Fire Mountain Part 6

Martin shrugged his shoulders. There seemed to be many preliminaries to an audience with this Captain Carew. Through the door the j.a.p held open he saw the outlines of a bed, and a rag of carpet. When he stepped through the door, the musty, sour air of the room smote his nostrils like a blow.

The j.a.panese closed the door, and the retreating echo of his footsteps sounded from the hall. Martin had not expected to be thus shut in darkness, but after all it was a small matter. He felt his way to the bed and sat down on its edge.

After a moment he struck a match. The flare revealed, as he expected, the meanly appointed bedroom of a tenth rate hostelry. The single window was shuttered.

He composed himself to patience. This business was getting on his nerves. This visit to the Black Cruiser was not proving the evening's anti-climax, as he had feared, but he was not enjoying himself. The loose face of the Cruiser's commander, the mysterious j.a.panese, the disturbing secrecy, the foul air--he would be glad when his errand was completed, and he was once again outdoors in the clean, fresh air.

There was an alien taint in that poisonous room. With the j.a.panese in mind he placed it--it was that indefinable odor the man of the Orient leaves about his abiding place, the smell one gets during a walk through Chinatown. Was this Spulvedo conducting this rookery as a j.a.panese lodging-house?

A strange place for a sea-captain to lodge. This Carew--this "Wild Bob" Carew, as the boatswain had termed him--must be a man very indifferent to his surroundings, or else mightily anxious to remain under cover. The captains Martin had met were particular men; one would not find them in such a noisome hole. This Carew must be some rough renegade. Perhaps he was not even white; perhaps he was a half-caste. That would explain his choice of lodgings. One would think from all the secret mummery with which he surrounded himself that he was the Mikado, himself. He certainly was not very popular with the boatswain.

Thus far had Martin got with his musings, when his attention was attracted by noises that suddenly disturbed the unearthly quiet of the house. They reached him quite plainly through the thin walls.

A door slammed, below stairs. He heard sounds of a scuffle. The sounds drew nearer--grunts, exclamations, footsteps. They were coming up the stairs. In the hall outside a door was noisily opened. Some one ran past his door, and sentences were, spoken in a harsh, clicking, alien tongue.

Martin sat tensely on the edge of the bed. What was about, there in the hall? The scuffling had reached the head of the stairs; now it was opposite his door. Several pairs of feet were making that noise.

Martin heard a voice exclaim chokingly, and in English----

"Let go--let go of me!"

It was a strange voice, a rich and thrilling voice, and it carried an appeal. A man's voice?

Martin felt his way to the door. This affair without was none of his business, but he must see what was being done to the owner of that voice. He must confirm or dispel that vague suspicion.

He turned the k.n.o.b and pulled, and the door came a few inches. There was an exclamation from some one who stood in front of the door. An arm shot through the opening, a clenched hand impacted against the pit of his stomach, and Martin went reeling backward. The door slammed shut and the lock clicked.

Martin fetched up against the bed and sat down heavily, experiencing that sharp agony that follows upon a plexus punch. In that brief instant he had held the door ajar, however, he had witnessed a sight that caused him to ignore the pain. He had seen what was transpiring in the hall. He had seen the group of little yellow men cl.u.s.tered about and urging along a single figure that slightly overtopped them; a figure clad in a gray overcoat.

At the very second Martin had looked, a gray cap had fallen from the head in the scuffle, and a wonderful ma.s.s of dark hair had tumbled down about the gray-clad shoulders. An excited, protesting face had turned toward him. It was a woman those chunky aliens were urging along the hallway, a woman clad in a man's gray overcoat. A white woman--a young and beautiful woman!

Martin crouched on the bed's edge and panted to recover his breath.

The scuffling without grew faint, a door slammed, and the house was again quiet.

Martin's mind was awhirl, but uppermost in the confusing chaos was that startling picture, photographic in its clearness, of the squat outlanders surrounding the protesting figure. A woman--a white woman--in the hands of these yellow men!

Surely he had seen aright. It was an ill light in the hall, but he had looked from a dense darkness, and had seen clearly. And had he not heard her voice? And seen the feminine tresses tumble about the gray-clad shoulders as the cap came off? There was some faint stirring of memory in connection with the thought of that gray, mannish apparel, but Martin was too excited to notice it. He was possessed by the event. He had caught a glimpse of the angry, vivid face. Angry, that was it--not fear, but anger, in her bearing. They had not wanted him to observe the incident, the outrage. They had offered him violence.

They had slammed and locked the door. He was prisoner.

By this time, Martin, a thoroughly aroused young man, was again at the door. He, Martin Blake, would not submit to maltreatment and imprisonment! He would find out what this yellow crew was doing with that girl.

In the back of his excited mind danced grim shadows of the tales every San Franciscan knows; stories of white slaves, of white women being seen entering Oriental dens, and being lost forever to the world that knew them; of horrible relics of womanhood being discovered years after in some underground cave of Chinatown. Sickening thoughts!

Martin yanked at the door and pounded upon the panel. His blows echoed without, but brought no other response. He lifted his foot and drove his boot against the door. It shivered and splintered.

Before he could kick a second time, there came a cry from the hall, a hurried footfall, and the door was unlocked. Martin jerked it open.

Confronting him was the j.a.panese who had been his guide, who had gone to "make prepare" Captain Carew.

"You come now," announced the little man, bowing courteously.

"What does all this mean?" demanded Martin angrily. "Who struck me through the door? How dare you lock me in? Who----"

"He Captain speak you come," said the other, smiling blandly. He shed Martin's rain of words as if he were some yellow oilskin. "I make him way--hon'ble fellow my show."

"What is going on in this house?" demanded Martin. "Who was that white woman? What was that gang doing with her?"

The other backed away before Martin's excited questioning. "No understand," he said. "No woman--no gang. No savvy."

"No savvy--big lie!" cried Martin, and he pounced down upon the gray cap which was lying on the hallway floor. He held it up for the other's inspection. "You savvy this?" he demanded.

The j.a.p shook his head. His smile was gone, and there was a hostile gleam in his eyes.

"That--no understand," he said crisply. "You come for he Captain--you catch business he Captain!"

Martin saw he could get nothing from this fellow. He was being told very plainly to mind his own business. Very well, this Captain Carew was perhaps a white man.

Without further words, Martin followed the j.a.panese. They went the length of the hall and paused before the last door, the one before which the light burned. The guide rapped. A deep voice rumbled orders within, chairs sc.r.a.ped, a door slammed, and the door before which they stood was opened.

CHAPTER V

WILD BOB CAREW

Martin lurched forward past the man who opened the door into a room that was brightly lighted by gas and kerosene lamps. It was a room bare of furniture save for a common kitchen table, littered with charts and papers, and several kitchen chairs.

It was a large room, much larger than the one he had just quitted, the full width of the house, and, it seemed, part of a suite, for two doors, besides the one he entered through, let upon it, from the rear wall. But these details only impressed themselves upon Martin's mind later, and gradually. At the instant of his tempestuous entrance, he was entirely engrossed with his obsession, and he had eyes only for the dominant figure that stood behind the paper-littered table in the center of the room. To this man Martin addressed himself without preliminary.

"That woman--didn't you hear?" he cried. "These j.a.ps have a woman prisoner in this house--a white woman! See! This is her cap. I saw----"

"Are you the messenger who was to come to me tonight?" interrupted the man addressed. He spoke in a commanding and vibrant ba.s.s voice.

It was suddenly borne in upon Martin's consciousness that he was in the presence of a personality. They were immobile yellow gargoyles, those two j.a.ps who stood against the farther wall, they did not count. But this man who stood across the table from him--the air of the room was electric with his presence. A commanding and forceful personality, but a hostile personality, there was a chill in that interruption. But the momentum of his feelings carried Martin on.

"In the hall--shoving her along--she was struggling! A white girl!

Those yellow----"

"What is your business with me?" The heavy voice beat down Martin's words. It was as if he had not spoken. "I am Captain Carew. You have a message for me?"

Martin checked his splutter of words. The other's sentences were like a dash of cold water; they cleared his mind. There was menace in that heavy voice, in the other's att.i.tude, in the frosty gleam of his eyes.

That veiled threat sobered Martin. He stood still and played his eyes upon the other in appraisal.

And he was a picture to fill the eye, this man who bore himself so disdainfully, this Captain Wild Bob Carew. Went glimmering the graceless, blasphemous sea-renegade of Martin's fancy. Martin caught his breath with unforced admiration as he measured the other's form and face.

Captain Carew was big and blond, as Smatt had predicted. He was also quite the handsomest man Martin had ever seen. He stood at least six feet, and was leanly and finely built. He was, perhaps, thirty-five years old, but the springiness of youth was still in his carriage.

Martin gained from him the impression of great physical strength. The face was finely chiseled, virile, aristocratic, a face to compel men's admiration, to turn women's heads. But Martin divined the flaw in that fine mask. The full, curved lips were shaded by a short, blond mustache, but that hirsute covering did not conceal the cruel quirk at the lips' corners. The face was ruddy, even in that light, and unlined. The eyes, probably blue in daylight, were black and glittering; and they bore Martin's scrutiny without a flicker. But after a moment the cruel lips curled scornfully.

"Well, my good fellow, have you quite finished with your inspection?"