A Desperate Voyage Part 20

"Oh, Monsieur Baptiste, let me go--let me go! I will join you. I will not betray you. I will help you work the ship. I will be your slave if you spare me!"

His comrades reviled him for his cowardice, but he still continued his piteous entreaties.

Baptiste turned round and gazed with a sardonic smile into the man's white, fear-distorted face. He felt that this was very much the way he would behave himself in similar circ.u.mstances, but he did not spare his own faults in others; few men do.

"So you would join us, would you? But how do I know if I can trust you, my friend? You may betray us when we get into port. Will you give me a proof of your fidelity?"

"I will give you any proof you wish," cried the wretched man, writhing in his bonds, but quite unable to move.

"Now, if I see you commit a far greater crime than any that I and my crew have committed, I shall know that you dare not tell tales. If I release you and give you a knife, will you kill all your comrades for me?"

The man burst into hysterical tears. "Yes!" he shrieked--"yes! Anything for my life."

Baptiste laughed contemptuously.

"Miserable man! Your answer is sufficient for me. We do not want such cowardly traitors among our crew. You shall stay here and die by the side of your braver comrades."

Baptiste and the two Spaniards then hurried off to the boat, for the sun was just setting. They pulled off to the barque, and the mate reported to the captain what he had done.

About an hour after their return--the night having settled down upon the ocean--Carew was sitting by himself on the quarter-deck. The hollow roar of the waves upon the beach sounded louder than in the daytime, and the vessel rolled in the swell caused by the recoil of the distant rollers.

All manner of strange and frightful noises came from the direction of the mysterious island. It seemed to Carew that he heard groans and wails echoing among the ravines, but he put this down to his imagination--to the now greatly unstrung condition of his nerves.

Suddenly he started to his feet, his heart beating violently. What was that he heard? Surely that last dreadful cry did not exist only in his fancy.

"Baptiste, come here!" he called out.

The mate sauntered up.

"Listen!" whispered Carew; "do you hear nothing?"

"Nothing but the noise of the breakers."

Once more arose that awful cry. It was as a shriek of unutterable despair and agony; faint, but easily to be distinguished when the lull came between one roller and another.

"What is it?"

Baptiste himself turned white at the sound. "I know not; it makes one's blood run cold. See, they too have heard it."

The Spaniards came up.

"Oh, sir!" cried El Toro, his voice indistinct with terror, "let us make sail at once and leave behind us this horrible place. Hark! that cry again! It is as the shrieks of the doomed in h.e.l.l. That island is the abode of evil spirits who are mocking us."

"We cannot set sail in a flat calm. We must wait," said Carew, in a low voice.

They stood on the deck and listened in silence. For half an hour or more those appalling cries continued; then they died away, and nothing was heard but the roaring of the ocean upon an iron-bound coast.

CHAPTER XVI

On the following day the fiery sun again blazed down upon the guilty ship out of a cloudless and windless sky. It seemed probable that one of those oppressive calms that are so frequent on this portion of the ocean would detain the barque for some days longer at her present anchorage.

In the early morning, when the west side of the island was still plunged in shade, Carew approached the mate, who was enjoying his matutinal cup of coffee and cigarette on the quarter-deck.

"Baptiste," he said, "I want a boat lowered; I am going on sh.o.r.e."

"Good, sir. How many of us do you wish to accompany you?"

"Thank you; I want none of you. Put the yacht's dinghy over the side.

She is the handiest boat on board; and I will pull off by myself."

"That will not be safe," objected Baptiste; "there is no place to beach a boat yonder, and she would smash up if you left her banging about alongside that rocky landing-place; we nearly lost the cutter in that way last night. If you desire to take a solitary promenade on that cheerful island, I will pull you off there myself in the dinghy, leave you, and return for you at any hour you mention."

Carew a.s.sented to this proposal, and prepared himself for the journey by placing his sheath-knife and loaded revolver in his belt. Baptiste watched him curiously, and wondered whether this eccentric Englishman had at last summoned up resolution, and was about to despatch the prisoners outright, as being a more merciful proceeding than allowing them to starve to death. Baptiste ventured no remark on the subject, for he observed that his captain was in a taciturn and absent-minded mood; and there was a peculiar, far-off look in his eyes that the Frenchman could not understand, not knowing that Carew had been dosing himself for the last few days with laudanum from his medicine chest, in the vain hope that the drug might numb the tortures of his conscience.

The dinghy was got overboard, and while Carew sat in the sternsheets, Baptiste took the oars and pulled leisurely across the smooth ocean swell.

While they were yet half-way to the sh.o.r.e, the boat shot suddenly out of the fervent sunshine into the cool dark shadow cast by the lofty mountains.

Baptiste, feeling the rapid change, rested on his oars, and looked round towards the pile of barren hills. "Ugh, what a horrid place!" he cried. "I have a sensation as if I were pa.s.sing into the mouth of a tomb. I should not like to explore that island alone."

"Pull away!" said Carew impatiently. "Are you superst.i.tious, like those two Spanish brutes?"

"Superst.i.tion is not one of my failings, captain," replied the Provencal, as he rowed on again; "but those dreadful cries we heard last night seem to be still ringing in my ears. I wonder what they could have been?"

"When you have put me on sh.o.r.e," said Carew, paying no heed to Baptiste's words, "you can go back to the barque. I shall probably remain on the island three or four hours. Then I will return to the landing-place, and stand on the end of it till you come off for me. So see that someone looks out for me with a telescope occasionally."

"We won't keep you waiting, for I know that you will soon have had enough of Trinidad. But perhaps monsieur has a scientific mind, and desires to study the botany, zoology, geology, and so forth, of the island?"

Carew made no reply to this. They came alongside the promontory of black coral, and found that the sea was not rolling in so heavily as on the previous day. The Englishman landed without any difficulty.

"Good-bye, sir," Baptiste called out. "You will find the prisoners behind the first big boulder up the ravine." Then he pulled lazily back to the vessel.

Carew was now alone on the desert island with his captives. He looked to his knife and pistol to see that they were ready to his hand, and proceeded to clamber cautiously along the narrow, slippery ledge.

At the farther end he found a loathsome monster standing in his way, seemingly quite indifferent to his approach; for it did not budge, but remained quite still, its ungainly form spread across the causeway, so that he had to step over it to pa.s.s by. Carew had never before seen one of the species; but he recognised this as a tropical land-crab--one of a hideous race of crustacea that swarm on this island, sharing the possession of Trinidad with the sea-birds and the snakes. In his present nervous state, Carew was startled by the sight of this repulsive-looking creature. It must have extended two feet across from claw to claw. Its colour was a bright saffron, and its grotesque features, which were turned towards the man, seemed to be fixed in a cynical grin. Its cruel-looking yellow pincers, hard as steel, could have bitten through an inch board, and between them was clutched--Carew sickened when he saw it--a fragment of the flesh of some animal.

Reaching the rugged sh.o.r.e, he found it covered with these land-crabs.

They crawled over the rocks and the dead trees, and the air was full of a mult.i.tudinous crackling noise, produced by the small particles of stone dislodged by their motion--a sound as of a distant bonfire, or as of an army of locusts settling on a field of maize.

On the evening before, when the men had landed, they had seen none of these creatures; now there were thousands of them on the mountain-side.

But it is well known that land-crabs at certain periods of the year migrate in immense hosts from one district to another.

Even on the previous afternoon, when the coast was illumined by the full glory of the setting sun, Baptiste and the two Spaniards had been impressed by the desolate aspect before them. But now that a dark shadow was thrown over the chaotic ma.s.ses of volcanic rock, the scenery was inexpressibly dreary and forbidding. Had there been no signs of life on the land, it would have appeared less terrible than with that ghastly vegetation of dead trees and snake-like creepers, and the teeming generation of silent crabs and foul sea-birds perpetually raising their hoa.r.s.e cries.