Chapter XIV: A Pirates’ Harbor

Windless swell and a burning sky. Ahead, broken palings of mop-headed tree-trunks growing straight across the sea; on one beam, scattered patches of white, where the surf crumbled over hidden coral reef; on the other, the bright blue water of the Mexican Gulf, with its yellow floating tangles of weed. A steamer lunging through the rollers at a small six knots.

On her decks was visible one man, and one alone, and he was on the upper bridge, with his fists on the spokes of the steam steering-wheel. He was swaying with weariness, his eyes were dull and leaden, his cheeks were of an unwholesome yellow, because the tan would not let them turn pale white. Yet his task was one which put to the strain every piece of his alertness. He was taking a steamer drawing nineteen feet through a channel of whose very existence no man on earth besides himself had ever guessed; and already he was deep in sea-territory which the charts of 1893 still mark as “unsurveyed.” He had vaguely found the channel some months before in an open boat, and written cross compass-bearings on the back of a crumpled envelope. These he carried in his head now, and used as the sea-marks closed; but they were a frail reed for much dependence.

For such work a leadsman is an absolute necessity; and on board the _Port Edes_ a leadsman was an absolute impossibility. The remaining two of her manning were working as ten men to keep up any head of steam for her engines. And so Patrick Onslow took his soundings with eye and nostrils, as do some of the more ancient of the coaster folk; and instinct did not, upon the whole, serve him badly. Twice he scoured the steamer’s bottom plates over branching coral plants, which broke away with clattering jars, and let her through to deeper water ahead; and once he ran upon a tail of white sand, which pinned her just forward of ’midships. But he rang off the engines, waited till the scream of the escape-pipe showed a full head of steam, and then on a flowing tide put her full speed astern, and slid clear.

The skipper in the stokehold below waxed blasphemous at the man who had “got the shore on board;” but he did not cease from shoveling coals; neither did the big donkeyman, save at those moments when the clang of the telegraph-bell called him to stand by the throttle or reversing gear in the engine-room.

So the _Port Edes_ drew up this narrow, unknown sea-river, through the shallows which fill that bight of the S. W. Floridan coast, and the tired man who was governing her steered every hour with stronger confidence and duller consciousness. Now he held on to what was apparently an unbroken line of surf, where, if the steamer struck, she would be a stove-in wreck within the hour; but as she closed with it a passage opened out which took her through in clear water, although the yeasty surges of the backwash would leap like live things far up her sides, and scream and bellow through the scuppers. Now he dodged, with helm hard a-starboard one minute, hard to port the next, amongst an archipelago of unnamed keys, where the first mangrove trees were getting to work at building these outlying scraps of animal stone into part of the North American continent.

Beyond was a broad, smooth lagoon, shimmering in the sunlight, dancing with little silver waves, and beyond, again, was a wall of woodwork growing in one solid mass of trunks from behind the tangle of slimy mangroves which sprawled along the water’s edge. Bare land was to be seen nowhere; all was blotted out by the rank luxuriance of the subtropical flora.

The steamer held on her course athwart this placid sea-lake, aiming straight as a rifle-shot for what appeared to be the densest part of the forest. But as she neared it, an overlapping cape gradually distinguished itself from the rest of the greenery, and directly afterwards banks of milky sand opened out, with a gut of river between them.

Onslow steered on, sitting upon the grating now, and holding the wheel one-handed by the lower spokes; and in the fat, hot stew of the stokehold below, Kettle and the donkeyman shoveled coal to the light of reeking slush-lamps and the tune of furnace-roar.

The steamer, in grip of the river-stream, swung round the bights and twistings, finding deep water everywhere, though often she could not make the turn quickly enough, and bruised with her forefoot the slimy mangrove-stems which marked the bank. But the current was strong, and each time swept her clear, and those below were scarcely conscious of the graze.

Knot by knot, the brine of the Mexican Gulf was being left behind, and the noises of the woods and odors of the trees and the swamps were closing in upon them. The swell fanning out from the steamer’s wake wetted the alligators in their basking-places behind the saw-grass; and the reek from her smoke-stacks scared the stilt-legged waterfowl afish in the shallows. She coasted round a bayou of black water, walled in by stern ranks of cypress-trees; she cut across another with graceful-leaved palmetto-scrub on either hand, and ragged cabbage-palms sprouting out from above. And then she swung again where the river forked, and steamed down a straight, unswerving water-line, which led to the very heart of the Everglades.

But the pace was slowing now; slowing, indeed, till the steamer would hardly steer against the current, which ever and anon gripped her by the head or the tail, and carried her with sullen sheerings on to mangrove cluster or tree-clad bluff. And the reason was that the head of steam was failing. Captain Owen Kettle, as more Christian men have done before, ignored his own previous preachings when the application came in, and proved only human soon after he had taken up the _rôle_ of fireman. Driven half lunatic by the heat and the work, he kept dipping his lips in the water-bucket, and drinking heavy draughts. As a consequence, that unpoetical complaint, cramp in the stomach, overtook him at last, and tied him into those ungainly knots of torture which he had so frequently observed upon scientifically in others. But, as there was no one at hand to administer the heroic remedy of chlorodyne _cum_ rhubarb _cum_ laudanum _cum_ pill, and give him something else to think about, in the original kind of knots he remained.

The donkeyman, with a hearty Belfast curse, tried to do double work; but, as he had been laboring quite to the top of his strength for many hours previously, the effort did not meet with unqualified success. As anyone with less dogged, wooden pluck might have known, it is impossible for one man to fire a twelve-furnace steamer, wheel himself coal from the bunkers, and act as engineer and greaser when required, however great be the initial supply of brute force with which God has endowed him. Every time he wiped the wet from his eyes and looked at the steam-gauge, it had climbed down since the time before; and however furiously he might heave new fuel on to the caking clinkers, that jumping index would continue its downward crawl.

The oiled rumbling of the engines slowed, and grew more sluggish, and then the ponderous cranks took to stopping on a turn, as though to gain strength for the next round. But this did not go on for long. The donkeyman felt a gentle heave of the foot-plates beneath him, and then a heel which was not recovered. “And begor!” said he, “the bucking old tramp’s tuk the ground at last, thanks be!”

He pitched his shovel through a dull glowing furnace-door, and turned to where the little Captain was lying on the polished foot-plates, holding a yellow, flaring slush-lamp before him to see through the stifling, dusty gloom.

“Gum!” he exclaimed, “the Old Man looks pretty sick. I’ll crane him up in the ash-lift.”

This he did, and took his commanding officer into the main cabin, where the air was bright and baking, and the mosquitoes were biting like dogs. Then, throwing back the lid of the medicine-chest (which stood beside the door into the companion way), he gazed appreciatively at the rows of bottles, unstoppered one or two and sniffed at their contents, and then slammed down the lid again as a thought struck him.

“No,” he said, “I’m blistered if I do! Red Kettle wouldn’t give me physic last time I thought I’d like a dose, an’ now I’ll see how he fancies getting round on nothing. Fair play’s a jool. I’ll just report to the pilot, an’ then turn in.”

The “pilot,” however, when the donkeyman had wearily hauled himself on to the upper bridge and stood by his side, proved to be so dead asleep that no amount of shouting or shaking would wake him. Even the flies did not make him wince.

“Sor, wake or ye’ll be sunstrook, if ye’re not that already. Rouse, sor; I can’t lug ye below, an’ I can’t rig an awnin’. I’m too tired to spake again; but if yez stay here ye’ll fry like a rasher an’ be ate by flies. There’s a whopping skeeter in each of yer eyeholes this minut, an’ a kind of a locust browsing on the end of yer snout. Listen! I’m knockin’ wid a boot-toe on yer ribs. Well, man, now, if ye won’t listen to reason, it’s just leavin’ yez I am to stew in yer own juice.”

The donkeyman clumped heavily back down the ladder, and went with weary steps aft along the bridge-deck towards his own place. But at the break of the deck he paused, spread his grimy, shiny elbows on the rail, and indulged in a thin, small whistle.

“Now here,” he soliloquized, “we have come, as the skipper remarked, up an unbeknown drain, to which man’s improvements have not been introjuced, and there’s callers turning up already. That was the nose of a gaff-taups’l squintin’ between those treetops down-stream a minute ago, or I’m a Dago. D’ye know, Mr. Sullivan, chief of the _Port Edes_, I’m beginning to think ye’d have got better value if ye’d gone cruisin’ off by an’ large with the other boys in the lifeboats. Thrue, there’s the twenty one-pound notes to dhraw, and a daisy of a spree to have if ye can get anywhere to have ut; but ye’ve worked that wage out already, me son, an’ it rather seems as though there’s more laboriousness to follow.”

He yawned cavernously. “’Tisn’t often I’d say ‘No’ to a bit of a scrimmage, but theatricals are not to my taste just now at all. Too much overtime ruins the sense of humor.”

He yawned again, and blinked his eyes drearily. “You must turn in now, Mr. Sullivan dear, or ye’ll fall down here and be ate alive by the skeeters an’ other wild beasts of the forrust; and if the explorers who are underneath that white gaff-taups’l want to come aboard here and make throuble, so far as you’re concerned they’ll be let.”

And with that the donkeyman staggered away to his room beneath the poop, sat over the edge of his bunk, and was snoring melodiously before his head and his heels were on the blanket.

Meanwhile, a mile lower down, a small center-board sloop was turning to windward up the river, but making little headway against the current. A negro stood in her fore-scuttle, with his elbows on the deck. Two others sprawled on either side of him. A big white man lay spread-eagled on the top of the coach-roof of the cabin, and another stood in the cockpit steering.

Of all the quintette, the man at the tiller was the only one who showed signs of energy, and his energy had sulphurous anger mixed with it. He was a bowed, shambling creature, with one eye red and the other missing, with long, hairy, ape-like arms, and with a dumb impediment of speech, which threw him into paroxysms of temper every second time he opened his lips. Once or twice, when his malady struck him voiceless in the middle of a sentence, the other white man laughed; and then, when his tongue served him again, the helmsman would break off from the text and rap out a stream of poisonous cursings.

At last he climaxed these by the only vituperation which no American can listen to unmoved, and the man on the coach-roof dropped his indolence like a flash, and was on him before he could resist. The aggressor was lusty, and he shook the steersman as a big dog shakes a rat, with ponderous wrenches; and because the sloop carried a strong weather helm, when the tiller was let go, she ran up into the wind with her canvas slatting wildly.

“You snake-mouthed little skunk! you’d say that to me, would you? I thought I learned you once before how far you might go. You’ve had one eye gouged for this game less’n a month back, and if you fling your twisted, stuttering tongue at me any more, by gum, I’ll pocket the other!”

The blacks on the fore-deck chuckled and spluttered; but the big man hove an iron bucket at them, with curt command to “quit that ye-hawin’,” which they did with a yell and a sudden veiling of ivory. Then, by an indolent sprawling of the arms and legs, he gained his basking-place again on the top of the cabin-roof, and once more the steersman got the sloop under command.

The next three boards were made in silence, save for the creaking of gear when she went about; and then the one-eyed man broke out again—

“You’re sure it wasn’t a Government bo-o-o-at, Hank?”

“Government be sugared! She wasn’t the right build, to start with. Besides, if Government knew this channel at all, you bet it’d be said so in all the papers. And _she_ did know it, or she wouldn’t have gone buzzing past at six knots without a leadsman. Seems to me someone’s split, and she’s some darned Britisher come to cut out our game for themselves.”

“You tire me. Plume-hunting’s illegal by these bub-bub-blessed bird laws, and so’s selling whisky to Injuns. As it is, we’ve trouble enough to sneak in and out of the ’Glades in this sus-sus-sus-s-s-lip of a sloop, so how in snakes d’you expect they’d do it in a thousand-ton——”

Here the man’s infirmity blocked his speech for a minute. He snarled out: “Oh, I’ve no use for a blank puttyhead like you!”

Hank laughed, and put tobacco into his mouth. “Go it!” he said—“go it, right close to the end if you like; but bring up short of that, or I’ll gouge you, sure’s death!”

The steersman grinned a spasm of fury. He longed much to use again the unpardonable phrase, but he forbore. He felt that his friend would be as good as his word. So he ceased from speech altogether, and a negro on the fore-deck enlivened the silence with the Jordan Hymn, giving full value to every possible shake and turn.

A porpoise surged past them, making for the open after a day’s fresh-water fishing, and once or twice an alligator’s eyebrows and snout showed like knots of black wood floating up against the current, for this was territory where the skin-hunter’s rifle had not scared them altogether into night-work. The sloop’s pace up-stream was small and it was not till just before nightfall that she rounded a cape where high black pines stood up like soldiers on parade around the water’s edge, and there saw the intruder. The steamer was grounded on a sandbank athwart the stream, and lay, with a two-foot list, away from the current. Not until they were close aboard of her could those on the sloop see the gold lettering on her counter.

“B-b-both lifeboats gone! Say, that’s rum!”

“‘_Port Edes_, of London,’” Hank read. “_Port Edes_? I seem to know that name.” He swung his long legs down over the cabin doorway, and sat staring at his companion with open-mouthed wonder. “Hallo, Nutt!” he said, “what’s wrong now! I haven’t seen you wear that kind o’ face before. You couldn’t look pleaseder if I’d said your rich uncle had gone dead. There’s no pards of ours aboard of her, is there?”

The one-eyed man’s face was lit up with an unholy joy. “Don’t you know?” he stuttered out. “The biz was in all the papers. That steamboat was bringing out half a million of sovereigns. Her port was New Orleans; and she’s got here. By gum, I s’pose they think they’re going to s-s-steal it all by themselves.”

“Steal? What do you mean?”

“Oh, you idiot! What would they come here at all for if it was all right?”

“Who’s they?” inquired Hank.

“I gug-gug-guess we shall know that soon,” returned the one-eyed man grimly. “Hi, you niggers there, forward! I s’pose you got razors hid somewhere in yer pants?”

“Say,” drawled his friend, “you’d mebbe better go slow over this deal, Mr. Billy Nutt. The steamer does look asleep, but if you start making your self ugly too soon, somebody may wake up and pull off guns at us.”

“I’ve been mum-mum-missed before.”

“So’ve I, sonny. That’s why there’s all the more chance of being hit now. You go slow, Billy Nutt; just go slow. If they see that ugly face of yours and hear you talk, somebody’ll shoot, sure’s death.”

“Shoot or no shoot,” retorted the man at the tiller, “I’m going to have some of their plunder before a dozen hours are over, or else be a deader. I never had a chance like this in all my life before, and I’ll never geg-geg-get another.”

“You bet not,” agreed his friend. “Nor’ll I. That’s why I’ll stand in with you over this deal down to the last chip. I guess it’s the one soft thing I’ve been looking for all through a lifetime. I thought once I was going to make my pile out of breaking Monte Carlo. Then it was a corner in pork. Then we tried to stick up a mail train and raid the dollars out of the express car. But all these operations kinder weakened when it came to the point. I s’pose we didn’t put enough jump into them. But we’ll not get euchred for want of that here. No, siree. You and me, Billy Nutt, ’ll either come out topside over this deal, or else die in our boots. You hear me. I reckon,” he added, in a lower voice, “we can count well on the niggers, too. They’re not exactly a camp-meeting crowd. They’re toughs that a racket like this’ll suit as nat’ral as chicken-stealing.”

He bent forward over the coach-roof and communicated the scheme to the negroes in a few words. The mobile African faces changed like children’s. They became savage and animal-like. The fellow who but a short while before had carried such a look of touching devotion as he trolled out the Jordan Hymn, ceased almost to be human. In a flash he had turned to a lustful, savage beast, with glinting yellow eyeballs, gripping a razor with one black paw and ready to grapple anything with the other. The veneer of American civilization had slid from him like some tattered wrap. He was a fitting specimen of the most dangerous “made” race of which this world can at present boast.

Even Hank was half alarmed at the furies he had unchained. “See here, fellows!” he said, as an after-thought. “Just take care which way you run when we get aboard that steamer, and don’t get foul of Billy Nutt and me. If you try any of your blame’ nigger carving games on us, I guess you’ll turn into cold meat quicker’n you can wink. Nutt and me are the handiest men with guns in this section of Florida.”

“All right, boss; no shirt!” said he of the razor.

“Well, I was just telling you,” returned the big man. “And now, quiet, all hands. If we can slip aboard without anybody hailing us, it’ll be healthier for us, whatever it may be for other people.”

Once more the noises of the forest, and the occasional creaking of the sloop’s gear, made up the only sounds; and from beyond the western treetops the brazen sun took a final glare at them before it dived to rest for the night. The negro who had been singing the hymn sat on the fore-deck, and stropped a razor on the bare sole-leather of his foot. The two white men re-charged their revolvers.