the designated position, and Hovey went on: “Lads, I’ve bad news, bad and good news together. The boats are gone—though who the devil destroyed them we don’t know—and now the wireless is destroyed. The boats are a big loss, for now we’ll have to rig up some sort of a raft to make shore when we beach the Heron. The busting of the wireless almost balances that loss. Now we’re sure they can’t slip out any quick wireless call that would bring a dozen ships after us. Bad news and good news together; and here’s some more of the same kind.

  “Henshaw has made up his mind to give Kamasura the whip. You know what that means? Well, I’ll tell you. It means that after the first dozen strokes—as Borgson will lay them on—Kamasura will break down and tell everything we don’t want him to say. Understand? With the cabin warned of what we’re going to do, what chance would we have to take them? So we’ll hang around close, lads, and the minute Kamasura opens his face to say the wrong thing, we’ll rush ’em—are you with me? And go for two men first—Black McTee and Harrigan. With them out of the way we’ll simply chew up the rest. Try to take the others alive, but don’t waste any time with McTee and the Irishman. You can lay to it before you start that they’ll never be taken till they’re dead.”

  For some minutes he talked on, appointing to each man or group of men the work he would be expected to perform when Hovey gave the signal to attack, which would be one long blast on his whistle.

  While they planned, Harrigan had reached the bridge and found McTee impatiently awaiting him.

  “You’re late,” frowned the Scotchman. “What’s happened in the forecastle?”

  “Black looks on all sides, and no talk,” said Harrigan.

  “A falling barometer,” nodded McTee, “and things are just as bad in the cabin. You’ve heard about the wireless breaking?”

  “I
have. What does it mean?”

  “It may have been done by the mutineers. I doubt it. But that isn’t all that’s happened. This is a pretty cool day for the tropics.”

  Harrigan stared at him, baffled by the sudden change of the conversation.

  “It is cool,” he assented.

  “But in the fireroom it’s hotter than it’s been at any time since the Heron started on this trip. The second assistant came up to complain to Henshaw, and I heard them.

  “‘There’s something wrong with the air shafts,’ he said to White Henshaw.

  “‘Look here,’ said Henshaw, “I’ve had enough grumbling from the fireroom. Put a fan in the air shaft, and don’t come up here again with any nonsense. D’you expect to find cool breezes in the South Seas? No, they’re hot as fire—hot as fire—hot as fire!’

  “He repeated those words three times over in a way that made my flesh creep, and then he laughed. Even the second saw that something was wrong. He took a long look at Henshaw, and then he went out with his head down.”

  “What did it all mean?” asked Harrigan.

  “I don’t know. I don’t dare think what it means. But if my guess is right, then the Heron is a lot nearer hell than even you and I expected. Look, there goes Fritz Klopp, the first assistant engineer. I’ll wager he’s got another complaint about the heat in the fireroom.”

  They watched Klopp go into the captain’s cabin, waited a moment, and then the door flew open and Klopp sprang out and fled aft like a man pursued. Henshaw came to the open door and peered after the engineer and laughed silently.

  McTee muttered: “That’s the way the devil laughs when he watches the damned souls pass by.”

  Here Henshaw glanced up and saw them watching him from the bridge. His face altered suddenly to a malevolence so terrible that both the men stepped back. Harrigan was trembling like a hysterical girl. He looked in the face of McTee and saw that the Scotchman had blanched. For a long moment they exchanged glances, and then McTee went down from the bridge and entered the cabin.

  Henshaw was not there. He had evidently gone into the inner room, and McTee sat down to wait. The time had come for him to ask questions, and he was nerving himself for the ordeal. His plans were disturbed by a muffled sound from the inner cabin, a sound so unusual that McTee stiffened in his chair with horror and then rose slowly.

  Tiptoe he stole across the floor and laid a hand lightly on the knob of the door of the captain’s private room. It turned easily without any creak, and the door opened a few inches. There sat Henshaw with his back to McTee, leaning over a table. Gold pieces were spilled loosely across the surface of the wood—possibly the contents of three or four of those small canvas bags—and Henshaw leaned forward with his forehead resting upon the glittering yellow coins and one hand clutching a quantity of them. His other hand held a photograph of the dead Beatrice. The sound continued. It was the low sobbing of the captain, a hoarse and horrible murmur.

  McTee closed the door and went back onto the deck, for he suddenly understood the futility of questions. Harrigan, in the meantime, had waited for the return of McTee, and when the latter did not come, the Irishman lingered on the bridge for an hour or more, pottering about with his brush in a pretense of finishing up a perfect job. His attention was drawn then by a gathering crowd and bustle in the waist of the ship between the wheelhouse and the forecastle. The entire crew of the Heron seemed to be mustering, with the exception of those needed to keep the engines running. They stood in a circle, leaving the cover of the hatch clear.

  He hurried down to witness the ceremony, and as he reached the waist, he saw Henshaw take up his position with folded arms in the very center of the hatch. A moment later Kamasura was led up by Eric Borgson and Jan Van Roos.

  The two mates, under the direction of Henshaw, lashed the Japanese face down upon the hatch, pulling his arms and legs taut with ropes that fastened to the bolts on all sides of the hatch cover.

  When he was securely tied, Kamasura was stripped to the waist, and then Harrigan saw Borgson, grinning evilly, step up with a long whip in his hand. It was a blacksnake, heavily loaded and stiff at the butt and tapering gradually to a slender, supple, snakelike body, with a thin, sinister lash. Borgson whirled the whip around his head to get its balance. Henshaw stepped back, still with folded arms.

  “This fellow Kamasura,” he announced to the crew, “has blown up the boats of the Heron. There’s no doubt of it. Borgson caught him almost in the act. I could do worse things than this to Kamasura, but I’ve decided to flog him until he confesses.”

  There was not a word of answer from the crew; they waited, hushed, ominous. A whisper sounded in the ear of Harrigan, who stood with gritting teeth and clenched hands.

  It was McTee who murmured: “Hold onto yourself, Harrigan. Our time hasn’t come.”

  “I’ll hold onto myself all right,” said Harrigan, “but look at the crew.”

  In fact, there was something more deadly than any snarling of a crowd in this unnatural silence of many men. Also they were not looking at Kamasura; they were staring, every man, at the bos’n, who stood with his whistle hanging from a cord around his neck.

  “Begin!” said Henshaw.

  The blacksnake whistled around the head of the third mate and there was a long scream from Kamasura—but the blacksnake only cracked loudly in the air. Borgson laughed with a hideous delight. Harrigan, sickly white, bowed his head. Again the blacksnake whirled and again it cracked, but this time on naked flesh, and the scream of Kamasura was like the cut of a knife.

  Again, again, and again the blacksnake fell, and now Kamasura twisted his head toward the captain and cried in a voice made thin by pain and rage at once: “I confess! Captain, let me speak!”

  At a gesture from Henshaw, the third mate reluctantly stepped back, drawing the lash of the blacksnake slowly through his hands with a caressing touch. Van Roos, the color completely gone from his usually blooming cheeks, cut the ropes, and Kamasura rose, facing the captain. He extended a naked, trembling arm toward Hovey.

  “Mutiny!” he yelled. “The whole crew—the whole forecastle—mutiny, Cap’n Henshaw! I know—”

  The piercing whistle of the bos’n cut into his speech, and the crew rolled forward over the hatch with a single shout that might have come from one throat except for its shrill volume.

  CHAPTER 32

  “It’s come!” cried Harrigan to McTee. “Kate!”

  But even as he whirled, two sailors leaped on him from behind and bore him to the deck. At the same time a gun flashed in the hand of Henshaw, and he fired twice into the onrushing host. Two men crumpled up on deck and the others gave back a little—they were glad to turn to the easier prey of Van Roos and Borgson, who were instantly overpowered, while Henshaw, with brandished revolver, made his way toward the main cabin.

  The second and smaller rush of the mutineers had been toward Harrigan and McTee, where the two men stood together. Harrigan, taken from behind, went down at once and then grappled with his assailants before they could use their knives. McTee stood over the struggling three and smote right and left among the mutineers. A knife caught his shirt at the shoulder and ripped it to the waist; a club whizzed past his head, but his great fists smashed home on face and head and sent men staggering and sprawling back. The confusion gave him an instant of freedom in a small circle, and he leaned and caught one of Harrigan’s assailants by the heels. It was a little man, a withered fellow scarcely five feet tall and literally dried up by the tropic heat. He was wrenched from his hold, heaved into the air, and then whirled about the head of McTee like a mighty bludgeon. As the sailors rushed again, that living club smashed against them and flung them back. Even to the herculean strength of McTee it was a prodigious feat, but the danger gave him for the moment the power of a madman. Twice he swung the shrieking little sailor, and twice that body smashed back the attack, while Harrigan leaped to his feet in time to knock down a man who sprang at McTee from behind with a brandished knife
.

  All this had occurred in the space of half a dozen seconds; the first rush of the mutineers was spent; before they could lunge forward again, McTee flung the half-lifeless body of his human weapon into the midst of the crowd and, turning with Harrigan at his shoulder, they sprang up the ladder to the main cabin door.

  Hovey was screaming commands over the din; the crowd rushed after the fugitives.

  Harrigan shouted at McTee: “Get Kate! Take her aft to the wireless house! I’ll hold ’em here a minute and then join you!”

  McTee nodded and tore down the deck toward Kate’s cabin, while Harrigan pulled the knife of Kamasura from his trousers and thrust it in the face of the first man up the ladder. The blade slashed him from nose to cheekbone, and he toppled back with a yell, bearing with him in the fall the two men immediately below. Harrigan glanced across to the other ladder on the farther side of the deck, and saw Kate and McTee running aft. He turned and raced after them.

  The wireless house was their one hope. There the sea would be at their backs, and the only approach for the mutineers in their rush would be up the ladders reaching from the deck below; the main cabin, on the other hand, had half a dozen places from which it could be assailed. This had been instantly seen by the other officers, and when Harrigan reached the ladder to the deck at the other end of the cabin, he saw Salvain standing in front of the wireless house, Kate and McTee in the act of climbing the steps from the waist, and White Henshaw, with his hair blowing, following hard in their tracks.

  Harrigan reached the waist at a leap, and in another moment joined the survivors in the shelter of the wireless house—Kate, McTee, Henshaw, Salvain, and Sloan, a party of six. They were safe for the moment, for the mutineers would certainly never venture an attack against the wheelhouse, where they could be beaten from the ladders by the defendants, but they were safe without food, without water.

  Then, as they stared hopelessly across the waist, they saw three men led across the rear promenade of the main cabin. Their hands were tied behind them, and they were kicked forward by the mutineers, first Jacob Van Roos—they could note his pallor even at that distance—then Eric Borgson, scowling and defiant, and dragged along by the men of the forecastle; and last came Douglas Campbell, surrounded by the firemen. Finally, Jerry Hovey shouted across the waist: