The Sea Bride Part 28

Came cries, blows, a tumultuous outbreak. The _Sally_ rang with the storm of battle. Then, abruptly, quiet....

At that sudden-falling quiet, Dan'l turned pale in spite of himself; he licked his lips. The thing was done....

He ran forward, virtuously ready to take a hand.

XXII

When Brander, at Dan'l's command, went forward to quiet the men in the fo'c's'le, he found two or three of the crew on deck about the scuttle, watching the tumult below.... When they heard him and saw him, they backed away. The light from the fo'c's'le lamp dimly illumined their faces; and Brander thought there was something murderous and at the same time furtive in their eyes.

More than that, he caught the smell of alcohol.... So there was whiskey loose below him.

A man boiled up the ladder past him to the deck, saw him and slid away into the dark. Another.... Six or eight were still fighting below.

Brander had that sixth sense which men must have who would command other men; he felt, now, the peril in the air. His duty was down there among those fighting men; to get down, he would ordinarily have used the ladder. But to do so would be to engage his hands and his feet, and he might well have need of both these members.... He put his hands on the edge of the fo'c's'le scuttle and dropped lightly to the floor of the fo'c's'le, without touching the ladder. He landed on his toes, poised, ready....

The narrow, crowded, triangular den was thick with the smell of hot men, of whiskey, of burning oil; the air was heavy with smoke. A single swinging lamp lighted the place.... Beneath this lamp, four or five men were involved in a battle from which legs and arms were waved awkwardly as their owners struggled. Two other men crouched at opposite sides of the fo'c's'le.... Watching.... One was Mauger; the other Slatter.

Brander cried:

"Drop it, now...."

The character of the struggle changed; the fighting men straightened....

Then some one hit the lamp and sent it whirling into darkness; and at the same moment, Brander heard Slatter scream murderously.... He slipped to one side, backed into a corner, held hands before him, ready to meet an attack....

Slatter's charge, if he were attacking Brander, should have carried the man past the mate's hiding place. But Brander, in the dark, heard a thump of two bodies together, and heard Slatter bellowing profanity, and heard heels thumping upon the floor. Then two or three men made a rush up the ladder to the deck.... Another.... Brander stepped forward, tripped over a whirling leg, and dropped upon a smother of two bodies which writhed beneath him. An arm was flying; he gripped for it and felt the p.r.i.c.k of a knife in his wrist. So.... Death in the air, then....

He dragged that arm down to his face and bit at the wrist and the back of the hand, till he felt the knife drop from the man's fingers.... The three of them were writhing and striking and kicking and strangling....

But the knife was gone.... So much the better. He began to fumble with his right hand, seeking marks for his fists.... He did not strike blindly, but when he struck, his blows went home.... On some one's ribs, and back, and once on the neck at the base of the ear....

They were fighting in silence now.... All had pa.s.sed so quickly that it was still scarce more than seconds since Brander dropped into the fo'c's'le. Their bodies thumped the planking resonantly; they struggled in a fashion that shook the ship. They were gasping and choking for breath....

Some one screamed terribly in Brander's very ear, and a hand that was gripping his neck relaxed and fell away. The bodies of the fighting men were for an instant still; and in that instant's silence, some one asked:

"You all right, Mr. Brander?"

Brander knew the voice. Mauger's. He said: "Yes...."

Mauger squirmed out from under Brander.... "What hit Slatter?" he asked sharply. "Did you get him?..."

Brander got up, and the body of Slatter fell away from him limply. It was about that time that Dan'l reached the fo'c's'le scuttle above, and looked down into the darkness. He saw nothing; and he called:

"Mr. Brander?"

Brander said quietly: "Yes, sir, all right."

"What's wrong, here?"

"Slatter tried to knife me," said Brander.

"Have you got him?"

"I don't know. He's still. Strike a light, if you please...."

Dan'l was already half way down the ladder; but even before his sulphur match scratched, Brander's nostrils told him what had happened. They brought him a smell.... Unmistakable.... Appalling.... The smell of blood....

He was on his knees beside Slatter's body when Dan'l bent over him with the flickering match. They saw Slatter doubled forward over his own legs, and Brander explained swiftly: "I had a full-Nelson.... I was forcing him over that way when he yelled...."

He lifted Slatter's body; and they saw the hilt of a knife that was stuck downward, deep into his right thigh. Dan'l cried:

"You've killed him."

And one-eyed Mauger interrupted loyally: "No, he didn't. Didn't...."

Dan'l looked at the one-eyed man. "How do you know?"

"I did. I stuck the knife in him...."

Brander looked at Mauger, and he touched the little man's shoulder.

"You're a liar, little friend," he said, and smiled. And he turned to Dan'l. "I bit the knife out of his hand," he said. "Out of Slatter's....

It fell against my chest and slid down.... It must have dropped between his body and his legs, and his own body, bending forward, drove it in."

Dan'l smiled unpleasantly. "All right; but Mauger says he did it."

Brander shook his head. "He didn't. For a good reason. He was flat on the floor, and I was kneeling on his back, between him and Slatter, when Slatter yelled and quit fighting...."

Dan'l groped for the whale-oil lamp and lighted it and bent to look at the knife. "How did it kill him, there?" he demanded.

"Struck the big thigh artery," said Brander. "It must have...."

Then Noll Wing's voice came to them from the scuttle. "What's wrong, below?" And his big bulk slid down the ladder....

Brander's explanation was the one that went down in the log, in the end.

Noll wrote it himself, in the irregular and straggling characters which his trembling fingers formed. And that was Faith's doing; for Dan'l did not believe, or affected not to believe, and Noll was too shaken by the tragedy to know what he believed.

Dan'l and Noll and Faith talked it over between them, in the after cabin, the next morning. Faith had slept through the disturbance of the night before; but when she heard of it in the morning it absorbed her.

She went on deck and found Brander and made him tell her what had happened. He described the outbreak in the fo'c's'le; he told how, when he went forward, he smelled liquor on the men.... How he dropped through the fo'c's'le scuttle, and some one knocked the lamp from its hanging, and Slatter rushed him.

"Mauger saw what the man meant," he said. "He jumped on him from the side; and then I took a hand; and we had it for a while, in a heap on the floor."

The other men in the fo'c's'le had fled to the deck, leaving Slatter to do his own work. "I made him let go of the knife," Brander explained, "and after we had banged around for a while, I got him from behind, my arms under his, my hands clasped behind his neck. I bent him over, forward.... He was trying to get hold of my throat, over his shoulder.... And he yelled and let go...."

Faith's eyes were troubled. "You say the men had been drinking?"

"Yes."