Somewhere in the Caribbean/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
A STERN CHASE.
As the event proved I hadn't long to wait. After he had stared a minute or so at the white yacht Morgan came tramping aft again. Oddly enough, as I thought, he did not see me, though he might have easily if he had looked across to where I was crouching at the corner of the deck house as he passed on the weather side. And neither, it appeared, did he notice that the companion slide was closed.
I let him get well beyond the line of the binnacle and the wheel before I ran across to take a stand near the weather rail, having no mind to give him the advantage of the inclination of the deck as the schooner heeled to leeward. Now that I was inviting the unequal battle I would have given much for a weapon of some sort, any sort, and would have thought it no disgrace to use it against such a man mountain as the huge liquor smuggler. But there was nothing save the belaying pins in their racks on either rail and they were too far aft to be reached in time.
For the time was mighty short. I had scarcely found my footing before the giant turned and saw me; saw too that I was waiting for him, I guess, for he charged like a mad bull, hugging the rail so that if I should dodge I'd be forced to give him the slant of the deck. I did give it to him as he closed in but only to duck under his outstretched arms and come up behind him, handing him a right and left in the short ribs as I passed. With a volley of oaths and with an alertness surprising in such a hulk of a man he spun around to face me again and again tried to rush me. But now I had more room to maneuver in and merely slipped aside, getting under his guard a second time with a couple of the short-arm body jabs. And with that the battle, the real battle, was on in deadly earnest.
Without being in any enthusiastic sense a sport fan in college I had been sufficiently interested in athletics to go in moderately for wrestling and boxing and in my senior year the college had been blessed with an under coach who knew ring fighting from the bottom up and was willing to impart his knowledge to any of the men who cared to stand up to him on the chalked canvas. From this shrewd and hard-hitting mentor I had learned two things above all others; one was never to let it come to a clinch with a bigger man and the other to seek to match overpowering weight with cleverness and agility.
A hot little flurry of give and take showed me that Dorgan had no “science;” no knowledge of the boxing game on its skillful side. His tremendous bulk and strength were his chief stock in trade. He knew very well that if he could once get his hands on me it would be all over but the bone cracking; but so did I. So I contented myself with playing him like a hooked fish, giving ground when he rushed, getting in a blow when I could and slipping away before he could recover. The chief disadvantages were the slant of the deck and the contracted space between the obstructing deck house and the binnacle stand and the wheel. If he should succeed in cornering me I knew I was gone.
In the warm work of the next two or three minutes I had half a dozen narrow escapes from the cornering. I soon found that I could hit him when and where I chose but I couldn't stop his bull-like rushes. When he got his enormous weight in motion nothing short of a stone wall would have stopped it. Under such conditions the fight speedily developed into a battle of endurance. Around and about in the narrow ring of the schooner's after deck it surged and shifted. Twice the big brute got a hamlike hand on my shoulder but the flimsy undershirt gave him no hold and both times the failure to force a clinch gave me a chance to hammer him viciously while his guard was down.
As any one who has ever put on the gloves will know, a round in which the fighting is pressed to the limit cannot last indefinitely without a breathing space. When the fight began, I thought or hoped that I could outlast him if I saved myself all I could and let him work hard enough. But his furious rushes kept on endlessly and he was still making them after my breath was coming in heartbreaking gasps and my foot work was beginning to grow uncertain. Once and once again I slipped just as he was crowding me against the lee rail and a moment later I escaped only by leaping backward over the corner of the deck house. Breathlessly I knew it must come to a decision before long and in the feinting and dodging I battered away desperately, breaking over and under the guard which he was now scarcely making any effort to maintain.
Through all this frenzied mêlée the Minorcan at the wheel had kept his place unmoved and his shipmate forward had come aft only far enough to get a near hand view of what was going on. But now I saw out of the corner of my eye that this second man was closing in and I caught a flash of the sun upon bright steel. The fellow had his knife out. Was he going to use it upon me or upon Dorgan? Above the volcanic eruption of curses that Dorgan was pouring out I heard the shrill voice of the man at the wheel answering my unworded question: “No se moleste, señor! Pedro will cut ze hear-rt out of heem!”
That put an entirely new face upon things. I didn't care to be a party to a butchery, even of so hardened a brute as the big bootlegger. Waving the knife man back I let Dorgan push me aft past the wheel and so out of the only space big enough to afford room to play in. The bully, thinking he had me cornered at last, gave a yell of triumph and closed in. But his triumph was short lived. As he grabbed me and I could feel his hot breath upon my face I snatched one of the iron pipe belaying pins from its rack; a weapon I had been coveting from the beginning of the fight but which had hitherto been out of reach. That settled it. The first swinging blow crippled his guarding arm, and the next crashing down upon his unprotected head laid him out.
By this time, of course, Brill was awake and up and battering at the locked companion slide but I let him batter while I leaned against the rail and got my breath. When I had enough of it to enable me to talk I turned to the sailor at the wheel.
“I'm captain of this ship now!” I panted. “Are you and your partner with me?”
“Si, señor,” he replied just as calmly as that; and then he added: “Too mooch damn-damn.”
“All right. You see that ship out ahead: You steer so as to catch her if you can. Do you understand?”
“Si, señor.”
Beckoning the other man, who apparently had no English, to come and help me I knelt beside Dorgan to find out whether or not I had killed him outright. He wasn't dead—for which I was duly thankful—but he was out of the fight permanently. The two bones of his left forearm were broken and while the second blow with the iron belaying pin hadn't quite cracked his skull, so far as I could determine in a hasty examination, there was little doubt that it would be some time before the wound would give him leave to ask what had happened to him.
I suppose it would have been only humane to have attended to the enemy's hurts before doing anything else; but Brill was still hammering at the companion slide and it seemed the part of prudence to bring the little war to a definite conclusion without any more loss of time. The Waikiki was gradually increasing her lead and if we were to overtake her, Brill, who was now the only man aboard of us who knew what the schooner could be made to do, must be persuaded to take his trick at the wheel.
Catching up the trusty belaying pin I stood aside and motioned to Pedro to open the slide. When he did so the fat-faced skipper popped up like a jack-in-the-box with a revolver in each hand, sweat streaming, and his red hair on end, not so much from belligerence, I thought, as from fright. When he saw Dorgan, bloody-headed and apparently dead, lying on the deck at his feet he pulled both triggers wildly, hitting nothing, of course, but the circumambient air. There were two of us to seize and disarm him and we did it promptly.
“Wot in 'ell's all this?” he yelped when we had him covered with his own weapons.
“Mutiny on the high seas,” I told him shortly. “I'm in command of this hooker now and if there is to be any drowning match pulled off, as you and Dorgan planned a few hours ago, you're the one who will go over the side—not I.”
That fetched him. “You—you'd murder me?” he wheezed cravenly.
“Just as certainly as you would have murdered me. Only you've got it coming to you and I haven't.”
At that I was given to see that my estimate of his courage, or rather of his lack of it, was fully justified. Before I knew what he was about he had fallen on his marrow bones and was begging like a dog. Life, life upon any terms was all he craved and his ravings were so mixed up with bubbling oaths as to be almost farcial.
“Get up!” I ordered. “You make me sick! Your partner did have sand enough to stand up to it until he was knocked out, but you haven't the nerve of a jellyfish! You say you want to live: you've got just one chance for it. If you can make this windjammer catch up with that yacht out ahead and put me aboard of her, you live. Otherwise you walk the plank in good old pirate style!”
He caught at the condition like a drowning man catching at a flung life line.
“I—I'll put you aboard of that smoke boat or sail the masts out o' this hooker,” he gasped stumbling aft to take the wheel. Then he burst out in a torrent of profanity at the two sailors, the imprecations being the embroidery of an order to set the gaff topsails. But I stopped that in a hurry—the cursing, I mean.
“Cut that out—cut it all out!” I said. “You forget that these men are no longer your serfs; they're your masters.” Then to the two Minorcans: “Do what he tells you to but kick him if he swears at you.”
While the two sailors were setting the topsails I slit the sleeve on Dorgan's broken arm and examined the fracture, keeping an eye on Brill meanwhile and also keeping one of the captured pistols within easy reach. As nearly as I could tell by feeling, the arm fracture was simple; the bones were not splintered. My experience as a boss in various construction camps remote from civilization had given me some knowledge of rough-and-ready surgery so I proceeded to set the bones as well as I could, whittling splints of kindling wood from the galley with Dorgan's own clasp knife and cutting up a piece of sailcloth for bandages. For the scalp wound I could do nothing better than to wash it with sea water; since Brill at my questioning said that the schooner carried no medicine chest, not even a bottle of iodine.
While I was working over the fallen giant the topsails were hoisted and the schooner, heeling to their draft, began to forge ahead at a gratifying increase of speed. During the fight and its mopping-up aftermath the Waikiki had increased her lead to possibly a mile. Now that I had time in which to weigh and measure the probabilities I wondered if by any unlucky chance Jeffreys had recognized the Vesta in passing. If he had, any attempt we might make to overtake the yacht was foredoomed to failure.
I knew from having sailed in her that the Waikiki could leave us as the bullet leaves the gun if she were put to speed. But after I had done what I could for Dorgan, and went to focus the binocular upon the vessel ahead, I was confident that as yet no full-speed order had been sent down to her engine room. She was still loafing easily over the long swells and with the glass, which was a good one, I could make out the figures of the people on her after-deck lounge though of course I could not recognize them.
As soon as the Minorcans were free to help me, we three got Dorgan down into the cabin and spread him out in one of the bunks; not however until I had first made sure of Israel Brill by anchoring him to the wheel standard with a lashing of ropeyarn around his legs. Having disposed of Dorgan, I left Brill tied while I took an inventory of the capture, overhauling the galley stores to see what we had in the way of provisions and sounding the gasoline tank to find out how we were supplied in the matter of engine fuel. In both respects the schooner was fairly well found. There was food enough in tins to last us a week or more and the gas tank, which was a large one, was still more than half full.
Next I made another trip to the cabin and rummaged for arms, making no doubt that a rum smuggler would carry something more than the pair of rusty army revolvers we had taken from Brill. The guess was confirmed. In one of the lockers I found four service rifles and another pair of army pistols, with a box of ammunition. To be on the safe side I removed this arsenal from its place in the locker, carrying it forward into the main hold and hiding it among the liquor cases.
Going on deck again I took another look at the yacht with the glass. Though, to my landsman's eye, the added topsails had increased our speed fully one half, the relative positions of the two vessels seemed unchanged. As nearly as I could judge we hadn't gained a foot in the race; this, too, with the wind coming still fresher than be fore out of the northeast. Turning upon Brill I asked him if he didn't have some more canvas that he could put upon the schooner.
“More sail?” he gurgled. “Wot in 'ell's the matter with you? She's got every stitch she can stagger under right now! If we'd get a capful more o' this wind she'd go on her beam ends as sure as the devil's a hog!” Then, in shrill terror: “Have a heart, man, and take these here lashin's off my feet! If she was to go over I'd be drowned like a rat in a trap!”
I untied him at his plea, saying it would be small loss to the world if he and all his tribe were drowned out of hand. At the same time I told him plainly what would happen if he took advantage of the unmanacling.
“One bad break on your part and you pass out,” I said, touching the pistol which I had thrust into my belt. “I don't particularly want to kill you in cold blood but if you pull it down on yourself you'll get it. And I might add that I can shoot straighter than you did when we let you come on deck.”
At this he made voluble protest as to his good intentions and I was obliged to admit that he seemed to be doing his best to overtake the yacht; though this was possibly only because the overtaking promised to rid him of me. He was a skillful sailor; I'll say that much for him. There was little question but that the schooner was carrying more sail than was at all prudent in a wind which was now beginning to pick up a few whitecaps; when the gusts came her lee scuppers ran full. But Brill was holding her to it grimly, easing the helm only when it seemed inevitable that she would capsize if he didn't.
It is a well-worn nautical maxim that a stern chase is a long chase. After an hour or more, during which time a choppy sea had risen to make the schooner thrash and pound and her masts to bend like whipstocks, Brill shouted to me that the topsails had to come off or we'd have the sticks out of her. Accordingly Pedro and Jose manned the downhauls and the dangerous canvas was taken in. By this time the wind had freshened to a half gale and a little later we had to reef both the fore and the mainsail, in which operation I lent a hand with the Minorcans while Brill held the schooner in the wind to bring the booms inboard.
Even under the reduced canvas we flew along, as it seemed to me, at undiminished speed, but try as we might we could not reduce the distance between us and the Waikiki. After a time it occurred to me that Jeffreys might be playing with us; that he might after all have recognized the Vesta in passing and have given his sailing master orders to tail us along but not to let us overtake the yacht. I couldn't conceive of any reason which he might have for doing such a thing but there seemed to be no other way of accounting for the unvarying distance between the two vessels when we were now sailing two miles to one we had been making when the chase began.
More than half convinced that this was the explanation of our inability to come up to the yacht I settled down to a grim determination to hang on and at least keep the Waikiki in sight, if possible, and so to follow her into her port. Up to this time I had had no reason to doubt that the port would be Havana; Alison had said Havana and so had the Sefton girl. But now a disturbing question of doubt was arising. It was past mid-afternoon and Dorgan had said that we would be off Key West by nightfall. In rummaging for arms in the cabin I had come across a roll of dingy charts and I went below to get it, taking a look at Dorgan while I was in the cabin. He was breathing regularly but was still locked in a stupor from the effects of the head wound. Going back to Brill at the wheel I showed him the chart covering the strait.
“Whereabouts are we?” I asked.
With a grimy forefinger he indicated our probable position; at a point about one third of the distance from the Keys to Cuba and about the same distance southeast of Key West. When he did that I glanced at the compass bearing in the binnacle. Our course was precisely what it had been all day; a few points to the south of due west.
'We're following that yacht,” I said. “Where is she heading for?”
“You tell, if you know,” he returned; adding: “I'm damned if I do.”
“Key West?” I queried.
He shook his head. “She'd be bearin' up more to the north if she was headin' for the Key.”
“Havana, then?”
“Not in a million years. Havana ain't such a mighty sight off o' due south fr'm where we're at now. If she holds the course she's been steerin' all day the first landfall she'll make'll be the coast o' Mexico, somewheres along about Tampico.”
Here was a mystery a mile wide. What had happened in two days to change the plans of the yacht party? If Alison could only have told me a little more—but she hadn't—couldn't. I was left completely in the dark. But there was only one thing to do, as I saw it. If the Waikiki was to go on steaming out into the Gulf of Mexico bound for some port unknown we were going to keep her in sight as long as we could. There was neither rhyme nor reason in such a determination but I was in no frame of mind to listen to reason.
“You, and Dorgan too, if he ever comes to his senses again, are due to be mighty sorry that you took a stranger's money to shanghai another stranger,” I said to Brill. “We are going to overtake that yacht before we quit if we have to chase her to Panama and back. That's what you've let yourselves in for, if you care to know.”
“But, lookee here!” he babbled; “we ain't 'found' for no such v'yage as that! There ain't scoffin's enough in the galley to feed us a week!”
“That is all right,” I told him. “When the provisions give out we'll go hungry. The one thing we won't do is to quit until you've put me aboard the yacht. That goes as it lies.”
Three hours later the sun dropped into the sea ahead of us and his level rays glorified for some brief seconds the shapely outline of the Waikiki still steaming straight into the eye of the sunset. And when darkness came we were tossing alone upon the heaving waters; alone but for the shimmer of the electrics on the after deck of the distant yacht, her lights serving as our guiding beacon.