Somewhere in the Caribbean/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
GOING AND COMING.
When I came to myself it was a bit difficult to patch things together in any sort of connected sequence. My head felt as big as a bushel basket and my tongue was like a dry stick in my mouth. At first I thought I must be stone blind; the most strenuous eye effort revealed no ray of light. Then I realized that I was lying on the rough floor of some windowless den or other; that the floor was rising and falling in rhythmic undulations; and that the sustained rumbling drumming in my ears was not the stamp and go of the engines of the canal dredge to the music of which I had lately been awakening at my camp in the Everglades.
Of course the sequences straightened themselves out in due time; Alison's letter—the long pull down the canal—dinner in the Waikiki—my curiously interrupted attempt to go ashore afterward. What exactly had happened in the dinghy after the two men had dropped into it from the rail of the slowly drifting vessel? Had one of them hit me with the limp-sausage thing he had drawn from his pocket? If so, why? And what and where was this uneasy pit of darkness in which I was lying?
The sense of smell and that of hearing quickly answered the last of these queries. The unmistakable stench of bilge water told me that I was in the hold of a ship, and with the stench there was a whiff of alcohol. Also, the sustained rumbling and steady vibration and the rise and fall of my rough-floor couch said plainly enough that the vessel was a motor craft, or at least an auxiliary, and that it was at sea.
Afterward it occurred to me to wonder why I did not at once hit upon the explanation which would immediately answer all the perplexing queries. The accounting was simple enough if I had only put two and two together. But my buzzing head and half-addled faculties refused to coördinate and I was still trying to flog the mental team into line when I heard voices and clumping footsteps, and a ray of yellow lantern light began to dilute the darkness.
Dissembling a stupor which was really more than half the fact I was presently conscious of the fact that two men were standing over me and that one of them was throwing the lantern light on my face. Through half-opened eyelids I tried to make them out; and did, dimly. They were pretty rough-looking customers—pirates, I should have called them if the time had been a century or so earlier. One was short and thickset, with the expressionless eyes of a pig and a stubbly black beard that seemed nothing more than a shameless neglect of the razor. The other was a giant in stature and build and he reminded me of the pictures of ogres in the children's fairy tales; cropped beard, wide mouth, flaring nostrils, eyes with a smoky look of savagery in them.
“Shammin', d'ye think?” growled the big man, holding the lantern still closer to my face.
“We'll see,” returned pig eyes and with that he planted the toe of his sea boot in my ribs.
That was sufficient. As if the brutal kick had been a tonic to clear away all the brain cobwebs, I leaped up and flung myself upon the kicker. Since they were two to one it was a short battle. At its close the giant had my right arm twisted back in some sort of a jujutsu hold that threatened to dislocate it at the shoulder.
“Oho! Ye'd put up a scrap, would you?” he offered, giving the arm a twist that nearly made me forget my manhood and yell for mercy. “That's all the thanks we get for pullin' ye out o' the pen, is it?”
“For what?” I raged.
“You know well enough for what. It's lucky you've got a good friend or two left that wouldn't see ye disgracin' everybody that belongs to you. All the same, you've got to work your passage on this hooker. You're an ingineer, they're tellin' me. Get along aft and dry-nurse that pusher ingine for a spell. 'Tis long since she's had a granduit ingineer to wait on her.”
I was left no choice as to obedience to the first part of this command. Retaining the twisting hold on my wrist the giant ran me ahead of him through the stinking hold, the short man following with the lantern. Through a bulkhead door I was thrust into the after hold where a heavy-duty motor was thumping away at its task of screw twirling and where the bilge stench was thinned—or thickened—with the reek of gasoline.
“There's your job,” said my captor, giving me a final shove in the direction of the laboring power producer. “You keep that baby turnin' over for what little it's worth. And you'd best keep awake on the job, at that. The gasoline feed has a trick o' jogglin' loose by times and if it springs a leak and sets us afire you'll be the first one to get cooked, d'ye see?”
With no more talk than this the pair left me, climbing a short ladder to disappear through a hatch through which, before it was closed after them, I had a glimpse of the stars. Whatever was to come afterward I was a prisoner for the time being, and if my jailers were not gallows birds of the most unmistakable sort their plumage certainly belied them. Massaging my strained shoulder I sat upon an empty biscuit box and tried to make sure that I was not merely having a bad dream. The two men had left me the lantern—carelessness fairly criminal, I thought, in a gasoline-engine hold with a putatively leaky fuel line—so I was not in total darkness. Gasping in the half-stifling, black-hole atmosphere of the place I tried to pull myself together.
What was this fantastic rigmarole about saving me from the penitentiary? Would the drumming motor, keeping even time to the throbbing pain in my head, help me to hammer out a sensible answer to that question? Like a flash such as might have followed an explosion of the gaseous reek of the engine hold the answer shot itself at me. Five months earlier Wickham Jeffreys, acting for his father but also turning a trick for himself, had tried to get rid of me by shipping me to South America—and thought he had succeeded. Was this another and more primitive attempt to efface me?
Slowly, because my head was still aching like sin, the pieces of the puzzle came together and began to arrange themselves in some sort of order. As I have said, after the brief butt-in upon Alison and me as we stood at the rail of the Waikiki Jeffreys had disappeared, leaving—or sending—Peggy Sefton to take his place as a preventer of confidences. In the hour, more or less, during which I had lingered in the hope of breaking the Sefton combination Jeffreys had had ample time to set a trap for me.
By this time I hadn't much doubt of the nature of the trap and the identity of the trapping vessel. The faint smell of alcohol in the forehold told the story. I had been sandbagged and taken aboard a bootlegging craft, shanghaied in good old-fashioned style; and the vessel was probably now on its way to the Bahamas for a cargo of spirits. Just how Jeffreys had gotten in touch with the bootleggers and had been able to cook up the plot in such a short time still remained something of a mystery, but that was a detail. The plot had worked.
The past thus accounted for, hypothetically at least, the future was the next consideration. What were the bootleggers going to do with me? That they would attempt to hold me as a member of the crew for any considerable length of time was incredible. Besides, it wouldn't be necessary. A day or so would probably measure the length of the Waikiki's stay at Miami and after she sailed she would be lost to me and Jeffreys' purpose would be fully served. But there was small comfort in this conclusion. There was Alison and her still unexplained trouble—Alison as a sort of prisoner, it seemed to me, in the disreputable booze party aboard the Waikiki.
With hot pricklings of helpless rage I pictured Alison's disappointment when she should go to the hotel in Miami and find that I wasn't keeping my promise to meet her there; that I had vanished into thin air. At that moment, if setting the kidnapers' ship on fire would have subserved any good end I felt quite equal to the applying of the match—or the smoking lantern wick.
A little further reflection showed me a still deeper depth of Wickham Jeffreys' suddenly devised plot for getting rid of me. If I hadn't been a criminal in the Colorado instance he had taken pains to make it appear that I was one now. As a member of the crew of a bootlegging craft—and what court would believe that I wasn't a voluntary member?—my status was fixed. If we should be caught I would go to jail with the ogre and the pig-eyed one, who would doubtless swear that I was equally guilty with themselves. Or they might even swear that I was their leader.
Taken as a whole it was a most dispiriting prospect. Escape from a gang of kidnapers on land was one thing but at sea it was quite another. If the vessel, to the chief engineer's post of which I had been so suddenly and forcibly promoted, should go to Nassau for its lading there might be a chance for me. I knew there was a regular boat plying between Miami and Nassau in the season and it was only a night's run across. I had money
The thought of the money made me feel mechanically in my pockets. My pocket-book was gone and so was my watch. The kidnapers had not only sandbagged me; they had robbed me as well. It was a small matter, I told myself; it was only a half chance spoiled. The probabilities were that the vessel wasn't headed for Nassau; it was more likely that it would pick up its contraband cargo at some one of the unfrequented islands of the group. In which case the half chance to escape would become no chance at all.
Musing sourly over the trap into which I had fallen and more sourly still over the stupid ease with which I had permitted its jaws to close upon me I wore away the painful hours and finally fell asleep to the thumping grind of the motor—did this and came broad awake some time later at the sound of a raucous voice bellowing down at me through the opened hatch at the ladder head.
“Asleep at the switch, are ye?” yelled the voice. “Shut off the power, afore I come down there and cave yer ribs in!”—this with a string of maledictions too profane to repeat. And after I had stopped the motor: “Now then, stand by to take signals, ye damn' scupper lubber!”
There were no bells in the engine hold and the signals were passed by word of mouth from the man at the wheel. Backing and filling by turns the desired position was finally secured and I heard the rasping roar of the chain cable as the descending anchor ran it out through the hawse hole. We were evidently-at our destination,-wherever that might be.
To my relief I was permitted, or rather ordered, to climb out of the hot and stifling machinery den to the deck. The arm-twisting giant who had so maltreated me in the night had not misstated the fact in calling the vessel a “hooker.” Above the water line at least she looked a clumsy enough craft, with the lines and rig of a small coasting schooner. The dawn was just breaking as I scrambled through the hatchway to the deck. The schooner was anchored in a little bay; and the bay as nearly as I could make out was an indentation in the coast of an islet which appeared to be uninhabited.
Amidships two men whose figures I could only dimly distinguish were clewing down the foresail and my two captors were wrestling with the bunched canvas of the mainsail. With an oath the giant ordered me to fall to and help with the clewing and I did it because the time didn't seem to be propitious for inviting another manhandling with the odds of two or possibly four against me.
With the canvas stowed all hands took hold to lift a whaleboat out of its chocks on the roof of the deck house and launch it over the side; and in this operation I got a near-hand view of the two other members of the crew. They were foreigners; Minorcans, as I found out later, and first-class sailormen. How much they knew or cared about the legality of the business in which their vessel was engaged—her name was the Vesta, as I learned by seeing it painted on the bow of the whaleboat—was never made apparent to me. They obeyed orders and asked no questions.
When the whaleboat was launched, Dorgan, the giant, ordered me into it with one of the Minorcans and himself took the steering oar. A short pull sufficed to beach the boat which was hauled up on the sands and left while the three of us, with Dorgan leading the way, plunged into the thicketing of jungle growth which came almost down to the water's edge. What we found in the thicket was what I was fully expecting to see; a liberal cargo of liquor in cases; stacks and tiers of the boxes ready to be transferred to our schooner.
There were no preliminaries to precede the attacking of the big job. With a grunted, “Get into it, you two,” to the sailor and me, Dorgan shouldered one of the cases and led the march back to the stranded whaleboat Morosely enough and with my head still throbbing painfully from the effects of the sandbagging I fell into line as a stevedore. An uninhabited islet, with the Vesta as the only means of escape from it, was not the place for rebellion.
When the whaleboat was loaded so that there was scant room for the sailor and me to man the oars we pulled off to the schooner. In our absence, pig eyes—his name, as I presently learned, was Israel Brill—and the remaining sailor had rigged a sling and a hoist and the cases of contraband were taken aboard and lowered into the hold. Five trips we made before Dorgan gave the word to knock off for breakfast, a rough-and-ready meal of canned stuff served with the low roof of the deck house for a table, and then we went at it again, working alternate shifts and continuing through the better part of the forenoon.
During this period of sweating toil in which Dorgan proved himself a man driver of sorts, nothing further was said to explain my kidnaping. But by this time I was in little doubt as to the true explanation. In my short sojourn in Florida I had heard many tales of the rum runners and the chances they took, but it was not believable that the most desperate of them would resort to shanghai methods to recruit their crews. The reasonable explanation was that Dorgan and Brill had been paid to shanghai me. And if the bribe were large enough they would probably see to it that I stayed shanghaied for as long a time as Jeffreys had bargained for.
From the fact that I speak of these things calmly it must not be supposed that I was taking all this “lying down,” as the phrase goes. On the contrary, long before the final load of liquor cases was ferried across to the Vesta I was so furious that I couldn't see straight. To say nothing of the sandbagging and the brutal manhandling that had followed it the time had now passed when I had promised to meet Alison. She needed me and my promise was broken. Somebody was going to pay; either the giant or his accomplice or Jeffreys—or all three.
But for the present there was nothing to be done. The bare islet offered no chance of escape and without a weapon of some sort I could accomplish nothing in a mêlée with four antagonists; for I made no doubt the Minorcans would side with their masters if it came to blows. Clearly there was nothing for me to do but to bide my time.
With the cargo stowing finished there was another meal of the canned stuff and it was eaten in silence. When he was through, Dorgan motioned me aft—this time I had eaten with the two sailors—and while Brill was stretching himself out in the shade of the bunched mainsail to sleep the big man herded me down into the little den of a cabin.
“Gettin' your bearin's by this time?” he asked, pushing me roughly to a seat on one of the lockers.
“What I am getting is nothing to what you will get when the proper time comes,” I told him wrathfully.
“Still nursin' the big grouch, are you?” he grinned.
“I am still waiting to be told why you shanghaied me.”
“I told you that last night,” he returned, crumbling some leaf tobacco in his hand to fill his cutty pipe." “Don't you want to keep out o' the pen?”
“The man who paid you for kidnaping me is much more likely to land in the penitentiary than I am,” I retorted.
“Well, I'll be damned!” he grunted in mock deprecation; “if that don't beat a hog a-flyin'! Here's your friend a-tryin' his bloomin' hardest to keep you fr'm runnin' your neck into trouble; a-payin' good money to snatch you out o' the jaws o' the devourin' what-you-may-call-it; and you kickin' about it like a bay steer! But it ain't no use. We're aimin' to keep you fr'm wearin' the stripes. Might as well get wise to that first as last.”
At this I looked him straight in the eyes.
“You're not fooling anybody with all this talk about 'friends' and the 'penitentiary,'” I said. “You've been paid to keep me out of the way for a certain length of time and the man who hired you to do it is no friend of mine. All I want to know is this: how long is my board paid for on this hooker?”
“That sort o' depends,” he answered, sucking hard at the pipe which was refusing to draw well. “I ain't hankerin' to sail shipmates with you no longer'n I have to and neither is Isra'l Brill; you're too damn' grouchy. It might be that we could heave you overboard t'-morrah mornin'—with not too far to swim to get onto the mainland—and then, ag'in, it mightn't.”
I knew exactly what that meant. The schooner would be recrossing to the Florida coast with her cargo the following night and if the giant got word that the Waikiki had put to sea from Biscayne Bay I would be free to go. Otherwise I wouldn't.”
“Well, what about it?” he barked when I made no reply.
“There isn't anything about it except that I'll do you and your partner in this business up cold if I get a chance.”
He gave me an exceedingly black look for this and I could see his big teeth bite down upon the stem of his pipe.
“See here, my bucko!” he snarled. “One bad break out o' you and you'll never see Florida ag'in—n'r no other place this side o' hell. There ain't nobody knows how you made your drop-out in the bay last night and there ain't nobody goin' to know. You try to ball things up for us and you'll get the sandbag ag'in and the next time you wake up the fishes'll be gnawin' at you. D'ye get that?”
“I hear what you say.”
“All right. If you want to go on livin' for a spell longer you just let it soak in. Now if you've got any horse sense left you'll turn in and sleep a few lines. Come dark you'll be down in the ingine hold ag'in, a-keepin' that leaky gasoline pipe fr'm bustin' down on us.”
With this the giant heaved himself up and left me, shutting the companion slide as he went on deck. And if I had had any doubt about my status on board it would have been removed by the click of a hasp and a padlock. I was still a prisoner.
A very cursory examination of the little den of a cabin soon convinced me that I couldn't break out of it while there were four men on deck to take the alarm. But as to that, there was nothing to be gained by trying to acquire any larger liberty while the schooner was at anchor in the islet bay. So, stiffly weary from the strenuous toil of the forenoon, I stretched myself upon one of the dirty bunks and almost immediately fell asleep.
It was pitch dark when Dorgan came to turn me out and from the racket on deck I gathered that Brill and the Minorcans were preparing to get the schooner under way. With brittle gruffness the giant ordered me down into the engine hold where the dangerous lantern was already lighted and hung, and I was told to start the motor. As before, Dorgan bellowed the signals down to me and after a short period of maneuvering I was given the order, “Full speed ahead,” and the slow rise and fall of the vessel told me that we were once more at sea.
More merciful or less careful than he had been the night before Dorgan left the hatch at the ladder head open. Though the night was warm there was a good breeze and the schooner, as I soon made out, was running close hauled. By consequence the big mainsail served as a wind vane to send a cooling breath now and then into the engine-heated den. After we had been running for perhaps a half hour one of the Minorcan sailors passed my supper down to me in a pannikin and later handed in a can of black coffee hot from the galley.
That was the beginning of a long night during which I alternately dozed on the cracker-box seat and started awake to examine the dangerous gasoline pipe. Nothing occurred to break the monotony. The weather held good and save for the ground swell the sea was as calm as a mill pond. Out of the last of the dozing periods I was aroused by Dorgan who had descended the ladder far enough to enable him to kick me awake. “Look alive and get onto your job!” he ordered snappishly and a little later he bawled down to me to shut off the motor.
With the power off the silence was almost deafening. From the lapping of the waves along the schooner's side I knew we were still making way slowly under sail; but presently the creaking of blocks and the rattle of the leach rings on the masts gave notice that we were heaving to.
For possibly half an hour, during which time the schooner swung gently to the swell and made no headway, nothing happened. Then a muffled stuttering announced the approach of a motor boat and a low-voiced hail was exchanged. This promised a chance to learn something of our whereabouts and I crept up the ladder as far as I dared with out showing my head above the coaming of the hatchway.
As nearly as I could judge the motor boat was lying to under the Vesta's quarter. At all events I was able to hear quite distinctly most of what was said. It was the newcomer who began.
“The jig's up,” was the word that came over the side. “They've piped you off and the cutter's down from Fernandina lookin' for you. We saw her searchlight off the inlet less than half an hour ago.”
“How do you know they're lookin' for us?” Dorgan asked.
“Got it straight by the underground. How much you got aboard?”
“Just about all she'll hold.”
“That settles it, then. Take half a night and more to run it ashore and if you're here at daybreak the cutter'll get a wireless and be down on us.”
Following this there was a low-toned argument of which I could catch only the drift. It seemed that the rum runners had an alternative landing place and the man in the motor boat was urging the necessity of using it in the present instance. For a time Dorgan was obstinate. The other place had its risks, the chief of which was that to reach it a steamer lane would have to be traversed, and in daylight. If the Vesta were known and suspected she would be certain to be seen and identified.
The conclusion of the argument came when a beam of light, plainly visible from my perch at the ladder head, swept like a giant finger through the sky overhead. The talk at the schooner's rail stopped as if the light beam had suddenly paralyzed the tongues that were making it. Then somebody swore feelingly—Brill, I think it was—and barked out a command to the crew of two as he sprang for the schooner's wheel.
I had no more than time to drop to the floor of the engine hold before Dorgan was yelling down to me to start the motor and at the same moment I heard the motor boat backing away. Since flight would mean a prolonging of my captivity I made delay as I could, half minded to dart up the ladder and try my luck at reaching the departing messenger boat before it should get out of reach. There was a light land breeze blowing and I could hear Brill cursing the Minorcans for their slowness in making sail.
While I hesitated, with my hands on the engine flywheel to turn it over, Dorgan swung down the ladder into the lantern-lighted pit vomiting profanity. Probably it was only the instinct of self-preservation that made me snatch up a wrench and back away to the port side of the motor. But the brandished wrench did not stop the giant.
“Damn your eyes! You'd double cross us, would you?” he bellowed and with that he came for me, all claws to clutch and huge hairy arms to grapple and crush.