by Talbot Mundy
“Gawd A’mighty!” murmured Joe Byng, gazing open-mouthed at fifty feet of jagged rock that grinned up suddenly three waves away.
The pilot braced both feet against a stanchion and tried to take the weigh off her by pulling.
“Half speed, sah! Go slow, sah! Go dead slow, sah! You’ll pile up you-ah damn ship, sah! Ah tell you, sah, you’ll pile her up as suah as hell, sah! ‘Bout a million sharks round he-ah, sah! For the love o’ God, sah — Captain, sah—”
“Oh, muzzle him, some one!” ordered the commander, and the jiggling, complaining engines danced ahead, the horrid gray beneath the pilot’s ebony notwithstanding.
“By the deep — four!” warned Joe Byng in a level sing-song. The two gongs clanged like an echo to him, and the Puncher’s speed was reduced at once to her point, of minimum stability. She rolled and quivered like a living thing in fear, falling on and off, nosing out a passage on her own account apparently, and seeming to be gathering all her strength for one tremendous effort.
“That’s bettah, sah! That’s bettah, Captain, sah! Go astern! This he-ah’s the bar, sah — damn bad place, the bar, sah! Go astern, sah. Captain, sah, d’you he-ah me — go astern! Try again, ‘nother place further up, sah. Captain, sah! Over that way; that way thar — that way, sah!”
He pointed through the sky-flung spray with a trembling finger and his voice was rich with doleful emphasis, but the commander held his course and carried on. There seemed neither sympathy nor understanding on that unsteadiest of ships. Curley Crothers, solemn-faced as Nemesis and looking half as compassionate, moved his wheel a trifle. Joe Byng in the chains kept up his even sing-song, expressionless, as if he were an automatic clock that did not care, but must record the truth each time his dripping pendulum touched bottom.
“And a half — three!”
White foam was boiling in among the dirty welter, and the Puncher’s bow pitched suddenly as the first big bar wave lifted her; a second later her propellers chug-chug-chugged in surface spume as she kicked upward like a porpoise diving.
“Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy!” groaned the pilot. “This he-ah watah’s full of sharks, an’ that’s the bar! You’re on the bar now, Captain, sah!”
“By the mark — three!” Byng chanted steadily.
“Starboard a little more,” said the commander leaning forward and shoving the pilot away to leeward at the same time. Then he shouted to the fo’castle head, where a bosun’s mate and his crew had climbed and were awaiting orders in evident and most unreasonable unconcern.
“Get both anchors ready!”
“Aye, aye, sir!” came the answer, and efficiency controlled by experts proceeded at kaleidoscopic angles to defy the elements. The big steel hooks were ready in an instant.
“Stop her!” ordered the commander.
The gongs clanged out an alarm and the throbbing ceased.
“Hard astern, both engines!”
Again there was a clangor under hatches, and the suffering bearings shrieked. The Puncher dropped her stern two feet or so, and the foam boiled brown round her propellers. The shock of the reversal pitched the pilot up against the forward rail, where he clung like a drowning man.
“For the love o’ God, sah! Captain; sah, we’ve struck! Ah told you so; Ah said—”
“And a half-three!” chanted Joe Byng.
“Stop her! Starboard engine ahead! Port engine ahead! Ease your helm! Meet her! Half speed ahead!”
The Puncher pitched and rolled, kicking at the following monsoon that thundered at her counter and tossing up the foam that seethed about her bow. She trembled from end to end, as if the pounding of the water hurt her.
“Helm amidships!” ordered the commander suddenly.
“‘Midships, sir!”
“Full speed ahead, both engines!”
The Puncher leaped, as all destroyers do the second day they are loosed. She sliced through the storm straight for the coral beach beyond the bar, shaking her graceful shoulders free of the sticky spray — reeling, rolling, thugging, kicking, bucking through the welter to where quiet water waited and the ever-lasting, utterly unrighteous stink of sun-baked Arab beaches. As each tremendous breaker thundered on her stern each time she lifted to the underswell, the pilot vowed that she had struck, rolling his eyes and calling two different deities to witness that none of it was any fault of his.
“Thar’s no water, sah — no water, Captain, sah — not one drop! You’ve piled up you-ah ship! Ah told you so; Ah said—”
“By the deep — four!”
“And a half-four!”
“By the mark — five!”
The Puncher was across the bar, gliding through muddy water on an even keel and giving the lie direct to him whose fee was ten pounds English. The pilot drew a talisman of some kind from underneath the least torn portion of his shirt, and to the commander’s amazement kissed it. It is not often that a woolly headed, or any other, native of the East kisses either folk or things. But the commander was too busy at the moment to ask questions.
“Have your starboard anchor ready!” he commanded, making mental notes.
“Ready, sir!”
The glittering, wet, wind-blown beach and the little estuary slid by like a painted panorama smelling of all the evil in the world as the Puncher eased her helm a time or two seeking a comfortable berth with Joe Byng’s chanted aid.
“Let go twenty fathoms!”
The pilot sighed relief as the starboard anchor splashed into the water and the cable roared after it through the hawse pipe.
“What nationality are you?” asked the commander, watching the Puncher swing and gaging distances, but sparing one eye now for his unwelcome but official guest.
“Me, sah?”
“Yes, you.”
The pilot looked anywhere but at his questioner, and a picture passed before the commander’s eyes — a memory, perhaps, of something he had read about at school — of Christians in Nero’s day being asked what their religion was.
“Are you afraid to tell me?” he asked, softening his voice to a kinder tone as he remembered that God did not make all men Englishmen, and turning just in time to cause Crothers to withdraw his right leg.
The pilot’s toes were, after all, not destined to be trodden on just then.
“No, sah, Ah’m not afraid.”
“What are you, then?”
“Ah’m—”
“Well? What?”
“Ah’m English!”
“What?”
“Captain, sah, Ah’m English!”
“Oh! Are you? Um-m-m! Mr. White, give this man his ten pounds, will you? And get his receipt for it.”
That appeared to end matters, so far as the commander was concerned; official dignity forbade any further interest. But it was not so very long since Mr. White was senior midshipman, and it takes a man until he is admiral of the fleet to unlearn all he knew then and forget the curiosity of those days.
“Now, I should have thought you were a Scotchman,” he suggested without smiling, studying the salt-encrusted wrinkles on the ebony face. “You like whisky?”
“Yes, sah — positively, sah! Yes, Captain, sah — Ah do!”
Mr. White sent for whisky and poured out a stiff four fingers, to the awful disgust of Curley Crothers, who saw the whole transaction. The pilot consumed it so instantly that there seemed never to have been any in the glass.
“I suppose your name’s Macnab — or Macphairson — which? Sign here, please.”
The pilot took the proffered pen in unaccustomed fingers and made a crisscross scrawl, adorned with thirteen blots. The pen nib broke under the strain, and he handed it back with an air of confidential remonstrance.
“That thing’s no mo-ah good,” he volunteered.
“So I see. Now tell me your name in full, so that I can write it next to the mark. It’s a wonder of a mark! Mac — what’s the rest of it?”
“Hassan Ah.”
“Machassan?”
“No, sah. Has
san Ah.”
“And you’re English?”
“Yes, sah.”
“With that name?”
“Mah name makes no diffunts, sah. Ah’m English.”
“Well — here’s your money. Cutter away, there! Put the pilot and his crew ashore! Sorry about your boat, pilot, but it couldn’t be helped.”
“Makes me believe that I’m a nigger!” muttered Curley Crothers, not yet released from duty on the bridge.
“First time I ever wished I was a Dutchman!” swore Joe Byng, coiling up his sounding line.
Ten minutes later the cutter’s captain swung the boat’s stern in shore when he judged that he was reasonably near enough and too far in for sharks. He had his orders to put the pilot and his crew ashore, but the means had not been too exactly specified.
“Get out and swim for it, you bally Englishman!” he ordered, using a boat-hook on the nearest one to make his meaning clear.
One by one they jumped for it, the pilot going last. He plainly did not understand the point of view.
“Ah’m English!” he expostulated. “Lissen he-ah, Ah’m English! Damwell English!”
“All right; let’s see you swim, English!” jeered the cutter’s captain, and the pilot took the water with a splash.
“Ah su-ah am English!” he vowed, as he swam for the shore, and he stood by the sea’s edge repeating his assertion with a leathery pair of lungs until the cutter had rowed out of ear-shot.
“English, is he?” said Joe Byng to Curley Crothers in the fo’castle, not twenty minutes later. “I’d show him, if I had him in here for twenty minutes!”
“That fellow’s interested me,” said Crothers. “He’s got me thinking. I vote we investigate him.”
“How?”
“Ashore, fathead.”
“There’ll be no shore leave.”
“No? You left off being wet nurse to the dawg?” “I brush him, mornin’s; if that’s what you mean.”
“Is he fit?”
“Fit to fight a bumboat full o’ pilots!”
“Could he be sick for an hour?”
“Might be did.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Morning?”
“At about two bells?”
“It could be done.”
“Then do it!”
“Why?”
“Because, Joe Byng my boy, you and I want shore leave; and the pup — and he’s a decent pup — must suffer for to make a ‘tween-deck holiday. Get my meaning? I’ve a propagandrum that’ll work this tide. You go and set the fuse in the pup’s inside; and mind you, time it right, my son — for two bells when the old man’s in the chair!”
So Joe Byng, who was something of an expert in the way and ways of dogs, departed in search of an oiler with whom he was on terms of condescension; and he returned to the fo’castle a little later with the nastiest, most awful-smelling mess that ever emanated even from the engine-room of a destroyer in the Persian Gulf (where grease and things run rancid.)
II.
Lying lazily at anchor off the reeking beach of Adra Bight, the Puncher looked peaceful and complacent — which is altogether opposite to what she and her commander were, or had been, for a month. The ship hummed her shut-in discontent, as a hive does when the bees propose to swarm, and her commander — who never, be it noted, went to windward of the one word “damn” — used that one word very frequently.
He sat “abaft the mainmast” at a table that was splotched already with abundant perspiration, and the acting engineer who stood in front of him shifted from foot to foot in attitudes expressive of increasing agony of mind. It grew obvious at last that there was a limit to Mr. Hartley’s store of courteous deference.
There had been news, red hot but wrong, of dhows loaded to the water-line with guns and ammunition somewhere up the Gulf. India, ever fretful for her tribes beyond the border, had borrowed Applewaite and his destroyer by instant cablegram, and jealously held records had been broken while the Puncher quartered those indecent seas and heated up her bearings. It was almost too much to have to come back empty-handed. It was quite too much to have to run for shelter under the lee of Adra’s uninviting coral reef. And to be told by an acting engineer that he would have to stay a week was utterly beyond the scope of polite conversation.
“Why a week?” asked Commander Applewaite, with eyebrows raised to the nth power of incredulity.
“Why a week?” asked Mr. Hartley, breaking down the barrier of self-restraint at last. “I’ll tell you why. Because, although the guts of her are so much scrap-iron, you’ve a crew of engineers who could build machinery of hell-slag — build it, mind — and could get steam out o’ the Sahara, where there isn’t any water at all.
“Because — conditional upon the act o’ God and your permission — I’m willing to perform a miracle. Because the whole engine-room complement is dancing mad for shore leave, and there’ll be none this side o’ Bombay; and because, in consequence o’ that, creation would be a mild name for what’s about to happen under gratings until the shafts revolve again. Man, I wish ye’d take one peep at her bearings, though ye wouldn’t understand.
“Because you’re lucky; any other engineer in all the navies o’ the world would take a month to tinker with her, even if he didn’t have to send to Bombay for a tow. Because—”
“That’ll do!” said Applewaite, his mind wandering already in search of suitable employment for the crew. “Get the repairs done as soon as possible; we stay here until you have finished what is necessary.”
It looked like an evil moment for asking favors, but it was the time laid down in Regulations when such things as favors may be had; and it was the moment Curley Crothers had picked out for asking for shore leave.
“Come ‘ere, Scamp. Come along, Scamp. Come along ‘ere — good boy!” he coaxed, dragging by a short chain in his wake the sorriest-looking bull terrier that ever acted mascot in the British or any other navy. Courteous and huge and cap in hand, his weather-beaten face smiling respectfully above a snow-white uniform, he took his stand before the little table. His outward bearing was one of certainty, but his shrewd, slightly puckered eyes alternately conned the expression of his commander’s face and watched the dog.
The lee, scuppers were the goal of the dog’s immediate ambition, for he was a well-brought-up dog and such of the decencies as were not his by instinct he had learned by painful and repeated acquisition. But at the moment Curley Crothers showed a wondrous disregard for etiquette.
“He’s very sick, sir,” he asserted, tugging a little at the chain in the hope of producing instant proof of his contention. But the dog was gamiest of the game, and swallowed hurriedly.
“Well? I’m not a vet. What about it?”
“The whole ship’s crew ‘ud be sorry, sir, if ‘e was to lose ‘is number. He’s the best mascot this ship ever had, by all accounts.”
“He hasn’t brought us much luck this run!” smiled Applewaite, remembering a long list of “previous convictions” and wondering what Crothers might be up to next.
“No, sir? We’re still a-top o’ the water, sir.”
“Oh! He gets the credit for that, eh? But for him, I suppose we’d have piled up on the reef yesterday?”
“Saving your presence, sir.”
Curley Crothers made a gesture expressive of a world of compliment and praise, but he kept one eye steadily on the dog; he seemed to imply that but for the presence of the dog on board the commander might have forgotten his seamanship.
“Well? What do you suggest?”
“Seeing the poor dog’s sick, sir, and you and all of us so fond of him, and all he needs is exercise, I thought perhaps as ‘ow you’d order me an’ Byng, sir, to take ‘im for a run ashore. There’d be jackals and pi-dogs for ‘im to chase. A bit o’ sport ‘ud set ‘im up in a jiffy. He’s languishing — that’s what’s the matter with him.”
There were almost tears in his voice as he tugged at the chain surreptitiously, in a vain effort t
o produce the cataclysm that was overdue. But for all his efforts to appear affected, his eyes were smiling. So were his commander’s.
“Why Byng?” he asked.
“Byng cleans him, sir. He knows Byng.”
“Then, why you?”
“Why; he knows me too, sir, and between the two of us, we’d manage him proper. S’posin’ he was to get huntin’ on his own and one of us was tired out chasin’ him, t’other could run and catch him. If there was only one of us, he couldn’t.”
“I see. Well? One of the other men might take him on the chain. A good-conduct man, for instance.”
Crothers tugged at the chain, and the unhappy dog drew away toward the scuppers with all his remaining strength.
“He’s cussed about the chain, sir — apt to drag on it and try to chaw it through. Besides, sir, when a dawg’s sick, he’s like a man — same as me an’ you; he likes to ‘ave ‘is partic’lar pals with ‘im. Now, that dawg’s fond o’ me an’ Byng.’
“I see. But supposing exercise isn’t what he wants after all? Suppose he needs a long rest and lots of sleep? How about that?”
The argument had reached a crisis, and Curley realized it. Joking or not, when the commander of a ship takes too long in reaching a decision he generally does not reach a favorable one. The leash was tugged again, this time with some severity. The martyred Scamp was drawn on his protesting haunches close to the official table, that the commander might have a better view of his distress. And then the expected happened — voluminously.
Curley stood with an expression of wooden-headed, abject innocence on his big, broad face, and looked straight in front of him.
“He certainly is sick, sir,” he remarked.
“Sick. Good heavens! The dog’s turning himself inside out! That’s the last time a thing like this happens; he’s the last dog I ever take on a cruise. Take him away at once! Bosun — call some one to wipe up that disgusting mess!”
“Take him ashore, did you say, sir?”
“Take him out of this! Take him anywhere you like! Yes, take him ashore and lose him — feed him to the sharks — give him to the Arabs — take him away, that’s all!”