Wide Courses Part 12

"The boat is now but a hundred yards away, Miss Shiela," said Captain Blaise. "Guy will take you there. Go you, too, Ubbo." I took her hand and we raced to the bank, where I handed her to a place beside her father in the boat.

"And what are you going to do now?" she asked.

"I? Why, I must go back to help Captain Blaise."

"Oh, of course. But hurry back. And be careful, won't you?"

I ran up the path and was soon at his elbow. The column was crowding down the path, and so soon after coming from the bright light, possibly they could not see clearly when he swung. However it was, one groaned and slid down. He cut again and the head of the column stopped dead.

"What's wrong?" came a voice, the Governor's. "What are you stopping for?"

"Won't you step this way and find out?" jeered Captain Blaise.

"What! only one man?"

The hedge lining the path was waist high, trimmed flat and wide, but I never suspected what was coming until I saw the flash and felt the ting of the bullet on my cheek. "Drop!" warned Captain Blaise, but I had no mind to drop. I held one of Mr. Cunningham's duelling pistols ready for the next shot. I saw it and fired, to the right of and just above the flash. I had half seen how he had rested his elbow on the hedge and carried his head to one side when he fired that first shot. There was the crash of a body through the hedge. And then a silence.

"You got him, I think," said Captain Blaise.

I had been spun half around by the shock of something or other, and now I was once more facing the path squarely, and a thought of those red and blue and gold uniforms jammed in there gave me an idea. "Ready, men!" I called out. "Steady! Aim!--and be sure you fire low." No more than that, when in the Governor's guard there was the wildest scrambling and trampling to get to the rear.

And we left them falling rearward over each other and ran for the landing. The men were waiting on their oars. We leaped in, and Captain Blaise took the tiller ropes. "Give way!" he ordered.

Mr. Cunningham was lying on cushions in the bottom of the boat. I was still laughing, and he rolled his head, I thought, to look at me.

"Where did that skunk get you, Guy?" asked Captain Blaise.

"Why, I didn't know that he got me at all."

"Feel on your cheek."

There was blood, not much, trickling down my right cheek.

"You'd better attend to it."

"Yes, sir."

Warm fingers met mine. It was her silk scarf which she was pressing into my hand. I thrust it in my left breast, then took my own handkerchief and held it to my cheek.

I was chuckling to myself as I fancied the Governor's guards tumbling over each other in their retreat, when Captain Blaise broke in on me.

"Aren't you laughing rather soon? You're not over your troubles yet."

"Troubles, sir? Troubles?" It was not at all like him, and his voice, too, was unwontedly harsh. "Troubles?" I almost laughed aloud again. He did not understand--I had only to lean forward to gaze into her eyes. I had only to reach out to clasp her hand. Troubles? Well, possibly so, but I smiled to myself in the dark.

IV

Ere we had fairly boarded the brig they were in chase of us. We could see lights flitting along the lagoon bank and hear the hallooing of native runners--the Governor's, we knew. And for every voice we heard and every light we saw, we knew that hidden back of the trees were a dozen or a score whom we could not hear or see. And on the black surface of the lagoon, paddling between us and the bank, as we worked the ship out, were noiseless men in canoes. We could not see them, but every few minutes a mysterious cry carried across the silent water, and the cry, we knew, was the word of our progress from the Governor's canoe-men to the messengers on the bank.

The lagoon emptied on the south into the Momba River, which twisted and turned like so many S's to the sea; on the north was the pa.s.sage by which we had come, that which led to the sea by way of the bar. But there was to be no crossing of the bar for us that night. Ten miles inland we had smelled that sea-breeze and knew what it meant; but Captain Blaise, nevertheless, held on with the _Bess_ toward the bar. We could hear their crews paddling off and shouting their messages of our progress until they were forced by the breakers to go ash.o.r.e. Their parting triumphant shouts was their word of our sure intent to attempt the pa.s.sage of the bar.

When all was quiet from their direction, we put back to the lagoon and headed for the river pa.s.sage. But one ship of any size had ventured this river pa.s.sage in a generation, and the planking of that one, the brig _Orion_, for years lay on the bank by way of a warning. "But the _Orion_ was no _Dancing Bess_," commented Captain Blaise. Surely not, nor was her master a Captain Blaise.

The top spars of the _Bess_ had been slung while we were ash.o.r.e, and by this time we had also knocked away the ugly and hindering false work on bow and stern, so that with her lifting foreyards which would have done for a sloop-of-war, and on her driving fore and aft sails which could have served the mizzen of a two-thousand-ton bark, the _Bess_ was now herself again. And she had need to be for the work before her.

Captain Blaise ordered her foresails brailed in to the mast to windward and her foreyards braced flat, this that she might sail closer to the wind.

Entering the narrow pa.s.sage, she was held to the edge of the low but steep bank to windward; so close that where the low-lying reeds grew outward we could hear them swishing against her sides as we pa.s.sed on.

Miss Cunningham, having seen her father comfortably established with Ubbo in the cabin, had come on deck, and Captain Blaise, busy though he was, took time to make her welcome. No need for him to boast of his seamanship--the whole coast could tell her that; but how often had a beautiful girl a chance to see the proof of it?

We followed the curve of the river's bank almost as the running stream itself. When we came to a sharp-jutting point, Captain Blaise himself, or me to the wheel, would let her fall away until her jib-boom lay over the opposite bank; and then, her sails well filled, it was shoot her up into the wind and past the point before us. Twenty times we had to weather a point of land in that fashion. Fill and shoot, fill and shoot, never a foot too soon, never a foot too late--it was a beautiful exhibition, and only a pity it was not light for her to see it better.

We were clear of the river at last; that is, we were in the river's V-shaped mouth, the delta. The south bank extended westerly, two miles or so farther to the sea, and the other bank north-westerly toward Momba Bar. Now we were able to get a view of the coast line, and northward to beyond the bar it was an almost unbroken line, we could see, of lights flaring from high points along the sh.o.r.e.

Captain Blaise hove her to until he should see a guiding rocket from the men-of-war which he knew were waiting. And presently one came, a blue and gold from due west, and another red and gold from the west-nor'-west, then a red and blue from north-west by west. Presently there was another, from abreast of and close in to the bar. And we knew there were more in waiting than had signalled. It was already a solid line across the mouth of the river.

If those ships guarding the river's mouth were only anch.o.r.ed, our problem would have been simplified; but they were constantly shifting, and as they showed no sailing lights, no telling where, after a signal flashed, they would fetch next up; and always, showing no signal-light whatever, would be the others guarding what they would like to have us mistake for an open pa.s.sage in the dark.

Their sending up so many signals indicated a bewilderment as to our whereabouts. By this time they must have known ash.o.r.e that we were not anch.o.r.ed inside the bar; and out to sea they must have known we had not foundered in the surf, and also by this time they had probably discovered that we were not in the lagoon.

"They will puzzle it out soon. Get your floating mines ready," ordered Captain Blaise. That was my work, and in antic.i.p.ation of it I had knocked together two small rafts loaded with explosives and a large one with explosives and combustible stuff to burn brightly for half an hour or so.

"What does this mean?" Miss Cunningham was at Captain Blaise's elbow.

She could not have asked a question more pleasing to him.

"It means that we are like a rat in a hole with half a dozen big cats guarding the exit. It is an acutely angled corner we are in, Miss Shiela, and a string of corvettes and sloops-of-war stretched, no knowing just where, across the narrow way out. So far they do not know we are here, but before long it is bound to occur to some of them that this is the _Dancing Bess_ and that she has made the Momba River pa.s.sage--and then they will crowd in and pounce on us. That is, if we don't get out before that."

"I see. I must go down and tell father. He's not worrying, but he wants to know what's going on."

He let the brigantine now run offsh.o.r.e, parallel with the southern bank, almost to the entrance. Then we doubled back on our course. As we came about he called, "Ready with your mines, Guy?"

"Ready, sir!"

"Let go!"

At the word over went the big raft. We sailed on for a quarter mile or so. "Let go!" Over went the second. A quarter mile farther and the third one went. Each mine had its time-fuse. In a very few minutes--the _Bess_ was in by the corner of the delta again--the insh.o.r.e mine exploded.

Following the noise and flame there was a quiet and a great darkness, and then from the southerly guard-ship a rocket, while from the sh.o.r.e burst forth new lights. If the surf had not been roaring, we knew that we could have heard those joyful yells from the watchers up that way.

Everybody on the coast knew that the _Bess_ carried two long-toms and no lack of ammunition for them. We could imagine their chuckling over our explosion.

Then came the second explosion, and five minutes later the third, and from her a great flame which continued to burn.

"Captain Blaise, I don't understand. Why that fire-raft?" Miss Shiela had reappeared on deck.

"Why? We are hoping that they will think that we are sailing out to sea in line of the explosions, just the opposite from what we are doing. If they will but think that that burning raft is our burning hold and that we are in distress, why--Look, Miss Shiela!"

Two war-ships were now signalling to each other recklessly, and their signals gave us a chance to reckon pretty nearly the course that they were steering. Both ships were headed straight for the burning raft. As they came on they uncovered their sailing lights, to prevent collision with each other, and watching these two ships' lights we might have picked a way directly between them. But if they happened to have another ship under cover in that apparently open water, we would be lost; and also, in pa.s.sing between, we would have blocked off the lights of each in turn to the other and then they would have us.

Between the bar and the sailing lights of the insh.o.r.e ship of the pair now bearing down, we knew there was another ship. We had seen her signal early, and that ship, we knew, would be held as close to the line of surf as her draught and the nerve of her commander would allow. Captain Blaise, reckoning where she should be, laid the _Bess's_ course for her.