Part 8 (2/2)
Her voice seemed to rouse him as from troubled sleep.
”I was. .h.i.t,” he muttered. ”What is it? What is wrong?”
”Oh, come, come!” she screamed, for some unseen agency tore a transverse gash in the planking not a foot in front of them.
He yielded with broken expostulations. She dragged him to the top of the stairs. Clinging to him, she half walked, half fell down the few steps. But she did not quite fall; Hozier's weight was almost more than she could manage, but she clung to him desperately, saved him from a headlong plunge to the deck, and literally carried him into the forecastle, where she found some of the crew who had scurried there like rabbits to their burrow when the first sh.e.l.l crashed into the engine-room.
Iris's fine eyes darted lightning at them.
”You call yourselves men,” she cried shrilly, ”yet you leave one of your officers lying on deck to be shot at by those fiends!”
”We didn't know he was there, miss,” said one. ”We'd ha' fetched him right enough if we did.”
Even in her present stress of mixed emotions, the sailor's words sounded reasonable. Every other person on board was just as greatly stunned by this monstrous attack as she herself, and the firing now appeared to increase in volume and accuracy. Several bullets clanged against the funnel or broke huge splinters off the boats.
”Gord A'mighty, listen to that,” growled a voice. ”An' we cooped up here, blazed at by a lot of rotten Dagos, with not a gun to our name!”
Iris was still supporting Hozier, whose head and shoulders were pillowed against her breast as she knelt behind him.
”Can nothing be done?” she asked. ”I believe Captain c.o.ke has been killed. Mr. Hozier is badly injured, I fear. Bring some water, if possible.”
”Yes, yes, water. . . . Only a knock on the head. . . . How did it happen? And what is that noise of firing?”
Hozier's scattered wits were returning, though neither he nor Iris remembered that the _Andromeda_ was waterless. He looked up at her, then at the men, and he smiled as his eyes met hers again.
”Funny thing!” he said, with a natural tone that was rea.s.suring. ”I thought the windla.s.s smashed itself into smithereens. But it couldn't.
What was it that banged?”
”A sh.e.l.l, fired from the island,” said the girl.
Hozier straightened himself a little. He was hearing marvels, though far from understanding them, as yet.
”A sh.e.l.l!” he repeated vacantly. Had she said ”a comet” it could not have sounded more incredible.
”Yes. It might have killed you. Several of the men are dead. I myself saw three of them killed outright, and two others are badly wounded.”
”Here you are, sir--drink this,” said a fireman, offering a pannikin of beer. It was unpalatable stuff, but it tasted like the nectar of the G.o.ds to one who had sustained a blow that would have felled an ox.
Hozier had almost emptied the tin when an exclamation from an Irish stoker drew all eyes to the after part of the s.h.i.+p.
”Holy war! Will ye look at that!” shouted the man. ”Sure the skipper isn't dead, at all, at all.”
Iris had failed to grasp the meaning of c.o.ke's antics in the chart-room, but they were now fully explained. The bulldog breed of this self-confessed rascal had taken the upper hand of him. Though he had not scrupled to plot the destruction of the s.h.i.+p, and thus rob a marine insurance company of a considerable sum of money--though at that very instant there was actual proof of his scheme in the preparations he had made to jam the steering-gear when the anchor was raised after the tanks were replenished--it was not in the man's nature to skulk into comparative safety because a foreigner, a pirate, a not-to-be-mentioned-in-polite-society Portygee, opened fire on him in this murderous fas.h.i.+on. Moreover, c.o.ke's villainy would have sacrificed no lives. The _Andromeda_ might be converted into sc.r.a.p iron, and thereby give back, by perverted arithmetic, the money invested in her. But her white decks would not be stained with blood.
Whatever risk was incurred would be his, the responsible captain's, his only. It was a vastly different thing that shot and sh.e.l.l should be rained on an unarmed s.h.i.+p by the troops of a civilized power when she was seeking the lowest form of hospitality. No wonder if the bull-necked skipper foamed at the mouth and used words forbidden by the catechism; no wonder if he tried to express his helpless fury in one last act of defiance.
He rummaged the lockers for a Union Jack and the four flags that showed the s.h.i.+p's name in signal letters. The red ensign was already fluttering from a staff at the stern, and the house flag of David Verity & Co. was at the fore, but these emblems did not satisfy c.o.ke's fighting mettle. The _Andromeda_ would probably crack like an eggsh.e.l.l the instant she touched the reef towards which she was hurrying; he determined that she would go down with colors flying if he were not put out of action by a bullet before he could reach the main halyard.
The swerve in the s.h.i.+p's course as she pa.s.sed the island gave him an opportunity. In justice to c.o.ke it should be said that he recked naught of this, but it would have been humanly impossible otherwise for the soldiers to have missed him. And now, while the vessel lay with straight keel in the set of the current, the national emblem of Britain, with the _Andromeda's_ code flags beneath, fluttered up the mainmast.
There are many imaginable conditions under which c.o.ke's deed would be regarded as sublime; there are none which could deny his splendid audacity. The soldiers, who seemed to be actuated by the utmost malevolence, redoubled their efforts to hit the squat Hercules who had bellowed at them and their fellow artillerists from the bridge.
<script>