Plundered Cargo/Chapter 7

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter VII

A WORM PLANS TO TURN

Fourteen days out from Abalone Cove the Lonney Lee rounded Cape San Lucas, where the bony finger of the peninsula of Lower California is chopped off in a forbidding headland. A fine following wind sent the schooner nosing up into the gulf between peninsula and Mexican mainland.

The Vermilion Sea is the name old Fernando de Alarcon gave to these lonely waters when in 1541 he warped his ship away to the head of the gulf and saw the blood-red waters of the river we-call Colorado staining the blue of delta tides. Though the red silt of the river dyes only shoal water a little way out from the point of discharge, hardly a sunset in a whole year round of perpetual summer that the entire gulf does not justify the name given it by a poetically minded adventurer and become for a magic hour in truth the Vermilion Sea. Even the Sixteenth Century navigators marveled at unique atmospheric conditions above this confined sea which wrought the miracle of turning water into blood with each setting sun.

Loneliest sea between Hudsons Bay and the Gulf of Panama is this seven-hundred-mile gut of salt water fringed east and: west by mountain-bound deserts. Two decayed ports mark a steamer path on the mainland side; ancient La Paz at the southern end of the peninsula has its occasional visits by craft courteously called steamships. For the rest of the gulf, on its western shore at least, ts vacant water, strewn with numberless uninhabitable island knobs and knowing no keels but those of the forty-foot gasolinas carrying mails, and in season the small craft of the pearl fishers going to the beds in Conception Bay, at the Punta de Santa Inez and Isle of Carmen. Gulf pearls of fabulous price are still to be bought in Paris.

A few dead-and-alive old villages sprawl along the peninsula shore of the Vermilion Sea where fringes of cocoa palms mark secret wells: Loerto the Blest, Mulege, Escondido. Life is as stagnant as dead ditch water it those inhabited spots except in midsummer when men go out to dive for treasure hidden under the mantle of one oyster in a thousand. Then the fervor of the gaming table revivifies slack nerves; a peasant may come home a king.

Of the four kidnapped landsmen aboard the Lonney Lee Doctor Chitterly alone shared with Captain Judah and Mr. Hansen knowledge of the schooner's whereabouts. The skipper made no effort to conceal from his titulary second mate the small black crosses he marked on his chart with each noon's shooting of the sun. Doctor Chitterly watched the procession of those crosses down and around the tip of the peninsula; but as to where they would end at destination Captain Judah gave him no hint. One night, the second after rounding the cape, the doctor saw a faint glow of lights behind an island's high shoulder and guessed La Paz, the capital, lay there. When the schooner kept right on her northing he yielded himself to the gloomiest forebodings. If the skipper was not making for La Paz where in the water wilderness north could he be going?

His vague unrest was by no means allayed when on the third day in gulf waters he found Captain Judah busy in the cabin with a nail puller gouging out nails which held the cover to a long packing case. On that cover a Spanish consignee's name had been lampblacked with the port, “Guaymas,” scrawled beneath and the legend, “Machine Dies,” in one corner.

“Lend a hand here, Mr. Chitterly,” his superior ordered as the last nail came out of the cover. He dropped it to the cabin floor. A double row of new rifles, their barrels greased against sea dampness, lay racked securely in the packing case. Captain Judah handed them up one by one to be stood against the wall by the doctor. At the bottom of the case were wedged two dozen paper boxes of shells in clips.

“Whats the matter, man?' Storrs caught a troubled look in the other's eyes. “Don't you like the look of these fancy machine dies?”

“Well—um—rifles,” the doctor stammered; “perhaps I was not quite prepared to—ah——”

“Did you expect to see bon-bons containing paper caps with strings to tie under the chin?” Doctor Chitterly was favored with a bland smile. “Come, come, Mr. Chitterly, I wouldn't pick you for a milksop!”

“I have never been accused of being that,” was the answer given with great dignity.

“Of course not! You remember what I said to you one night on the run down: how I'd put thousands in your pocket if you'd stick by me. Well, Mr. Chitterly, you do not have to be told that in this rough-and-ready world folks don't pick up thousands without fighting for them.

“And machine dies—” the skipper gave one of his tight lipped smiles—“machine dies are right handsome things to have handy in a fight. Now take this rag and be so good as to wipe the grease off those barrels before we stow our little trinkets away.”

While the worthy doctor was not an arrant pacifist, it was true that in his way through life he had made it a practice to cut a wide corner around ugly violence. He had relied upon the power of the word rather than a smash from the fist to lift him over rough going. He abhorred anything savoring of crude force.

Indeed, the uncovering of rifles secretly shipped left the discoverer of Squaw Root Tonic in a most chaotic frame of mind approaching outright funk. Here in this lonely sea suddenly was disclosed a very tangible portent of dirty work ahead, dirty work in which the captain of the Lonney Lee evidently expected him to take a hand. It appeared to be tacitly understood that he, a peace loving man, was going to shoot somebody, or several persons, as yet unknown, in order that he might share in ill gotten thousands.

Who might be the ones destined to receive those slender steel points which the doctor had viewed with a slight shudder upon the opening of one of the paper shell boxes? Where would they be found? When?

Moreover, Captain Judah had not spoken of a massacre; it was a fight which lay ahead somewhere in this bleak waste of waters. And a fight of presupposed give and take in the matter of steel-jacketed bullets. Glory be! If there could be one thing the good doctor abhorred over shooting somebody else it would be the experience of having somebody else shoot at him. Once or twice in his lifetime he had been shot at; recollection of that experience always made his entire internal machinery turn over. A knife wound—he'd seen them in others—might be bearable if not fatal. Nasty, of course, and something to be avoided at all hazards. But to receive perforations from a steel slug traveling with the speed of light—ugh!

The doctor's secondary reaction to the uncovering of the rifles was a sense of great loneliness. There was nobody on the schooner with whom he could take counsel. The Iron Man was a swine; he had hidden behind a flour barrel in the galley that epic moment of the assault upon Angelo the flute player. Angelo himself was unquestionably crazy, or far enough off his balance to deny the worth of any confidences. Spike Horn, then——

With him Doctor Chitterly had had little to do since that fatal hour of their kidnapping. The young man was a violent person, although he had the doctor's secret sympathy in his defiance of Captain Judah. Then, too, the doctor was half inclined to believe what Storrs had told him: that Horn was allied with that mysterious enemy who was out to double-cross Storrs—doubtless the enemy against which rifles had been provided. How could Chitterly be sure one way or the other? All he knew about Horn was what that exuberant youth himself had told him after climbing down the struts of a Ferris wheel to the doctor's car.

But to Spike he went, nevertheless, for comfort and counsel in his dire stress of mind. The night following the uncrating of the rifles when the skipper was busy in his cabin Doctor Chitterly found Spike alone by the windlass smoking the butt of the third stolen cigar. He told him what Storrs had revealed as to the imminence of a fight and the circumstance of the rifles.

Spike heard him through without comment. Then when the doctor paused, “Well, Doc, looks like we can get the game in our own hands.”

Doctor Chitterly vented an incredulous whistle.

“You know where Storrs put those guns, don't you?” from Spike.

“Yes, in a locker under one of the cabin seats.”

“Shells there, too?”

The doctor nodded.

“Is there a lock on that locker?”

“I didn't see any padlock. Maybe it closes with a spring lock, But my dear fellow——”

Spike waved down the doctor's rising objection. He rushed on in an eager undertone.

“Like this, Doc! Tonight when that Swede Hansen's on the middle watch—old Storrs snoring in his cabin—you slip out of the hay minute two bells sound. I'll've crawled along the deck right up to the cabin hatch. You find me there. We gumshoe into Storrs' cabin and tap him once with one of these marlin spike dinguses or somethin'. Then us for the guns—and the schooner's ours.”

Doctor Chitterly was appalled.

“My dear boy! That's mutiny, and Captain Storrs could hang us for less than that.” The doctor's juvenile reading taught him that where mutiny at sea was, a tidy hanging hovered in the offing.

“Mutiny be damned! How's he goin' hang us if we've got him where we want him? You poor goat! Talk about hanging when you come to me, an' you're like to get shot. I tell you, let me an' you get hands on a rifle apiece an' in five minutes we're running this ole soap-dish! The Swede we'll tie up with the skipper. We give the Wop an' that big stiff, the Iron Man, a gun each to watch the Chinks, an' there you are!”

“But,” the doctor interposed with fluttering breath, “suppose all goes well and we get control of the ship, you and I don't know how to run it. Where would we take her?”

“Like hell I don't know how to run this scow!” was Spikes confident rejoinder. “Where 'bouts are we, anyway?”

“In the Gulf of California,” Chitterly answered.

“I don't know where that is; but I can see land over yonder. That's enough for me. We'll steer for land. Me for that!”

“And wreck the ship?” Doctor Chitterly quavered. Spike suddenly put his face very close to the Chitterly beard and hissed at him.

“You ain't got the guts of a louse, Chitterly. You're the kind of a feller that teaches penmanship in a young ladies' seminary and takes tea with cream puffs every afternoon at five. Cripes, but you give me a pain!”

All unwittingly the headstrong Mr. Horn had plucked just the right chord in the worthy physician's soul scale to bring him to support the hairbrained scheme. Doctor Chitterly drew himself up to stiff dignity.

“Young fellow, no man can impute cowardice to Old Doctor Chitterly and not live to regret it. I expect, sir, that when we have made ourselves masters of this ship you will come to me with appropriate apology.”

“Good kid!” was Spike's irreverent approval, and the doctor felt his hand in a strong grasp. “At two bells I'll be at the cabin hatch.”

“At two bells, then, I'll be waiting for you,” said the doctor.