Plundered Cargo/Chapter 15

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter XV

A GOOD WILL EMBASSY

The sun, which in September swings over the Vermilion Sea like a white-hot pendulum, never looked down, perhaps, upon a sweeter interlude of piracy than that which transpired in the dish cove of Sabina Island that afternoon.

A survey of the Sierra Park's stores and water tanks convinced Spike and the doctor the marooning of Captain Judah and his crew on the hulk stranded on that deserted shore would not entail hardship for many weeks. After that—well, they, the mutineers, would report the presence of men on the wreck at the first Mexican port the Lonney Lee touched; and perhaps a kind hearted government would send to take them off.

Captain Judah, back against the mast, had watched the comings and goings of his enemies with eyes alive. Not a word of their intent was flung at him. He saw the three go overside. The man made a desperate attempt to gain his feet; an invisible quicksand held his legs prisoners.

Back on the schooner once more, Spike made no ado about bundling the remaining Chinamen, their little wicker ditty baskets and opium pipes, into the boats where their fellows waited at the oars. His rifle, carried hunter-wise in the crook of an arm, emphasized his orders.

“You, too, Hansen!” The wooden-faced mate showed mild surprise; but he was one to take the fall of the cards as predestined. With an imitation leather suitcase under his arm Hansen paused at the rail:

“Maister Spike, you remembair von time you ask me I skol sell you tobaccy. Maybe I say then, naw. Skol you ask me now I sell you tobaccy, I say yaw.”

“Ask me again next time you see me,” was Spike's hearty promise of future business, and he dropped Hansen's suitcase down to one of the boats. With the doctor and his rifle in the stern of one ferry and himself similarly shepherding the second, Spike gave orders to push off for the Sierra Park's side. The twain rowed the empty boats back to the Lonney Lee. Transfer of the last vestige of Judah Storrs' authority was complete.

To sum up, here were two ships in a shallow cove on the seaward side of Sabina Island, somewhere offshore in the Vermilion Sea: one a beached wreck with gaping seams letting the tides into a hold believed to contain treasure; the other seaworthy and at anchor. Aboard the derelict Captain Judah Storrs and a crew of seven, with no chance of navigating anywhere—not even,a small boat in their possession. And with the two white men, Storrs and Hansen, no weapon to buttress their authority over six yellow men from Canton River.

On the deck of the Lonney Lee were four men—landsmen. Two only, Horn and the doctor, possessed quite the most shadowy rudiments of the art of navigation. Two, the Iron Man and the flute player, have seen nothing of the working of a schooner beyond the galley door. Four men, sailors, could make shift to navigate a 120 ton schooner; but hardly a quack doctor, a gold miner, a flute player and an Iron Man lately off the stage of a honkey-tonk.

There was still another factor in the situation: one embodied by the vigorous personality of Karelia Lofgren, the Finnish girl who had taken her smoldering wrath ashore with her to the oven slopes of a barren island. Captain Judah Storrs, wounded and aboard the treasure hulk, might be revising his plans for the immediate future. Chitterly, Horn, and the others on the Lonney Lee had theirs to make. But what of this jet-haired woman of the fens and her lust for revenge?

Ft was to her that Spike Horn's thoughts turned the minute he was back upon the schooner. In fact, the vision of that straight and lithe body in shirt and trousers, that oval face with its black brows drawn into a furious frown had floated like an aura behind every turn of action since Karelia Lofgren went over the Sierra Park's side. Some unsuspected chords in his being tingled as if blown by a strong wind,

The doctor saw Horn preparing to drop overside into one of the yawls riding at painter's end and guessed his purpose.

“Horn, you're not going to look for more trouble ashore?”

“What d yuh mean, trouble?” Spike challenged. “I'm headed to fetch off a captain to run this ship.”

“Captain?” Chitterly echoed. “You don't mean——”

“The girl, sure! Daughter of a sea captain, ain't she? Been to sea all her life, most likely. Knows how to steer this 1i'l ole bathtub so's it'll get somewheres—which is more'n you and I know, Doc.”

“But you'll take your rifle along, Horn,” anxiously.

“That'd be a nice way to make a call on a lady.” And Spike pushed off. Doctor Chitterly followed his progress shoreward with deepened misgivings. Any young female, he reasoned, who signalized her sudden appearance from nowhere by instant and unreasoned shooting would not make good company aboard the schooner.

Spike drove the boat onto the sand alongside where the girl's rude raft was tethered, gave the painter a twist around a rock and set off toward the spine of naked dike which seamed the seaward side of the mountain and over which he had seen her disappear. For all his decidedly low-brow surface character, Spike Horn possessed a store of imagination carried over from childhood. To be thus treading the burnt turf of a bit of island bastioned off from all the world and in quest of a sort of Miss Robinson Crusoe gave him a skipping sensation around the heart. A far cry from Stingaree Gulch in Goldfield or even a Ferris wheel on the beach near the Cliff House!

He scaled the natural stone fence which came slanting from the heights and looked down upon a bit of beach beyond the cove where lay the two craft. A hedge of naked thorn bush blocked off the foot of the mountain from the yellow scimitar of sand where the fan lace of the surf laid its changing patterns of foam. Back against the gaunt branches of the desert shrubs Horn thought he saw a dun colored peak of tarpaulin stretched tentwise. He commenced picking his way down a talus slope bearing in that direction.

“Stop where you are!”

The command came from behind him and a little way up the rocky battlement he had just crossed. Spike whirled in the direction of the voice and stood moveless, his hands lifted a little way from his thighs. He saw a blue-shirted torso and a black head lifted above the rocky dike. He saw the same curiously silvered finger he had first noted before; and it was covering him in an identical manner.

Spike swept off the fragment of a straw hat which partially covered his shock of hair and made with it a sweeping bow.

“Pleased to meetcha again!” he called with one of his comedian's grins. The girl stepped out from behind her breastwork. She lowered her weapon a little, though still keeping the blocky figure of the invader covered. Spike could see the knotting of the black brows in a scowl.

“What are you doing ashore?” Karelia demanded roughly.

“Come to have a little pow-wow with you, lady,” was the hardy answer.

“Well, you might just as well make tracks back to your schooner. I've got nothing to say to anybody from Judah Storrs' craft.”

Spike widened his grin. “There's where you're wrong, lady. It ain't ole Cap Storrs' schooner any more. It's ours—mine an' Doc Chitterly's—an' we're goin' pull our freight outa here just's soon as you'll say the word an' come aboard.”

Karelia's scowl of displeasure turned to one of mystification. What sort of a game, her tip-tilted brows asked, was this tough looking man trying to put over?

“How's this—the schooner no longer Cap'n Storrs'?”

“Well, you see, lady, it's kind of a long story from where it starts with a Ferris wheel at the Cliff House down to this morning, an' if I should start to yell it at you across fifty feet of rock maybe you'd get tired of my voice before you knew it all.” Spike's insinuation of a closer approach was given most engagingly, but met with no favorable response.

“You can keep your distance just the same,” the girl said with crisp incisiveness. “And you needn't make up any fairy tales as you go along.”

Spike started in an exaggerated bellow which could have been heard on the deck of the Sierra Park: “My name's Spike Horn, an' I'm a minin' man from Goldfield, just a decent young feller tryin' to get along. An' I never pack a gun when I go to see a lady, howbe the lady may figure she's got to take precautions.”

Karelia's glance dropped to the weapon she held at her hip and for an instant something like shame flickered through her black eyes. Then her protective mantle of suspicion dropped over her again and she nodded curtly for Spike to continue. The revolver held its place at her hip.

He continued with no abatement of his voice. Told her simply and with unconscious dramatic power how his ambition to build a fire under San Francisco had landed him, together with three other men he'd never seen before that hectic night, on the deck of a strange schooner in a fog-bound cove south of the city. How the entry on the credit side of a bankbook had started Captain Storrs off on a cranky notion that he'd stumbled onto a band of conspirators. How, the dawn just passed, when he had the skipper helpless, he, Spike, had angled in the dark waters of mystery and had hooked a contract with the raging Judah Storrs. How they had marooned Storrs and his crew on the wreck.

“I give you my word, lady, I got no more idea than a rabbit this minute what it is ole Cap Storrs's so crazy to get at down in the muck of that steamer's hold. What's more, I don't care. Me, I'm for pullin' my freight outa this-hell-hole, pronto! An' Doc Chitterly, who's a nice ole gazabo if you handle him right; the doc thinks like I do.

“'But,' says I to the doc, 'we don't pull outa this bowl of hot slum they call a ocean 'til we get that young lady ashore to go with us. She sure needs to be looked after,' I says.”

Silence between them for a long minute. Spike watched the play of emotions across the olive features of the girl. They registered themselves without dissembling: suspicion, hope, beginning beam of confidence. Finally she put a test.

“But suppose I don't wish to go with you. Suppose I tell you I'm perfectly content to stay here on Sabina Island and play out my game with Cap'n Storrs.”

Spike pondered this challenge, abashed. Here was a facer.

“But, Miss Ka-Karelia, we can't go 'way an' leave you here alone. Not with ole Storrs out there on that busted steamer like a chained wolf pup ragin' to get at you. He can get ashore like you did—some sorta raft business. An' when he does—why, girl, I tell you it ain't safe!”

Unconsciously Spike Horn poured into his plea a weight of sincerity calculated to convince the most skeptical Karelia Lofgren. A great deal more feeling than he would have thought he possessed. And, though he did not know it, there was in his urging something more personal than abstract chivalry.

The girl behind the dike pondered his words with brooding eyes, for doubt of men which had been lodged in her by cruel bludgeoning was slow to yield. Finally she thrust her revolver under her strap belt with a definitive gesture and came and gave Spike her hand with a hearty grip.

“Now,” said she, “we'll talk things over.”