“They’ll be back soon,” said he. “Stay here; I’m going to investigate. If I whistle, look alive for orders.”
He pressed a revolver into her hand, clambered the barricade and was gone. The darkness swallowed him.
She crouched behind the barricade, waiting, wondering, thrilling with the first imperative command which ever, as a woman, had been given her. The mastery of it steadied her, and was sweet. It almost made her forget the aching shoulder where the rifle-butt had plunged, and the dizzy swimming of her head.
The moments lagged eternal. What if some evil chance should fall and he should never come? She trembled at the thought. Suddenly and for the first time in her whole life she realized what manner of thing the comradeship of man may be, how very needful, very dear.
“Come back! Come back!” her lips formed the words there in the night—words which she dared not bring to utterance.
She heard a sudden wild noise on the sea. “They’re coming back!” she shuddered.
Then, all at once, sounded a clear, low whistle on the starboard side.
“Drop a line here, and make it fast!” a voice rose up to her.
Not understanding, just obeying with a strange, new happiness in her fear, she tugged a rope from the tangled barricade, cross-looped it firmly on a chock, and flung it overboard. She heard it swish and strike the water—felt it tauten. The voice rose again: “First-rate, so far. I’m coming up!”
She peered across the rail. From the wreckers’ fleet a nearing tumult wafted. The torches now were blazing not five hundred fathoms off.
“Hurry!” she cried. “Hurry, or it will be too late!”
Staring down into the dark, she could just see a dim mass toiling up the rope. Then, quite suddenly, the doctor swarmed to the rail—was over it.
“We’ve got to rush!” he panted. “Found a mighty handy craft banging at the end of a liana-cord—obliging of ’em to have left it! By dropping off to starboard, they may never know we’re gone; at least, not till we’ve made a start. You gather up the cartridges. We’re apt to need ’em. I’ll take the guns.”
She filled her bosom with the leaden deaths, while he, with his knife, slit out a square of tarpaulin, wrapped the guns in it, and lashed them with a cord. He made a loop and slung the bundle over his head.
Then a match r-r-rasped, and eager little flames licked at the barricade, fingering the oil-soaked cabin wall.
“Good-by, old Suth!” the doctor whispered hoarsely to himself.
A moment there was silence—then the doctor faced her.
“Come!” said he. “Come, now! Are you afraid?”
“Afraid—with you?”
VI.
And it befell that, just before the breaking of the day, a man and woman, all disheveled, weary, black with powder-grime, resting on their paddles in a huge, uncouth barraca, turned and gazed back over the heaving ocean-breast to the distant tower of flame that bloodied the horizon.
Neither spoke. There was no need of words as the swift dawn flared up the sky. The sea crimsoned; fantom blues and opals spread abroad; luminous greens rimmed the far crescent of the western heaven as the last few watchful stars faded in the glory of another day.
“See?” said the man, pointing ahead.
The woman from her place in the bow looked far across the painted waters where a thin-drawn blur of smoke trailed slowly landward.
“See there? Two hours more and we’ll be with—well, people again. Two hours more, and this will all be over, all be at an end for me—everything. I know how it will be! Just as I said last night, things will seem different to you—by the light of day. It is useless for me to hope otherwise.”
“No, no,” she answered, while her paddle dragged. “Not Africa—not you!”
As the full broad circle of the sun kissed the sea suddenly to gold, a song rose to the man’s brave, eager lips. Strongly he plunged his paddle, urging the long barraca northward up the coast of Africa, over the bosom of the morning sea.
CURSED (Part 1)
Originally published in 1919.
CHAPTER I
AT BATU KAWAN
Slashed across the copper bowl of sunset, the jagged silhouette of tawny-shouldered mountains, fringed with areca-palms in black fretwork against the swift-fading glow, divided the tropic sky. Above, day yet lingered. Below, night’s dim shroud, here and there spangled with glow-lights still or moving, had already folded earth in its obscurity.
Down from that mountain crest the descending slopes fell through grove and plantation to the drowned paddy-fields and to the miasmatic swamps, brooded by settling mists like thin, white breath of ghosts that in this Malay land all men gave faith to.
Nearer still, it reached the squalid campong of Batu Kawan. Batu Kawan, huddled in filth, disorder and disease between the steaming arsenical green of the lowlands and the muddy idleness of the boat-jammed Timbago River. Batu Kawan, whence the New Bedford clipper-ship, Silver Fleece, should have sailed two hours ago on the high tide, this 18th day of February, 1868. Batu Kawan, pestilent, malodorous, sinister, swarming with easy life, hemmed round with easier death.
William Scurlock, mate, was looking townward, leaning with crossed arms on rail. The umber smudge of half-light in the sky, fading over the torn edge of the mountains, revealed something of his blond bigness, freckled, weather-bitten, with close-cropped hair, a scarred jaw and hard teeth that gripped his cutty-pipe in bulldog fashion.
Scurlock seemed to be engaged with inward visionings, rather than outward. The occasional come-and-go of some dim figure in the waist of the ship, the fan-tan game of four or five Malay seamen—for the Silver Fleece carried a checkerboard crew, white, yellow and brown—as they squatted on their hunkers under the vague blur of a lantern just forward of the mainmast, and the hiccoughing stridor of an accordion in the fo’c’s’le, roused in him no reaction.
Nor, as he lolled there under the awning, did he appear to take heed of the mud-clogged river with its jumble of sampans and house-boats, or of the thatched huts and tiled godowns past which the colorful swarm of Oriental life was idling along the bund. This stewing caldron of heat, haze, odors, dusk where fruit-bats staggered against the appearing stars said nothing whatever to the mate. All he could see in it was inefficiency, delay and loss.
Not all its wizardry of gleaming lights in hut and shop, its firefly paper lanterns, its murmuring strangeness could weigh against the vexing fact that his ship had missed the tide, and that—though her full cargo of tea, rattan, tapioca, cacao and opium was under hatches—she still lay made fast to the bamboo mooring-piles. What could offset the annoyance that Captain Alpheus Briggs, ashore on business of his own, was still delaying the vital business of working downstream on the ebb?
“Devil of a cap’n!” grumbled Scurlock. He spat moodily into the dark waters, and sucked at his pipe. “Ain’t it enough for him to have put in a hundred boxes of raw opium, which is liable to land us all in hell, without stealin’ a nigger wench an’ now drinkin’ samshu, ashore? Trouble comin’—mutiny an’ murder an’ damnation with trimmin’s, or I’m no Gloucester man!”
Savagely he growled in his deep throat. Scurlock disapproved of Batu Kawan and of all its works, especially of its women and its raw rice-whisky. The East grated on his taut nerves. Vague singing in huts and the twangle of musically discordant strings set his teeth on edge. He hated the smells of the place, all seemingly compounded of curry and spices and mud and smoke of wood fires, through which the perfumes of strange fruits and heavy flowers drifted insistently.
The voices of mothers calling their naked little ones within their doors, lest Mambang Kuning, the yellow devil who dwells in the dusk, should snatch them, jarred upon his evil temper. So, too, the monotonous tunk-tunk-tunk of metal-workers’ hammers in some unseen place; the snuffling grunt of carabaos wallowing in the mud-swale beyond the guava clump, up-stream; the nasal chatter of gharry-drivers and Kling boatmen; the whining sing-song of Malay pedlers with shouldered poles, wh
ence swung baskets of sugar-cane and mangosteens. Scurlock abominated all that shuffling, chattering tangle of dark, half-clad life. The gorge of his trim, efficient, New England soul rose up against it, in hot scorn.
“Damn the Straits!” he grumbled, passing his hand over his forehead, sweaty in the breathless heat. “An’ damn Briggs, too! It’s my last voyage East, by joycus!”
Which was, indeed, the living truth, though by no means as Scurlock meant or understood it.
A plaintive hail from the rough brick coping of the bund drew his atrabilious attention. The mate saw that a brown, beardless fellow was making gestures at him. A lantern on the quarterdeck flung unsteady rays upon the Malay’s nakedness, complete save for the breech-clout through which a kris was thrust. In his left hand he gripped a loose-woven coir bag, heavily full. His left held out, on open palm, three or four shining globules. Scurlock viewed with resentment the lean, grinning face, lips reddened and teeth jet-black by reason of long years of chewing lime and betel.
“Turtle egg, sar, sellum piecee cheap,” crooned the Malay. “Buyum turtle egg, sar?”
Scurlock’s answer was to bend, reach for a piece of holystone in a bucket by the rail, and catapult it at the vagabond who had made so bold as to interrupt his musings. The Malay swung aside; the holystone crunched into the sack of eggs and slid to earth.
The screaming curse of the barbarian hardly crossed the rail ahead of the flung kris. The wavy, poisoned blade flickered, spinning. Scurlock stooped away; the fraction of an eyewink later would have done his life’s business very neatly. Into the mizzen-mast drove the kris, and quivered there.
Scurlock turned, strode to it and plucked it out, swearing in his rage. The Malays at fan-tan by the gleam of the slush-light under the awning grew silent. Their fantastic little cards, of gaudy hue, dropped unheeded; for they had heard the name of Ratna Mutnu Manikam, god who brings death. Wherefore they shuddered, and turned scared faces aft; and some touched heart and forehead, warding off the curse.
Back to the rail, kris in hand, ran Scurlock.
“Juldi, you!” he shouted, with an oath unprintable. “Top your broom, you black swine—skip, before I come ashore an’ split you! Juldi jao!”
The Malay hesitated. Scurlock, flinging “Sur!” at him, which in the lingua franca denominates a swine, started for the gangway. Silently the Malay faded into the little fringe of brown and yellow folk that had already gathered; and so he vanished. Scurlock was already setting foot upon the gangway that led slantwise down to the bund, when through the quickly coagulating street-crowd an eddy, developing, made visible by the vague light a large head covered with a topi hat wrapped in a pugree. Powerful shoulders and huge elbows, by no means chary of smashing right and left against the naked ribs, cleared a passage, amid grunts and gasps of pain; and once or twice the big man’s fists swung effectively, by way of make-weight.
Then to William Scurlock’s sight appeared a tall, heavy-set figure, rather dandified, in raw yellow bamboo silk and with very neatly polished boots that seemed to scorn the mud of Batu Kawan. A first glance recorded black brows of great luxuriance, a jungle of black beard contrasting sharply with a face reddened by wind, weather and hard liquor, and, in the V of a half-opened shirt, a corded neck and hairy chest molded on lines of the young Hercules. This man would be going on for twenty-eight or so. Fists, eyes and jaw all lusted battle.
Alpheus Briggs, captain and part owner of the Silver Fleece, had returned.
CHAPTER II
ALPHEUS BRIGGS, BUCKO
For a moment, Briggs and Scurlock confronted each other, separated by the length of the gangway. Between them stretched silence; though on the bund a cackle and chatter of natives offended the night. Then Captain Briggs got sight of the kris. That sufficed, just as anything would have sufficed. He put his two huge, hairy fists on his hips; his neck swelled with rage born of samshu and a temper by nature the devil’s own; he bellowed in a formidable roar:
“Drop that knife, Mr. Scurlock! What’s the matter with you, sir?”
A wise mate would have obeyed, with never one word of answer. But Mr. Scurlock was very angry, and what very angry man was ever wise? He stammered, in a burst of rage:
“I—a Malay son of a pup—he hove it at me, an’ I—”
“Hove it at you, did he, sir?”
“Yes, an’—”
Tigerish with drunken ferocity, Briggs sprang up the plank. A single, right-hand drive to the jaw felled Scurlock. The kris jangled away and came to rest as Scurlock sprawled along the planking.
“Sir, Mr. Scurlock!” fulminated Briggs—though not even in this blind passion did he forget sea-etiquette, the true-bred Yankee captain’s “touch of the aft” in dealing with an officer. No verbal abuse; just the swinging fists now ready to knock Scurlock flat again, should he attempt to rise. “Say sir to me, Mr. Scurlock, or I’ll teach you how!”
“Sir,” mumbled the mate, half dazed. He struggled to a sitting posture, blinking up with eyes of hate at the taut-muscled young giant who towered over him, eager for another blow.
“All right, Mr. Scurlock, and don’t forget I got a handle to my name, next time you speak to me. If any man, fore or aft, wants any o’ my fist, let him leave off sir, to me!”
He kicked Scurlock heavily in the ribs, so that the breath went grunting from him; then reached down a gorilla-paw, dragged him up by the collar and flung him staggering into the arms of “Chips,” the clipper’s carpenter—Gascar, his name was—who had just come up the quarterdeck companion. Other faces appeared: Bevans, the steward, and Prass, the bo’sun. Furiously Briggs confronted them all.
“Understand me?” he shouted, swaying a little as he stood there with eager fists. “Where’s Mr. Wansley?”
“Asleep, sir,” answered Bevans. Wansley, second-mate, was indeed dead to the world in his berth. Most of the work of stowing cargo had fallen on him, for in the old clippers a second-mate’s life hardly outranked a dog’s.
“What right has Mr. Wansley to be sleeping?” vociferated the captain, lashing himself into hotter rage. “By God, you’re all a lot of lazy, loafing, impudent swine!”
One smash of the fist and Bevans went staggering toward the forward companion ladder, near the foot of which a little knot of seamen, white, brown and yellow, had gathered in cheerful expectation of seeing murder done.
Briggs balanced himself, a strange figure in his dandified silk and polished boots, with his topi hat awry, head thrust forward, brows scowling, massive neck swollen with rage and drink. Under the smudgy gleam of the lantern on the mizzen, his crimson face, muffled in jetty beard, and the evil-glowering eyes of him made a picture of wrath.
Briggs stooped, snatched up the kris that lay close by his feet, and with a hard-muscled arm whistled its keen edge through air.
“I’ll keep order on my ship,” he blared, passionately, “and if I can’t do it with my fists, by God, I’ll do it with this! The first man that loosens his tongue, I’ll split him like a herring!”
“Captain Briggs, just a moment, sir!” exclaimed a voice at his left. A short, well-knit figure in blue, advancing out of the shadows, ’round the aft companion, laid a hand on the drunken brute’s arm.
“You keep out of this, doctor!” cried Briggs. “They’re a mutinous, black lot o’ dogs that need lickin’, and I’m the man to give it to ’em!”
“Yes, yes, sir, of course,” Dr. Filhiol soothed the beast. “But as the ship’s physician, let me advise you to go to your cabin, sir. The heat and humidity are extremely bad. There’s danger of apoplexy, sir, if you let these fellows excite you. You aren’t going to give them the satisfaction of seeing you drop dead, are you, captain?”
Thrown off his course by this new idea, Briggs peered, blinked, pushed back his topi and scratched his thick, close-curling poll. Then all at once he nodded, emphatically.
“Right you are, doctor!” he cried, his mood swiftly changing. “I’ll go. They shan’t murder me—not yet, much as they’d like
to!”
“Well spoken, sir. You’re a man of sense, sir—rare sense. And on a night like this—”
“The devil’s own night!” spat Briggs. “God, the breath sticks in my throat!” With thick, violent fingers he ripped at his shirt, baring his breast.
“Captain Briggs!” exclaimed Scurlock, now on his feet again. “Listen to a word, sir, please.”
“What the damnation now, sir?”
“We’ve lost the tide, sir. The comprador sent word aboard at four bells, he couldn’t hold his sampan men much longer. We should be standin’ downstream now, sir.” Scurlock spoke with white, shaking lips, rubbing his smitten jaw. Hate, scorn, rage grappled in his soul with his invincible New England sense of duty, of efficiency, of getting the ship’s work done. “If they’re goin’ to tow us down to-night, by joycus, sir, we’ve got to get under way, and be quick about it!”
Briggs dandled the kris. Its wavy blade, grooved to hold the dried curaré-poison that need do no more than scratch to kill, flung out vagrant high-lights in the gloom.
“For two cents I’d gut you, Mr. Scurlock,” he retorted. “I’m master of this ship, and she’ll sail when I’m ready, sir, not before!”
“Captain, they’re only trying to badger-draw you,” whispered Filhiol in the bucko’s ear. “A man of your intelligence will beat them at their own game.” Right well the doctor knew the futility of trying to get anything forward till the captain’s rage and liquor should have died. “Let these dogs bark, sir, if they will. You and I are men of education. I propose a quiet drink or two, sir, and then a bit of sleep—”
“What the devil do you mean by that, sir?” flared Briggs, turning on him. “You mean I’m not able to take my ship out of this devil’s ditch, to-night?”
“Farthest from my thought, captain,” laughed the doctor. “Of course you can, sir, if you want to. But this mutinous scum is trying to force your hand. You’re not the man to let them.”
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