“Petty game,” burst out the captain, “no good. Make it a real one, and I’ll go you!”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Stakes worth playin’ for! Man-size stakes! You got money in Boston, sir. Some fifteen thousand. I’ll play you for that, plus your wages this voyage!”
“Against what, sir?”
“Against my share of the ship’s cargo, and my share of the Silver Fleece, herself. And if I scuttle her, as scuttle her I may, in case the insurance money foots bigger than the ship’s worth and the cargo, I stake that money, too!”
The doctor pondered a moment, while Briggs pressed a hand to his thick neck, redly swollen with heat and rum. Suddenly the captain broke out again:
“That’s an A1 gamble for you, sir. When I land my West Coast natives at San Felipe, and slip my opium into Boston, there won’t be a shipmaster walk up State Street that will be better fixed than I’ll be.”
“Bring out the cards, sir,” answered the doctor. “But the kris goes in as part of the wager?”
“Yes, damn it, and I’ll be generous,” slavered Briggs. He jerked open the table drawer and fetched out a well-thumbed pack of cards, which he flung on the green cloth. “I’ll put up a stake that’d make any man’s mouth water, sir, if he is a man! Though maybe you’re not, bein’ only a sawbones!”
“What’s that, sir?”
“The yellow wench asleep in my berth—Kuala Pahang!”
“Done!” exclaimed Filhiol, humoring the ruffian to all possible limits, till liquor and heat should have overcome him.
“Deal the cards, sir!” cried Briggs. “I may be a bucko, and I may be drunk to-night, but I know a man when I see one. I’m not too drunk to add your wages and your savin’s to my plunder. Deal the cards!”
Filhiol had just fallen to shuffling the pasteboards when a groan, from behind the door of the captain’s private cabin, arrested his hand. Frowning, he swung around. In his tensing hand the cards bent almost double.
Briggs buffeted him upon the shoulder, with huge merriment.
“She’s not dead yet, is she?” exulted he. “No, no, not yet. Even though everybody in this devil’s hole claims the wenches will die first, before they’ll be a white man’s darlin’.” His speech had become so thick as to be hardly speech at all. “All infernal liars, sawbones! She’s been here already two days, Topsy has. An’ is she dead yet? Not very! No, nor not goin’ to die, neither, an’ you can lay to that! Nor get away from me. Not while I’m alive, an’ master o’ the Silver Fleece!”
The doctor’s jaw set so hard that his tanned skin whitened over the maxillary muscles. Very vividly Filhiol still perceived the danger of general mutiny, of mass-attack from Batu Kawan, of fire and sword impending before the clipper could be got down-river and away. Come all that might, he must cling to Briggs, warily, humoringly.
After all, what was one native girl, more or less? The doctor shuffled the cards again, and dealt, under the raw light of the swinging-lamp. A louder cry from the girl turned Briggs around.
“Damnation!” he blared, starting up. “If the wench gets to howling, she’ll raise the town. I’m goin’ to shut her jaw, and shut it hard!”
“Quite right, sir,” assented the doctor, though his deep eyes glowed with murder. “But, why not get under way, at once, drop down the river to-night, anchor inside Ulu Salama bar till—”
Briggs interrupted him with a boisterous laugh.
“Even Reuben Ranzo, the tailor,” he gibed, “could give you points on navigation!” He stared at Filhiol a moment, his face darkening; then added harshly: “You stick to your pills and powders, Mr. Filhiol, or there’ll be trouble. I won’t have anybody tryin’ to boss. Now, I’m not goin’ to tell you twice!”
For three heartbeats their eyes met. The doctor’s had become injected with blood. His face had assumed an animal expression. Briggs snapped his thick fingers under the physician’s nose, then turned with an oath and strode to his cabin door. He snatched it open, and stood there a moment peering in, his face deep-lined in a mask of vicious rage.
“Captain Briggs!”
The doctor’s voice brought the ruffian about with a sharp turn.
“You mutinous, too?” shouted he, swinging his shoulders, loose, hulking, under the yellow silk of his jacket.
“By no means, sir. As a personal favor to me, however, I’m asking you not to strike that girl.” The doctor’s voice was shaking; yet still he sat there at the table, holding his cards in a quivering hand.
“You look out for your own skin, sawbones!” Briggs menaced. “The woman’s mine to do with as I please, an’ it’s nobody’s damn business, you lay to that! I’ll love her or beat her or throw her to the sharks, as I see fit. So now you hear me, an’ I warn you proper, stand clear o’ me, or watch out for squalls!”
Into the cabin he lunged, just as another door, opening, disclosed a sleepy-eyed, yellow-haired young man—Mr. Wansley, second-mate of the devil-ship. Wansley stared, and the doctor stood up with doubled fists, as they heard the sound of blows from within, then shriller cries, ending in a kind of gurgle—then silence.
The doctor gripped both hands together, striving to hold himself. The life of every white man aboard now depended absolutely on seeing this thing through without starting mutiny and war.
“Get back in your cabin, Mr. Wansley, for God’s sake!” he exclaimed, “or go on deck! The captain’s crazy drunk. If he sees you here, there’ll be hell to pay. Get out, quick!”
Wansley grasped the situation and made a speedy exit up the after-companion, just ahead of Briggs’s return. The captain banged his cabin door, and staggered back to the table. He dusted his palms one against the other.
“The black she-dog won’t whine again, for one while,” he grinned with white teeth through his mat of beard. “That’s the only way to teach ’em their lesson!” He clenched both fists, turning them, admiring them under the lamp-light. “Great pacifiers, eh, sawbones? I tell you! Beat a dog an’ a woman, an’ you can’t go far off your course. So now I’ll deal the cards, an’ win every cent you’ve got!”
“The cards are dealt, sir,” answered Filhiol, chalky to the lips.
“Yes, an’ you’ve been here with ’em, all alone!” retorted the captain. “No, sir, that won’t go. Fresh deal—here, I’ll do it!”
He gathered the dealt hands and unsteadily began shuffling, while the doctor, teeth set in lip, swallowed the affront. Some of the cards escaped the drunken brute’s thick fingers; two or three dropped to the floor.
“Pick ’em up, sir,” directed Briggs. “No captain of my stamp bends his back before another man—an’ besides, I know you’d be glad to knife me, while I was down!”
Filhiol made no answer. He merely obeyed, and handed the cards to Briggs, who was about to deal, when all at once his hands arrested their motion. His eyes fixed themselves in an incredulous, widening stare, at the forward cabin door. His massive jaw dropped. A sound escaped his throat, but no word came.
The doctor spun his chair around. He, too, beheld a singular apparition; though how it could have got there—unless collusion had been at work among the Malays in the waist—seemed hard to understand.
So silently the door had slid, that the coming of the aged native woman had made no sound. Aged she seemed, incredibly old, wizen, dried; though with these people who can tell of age? The dim light revealed her barefooted, clad in a short, gaudily-striped skirt, a tight-wrapped body-cloth that bound her shrunken breast. Coins dangled from her ears; her straight black hair was drawn back flatly; her lips, reddened with lime and betel, showed black, sharp-filed teeth in a horrible snarl of hatred.
Silent, a strange yellow ghostlike thing, she crept nearer. Briggs sprang up, snatched the rum-bottle by its neck and waited, quivering. Right well he knew the woman—old Dengan Jouga, mother of Kuala, his prey.
For the first time in years unnerved, he stood there. Had she rushed in at him, screamed, vociferated, clawed with hooked talons, bea
ten at him with skinny fists, he would have knocked her senseless, dragged her on deck and flung her to the bund; but this cold, silent, beady-eyed approach took all his sails aback.
Only for a moment, however. Briggs was none of your impressionable men, the less so when in drink.
“Get out!” he shouted, brandishing the bottle. “Out o’ this, or by God—”
The door, opening again, disclosed the agitated face of Texel, a foremast hand.
“Cap’n Briggs, sir!” exclaimed this wight, touching his cap, “one o’ the Malays says she, there, has got news o’ Mr. Scurlock an’ the boy, sir, that you’ll want to hear. He’s out here now, the Malay is. Will I tell him to come in?”
“I could have you flogged, you scum, for darin’ to come into my cabin till you’re called,” shouted Briggs. “But send the pig in!”
The bottle lowered, as Briggs peered frowning at the silent hag. Uncanny, this stillness was. Tempests, hurricanes of passion and of hate would have quite suited him; but the old Malay crone, standing there half-way to the table, the light glinting from her deep coal-black eyes, her withered hands clutching each other across her wasted body, disconcerted even his bull-like crassness.
The seaman turned and whistled. At once, a Malay slid noiselessly in, salaamed and stood waiting. Texel, nervously fingering the cap he held in his hands, lingered by the door.
“Oh, it’s you again, Mud Baby, is it?” cried the bucko. “What’s the news Dengan Jouga has for me? Tell her to hand it over an’ then clear out! Savvy?”
“Captain, sahib, sar,” stammered Mahmud, almost gray with fear, every lean limb aquiver with the most extraordinary panic. “She says Mr. Scurlock, an’ boy, him prisoner. You give up girl, Kuala Pahang. No givem—”
The sentence ended in a quick stroke of the Malay’s forefinger across the windpipe, a whistling sound.
Briggs stared and swore. The doctor laid a hand on his arm.
“Checkmated, sir,” said he. “The old woman wins.”
“Like hell!” roared the captain. “I don’t know what the devil she’s talkin’ about. If Scurlock an’ the boy get their fool throats cut, it’s their own fault. They’re bein’ punished for mutiny. No girl here, at all! You, Mud Baby, tell that to old Jezebel!”
Mahmud nodded, and slid into a sing-song chatter. The woman gave ear, all the while watching Briggs with the unwinking gaze of a snake. She flung back a few crisp words at Mahmud.
“Well, what now?” demanded Briggs.
“She say, you lie, captain, sar!”
“I lie, do I?” vociferated the bucko. He heaved the bottle aloft and would have struck the hag full force, had not the doctor caught his arm, and held it fast.
“My God, captain!” cried Filhiol, gusty with rage and fear. “You want mutiny? Want the whole damned town swarming over us, with torch and kris?”
Briggs tried to fling him off, but the doctor clung, in desperation. Mahmud Baba wailed:
“No, no, captain! No touch her! She very bad luck—she Nenek Kabayan!”
“What the devil do I care?” roared Briggs, staggering as he struggled with the doctor. “She’s got to get out o’ my cabin, or by—”
“She’s a witch-woman!” shouted Filhiol, clinging fast. “That means a witch, Nenek Kabayan does. If you strike her, they’ll tear your heart out!”
Mahmud, in the extremity of his terror, clasped thin, brown hands, groveled, clutching at the captain’s knees. Briggs kicked him away like a dog.
“Get out, you an’ everybody!” he bellowed. “Doctor, I’ll lay you in irons for this. Into the lazaret you go, so help me!”
The witch-woman, raising crooked claws against him, hurled shrill curses at Briggs—wild, unintelligible things, in a wail so penetrantly heart-shaking, that even the captain’s bull-like rage shuddered.
From the floor, Mahmud raised appealing hands.
“She say, give girl or she make orang onto kill everybody!” cried the Malay. “Orang onto, bad ghost! She say she make sabali—sacrifice—of everybody on ship.” His voice broke, raw, in a frenzy of terror. “She say Vishnu lay curse on us, dead men come out of graves, be wolves, be tigers—menjelma kramat—follow us everywhere!”
“Shut your jaw, idiot!” shouted Briggs, but in a tone less brutal. The man was shaken. Not all his bluster could blink that fact. The doctor loosed his arm; Briggs did not raise the bottle, now, to strike. On and on wailed Mahmud:
“She say chandra wasi, birds of ocean foam, poison us, an’ Zemrud, him what keep life, leave us. She say blind face in sky watch you, cap’n, sahib, an’ laugh, an’ you want to die, but you not die. She say you’ life be more poison than katchubong flowers—she say evil seed grow in you’ heart, all life long—she say somethin’ you love, cap’n, sar, somethin’ you love more than you’ life, sometime die, an’ you die then but still you not die! She say—”
Briggs chewed and spat a curse and, turning to the table, sat down heavily there. Astonished, Filhiol stared at him. Never had he seen the captain in this mood. A wild attack, assault, even murder, would not have surprised the doctor; but this strange quietude surpassed belief. Filhiol leaned over Briggs, as he sat there sagging, staring at the witch-woman still in furious tirade.
“Captain,” he whispered, “you’re going to give up the girl, of course? You’re going to save Mr. Scurlock and the boy, and keep this shriveled monkey of a witch from raising the town against us?”
Briggs only shook his head.
“No,” he answered, in a strange, weary voice. “She can’t have her, an’ that’s flat. I don’t give a damn for the deserters, an’ if it comes to a fight, we got our signal-cannon an’ enough small-arms to make it hot for all the natives between here an’ hell. The girl’s plump as a young porpoise, an’ she’s mine, an’ I’m going to keep her; you can lay to that!”
Mahmud, still stammering crude translation of the witch-woman’s imprecations, crawled to Briggs’s feet. Briggs kicked the man away, once more, and burst into a jangle of laughter.
“Get ’em all out o’ here, sawbones,” said he, his head sagging. The life seemed to have departed from him. “I’m tired of all this hullabaloo.” He opened his table drawer and drew out an army revolver. “Three minutes for you to get ’em all out, doctor, or I begin shootin’.”
In the redness of his eye, bleared with drink and rage, Filhiol read cold murder. He dragged Mahmud up, and herded him, with Texel and the now silent witch-woman, out the forward cabin door.
“You get out, too!” mouthed the captain, dully. “I’ll have no sawbones sneakin’ and spyin’ on my honeymoon. Get out, afore I break you in ways your books don’t tell you how to fix!”
The doctor gave him one silent look. Then, very tight-lipped, he issued out beneath the awning, where among the Malays a whispering buzz of talk was forward.
As he wearily climbed the companion ladder, he heard the bolt go home, in the cabin door. A dull, strange laugh reached his ears, with mumbled words.
“God save us, now!” prayed Filhiol, for the first time in twenty years. “God save and keep us, now!”
CHAPTER V
THE MALAY FLEET OF WAR
Dawn, leaping out of Motomolo Strait, flinging its gold-wrought, crimson mantle over an oily sea that ached with crawling color, found the clipper ship, whereon rested the curse of old Dengan Jouga, set fast and fair on the sandspit of Ula Salama, eight miles off the mouth of the Timbago River.
Fair and fast she lay there, on a tide very near low ebb, so that two hours or such a matter would float her again; but in two hours much can happen and much was destined to.
At the taffrail, looking landward where the sand-dunes of the river met the sea, and where tamarisk and mangrove-thickets and pandan-clumps lay dark against the amethyst-hazed horizon, Dr. Filhiol and Mr. Wansley—now first mate of the Silver Fleece, with Prass installed as second—were holding moody speech.
“As luck goes,” the doctor was growling, “this voyage outclasses anything I
’ve ever known. This puts the climax on—this Scurlock matter, and the yellow girl, and going aground.”
“We did the best we could, sir,” affirmed Wansley, hands deep in jacket pockets. “With just tops’ls an’ fores’ls on her—”
“Oh, I’m not criticising your navigation, Mr. Wansley,” the doctor interrupted. “The old man, of course, is the only one who knows the bars, and we didn’t dare wait for him to wake up. Yes, you did very well indeed. If you’d been carrying full canvas, you’d have sprung her butts, when she struck, and maybe lost a stick or two. Perhaps there’s no great harm done, after all, if we can hold this damned crew.”
Thus hopefully the doctor spoke, under the long, level shafts of day breaking along the gold and purple waters that further off to sea blended into pale greens and lovely opalescences. But his eyes, turning now and then towards the ship’s waist, and his ear, keen to pick up a more than usual chatter down there under the weather-yellowed awnings, belied his words.
Now, things were making that the doctor knew not of; things that, had he known them, would have very swiftly translated his dull anxieties into active fears. For down the mud-laden river, whose turbid flood tinged Motomolo Strait with coffee five miles at sea, a fleet of motley craft was even now very purposefully making way.
This fleet was sailing with platted bamboo-mats bellying on the morning breeze, with loose-stepped masts and curiously tangled rattan cordage; or, in part, was pulling downstream with carven oars and paddles backed by the strength of well-oiled brown and yellow arms.
A fleet it was, laden to the topmost carving of its gunwales with deadly hate of the white men. A fleet hastily swept together by the threats, promises and curses of old Dengan Jouga, the witch-woman. A rescue fleet, for the salvation of the yellow girl—a fleet grim either to take her back to Batu Kawan, or else to leave the charred ribs of the Silver Fleece smoldering on Ulu Salama bar as a funeral pyre over the bones of every hated orang puti, white man, that trod her cursèd decks.
Nineteen boats in all there were; seven sail-driven, twelve thrust along with oars and paddles cunningly fashioned from teak and tiu wood. These nineteen boats carried close on three hundred fighting men, many of them head-hunters lured by the prospect of a white man’s head to give their sweethearts.
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