The Captain of the Kansas Part 21

"I would say more than that if it were not for these poisonous Indians," replied Tollemache. "Here they come now, a whole canoe load of 'em. I have never seen such rotters."

And, indeed, Francisco Suarez, detailed to keep watch and ward over the ship until noon, ran up the companion and cried excitedly:

"Four head men have just put off from Otter Creek. They have missed me, I expect. They will want me to go back. I beseech you, senor captain, not to give me up to them, but rather to send a bullet through my miserable heart."

"Tell him to calm himself," said Courtenay, coolly, when Christobal had translated this flow of guttural Spanish. "He has no cause to fear them now; let him nerve himself, and show a bold front. A palaver is the best thing that can happen. We must display all the arms we possess. Bid any of your invalids who can stand upright show themselves, Christobal. We must lift you outside, Boyle. Bring your camera, Miss Maxwell. If we could give these fellows a good picture of themselves it would scare them to death."

The captain of the _Kansas_ was not to be repressed that day. He refused to look at the dark side of things. He even found cause for congratulation in the threatened visit of cannibals whom Suarez feared so greatly that he preferred death to the chance of returning to them, although they had spared his life.

And Courtenay infected them all with his splendid optimism. It was with curiosity rather than dread that they watched the rapid approach of the canoe and its almost naked occupants.

CHAPTER XI

CONFIDENCES

Courtenay was mistaken in thinking that the savages sought a parley.

The canoe was paddled by two women; they changed its course with a dexterous twist of the blades when within a cable's length of the ship, and then circled slowly round her. The four men jabbered in astonishingly loud voices. Suarez, who gathered the purport of their talk, explained that they were discussing the best method of attack.

"The three younger men belong to the tribe which I lived with," he said. "The old man sitting between the women is a stranger. I think he must have come from the north of the island with some of his friends, attracted by the smoke signals."

"From the north? Is there a road?" asked Courtenay, when he learnt what Suarez was saying.

"He would arrive in a canoe," was the answer. "The Indians venture out to sea in very bad weather. He probably pa.s.sed the ship late last night, and, now I come to think of it, the canoe which you captured is not familiar to me, whereas I know by sight every craft owned by the Feathered People."

"How many do they possess?"

"Twenty-three."

These statements were disconcerting. Not only was it possible for the natives to surround the _Kansas_ with a whole swarm of men, but the mere number of their boats would render it exceedingly difficult to repel a combined a.s.sault. And nothing could be more truculent than the demeanor of the semi-nude warriors. They pointed at each person they saw on the decks, and made a tremendous row when they pa.s.sed the canoe fastened alongside. Despite their keen sight, they evidently did not recognize Suarez, who now wore a cap and a suit of clothes taken from the locker of one of the missing stewards, while his appearance was so altered otherwise that even the people on board found it difficult to regard him as the monstrous-looking wizard whom they had dragged out of the water some twelve hours earlier.

The impudence of the Indians exasperated Courtenay. The sheer size of the _Kansas_ should have awed them, he thought.

"I wish they had left their women behind," he muttered. "If the men were alone, an ounce or two of buck-shot would soon teach them to keep their distance."

"Perhaps they are aware of the danger of boarding a ship which stands so high above the sea as the _Kansas_," said Christobal. "Why not fire a couple of rounds of blank cartridge at them?"

"Worst thing you can do," said Tollemache.

"But why?"

"They would be sure, then, you could not hurt them. If you shoot, shoot straight, with the heaviest shot you possess."

At that moment the rowers permitted the canoe to swing round with the tide. One of the men stood up, and Elsie, who seized the chance of snap-shotting the party, ran to the upper deck, so she did not overhear Courtenay's smothered e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. He was scrutinizing the savages through his gla.s.ses, and he had distinctly seen the ship's name painted on a small water-cask on which the Indian had been sitting. Tollemache made the same dramatic discovery.

"Out of one of the ship's life-boats, I suppose?" he said in a low tone to the captain.

"Yes. Did you see the number?"

"Number 3, I think."

"I agree with you. That was the first life-boat which got away."

Christobal, startled out of his wonted sang-froid, whispered in his turn:

"Do you mean to say that one of the boats has fallen into the hands of these fiends?"

"I am afraid so," replied Courtenay. "Of course, that particular keg may have drifted ash.o.r.e. In any case, it tells the fate of one section of the mutineers. Either the boat is swamped, or the crew are now on the island, and we know what that signifies."

"Is there no chance of bribing these people into friendliness, or, at least, into a temporary truce?"

"It is hard to decide. Tollemache and Suarez are best able to form an opinion. What do you say, Tollemache?"

"Not a bit of use; they are insatiable. The more you give the more they want. The only way to deal with those rotters is to stir them up with a Gatling or a twelve-pounder."

Suarez, when appealed to, shook his head.

"Last winter," he said, "the man sitting aft, he with the single albatross feather sticking in his hair, seized his own son, aged six, and dashed his brains out on the rocks because the little fellow dropped a basket of sea-eggs he was carrying. The woman nearest to him is his wife, and she raised no protest. You might as well try to fondle a hungry puma. I am the only man they have ever spared, and they spared me solely because they thought I gave them power over their enemies. If you had a cannon, you might drive them off. As it is, we shall be compelled to fight for our lives; they are brave enough in their own way."

The experience of the miner from Argentina was not to be gainsaid. The predicament of the giant _Kansas_--inert, immovable, lying in that peaceful bay at the mercy of a horde of painted savages--was one of the strange facts almost beyond credence which men encounter at times in the byways of life. It reminded Courtenay of a visit he paid to the crocodile tank at Karachi when he was a midshipman on the _Boadicea_.

He noticed that some of the huge saurians, eighteen feet in length and covered with scale armor off which a bullet would glance, were squirming uneasily, and the Hindu attendant told him that they had been bitten by mosquitoes!

He laughed quietly, but his mirth had a curious ring in it which boded ill for certain unknown members of the Alaculof tribe when the threatened tussle came to close quarters. Elsie heard him. Leaning over the rails of the spar deck, she asked cheerfully:

"What is the joke, Captain Courtenay? And why don't the Indians come nearer? Are they timid? They don't look it."

He glanced up at her. If aught were needed to complete the contrast between civilization and savagery it was given by the comparison which the girl offered to the women in the canoe. The hot sun and the absence of wind had changed the temperature from winter to summer.

After breakfast, Elsie had donned a muslin dress, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. Exposure to the weather had bronzed her skin to a delightful tint. Her nut-brown hair framed a sweetly pretty face, and her clear blue eyes and red lips, slightly parted, smiled bewitchingly at the men beneath. The camera in her hands added a holiday aspect to her appearance, an aspect which was unutterably disquieting in its relation to the muttered forebodings she had broken in on.

But Courtenay's voice gave no hint of the tumult in his breast, though some malign spirit seemed to whisper the agonizing question: "Will you permit her to fall into the hands of the ghouls waiting without?"

"I find the get-up of our visitors distinctly humorous," he said, "and I hope they are a bit scared of us. We would prefer their room to their company."

"I thought that Senor Suarez would hail them, as he can speak their language. Perhaps he does not wish them to know he is on board?"

Now, Elsie had heard the man's impa.s.sioned appeal when the Indians were first sighted, so Courtenay felt that she, too, was acting.

"You look nice and cool up there," he answered, "and your words do not belie your looks."

"Please, what does that mean exactly?"

"Need I tell you? You treat our troubles airily."

"Shall one 'wear a rough garment to deceive'?" she quoted with a laugh.

"Don't you remember the next verse? You ought to retort: 'I am no prophet, I am an husbandman!' But that would not be quite right, for you are a sailor."

She blushed a little at the chance turn of the phrase. Neither the girl nor her hearers recalled the succeeding verses, wherein the destruction of Jerusalem is foretold: "And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried."