Harrigan Part 44

"You remember Samson's death, Beatrice? And how he pulled the house down on the shoulders of his enemies?"

"Yes."

"That was a wonderful way to die--wonderful! But I, Beatrice, look at me, child!--I have surpa.s.sed Samson! Listen! You will wonder and you will admire when you hear it! When I got the word that you were dead, I knew two things: first, that the prophecy of my death at sea would come true, and secondly that my gold must perish with me. You will never guess how long I pondered over a way to destroy my gold before I died!

You will think I could have simply thrown it into the sea? Yes, but the ship was filled with men ready to mutiny, and they were hungry for my wealth. They would never have allowed me to destroy that gold! So I thought of a way--ah, it was an inspiration!--by which I could destroy my body, my wealth, and the lives of all the mutineers at once. Like Samson, I would pull the house on the heads of my enemies. Ha, ha, ha!"

His laughter was rather a grimace than a sound.

He went on: "See how cunningly, how carefully I worked! First I blew up the three lifeboats so that there would be no escape for the crew. Then I tampered with the dynamo so that it burned out, and they could not send out a wireless call for help. That touch was the best of all.

Well, well! Then I went down into the hold, deep down, and I started a fire in the cargo. And then--"

"Oh, my G.o.d!" stammered Sloan.

The others were white, but they gestured at Sloan to silence him. The whisper continued: "And then I knew that they were done for. The wheat would not break into a sudden flame, but it would smolder and glow and spread from hour to hour and from day to day. The crew would know nothing of it for a long time. But when they guessed at what was happening, they would open the hatches to fight the fire with water.

Then what would happen? Ah, my dear, there was the crowning touch; for when they opened the hatches, the current of air would feed the fire and the ship would be instantly in flames. And so they would burn like dogs with water, water all around them, and no boats to put off in--no boats. Ha, ha, ha!"

He choked with his laughter and gasped for breath.

"If it were possible for a bodiless spirit to perish, I should think that I am dying twice, Beatrice. The air is thick--this air of h.e.l.l!"

He broke off short in his whispering and raised himself suddenly to an elbow. With the coming of death his voice grew strong and rang clearly: "They are in the corners--they are coming closer! Beatrice! Brush them away with your fingers as cold as snow. Beatrice, oh, my dear!"

And he was dead as he fell back on the bunk.

Sloan was already on the deck outside the wireless house, shrieking with all the power of his lungs: "Fire! Fire! The wheat in the hold!"

CHAPTER 37

And as Harrigan and McTee, followed by Kate and Campbell, ran out to the open air, they saw the crowd of the mutineers surge across the waist toward Sloan with upturned faces, wondering, and ready for terror. Hovey broke through their midst.

"Hovey!" shouted McTee. "Look at the mist over the sides! Draw a breath; smell of it! It is fire! Henshaw has set fire in the hold!"

It was plain to every brain in the instant. To every man came the thought of the complaints of the firemen concerning the heat in the hold of the _Heron_; the noxious odor like musty straw; the warmth, the deadly warmth of the decks. A volcano smoldered beneath them, and the mist was the sign of the coming outbreak of flames. And the mutineers stood mute, gaping at one another, looking for some hope, some comfort, and finding the same question repeated in every eye. McTee climbed down the ladder to the waist, followed by the rest of the fugitives. Ten minutes before they would have been torn to pieces by the wolf pack.

Now no man had a thought for anything save his own death.

"Hovey," ordered McTee in his voice of thunder, "tell these fellows they must obey my voice from now on."

They roared, s.n.a.t.c.hing at this ghost of a hope: "We will! We'll follow Black McTee! Hovey has brought us to h.e.l.l!"

In a moment everyone was in frantic motion. Campbell started for the engine room to see what had caused the stopping of the ship. McTee himself, followed by Harrigan and the stokers, went down to the fireroom. It was fiery hot there, indeed. When the Scotchman swung down the ladder into the hole, it was like a blast from a furnace, and the air was foul with the nauseating odor of the smoldering wheat. The men gasped and struggled for breath, and yet they began to work without complaint.

All hands set to. The fires were shaken down and started afresh; the coal shoveled out from the bunkers. Then a fireman collapsed without a cry of warning. They carried him out to the upper air, and brought down two of the sailors to take his place. And the sailors went without a murmur. They were fighting for the one chance in ten thousand, the chance of bringing the ship to sh.o.r.e before the fire burst out in flame which would lick the _Heron_ from one end to the other within an hour.

McTee went up to the bridge to take the bearings and lay the course. By the time his reckonings were completed, steam was up; Campbell had remedied the trouble in the engine room; the propeller began to turn, and a yell went up from the ship and tingled to heaven. When McTee came down from the bridge to the waist, leaving Hovey at the wheel, a dozen of the tars gathered about the new skipper, weeping and shouting, for in their eyes he was the deliverer, it was he who was giving them the fighting chance to live.

And how they fought! There was something awe-inspiring and almost beyond the human in the fury with which they labored. It was in the fireroom that their chief difficulty lay. The fireroom of a large steamer is a veritable furnace, and when to this heat was added that from the hold of the ship, it was truly a miracle that any living thing could exist there.

But Harrigan was in charge. When men wilted and pitched to their faces on the sooty, dusty floor, he trussed them under one arm and bore them up to the air. Then he went back and drove them on again. Before the end of that day, however, with the coast still a full thirty-hour run ahead of them, it became literally impossible to continue longer in the fireroom. But Harrigan would not leave. He had a hose introduced into the hold. The men worked absolutely naked with a stream of water playing on them. Now and again when one of them collapsed, Harrigan s.n.a.t.c.hed the fire bar or the shovel from the hands of the worker and labored furiously until another subst.i.tute was found.

The necessity of his presence was amply demonstrated that night. The Irishman was too exhausted to continue another minute, and the men helped him to the deck and sluiced buckets of salt water over his great, trembling body. To keep the men at work, Campbell went down in the hole.

They had to carry him up in half an hour. Then McTee tried his hand. He stood the heat as well as Harrigan, but he could not inspire such daredevil enthusiasm in the men. They missed the raucous, cheery voice of Harrigan; they missed the inspiring sight of that flame-red hair; and they missed above all his peculiar driving force. In other words, when Harrigan came among them, they felt _hope_, and when a man has hope, he will work on in the face of death.

And at last McTee came up and begged Harrigan to go back. He went, and found an empty fireroom and dying fires. He ran back to the deck, and at his shout the dead veritably rose to life. Men staggered to their feet to follow him below. Every man on the ship took his turn. Hovey came down and pa.s.sed coal; McTee came down and wielded the fire bar, doing the labor of three men while he could endure.

And the _Heron_ drove on toward the sh.o.r.e. The morning pa.s.sed; the afternoon wore away. It was a matter of hours now before the sh.o.r.e would be in sight, and McTee spread this news among the crew. He sent little Kamasura and Shida, the cabin boys, running here and there saying to every man they pa.s.sed: "Four hours! Four hours! Four hours!"

And then: "Three hours! Three hours! Three hours!"

And the crew swallowed whisky neat and returned to the fireroom.

At sunset, dim as a shadow, a thing to be guessed at rather than known, the man on the bridge sighted land. The word spread like lightning. The staggering workers in the fireroom heard and joined the cheer which Harrigan started. Then the catastrophe came.

A torch of red fire licked up the stern of the ship; the flames had eaten their way out to the open air!

It was the quick action of McTee which kept the panic from spreading to the hold of the ship at once and bringing up every one of the workers from the fireroom. He gathered the sailors on deck who had strength enough left to walk, and they made a line and attacked the flames with buckets of water. There was, of course, no possibility of quelling the fire at its source, for by this time the hold of the ship where the wheat was stowed must have been one glowing ma.s.s of smoldering matter.

Yet they were able, for a time, to keep the course of the fire from spreading over the decks of the ship.

With this work fairly started, McTee ran back to the forward cabin and upper deck of the _Heron_ and set several men to tear down some of the framework, sufficient at least to build enough rafts to maintain the crew in the water. So the three sections of the work went on--the firefighting, the lifesaving, and the driving of the ship. McTee on deck managed two ends of it; Harrigan in the fireroom handled the most desperate responsibility. It seemed as if these two men by their naked will power were lifting the lives of the crew away from the touch of death and hurling the ship toward the sh.o.r.e.

And now for an hour, for two hours, that ghastly labor continued. The entire stern of the _Heron_ was a sheet of flames when the last workers staggered up from the fireroom, their skin seared and blistered by the terrific heat. Last of all came Harrigan, raving and cursing and imploring the men to return to their work. As he staggered up the deck, reeling and sobbing hoa.r.s.ely, Kate Malone ran to him. She pointed out across the waters ahead of the ship. There rose the black shadow of the sh.o.r.e and under it a thin line of white--the breakers!

Now by McTee's direction the rafts were hoisted and dragged over the side of the ship, while one frail line of men remained to struggle against the encroaching flames.

They were licking into the waist of the _Heron_, and the wireless house was a ma.s.s of red; White Henshaw was burning at sea, and the prophecy was fulfilled.

The last of the rafts were hoisted overboard and half a dozen men tumbled into each. When the rest of the crew were overboard, McTee, Kate, and Harrigan, lingering behind by mutual consent, took one raft to themselves. All about them tossed the other rafts, and not one man of all the crowd had thought of the golden treasure which they were abandoning with the _Heron_. Each might be carrying a few gold pieces, but the wealth of White Henshaw would go back into the sea from which it came.

They had not abandoned the flaming ship too soon. A fresh breeze was sweeping from the ocean onto the sh.o.r.e, and red tongues licked about the main cabin and darted like reaching hands into the heart of the sky. By these flashes they could make out the struggling rafts where the sailors cheered and yelled in the triumph of their escape. But McTee set about erecting a jury sail.

He wrenched off two strips of board from their raft and across these he and Harrigan affixed their shirts. The same wind which had lashed the fires forward on the _Heron_ now hurried the fugitives toward the sh.o.r.e. They had a serious purpose in outstripping the rest of the rafts, because when the mutineers reached the sh.o.r.e, the mood of grat.i.tude which they held for Harrigan and McTee was sure to change, for these two men could submit enough evidence to hang them in any country in the world.

Looking back, the _Heron_ was a belching volcano, which suddenly lifted in the center with the sound of a dozen siege guns in volleyed unison, and a column of fire vaulted high into the heavens. Before they reached the tossing heart of the breakers, the _Heron_ was dwindling and sliding, fragment by fragment into the sea.

Through those breakers the last light from the ship helped them, and the wind tugging at their little jury sail aided to drive them on until they could swing off the raft and walk toward the beach, carrying Kate between them. On the safe, dry sands they turned, and as they looked back, the Heron slid forward into the ocean and quenched her fires with a hiss that was like a far-heard whisper of the sea.

CHAPTER 38

Meanwhile the shouts of the mutineers rang louder and louder as their rafts edged in toward the land, so the three turned again and made directly inland. A hundred yards from the edge of the water they were in a dense jungle such as only exists in a Central American swamp region, but they waded and splashed on, and clambered over rotten stumps, slick with wet moss, and stepped on fragments of wood that crumbled under their feet. And all the time they kept the girl between them, lifting her clear of the noisome water as much as possible.

The shouting of the mutineers, however, urged them on, and from the sound of the voices there was no doubt that Hovey and his men were combing the marsh for the fugitives. Torches had been made by the sailors, and behind them, now and then, they caught a glimpse of a winking eye of light. This drove them on, and just when the shouts of the mutineers began to die away, the marsh ended as abruptly as it had begun, and they started to climb a slope where the thicket changed to an almost open wood. The rise was not long, for after some hours of weary trudging, they reached a road.