Part 4 (2/2)
In telling it, the picture seems clear enough, but in the seeing, it was a thing of horrible and tangled details, enacted as swiftly as a moving-picture film run too rapidly on its reel.
There were shouts and quick staccato orders piercing the blending of terrorized voices--an oath snapped out--a shriek--a struggling ma.s.s--a desperate run up the ladder--hands straining aloft to pull down the climber and clear the way--a swift blow from above, a thud on the deck below--a sickening vision of slaughter. Over it all pounded the hammering racket from the disorganized engines. Soon came the stench of smoke and out of one of the after hatches mounted a thin tongue of orange flame, snapping and sputtering vengefully for a moment, then leaping up with a suddenly augmented roar. The twin elements of destruction, water and fire, were vying in the work of annihilation.
I turned my head for an instant to look back at the new menace, and clutched Mansfield's arm. Aloof with folded arms against the rail, making no effort to partic.i.p.ate in the riot, stood young Lawrence. The fast-spreading flames lit up his face. His att.i.tude and expression were those of quiet disgust. His lips were set in scorn for the superlative excitement of his fellows. He was the stoic awaiting the end, with a smile of welcome for the acid test which held, for him, no fear. It was as though the rising rim of water brought a promise of grateful rest. He saw ahead nothing except release from all the wild turmoil and misery which had spoken itself without words that evening when Coulter had silenced the improvisation of his violin.
But if the end was a thing of quiet philosophy to Lawrence, it was not so to others. The lurid flare, which turned the impa.s.sioned picture in a moment from a silhouette of blacks and cobalts to a crimson h.e.l.l, seemed to inflame to greater madness men already mad. There was a rush for the rails. We saw figures leaping into the sea. There had been some hitch on the bridge, due no doubt to the miserable condition of everything aboard the disheveled tramp. The boats were not yet launched, but now the men were embarking. Coulter himself was the last to leap for the swinging boat, and a moment before he did so Hoak appeared. He had miraculously made his way alive out of the engine-room's inferno, and his coming was that of a maniac. His huge body, bare to the waist, sweat-streaked and soot-blackened and fire-blistered, was also dark with blood. His voice was raised in demented laughter and every vestige of reason had deserted eyes that were now agleam only with homicidal mania. From the companionway to the bridge, his course was as swift and sure as a homing pigeon's. He brandished the shovel with which he had been shamefully forced to feed the maws of the furnaces. The struggling men fell back before his onslaught. But Hoak had no care for self-preservation. His sole mission was reprisal.
The fight about the ladder's foot had waned. With a leap that carried him half-way up and an agility that knew no thwarting the madman made the upper level. The tyrannical despot of the vessel, standing poised for his swing to the boat raised the pistol which had already halted other mad rushes during the last sanguinary minutes. At its bark Hoak staggered to his knees, but was up again and charging forward with the impetus of a wounded rhinoceros. He had one deed to do before he died and would not be denied. The flying shovel narrowly missed the captain's head as he jumped for the boat, but the seaman with his lips parted over the snarl of clenched teeth fought his painful way to the davit, gripping a knife which he had brought in his belt. His eyes glowed with the strange light that madness lends and his muscles were tensed in the brief exaggerated strength of a supreme effort. He hurled himself to the out-swung support and seizing the stern line began hacking at its tarred tautness as he bellowed ghastly laughter and blasphemies. Coulter from his place below sent two more bullets into the great hulk of flesh that hung tenaciously and menacingly above him, but, as the second spat out, the rope, none too good at best, parted and the boat, held only by its bow line, swung down with a mighty snap, spilling its occupants into the sea like apples tossed from an overturned plate. We had a momentary glimpse of the captain clinging to the gunwale, his legs las.h.i.+ng out flail-like. Then his hold loosened and he fell with a splash into the phosphorus water where the sharks were already gathering. And at the same moment, his mission performed, Hoak slowly slid around the curving davit and dropped limply after him.
Young Mansfield's voice came vaguely to my ear. ”They've overlooked the life-raft,” he said. ”Let's have a try at that. There's not much time now.”
The starboard scuppers were letting in sea water and the flames were creeping close, as we turned together, holding to the shadows of the superstructure, and ran forward.
We were tearing our fingers raw over stiffened knots when a rush of feet interrupted us. The next instant I saw my companion las.h.i.+ng out with the b.u.t.t of his pistol, and surrounded by a quartette of a.s.sailants. In the moonlight he loomed gigantic and heroic of proportion. I, too, was surrounded and conscious only of a wild new elation and battle-l.u.s.t, as I fought.
Suddenly there came a terrific shock, preceded by a wildly screaming hiss in the bowels of the _Wastrel's_ hull. The torn sh.e.l.l quivered in an insensate death-rattle, and under a detonation at once hollow and loud a ma.s.s of timbers shot upward amids.h.i.+ps. The boilers had let go and we hung wavering for the final plunge, yet it did not come at once. Then I suppose I was struck by falling debris. With a dizzy sense of stars dancing as lawlessly as rocket sparks and dying as quickly into blackness, I lost all hold on consciousness.
CHAPTER VII
IN STRANGE CIRc.u.mSTANCES.
Pongee pajamas and a revolver belt const.i.tute a light equipment even for the tropics, but that was the least pressing of my concerns.
How long I had remained insensible I can only estimate, but often there come back to me, from that time, wraith-like shreds of memory in which I seem to have drifted down the centuries. I recall for one thing a stunned and throbbing aching back of the eyes and a half-conscious gazing up at rocking stars.
At all events, when rational understanding returned to me, the sun was glaring insufferably from a scorched zenith. I began to patch together fragments of memory and to call loudly for Mansfield. There was no answer, and when I attempted to rise I found myself roughly lashed to the life-raft by several turns of a line so tightly drawn that the sensory nerves in my legs gave no response to my movements.
My support was rocking in its lodgment between two weed-trailing boulders, stained like verdigris and licked smooth by the lapping of the sea. Off to my front stretched waters, so quiet that they seemed almost tideless, though at a distance I could hear the running of surf. To look behind involved a painful twisting of my neck, but I made the effort, and was rewarded with the sight of land. A quarter of a mile away smooth reaches of white sand met the water in a graciously inviting beach.
Beyond it and mounting upward from palm fringe to snow-cap rose the very respectable proportions of a volcanic island. The coral rocks which had caught my raft were outposts of many others that went trooping sh.o.r.eward, breaking, here and there, the surface of jade-green shallows.
From the deep turquoise of the outer sea to the white rim of the sands ran a gamut of colorful beauty. The mountain, as symmetrically coned as Fuji-yama, stood over it all in grave dominance. Off to the left sponge-like cliffs broke steeply upward from the level of the beach and about their clefts circled endless flights of gulls. There I knew the rising tide would thunder and break itself to pieces in a thousand plumes of spray.
But how had I reached this place and what had become of Mansfield? It must have been he who had lashed me to the raft. From no one else on the _Wastrel_ could I have expected better treatment than ”a cutla.s.s swipe or an ounce of lead.” Palpably, he had emerged from the battle victor, and, save for myself, sole survivor. I conjectured that when he had floated the raft from the partly submerged deck, he had found the spark of life still lurking in my pulses and had made me fast upon its timbers. Perhaps an over-trust in his ability to remain afloat had made him less careful of himself. Possibly he had lost consciousness as we drifted and had been washed over-side, to fall prey to the prowling sharks. I could not hope to know what his end had been, but I wished that I might have shared it with him.
I fumbled at the soaked knots of my rope with fingers that had grown numb. When, at last, I was free and had to some extent restored the circulation in my stagnant veins, I began the task of freeing my oarless craft from its wedged position so that the insetting tide might carry me to the sh.o.r.e.
In the pocket of my pajama jacket, soaked with salt water and almost reduced to a pulp, I found the letter which I stood charged to deliver to the girl in Suss.e.x. I laughed. I knew that I was not in reality the solitary survivor of the _Wastrel_. I was merely the latest survivor. I was to die more slowly than my fellows. This sun, at the end of my lingering, would beat down on my bones, whitened, disjointed and perhaps vulture-plucked. The revolver in my belt was already clouding into red rust under the was.h.i.+ng of the night's salt water. I experimentally turned the cylinder and found that the corrosion had not yet attacked the mechanism. One cartridge could cheat my sentence of slow death, yet I did not fire the shot.
Life had heretofore been a thing I would have willingly surrendered.
Now, I found myself standing precariously on the narrow and very slippery edge of existence, and with Death advancing on me I no longer wished to die. The very odds against me brought a dogged desire to cling until my feet should slip and my fingers could no longer hold their life-grip. Meantime I should probably go mad, but that lay hereafter. At present I had only to wait for the tide. Since I could not hurry the ocean pulse, I must lie there thinking.
From the sea I could look for rescue only by a miracle. What had been Coulter's course or destination he had not confided, but I knew that we had for days been in imperfectly charted waters where our screws had perhaps kicked up a virgin wake. We had pa.s.sed atolls marked, on the chart, P. D. and even E. D. (”position doubtful” and ”existence doubtful”), and to hope that some other wanderer might shortly follow would be taxing coincidence too far.
Only G.o.d knew what type of human, animal and reptilian life the island held. I could view it across the accursedly beautiful waterway and speculate upon its nature, but I could beat up no confidence in its treatment of me. Its aspect would have been magnificent had its lush greenery not wrapped and softened every commanding crag and angle, but it was a loveliness which suggested treacherous menace; the deceptive beauty of the panther or of the soft-gliding snake that charms its prey to death.
Isolation here would sap my mental essence and atrophy my brain, unless some device could be found by which I could side-focus and divert my trend of thought. Even had the young girl's diary remained to me, I might by it have kept myself reminded of life in those civilized spots which I could hardly hope to revisit; and so I might die sane. A single book would have helped. I had been credited with a sense of the ludicrous so whimsical as to be almost irresponsible. If now I could invoke that facetious quality to my salvation I might hope to be regarded as a consistent humorist.
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