CHAPTER IXONSET OF BATTLEThe shot that Wansley fired, a chance shot hardly aimed at all, must have been guided by the finger of the captain’s guardian genius. It crumpled the Malay, with strangely sprawling legs. Kill him it did not. But the bullet through his lower vertebræ left only his upper half alive.With a grunt he crumpled to the hot deck, knife still clutched in skinny fist. Shouts echoed. Briggs stood aghast, with even his steel nerve jangling. The quivering Malay was a half-dead thing that still lived. He writhed with contorted face, dragging himself toward Briggs. The knife-blade clicked on the planking, like the clicking of his teeth that showed black through slavering lips.“Allah! il Allah!” he gulped, heaving himself up on one hand, slashing with the other.Why do men, in a crisis, so often do stupid, unaccountable things? Why did Briggs kick at him, with a roaring oath, instead of shooting? Briggs felt the bite of steel in his leg. That broke the numbing spell of unreason. The captain’s pistol, at point-blank range, shattered the yellow man’s skull. Blood, smeared with an ooze of brain, colored the stewing deck.“Allah! il Al—!”The cry ended in a choking gurgle on lips that drew into a horrible grin. And now completely dead even beyond the utmost lash of Islamic fanaticism, theMalay dropped face down. This time the captain’s kick landed only on flesh and bone past any power of feeling.At the capstan-bars it was touch-and-go. Crevay was down, groaning, his hands all slippery and crimson with the blood that seeped through his clutching fingers. For a moment, work slacked off. Wansley was shouting, with revolver leveled, his voice blaring above the cries, oaths, imprecations. Things came to the ragged edge of a rush, but white men ran in with rifles and cutlasses. Briggs flung himself aft, trailing blood.Crazed with rage and the burn of that wound, he fired thrice. Malays sagged down, plunged screaming to the deck. The captain would have emptied his revolver into the pack, but Wansley snatched him by the arm.“Hold on!” he shouted. “That’s enough—we need ’em, sir!”Prass, belaying-pin in hand, struck to right, to left. Yells of pain mingled with the tumult that drowned the ragged, ineffective spatter of firing from the war-fleet. The action was swift, decisive. In half a minute, the capstan was clicking again, faster than ever. Its labor-power, diminished by the loss of three men, was more than compensated by the fear of the survivors.“Overboard with the swine!” shouted Briggs. “Overboard with ’em, to the sharks!”“This here one ain’t done for yet, sir,” began Prass, pointing. “He’s only—”“Overboard, I said!” roared Briggs. “You’ll go, too, by God, if you give me any lip!”As men laid hands on the Malays to drag them to the rail, Briggs dropped on his knees beside Crevay. He pulled away the man’s hands from the gaping neck-wound, whence the life was irretrievably spurting.“Judas priest!” he stammered, for here was his right-hand man as good as dead. “Doctor! Where the devil is Mr. Filhiol?”“In the cabin, sir,” Prass answered.“Cabin! Holy Lord! On deck with him!”“Yes, sir.”“And tell him to bring his kit!”Prass had already dived below. The doctor was haled up again, with his bag. A kind of hard exultation blazed in the captain’s face. He seemed not to hear the shouts of war, the spattering fusillade from the canoes. His high-arched chest rose and fell, pantingly. His hands, reddened with the blood of Crevay, dripped horribly. Filhiol, hustled on deck, stared in amazement.“A job for you, sir!” cried Briggs. “Prove yourself!”Filhiol leaned over Crevay. But he made no move to open his kit-bag. One look had told him the truth.The man, already unconscious, had grown waxen. His breathing had become a stertorous hiccough. The deck beneath him was terrible to look upon.“No use, sir,” said the doctor briefly. “He’s gone.”“Do something!” blazed the captain. “Something!”“For a dead man?” retorted Filhiol. As he spoke, even the hiccough ceased.Briggs stared with eyes of rage. He got to his feet, hulking, savage, with swaying red fists.“They’ve killed my best man,” he snarled. “If we didn’t need the dogs, we’d feed ’em all to the sharks, so help me!”“You’re wounded, sir!” the doctor cried, pointing at the blood-wet slash in the captain’s trouser-leg.“Oh, to hell with that!” Briggs retorted. “You, and you,” he added, jabbing a finger at two sailors,“carry Mr. Crevay down to the cabin—then back to your rifles at the rail!”They obeyed, their burden sagging limply. Already the dead and wounded Malays had been bundled over the rail. The fusillade from the war-canoes was strengthening, and the shouts had risen to a barbaric chorus. The patter of bullets and slugs into the sea or against the planking of theSilver Fleeceformed a ragged accompaniment to the whine of missiles through the air. A few holes opened in the clipper’s canvas. One of the men who had thrown the Malays overboard cursed suddenly and grabbed his left elbow, shattered.“Take cover!” commanded Briggs. “Down, everybody, along the rail! Mr. Wansley, down with you and your men. Get down!”Indifferent to all peril for himself, Briggs turned toward the companion.“Captain,” the doctor began again. “Your boot’s full of blood. Let me bandage—”Briggs flung a snarl at him and strode to the companion.“Below, there!” he shouted.“Aye, aye, sir!” rose the voice of one of the foremast hands.“Get that wench up here! The yellow girl! Bring her up—an’ look alive!”“Captain,” the doctor insisted, “I’ve got to do something for that gash in your leg. Not that I love you, but you’re the only man that can save us. Sit down here, sir. You’ll bleed to death where you stand!”Something in Filhiol’s tone, something in a certain giddiness that was already reaching for the captain’s heart and brain, made him obey. He sat down shakily on deck beside the after-companion. In the midstof all that turmoil, all underlaid by the slow, grinding scrape of the keel on the sand-bar, the physician performed his duty.With scissors, he shore away the cloth. A wicked slash, five or six inches long, stood redly revealed.“Tss! Tss!” clucked Filhiol. “Lucky if it’s not poisoned.”“Mr. Gascar!” shouted the captain. “Go below!” Briggs jerked a thumb downward at the cabin, whence sounds of a struggle, mingled with cries and animal-like snarls, had begun to proceed. “Bring up the jug o’ rum you’ll find in my locker. Serve it out to all hands. And, look you, if they need a lift with the girl, give it; but don’t you kill that wench. I need her, alive! Understand?”“Yes, sir,” Gascar replied, and vanished down the companion. He reappeared with a jug and a tin cup.“They’re handlin’ her all right, sir,” he reported. “Have a drop, sir?”“You’re damned shoutin’, I will!” And the captain reached for the cup. Gascar poured him a stiff drink. He gulped it and took another. “Now deal it out. There’ll be plenty more when we’ve sunk the yellow devils!”He got to his feet, scorning further care from Filhiol, and stood there wild and disheveled, with one leg of his trousers cut off at the knee and with his half-tied bandages already crimsoning.“Rum for all hands, men!” he shouted. “And better than rum—my best wine, sherry, champagne—a bottle a head for you, when this shindy’s over!”Cheers rose unevenly. Gascar started on his round with the jug. Even the wounded men, such as could still raise their voices, shouted approval.“Hold your fire, men,” the captain ordered. “Let ’em close in—then blow ’em out o’ the water!”CHAPTER XKUALA PAHANGThe doctor, presently finishing with Briggs, turned his attention to the other injured ones. At the top of the companion now stood the captain with wicked eyes, as up the ladder emerged the two seamen with the struggling, clawing tiger-cat of a girl.The cruel beating the captain had given her the night before had not yet crushed her spirit. Neither had the sickness of the liquor he had forced her to drink. Bruised, spent, broken as she was, the spirit of battle still dwelt in the lithe barbarian. That her sharp nails had been busy to good effect was proved by the long, deep gashes on the faces and necks of both seamen. One had been bitten on the forearm. For all their strength, they proved hardly more than a match for her up the narrow, steep companion. Their blasphemies mingled with the girl’s animal-like cries. Loudly roared the booming bass of the captain:“Up with the she-dog! I’ll teach her something—teach ’em all something, by the Judas priest! Up with her!”They dragged her out on deck, up into all that shouting and firing, that turmoil and labor and blood. And as they brought her up a plume of smoke jetted from the bows of the proa. The morning air sparkled with the fire-flash of that ancient brass cannon. With a crashing shower of splinters, a section of the rail burst inward. Men sprawled, howling. But a greater tragedy—in the eyes of these sailormen—befell:for a billet of wood crashed the jug to bits, cascading the deck with good Medford. And, his hand paralyzed and tingling with the shock, Gascar remained staring at the jug-handle still in his grip and at the flowing rum on deck.Howls of bitter rage broke from along the rail, and the rifles began crackling. The men, cheated of their drink, were getting out of hand.“Cease firing, you!” screamed Briggs. “You’ll fire when I command, and not before. Mr. Bevans! Loaded again?”“All loaded, sir. Say when!”“Not yet! Lay a good aim on the proa. We’ve got to blow her out o’ the water!”“Aye, aye, sir!” And Bevans patted the rusty old piece. “Leave that to me, sir!”Briggs turned again to the struggling girl. A thin, evil smile drew at his lips. His face, under its bronze of tan, burned with infernal exultation.“Now, my beauty,” he mocked, “now I’ll attend to you!”For a moment he eyed Kuala Pahang. Under the clear, morning light, she looked a strange and wild creature indeed—golden-yellow of tint, with tangled black hair, and the eyes of a trapped tigress. Bruises wealed her naked arms and shoulders, souvenirs of the captain’s club and fist. Her supple body was hardly concealed by her short skirt and by the tight Malay jacket binding her lithe waist and firm, young breast.Briggs exulted over her, helpless and panting in the clutch of the two foremast-hands. “To the rail with her!” he ordered.“What you goin’ to do, sir?” asked one of the men, staring. “Heave her over?”Briggs menaced him with clenched fist.“None o’ your damned business!” he shouted. “To the rail with her! Jump, afore I teach you how!”They dragged her, screeching, to the starboard rail. All the time they had to hold those cat-clawed hands of hers. From side to side she flung herself, fighting every foot of the way. Briggs put back his head and laughed at the rare spectacle. Twice or thrice the sailors slipped in blood and rum upon the planking, and once Kuala Pahang all but jerked free from them. At the capstan, only the pistols of the three white guards held her kinsmen back from making a stampede rush; and not even the pistols could silence among them a menacing hum of rage that seethed and bubbled.“Here, you!” shouted Briggs. “Mahmud Baba, you yellow cur, come here!”Mahmud loosed his hold on the capstan-bar and in great anguish approached.“Yas, sar?” whined he. The lean, brown form was trembling. The face had gone a jaundiced color. “I come, sar.”Briggs leveled his revolver at the Malay. Unmindful of the spattering bullets, he spoke with deliberation.“Son of a saffron dog,” said he, “you’re going to tell this wench something for me!”“Yas, sar. What piecee thing me tell?”“You tell her that if the boats don’t go back to land I’ll heave her over the rail. I’ll feed her to the sharks, by God! Alive, to the sharks—sharks, down there! Savvy?”“Me savvy.”“And she’s got to shout that to the canoes! She’s got to shout it to ’em. Go on, now, tell her!”Mahmud hesitated a moment, shuddered and grimaced. His eyes narrowed to slits. The captainpoked the revolver into his ribs. Mahmud quivered. He fell into a sing-song patter of strange words with whining intonations. Suddenly he ceased.The girl listened, her gleaming eyes fixed on Mahmud’s face. A sudden question issued from her bruised, cut lips.“What’s she asking?” demanded Briggs.“She ask where her mother, sar?”“Tell her! Tell her I’ve shot the old she-devil to hell, and beyond! Tell her she’ll get worse if she don’t make the canoes stand off—worse, because the sharks will get her alive! Go on, you black scut o’ misery, tell her!”Mahmud spoke again. He flung a hand at the enveloping half-circle of the war-fleet. The nearest boats now were moving hardly a quarter-mile away. The gleam of krises and of spears twinkled in the sun. Little smoke-puffs all along the battle-front kept pace with the popping of gunfire. In the proa, oily brown devils were laboring to reload the brass cannon.Mahmud’s speech ended. The girl stiffened, with clenched hands. The sailors, holding her wrists, could feel the whipcord tension of her muscles.“Tell her to shout to the proa there!” yelled the captain in white fury. “Either they stand off or over she goes—and you see for yourself there’s sharks enough!”Again Mahmud spoke. The girl grunted a monosyllable.“What’s that she says?” demanded Briggs.“She say no, sar. She die, but she no tell her people.”“The hell you say!” roared the captain. He seized her neck in a huge, hairy paw, tightened his fingers till they bit into the yellow skin, and shook her violently.“I’ll break your damned, obstinate neck for you!” he cried, his face distorted. “Tell your people to go back! Tell ’em!”Mahmud translated the order. The girl only laughed. Briggs knew himself beaten. In that sneering laugh of Kuala Pahang’s echoed a world of maddening defiance. He loosened his hold, trying to think how he should master her. Another man grunted, by the rail, and slid to the deck, where a chance bullet had given him the long sleep.Briggs whirled on Mahmud, squeezed his lean shoulder till the bones bent.“Youtell ’em!” he bellowed. “If she won’t, you will!”“Me, sar?” whined the Malay, shivering and fear-sick to the inner marrow. “Me tell so, they kill me!”“If you don’t,Iwill! Up with you now—both o’ you, up, on the rail! Here, you men—up with ’em!”They hoisted the girl, still impassive, to the rail, and held her there. The firing almost immediately died away. Mahmud tried to grovel at the captain’s feet, wailing to Allah and the Prophet. Briggs flung him up, neck and crop. Mahmud grappled the after backstays and clung there, quivering.“Go on, now, out with it!” snarled Briggs, his pistol at the Malay’s back. “And make it loud, or the sharks will get you, too!”Mahmud raised a bony arm, howled words that drifted out over the pearl-hued waters. Silence fell, along the ragged line of boats. In the bow of the proa a figure stood up, naked, gleaming with oil in the sunlight, which flicked a vivid, crimson spot of color from a nodding feather head-dress.Back to theSilver Fleecefloated a high-pitched question, fraught with a heavy toll of life and death. Mahmudanswered. The figure waved a furious arm, and fire leaped from the brass cannon.The shot went high, passing harmlessly over the clipper and ricochetting beyond. But at the same instant a carefully laid rifle, from a canoe, barked stridently. Mahmud coughed, crumpled and slid from the rail. He dropped plumb; and the shoal waters, clear-green over the bar, received him.As he fell, Briggs struck the girl with a full drive of his trip-hammer fist. The blow broke the sailors’ hold. It called no scream from Kuala Pahang. She fell, writhing, plunged in foam, rose, and with splendid energy struck out for the canoes.Briggs leaned across the rail, as if no war-fleet had been lying in easy shot; and with hard fingers tugging at his big, black beard, watched the swimming girl, her lithe, yellow body gleaming through the water. Watched, too, the swift cutting of the sharks’ fins toward her—the darting, black forms—the grim tragedy in that sudden, reddening whip of brine. Then he laughed, his teeth gleaming like wolves’ teeth, as he heard her scream.“Broke her silence at last, eh?” he sneered. “They got a yell out of the she-dog, the sharks did, even if I couldn’t—eh?”Along the rail, hard-bitten as the clipper’s men were, oaths broke out, and mutterings. Work slackened at the capstan, and for the moment the guards forgot to drive their lathering slaves there.“Great God, captain!” sounded the doctor’s voice, as he looked up from a wounded man. “You’ve murdered us all!”Briggs only laughed again and looked to his pistol.“They’re coming now, men,” said he coolly. To his ears the high and rising tumult from the flotilla made music. The lust of war was in him. For amoment he peered intently at the paddlemen once more bending to their work; the brandished krises and long spears; the spattering of bullets all along the water.“Let ’em come!” he cried, laughing once more. “With hot lead and boiling water and cold steel, I reckon we’re ready for ’em. Steady’s the word, boys! They’re coming—give ’em hell!”CHAPTER XIHOME BOUNDNoon witnessed a strange scene in the Straits of Motomolo, a scene of agony and death.Over the surface of the strait, inborne by the tide, extended a broad field of débris, of shattered planks, bamboos, platted sails.In mid-scene, sunk on Ulu Salama bar only a few fathoms from where theSilver Fleecehad lain, rested the dismantled wreck of the proa. The unpitying sun flooded that wreck—what was left of it after a powder-cask, fitted with fuse, had been hurled aboard by Captain Briggs himself. No living man remained aboard. On the high stern still projecting from the sea—the stern whence a thin waft of smoke still rose against the sky—a few broken, yellow bodies lay half consumed by fire, twisted and hideous.Of the small canoes, not one remained. Such as had not been capsized and broken up, had lamely paddled back to shore with the few Malays who had survived the guns and cutlasses and brimming kettles of seething water. Corpses lay awash. The sharks no longer quarreled for them. Full-fed on the finest of eating, they hardly snouted at the remnants of the feast.So much, then, for the enemy. And theSilver Fleece—what of her?A mile to seaward flying a few rags of canvas, the wounded clipper was limping on, under a little slant of wind that gave her hardly steerageway. Her kedge cable had been chopped, her mizzen-topmastwas down, and a raffle of spars, ropes and canvas littered her decks or had brought down the awnings, that smoldered where the fire-arrows had ignited them.Her deck-houses showed the splintering effects of rifle and cannon-fire. Here, there, lay empty pails and coppers that had held boiling water. Along the rails and lying distorted on deck, dead men and wounded—white, brown and yellow—were sprawling. And there were wounds and mutilations and dead men still locked in grapples eloquent of fury—a red shambles on the planks once so whitely holystoned.The litter of knives, krises, cutlasses and firearms told the story; told that some of the Malays had boarded theSilver Fleeceand that none of these had got away.The brassy noonday fervor, blazing from an unclouded sky, starkly revealed every detail. On the heavy air a mingled odor of smoke and blood drifted upward, as from a barbaric pyre to some unpitying and sanguinary god—perhaps already to the avenging god that old Dengan Jouga had called upon to curse the captain and his ship, “the Eyeless Face that waits above and laughs.”A doleful sound of groaning and cursing arose. Beside the windlass—deserted now, with part of the Malays dead and part under hatches—Gascar was feebly raising a hand to his bandaged head, as he lay there on his back. His eyes, open and staring, seemed to question the sun that cooked his bloodied face. A brown man, blind and aimless, was crawling on slippery red hands and knees, amidships; and as he crawled, he moaned monotonously. Two more, both white, were sitting with their backs against the deck-house. Neither spoke. One was past speech; the other, badly slashed about the shoulders, was gropingin his pockets for tobacco; and, finding none, was feebly cursing.Bevans, leaning against the taffrail, was binding his right forearm with strips torn from the shirt that hung on him in tatters. He was swearing mechanically, in a sing-song voice, as the blood seeped through each fresh turn of cotton.From the fo’c’s’le was issuing a confused sound. At the wheel stood a sailor, beside whom knelt the doctor. As this sailor grimly held the wheel, Filhiol was bandaging his thigh.“It’s the best I can do for you now, my man,” the doctor was saying. “Others need me worse than you do.”A laugh from the companionway jangled on this scene of agony. There stood Alpheus Briggs, smearing his bearded lips with his hirsute paw—for once again he had been at the liquor below. He blinked about him, set both fists on his hips, and then flung an oath of all-comprehensive execration at sea and sky and ship.“Well, anyhow, by the holy Jeremiah,” he cried, with another laugh of barbaric merriment, “I’ve taught those yellow devils one good lesson!”A shocking figure the captain made. All at once Prass came up from below and stood beside him. Mauled as Prass was, he seemed untouched by comparison with Briggs. The captain’s presence affronted heaven and earth, with its gross ugliness of rags and dirt and wounds, above which his savage spirit seemed to rise indifferent, as if such trifles as mutilations lay beneath notice.Across the captain’s brow a gash oozed redly into his eye, puffy, discolored. As he smeared his forehead, his arm knotted into hard bunches. His hairy breast was slit with slashes, too; his mop of beard hadstiffened from a wound across his cheek. Nothing of his shirt remained, save a few tatters dangling from his tightly-drawn belt. His magnificent torso, muscled like an Atlas, was all grimed with sweat, blood, dirt. Save for his boots, nothing of his clothing remained intact; and the boots were sodden red.Now as he stood there, peering out with his one serviceable eye under a heavy, bushy brow, and chewing curses to himself, he looked a man, if one ever breathed, unbeaten and unbeatable.The captain’s voice gusted out raw and brutelike, along the shambles of the deck.“Hell of a thing, this is! And all along of a yellow wench. Devil roast all women! An’ devil take the rotten, cowardly crew! If I’d had that crew I went black-birding with up the Gold Coast, not one o’ those hounds would have boarded us. But they didn’t get the she-dog back, did they? It’s bad, bad, but might be worse, so help me!”Again he laughed, with white teeth gleaming in his reddened beard, and lurched out on deck. He peered about him. A brown body lay before him, face upward, with grinning teeth. Briggs recognized the turtle-egg seller, who had thrown the kris. With a foul oath he kicked the body.“Yougot paid off, anyhow,” he growled. “Now you and Scurlock can fight it out together, in hell!”He turned to the doctor, and limped along the deck.“Doctor Filhiol!”“Yes, sir?” answered the doctor, still busy with the man at the wheel.“Make a short job o’ that, and get to work on those two by the deck-house. We’ve got to muster all hands as quick as the Lord’ll let us—got to get sail on her, an’ away. These damned Malays will be worryin’ at our heels again, if we don’t.”“Yes, sir,” said Filhiol, curtly. He made the bandage fast, took his kit, and started forward. Briggs laid a detaining hand on his arm—a hand that left a broad red stain on the rolled-up sleeve.“Doctor,” said he, thickly, “we’ve got to stand together, now. There’s a scant half-dozen men, here, able to pull a rope; and with them we’ve got to make Singapore. Do your best, doctor—do your best!”“I will, sir. But that includes cutting off your rum!”The captain roared into boisterous laughter and slapped Filhiol on the back.“You’ll have to cut my throat first!” he ejaculated. “No, no; as long as I’ve got a gullet to swallow with, and the rum lasts, I’ll lay to it. Patch ’em up, doctor, an’ then—”“You could do with a bit of patching, yourself.”The captain waved him away.“Scratches!” he cried. “Let the sun dry ’em up!” He shoved the doctor forward, and followed him, kicking to right and left a ruck of weapons and débris. Together the men advanced, stumbling over bodies.“Patch those fellows up the best you can,” directed Briggs, gesturing at the pair by the deck-house. “One of ’em, anyhow, may be some good. We’ve got to save every man possible, now. Not that I love ’em, God knows,” he added, swaying slightly as he stood there, with his blood-stained hand upon the rail. “The yellow-bellied pups! We’ve got to save ’em. Though if this was Singapore, I’d let ’em rot. At Singapore, Lascars are plenty, and beach-combers you can get for a song a dozen. Get to work now, sir, get to work!”Life resumed something of order aboard theSilver Fleece, as she wore slowly down Motomolo Strait.The few Malays of the crew, who had survived the fight and had failed to make their escape with the retreating forces, were for the present kept locked in the deck-house. Briggs was taking no chances with another of the yellow dogs runningamok.The number of hands who mustered for service, including Briggs, Wansley and the doctor, was only nine. This remnant of a crew, as rapidly as weak and wounded flesh could compass it, spread canvas and cleaned ship. A grisly task that was, of sliding the remaining bodies over the rail and of sluicing down the reddened decks with buckets of warm seawater. More and more canvas filled—canvas cut and burned, yet still holding wind enough to drive the clipper. TheSilver Fleeceheeled gracefully and gathered way.Slowly the scene of battle drew astern, marked by the thin smoke still rising from the wreckage of the proa. Slowly the haze-shrouded line of shore grew dim. A crippled ship, bearing the dregs of a mutilated crew, she left the vague, blue headland of Columpo Point to starboard, and so—sorely broken but still alive—passed beyond all danger of pursuit.And as land faded, Captain Alpheus Briggs, drunk, blood-stained, swollen with malice and evil triumph, stood by the shattered taffrail, peering back at the vanishing scene of one more battle in a life that had been little save violence and sin. Freighted with fresh and heavy crimes he exulted, laughing in his blood-thick beard. The tropic sun beat down upon his face, bringing each wicked line to strong relief.“Score one more for me,” he sneered, his hairy fists clenched hard. “Hell’s got you now, witch-woman, an’ Scurlock an’ all the rest that went against me. But I’m still on deck! They don’t stick onme, curses don’t. And I’ll outlaugh that Eyeless Face—outlaughit, by God, and come again. And so to hell with that, too!”He folded steel-muscled arms across his bleeding, sweating chest, heaved a deep breath and gloried in his lawless strength.“To hell with that!” he spat, once more. “I win—I always win! To hell with everything that crosses me!”CHAPTER XIIAT LONG WHARFFour months from that red morning, theSilver Fleecedrew in past Nix’s Mate and the low-buttressed islands in Boston Harbor, and with a tug to ease her to her berth, made fast at Long Wharf.All signs of the battle had long since been obliterated, overlaid by other hardships, violences, evil deeds. Her bottom fouled by tropic weed and barnacles that had accumulated in West Indian waters, her canvas brown and patched, she came to rest. Of all the white men who had sailed with her, nearly two years before, now remained only Captain Briggs, Mr. Wansley, and the doctor. The others who had escaped the fight had all died or deserted on the home-bound journey. One had been caught by bubonic at Bombay, and two by beri-beri at Mowanga, on the Ivory Coast; the others had taken French leave as occasion had permitted.Short-handed, with a rag-tag crew, theFleecemade her berth. She seemed innocent enough. The sickening stench of the slave cargo that had burdened her from Mowanga to Cuba had been fumigated out of her, and now she appeared only a legitimate trader. That she bore, deftly hidden in secret places, a hundred boxes of raw opium, who could have suspected?As the hawsers were flung and the clipper creaked against the wharf, there came to an end surely one of the worst voyages that ever an American clipper-ship made. And this is saying a great deal. Thosewere hard days—days when Massachusetts ships carried full cargoes of Medford rum and Bibles to the West Coast, and came back as slavers, with black ivory groaning and dying under hatches—days when the sharks trailed all across the Atlantic, for the bodies of black men and women—hard days and evil ways, indeed.Very spruce and fine was Captain Briggs; very much content with life and with the strength that in him lay, that excellent May morning, as with firm stride and clear eye he walked up State Street, in Boston Town. The wounds which would have killed a weaker man had long since healed on him. Up from the water-front he walked, resplendent in his best blue suit, and with a gold-braided cap on his crisp hair. His black beard was carefully trimmed and combed; his bronzed, full-fleshed face glowed with health and satisfaction; and the smoke of his cigar drifted behind him on the morning air. As he went he hummed an ancient chantey:“Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,Awa-a-ay, my rollin’ river!Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,Ah! Ah! We’re bound with awa-a-ay,’Cross the wide Missouri!”Past the ship-chandlers’ stores, where all manner of sea things lay in the windows, he made his way, and past the marine brokers’ offices; past the custom-house and up along the Old State House; and so he came into Court Street and Court Square, hard by which, in a narrow, cobbled lane, the Bell-in-Hand Tavern was awaiting him.All the way along, shipmasters and seafaring folk nodded respectfully to Alpheus Briggs, or touched their hats to him. But few men smiled. His reputationof hard blows and harder dealings made men salute him. But no man seized him by the hand, or haled him into any public house to toast his safe return.Under the dark doorway of the Bell-in-Hand—under the crude, wooden fist that from colonial times, as even to-day, has held the gilded, wooden bell—Briggs paused a moment, then entered the inn. His huge bulk seemed almost to fill the dim, smoky, low-posted old place, its walls behung with colored woodcuts of ships and with fine old sporting prints. The captain raised a hand of greeting to Enoch Winch, the publican, passed the time of day with him, and called for a pewter of Four-X, to be served in the back room.There he sat down in the half-gloom that seeped through the little windows of heavily leaded bull’s-eye glass. He put his cap off, drew deeply at his cigar, and sighed with vast content.“Back home again,” he murmured. “A hell of a time I’ve had, and that’s no lie. But I’m back home at last!”His satisfaction was doubled by the arrival of the pewter of ale. Briggs drank deeply of the cold brew, then dried his beard with a handkerchief of purple silk. Not now did he smear his mouth with his hand. This was a wholly other and more elegant Alpheus Briggs. Having changed his latitude and raiment, he had likewise changed his manners.He drained the pewter till light showed through the glass bottom—the bottom reminiscent of old days when to accept a shilling from a recruiting officer, even unaware, meant being pressed into the service; for a shilling in an empty mug was held as proof of enlistment, unless instantly detected and denied. Briggs smiled at memory of the trick.“Clumsy stratagem,” he pondered, “We’re a bit slicker, to-day. In the old days it took time to make a fortune. Now, a little boldness turns the trick, just as I’ve turned it, this time!”He rapped on the table for another pewter of Four-X. Stronger liquors would better have suited his taste, but he had certain business still to be carried out, and when ashore the captain never let drink take precedence of business.The second pewter put Captain Briggs in a reminiscent mood, wherein memories of the stirring events of the voyage just ended mingled with the comforting knowledge that he had much money in pocket and that still more was bound to come, before that day’s end. As in a kind of mental mirage, scenes arose before him—scenes of hardship and crime, now in security by no means displeasing to recall.The affair with the Malay war fleet had already been half-obliterated by more recent violences. Briggs pondered on the sudden mutiny that had broken out, ten days from Bombay, led by a Liverpool ruffian named Quigley, who had tried to brain him with a piece of iron in a sock. Briggs had simply flung him into the sea; then he had faced the others with naked fists, and they had slunk away forward.He and Wansley had later lashed them to the gangway and had given them the cat to exhaustion. Briggs felt that he had come out of this affair with honors. He took another draught of ale.Beating up the West Coast, he recalled how he had punished a young Irishman, McCune, whom he had shipped at Cape Town. McCune, from the supposed security of the foretop-gallant yard, had cursed him for a black-hearted bucko. Without parley, Briggs had run up the ratlines, and had flung McCune to the deck. The man had lived only a few minutes.Briggs nodded with satisfaction. He clenched his right fist, hairy, corded, and turned it this way and that, glad of its power. Greatly did he admire the resistless argument that lay in all its bones and ligaments.“There’s no man can talk back tome!” he growled. “No, by the Judas priest!”Now came less pleasing recollections. The slave cargo on the west-bound voyage had been unusually heavy. Ironed wrist and ankle, the blacks—men, women, children, purchased as a rather poor bargain lot from an Arab trader—had lain packed in the hold. They had been half starved when Briggs had loaded them, and the fever had already got among them. The percentage of loss had been a bit too heavy. Some death was legitimate, of course; but an excessive mortality meant loss.The death rate had risen so high that Briggs had even considered bringing some of the black ivory on deck, and increasing the ration. But in the end he had decided to hold through, and trust luck to arrive in Cuba with enough slaves to pay a good margin. Results had justified his decision.“I was right about that, too,” thought he. “Seems like I’m always right—or else it’s gilt-edged luck!”Yet, in spite of all, that voyage had left some disagreeable memories. The reek and stifle of the hold, the groaning and crying of the blacks—that no amount of punishment could silence—had vastly annoyed the captain. The way in which his crew had stricken the shackles from the dead and from those manifestly marked for death and had heaved them overboard to the trailing sharks, had been only a trivial detail.But the fact that Briggs’s own cabin had been invadedby vermin and by noxious odors had greatly annoyed the captain. Not all Doctor Filhiol’s burning of pungent substances in the cabin had been able to purify the air. Briggs had cursed the fact that this most profitable trafficking had involved such disagreeable concomitants, and had consoled himself with much strong drink.Then, too, a five-day blow, three hundred miles west of the Cape Verdes, had killed off more than forty of his negroes and had made conditions doubly intolerable. Once more he formulated thoughts in words:“Damn it! I might have done better to have scuttled her, off the African coast, and have drawn down my share of the insurance money. If I’d known what I was running into, that’s just what Iwouldhave done, so help me! I made a devilish good thing of it, that way, in the oldWhite Cloudtwo years ago. And never was so much as questioned!”He pondered a moment, frowning blackly.“Maybe I did wrong, after all, to bring theFleeceinto port. But if I hadn’t, I’d have had to sacrifice those hundred boxes of opium, that will bring me a clear two hundred apiece, from Hendricks. So after all, it’s all right. I’m satisfied.”He drained the last of the Four-X, and carefully inspected his watch.“Ten-fifteen,” said he. “And I’m to meet Hendricks at ten-thirty at the Tremont House. I’ll hoist anchor and away.”He paid his score with scrupulous exactness, for in such matters he greatly prided himself on his honesty, lighted a fresh cigar, and departed from the Bell-in-Hand.Cigar in mouth, smoke trailing on the May morning,he made his way to School Street and up it. A fine figure of a mariner he strode along, erect, deep-chested, thewed and sinewed like a bull.In under the columned portals of the old Tremont House—now long since only a memory—he entered, to his rendezvous with Hendricks, furtive buyer of the forbidden drug.And as he vanishes beneath that granite doorway, for fifty years he passes from our sight.CHAPTER XIIIAFTER FIFTY YEARSIf you will add into one total all that is sunniest and most sheltered, all that hangs heaviest with the perfume of old-fashioned New England gardens, all that most cozily combines in an old-time sailor’s home, you will form a picture of Snug Haven, demesne of Captain Alpheus Briggs, long years retired.Snug Haven, with gray-shingled walls, with massive chimney stacks projecting from its weather-beaten, gambreled roof, seemed to epitomize rest after labor, peace after strife.From its broad piazza, with morning-glory-covered pillars, a splendid view opened of sea and shore and foam-ringed islets in the harbor of South Endicutt—a view commanding kelp-strewn foreshore, rock-buttressed headlands, sun-spangled cobalt of the bay; and then the white, far tower of Truxbury Light, and then the hazed and brooding mystery of open Atlantic.Behind the cottage rose Croft Hill, sweet with ferns, with bayberries and wild roses crowding in among the lichen-crusted boulders and ribbed ledges, where gnarly, ancient apple-trees and silver birches clung. Atop the hill, a wall of mossy stones divided the living from the dead; for there the cemetery lay, its simple monuments and old, gray headstones of carven slate bearing some family names that have loomed big in history.Along the prim box-hedge of Captain Briggs’s front garden, the village street extended. Wandering irregularlywith the broken shore line, it led past time-grayed dwellings, past the schoolhouse and the white, square-steepled church, to the lobstermen’s huts, the storehouses and wharves, interspersed with “fish-flakes” that blent pungent marine odors with the fresh tang of the sea.Old Mother Nature did her best, all along that street and in the captain’s garden, to soften those sometimes insistent odors, with her own perfumes of asters and petunias, nasturtiums, dahlias, sweet fern, and fresh, revivifying caresses of poplar, elm and pine, of sumac, buttonwood and willow.With certain westerly breezes—breezes that bore to Snug Haven the sad, slow chant of the whistling buoy on Graves Shoal and the tolling of the bell buoy on the Shallows—oakum and tar, pitch, salt and fish had the best of it in South Endicutt. But with a shift to landward, apple-tree, mignonette and phlox and other blooms marshalled victorious essences; and the little village by the lip of the sea grew sweet and warm as the breast of a young girl who dreams.The afternoon on which Captain Alpheus Briggs once more comes to our sight—the 24th of June, 1918—was just one of those drowsy, perfumed afternoons, when the long roar of the breakers over Dry Shingle Reef seemed part of the secrets the breeze was whispering among the pine needles on Croft Hill, and when the droning of the captain’s bees, among his spotted tiger-lilies, his sweet peas, cannas and hydrangeas, seemed conspiring with the sun-drenched warmth of the old-fashioned garden to lull man’s spirit into rest and soothe life’s fever with nepenthe.Basking in the sunlight of his piazza, at ease in a broad-armed rocker by a wicker table, the old captain appeared mightily content with life. Beside him lay a wiry-haired Airedale, seemingly asleep yet with oneeye ready to cock open at the captain’s slightest move. A blue cap, gold-braided, hung atop one of the uprights of the rocking-chair; the captain’s bushy hair, still thick, though now spun silver, contrasted with his deep-lined face, tanned brown. Glad expectancy showed in his deep-set eyes, clear blue as they had been full fifty years ago, eyes under bushy brows that, once black, now matched the silver of his hair.White, too, his beard had grown. Once in a while he stroked it, nervously, with a strong, corded hand that seemed, as his whole, square-knit body seemed, almost as vigorous as in the long ago—the half-forgotten, wholly repented long ago of violence and evil ways. Not yet had senility laid its clutch upon Alpheus Briggs. Wrinkles had come, and a certain stooping of the powerful shoulders; but the old captain’s blue coat with its brass buttons still covered a body of iron strength.The telescope across his knees was no more trim than he. Carefully tended beard, well-brushed coat and polished boots all proclaimed Alpheus Briggs a proud old man. Though the soul of him had utterly changed, still Captain Briggs held true to type. In him no laxity inhered, no falling away from the strict tenets of shipshape neatness.The captain appeared to be waiting for something. Once in a while he raised the telescope and directed it toward the far blue sheet of the outer harbor, where the headland of Pigeon Cliff thrust itself against the gray-green of the ship channel, swimming in a distant set of haze. Eagerly he explored the prospect, letting his glass rest on white lines of gulls that covered the tide-bars, on the whiter lines of foam over the reef, on the catboats and dories, the rusty coasting steamers and clumsy coal-barges near or far away. With care he sought among the tawny sails; and as each schoonertacked, its canvas now sunlit, now umber in shade, the captain’s gaze seemed questioning: “Are you the craft I seek?”The answer came always negative. With patience, Captain Briggs lowered his glass again and resumed his vigil.“No use getting uneasy,” said he, at last; and brought out pipe and tobacco from the pocket of his square-cut jacket. “It won’t bring him a bit sooner. He wrote me he’d be here sometime to-day, and that means he surely will be. He’s a Briggs. What he says he’ll do hewilldo. No Briggs ever breaks a promise, and Hal is all clear Briggs, from truck to keelson!”Waiting, pondering, the old man let his eyes wander over the Snug Haven of his last years; the place where he could keep contact with sunshine and seashine, with the salt breeze and the bite of old ocean, yet where comfort and peace profound could all be his.A pleasant domain it was, and in all its arrangements eloquent of the old captain. There life had been very kind to him, and there his darkest moments of bereavement had been fought through, survived. Thither, more than five-and-forty years ago, he had brought the young wife whose love had turned his heart from evil ways and set his feet upon the better path from which, nearly half a century, they had not strayed.In the upper front room his only son, Edward, had been born; and from the door, close at hand, he had followed the coffins that had taken away from him the three beings about whom, successively, the tendrils of his affection had clung.First, the hand of death had closed upon his wife; but, profound as that loss had been, it had left to him his son. In this same house, that son had grown tomanhood, and had himself taken a wife; and so for a few years there had been happiness again.But not for long. The birth of Hal, the old man’s grandson, had cost the life of Hal’s mother, a daughter-in-law whom Captain Briggs had loved like his own flesh and blood; and, two years after, tragedy had once more entered Snug Haven. Edward Briggs, on his first voyage as master of a ship—a granite-schooner, between Rockport and Boston—had fallen victim of a breaking derrick-rope. The granite lintel that had crushed the body of the old captain’s son had fallen also upon the captain’s heart. Long after the grass had grown upon that third grave in the Briggs burial lot, up there on the hill overlooking the shining harbor, the old man had lived as in a dream.Then, gradually, the fingers of little Hal, fumbling at the latchets of the old man’s heart, had in some miraculous way of their own that only childish fingers possess, opened that crushed and broken doorway; and Hal had entered in, and once more life had smiled upon the captain.After even the last leaves of autumn have fallen, sometimes wonderful days still for a little while warm the dying world and make men glad. Thus, with the captain. He had seemed to lose everything; and yet, after all, Indian summer still had waited for him. In the declining years, Hal had become his sunshine and his warmth, once more to expand his soul, once more to bid him love. And he had loved, completely, blindly, concentrating upon the boy, the last remaining hope of his family, an affection so intense that more than once the child, hurt by the fierce grip of the old man’s arms, had cried aloud in pain and fright. Whereat the captain, swiftly penitent, had kissed and fondled him, sung brave sea chanteys to him, taught him wondrous miracles of splicing andweaving, or had fashioned boats and little guns, and so had brought young Hal to worship him as a child will when a man comes to his plane and is another, larger child with him.Life would have ceased to hold any purpose or meaning for the captain, had it not been for Hal. The boy, wonderfully strong, had soon begun to absorb so much of the captain’s affection that the wounds in his heart had ceased to bleed, and that his pain had given place to a kind of dumb acquiescence. And after the shock of the final loss had somewhat passed life had taken root again, in Snug Haven.Hal had thriven mightily in the sea air. Body and mind, he had developed at a wonderful pace. He had soon grown so handsome that even his occasional childish fits of temper—quite extraordinary fits, of strange violence, though brief—had been forgiven by every one. He had needed but to smile to be absolved.Life had been, for the boy, all “a wonder and a wild desire.” The shadow of death had not been able to darken it. Before very long he had come to care little for any human relationship save with his grandfather. But the captain, proud of race, had often spoken to him of his father and his mother, or, leading Hal by the hand, had trudged up the well-worn path to the cemetery on the hill, to show the boy the well-kept graves.So Hal had grown up. Shore and sea and sky had all combined to develop him. School and play, and all the wonders of cliff, beach, tide, and storm, of dories, nets, tackle, ships, and sea-things had filled both mind and body with unusual vigor.The captain had told Hal endless tales of travel, had taught him an infinite number of sea-marvels. Before Hal had reached ten years, he had come to know every rope and spar of many rigs.At twelve, he had built a dory; and, two years later with the captain’s help, a catboat, in which he and the old man had sailed in all weathers. If there were any tricks of navigation that the boy did not learn, or anything about the mysterious doings of the sea, it was only because the captain himself fell short of complete knowledge.In everything the captain had indulged him. Yet even though he had never inflicted punishment, and even though young Hal had grown up to have pretty much his own way, the captain had denied spoiling him.“Only poor material will spoil,” he had always said. “You can’t spoil the genuine, thoroughbred stuff. No, nor break it, either. I know what I’m doing. Whose business is it, but my own?”Sharing a thousand interests in common with Hal, the captain’s love and hope had burned ever higher and more steadily. As the violent and grief-stricken past had faded gradually into a vague melancholy, the future had seemed beckoning with ever clearer cheer. The captain had come to have dreams of some day seeing Hal master of the biggest ship afloat. He had formed a hundred plans and dreamed a thousand dreams, all more or less enwoven with the sea. And though Hal, when he had finished school and had entered college, had begun to show strange aptitude for languages—especially the Oriental tongues—still the old man had never quite abandoned hope that some day the grandson might stand as captain on the bridge of a tall liner.For many years another influence had had its part in molding Hal—the influence of Ezra Trefethen, whereof now a word or two. Ezra, good soul, had lived at Snug Haven ever since Hal’s birth, less as a servant than as a member of the household. Once hehad cooked for the captain, on a voyage out to Japan. His simple philosophy and loyalty, as well as his exceeding skill with saucepans, had greatly attached the captain to him—this being, you understand, in the period after the captain’s marriage had made of him another and a better man.When Hal’s mother had died, the captain had given Ezra dominion over the “galley” at Snug Haven, a dominion which had gradually extended itself to the whole house and garden, and even to the upbringing of the boy.Together, in a hit-or-miss way that had scandalized the good wives of South Endicutt, Briggs and Trefethen had reared little Hal. The captain had given no heed to hints that he needed a house-keeper or a second wife. Trefethen had been a powerful helper with the boy. Deft with the needle, he had sewed for Hal. He had taught him to keep his little room—his little “first mate’s cabin,” as he had always called it—very shipshape. And he had taught him sea lore, too; and at times when the captain had been abroad on the great waters, had taken complete charge of the fast-growing lad.Thus the captain had been ever more and more warmly drawn towards Ezra. The simple old fellow had followed the body of the captain’s son up there to the grave on the hill, and had wept sincerely in the captain’s sorrow. Together, Briggs and Ezra had kept the cemetery lot in order. Evenings without number, after little Hal had been tucked into bed, the two ageing men had sat and smoked together.Almost as partners in a wondrous enterprise, they two had watched Hal grow. Ezra had been just as proud as the captain himself, when the sturdy, black-haired, blue-eyed boy had entered high school and had won his place at football and on the running-track.When “Hal” had become “Master Hal,” for him, on the boy’s entering college, the old servitor had come to look upon him with something of awe, for now Hal’s studies had lifted him beyond all possible understanding. Old Ezra had thrilled with pride as real and as proprietary as any Captain Briggs had felt.Thus, the belovèd idol of the two indulgent old sea-dogs, Hal had grown up.
CHAPTER IXONSET OF BATTLEThe shot that Wansley fired, a chance shot hardly aimed at all, must have been guided by the finger of the captain’s guardian genius. It crumpled the Malay, with strangely sprawling legs. Kill him it did not. But the bullet through his lower vertebræ left only his upper half alive.With a grunt he crumpled to the hot deck, knife still clutched in skinny fist. Shouts echoed. Briggs stood aghast, with even his steel nerve jangling. The quivering Malay was a half-dead thing that still lived. He writhed with contorted face, dragging himself toward Briggs. The knife-blade clicked on the planking, like the clicking of his teeth that showed black through slavering lips.“Allah! il Allah!” he gulped, heaving himself up on one hand, slashing with the other.Why do men, in a crisis, so often do stupid, unaccountable things? Why did Briggs kick at him, with a roaring oath, instead of shooting? Briggs felt the bite of steel in his leg. That broke the numbing spell of unreason. The captain’s pistol, at point-blank range, shattered the yellow man’s skull. Blood, smeared with an ooze of brain, colored the stewing deck.“Allah! il Al—!”The cry ended in a choking gurgle on lips that drew into a horrible grin. And now completely dead even beyond the utmost lash of Islamic fanaticism, theMalay dropped face down. This time the captain’s kick landed only on flesh and bone past any power of feeling.At the capstan-bars it was touch-and-go. Crevay was down, groaning, his hands all slippery and crimson with the blood that seeped through his clutching fingers. For a moment, work slacked off. Wansley was shouting, with revolver leveled, his voice blaring above the cries, oaths, imprecations. Things came to the ragged edge of a rush, but white men ran in with rifles and cutlasses. Briggs flung himself aft, trailing blood.Crazed with rage and the burn of that wound, he fired thrice. Malays sagged down, plunged screaming to the deck. The captain would have emptied his revolver into the pack, but Wansley snatched him by the arm.“Hold on!” he shouted. “That’s enough—we need ’em, sir!”Prass, belaying-pin in hand, struck to right, to left. Yells of pain mingled with the tumult that drowned the ragged, ineffective spatter of firing from the war-fleet. The action was swift, decisive. In half a minute, the capstan was clicking again, faster than ever. Its labor-power, diminished by the loss of three men, was more than compensated by the fear of the survivors.“Overboard with the swine!” shouted Briggs. “Overboard with ’em, to the sharks!”“This here one ain’t done for yet, sir,” began Prass, pointing. “He’s only—”“Overboard, I said!” roared Briggs. “You’ll go, too, by God, if you give me any lip!”As men laid hands on the Malays to drag them to the rail, Briggs dropped on his knees beside Crevay. He pulled away the man’s hands from the gaping neck-wound, whence the life was irretrievably spurting.“Judas priest!” he stammered, for here was his right-hand man as good as dead. “Doctor! Where the devil is Mr. Filhiol?”“In the cabin, sir,” Prass answered.“Cabin! Holy Lord! On deck with him!”“Yes, sir.”“And tell him to bring his kit!”Prass had already dived below. The doctor was haled up again, with his bag. A kind of hard exultation blazed in the captain’s face. He seemed not to hear the shouts of war, the spattering fusillade from the canoes. His high-arched chest rose and fell, pantingly. His hands, reddened with the blood of Crevay, dripped horribly. Filhiol, hustled on deck, stared in amazement.“A job for you, sir!” cried Briggs. “Prove yourself!”Filhiol leaned over Crevay. But he made no move to open his kit-bag. One look had told him the truth.The man, already unconscious, had grown waxen. His breathing had become a stertorous hiccough. The deck beneath him was terrible to look upon.“No use, sir,” said the doctor briefly. “He’s gone.”“Do something!” blazed the captain. “Something!”“For a dead man?” retorted Filhiol. As he spoke, even the hiccough ceased.Briggs stared with eyes of rage. He got to his feet, hulking, savage, with swaying red fists.“They’ve killed my best man,” he snarled. “If we didn’t need the dogs, we’d feed ’em all to the sharks, so help me!”“You’re wounded, sir!” the doctor cried, pointing at the blood-wet slash in the captain’s trouser-leg.“Oh, to hell with that!” Briggs retorted. “You, and you,” he added, jabbing a finger at two sailors,“carry Mr. Crevay down to the cabin—then back to your rifles at the rail!”They obeyed, their burden sagging limply. Already the dead and wounded Malays had been bundled over the rail. The fusillade from the war-canoes was strengthening, and the shouts had risen to a barbaric chorus. The patter of bullets and slugs into the sea or against the planking of theSilver Fleeceformed a ragged accompaniment to the whine of missiles through the air. A few holes opened in the clipper’s canvas. One of the men who had thrown the Malays overboard cursed suddenly and grabbed his left elbow, shattered.“Take cover!” commanded Briggs. “Down, everybody, along the rail! Mr. Wansley, down with you and your men. Get down!”Indifferent to all peril for himself, Briggs turned toward the companion.“Captain,” the doctor began again. “Your boot’s full of blood. Let me bandage—”Briggs flung a snarl at him and strode to the companion.“Below, there!” he shouted.“Aye, aye, sir!” rose the voice of one of the foremast hands.“Get that wench up here! The yellow girl! Bring her up—an’ look alive!”“Captain,” the doctor insisted, “I’ve got to do something for that gash in your leg. Not that I love you, but you’re the only man that can save us. Sit down here, sir. You’ll bleed to death where you stand!”Something in Filhiol’s tone, something in a certain giddiness that was already reaching for the captain’s heart and brain, made him obey. He sat down shakily on deck beside the after-companion. In the midstof all that turmoil, all underlaid by the slow, grinding scrape of the keel on the sand-bar, the physician performed his duty.With scissors, he shore away the cloth. A wicked slash, five or six inches long, stood redly revealed.“Tss! Tss!” clucked Filhiol. “Lucky if it’s not poisoned.”“Mr. Gascar!” shouted the captain. “Go below!” Briggs jerked a thumb downward at the cabin, whence sounds of a struggle, mingled with cries and animal-like snarls, had begun to proceed. “Bring up the jug o’ rum you’ll find in my locker. Serve it out to all hands. And, look you, if they need a lift with the girl, give it; but don’t you kill that wench. I need her, alive! Understand?”“Yes, sir,” Gascar replied, and vanished down the companion. He reappeared with a jug and a tin cup.“They’re handlin’ her all right, sir,” he reported. “Have a drop, sir?”“You’re damned shoutin’, I will!” And the captain reached for the cup. Gascar poured him a stiff drink. He gulped it and took another. “Now deal it out. There’ll be plenty more when we’ve sunk the yellow devils!”He got to his feet, scorning further care from Filhiol, and stood there wild and disheveled, with one leg of his trousers cut off at the knee and with his half-tied bandages already crimsoning.“Rum for all hands, men!” he shouted. “And better than rum—my best wine, sherry, champagne—a bottle a head for you, when this shindy’s over!”Cheers rose unevenly. Gascar started on his round with the jug. Even the wounded men, such as could still raise their voices, shouted approval.“Hold your fire, men,” the captain ordered. “Let ’em close in—then blow ’em out o’ the water!”
ONSET OF BATTLE
The shot that Wansley fired, a chance shot hardly aimed at all, must have been guided by the finger of the captain’s guardian genius. It crumpled the Malay, with strangely sprawling legs. Kill him it did not. But the bullet through his lower vertebræ left only his upper half alive.
With a grunt he crumpled to the hot deck, knife still clutched in skinny fist. Shouts echoed. Briggs stood aghast, with even his steel nerve jangling. The quivering Malay was a half-dead thing that still lived. He writhed with contorted face, dragging himself toward Briggs. The knife-blade clicked on the planking, like the clicking of his teeth that showed black through slavering lips.
“Allah! il Allah!” he gulped, heaving himself up on one hand, slashing with the other.
Why do men, in a crisis, so often do stupid, unaccountable things? Why did Briggs kick at him, with a roaring oath, instead of shooting? Briggs felt the bite of steel in his leg. That broke the numbing spell of unreason. The captain’s pistol, at point-blank range, shattered the yellow man’s skull. Blood, smeared with an ooze of brain, colored the stewing deck.
“Allah! il Al—!”
The cry ended in a choking gurgle on lips that drew into a horrible grin. And now completely dead even beyond the utmost lash of Islamic fanaticism, theMalay dropped face down. This time the captain’s kick landed only on flesh and bone past any power of feeling.
At the capstan-bars it was touch-and-go. Crevay was down, groaning, his hands all slippery and crimson with the blood that seeped through his clutching fingers. For a moment, work slacked off. Wansley was shouting, with revolver leveled, his voice blaring above the cries, oaths, imprecations. Things came to the ragged edge of a rush, but white men ran in with rifles and cutlasses. Briggs flung himself aft, trailing blood.
Crazed with rage and the burn of that wound, he fired thrice. Malays sagged down, plunged screaming to the deck. The captain would have emptied his revolver into the pack, but Wansley snatched him by the arm.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “That’s enough—we need ’em, sir!”
Prass, belaying-pin in hand, struck to right, to left. Yells of pain mingled with the tumult that drowned the ragged, ineffective spatter of firing from the war-fleet. The action was swift, decisive. In half a minute, the capstan was clicking again, faster than ever. Its labor-power, diminished by the loss of three men, was more than compensated by the fear of the survivors.
“Overboard with the swine!” shouted Briggs. “Overboard with ’em, to the sharks!”
“This here one ain’t done for yet, sir,” began Prass, pointing. “He’s only—”
“Overboard, I said!” roared Briggs. “You’ll go, too, by God, if you give me any lip!”
As men laid hands on the Malays to drag them to the rail, Briggs dropped on his knees beside Crevay. He pulled away the man’s hands from the gaping neck-wound, whence the life was irretrievably spurting.
“Judas priest!” he stammered, for here was his right-hand man as good as dead. “Doctor! Where the devil is Mr. Filhiol?”
“In the cabin, sir,” Prass answered.
“Cabin! Holy Lord! On deck with him!”
“Yes, sir.”
“And tell him to bring his kit!”
Prass had already dived below. The doctor was haled up again, with his bag. A kind of hard exultation blazed in the captain’s face. He seemed not to hear the shouts of war, the spattering fusillade from the canoes. His high-arched chest rose and fell, pantingly. His hands, reddened with the blood of Crevay, dripped horribly. Filhiol, hustled on deck, stared in amazement.
“A job for you, sir!” cried Briggs. “Prove yourself!”
Filhiol leaned over Crevay. But he made no move to open his kit-bag. One look had told him the truth.
The man, already unconscious, had grown waxen. His breathing had become a stertorous hiccough. The deck beneath him was terrible to look upon.
“No use, sir,” said the doctor briefly. “He’s gone.”
“Do something!” blazed the captain. “Something!”
“For a dead man?” retorted Filhiol. As he spoke, even the hiccough ceased.
Briggs stared with eyes of rage. He got to his feet, hulking, savage, with swaying red fists.
“They’ve killed my best man,” he snarled. “If we didn’t need the dogs, we’d feed ’em all to the sharks, so help me!”
“You’re wounded, sir!” the doctor cried, pointing at the blood-wet slash in the captain’s trouser-leg.
“Oh, to hell with that!” Briggs retorted. “You, and you,” he added, jabbing a finger at two sailors,“carry Mr. Crevay down to the cabin—then back to your rifles at the rail!”
They obeyed, their burden sagging limply. Already the dead and wounded Malays had been bundled over the rail. The fusillade from the war-canoes was strengthening, and the shouts had risen to a barbaric chorus. The patter of bullets and slugs into the sea or against the planking of theSilver Fleeceformed a ragged accompaniment to the whine of missiles through the air. A few holes opened in the clipper’s canvas. One of the men who had thrown the Malays overboard cursed suddenly and grabbed his left elbow, shattered.
“Take cover!” commanded Briggs. “Down, everybody, along the rail! Mr. Wansley, down with you and your men. Get down!”
Indifferent to all peril for himself, Briggs turned toward the companion.
“Captain,” the doctor began again. “Your boot’s full of blood. Let me bandage—”
Briggs flung a snarl at him and strode to the companion.
“Below, there!” he shouted.
“Aye, aye, sir!” rose the voice of one of the foremast hands.
“Get that wench up here! The yellow girl! Bring her up—an’ look alive!”
“Captain,” the doctor insisted, “I’ve got to do something for that gash in your leg. Not that I love you, but you’re the only man that can save us. Sit down here, sir. You’ll bleed to death where you stand!”
Something in Filhiol’s tone, something in a certain giddiness that was already reaching for the captain’s heart and brain, made him obey. He sat down shakily on deck beside the after-companion. In the midstof all that turmoil, all underlaid by the slow, grinding scrape of the keel on the sand-bar, the physician performed his duty.
With scissors, he shore away the cloth. A wicked slash, five or six inches long, stood redly revealed.
“Tss! Tss!” clucked Filhiol. “Lucky if it’s not poisoned.”
“Mr. Gascar!” shouted the captain. “Go below!” Briggs jerked a thumb downward at the cabin, whence sounds of a struggle, mingled with cries and animal-like snarls, had begun to proceed. “Bring up the jug o’ rum you’ll find in my locker. Serve it out to all hands. And, look you, if they need a lift with the girl, give it; but don’t you kill that wench. I need her, alive! Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Gascar replied, and vanished down the companion. He reappeared with a jug and a tin cup.
“They’re handlin’ her all right, sir,” he reported. “Have a drop, sir?”
“You’re damned shoutin’, I will!” And the captain reached for the cup. Gascar poured him a stiff drink. He gulped it and took another. “Now deal it out. There’ll be plenty more when we’ve sunk the yellow devils!”
He got to his feet, scorning further care from Filhiol, and stood there wild and disheveled, with one leg of his trousers cut off at the knee and with his half-tied bandages already crimsoning.
“Rum for all hands, men!” he shouted. “And better than rum—my best wine, sherry, champagne—a bottle a head for you, when this shindy’s over!”
Cheers rose unevenly. Gascar started on his round with the jug. Even the wounded men, such as could still raise their voices, shouted approval.
“Hold your fire, men,” the captain ordered. “Let ’em close in—then blow ’em out o’ the water!”
CHAPTER XKUALA PAHANGThe doctor, presently finishing with Briggs, turned his attention to the other injured ones. At the top of the companion now stood the captain with wicked eyes, as up the ladder emerged the two seamen with the struggling, clawing tiger-cat of a girl.The cruel beating the captain had given her the night before had not yet crushed her spirit. Neither had the sickness of the liquor he had forced her to drink. Bruised, spent, broken as she was, the spirit of battle still dwelt in the lithe barbarian. That her sharp nails had been busy to good effect was proved by the long, deep gashes on the faces and necks of both seamen. One had been bitten on the forearm. For all their strength, they proved hardly more than a match for her up the narrow, steep companion. Their blasphemies mingled with the girl’s animal-like cries. Loudly roared the booming bass of the captain:“Up with the she-dog! I’ll teach her something—teach ’em all something, by the Judas priest! Up with her!”They dragged her out on deck, up into all that shouting and firing, that turmoil and labor and blood. And as they brought her up a plume of smoke jetted from the bows of the proa. The morning air sparkled with the fire-flash of that ancient brass cannon. With a crashing shower of splinters, a section of the rail burst inward. Men sprawled, howling. But a greater tragedy—in the eyes of these sailormen—befell:for a billet of wood crashed the jug to bits, cascading the deck with good Medford. And, his hand paralyzed and tingling with the shock, Gascar remained staring at the jug-handle still in his grip and at the flowing rum on deck.Howls of bitter rage broke from along the rail, and the rifles began crackling. The men, cheated of their drink, were getting out of hand.“Cease firing, you!” screamed Briggs. “You’ll fire when I command, and not before. Mr. Bevans! Loaded again?”“All loaded, sir. Say when!”“Not yet! Lay a good aim on the proa. We’ve got to blow her out o’ the water!”“Aye, aye, sir!” And Bevans patted the rusty old piece. “Leave that to me, sir!”Briggs turned again to the struggling girl. A thin, evil smile drew at his lips. His face, under its bronze of tan, burned with infernal exultation.“Now, my beauty,” he mocked, “now I’ll attend to you!”For a moment he eyed Kuala Pahang. Under the clear, morning light, she looked a strange and wild creature indeed—golden-yellow of tint, with tangled black hair, and the eyes of a trapped tigress. Bruises wealed her naked arms and shoulders, souvenirs of the captain’s club and fist. Her supple body was hardly concealed by her short skirt and by the tight Malay jacket binding her lithe waist and firm, young breast.Briggs exulted over her, helpless and panting in the clutch of the two foremast-hands. “To the rail with her!” he ordered.“What you goin’ to do, sir?” asked one of the men, staring. “Heave her over?”Briggs menaced him with clenched fist.“None o’ your damned business!” he shouted. “To the rail with her! Jump, afore I teach you how!”They dragged her, screeching, to the starboard rail. All the time they had to hold those cat-clawed hands of hers. From side to side she flung herself, fighting every foot of the way. Briggs put back his head and laughed at the rare spectacle. Twice or thrice the sailors slipped in blood and rum upon the planking, and once Kuala Pahang all but jerked free from them. At the capstan, only the pistols of the three white guards held her kinsmen back from making a stampede rush; and not even the pistols could silence among them a menacing hum of rage that seethed and bubbled.“Here, you!” shouted Briggs. “Mahmud Baba, you yellow cur, come here!”Mahmud loosed his hold on the capstan-bar and in great anguish approached.“Yas, sar?” whined he. The lean, brown form was trembling. The face had gone a jaundiced color. “I come, sar.”Briggs leveled his revolver at the Malay. Unmindful of the spattering bullets, he spoke with deliberation.“Son of a saffron dog,” said he, “you’re going to tell this wench something for me!”“Yas, sar. What piecee thing me tell?”“You tell her that if the boats don’t go back to land I’ll heave her over the rail. I’ll feed her to the sharks, by God! Alive, to the sharks—sharks, down there! Savvy?”“Me savvy.”“And she’s got to shout that to the canoes! She’s got to shout it to ’em. Go on, now, tell her!”Mahmud hesitated a moment, shuddered and grimaced. His eyes narrowed to slits. The captainpoked the revolver into his ribs. Mahmud quivered. He fell into a sing-song patter of strange words with whining intonations. Suddenly he ceased.The girl listened, her gleaming eyes fixed on Mahmud’s face. A sudden question issued from her bruised, cut lips.“What’s she asking?” demanded Briggs.“She ask where her mother, sar?”“Tell her! Tell her I’ve shot the old she-devil to hell, and beyond! Tell her she’ll get worse if she don’t make the canoes stand off—worse, because the sharks will get her alive! Go on, you black scut o’ misery, tell her!”Mahmud spoke again. He flung a hand at the enveloping half-circle of the war-fleet. The nearest boats now were moving hardly a quarter-mile away. The gleam of krises and of spears twinkled in the sun. Little smoke-puffs all along the battle-front kept pace with the popping of gunfire. In the proa, oily brown devils were laboring to reload the brass cannon.Mahmud’s speech ended. The girl stiffened, with clenched hands. The sailors, holding her wrists, could feel the whipcord tension of her muscles.“Tell her to shout to the proa there!” yelled the captain in white fury. “Either they stand off or over she goes—and you see for yourself there’s sharks enough!”Again Mahmud spoke. The girl grunted a monosyllable.“What’s that she says?” demanded Briggs.“She say no, sar. She die, but she no tell her people.”“The hell you say!” roared the captain. He seized her neck in a huge, hairy paw, tightened his fingers till they bit into the yellow skin, and shook her violently.“I’ll break your damned, obstinate neck for you!” he cried, his face distorted. “Tell your people to go back! Tell ’em!”Mahmud translated the order. The girl only laughed. Briggs knew himself beaten. In that sneering laugh of Kuala Pahang’s echoed a world of maddening defiance. He loosened his hold, trying to think how he should master her. Another man grunted, by the rail, and slid to the deck, where a chance bullet had given him the long sleep.Briggs whirled on Mahmud, squeezed his lean shoulder till the bones bent.“Youtell ’em!” he bellowed. “If she won’t, you will!”“Me, sar?” whined the Malay, shivering and fear-sick to the inner marrow. “Me tell so, they kill me!”“If you don’t,Iwill! Up with you now—both o’ you, up, on the rail! Here, you men—up with ’em!”They hoisted the girl, still impassive, to the rail, and held her there. The firing almost immediately died away. Mahmud tried to grovel at the captain’s feet, wailing to Allah and the Prophet. Briggs flung him up, neck and crop. Mahmud grappled the after backstays and clung there, quivering.“Go on, now, out with it!” snarled Briggs, his pistol at the Malay’s back. “And make it loud, or the sharks will get you, too!”Mahmud raised a bony arm, howled words that drifted out over the pearl-hued waters. Silence fell, along the ragged line of boats. In the bow of the proa a figure stood up, naked, gleaming with oil in the sunlight, which flicked a vivid, crimson spot of color from a nodding feather head-dress.Back to theSilver Fleecefloated a high-pitched question, fraught with a heavy toll of life and death. Mahmudanswered. The figure waved a furious arm, and fire leaped from the brass cannon.The shot went high, passing harmlessly over the clipper and ricochetting beyond. But at the same instant a carefully laid rifle, from a canoe, barked stridently. Mahmud coughed, crumpled and slid from the rail. He dropped plumb; and the shoal waters, clear-green over the bar, received him.As he fell, Briggs struck the girl with a full drive of his trip-hammer fist. The blow broke the sailors’ hold. It called no scream from Kuala Pahang. She fell, writhing, plunged in foam, rose, and with splendid energy struck out for the canoes.Briggs leaned across the rail, as if no war-fleet had been lying in easy shot; and with hard fingers tugging at his big, black beard, watched the swimming girl, her lithe, yellow body gleaming through the water. Watched, too, the swift cutting of the sharks’ fins toward her—the darting, black forms—the grim tragedy in that sudden, reddening whip of brine. Then he laughed, his teeth gleaming like wolves’ teeth, as he heard her scream.“Broke her silence at last, eh?” he sneered. “They got a yell out of the she-dog, the sharks did, even if I couldn’t—eh?”Along the rail, hard-bitten as the clipper’s men were, oaths broke out, and mutterings. Work slackened at the capstan, and for the moment the guards forgot to drive their lathering slaves there.“Great God, captain!” sounded the doctor’s voice, as he looked up from a wounded man. “You’ve murdered us all!”Briggs only laughed again and looked to his pistol.“They’re coming now, men,” said he coolly. To his ears the high and rising tumult from the flotilla made music. The lust of war was in him. For amoment he peered intently at the paddlemen once more bending to their work; the brandished krises and long spears; the spattering of bullets all along the water.“Let ’em come!” he cried, laughing once more. “With hot lead and boiling water and cold steel, I reckon we’re ready for ’em. Steady’s the word, boys! They’re coming—give ’em hell!”
KUALA PAHANG
The doctor, presently finishing with Briggs, turned his attention to the other injured ones. At the top of the companion now stood the captain with wicked eyes, as up the ladder emerged the two seamen with the struggling, clawing tiger-cat of a girl.
The cruel beating the captain had given her the night before had not yet crushed her spirit. Neither had the sickness of the liquor he had forced her to drink. Bruised, spent, broken as she was, the spirit of battle still dwelt in the lithe barbarian. That her sharp nails had been busy to good effect was proved by the long, deep gashes on the faces and necks of both seamen. One had been bitten on the forearm. For all their strength, they proved hardly more than a match for her up the narrow, steep companion. Their blasphemies mingled with the girl’s animal-like cries. Loudly roared the booming bass of the captain:
“Up with the she-dog! I’ll teach her something—teach ’em all something, by the Judas priest! Up with her!”
They dragged her out on deck, up into all that shouting and firing, that turmoil and labor and blood. And as they brought her up a plume of smoke jetted from the bows of the proa. The morning air sparkled with the fire-flash of that ancient brass cannon. With a crashing shower of splinters, a section of the rail burst inward. Men sprawled, howling. But a greater tragedy—in the eyes of these sailormen—befell:for a billet of wood crashed the jug to bits, cascading the deck with good Medford. And, his hand paralyzed and tingling with the shock, Gascar remained staring at the jug-handle still in his grip and at the flowing rum on deck.
Howls of bitter rage broke from along the rail, and the rifles began crackling. The men, cheated of their drink, were getting out of hand.
“Cease firing, you!” screamed Briggs. “You’ll fire when I command, and not before. Mr. Bevans! Loaded again?”
“All loaded, sir. Say when!”
“Not yet! Lay a good aim on the proa. We’ve got to blow her out o’ the water!”
“Aye, aye, sir!” And Bevans patted the rusty old piece. “Leave that to me, sir!”
Briggs turned again to the struggling girl. A thin, evil smile drew at his lips. His face, under its bronze of tan, burned with infernal exultation.
“Now, my beauty,” he mocked, “now I’ll attend to you!”
For a moment he eyed Kuala Pahang. Under the clear, morning light, she looked a strange and wild creature indeed—golden-yellow of tint, with tangled black hair, and the eyes of a trapped tigress. Bruises wealed her naked arms and shoulders, souvenirs of the captain’s club and fist. Her supple body was hardly concealed by her short skirt and by the tight Malay jacket binding her lithe waist and firm, young breast.
Briggs exulted over her, helpless and panting in the clutch of the two foremast-hands. “To the rail with her!” he ordered.
“What you goin’ to do, sir?” asked one of the men, staring. “Heave her over?”
Briggs menaced him with clenched fist.
“None o’ your damned business!” he shouted. “To the rail with her! Jump, afore I teach you how!”
They dragged her, screeching, to the starboard rail. All the time they had to hold those cat-clawed hands of hers. From side to side she flung herself, fighting every foot of the way. Briggs put back his head and laughed at the rare spectacle. Twice or thrice the sailors slipped in blood and rum upon the planking, and once Kuala Pahang all but jerked free from them. At the capstan, only the pistols of the three white guards held her kinsmen back from making a stampede rush; and not even the pistols could silence among them a menacing hum of rage that seethed and bubbled.
“Here, you!” shouted Briggs. “Mahmud Baba, you yellow cur, come here!”
Mahmud loosed his hold on the capstan-bar and in great anguish approached.
“Yas, sar?” whined he. The lean, brown form was trembling. The face had gone a jaundiced color. “I come, sar.”
Briggs leveled his revolver at the Malay. Unmindful of the spattering bullets, he spoke with deliberation.
“Son of a saffron dog,” said he, “you’re going to tell this wench something for me!”
“Yas, sar. What piecee thing me tell?”
“You tell her that if the boats don’t go back to land I’ll heave her over the rail. I’ll feed her to the sharks, by God! Alive, to the sharks—sharks, down there! Savvy?”
“Me savvy.”
“And she’s got to shout that to the canoes! She’s got to shout it to ’em. Go on, now, tell her!”
Mahmud hesitated a moment, shuddered and grimaced. His eyes narrowed to slits. The captainpoked the revolver into his ribs. Mahmud quivered. He fell into a sing-song patter of strange words with whining intonations. Suddenly he ceased.
The girl listened, her gleaming eyes fixed on Mahmud’s face. A sudden question issued from her bruised, cut lips.
“What’s she asking?” demanded Briggs.
“She ask where her mother, sar?”
“Tell her! Tell her I’ve shot the old she-devil to hell, and beyond! Tell her she’ll get worse if she don’t make the canoes stand off—worse, because the sharks will get her alive! Go on, you black scut o’ misery, tell her!”
Mahmud spoke again. He flung a hand at the enveloping half-circle of the war-fleet. The nearest boats now were moving hardly a quarter-mile away. The gleam of krises and of spears twinkled in the sun. Little smoke-puffs all along the battle-front kept pace with the popping of gunfire. In the proa, oily brown devils were laboring to reload the brass cannon.
Mahmud’s speech ended. The girl stiffened, with clenched hands. The sailors, holding her wrists, could feel the whipcord tension of her muscles.
“Tell her to shout to the proa there!” yelled the captain in white fury. “Either they stand off or over she goes—and you see for yourself there’s sharks enough!”
Again Mahmud spoke. The girl grunted a monosyllable.
“What’s that she says?” demanded Briggs.
“She say no, sar. She die, but she no tell her people.”
“The hell you say!” roared the captain. He seized her neck in a huge, hairy paw, tightened his fingers till they bit into the yellow skin, and shook her violently.
“I’ll break your damned, obstinate neck for you!” he cried, his face distorted. “Tell your people to go back! Tell ’em!”
Mahmud translated the order. The girl only laughed. Briggs knew himself beaten. In that sneering laugh of Kuala Pahang’s echoed a world of maddening defiance. He loosened his hold, trying to think how he should master her. Another man grunted, by the rail, and slid to the deck, where a chance bullet had given him the long sleep.
Briggs whirled on Mahmud, squeezed his lean shoulder till the bones bent.
“Youtell ’em!” he bellowed. “If she won’t, you will!”
“Me, sar?” whined the Malay, shivering and fear-sick to the inner marrow. “Me tell so, they kill me!”
“If you don’t,Iwill! Up with you now—both o’ you, up, on the rail! Here, you men—up with ’em!”
They hoisted the girl, still impassive, to the rail, and held her there. The firing almost immediately died away. Mahmud tried to grovel at the captain’s feet, wailing to Allah and the Prophet. Briggs flung him up, neck and crop. Mahmud grappled the after backstays and clung there, quivering.
“Go on, now, out with it!” snarled Briggs, his pistol at the Malay’s back. “And make it loud, or the sharks will get you, too!”
Mahmud raised a bony arm, howled words that drifted out over the pearl-hued waters. Silence fell, along the ragged line of boats. In the bow of the proa a figure stood up, naked, gleaming with oil in the sunlight, which flicked a vivid, crimson spot of color from a nodding feather head-dress.
Back to theSilver Fleecefloated a high-pitched question, fraught with a heavy toll of life and death. Mahmudanswered. The figure waved a furious arm, and fire leaped from the brass cannon.
The shot went high, passing harmlessly over the clipper and ricochetting beyond. But at the same instant a carefully laid rifle, from a canoe, barked stridently. Mahmud coughed, crumpled and slid from the rail. He dropped plumb; and the shoal waters, clear-green over the bar, received him.
As he fell, Briggs struck the girl with a full drive of his trip-hammer fist. The blow broke the sailors’ hold. It called no scream from Kuala Pahang. She fell, writhing, plunged in foam, rose, and with splendid energy struck out for the canoes.
Briggs leaned across the rail, as if no war-fleet had been lying in easy shot; and with hard fingers tugging at his big, black beard, watched the swimming girl, her lithe, yellow body gleaming through the water. Watched, too, the swift cutting of the sharks’ fins toward her—the darting, black forms—the grim tragedy in that sudden, reddening whip of brine. Then he laughed, his teeth gleaming like wolves’ teeth, as he heard her scream.
“Broke her silence at last, eh?” he sneered. “They got a yell out of the she-dog, the sharks did, even if I couldn’t—eh?”
Along the rail, hard-bitten as the clipper’s men were, oaths broke out, and mutterings. Work slackened at the capstan, and for the moment the guards forgot to drive their lathering slaves there.
“Great God, captain!” sounded the doctor’s voice, as he looked up from a wounded man. “You’ve murdered us all!”
Briggs only laughed again and looked to his pistol.
“They’re coming now, men,” said he coolly. To his ears the high and rising tumult from the flotilla made music. The lust of war was in him. For amoment he peered intently at the paddlemen once more bending to their work; the brandished krises and long spears; the spattering of bullets all along the water.
“Let ’em come!” he cried, laughing once more. “With hot lead and boiling water and cold steel, I reckon we’re ready for ’em. Steady’s the word, boys! They’re coming—give ’em hell!”
CHAPTER XIHOME BOUNDNoon witnessed a strange scene in the Straits of Motomolo, a scene of agony and death.Over the surface of the strait, inborne by the tide, extended a broad field of débris, of shattered planks, bamboos, platted sails.In mid-scene, sunk on Ulu Salama bar only a few fathoms from where theSilver Fleecehad lain, rested the dismantled wreck of the proa. The unpitying sun flooded that wreck—what was left of it after a powder-cask, fitted with fuse, had been hurled aboard by Captain Briggs himself. No living man remained aboard. On the high stern still projecting from the sea—the stern whence a thin waft of smoke still rose against the sky—a few broken, yellow bodies lay half consumed by fire, twisted and hideous.Of the small canoes, not one remained. Such as had not been capsized and broken up, had lamely paddled back to shore with the few Malays who had survived the guns and cutlasses and brimming kettles of seething water. Corpses lay awash. The sharks no longer quarreled for them. Full-fed on the finest of eating, they hardly snouted at the remnants of the feast.So much, then, for the enemy. And theSilver Fleece—what of her?A mile to seaward flying a few rags of canvas, the wounded clipper was limping on, under a little slant of wind that gave her hardly steerageway. Her kedge cable had been chopped, her mizzen-topmastwas down, and a raffle of spars, ropes and canvas littered her decks or had brought down the awnings, that smoldered where the fire-arrows had ignited them.Her deck-houses showed the splintering effects of rifle and cannon-fire. Here, there, lay empty pails and coppers that had held boiling water. Along the rails and lying distorted on deck, dead men and wounded—white, brown and yellow—were sprawling. And there were wounds and mutilations and dead men still locked in grapples eloquent of fury—a red shambles on the planks once so whitely holystoned.The litter of knives, krises, cutlasses and firearms told the story; told that some of the Malays had boarded theSilver Fleeceand that none of these had got away.The brassy noonday fervor, blazing from an unclouded sky, starkly revealed every detail. On the heavy air a mingled odor of smoke and blood drifted upward, as from a barbaric pyre to some unpitying and sanguinary god—perhaps already to the avenging god that old Dengan Jouga had called upon to curse the captain and his ship, “the Eyeless Face that waits above and laughs.”A doleful sound of groaning and cursing arose. Beside the windlass—deserted now, with part of the Malays dead and part under hatches—Gascar was feebly raising a hand to his bandaged head, as he lay there on his back. His eyes, open and staring, seemed to question the sun that cooked his bloodied face. A brown man, blind and aimless, was crawling on slippery red hands and knees, amidships; and as he crawled, he moaned monotonously. Two more, both white, were sitting with their backs against the deck-house. Neither spoke. One was past speech; the other, badly slashed about the shoulders, was gropingin his pockets for tobacco; and, finding none, was feebly cursing.Bevans, leaning against the taffrail, was binding his right forearm with strips torn from the shirt that hung on him in tatters. He was swearing mechanically, in a sing-song voice, as the blood seeped through each fresh turn of cotton.From the fo’c’s’le was issuing a confused sound. At the wheel stood a sailor, beside whom knelt the doctor. As this sailor grimly held the wheel, Filhiol was bandaging his thigh.“It’s the best I can do for you now, my man,” the doctor was saying. “Others need me worse than you do.”A laugh from the companionway jangled on this scene of agony. There stood Alpheus Briggs, smearing his bearded lips with his hirsute paw—for once again he had been at the liquor below. He blinked about him, set both fists on his hips, and then flung an oath of all-comprehensive execration at sea and sky and ship.“Well, anyhow, by the holy Jeremiah,” he cried, with another laugh of barbaric merriment, “I’ve taught those yellow devils one good lesson!”A shocking figure the captain made. All at once Prass came up from below and stood beside him. Mauled as Prass was, he seemed untouched by comparison with Briggs. The captain’s presence affronted heaven and earth, with its gross ugliness of rags and dirt and wounds, above which his savage spirit seemed to rise indifferent, as if such trifles as mutilations lay beneath notice.Across the captain’s brow a gash oozed redly into his eye, puffy, discolored. As he smeared his forehead, his arm knotted into hard bunches. His hairy breast was slit with slashes, too; his mop of beard hadstiffened from a wound across his cheek. Nothing of his shirt remained, save a few tatters dangling from his tightly-drawn belt. His magnificent torso, muscled like an Atlas, was all grimed with sweat, blood, dirt. Save for his boots, nothing of his clothing remained intact; and the boots were sodden red.Now as he stood there, peering out with his one serviceable eye under a heavy, bushy brow, and chewing curses to himself, he looked a man, if one ever breathed, unbeaten and unbeatable.The captain’s voice gusted out raw and brutelike, along the shambles of the deck.“Hell of a thing, this is! And all along of a yellow wench. Devil roast all women! An’ devil take the rotten, cowardly crew! If I’d had that crew I went black-birding with up the Gold Coast, not one o’ those hounds would have boarded us. But they didn’t get the she-dog back, did they? It’s bad, bad, but might be worse, so help me!”Again he laughed, with white teeth gleaming in his reddened beard, and lurched out on deck. He peered about him. A brown body lay before him, face upward, with grinning teeth. Briggs recognized the turtle-egg seller, who had thrown the kris. With a foul oath he kicked the body.“Yougot paid off, anyhow,” he growled. “Now you and Scurlock can fight it out together, in hell!”He turned to the doctor, and limped along the deck.“Doctor Filhiol!”“Yes, sir?” answered the doctor, still busy with the man at the wheel.“Make a short job o’ that, and get to work on those two by the deck-house. We’ve got to muster all hands as quick as the Lord’ll let us—got to get sail on her, an’ away. These damned Malays will be worryin’ at our heels again, if we don’t.”“Yes, sir,” said Filhiol, curtly. He made the bandage fast, took his kit, and started forward. Briggs laid a detaining hand on his arm—a hand that left a broad red stain on the rolled-up sleeve.“Doctor,” said he, thickly, “we’ve got to stand together, now. There’s a scant half-dozen men, here, able to pull a rope; and with them we’ve got to make Singapore. Do your best, doctor—do your best!”“I will, sir. But that includes cutting off your rum!”The captain roared into boisterous laughter and slapped Filhiol on the back.“You’ll have to cut my throat first!” he ejaculated. “No, no; as long as I’ve got a gullet to swallow with, and the rum lasts, I’ll lay to it. Patch ’em up, doctor, an’ then—”“You could do with a bit of patching, yourself.”The captain waved him away.“Scratches!” he cried. “Let the sun dry ’em up!” He shoved the doctor forward, and followed him, kicking to right and left a ruck of weapons and débris. Together the men advanced, stumbling over bodies.“Patch those fellows up the best you can,” directed Briggs, gesturing at the pair by the deck-house. “One of ’em, anyhow, may be some good. We’ve got to save every man possible, now. Not that I love ’em, God knows,” he added, swaying slightly as he stood there, with his blood-stained hand upon the rail. “The yellow-bellied pups! We’ve got to save ’em. Though if this was Singapore, I’d let ’em rot. At Singapore, Lascars are plenty, and beach-combers you can get for a song a dozen. Get to work now, sir, get to work!”Life resumed something of order aboard theSilver Fleece, as she wore slowly down Motomolo Strait.The few Malays of the crew, who had survived the fight and had failed to make their escape with the retreating forces, were for the present kept locked in the deck-house. Briggs was taking no chances with another of the yellow dogs runningamok.The number of hands who mustered for service, including Briggs, Wansley and the doctor, was only nine. This remnant of a crew, as rapidly as weak and wounded flesh could compass it, spread canvas and cleaned ship. A grisly task that was, of sliding the remaining bodies over the rail and of sluicing down the reddened decks with buckets of warm seawater. More and more canvas filled—canvas cut and burned, yet still holding wind enough to drive the clipper. TheSilver Fleeceheeled gracefully and gathered way.Slowly the scene of battle drew astern, marked by the thin smoke still rising from the wreckage of the proa. Slowly the haze-shrouded line of shore grew dim. A crippled ship, bearing the dregs of a mutilated crew, she left the vague, blue headland of Columpo Point to starboard, and so—sorely broken but still alive—passed beyond all danger of pursuit.And as land faded, Captain Alpheus Briggs, drunk, blood-stained, swollen with malice and evil triumph, stood by the shattered taffrail, peering back at the vanishing scene of one more battle in a life that had been little save violence and sin. Freighted with fresh and heavy crimes he exulted, laughing in his blood-thick beard. The tropic sun beat down upon his face, bringing each wicked line to strong relief.“Score one more for me,” he sneered, his hairy fists clenched hard. “Hell’s got you now, witch-woman, an’ Scurlock an’ all the rest that went against me. But I’m still on deck! They don’t stick onme, curses don’t. And I’ll outlaugh that Eyeless Face—outlaughit, by God, and come again. And so to hell with that, too!”He folded steel-muscled arms across his bleeding, sweating chest, heaved a deep breath and gloried in his lawless strength.“To hell with that!” he spat, once more. “I win—I always win! To hell with everything that crosses me!”
HOME BOUND
Noon witnessed a strange scene in the Straits of Motomolo, a scene of agony and death.
Over the surface of the strait, inborne by the tide, extended a broad field of débris, of shattered planks, bamboos, platted sails.
In mid-scene, sunk on Ulu Salama bar only a few fathoms from where theSilver Fleecehad lain, rested the dismantled wreck of the proa. The unpitying sun flooded that wreck—what was left of it after a powder-cask, fitted with fuse, had been hurled aboard by Captain Briggs himself. No living man remained aboard. On the high stern still projecting from the sea—the stern whence a thin waft of smoke still rose against the sky—a few broken, yellow bodies lay half consumed by fire, twisted and hideous.
Of the small canoes, not one remained. Such as had not been capsized and broken up, had lamely paddled back to shore with the few Malays who had survived the guns and cutlasses and brimming kettles of seething water. Corpses lay awash. The sharks no longer quarreled for them. Full-fed on the finest of eating, they hardly snouted at the remnants of the feast.
So much, then, for the enemy. And theSilver Fleece—what of her?
A mile to seaward flying a few rags of canvas, the wounded clipper was limping on, under a little slant of wind that gave her hardly steerageway. Her kedge cable had been chopped, her mizzen-topmastwas down, and a raffle of spars, ropes and canvas littered her decks or had brought down the awnings, that smoldered where the fire-arrows had ignited them.
Her deck-houses showed the splintering effects of rifle and cannon-fire. Here, there, lay empty pails and coppers that had held boiling water. Along the rails and lying distorted on deck, dead men and wounded—white, brown and yellow—were sprawling. And there were wounds and mutilations and dead men still locked in grapples eloquent of fury—a red shambles on the planks once so whitely holystoned.
The litter of knives, krises, cutlasses and firearms told the story; told that some of the Malays had boarded theSilver Fleeceand that none of these had got away.
The brassy noonday fervor, blazing from an unclouded sky, starkly revealed every detail. On the heavy air a mingled odor of smoke and blood drifted upward, as from a barbaric pyre to some unpitying and sanguinary god—perhaps already to the avenging god that old Dengan Jouga had called upon to curse the captain and his ship, “the Eyeless Face that waits above and laughs.”
A doleful sound of groaning and cursing arose. Beside the windlass—deserted now, with part of the Malays dead and part under hatches—Gascar was feebly raising a hand to his bandaged head, as he lay there on his back. His eyes, open and staring, seemed to question the sun that cooked his bloodied face. A brown man, blind and aimless, was crawling on slippery red hands and knees, amidships; and as he crawled, he moaned monotonously. Two more, both white, were sitting with their backs against the deck-house. Neither spoke. One was past speech; the other, badly slashed about the shoulders, was gropingin his pockets for tobacco; and, finding none, was feebly cursing.
Bevans, leaning against the taffrail, was binding his right forearm with strips torn from the shirt that hung on him in tatters. He was swearing mechanically, in a sing-song voice, as the blood seeped through each fresh turn of cotton.
From the fo’c’s’le was issuing a confused sound. At the wheel stood a sailor, beside whom knelt the doctor. As this sailor grimly held the wheel, Filhiol was bandaging his thigh.
“It’s the best I can do for you now, my man,” the doctor was saying. “Others need me worse than you do.”
A laugh from the companionway jangled on this scene of agony. There stood Alpheus Briggs, smearing his bearded lips with his hirsute paw—for once again he had been at the liquor below. He blinked about him, set both fists on his hips, and then flung an oath of all-comprehensive execration at sea and sky and ship.
“Well, anyhow, by the holy Jeremiah,” he cried, with another laugh of barbaric merriment, “I’ve taught those yellow devils one good lesson!”
A shocking figure the captain made. All at once Prass came up from below and stood beside him. Mauled as Prass was, he seemed untouched by comparison with Briggs. The captain’s presence affronted heaven and earth, with its gross ugliness of rags and dirt and wounds, above which his savage spirit seemed to rise indifferent, as if such trifles as mutilations lay beneath notice.
Across the captain’s brow a gash oozed redly into his eye, puffy, discolored. As he smeared his forehead, his arm knotted into hard bunches. His hairy breast was slit with slashes, too; his mop of beard hadstiffened from a wound across his cheek. Nothing of his shirt remained, save a few tatters dangling from his tightly-drawn belt. His magnificent torso, muscled like an Atlas, was all grimed with sweat, blood, dirt. Save for his boots, nothing of his clothing remained intact; and the boots were sodden red.
Now as he stood there, peering out with his one serviceable eye under a heavy, bushy brow, and chewing curses to himself, he looked a man, if one ever breathed, unbeaten and unbeatable.
The captain’s voice gusted out raw and brutelike, along the shambles of the deck.
“Hell of a thing, this is! And all along of a yellow wench. Devil roast all women! An’ devil take the rotten, cowardly crew! If I’d had that crew I went black-birding with up the Gold Coast, not one o’ those hounds would have boarded us. But they didn’t get the she-dog back, did they? It’s bad, bad, but might be worse, so help me!”
Again he laughed, with white teeth gleaming in his reddened beard, and lurched out on deck. He peered about him. A brown body lay before him, face upward, with grinning teeth. Briggs recognized the turtle-egg seller, who had thrown the kris. With a foul oath he kicked the body.
“Yougot paid off, anyhow,” he growled. “Now you and Scurlock can fight it out together, in hell!”
He turned to the doctor, and limped along the deck.
“Doctor Filhiol!”
“Yes, sir?” answered the doctor, still busy with the man at the wheel.
“Make a short job o’ that, and get to work on those two by the deck-house. We’ve got to muster all hands as quick as the Lord’ll let us—got to get sail on her, an’ away. These damned Malays will be worryin’ at our heels again, if we don’t.”
“Yes, sir,” said Filhiol, curtly. He made the bandage fast, took his kit, and started forward. Briggs laid a detaining hand on his arm—a hand that left a broad red stain on the rolled-up sleeve.
“Doctor,” said he, thickly, “we’ve got to stand together, now. There’s a scant half-dozen men, here, able to pull a rope; and with them we’ve got to make Singapore. Do your best, doctor—do your best!”
“I will, sir. But that includes cutting off your rum!”
The captain roared into boisterous laughter and slapped Filhiol on the back.
“You’ll have to cut my throat first!” he ejaculated. “No, no; as long as I’ve got a gullet to swallow with, and the rum lasts, I’ll lay to it. Patch ’em up, doctor, an’ then—”
“You could do with a bit of patching, yourself.”
The captain waved him away.
“Scratches!” he cried. “Let the sun dry ’em up!” He shoved the doctor forward, and followed him, kicking to right and left a ruck of weapons and débris. Together the men advanced, stumbling over bodies.
“Patch those fellows up the best you can,” directed Briggs, gesturing at the pair by the deck-house. “One of ’em, anyhow, may be some good. We’ve got to save every man possible, now. Not that I love ’em, God knows,” he added, swaying slightly as he stood there, with his blood-stained hand upon the rail. “The yellow-bellied pups! We’ve got to save ’em. Though if this was Singapore, I’d let ’em rot. At Singapore, Lascars are plenty, and beach-combers you can get for a song a dozen. Get to work now, sir, get to work!”
Life resumed something of order aboard theSilver Fleece, as she wore slowly down Motomolo Strait.The few Malays of the crew, who had survived the fight and had failed to make their escape with the retreating forces, were for the present kept locked in the deck-house. Briggs was taking no chances with another of the yellow dogs runningamok.
The number of hands who mustered for service, including Briggs, Wansley and the doctor, was only nine. This remnant of a crew, as rapidly as weak and wounded flesh could compass it, spread canvas and cleaned ship. A grisly task that was, of sliding the remaining bodies over the rail and of sluicing down the reddened decks with buckets of warm seawater. More and more canvas filled—canvas cut and burned, yet still holding wind enough to drive the clipper. TheSilver Fleeceheeled gracefully and gathered way.
Slowly the scene of battle drew astern, marked by the thin smoke still rising from the wreckage of the proa. Slowly the haze-shrouded line of shore grew dim. A crippled ship, bearing the dregs of a mutilated crew, she left the vague, blue headland of Columpo Point to starboard, and so—sorely broken but still alive—passed beyond all danger of pursuit.
And as land faded, Captain Alpheus Briggs, drunk, blood-stained, swollen with malice and evil triumph, stood by the shattered taffrail, peering back at the vanishing scene of one more battle in a life that had been little save violence and sin. Freighted with fresh and heavy crimes he exulted, laughing in his blood-thick beard. The tropic sun beat down upon his face, bringing each wicked line to strong relief.
“Score one more for me,” he sneered, his hairy fists clenched hard. “Hell’s got you now, witch-woman, an’ Scurlock an’ all the rest that went against me. But I’m still on deck! They don’t stick onme, curses don’t. And I’ll outlaugh that Eyeless Face—outlaughit, by God, and come again. And so to hell with that, too!”
He folded steel-muscled arms across his bleeding, sweating chest, heaved a deep breath and gloried in his lawless strength.
“To hell with that!” he spat, once more. “I win—I always win! To hell with everything that crosses me!”
CHAPTER XIIAT LONG WHARFFour months from that red morning, theSilver Fleecedrew in past Nix’s Mate and the low-buttressed islands in Boston Harbor, and with a tug to ease her to her berth, made fast at Long Wharf.All signs of the battle had long since been obliterated, overlaid by other hardships, violences, evil deeds. Her bottom fouled by tropic weed and barnacles that had accumulated in West Indian waters, her canvas brown and patched, she came to rest. Of all the white men who had sailed with her, nearly two years before, now remained only Captain Briggs, Mr. Wansley, and the doctor. The others who had escaped the fight had all died or deserted on the home-bound journey. One had been caught by bubonic at Bombay, and two by beri-beri at Mowanga, on the Ivory Coast; the others had taken French leave as occasion had permitted.Short-handed, with a rag-tag crew, theFleecemade her berth. She seemed innocent enough. The sickening stench of the slave cargo that had burdened her from Mowanga to Cuba had been fumigated out of her, and now she appeared only a legitimate trader. That she bore, deftly hidden in secret places, a hundred boxes of raw opium, who could have suspected?As the hawsers were flung and the clipper creaked against the wharf, there came to an end surely one of the worst voyages that ever an American clipper-ship made. And this is saying a great deal. Thosewere hard days—days when Massachusetts ships carried full cargoes of Medford rum and Bibles to the West Coast, and came back as slavers, with black ivory groaning and dying under hatches—days when the sharks trailed all across the Atlantic, for the bodies of black men and women—hard days and evil ways, indeed.Very spruce and fine was Captain Briggs; very much content with life and with the strength that in him lay, that excellent May morning, as with firm stride and clear eye he walked up State Street, in Boston Town. The wounds which would have killed a weaker man had long since healed on him. Up from the water-front he walked, resplendent in his best blue suit, and with a gold-braided cap on his crisp hair. His black beard was carefully trimmed and combed; his bronzed, full-fleshed face glowed with health and satisfaction; and the smoke of his cigar drifted behind him on the morning air. As he went he hummed an ancient chantey:“Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,Awa-a-ay, my rollin’ river!Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,Ah! Ah! We’re bound with awa-a-ay,’Cross the wide Missouri!”Past the ship-chandlers’ stores, where all manner of sea things lay in the windows, he made his way, and past the marine brokers’ offices; past the custom-house and up along the Old State House; and so he came into Court Street and Court Square, hard by which, in a narrow, cobbled lane, the Bell-in-Hand Tavern was awaiting him.All the way along, shipmasters and seafaring folk nodded respectfully to Alpheus Briggs, or touched their hats to him. But few men smiled. His reputationof hard blows and harder dealings made men salute him. But no man seized him by the hand, or haled him into any public house to toast his safe return.Under the dark doorway of the Bell-in-Hand—under the crude, wooden fist that from colonial times, as even to-day, has held the gilded, wooden bell—Briggs paused a moment, then entered the inn. His huge bulk seemed almost to fill the dim, smoky, low-posted old place, its walls behung with colored woodcuts of ships and with fine old sporting prints. The captain raised a hand of greeting to Enoch Winch, the publican, passed the time of day with him, and called for a pewter of Four-X, to be served in the back room.There he sat down in the half-gloom that seeped through the little windows of heavily leaded bull’s-eye glass. He put his cap off, drew deeply at his cigar, and sighed with vast content.“Back home again,” he murmured. “A hell of a time I’ve had, and that’s no lie. But I’m back home at last!”His satisfaction was doubled by the arrival of the pewter of ale. Briggs drank deeply of the cold brew, then dried his beard with a handkerchief of purple silk. Not now did he smear his mouth with his hand. This was a wholly other and more elegant Alpheus Briggs. Having changed his latitude and raiment, he had likewise changed his manners.He drained the pewter till light showed through the glass bottom—the bottom reminiscent of old days when to accept a shilling from a recruiting officer, even unaware, meant being pressed into the service; for a shilling in an empty mug was held as proof of enlistment, unless instantly detected and denied. Briggs smiled at memory of the trick.“Clumsy stratagem,” he pondered, “We’re a bit slicker, to-day. In the old days it took time to make a fortune. Now, a little boldness turns the trick, just as I’ve turned it, this time!”He rapped on the table for another pewter of Four-X. Stronger liquors would better have suited his taste, but he had certain business still to be carried out, and when ashore the captain never let drink take precedence of business.The second pewter put Captain Briggs in a reminiscent mood, wherein memories of the stirring events of the voyage just ended mingled with the comforting knowledge that he had much money in pocket and that still more was bound to come, before that day’s end. As in a kind of mental mirage, scenes arose before him—scenes of hardship and crime, now in security by no means displeasing to recall.The affair with the Malay war fleet had already been half-obliterated by more recent violences. Briggs pondered on the sudden mutiny that had broken out, ten days from Bombay, led by a Liverpool ruffian named Quigley, who had tried to brain him with a piece of iron in a sock. Briggs had simply flung him into the sea; then he had faced the others with naked fists, and they had slunk away forward.He and Wansley had later lashed them to the gangway and had given them the cat to exhaustion. Briggs felt that he had come out of this affair with honors. He took another draught of ale.Beating up the West Coast, he recalled how he had punished a young Irishman, McCune, whom he had shipped at Cape Town. McCune, from the supposed security of the foretop-gallant yard, had cursed him for a black-hearted bucko. Without parley, Briggs had run up the ratlines, and had flung McCune to the deck. The man had lived only a few minutes.Briggs nodded with satisfaction. He clenched his right fist, hairy, corded, and turned it this way and that, glad of its power. Greatly did he admire the resistless argument that lay in all its bones and ligaments.“There’s no man can talk back tome!” he growled. “No, by the Judas priest!”Now came less pleasing recollections. The slave cargo on the west-bound voyage had been unusually heavy. Ironed wrist and ankle, the blacks—men, women, children, purchased as a rather poor bargain lot from an Arab trader—had lain packed in the hold. They had been half starved when Briggs had loaded them, and the fever had already got among them. The percentage of loss had been a bit too heavy. Some death was legitimate, of course; but an excessive mortality meant loss.The death rate had risen so high that Briggs had even considered bringing some of the black ivory on deck, and increasing the ration. But in the end he had decided to hold through, and trust luck to arrive in Cuba with enough slaves to pay a good margin. Results had justified his decision.“I was right about that, too,” thought he. “Seems like I’m always right—or else it’s gilt-edged luck!”Yet, in spite of all, that voyage had left some disagreeable memories. The reek and stifle of the hold, the groaning and crying of the blacks—that no amount of punishment could silence—had vastly annoyed the captain. The way in which his crew had stricken the shackles from the dead and from those manifestly marked for death and had heaved them overboard to the trailing sharks, had been only a trivial detail.But the fact that Briggs’s own cabin had been invadedby vermin and by noxious odors had greatly annoyed the captain. Not all Doctor Filhiol’s burning of pungent substances in the cabin had been able to purify the air. Briggs had cursed the fact that this most profitable trafficking had involved such disagreeable concomitants, and had consoled himself with much strong drink.Then, too, a five-day blow, three hundred miles west of the Cape Verdes, had killed off more than forty of his negroes and had made conditions doubly intolerable. Once more he formulated thoughts in words:“Damn it! I might have done better to have scuttled her, off the African coast, and have drawn down my share of the insurance money. If I’d known what I was running into, that’s just what Iwouldhave done, so help me! I made a devilish good thing of it, that way, in the oldWhite Cloudtwo years ago. And never was so much as questioned!”He pondered a moment, frowning blackly.“Maybe I did wrong, after all, to bring theFleeceinto port. But if I hadn’t, I’d have had to sacrifice those hundred boxes of opium, that will bring me a clear two hundred apiece, from Hendricks. So after all, it’s all right. I’m satisfied.”He drained the last of the Four-X, and carefully inspected his watch.“Ten-fifteen,” said he. “And I’m to meet Hendricks at ten-thirty at the Tremont House. I’ll hoist anchor and away.”He paid his score with scrupulous exactness, for in such matters he greatly prided himself on his honesty, lighted a fresh cigar, and departed from the Bell-in-Hand.Cigar in mouth, smoke trailing on the May morning,he made his way to School Street and up it. A fine figure of a mariner he strode along, erect, deep-chested, thewed and sinewed like a bull.In under the columned portals of the old Tremont House—now long since only a memory—he entered, to his rendezvous with Hendricks, furtive buyer of the forbidden drug.And as he vanishes beneath that granite doorway, for fifty years he passes from our sight.
AT LONG WHARF
Four months from that red morning, theSilver Fleecedrew in past Nix’s Mate and the low-buttressed islands in Boston Harbor, and with a tug to ease her to her berth, made fast at Long Wharf.
All signs of the battle had long since been obliterated, overlaid by other hardships, violences, evil deeds. Her bottom fouled by tropic weed and barnacles that had accumulated in West Indian waters, her canvas brown and patched, she came to rest. Of all the white men who had sailed with her, nearly two years before, now remained only Captain Briggs, Mr. Wansley, and the doctor. The others who had escaped the fight had all died or deserted on the home-bound journey. One had been caught by bubonic at Bombay, and two by beri-beri at Mowanga, on the Ivory Coast; the others had taken French leave as occasion had permitted.
Short-handed, with a rag-tag crew, theFleecemade her berth. She seemed innocent enough. The sickening stench of the slave cargo that had burdened her from Mowanga to Cuba had been fumigated out of her, and now she appeared only a legitimate trader. That she bore, deftly hidden in secret places, a hundred boxes of raw opium, who could have suspected?
As the hawsers were flung and the clipper creaked against the wharf, there came to an end surely one of the worst voyages that ever an American clipper-ship made. And this is saying a great deal. Thosewere hard days—days when Massachusetts ships carried full cargoes of Medford rum and Bibles to the West Coast, and came back as slavers, with black ivory groaning and dying under hatches—days when the sharks trailed all across the Atlantic, for the bodies of black men and women—hard days and evil ways, indeed.
Very spruce and fine was Captain Briggs; very much content with life and with the strength that in him lay, that excellent May morning, as with firm stride and clear eye he walked up State Street, in Boston Town. The wounds which would have killed a weaker man had long since healed on him. Up from the water-front he walked, resplendent in his best blue suit, and with a gold-braided cap on his crisp hair. His black beard was carefully trimmed and combed; his bronzed, full-fleshed face glowed with health and satisfaction; and the smoke of his cigar drifted behind him on the morning air. As he went he hummed an ancient chantey:
“Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,Awa-a-ay, my rollin’ river!Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,Ah! Ah! We’re bound with awa-a-ay,’Cross the wide Missouri!”
Past the ship-chandlers’ stores, where all manner of sea things lay in the windows, he made his way, and past the marine brokers’ offices; past the custom-house and up along the Old State House; and so he came into Court Street and Court Square, hard by which, in a narrow, cobbled lane, the Bell-in-Hand Tavern was awaiting him.
All the way along, shipmasters and seafaring folk nodded respectfully to Alpheus Briggs, or touched their hats to him. But few men smiled. His reputationof hard blows and harder dealings made men salute him. But no man seized him by the hand, or haled him into any public house to toast his safe return.
Under the dark doorway of the Bell-in-Hand—under the crude, wooden fist that from colonial times, as even to-day, has held the gilded, wooden bell—Briggs paused a moment, then entered the inn. His huge bulk seemed almost to fill the dim, smoky, low-posted old place, its walls behung with colored woodcuts of ships and with fine old sporting prints. The captain raised a hand of greeting to Enoch Winch, the publican, passed the time of day with him, and called for a pewter of Four-X, to be served in the back room.
There he sat down in the half-gloom that seeped through the little windows of heavily leaded bull’s-eye glass. He put his cap off, drew deeply at his cigar, and sighed with vast content.
“Back home again,” he murmured. “A hell of a time I’ve had, and that’s no lie. But I’m back home at last!”
His satisfaction was doubled by the arrival of the pewter of ale. Briggs drank deeply of the cold brew, then dried his beard with a handkerchief of purple silk. Not now did he smear his mouth with his hand. This was a wholly other and more elegant Alpheus Briggs. Having changed his latitude and raiment, he had likewise changed his manners.
He drained the pewter till light showed through the glass bottom—the bottom reminiscent of old days when to accept a shilling from a recruiting officer, even unaware, meant being pressed into the service; for a shilling in an empty mug was held as proof of enlistment, unless instantly detected and denied. Briggs smiled at memory of the trick.
“Clumsy stratagem,” he pondered, “We’re a bit slicker, to-day. In the old days it took time to make a fortune. Now, a little boldness turns the trick, just as I’ve turned it, this time!”
He rapped on the table for another pewter of Four-X. Stronger liquors would better have suited his taste, but he had certain business still to be carried out, and when ashore the captain never let drink take precedence of business.
The second pewter put Captain Briggs in a reminiscent mood, wherein memories of the stirring events of the voyage just ended mingled with the comforting knowledge that he had much money in pocket and that still more was bound to come, before that day’s end. As in a kind of mental mirage, scenes arose before him—scenes of hardship and crime, now in security by no means displeasing to recall.
The affair with the Malay war fleet had already been half-obliterated by more recent violences. Briggs pondered on the sudden mutiny that had broken out, ten days from Bombay, led by a Liverpool ruffian named Quigley, who had tried to brain him with a piece of iron in a sock. Briggs had simply flung him into the sea; then he had faced the others with naked fists, and they had slunk away forward.
He and Wansley had later lashed them to the gangway and had given them the cat to exhaustion. Briggs felt that he had come out of this affair with honors. He took another draught of ale.
Beating up the West Coast, he recalled how he had punished a young Irishman, McCune, whom he had shipped at Cape Town. McCune, from the supposed security of the foretop-gallant yard, had cursed him for a black-hearted bucko. Without parley, Briggs had run up the ratlines, and had flung McCune to the deck. The man had lived only a few minutes.Briggs nodded with satisfaction. He clenched his right fist, hairy, corded, and turned it this way and that, glad of its power. Greatly did he admire the resistless argument that lay in all its bones and ligaments.
“There’s no man can talk back tome!” he growled. “No, by the Judas priest!”
Now came less pleasing recollections. The slave cargo on the west-bound voyage had been unusually heavy. Ironed wrist and ankle, the blacks—men, women, children, purchased as a rather poor bargain lot from an Arab trader—had lain packed in the hold. They had been half starved when Briggs had loaded them, and the fever had already got among them. The percentage of loss had been a bit too heavy. Some death was legitimate, of course; but an excessive mortality meant loss.
The death rate had risen so high that Briggs had even considered bringing some of the black ivory on deck, and increasing the ration. But in the end he had decided to hold through, and trust luck to arrive in Cuba with enough slaves to pay a good margin. Results had justified his decision.
“I was right about that, too,” thought he. “Seems like I’m always right—or else it’s gilt-edged luck!”
Yet, in spite of all, that voyage had left some disagreeable memories. The reek and stifle of the hold, the groaning and crying of the blacks—that no amount of punishment could silence—had vastly annoyed the captain. The way in which his crew had stricken the shackles from the dead and from those manifestly marked for death and had heaved them overboard to the trailing sharks, had been only a trivial detail.
But the fact that Briggs’s own cabin had been invadedby vermin and by noxious odors had greatly annoyed the captain. Not all Doctor Filhiol’s burning of pungent substances in the cabin had been able to purify the air. Briggs had cursed the fact that this most profitable trafficking had involved such disagreeable concomitants, and had consoled himself with much strong drink.
Then, too, a five-day blow, three hundred miles west of the Cape Verdes, had killed off more than forty of his negroes and had made conditions doubly intolerable. Once more he formulated thoughts in words:
“Damn it! I might have done better to have scuttled her, off the African coast, and have drawn down my share of the insurance money. If I’d known what I was running into, that’s just what Iwouldhave done, so help me! I made a devilish good thing of it, that way, in the oldWhite Cloudtwo years ago. And never was so much as questioned!”
He pondered a moment, frowning blackly.
“Maybe I did wrong, after all, to bring theFleeceinto port. But if I hadn’t, I’d have had to sacrifice those hundred boxes of opium, that will bring me a clear two hundred apiece, from Hendricks. So after all, it’s all right. I’m satisfied.”
He drained the last of the Four-X, and carefully inspected his watch.
“Ten-fifteen,” said he. “And I’m to meet Hendricks at ten-thirty at the Tremont House. I’ll hoist anchor and away.”
He paid his score with scrupulous exactness, for in such matters he greatly prided himself on his honesty, lighted a fresh cigar, and departed from the Bell-in-Hand.
Cigar in mouth, smoke trailing on the May morning,he made his way to School Street and up it. A fine figure of a mariner he strode along, erect, deep-chested, thewed and sinewed like a bull.
In under the columned portals of the old Tremont House—now long since only a memory—he entered, to his rendezvous with Hendricks, furtive buyer of the forbidden drug.
And as he vanishes beneath that granite doorway, for fifty years he passes from our sight.
CHAPTER XIIIAFTER FIFTY YEARSIf you will add into one total all that is sunniest and most sheltered, all that hangs heaviest with the perfume of old-fashioned New England gardens, all that most cozily combines in an old-time sailor’s home, you will form a picture of Snug Haven, demesne of Captain Alpheus Briggs, long years retired.Snug Haven, with gray-shingled walls, with massive chimney stacks projecting from its weather-beaten, gambreled roof, seemed to epitomize rest after labor, peace after strife.From its broad piazza, with morning-glory-covered pillars, a splendid view opened of sea and shore and foam-ringed islets in the harbor of South Endicutt—a view commanding kelp-strewn foreshore, rock-buttressed headlands, sun-spangled cobalt of the bay; and then the white, far tower of Truxbury Light, and then the hazed and brooding mystery of open Atlantic.Behind the cottage rose Croft Hill, sweet with ferns, with bayberries and wild roses crowding in among the lichen-crusted boulders and ribbed ledges, where gnarly, ancient apple-trees and silver birches clung. Atop the hill, a wall of mossy stones divided the living from the dead; for there the cemetery lay, its simple monuments and old, gray headstones of carven slate bearing some family names that have loomed big in history.Along the prim box-hedge of Captain Briggs’s front garden, the village street extended. Wandering irregularlywith the broken shore line, it led past time-grayed dwellings, past the schoolhouse and the white, square-steepled church, to the lobstermen’s huts, the storehouses and wharves, interspersed with “fish-flakes” that blent pungent marine odors with the fresh tang of the sea.Old Mother Nature did her best, all along that street and in the captain’s garden, to soften those sometimes insistent odors, with her own perfumes of asters and petunias, nasturtiums, dahlias, sweet fern, and fresh, revivifying caresses of poplar, elm and pine, of sumac, buttonwood and willow.With certain westerly breezes—breezes that bore to Snug Haven the sad, slow chant of the whistling buoy on Graves Shoal and the tolling of the bell buoy on the Shallows—oakum and tar, pitch, salt and fish had the best of it in South Endicutt. But with a shift to landward, apple-tree, mignonette and phlox and other blooms marshalled victorious essences; and the little village by the lip of the sea grew sweet and warm as the breast of a young girl who dreams.The afternoon on which Captain Alpheus Briggs once more comes to our sight—the 24th of June, 1918—was just one of those drowsy, perfumed afternoons, when the long roar of the breakers over Dry Shingle Reef seemed part of the secrets the breeze was whispering among the pine needles on Croft Hill, and when the droning of the captain’s bees, among his spotted tiger-lilies, his sweet peas, cannas and hydrangeas, seemed conspiring with the sun-drenched warmth of the old-fashioned garden to lull man’s spirit into rest and soothe life’s fever with nepenthe.Basking in the sunlight of his piazza, at ease in a broad-armed rocker by a wicker table, the old captain appeared mightily content with life. Beside him lay a wiry-haired Airedale, seemingly asleep yet with oneeye ready to cock open at the captain’s slightest move. A blue cap, gold-braided, hung atop one of the uprights of the rocking-chair; the captain’s bushy hair, still thick, though now spun silver, contrasted with his deep-lined face, tanned brown. Glad expectancy showed in his deep-set eyes, clear blue as they had been full fifty years ago, eyes under bushy brows that, once black, now matched the silver of his hair.White, too, his beard had grown. Once in a while he stroked it, nervously, with a strong, corded hand that seemed, as his whole, square-knit body seemed, almost as vigorous as in the long ago—the half-forgotten, wholly repented long ago of violence and evil ways. Not yet had senility laid its clutch upon Alpheus Briggs. Wrinkles had come, and a certain stooping of the powerful shoulders; but the old captain’s blue coat with its brass buttons still covered a body of iron strength.The telescope across his knees was no more trim than he. Carefully tended beard, well-brushed coat and polished boots all proclaimed Alpheus Briggs a proud old man. Though the soul of him had utterly changed, still Captain Briggs held true to type. In him no laxity inhered, no falling away from the strict tenets of shipshape neatness.The captain appeared to be waiting for something. Once in a while he raised the telescope and directed it toward the far blue sheet of the outer harbor, where the headland of Pigeon Cliff thrust itself against the gray-green of the ship channel, swimming in a distant set of haze. Eagerly he explored the prospect, letting his glass rest on white lines of gulls that covered the tide-bars, on the whiter lines of foam over the reef, on the catboats and dories, the rusty coasting steamers and clumsy coal-barges near or far away. With care he sought among the tawny sails; and as each schoonertacked, its canvas now sunlit, now umber in shade, the captain’s gaze seemed questioning: “Are you the craft I seek?”The answer came always negative. With patience, Captain Briggs lowered his glass again and resumed his vigil.“No use getting uneasy,” said he, at last; and brought out pipe and tobacco from the pocket of his square-cut jacket. “It won’t bring him a bit sooner. He wrote me he’d be here sometime to-day, and that means he surely will be. He’s a Briggs. What he says he’ll do hewilldo. No Briggs ever breaks a promise, and Hal is all clear Briggs, from truck to keelson!”Waiting, pondering, the old man let his eyes wander over the Snug Haven of his last years; the place where he could keep contact with sunshine and seashine, with the salt breeze and the bite of old ocean, yet where comfort and peace profound could all be his.A pleasant domain it was, and in all its arrangements eloquent of the old captain. There life had been very kind to him, and there his darkest moments of bereavement had been fought through, survived. Thither, more than five-and-forty years ago, he had brought the young wife whose love had turned his heart from evil ways and set his feet upon the better path from which, nearly half a century, they had not strayed.In the upper front room his only son, Edward, had been born; and from the door, close at hand, he had followed the coffins that had taken away from him the three beings about whom, successively, the tendrils of his affection had clung.First, the hand of death had closed upon his wife; but, profound as that loss had been, it had left to him his son. In this same house, that son had grown tomanhood, and had himself taken a wife; and so for a few years there had been happiness again.But not for long. The birth of Hal, the old man’s grandson, had cost the life of Hal’s mother, a daughter-in-law whom Captain Briggs had loved like his own flesh and blood; and, two years after, tragedy had once more entered Snug Haven. Edward Briggs, on his first voyage as master of a ship—a granite-schooner, between Rockport and Boston—had fallen victim of a breaking derrick-rope. The granite lintel that had crushed the body of the old captain’s son had fallen also upon the captain’s heart. Long after the grass had grown upon that third grave in the Briggs burial lot, up there on the hill overlooking the shining harbor, the old man had lived as in a dream.Then, gradually, the fingers of little Hal, fumbling at the latchets of the old man’s heart, had in some miraculous way of their own that only childish fingers possess, opened that crushed and broken doorway; and Hal had entered in, and once more life had smiled upon the captain.After even the last leaves of autumn have fallen, sometimes wonderful days still for a little while warm the dying world and make men glad. Thus, with the captain. He had seemed to lose everything; and yet, after all, Indian summer still had waited for him. In the declining years, Hal had become his sunshine and his warmth, once more to expand his soul, once more to bid him love. And he had loved, completely, blindly, concentrating upon the boy, the last remaining hope of his family, an affection so intense that more than once the child, hurt by the fierce grip of the old man’s arms, had cried aloud in pain and fright. Whereat the captain, swiftly penitent, had kissed and fondled him, sung brave sea chanteys to him, taught him wondrous miracles of splicing andweaving, or had fashioned boats and little guns, and so had brought young Hal to worship him as a child will when a man comes to his plane and is another, larger child with him.Life would have ceased to hold any purpose or meaning for the captain, had it not been for Hal. The boy, wonderfully strong, had soon begun to absorb so much of the captain’s affection that the wounds in his heart had ceased to bleed, and that his pain had given place to a kind of dumb acquiescence. And after the shock of the final loss had somewhat passed life had taken root again, in Snug Haven.Hal had thriven mightily in the sea air. Body and mind, he had developed at a wonderful pace. He had soon grown so handsome that even his occasional childish fits of temper—quite extraordinary fits, of strange violence, though brief—had been forgiven by every one. He had needed but to smile to be absolved.Life had been, for the boy, all “a wonder and a wild desire.” The shadow of death had not been able to darken it. Before very long he had come to care little for any human relationship save with his grandfather. But the captain, proud of race, had often spoken to him of his father and his mother, or, leading Hal by the hand, had trudged up the well-worn path to the cemetery on the hill, to show the boy the well-kept graves.So Hal had grown up. Shore and sea and sky had all combined to develop him. School and play, and all the wonders of cliff, beach, tide, and storm, of dories, nets, tackle, ships, and sea-things had filled both mind and body with unusual vigor.The captain had told Hal endless tales of travel, had taught him an infinite number of sea-marvels. Before Hal had reached ten years, he had come to know every rope and spar of many rigs.At twelve, he had built a dory; and, two years later with the captain’s help, a catboat, in which he and the old man had sailed in all weathers. If there were any tricks of navigation that the boy did not learn, or anything about the mysterious doings of the sea, it was only because the captain himself fell short of complete knowledge.In everything the captain had indulged him. Yet even though he had never inflicted punishment, and even though young Hal had grown up to have pretty much his own way, the captain had denied spoiling him.“Only poor material will spoil,” he had always said. “You can’t spoil the genuine, thoroughbred stuff. No, nor break it, either. I know what I’m doing. Whose business is it, but my own?”Sharing a thousand interests in common with Hal, the captain’s love and hope had burned ever higher and more steadily. As the violent and grief-stricken past had faded gradually into a vague melancholy, the future had seemed beckoning with ever clearer cheer. The captain had come to have dreams of some day seeing Hal master of the biggest ship afloat. He had formed a hundred plans and dreamed a thousand dreams, all more or less enwoven with the sea. And though Hal, when he had finished school and had entered college, had begun to show strange aptitude for languages—especially the Oriental tongues—still the old man had never quite abandoned hope that some day the grandson might stand as captain on the bridge of a tall liner.For many years another influence had had its part in molding Hal—the influence of Ezra Trefethen, whereof now a word or two. Ezra, good soul, had lived at Snug Haven ever since Hal’s birth, less as a servant than as a member of the household. Once hehad cooked for the captain, on a voyage out to Japan. His simple philosophy and loyalty, as well as his exceeding skill with saucepans, had greatly attached the captain to him—this being, you understand, in the period after the captain’s marriage had made of him another and a better man.When Hal’s mother had died, the captain had given Ezra dominion over the “galley” at Snug Haven, a dominion which had gradually extended itself to the whole house and garden, and even to the upbringing of the boy.Together, in a hit-or-miss way that had scandalized the good wives of South Endicutt, Briggs and Trefethen had reared little Hal. The captain had given no heed to hints that he needed a house-keeper or a second wife. Trefethen had been a powerful helper with the boy. Deft with the needle, he had sewed for Hal. He had taught him to keep his little room—his little “first mate’s cabin,” as he had always called it—very shipshape. And he had taught him sea lore, too; and at times when the captain had been abroad on the great waters, had taken complete charge of the fast-growing lad.Thus the captain had been ever more and more warmly drawn towards Ezra. The simple old fellow had followed the body of the captain’s son up there to the grave on the hill, and had wept sincerely in the captain’s sorrow. Together, Briggs and Ezra had kept the cemetery lot in order. Evenings without number, after little Hal had been tucked into bed, the two ageing men had sat and smoked together.Almost as partners in a wondrous enterprise, they two had watched Hal grow. Ezra had been just as proud as the captain himself, when the sturdy, black-haired, blue-eyed boy had entered high school and had won his place at football and on the running-track.When “Hal” had become “Master Hal,” for him, on the boy’s entering college, the old servitor had come to look upon him with something of awe, for now Hal’s studies had lifted him beyond all possible understanding. Old Ezra had thrilled with pride as real and as proprietary as any Captain Briggs had felt.Thus, the belovèd idol of the two indulgent old sea-dogs, Hal had grown up.
AFTER FIFTY YEARS
If you will add into one total all that is sunniest and most sheltered, all that hangs heaviest with the perfume of old-fashioned New England gardens, all that most cozily combines in an old-time sailor’s home, you will form a picture of Snug Haven, demesne of Captain Alpheus Briggs, long years retired.
Snug Haven, with gray-shingled walls, with massive chimney stacks projecting from its weather-beaten, gambreled roof, seemed to epitomize rest after labor, peace after strife.
From its broad piazza, with morning-glory-covered pillars, a splendid view opened of sea and shore and foam-ringed islets in the harbor of South Endicutt—a view commanding kelp-strewn foreshore, rock-buttressed headlands, sun-spangled cobalt of the bay; and then the white, far tower of Truxbury Light, and then the hazed and brooding mystery of open Atlantic.
Behind the cottage rose Croft Hill, sweet with ferns, with bayberries and wild roses crowding in among the lichen-crusted boulders and ribbed ledges, where gnarly, ancient apple-trees and silver birches clung. Atop the hill, a wall of mossy stones divided the living from the dead; for there the cemetery lay, its simple monuments and old, gray headstones of carven slate bearing some family names that have loomed big in history.
Along the prim box-hedge of Captain Briggs’s front garden, the village street extended. Wandering irregularlywith the broken shore line, it led past time-grayed dwellings, past the schoolhouse and the white, square-steepled church, to the lobstermen’s huts, the storehouses and wharves, interspersed with “fish-flakes” that blent pungent marine odors with the fresh tang of the sea.
Old Mother Nature did her best, all along that street and in the captain’s garden, to soften those sometimes insistent odors, with her own perfumes of asters and petunias, nasturtiums, dahlias, sweet fern, and fresh, revivifying caresses of poplar, elm and pine, of sumac, buttonwood and willow.
With certain westerly breezes—breezes that bore to Snug Haven the sad, slow chant of the whistling buoy on Graves Shoal and the tolling of the bell buoy on the Shallows—oakum and tar, pitch, salt and fish had the best of it in South Endicutt. But with a shift to landward, apple-tree, mignonette and phlox and other blooms marshalled victorious essences; and the little village by the lip of the sea grew sweet and warm as the breast of a young girl who dreams.
The afternoon on which Captain Alpheus Briggs once more comes to our sight—the 24th of June, 1918—was just one of those drowsy, perfumed afternoons, when the long roar of the breakers over Dry Shingle Reef seemed part of the secrets the breeze was whispering among the pine needles on Croft Hill, and when the droning of the captain’s bees, among his spotted tiger-lilies, his sweet peas, cannas and hydrangeas, seemed conspiring with the sun-drenched warmth of the old-fashioned garden to lull man’s spirit into rest and soothe life’s fever with nepenthe.
Basking in the sunlight of his piazza, at ease in a broad-armed rocker by a wicker table, the old captain appeared mightily content with life. Beside him lay a wiry-haired Airedale, seemingly asleep yet with oneeye ready to cock open at the captain’s slightest move. A blue cap, gold-braided, hung atop one of the uprights of the rocking-chair; the captain’s bushy hair, still thick, though now spun silver, contrasted with his deep-lined face, tanned brown. Glad expectancy showed in his deep-set eyes, clear blue as they had been full fifty years ago, eyes under bushy brows that, once black, now matched the silver of his hair.
White, too, his beard had grown. Once in a while he stroked it, nervously, with a strong, corded hand that seemed, as his whole, square-knit body seemed, almost as vigorous as in the long ago—the half-forgotten, wholly repented long ago of violence and evil ways. Not yet had senility laid its clutch upon Alpheus Briggs. Wrinkles had come, and a certain stooping of the powerful shoulders; but the old captain’s blue coat with its brass buttons still covered a body of iron strength.
The telescope across his knees was no more trim than he. Carefully tended beard, well-brushed coat and polished boots all proclaimed Alpheus Briggs a proud old man. Though the soul of him had utterly changed, still Captain Briggs held true to type. In him no laxity inhered, no falling away from the strict tenets of shipshape neatness.
The captain appeared to be waiting for something. Once in a while he raised the telescope and directed it toward the far blue sheet of the outer harbor, where the headland of Pigeon Cliff thrust itself against the gray-green of the ship channel, swimming in a distant set of haze. Eagerly he explored the prospect, letting his glass rest on white lines of gulls that covered the tide-bars, on the whiter lines of foam over the reef, on the catboats and dories, the rusty coasting steamers and clumsy coal-barges near or far away. With care he sought among the tawny sails; and as each schoonertacked, its canvas now sunlit, now umber in shade, the captain’s gaze seemed questioning: “Are you the craft I seek?”
The answer came always negative. With patience, Captain Briggs lowered his glass again and resumed his vigil.
“No use getting uneasy,” said he, at last; and brought out pipe and tobacco from the pocket of his square-cut jacket. “It won’t bring him a bit sooner. He wrote me he’d be here sometime to-day, and that means he surely will be. He’s a Briggs. What he says he’ll do hewilldo. No Briggs ever breaks a promise, and Hal is all clear Briggs, from truck to keelson!”
Waiting, pondering, the old man let his eyes wander over the Snug Haven of his last years; the place where he could keep contact with sunshine and seashine, with the salt breeze and the bite of old ocean, yet where comfort and peace profound could all be his.
A pleasant domain it was, and in all its arrangements eloquent of the old captain. There life had been very kind to him, and there his darkest moments of bereavement had been fought through, survived. Thither, more than five-and-forty years ago, he had brought the young wife whose love had turned his heart from evil ways and set his feet upon the better path from which, nearly half a century, they had not strayed.
In the upper front room his only son, Edward, had been born; and from the door, close at hand, he had followed the coffins that had taken away from him the three beings about whom, successively, the tendrils of his affection had clung.
First, the hand of death had closed upon his wife; but, profound as that loss had been, it had left to him his son. In this same house, that son had grown tomanhood, and had himself taken a wife; and so for a few years there had been happiness again.
But not for long. The birth of Hal, the old man’s grandson, had cost the life of Hal’s mother, a daughter-in-law whom Captain Briggs had loved like his own flesh and blood; and, two years after, tragedy had once more entered Snug Haven. Edward Briggs, on his first voyage as master of a ship—a granite-schooner, between Rockport and Boston—had fallen victim of a breaking derrick-rope. The granite lintel that had crushed the body of the old captain’s son had fallen also upon the captain’s heart. Long after the grass had grown upon that third grave in the Briggs burial lot, up there on the hill overlooking the shining harbor, the old man had lived as in a dream.
Then, gradually, the fingers of little Hal, fumbling at the latchets of the old man’s heart, had in some miraculous way of their own that only childish fingers possess, opened that crushed and broken doorway; and Hal had entered in, and once more life had smiled upon the captain.
After even the last leaves of autumn have fallen, sometimes wonderful days still for a little while warm the dying world and make men glad. Thus, with the captain. He had seemed to lose everything; and yet, after all, Indian summer still had waited for him. In the declining years, Hal had become his sunshine and his warmth, once more to expand his soul, once more to bid him love. And he had loved, completely, blindly, concentrating upon the boy, the last remaining hope of his family, an affection so intense that more than once the child, hurt by the fierce grip of the old man’s arms, had cried aloud in pain and fright. Whereat the captain, swiftly penitent, had kissed and fondled him, sung brave sea chanteys to him, taught him wondrous miracles of splicing andweaving, or had fashioned boats and little guns, and so had brought young Hal to worship him as a child will when a man comes to his plane and is another, larger child with him.
Life would have ceased to hold any purpose or meaning for the captain, had it not been for Hal. The boy, wonderfully strong, had soon begun to absorb so much of the captain’s affection that the wounds in his heart had ceased to bleed, and that his pain had given place to a kind of dumb acquiescence. And after the shock of the final loss had somewhat passed life had taken root again, in Snug Haven.
Hal had thriven mightily in the sea air. Body and mind, he had developed at a wonderful pace. He had soon grown so handsome that even his occasional childish fits of temper—quite extraordinary fits, of strange violence, though brief—had been forgiven by every one. He had needed but to smile to be absolved.
Life had been, for the boy, all “a wonder and a wild desire.” The shadow of death had not been able to darken it. Before very long he had come to care little for any human relationship save with his grandfather. But the captain, proud of race, had often spoken to him of his father and his mother, or, leading Hal by the hand, had trudged up the well-worn path to the cemetery on the hill, to show the boy the well-kept graves.
So Hal had grown up. Shore and sea and sky had all combined to develop him. School and play, and all the wonders of cliff, beach, tide, and storm, of dories, nets, tackle, ships, and sea-things had filled both mind and body with unusual vigor.
The captain had told Hal endless tales of travel, had taught him an infinite number of sea-marvels. Before Hal had reached ten years, he had come to know every rope and spar of many rigs.
At twelve, he had built a dory; and, two years later with the captain’s help, a catboat, in which he and the old man had sailed in all weathers. If there were any tricks of navigation that the boy did not learn, or anything about the mysterious doings of the sea, it was only because the captain himself fell short of complete knowledge.
In everything the captain had indulged him. Yet even though he had never inflicted punishment, and even though young Hal had grown up to have pretty much his own way, the captain had denied spoiling him.
“Only poor material will spoil,” he had always said. “You can’t spoil the genuine, thoroughbred stuff. No, nor break it, either. I know what I’m doing. Whose business is it, but my own?”
Sharing a thousand interests in common with Hal, the captain’s love and hope had burned ever higher and more steadily. As the violent and grief-stricken past had faded gradually into a vague melancholy, the future had seemed beckoning with ever clearer cheer. The captain had come to have dreams of some day seeing Hal master of the biggest ship afloat. He had formed a hundred plans and dreamed a thousand dreams, all more or less enwoven with the sea. And though Hal, when he had finished school and had entered college, had begun to show strange aptitude for languages—especially the Oriental tongues—still the old man had never quite abandoned hope that some day the grandson might stand as captain on the bridge of a tall liner.
For many years another influence had had its part in molding Hal—the influence of Ezra Trefethen, whereof now a word or two. Ezra, good soul, had lived at Snug Haven ever since Hal’s birth, less as a servant than as a member of the household. Once hehad cooked for the captain, on a voyage out to Japan. His simple philosophy and loyalty, as well as his exceeding skill with saucepans, had greatly attached the captain to him—this being, you understand, in the period after the captain’s marriage had made of him another and a better man.
When Hal’s mother had died, the captain had given Ezra dominion over the “galley” at Snug Haven, a dominion which had gradually extended itself to the whole house and garden, and even to the upbringing of the boy.
Together, in a hit-or-miss way that had scandalized the good wives of South Endicutt, Briggs and Trefethen had reared little Hal. The captain had given no heed to hints that he needed a house-keeper or a second wife. Trefethen had been a powerful helper with the boy. Deft with the needle, he had sewed for Hal. He had taught him to keep his little room—his little “first mate’s cabin,” as he had always called it—very shipshape. And he had taught him sea lore, too; and at times when the captain had been abroad on the great waters, had taken complete charge of the fast-growing lad.
Thus the captain had been ever more and more warmly drawn towards Ezra. The simple old fellow had followed the body of the captain’s son up there to the grave on the hill, and had wept sincerely in the captain’s sorrow. Together, Briggs and Ezra had kept the cemetery lot in order. Evenings without number, after little Hal had been tucked into bed, the two ageing men had sat and smoked together.
Almost as partners in a wondrous enterprise, they two had watched Hal grow. Ezra had been just as proud as the captain himself, when the sturdy, black-haired, blue-eyed boy had entered high school and had won his place at football and on the running-track.When “Hal” had become “Master Hal,” for him, on the boy’s entering college, the old servitor had come to look upon him with something of awe, for now Hal’s studies had lifted him beyond all possible understanding. Old Ezra had thrilled with pride as real and as proprietary as any Captain Briggs had felt.
Thus, the belovèd idol of the two indulgent old sea-dogs, Hal had grown up.