Somewhere in the Caribbean/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
A FLIGHT IN THE DARK.
When we reached the edge of the glade I was relieved to see that the figures around the dying fire—which Alison told me had been lighted as a smudge to drive the mosquitoes away—were now all recumbent; a fair indication that the survivors of the Waikiki's company were all asleep. Alison wanted to be the one to go and wake her maid but I wouldn't listen to that.
“You will take no more chances, not if I can help it,” I told her. “Just show me where the girl is and I'll bring her out.”
“But she doesn't know you; and if she screams and wakes the others”
“In that case somebody is mighty likely to get hurt,” I promised. “After what you've told me, I wouldn't mind running amuck in that bunch. It's a crime to let Wickham Jeffreys go on living, don't you think?”
“But, Dick—for my sake!” she pleaded. “You are only one man and there are so many of them!”
“I have this,” I said, showing her the rusty revolver which I had been carrying in my belt as a persuader for Brill.
“Hedda is under this nearest shelter,” she said, pointing. “That is she, on the side farthest from the fire. You'll be awfully careful?”
“Naturally, with your safety at stake. Stay here in the shadows and don't show yourself no matter what happens. I won't be long about it.”
One never knows what experience in life is going to turn up later as the one thing critically needful. Once on a preliminary survey for a mining railroad in the Idaho mountains I had numbered in my gang an old hunter and woodsman who had taught me the art—for it is no less than an art—of deer stalking. Flat on my stomach I wormed my way toward the shelters in the open glade, wriggling forward by slow inchings and never taking my eyes from the figures around the fire. Twice, and once again when one of the men stirred, I stopped and tried to look as much as possible like a log, but there was no alarm given.
In due time I was within arm's reach of the sleeping young woman. Luckily she was lying a little apart from the others, flat on her back and with her mouth open; a big girl, with the arm she had thrown over her head muscular enough to garrote a giant and her deep bosom rising and subsiding like the swell of a little sea. Choosing the instant of breath taking I clapped a hand over the open mouth and put my lips to her ear.
“Don't make a noise—for your life!” I hissed. “Miss Carter wants you!”
For a battling moment I had my hands full to keep her quiet. She was as strong as a daughter of the vikings. As a matter of fact, I had to draw the revolver and press the cold muzzle of it to her head before I could make her understand that she must stop struggling and come with me. And even at that I couldn't force her to lie down and creep away silently. She bounced to her feet and all I could do was to spring up and run with her, ready to cover the retreat with the revolver if the hue and cry should be raised.
Fortunately the alarm wasn't given. As if they had all been drunk the sleepers at the fire and under the shelters slept on undisturbed, and running swiftly we soon reached the fringe of the jungle and found Alison.
From that to getting away from the vicinity of the glade was an easy matter. Keeping in the shadows of the wood we retreated to the beach and soon put distance between us and the landing place of the shipwrecked yacht's company. There was some little method in this. It was certain that as soon as Alison and her maid were missed a search would be made and while I had no plan as yet reaching beyond a return to the stranded schooner I thought it would be wise not to leave too plain a trail across the island. To avoid doing so we kept on along the beach for a full half mile before turning to enter the jungle.
It was then that the real work of the flight began. I had found it difficult enough to cross the island alone in the darkness; but with two women to pilot and help the difficulties were much more than multiplied by three. Uncounted times during the fight with the vegetation I had to kneel and grope to free Alison's skirts or the Swedish girl's from the brier tangles, and even so I knew they were going to come out of the thicket in rags and tatters. But neither of them complained.
As the longest night will finally come to an end so will the most toilsome flight. In due course of time we came out upon the other beach not so very far from the black bulk of the stranded Vesta. A cooling breeze had sprung up, blowing in from the sea, and I was glad, thinking it would drive the mosquitoes back from the beach, as it did. The red lantern which we had hoisted at the Vesta's masthead at dark glowed like a red star against a background of white-starred black velvet and I pointed it out to Alison.
“That light is on the schooner. It's only a little way now. Are you terribly tired?”
“Not so tired as—as hungry,” she returned in a weak little voice.
It was then and only then that I recalled what she had told me about the lack of food in the camp of the castaways. And here I had been dragging her for miles through a labyrinth formidable enough to have wearied a well-fed athlete.
“If you can keep going just a bit longer,” I said, and when I slipped an arm around her she was worn enough to lean on me like a tired child.
At the schooner there was neither sight nor sound to reveal the fact that four men were asleep in her. The rope by means of which I had descended from the deck hung over the bows and I showed the Swedish girl how she was to knot it under her mistress' arms after I had climbed aboard. With the help of the rope I soon had Alison beside me and together we hauled the bulky daughter of vikings up to where she could lay hold of the bulwark.
“Those terrible ruffians who kidnaped you,” said Alison clinging to me as I led her aft, “where are they?”
“Between decks and sound asleep,” I answered. “I don't suppose anything short of an earthquake would rouse them. It is the first chance they have had to catch up in two pretty hard days and nights. And you needn't be afraid of them, asleep or awake. One of them wouldn't hurt you if he could and the other couldn't if he would, because he knows I'd kill him.”
“And the others—the sailors?”
“They are asleep too—in the forecastle. But they are my friends and fellow mutineers. We are three men to two and one of the two has a broken arm. You are perfectly safe, so far as this vessel's company is concerned.”
Telling the two women to sit down on my blankets and rest I tiptoed forward to the galley and with one of the alcohol candles for a fire heated some water and made a pot of coffee. This, with a tin of biscuits, a can of bully beef and another of apricots, I carried aft to the starved ones.
“Can you manage to eat by the starlight?” I asked.
“I could eat in the deepest, darkest dungeon of a Middle Ages castle,” Alison said, with a tired little laugh; and the laugh did me more good than anything except the way she ate and drank and chirked up under the stimulus of the food and the hot coffee and speedily became the self-reliant, clear headed girl I had known so well in our childhood days.
“Well, what next?” she inquired after the biscuit tin had been emptied, even to the crumbs, by the two of them. “Do you suppose Wickham Jeffreys is going to let me vanish into thin air without trying to find out what has become of me?”
I had rearranged the blankets and now I told the Swedish girl to lie down and have her nap out. When she was asleep, which was in less than half a minute after she had stretched herself under the lee of the rail, I answered Alison's question by asking one of my own:
“Tell me; is Jeffreys as madly in love with you as all this cave-man stuff would seem to indicate?”
“Honestly, Dick, I don't think he is; not even the kind of love that such a brute as he is is capable of. I imagine there is something bigger and deeper at the bottom of all this. Whatever else he is, Wickham is not a fool. He must know that if he should force me to marry him nothing on earth could force me to live with him as his wife after we get back to civilization.”
“You have no idea of what the bigger thing is?”
“Not in the least. But I do know this; that not even a cave man in love with a cave woman—but it is too horrible to talk about.”
“And yet you say he is bent upon marrying you.”
“He said that I'd got to marry him; that I'd never see daddy again until we were safely man and wife; that he wouldn't stop at anything to make me take him and take him willingly.”
“That clears the air a bit,” I said. “I don't know any more than a goat what is to become of us here on this lonesome island or what we shall do when our food supply is gone, but I do know this, that when Wickham Jeffreys gets you in his power again it will be after I am too dead to bury. That's that. Now curl up there beside your woman and go to sleep. To-morrow may be a very busy day for all of us.”
“And you?” she asked.
“I shall sleep too, but not just yet. I'll put our fortress in a state of siege first.”
“Have I got to go to sleep?”
“You have. I'm the captain of this hooker—the pirate captain, if you please—and my orders must be obeyed. Good night.”
She put out her hand. “You're good, Dick; always good and dear and splendidly dependable. You came to-night like a special angel from heaven. Wo-won't you kiss me?”
Of course I did it, trying to make the kiss as cool and brotherly as it ought to have been since she had told me that there was another man who was the only one that had the right to kiss her any other way. But after it was done and the touch of her soft lips was burning itself into my very soul I told myself that there must be no more of this; that it must be strictly a case of touch not, handle not, for me. After which I went forward to rout out José and put him on guard, telling him of the presence of the women on .the schooner and of the Waikiki survivors on the other side of the island and of the new danger that threatened us in consequence. Having his assurance that he would call me instantly if anything untoward occurred I stretched myself on the bunched staysail to try for the sleep which the wonderful discovery and exciting experiences of the past few hours were threatening to postpone indefinitely.
Sleep came at last but not, however, until after I had sorted out some of the problems and possibilities. It was not difficult to find a starting point. Wickham Jeffreys as I knew him, spendthrift, loose liver, high roller, was not the man to grab off the methods of the bandit and the holdup artist unless there were some powerful motive to drive him. Discounting the argument he had used upon Alison—that her father was in danger of a prison sentence and that he, Jeffreys, was seeking to avert the catastrophe—it required no stretch of the imagination to postulate what I was convinced was the true state of affairs; namely that it was the Jeffreys, father and son, who were in danger of the prison sentence and that honest old Hiram Carter was the person who would do the sentencing unless some means were found of tying his hands. And what means could be more effective than the marriage of one of the criminals to the only daughter of the chief prosecutor?
With so much assumed it was not to be supposed that Jeffreys would quit simply because Alison and her maid had disappeared in the night. He would know that the two women could not get very far away and with the men of his party to help he would speedily comb the island for them. The only thing that might delay the search would be the lack of food; but this lack was going to be our own too, very shortly. True, there were coconuts on the trees and shellfish in the lagoon; Alison had told me that a scanty supply of both had been gathered by the Waikiki survivors during the day; but these were poor filling for white stomachs.
At this I remembered another thing that Alison had said; that the Waikiki was still above water on an offshore rock or shoal. There were doubtless plenty of provisions on board the yacht, out of reach for the boatless crew on the other side of the island but not out of reach for us. The Vesta's whaleboat was still firmly lashed in its chocks on top of our deck house, having come through the hurricane without being carried away and without damage. If the sea should remain calm, what was to prevent our sailing around the island and looting the wreck in our own behalf?
It was with this cheering thought in mind that I finally fell asleep; and it was broad day and the sun was peering over the island treetops at us when I awoke to find Dorgan standing over me. He was pointing aft and saying: “Hell's bells, pardner! Lookee what's been fetched us in the night!”
I looked and saw the two women still sleeping snuggled in the blankets.
“I brought them, Dorgan,” I said. “The yacht is wrecked on the other side of this island. I saw the light of a fire after you'd gone to bed and went over to investigate.” Then I told him briefly the circumstances, or enough of them to let him get hold of the situation.
“Well, I'm damned!” he commented. “Wouldn't that jar your back teeth loose? Hell's own hurricane for two days and nights and both ships blowed ashore on the same pin point o' land! Nobody'll ever believe it. What you goin' to do with them women?”
“We are going to keep them with us, of course.” Then I looked him in the eyes: “And, besides that, we're going to treat them as if they owned the earth and everything on it. Do you get that, Dorgan?”
“Huh! You don't need to say that to me; Isra'l Brill is the one you got to rub that into. I done told you what my mushy spot is. But Isra'l, he's another keg o' nails, he is.”
“I'll fix Brill,” I said. “Where is he?”
“Still corkin' it off in his bunk; looks like he's goin' to snooze the clock around. But what about these folk on t'other side? Do they know you've got the women?”
“They know it now—or at least they know they haven't got them. We'll likely have visitors before the day is over.”
“Peaceable?—or warlike?”
“Warlike, most probably.”
“All right. I've got one good arm and hand yet—if you reckon you could make out to trust me with a gun.”
I took the bull by the horns because I knew I'd have to sooner or later. “I'd trust you anywhere, Dorgan, if you gave me your word.”
“You can,” he remarked,shortly; adding: “Only you'd better not trust Isra'l. He'd do you up in a holy minute if you gave him a chance to get out of it with a whole skin.”
It was just here that the interruption broke in. Brill hadn't slept the clock around. I saw his red head and heavy shoulders coming up out of the companionway and heard his astonished whistle when his eyes lighted upon the women. Alison heard it, too, and started up like a scared wild creature. By that time I had run aft and was on the job.
“The least said is the soonest mended, Brill,” I snapped at him. “I'm the captain of this ship and this lady and her maid are my guests. So long as you treat them as my guests you'll live. When you forget you'll die. Go up forward and Dorgan will tell you what happened in the night.”
“Goodness!” said Alison with a little shudder. “What a dreadful face! Is he one of your kidnapers?”
“Yes; and that is the other up there by the foremast; the big man with the bandaged arm and head. Did you have a good sleep?”
She was stretching her pretty arms over her head.
“The best I've had in I don't know how many nights. Oh, but it's good not to have the nightmare, Dick!”
Her saying that gave me a thrill like the pricking of pins. Here we were stranded on an uninhabited islet and with a fair-to-middling prospect of starving before we were through with it and yet the misery she had been enduring had been so bitter that the present and prospective hardships seemed as nothing to her.
While she was speaking the Swedish young woman stirred, threw off the blanket and got upon her feet. Seen in daylight she was a magnificent specimen of the Scandinavian peasant type, generously large, not unshapely, with big blue eyes, a milk-white skin and a perfect mane of tow-colored hair which she was wearing in a thick braid down her back. She looked at me with a calm stare.
“Aye faight you las' night baycoose Aye tank you bane Mester Vickham,” she said slowly.
“That's all right, Hedda,” I returned laughing. “I couldn't let you make a noise, you know, and rouse the others.” Then I turned to Alison: “The cabin is yours, though you won't find much down there but a washbasin and some water. While you're gone I'll see what I can do toward getting breakfast.”
But here the daughter of vikings had her say: “You vait yoost liddle vile and lat dem breakfast vait, too. If you got somedings to eat I bane cook it for averybody.”
“Can she?” I asked Alison.
“I wouldn't put anything beyond Hedda. She is a treasure.”
While the women were below I went forward and joined Brill and Dorgan at the foremast. Dorgan was ready with a question.
“What's your lay when them dickies fr'm t'other side turn up?”
“If we're here we'll turn them down,” I replied.
“They'll want the women back?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“How many did you say there was of 'em?”
“There are eleven men in all—and five women.”
“Will the men fight?”
“If your bribe payer can make them—yes.”
“A little worse'n two to one; reckon we can stand 'em off?”
“We've got it to do—if we're here.”
“You said that afore—if we're here. Where else would we be?”
I pointed to the whaleboat.
“Miss Carter says the yacht didn't sink and that it hasn't gone to pieces yet. It is hung up on a reef or shoal on the other side of the island. The other people can't get to it because they have no boat. But we can.”
Dorgan grinned.
“We got a wreck of our own; whadda we want of another?”
“Your head must be hurting you again,” I said. “If the sea hasn't looted her completely the Waikiki has plenty of good food aboard.”
“You ride,” the big man chuckled. “I reckon I'm one o' them willies that has to have their heads chopped off afore they know 'at they're dead.”
Brill didn't say anything but he called José and Pedro and sent them aloft to rig a tackle for hoisting the whaleboat over the side; and he did it without cursing.
Some half hour later Hedda dished us up a breakfast which, though it made reckless havoc of our scanty larder stock was a vast improvement upon anything we'd had since the Vesta had left Miami. Dorgan, Brill and the sailors gorged themselves at the galley but Hedda served Alison and me on the break of the deck house. While we were eating I told Alison that our food supply was about exhausted and that if we couldn't renew it from the wreck of the Waikiki we'd soon be no better off than the yacht's survivors. This brought on more talk about our situation as castaways and the prospects for a rescue. Volney, the sailing master of the yacht, had been lost when the Waikiki struck and the first boatload of the panic-stricken went down, and from what Alison was able to tell me I gathered that there was no one among the survivors who could make even an intelligent guess as to the longitude and latitude of our island.
“Brill 'shot the sun' yesterday and he says our latitude is between nineteen and twenty degrees, north, which would put us well out of the track of the steamer lines,” I said. “Beyond that it is all guesswork. We are just somewhere in the Caribbean.”
“That sounds tragic, doesn't it!” she commented with a little shiver. “When the news gets out I suppose that will be the headline in the home newspapers: 'Lost,' the Private Yacht Waikiki—Somewhere in the Caribbean.' And when the food is all gone”
“We won't borrow trouble from the future,” I hastened to say. “The Caribbean isn't as wide as the Pacific or even the Atlantic. Besides we are going to have trouble nearer at hand. I believe Jeffreys has the best of reasons for not wanting to lose you; a much more vital reason than the sham altruistic notion he was trying to make you swallow. Don't you?”
She nodded and said: “I wonder if we are thinking of the same thing, Dick?”
“That the penitentiary threat is really hanging over Jeffreys and his father instead of over your father?” I suggested.
She nodded again, saying: “Could it be that way?”
“I am pretty confident that it is that way. Everything points to it. I know positively that the two Jeffreys are as crooked as rams' horns; that was why I was fired last spring in Colorado—as a scapegoat to cover up some of their grafting. It says itself that if you were married to Wickham your father wouldn't prosecute; and if the Jeffreys are in a criminal hole—which seems likely—he'd pay them out of it and take the loss himself to save you from a scandal and disgrace. Haven't you ever considered it in that light?”
“I have,” she returned, which proved what I had always known—that she was much more clear-headed and logical than most young women who haven't had to go up against the grimmer realities of life.
“In that case we haven't heard the last of Wickham Jeffreys,” I went on. “You are his sheet anchor—his hope of salvation —and he isn't going to lose you without a struggle. What sort of a crew did you have in the Waikiki? Scoundrels, I should say, from what they did when the yacht struck.”
“Those that were saved were no better. You'd think they were hired ruffians from the way they act.”
“They probably are, and Jeffreys picked them for his purpose. This island is small and he'll comb it in his search for you and Hedda. When he finds this schooner and recognizes her he'll know what's happened and that you are with me. That will mean war. Wickham Jeffreys is not precisely the kind of material out of which buccaneers and bloody-handed pirates are made. But even a rat will bite when it is cornered.”
She looked at me wide-eyed.
“Are you trying to frighten me, Dick?”
“The Lord forbid! I am only trying to prepare you for what may happen. If Wickham and his gang find us, as they are morally certain to, there will be battle and murder and quite possibly sudden death. I'm going to dodge all this if I can, but if worst comes to worst”
“I understand,” she broke in quite calmly. Then she repeated what she had said in the night: “You're good, Dick; always good and dependable. I think I am going to owe you more than I can ever repay.”
“Nothing like it!” I rejoined as lightly as I could, loving her as I did. “Now, if you are ready we'll disappear and at least postpone the evil day for a little while.”
Pedro and José had gotten the whaleboat over the side and around under the stem of the schooner and Brill had rigged a spare staysail boom for a stub mast with a lug sail. It seemed only the part of prudence to take what was left of our provisions, so I told José to empty the galley locker into the boat and to add a breaker of water drawn from the Vesta's fresh-water butt. The one important thing that I forgot to do—and the memory lapse was inexcusable—was to go down into the hold and get the arms and ammunition from their hiding place in the liquor cargo.
The seven of us made a fairly full load for the whaleboat but though there was a steady land breeze blowing there was no sea on and the lagoon was like a mill pond. When the Minorcans had set the tiny sail Brill took the steering oar and we shoved off. As yet there had been neither sight nor sound from the jungle but I was momently expecting both. I could easily picture Jeffreys' dismay and rage—not to speak of any uglier emotions—when he found that his safety anchor had been pulled up by the roots.
With the breeze coming off the land we had a fair sailing wind and the whaleboat behaved very well, making good time as we coasted along between the reef and the mainland. The coast line of the island on that side—on both sides, as we afterward learned—was somewhat irregular, being in dented with little bays and coves with blunt headlands to separate them, and it was just as we were rounding the first of these headlands and were getting our last glimpse of the beached Vesta that Alison laid a hand on my arm. “Look!” she whispered and when I looked I saw the beach at the schooner's bow suddenly dotted with the figures of men.
Dorgan saw them too and gave his wide-mouthed grin.
“I reckon we didn't crawl out none too soon,” he observed. And then: “Whadda you allow they'll do to the schooner?”
“Raid the cargo,” I prophesied; “do that and try to make your contraband answer for the food they haven't got.”
“Here's hopin' it'll p'ison the last one of 'em deader'n a nit!” said Brill bitterly; and then a twist of the steering oar sent us past the point of land and blotted out the distant view of the Vesta and her raiders.