The Dust of Conflict Part 10

"Hold on!" he said quietly as the bows went up.

Then she struck, with a crash that sent two men reeling across her deck, and the sea that rolled up behind her surged frothing on board. It went forward waist deep; the "Ventura" lifted, and came down again, with everything in her rattling and her crew holding fast for their lives.

Then she twisted round, so that the next comber foamed across her and ground her on the reef, hove herself up, sc.r.a.ped forward, grinding and groaning, a few more fathoms, and stopped again; while a negro and a Cuban shaken from their hold rolled down the slanting deck clutching at each other until they fell into the water pent up by the lower rail. The din was bewildering, for every block and spar banged and rattled amidst the dull roar of the seas, but it was rent by the crash of a gun.

Grasping the rail with both hands, Appleby saw the gunboat rolling black athwart the moonlight, while a smear of vapor broadened about her; but there was another sound beneath him as he gazed, and while the splinters flew in showers a great rent opened in the deck. n.o.body said anything, or could have been heard if he had, and Appleby clung tighter still when once more a sea crested with spouting white came along. It lifted the "Ventura" up, and then there was a curious quietness as it dropped her clear of the reef. Through the sudden silence Harper's voice rose evenly and almost expressionless.

"I guess there's some of the rudder left, though it's jammed. Give me a hand," he said.

Appleby sprang to help him, and between them they dragged the helm over.

The "Ventura" lurched on more smoothly with a gurgling sound inside her, for the reef broke the sea; but ten minutes later she struck again, and remained this time immovable. n.o.body waited for orders, and in swift silence the boat was got over, while a fire commenced to twinkle on the beach. Wooden cases were pa.s.sed up from the hold, and-for the water was smoother there-the boat got away. Four men went in her, and the rest dropped into the hold, where they tore out boxes and cases and pa.s.sed them from man to man. While they worked the gun boomed again, but the gasping men toiled the more fiercely, and Appleby did his part with them. He was dripping with perspiration and spray, his hands were bleeding, and his duck jacket rent up the back, but, gasping and panting, he labored on with a fierce pleasure that seemed wholly illogical.

Once he lifted his head above the hatch, as he tore the jacket which impeded him off his shoulders, and saw that the gunboat had stopped. She was not firing now, and his comrades had, he fancied, sent three loads ash.o.r.e by that time; but he had scarcely glanced at her when Harper saw him. "Hustle!" he said. "The boats are coming."

How long they toiled in the hold Appleby could never remember, but though it appeared no more than a few minutes to him the moon had moved across a broad strip of sky when he crawled on deck again. The boat lay beneath him, half full of cases, and the men were dropping into her. Two other boats showed for a moment to windward, and then sank from sight again.

"Hold on!" said Harper, pointing to the cases still on deck. "Into the sea with them!"

Appleby and another man threw them over, though there were impatient cries from the boat below, and the rest were shoving off when they dropped into her. Somebody was baling furiously, two men tugged and thrust, Spanish fashion, at every oar, and they reeled away sh.o.r.ewards with the water lapping into her. Then a fire grew brighter above the roaring beach, men came floundering waist-deep through the surf, those in the boat sprang over, and they went up with the wash of a sea.

Appleby, scrambling out of the backwash, stood up, dripping, breathless, and aching all over, and saw Harper not far away and a host of dusky figures flitting about the fire. Then there was a flash from seawards, a crash in the forest behind them, and they disappeared.

"Well," said the skipper quietly, "the 'Ventura' isn't going to sea any more. You have to take your chances in this business; and we got most of the inside out of her, anyway."

VII - THE DESCENT OF SANTA MARTA

A LITTLE fire burned in a hollow of the dusty barranco that fissured the face of the hill, a clear red fire of the kind that gives little light and makes no smoke, and its pale glow showed but feebly against the rock behind. This was still flushed with a warm l.u.s.tre caught from the western sky, though the sun had dipped and the fleecy mists were creeping across the dusky plain below.

A group of weary men lay about the fire, dusty and ragged, for they had spent most of twelve weary hours forcing a path through thickets and climbing like goats from rock to rock under the heat of the tropics. Two of them wore garments of cotton, which hung about them rent by thorns; three others jackets of American make, looted from a loyalist store; and one trousers of English tweed, through which his knees protruded, and a jacket of alpaca of a kind esteemed in Spain. He had, however, a red silk sash of beautiful texture, which had cost somebody else a good many dollars, round his waist; and his face, which was bronzed to a coffee color, had once been of paler complexion than those of most of his companions. He raised himself a trifle, and glanced about him with a little whimsical smile.

"They are a choice collection of scarecrows to take a city with," he said in English.

A man who lay close by looked up with a twinkle in his eyes. "I have seen smarter soldiers," he drawled. "Still, they're a hard crowd, and I'd feel kind of sorry for Colonel Morales if his cazadores don't put up a good fight to-night. What we have on hand isn't quite the thing I came out to do, but I guess it's better than catching fever down there in the mangrove swamps. That's how it strikes me, though it will scarcely be the kind of business you've been used to, Appleby."

Appleby laughed again as he glanced at the ragged men sprawling in att.i.tudes that were rather easy than picturesque a little farther up the gorge. They were of various shades of color, from pale Castilian olive to African jet, and a good many of them were barefooted, while the shoes of the rest were burst. The arms scattered about them were as curiously a.s.sorted-American Marlin rifles, old English Sniders, Spanish service weapons, and cutla.s.s-like machetes with a two-foot blade, which proved as efficient when, as quite frequently happened, there was a difficulty in obtaining the right kind of cartridges.

They were for the most part men with wrongs, individual as well as national; for the Spanish system of checking disaffection was sharp and stern, and the man who has seen brother or comrade butchered to bolster up an effete authority is apt to remember it. Those who had no wrongs possessed a l.u.s.t of plunder which served almost as well as animus; but there were a few who had been driven to join them by patriotic convictions. They had already made themselves a terror to the conscript troops of Spain, as well as peaceful peasants with loyalist sympathies, who called them the Sin Verguenza-the men without shame. It was not from choice that Appleby had cast in his lot with them, but because it seemed to him preferable to falling into the Spaniards' hands. He had, however, by daring in one encounter, and shrewd counsel, already made himself an influence, and had been endowed with the rank of Teniente.

"No," he said a trifle dryly, "it is not. When I plundered folks in my country I did it for other people with a bill, and I had the law behind me. I was trained to it, you see."

"It's quite a good trade," said Harper, who had joined the Sin Verguenza because the coast was too strictly watched to leave him any chance of getting away again. "Kind of pity to let up on it. It was a woman sent you here?"

Appleby laughed, and then sat silent a moment or two staring straight before him. The dusty gorge seemed to fade, and he could fancy himself standing once more at the head of a shadowy stairway in an English hall looking into a woman's eyes. They were big gray eyes that seemed to read one's thoughts, set most fittingly in a calm, proud face, above which cl.u.s.tered red-gold hair, and he had seen them often since that eventful night, on many a weary march, as well as in his sleep.

"Yes," he said; "but not in the way I think you mean. She was my best friend's sweetheart, and nothing to me. No doubt she has married him by now."

Harper's smile seemed to express incredulity, and for the first time a doubt flashed into his comrade's mind. Would he have done so much for Tony if the woman had been any one else than Violet Wayne? The question almost startled him and though he strove to answer it in the affirmative no conviction came. Tony had been his friend, and until he came to Northrop he had never seen the girl; while it was, of course, preposterous to suspect that he had gone out under a cloud for her sake; and yet the doubt remained to be afterwards grappled with. In the meanwhile he brushed the question aside as of no moment. Violet Wayne would marry Tony, and in all probability he had already pa.s.sed out of her memory. He was, however, glad when a man with an olive face stood up beside the fire and glanced at him with a smile.

"Among comrades it is not good courtesy to speak apart, and the English is a difficult tongue to me," he said in Castilian. "I have apprehended no more in the Havana than the response discourteous, 'You bedam.'"

Appleby laughed. "I fancy you others can beat us in that line," he said.

"Shall we get in to-night, Maccario?"

The Insurgent captain made a little expressive gesture. "Who knows!" he said. "They have two companies of cazadores, but there is this in our favor-they do not expect us. Four days' march-for troops-from Adeje, and we have come in two! Yes, I think we shall get in, and then there will be trouble for those others in Santa Marta and the Colonel Morales."

Appleby glanced down the barranco, and saw framed, as it were, in its rocky gateway the sweep of plain below. The tall green cane and orange groves had faded to a blur of dusky blueness now, but in one place he could still discern the pale gleam of white walls. That was Santa Marta, and he remembered how they had been welcomed there when, weary and dusty with travel, they had last limped that way. There were no troops in Santa Marta then, and the Sin Verguenza, who did not know that an infantry battalion lay close by, had accepted the citizens' hospitality, and borrowed much less from them than they usually did when their entertainers had loyalist sympathies. While they slept the deep sleep of weariness the cazadores fell upon the town, and the Colonel Morales allowed a very short shrift to those who failed to escape from it.

Therefore Santa Marta was anathema to the Sin Verguenza, and, what was almost as much to the purpose, it was rich.

While he watched the white walls faded, and the fire in the barranco grew brighter as darkness closed down. A negro, who removed a kettle from it, carefully put it out, and served them with a meal, though Harper sighed disgustedly as he lighted a maize-husk cigarette when he had consumed his portion.

"Well, I guess we'll get breakfast to-morrow, if we're alive," he said.

"I've lived on some kind of curious things in Cuba, including frica.s.see of mule, but onions, bad guavas, and half-ripe mangoes, as a mixture for fighting on, doesn't suit my taste at all. No, sir. I want to lie down nice and quiet, and not worry anybody, when I've got dysentery."

His companions, however, did not complain. Perhaps they were accustomed to scarcity, though the Sin Verguenza lived well when they could do so at other men's expense; and there is a capacity for patient endurance in most of the peoples of Spain. They lay smoking cigarettes instead, while a little cool breeze came down out of the soft darkness that now veiled the hills above. Beneath them lights twinkled dimly like cl.u.s.tering fireflies in the misty plain, and once a faint elfin ringing of bugles came up. The Sin Verguenza answered it with a hoa.r.s.e murmur, and then lay still, patiently biding their time.

The dew settled heavily as the rocks grew cooler; Appleby's alpaca jacket grew clammy, but he lay motionless beside the embers, once more grappling with the question what was he, an Englishman of education, doing there? Violet Wayne's eyes seemed to ask it of him reproachfully, and he could not find a fitting answer. The plea that he was there because he could not help it did not occur to him, for he was young, and believed that a determined man can shape his own destiny. Instead, he admitted vaguely that the reckless life, the testing of his bodily strength, the close touch with human nature stripped of its veneer, and the brief taste of command, all appealed to him. This, he knew, was no defence; but he felt that he at least owed the Sin Verguenza something, for they had come upon him while he hid from the troops of Spain, and, finding that he had nothing but his life to part with, had incontinently given him what they had, which was just then very little.

At last the Captain Maccario rose to his feet and called aloud. There was a murmur of voices, a clatter of arms, a rattle of stones, and a patter of feet, and the Sin Verguenza came out from the barranco like beasts from their lairs. The hillside fell steep beneath them, but they went down, flitting noiselessly, half-seen shadows, while each man chose his own path, and not as troops would have done. Here and there the machetes cleared a way where it would take too long to go round, or there was a crackle of undergrowth when they plunged into a belt of trees. Then a mule track led them down to the level, and with a shuffle of broken boots and soft patter of naked feet they swung along the dusty carretera road. It wound away before them smelling of dew-cooled earth, a faint white riband, past the shadowy tobacco and dusky sugar cane, and there was no stoppage when here and there a flat-roofed house loomed up beside it. Then there was a murmur of warning, a drowsy "Viva la libertad!" and the column pa.s.sed on; for the insurrection had taken hold, and the enemies of the Sin Verguenza were the men who had something to lose.

Still, a dozen men with rifles, and cartridges to match, stayed behind when they filed through a white aldea lying silent amidst the cane, and the Sin Verguenza swung into slightly quicker stride. If the Colonel Morales was to be caught at all he must be caught napping, and, as they knew, he usually slept with one eye open. Still, Appleby fancied it might be accomplished, for he had discovered already that the Castilian has a disdain for petty details, and frequently leaves a good deal to chance.

By degrees the dust grew thicker and the little flat-topped houses more plentiful, while here and there white haciendas grew into shape among the trees. There were no lights in any of them; but by and by the Sin Verguenza stopped where the white orange flowers lay crushed upon the road and consulted with their guide. The Colonel Morales, they believed, did not expect them, but it was likely that he had pushed forward a section or two of cazadores to watch the road. The leaders also argued softly for some little time, and Appleby listened with his Marlin rifle under his arm, noticing how the fireflies sparkled in the leaves meanwhile. There were great stars above him in the sweep of cloudless indigo, and the low murmur of voices emphasized the stillness, while the heavy scent of the orange flowers was in his nostrils. Long afterwards a vision of the long, straggling column waiting in the dim white road would rise up before him when he breathed that scent.

Then they went on again, by paths that led through tobacco fields and amidst breast-high cane dripping with the dew that brushed them as they pa.s.sed. This was, however, the work the Sin Verguenza were accustomed to, and no one saw them flit through the misty fields file by file. The cazadores, on their part, marched with bugles and wagons and loaded mules; and there was perhaps some excuse for their leader, the Colonel Morales, who believed the Sin Verguenza to be hiding some ten leagues away.

They stopped for the last time within sight of the white-walled town, which lay dark and silent girdled by thin wisps of mist, and the Captain Maccario spoke to those who could hear him. His words were not eloquent or especially patriotic, but they were answered by a portentous murmur; and Appleby surmised that there would be wild work if the Sin Verguenza sacked the town. He, however, moved forward as he was bidden with his ragged half-company, realizing that in the meanwhile he was rather going with than leading them. Where the rest went he could not see, for his attention was occupied in getting into and out of enclosures noiselessly, and once he fell into an aloe hedge and p.r.i.c.ked himself grievously. Then he wondered what had happened to the barefooted men, but none of them at least said anything, and the dim, flitting forms went on. It all seemed unreal to him-white walls that rose higher, shadowy figures, and the silence they scarcely disturbed; but once more he was vaguely conscious that it was curiously familiar.

Then there was no more cover, for they straggled out, not in ranks, but cl.u.s.ters, from among orange trees and tall, flowering shrubs, which he fancied by their scent were oleanders, with a bare strip between them and the flat-topped houses. Santa Marta lay before him scarcely two hundred yards away, and he felt his heart throb painfully. His guide whispered something, and Appleby nodded, though he could not remember what the man had said, and they went forward at a run. The patter of feet, and clatter of strap and swivel, seemed to swell into a bewildering din, but they were almost upon the fielato offices, where the carretera entered the town, before a rifle flashed.

It was answered by a bugle behind them, for it seemed that the cazadores had watched the road; another rang out in the town. But it was in grim silence the Sin Verguenza ran, though there were now pale flashes along the parapet of the flat roofs in front of them. A man-a negro, he fancied-clutched at Appleby's arm, loosed it, and reeled backwards with a shrill scream. Another staggered, and Appleby trod on him as he fell under his feet. He scarcely saw the man, only the white walls that seemed to come no nearer, though he knew by the way his heart was thumping that he was running savagely. A curious din was going on, bugles ringing, the patter of desultory riflery; but he caught the words of somebody who ran behind him, and cried out breathlessly in Castilian as he swung up his hand.

Swinging past the fielato offices they swept under a white wall, and plunged into a shadowy calle, where pale faces peered out at them from the lattices. They went down it at a run, and would have gained the broad plaza it led to but that the blast of a volley met them in the face. Men went down, but not many, for Appleby heard the click of the bullets on the walls and stones, and surmised that it was conscript troops shipped off half trained in haste from Spain that fired. He could dimly see more of them flocking into the calle, and it became evident to him that his men must go through them.

With a hoa.r.s.e shout he sprang forward, though he could never remember whether it was in English or Castilian he cried, and the Sin Verguenza came on with a roar behind. This was not the kind of fighting they preferred, but they had the best of reasons for surmising that no mercy would be shown them if they did not succeed. They were in among the huddled men before the rifles could flash again, barrel and b.u.t.t rattling among the bayonets of those who had found opportunity of fixing them, and machetes swinging.

Almost to Appleby's astonishment they also went through; and when, swinging the Marlin rifle by the muzzle, he reeled out into the plaza the cazadores fled across it like sheep. There was a breathless howl as they did so, a fresh trampling of feet, and the rest of the Sin Verguenza poured out from another calle with a half-company of cazadores retiring before them, and firing as they went. Some of them were less than half dressed, but they gave back unwillingly, with the spitting of their rifles showing red against the walls that shut in the shadowy square.

It seemed to Appleby that if the others rallied and joined them the Sin Verguenza would have their work cut out, and when one who carried a sword in place of a rifle made a stand he shouted in Castilian. He spoke the words that came to him, without reflection; but he was the son of a ranker, and the grandson of a colonel on his mother's side. There was a flicker of riflery from the calle where Maccario's men were, but the officer with the sword was standing still, and men who turned by twos and threes closing in on him. The first mob of beaten men were also halting, when Appleby hurled his ragged handful like a wedge in between.

They went in with clubbed rifle and red machete; the officer went down, and for a few wild, moments cazador and rebel fought hand to hand. Then the drilled men broke and fled, half of them to meet the other band of Sin Verguenza pouring from the street, and the rest up the dark calle that led out of the plaza with Appleby and his followers hard upon their heels. It was a fierce chase, but a short one, for the cazadores vanished into a great archway, and streaks of red sparks lighted the windows above. Appleby glanced over his shoulder and saw the rest of the ragged column running down the street, and then that some of them were going down. He had no leisure for reflection, but it was borne in upon him that if they were to carry Santa Marta it must be accomplished before the scattered infantry had recovered from the surprise, for he had seen already that there is very little cowardice amongst the troops of Spain.

What he said or in which tongue he spoke he did not know, but in another moment he and a negro with a machete sprang into the smoke of the rifles that whirled in the archway, and, howling like beasts now, the Sin Verguenza followed them. Men he could scarcely see broke away before them, though he fancied some remained and were trampled on; and then they were in a broad patio with lights shining behind the lattices about him, and the negro was no longer beside him. A door crashed to in front of them, pale flashes shone at the windows; but in another moment the door went down, and they were pressing up a stairway through stinging smoke, with half-seen men firing down on them. There was dust in the smoke, and the plaster came raining down until Appleby could scarcely see anything at all; but the Sin Verguenza went on, and he was borne forward in front of them when they poured tumultuously out upon a flat roof at the head of the stairway. Then there was a roar of exultation, and he dimly saw men in uniform floundering over the low walls that divided roof from roof, while from other openings there poured out more of the Sin Verguenza.

Appleby wondered why he could not see them clearly, and then his hearing also seemed to fail him. He was conscious of a confused shouting in the street below, but it grew curiously faint, and he staggered clear of the rest, and, scarcely knowing why he did so, groped his way back to the patio, where he sat down beside a bush of heliotrope or some other flower that had a heavy sickly smell. He did not know how long he sat there feeling cold and faint, but at last somebody shook him and held something to his lips. He drank, gasped, and saw Harper smiling gravely down on him.

"I guess you feel better now!" he said.