The Vultures Part 3

"Mr. Martin will be on board the _Olaf_ when you meet Captain Petersen in the North Sea. He will act as interpreter. You remember that Captain Petersen speaks no English, and you do not know his language. The two crews, I understand, will be similarly placed. Captain Peterson undertakes to have no one on board speaking English. And your crew, my fren'?"

"My crew comes from Sun'land. Men that only speak English, and precious little of that," replied Captain Cable.

He had his finger on the chart, but paused and looked up, fixing his bright glance on the face of the white-haired gentleman.

"There's one thing--I'm a plain-spoken man myself--what is there for us two--us seafaring men?"

"There is five hundred pounds for each of you," replied the white-haired gentleman for himself, in slow and careful English.

Captain Cable nodded his grizzled head over the chart.

"I like to deal with a gentleman," he said, gruffly.

"And so do I," replied the white-haired foreigner, with a bow.

Captain Cable grunted audibly.

III

A SPECIALTY

A muddy sea and a dirty gray sky, a cold rain and a moaning wind.

Short-capped waves breaking to leeward in a little hiss of spray. The water itself sandy and discolored. Far away to the east, where the green-gray and the dirty gray merge into one, a windmill spinning in the breeze--Holland. Near at hand, standing in the sea, the picture of wet and disconsolate solitude, a little beacon, erect on three legs, like a bandbox affixed to a giant easel. It is alight, although it is broad daylight; for it is always alight, always gravely revolving, night and day, alone on this sandbank in the North Sea. It is tended once in three weeks. The lamp is filled; the wick is trimmed; the screen, which is ingeniously made to revolve by the heat of the lamp, is lubricated, and the beacon is left to its solitude and its work.

There must be land to the eastward, though nothing but the spinning mill is visible. The land is below the level of the sea. There is probably an entrance to some ca.n.a.l behind the moving sandbank. This is one of the waste-places of the world--a place left clean on sailors' charts; no one pa.s.ses that way. These banks are as deadly as many rocks which have earned for themselves a dreaded name in maritime story. For they never relinquish anything that touches them. They are soft and gentle in their embrace; they slowly suck in the ship that comes within their grasp.

Their story is a long, grim tale of disaster. Their treasure is vast and stored beneath a weight, half sand, half water, which must ever baffle the ingenuity of man. Fog, the sailors' deadliest foe, has its home on these waters, rising on the low-lying lands and creeping out to sea, where it blows to and fro for weeks and weeks together. When all the world is blue and sunny, fog-banks lie like a sheet of cotton-wool on these coasts.

"Barrin' fogs--always barrin' fogs!" Captain Cable had said as his last word on leaving the Signal House. "If ye wait a month, never move in a fog in these waters, or ye'll move straight to Davy Jones!"

And chance favored him, for a gale of wind came instead of a fog, one of those May gales that sweep down from the northwest without warning or reason.

At sunset the _Olaf_ had crept cautiously in from the west--a high-prowed, well-decked, square-rigged steamer of the old school, with her name written large amidships and her side-lights set aft. Captain Petersen was a cautious man, and came on with the leadsman working like a clock. He was a man who moved slowly. And at sea, as in life, he who moves slowly often runs many dangers which a greater confidence and a little dash would avoid. He who moves slowly is the prey of every current.

Captain Petersen steamed in behind the beacon. He sighted the windmill very carefully, very correctly, very cautiously. He described a half-circle round the bank hidden a few feet below the muddy water. Then he steamed slowly seawards, keeping the windmill full astern and the beacon on his port quarter. When the beacon was bearing southeast he rang the engine-room bell. The steamer, hardly moving before, stopped dead, its bluff nose turned to the wind and the rustling waves. Then Captain Petersen held up his hand to the first mate, who was on the high forecastle, and the anchor splashed over. The _Olaf_ was anch.o.r.ed at the head of a submarine bay. She had shoal water all round her, and no vessel could get at her unless it came as she had come. The sun went down, and the red-gray clouds in the stormy west slowly faded into night. There was no land in sight. Even the whirligig windmill was below the horizon now. Only the three-legged beacon stood near, turning its winking, wondering eye round the waste of waters.

Here the _Olaf_ rode out the gale that raged all through the night, and in the morning there was no peace, for it still rained and the northwest wind still blew hard. There was no depth of water, however, to make a sea big enough to affect large vessels. The _Olaf_ rode easily enough, and only pitched her nose into the yellow sea from time to time, throwing a cloud of spray over the length of her decks, like a bird at its bath.

Soon after daylight the Prince Martin Bukaty came on deck, gay and lively in his borrowed oilskins. His blue eyes laughed in the shadow of the black sou'wester tied down over his eyes, his slight form was lost in the ample folds of Captain Petersen's best oilskin coat.

"It remains to be seen," he said, peering out into the rain and spray, "whether that little man will come to us in this."

"He will come," said Captain Petersen.

Prince Martin Bukaty laughed. He laughed at most things--at the timidity and caution of this Norse captain, at good weather, at bad weather, at life as he found it. He was one of those few and happy people who find life a joy and his fellow-being a huge joke. Some will say that it is easy enough to be gay at the threshold of life; but experience tells that gayety is an inward sun which shines through all the changes and chances of a journey which has a.s.suredly more bad weather than good. The gayest are not those who can be pointed out as the happiest. Indeed, the happiest are those who appear to have nothing to make them happy. Martin Bukaty might, for instance, have chosen a better abode than the stuffy cabin of a Scandinavian cargo-boat and cheerier companions than a grim pair of Norse seamen. He might have sought a bluer sky and a bluer sea, and yet he stood on the dripping deck and laughed. He clapped Captain Petersen on the back.

"Well, we have got here and we have ridden out the worst of it, and we haven't dragged our anchors and n.o.body has seen us, and that exceedingly amusing little captain will be here in a few hours. Why look so gloomy, my friend?"

Captain Petersen shook the rain from the brim of his sou'wester.

"We are putting our necks within a rope," he said.

"Not your neck--only mine," replied Martin. "It is a necktie that one gets accustomed to. Look at my father! One rarely sees an old man so free from care. How he laughs! How he enjoys his dinner and his wine!

The wine runs down a man's throat none the less pleasantly because there is a loose rope around it. And he has played a dangerous game all his life--that old man, eh?"

"It is all very well for you," said Captain Petersen, gravely, turning his gloomy eyes towards his companion. "A prince does not get shot or hanged or sent to the bottom in the high seas."

"Ah! you think that," said Prince Martin, momentarily grave. "One can never tell."

Then he broke into a laugh.

"Come!" he said, "I am going aloft to look for that English boat. Come on to the fore-yard. We can watch him come in--that little bulldog of a man."

"If he has any sense he will wait in the open until this gale is over,"

grumbled Petersen, nevertheless following his companion forward.

"He has only one sense, that man--a sense of infinite fearlessness."

"He is probably afraid--" Captain Petersen paused to hoist himself laboriously on to the rail.

"Of what?" inquired Martin, looking through the ratlines.

"Of a woman."

And Martin Bukaty's answer was lost in the roar of the wind as he went aloft.

They lay on the fore-yard for half an hour, talking from time to time in breathless monosyllables, for the wind was gathering itself together for that last effort which usually denotes the end of a gale. Then Captain Petersen pointed his steady hand almost straight ahead. On the gray horizon a little column of smoke rose like a pillar. It was a steamer approaching before the wind.

Captain Cable came on at a great pace. His ship was very low in the water, and kicked up awkwardly on a following sea. He swung round the beacon on the shoulder of a great wave that turned him over till the rounded wet sides of the steamer gleamed like a whale's back. He disappeared into the haze nearer the land, and presently emerged again astern of the _Olaf_, a black nozzle of iron and an intermittent fan of spray. He was crashing into the seas at full speed--a very different kind of sailor to the careful captain of the _Olaf_. His low decks were clear, and each sea leaped over the bow and washed aft--green and white.

As the little steamer came down he suddenly slackened speed, and waved his hand as he stood alone on the high bridge.

Then two or three oilskin-clad figures crept forward into the spray that still broke over the bows. The crew of the _Olaf_, crowding to the rail, looked down on the deeply laden little vessel from the height of their dry and steady deck. They watched the men working quickly almost under water on the low forecastle, and saw that it was good. Captain Cable stood swaying on the bridge--a little, square figure in gleaming oilskins--and said no word. He had a picked crew.

He pa.s.sed ahead of the _Olaf_ and anch.o.r.ed there, paying out cable as if he were going to ride out a cyclone. The steamer had no name visible, a sail hanging carelessly over the stern completely hid name and port of registry. Her forward name-boards had been removed. Whatever his business was, this seaman knew it well.

No sooner was his anchor down than Captain Cable began to lower a boat, and Petersen, seeing the action, broke into mild Scandinavian profanity.

"He is going to try and get to us!" he said, pessimistically, and went forward to give the necessary orders. He knew his business, too, this Northern sailor, and when, after a long struggle, the boat containing Captain Cable and two men came within reach, a rope--cleverly thrown--coiled out into the flying scud and fell across the captain's face.

A few minutes later he scrambled on to the deck of the _Olaf_ and shook hands with Captain Petersen. He did not at once recognize Prince Martin, who held out his hand.

"Glad to see you, Captain Cable," he said. Cable finished drying the salt water from his face with a blue cotton handkerchief before he shook hands.

"Suppose you thought I wasn't coming," he said, suspiciously.

"No, I knew you would."

"Glad to see me for my own sake?" suggested the captain, grimly smiling.