The Pilot and his Wife Part 11

"Ah! Norwegian. Good sailors."

"Deserted at Rio?" he asked then, with a laugh, as if he expected, as a matter of course, an answer in the affirmative.

"Shall I play for you?" he asked presently.

"No money."

"Here's a guinea on account of your wages on board the 'Stars and Stripes,' for Valparaiso and Chinchas!" he cried, with a laugh that was heard above the surrounding din; and flinging a gold piece on the table, he lost it.

He turned, and putting his hand to his mouth, shouted--

"One more on account!" and another gold piece shared the fate of the first.

"One more on account!" there came again, and with the same result.

Salve had by this time had about enough of this free-and-easy and undesired playing on his account. The man's face, moreover, with all its joviality, by no means attracted him, and he shouted to him in a sharply-protesting tone--

"Play for yourself, Yankee."

The American seemed not to be able to hear on that side, for he repeated, coolly nodding to him--

"One more on account!"

Salve's patience was exhausted. He had been sitting all this time squeezed up in the narrow s.p.a.ce between the bench and the wall with people on both sides of him, preventing his getting out; but now grasping his neighbour violently by the shoulder, he sprang all at once across the table and over to the unabashed Yankee, with an irresistible feeling that, come what might, he would get out into the freedom of the open air once more.

Just then there came from the furthest room a cry of "police." The lights in that room were at once extinguished; and a moment after, those in the room where Salve was on the point of falling foul of the American (who, to his great surprise, found him all of a sudden confronting him) went out also.

Their hostile relations, however, were almost immediately turned into friendly ones. For Salve, who had seen the landlord making a rush towards him, felt himself suddenly, in the midst of the confusion caused by the darkness, seized by two men and forced towards a door leading in another direction than that in which he saw the stream was setting, and which no doubt was the way out.

"Help, Yankee! there's some villany on here; the small door to the right!" he shouted, with great presence of mind, and at the same moment the door was slammed behind him. A handkerchief was tied over his mouth; he was tripped up and brought heavily to the ground, where his feet and hands were tied, and he was then shot into a dark side-room, which seemed to be at the back of a press, that was unlatched to pa.s.s him through.

"H'm!" said the Yankee coolly, to himself. "I am not going to lose his pay, if I know it," and he set out accordingly in search of the police, with whom he had no outstanding account.

Salve was certain he had heard the senorita's voice whispering in the outer room; and not long after he heard the latch in the press raised, and she stood before him with a light. She looked at him mischievously, and spilt some oil out of the lamp on to his face with a little scornful laugh. But her expression changed then to that of a tigress burning for revenge that is compelled to put off the gratification of her fury, and she darted out again, clapping down the latch behind her.

Salve lay tightly bound with his hands behind his back. But his cat-like suppleness enabled him eventually to wriggle his sheath-knife out of his breast pocket, and he found no great difficulty then in freeing himself from his bonds.

He stood now with his knife in his hand and listened.

Before long he heard the American's voice, with the police, and they appeared to be searching. He shouted to them; and the next moment he was released.

"He is one of our crew--belongs to the Stars and Stripes," said the American, arresting Salve, who, as long as he got out of this accursed town now, did not care in what capacity it might be, and offered no opposition.

"You have not improved your beauty, my lad," said his rescuer, derisively, as he held up the light to his face.

"I should like to have one word with the tavern-keeper before I go,"

said Salve.

"And that is what we have not the slightest inclination for," said the American--who, it now appeared, was boatswain on board--in a dry tone of authority. "We are not going larking with the police. Besides, having once recovered that trifle of wages, I don't mean to risk losing it again."

The Yankees made a close ring round their prisoner, and there was nothing for it but to follow as he was directed. A look, however, at the boatswain gave him to understand that that question of the wages would be settled between them when they got on board.

CHAPTER XVI.

The Stars and Stripes lay in the roads with the Union flag at her gaff.

She was a long, black, and, at the water-line, well-shaped vessel, with a crew of thirty-two men; and Salve was so taken with her appearance that as they came alongside he silently congratulated himself on his luck in getting a berth in her. They were so obliging, moreover, as to give him a berth to himself in a separate cabin below. But, to his intense indignation, no sooner had he entered it than the door was latched on the outside, and when he tried to kick it open, it was signified to him that during the short time they had still to be at Rio, he was to remain in confinement, that they might be sure of him. The heat was intolerable down there; and to add to that, there was incessant crying and groaning going on in the hold beside him, as if it were full of sick people. It was the vilest treatment he had ever been subjected to.

The work of taking in the cargo went on uninterruptedly the whole night, as if they were in a particular hurry to get out of the harbour, and about noon the anchor was weighed while the contents of the last lighter were being taken on board.

When Salve, some hours after, was set at liberty, they were already out in the open sea off the mouth of the channel. The captain, the three mates, and several of the inferiors in command, when on deck, wore gold-laced caps and a kind of uniform, as on a man-of-war, and the officer of the watch was armed. The crew, on the other hand, were almost to a man shabby, and they seemed to consist of men of every nationality--English, Irish, Germans, and Americans, not to mention half a dozen negroes and mulattoes. As no one took any notice of him, he went about as he pleased for a while; and presently saw, with a disagreeable sensation, no less than three corpses carelessly sewed up in sail-cloth dropped over the side of the ship that was turned from the land, without the slightest ceremony. The uncomfortable feeling which this incident had aroused was anything but allayed when he heard presently from a little pale cabin-boy with whom he had entered into conversation that it had been successfully concealed from the harbour authorities that there was yellow fever on board; that there were many more lying sick below; and that one of those who had just been heaved overboard, had died the day before in the very berth in which Salve had slept that night.

In the evening he was called aft to the captain, who was standing with the boatswain at his elbow. He was a spare, energetic-looking man, of about forty years of age, with thick black whiskers, marked features, and rather hollow cheeks, and with carefully dressed, glossy hair. He was smoking a handsome pipe with a long stem inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and took a sip from time to time from a cup of black coffee that was standing on the skylight.

"What is your name?" he asked, nodding in reply to Salve's salute.

"Salve."

"Salve," repeated the captain, with an English p.r.o.nunciation of the name; "and Norwegian?"

"He looks too respectable for the pack he'll have to herd with," he muttered to the boatswain.

"Able seaman?"

"Yes."

"You have had three guineas on account?" he went on, after a couple of puffs to keep his pipe alight, as he looked into his ledger; "a month's wages."

"No, sir," said Salve, firmly, "I have had nothing on account,"--and he proceeded then to relate the circ.u.mstances under which the supposed payment had been made. "I have not been regularly engaged till this moment, if I am so now; but up to this I have been treated like a dog, and worse."

The captain took no notice of his last observation, and merely said shortly and sternly--

"The three guineas are owing to him, boatswain Jenkins. His place will be in the foretop. A steady hand will be wanted among all that rabble there."

"Another time you'll perhaps play on your own account, and not on the sailors'," he observed, turning to the boatswain; but Salve caught the remark.

With this the conference came to an end, the boatswain's expression prophesying that when the opportunity offered Salve should pay for his triumph. He went about nursing his prominent chin, and twisting his yellow whiskers, and found a victim for the present in a wretched Mulatto, who was scouring for the cook. After first correcting him sharply for nothing, he coolly felled him to the deck with a handspike, and left him lying there unable to move.

Salve's blood boiled at the sight; but his indignation gave way presently to astonishment when he saw the poor fellow get up and go on indefatigably with his work, after first quietly wiping his own blood off the saucepan. There was a limit to brutality, he thought, and in his disgust he almost envied him the blow he had received.

He provided himself now from the purser with a suit of seaman's clothes in lieu of the rather damaged cloth ones which he wore; and the sailmaker gave him out hammock clothes, to be paid for out of his wages.

He proceeded then to hang his hammock from one of the beams between decks; and while he was doing so observed another man in a canvas suit like his own, similarly occupied, not far from him. He couldn't be mistaken--it was Federigo.

The latter had, as Salve afterwards heard, been taken by the police during the affair in the tavern. He had seen how Salve had been rescued by the boatswain of the Stars and Stripes; and having managed to escape from his captors on the way to the guard-house, he had sought a similar refuge.