Chapter XIII: Three for Twenty-Seven

“Now, my lads,” said Kettle, “you’ve got to hump yourselves, or we’ll have the steamer swamping beneath us. It’ll be touch and go, anyway. Mr. Onslow, you will have the deck all to yourself—after you’ve done your job on the forehold, of course; and you’d better jump lively after that at once. Every gill of water tells now, and it strikes me if we get very much more of the Mexican Gulf on board the decks will blow up, and she’ll go down like kentledge ballast.”

Onslow darted away through the doorway.

“And now, Mister Sullivan, understand that although I still continue to rate as skipper of this craft, for the present I’m going to work as fireman and coal-trimmer. You will be chief engineer; and I’m the sum total of your crew; and between us we’ve got to do the work of seven horses and one mule. Are the bilge-pumps clear?”

“Yes, sor.”

“And has she still a good head of steam?”

“She has. None’s been blown off.”

“Then pick up your feet and let’s go to your hardware shop and start in work.”

“Wait a bit, sor,” said the donkeyman. “There’s things here I don’t understand. Aren’t the lives of us in beastly danger? Didn’t them boats go off because the steamer’s sinking?”

“Do you,” retorted Kettle, “consider me one of those fancy sorts of maniac, who have no wish to survive the loss of a ship? I tell you I should have been drowned eight times already if that had been my lay. No, Mr. Chief, fair fight’s right enough, and I’d stand up to Nick in that, and value my life at less than a rice-mat; but, at other times, you bet, I’m no fool to chuck it away.”

“But,” said the donkeyman, “what gets me’s this. If the blooming steamer’s bottom’s shot out, what’s the fun in messing with it? The Mexican Gulf will circulate through that hole longer than our bilge-pumps will run.”

“You tire me,” said the little man. “Who said she’d her bottom blown out? I tell you this steamer was sunk a few plates above her usual trim—for reasons; and now we are going to pull her up again. See here, do you take the synch from me, Mr. Chief, and ask no more questions, and you’ll get told no lies. It’ll pay you. If you do as you’re bid aboard of me you’ll have sovereigns enough given you to work through the biggest spree that was ever spread out in a seaport town.”

The big donkeyman appreciatively drew the back of a hand across his muzzle.

“Ah, Captain dear,” he said coaxingly, “I’d just like to hear ye mention a figure.”

“Call it two ten-pound notes.”

“Then, be Christopher, I’m yer man for any piece of devilment in the calendar! Come along, Captain dear. ’Tis a melojious little man y’ are, for all they say against yez.”

Meanwhile the steamer was becoming more and more waterlogged with every plunge and roll, and Patrick Onslow feared that his dangerous stratagem for driving away the crew had been carried too far. It seemed to him impossible that they could salvage her now. True, she was brought up to the wind by the after-canvas, and her rollings were not of such sickening strength; but the stern loomed high in the wild night air, and the bows lunged deep into every successive sea that rolled up from the stormy south, taking green water over the forecastle head in masses which scoured anchors and windlass to the naked iron.

The wash found its way below through that jagged gap in the lower deck in crashing water-falls, and every moment, too, the opened valve beside her keel was gushing in fresh gallons to the swamping holds. Any larger sea which swept up now might well settle over her solidly, and launch her with bursted decks on to the sponges and the coral growths a hundred fathoms below.

Some men, in the face of such conditions, would have been mazed, helpless—physically incapable, in the presence of that solitude, of making any necessary effort; for it is one thing to do a desperate matter before the eyes of an applauding crowd, and another when the Devil below is your only appreciative onlooker. It would have been beyond the capabilities of Captain Kettle, for instance. Onslow, however, was the one man in the million to whom the adventure was as meat and drink. If he succeeded, then the profit was his; if he failed, death would be useful to him; and anyway there was the wild excitement of the moment, which was a meal to be enjoyed, and one which nothing could snatch away.

It was in this mood of mind that the man on whose actions the very outer-air existence of the _Port Edes_ depended left his fellows in the chart-house, and raced forward to where the jagged lip of the forehold hatch yawned to the swilling seas. Without lantern, without so much as a look before him, he lowered himself on to the twisted battens below, with the clean water raining on to him from above, and muddy wavelets squirting up from beneath; and then when the steamer gave a heavy send, and the more solid wash from the hold smote him heavily upon the thighs, he loosed his grip, and dived like a stone through the brimming shaft-way of the hatch.

Seconds passed, a minute, two minutes, and still he did not reappear. Three minutes. Then the rounded outlines of something black rolled to the surface, and surged about limply with the swill of the water.

For a while it stayed so; then, swung by a heavier pitch of the steamer, it was washed to the back of a stanchion, where it hung. The slopping water beneath ebbed steadily. The valve in the steamer’s bottom had been closed. Her bilge pumps were running at speed.

During a whole hour Patrick Onslow lodged behind that iron pillar, a mere boneless mass of flesh and clothes; and then the pains of life came into him again with shivers and shudderings. The thin gray light of the dawn was filtering down through the jagged opening above when first the trembling lids slid from his eyeballs; but for still another thirty minutes he was a thing of no wit, breathing truly, but caring naught for all the world contained.

Then a sucking, sobbing noise from the depths of the hold far beneath broke upon his ear, and the languid brain began to work. With an effort he sat up, dizzily holding to the pillar, trying to think where he was, and how ran recent history; and by degrees the details strolled back to him. Before, however, he had gathered all his senses, or a working quantum of strength, he had a visitor in the shape of the donkeyman, who clattered up over the decks with plate-shod boots, and crouched beside the gap above on knees and hands.

“Have you been getting hurt, now?” inquired this new-comer.

“About nine-tenths drowned, I fancy, if that counts. But I’m pretty near all right again now.”

“Ye don’t look ut,” replied the donkeyman candidly. “Barrin’ the tan, ye’d be blue and lard color about the face this minute. But I feared there was something wrong through not seeing ye on the bridge, so I nipped into the chart-room and pockutted a whisky-bottle that was lying convenient—in case. Pull at the small end, sor.”

The bottle was handed down, and Onslow lifted it, his teeth chattering against the nozzle like castanets; but the spirit drove up color into his face, and set the sluggish blood once more on its appointed journey through his limbs and trunk.

“What has happened since I left you?” he asked.

“Well, first, sor, the captain and meself had a little friendly discussion about what’s been happening, and came to a bit of a financial agreement. But I will say that I figured me new terms very low when I understood it was a thrifle of a conspiracy that ye wanted me to stand in at. And then, sor, we went below to the engine-room and turned steam into the bilge pumps, to heave this nasty slop of water overboard; after which, as chief, I set about making a thrifting repair to the low-pressure engine. Ye see, when that explosion took place, a bit of a casting jumped into the crank-pit, and got jammed there hard before they could stop her. I’ve had a fair do at elbow work, cutting it out cold; but it’s clear now, and she runs as sweetly as she did the day she left the shops. But oh, Mr. Onslow, I wish you could see the Old Man. The sight of that little chap, shoveling coals, and swearing, and tumbling, and burning himself, is enough to make the ghosts of some dead firemen I know about grin and dance sand-jigs in their graves.”

The donkeyman was inclined to be garrulous, and evidently lusted for a considerable chat; but, with returning strength, Onslow’s anxiety grew on him again, and he climbed out on deck keen to be once more in action. His knees were tottery, and the donkeyman gave him an arm aft. But when he had climbed up the ladder and gained the bridge deck, he stood for a minute staring, and then threw up his hands and pitched forward on to the planking, as though a bullet had bitten the life in his brain.

The big donkeyman also was startled. Out of the morning mists of the south there had come up a small center-board schooner of some fifteen tons—an oysterman, perhaps, in the season, and now a sponge-gatherer or a mere coaster. She was coming down over the seas dry as a gull, driving along under her boom foresail and jib.

The donkeyman’s eye hung on her as she surged past the rust-streaked flank of the steamer, some twenty fathoms away, not because the sight of a little white-painted schooner was new to him, not because he was impressed by the danger to the _Port Edes’_ enterprise in her being seen by any alien eye, but on account of the tiny vessel being handled (in what to her was distinctly ugly weather) by so extraordinary a person as a young and pretty girl. No one else was on deck, and the girl sat on the coaming of the cockpit, tiller in one hand, tiller rope in the other, as unconcernedly as though she had been an ancient mariner, bred and aged in fore-and-afters.

She was a girl, too, with looks much to the Irishman’s liking: with copper-red hair, whose ends blew out from beneath a green Italian’s nightcap; laughing, impudent features, with the color whipped up into warm pinks by the wind; a figure of pretty curves; and the shapeliest little brown fists in the world splayed on the tiller and gripping the restraining tiller-rope. She was fairly well up to the eyes in her steering, but she found time to throw an _œillade_ towards the steamer, which Mr. Sullivan answered with a yell intended to show his complete admiration, and a swirl of his greasy cap. It was then that Onslow fell, and the donkeyman took his eyes from the schooner, and picked him up and once more applied the whisky-bottle. “More drowned than I thought for!” he muttered. “It’ll be a pig’s mess for us if he goes ill.”

But Patrick Onslow had not fainted through the effect of his recent struggle with death. It was quite another matter which had dealt him the sufficing shock.

In the steerer of that little schooner he had seen the sister of the woman to whom he had once been affianced, who had discarded him for another man, who had driven him from a sedate English life to be a wanderer and a vagabond upon the face of the earth. His roamings had begun and continued only because the image of this one woman had refused to leave his thoughts; and the half-sarcastic nickname of “The Great Traveler” had been gained without any seeking on his part.

Five long desperate years had passed since the blow fell upon him, and time was doing its work. He had begun to forget her; to promise himself that, this present enterprise accomplished, he would eliminate the past, and lead a different and cleaner life; and yet, here, on the most unlikely corner of God’s earth, her sister passed like a stage figure before his eyes—the sister from whom she was never parted.

The shock came upon him as a thunderbolt from a blue sky. He had fancied her to be in England, Europe, Australia—anywhere but here. In his weak state the surprise was too great. Again the gush of the waters thundered in his ear; again the light faded from his eyes; and this time he dived into blank unconsciousness.