“The boat-patrols wouldn’t phase me,” he announced. His thoughts, in fact, were already far ahead, marshaling themselves about other things.
“You’ve a weakness for yellow fever?” inquired the ironic McGlade.
“I guess it’d take more than a few fever germs to throw me off that trail,” was the detective’s abstracted retort. He was recalling certain things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him. And before everything else he felt that it would be well to get in touch with that distributor of bridge equipment and phonograph records.
“You don’t mean you’re going to try to get into Guayaquil?” demanded McGlade.
“If Connie Binhart’s down there I’ve got to go and get him,” was Never-Fail Blake’s answer.
* * * * * * * *
The following morning Blake, having made sure of his ground, began one of his old-time “investigations” of that unsuspecting worthy known as Pip Tankred.
This investigation involved a hurried journey back to Colon, the expenditure of much money in cable tolls, the examination of records that were both official and unofficial, the asking of many questions and the turning up of dimly remembered things on which the dust of time had long since settled.
It was followed by a return to Panama, a secret trip several miles up the coast to look over a freighter placidly anchored there, a dolorous-appearing coast-tramp with unpainted upperworks and a rusty red hull. The side-plates of this red hull, Blake observed, were as pitted and scarred as the face of an Egyptian obelisk. Her ventilators were askew and her funnel was scrofulous and many of her rivet-heads seemed to be eaten away. But this was not once a source of apprehension to the studious-eyed detective.
The following evening he encountered Tankred himself, as though by accident, on the veranda of the Hotel Angelini. The latter, at Blake’s invitation, sat down for a cocktail and a quiet smoke.
They sat in silence for some time, watching the rain that deluged the city, the warm devitalizing rain that unedged even the fieriest of Signor Angelinas stimulants.
“Pip,” Blake very quietly announced, “you’re going to sail for Guayaquil to-morrow!”
“Am I?” queried the unmoved Pip.
“You’re going to start for Guayaquil to-morrow,” repeated Blake, “and you’re going to take me along with you!”
“My friend,” retorted Pip, emitting a curling geyser of smoke as long and thin as a pool-que, “you’re sure laborin’ under the misapprehension this steamer o’ mine is a Pacific mailer! But she ain’t, Blake!”
“I admit that,” quietly acknowledged the other man. “I saw her yesterday!”
“And she don’t carry no passengers—she ain’t allowed to,” announced her master.
“But she’s going to carry me,” asserted Blake, lighting a fresh cigar.
“What as?” demanded Tankred. And he fixed Blake with a belligerent eye as he put the question.
“As an old friend of yours!”
“And then what?” still challenged the other.
“As a man who knows your record, in the next place. And on the next count, as the man who’s wise to those phony bills of lading of yours, and those doped-up clearance papers, and those cases of carbines you’ve got down your hold labeled bridge equipment, and that nitro and giant-caps, and that hundred thousand rounds of smokeless you’re running down there as phonograph records!”
Tankred continued to smoke.
“You ever stop to wonder,” he finally inquired, “if it ain’t kind o’ flirtin’ with danger knowin’ so much about me and my freightin’ business?”
“No, you’re doing the coquetting in this case, I guess!”
“Then I ain’t standin’ for no rivals—not on this coast!”
The two men, so dissimilar in aspect and yet so alike in their accidental attitudes of an uncouth belligerency, sat staring at each other.
“You’re going to take me to Guayaquil,” repeated Blake.
“That’s where you’re dead wrong,” was the calmly insolent rejoinder. “I ain’t evengoin’to Guayaquil.”
“I say you are.”
Tankred’s smile translated his earlier deliberateness into open contempt.
“You seem to forget that this here town you’re beefin’ about lies a good thirty-five miles up the Guayas River. And if I’m gun-runnin’ for Alfaro, as you say, I naturally ain’t navigatin’ streams where they’d be able to pick me off the bridge-deck with a fishin’-pole!”
“But you’re going to get as close to Guayaquil as you can, and you know it.”
“Do I?” said the man with the up-tilted cigar.
“Look here, Pip,” said Blake, leaning closer over the table towards him. “I don’t give a tinker’s dam about Alfaro and his two-cent revolution. I’m not sitting up worrying over him or his junta or how he gets his ammunition. But I want to get into Guayaquil, and this is the only way I can do it!”
For the first time Tankred turned and studied him.
“What d’ you want to get into Guayaquil for?” he finally demanded. Blake knew that nothing was to be gained by beating about the bush.
“There’s a man I want down there, and I’m going down to get him!”
“Who is he?”
“That’s my business,” retorted Blake.
“And gettin’ into Guayaquil’s your business!” Tankred snorted back.
“All I’m going to say is he’s a man from up North—and he’s not in your line of business, and never was and never will be!”
“How do I know that?”
“You’ll have my word for it!”
Tankred swung round on him.
“D’ you realize you’ll have to sneak ashore in alanchaand pass a double line o’ patrol? And then crawl into a town that’s reekin’ with yellow-jack, a town you’re not likely to crawl out of again inside o’ three months?”
“I know all that!” acknowledged Blake.
For the second time Tankred turned and studied the other man.
“And you’re still goin’ after your gen’leman friend from up North?” he inquired.
“Pip, I’ve got to get that man!”
“You’ve got ’o?”
“I’ve got to, and I’m going to!”
Tankred threw his cigar-end away and laughed leisurely and quietly.
“Then what’re we sittin’ here arguin’ about, anyway? If it’s settled, it’s settled, ain’t it?”
“Yes, I think it’s settled!”
Again Tankred laughed.
“But take it from me, my friend, you’ll sure see some rough goin’ this next few days!”
As Tankred had intimated, Blake’s journey southward from Panama was anything but comfortable traveling. The vessel was verminous, the food was bad, and the heat was oppressive. It was a heat that took the life out of the saturated body, a thick and burdening heat that hung like a heavy gray blanket on a gray sea which no rainfall seemed able to cool.
But Blake uttered no complaint. By day he smoked under a sodden awning, rained on by funnel cinders. By night he stood at the rail. He stood there, by the hour together, watching with wistful and haggard eyes the Alpha of Argo and the slowly rising Southern Cross. Whatever his thoughts, as he watched those lonely Southern skies, he kept them to himself.
It was the night after they had swung about and were steaming up the Gulf of Guayaquil under a clear sky that Tankred stepped down to Blake’s sultry little cabin and wakened him from a sound sleep.
“It’s time you were gettin’ your clothes on,” he announced.
“Getting my clothes on?” queried Blake through the darkness.
“Yes, you can’t tell what we’ll bump into, any time now!”
The wakened sleeper heard the other man moving about in the velvety black gloom.
“What’re you doing there?” was his sharp question as he heard the squeak and slam of a shutter.
“Closin’ this dead-light, of course,” explained Tankred. A moment later he switched on the electric globe at the bunk-head. “We’re gettin’ in pretty close now and we’re goin’ with our lights doused!”
He stood for a moment, staring down at the sweat-dewed white body on the bunk, heaving for breath in the closeness of the little cabin. His mind was still touched into mystery by the spirit housed in that uncouth and undulatory flesh. He was still piqued by the vast sense of purpose which Blake carried somewhere deep within his seemingly tepid-willed carcass, like the calcinated pearl at the center of an oyster.
“You’d better turn out!” he called back as he stepped into the engulfing gloom of the gangway.
Blake rolled out of his berth and dressed without haste or excitement. Already, overhead, he could hear the continuous tramping of feet, with now and then a quiet-noted order from Tankred himself. He could hear other noises along the ship’s side, as though a landing-ladder were being bolted and lowered along the rusty plates.
When he went up on deck he found the boat in utter darkness. To that slowly moving mass, for she was now drifting ahead under quarter-speed, this obliteration of light imparted a sense of stealthiness. This note of suspense, of watchfulness, of illicit adventure, was reflected in the very tones of the motley deckhands who brushed past him in the humid velvety blackness.
As he stood at the rail, staring ahead through this blackness, Blake could see a light here and there along the horizon. These lights increased in number as the boat steamed slowly on. Then, far away in the roadstead ahead of them, he made out an entire cluster of lights, like those of a liner at anchor. Then he heard the tinkle of a bell below deck, and he realized that the engines had stopped.
In the lull of the quieted ship’s screw he could hear the wash of distant surf, faint and phantasmal above the material little near-by boat-noises. Then came a call, faint and muffled, like the complaining note of a harbor gull. A moment later the slow creak of oars crept up to Blake’s straining ears. Then out of the heart of the darkness that surrounded him, not fifty feet away, he saw emerge one faint point of light, rising and falling with a rhythm as sleepy as the slow creak of the oars. On each side of it other small lights sprang up. They were close beside the ship, by this time, a flotilla of lights, and each light, Blake finally saw, came from a lantern that stood deep in the bottom of a boat, a lantern that had been covered with a square of matting or sail-cloth, until some prearranged signal from the drifting steamer elicited its answering flicker of light. Then they swarmed about the oily water, shifting and swaying on their course like a cluster of fireflies, alternately dark and luminous in the dip and rise of the ground-swell. Within each small aura of radiance the watcher at the rail could see a dusky and quietly moving figure, the faded blue of a denim garment, the brown of bare arms, or the sinews of a straining neck. Once he caught the whites of a pair of eyes turned up towards the ship’s deck. He could also see the running and wavering lines of fire as the oars puddled and backed in the phosphorescent water under the gloomy steel hull. Then he heard a low-toned argument in Spanish. A moment later the flotilla of small boats had fastened to the ship’s side, like a litter of suckling pigs to a sow’s breast. Every light went out again, every light except a faint glow as a guide to the first boat at the foot of the landing-ladder. Along this ladder Blake could hear barefooted figures padding and grunting as cases and bales were cautiously carried down and passed from boat to boat.
He swung nervously about as he felt a hand clutch his arm. He found Tankred speaking quietly into his ear.
“There’ll be one boat over,” that worthy was explaining. “One boat—you take that—the last one! And you’d better give theguinneya ten-dollar bill for his trouble!”
“All right! I’m ready!” was Blake’s low-toned reply as he started to move forward with the other man.
“Not yet! Not yet!” was the other’s irritable warning, as Blake felt himself pushed back. “You stay where you are! We’ve got a half-hour’s hard work ahead of us yet!”
As Blake leaned over the rail again, watching and listening, he began to realize that the work was indeed hard, that there was some excuse for Tankred’s ill-temper. Most men, he acknowledged, would feel the strain, where one misstep or one small mistake might undo the work of months. Beyond that, however, Blake found little about which to concern himself. Whether it was legal or illegal did not enter his mind. That a few thousand tin-sworded soldiers should go armed or unarmed was to him a matter of indifference. It was something not of his world. It did not impinge on his own jealously guarded circle of activity, on his own task of bringing a fugitive to justice. And as his eyes strained through the gloom at the cluster of lights far ahead in the roadstead he told himself that it was there that his true goal lay, for it was there that theTrunellamust ride at anchor and Binhart must be.
Then he looked wonderingly back at the flotilla under the rail, for he realized that every movement and murmur of life there had come to a sudden stop. It was a cessation of all sound, a silence as ominously complete as that of a summer woodland when a hawk soars overhead. Even the small light deep in the bottom of the firstlanchatied to the landing-ladder had been suddenly quenched.
Blake, staring apprehensively out into the gloom, caught the sound of a soft and feverish throbbing. His disturbed mind had just registered the conclusion that this sound must be the throbbing of a passing marine-engine, when the thought was annihilated by a second and more startling occurrence.
Out across the blackness in front of him suddenly flashed a white saber of light. For one moment it circled and wavered restlessly about, feeling like a great finger along the gray surface of the water. Then it smote full on Blake and the deck where he stood, blinding him with its glare, picking out every object and every listening figure as plainly as a calcium picks out a scene on the stage.
Without conscious thought Blake dropped lower behind the ship’s rail. He sank still lower, until he found himself down on his hands and knees beside a rope coil. As he did so he heard the call of a challenging Spanish voice, a murmur of voices, and then a repeated command.
There was no answer to this challenge. Then came another command and then silence again. Then a faint thrill arrowed through Blake’s crouching body, for from somewhere close behind him a gun-shot rang out and was repeated again and again. Blake knew, at that sound, that Tankred or one of his men was firing straight into the dial of the searchlight, that Tankred himself intended to defy what must surely be an Ecuadorean gunboat. The detective was oppressed by the thought that his own jealously nursed plan might at any moment get a knock on the head.
At almost the same time the peevishly indignant Blake could hear the tinkle of the engine-room bell below him and then the thrash of the screw wings. The boat began to move forward, dangling the knocking and rocking flotilla oflanchasand surf-boats at her side, like a deer-mouse making off with its young. Then came sharp cries of protest, in Spanish, and more cries and curses in harbor-English, and a second engine-room signal and a cessation of the screw thrashings. This was followed by a shower of carbine-shots and the plaintive whine of bullets above the upperworks, the crack and thud of lead against the side-plates. At the same time Blake heard the scream of a denim-clad figure that suddenly pitched from the landing-ladder into the sea. Then came an answering volley, from somewhere close below Blake. He could not tell whether it was from the boat-flotilla or from the port-holes above it. But he knew that Tankred and his men were returning the gunboat’s fire.
Blake, by this time, was once more thinking lucidly. Some of the cases in those surf-boats, he remembered, held giant-caps and dynamite, and he knew what was likely to happen if a bullet struck them. He also remembered that he was still exposed to the carbine fire from behind the searchlight.
He stretched out, flat on the deck-boards, and wormed his way slowly and ludicrously aft. He did not bring those uncouth vermiculations to a stop until he was well back in the shelter of a rusty capstan, cut off from the light by a lifeboat swinging on its davits. As he clambered to his feet again he saw this light suddenly go out and then reappear. As it did so he could make out a patrol-boat, gray and low-bodied, slinking forward through the gloom. He could see that boat crowded with men, men in uniform, and he could see that each man carried a carbine. He could also see that it would surely cut across the bow of his own steamer. A moment later he knew that Tankred himself had seen this, for high above the crack and whine of the shooting and the tumult of voices he could now hear Tankred’s blasphemous shouts.
“Cut loose those boats!” bellowed the frantic gun-runner. Then he repeated the command, apparently in Spanish. And to this came an answering babel of cries and expostulations and counter-cries. But still the firing from behind the searchlight kept up. Blake could see a half-naked seaman with a carpenter’s ax skip monkey-like down the landing-ladder. He saw the naked arm strike with the ax, the two hands suddenly catch at the bare throat, and the figure fall back in a huddle against the red-stained wooden steps.
Blake also saw, to his growing unrest, that the firing was increasing in volume, that at the front of the ship sharp volley and counter-volley was making a pandemonium of the very deck on which he knelt. For by this time the patrol-boat with the carbineers had reached the steamer’s side and a boarding-ladder had been thrown across her quarter. And Blake began to comprehend that he was in the most undesirable of situations. He could hear the repeated clang of the engine-room telegraph and Tankred’s frenzied and ineffectual bellow of “Full steam ahead! For the love o’ Christ, full ahead down there!”
Through all that bedlam Blake remained resentfully cool, angrily clear-thoughted. He saw that the steamer did not move forward. He concluded the engine-room to be deserted. And he saw both the futility and the danger of remaining where he was.
He crawled back to where he remembered the rope-coil lay, dragging the loose end of it back after him, and then lowering it over the ship’s side until it touched the water. Then he shifted this rope along the rail until it swung over the last of the line of surf-boats that bobbed and thudded against the side-plates of the gently rolling steamer. About him, all the while, he could hear the shouts of men and the staccato crack of the rifles. But he saw to it that his rope was well tied to the rail-stanchion. Then he clambered over the rail itself, and with a double twist of the rope about his great leg let himself ponderously down over the side.
He swayed there, for a moment, until the roll of the ship brought him thumping against the rusty plates again. At the same moment the shifting surf-boat swung in under him. Releasing his hold, he went tumbling down between the cartridge-cases and the boat-thwarts.
This boat, he saw, was still securely tied to its mate, one of the larger-bodiedlanchas, and he had nothing with which to sever the rope. His first impulse was to reach for his revolver and cut through the manilla strands by means of a half-dozen quick shots. But this, he knew, would too noisily announce his presence there. So he fell on his knees and peered and prodded about the boat bottom. There, to his surprise, he saw the huddled body of a dead man, face down. This body he turned over, running an exploring hand along the belt-line. As he had hoped, he found a heavy nine-inch knife there.
He was dodging back to the bow of the surf-boat when a uniformed figure carrying a rifle came scuttling and shouting down the landing-ladder. Blake’s spirits sank as he saw that figure. He knew now that his movement had been seen and understood. He knew, too, as he saw the figure come scrambling out over the rocking boats, what capture would mean.
He had the last strand of the rope severed before the Ecuadorean with the carbine reached thelanchanext to him. He still felt, once he was free, that he could use his revolver and get away. But before Blake could push off a sinewy brown hand reached out and clutched the gunwale of the liberated boat. Blake ignored the clutching hand. But, relying on his own sheer strength, he startled the owner of the hand by suddenly flinging himself forward, seizing the carbine barrel, and wresting it free. A second later it disappeared beneath the surface of the water.
That impassioned brown hand, however, still clung to the boat’s gunwale. It clung there determinedly, blindly—and Blake knew there was no time for a struggle. He brought the heavy-bladed knife down on the clinging fingers. It was a stroke like that of a cleaver on a butcher’s block. In the strong white light that still played on them he could see the flash of teeth in the man’s opened mouth, the upturn of the staring eye-balls as the severed fingers fell away and he screamed aloud with pain.
But with one quick motion of his gorilla-like arms Blake pushed his boat free, telling himself there was still time, warning himself to keep cool and make the most of every chance. Yet as he turned to take up the oars he saw that he had been discovered by the Ecuadoreans on the freighter’s deck, that his flight was not to be as simple as he had expected. He saw the lean brown face, picked out by the white light, as a carbineer swung his short-barreled rifle out over the rail—and the man in the surf-boat knew by that face what was coming.
His first impulse was to reach into his pocket for his revolver. But that, he knew, was already too late, for a second man had joined the first and a second rifle was already swinging round on him. His next thought was to dive over the boat’s side. This thought had scarcely formulated itself, however, before he heard the bark of the rifle and saw the puff of smoke.
At the same moment he felt the rip and tug of the bullet through the loose side-folds of his coat. And with that rip and tug came a third thought, over which he did not waver. He threw up his hands, sharply, and flung himself headlong across the body of the dead man in the bottom of the surf-boat.
He fell heavily, with a blow that shook the wind from his body. But as he lay there he knew better than to move. He lay there, scarcely daring to breathe, dreading that the rise and fall of his breast would betray his ruse, praying that his boat would veer about so his body would be in the shadow. For he knew the two waiting carbines were still pointed at him.
He lay there, counting the seconds, knowing that he and his slowly drifting surf-boat were still in the full white fulgor of the wavering searchlight. He lay there as a second shot came whistling overhead, spitting into the water within three feet of him. Then a third bullet came, this time tearing through the wood of the boat bottom beside him. And he still waited, without moving, wondering what the next shot would do. He still waited, his passive body horripilating with a vast indignation at the thought of the injustice of it all, at the thought that he must lie there and let half-baked dagoes shower his unprotesting back with lead. But he lay there, still counting the seconds, as the boat drifted slowly out on the quietly moving tide.
Then a new discovery disturbed him. It obliterated his momentary joy at the thought that they were no longer targeting down at him. He could feel the water slowly rising about his prostrate body. He realized that the boat in which he lay was filling. He calmly figured out that with the body of the dead man and the cartridge-cases about him it was carrying a dead weight of nearly half a ton. And through the bullet hole in its bottom the water was rushing in.
Yet he could do nothing. He could make no move. For at the slightest betrayal of life, he knew, still another volley would come from that ever-menacing steamer’s deck. He counted the minutes, painfully, methodically, feeling the water rise higher and higher about his body. The thought of this rising water and what it meant did not fill him with panic. He seemed more the prey of a deep and sullen resentment that his plans should be so gratuitously interfered with, that his approach to theTrunellashould be so foolishly delayed, that so many cross-purposes should postpone and imperil his quest of Binhart.
He knew, by the slowly diminishing sounds, that he was drifting further and further away from Tankred and his crowded fore-deck. But he was still within the area of that ever-betraying searchlight. Some time, he knew, he must drift beyond it. But until that moment came he dare make no move to keep himself afloat.
By slowly turning his head an inch or two he was able to measure the height of the gunwale above the water. Then he made note of where an oar lay, asking himself how long he could keep afloat on a timber so small, wondering how far he could be from land. Then he suddenly fell to questioning if the waters of that coast were shark infested.
He was still debating the problem when he became conscious of a change about him. A sudden pall of black fell like balm on his startled face. The light was no longer there. He found himself engulfed in a relieving, fortifying darkness, a darkness that brought him to his feet in the slowly moving boat. He was no longer visible to the rest of the world. At a breath, almost, he had passed into eclipse.
His first frantic move was to tug and drag the floating body at his feet to the back of the boat and roll it overboard. Then he waded forward and one by one carefully lifted the cases of ammunition and tumbled them over the side. One only he saved, a smaller wooden box which he feverishly pried open with his knife and emptied into the sea. Then he flung away the top boards, placing the empty box on the seat in front of him. Then he fell on his hands and knees, fingering along the boat bottom until he found the bullet-hole through which the water was boiling up.
Once he had found it he began tearing at his clothes like a madman, for the water was now alarmingly high. These rags and shreds of clothing he twisted together and forced into the hole, tamping them firmly into place with his revolver-barrel.
Then he caught up the empty wooden box from the boat seat and began to bale. He baled solemnly, as though his very soul were in it. He was oblivious of the strange scene silhouetted against the night behind him, standing out as distinctly as though it were a picture thrown on a sheet from a magic-lantern slide—a circle of light surrounding a drifting and rusty-sided ship on which tumult had turned into sudden silence. He was oblivious of his own wet clothing and his bruised body and the dull ache in his leg wound of many months ago. He was intent only on the fact that he was lowering the water in his surf-boat, that he was slowly drifting further and further away from the enemies who had interfered with his movements, and that under the faint spangle of lights which he could still see in the offing on his right lay an anchored liner, and that somewhere on that liner lay a man for whom he was looking.
Once assured that his surf-boat would keep afloat, Blake took the oars and began to row. But even as he swung the boat lumberingly about he realized that he could make no headway with such a load, for almost a foot of water still surged along its bottom. So he put down the oars and began to bale again. He did not stop until the boat was emptied. Then he carefully replugged the bullet-hole, took up the oars again, and once more began to row.
He rowed, always keeping his bow towards the far-off spangle of lights which showed where theTrunellalay at anchor.
He rowed doggedly, determinedly. He rowed until his arms were tired and his back ached. But still he did not stop. It occurred to him, suddenly, that there might be a tide running against him, that with all his labor he might be making no actual headway. Disturbed by this thought, he fixed his attention on two almost convergent lights on shore, rowing with renewed energy as he watched them. He had the satisfaction of seeing these two lights slowly come together, and he knew he was making some progress.
Still another thought came to him as he rowed doggedly on. And that was the fear that at any moment, now, the quick equatorial morning might dawn. He had no means of judging the time. To strike a light was impossible, for his matches were water-soaked. Even his watch, he found, had been stopped by its bath in sea-water. But he felt that long hours had passed since midnight, that it must be close to the break of morning. And the fear of being overtaken by daylight filled him with a new and more frantic energy.
He rowed feverishly on, until the lights of theTrunellastood high above him and he could hear the lonely sound of her bells as the watch was struck. Then he turned and studied the dark hull of the steamer as she loomed up closer in front of him. He could see her only in outline, at first, picked out here and there by a light. But there seemed something disheartening, something intimidating, in her very quietness, something suggestive of a plague-ship deserted by crew and passengers alike. That dark and silent hull at which he stared seemed to house untold possibilities of evil.
Yet Blake remembered that it also housed Binhart. And with that thought in his mind he no longer cared to hesitate. He rowed in under the shadowy counter, bumping about the rudder-post. Then he worked his way forward, feeling quietly along her side-plates, foot by foot.
He had more than half circled the ship before he came to her landing-ladder. The grilled platform at the bottom of this row of steps stood nearly as high as his shoulders, as though the ladder-end had been hauled up for the night.
Blake balanced himself on the bow of his surf-boat and tugged and strained until he gained the ladder-bottom. He stood there, recovering his breath, for a moment or two, peering up towards the inhospitable silence above him. But still he saw no sign of life. No word or challenge was flung down at him. Then, after a moment’s thought, he lay flat on the grill and deliberately pushed the surf-boat off into the darkness. He wanted no more of it. He knew, now, there could be no going back.
He climbed cautiously up the slowly swaying steps, standing for a puzzled moment at the top and peering about him. Then he crept along the deserted deck, where a month of utter idleness, apparently, had left discipline relaxed. He shied away from the lights, here and there, that dazzled his eyes after his long hours of darkness. With an instinct not unlike that which drives the hiding wharf-rat into the deepest corner at hand, he made his way down through the body of the ship. He shambled and skulked his way down, a hatless and ragged and uncouth figure, wandering on along gloomy gangways and corridors until he found himself on the threshold of the engine-room itself.
He was about to back out of this entrance and strike still deeper when he found himself confronted by an engineer smoking a short brier-root pipe. The pale blue eyes of this sandy-headed engineer were wide with wonder, startled and incredulous wonder, as they stared at the ragged figure in the doorway.
“Where in the name o’ God didyoucome from?” demanded the man with the brier-root pipe.
“I came out from Guayaquil,” answered Blake, reaching searchingly down in his wet pocket. “And I can’t go back.”
The sandy-headed man backed away.
“From the fever camps?”
Blake could afford to smile at the movement.
“Don’t worry—there’s no fever ’round me.That’swhat I’ve been through!” And he showed the bullet-holes through his tattered coat-cloth.
“How’d you get here?”
“Rowed out in a surf-boat—and I can’t go back!”
The sandy-headed engineer continued to stare at the uncouth figure in front of him, to stare at it with vague and impersonal wonder. And in facing that sandy-headed stranger, Blake knew, he was facing a judge whose decision was to be of vast moment in his future destiny, whose word, perhaps, was to decide on the success or failure of much wandering about the earth.
“I can’t go back!” repeated Blake, as he reached out and dropped a clutter of gold into the palm of the other man. The pale blue eyes looked at the gold, looked out along the gangway, and then looked back at the waiting stranger.
“That Alfaro gang after you?” he inquired.
“They’reallafter me!” answered the swaying figure in rags. They were talking together, by this time, almost in whispers, like two conspirators. The young engineer seemed puzzled. But a wave of relief swept through Blake when in the pale blue eyes he saw almost a look of pity.
“What d’ you want me to do?” he finally asked.
Blake, instead of answering that question, asked another.
“When do you move out of here?”
The engineer put the coins in his pocket.
“Before noon to-morrow, thank God! TheYorktownought to be here by morning—she’s to give us our release!”
“Then you’ll sail by noon?”
“We’vegotto! They’ve tied us up here over a month, without reason. They worked that old yellow-jack gag—and not a touch of fever aboard all that time!”
A great wave of contentment surged through Blake’s weary body. He put his hand up on the smaller man’s shoulder.
“Then you just get me out o’ sight until we’re off, and I’ll fix things so you’ll never be sorry for it!”
The pale-eyed engineer studied the problem. Then he studied the figure in front of him.
“There’s nothing crooked behind this?”
Blake forced a laugh from his weary lungs. “I’ll prove that in two days by wireless—and pay first-class passage to the next port of call!”
“I’m fourth engineer on board here, and the Old Man would sure fire me, if—”
“But you needn’t even know about me,” contended Blake. “Just let me crawl in somewhere where I can sleep!”
“You need it, all right, by that face of yours!”
“I sure do,” acknowledged the other as he stood awaiting his judge’s decision.
“Then I’d better get you down to my bunk. But remember, I can only stow you there until we get under way—perhaps not that long!”
He stepped cautiously out and looked along the gangway. “This is your funeral, mind, when the row comes. You’ve got to face that, yourself!”
“Oh, I’ll face it, all right!” was Blake’s calmly contented answer. “All I want now is about nine hours’ sleep!”
“Come on, then,” said the fourth engineer. And Blake followed after as he started deeper down into the body of the ship. And already, deep below him, he could hear the stokers at work in their hole.
After seven cataleptic hours of unbroken sleep Blake awakened to find his shoulder being prodded and shaken by the pale-eyed fourth engineer. The stowaway’s tired body, during that sleep, had soaked in renewed strength as a squeezed sponge soaks up water. He could afford to blink with impassive eyes up at the troubled face of the young man wearing the oil-stained cap.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, awakening to a luxurious comprehension of where he was and what he had escaped. Then he sat up in the narrow berth, for it began to dawn on him that the engines of theTrunellawere not in motion. “Why aren’t we under way?”
“They’re having trouble up there, with theCommandante. We can’t get off inside of an hour—and anything’s likely to happen in that time. That’s why I’ve got to get you out of here!”
“Where’ll you get me?” asked Blake. He was on his feet by this time, arraying himself in his wet and ragged clothing.
“That’s what I’ve been talking over with the Chief,” began the young engineer. Blake wheeled about and fixed him with his eye.
“Did you let your Chief in on this?” he demanded, and he found it hard to keep his anger in check.
“I had to let him in on it,” complained the other. “If it came to a line up or a searching party through here, they’d spot you first thing. You’re not a passenger; you’re not signed; you’re not anything!”
“Well, supposing I’m not?”
“Then they’d haul you back and give you a half year in thatLazarettoo’ theirs!”
“Well, what do I have to do to keep from being hauled back?”
“You’ll have to be one o’ the workin’ crew, until we get off. The Chief says that, and I think he’s right!”
A vague foreboding filled Blake’s soul. He had imagined that the ignominy and agony of physical labor was a thing of the past with him. And he was still sore in every sinew and muscle of his huge body.
“You don’t mean stoke-hole work?” he demanded.
The fourth engineer continued to look worried.
“You don’t happen to know anything about machinery, do you?” he began.
“Of course I do,” retorted Blake, thinking gratefully of his early days as a steamfitter.
“Then why couldn’t I put you in a cap and jumper and work you in as one of the greasers?”
“What do you mean by greasers?”
“That’s an oiler in the engine-room. It—it may not be the coolest place on earth, in this latitude, but it sure beats the stoke-hole!”
And it was in this way, thirty minutes later, that Blake became a greaser in the engine-room of theTrunella.
Already, far above him, he could hear the rattle and shriek of winch-engines and the far-off muffled roar of the whistle, rumbling its triumph of returning life. Already the great propeller engines themselves had been tested, after their weeks of idleness, languidly stretching and moving like an awakening sleeper, slowly swinging their solemn tons forward through their projected cycles and then as solemnly back again.
About this vast pyramid-shaped machinery, galleried like a Latin house-court, tremulous with the breath of life that sang and hissed through its veins, the new greaser could see his fellow workers with their dripping oil-cans, groping gallery by gallery up towards the square of daylight that sifted down into the oil-scented pit where he stood. He could see his pale-eyed friend, the fourth engineer, spanner in hand, clinging to a moving network of steel like a spider to its tremulous web—and in his breast, for the first time, a latent respect for that youth awakened. He could see other greasers wriggling about between intricate shafts and wheels, crawling cat-like along narrow steel ledges, mounting steep metal ladders guarded by hot hand rails, peering into oil boxes, “worrying” the vacuum pump, squatting and kneeling about iron floors where oil-pits pooled and pump-valves clacked and electric machines whirred and the antiphonal song of the mounting steam roared like music in the ears of the listening Blake, aching as he was for the first relieving throb of the screws. Stolidly and calmly the men about him worked, threatened by flailing steel, hissed at by venomously quiescent powers, beleaguered by mysteriously moving shafts, surrounded by countless valves and an inexplicable tangle of pipes, hemmed in by an incomprehensible labyrinth of copper wires, menaced by the very shimmering joints and rods over which they could run such carelessly affectionate fingers.