The Skipper and the Skipped Part 42

"You whelps of perdition!" he shrieked. "Lifts cut, mains'l blowed out, and a lee sh.o.r.e a quarter of a mile away! I've knowed fools, lunatics, and idjits, and I don't want to insult 'em by callin' you them names. You--"

"Well, if we are any crazier for wantin' to go ash.o.r.e where we belong than you was for settin' out to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a night like this, I'd like to have it stated why," declared Hiram.

"Don't you know enough to understand that I was tryin' to save your lives by ratchin' her off'm this coast?" bellowed Cap'n Sproul.

"Just thought you was crazy, and think so now," replied the showman, now fully as furious as the Cap'n--each in his own mind accusing the other of being responsible for their present plight. "The place for us is on sh.o.r.e, and we're goin' there!"

"What do you suppose is goin' to become of us when she strikes?"

bawled the Cap'n, clutching the backstay and leaning into the night.

"She'll strike sh.o.r.e, won't she? Well, that's what I want to strike.

It'll sound good and feel good."

For such gibbering lunacy as this the master mariner had no fit reply.

His jaws worked wordlessly. He kept his clutch on the backstay with the dizzy notion that this saved him from clutching some one's throat.

"You'd better begin to pray, you fellers," he cried at last, with a quaver in his tones. "We're goin' smash-ti-belter onto them rocks, and Davy Jones is settin' on extra plates for eight at breakfast to-morrer mornin'. Do your prayin' now."

"The only Scripture that occurs to me just now," said Hiram, in a hush of the gale, "is that 'G.o.d tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.'"

That was veritably a Delphic utterance at that moment, had Hiram only known it.

Some one has suggested that there is a providence that watches over children and fools. It is certain that chance does play strange antics. Men have fallen from balloons and lived. Other men have slipped on a banana skin and died. Men have fought to save themselves from destruction, and have been destroyed. Other men have resigned themselves and have won out triumphantly.

The doomed _Dobson_ was swashing toward the roaring sh.o.r.e broadside on. The first ledge would roll her bottom up, beating in her punky breast at the same time. This was the programme the doleful skipper had pictured in his mind. There was no way of winning a chance through the rocks, such as there might have been with steerageway, a tenuous chance, and yet a chance. But the Cap'n decided with apathy and resignation to fate that one man could not raise a sail out of that wreck forward and at the same time heave her up to a course for the sake of that chance.

As to Imogene he had not reckoned.

Perhaps that faithful pachyderm decided to die with her master embraced in her trunk. Perhaps she decided that the quarter-deck was farther above water than the waist.

At any rate, curving back her trunk and "roomping" out the perturbation of her spirit, she reared on her hind-legs, boosted herself upon the roof of the house, and clawed aft. This auto-shifting of cargo lifted the bow of the little schooner. Her jibs, swashing soggily about her bow, were hoisted out of the water, and a gust bellied them. On the pivot of her buried stern the _Dobson_ swung like a top just as twin ledges threatened her broadside, and she danced gayly between them, the wind tugging her along by her far-flung jibs.

In matter of wrecks, it is the outer rocks that smash; it is the teeth of these ledges that tear timbers and macerate men. The straggling remains are found later in the sandy cove.

But with Imogene as unwitting master mariner in the crisis, the schooner dodged the danger of the ledges by the skin of her barnacled bottom, spun frothing up the cove in the yeast of the waves, b.u.mped half a dozen times as though searching suitable spot for self-immolation, and at last, finding a bed of white sand, flattened herself upon it with a racket of demolition--the squall of drawing spikes her death-wail, the boom of water under her bursting deck her grunt of dissolution.

The compelling impulse that drives men to close personal contact in times of danger had a.s.sembled all the crew of the schooner upon the p.o.o.p, the distracted Imogene in the centre. She wore the trappings of servitude--the rude harness in which she had labored to draw up the buckets of dirt on Cod Lead, the straps to which the tackle had been fastened to hoist her on board the _Dobson_.

When the deck went out from under them, the elephant was the biggest thing left in reach.

And as she went st.u.r.dily swimming off, trunk elevated above the surges, the desperate crew of the _Dobson_ grabbed at straps and dangling traces and went, too, towing behind her. Imogene could reach the air with the end of her uplifted trunk. The men submerged at her side gasped and strangled, but clung with the death-grip of drowning men; and when at last she found bottom and dragged herself up the beach with the waves beating at her, she carried them all, salvaged from the sea in a fashion so marvellous that Cap'n Aaron Sproul, first on his legs, had no voice left with which to express his sentiments.

He staggered around to the front of the panting animal and solemnly seized her trunk and waggled it in earnest hand-shake.

"You're a dumb animile," he muttered, "and you prob'ly can't have any idea of what I'm meanin' or sayin'. But I want to say to you, man to elephant, that I wouldn't swap your hind-tail--which don't seem to be of any use, anyway--for the whole Smyrna fire company.

I'm sayin' to you, frank and outspoken, that I was mad when you first come aboard. I ask your pardon. Of course, you don't understand that.

But my mind is freer. Your name ought to be changed to Proverdunce, and the United States Government ought to give you a medal bigger'n a pie-plate."

He turned and bent a disgusted stare on the gasping men dimly outlined in the gloom.

"I'd throw you back again," he snapped, "if it wa'n't for givin' the Atlantic Ocean the colic."

One by one they staggered up from the beach gra.s.s, revolved dizzily, and with the truly homing instinct started away in the direction of the fire-flare on the higher land of the island.

Of that muddled company, he was the only one who had the least knowledge of their whereabouts or guessed that those responsible for the signal-fire were Colonel Gideon Ward and Eleazar Bodge. He followed behind, steeling his soul to meet those victims of the complicated plot. An astonished bleat from Hiram Look, who led the column, announced them. Colonel Ward was doubled before the fire, his long arms embracing his thin knees. Eleazar Bodge had just brought a fresh armful of driftwood to heap on the blaze.

"We thought it would bring help to us," cried the Colonel, who could not see clearly through the smoke. "We've been left here by a set of thieves and murderers." He unfolded himself and stood up. "You get me in reach of a telegraph-office before nine o'clock to-morrow and I'll make it worth your while."

"By the long-horned heifers of Hebron!" bawled Hiram. "We've come back to just the place we started from! If you built that fire to tole us ash.o.r.e here, I'll have you put into State Prison."

"Here they are, Bodge!" shrieked the Colonel, his teeth chattering, squirrel-like, in his pa.s.sion. "Talk about State Prison to me! I'll have the whole of you put there for bunco-men. You've stolen fifteen thousand dollars from me. Where is that old h.e.l.l-hound that's got my check?"

"Here are six square and responsible citizens of Smyrna that heard you make your proposition and saw you pa.s.s that check," declared Hiram, stoutly, awake thoroughly, now that his prized plot was menaced. "It was a trade."

"It was a steal!" The Colonel caught sight of Cap'n Sproul on the outskirts of the group. "You cash that check and I'll have you behind bars. I've stopped payment on it."

"Did ye telegraft or ride to the bank on a bicycle?" inquired the Cap'n, satirically. He came straight up to the fire, pushing the furious Colonel to one side as he pa.s.sed him. Angry as Ward was, he did not dare to resist or attack this grim man who thus came upon him, dripping, from the sea.

"Keep out of the way of gentlemen who want to dry themselves," grunted the skipper, and he calmly took possession of the fire, beckoning his crew to follow him. The Colonel and Mr. Bodge were shut out from the cheering blaze.

The first thing Cap'n Sproul did, as he squatted down, was to pull out his wallet and inspect the precious check.

"It's pretty wet," he remarked, "but the ink ain't run any. A little dryin' out is all it needs."

And with Ward shouting fearful imprecations at him over the heads of the group about the fire, he proceeded calmly to warm the check, turning first one side and then the other to the blaze.

"If you try to grab that," bawled Hiram, who was squatting beside the Cap'n, eying him earnestly in his task, "I'll break in your head."

Then he nudged the elbow of the Cap'n, who had remained apparently oblivious of his presence. "Aaron," he muttered, "there's been some things between us to-night that I wish hadn't been. But I'm quick-tempered, and I ain't used to the sea, and what I done was on the spur of the moment. But I've shown that I'm your friend, and I'll do more to show--"

"Hiram," broke in the Cap'n, and his tone was severe, "mutiny ain't easy overlooked. But considerin' that your elephant has squared things for you, we'll let it stand as settled. But don't ever talk about it. I'm havin' too hard work to control my feelin's."

And then, looking up from the drying check, he fixed the vociferous Colonel with flaming eyes.

"Did ye hear me make a remark about my feelin's?" he rasped. "Your business and my business has been settled, and here's the paper to show for it." He slapped his hand across the check. "I didn't come back here to talk it over." He gulped down his wrathful memory of the reasons that had brought him. "You've bought Bodge. You've bought Cap Kidd's treasure, wherever it is. You're welcome to Bodge and to the treasure. And, controllin' Bodge as you do, you'd better let him make you up another fire off some little ways from this one, because this one ain't big enough for you and me both." The Cap'n's tone was significant. There was stubborn menace there, also. After gazing for a time on Sproul's uncompromising face and on the check so tantalizingly displayed before the blaze, Colonel Ward turned and went away. Ten minutes later a rival blaze mounted to the heavens from a distant part of Cod Lead Nubble. Half an hour later Mr. Bodge came as an emissary. He brought the gage of battle and flung it down and departed instantly.

"Colonel Ward says for me to say to you," he announced, "that he'll bet a thousand dollars you don't dare to hand that check into any bank."

"And you tell him I'll bet five thousand dollars," bellowed the Cap'n, "that I not only dare to cash it, but that I'll get to a bank and do it before he can get anywhere and stop payment."

"It's a pretty fair gamble both ways," remarked Hiram, his sporting instincts awake. "You may know more about water and ways of gettin'

acrost that, but if this wind holds up the old spider will spin out a thread and ride away on it. He's ga'nt enough!"

Cap'n Sproul made no reply. He sat before his fire buried in thought, the gale whipping past his ears.

Colonel Ward, after ordering the returned and communicative Bodge to shut up, was equally thoughtful as he gazed into his fire.

Ludelphus Murray, after trying long and in vain to light a soggy pipeful of tobacco, gazed into the fire-lit faces of his comrades of the Ancients and Honorables of Smyrna and said, with a sickly grin:

"I wisht I knew Robinson Crusoe's address. He might like to run out and spend the rest of the fall with us."