Money to Burn/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
DEADLY WEAPONS
AFTER squeamish days of infernal weather, the British tramp steamer Hawk—nine hundred tons, Captain Goldthwaite, New York to West Indian ports—limped across an unruffled sea, blue and transparent. There, where the waters of the Atlantic and the Caribbean meet, morning had dawned like the unfolding of a pale-pink rose. Far away off the old tub's starboard quarter, a silver-gray blot against the glittering azure of the sky increased in size; gradually it seemed to descend to the world's rim until it detached itself from the heavens; Mount Diablo of Santo Domingo.
The Hawk groaned at sight of it like a man with sore corns, but the cranky screw continued, however unsteadily, its revolutions. The heat was intense and the direct summer sun cast a shadowless glare over peeling stack, suspicious deck, paint-hungry sides. A sinister craft; as regiments contract the temperament of their colonels, so do merchant vessels assume a likeness to their commanders—sullen, ominous, a discord in that marine symphony, Captain Goldthwaite's ocean peddler advertised its master's character to air and wave.
Below, in the cabin forward, Dan Stone's straight blue eyes grew bluer. His open smile widened.
“Oh, she's a rum ship, all right,” he grinned.
The Greek philosopher who advised us to know ourselves counseled the impossible. The briefest experience suffices for a practical understanding of nature. A kitten need fall only once into the water and be rescued; it will dread drowning ever thereafter. A baby needs few tumbles before he realizes that heights are best avoided. Yet, though the wasp born yesterday can to-day design and build its intricate nest, the longest life and the hardest study are not long enough or hard enough to furnish man with self-comprehension. He may acquire all the lore of the scholar, all the arts of business, but he will never thoroughly read his own mind and his own heart. He will tell his child that the attraction of gravity draws the loosened apple to the ground, but he can master nothing except the broadest principles of that inevitable law of cause and effect as it determines his own history. A Sicilian slave throws away his worn-out sandal and thereby becomes a Roman general. Proceeding leisurely to his office, a rich New York broker pauses to buy a cravat that has attracted him from a haberdasher's window, and so starts in motion a train of events that, five years later, makes him a pauper. Dan Stone set the broken leg of a dog in Brooklyn; that act sent him southward aboard the Hawk.
“That's what she is,” he repeated, “a rum ship.”
He had, in his capacity of acting ship's doctor, just concluded the professional portion of his call on the tramp's only passenger. Seen by daylight, or by so much of it as the cabin permitted to enter. Stone presented a picture of the physically well-proportioned man; but so nicely balanced were his muscles that no gaze save a trained one would have marked him out for owning the unusual strength—the quick movement and long endurance—which he really possessed.
Anybody not both anatomist and psychologist must have been preoccupied with his impetuous face, his frank glance that was too ready to accept the rest of the world on its own terms, and his boyishly unruly hair, tow colored and irreconcilably rebellions to the brushes; and anybody with a knowledge of the Hawk's captain would have wondered how Stone came to be his medico and how long he could stand that tyrant's gaff.
From his bunk, the passenger echoed his physician's last word. “Rum?” He nearly pulled himself to a sitting posture. “Is that what she is?”
The Hawk was no floating fortress of free speech. Though few of the hands on that British boat understood the English tongue, Stone glanced beyond the cabin door to make sure that he wasn't overheard. Then he glanced back at his mysterious patient.
“I don't mean liquor, Mr. Hoagland. Her liquor's milk, all right, condensed milk, to be dropped here, there, and everywhere till we dump the last at Port of Spain; only I bet it's curdled by now. I just meant she was—well, what Captain Goldthwaite or any of his fellow countrymen would mean when they used the word that I used in the way I used it. She's rum.”
This patient was the only other American aboard, and if Stone's presence furnished him with material for speculation, he was a puzzle to Stone. The acting doctor rarely indulged the vice of personal questions, but he found it hard to understand why so well-groomed a man—well groomed even in his illness—should have chosen this manifestly disreputable tramp when, as a hundred signs gave testimony to even this fresh-water physician, he was accustomed to ocean liners. However, the urbane Mr. Hoagland had kept largely to himself, and until stricken with ptomaine poisoning, mostly confined his conversation to the tempestuous captain and the latter's malicious mate.
The Hawk, if she had made much more bad weather, would have been in real danger of foundering. During the storm which had swooped down upon them within an hour of their dropping Sandy Hook—which had, indeed, only yesterday subsided—she shipped veritable seas that seemed to push her completely beneath the surface of the ocean and hold her there until, miraculously, she wriggled back to life.
Though possibly ignorant of her captain's temper, Hoagland, who must have had some choice of boat, should have gleaned from the most cursory observation a general idea of the Hawk's sea qualities before ever he came aboard of her. Larger, more comfortable, and far swifter boats touched at all the ports at which the Hawk called, though their sailings might be fairly infrequent. It seemed to the doctor that Hoagland's haste must, therefore, have been to leave America rather than to arrive at his destination. Did he have to hurry from his country for his country's good?
“You're some doctor!” said he now; he was a wiry little man with thin hair and a snub nose. His eyes, of a gray that generally veiled their alertness by staring into vacancy, now turned with frank questioning directly on the figure in the door way. “Why d'you pick a tub like this?”
It was exactly the query that Dan Stone, M. D.-minus, would have liked to put to Hoagland. However, he answered it easily enough. “Because I'm not really a doctor yet.”
“No diploma?”
“Third year and working my way through. First summer I was a second-rate hotel clerk at a third-rate seaside resort. Last year I was a hospital orderly. Two weeks ago the mate of this boat got in a scrap, and I happened along when he needed some first aid. The Hawk wanted a doctor and asked no questions; I wanted a job and didn't ask any, either. So here I am.”
It was his way to make light of his own hardships. He honestly laughed at them now. He didn't like to talk about himself, and so he neglected to add that, nursing a dream about some day setting up practice in these latitudes, he wanted to better his already nearly perfect knowledge of Spanish, and that he wanted, also, to see something of West Indian ecclesiastical architecture.
“Well,” persisted his patient, “hut why do you call it a rum ship?”
Dan laughed again. He thought of the Hawk's rats, which scuttled over him when he tried to sleep. He was bunking with a crew that had no notion of personal cleanliness; even now he could smell the stench of their quarters; they never volunteered to police the place; its deck was a mass of filth, swabbed only when his threats of violence moved his messmates to sullen effort. But he laughed, because he had found that the easiest way of supporting tyranny, and all he said was:
“You wouldn't call it a champagne one, would you?”
Rum it was, because rum furnished its commander with the chiefest of his preoccupations. Congressmen from the farm and senators that have never gone deeper than the Leviathan's dining room have devised some well-intentioned laws for sailor folk; so has his Britannic majesty's Parliament; but when a ship's master is far at sea and his boat returns only once in five years to its home port, that master may become a master indeed. If he is a bully born, with a hatred of humanity because he can abuse it, and if he overstokes his temper with the fuel of alcohol, his ship will be as much a floating hell as ever was any slaver's in the Middle Passage; and Captain Goldthwaite was exactly the sort of devil to meet all these requirements and enjoy them.
For Stone, things had begun to go wrong when the Goddess of Liberty stolidly watched the Hawk pass her pedestal. The bull-necked, blue-nosed captain had coveted the liberal graft to be acquired by surrendering his cabin to the unexpected and eleventh-hour passenger; but once his cabin was surrendered, he fell into an abiding rage because he had to occupy the mate's instead. Cross-eyed Johnson, the mate, cursed at having to bunk with the engineer, whom he hated, and Dan, who had been promised a couch in the engineer's quarters, was contemptuously housed with the doubtful West Indian crew.
Being there, he was promptly treated as belong ing. Almost the first warmth, when she nosed her way into the Gulf Stream, proved too much for the Hawk's so-called cold-storage locker. The beef went bad and half the ship's company with it. Hoagland, the solitary passenger, fell a victim. Dan saved himself by subsisting on pilot biscuit and coffee, yet that he saved the others was not charged to his credit. Captain Goldthwaite's habit was to regard as less than human any being that lived forward; twice already he had raised his drunken but powerful hands against the doctor.
“It's my own fault,” Dan reflected; “I ought to have known better. I did. I knew Johnson was a brute the minute I saw him, and he as good as told me what his captain was. I've only myself to blame for ever shipping on this boat; but I won't take any man's fist and not come back at him. The day that Goldthwaite touches me,” Stone quietly vowed, “I'll first knock him down and then leave the ship if I have to swim till I go under.”
Now Hoagland, with a wry smile that drew his thin face into deep wrinkles, was answering Dan's latest question with another:
“No, I wouldn't call it a champagne ship, but I might say it was a milk punch. What do you make of the captain?”
Was the misplaced passenger asking all this because he really wanted to learn more of the Hawk, or because he wanted to ferret out something about Stone? It was all too pointed to be the mere making of conversation. Dan had nothing to conceal, and therefore retained his natural reticence.
“I haven't seen enough of him to think anything worth repeating,” he said. He bade his patient a quick good-by and went on deck.
The tramp had entered a bay and was skirting shores where luxuriant vegetation rose abruptly from the water's edge and climbed mountain high behind. Tangles of greenery grew steep as a medieval city's walls, from the sea grape to the banana fan, and so to strange varieties of palm. At the far head of the landlocked sea, a little town, all gleaming white and hot, peeped from its verdant frame.
Dan accosted a passing member of the crew. “What's this?” he asked.
“Sanchez, Señor Medico.”
The sailor pointed also to San Lorenzo, close off their port bow. He indicated, well to starboard, Santa Barbara de Samaná.
The profession of medicine and the study of church architecture do not entail a thorough knowledge of geography. Dan had understood that the city of Santo Domingo was to be their first call, and he now assumed that all this lay in their course thither. For the rest, it was enough for him that the way was beautiful and that he was passing over waters that Columbus sailed when he had his first glimpse of the New World.
Bells rang out orders from above. The throb of rickety machinery suddenly stopped and gave the tired ship an instant's rest.
There came a cry from alongside and answering shouts from the bridge. A face appeared over the rail—wide nose and thick lips, yet skin of purest copper, and straight black hair. The body that followed was clad in a dirty uniform bedecked with much gold lace; one foot wore a patent-leather dancing pump, the other a canvas tennis shoe. The negro Indian pilot climbed to the wheelhouse. A moment later, bulking Captain Goldthwaite passed Stone without so much as a nod, on his way below.
The Hawk's progress was anything but rapid. Dan waited until the swift tropical night descended and the yellow stars drooped close above the funnel. The land turned to lilac, and little lights began to appear on shore.
Then cross-eyed Johnson hurried up to the American.
Notwithstanding Dan's ministrations in the speakeasy and at the hospital, the mate had never pretended friendliness. Perhaps he realized the unexpressed but low opinion in which he was held; certainly, he had proffered the post of ship's doctor, not out of gratitude of Stone, but because Stone's casually announced desire for such a position provided an opportunity to do Goldthwaite a good turn by getting him a medical officer at a low figure.
“Where've you been?” The mate spoke always the broad tongue of Avonmouth, and now he spoke with an even more than usual brusqueness.
“Here,” said Dan imperturbably.
“Been a-lukin' everywheres fur you.”
“I've been in full view all the time.”
“Well, you're wanted.”
“Where?”
“In my cabin.” Johnson leered. “And,” he added, “I'd advise you 'urry, my lad!”
Stone left him and went where ordered. His heart was hot. He wanted to practice obedience; but he was nearing the limits of his endurance. Until this afternoon, he had had small time for reflection, but to-day's respite, with the land so close, and the prospect of weeks of browbeating ahead, had determined him on a definite course of action that began with his recorded vow to meet possible force by certain retaliation.
There was a small table in the mate's stifling quarters. Here, under a smoking lamp, sprawled Captain Goldthwaite. His huge bulk slumped forward; his lurching elbows, supported by the table top, swelled the muscles of his arms until, over them, the coat sleeves strained tight. His monstrous shoulders were hunched to his hairy ears. A lowering, bestial face—his brows were knitted over a large book and over his repugnance for anything so contemptible as the printed page. His blue nose was a dark splash between his crimson cheeks; from his thick lips, curling scornfully, his breath issued with a sibilant sound and, in this airless cubby-hole, hung as heavily as that dive keeper's in the Brooklyn grog shop. Goldthwaite's breath was rank with Barbados rum.
“You sent for me?” asked Dan, and then he recognized the book and flushed.
“Yes.”
Goldthwaite growled the monosyllable. He had always detested the doctor, because the doctor would show no fear of him. Not able to wreak resentment on the passenger who had deprived him—at a good price—of his quarters, the captain fastened it on the sole compatriot of that passenger aboard. Now a drunken cunning had come to the aid of enmity and pointed a way to revenge—and to profit as well. The drunkard transfixed his auditor with a concentrated glare.
Dan did not so much as blink. He was resolved to make this fellow state his grievance. The captain, on the other hand, was equally resolved to stare the medical student into startled speech, and then to take offense at it. Dan's temper was longer than Goldthwaite's, and Dan won.
“I sent for you a half hour ago!” the captain suddenly roared. “Where have you been hiding yourself?”
“I have been on deck all afternoon.”
“On deck! Why haven't you been attending to your job?”
“I haven't any patients left except the passenger, and he won't need me till eight bells, if even then.”
“None of your lip! I've found out you're no doctor—and I'll have no damned lip from you!”
Goldthwaite's hairy right fist pounded the volume lying open on his table, and at that Dan winced. He had to speak decisively after all, but he kept as much anger from his voice as he could manage:
“I don't mean to be impudent, sir, but at the same time I want proper treatment in return.”
Had the captain been sober, his reply would have been a blow. He was, of course, far from sober, and so there was no honesty in his rage. It was the slow rage that traps. He leaned back in his chair with an ugly grin and a choked oath.
“Go on,” said he.
Johnson had entered the cabin. With a twist of "his crossed eye, he grunted an echo to his master's order.
“I never pretended to be a graduate physician” Dan quietly continued; “but I was shipped as doctor and I've been treated like a deck hand. Graduate or not, I've saved half your crew for you, and all I've got in return is curses—almost blows. Our agreement hasn't once been kept—on your part or Johnson's.”
“So that's it?” sneered the captain. “Well, what do you want?”
The mate grunted again. Dan cleared his throat; he spoke with firmness. “I'm going to have my pay to date and leave this ship at Santo Domingo City.”
Whether or not that statement was expected, he never knew. It served, in any case, as the opening for an attack, which was what Goldthwaite wanted.
“Leave the ship?” The captain sprang up with such violence that even Johnson drew aside. “Desert, will you? You signed for the voyage, and I'll have you in irons in five minutes!” He leaned across the table and shook a fist under Dan's nose.
“If you do that,” began Stone, “I'll”
“Law?” screamed the captain before any mention could be made of courts. “Don't you talk to me about law! You signed as a doctor and you ain't one. What'll the law say to that? A doctor!” He thumped the volume again, and his descending paw tore loose one of its treasured pages. “Johnson found this book in your duffel hag, didn't you, Johnson? And what's it about? Medicine? No! It's all about how they built churches. Now then, young fellow, you go to jail ashore for a faker—breaking the regulations governing ships' doctors—or else you stay aboard of us without pay!”
The guile of this tyrant was unworthy of its name. His flagrant scheme was to punish Dan and at the same time divert to his own pocket the medico's wages. Goldthwaite's right hand went up again. Its open palm, thrust over the table, caught Stone across the face.
Dan staggered back. When, in an instant, sight returned, he saw the captain in the act of wrenching the cover from the book.
There are not extant a dozen samples of the 1620 edition of Amades Lizarrago's monumental work on “The Cathedrals and Churches of New Spain,” and this copy was one of them. It was priceless in the old-book market, but, poor as he was, Dan Stone would never have sold his copy. Along with a useless passion for the lesser phases of ecclesiastical architecture and a hundred or two other old volumes, that book formed the only legacy left him by the father he had loved.
The captain's last act was too much for Dan. He vaulted the table.
Goldthwaite sprang back until the cabin wall stopped him. He whipped out a pistol and fired. One of Stone's fists knocked up the weapon not an instant too soon; the other drove itself into the captain's raging face.
Almost at once the thing had happened. Johnson stood motionless, so amazed at this marvel of resistance as to be unable to help his superior officer.
Goldthwaite, on his part, was too dissipated a bully to stand punishment. His eyes started from their sockets. As if a painter's brush swept over them, his cheeks turned purple; his mouth screwed upward on one side, like the mouth of a man in a fit, and he pitched over and fell his full length on the floor.
“You've murdered him! You'll swing for this! My God, you'll swing for it!”
Cross-eyed Johnson came to life with his declaration of Goldthwaite's leaving it. He sprang between Dan and the doorway.
Stone gave one look at the captain's form. It was horribly still. He wheeled and with one sweep of his arm drove the mate aside. A steep flight of stairs ascended directly from the corridor. Dan plunged up them.
He heard the cross-eyed man yell, heard the pounding of the mate's feet in gaining pursuit, but he reached the deck.
There were sailors about. They looked up at the noise of his approach.
“Stop him!” shrieked Johnson.
Dan ran to the rail. He climbed it. He poised there one instant only. Then he flung his hands together above his head and dived over the side, through the darkness, toward the invisible sea.