“I should say not!” swaggered the captain, with a blasphemy, while low-voiced murmurs ran among the men,—dim, half glimpsed figures by the mizzen, or in the waist. “Not much! Come, doctor!”
He lurched aft, still swinging the kris. Ardently Filhiol prayed he might gash himself therewith, but the devil guards his own. With savage grimace at Scurlock, the physician whispered: “Name o’ God, man, let him be!” Then, at a discreet distance, he followed Briggs.
Scurlock nodded, with murder in his eyes. Gascar and Bevans murmured words that must remain unwritten. Under the awning at the foot of the forward companion, white men from the fo’c’sle and Malays from the deck-house buzzed in divers tongues. Briggs, the while, was about to enter the after companion when to his irate ear the sound of a droning chant, somewhere ashore, came mingled with the dull thudding of a drum, monotonous, irritating as fever pulses in the brain of a sick man.
Briggs swerved to the starboard quarter rail and smote it mightily with his fist, as with bloodshot eyes he peered down at the smoky, lantern-glowing confusion of the bund.
“The damned Malays!” he shouted. “They’ve started another of their infernal sing-songs! If I could lay hands on that son of a whelp—”
He shook the kris madly at a little group about a blazing flare; in the midst squatted an itinerant ballad-singer. Tapping both heads of a small, barrel-like drum, the singer whined on and on, with intonations wholly maddening to the captain.
For a moment Briggs glared down at this scene, which to his fuddled senses seemed a challenge direct, especially devilsent to harry him.
“Look at that now, doctor, will you?” Briggs flung out his powerful left hand toward the singer. “Want to bet I can’t throw this knife through the black dog?”
He balanced the kris, ready for action, and with wicked eyes gauged the throw. Filhiol raised a disparaging hand.
“Don’t waste a splendid curio on the dog, captain,” smiled he, masking fear with indifference. Should Briggs so much as nick one of the Malays with that envenomed blade, Filhiol knew to a certainty that with fire and sword Batu Kawan would take complete vengeance. He knew that before morning no white man would draw life’s breath aboard the Silver Fleece. “You’ve got a wonderful curio there, sir. Don’t lose it, for a mere nothing.”
“Curio? What the devil do I care for Malay junk?” retorted Briggs, thick-tongued and bestial. “The only place I’d like to see this toothpick would be stickin’ out of that swine’s ribs!”
“Ah, but you don’t realize the value of the knife, sir,” wheedled Filhiol. “It’s an extraordinarily fine piece of steel, captain, and the carving of the lotus bud on the handle is a little masterpiece. I’d like it for my collection.” He paused, struck by inspiration. “I’ll play you for the knife, sir. Let’s have that drink we were speaking of, and then a few hands of poker. I’ll play you anything I’ve got—my watch, my instrument case, my wages for the voyage, whatever you like—against that kris. Is that a go?”
“Sheer off!” mocked Briggs, raising the blade. The doctor’s eye judged distance. He would grapple, if it came to that. But still he held to craft:
“This is the first time, captain, I ever knew you to be afraid of a good gamble.”
“Afraid? Me, afraid?” shouted the drunken man. “I’ll make you eat those words, sir! The knife against your pay!”
“Done!” said the doctor, stretching out his hand. Briggs took it in a grip that gritted the bones of Filhiol, then for a moment stood blinking, dazed, hiccoughing once or twice. His purpose, vacillant, once more was drawn to the singer. He laughed, with a maudlin catch of the breath.
“Does that gibberish mean anything, doctor?” asked he.
“Never mind, sir,” answered Filhiol. “We’ve got a game to play, and—”
“Not just yet, sir! That damned native may be laying a curse on me, for all I know. Mr. Scurlock!” he suddenly shouted forward.
“Aye, aye, sir,” answered the mate’s voice, through the gloom.
“Send me a Malay—one that can talk United States!”
“Yes, sir!” And Scurlock was heard in converse with the brown men in the waist. Over the rail the captain leaned, staring at the singer and the crowd, the smoky torches, the confused crawling of life in Batu Kawan; and as he stared, he muttered to himself, and twisted at his beard with his left hand—his right still gripped the kris.
“You damned, outrageous blackguard!” the doctor thought. “If I ever get you into your cabin, God curse me if I don’t throw enough opium into you to keep you quiet till we’re a hundred miles at sea!”
Came the barefoot slatting of a Malay, pad-pad-padding aft, and the sound of a soft-voiced: “Captain Briggs, sar?”
“You the man that Mr. Scurlock sent?” demanded Briggs.
“Yas, sar.”
“All right. Listen to that fellow down there—the one that’s singing!” Briggs laid a hand on the Malay, jerked him to the rail and pointed a thick, angry finger. “Tell me what he’s sayin’! Understand?”
“Yas, sar.”
The Malay put both lean, brown hands on the rail, squinted his gray eyes, impassive as a Buddha’s, and gave attentive ear. To him arose the droning words of the long-drawn, musical cadences:
Arang itou dibasouh dengan ayer
Mawar sakalipoun tiada akan poutih.
Satahoun houdjan di langit ayer latout masakan tawar?
Sebab tiada tahon menari dikatakan tembad.
Tabour bidjian diatas tasik tiada akan toumbounh—
On, on wailed the chant. At last the Malay shook his head, shrugged thin shoulders under his cotton shirt, and cast an uneasy glance at Briggs, looming black-bearded and angry at his side.
“Well, what’s it all about?” demanded the captain, thudding a fist on the rail. “Sayin’ anythin’ about me, or the Silver Fleece? If he is—”
“No, sar. Nothin’ so, sar.”
“Well, what?”
“He sing about wicked things. About sin. He say—”
“What does he say, you cinder from the Pit?”
“He say, you take coal, wash him long time, in water of roses, coal never get white. Sin always stay. He say, rain fall long time, one year, ocean never get fresh water. Always salty water. Sin always stay. He say one small piece indigo fall in one jar of goat-milk, spoil all milk, make all milk blue. One sin last all life, always.” The Malay paused, trying to muster his paucity of English. Briggs shook him roughly, bidding him go on, or suffer harm.
“He say if sky will go to fall down, no man can hold him up. Sin always fall down. He say, good seed on land, him grow. Good seed on ocean, him never grow. He say—”
“That’ll do! Stow your jaw, now!”
“Yas, sar.”
“Get out—go forrard!”
The Malay salaamed, departed. Briggs hailed him again.
“Hey, you!”
“Yes, sar?” answered the brown fellow, wheeling.
“What’s your name—if pigs have names?”
“Mahmud Baba, sar,” the Malay still replied with outward calm. Yet to call a follower of the Prophet “pig” could not by any invention of the mind have been surpassed in the vocabulary of death-inviting insult.
“My Mud Baby, eh? Good name—that’s a slick one!” And Briggs roared into a laugh of drunken discord. He saw not that the Malay face was twitching; he saw not the stained teeth in grimaces of sudden hate. Gloom veiled this. “I’ll remember that,” he went on. “My Mud Baby. Well now, Mud Baby, back to your sty!”
“Captain Briggs,” the doctor put in, fair desperate to get this brute below-decks ere blood should flow. “Captain, if you were as anxious as I am for a good stiff game of poker and a stiffer drink, you wouldn’t be wasting your breath on Malay rubbish. Shall we mix a toddy for the first one?”
“Good idea, sir!” Briggs answered, his eyes brightening. He clapped Filhiol on the shoulder, so that the man reeled toward the after-companion.
Down the
stairway they went, the doctor cursing under his breath, Briggs clumping heavily, singing a snatch of low ribaldry from a Bombay gambling-hell. They entered the cabin. To them, as the door closed, still droned the voice of the minstrel on the bund:
Sebab tiada tahon menari dikatakan tembad,
Tabour bidjian diatas tasik tiada akan toumbounh.
One drop of indigo spoils the whole jar of milk;
Seed sown upon the ocean never grows.
CHAPTER III
SCURLOCK GOES ASHORE
Sweltering though the cabin was, it seemed to Dr. Filhiol a blessèd haven of refuge from the probabilities of grevious harm that menaced, without. With a deep breath of relief he saw Briggs lay the kris on the cabin table. Himself, he sat down at that table, and while Briggs stood there half-grinning with white teeth through black beard, took up the knife.
He studied it, noting its keen, double edge, its polished steel, the deft carving of the lotus-bud handle. Then, as he laid it down, he offered:
“It’s a genuine antique. I’ll go you a month’s wages against it.”
“You’ll do nothin’ of the kind, sir!” ejaculated Briggs, and took it up again. “The voyage, you said, and it’s that or nothing!”
The doctor bit his close-razored lip. Then he nodded. Filhiol was shrewd, and sober; Briggs, rash and drunk. Yes, for the sake of getting that cursed knife out of the captain’s hands, Filhiol would accept.
“Put it out of harm’s way, sir, and let’s deal the cards,” said he. “It’s poisoned. We don’t want it where we might get scratched, by accident.”
“Poisoned, sir?” demanded Briggs, running a horny thumb along the point. His brows wrinkled, inquisitively. No fear showed in that splendidly male, lawless, unconquered face.
“For God’s sake, captain, put that devilish thing away!” exclaimed the doctor, feigning to shudder; though all the while a secret hope was whispering:
“Heaven send that he may cut himself!” Aloud he said: “I’ll play no game, sir, with that kris in sight. Put it in your locker, captain, and set out the drink. My throat’s afire!”
“Poisoned, eh?” grunted the captain again, still with drunken obstinacy testing the edge. “All damned nonsense, sir. After that’s been run into the Oregon pine of my mizzen, a couple of inches—”
“There’s still enough left to put you in a shotted hammock, sir, if you cut yourself,” the doctor insisted. “But it’s your own affair. If you choose to have Mr. Scurlock take the Silver Fleece back to Long Wharf, Boston, while you rot in Motomolo Straits—”
With a blasphemy, Briggs strode to his locker. The doctor smiled cannily as Briggs flung open the locker, tossed in the kris and, taking a square-shouldered bottle, returned to the table. This bottle the captain thumped down on the table, under the lamp-gleam.
“Best Old Jamaica,” boasted he. “Best is none too good, when I win my doctor’s entire pay. For it’s as good as mine already, and you can lay to that!”
Speaking, he worried out the cork. He sniffed at the bottle, blinked, peered wonderingly at the label, and sniffed again.
“Hell’s bells!” roared Briggs, flaring into sudden passion.
“What’s the matter, sir?”
“Old Jamaica!” vociferated the captain. “It was Old Jamaica, but now smell o’ that, will you?”
Filhiol sniffed, tentatively. In a second he knew some one had been tampering with the liquor, substituting low-grade spirits for Brigg’s choicest treasure; but he merely shrugged his shoulders, with:
“It seems like very good rum, sir. Come, let’s mix our grog and get the cards.”
“Good rum!” gibed Briggs. “Some thieving son of Satan has been at my Jamaica, and has been fillin’ the square-face up with hog-slop, or I never sailed blue water! Look at the stuff now, will you?”
He spilled out half a glass of the liquor, tasted it, spat it upon the floor. Then he dashed the glass violently to the boards, crashing it to flying shards and spattering the rum all about. In a bull-like roar he shouted:
“Boy! You, there, boy!”
A moment, and one of the doors leading off the main cabin opened, on the port side. A pale, slim boy appeared and advanced into the cabin, blinking up with fear at the black-bearded vision of wrath.
“Yes, sir? What is it, sir?” asked he, in a scared voice.
Briggs dealt him a cuff that sent him reeling. The captain’s huge hand, swinging back, overset the bottle, that gurgled out its life-blood.
“What is it?” shouted Briggs. “You got the impudence to ask me what it is? I’ll learn you to step livelier when I call, you whelp! Come here!”
“Yes, sir,” quavered the boy. Shaking, he sidled nearer. “What—what do you want, sir?”
“What do I want?” the captain howled; while Filhiol, suddenly pale with a rage that shook his heart, pressed lips hard together, lest some word escape them. “You swab! Catechisin’ me, are you? Askin’ me what I want, eh? If I had a rope’s-end here I’d show you! Get out, now. Go, tell Mr. Scurlock I want him. Jump!”
The lad ducked another blow, ran to the cabin-door and sprang for the stairs. Ill-fortune ran at his side. He missed footing, sprawled headlong up the companion stairway.
With a shout of exultation, Briggs caught up from a corner a long, smooth stick, with a polished knob carved from a root—one of the clubs known in the Straits as “Penang-lawyers,” by reason of their efficacy in settling disputes. He grabbed the writhing boy, now frantically trying to scrabble up the stairs, in a clutch that almost crunched the frail shoulder bones. Up the companion he dragged him—the boy screaming with terror of death—and hurled him out on deck, fair against the wheel.
The boy collapsed in a limp, groaning heap. Briggs laughed wildly, and, brandishing the Penang-lawyer, advanced out upon the dim-lit planking.
An arm thrust him back.
“You ain’t goin’ to hit that there boy!” shouted a voice—William Scurlock’s. “Not while I’m alive, you ain’t!”
A wrench and the club flew over the rail. It splashed in the dark, slow waters of the Timbago.
Briggs gulped. He whirled, both fists knotted. Then, swift as a cobra, he sprang and struck.
Scurlock dodged. The captain’s fist, finding no mark, drove against one of the spokes of the wheel with a crash that split the hickory. As Briggs had never cursed before, now he cursed. For a second or two he nursed his damaged hand.
The brief respite sufficed. Scurlock snatched up the boy. He started forward, just as the doctor appeared at the top of the companion.
“Captain Briggs, sir!” cried Filhiol, in a shaking voice. Still he was hoping against hope to keep the peace. “Are you hurt, sir?”
“To hell with you!” roared Briggs, now forgetting sea-etiquette—surest indication of the extremity of his drunken passion. He lurched after the retreating Scurlock. “Back, here, you bloody swine! Drop that brat, and I’ll show you who’s boss!”
Scurlock laughed mockingly and quickened his stride. Mad with the rage that kills, Briggs pursued, a huge, lunging figure of malevolence and hate. Before he could lay grips on Scurlock, the mate wheeled. He let the fainting boy slide down on deck, whipped out a clasp-knife, snicked open the blade. Holding it low, to rip upward, he confronted Briggs under the glimmer of the mizzen-lantern.
Now this was raw mutiny, and a hanging matter if Scurlock drew one drop of the captain’s blood. But that Scurlock cared nothing for the noose was very plain to see. Even the crimson rage of Briggs saw death knocking at the doors of his life. Barehanded, he could not close for battle. He recoiled, his bloodshot eyes shuttling for some handy weapon.
“Damn you, if I had that kris—” he panted.
“But you ain’t, you lousy bucko!” mocked Scurlock. “An’ you turn your back on me, to go for it, if you dare!”
Briggs sprang for the rail. He snatched at a belaying-pin, with wicked blasphemies. The pin stuck, a moment. He wrenched it clear, and wheeled—too late.
&n
bsp; Already Scurlock had snatched up the boy again. Already he was at the gangway. Down it he leaped, to the bund. With the unconscious boy still in the crook of his left arm, he shoved into the scatter of idling natives. Then he turned, raised a fist of quivering hatred, and flung his defiance toward the vague, yellow-clad figure now hesitating at the top of the gangway, pin in hand:
“I’m through with you, you rum-soaked hellbender! He’s through, too, the boy is. We’ll take our chances with the Malays an’ the plague.”
Scurlock’s voice, rising out of the softly-lit tropic evening, died suddenly.
“Come back, Mr. Scurlock, and bring that boy!” cried the doctor, from the rail.
“I’ve got nothin’ against you, sir,” answered Scurlock. “But against him. God! If I come back, it’ll only be to cut his black heart out an’ throw it to the sharks. We’re done!”
A moment Briggs stood drunkenly peering, half minded to pursue, to match his belaying-pin against the mate’s dirk. Gurgling in his throat—for excess of rage had closed upon all speech—he panted, with froth upon his black beard, while dim figures along the rail and on shore waited great deeds. Then all at once he laughed—a horrible, deep-throated laugh, rising, swelling to mighty and bestial merriment; the laugh of a gorilla, made man.
“The Malays and the plague,” he thickly stammered. “—He’s said it—let ’em go! They’re good as dead already, and hell take ’em!”
He swung on his heel, then strode back unsteadily to the companion. Down it he lunged. Still laughing, he burst into the heat and reek of the cabin.
“Come on, doctor,” cried he, “our cards, our cards!”
CHAPTER IV
THE CURSE OF NENEK KABAYAN
“He’ll steal no more of my Old Jamaica,” exulted Briggs, flinging himself into a chair by the table. “And that sniveling boy will give me no more of his infernal lip! Skunks!” He picked up the bottle, still containing a little rum, and poured a gulp of liquor down his throat. “On my own ship!”
“Where are the cards, sir?” asked Filhiol. His voice, quivering, was hardly audible.
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