Chapter IX: Ground-Bait

For reasons, the _Port Edes_ took the “North about” course; that is, she headed across south of the Banks of Newfoundland nearly to Cape Hatteras, and then braved the three-knot current of the Gulf Stream by passing down the Florida Channel on the western side of the Bahamas. They had carried good weather with them—light head breezes or calms—all the way; and, although coals were dear and the day’s outlay was limited to twenty-eight tons by order, the steamer usually averaged ten and a half knots, despite the unskilfulness of the engine-room staff.

In a canvas chair on the bridge deck under the lee of the fiddley sat Patrick Onslow, with a pipe between his teeth and Pierre Loti’s “Fantôme d’Orient” in his lap. He was distinctly idling. For the moment he was wondering how, from so transparently blue a sea, the spray which jumped from the wave-crests could be colorless and opaque. Then, by following with the eye a tangle of yellow Gulf weed which floated past, his attention was carried away to some little gray spouts of fog, which told of whales and their calves taking a summer outing in the milk-warm waters of the south. Beyond, his eyes fell upon one of the screw-pile lighthouses with which the United States Government has fringed the Florida shoal; and on the far horizon sprouted the wind-threshed tops of some scattered cabbage palms, which told that there at least the shallow sea was sea no more. At the back of these palms lay the mysterious shelter of the Everglades.

A thought passed through Patrick Onslow’s mind, a thought of the drama to be played under shelter of those recesses within the next few days, and he frowned. He thrust the thought from him as an impertinence, and turned again to his novel. But he was destined just then to read no more from that dainty vignette of Stamboul. Through the grating of the fiddley above his head came a frightened shout; then a chorus; then a prolonged clattering, as iron tools were thrown on the floor-plates, and the boots of scared men smote the rungs of the ladders.

Onslow gave a quick smile to himself, as though he understood something; then mounted a look of concern on his face, and, getting up from his chair, crossed to port and strode up to the break of the bridge-deck. The captain, coming out of the chart-house, joined him. From the door of the alley-way beneath them rushed a crowd of frightened men—trimmers and stokers, stripped to the waist, engineers in dungaree—all the human contents of the lowest hold. Kettle singled out the Chief with his eye, and addressed him with sour irony—

“’Afternoon, Mr. McFee. Fine, isn’t it, for the time of year? Have your curs forgotten that they’re paid to work this steamboat up Mississippi River to a city called New Orleans? Or have they induced the other watch to go below and give them a spell?”

“Guid God, sir, dinna jest!” replied the Chief.

“Ye remember what yon scoundrel said on Liverpool dock wall? Weel, he’s been as guid as his words, sir. We’ve found an infernal machine already.”

“Well?” drawled Kettle.

“Man, we may be blown to the sea-floor any minute.”

“Sea whisky! sea grandmother!”

“Man, sir, see wi’ your own een. By God’s guid mercy the donkeyman picked it from among the coals, or it’s no knowin’ where we’d bin this blessed moment!”

“Hand it up here,” the skipper commanded shortly.

The burly donkeyman, half grinning, half afraid, came up the iron steps and handed the captain a box painted to look like a knob of coal.

“It was ticking when I picked it up, sir,” he said, “but when I handled it, the ticking stopped.”

The captain took the thing in his hand. It started on a fresh _cluck_, _cluck_, and the grimy men on the iron decks below humped their shoulders as though to better receive a blow, and began to shuffle away towards the bows.

“Oh, it may be something dangerous,” said Captain Kettle, and he hove his burden over the side, “or it mayn’t. Looked to me like a toy to frighten flats. There’s only one man with the pluck of a roach amongst you, and here’s half-a-crown for him.”

The donkeyman’s black forefinger knuckled his greasy cap.

“As for the rest, your mothers must have suckled you on pigeons’ milk, and then sent you to a girls’ school to dry-nurse. You pack of beauties! Oh, you cowardly, bobby-hunted gems! If the thing was found, well, found it was, and the donkeyman brought it on deck. What do you want to foul the clean air for with your dingy stinking carcasses before your watch was out? I’ll log every man of you for this; yes, Mr. McFee, and Mr. Second, and Mr. Third, I’ll dirty your tickets for you as well, and if you give me another ounce of bother I’ll take care you none of you ever get another berth so long as the universe holds water to carry shipping. You cowardly hounds! Oh, you trust me!”

The men slunk back into the alley-way again out of shot of the skipper’s tongue, and the engineers, plucking up courage first, led the way below. Some one clattered a shovel on a firebar. Instinct made the trimmers obey the signal, and they went to the bunkers. The firemen followed, and the steam-gauge remounted before it had received any appreciable check. It was all an affairs of five minutes.

Kettle passed a forefinger round the inside of his shirt-collar, and strolled across with Onslow to where the deck-chairs straddled in the shade of the fiddley. “They’re a holy crew, aren’t they?” said the master of the _Port Edes_.

“I think they’re what we want. We should be rather out of it with a plucky lot who insisted on standing by us at a pinch.”

“Oh, don’t you make any error about that,” replied Kettle. “They’d have been shaky anyway, but this bogus clockwork devil of yours fixes them to a nicety. It’ll be every Jack for himself when the scare comes, and Davy Jones take the steamer, and the others. Oh, they’ll run like a warren of rabbits. The brutes!”

Kettle broke off abruptly, and stared moodily over the Gulf Stream. A flying-fish got out of the blue water and ran across the ripples like a silver rat. A school of porpoises snorted leisurely up from astern, and passed the steamer as though she had been at anchor. And the tangles of the gulf-weed floated past like reefs of tawny coral.

“Do you ever read poetry?” the skipper suddenly asked.

Onslow slewed round his head and stared. The idea of this vinegar-mouthed little savage talking of poetry very nearly made him break into wild laughter. With an effort he steadied his face and said quietly, “Sometimes.”

“I’m glad of that. Somehow I hadn’t dared ask you before, but now I know, Mr. Onslow, I like you all the better. It gives us something in common we can talk about without being ashamed. We can’t very well discuss the other matter which binds us together and respect ourselves at the same time.”

“Quite right. You and I, captain, are shouldered to common piracy by the force of circumstances; but I always kick myself when I think about it. There’s no glamour of romance about our intended villainy, or the way it’s being led up to.”

“Not a bit. Byron wrote about piracy, but Byron was no seaman, and he didn’t know what hazing a crew meant. A thief’s a dirty scoundrel all the world over, and always has been; and a sea thief, having the scum of the earth to handle, has to make himself the crudest brute on earth if he wants to succeed. I think it’s that which put me out of liking with Byron and all those poets who’ve written about movement at sea. They give a wrong idea of men’s motives and actions, and when they get talking on shop, they’re that inaccurate and absurd they make one tired. No, Mr. Onslow, give me a land poet, who talks about farms, and primroses, and tinkling brooks, and things he understands, and with that man I can sit through two watches on end. Reading him may make me feel low, but it doesn’t do a man harm to be that way sometimes. Ye see, Mr. Onslow, a scuffle, or a row with a mutinous crew, is just meat and drink to me. Yes, sir, that’s the kind of brute I am.”

They chatted and basked during the rest of the afternoon, whilst the two mates off watch painted ironwork, and the crew off duty grumbled and smoked and slept in the stuffy forecastle. The cabin tea came. Kettle, at the head of the table, preserved a sour silence, and Onslow and the mates carried amongst them a strained civility. And then skipper and supernumerary officer returned to their canvas chairs beside the fiddley on the bridge-deck.

The Gulf Stream rippled crisply over the steamer’s wake astern, and the small wavelets of a calm licked the yellow rust-stains which patched her sweeping flank. Before them the narrow sea was the color of a dull blue roofing-slate. The bright, hot day had faded; the brilliant cobalt had filtered away from overhead, and a silver nail-paring of moon peered from a sky of amorphous violet, still lighted in its higher flats by the sun’s after-glow.

On the horizon line was what at first appeared to be a steamer’s smoke, but what the glass showed to be the reek of a fire on the invisible, low-lying Florida coast. No blaze-glow could be seen. It might be a fisher’s camp-fire on an outlying key; it might be a game-driving of Seminole Indians beyond the explored coast-fringe, in that unknown tangle of trees and grasses and lagoons, the Everglades themselves.

“It’s worth living, Mr. Onslow, times like these,” said Kettle, when they had sat there in silence till the warm night had spread all over, and the white stars were beginning to show in multitudes through its gaps.

The other nodded, sucking at his cold pipe. “None of those poets have ever put all this down on paper. They’ve got parts—bits—but not all. I fancy it is because they haven’t seen the thing for themselves. I’ve tried myself, but I haven’t made much account of it.”

“What, you—you’re a poet?” Onslow rapped out.

“I knock off a bit of verse occasionally,” said the skipper complacently. “When I’m in the mood, that is. It generally comes times like this—when I’ve been tail-twisting the hands, and have a spell of a rest and a think afterwards.”

“I see—the outcome of the vivid contrast,” said Onslow. He imagined to himself that these boasted poems would be of the “heroic” order, to the verge of melodrama. As it happened, he could not conveniently have made a worse guess. Kettle lugged from his pocket a doubled-up exercise-book, reddened slightly under the tan, and handed it across. His companion flattened out the crease, and, in the light which came from a chart-house port, dipped into the manuscript verses for himself. To his astonishment, they were one and all sonnets and ballads which might well have been written by a sentimental schoolgirl. They breathed of love and devotion and premature fading away, and at least three gushing adjectives qualified each tender noun.

There was no word about the sea, on which their author had spent his life, or of the things of the sea, with which he had had all his dealings. He knew about these as few men did, but they seemed common to him, and unclean. Consequently he had delivered himself of an ode to that Spring which he had never witnessed ashore, and love songs to ladies he had never met outside the covers of cheap fiction. It was all imagination, and untutored, uninspired imagination at that.

As a result, Onslow found the poems too killingly funny for words, and was consumed with a wild desire for laughter; but, with that red-bearded little savage, their maker, glaring anxiously at him from the opposite shadow, he dare not let so much as the tail of a smile dance from the corner of his mouth. He had to enjoy and endure in silence; and, with the exercise-book thrust out to the yellow light-stream, he read on through the stanzas diligently.

In one, evidently autobiographical, the writer spoke of himself as a “timid frail gazelle,” in another he addressed his remarks from the mouth-piece of a “coy and cooing turtle-dove,” to a “sylphlike maiden of haughty mien,” who, at the time of the narration, was the “bewitching, entrancing, unparalleled queen” of another gentleman’s hearth. An “Ode to Excellence,” which commenced “Hairy Alfred, brother bard,” was evidently directed at a contemporary; but the past was cared for in “Cleopatra, a lament,” which a footnote stated could be sung to the tune of “Greenland’s Icy Mountains.”

Probably as a collection Captain Kettle’s was unique in its clumsy, maudlin sentiment, and its general unexpectedness.

Meanwhile the author was fidgeting nervously. He had not got over that initial nervousness which publication gives. He hungered for a criticism—favorable if possible. At last he made bold to ask for it.

“You’re a wonderful man, Kettle,” returned his companion, quite meaning what he said; “and unless I had seen those verses for myself, I’d never have believed you capable of producing them, no matter what had been told me about your powers.”

The poet gave a sigh of relief, and was going to pursue the subject further, when something fell upon his ear which turned his thoughts into a very different key.

“By James! there’s the engine stopped. What’s up now, I wonder?”

He jumped to his feet, and stood with neck craned out, listening. The ring of heavy boots made itself heard on the engine-room ladders. Then there was a murmur of voices and a pattering of footsteps from the forecastle, and presently a stream of men began to ascend the bridge-deck ladders. Amongst the growing babel of voices came references to the gold: “Half a million yellow sovereigns, boys!” and threats there was no mistaking. “Teach the old man manners, or put him over the side!”

By an evident previous arrangement the men were massing themselves on the port side of the bridge deck.

“Mutiny, by James!—that’s what this means!” commented Captain Kettle in an undertone.

He was cool as ice, and on the moment had decided how to act.

“Now, Mr. Onslow, slip into the chart-house for your pistol. I have mine in my pocket. It’s us two against the crowd of ’em, and we’ll finish out top side. Oh, don’t you make any error; it’ll be a red night’s work for those dogs. But we’ll rub the fear of death into them before we’ve done this time—into those that are left, that is. Get your pistol, quick, sir, and skin your eye for handy shooting!”