O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 8

"Water, Hogjaw!" roared the master. "She's gainin' on us--she's under the bilge floor now!" He hurled a bucket viciously at his helper. And as they pretended to fight the fire, Crump suddenly began laughing and stood up. The deckman was grinning also. The master watched him narrowly.

"Kick the stuff into the waste under the stairs," he grunted. "Hogjaw, this here boat's goin'--yeh understand? We take the skiff and pull to the shrimp camps, and she hogs down and burns--"

The black man was laughing. Then he stopped curiously. "The cows--"

"d.a.m.n the cows! I'll git my money back on 'em! Yeh go lower away on the skiff davits. Yeh don't ask me nothin'--yeh don't know nothin'!"

"Sho', boss! I don't know nothin', or see nothin'!"

He swung out of the smoke already drifting greasily up from the foul waist of the _Marie Louise_. A little glare of red was beginning to reflect from the mirrored sea. The ripples of the beaching had vanished; obscurely, undramatically as she had lived, the _Marie Louise_ sat on the bar to choke in her own fetid fumes.

Tedge clambered to the upper deck and hurried to his bunk in the wheelhouse. There were papers there he must save--the master's license, the insurance policy, and a few other things. The smell of burning wood and grease was thickening; and suddenly now, through it, he saw the quiet, questioning face of the stranger.

He had forgotten him completely. Tedge's small brain had room but for one idea at a time: first his rage at the lilies, and then the wrecking of the _Marie_. And this man knew. He had been staring down the after-companionway. He had seen and heard. He had seen the master and crew laughing while the fire mounted.

Tedge came to him. "We're quittin' ship," he growled.

"Yes, but the cattle--" The other looked stupefiedly at him.

"We got to pull inside afore the sea comes up--"

"Well, break the pens, can't you? Give 'em a chance to swim for a bar.

I'm a cowman myself--I cain't let dumb brutes burn and not lift a hand--"

The fire in the waist was beginning to roar. A plume of smoke streamed straight up in the starlight. The glare showed the younger man's startled eyes. He shifted them to look over the foredeck rail down to the cattle. Sparks were falling among them, the fire veered slightly forward; and the survivors were crowding uneasily over the fallen ones, catching that curious sense of danger which forewarns creatures of the wild before the Northers, a burning forest, or creeping flood, to move on.

"You cain't leave 'em so," muttered the stranger. "No; I seen you--"

He did not finish. Tedge had been setting himself for what he knew he should do. The smaller man had his jaw turned as he stared at the suffering brutes. And Tedge's mighty fist struck him full on the temple. The master leaned over the low rail to watch quietly.

The man who wished to save the cattle was there among them. A little flurry of sparks drove over the spot he fell upon, and then a maddened surge of gaunt steers. Tedge wondered if he should go finish the job.

No; there was little use. He had crashed his fist into the face of a shrimp-seine hauler once, and the fellow's neck had shifted on his spine--and once he had maced a woman up-river in a shantyboat drinking bout--Tedge had got away both times. Now and then, boasting about the shrimp camps, he hinted mysteriously at his two killings, and showed his freckled, hairy right hand.

"If they find anything of him--he got hurt in the wreck," the master grinned. He couldn't see the body, for a black longhorn had fallen upon his victim, it appeared. Anyhow, the cattle were milling desperately around in the pen; the stranger who said his name was Milt Rogers would be a lacerated lump of flesh in that mad stampede long ere the fire reached him. Tedge got his tin doc.u.ment box and went aft.

Crump and Hogjaw were already in the flat-bottomed bayou skiff, holding it off the _Marie Louise's_ port runway, and the master stepped into it. The heat was singeing their faces by now.

"Pull off," grunted the skipper, "around east'ard. This bar sticks clean out o' water off there, and you lay around it, Hogjaw. They won't be no sea 'til the breeze lifts at sunup."

The big black heaved on the short oars. The skiff was a hundred yards out on the gla.s.sy sea when Crump spoke cunningly, "I knowed something----"

"Yeh?" Tedge turned from his bow seat to look past the oarsman's head at the engineman. "Yeh knowed----"

"This Rogers, he was tryin' to get off the burnin' wreck and he fell, somehow or----"

"The oil tank blew, and a piece o' pipe took him," grunted Tedge. "I tried to drag him out o' the fire--Gawd knows I did, didn't I, Crump?"

Crump nodded scaredly. The black oarsman's eyes narrowed and he crouched dumbly as he rowed. Tedge was behind him--Tedge of the _Marie Louise_ who could kill with his fists. No, Hogjaw knew nothing--he never would know anything.

"I jest took him on out o' kindness," mumbled Tedge. "I got no license fer pa.s.senger business. Jest a b.u.m I took on to go and see his swamp girl up Des Amoureaux. Well, it ain't no use sayin' anything, is it now?"

A mile away the wreck of the _Marie Louise_ appeared as a yellow-red rent in the curtain of night. Red, too, was the flat, calm sea, save northerly where a sand ridge gleamed. Tedge turned to search for its outlying point. There was a pa.s.s here beyond which the reefs began once more and stretched on, a barrier to the shoal inside waters. When the skiff had drawn about the sand spit, the reflecting waters around the _Marie_ had vanished, and the fire appeared as a fallen meteor burning on the flat, black belt of encircling reef.

Tedge's murderous little eyes watched easterly. They must find the other side of the tidal pa.s.s and go up it to strike off for the distant shrimp camps with their story of the end of the _Marie Louise_--boat and cargo a total loss on Au Fer sands.

Upon the utter sea silence there came a sound--a faint bawling of dying cattle, of trampled, choked cattle in the fume and flames. It was very far off now; and to-morrow's tide and wind would find nothing but a blackened timber, a swollen, floating carca.s.s or two--nothing more.

But the black man could see the funeral pyre; the distant glare of it was showing the whites of his eyes faintly to the master, when suddenly he stopped rowing. A drag, the soft sibilance of a moving thing, was on his oar blade. He jerked it free, staring.

"Lilies, boss--makin' out dis pa.s.s, too, lilies--"

"I see 'em--drop below 'em!" Tedge felt the glow of an unappeasable anger mount to his temples. "d.a.m.n 'em--I see 'em!"

There they were, upright, tranquil, immense hyacinths--their spear-points three feet above the water, their feathery streamers drifting six feet below; the broad, waxy leaves floating above their bulbous surface mats--they came on silently under the stars; they vanished under the stars seaward to their death.

"Yeh!" roared Tedge. "Sun and sea to-morry--they'll be back on Au Fer like dried bones o' dead men in the sand! Bear east'ard off of 'em!"

The oarsman struggled in the deeper pa.s.s water. The skiff bow suddenly plunged into a wall of green-and-purple bloom. The points brushed Tedge's cheek. He cursed and smote them, tore them from the low bow and flung them. But the engineman stood up and peered into the starlight.

"Yeh'll not make it. Better keep up the port sh.o.r.e. I cain't see nothin' but lilies east'ard--worlds o'flowers comin' with the _creva.s.se_ water behind 'em." He dipped a finger to the water, tasted of it, and grumbled on: "It ain't hardly salt, the big rivers are pourin' such a flood out o' the swamps. Worlds o' flowers comin' out the pa.s.ses--"

"d.a.m.n the flowers!" Tedge arose, shaking his fist at them. "Back out o' 'em! Pull up the Au Fer side, and we'll break through 'em in the bay!"

Against the ebb tide close along Au Fer reef, the oarsman toiled until Crump, the lookout, grumbled again.

"The shoal's blocked wi' 'em! They're stranded on the ebb. Tedge, yeh'll have to wait for more water to pa.s.s this bar inside 'em. Yeh try to cross the pa.s.s, and the lilies 'll have us all to sea in this crazy skiff when the wind lifts wi' the sun."

"I'm clean wore out," the black man muttered. "Yeh can wait fer day and tide on the sand, boss."

"Well, drive her in, then!" raged the skipper. "The in-tide'll set before daylight. We'll take it up the bay."

He rolled over the bow, knee-deep in the warm inlet water, and dragged the skiff through the shoals. Crump jammed an oar in the sand; and warping the headline to this, the three trudged on to the white dry ridge. Tedge flung himself by the first stubby gra.s.s clump.

"Clean beat," he muttered. "By day we'll pa.s.s 'em. d.a.m.n 'em--and I'll see 'em dyin' in the sun--lilies like dried, dead weeds on the sand--that's what they'll be in a couple o' days--he said they was pretty, that fello' back there--" Lying with his head on his arm, he lifted a thumb to point over his shoulder. He couldn't see the distant blotch of fire against the low stars--he didn't want to. He couldn't mark the silent drift of the sea gardens in the pa.s.s, but he gloated in the thought that they were riding to their death. The pitiless sun, the salt tides drunk up to their spongy bulbs, and their glory pa.s.sed--they would be matted refuse on the sh.o.r.es and a man could trample them. Yes, the sea was with Tedge, and the rivers, too; the flood waters were lifting the lilies from their immemorable strongholds and forcing them out to their last pageant of death.

The three castaways slept in the warm sand. It was an hour later that some other living thing stirred at the far end of Au Fer reef. A scorched and weakened steer came on through salt pools to stagger and fall. Presently another, and then a slow line of them. They crossed the higher ridge to huddle about a sink that might have made them remember the dry drinking holes of their arid home plains. Tired, gaunt cattle mooing lonesomely, when the man came about them to dig with his b.l.o.o.d.y fingers in the sand.

He tried another place, and another--he didn't know--he was a man of the short-gra.s.s country, not a coaster; perhaps a sandy sink might mean fresh water. But after each effort the damp feeling on his hands was from his gashed and battered head and not life-giving water. He wiped the blood from his eyes and stood up in the starlight.

"Twenty-one of 'em--alive--and me," he muttered. "I got 'em off--they trampled me and beat me down, but I got their pens open. Twenty-one livin'--and me on the sands!"

He wondered stupidly how he had done it. The stern of the _Marie Louise_ had burned off and sogged down in deep water, but her bow hung to the reef, and in smoke and flame he had fought the cattle over it.

They cl.u.s.tered now in the false water-hole, silent, listless, as if they knew the uselessness of the urge of life on Au Fer reef.

And after a while the man went on eastward. Where and how far the sand ridge stretched he did not know. Vaguely he knew of the tides and sun to-morrow. From the highest point he looked back. The wreck was a dull red glow, the stars above it cleared now of smoke. The sea, too, seemed to have gone back to its infinite peace, as if it had washed itself daintily after this greasy morsel it must hide in its depths.

A half hour the man walked wearily, and then before him stretched water again. He turned up past the tide flowing down the pa.s.s--perhaps that was all of Au Fer. A narrow spit of white sand at high tide, and even over that, the sea breeze freshening, the surf would curl?