Dan Merrithew Part 16

"Oh, you did! Has your experience with women taught you that is the best way to please them?"

Dan, now completely at sea, simply regarded her in silence. Virginia, inwardly triumphant, smiled.

"Now what can you do in four days to atone?"

"I might jump overboard."

"That would be romantic, but hardly--"

As the girl was speaking she turned her eyes to the water rushing past the hull, just as a dull, wallowing shape flashed by the bow, a.s.suming form right under her eyes--a dark, soughing, coughing derelict, moving in the waves spinelessly, like a serpent; black, slimy, repulsive, with broken, hemp-littered masts and rusty chains clanking over the bow.

"Oh!" Virginia jumped back with a startled cry and looked fearfully at her companion. He was smiling, and intuitively she recognized that it was not a smile of amus.e.m.e.nt, but of sympathy, rea.s.surance.

"Oh, wasn't it horrid!"

"Yes, it was not a pretty sight," replied Dan. "Derelicts never are.

There are lots of them around here; they travel in currents, sometimes in short orbits, sometimes hundreds of miles in a straight line."

The terror had not left her eyes, and she glanced astern to where the ugly shape was burying itself in the gloom. She was an impressionable girl, and that loathsome object, rising as it were out of the bottom of the deep, clanking, sighing, brought to her an epitome of all the fear and mystery of the great, dark, silent waste. And she looked at the Captain with new interest. Here was one of the men who brave these things, who brave great big problems, who face the unknown and a future as full of mystery, as fraught with evil possibilities as when the first mariner put out to the Beyond in a boat hollowed from a tree. In a flash that derelict taught her to read Dan better; gave her a better insight into the look that she sometimes caught in his steely, inscrutable eyes, and the grave lines in his sun-bronzed face. And in the light of this knowledge her soul went out to this man, this type of man, so strange, so utterly foreign to a girl brought up in an environment where such types do not exist.

She held out her hand.

"I am going to my stateroom now, Captain. Good-night. We are going to be better friends, aren't we?"

"Thank you," said Dan; and he watched her tall, white form as it disappeared down the deck. He gazed moodily out at the dark horizon.

Friends! He searched himself thoroughly, and he could not deny the truth as formulated in his mind. Friends! How hollow the word sounded! He knew how hollow it would seem all through his life.

Better it should be nothing. Yes, far better, instinct told him that.

Miss Howland had come into his existence, radiant, pure, beautiful, and so utterly feminine; as a meteor flashing across the night pauses for a brief instant in the sky before shivering to nothingness. This simile occurred to Dan, who, though no poet, was at least a sailor and as such a student of the heavenly bodies. Yes, a meteor which had illumined his life.

He had never permitted himself to think in this way before. It is doubtful if before to-night he could have felt as he now did. It had all come over him suddenly with a rush. When he talked with her at the hotel in San Blanco he was filled with thoughts of his future, and a.s.sumed as granted his footing upon her plane. How absurd, how ridiculous this seemed now!

Why, why was it, he asked himself, that society or convention or whatever it was had drawn the grim _chevaux de frise_ between those who had accomplished, or whose forebears had accomplished for them, and those who were yet to accomplish; with hosts eager to applaud the achievements of finality, but who had no adequate encouragement for those who had yet to achieve their mission, who fought their battles in the dark and won them in the glorious light, or losing, sank back into that oblivion out of which they had striven to emerge?

If fate had been different--yet if fate had been different he would never have seen her, perhaps. Yes, he should be satisfied; he had seen his star. And when it faded, as fade it must, in the vastness of the dark--why, what then? Well, at least he had seen his star; even this much is denied many. So, he would live it out and be thankful he had been permitted to feel the great thrill--to know that at least he had the heart for the greatest pa.s.sion the world knows. Poor consolation, he told himself with a grim smile. And yet he who hitches his chariot to a star might well be content with less.

CHAPTER XI

THE BURNING OF THE "TAMPICO"

Just an hour later the _Tampico_ lay burning at a point in the Atlantic where if the white lights of Cape Fear and Cape Lookout had converged ninety-two miles farther out to sea they would have rested full on the reeking hull.

Dan had been fearful of the results of Mr. Howland's policy in loading the _Tampico_ with inflammable cargo. He had been reared with the fear of fire in his heart. From one of his voyages his grandfather, Daniel Merrithew, had never returned. A charred name board had told the grim tale, and so Dan had gone out into the world with a long, red, flaming line across his fate, as in knightly days a man might have included the bar sinister or some other portentous device among his symbols of heraldry.

Pacing the forward deck with his pipe, thinking deeply of his talk with Virginia, Dan had seen pitch bubbling out of the deck seams and spilling into rich black pools. And thus the fire was discovered--some fifteen minutes too late, however, to effect the rescue of several of the crew, who shrieked and pounded at the bulkhead door, warped and welded tight by the heat; shrieked and pounded, until the throttling smoke bade them hold their peace.

First, Dan had the vessel swung about with her stern to the wind, the fire being forward; and the crew had piled up on deck and rushed without confusion or undue noise to their various stations. Some unscrewed deck valves over the burning hold, fastening thereto the ends of seven-inch rubber hose; while below, the engine-room staff, with soldierly precision, attached the other ends to the boilers and stood like statues until a signal gong sounded through the black depth.

Whereupon they handled certain valves, and with a hissing scream great volumes of hot vapor poured into the blazing compartment. On deck other seamen dragged lengths of hose forward, forced the nozzles through narrow deck-vents, and held them there while the force pump sent up thousands of gallons of brine.

Dan, ubiquitous, cheerful, commanding, lending a hand to one set of men, directing another, came upon a station two short of its quota.

"Where are Phillips and f.a.gan?" asked Dan, sharply.

"They bunked in the steerage," replied a sailor, choking in the smoke weltering up through the hose vent.

The young Captain's breath caught; but there was no time for sentiment.

He inspected the vessel, bow and stern, marshalled the members of the Howland party into the saloon and bade them stay there until otherwise ordered, and then went up to his men and fought with them. An hour pa.s.sed, and twenty more minutes. The lurid tinge to the smoke, bellying up through the deck-vents, gave sharp hint of the undiminished fury of the flames raging below.

"It's like pouring in oil," muttered Dan to himself; and then he added aloud, "Keep right to it, men, you're holding it," and thus saying he left them and ran aft to where the second mate and the reserve section of eight men were growling impatiently.

"Take up your hose, men, and come with me down into hold No. 2. The fire's going to clean out No. 1 to the skin, sure. We'll have to keep it from breaking through to the other holds. Come on! Hurry!"

Without a word the men picked up the three lengths of emergency hose and followed their Captain. As Dan ran along the deck, leading the way to the hatch, he heard his name called, and looking up quickly, saw Mr.

Howland and Virginia approaching. The girl's hair was flying loose and she had a long blue coat thrown over her shoulders. The deck was filled with heavy smoke.

"Captain," said the shipping magnate, "how are we now?"

Dan paused just an instant.

"Fighting hard," he replied, and then he added quickly, "Mr. Howland, we need men. Two of the crew are gone. Ask some of the men of your party, please, to go forward and report to Mr. Jackson. And you, Miss Howland, go into the saloon right away--and stay there. Tell the others that if they appear on deck before I give the word I shall have them locked in."

The girl obeyed silently, but Mr. Howland paused irresolutely a second, in which time Dan had turned and was hastening after his men.

"I will do as you say," Mr. Howland called after the retreating form of the Captain, "but I want to talk to you first."

"All right, sir, come on then. You'll have to talk to me down in the hold, I'm afraid."

The second mate and his men had in the meantime pried the battens from the hatch and thrown it open. The hold was about half full of cotton bales, railroad ties, oak.u.m, resin, and the like, and they descended to them by means of a scaling ladder, clambering thence toward the forward bulkhead. One of the men had a lantern which cast a pallid glow about the immediate vicinity, bringing into vague relief the well-ordered ma.s.ses of cargo, and ending suddenly against a hard wall of dark as palpable as a barrier of stone. The air was heavy with musty sweetness and with yellow smoke which streaked lazily past the lantern globe--and with silence, save for the dull roar in the adjoining hold.

"Make a stand right here," and Dan's voice sounded hollow through the gloom. "Stand right here. You've got water in your hose; I want that bulkhead kept soaked. Let her go."

As the streams of water plunged against the steel wall Dan turned to his employer.

"You wanted to speak to me, Mr. Howland?"

"Yes, I want to compliment you on your discipline and--and what is the exact situation?"

"Not so good; but a working chance. It will be a short and sharp go; for the hold's lined with tar and sugar reek--otherwise the cotton might go for days. It won't in that hold, though. The fight'll be right here. If it breaks through into this we've got to run; if not, it will burn out where it is."

"What are the chances that it won't?"

"Why, you know more about the structural strength of this boat than I do. To be honest, I never liked your bulkheads, else I would have opened a stop-c.o.c.k and flooded the hold long ago. Still, what water would burst through, fire might not."

Horace Howland, who had paid his own price for the _Tampico_, and who by the same token had his own opinion of her, said nothing.

"I have arranged about the boats," resumed Dan. "If the worst comes, my men know what to do and they are the men to do it. It's not too rough to launch safely. Now, Mr. Howland, I've wasted too much time talking. Don't forget to send two men to Mr. Jackson," and he sprang up the ladder and hurried forward.