The Captain of the Kansas Part 29

His left arm was now so well established that his hand touched her cheek, and he found it wet with tears.

"What wild conceit has crept into your pretty little head?" he cried in amaze, unconsciously raising his voice somewhat. "A letter from my sister! She is the most straightforward woman breathing, I a.s.sure you.

Never a line has she written to me which could bear any construction such as seems to trouble you. Why, on the contrary, Madge has often chaffed me for being so like herself in giving no thought to matrimony."

"It is horrid of me to persist, but I owe it to you to tell you what I saw. She alluded to your 'affianced wife,' and said that 'under no other circ.u.mstances,' whatever they were, would she receive her."

Then Courtenay laughed again, and Elsie found it was absolutely essential, if Joey were not to be crushed, that her head should bend a little forward, with the obvious result that it rested on Courtenay's shoulder.

"I must show you the whole of that letter," he cried, "and the others which are tied up in the same bundle. You will see me blush, I admit, but it will not be from a sense of perfidy. But there is one thing you have forgotten, Elsie--" and his voice dropped to a tense whisper again--"In telling me your secret, which is no secret, you have given me my answer. Your heart must have crept out a little way to meet mine, dear, or my sister's words would not have perplexed you. So that is why you have avoided me during the past few days! But there! Now, indeed, I am not acting quite fairly. It is unfair to ask you to confess when I want you to wait until we win clear of our present difficulties before you decide whether or not you can find it to your liking to make a poor sailor-man happy."

Joey was a highly accommodating dog under certain conditions. He had curled up so complacently that Elsie found she could hold him quite easily with one arm. So the other went out in the darkness until it rested timidly on her lover's disengaged shoulder.

"It is easy to confess that which is already known," she murmured.

"Whether we are fated to live one day or fifty years, it will be all the same to me, dear."

She lifted her face again to his, and would have returned the kisses he gave her were it not that they lost their one-sided character this time. It was an odd place for love-making, this darkened nook on the deck of a disabled and beleaguered ship. But a man and a woman reck little of time or locality when the call of love's spring-time sounds in their ears. That magic summons can be heard but once, and it is well with the world, for those two at least, while its ecstasy floods the soul.

There was a chance that Joey might have been partly suffocated--though, to all appearance, he meant to die a willing martyr--had not Suarez leaned over the upper rail, and asked, in his grating accents, if he heard the senor captain's voice below.

Elsie, all tremulous and rosy, and profoundly thankful for the darkness, withdrew herself from Courtenay's embrace and answered the Argentine.

"Ah," said Suarez, "I am glad you are there too, senorita. Will you tell him that I am very hungry, and that I have not been relieved at the proper time. I have been waiting half an hour or more."

"There!" cried the captain, squeezing Elsie's arm, "that comes of using so many unnecessary explanations. I ought to have adopted the recognized Jack Tar method and just grabbed you round the waist without ceremony. I wonder where Boyle is. He and Christobal take the first watch, and it must be two bells, or later. I will hunt them up.

Good-by, sweetheart. Meet you at supper in ten minutes."

It was a strange and peculiar fact that Boyle had cornered Christobal in the saloon, and had insisted on telling him various remarkable anecdotes concerning the one-legged skipper of the _Flower of the Ocean_ brig. It was still more odd that when Christobal yielded to a fit of unwonted and melancholy silence after learning from Suarez that the senor captain had been talking to the senorita for a very long time on the promenade deck, Boyle should feel inclined to sing.

The chief officer's musical attainments were not of the highest, and his repertory was archaic. But there must be some explanation of his unwonted and melancholy chanting. He always spoke of Elsie with the utmost admiration, and it was no secret that he rendered Courtenay a sort of hero-worship hidden under the guise of an exaggerated belief in the good luck which followed the captain of the _Kansas_ in all his doings. And then, with a chilling inspiration, Christobal knew why the chief officer had caused him to miss the hour for relieving the watch.

Boyle had seen those two together, and had planned to leave them undisturbed!

The Spaniard was a dignified man; he had inherited from his English mother a saving sense of humor. It was intolerable that the pleasant relations existing between the few survivors on board the Kansas should be disturbed by reason of any failure on his part to acquiesce in Elsie's right to bestow her affections where she listed. He wondered if the girl had come on deck after supper; her habit was to retire early, as she rose soon after the sun. He had seen her for a moment only in pa.s.sing out of the saloon, and there was a suspicious brightness in her eyes for which solicitude on the dog's behalf would hardly account. Why not put his fortunes to the test that night and have done with it? Yes, that was the right course. He would cease this petty watchfulness, this campaign of planning and contriving lest others should monopolize more of her smiles and pleasant words than he.

A simple question would determine his fate. Either she was heart-whole, or not; at any rate, he would receive a straight answer.

So it was on the cards that Elsie would be the amazed recipient of two proposals in one evening, which is a better average than most women are favored with in a lifetime. Christobal had entered the chart-house with the fixed intent of warning Boyle that he was going below for a moment to ask Miss Maxwell to come on deck, when a hurried step on the bridge companion caused the imminent words to be withheld.

It was Courtenay, who had run up from the saloon to procure those fateful letters which had so nearly parted Elsie and himself. He had laughingly refused to tell her their history. That would spoil their effect, he said. She must take them to her state-room and read them at her leisure. Then she would see their true inwardness, and his feelings would be spared, as he could not deny that the majority of them had been written by ladies.

On his way, he looked into the wheel-house. There was no light in the interior. Boyle, wrapped in a heavy coat, was seated in the most sheltered corner.

"All quiet?" asked the captain, in his brisk way.

"Nothin' doin', sir," answered Boyle.

"I expect you are both feeling pretty tired. Tollemache and I propose to relieve you at six bells."

"But why?" demanded Christobal. "It is you who have pa.s.sed an exciting day. I am ready to mount guard until dawn. Tollemache can join me now if he likes, as Mr. Boyle ought to be in bed."

"I'm all right," said Boyle, gruffly. "I am only sitting here because my back is stiff."

Courtenay glanced at the somber shadow of Point _Kansas_, silhouetted against the deep blue of the seaward arc.

"Suarez has retired to roost," he said. "He seems to be quite a.s.sured that the Indians will never deliver a night attack."

"To-day's hammering should teach them to leave the _Kansas_ alone in future," said Christobal.

"I hope so, but Suarez and Tollemache agree that they are most persistent wretches. Now, Boyle, you must obey the doctor. I am going back to the saloon to give Miss Maxwell some doc.u.ments I wish her to see. Then, Tollemache and I will relieve the pair of you. All right, Christobal; I promise to take my share of the blankets in the morning.

I shall be ready for a nap at four o'clock. At present I feel particularly wide-awake."

He went to the cabin. They heard him unlock the door and enter. At that instant a startling hail came from two sailors stationed on the p.o.o.p.

"Indianos!" they yelled.

The three men were on the spar deck a second later, straining their eyes into the black vagueness of the water.

"Indianos!" shouted two other sailors on the forecastle, and from the spar deck it seemed to be possible to distinguish several black objects moving towards the ship.

"The siren, Boyle," cried Courtenay, striking a match. At once the swelling note of the fog-horn smote the air and thundered away in tremendous sound waves. Soon a hissing, fiery serpent ran up the port wall of the chart-house, and a fine star rocket soared into the sky.

It illuminated a wide area of the bay, and revealed a number of crowded canoes darting in on the ship from all sides. Courtenay grasped the lines connected with the remaining mines and hauled for dear life.

Already the Indian rifle fire was crackling with vivid spurts of flame, and stones and arrows were beginning to patter on the deck and bang against the steel plates. Two of the dynamite bombs exploded with the usual din, but it was impossible to ascertain their effect owing to the yelling of the Indians.

The loud summons of the siren brought all hands from below; arms were hastily secured, the fore and aft awnings closed, and Walker made shift to hammer the engine-room door tight. The increasing violence of the stone-slinging showed that the Alaculofs meant to press home this time.

Whatever their dread of the fiends who roam the world in the dark, they had conquered it, and this latest phase in the stormy history of the ship threatened to be its most trying one.

Courtenay, who seemed to be everywhere at once, lighted torches which were fastened to the empty davits in readiness for a night alarm. He had used the last rocket on board, but the flares would burn for fifteen minutes at least. By their light the defenders were able to shoot or smash the skulls of several savages who climbed up roughly contrived grapnells fashioned out of bent sticks and thongs of hide.

But there were only thirteen men to repel an attack which developed at fifty points simultaneously. Ere the torches flickered in their sockets the savages had swarmed over p.o.o.p and bows. They were tearing at the canvas shields and sweeping the hurricane deck with showers of missiles. Tollemache was injured, and Walker. Courtenay had his forehead cut open. Suarez fell insensible while he was bellowing curses through the megaphone in the vain hope of frightening the determined enemy. Two Chileans were down, one struck with a stone and the other shot through the lungs.

So, at last, the _Kansas_ was in the grip of a savage and implacable foe. Courtenay, while hauling a steam hose to the weakest point, the after part of the promenade deck, met Christobal. He clutched the Spaniard in a way there could be no mistaking.

"Go below!" he muttered in a terrible voice. "I cannot leave the deck.

You must go. And, for G.o.d's sake, don't tell her! Let her die without knowing!"

CHAPTER XV

IN WHICH THE UNEXPECTED HAPPENS

When Christobal descended to the saloon he found Elsie holding the excited dog. It was instantly perceptible that she was not aware of the grave position of affairs on deck. She knew, of course, that the Alaculof menace had become active again, but the first attack had been beaten off so easily that she was sure this later effort would fail.

The dog was better informed. His alert ears told him that there were strange beings on board. He struggled so resolutely that Elsie freed him just as the Spaniard reached the foot of the stairs. Forgetting his wounded paw, and all a-quiver with the fine courage of his race, Joey galloped up the companion and disappeared. Elsie was much distressed by her four-footed friend's useless pugnacity.

"I could not keep him back," she said, "and I am afraid he runs some risk of being hit. Do you think he will go to the chart-house? That is so exposed--Captain Courtenay is not there, is he?"

"No. I left him a moment ago, close to the saloon entrance."

She listened intently. Her imagination led her astray, it was so hopelessly on the wrong tack.