Fire Mountain Part 23

"Good Lord, you wouldn't do that!" exclaimed Martin.

"Oh, yes--I did it once," confessed Little Billy easily. "Indeed, a swig of sh.e.l.lac punch is drink for the G.o.ds; my very soul writhes now at the thought of it. But, I'll admit, the wood-alcohol beverage conceals complications. It was the captain, and his little stomach-pump, that brought me to that time. But no more of such frolicking on board ship. That episode occurred during my first year with Captain Dabney. Never since have I succ.u.mbed to the craving while at sea. Oh, I'll be all right this time--only don't be startled if you hear me talking to myself, or roaming about in the middle of the night."

That was all that pa.s.sed between them. But during the days following Martin's eyes often rested on the other with curiosity and sympathy.

It was a new experience for Martin, to be room-mated with a dipsomaniac, and besides Little Billy had grown to be a very dear friend, indeed. Everybody on the ship loved the sunny hunchback.

Little Billy's happy face grew bleak, and many fine lines appeared about the corners of his eyes and mouth. He was suffering keenly, Martin knew. Even now, he could hear the uneasy, labored breathing of the man in the bunk above.

It was a strange, changeable, eager face, Little Billy had. It seemed to vary in age according to the hunchback's mood; these days he looked forty, but Martin had seen him appear a youthful twenty during an exceptionally happy moment. Actually, Martin learned during the pa.s.sage, Little Billy Corcoran's age was thirty-one.

He learned, moreover, that Little Billy was the son, and sole surviving relative, of Judge Corcoran, a famous California politician in his day.

Judge Corcoran had been a noted "good fellow" and a famous man with the bottle. And his son was a hunchback and a dipsomaniac. Little Billy was blessed with a fine mind, and he had taken his degree at Yale, but throughout his hectic life the thirst he was born with proved his undoing.

"I am an oddity among a nation of self-made men," Little Billy once told Martin. "They all commenced at the bottom and ascended fortune's ladder, whereas I started at the top and descended. And what a descent! I hit every rung of that ladder with a heavy b.u.mp, and jarred Old Lady Grundy every time. I was the crying scandal, the horrible example, of my native heath. That old rogue, my father, used to boast that he never got drunk--I used to boast that I never got sober.

Finally, I b.u.mped my last b.u.mp and found myself at the bottom. And there I stayed, until Captain Dabney, and the dear girl, pulled me out of the mire."

Almost literally true, this last, for Martin learned that five years before, Captain Dabney had salvaged Little Billy off the beach at Suva, a dreadful scarecrow of a man, and Ruth's nursing, and the clean sea life, had built a new William Corcoran. But the appet.i.te for the drink was uneradicable, and the genial hunchback's life was a series of losing battles with his hereditary curse.

But the boatswain was proved a poor prophet. Not that week, nor the next, did they reach Fire Mountain. The _Coha.s.set_ crossed the path of the Orient mail-packets, the great circle sailers, and they entered their last stretch of Pacific sailing, above the forty-eighth parallel.

Captain Dabney's objective was the little-used gateway to the Bering that lies between Copper Island and the outlying Aleuts. They sailed upon a wild and desolate waste of leaden sea; a sea shrouded frequently with fog, and plentifully populated with those shipmen's horrors, foot-loose icebergs. And their fair sailing abruptly terminated.

It began in the s.p.a.ce of a watch. The gla.s.s tumbled, the wind hauled around to foul, and it began to blow viciously. For days they rode hove to.

That was but the beginning. For weeks, they obtained only an occasional favorable slant of wind, and these, as often as not, in the shape of short, sharp gales. They made the most of them; the blind man on the p.o.o.p coached cannily, and Ruth and the boatswain carried on to the limit.

Martin, once again, as in the days leaving San Francisco, saw the smother of canvas fill the decks with water. But such sailing was rare, and of short duration. Always, succeeding, came the heavy slap in the face from the fierce wind G.o.d of the North.

Martin labored mightily, in company with his fellows, it being a constant round of "reef, shake out, and come about." The days were sharp, and the nights bitter cold--though, as they won northward, and the season advanced, the days grew steadily longer.

Went glimmering, as the weeks pa.s.sed, the high hopes of a record pa.s.sage. Disappeared, also, the a.s.surance of recovering the treasure.

The shadow of Wild Bob Carew fell between them and their destination.

When one day the capricious wind drove them fairly past Copper Island, and they plunged into the foggy, ill-charted reaches of the Bering, their jubilation was tempered with a note of pessimism. They debated, in the _Coha.s.set's_ cabin, whether the adventurer of the _Dawn_ had been beforehand; and Captain Dabney discussed his plans for proceeding on to the Kamchatka coast for trading in case they discovered Fire Mountain to be despoiled.

The situation, it seemed to Martin, resolved itself to this: If Carew knew the lat.i.tude and longitude of the smoking mountain--and being familiar with the Bering Sea, all hands admitted that he might well know it--the ambergris was most certainly lost to them, unless, as was most unlikely, the _Dawn_ had had even worse luck with the weather than the _Coha.s.set_. But if Carew did not know Fire Mountain's location, they had a chance, though Carew was probably cruising adjacent waters, on the lookout for them--and if they encountered him, they might prepare to resist a piracy.

Martin, in truth, had a secret hope that they might encounter Carew's schooner. He had a healthy l.u.s.t for trouble and a scorn bred of ignorance for the j.a.panese crew of the _Dawn_. He harbored a grudge against the _Dawn's_ redoubtable skipper. Ruth was the kernel of that grudge.

And, oddly enough, he had a queer companion also wishing they might be compelled to battle the j.a.panese. It was none other than Charley Bo Yip, the cook.

Yip hated the j.a.panese with a furious hatred, if the garbled words that dropped from his smiling lips were to be believed. He hated them individually and nationally. And he sharpened, ostentatiously, a meat-cleaver, and proclaimed his intention of procuring a j.a.p's head as a trophy, should they have trouble.

"Me China boy, all same Melican," he told Martin, as he industriously turned the grindstone beneath the cleaver's edge. "Me like all same lepublic--me fight like devil all same time when China war. Now j.a.p he come take China. No good. Me kill um j.a.p. Velly good. All same chop um head, chop, chop!"

And Yip waved his cleaver over his head, and a seraphic smile lighted his bland, unwarlike face.

At last, on the sixty-eighth day of the pa.s.sage, Martin came on deck for the morning watch and found the vessel bouncing along under unaccustomed blue skies, and with a fair breeze. The boatswain went below, swiggling himself very stiff with the fervent hope that no bleeding Jonah would interrupt the course before the next eight bells, and Ruth took up an expectant watch with the gla.s.ses handy. Captain Dabney also kept the deck. Martin knew the landfall was expected.

At the middle of the watch, a squall sent Martin racing aloft to furl the royal. It was then that his sea-sharpened sight raised the land.

His hail to the deck aroused the ship. By the time he had finished his descent from aloft, all hands were at the rail, endeavoring each to pick up the distant speck.

Four bells had gone while he was aloft, and he strode aft to take his wheel. As he pa.s.sed along the p.o.o.p, he heard Ruth say--

"If the breeze holds, we'll be inside in a couple of hours."

Captain Dabney turned his old, sea-wise face to the wind. After a moment, he shook his head.

"I feel fog," he said.

CHAPTER XIII

FIRE MOUNTAIN

Within the hour, Captain Dabney's words bore fruit. The spanking ten-knot breeze dropped abruptly to a gentle four-knot power. Then in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the fog enveloped them.

Martin, at the wheel, was straining his eyes, trying to make out the land ahead that he had seen from aloft. Abruptly before his eyes rose a wall of opaque gray.

It was a typical Smoky Sea fog, a wet, dense, Bering blanket. From his station near the stern, Martin could not see the rail at the break of the p.o.o.p, could hardly, indeed, discern objects a dozen paces distant.

Familiar figures, entering his circle of vision, loomed gigantic and grotesque. The _Coha.s.set_ sailed over a ghostly sea, whose quiet was broken only by the harsh squawking of sea-birds flying high overhead.

Of recent weeks, Martin had become accustomed to fog. But there was about this fog a peculiarity foreign to his experience, though he had been informed during the cabin talks of the frequent occurrence of this particular brand of mist in these waters. For, though Martin, standing on deck, was surrounded by an impervious wall of fog that pressed upon him, though he could not see the water overside or forward for a quarter of the little vessel's length, yet he could bend back his head and see quite plainly the round ball of the sun glowing dully through the whitening mist overhead.

He understood the wherefor. The fog was a low-lying bank, and thirty feet or so above his head it ended. He could not, from the wheel, distinguish the upper hamper, but he knew the topmasts were free of the mist that shrouded the deck. Presently, from overhead, and ghostily piercing the gray veil, came Ruth's clear hail. She ordered him to shift the course a couple of points. So he knew his officer was aloft, up there in the sunshine, in a position that enabled her to direct their course.

In such a fashion, creeping through the fog, the _Coha.s.set_ came at last to Fire Mountain. The fog delayed, but did not daunt, the mariners of the happy family.

After the hurried noon meal, Ruth returned to her station aloft and resumed conning the vessel by remembered landmarks on the mountain's face. On deck, Martin, in company with his fellows, labored under the boatswain's lurid driving to prepare the ship for anchoring. They c.o.c.kbilled the great hooks, overhauled the cables, and coiled down running braces and halyards; for, said the captain, attending upon their bustle with his abnormally sharp ears:

"It's a wide breach in the reef that makes the cove, and the water is deep right up to the beach. The la.s.s should have no trouble conning us in, for she has a clean view aloft. But just have everything ready for quick work, bosun, in case we get into trouble."

Hence it was that Martin, a-tingle though he was with curiosity, found no opportunity to run aloft into the sunshine and view the place he had talked and dreamed so much about. Other men went aloft on ship's work, but Martin's duty kept him racing about the wet decks.

The fog pressed closer upon them as the day advanced, it seemed to Martin. It required an effort of his imagination to admit that a few feet above him the sun shone.

The ship seemed to be crawling blindly about in a limitless void. Anon would come Ruth's cheering and mellow halloo, cleaving sweetly through the drab enveloping blanket, and seeming to Martin's eager ears to be a good fairy's voice from another world.

The screaming of the sea-birds grew in volume--but not a wing did Martin spy. The air appeared to take on an irritating taint; the fog tasted smoky.

Added to other sounds, slowly grew a great surging rumble. Aided by Ruth's calls, Martin knew he heard the sea beating against the reef that encircled the mountain; but he saw nothing overside but that dead gray wall.

The upper canvas was clewed up and left hanging, and the brig's slow pace became perceptibly slower.