The Stowaway Girl Part 8

c.o.ke appeared to be dumfounded for an instant. Recovering himself, he ran to the starboard side, leaned over, looked down at a torn plate that showed its jagged edges just above the water-line, and then lifted a blazing face toward a point half-way up the neighboring cliff, where a haze lay like a veil of gauze on the weather-scarred rocks.

"You d--d pirates!" he yelled, raising both clenched fists at the hidden battery which had fired a twelve-pound sh.e.l.l into the doomed ship.

The _Andromeda_ herself seemed to recognize that she was stricken unto death. She fell away before the current with the aimless drift of a log.

"Let go!" bellowed c.o.ke with frenzied pantomime of action to Hozier.

It was too late. Before the lever controlling the steam windla.s.s that released the anchor could be shoved over, another sh.e.l.l plunged through the thin iron plates in the bows, smashing a steam pipe, and jamming the hawser gear by its impact. The missile burst with a terrific report. A sailor was knocked overboard, the carpenter was killed outright, two other men were seriously wounded, and Hozier received a blow on the forehead from a flying sc.r.a.p of metal that stretched him on the deck.

The gunners on sh.o.r.e had not allowed for the drifting of the ship.

That second sh.e.l.l was meant to demolish the chart-house and clear the bridge of its occupants. Striking high and forward, it had robbed the _Andromeda_ of her last chance. Now she was rolling in the full grip of the tidal stream. It could only be a matter of a minute or less before she struck.

CHAPTER IV

SHOWING WHAT BECAME OF THE "ANDROMEDA"

The island artillery did not succeed in hitting the crippled ship again. Three more sh.e.l.ls were fired, but each projectile screamed harmlessly far out to sea. A trained gunner, noting these facts, would reason that the sh.o.r.e battery made good practice in the first instance solely because its ordnance was trained at a known range. Indeed, he might even hazard a guess that the _Andromeda's_ warm reception was arranged long before her masts and funnel rose over the horizon. That the islanders intended nothing less than her complete destruction was self-evident. Without the slightest warning they had tried to sink her; and now that she was escaping the further attentions of the field pieces, a number of troops stationed on South Point and the Isle des Fregates began to pelt her with bullets.

Iris, when the first paralysis of fear had pa.s.sed, when her stricken senses resumed their sway and her limbs lost their palsy, flinched from this new danger, and sank sobbing to her knees behind the canvas shield of the bridge. Somehow, this flimsy shelter, which sailors call the "dodger," gave some sense of safety. Her throbbing brain was incapable of lucid thought, but it was borne in on her mistily that the world and its occupants had suddenly gone mad. The omen of the blood-red water had justified itself most horribly. The dead carpenter was sprawling over the forecastle windla.s.s. His hand still clutched the brake. The sailor at the wheel had been shot through the throat, and had fallen limply through the open doorway of the chart-room; he lay there, coughing up blood and froth, and gasping his life out. The two men wounded by the second sh.e.l.l were creeping down the forward companion in the effort to avoid the hail of lead that was beating on the ship.

Hozier was raising himself on hands and knees, his att.i.tude that of a man who is dazed, almost insensible. Watts had gone from the bridge--he might have been whirled to death over the side like the unfortunate foremast hand she had seen tossed from off the forecastle; but c.o.ke, whose charmed life apparently ent.i.tled him to act like a lunatic, was actually balancing himself on top of the starboard rails of the bridge by clinging to a stay, having climbed to that exposed position in order to hurl oaths at the soldiers on sh.o.r.e. He had gone berserk with rage. His cap had either fallen off or been torn from his head by a bullet; his squat, powerful figure was shaking with frenzy; he emphasized each curse with a pa.s.sionate gesture of the free hand and arm; he said among other things, and with no lack of forceful adjectives, that if he could only come to close quarters with some of the Portygee a.s.sa.s.sins on the island he would tear their sanguinary livers out. It is an odd thing that men made animal by fury often use that trope. They do really mean it. The liver is the earliest spoil of the successful tiger.

The _Andromeda_, uncontrollable as destiny, and quite as heedless of her human freight, swung round with the current until her bows pointed to the islet occupied by the marksmen. All at once, c.o.ke suspended his flow of invectives and rushed into the chart-room, where Iris heard him tearing lockers open and throwing their contents on the deck. To enter, he was obliged to leap over the body of the dying man. The action was grotesque, callous, almost inhuman; it jarred the girl's agonized transports back into a species of spiritual calm, a mental state akin to the fatalism often exhibited by Asiatics when death is imminent and not to be denied. The apparent madness of the captain was now more distressing to her than the certain loss of the ship or the invisible missiles that clanged into white patches on the iron plates, cut sudden holes and scars in the woodwork, or whirred through the air with a buzzing whistle of singularly menacing sound. She began to be afraid of remaining on the bridge; her fear was not due to the really vital fact that it was so exposed; it arose from the purely feminine consideration that she was sure c.o.ke had become a raving maniac, and she dreaded meeting him when, if ever, he reappeared.

A bullet struck the front frame of the chart-room, and several panes of gla.s.s were shattered with a fearful din. That decided her. c.o.ke, if he were not killed, would surely be driven out. She sprang to her feet, and literally ran down the steep ladder to the saloon deck.

Through the open door of the officers' mess she witnessed another bizarre act--an act quite as extraordinary in its way as c.o.ke's jump over the steersman's body. In the midst of this drama of death and destruction, Watts was standing there, with head thrown back and uplifted arm, gulping down a tumblerful of some dark-colored liquid, draining it to the dregs, while he held a black bottle in the other hand. That a man should fly to rum for solace when existence itself might be measured by minutes or seconds, was, to Iris, not the least amazing experience of an episode crammed with all that was new, and strange, and horrible in her life. She raced on, wholly unaware that the drifting ship was now presenting her port bow to the death-dealing fusillade.

Then, from somewhere, she heard a gruff voice:

"Hev' ye shut off steam, Macfarlane?"

"Ou ay. It's a' snug below till the watter reaches the furnaces," came the answer.

So some of the men were doing their duty. Thank G.o.d for that!

Undeterred by the fact that a live sh.e.l.l had burst among the engines, the oil-stained, grim-looking engineers had not quitted their post until they had taken such precautions as lay in their power to insure the ship's safety. A light broke in on the fog in the girl's mind.

Even now, at the very gate of eternity, one might try to help others!

The thought brought a ray of comfort. She was about to look for the speakers when a bullet drilled a hole in a panel close to her side.

She began to run again, for a terrified glance through the forward gangway showed that the ship was quite close to the land, where men in blue uniforms, wearing curiously shaped hats and white gaiters, were scattered among the rocks, some standing, some kneeling, some p.r.o.ne, but all taking steady aim.

But it showed something more. Hozier was now lying sideways on the raised deck of the forecastle; he partly supported himself on his right arm; his left hand was pressed to his forehead; he was trying to rise.

With an intuition that was phenomenal under the circ.u.mstances, Iris realized that he was screened from observation for the moment by the windla.s.s and the corpse that lay across it. But the ship's ever increasing speed, and the curving course of her drifting, would soon bring him into sight, and then those merciless riflemen would shoot him down.

"Oh, not that! Not that!" she wailed aloud.

An impulse stronger than the instinct of self-preservation caused the blood to tingle in her veins. She had waited to take that one look, and now, bent double so as to avoid being seen by the soldiers, she sped back through the gangway, gained the open deck, crouched close to the bulwarks on the port side, and thus reached unscathed the foot of the companion down which the wounded men had crawled. The zinc plates on the steps were slippery with their blood, but she did not falter at the sight. Up she went, stooped over Hozier, and placed her strong young arms round his body.

"Quick!" she panted, "let me help you! You will be killed if you remain here!"

Her voice seemed to rouse him as from troubled sleep.

"I was. .h.i.t," he muttered. "What is it? What is wrong?"

"Oh, come, come!" she screamed, for some unseen agency tore a transverse gash in the planking not a foot in front of them.

He yielded with broken expostulations. She dragged him to the top of the stairs. Clinging to him, she half walked, half fell down the few steps. But she did not quite fall; Hozier's weight was almost more than she could manage, but she clung to him desperately, saved him from a headlong plunge to the deck, and literally carried him into the forecastle, where she found some of the crew who had scurried there like rabbits to their burrow when the first sh.e.l.l crashed into the engine-room.

Iris's fine eyes darted lightning at them.

"You call yourselves men," she cried shrilly, "yet you leave one of your officers lying on deck to be shot at by those fiends!"

"We didn't know he was there, miss," said one. "We'd ha' fetched him right enough if we did."

Even in her present stress of mixed emotions, the sailor's words sounded reasonable. Every other person on board was just as greatly stunned by this monstrous attack as she herself, and the firing now appeared to increase in volume and accuracy. Several bullets clanged against the funnel or broke huge splinters off the boats.

"Gord A'mighty, listen to that," growled a voice. "An' we cooped up here, blazed at by a lot of rotten Dagos, with not a gun to our name!"

Iris was still supporting Hozier, whose head and shoulders were pillowed against her breast as she knelt behind him.

"Can nothing be done?" she asked. "I believe Captain c.o.ke has been killed. Mr. Hozier is badly injured, I fear. Bring some water, if possible."

"Yes, yes, water. . . . Only a knock on the head. . . . How did it happen? And what is that noise of firing?"

Hozier's scattered wits were returning, though neither he nor Iris remembered that the _Andromeda_ was waterless. He looked up at her, then at the men, and he smiled as his eyes met hers again.

"Funny thing!" he said, with a natural tone that was rea.s.suring. "I thought the windla.s.s smashed itself into smithereens. But it couldn't.

What was it that banged?"

"A sh.e.l.l, fired from the island," said the girl.

Hozier straightened himself a little. He was hearing marvels, though far from understanding them, as yet.

"A sh.e.l.l!" he repeated vacantly. Had she said "a comet" it could not have sounded more incredible.

"Yes. It might have killed you. Several of the men are dead. I myself saw three of them killed outright, and two others are badly wounded."

"Here you are, sir--drink this," said a fireman, offering a pannikin of beer. It was unpalatable stuff, but it tasted like the nectar of the G.o.ds to one who had sustained a blow that would have felled an ox.

Hozier had almost emptied the tin when an exclamation from an Irish stoker drew all eyes to the after part of the ship.

"Holy war! Will ye look at that!" shouted the man. "Sure the skipper isn't dead, at all, at all."

Iris had failed to grasp the meaning of c.o.ke's antics in the chart-room, but they were now fully explained. The bulldog breed of this self-confessed rascal had taken the upper hand of him. Though he had not scrupled to plot the destruction of the ship, and thus rob a marine insurance company of a considerable sum of money--though at that very instant there was actual proof of his scheme in the preparations he had made to jam the steering-gear when the anchor was raised after the tanks were replenished--it was not in the man's nature to skulk into comparative safety because a foreigner, a pirate, a not-to-be-mentioned-in-polite-society Portygee, opened fire on him in this murderous fashion. Moreover, c.o.ke's villainy would have sacrificed no lives. The _Andromeda_ might be converted into sc.r.a.p iron, and thereby give back, by perverted arithmetic, the money invested in her. But her white decks would not be stained with blood.

Whatever risk was incurred would be his, the responsible captain's, his only. It was a vastly different thing that shot and sh.e.l.l should be rained on an unarmed ship by the troops of a civilized power when she was seeking the lowest form of hospitality. No wonder if the bull-necked skipper foamed at the mouth and used words forbidden by the catechism; no wonder if he tried to express his helpless fury in one last act of defiance.

He rummaged the lockers for a Union Jack and the four flags that showed the ship's name in signal letters. The red ensign was already fluttering from a staff at the stern, and the house flag of David Verity & Co. was at the fore, but these emblems did not satisfy c.o.ke's fighting mettle. The _Andromeda_ would probably crack like an eggsh.e.l.l the instant she touched the reef towards which she was hurrying; he determined that she would go down with colors flying if he were not put out of action by a bullet before he could reach the main halyard.

The swerve in the ship's course as she pa.s.sed the island gave him an opportunity. In justice to c.o.ke it should be said that he recked naught of this, but it would have been humanly impossible otherwise for the soldiers to have missed him. And now, while the vessel lay with straight keel in the set of the current, the national emblem of Britain, with the _Andromeda's_ code flags beneath, fluttered up the mainmast.

There are many imaginable conditions under which c.o.ke's deed would be regarded as sublime; there are none which could deny his splendid audacity. The soldiers, who seemed to be actuated by the utmost malevolence, redoubled their efforts to hit the squat Hercules who had bellowed at them and their fellow artillerists from the bridge.