A Master of Fortune Part 20

"Do you, by G.o.d!" said the mate, and then the pair of them closed without any further preliminaries. They were both of them well used to quick rough-and-tumbles, and they both of them knew that the man who gets the first grip in these wrestles usually wins, and instinctively each tried to act on that knowledge.

But if the third mate had bulk and strength, Kettle had science and abundant wiriness; and though the pair of them lost their footing on the sloping cabin floor at the first embrace, and wriggled over and under like a pair of eels, Captain Kettle got a thumb artistically fixed in the bigger man's windpipe, and held it there doggedly. The mate, growing more and more purple, hit out with savage force, but Kettle dodged the bull-like blows like the boxer he was, and the mate's efforts gradually relaxed.

But at this point they were interrupted. "That wobbly boat was making me sea-sick," said a voice, "so I came on board here. Hullo, you fellows!"

Kettle looked up. "Mr. Philipps," he said, "I wish you'd go and get the rest of our crew on deck out of the boat."

"But what are you two doing down there?"

"We disagreed over a question of judgment. He said this ship isn't safe, and I shouldn't have the chance to take her home. I say there's nothing wrong with her that can't be remedied, and home I'm going to take her, anyway. It might be the one chance in my life, sir, of getting a balance at the bank, and I'm not going to miss it."

"Ho!" said Dayton-Philipps.

"If you don't like to come, you needn't," said Kettle. "But I'm going to have the stonemason and the Dago, and those two coal-heavers. Perhaps you'd better go back. It will be wet, hard work here; no way the sort of job to suit a soldier."

Dayton-Philipps flushed slightly, and then he laughed. "I suppose that's intended to be nasty," he said. "Well, Captain, I shall have to prove to you that we soldiers are equal to a bit of manual labor sometimes. By the way, I don't want to interfere in a personal matter, but I'd take it as a favor if you wouldn't kill Strake quite. I rather like him."

"Anything to oblige," said Kettle, and took his thumb out of the third mate's windpipe. "And now, sir, as you've so to speak signed on for duty here, away with you on deck and get those four other beauties up out of the boat."

Dayton-Philipps touched his hat and grinned. "Ay, ay, sir," he said, and went back up the companion.

Shortly afterward he came to report the men on board, and Kettle addressed his late opponent. "Now, look here, young man, I don't want to have more trouble on deck before the hands. Have you had enough?"

"For the present, yes," said the third mate huskily. "But I hope we'll meet again some other day to have a bit of further talk."

"I am sure I shall be quite ready. No man ever accused me of refusing a sc.r.a.p. But, me lad, just take one tip from me: don't you go and make Captain Image anxious by saying this ship isn't seaworthy, or he'll begin to ask questions, and he may get you to tell more than you're proud about."

"You can go and get drowned your own way. As far as I am concerned, no one will guess it's coming off till they see it in the papers."

"Thanks," said Kettle. "I knew you'd be nice about it."

The third mate went down to his boat, and the three rowers took her across to the _M'poso_, where she was hauled up to davits again. The steamer's siren boomed out farewells, as she got under way again, and Kettle with his own hands unbent the reversed ensign from the ship's main rigging, and ran it up to the peak and dipped it three times in salute.

He breathed more freely now. One chance and a host of unknown dangers lay ahead of him. But the dangers he disregarded. Dangers were nothing new to him. It was the chance which lured him on. Chances so seldom came in his way, that he intended to make this one into a certainty if the efforts of desperation could do it.

Alone of all the six men on the derelict, Captain Kettle had knowledge of the seaman's craft; but, for the present, thews and not seamanship were required. The vessel lay in pathetic helplessness on her side, liable to capsize in the first squall which came along, and their first effort must be to get her in proper trim whilst the calm continued. They knocked out the wedges with their heels, and got the tarpaulins off the main hatch; they pulled away the hatch covers, and saw beneath them smooth slopes of yellow grain.

As though they were an invitation to work, shovels were made fast along the coamings of the hatch. The six men took these, and with shouts dropped down upon the grain. And then began a period of Homeric toil.

The fireman and the coal-trimmer set the pace, and with a fine contempt for the unhandiness of amateurs did not fail to give a display of their utmost. Kettle and Dayton-Philipps gamely kept level with them. The Italian ganger turned out to have his pride also, and did not lag, and only the free-born British subject from Sierra Leone endeavored to shirk his due proportion of the toil.

But high-minded theories as to the rights of man were regarded here as little as threats to lay information before a justice of the peace; and under the sledge-hammer arguments of shovel blows from whoever happened to be next to him, the unfortunate colored gentleman descended to the grade of n.i.g.g.e.r again (which he had repeatedly sworn never to do), and toiled and sweated equally with his betters.

The heat under the decks was stifling, and dust rose from the wheat in choking volumes, but the pace of the circling shovels was never allowed to slacken. They worked there stripped to trousers, and they understood, one and all, that they were working for their lives. A breeze had sprung up almost as soon as the _M'poso_ had steamed away, and hourly it was freshening: the barometer in the cabin was registering a steady fall; the sky was banking up with heavy clouds.

Kettle had handled sheets and braces and hove the vessel to so as to steady her as they worked, but she still labored heavily in the sea, and beneath them they could hear the leaden swish of water in the floor of the hold beneath. Their labor was having its effect, and by infinitesimal gradations they were counteracting the list and getting the ship upright; but the wind was worsening, and it seemed to them also that the water was getting deeper under their feet, and that the vessel rode more sluggishly.

So far the well had not been sounded. It is no use getting alarming statistics to discourage one's self unnecessarily. But after night had fallen, and it was impossible to see to work in the gloomy hold any longer without lamps, Captain Kettle took the sounding-rod and found eight feet.

He mentioned this when he took down the lanterns into the hold, but he did not think it necessary to add that as the sounding had been taken with the well on the slant it was therefore considerably under the truth. Still he sent Dayton-Philipps and the trimmer on deck to take a spell at the pumps, and himself resumed his shovel-work alongside the others.

Straight away on through the night the six men stuck to their savage toil, the blood from their blistered hands reddening the shafts of the shovels. Every now and again one or another of them, choked with the dust, went to get a draft of lukewarm water from the scuttleb.u.t.t. But no one stayed over long on these excursions. The breeze had blown up into a gale. The night overhead-was starless and moonless, but every minute the black heaven was split by spurts of lightning, which showed the laboring, dishevelled ship set among great mountains of breaking seas.

The sight would have been bad from a well-manned, powerful steamboat; from the deck of the derelict it approached the terrific. With the seas constantly crashing on board of her, to have left the hatches open would have been, in her semi-waterlogged condition, to court swamping, and after midnight these were battened down, and the men with the shovels worked among the frightened, squeaking rats in the closed-in box of the hold. There were four on board the ship during that terrible night who openly owned to being cowed, and freely bewailed their insanity in ever being lured away from the _M'poso_. Dayton-Philipps had sufficient self-control to keep his feelings, whatever they were, unstated; but Kettle faced all difficulties with indomitable courage and a smiling face.

"I believe," said Dayton-Philipps to him once when they were taking a spell together at the clanking pumps, "you really glory in finding yourself in this beastly mess."

"I have got to earn out the salvage of this ship somehow," Kettle shouted back to him through the windy darkness, "and I don't much care what work comes between now and when I handle the check."

"You've got a fine confidence. I'm not grumbling, mind, but it seems very unlikely we shall be still afloat to-morrow morning."

"We shall pull through, I tell you."

"Well," said Dayton-Philipps, "I suppose you are a man that's always met with success. I'm not. I've got blundering bad luck all along, and if there's a hole available, I get into it."

Captain Kettle laughed aloud into the storm. "Me!" he cried. "Me in luck! There's not been a man more bashed and kicked by luck between here and twenty years back. I suppose G.o.d thought it good for me, and He's kept me down to my bearings in bad luck ever since I first got my captain's ticket. But He's not cruel, Mr. Philipps, and He doesn't push a man beyond the end of his patience. My time's come at last. He's given me something to make up for all the weary waiting. He's sent me this derelict, and He only expects me to do my human best, and then He'll let me get her safely home."

"Good Heavens, Skipper, what are you talking about? Have you seen visions or something?"

"I'm a man, Mr. Philipps, that's always said my prayers regular all through life. I've asked for things, big things, many of them, and I'll not deny they've been mostly denied me. I seemed to know they'd be denied. But in the last week or so there's been a change. I've asked on, just as earnestly as I knew how, and I seemed to hear Him answer. It was hardly a voice, and yet it was like a voice; it appeared to come out of millions of miles of distance; and I heard it say: 'Captain, I do not forget the sparrows, and I have not forgotten you. I have tried you long enough. Presently you shall meet with your reward.'"

Dayton-Philipps stared. Was the man going mad?

"And that's what it is, sir, that makes me sure I shall bring this vessel into some port safely and pocket the salvage."

"Look here, Skipper," said Dayton-Philipps, "you are just f.a.gged to death, and I'm the same. We've been working till our hands are raw as butcher's meat, and we're clean tired out, and we must go below and get a bit of sleep. If the ship swims, so much the better; if she sinks, we can't help it; anyway, we're both of us too beat to work any more. I shall be 'seeing things' myself next."

"Mr. Philipps," said the little sailor gravely, "I know you don't mean anything wrong, so I take no offence. But I'm a man convinced; I've heard the message I told you with my own understanding; and it isn't likely anything you can say will persuade me out of it. I can see you are tired out, as you say, so go you below and get a spell of sleep. But as for me, I've got another twenty hours' wakefulness in me yet, if needs be. This chance has mercifully been sent in my way, as I've said, but naturally it's expected of me that I do my human utmost as well to see it through."

"If you stay on at this heart-breaking work, so do I," said Dayton-Philipps, and toiled gamely on at the pump. There he was still when day broke, sawing up and down like an automaton. But before the sun rose, utter weariness had done its work. His bleeding fingers loosed themselves from the break, his knees failed beneath him, and he fell in an unconscious stupor of sleep on to the wet planking of the deck. For half an hour more Kettle struggled on at the pump, doing double work; but even his flesh and blood had its breaking strain; and at last he could work no more.

He leaned dizzily up against the pump for a minute or so, and then with an effort he pulled his still unconscious companion away and laid him on the dry floor of a deck-house. There was a pannikin of cold stewed tea slung from a hook in there, and half a sea biscuit on one of the bunks.

He ate and drank greedily, and then went out again along the streaming decks to work, so far as his single pair of hands could accomplish such a thing, at getting the huge derelict once more in sailing trim.

The shovels meanwhile had been doing their work, and although the list was not entirely gone, the vessel at times (when a sea b.u.t.tressed her up) floated almost upright. The gale was still blowing, but it had veered to the southward, and on the afternoon of that day Kettle called all hands on deck and got her under way again, and found to his joy that the coal-trimmer had some elementary notion of taking a wheel.

"I rate you as Mate," he said in his grat.i.tude, "and you'll draw salvage pay according to your rank. I was going to make Mr. Philipps my officer, but--"

"Don't apologize," said Dayton-Philipps. "I don't know the name of one string from another, and I'm quite conscious of my deficiency. But just watch me put in another spell at those infernal pumps."

The list was of less account now, and the vessel was once more under command of her canvas. It was the leak which gave them most cause for anxiety. Likely enough it was caused by the mere wrenching away of a couple of rivets. But the steady inpour of water through the holes would soon have made the ship grow unmanageable and founder if it was not constantly attended to. Where the leak was they had not a notion.

Probably it was deep down under the cargo of grain, and quite unget-at-able; but anyway it demanded a constant service at the pumps to keep it in check, and this the bone-weary crew were but feebly competent to give. They were running up into the lat.i.tude of the Bay, too, and might reasonably expect that "Biscay weather" would not take much from the violence of the existing gale.

However, the dreaded Bay, fickle as usual, saw fit to receive them at first with a smiling face. The gale eased to a plain smiling wind; the sullen black clouds dissolved away into fleckless blue, and a sun came out which peeled their arms and faces as they worked. During the afternoon they rose the brown sails of a Portuguese fishing schooner, and Kettle headed toward her.

Let his crew be as willing as they would, there was no doubt that this murderous work at the pumps could not be kept up for a voyage to England. If he could not get further reinforcements, he would have to take the ship into the nearest foreign port to barely save her from sinking. And then where would be his sighed-for salvage? Wofully thinned, he thought, or more probably whisked away altogether. Captain Kettle had a vast distrust for the sh.o.r.e foreigner over questions of law proceedings and money matters. So he made for the schooner, hove his own vessel to, and signalled that he wished to speak.

A boat was slopped into the water from the schooner's deck, and ten swarthy, ragged Portuguese fishermen crammed into her. A couple pushed at the oars, and they made their way perilously over the deep hill and dale of ocean with that easy familiarity which none but deep-sea fishermen can attain. They worked up alongside, caught a rope which was thrown them, and nimbly climbed over on to the decks.

Two or three of them had a working knowledge of English; their captain spoke it with fluent inaccuracy; and before any of them had gone aft to Kettle, who stood at the wheel, they heard the whole story of the ship being found derelict, and (very naturally) were anxious enough by some means or another to finger a share of the salvage. Even a ragged Portuguese _baccalhao_ maker can have his ambitions for prosperity like other people.