Plundered Cargo/Chapter 9

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter IX

SPIKE HORN TALKS BUSINESS

Spike Horn's first act after successful overturn of authority aboard the Lonney Lee was to go down into the cabin and rummage among the effects of the unconscious skipper. He came on deck with a cigar spearing through his grin of triumph. That flower of Havana was incense burned on the altar of victory. The waxing and waning of the glow at its tip gave quick-shutter pictures of a gargoyle mask which was Spike's battered countenance.

Doctor Chitterly was at the wheel, his rifle, now loaded, conveniently propped against the binnacle. On the edge of the deckhouse beyond the glow of the binnacle light sat the Iron Man. Angelo was for'ard giving his starved soul to music. Not a Chinaman was to be seen; with true Oriental stoicism they had accepted a changed situation and waited to test the mettle of whatever new master fate might order.

Spike stopped in front of the Iron Man and gave him a truculent stare. “Who asked you back here?” he wanted to know.

“Looks like I don't have to get an invite now.” The Iron Man tried to match the hardihood in his voice to Spike's. “We're runnin' this floatin' coffin now, looks like.”

“'We'!” the man from Goldfield mocked. Then he called over the binnacle to the doctor, “Doc, where was this big boloney sausage when you was holdin' the deck alone against Hansen an' the six Chinks—me down below havin' a little pasear with ole Storrs? Where'd you see him?”

“I did not see him at all, Horn,” Doctor Chitterly answered accusingly. Spike turned again on the Iron Man.

“How come?”

“Guess I was doin' my share in the fo'c's'le,” he mumbled. “When that shot went off—the first one, I mean—two Chinks come over to my bunk an' wrastled me. One held my legs; t'other one give me an awful fight with somepin hard—felt like a bar of iron. All over the top of the head he give me that fight, an'——”

“Les see.” Spike's hand shot out, gripped the Iron Man's collar and dragged him over to hold his head in the light of the binnacle. His free hand explored the expanse of wiry hair.

“Where's your bumps?” Spike's question might have come from an examining judge on his bench. The Iron Man, held in this undignified position with an inexorable fist slowly strangling him by its grip on the neckband of his shirt, vented a sound which was surprisingly like a snivel.

“My God, gents! I don't get no bumps on the head after—after the big one a guy give me six years ago. I—I take bumps on the head like I take 'em other places—'thout a mark. Say, gents, don't make me go up with those Chinks, now that yuh've broken away from that fo'c's'le place!”

Horn gave the Iron Man a shove back against the coaming of the house, glared at him—and then suddenly burst out laughing at the ludicrous abjectness of him. He turned to the doctor.

“Doc, what'll we do with this beauty?”

The soft hearted doctor stroked his beard reflectively a moment or two.

“Well, suppose we let him stay with us,” he said. “He obviously can't hurt us.”

“Right,” seconded Horn. And the Iron Man sighed with relief.

So far as matters of navigation and the outward peace of the schooner went, when dawn broke on the Lonney Lee's first day under amateur management, things could not have shaped up better. Doctor Chitterly, still at the wheel, was holding the bowsprit to the course marked out for him by the stolid Mr. Hansen just before he submitted to being bound and carried to his bunk below. By luck there didn't happen to be any islands or shoal water along that course. Nor had any stiffening of the wind prompted the good doctor to shorten sail. He wouldn't have known how if the occasion had arisen. The Lonney Lee was making her slow northing about twenty miles off shore when the sunrise glory in the east lighted the mountains of the peninsula.

Angelo went to his galley. The Iron Man accompanied him to do the humble things with breakfast pots and pans. The Chinamen for'ard came blinking out of their hole. Unbidden, three of them took to swabbing down the maindeck without orders as evidence of good faith under a changed management.

Spike Horn went down into the cabin to see how Captain Judah might be faring. Now that he had worsted the worthy skipper in stand-up fight, his bare knuckles against the other's fists plus a revolver, the man from Goldfield could afford to be magnanimous. All the murder poison which had been engendered in Spike's veins when he was chipping the anchor chain with the mark of the Storrs boot fresh on his cheek had been dissipated by that berserker battle in the dark.

He came under the saturnine stare of the skipper's eyes the instant he entered the latter's wrecked quarters: eyes fully alight with reason and a sort of impersonal fury. Storrs lay as he had been left, with hands bound behind his back and feet laced to a stanchion at the foot of his bunk. His face was not pleasant to see. Spike had played considerable havoc with it.

“Well, Horn, you've thought better of your folly and have come to release me?” Captain Judah's soft voice carried almost a burlesque quality by contrast with his brutalized features.

“You got another guess, Cap,” was Spike's hearty denial. “Just come down to figure out a way to slip you some coffee 'thout giving you a chance to start something. If you were a horse, I'd know what to do—hobble you.”

He went to the folding bowl on a bulkhead wall, soaked a towel in water and clumsily bathed the blood from the skipper's face. Here was a simple gesture of charity which might have moved a heart less embittered than Captain Judah's. The man mumbled at him from under the wet cloth:

“How long do you think, Horn, you and your bunch of crazy handsmen can keep my schooner off the rocks? Not one of you that knows as much about navigation as one of those Chinamen for'ard.”

“We won't keep her off the rocks long, Cap, if rocks mean shore. We're goin' ashore, schooner or no schooner, soon's we get breakfast.” Spike gave his answer cheerily.

Captain Judah writhed in impotent rage. “What! Deliberately wreck the Lonney Lee on this bare beach, and with Sabina reckoning yesterday? Oh, you black swine!”

Spike grinned with utmost humor and carefully swabbed a bit of clotted blood from the skipper's chin.

“Sabina Island? Where does she fit into the picture? Me, I've seen enough islands to last a lifetime. Reckon I can give this Sabina the go-by an' not feel broke up about it.”

“Quit your damn' foolishness, Horn?” Captain Judah snarled. “You know well as I do your business aboard this schooner was to keep me from getting to Sabina Island—to hold me off until your gang could hop from San Francisco down to Guaymas and run over there to get—to get what is mine by right!”

Spike walked over to soak the towel anew. Here was the master of the Lonney Lee off again on that mysterious hunch of his about a decent young fellah named Spike Horn trying to doublecross him. Same sort of bunk Storrs had talked that night in the house of the cabbage fields when he found Spike's bankbook showing the deposit of one hundred thousand dollars. Must be a big stake behind all this. Something phoney.

Spike Horn was a gambler in blind chances. He might try sinking an explanatory shaft to tap this blind business; maybe something doing for ole Spike.

“Gap,” he began with mock seriousness, “I'm just a young fellah tryin' to get along in the world and followin' the Golden Rule wherever she leads. Maybe so I'd listen to reason; who knows?”

He sat on the edge of Storrs' bunk in an attitude suggesting an invitation to confidences. A crafty gleam shot through the bound man's eyes and was as quickly smudged. What his ears told him was that this fellow Horn, for the minute holding the upper hand, was willing to sell out, at a price. Horn would play both ends against the middle—so Captain Judah appraised his intention—and, having already been paid a fat price by the other side, would now attempt to bleed him, Storrs, as the price of restoring his schooner to him and making possible the gaining of Sabina Island in time. Captain Judah did some quick calculating.

“Horn,” he began with an air of crafty deliberation, “the difference between you and me—between your gang and me, let us say—is that you fellows guess the value of what lies at Sabina. I know to the last dollar piece what that value is. You fellows are taking a flyer on a gamble; I'm playing a sure thing. Does that circumstance tell you anything?”

“Not much,” Spike grinned noncommittally.

“Doesn't it mean that I can talk cold turkey?” Captain Judah asked. Spike gave him a shrug of the shoulders. “Well, then, let's get down to tacks. What's your price for restoring the Lonney Lee to me?”

That hit Horn under his guard. A game of discovery into which he had entered casually but a moment ago appeared to have become suddenly a bonanza lure. Here was a turn! Yesterday he was a shanghaied sailor sweating under the heel of a bitter-hard master; now before breakfast he was asked to name his price in a deal as far from his ken as the ultimate fixed star. Spike took a shot at the moon.

“You're so cock-sure about what the stuff's worth—what lies on Sabina Island, Į mean. Why not name that figure so's we can tell where we stand?”

Cold blue eyes stared up at him unwinkingly. “Two hundred thousand,” was the skipper's answer.

Spike was wearing his poker face. Not so much as the tweak of an eyebrow registered.

“Well, Storrs, figuring on two hundred thousand, how much is it worth to you to go up on deck and put your two hands to the wheel once more?”

“Ten thousand dollars.” Spike tipped back his head and laughed.

“Goodness gracious, Claudine, aren't you a spender!” he mocked. “I raise you a cold forty thousand.”

The man in the bunk fumed and swore. Horn sat tight. Finally Storrs met the terms named. A monitory finger was wagged before the captain's nose.

“Here's the other terms,” Spike dictated. “First thing you do when I untie your hands is to sign a contract which I'll draw up an' which'll say you agree to pay the party of the second part fifty thousand dollars by draft on the Wells Fargo Bank the day the Lonney Lee ties up in San Francisco. Item two: you'll run the schooner but you'll take orders from me any time I have a mind to give 'em. Item three: you'll turn over to me one box of a hundred prime Havana cigars an' receive from me in gold their price at the market—an' we won't have any of 'em boiled, either.”

Captain Storrs nodded assent. Horn stooped over and picked up the skipper's revolver where it lay amid the débris of the fight. He pawed over a shelf above the skipper's head and brought down three boxes of cartridges.

“These little nick-nacks stay by me until we wind up our little business affair,” he said. “We don't want you to be a bad boy any longer, Cap. Now, I'll fetch you down some of Angelo's prime coffee.”

He quit Storrs' quarters, but he did not go to the galley for coffee immediately. Instead he gathered into his arms all the pretty new rifles left in the cabin locker—his own and the doctor's were on deck—and carrying them up to the weather rail he dropped them into the gulf. The ammunition he stowed in a cache of his own choosing and behind a padlock. That left, so far as he knew, two rifles and a revolver the only weapons aboard, and in safe hands.

Then he brought Captain Judah his coffee.

Fifteen minutes later Doctor Chitterly, who was having his breakfast on the deckhouse so that he could have an eye to the Chinaman at the wheel, was thunderstruck to see Captain Storrs and Mr. Hansen emerge from the cabin hatchway. Spike Horn had his arm, in its shreds of silk shirt, linked through the skipper's.