Part 44 (2/2)
And how they fought! There was something awe-inspiring and almost beyond the human in the fury with which they labored. It was in the fireroom that their chief difficulty lay. The fireroom of a large steamer is a veritable furnace, and when to this heat was added that from the hold of the s.h.i.+p, it was truly a miracle that any living thing could exist there.
But Harrigan was in charge. When men wilted and pitched to their faces on the sooty, dusty floor, he trussed them under one arm and bore them up to the air. Then he went back and drove them on again. Before the end of that day, however, with the coast still a full thirty-hour run ahead of them, it became literally impossible to continue longer in the fireroom. But Harrigan would not leave. He had a hose introduced into the hold. The men worked absolutely naked with a stream of water playing on them. Now and again when one of them collapsed, Harrigan s.n.a.t.c.hed the fire bar or the shovel from the hands of the worker and labored furiously until another subst.i.tute was found.
The necessity of his presence was amply demonstrated that night. The Irishman was too exhausted to continue another minute, and the men helped him to the deck and sluiced buckets of salt water over his great, trembling body. To keep the men at work, Campbell went down in the hole.
They had to carry him up in half an hour. Then McTee tried his hand. He stood the heat as well as Harrigan, but he could not inspire such daredevil enthusiasm in the men. They missed the raucous, cheery voice of Harrigan; they missed the inspiring sight of that flame-red hair; and they missed above all his peculiar driving force. In other words, when Harrigan came among them, they felt _hope_, and when a man has hope, he will work on in the face of death.
And at last McTee came up and begged Harrigan to go back. He went, and found an empty fireroom and dying fires. He ran back to the deck, and at his shout the dead veritably rose to life. Men staggered to their feet to follow him below. Every man on the s.h.i.+p took his turn. Hovey came down and pa.s.sed coal; McTee came down and wielded the fire bar, doing the labor of three men while he could endure.
And the _Heron_ drove on toward the sh.o.r.e. The morning pa.s.sed; the afternoon wore away. It was a matter of hours now before the sh.o.r.e would be in sight, and McTee spread this news among the crew. He sent little Kamasura and s.h.i.+da, the cabin boys, running here and there saying to every man they pa.s.sed: ”Four hours! Four hours! Four hours!”
And then: ”Three hours! Three hours! Three hours!”
And the crew swallowed whisky neat and returned to the fireroom.
At sunset, dim as a shadow, a thing to be guessed at rather than known, the man on the bridge sighted land. The word spread like lightning. The staggering workers in the fireroom heard and joined the cheer which Harrigan started. Then the catastrophe came.
A torch of red fire licked up the stern of the s.h.i.+p; the flames had eaten their way out to the open air!
It was the quick action of McTee which kept the panic from spreading to the hold of the s.h.i.+p at once and bringing up every one of the workers from the fireroom. He gathered the sailors on deck who had strength enough left to walk, and they made a line and attacked the flames with buckets of water. There was, of course, no possibility of quelling the fire at its source, for by this time the hold of the s.h.i.+p where the wheat was stowed must have been one glowing ma.s.s of smoldering matter.
Yet they were able, for a time, to keep the course of the fire from spreading over the decks of the s.h.i.+p.
With this work fairly started, McTee ran back to the forward cabin and upper deck of the _Heron_ and set several men to tear down some of the framework, sufficient at least to build enough rafts to maintain the crew in the water. So the three sections of the work went on--the firefighting, the lifesaving, and the driving of the s.h.i.+p. McTee on deck managed two ends of it; Harrigan in the fireroom handled the most desperate responsibility. It seemed as if these two men by their naked will power were lifting the lives of the crew away from the touch of death and hurling the s.h.i.+p toward the sh.o.r.e.
And now for an hour, for two hours, that ghastly labor continued. The entire stern of the _Heron_ was a sheet of flames when the last workers staggered up from the fireroom, their skin seared and blistered by the terrific heat. Last of all came Harrigan, raving and cursing and imploring the men to return to their work. As he staggered up the deck, reeling and sobbing hoa.r.s.ely, Kate Malone ran to him. She pointed out across the waters ahead of the s.h.i.+p. There rose the black shadow of the sh.o.r.e and under it a thin line of white--the breakers!
Now by McTee's direction the rafts were hoisted and dragged over the side of the s.h.i.+p, while one frail line of men remained to struggle against the encroaching flames.
They were licking into the waist of the _Heron_, and the wireless house was a ma.s.s of red; White Henshaw was burning at sea, and the prophecy was fulfilled.
The last of the rafts were hoisted overboard and half a dozen men tumbled into each. When the rest of the crew were overboard, McTee, Kate, and Harrigan, lingering behind by mutual consent, took one raft to themselves. All about them tossed the other rafts, and not one man of all the crowd had thought of the golden treasure which they were abandoning with the _Heron_. Each might be carrying a few gold pieces, but the wealth of White Henshaw would go back into the sea from which it came.
They had not abandoned the flaming s.h.i.+p too soon. A fresh breeze was sweeping from the ocean onto the sh.o.r.e, and red tongues licked about the main cabin and darted like reaching hands into the heart of the sky. By these flashes they could make out the struggling rafts where the sailors cheered and yelled in the triumph of their escape. But McTee set about erecting a jury sail.
He wrenched off two strips of board from their raft and across these he and Harrigan affixed their s.h.i.+rts. The same wind which had lashed the fires forward on the _Heron_ now hurried the fugitives toward the sh.o.r.e. They had a serious purpose in outstripping the rest of the rafts, because when the mutineers reached the sh.o.r.e, the mood of grat.i.tude which they held for Harrigan and McTee was sure to change, for these two men could submit enough evidence to hang them in any country in the world.
Looking back, the _Heron_ was a belching volcano, which suddenly lifted in the center with the sound of a dozen siege guns in volleyed unison, and a column of fire vaulted high into the heavens. Before they reached the tossing heart of the breakers, the _Heron_ was dwindling and sliding, fragment by fragment into the sea.
Through those breakers the last light from the s.h.i.+p helped them, and the wind tugging at their little jury sail aided to drive them on until they could swing off the raft and walk toward the beach, carrying Kate between them. On the safe, dry sands they turned, and as they looked back, the Heron slid forward into the ocean and quenched her fires with a hiss that was like a far-heard whisper of the sea.
CHAPTER 38
Meanwhile the shouts of the mutineers rang louder and louder as their rafts edged in toward the land, so the three turned again and made directly inland. A hundred yards from the edge of the water they were in a dense jungle such as only exists in a Central American swamp region, but they waded and splashed on, and clambered over rotten stumps, slick with wet moss, and stepped on fragments of wood that crumbled under their feet. And all the time they kept the girl between them, lifting her clear of the noisome water as much as possible.
The shouting of the mutineers, however, urged them on, and from the sound of the voices there was no doubt that Hovey and his men were combing the marsh for the fugitives. Torches had been made by the sailors, and behind them, now and then, they caught a glimpse of a winking eye of light. This drove them on, and just when the shouts of the mutineers began to die away, the marsh ended as abruptly as it had begun, and they started to climb a slope where the thicket changed to an almost open wood. The rise was not long, for after some hours of weary trudging, they reached a road.
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