Carette of Sark Part 25

"A merchantman," said Martin Cohu disgustedly, "and English or I'm a Dutchman. One of the convoy lagged behind. No pickings for us this time, my lads."

But there was more there than he expected.

There was always the chance of her having been captured by the French, in which case her recapture would bring some little grist to our mill, and so we crowded sail for her. And, as we drew nearer, it was evident, from the talk among John Ozanne and his mates, that they could see more through their gla.s.ses than we could with our eyes.

"Guyabble!" cried old Martin at last. "There's another ship hitched on to her far side. I can see her masts. Now, what's this? A privateer as like as no, and we'll have our bite yet, maybe."

And before long we could all make out the thin masts of a smaller vessel between the flapping canvas of the larger. John Ozanne ordered us to quarters, and got ready for a fight. He gave us a hearty word or two, since every man likes to know what's in the wind.

"There's a schooner behind yonder Indiaman, my lads, and it's as likely as not she's been captured. If so we'll do our best to get her back, for old England's sake, and our own, and just to spite the Frenchman. If the schooner should prove the _Red Hand_, and that's as like as not, for he's the pluckiest man they have, you know what it means. It'll be hard fighting and no quarter. But he's worth taking. The London merchants have put a price on him, and there'll be that, and himself, and a share in the Indiaman besides, and we'll go back to Peter Port with our pockets lined."

We gave him a cheer and hungered for the fray.

John Ozanne took us round in a wide sweep to open the ships, and every eye and gla.s.s was glued to them. As we rounded the Indiaman's great gilded stern, about a mile away, it did not need John Ozanne's emphatic--"It's him!" to tell us we were in for a tough fight, and that three prizes lay for our taking. We gave John another cheer, tightened our belts, and perhaps--I can speak for one at all events--wondered grimly how it would be with some of us a couple of hours later.

The Frenchman cast off at once and came to meet us, the Red Hand flying at his masthead, the red lump at his bows, the red streak clearly visible just below the open gun-ports.

"Do your duty, lads," said John Ozanne. "There'll be tough work for us. He carries heavy metal. We'll close with him at all odds, and then the British bull-dog must see to it."

We gave him another cheer, and then a cloud of white smoke burst from the Frenchman's fore deck, and our topmast and all its hamper came down with a crash, and our deck rumbled with bitter curses.

"---- him!" said Martin Cohu. "That's not fair play. Dismantling shot or I'm a Dutchman! It's only devils and Yankees use shot like that. ---- me, if we don't hang him if we catch him."

John Ozanne tried him with our long gun forward, but the shot fell short.

In point of metal the Frenchman beat us, and our best hope was to close with him as quickly as possible.

But he knew that quite as well as we. He was well up to his business, and chose his own distance. His next shot swept along our deck, smashing half a dozen men most horribly, and tied itself round the foot of the mainmast, wounding it badly. And then I saw for the first time that most hideous missile which the Americans had introduced, but which other nations declined to use, as barbarous and uncivilised. It was a great iron ring round which were looped iron bars between two and three feet long. The bars played freely like keys on a ring, and splayed out in their flight, and did the most dreadful execution. Intended originally, I believe, for use only against hostile spars and rigging, this rascally freebooter put them to any and every service, and with his powerful armament and merciless ferocity they went far towards explaining his success.

For myself, and I saw the same in all my shipmates, the first sense of dismayed impotence in the face of those most d.a.m.nable whirling flails very soon gave place to black fury. For the moment one thing only did I desire, and that was to be within arm's reach of the Frenchman, cutla.s.s in hand.

Had he been three times our number I doubt if one of them would have escaped if we had reached him. My heart felt like to burst with its boiling rage, and all one could do was to wait patiently at one's post, and it was the hardest thing I had ever had to do yet.

John Ozanne made us all lie down, save when a change of course was necessary, while he did his utmost to get the weather gauge of the enemy.

And he managed it at last by a series of tacks which cost us many men and more spars. Then, throwing prudence to the winds, he drove straight for the Frenchman to board him at any cost. It was our only chance, for his heavier guns would have let him plug us from a distance, till every man on board was down.

We gave a wild cheer as we recognised the success of John Ozanne's manoeuvring, and every man gripped his steel and ground his teeth for a fight to the death.

But it was not to be. Death was there, but no fight. For, as we plunged straight for the Frenchman, following every twist he made, and eager only for the leap at his throat, our little ship began to roll in a sickly fashion as she had never done before, and men looked into one another's faces with fears in their eyes beyond any all the Frenchmen in the world could put there. And the carpenter, who had been on deck with the rest, bursting for the fight, tumbled hastily below, and came up in a moment with a face like putty.

"She's going!" he cried, and it was his last word. One of those devilish six feet of whirling bars scattered him and three others into fragments and then sh.o.r.e its way through the bulwarks behind. And the winged _Swallow_ began to roll under our feet in the way that makes a seaman's heart grow sick.

The Frenchman never ceased firing on us. No matter. It was only a choice of deaths. Not a man among us would have asked his life from him, even if the chance had been given, and it was not.

My last look at the Frenchman showed him coming straight for us. I saw the great forecastle gun belch its cloud of smoke. The water was spouting up in white jets through our scuppers. It came foaming green and white through our gun ports. Then, in solid green sheets, it leaped up over the bulwarks, and for a moment the long flush deck was a boiling cauldron with a b.l.o.o.d.y sc.u.m, in which twirled and twisted dead men and living, and fragments of the ship and rigging.

When I came up through the roaring green water I found myself within arm's length of the foretopsailyard, to which a strip of ragged sail still hung.

I hooked my arm over it and looked round for my comrades. About a score of heads floated in the belching bubbles of the sunken ship, but even as I looked the number lessened, for the Island men of those days were no swimmers. A burly body swung past me. I grabbed it, dragged it to the spar and hoisted its arm over it. It was John Ozanne, and presently he recovered sufficiently to get his other arm up and draw himself chest-high to look about him. The light spar would not support us both, and I let myself sink into the water, with only a grip on a hanging rope's end to keep in tow with it.

John Ozanne gazed wildly round for a minute, and then raised his right arm and volubly cursed the Frenchman, who was coming right down on us.

"Oh, you devils! You devils! May--" and then to my horror, for with the wash of the waves in my ears I could hear nothing, a small round hole bored itself suddenly in his broad forehead, just where the brown and the white met, and he threw up his arms and dropped back into the water.

I made a grab for him, but he was gone, and even as I did so the meaning of that hideous little round hole in his forehead came plain to me. The Frenchman was shooting at every head he could see.

I dragged the spar over me, and floated under the strip of sail with no more than my nose showing between it and the wood, and the long black hull, with its red streak glistening as though but just new dipped in blood, swept past me so close that I could have touched it. Through the opening between my sail and the spar I could see grim faces looking over the side, and the flash and smoke of muskets as the poor strugglers beyond were shot down one by one.

I lay there--in fear and trembling, I confess, for against cold-blooded brutality such as this no man's courage may avail--till the last shots had long died away. And when at last I ventured to raise my head and look about me, the Frenchman was stretching away to the north-east and the Indiaman was pressing to the north, and both were far away. The sun sank like a ball of fire dipped in blood as I watched. The long red trail faded off the waters, and the soft colours out of the sky. The sea was a chill waste of tumbling waves. The sky was a cast-iron shutter. The manhood went out of me, and I sank with a sob on to my frail spar, for of all our company which had sailed so gallantly out of Peter Port five days before, I was the only one left, and the rest had all been done to death in most foul and cruel fashion.

CHAPTER XIX

HOW I FELL INTO THE _RED HAND_

I must have fallen into a stupor, as the effect of the terrible strain on mind and body of all I had gone through. For I remember nothing of that first night on the spar, and only came slowly back to sense of sodden pain and hunger when the sun was up. Some sailorly instinct, of which I have no recollection whatever, had taken a turn of the rope under my arms and round the yard, and so kept me from slipping away. But I woke up to agonies of cold--a sodden deadness of the limbs which set me wondering numbly if I had any legs left--and a gnawing hunger and emptiness. I felt no thirst; perhaps because my body was so soaked with water. In the same dull way the horrors of the previous day came back on me, and I wondered heavily if my dead comrades had not the better lot.

But the bright sun warmed the upper part of me, and I essayed to drag my dead legs out of the water, if perchance they might be warmed back to life also. They came back in time, with horrible p.r.i.c.king pains and cramps which I could only suffer, lest I should roll off into the water. And if I had, I am not at all sure that I would have struggled further, so weary and broken had the night left me.

All that day I lay on my spar, warmed into meagre life by the sun, and tortured at first with the angry clamour of an empty stomach, for it was full twenty hours since I had eaten, and the wear and tear alone would have needed very full supplies to make good. But in time the bitter hunger gave place to a sick emptiness which I essayed to stay by chewing bits of floating seaweed. And this, and the drying of my body by the sun, brought on a furious thirst, to which the sparkling water that broke against my spar proved a most horrible temptation. So torturing was it in the afternoon that the sodden cold of the night now seemed as nothing in comparison, and to relieve it I dropped my body into the water to soak again.

Not a sail did I see that whole day, but being so low in the water my range was of course very limited. In the times when I could get away for a moment or two from my hunger and thirst, my thoughts ran horribly on the previous day's happenings--those hurtling iron flails against which we were powerless--that little round hole that bored itself in John Ozanne's forehead--that cold-blooded shooting of drowning men--the monstrous brutality of it all! What little blood was in me, and cold as that was, surged up into my head at the recollection, and set me swaying on my perch.

And then my thoughts wandered off to the poor souls in Peter Port, hopefully speculating on the luck we were like to have, counting on the return of those whose broken bodies were dredging the bottom below me,--to the shocking completeness of our disasters. Truly when it all came back on me like that I felt inclined at times to loose my hold and have done with life. And then the thought of Carette, and my mother, and my grandfather, and Krok, would brace me to further precarious clinging with a warming of the heart, but chiefly the thought of Carette, and the good-bye she had waved to me from the point of Brecqhou.

I might, perhaps, with reason have remembered that what had happened to us was but one of the natural results of warfare--barring, of course, the murderous treatment of which no British seaman ever would be guilty. But I did not. My thoughts ran wholly on the actual facts, and, as I have said, faintly at times, but to my salvation, on Carette and home.

While the sun shone, and the ma.s.ses of soft white cloud floated slowly against the blue, hope still held me, if precariously at times. At midday, indeed, the fierce bite of his rays on my bare back--for we had stripped for the fight and I had on only my breeches and belt--combined with the salting of the previous night and the dazzle of the dancing waves added greatly to my discomfort. I felt like an insect under a burning gla.s.s, and suffered much until I had the sense to slice a piece off my sail with my knife and pull it over my raw shoulder bones. But when night fell again, the chill waste of waters washed in on my soul and left me desolate and hopeless, and I hardly hoped to see the dawn.

I remember little of the night, except that it was full of long-drawn agony and seemed as if it would never end. But for the rope under my arms and the loop of the sail, into which some time during the night I slipped, I must have gone, and been lost.

In the morning the sun again woke what life was left in me. I had been nearly forty-eight hours without food or drink, and strained on the edge of death every moment of that time. It was but the remnant of a man that lay like a rag across the spar, and he looked only for death, and yet by instinct clung to life.

And when my weary eyes lifted themselves to look dully round, there, like a white cloud of hope, came life pressing gloriously towards me--a pyramid of snowy canvas, dazzling in the sunshine, the upper courses of a very large ship.

She was still a great way off, but I could see down to her lower foretop-gallant sail, and to my starting eyes she seemed to grow as I watched her. She was coming my way, and I have little doubt that, in the weakness of the moment and the sudden leap of hope when hope seemed dead, I laughed and cried and behaved like a witless man. I know that I prayed G.o.d, as I had never prayed in my life before, that she might keep her course and come close enough for some sharp eye to see me.

Now I could see her fore and main courses, and presently the black dot of her hull, and at last the white curl at her forefoot, as she came pressing gallantly on, just as though she knew my need and was speeding her best to answer it.

While she was still far away, I raised myself as high as I could on my spar and waved my rag of sail desperately. I tried to shout, but could not bring out so much as a whisper. I waved and waved. She was coming--coming. She was abreast of me, and showed no sign of having seen me. She was pa.s.sing--pa.s.sing. I remember scrambling up onto the spar and waving--waving--waving--

I came to myself in the comforting confinement of a bunk. I could touch the side and the roof. They were real and solid. I rubbed my hand on them.

There was mighty comfort and a.s.surance of safety in the very feel of them.

I lay between white sheets, and there was a pillow under my head. I tried to raise my head to look about me, but it swam like oil in a pitching lamp, and I was glad to drop it on the pillow again. The place was full of creakings, a sound I knew right well.