Plundered Cargo/Chapter 5

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter V

DIVIDENDS OF SIN

A week out from the questionable port of Abalone Cove.

The stiff north winds which had carried the Lonney Lee down the coast suddenly died with the passing of San Clemente Island, and the schooner made bare steering way, jibs and tops'ls limp as bed sheets between vagrant puffs of zephyrs.

An African heat dropped upon the ocean; a shriveling furnace breath straight off the deserts behind San Diego where September marks the climax of summer's torridity. The sky was a thin. plate of superheated brass riveted upon the horizon. The sea appeared molten tallow, viscid, filmed over by grease globules wherever a capful of wind dropped. Only twice in twenty-four hours did sea and sky return to familiar aspect and then in an exaggerated degree. At dawn and sunset, especially at the latter hour, the ether was a crystal sphere deep as the universe itself, through which played unimaginable colors. Then the sea became a mirror to distort and blend violets and golds and ruby reds into a breath-taking pattern.

Land still showed off the port bow—it never had been out of sight. But it was an unreal land. Tenuous blue mountains, which at dawn showed bare and ragged and by sunset became black iron palings, fenced the eastern horizon. Distance half veiled a stark brutality, a portent of slow death awaiting any luckless one who might be cast upon this inhospitable coast.

All of this was background for the bit of yeasty life being played on the Lonney Lee. Between bowsprit and taffrail ran cross-currents of passion which the heat and hours of mid-day breathlessness served only to aggravate. Under the surface of affairs psychic forces were constantly coursing: blood lust, mounting promptings of savagery—even, in time, the popping of bubbles in the brain pan of the least stable intelligence aboard this floating half-portion of life.

Not a man on the Lonney Lee, except perhaps the dull Mr. Hansen who lacked the imagination of a cockroach, who did not feel the prickle of portents.

Spike Horn, seven days after he had started out to build a fire of easy money under gay San Francisco, was at war with the whole immediate world except Doctor Chitterly; and him he held only in disdainful tolerance. It was Spike Horn against every other damned man on the ship, yellow, white or olive tinted. The major force of his antagonism was directed, of course, against Captain Judah Storrs.

He only bided an opportunity to kill the skipper. No middle ground for the rage that boiled like hot pitch through his veins; it was kill Captain Judah or be killed by him. No man, in Spike's very direct code of personal ethics, could put the mark of his boot heel on Spike Horn's face and get away with it. He'd stand being knocked down in a fair fight, Spike would; he'd take his medicine if anybody could give him a licking straight and above the belt. But to be brass-knuckled and then stamped on when he was out, that was a killing matter.

Captain Judah sensed the temper that was in him and was vigilantly on his guard. He never approached the man he'd marked but that one hand stayed in his pocket; and it took no sharp eye to see the bulge a revolver butt made in the cloth. He took care, the skipper did, that wherever he went on his schooner, day of night, the deckhouse, a mast or a rail should be close at his back. Yet the odd humor of the man twisted these precautions into a sort of game, as a tiger tamer might conceal his whip upon entering his cage of beasts. He developed the trick of standing a little away from where his enemy was at work upon some wretched task and letting his cold blue eyes follow every swing of an arm, each bending of the back. This sometimes for an hour on end, with not a word spoken by either.

And Captain Judah exercised sweet ingenuity in the appointment of these tasks. During the first days of the voyage there was brass to be polished and the windlass to be scraped and repainted. He saved the most heart-racking job for the hot weather he knew would befall. That was the chipping of rust from the anchor chain.

The skipper had the fathoms of heavy links stretched on the fo'c's'le deck in massy parallels of sullen steel, then set Spike to work with a shortened cold chisel and a maul scaling the rust off link by link. A paint job would follow the chipping.

Without cover from the grilling sun, the youth who had one hundred thousand dollars written on his bankbook's credit side started his slave work. He had cajoled a coolie's wicker hat from a Chinese fo'c's'le' mate; this sat on his head like a mammoth toadstool. Shreds of a silk shirt and his loud checked trousers, now grimed and grease stained, completed his rigging. Whenever Captain Judah mounted his tantalizing vigil by the windlass Spike put on his dogged grin which could not be drowned by sweat.

Doctor Chitterly ventured to expostulate with the skipper the second day of this torture. Not at all sure of his own somewhat honorary position as second mate, nevertheless the worthy discoverer of Squaw Root Tonic risked his peacock feather.

“Captain Storrs, sir,” he suggested, “I do not know exactly what may be a schooner's equipment; but if there might be such a thing aboard as—um—a sea umbrella which could be raised over that poor young man's head——”

“Mr. Chitterly,” spoke the skipper's suave voice, “I regret to say that the Lonney Lee left her sea umbrella at home.” And that was that.

A word as to Spike's status in the fo'c's'le, which the Iron Man, Angelo the flute player and impressed cook and he himself shared with six scurvy offscourings from Canton. That fo'c's'le was a ten-by-twelve corner of Bedlam.

The Iron Man cordially hated Horn as the cause of the misfortune which had been visited upon him. Had not this loud-mouth plucked him from the dramatic stage where he had earned an honest living by being smitten with ball bats and billiard cues and singing “Asleep In the Deep” between spoonfuls of beer? 'What chance of getting back to the artistic life? And what about five bucks a day with cakes?

Angelo's Latin temperament was quick to sense the roused tiger in Spike who bore the fresh scar of degradation on his face. He looked upon Spike as some sort of a mad dog and, being a timorous soul, he greatly feared lest he fall foul of so dangerous a character. A man afraid is a dangerous man. Angelo slept at night in the bunk above Spike's with a long bladed knife from the galley handy under his blankets.

The blunter sensibilities of the Iron Man and Angelo did not find bunking with Chinamen the abomination it was in Spike Horn's eyes. Reared in the mines where the most despised member of society is the humble Chink, Spike felt his soul smirched by being herded in a dark cubby reeking with the burnt-peanut smell of opium. ”

But there was more to it than squeamishness. Spike had been shanghaied aboard with a pocket bursting with gold pieces. When on that night of their kidnapping he had undertaken a partial change of wardrobe a pitch of the schooner had floored him and before several of the Chinese, tell-tale gold had spurted from his pocket. An avid light jumped to slant eyes when the white man scrambled to recover his money. The secret was out. A dangerous secret in those surroundings.

Once the cause of that bulge over his thigh was revealed, there was no dodging the ever present threat of robbery. Spike knew coolies of this type would kill for the sake of gold if a reasonable chance offered—a chance and a fair possibility of not being caught at murder. A silent knife-thrust in the dark; a body carried up four steps to the deck; a splash——

He seized the initiative himself by stealing a sheath knife from the belt of one of the sleeping Chinamen—a sort of bos'n-boss of the crew; this on the second night out. Thereafter he carried that knife by day inside his shirt and at nights he cat-winked—deep sleep would not come however great his exhaustion—with the haft clutched close to him. His gold he distributed between three trousers pockets and the inside of each sock. Walking on double-eagles raised blisters on his soles.

To complete the bizarre picture of life aboard the Lonney Lee there was the matter of Angelo and his flute.

When that musician started to walk with Spike Horn and his two companions to find a telephone at the time of the palace trolley car's wreck, canny caution had dictated he take his instrument with him. The thing unjointed into three segments and was carried in a flat case capable of being slipped in an inside coat pocket. During the surprise at the house of the cabbage fields and the subsequent rough handling this precious instrument remained snugly stowed. The third night of the voyage, when he and his pot-walloper had things all tidied up in the galley, Angelo screwed his flute together. Seated on a box with his back against the foremast, Angelo forgot his troubles in music.

Captain Judah was one who did not favor flute piping overmuch. The second night of Angelo's solo work the skipper sent Doctor Chitterly for'ard to bid him cease.

“Why not I playa da flute—me, Angelo? Good musich!” Angelo protested.

“Because, my good man, the captain says you shall not,” Doctor Chitterly answered with what he meant to be a note of fatherly austerity.

“Capitan, he can go t' hell—heem!” Angelo pursed his lips anew to finish the rippling arpeggio of a Spanish bolero.

Captain Judah was on him before six notes were vented. Without a word he snatched the instrument from the Italian's lips and tossed it overboard. Like a flash Angelo leaped to his feet, his hand searching his waist-band for the knife he carried against attack by the wild man Horn. The skipper deliberately turned his back and walked away. He knew the man was a coward.

But that incident was the beginning cause for what the other white men aboard came to believe was Angelo's madness. Angelo spoke word to nobody, not even to the Iron Man, his helper. Glumly he went through his tasks in the galley. Everybody who encountered him, whether yellow man or white, got a baleful look from his black eyes, wherein much of the white showed. And at spare moments during the day, under a lantern at night, Angelo busied himself with a section of bamboo broom handle. He was filing and haggling vents in the stone-like fibre. He cut and fitted a wooden stopple to close one hollow end. He was making himself another flute.

Captain Judah locked up a can of ant poison which stood on a galley shelf.

“Ant poison,” he remarked to Doctor Chitterly, “is all right in its place; but it wouldn't go so well in coffee.”

Doctor Chitterly's position as second mate was, as I have said, more or less an honorary one. Though he went through the pretense of standing the first watch, with Captain Judah always within call if not actually on deck during that term of hours, his real status aboard the Lonney Lee was that of entertainer and companion for the skipper. Perhaps you have seen that Captain Judah was not of the ordinary type of coasting master, The man possessed a well ordered and acquisitive mind; he was far more widely read than the doctor; he took a secret pride in his ability to dissect character.

Perhaps this latter characteristic was what prompted his instant selection of the doctor for a cabin berth upon the coming aboard of the shanghaied four. Certainly he found amusement in the gentle old fraud's pompous mannerisms and pretended erudition. After the third night out they played dominoes together each evening on the cleared table of the cabin. On these formal occasions Doctor Chitterly donned his Prince Albert coat.

The worthy Chitterly, being secretly very much afraid of Captain Judah and fearful lest some sudden whim should send him to the fo'c's'le, ventured no reference to the manner of his and his companions' coming aboard. However great his curiosity as to what lay behind that incident, as to where the Lonney Lee might be bound and what awaited at the end of the voyage, his judgment tied his tongue. One night, which was the second of the calm, Captain Judah broke the silence of the game by plumping an interesting observation.

“Mr. Chitterly, I believe I shanghaied you by mistake.”

“Captain Storrs, sir, I offer a hearty second to that statement,” was the doctor's gusty answer.

“Tm rather pleased that I did, after all.” The skipper bent his blue eyes upon his second mate in a baffling half-smile.

“Meaning no offense, sir, I cannot share that sentiment,” Doctor Chitterly declared. “My previous ventures at sea have all proved—um—unfortunate; and I have no reason to believe this experience will break the rule. Moreover my duty on shore—the thousands of ailing folk who crave the healing touch of Squaw Root Tonic——”

“Rot!” snapped Captain Judah. “If things break right on this voyage, I can put you in a position where you'll never have to cure another stomach ache. That is if you have the gumption to know which side your bread's buttered on.”

“You mean——”

“Thousands! Thousands in your pocket, Mr. Chitterly, if you stick by me.”

The doctor turned in his swivel seat so that he might slip his hand beneath the second button of his Prince Albert—his Henry Clay gesture. “A-hum, Captain Storrs, my integrity in a worthy cause—in a worthy cause mind you, sir, has never been open to question. Once when I was suspected of assassinating, or attempting to assassinate the President of Panama——”

The skipper cut him short with an impatient shake of the head. “You wouldn't hesitate to shoot a man if he stood between yourself and a fortune?”

Doctor Chitterly combed his beard in acute embarrassment. He wanted to temper his answer to trim with the necessities of the moment; yet somewhere under his diamond stud lurked a conscience.

“Wouldn't that depend, Captain Storrs, sir, upon how the right of the thing lay—his right and mine?”

Captain Judah shrugged. He stirred the mess of dominoes on the red cloth. “Draw,” he commanded and at random picked out five.

“You can lay to this much, Mr. Chitterly,” he mused in afterthought as he put the five counters before him up on edge. “If I made a mistake in shanghaing you I didn't go far wrong with that young wolf pup for'ard, that Horn fellow. He represents the people who're going to race down here to double-cross me. It's my guess Horn's the first man that you—or perhaps I—will have to drill with a lead slug.”