CURSED

[ii]
[iii]
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[vi]

Copyright, 1919,
By SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
(incorporated)

CURSED

[x]
[1]

CURSED

AT BATU KAWAN

Slashed across the copper bowl of sunset, the jagged silhouette of tawny-shouldered mountains, fringed with areca-palms in black fretwork against the swift-fading glow, divided the tropic sky. Above, day yet lingered. Below, night’s dim shroud, here and there spangled with glow-lights still or moving, had already folded earth in its obscurity.

Down from that mountain crest the descending slopes fell through grove and plantation to the drowned paddy-fields and to the miasmatic swamps, brooded by settling mists like thin, white breath of ghosts that in this Malay land all men gave faith to.

Nearer still, it reached the squalid campong of Batu Kawan. Batu Kawan, huddled in filth, disorder and disease between the steaming arsenical green of the lowlands and the muddy idleness of the boat-jammed Timbago River. Batu Kawan, whence the New Bedford clipper-ship, Silver Fleece, should have sailed two hours ago on the high tide, this 18th day of February, 1868. Batu Kawan, pestilent, malodorous, sinister, swarming with easy life, hemmed round with easier death.

William Scurlock, mate, was looking townward, leaning with crossed arms on rail. The umber smudge[2] of half-light in the sky, fading over the torn edge of the mountains, revealed something of his blond bigness, freckled, weather-bitten, with close-cropped hair, a scarred jaw and hard teeth that gripped his cutty-pipe in bulldog fashion.

Scurlock seemed to be engaged with inward visionings, rather than outward. The occasional come-and-go of some dim figure in the waist of the ship, the fan-tan game of four or five Malay seamen—for the Silver Fleece carried a checkerboard crew, white, yellow and brown—as they squatted on their hunkers under the vague blur of a lantern just forward of the mainmast, and the hiccoughing stridor of an accordion in the fo’c’s’le, roused in him no reaction.

Nor, as he lolled there under the awning, did he appear to take heed of the mud-clogged river with its jumble of sampans and house-boats, or of the thatched huts and tiled godowns past which the colorful swarm of Oriental life was idling along the bund. This stewing caldron of heat, haze, odors, dusk where fruit-bats staggered against the appearing stars said nothing whatever to the mate. All he could see in it was inefficiency, delay and loss.

Not all its wizardry of gleaming lights in hut and shop, its firefly paper lanterns, its murmuring strangeness could weigh against the vexing fact that his ship had missed the tide, and that—though her full cargo of tea, rattan, tapioca, cacao and opium was under hatches—she still lay made fast to the bamboo mooring-piles. What could offset the annoyance that Captain Alpheus Briggs, ashore on business of his own, was still delaying the vital business of working downstream on the ebb?

“Devil of a cap’n!” grumbled Scurlock. He spat moodily into the dark waters, and sucked at his pipe. “Ain’t it enough for him to have put in a hundred[3] boxes of raw opium, which is liable to land us all in hell, without stealin’ a nigger wench an’ now drinkin’ samshu, ashore? Trouble comin’—mutiny an’ murder an’ damnation with trimmin’s, or I’m no Gloucester man!”

Savagely he growled in his deep throat. Scurlock disapproved of Batu Kawan and of all its works, especially of its women and its raw rice-whisky. The East grated on his taut nerves. Vague singing in huts and the twangle of musically discordant strings set his teeth on edge. He hated the smells of the place, all seemingly compounded of curry and spices and mud and smoke of wood fires, through which the perfumes of strange fruits and heavy flowers drifted insistently.

The voices of mothers calling their naked little ones within their doors, lest Mambang Kuning, the yellow devil who dwells in the dusk, should snatch them, jarred upon his evil temper. So, too, the monotonous tunk-tunk-tunk of metal-workers’ hammers in some unseen place; the snuffling grunt of carabaos wallowing in the mud-swale beyond the guava clump, up-stream; the nasal chatter of gharry-drivers and Kling boatmen; the whining sing-song of Malay pedlers with shouldered poles, whence swung baskets of sugar-cane and mangosteens. Scurlock abominated all that shuffling, chattering tangle of dark, half-clad life. The gorge of his trim, efficient, New England soul rose up against it, in hot scorn.

“Damn the Straits!” he grumbled, passing his hand over his forehead, sweaty in the breathless heat. “An’ damn Briggs, too! It’s my last voyage East, by joycus!”

Which was, indeed, the living truth, though by no means as Scurlock meant or understood it.

A plaintive hail from the rough brick coping of the bund drew his atrabilious attention. The mate[4] saw that a brown, beardless fellow was making gestures at him. A lantern on the quarterdeck flung unsteady rays upon the Malay’s nakedness, complete save for the breech-clout through which a kris was thrust. In his left hand he gripped a loose-woven coir bag, heavily full. His left held out, on open palm, three or four shining globules. Scurlock viewed with resentment the lean, grinning face, lips reddened and teeth jet-black by reason of long years of chewing lime and betel.

“Turtle egg, sar, sellum piecee cheap,” crooned the Malay. “Buyum turtle egg, sar?”

Scurlock’s answer was to bend, reach for a piece of holystone in a bucket by the rail, and catapult it at the vagabond who had made so bold as to interrupt his musings. The Malay swung aside; the holystone crunched into the sack of eggs and slid to earth.

The screaming curse of the barbarian hardly crossed the rail ahead of the flung kris. The wavy, poisoned blade flickered, spinning. Scurlock stooped away; the fraction of an eyewink later would have done his life’s business very neatly. Into the mizzen-mast drove the kris, and quivered there.

Scurlock turned, strode to it and plucked it out, swearing in his rage. The Malays at fan-tan by the gleam of the slush-light under the awning grew silent. Their fantastic little cards, of gaudy hue, dropped unheeded; for they had heard the name of Ratna Mutnu Manikam, god who brings death. Wherefore they shuddered, and turned scared faces aft; and some touched heart and forehead, warding off the curse.

Back to the rail, kris in hand, ran Scurlock.

“Juldi, you!” he shouted, with an oath unprintable. “Top your broom, you black swine—skip, before I come ashore an’ split you! Juldi jao!”

[5]

The Malay hesitated. Scurlock, flinging “Sur!” at him, which in the lingua franca denominates a swine, started for the gangway. Silently the Malay faded into the little fringe of brown and yellow folk that had already gathered; and so he vanished. Scurlock was already setting foot upon the gangway that led slantwise down to the bund, when through the quickly coagulating street-crowd an eddy, developing, made visible by the vague light a large head covered with a topi hat wrapped in a pugree. Powerful shoulders and huge elbows, by no means chary of smashing right and left against the naked ribs, cleared a passage, amid grunts and gasps of pain; and once or twice the big man’s fists swung effectively, by way of make-weight.

Then to William Scurlock’s sight appeared a tall, heavy-set figure, rather dandified, in raw yellow bamboo silk and with very neatly polished boots that seemed to scorn the mud of Batu Kawan. A first glance recorded black brows of great luxuriance, a jungle of black beard contrasting sharply with a face reddened by wind, weather and hard liquor, and, in the V of a half-opened shirt, a corded neck and hairy chest molded on lines of the young Hercules. This man would be going on for twenty-eight or so. Fists, eyes and jaw all lusted battle.

Alpheus Briggs, captain and part owner of the Silver Fleece, had returned.

ALPHEUS BRIGGS, BUCKO

For a moment, Briggs and Scurlock confronted each other, separated by the length of the gangway. Between them stretched silence; though on the bund a cackle and chatter of natives offended the night. Then Captain Briggs got sight of the kris. That sufficed, just as anything would have sufficed. He put his two huge, hairy fists on his hips; his neck swelled with rage born of samshu and a temper by nature the devil’s own; he bellowed in a formidable roar:

“Drop that knife, Mr. Scurlock! What’s the matter with you, sir?”

A wise mate would have obeyed, with never one word of answer. But Mr. Scurlock was very angry, and what very angry man was ever wise? He stammered, in a burst of rage:

“I—a Malay son of a pup—he hove it at me, an’ I—”

“Hove it at you, did he, sir?”

“Yes, an’—”

Tigerish with drunken ferocity, Briggs sprang up the plank. A single, right-hand drive to the jaw felled Scurlock. The kris jangled away and came to rest as Scurlock sprawled along the planking.

“Sir, Mr. Scurlock!” fulminated Briggs—though not even in this blind passion did he forget sea-etiquette, the true-bred Yankee captain’s “touch of the aft” in dealing with an officer. No verbal abuse; just the swinging fists now ready to knock Scurlock[7] flat again, should he attempt to rise. “Say sir to me, Mr. Scurlock, or I’ll teach you how!”

“Sir,” mumbled the mate, half dazed. He struggled to a sitting posture, blinking up with eyes of hate at the taut-muscled young giant who towered over him, eager for another blow.

“All right, Mr. Scurlock, and don’t forget I got a handle to my name, next time you speak to me. If any man, fore or aft, wants any o’ my fist, let him leave off sir, to me!”

He kicked Scurlock heavily in the ribs, so that the breath went grunting from him; then reached down a gorilla-paw, dragged him up by the collar and flung him staggering into the arms of “Chips,” the clipper’s carpenter—Gascar, his name was—who had just come up the quarterdeck companion. Other faces appeared: Bevans, the steward, and Prass, the bo’sun. Furiously Briggs confronted them all.

“Understand me?” he shouted, swaying a little as he stood there with eager fists. “Where’s Mr. Wansley?”

“Asleep, sir,” answered Bevans. Wansley, second-mate, was indeed dead to the world in his berth. Most of the work of stowing cargo had fallen on him, for in the old clippers a second-mate’s life hardly outranked a dog’s.

“What right has Mr. Wansley to be sleeping?” vociferated the captain, lashing himself into hotter rage. “By God, you’re all a lot of lazy, loafing, impudent swine!”

One smash of the fist and Bevans went staggering toward the forward companion ladder, near the foot of which a little knot of seamen, white, brown and yellow, had gathered in cheerful expectation of seeing murder done.

Briggs balanced himself, a strange figure in his[8] dandified silk and polished boots, with his topi hat awry, head thrust forward, brows scowling, massive neck swollen with rage and drink. Under the smudgy gleam of the lantern on the mizzen, his crimson face, muffled in jetty beard, and the evil-glowering eyes of him made a picture of wrath.

Briggs stooped, snatched up the kris that lay close by his feet, and with a hard-muscled arm whistled its keen edge through air.

“I’ll keep order on my ship,” he blared, passionately, “and if I can’t do it with my fists, by God, I’ll do it with this! The first man that loosens his tongue, I’ll split him like a herring!”

“Captain Briggs, just a moment, sir!” exclaimed a voice at his left. A short, well-knit figure in blue, advancing out of the shadows, ’round the aft companion, laid a hand on the drunken brute’s arm.

“You keep out of this, doctor!” cried Briggs. “They’re a mutinous, black lot o’ dogs that need lickin’, and I’m the man to give it to ’em!”

“Yes, yes, sir, of course,” Dr. Filhiol soothed the beast. “But as the ship’s physician, let me advise you to go to your cabin, sir. The heat and humidity are extremely bad. There’s danger of apoplexy, sir, if you let these fellows excite you. You aren’t going to give them the satisfaction of seeing you drop dead, are you, captain?”

Thrown off his course by this new idea, Briggs peered, blinked, pushed back his topi and scratched his thick, close-curling poll. Then all at once he nodded, emphatically.

“Right you are, doctor!” he cried, his mood swiftly changing. “I’ll go. They shan’t murder me—not yet, much as they’d like to!”

“Well spoken, sir. You’re a man of sense, sir—rare sense. And on a night like this—”

[9]

“The devil’s own night!” spat Briggs. “God, the breath sticks in my throat!” With thick, violent fingers he ripped at his shirt, baring his breast.

“Captain Briggs!” exclaimed Scurlock, now on his feet again. “Listen to a word, sir, please.”

“What the damnation now, sir?”

“We’ve lost the tide, sir. The comprador sent word aboard at four bells, he couldn’t hold his sampan men much longer. We should be standin’ downstream now, sir.” Scurlock spoke with white, shaking lips, rubbing his smitten jaw. Hate, scorn, rage grappled in his soul with his invincible New England sense of duty, of efficiency, of getting the ship’s work done. “If they’re goin’ to tow us down to-night, by joycus, sir, we’ve got to get under way, and be quick about it!”

Briggs dandled the kris. Its wavy blade, grooved to hold the dried curaré-poison that need do no more than scratch to kill, flung out vagrant high-lights in the gloom.

“For two cents I’d gut you, Mr. Scurlock,” he retorted. “I’m master of this ship, and she’ll sail when I’m ready, sir, not before!”

“Captain, they’re only trying to badger-draw you,” whispered Filhiol in the bucko’s ear. “A man of your intelligence will beat them at their own game.” Right well the doctor knew the futility of trying to get anything forward till the captain’s rage and liquor should have died. “Let these dogs bark, sir, if they will. You and I are men of education. I propose a quiet drink or two, sir, and then a bit of sleep—”

“What the devil do you mean by that, sir?” flared Briggs, turning on him. “You mean I’m not able to take my ship out of this devil’s ditch, to-night?”

“Farthest from my thought, captain,” laughed the doctor. “Of course you can, sir, if you want to.[10] But this mutinous scum is trying to force your hand. You’re not the man to let them.”

“I should say not!” swaggered the captain, with a blasphemy, while low-voiced murmurs ran among the men,—dim, half glimpsed figures by the mizzen, or in the waist. “Not much! Come, doctor!”

He lurched aft, still swinging the kris. Ardently Filhiol prayed he might gash himself therewith, but the devil guards his own. With savage grimace at Scurlock, the physician whispered: “Name o’ God, man, let him be!” Then, at a discreet distance, he followed Briggs.

Scurlock nodded, with murder in his eyes. Gascar and Bevans murmured words that must remain unwritten. Under the awning at the foot of the forward companion, white men from the fo’c’sle and Malays from the deck-house buzzed in divers tongues. Briggs, the while, was about to enter the after companion when to his irate ear the sound of a droning chant, somewhere ashore, came mingled with the dull thudding of a drum, monotonous, irritating as fever pulses in the brain of a sick man.

Briggs swerved to the starboard quarter rail and smote it mightily with his fist, as with bloodshot eyes he peered down at the smoky, lantern-glowing confusion of the bund.

“The damned Malays!” he shouted. “They’ve started another of their infernal sing-songs! If I could lay hands on that son of a whelp—”

He shook the kris madly at a little group about a blazing flare; in the midst squatted an itinerant ballad-singer. Tapping both heads of a small, barrel-like drum, the singer whined on and on, with intonations wholly maddening to the captain.

For a moment Briggs glared down at this scene,[11] which to his fuddled senses seemed a challenge direct, especially devil-sent to harry him.

“Look at that now, doctor, will you?” Briggs flung out his powerful left hand toward the singer. “Want to bet I can’t throw this knife through the black dog?”

He balanced the kris, ready for action, and with wicked eyes gauged the throw. Filhiol raised a disparaging hand.

“Don’t waste a splendid curio on the dog, captain,” smiled he, masking fear with indifference. Should Briggs so much as nick one of the Malays with that envenomed blade, Filhiol knew to a certainty that with fire and sword Batu Kawan would take complete vengeance. He knew that before morning no white man would draw life’s breath aboard the Silver Fleece. “You’ve got a wonderful curio there, sir. Don’t lose it, for a mere nothing.”

“Curio? What the devil do I care for Malay junk?” retorted Briggs, thick-tongued and bestial. “The only place I’d like to see this toothpick would be stickin’ out of that swine’s ribs!”

“Ah, but you don’t realize the value of the knife, sir,” wheedled Filhiol. “It’s an extraordinarily fine piece of steel, captain, and the carving of the lotus bud on the handle is a little masterpiece. I’d like it for my collection.” He paused, struck by inspiration. “I’ll play you for the knife, sir. Let’s have that drink we were speaking of, and then a few hands of poker. I’ll play you anything I’ve got—my watch, my instrument case, my wages for the voyage, whatever you like—against that kris. Is that a go?”

“Sheer off!” mocked Briggs, raising the blade. The doctor’s eye judged distance. He would grapple, if it came to that. But still he held to craft:

[12]

“This is the first time, captain, I ever knew you to be afraid of a good gamble.”

“Afraid? Me, afraid?” shouted the drunken man. “I’ll make you eat those words, sir! The knife against your pay!”

“Done!” said the doctor, stretching out his hand. Briggs took it in a grip that gritted the bones of Filhiol, then for a moment stood blinking, dazed, hiccoughing once or twice. His purpose, vacillant, once more was drawn to the singer. He laughed, with a maudlin catch of the breath.

“Does that gibberish mean anything, doctor?” asked he.

“Never mind, sir,” answered Filhiol. “We’ve got a game to play, and—”

“Not just yet, sir! That damned native may be laying a curse on me, for all I know. Mr. Scurlock!” he suddenly shouted forward.

“Aye, aye, sir,” answered the mate’s voice, through the gloom.

“Send me a Malay—one that can talk United States!”

“Yes, sir!” And Scurlock was heard in converse with the brown men in the waist. Over the rail the captain leaned, staring at the singer and the crowd, the smoky torches, the confused crawling of life in Batu Kawan; and as he stared, he muttered to himself, and twisted at his beard with his left hand—his right still gripped the kris.

“You damned, outrageous blackguard!” the doctor thought. “If I ever get you into your cabin, God curse me if I don’t throw enough opium into you to keep you quiet till we’re a hundred miles at sea!”

Came the barefoot slatting of a Malay, pad-pad-padding aft, and the sound of a soft-voiced: “Captain Briggs, sar?”

[13]

“You the man that Mr. Scurlock sent?” demanded Briggs.

“Yas, sar.”

“All right. Listen to that fellow down there—the one that’s singing!” Briggs laid a hand on the Malay, jerked him to the rail and pointed a thick, angry finger. “Tell me what he’s sayin’! Understand?”

“Yas, sar.”

The Malay put both lean, brown hands on the rail, squinted his gray eyes, impassive as a Buddha’s, and gave attentive ear. To him arose the droning words of the long-drawn, musical cadences:

Arang itou dibasouh dengan ayer
Mawar sakalipoun tiada akan poutih.

Satahoun houdjan di langit ayer latout masakan tawar?

Sebab tiada tahon menari dikatakan tembad.

Tabour bidjian diatas tasik tiada akan toumbounh—

On, on wailed the chant. At last the Malay shook his head, shrugged thin shoulders under his cotton shirt, and cast an uneasy glance at Briggs, looming black-bearded and angry at his side.

“Well, what’s it all about?” demanded the captain, thudding a fist on the rail. “Sayin’ anythin’ about me, or the Silver Fleece? If he is—”

“No, sar. Nothin’ so, sar.”

“Well, what?”

“He sing about wicked things. About sin. He say—”

“What does he say, you cinder from the Pit?”

“He say, you take coal, wash him long time, in water of roses, coal never get white. Sin always stay. He say, rain fall long time, one year, ocean never get fresh water. Always salty water. Sin always stay. He say one small piece indigo fall in one jar of goat-milk,[14] spoil all milk, make all milk blue. One sin last all life, always.” The Malay paused, trying to muster his paucity of English. Briggs shook him roughly, bidding him go on, or suffer harm.

“He say if sky will go to fall down, no man can hold him up. Sin always fall down. He say, good seed on land, him grow. Good seed on ocean, him never grow. He say—”

“That’ll do! Stow your jaw, now!”

“Yas, sar.”

“Get out—go forrard!”

The Malay salaamed, departed. Briggs hailed him again.

“Hey, you!”

“Yes, sar?” answered the brown fellow, wheeling.

“What’s your name—if pigs have names?”

“Mahmud Baba, sar,” the Malay still replied with outward calm. Yet to call a follower of the Prophet “pig” could not by any invention of the mind have been surpassed in the vocabulary of death-inviting insult.

“My Mud Baby, eh? Good name—that’s a slick one!” And Briggs roared into a laugh of drunken discord. He saw not that the Malay face was twitching; he saw not the stained teeth in grimaces of sudden hate. Gloom veiled this. “I’ll remember that,” he went on. “My Mud Baby. Well now, Mud Baby, back to your sty!”

“Captain Briggs,” the doctor put in, fair desperate to get this brute below-decks ere blood should flow. “Captain, if you were as anxious as I am for a good stiff game of poker and a stiffer drink, you wouldn’t be wasting your breath on Malay rubbish. Shall we mix a toddy for the first one?”

“Good idea, sir!” Briggs answered, his eyes brightening.[15] He clapped Filhiol on the shoulder, so that the man reeled toward the after-companion.

Down the stairway they went, the doctor cursing under his breath, Briggs clumping heavily, singing a snatch of low ribaldry from a Bombay gambling-hell. They entered the cabin. To them, as the door closed, still droned the voice of the minstrel on the bund:

Sebab tiada tahon menari dikatakan tembad,
Tabour bidjian diatas tasik tiada akan toumbounh.

One drop of indigo spoils the whole jar of milk;
Seed sown upon the ocean never grows.

SCURLOCK GOES ASHORE

Sweltering though the cabin was, it seemed to Dr. Filhiol a blessèd haven of refuge from the probabilities of grevious harm that menaced, without. With a deep breath of relief he saw Briggs lay the kris on the cabin table. Himself, he sat down at that table, and while Briggs stood there half-grinning with white teeth through black beard, took up the knife.

He studied it, noting its keen, double edge, its polished steel, the deft carving of the lotus-bud handle. Then, as he laid it down, he offered:

“It’s a genuine antique. I’ll go you a month’s wages against it.”

“You’ll do nothin’ of the kind, sir!” ejaculated Briggs, and took it up again. “The voyage, you said, and it’s that or nothing!”

The doctor bit his close-razored lip. Then he nodded. Filhiol was shrewd, and sober; Briggs, rash and drunk. Yes, for the sake of getting that cursed knife out of the captain’s hands, Filhiol would accept.

“Put it out of harm’s way, sir, and let’s deal the cards,” said he. “It’s poisoned. We don’t want it where we might get scratched, by accident.”

“Poisoned, sir?” demanded Briggs, running a horny thumb along the point. His brows wrinkled, inquisitively. No fear showed in that splendidly male, lawless, unconquered face.

“For God’s sake, captain, put that devilish thing away!” exclaimed the doctor, feigning to shudder; though all the while a secret hope was whispering:

[17]

“Heaven send that he may cut himself!” Aloud he said: “I’ll play no game, sir, with that kris in sight. Put it in your locker, captain, and set out the drink. My throat’s afire!”

“Poisoned, eh?” grunted the captain again, still with drunken obstinacy testing the edge. “All damned nonsense, sir. After that’s been run into the Oregon pine of my mizzen, a couple of inches—”

“There’s still enough left to put you in a shotted hammock, sir, if you cut yourself,” the doctor insisted. “But it’s your own affair. If you choose to have Mr. Scurlock take the Silver Fleece back to Long Wharf, Boston, while you rot in Motomolo Straits—”

With a blasphemy, Briggs strode to his locker. The doctor smiled cannily as Briggs flung open the locker, tossed in the kris and, taking a square-shouldered bottle, returned to the table. This bottle the captain thumped down on the table, under the lamp-gleam.

“Best Old Jamaica,” boasted he. “Best is none too good, when I win my doctor’s entire pay. For it’s as good as mine already, and you can lay to that!”

Speaking, he worried out the cork. He sniffed at the bottle, blinked, peered wonderingly at the label, and sniffed again.

“Hell’s bells!” roared Briggs, flaring into sudden passion.

“What’s the matter, sir?”

“Old Jamaica!” vociferated the captain. “It was Old Jamaica, but now smell o’ that, will you?”

Filhiol sniffed, tentatively. In a second he knew some one had been tampering with the liquor, substituting low-grade spirits for Brigg’s choicest treasure; but he merely shrugged his shoulders, with:

“It seems like very good rum, sir. Come, let’s mix our grog and get the cards.”

[18]

“Good rum!” gibed Briggs. “Some thieving son of Satan has been at my Jamaica, and has been fillin’ the square-face up with hog-slop, or I never sailed blue water! Look at the stuff now, will you?”

He spilled out half a glass of the liquor, tasted it, spat it upon the floor. Then he dashed the glass violently to the boards, crashing it to flying shards and spattering the rum all about. In a bull-like roar he shouted:

“Boy! You, there, boy!”

A moment, and one of the doors leading off the main cabin opened, on the port side. A pale, slim boy appeared and advanced into the cabin, blinking up with fear at the black-bearded vision of wrath.

“Yes, sir? What is it, sir?” asked he, in a scared voice.

Briggs dealt him a cuff that sent him reeling. The captain’s huge hand, swinging back, overset the bottle, that gurgled out its life-blood.

“What is it?” shouted Briggs. “You got the impudence to ask me what it is? I’ll learn you to step livelier when I call, you whelp! Come here!”

“Yes, sir,” quavered the boy. Shaking, he sidled nearer. “What—what do you want, sir?”

“What do I want?” the captain howled; while Filhiol, suddenly pale with a rage that shook his heart, pressed lips hard together, lest some word escape them. “You swab! Catechisin’ me, are you? Askin’ me what I want, eh? If I had a rope’s-end here I’d show you! Get out, now. Go, tell Mr. Scurlock I want him. Jump!”

The lad ducked another blow, ran to the cabin-door and sprang for the stairs. Ill-fortune ran at his side. He missed footing, sprawled headlong up the companion stairway.

With a shout of exultation, Briggs caught up from[19] a corner a long, smooth stick, with a polished knob carved from a root—one of the clubs known in the Straits as “Penang-lawyers,” by reason of their efficacy in settling disputes. He grabbed the writhing boy, now frantically trying to scrabble up the stairs, in a clutch that almost crunched the frail shoulder bones. Up the companion he dragged him—the boy screaming with terror of death—and hurled him out on deck, fair against the wheel.

The boy collapsed in a limp, groaning heap. Briggs laughed wildly, and, brandishing the Penang-lawyer, advanced out upon the dim-lit planking.

An arm thrust him back.

“You ain’t goin’ to hit that there boy!” shouted a voice—William Scurlock’s. “Not while I’m alive, you ain’t!”

A wrench and the club flew over the rail. It splashed in the dark, slow waters of the Timbago.

Briggs gulped. He whirled, both fists knotted. Then, swift as a cobra, he sprang and struck.

Scurlock dodged. The captain’s fist, finding no mark, drove against one of the spokes of the wheel with a crash that split the hickory. As Briggs had never cursed before, now he cursed. For a second or two he nursed his damaged hand.

The brief respite sufficed. Scurlock snatched up the boy. He started forward, just as the doctor appeared at the top of the companion.

“Captain Briggs, sir!” cried Filhiol, in a shaking voice. Still he was hoping against hope to keep the peace. “Are you hurt, sir?”

“To hell with you!” roared Briggs, now forgetting sea-etiquette—surest indication of the extremity of his drunken passion. He lurched after the retreating Scurlock. “Back, here, you bloody swine! Drop that brat, and I’ll show you who’s boss!”

[20]

Scurlock laughed mockingly and quickened his stride. Mad with the rage that kills, Briggs pursued, a huge, lunging figure of malevolence and hate. Before he could lay grips on Scurlock, the mate wheeled. He let the fainting boy slide down on deck, whipped out a clasp-knife, snicked open the blade. Holding it low, to rip upward, he confronted Briggs under the glimmer of the mizzen-lantern.

Now this was raw mutiny, and a hanging matter if Scurlock drew one drop of the captain’s blood. But that Scurlock cared nothing for the noose was very plain to see. Even the crimson rage of Briggs saw death knocking at the doors of his life. Barehanded, he could not close for battle. He recoiled, his bloodshot eyes shuttling for some handy weapon.

“Damn you, if I had that kris—” he panted.

“But you ain’t, you lousy bucko!” mocked Scurlock. “An’ you turn your back on me, to go for it, if you dare!”

Briggs sprang for the rail. He snatched at a belaying-pin, with wicked blasphemies. The pin stuck, a moment. He wrenched it clear, and wheeled—too late.

Already Scurlock had snatched up the boy again. Already he was at the gangway. Down it he leaped, to the bund. With the unconscious boy still in the crook of his left arm, he shoved into the scatter of idling natives. Then he turned, raised a fist of quivering hatred, and flung his defiance toward the vague, yellow-clad figure now hesitating at the top of the gangway, pin in hand:

“I’m through with you, you rum-soaked hellbender! He’s through, too, the boy is. We’ll take our chances with the Malays an’ the plague.”

Scurlock’s voice, rising out of the softly-lit tropic evening, died suddenly.

[21]

“Come back, Mr. Scurlock, and bring that boy!” cried the doctor, from the rail.

“I’ve got nothin’ against you, sir,” answered Scurlock. “But against him. God! If I come back, it’ll only be to cut his black heart out an’ throw it to the sharks. We’re done!”

A moment Briggs stood drunkenly peering, half minded to pursue, to match his belaying-pin against the mate’s dirk. Gurgling in his throat—for excess of rage had closed upon all speech—he panted, with froth upon his black beard, while dim figures along the rail and on shore waited great deeds. Then all at once he laughed—a horrible, deep-throated laugh, rising, swelling to mighty and bestial merriment; the laugh of a gorilla, made man.

“The Malays and the plague,” he thickly stammered. “—He’s said it—let ’em go! They’re good as dead already, and hell take ’em!”

He swung on his heel, then strode back unsteadily to the companion. Down it he lunged. Still laughing, he burst into the heat and reek of the cabin.

“Come on, doctor,” cried he, “our cards, our cards!”

THE CURSE OF NENEK KABAYAN

“He’ll steal no more of my Old Jamaica,” exulted Briggs, flinging himself into a chair by the table. “And that sniveling boy will give me no more of his infernal lip! Skunks!” He picked up the bottle, still containing a little rum, and poured a gulp of liquor down his throat. “On my own ship!”

“Where are the cards, sir?” asked Filhiol. His voice, quivering, was hardly audible.

“Petty game,” burst out the captain, “no good. Make it a real one, and I’ll go you!”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Stakes worth playin’ for! Man-size stakes! You got money in Boston, sir. Some fifteen thousand. I’ll play you for that, plus your wages this voyage!”

“Against what, sir?”

“Against my share of the ship’s cargo, and my share of the Silver Fleece, herself. And if I scuttle her, as scuttle her I may, in case the insurance money foots bigger than the ship’s worth and the cargo, I stake that money, too!”

The doctor pondered a moment, while Briggs pressed a hand to his thick neck, redly swollen with heat and rum. Suddenly the captain broke out again:

“That’s an A1 gamble for you, sir. When I land my West Coast natives at San Felipe, and slip my opium into Boston, there won’t be a shipmaster walk up State Street that will be better fixed than I’ll be.”

“Bring out the cards, sir,” answered the doctor. “But the kris goes in as part of the wager?”

[23]

“Yes, damn it, and I’ll be generous,” slavered Briggs. He jerked open the table drawer and fetched out a well-thumbed pack of cards, which he flung on the green cloth. “I’ll put up a stake that’d make any man’s mouth water, sir, if he is a man! Though maybe you’re not, bein’ only a sawbones!”

“What’s that, sir?”

“The yellow wench asleep in my berth—Kuala Pahang!”

“Done!” exclaimed Filhiol, humoring the ruffian to all possible limits, till liquor and heat should have overcome him.

“Deal the cards, sir!” cried Briggs. “I may be a bucko, and I may be drunk to-night, but I know a man when I see one. I’m not too drunk to add your wages and your savin’s to my plunder. Deal the cards!”

Filhiol had just fallen to shuffling the pasteboards when a groan, from behind the door of the captain’s private cabin, arrested his hand. Frowning, he swung around. In his tensing hand the cards bent almost double.

Briggs buffeted him upon the shoulder, with huge merriment.

“She’s not dead yet, is she?” exulted he. “No, no, not yet. Even though everybody in this devil’s hole claims the wenches will die first, before they’ll be a white man’s darlin’.” His speech had become so thick as to be hardly speech at all. “All infernal liars, sawbones! She’s been here already two days, Topsy has. An’ is she dead yet? Not very! No, nor not goin’ to die, neither, an’ you can lay to that! Nor get away from me. Not while I’m alive, an’ master o’ the Silver Fleece!”

The doctor’s jaw set so hard that his tanned skin whitened over the maxillary muscles. Very vividly[24] Filhiol still perceived the danger of general mutiny, of mass-attack from Batu Kawan, of fire and sword impending before the clipper could be got down-river and away. Come all that might, he must cling to Briggs, warily, humoringly.

After all, what was one native girl, more or less? The doctor shuffled the cards again, and dealt, under the raw light of the swinging-lamp. A louder cry from the girl turned Briggs around.

“Damnation!” he blared, starting up. “If the wench gets to howling, she’ll raise the town. I’m goin’ to shut her jaw, and shut it hard!”

“Quite right, sir,” assented the doctor, though his deep eyes glowed with murder. “But, why not get under way, at once, drop down the river to-night, anchor inside Ulu Salama bar till—”

Briggs interrupted him with a boisterous laugh.

“Even Reuben Ranzo, the tailor,” he gibed, “could give you points on navigation!” He stared at Filhiol a moment, his face darkening; then added harshly: “You stick to your pills and powders, Mr. Filhiol, or there’ll be trouble. I won’t have anybody tryin’ to boss. Now, I’m not goin’ to tell you twice!”

For three heartbeats their eyes met. The doctor’s had become injected with blood. His face had assumed an animal expression. Briggs snapped his thick fingers under the physician’s nose, then turned with an oath and strode to his cabin door. He snatched it open, and stood there a moment peering in, his face deep-lined in a mask of vicious rage.

“Captain Briggs!”

The doctor’s voice brought the ruffian about with a sharp turn.

“You mutinous, too?” shouted he, swinging his shoulders, loose, hulking, under the yellow silk of his jacket.

[25]

“By no means, sir. As a personal favor to me, however, I’m asking you not to strike that girl.” The doctor’s voice was shaking; yet still he sat there at the table, holding his cards in a quivering hand.

“You look out for your own skin, sawbones!” Briggs menaced. “The woman’s mine to do with as I please, an’ it’s nobody’s damn business, you lay to that! I’ll love her or beat her or throw her to the sharks, as I see fit. So now you hear me, an’ I warn you proper, stand clear o’ me, or watch out for squalls!”

Into the cabin he lunged, just as another door, opening, disclosed a sleepy-eyed, yellow-haired young man—Mr. Wansley, second-mate of the devil-ship. Wansley stared, and the doctor stood up with doubled fists, as they heard the sound of blows from within, then shriller cries, ending in a kind of gurgle—then silence.

The doctor gripped both hands together, striving to hold himself. The life of every white man aboard now depended absolutely on seeing this thing through without starting mutiny and war.

“Get back in your cabin, Mr. Wansley, for God’s sake!” he exclaimed, “or go on deck! The captain’s crazy drunk. If he sees you here, there’ll be hell to pay. Get out, quick!”

Wansley grasped the situation and made a speedy exit up the after-companion, just ahead of Briggs’s return. The captain banged his cabin door, and staggered back to the table. He dusted his palms one against the other.

“The black she-dog won’t whine again, for one while,” he grinned with white teeth through his mat of beard. “That’s the only way to teach ’em their lesson!” He clenched both fists, turning them, admiring them under the lamp-light. “Great pacifiers,[26] eh, sawbones? I tell you! Beat a dog an’ a woman, an’ you can’t go far off your course. So now I’ll deal the cards, an’ win every cent you’ve got!”

“The cards are dealt, sir,” answered Filhiol, chalky to the lips.

“Yes, an’ you’ve been here with ’em, all alone!” retorted the captain. “No, sir, that won’t go. Fresh deal—here, I’ll do it!”

He gathered the dealt hands and unsteadily began shuffling, while the doctor, teeth set in lip, swallowed the affront. Some of the cards escaped the drunken brute’s thick fingers; two or three dropped to the floor.

“Pick ’em up, sir,” directed Briggs. “No captain of my stamp bends his back before another man—an’ besides, I know you’d be glad to knife me, while I was down!”

Filhiol made no answer. He merely obeyed, and handed the cards to Briggs, who was about to deal, when all at once his hands arrested their motion. His eyes fixed themselves in an incredulous, widening stare, at the forward cabin door. His massive jaw dropped. A sound escaped his throat, but no word came.

The doctor spun his chair around. He, too, beheld a singular apparition; though how it could have got there—unless collusion had been at work among the Malays in the waist—seemed hard to understand.

So silently the door had slid, that the coming of the aged native woman had made no sound. Aged she seemed, incredibly old, wizen, dried; though with these people who can tell of age? The dim light revealed her barefooted, clad in a short, gaudily-striped skirt, a tight-wrapped body-cloth that bound her shrunken breast. Coins dangled from her ears; her straight black hair was drawn back flatly; her lips, reddened with lime and betel, showed black, sharp-filed teeth in a horrible snarl of hatred.

[27]

Silent, a strange yellow ghostlike thing, she crept nearer. Briggs sprang up, snatched the rum-bottle by its neck and waited, quivering. Right well he knew the woman—old Dengan Jouga, mother of Kuala, his prey.

For the first time in years unnerved, he stood there. Had she rushed in at him, screamed, vociferated, clawed with hooked talons, beaten at him with skinny fists, he would have knocked her senseless, dragged her on deck and flung her to the bund; but this cold, silent, beady-eyed approach took all his sails aback.

Only for a moment, however. Briggs was none of your impressionable men, the less so when in drink.

“Get out!” he shouted, brandishing the bottle. “Out o’ this, or by God—”

The door, opening again, disclosed the agitated face of Texel, a foremast hand.

“Cap’n Briggs, sir!” exclaimed this wight, touching his cap, “one o’ the Malays says she, there, has got news o’ Mr. Scurlock an’ the boy, sir, that you’ll want to hear. He’s out here now, the Malay is. Will I tell him to come in?”

“I could have you flogged, you scum, for darin’ to come into my cabin till you’re called,” shouted Briggs. “But send the pig in!”

The bottle lowered, as Briggs peered frowning at the silent hag. Uncanny, this stillness was. Tempests, hurricanes of passion and of hate would have quite suited him; but the old Malay crone, standing there half-way to the table, the light glinting from her deep coal-black eyes, her withered hands clutching each other across her wasted body, disconcerted even his bull-like crassness.

The seaman turned and whistled. At once, a Malay slid noiselessly in, salaamed and stood waiting.[28] Texel, nervously fingering the cap he held in his hands, lingered by the door.

“Oh, it’s you again, Mud Baby, is it?” cried the bucko. “What’s the news Dengan Jouga has for me? Tell her to hand it over an’ then clear out! Savvy?”

“Captain, sahib, sar,” stammered Mahmud, almost gray with fear, every lean limb aquiver with the most extraordinary panic. “She says Mr. Scurlock, an’ boy, him prisoner. You give up girl, Kuala Pahang. No givem—”

The sentence ended in a quick stroke of the Malay’s forefinger across the windpipe, a whistling sound.

Briggs stared and swore. The doctor laid a hand on his arm.

“Checkmated, sir,” said he. “The old woman wins.”

“Like hell!” roared the captain. “I don’t know what the devil she’s talkin’ about. If Scurlock an’ the boy get their fool throats cut, it’s their own fault. They’re bein’ punished for mutiny. No girl here, at all! You, Mud Baby, tell that to old Jezebel!”

Mahmud nodded, and slid into a sing-song chatter. The woman gave ear, all the while watching Briggs with the unwinking gaze of a snake. She flung back a few crisp words at Mahmud.

“Well, what now?” demanded Briggs.

“She say, you lie, captain, sar!”

“I lie, do I?” vociferated the bucko. He heaved the bottle aloft and would have struck the hag full force, had not the doctor caught his arm, and held it fast.

“My God, captain!” cried Filhiol, gusty with rage and fear. “You want mutiny? Want the whole damned town swarming over us, with torch and kris?”

[29]

Briggs tried to fling him off, but the doctor clung, in desperation. Mahmud Baba wailed:

“No, no, captain! No touch her! She very bad luck—she Nenek Kabayan!”

“What the devil do I care?” roared Briggs, staggering as he struggled with the doctor. “She’s got to get out o’ my cabin, or by—”

“She’s a witch-woman!” shouted Filhiol, clinging fast. “That means a witch, Nenek Kabayan does. If you strike her, they’ll tear your heart out!”

Mahmud, in the extremity of his terror, clasped thin, brown hands, groveled, clutching at the captain’s knees. Briggs kicked him away like a dog.

“Get out, you an’ everybody!” he bellowed. “Doctor, I’ll lay you in irons for this. Into the lazaret you go, so help me!”

The witch-woman, raising crooked claws against him, hurled shrill curses at Briggs—wild, unintelligible things, in a wail so penetrantly heart-shaking, that even the captain’s bull-like rage shuddered.

From the floor, Mahmud raised appealing hands.

“She say, give girl or she make orang onto kill everybody!” cried the Malay. “Orang onto, bad ghost! She say she make sabali—sacrifice—of everybody on ship.” His voice broke, raw, in a frenzy of terror. “She say Vishnu lay curse on us, dead men come out of graves, be wolves, be tigers—menjelma kramat—follow us everywhere!”

“Shut your jaw, idiot!” shouted Briggs, but in a tone less brutal. The man was shaken. Not all his bluster could blink that fact. The doctor loosed his arm; Briggs did not raise the bottle, now, to strike. On and on wailed Mahmud:

“She say chandra wasi, birds of ocean foam, poison us, an’ Zemrud, him what keep life, leave us. She say blind face in sky watch you, cap’n, sahib, an’ laugh,[30] an’ you want to die, but you not die. She say you’ life be more poison than katchubong flowers—she say evil seed grow in you’ heart, all life long—she say somethin’ you love, cap’n, sar, somethin’ you love more than you’ life, sometime die, an’ you die then but still you not die! She say—”

Briggs chewed and spat a curse and, turning to the table, sat down heavily there. Astonished, Filhiol stared at him. Never had he seen the captain in this mood. A wild attack, assault, even murder, would not have surprised the doctor; but this strange quietude surpassed belief. Filhiol leaned over Briggs, as he sat there sagging, staring at the witch-woman still in furious tirade.

“Captain,” he whispered, “you’re going to give up the girl, of course? You’re going to save Mr. Scurlock and the boy, and keep this shriveled monkey of a witch from raising the town against us?”

Briggs only shook his head.

“No,” he answered, in a strange, weary voice. “She can’t have her, an’ that’s flat. I don’t give a damn for the deserters, an’ if it comes to a fight, we got our signal-cannon an’ enough small-arms to make it hot for all the natives between here an’ hell. The girl’s plump as a young porpoise, an’ she’s mine, an’ I’m going to keep her; you can lay to that!”

Mahmud, still stammering crude translation of the witch-woman’s imprecations, crawled to Briggs’s feet. Briggs kicked the man away, once more, and burst into a jangle of laughter.

“Get ’em all out o’ here, sawbones,” said he, his head sagging. The life seemed to have departed from him. “I’m tired of all this hullabaloo.” He opened his table drawer and drew out an army revolver. “Three minutes for you to get ’em all out, doctor, or I begin shootin’.”

[31]

In the redness of his eye, bleared with drink and rage, Filhiol read cold murder. He dragged Mahmud up, and herded him, with Texel and the now silent witch-woman, out the forward cabin door.

“You get out, too!” mouthed the captain, dully. “I’ll have no sawbones sneakin’ and spyin’ on my honeymoon. Get out, afore I break you in ways your books don’t tell you how to fix!”

The doctor gave him one silent look. Then, very tight-lipped, he issued out beneath the awning, where among the Malays a whispering buzz of talk was forward.

As he wearily climbed the companion ladder, he heard the bolt go home, in the cabin door. A dull, strange laugh reached his ears, with mumbled words.

“God save us, now!” prayed Filhiol, for the first time in twenty years. “God save and keep us, now!”

THE MALAY FLEET OF WAR

Dawn, leaping out of Motomolo Strait, flinging its gold-wrought, crimson mantle over an oily sea that ached with crawling color, found the clipper ship, whereon rested the curse of old Dengan Jouga, set fast and fair on the sandspit of Ula Salama, eight miles off the mouth of the Timbago River.

Fair and fast she lay there, on a tide very near low ebb, so that two hours or such a matter would float her again; but in two hours much can happen and much was destined to.

At the taffrail, looking landward where the sand-dunes of the river met the sea, and where tamarisk and mangrove-thickets and pandan-clumps lay dark against the amethyst-hazed horizon, Dr. Filhiol and Mr. Wansley—now first mate of the Silver Fleece, with Prass installed as second—were holding moody speech.

“As luck goes,” the doctor was growling, “this voyage outclasses anything I’ve ever known. This puts the climax on—this Scurlock matter, and the yellow girl, and going aground.”

“We did the best we could, sir,” affirmed Wansley, hands deep in jacket pockets. “With just tops’ls an’ fores’ls on her—”

“Oh, I’m not criticising your navigation, Mr. Wansley,” the doctor interrupted. “The old man, of course, is the only one who knows the bars, and we didn’t dare wait for him to wake up. Yes, you did very[33] well indeed. If you’d been carrying full canvas, you’d have sprung her butts, when she struck, and maybe lost a stick or two. Perhaps there’s no great harm done, after all, if we can hold this damned crew.”

Thus hopefully the doctor spoke, under the long, level shafts of day breaking along the gold and purple waters that further off to sea blended into pale greens and lovely opalescences. But his eyes, turning now and then towards the ship’s waist, and his ear, keen to pick up a more than usual chatter down there under the weather-yellowed awnings, belied his words.

Now, things were making that the doctor knew not of; things that, had he known them, would have very swiftly translated his dull anxieties into active fears. For down the mud-laden river, whose turbid flood tinged Motomolo Strait with coffee five miles at sea, a fleet of motley craft was even now very purposefully making way.

This fleet was sailing with platted bamboo-mats bellying on the morning breeze, with loose-stepped masts and curiously tangled rattan cordage; or, in part, was pulling down-stream with carven oars and paddles backed by the strength of well-oiled brown and yellow arms.

A fleet it was, laden to the topmost carving of its gunwales with deadly hate of the white men. A fleet hastily swept together by the threats, promises and curses of old Dengan Jouga, the witch-woman. A rescue fleet, for the salvation of the yellow girl—a fleet grim either to take her back to Batu Kawan, or else to leave the charred ribs of the Silver Fleece smoldering on Ulu Salama bar as a funeral pyre over the bones of every hated orang puti, white man, that trod her cursèd decks.

Nineteen boats in all there were; seven sail-driven, twelve thrust along with oars and paddles cunningly[34] fashioned from teak and tiu wood. These nineteen boats carried close on three hundred fighting men, many of them head-hunters lured by the prospect of a white man’s head to give their sweethearts.

A sinister and motley crew, indeed; some of chief’s rank, clad in rare feather cloaks, but for the most part boasting no garment save the de rigueur breech-clout. Among them rowed no less than eight or ten Mohammedan amok fanatics, who had sworn on the beard of the Prophet to take a Frank dog’s life or else to die—in either event surely destined for paradise and the houris’ arms. And one of these fanatics was the turtle-egg seller, with special hopes in mind which for the present cannot be divulged.

Under the leadership of Dengan Jouga and a lean, painted pawang, or medicine-man, the war fleet crawled downstream. Spears, axes, stone and iron maces with ornate hafts bristled in all the long war-canoes, high-prowed and gaudy with flaring colors. Blow-guns, too, were there, carrying venomed darts, and krises by the score—wavy-edged blades, heavy and long, that, driven by a sinewed arm, would slice through a man’s neck as if it had been ghee, or melted butter; would open a man’s body broad to the light of day; or, slashing downward, split him from crown to collar bone.

The morning shafts of sun glinted, too, on gun-barrels—old flintlock muzzle-loaders, with a few antique East India Company’s rifles that in some obscure channels of trade had worked their way up the east coast of the Malay Peninsula to Batu Kawan. Some bowmen had long arrows wrapped in oil-soaked cotton pledgets. Such fire-balls, shot into the sun-dried canvas of the clipper, might go far towards leaving her bones ableach on Ulu Salama.

Nor was this all. More formidable still was a small,[35] brass cannon, securely lashed in the bows of a seagoing proa, its lateen sail all patched with brown and blue; a proa manned by fifty chosen warriors, and carrying the medicine man and Dengan Jouga herself. True, the Malays had only a scant dozen charges for their ordnance, but if they could catch the hull of the Silver Fleece between wind and water, as she careened on the bar, they might so riddle her that the up-coming tide would pour her full of brine.

Down the fever-smelling river, steaming with heat and purple haze under the mounting sun, the war-fleet drove, between lush banks now crowded with sandal and angsana-trees all clustered with their lolling, yellow blooms, now mere thickets where apes and screaming parrots rioted amid snarled labyrinths of lianas, now sinking into swamps choked with bamboo and lalang grass.

In some occasional pool, pink lotus-blossoms contrasted with fragrant charm against the vivid, unhealthy green of marsh and forest. And, louder than the crooning war-songs that unevenly drifted on the shimmering air, the loomlike whir of myriad trumpeter-beetles blurred the waiting day whose open eye shrank not from what must be.

Here, there, a fisherman’s hut extended its crazy platform out over the sullen waters. From such platforms, yellow-brown folk with braided top-knots shouted words of good augury to the on-toiling warriors. Naked, pot-bellied children stood and stared in awe. Flea-tormented curs barked dolefully. And from such fisher-boats, as lay anchored in the stream, rose shouts of joy. For, in the mysterious way of the Orient, the news of the great, black deed done by the devil-captain, Briggs Sahib, had already run all down the Timbago.

Thus the war-fleet labored downward to the sea,[36] coming [towards the hour that a landsman would call eight o’clock,] to salt water. Withered Dengan Jouga, crouching snake-eyed in the proa, caught sight of the long, turquoise line that marked the freedom of the open.

She pointed a skinny arm, flung a word at Akan Mawar, the medicine man, and clutched more tightly the thin-bladed knife which—so all had sworn to her—she, and only she, should plunge into the heart of the black-bearded devil. Silently she waited, as the seascape broadened. The sunlight, sparkling on that watery plain, dazzled her eyes like the shimmer of powdered glass, but still she peered, eager to catch a glimpse of the Silver Fleece. Her betel-reddened lips moved again. She whispered:

“My daughter I shall have. His blood, his blood I shall have, even though he flee from me diatas angin, beyond the back of the wind! King Surana, who reigns in the watery depths, will give him to me. Even though he flee through the Silken Sea, at the end of the world, I shall have his blood! Tuan Allah poonia krajah! It is the work of the Almighty.”

“Tuan Allah poonia krajah!” echoed old Akan Mawar; and other voices raised the supplication. Back drifted the words from boat to boat; the whole river murmured with confused echoes: “Tuan Allah poonia krajah!”

Now silence fell again, but for the lipping of cleft waters at many prows, the dip of oars, the little whispering swirl of eddies where paddles lifted. Bright-yellow sands, here and there gleaming pearl-white with millions of turtle-eggs, extended seaward from the river-mouth, pointing like a dagger of menace at Ulu Salama bar eight miles to sea; the bar that Alpheus Briggs so easily could have left to starboard,[37] had he not been sleeping off the fumes of samshu in the cabin with Kuala Pahang.

Cries from the proa and the war-canoes echoed across the waters. No longer could savagery repress its rage. Already, far and dim through the set of haze that brooded over Motomolo Strait, dimming the liquid light of morning, eyes of eager hate had seen a distant speck. A tiny blot it was, against the golden welter on the eastern horizon; a blot whence rose fine-pricked masts and useless sails.

And spontaneously there rose an antiphonal pantun, or song of war. Up from the fleet it broke, under the shrill lead of the hag, now standing with clenched, skinny fists raised high. She wailed:

Adapoun pipit itou sama pipit djouga!

Others answered. A drum of bamboo, headed with snake-skin, began to throb.

Dan yang enggang itou sama enggang djouga!

As the echoes died, again rose the witch-woman’s voice, piercing, resonant:

Bourga sedap dispakey!

The others then:

Layou—dibouang![1]

The song continued, intoned by the witch-woman[38] with choral responses from the fighting men. From lament it passed to savage threats of death by torture and by nameless mutilations. Maces began to clatter on shields, krises to glint in sunlight, severed heads of enemies to wave aloft on spears.

And out over the liquid rainbow surface of the strait rolled a long echo, blent of war-cries, shouts of vengeance, the booming of snake-skin drums—defiance of the human wolf-pack now giving wild tongue.

Dr. Filhiol and Mr. Wansley stopped in their speech and raised peering eyes landward, as some faint verberation of the war-shout drifted down upon them. The doctor’s brows drew to a frown; he narrowed his keen eyes toward the line of hot, damp hills. Mr. Wansley pushed back his cap and scratched his head. Together they stood at the rail, not yet glimpsing the war-fleet which still moved in partial concealment along the wooded shore.

Into their silence, a harsh, liquor-roughened voice broke suddenly:

“Empty staring for empty brains! Nothin’ better to do than look your eyes out at the worst coast, so help me, God ever made?”

Neither answered. Mr. Wansley surveyed in silence the hulking, disordered figure now coming forward from the after companion. The doctor drew a cigar from his waistcoat pocket and lighted it. Complete silence greeted Briggs—silence through which the vague turmoil trembling across the mother-of-pearl iridescence of the strait still reached the Silver Fleece.

COUNCIL OF WAR

A moment the two men eyed the captain. Malay voices sounded under the awning. Forward, a laugh drifted on the heat-shimmering air. Briggs cursed, and still came on.

A sorry spectacle he made, tousled, bleary-eyed, with pain-contracted forehead where the devil’s own headache was driving spikes. Right hand showed lacerations, from having struck the wheel. Heavy shoulders sagged, head drooped. Angrily he blinked, his mood to have torn up the world and spat upon the fragments in very spite.

“Well, lost your tongues, have you?” he snarled. “I’m used to being answered on my own ship. You, Mr. Wansley, would do better reading your ’Bow-ditch’ than loafing. And you, doctor, I want you to mix me a stiff powder for the damnedest headache that ever tangled my top-hamper. I’ve had a drink or two, maybe three, already this morning. But that does no good. Fix me up something strong. Come, stir a stump, sir! I’m going to be obeyed on my own ship!”

“Yes, sir,” answered the doctor, keeping his tongue between his teeth, as the saying is. He started aft, followed by Wansley. Briggs burst out again:

“Insubordination, mutiny—that’s all I get, this voyage!” His fists swung, aching for a target. “Look what’s happened! Against my orders you, Mr. Wansley, try to take the Fleece to sea. And run[40] her aground! By God, sir, I could have you disrated for that! I’d put you in irons for the rest of the voyage if I didn’t need you on deck. Understand me, sir?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Wansley, with exceeding meekness. Briggs was about to flare out at him again, and might very well have come to fist-work, when a hard, round little concussion, bowling seaward, struck his ear.

At sound of the shot, the captain swung on his heel, gripped the rail and stared shoreward.

“What the hell is that?” demanded he, unable to conceal a sudden fear that had stabbed through the thrice-dyed blackness of his venom.

“I rather think, sir,” answered Filhiol, blowing a ribbon of smoke on the still morning air, “it’s trouble brewing. By Jove, sir—see that, will you?”

His hand directed the captain’s reddened eyes far across the strait toward the coastal hills, palm-crowded. Vaguely the captain saw a long, dim line. At its forward end, just a speck against the greenery, a triangle of other color was creeping on. Briggs knew it for the high sail of a proa.

“H-m!” he grunted. Under the bushy blackness of his brows he stared with blood-injected eyes. His muscles tautened. Suddenly he commanded:

“Mr. Wansley, my glass, sir!”

The doctor pursed anxious lips as Wansley departed toward the companion.

“Trouble, sir?” asked he.

“I’ll tell you when there’s trouble! How can I hear anythin’, with your damned jaw-tackle always busy?”

The doctor shut up, clamwise, and leaned elbows on the rail, and so they stood there, each peering, each listening, each thinking his own thoughts.

[41]

Mr. Wansley’s return, brass telescope in hand, broke both lines of reflection. Briggs snatched the glass, yearning to knock Wansley flat, as he might have done a cabin-boy. Wansley peered at him with bitter malevolence.

“You hell-devil!” muttered he. “You’ve murdered two of us already, an’ like as not you’ll murder all of us before you’re done. If the sharks had you this minute—”

“By the Judas priest!” ejaculated Briggs, glass at eye. He swung it left and right. “Now you lubberly sons of swabs have got me on a lee-shore with all anchors draggin’!”

“What is it, sir?” demanded Filhiol, calmly.

“What is it?” roared the captain, neck and face scarlet. “After you help run the Silver Fleece on Ulu Salama bar, where that damned war-party can close in on her, you ask me what it is! Holy Jeremiah!”

“See here, Captain Briggs.” The doctor’s voice cut incisively. “If that’s a war-party, we’ve got no time to waste in abuse. Please let me use that glass and see for myself.”

“Use nothing!” shouted Briggs. “What? Call me a liar, do you? I tell you it is a war-party with five—eight—twelve—well, about sixteen boats and a proa, I make it; and you stand there and call me a liar!”

“I call you nothing, sir,” retorted the physician, his face impassive. In spite of anger, Filhiol comprehended that he and Briggs represented the best brain-power on the clipper. Under the urge of peril these two must temporarily sink all differences and stand together. “You say there’s a war-party coming out. I place myself at your orders.”

“Same here, sir,” put in Mr. Wansley. “What’s to[42] be done, sir?” Urgent peril had stifled the fires of hate.

“Call Mr. Prass and Mr. Crevay,” answered the captain, sobered. “You, doctor, mix me up that powder, quick. Here, I’ll go with you. You’ve got to stop this damned headache of mine! Look lively, Mr. Wansley! Get Bevans, too, and Gascar!”

In five minutes the war-council was under way on the after-deck. Already the doctor’s drug had begun to loosen the bands of pain constricting the captain’s brow. Something of Briggs’s normal fighting energy was returning. The situation was already coming under his strong hand.

Careful inspection through the glass confirmed the opinion that a formidable war-fleet was headed toward Ulu Salama bar. The far, vague sound of chanting and of drums clinched matters.

“We’ve got to meet ’em with all we’ve got,” said Briggs, squinting through the tube. “There’s a few hundred o’ the devils. Our game is to keep ’em from closing in. If they board us—well, they aren’t goin’ to, that’s all.”

“I don’t like the look o’ things forrard, sir,” put in Crevay, now bo’sun of the clipper, filling the position that Prass had vacated in becoming second mate. “Them Malays, sir—”

“That’s the hell of it, I know,” said Briggs. He spoke rationally, sobered into human decency. “If we had a straight white crew, we could laugh at the whole o’ Batu Kawan. But our own natives are liable to run amok.”

“We’d better iron the worst of ’em, sir, an’ clap hatches on ’em,” suggested Crevay. “There’s seventeen white men of us, an’ twenty natives. If we had more whites, I’d say shoot the whole damn lot o’ Malays an’ chuck ’em over to the sharks while there’s[43] time!” His face was deep-lined, cruel almost as the captain’s.

Silence followed. Gascar nodded approval, Bevans went a trifle pale, and Wansley shook his head. Prass turned his quid and spat over the rail; the doctor glanced forward, squinting with eyes of calculation. Under the brightening sun, each face revealed the varying thoughts that lay in each man’s heart. Filhiol was first to speak.

“Those Malays are valuable to us,” said he. “They make excellent hostages, if properly restrained in the hold. But we can’t have them at large.”

“We can, and must, all of ’em!” snapped Briggs. His eye had cleared and once more swept up the situation with that virile intelligence which long had made him a leader of men. His nostrils widened, breathing the air of battle. His chest, expanding, seemed a barrier against weakness, indecision. The shadow of death had blotted out the madness of his orgy. He stood there at the rail, erect, square-jawed, a man once more. A man that even those who most bitterly hated him now had to respect and to obey.

“We need ’em all,” he repeated, with the resonance of hard decision. “We’re short-handed as it is. We need every man-jack of them, but not to fight. They won’t fight for us. We daren’t put so much as a clasp-knife in their murderin’ hands. But they can work for us, and, by the Judas priest, they shall! Our pistols can hold ’em to it. Work, sweat, damn ’em—sweat the yellow devils, as they never sweat before!”

“How so, captain?” asked the doctor.

“It’ll be an hour before that fleet lays alongside. There’s a good chance we can kedge off this damned bar. Twenty natives at the poop capstan, with you, Mr. Bevans—and I guess I’ll let the doctor lend a hand, too—standing over ’em with cold lead—that’s[44] the game.” Briggs laughed discordantly. “How’s your nerve, Mr. Bevans? All right, sir?”

Sea-etiquette was returning. Confidence brightened.

“Nerve, sir? All right!”

“Ever shoot a man dead in his tracks?”

“I have, sir.”

“Good! Then you’ll do!” Briggs slapped Bevans on the shoulder. “I’ll put you and the doctor in charge of the natives. First one that raises a hand off a capstan-bar, drill him through the head. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said Bevans. The doctor nodded.

“That’s settled! To work! We won’t want the natives at large, though, till we get the kedge over. We’ll keep ’em in the ’midships deck-house for a while yet. Doctor, you stand at the break and shoot the first son of a hound that sticks his nose out. Mr. Wansley, muster all the white men aft for instructions. Mr. Prass, take what men you need and get up all the arms and ammunition. First thing, get out that stand of rifles in my cabin. Here’s two keys. One is my private locker-key, and the other the key to the arms-locker. In my locker you’ll find a kris. In the other, three revolvers. Bring those.” The captain’s words came crisp, sharp, decisive. “Bring up the six navy cutlasses from the rack in the cabin. Mr. Gascar will help you. Mr. Gascar, how many axes have you got in your carpenter’s chest?”

“Four, sir, and an adz.”

“Bring ’em all. Tell the cook to boil every drop of water he’s got room for on the galley range. Get the marline spikes from the bo’sun’s locker and lay ’em handy. Cast loose the signal-gun lashed down there on the main deck. We’ll haul that up and mount it at[45] the taffrail. God! If they want war, they’ll get it, the black scuts!”

“We’re short of round-shot for the gun, sir,” said “Chips.” “I misdoubt there’s a dozen rounds.”

“No matter. Solid shot isn’t much good for this work. Get all the bolts, nuts and screws from your shop—all the old iron junk you can ram down her throat. How’s powder?”

“Plenty, sir.”

“Good! We’ve got powder enough, men enough and guts enough. To your work. Mr. Crevay!”

“Yes, sir?” A lank, bony man, Crevay, with fiery locks and a slashed cheek where a dirk had once ripped deep. An ex-navy man he, and of fighting blood.

“I’m goin’ to have you serve the gun when ready. You and any men you pick,” the captain told him, while the others departed each on his own errand, tensely, yet without haste or fear. “Meanwhile, I’ll put you in charge of kedgin’ us off. Cast loose and rig the kedge-anchor, lower it away from that davy there to the long-boat, and sink it about a hundred fathom off the starb’d quarter. With twenty Malays at the capstan-bars, we ought to start the Fleece. If not, we’ll shift cargo from forrard. Look alive, sir!”

“Yes, sir!” And Crevay, too, departed, filled with the energy that comes to every man when treated like a man and given a man’s work to do.

As by a miracle, the spirit of the Silver Fleece had changed. Discipline had all come back with a rush; the battling blood had risen. No longer, for the moment, were the captain’s heavy crimes and misdemeanors held against him. Briggs stood for authority, defense in face of the peril of death. His powerful body and stern spirit formed a rallying-point for every white man aboard. And even those who[46] had most poisonously grisled in their hearts against the man, now ran loyally to do his bidding.

Forgotten was the cause of all this peril—the stealing of Kuala Pahang, in drunken lust. Forgotten the barbarities that had driven Mr. Scurlock and the boy ashore. Forgotten the brutal cynicism that had refused to buy their liberty at the price of giving up the girl. Of all these barbarities, no memory seemed now to survive. The deadly menace of twenty Malays already growling in the waist of the ship, and of the slow-advancing line of war-canoes, banished every thought save one—battle!

Once more Captain Alpheus Briggs had proved himself, in time of crisis, a man; more than a man—a master of men.

Thus, now, swift preparations had begun to play the game of war in which no quarter would be asked or given.

BEFORE THE BATTLE

Strenuous activities leaped into being, aboard the stranded clipper ship.

All the Malays were herded in the deck-house, informed that they were sons of swine and that the first one who showed a face on deck, till wanted, would be shot dead. The doctor, with a revolver ready for business, added weight to this information.

Under the orders of Mr. Wansley, all the white sailors came trooping aft. Noisily and profanely they came, making a holiday of the impending slaughter. A hard company they were, many in rags, for Briggs could never have been called other than conservative regarding credits from the slop-chest. Rum, however, he now promised them, and whatever loot they could garner from the Malay fleet; so they cheered him heartily. They, too, had all become his men.

Bad men they looked, and such as now were needed—three or four Liverpool guttersnipes, a Portuguese cut-throat from Fayal, a couple of Cayman wreckers, a French convict escaped from the penal ship at Marseilles, and the rest low-type American scum. For such was the reputation of Alpheus Briggs, all up and down the Seven Seas, that few first-class men ever willingly shipped with him before the mast.

Workers and fighters they were, though, every one. While black smoke began to emerge from the galley funnel, on the shimmering tropic air, as the cook stuffed oily rags and oil-soaked wood under all the[48] coppers that his range would hold, divers lines of preparation swiftly developed.

Already some were casting loose the lashings of the signal-gun and rigging tackle to hoist the rust-red old four-inch piece to the after-deck. Others fell to work with Mr. Crevay, rigging the kedge-anchor or lowering away the long-boat. Another gang leaped to the task of getting above-decks all the rifles, cutlasses, powder, ball-shot and iron junk, the axes and revolvers; of loading everything, even of laying belaying-pins handy as a last line of hand-to-hand weapons.

Briggs supervised all details, even to the arming of each man with the butchering-tool he claimed to be most expert with. The best were given the rifles; to those of lesser skill was left the cutlass work. A gun crew of two men was picked to serve the cannon with Mr. Crevay. Three were detailed to help the cook carry boiling water.

“Mr. Bevans will stand over the natives at the capstan,” directed Briggs. “And you, doctor, will act in your medical capacity when we get into action. If hard-driven, you can be useful with the kris, eh? Quite in your line, sir; quite in your line.”

Briggs smiled expansively. All his evil humors had departed. The foretaste of battle had shaken him clean out of his black moods. His genius for organizing, for leading men, seemed to have expanded him to heroic proportions. In his deep, black eyes, the poise of his head, the hard, glad expression of his full-blooded, black-bearded face, one saw eager virility that ran with joy to meet the test of strength, and that exulted in a day’s work of blood.

A heroic figure he, indeed—thewed like a bull; with sunlight on face and open, corded neck; deep-chested, coatless now, the sleeves of his pongee shirt rolled up to herculean elbows. Some vague perception[49] crossed the doctor’s mind that here, indeed, stood an anomaly, a man centuries out of time and place, surely a throwback to some distant pirate strain of the long-vanished past.

Imagination could twist a scarlet kerchief ’round that crisp-curling hair, knot a sash about the captain’s waist, draw high boots up to his powerful knees. Imagination could transport him to the coasts of Mexico long, long ago; imagination could run the Jolly Roger to the masthead—and there, in Captain Briggs, merchant-ship master of the year 1868, once more find kith and kin of Blackbeard, Kidd, Morgan, England, and all others of the company of gentlemen rovers in roistering days.

Something of this the doctor seemed to understand. Yet, as he turned his glance a moment to the line of war-craft now more plainly visible across the shimmering nacre of the strait, he said, raising his voice a trifle by reason of the various shouts, cries and diverse noises blending confusedly, and now quite obliterating all sounds from the war fleet:

“You know what those canoes are coming after, of course.”

“The girl! What of it?”

“And you know, sir, that old Dengan Jouga is bound to be aboard. There’ll be a medicine man or two, as well.”

“What the devil are you driving at?” demanded Briggs.

“That’s a formidable combination, sir,” continued the doctor. “We’ve got twenty Malays on board that will face hell-fire itself rather than see any harm befall a native pawang or a witch-woman. We’ll never be able to hold them to any work. Each of them believes he can reach paradise by slaughtering a white man. In addition, he can avenge harm done[50] to the old woman and the girl. Under those circumstances—”

“By God, sir, if I didn’t need you, sir—”

“Under those circumstances, my original suggestion of holding them all under hatches, as hostages, has much to recommend it, if we come to a fight. But need we come to a fight? Need we, sir?”

“How the devil can we sheer off from it?”

“By giving up the girl, sir. Put her in one of the small boats with a few trade-dollars and trinkets for her dowry—which will effectually lustrate the girl, according to these people’s ideas—and give her a pair of oars. She’ll take care of herself all right. The war-fleet will turn around and go back, which will be very much better, sir, than slaughter. We’ve already lost two men, and—”

“And you’re white-livered enough to stand there and advise taking no revenge for them?” interrupted Briggs, his voice gusty with sudden passion.

Briggs struck the rail with the flat of his palm, a blow that cracked like a pistol-shot; while the doctor, wholly unhorsed by this tilt from so unexpected an angle, could only stare.

“By the Judas priest, sir!” cried Briggs furiously. “That’s enough to make a man want to cut you down where you stand, sir, you hear me? And if that yellow-bellied cowardice wasn’t enough, you ask me to give up the girl—the girl that’s cost me two men already—the girl that may yet cost me my ship and my own life! Well, by the Judas priest!”

“Don’t risk your life and the ship for a native wench!” cut in the doctor with a rush of indignation. “There are wenches by the score, by the hundred, all up and down the Straits. You can buy a dozen, for a handful of coin. Wenches by the thousands—but only one Silver Fleece, sir!”

[51]

“Devilish lot you care about the Fleece!” snarled Briggs. “Or about anything but your own cowardly neck!”

“Captain Briggs, don’t forget yourself!”

“Hell’s bells! They shan’t have that girl. Witch-women, medicine men or all the devils of the Pit shan’t take her back. She’s mine, I tell you, and before I’ll let her go I’ll throw her to the sharks myself. Sharks enough, and plenty—there’s one now,” he added, jerking his hand at a slow-moving, black triangle that was cutting a furrow off to starboard. “So I want to hear no more from you about the girl, and you can lay to that!”

He turned on his heel and strode aft, growling in his beard. The doctor, peering after him with smoldering eyes, felt his finger tighten on the trigger. One shot might do the business. It would mean death, of course, for himself. The courts would take their full penalty, all in due time; but it would save the ship and many white men’s lives.

Nevertheless, the doctor did not raise his weapon. Discipline still held; the dominance of that black-bearded Hercules still viséed all opposition into impotence. With no more than a curse, the doctor turned back to his guard duty.

“Are you man or are you devil?” muttered Filhiol. “Good God, what are you?”

Already the defense of the Silver Fleece was nearly complete; and in the long-boat the kedge-anchor was being rowed away by four men under command of Mr. Crevay. The war-fleet had drawn much nearer, in a rough crescent to northwestward, its sails taut. Flashing water-jewels, swirled up from paddles, had become visible, under the now unclouded splendor of the sun. More and more distinctly the chanting and war-drums drifted in.

[52]

The off-shore breeze was urging the armada forward; the dip and swing of all those scores of paddles gave a sense of unrelenting power. But Briggs, hard, eager, seemed only welcoming battle as he stood calculating time and distance, armament and disposal of his forces, or, with an eye aloft at the clewed-up canvas, figured the tactics of kedging-off, of making sail if possible, and showing Batu Kawan’s forces a clean pair of heels.

“Look lively with that anchor!” he shouted out across the sparkling waters. “Drop her in good holdin’ ground, and lead that line aboard. The sooner we get our Malays sweatin’ on the capstan, the better!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” drifted back the voice of Crevay. And presently the splash of the anchor as the boat-crew tugged it over the stern, flung cascades of foam into the heat-quivering air.

The boat surged back bravely; the line was bent to the capstan, and Briggs ordered the Malays to the bars. Sullen they came, shuffling, grumbling strange words—lean, brown and yellow men in ragged cotton shirts and no shirts at all—as murderous a pack as ever padded in sandals or bare feet along white decks.

Among them slouched Mahmud Baba, who, like all the rest, shot a comprehending glance at the on-drawing fleet. Up the forward companion-ladder they swarmed, and aft to the capstan, with Briggs, the doctor and Wansley all three on a hair-trigger to let sunlight through the first who should so much as raise a hand of rebellion. And so they manned the capstan-bars, and so they fell a-heaving at the kedge-line, treading with slow, toilsome feet ’round and ’round on the hot planks, where—young as the morning was—the pitch had already softened.

“Come here, you surkabutch!” commanded the[53] captain, summoning Mahmud Baba. “Juldi, idherao!”

The Malay came, gray with anger—for Briggs had, in hearing of all his fellows, called him “son of a pig,” and a Mohammedan will kill you for calling him that, if he can. Nevertheless, Mahmud salaamed. Not now could he kill. Later, surely. He could afford to wait. The Frank must not call him son of a pig, and still live. Might not Allah even now be preparing vengeance, in that war-fleet? Mahmud salaamed again, and waited with half-closed eyes.

At the capstan the thud-thud-thud of twoscore trampling feet was already mingling with a croon of song, that soon would rise and strengthen, if not summarily suppressed, and drift out to meet the war-chant of the warrior blood-kin steadily approaching.

Click-click-click! the pawl and ratchet punctuated the rhythm of feet and song, as the hawser began to rise, dripping, from the sea. Briggs drew his revolver from his belt, and ground the muzzle fair against Mahmud’s teeth.

“You tell those other surkabutchas,” said he with cold menace, “that I’ll have no singing. I’ll have no noise to cover up your plotting and planning together. You’ll all work in silence or you’ll all be dead. Understand me?”

“Yas, sar.”

“And you’ll hang to the capstan-bars till we’re free, no matter what happens. The first man that quits, goes to glory on the jump. Savvy?”

“Yas, sar.” Mahmud’s voice was low, submissive; but through the drooping lids a gleam shone forth that never came from sunlight or from sea.

“All right,” growled Briggs, giving the revolver an extra shove. “Get to work! And if those other[54] sons of pigs in the canoes board us, we white men will shoot down every last one o’ you here. We’ll take no chances of being knifed in the back. You’ll all have gone to damnation before one o’ them sets foot on my decks. You lay to that, my Mud Baby! Now, tell ’em all I’ve told you, and get it straight! Jao!”

Briggs struck Mahmud a head-cracking blow with the revolver just above the ear and sent him staggering back to the capstan. The song died, as Mahmud gulped out words that tumbled over each other with staccato vehemence.

“Get in there at the bars!” shouted Briggs. “Get to work, you, before I split you!”

Mahmud swung to place, and bent his back to labor, as his thin chest and skinny hands pushed at the bar beside his fellows.

And steadily the war-fleet drew in toward its prey.

PARLEY AND DEATH

In silence now the capstan turned. No Malays hummed or spoke. Only the grunting of their breath, oppressed by toil and the thrust of the bars, kept rough time with the slither of feet, the ratchet-click, the groaning creak of the cable straining through the chocks.

“Dig your toe-nails in, you black swine!” shouted Briggs. “The first one that—”

“Captain Briggs,” the doctor interrupted, taking him by the arm, “I think the enemy’s trying to communicate with us. See there?”

He pointed where the fleet had now ranged up to within about two miles. The mats of the proa and of the other sailing-canoes had crumpled down, the oars and paddles ceased their motion. The war-party seemed resting for deliberation. Only one boat was moving, a long canoe with an outrigger; and from this something white was slowly waving.

“Parley be damned!” cried Briggs. “The only parley I’ll have with that pack of lousy beggars will be hot shot!”

“That canoe coming forward there, with the white flag up,” Filhiol insisted, “means they want to powwow. It’s quite likely a few dollars may settle the whole matter; or perhaps a little surplus hardware. Surely you’d rather part with something than risk losing your ship, sir?”

“I’ll part with nothin’, and I’ll save my ship into[56] the bargain,” growled the captain. “There’ll be no tribute paid, doctor. Good God! White men knucklin’ under, to niggers? Never, sir—never!”

Savagely he spoke, but Filhiol detected intonations that rang not quite true. Again he urged: “A bargain’s a bargain, black or white. Captain Light was as good a man as ever sailed the Straits, and he wasn’t above diplomacy. He understood how to handle these people. Wanted a landing-place cleared, you remember. Couldn’t hire a man-jack to work for him, so he loaded his brass cannon with trade-dollars and shot them into the jungle. The Malays cleared five acres, hunting for those dollars. These people can be handled, if you know how.”

The captain, his heavy brows furrowed with a black frown, still peered at the on-drawing canoe. Silence came among all the white men at their fighting-stations or grouped near the captain.

“That’s enough!” burst out Briggs. “Silence, sir! Mr. Gascar, fetch my glass!”

The doctor, very wise, held his tongue. Already he knew he was by way of winning his contention. Gascar brought the telescope from beside the after-companion housing, where Briggs had laid it. The captain thrust his revolver into his belt. In silence he studied the approaching canoe. Then he exclaimed: “This is damned strange! Dr. Filhiol!”

“Well, sir?”

“Take a look, and tell me what you see.”

He passed the telescope to the doctor, who with keenest attention observed the boat, then said:

“White men on board that canoe. Two of them.”

“That’s what I thought, doctor. Must be Mr. Scurlock and the boy, eh?”

“Yes, sir. I think there’s still time to trade the girl for them,” the doctor eagerly exclaimed. A moment[57] Briggs seemed pondering, while at the capstan the driven Malays—now reeking in a bath of sweat—still trod their grunting round.

“Captain, I beg of you—” the doctor began. Briggs raised a hand for silence.

“Don’t waste your breath, sir, till we know what’s what!” he commanded. “I’ll parley, at any rate. We may be able to get that party on board here. If we can, the rest will be easy. And I’m as anxious to lay hands on those damned deserters o’ mine as I was ever anxious for anything in my life. Stand to your arms, men! Mr. Bevans, be ready with that signal-gun to blow ’em out of the water if they start trouble. Mr. Gascar, fetch my speakin’-trumpet from the cabin. Bring up a sheet, too, from Scurlock’s berth. That’s the handiest flag o’ truce we’ve got. Look alive now!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” answered Gascar, and departed on his errand.

Silence fell, save for the toiling Malays, whose labors still were fruitless to do aught save slowly drag the kedge through the gleaming sand of the sea-bottom. Mr. Wansley muttered something to himself; the doctor fell nervously to pacing up and down; the others looked to their weapons.

From the fleet now drifted no sound of drums or chanting. In stillness lay the war-craft; in stillness the single canoe remained on watch, with only that tiny flicker of white to show its purpose. A kind of ominous hush brooded over sea and sky; but ever the tramp of feet at the capstan, and the panting breath of toil there rose on the superheated air.

Gascar returned, handed the trumpet to Briggs, and from the rail waved the sheet. After a minute the canoe once more advanced, with flashing paddles. Steadily the gun-crew kept it covered, ready at a[58] word to shatter it. Along the rail the riflemen crouched. And still the little white flutter spoke of peace, if peace the captain could be persuaded into buying.

The glass now determined beyond question that Mr. Scurlock and the boy were on board. Briggs also made out old Dengan Jouga, the witch-woman, mother of the girl. His jaw clamped hard as he waited. He let the war-craft draw up to within a quarter-mile, then bade Gascar cease displaying the sheet, and through the speaking-trumpet shouted:

“That’ll do now, Scurlock! Nigh enough! What’s wanted?”

The paddlers ceased their work. The canoe drifted idly. Silence followed. Then a figure stood up—a figure now plainly recognizable in that bright glow as Mr. Scurlock. Faintly drifted in the voice of the former mate:

“Captain Briggs! For God’s sake, listen to me! Let me come closer—let me talk with you!”

“You’re close enough now, you damned mutineer!” retorted Briggs. “What d’ you want? Spit it out, and be quick about it!”

Another silence, while the sound traveled to the canoe and while the answer came:

“I’ve got the boy with me. We’re prisoners. If you don’t give up that girl, an’ pay somethin’ for her, they’re goin’ to kill us both. They’re goin’ to cut our heads off, cap’n, and give ’em to the witch-woman, to hang outside her hut!”

“And a devilish good place for ’em, too!” roared Briggs, unmindful of surly looks and muttered words revealing some disintegration of the discipline at first so splendidly inspired. “I’ll have no dealin’s with you on such terms. Get back now—back, afore I sink you, where you lie!”

[59]

“See here, captain!” burst out Filhiol, his face white with a flame of passion. “I’m no mutineer, and I’m not refusing duty, but by God—”

“Silence, sir!” shouted Briggs. “I’ve got irons aboard for any man as sets himself against me!”

“Irons or no irons, I can’t keep silent,” the doctor persisted, while here and there a growl, a curse, should have told Briggs which way the spate of things had begun to flow. “That man, there, and that helpless boy—”

He choked, gulped, stammered in vain for words.

“They’ll hang our heads up, and they’ll burn the Silver Fleece and bootcher all hands,” drifted in the far, slow cry of Mr. Scurlock. “They got three hundred men an’ firearms, an’ a brass cannon. An’ if this party is beat, more will be raised. This is your last chance! For the girl an’ a hundred trade-dollars they’ll all quit and go home!”

“To hell with ’em!” shouted Briggs at the rail, his face swollen with hate and rage. “To hell with you, too! There’ll be no such bargain struck so long as I got a deck to tread on, or a shot in my lockers! If they want the yellow she-dog, let ’em come an’ take her! Now, stand off, there, afore I blow you to Davy Jones!”

“It’s murder!” flared the doctor. “You men, here—officers of this ship—I call on you to witness this cold-blooded murder. Murder of a good man, and a harmless boy! By God, if you stand there and let him kill those two—”

Briggs flung up his revolver and covered the doctor with an aim the steadiness of which proved how unshaken was his nerve.

“Murder if you like,” smiled he with cold malice, his white teeth glinting. “An’ there’ll be another one right here, if you don’t put a stopper on that mutinous[60] jaw of yours and get back to your post. That’s my orders, and if you don’t obey on shipboard, it’s mutiny. Mutiny, sawbones, an’ I can shoot you down, an’ go free. I’m to windward o’ the law. Now, get back to the capstan, afore I let daylight through you!”

Outplayed by tactics that put a sudden end to any opposition, the doctor ceded. The steady “O” of the revolver-muzzle paralyzed his tongue and numbed his arm. Had he felt that by a sudden shot he could have had even a reasonable chance of downing the captain, had he possessed any confidence of backing from enough of the others to have made mutiny a success, he would have risked his life—yes, gladly lost it—by coming to swift grips with the brute. But Filhiol knew the balance of power still lay against him. The majority, he sensed, still stood against him. Sullenly the doctor once more lagged aft.

From the canoe echoed voices, ever more loud and more excited. In the bow, Scurlock gesticulated. His supplications were audible, mingled with shouts and cries from the Malays. Added thereto were high-pitched screams from the boy—wild, shrill, nerve-breaking screams, like those of a wounded animal in terror.

“Oh, God, this is horrible!” groaned the doctor, white as paper. His teeth sank into his bleeding lip. He raised his revolver to send a bullet through the captain; but Crevay, with one swift blow, knocked the weapon jangling to the deck, and dealt Filhiol a blow that sent him reeling.

“Payne, and you, Deming, here!” commanded he, summoning a couple of foremast hands. They came to him. “Lock this man in his cabin. He’s got a touch o’ sun. Look alive, now!”

Together they laid hands on Filhiol, hustled him down the after-companion, flung him into his cabin[61] and locked the door. Crevay, guarding the Malays at the capstan, muttered:

“Saved the idiot’s life, anyhow. Good doctor; but as a man, what a damned, thundering fool!”

Unmindful of this side-play Briggs was watching the canoe. His face had become that of a devil glad of vengeance on two hated souls. He laughed again at Scurlock’s up-flung arms, at his frantic shout:

“For the love o’ God, captain, save us! If you don’t give up that girl, they’re goin’ to kill us right away! You got to act quick, now, to save us!”

“Save yourselves, you renegades!” shouted Briggs, swollen with rage and hate. His laugh chilled the blood. “You said you’d chance it with the Malays afore you would with me. Well, take it, now, and to hell with you!”

“For God’s sake, captain—”

Scurlock’s last, wild appeal was suddenly strangled into silence. Another scream from the boy echoed over the water. The watchers got sight of a small figure that waved imploring arms. All at once this figure vanished, pulled down, with Scurlock, by shouting Malays.

The exact manner of the death of the two could not be told. All that the clipper’s men could see was a sudden, confused struggle, that ended almost before it had begun. A few shouts drifted out over the clear waters. Then another long, rising shriek in the boy’s treble, shuddered across the vacancy of sea and sky—a shriek that ended with sickening suddenness.

Some of the white men cursed audibly. Some faces went drawn and gray. A flurry of chatter broke out at the toiling capstan—not even Mr. Crevay’s furious oaths and threats could immediately suppress it.

Briggs only laughed, horribly, his teeth glinting as he leaned on the rail and watched.

[62]

For a moment the canoe rocked in spite of its steadying outrigger, with the violence of the activities aboard it. Then up rose two long spears; spears topped with grisly, rounded objects. A rising chorus of yells, yells of rage, hate, defiance, spread abroad, echoed by louder shouts from the wide crescent of the fleet. And once again the drums began to pulse.

From the canoe, two formless things were thrown. Here, there, a shark-fin turned toward the place—a swirl of water.

Silence fell aboard the clipper. In that silence a slight grating sound, below, told Briggs the kedging had begun to show results. A glad sound, indeed, that grinding of the keel!

“By God, men!” he shouted, turning. “The forefoot’s comin’ free. Dig in, you swine! Men, when she clears, we’ll box her off with the fores’l—we’ll beat ’em yet!”

Once more allegiance knit itself to Briggs. Despite that double murder (as surely done by him as if his own hand had wielded the kris that had beheaded Mr. Scurlock and the boy), the drums and shoutings of the war-fleet, added to this new hope of getting clear of Ulu Salama, fired every white man’s heart with sudden hope.

The growl that had begun to rise against Briggs died away.

“Mr. Crevay,” he commanded, striding aft, “livelier there with those pigs! They’re not doin’ half a trick o’ work!” Angrily he gestured at the sweat-bathed, panting men. “You, Lumbard, fetch me up a fathom o’ rope. I’ll give ’em a taste o’ medicine that’ll make ’em dig! And you, Mr. Bevans—how’s the gun? All loaded with junk?”

“All ready, sir!”

Briggs turned to it. Out over the water he squinted,[63] laying careful aim at the canoe where Scurlock and the boy had died.

The canoe had already begun retreating from the place now marked by a worrying swirl of waters where the gathering sharks held revel. Back towards the main fleet it was circling as the paddlemen—their naked, brown bodies gleaming with sunlight on the oil that would make them slippery as eels in case of close fighting—bent to their labor.

On the proa and the other sailing-canoes the mat sails had already been hauled up again. The proa was slowly lagging forward; and with it the battle-line, wide-flung.

Briggs once more assured his aim. He seized the lanyard, stepped back, and with a shout of: “Take this, you black scum!” jerked the cord.

The rusty old four-inch leaped against its lashings as it vomited half a bushel of heavy nuts, bolts, brass and iron junk in a roaring burst of smoke and flame.

Fortune favored. The canoe buckled, jumped half out of the water, and, broken fair in two, dissolved in a scattering flurry of débris. Screams echoed with horrible yells from the on-drawing fleet. Dark, moving things, the heads of swimmers already doomed by the fast-gathering sharks, jostled floating things that but a second before had been living men. The whole region near the canoe became a white-foaming thrash of struggle and of death.

“Come on, all o’ you!” howled Briggs with the laughter of a blood-crazed devil. “We’re ready, you surkabutchas! Ready for you all!”

With an animal-like scream of rage, a Malay sprang from the capstan-bar where he had been sweating. On Crevay he flung himself. A blade, snatched from the Malay’s breech-clout, flicked high-lights as it plunged into Crevay’s neck.

[64]

Whirled by a dozen warning yells, the captain spun. He caught sight of Crevay, already crumpling down on the hot deck: saw the reddened blade, the black-toothed grin of hate, the on-rush of the amok Malay.

Up flung his revolver. But already the leaping figure was upon him.

ONSET OF BATTLE

The shot that Wansley fired, a chance shot hardly aimed at all, must have been guided by the finger of the captain’s guardian genius. It crumpled the Malay, with strangely sprawling legs. Kill him it did not. But the bullet through his lower vertebræ left only his upper half alive.

With a grunt he crumpled to the hot deck, knife still clutched in skinny fist. Shouts echoed. Briggs stood aghast, with even his steel nerve jangling. The quivering Malay was a half-dead thing that still lived. He writhed with contorted face, dragging himself toward Briggs. The knife-blade clicked on the planking, like the clicking of his teeth that showed black through slavering lips.

“Allah! il Allah!” he gulped, heaving himself up on one hand, slashing with the other.

Why do men, in a crisis, so often do stupid, unaccountable things? Why did Briggs kick at him, with a roaring oath, instead of shooting? Briggs felt the bite of steel in his leg. That broke the numbing spell of unreason. The captain’s pistol, at point-blank range, shattered the yellow man’s skull. Blood, smeared with an ooze of brain, colored the stewing deck.

“Allah! il Al—!”

The cry ended in a choking gurgle on lips that drew into a horrible grin. And now completely dead even beyond the utmost lash of Islamic fanaticism, the[66] Malay dropped face down. This time the captain’s kick landed only on flesh and bone past any power of feeling.

At the capstan-bars it was touch-and-go. Crevay was down, groaning, his hands all slippery and crimson with the blood that seeped through his clutching fingers. For a moment, work slacked off. Wansley was shouting, with revolver leveled, his voice blaring above the cries, oaths, imprecations. Things came to the ragged edge of a rush, but white men ran in with rifles and cutlasses. Briggs flung himself aft, trailing blood.

Crazed with rage and the burn of that wound, he fired thrice. Malays sagged down, plunged screaming to the deck. The captain would have emptied his revolver into the pack, but Wansley snatched him by the arm.

“Hold on!” he shouted. “That’s enough—we need ’em, sir!”

Prass, belaying-pin in hand, struck to right, to left. Yells of pain mingled with the tumult that drowned the ragged, ineffective spatter of firing from the war-fleet. The action was swift, decisive. In half a minute, the capstan was clicking again, faster than ever. Its labor-power, diminished by the loss of three men, was more than compensated by the fear of the survivors.

“Overboard with the swine!” shouted Briggs. “Overboard with ’em, to the sharks!”

“This here one ain’t done for yet, sir,” began Prass, pointing. “He’s only—”

“Overboard, I said!” roared Briggs. “You’ll go, too, by God, if you give me any lip!”

As men laid hands on the Malays to drag them to the rail, Briggs dropped on his knees beside Crevay. He pulled away the man’s hands from the gaping neck-wound, whence the life was irretrievably spurting.

[67]

“Judas priest!” he stammered, for here was his right-hand man as good as dead. “Doctor! Where the devil is Mr. Filhiol?”

“In the cabin, sir,” Prass answered.

“Cabin! Holy Lord! On deck with him!”

“Yes, sir.”

“And tell him to bring his kit!”

Prass had already dived below. The doctor was haled up again, with his bag. A kind of hard exultation blazed in the captain’s face. He seemed not to hear the shouts of war, the spattering fusillade from the canoes. His high-arched chest rose and fell, pantingly. His hands, reddened with the blood of Crevay, dripped horribly. Filhiol, hustled on deck, stared in amazement.

“A job for you, sir!” cried Briggs. “Prove yourself!”

Filhiol leaned over Crevay. But he made no move to open his kit-bag. One look had told him the truth.

The man, already unconscious, had grown waxen. His breathing had become a stertorous hiccough. The deck beneath him was terrible to look upon.

“No use, sir,” said the doctor briefly. “He’s gone.”

“Do something!” blazed the captain. “Something!”

“For a dead man?” retorted Filhiol. As he spoke, even the hiccough ceased.

Briggs stared with eyes of rage. He got to his feet, hulking, savage, with swaying red fists.

“They’ve killed my best man,” he snarled. “If we didn’t need the dogs, we’d feed ’em all to the sharks, so help me!”

“You’re wounded, sir!” the doctor cried, pointing at the blood-wet slash in the captain’s trouser-leg.

“Oh, to hell with that!” Briggs retorted. “You, and you,” he added, jabbing a finger at two sailors,[68] “carry Mr. Crevay down to the cabin—then back to your rifles at the rail!”

They obeyed, their burden sagging limply. Already the dead and wounded Malays had been bundled over the rail. The fusillade from the war-canoes was strengthening, and the shouts had risen to a barbaric chorus. The patter of bullets and slugs into the sea or against the planking of the Silver Fleece formed a ragged accompaniment to the whine of missiles through the air. A few holes opened in the clipper’s canvas. One of the men who had thrown the Malays overboard cursed suddenly and grabbed his left elbow, shattered.

“Take cover!” commanded Briggs. “Down, everybody, along the rail! Mr. Wansley, down with you and your men. Get down!”

Indifferent to all peril for himself, Briggs turned toward the companion.

“Captain,” the doctor began again. “Your boot’s full of blood. Let me bandage—”

Briggs flung a snarl at him and strode to the companion.

“Below, there!” he shouted.

“Aye, aye, sir!” rose the voice of one of the foremast hands.

“Get that wench up here! The yellow girl! Bring her up—an’ look alive!”

“Captain,” the doctor insisted, “I’ve got to do something for that gash in your leg. Not that I love you, but you’re the only man that can save us. Sit down here, sir. You’ll bleed to death where you stand!”

Something in Filhiol’s tone, something in a certain giddiness that was already reaching for the captain’s heart and brain, made him obey. He sat down shakily on deck beside the after-companion. In the midst[69] of all that turmoil, all underlaid by the slow, grinding scrape of the keel on the sand-bar, the physician performed his duty.

With scissors, he shore away the cloth. A wicked slash, five or six inches long, stood redly revealed.

“Tss! Tss!” clucked Filhiol. “Lucky if it’s not poisoned.”

“Mr. Gascar!” shouted the captain. “Go below!” Briggs jerked a thumb downward at the cabin, whence sounds of a struggle, mingled with cries and animal-like snarls, had begun to proceed. “Bring up the jug o’ rum you’ll find in my locker. Serve it out to all hands. And, look you, if they need a lift with the girl, give it; but don’t you kill that wench. I need her, alive! Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Gascar replied, and vanished down the companion. He reappeared with a jug and a tin cup.

“They’re handlin’ her all right, sir,” he reported. “Have a drop, sir?”

“You’re damned shoutin’, I will!” And the captain reached for the cup. Gascar poured him a stiff drink. He gulped it and took another. “Now deal it out. There’ll be plenty more when we’ve sunk the yellow devils!”

He got to his feet, scorning further care from Filhiol, and stood there wild and disheveled, with one leg of his trousers cut off at the knee and with his half-tied bandages already crimsoning.

“Rum for all hands, men!” he shouted. “And better than rum—my best wine, sherry, champagne—a bottle a head for you, when this shindy’s over!”

Cheers rose unevenly. Gascar started on his round with the jug. Even the wounded men, such as could still raise their voices, shouted approval.

“Hold your fire, men,” the captain ordered. “Let ’em close in—then blow ’em out o’ the water!”

KUALA PAHANG

The doctor, presently finishing with Briggs, turned his attention to the other injured ones. At the top of the companion now stood the captain with wicked eyes, as up the ladder emerged the two seamen with the struggling, clawing tiger-cat of a girl.

The cruel beating the captain had given her the night before had not yet crushed her spirit. Neither had the sickness of the liquor he had forced her to drink. Bruised, spent, broken as she was, the spirit of battle still dwelt in the lithe barbarian. That her sharp nails had been busy to good effect was proved by the long, deep gashes on the faces and necks of both seamen. One had been bitten on the forearm. For all their strength, they proved hardly more than a match for her up the narrow, steep companion. Their blasphemies mingled with the girl’s animal-like cries. Loudly roared the booming bass of the captain:

“Up with the she-dog! I’ll teach her something—teach ’em all something, by the Judas priest! Up with her!”

They dragged her out on deck, up into all that shouting and firing, that turmoil and labor and blood. And as they brought her up a plume of smoke jetted from the bows of the proa. The morning air sparkled with the fire-flash of that ancient brass cannon. With a crashing shower of splinters, a section of the rail burst inward. Men sprawled, howling. But a greater tragedy—in the eyes of these sailormen—befell:[71] for a billet of wood crashed the jug to bits, cascading the deck with good Medford. And, his hand paralyzed and tingling with the shock, Gascar remained staring at the jug-handle still in his grip and at the flowing rum on deck.

Howls of bitter rage broke from along the rail, and the rifles began crackling. The men, cheated of their drink, were getting out of hand.

“Cease firing, you!” screamed Briggs. “You’ll fire when I command, and not before. Mr. Bevans! Loaded again?”

“All loaded, sir. Say when!”

“Not yet! Lay a good aim on the proa. We’ve got to blow her out o’ the water!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” And Bevans patted the rusty old piece. “Leave that to me, sir!”

Briggs turned again to the struggling girl. A thin, evil smile drew at his lips. His face, under its bronze of tan, burned with infernal exultation.

“Now, my beauty,” he mocked, “now I’ll attend to you!”

For a moment he eyed Kuala Pahang. Under the clear, morning light, she looked a strange and wild creature indeed—golden-yellow of tint, with tangled black hair, and the eyes of a trapped tigress. Bruises wealed her naked arms and shoulders, souvenirs of the captain’s club and fist. Her supple body was hardly concealed by her short skirt and by the tight Malay jacket binding her lithe waist and firm, young breast.

Briggs exulted over her, helpless and panting in the clutch of the two foremast-hands. “To the rail with her!” he ordered.

“What you goin’ to do, sir?” asked one of the men, staring. “Heave her over?”

Briggs menaced him with clenched fist.

[72]

“None o’ your damned business!” he shouted. “To the rail with her! Jump, afore I teach you how!”

They dragged her, screeching, to the starboard rail. All the time they had to hold those cat-clawed hands of hers. From side to side she flung herself, fighting every foot of the way. Briggs put back his head and laughed at the rare spectacle. Twice or thrice the sailors slipped in blood and rum upon the planking, and once Kuala Pahang all but jerked free from them. At the capstan, only the pistols of the three white guards held her kinsmen back from making a stampede rush; and not even the pistols could silence among them a menacing hum of rage that seethed and bubbled.

“Here, you!” shouted Briggs. “Mahmud Baba, you yellow cur, come here!”

Mahmud loosed his hold on the capstan-bar and in great anguish approached.

“Yas, sar?” whined he. The lean, brown form was trembling. The face had gone a jaundiced color. “I come, sar.”

Briggs leveled his revolver at the Malay. Unmindful of the spattering bullets, he spoke with deliberation.

“Son of a saffron dog,” said he, “you’re going to tell this wench something for me!”

“Yas, sar. What piecee thing me tell?”

“You tell her that if the boats don’t go back to land I’ll heave her over the rail. I’ll feed her to the sharks, by God! Alive, to the sharks—sharks, down there! Savvy?”

“Me savvy.”

“And she’s got to shout that to the canoes! She’s got to shout it to ’em. Go on, now, tell her!”

Mahmud hesitated a moment, shuddered and grimaced. His eyes narrowed to slits. The captain[73] poked the revolver into his ribs. Mahmud quivered. He fell into a sing-song patter of strange words with whining intonations. Suddenly he ceased.

The girl listened, her gleaming eyes fixed on Mahmud’s face. A sudden question issued from her bruised, cut lips.

“What’s she asking?” demanded Briggs.

“She ask where her mother, sar?”

“Tell her! Tell her I’ve shot the old she-devil to hell, and beyond! Tell her she’ll get worse if she don’t make the canoes stand off—worse, because the sharks will get her alive! Go on, you black scut o’ misery, tell her!”

Mahmud spoke again. He flung a hand at the enveloping half-circle of the war-fleet. The nearest boats now were moving hardly a quarter-mile away. The gleam of krises and of spears twinkled in the sun. Little smoke-puffs all along the battle-front kept pace with the popping of gunfire. In the proa, oily brown devils were laboring to reload the brass cannon.

Mahmud’s speech ended. The girl stiffened, with clenched hands. The sailors, holding her wrists, could feel the whipcord tension of her muscles.

“Tell her to shout to the proa there!” yelled the captain in white fury. “Either they stand off or over she goes—and you see for yourself there’s sharks enough!”

Again Mahmud spoke. The girl grunted a monosyllable.

“What’s that she says?” demanded Briggs.

“She say no, sar. She die, but she no tell her people.”

“The hell you say!” roared the captain. He seized her neck in a huge, hairy paw, tightened his fingers till they bit into the yellow skin, and shook her violently.

[74]

“I’ll break your damned, obstinate neck for you!” he cried, his face distorted. “Tell your people to go back! Tell ’em!”

Mahmud translated the order. The girl only laughed. Briggs knew himself beaten. In that sneering laugh of Kuala Pahang’s echoed a world of maddening defiance. He loosened his hold, trying to think how he should master her. Another man grunted, by the rail, and slid to the deck, where a chance bullet had given him the long sleep.

Briggs whirled on Mahmud, squeezed his lean shoulder till the bones bent.

“You tell ’em!” he bellowed. “If she won’t, you will!”

“Me, sar?” whined the Malay, shivering and fear-sick to the inner marrow. “Me tell so, they kill me!”

“If you don’t, I will! Up with you now—both o’ you, up, on the rail! Here, you men—up with ’em!”

They hoisted the girl, still impassive, to the rail, and held her there. The firing almost immediately died away. Mahmud tried to grovel at the captain’s feet, wailing to Allah and the Prophet. Briggs flung him up, neck and crop. Mahmud grappled the after backstays and clung there, quivering.

“Go on, now, out with it!” snarled Briggs, his pistol at the Malay’s back. “And make it loud, or the sharks will get you, too!”

Mahmud raised a bony arm, howled words that drifted out over the pearl-hued waters. Silence fell, along the ragged line of boats. In the bow of the proa a figure stood up, naked, gleaming with oil in the sunlight, which flicked a vivid, crimson spot of color from a nodding feather head-dress.

Back to the Silver Fleece floated a high-pitched question, fraught with a heavy toll of life and death. Mahmud[75] answered. The figure waved a furious arm, and fire leaped from the brass cannon.

The shot went high, passing harmlessly over the clipper and ricochetting beyond. But at the same instant a carefully laid rifle, from a canoe, barked stridently. Mahmud coughed, crumpled and slid from the rail. He dropped plumb; and the shoal waters, clear-green over the bar, received him.

As he fell, Briggs struck the girl with a full drive of his trip-hammer fist. The blow broke the sailors’ hold. It called no scream from Kuala Pahang. She fell, writhing, plunged in foam, rose, and with splendid energy struck out for the canoes.

Briggs leaned across the rail, as if no war-fleet had been lying in easy shot; and with hard fingers tugging at his big, black beard, watched the swimming girl, her lithe, yellow body gleaming through the water. Watched, too, the swift cutting of the sharks’ fins toward her—the darting, black forms—the grim tragedy in that sudden, reddening whip of brine. Then he laughed, his teeth gleaming like wolves’ teeth, as he heard her scream.

“Broke her silence at last, eh?” he sneered. “They got a yell out of the she-dog, the sharks did, even if I couldn’t—eh?”

Along the rail, hard-bitten as the clipper’s men were, oaths broke out, and mutterings. Work slackened at the capstan, and for the moment the guards forgot to drive their lathering slaves there.

“Great God, captain!” sounded the doctor’s voice, as he looked up from a wounded man. “You’ve murdered us all!”

Briggs only laughed again and looked to his pistol.

“They’re coming now, men,” said he coolly. To his ears the high and rising tumult from the flotilla made music. The lust of war was in him. For a[76] moment he peered intently at the paddlemen once more bending to their work; the brandished krises and long spears; the spattering of bullets all along the water.

“Let ’em come!” he cried, laughing once more. “With hot lead and boiling water and cold steel, I reckon we’re ready for ’em. Steady’s the word, boys! They’re coming—give ’em hell!”

HOME BOUND

Noon witnessed a strange scene in the Straits of Motomolo, a scene of agony and death.

Over the surface of the strait, inborne by the tide, extended a broad field of débris, of shattered planks, bamboos, platted sails.

In mid-scene, sunk on Ulu Salama bar only a few fathoms from where the Silver Fleece had lain, rested the dismantled wreck of the proa. The unpitying sun flooded that wreck—what was left of it after a powder-cask, fitted with fuse, had been hurled aboard by Captain Briggs himself. No living man remained aboard. On the high stern still projecting from the sea—the stern whence a thin waft of smoke still rose against the sky—a few broken, yellow bodies lay half consumed by fire, twisted and hideous.

Of the small canoes, not one remained. Such as had not been capsized and broken up, had lamely paddled back to shore with the few Malays who had survived the guns and cutlasses and brimming kettles of seething water. Corpses lay awash. The sharks no longer quarreled for them. Full-fed on the finest of eating, they hardly snouted at the remnants of the feast.

So much, then, for the enemy. And the Silver Fleece—what of her?

A mile to seaward flying a few rags of canvas, the wounded clipper was limping on, under a little slant of wind that gave her hardly steerageway. Her kedge cable had been chopped, her mizzen-topmast[78] was down, and a raffle of spars, ropes and canvas littered her decks or had brought down the awnings, that smoldered where the fire-arrows had ignited them.

Her deck-houses showed the splintering effects of rifle and cannon-fire. Here, there, lay empty pails and coppers that had held boiling water. Along the rails and lying distorted on deck, dead men and wounded—white, brown and yellow—were sprawling. And there were wounds and mutilations and dead men still locked in grapples eloquent of fury—a red shambles on the planks once so whitely holystoned.

The litter of knives, krises, cutlasses and firearms told the story; told that some of the Malays had boarded the Silver Fleece and that none of these had got away.

The brassy noonday fervor, blazing from an unclouded sky, starkly revealed every detail. On the heavy air a mingled odor of smoke and blood drifted upward, as from a barbaric pyre to some unpitying and sanguinary god—perhaps already to the avenging god that old Dengan Jouga had called upon to curse the captain and his ship, “the Eyeless Face that waits above and laughs.”

A doleful sound of groaning and cursing arose. Beside the windlass—deserted now, with part of the Malays dead and part under hatches—Gascar was feebly raising a hand to his bandaged head, as he lay there on his back. His eyes, open and staring, seemed to question the sun that cooked his bloodied face. A brown man, blind and aimless, was crawling on slippery red hands and knees, amidships; and as he crawled, he moaned monotonously. Two more, both white, were sitting with their backs against the deck-house. Neither spoke. One was past speech; the other, badly slashed about the shoulders, was groping[79] in his pockets for tobacco; and, finding none, was feebly cursing.

Bevans, leaning against the taffrail, was binding his right forearm with strips torn from the shirt that hung on him in tatters. He was swearing mechanically, in a sing-song voice, as the blood seeped through each fresh turn of cotton.

From the fo’c’s’le was issuing a confused sound. At the wheel stood a sailor, beside whom knelt the doctor. As this sailor grimly held the wheel, Filhiol was bandaging his thigh.

“It’s the best I can do for you now, my man,” the doctor was saying. “Others need me worse than you do.”

A laugh from the companionway jangled on this scene of agony. There stood Alpheus Briggs, smearing his bearded lips with his hirsute paw—for once again he had been at the liquor below. He blinked about him, set both fists on his hips, and then flung an oath of all-comprehensive execration at sea and sky and ship.

“Well, anyhow, by the holy Jeremiah,” he cried, with another laugh of barbaric merriment, “I’ve taught those yellow devils one good lesson!”

A shocking figure the captain made. All at once Prass came up from below and stood beside him. Mauled as Prass was, he seemed untouched by comparison with Briggs. The captain’s presence affronted heaven and earth, with its gross ugliness of rags and dirt and wounds, above which his savage spirit seemed to rise indifferent, as if such trifles as mutilations lay beneath notice.

Across the captain’s brow a gash oozed redly into his eye, puffy, discolored. As he smeared his forehead, his arm knotted into hard bunches. His hairy breast was slit with slashes, too; his mop of beard had[80] stiffened from a wound across his cheek. Nothing of his shirt remained, save a few tatters dangling from his tightly-drawn belt. His magnificent torso, muscled like an Atlas, was all grimed with sweat, blood, dirt. Save for his boots, nothing of his clothing remained intact; and the boots were sodden red.

Now as he stood there, peering out with his one serviceable eye under a heavy, bushy brow, and chewing curses to himself, he looked a man, if one ever breathed, unbeaten and unbeatable.

The captain’s voice gusted out raw and brutelike, along the shambles of the deck.

“Hell of a thing, this is! And all along of a yellow wench. Devil roast all women! An’ devil take the rotten, cowardly crew! If I’d had that crew I went black-birding with up the Gold Coast, not one o’ those hounds would have boarded us. But they didn’t get the she-dog back, did they? It’s bad, bad, but might be worse, so help me!”

Again he laughed, with white teeth gleaming in his reddened beard, and lurched out on deck. He peered about him. A brown body lay before him, face upward, with grinning teeth. Briggs recognized the turtle-egg seller, who had thrown the kris. With a foul oath he kicked the body.

“You got paid off, anyhow,” he growled. “Now you and Scurlock can fight it out together, in hell!”

He turned to the doctor, and limped along the deck.

“Doctor Filhiol!”

“Yes, sir?” answered the doctor, still busy with the man at the wheel.

“Make a short job o’ that, and get to work on those two by the deck-house. We’ve got to muster all hands as quick as the Lord’ll let us—got to get sail on her, an’ away. These damned Malays will be worryin’ at our heels again, if we don’t.”

[81]

“Yes, sir,” said Filhiol, curtly. He made the bandage fast, took his kit, and started forward. Briggs laid a detaining hand on his arm—a hand that left a broad red stain on the rolled-up sleeve.

“Doctor,” said he, thickly, “we’ve got to stand together, now. There’s a scant half-dozen men, here, able to pull a rope; and with them we’ve got to make Singapore. Do your best, doctor—do your best!”

“I will, sir. But that includes cutting off your rum!”

The captain roared into boisterous laughter and slapped Filhiol on the back.

“You’ll have to cut my throat first!” he ejaculated. “No, no; as long as I’ve got a gullet to swallow with, and the rum lasts, I’ll lay to it. Patch ’em up, doctor, an’ then—”

“You could do with a bit of patching, yourself.”

The captain waved him away.

“Scratches!” he cried. “Let the sun dry ’em up!” He shoved the doctor forward, and followed him, kicking to right and left a ruck of weapons and débris. Together the men advanced, stumbling over bodies.

“Patch those fellows up the best you can,” directed Briggs, gesturing at the pair by the deck-house. “One of ’em, anyhow, may be some good. We’ve got to save every man possible, now. Not that I love ’em, God knows,” he added, swaying slightly as he stood there, with his blood-stained hand upon the rail. “The yellow-bellied pups! We’ve got to save ’em. Though if this was Singapore, I’d let ’em rot. At Singapore, Lascars are plenty, and beach-combers you can get for a song a dozen. Get to work now, sir, get to work!”

Life resumed something of order aboard the Silver Fleece, as she wore slowly down Motomolo Strait.[82] The few Malays of the crew, who had survived the fight and had failed to make their escape with the retreating forces, were for the present kept locked in the deck-house. Briggs was taking no chances with another of the yellow dogs running amok.

The number of hands who mustered for service, including Briggs, Wansley and the doctor, was only nine. This remnant of a crew, as rapidly as weak and wounded flesh could compass it, spread canvas and cleaned ship. A grisly task that was, of sliding the remaining bodies over the rail and of sluicing down the reddened decks with buckets of warm seawater. More and more canvas filled—canvas cut and burned, yet still holding wind enough to drive the clipper. The Silver Fleece heeled gracefully and gathered way.

Slowly the scene of battle drew astern, marked by the thin smoke still rising from the wreckage of the proa. Slowly the haze-shrouded line of shore grew dim. A crippled ship, bearing the dregs of a mutilated crew, she left the vague, blue headland of Columpo Point to starboard, and so—sorely broken but still alive—passed beyond all danger of pursuit.

And as land faded, Captain Alpheus Briggs, drunk, blood-stained, swollen with malice and evil triumph, stood by the shattered taffrail, peering back at the vanishing scene of one more battle in a life that had been little save violence and sin. Freighted with fresh and heavy crimes he exulted, laughing in his blood-thick beard. The tropic sun beat down upon his face, bringing each wicked line to strong relief.

“Score one more for me,” he sneered, his hairy fists clenched hard. “Hell’s got you now, witch-woman, an’ Scurlock an’ all the rest that went against me. But I’m still on deck! They don’t stick on me, curses don’t. And I’ll outlaugh that Eyeless Face—outlaugh[83] it, by God, and come again. And so to hell with that, too!”

He folded steel-muscled arms across his bleeding, sweating chest, heaved a deep breath and gloried in his lawless strength.

“To hell with that!” he spat, once more. “I win—I always win! To hell with everything that crosses me!”

AT LONG WHARF

Four months from that red morning, the Silver Fleece drew in past Nix’s Mate and the low-buttressed islands in Boston Harbor, and with a tug to ease her to her berth, made fast at Long Wharf.

All signs of the battle had long since been obliterated, overlaid by other hardships, violences, evil deeds. Her bottom fouled by tropic weed and barnacles that had accumulated in West Indian waters, her canvas brown and patched, she came to rest. Of all the white men who had sailed with her, nearly two years before, now remained only Captain Briggs, Mr. Wansley, and the doctor. The others who had escaped the fight had all died or deserted on the home-bound journey. One had been caught by bubonic at Bombay, and two by beri-beri at Mowanga, on the Ivory Coast; the others had taken French leave as occasion had permitted.

Short-handed, with a rag-tag crew, the Fleece made her berth. She seemed innocent enough. The sickening stench of the slave cargo that had burdened her from Mowanga to Cuba had been fumigated out of her, and now she appeared only a legitimate trader. That she bore, deftly hidden in secret places, a hundred boxes of raw opium, who could have suspected?

As the hawsers were flung and the clipper creaked against the wharf, there came to an end surely one of the worst voyages that ever an American clipper-ship made. And this is saying a great deal. Those[85] were hard days—days when Massachusetts ships carried full cargoes of Medford rum and Bibles to the West Coast, and came back as slavers, with black ivory groaning and dying under hatches—days when the sharks trailed all across the Atlantic, for the bodies of black men and women—hard days and evil ways, indeed.

Very spruce and fine was Captain Briggs; very much content with life and with the strength that in him lay, that excellent May morning, as with firm stride and clear eye he walked up State Street, in Boston Town. The wounds which would have killed a weaker man had long since healed on him. Up from the water-front he walked, resplendent in his best blue suit, and with a gold-braided cap on his crisp hair. His black beard was carefully trimmed and combed; his bronzed, full-fleshed face glowed with health and satisfaction; and the smoke of his cigar drifted behind him on the morning air. As he went he hummed an ancient chantey:

“Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,
Awa-a-ay, my rollin’ river!
Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,
Ah! Ah! We’re bound with awa-a-ay,
’Cross the wide Missouri!”

Past the ship-chandlers’ stores, where all manner of sea things lay in the windows, he made his way, and past the marine brokers’ offices; past the custom-house and up along the Old State House; and so he came into Court Street and Court Square, hard by which, in a narrow, cobbled lane, the Bell-in-Hand Tavern was awaiting him.

All the way along, shipmasters and seafaring folk nodded respectfully to Alpheus Briggs, or touched their hats to him. But few men smiled. His reputation[86] of hard blows and harder dealings made men salute him. But no man seized him by the hand, or haled him into any public house to toast his safe return.

Under the dark doorway of the Bell-in-Hand—under the crude, wooden fist that from colonial times, as even to-day, has held the gilded, wooden bell—Briggs paused a moment, then entered the inn. His huge bulk seemed almost to fill the dim, smoky, low-posted old place, its walls behung with colored woodcuts of ships and with fine old sporting prints. The captain raised a hand of greeting to Enoch Winch, the publican, passed the time of day with him, and called for a pewter of Four-X, to be served in the back room.

There he sat down in the half-gloom that seeped through the little windows of heavily leaded bull’s-eye glass. He put his cap off, drew deeply at his cigar, and sighed with vast content.

“Back home again,” he murmured. “A hell of a time I’ve had, and that’s no lie. But I’m back home at last!”

His satisfaction was doubled by the arrival of the pewter of ale. Briggs drank deeply of the cold brew, then dried his beard with a handkerchief of purple silk. Not now did he smear his mouth with his hand. This was a wholly other and more elegant Alpheus Briggs. Having changed his latitude and raiment, he had likewise changed his manners.

He drained the pewter till light showed through the glass bottom—the bottom reminiscent of old days when to accept a shilling from a recruiting officer, even unaware, meant being pressed into the service; for a shilling in an empty mug was held as proof of enlistment, unless instantly detected and denied. Briggs smiled at memory of the trick.

[87]

“Clumsy stratagem,” he pondered, “We’re a bit slicker, to-day. In the old days it took time to make a fortune. Now, a little boldness turns the trick, just as I’ve turned it, this time!”

He rapped on the table for another pewter of Four-X. Stronger liquors would better have suited his taste, but he had certain business still to be carried out, and when ashore the captain never let drink take precedence of business.

The second pewter put Captain Briggs in a reminiscent mood, wherein memories of the stirring events of the voyage just ended mingled with the comforting knowledge that he had much money in pocket and that still more was bound to come, before that day’s end. As in a kind of mental mirage, scenes arose before him—scenes of hardship and crime, now in security by no means displeasing to recall.

The affair with the Malay war fleet had already been half-obliterated by more recent violences. Briggs pondered on the sudden mutiny that had broken out, ten days from Bombay, led by a Liverpool ruffian named Quigley, who had tried to brain him with a piece of iron in a sock. Briggs had simply flung him into the sea; then he had faced the others with naked fists, and they had slunk away forward.

He and Wansley had later lashed them to the gangway and had given them the cat to exhaustion. Briggs felt that he had come out of this affair with honors. He took another draught of ale.

Beating up the West Coast, he recalled how he had punished a young Irishman, McCune, whom he had shipped at Cape Town. McCune, from the supposed security of the foretop-gallant yard, had cursed him for a black-hearted bucko. Without parley, Briggs had run up the ratlines, and had flung McCune to the deck. The man had lived only a few minutes.[88] Briggs nodded with satisfaction. He clenched his right fist, hairy, corded, and turned it this way and that, glad of its power. Greatly did he admire the resistless argument that lay in all its bones and ligaments.

“There’s no man can talk back to me!” he growled. “No, by the Judas priest!”

Now came less pleasing recollections. The slave cargo on the west-bound voyage had been unusually heavy. Ironed wrist and ankle, the blacks—men, women, children, purchased as a rather poor bargain lot from an Arab trader—had lain packed in the hold. They had been half starved when Briggs had loaded them, and the fever had already got among them. The percentage of loss had been a bit too heavy. Some death was legitimate, of course; but an excessive mortality meant loss.

The death rate had risen so high that Briggs had even considered bringing some of the black ivory on deck, and increasing the ration. But in the end he had decided to hold through, and trust luck to arrive in Cuba with enough slaves to pay a good margin. Results had justified his decision.

“I was right about that, too,” thought he. “Seems like I’m always right—or else it’s gilt-edged luck!”

Yet, in spite of all, that voyage had left some disagreeable memories. The reek and stifle of the hold, the groaning and crying of the blacks—that no amount of punishment could silence—had vastly annoyed the captain. The way in which his crew had stricken the shackles from the dead and from those manifestly marked for death and had heaved them overboard to the trailing sharks, had been only a trivial detail.

But the fact that Briggs’s own cabin had been invaded[89] by vermin and by noxious odors had greatly annoyed the captain. Not all Doctor Filhiol’s burning of pungent substances in the cabin had been able to purify the air. Briggs had cursed the fact that this most profitable trafficking had involved such disagreeable concomitants, and had consoled himself with much strong drink.

Then, too, a five-day blow, three hundred miles west of the Cape Verdes, had killed off more than forty of his negroes and had made conditions doubly intolerable. Once more he formulated thoughts in words:

“Damn it! I might have done better to have scuttled her, off the African coast, and have drawn down my share of the insurance money. If I’d known what I was running into, that’s just what I would have done, so help me! I made a devilish good thing of it, that way, in the old White Cloud two years ago. And never was so much as questioned!”

He pondered a moment, frowning blackly.

“Maybe I did wrong, after all, to bring the Fleece into port. But if I hadn’t, I’d have had to sacrifice those hundred boxes of opium, that will bring me a clear two hundred apiece, from Hendricks. So after all, it’s all right. I’m satisfied.”

He drained the last of the Four-X, and carefully inspected his watch.

“Ten-fifteen,” said he. “And I’m to meet Hendricks at ten-thirty at the Tremont House. I’ll hoist anchor and away.”

He paid his score with scrupulous exactness, for in such matters he greatly prided himself on his honesty, lighted a fresh cigar, and departed from the Bell-in-Hand.

Cigar in mouth, smoke trailing on the May morning,[90] he made his way to School Street and up it. A fine figure of a mariner he strode along, erect, deep-chested, thewed and sinewed like a bull.

In under the columned portals of the old Tremont House—now long since only a memory—he entered, to his rendezvous with Hendricks, furtive buyer of the forbidden drug.

And as he vanishes beneath that granite doorway, for fifty years he passes from our sight.

AFTER FIFTY YEARS

If you will add into one total all that is sunniest and most sheltered, all that hangs heaviest with the perfume of old-fashioned New England gardens, all that most cozily combines in an old-time sailor’s home, you will form a picture of Snug Haven, demesne of Captain Alpheus Briggs, long years retired.

Snug Haven, with gray-shingled walls, with massive chimney stacks projecting from its weather-beaten, gambreled roof, seemed to epitomize rest after labor, peace after strife.

From its broad piazza, with morning-glory-covered pillars, a splendid view opened of sea and shore and foam-ringed islets in the harbor of South Endicutt—a view commanding kelp-strewn foreshore, rock-buttressed headlands, sun-spangled cobalt of the bay; and then the white, far tower of Truxbury Light, and then the hazed and brooding mystery of open Atlantic.

Behind the cottage rose Croft Hill, sweet with ferns, with bayberries and wild roses crowding in among the lichen-crusted boulders and ribbed ledges, where gnarly, ancient apple-trees and silver birches clung. Atop the hill, a wall of mossy stones divided the living from the dead; for there the cemetery lay, its simple monuments and old, gray headstones of carven slate bearing some family names that have loomed big in history.

Along the prim box-hedge of Captain Briggs’s front garden, the village street extended. Wandering irregularly[92] with the broken shore line, it led past time-grayed dwellings, past the schoolhouse and the white, square-steepled church, to the lobstermen’s huts, the storehouses and wharves, interspersed with “fish-flakes” that blent pungent marine odors with the fresh tang of the sea.

Old Mother Nature did her best, all along that street and in the captain’s garden, to soften those sometimes insistent odors, with her own perfumes of asters and petunias, nasturtiums, dahlias, sweet fern, and fresh, revivifying caresses of poplar, elm and pine, of sumac, buttonwood and willow.

With certain westerly breezes—breezes that bore to Snug Haven the sad, slow chant of the whistling buoy on Graves Shoal and the tolling of the bell buoy on the Shallows—oakum and tar, pitch, salt and fish had the best of it in South Endicutt. But with a shift to landward, apple-tree, mignonette and phlox and other blooms marshalled victorious essences; and the little village by the lip of the sea grew sweet and warm as the breast of a young girl who dreams.

The afternoon on which Captain Alpheus Briggs once more comes to our sight—the 24th of June, 1918—was just one of those drowsy, perfumed afternoons, when the long roar of the breakers over Dry Shingle Reef seemed part of the secrets the breeze was whispering among the pine needles on Croft Hill, and when the droning of the captain’s bees, among his spotted tiger-lilies, his sweet peas, cannas and hydrangeas, seemed conspiring with the sun-drenched warmth of the old-fashioned garden to lull man’s spirit into rest and soothe life’s fever with nepenthe.

Basking in the sunlight of his piazza, at ease in a broad-armed rocker by a wicker table, the old captain appeared mightily content with life. Beside him lay a wiry-haired Airedale, seemingly asleep yet with one[93] eye ready to cock open at the captain’s slightest move. A blue cap, gold-braided, hung atop one of the uprights of the rocking-chair; the captain’s bushy hair, still thick, though now spun silver, contrasted with his deep-lined face, tanned brown. Glad expectancy showed in his deep-set eyes, clear blue as they had been full fifty years ago, eyes under bushy brows that, once black, now matched the silver of his hair.

White, too, his beard had grown. Once in a while he stroked it, nervously, with a strong, corded hand that seemed, as his whole, square-knit body seemed, almost as vigorous as in the long ago—the half-forgotten, wholly repented long ago of violence and evil ways. Not yet had senility laid its clutch upon Alpheus Briggs. Wrinkles had come, and a certain stooping of the powerful shoulders; but the old captain’s blue coat with its brass buttons still covered a body of iron strength.

The telescope across his knees was no more trim than he. Carefully tended beard, well-brushed coat and polished boots all proclaimed Alpheus Briggs a proud old man. Though the soul of him had utterly changed, still Captain Briggs held true to type. In him no laxity inhered, no falling away from the strict tenets of shipshape neatness.

The captain appeared to be waiting for something. Once in a while he raised the telescope and directed it toward the far blue sheet of the outer harbor, where the headland of Pigeon Cliff thrust itself against the gray-green of the ship channel, swimming in a distant set of haze. Eagerly he explored the prospect, letting his glass rest on white lines of gulls that covered the tide-bars, on the whiter lines of foam over the reef, on the catboats and dories, the rusty coasting steamers and clumsy coal-barges near or far away. With care he sought among the tawny sails; and as each schooner[94] tacked, its canvas now sunlit, now umber in shade, the captain’s gaze seemed questioning: “Are you the craft I seek?”

The answer came always negative. With patience, Captain Briggs lowered his glass again and resumed his vigil.

“No use getting uneasy,” said he, at last; and brought out pipe and tobacco from the pocket of his square-cut jacket. “It won’t bring him a bit sooner. He wrote me he’d be here sometime to-day, and that means he surely will be. He’s a Briggs. What he says he’ll do he will do. No Briggs ever breaks a promise, and Hal is all clear Briggs, from truck to keelson!”

Waiting, pondering, the old man let his eyes wander over the Snug Haven of his last years; the place where he could keep contact with sunshine and seashine, with the salt breeze and the bite of old ocean, yet where comfort and peace profound could all be his.

A pleasant domain it was, and in all its arrangements eloquent of the old captain. There life had been very kind to him, and there his darkest moments of bereavement had been fought through, survived. Thither, more than five-and-forty years ago, he had brought the young wife whose love had turned his heart from evil ways and set his feet upon the better path from which, nearly half a century, they had not strayed.

In the upper front room his only son, Edward, had been born; and from the door, close at hand, he had followed the coffins that had taken away from him the three beings about whom, successively, the tendrils of his affection had clung.

First, the hand of death had closed upon his wife; but, profound as that loss had been, it had left to him his son. In this same house, that son had grown to[95] manhood, and had himself taken a wife; and so for a few years there had been happiness again.

But not for long. The birth of Hal, the old man’s grandson, had cost the life of Hal’s mother, a daughter-in-law whom Captain Briggs had loved like his own flesh and blood; and, two years after, tragedy had once more entered Snug Haven. Edward Briggs, on his first voyage as master of a ship—a granite-schooner, between Rockport and Boston—had fallen victim of a breaking derrick-rope. The granite lintel that had crushed the body of the old captain’s son had fallen also upon the captain’s heart. Long after the grass had grown upon that third grave in the Briggs burial lot, up there on the hill overlooking the shining harbor, the old man had lived as in a dream.

Then, gradually, the fingers of little Hal, fumbling at the latchets of the old man’s heart, had in some miraculous way of their own that only childish fingers possess, opened that crushed and broken doorway; and Hal had entered in, and once more life had smiled upon the captain.

After even the last leaves of autumn have fallen, sometimes wonderful days still for a little while warm the dying world and make men glad. Thus, with the captain. He had seemed to lose everything; and yet, after all, Indian summer still had waited for him. In the declining years, Hal had become his sunshine and his warmth, once more to expand his soul, once more to bid him love. And he had loved, completely, blindly, concentrating upon the boy, the last remaining hope of his family, an affection so intense that more than once the child, hurt by the fierce grip of the old man’s arms, had cried aloud in pain and fright. Whereat the captain, swiftly penitent, had kissed and fondled him, sung brave sea chanteys to him, taught him wondrous miracles of splicing and[96] weaving, or had fashioned boats and little guns, and so had brought young Hal to worship him as a child will when a man comes to his plane and is another, larger child with him.

Life would have ceased to hold any purpose or meaning for the captain, had it not been for Hal. The boy, wonderfully strong, had soon begun to absorb so much of the captain’s affection that the wounds in his heart had ceased to bleed, and that his pain had given place to a kind of dumb acquiescence. And after the shock of the final loss had somewhat passed life had taken root again, in Snug Haven.

Hal had thriven mightily in the sea air. Body and mind, he had developed at a wonderful pace. He had soon grown so handsome that even his occasional childish fits of temper—quite extraordinary fits, of strange violence, though brief—had been forgiven by every one. He had needed but to smile to be absolved.

Life had been, for the boy, all “a wonder and a wild desire.” The shadow of death had not been able to darken it. Before very long he had come to care little for any human relationship save with his grandfather. But the captain, proud of race, had often spoken to him of his father and his mother, or, leading Hal by the hand, had trudged up the well-worn path to the cemetery on the hill, to show the boy the well-kept graves.

So Hal had grown up. Shore and sea and sky had all combined to develop him. School and play, and all the wonders of cliff, beach, tide, and storm, of dories, nets, tackle, ships, and sea-things had filled both mind and body with unusual vigor.

The captain had told Hal endless tales of travel, had taught him an infinite number of sea-marvels. Before Hal had reached ten years, he had come to know every rope and spar of many rigs.

[97]

At twelve, he had built a dory; and, two years later with the captain’s help, a catboat, in which he and the old man had sailed in all weathers. If there were any tricks of navigation that the boy did not learn, or anything about the mysterious doings of the sea, it was only because the captain himself fell short of complete knowledge.

In everything the captain had indulged him. Yet even though he had never inflicted punishment, and even though young Hal had grown up to have pretty much his own way, the captain had denied spoiling him.

“Only poor material will spoil,” he had always said. “You can’t spoil the genuine, thoroughbred stuff. No, nor break it, either. I know what I’m doing. Whose business is it, but my own?”

Sharing a thousand interests in common with Hal, the captain’s love and hope had burned ever higher and more steadily. As the violent and grief-stricken past had faded gradually into a vague melancholy, the future had seemed beckoning with ever clearer cheer. The captain had come to have dreams of some day seeing Hal master of the biggest ship afloat. He had formed a hundred plans and dreamed a thousand dreams, all more or less enwoven with the sea. And though Hal, when he had finished school and had entered college, had begun to show strange aptitude for languages—especially the Oriental tongues—still the old man had never quite abandoned hope that some day the grandson might stand as captain on the bridge of a tall liner.

For many years another influence had had its part in molding Hal—the influence of Ezra Trefethen, whereof now a word or two. Ezra, good soul, had lived at Snug Haven ever since Hal’s birth, less as a servant than as a member of the household. Once he[98] had cooked for the captain, on a voyage out to Japan. His simple philosophy and loyalty, as well as his exceeding skill with saucepans, had greatly attached the captain to him—this being, you understand, in the period after the captain’s marriage had made of him another and a better man.

When Hal’s mother had died, the captain had given Ezra dominion over the “galley” at Snug Haven, a dominion which had gradually extended itself to the whole house and garden, and even to the upbringing of the boy.

Together, in a hit-or-miss way that had scandalized the good wives of South Endicutt, Briggs and Trefethen had reared little Hal. The captain had given no heed to hints that he needed a house-keeper or a second wife. Trefethen had been a powerful helper with the boy. Deft with the needle, he had sewed for Hal. He had taught him to keep his little room—his little “first mate’s cabin,” as he had always called it—very shipshape. And he had taught him sea lore, too; and at times when the captain had been abroad on the great waters, had taken complete charge of the fast-growing lad.

Thus the captain had been ever more and more warmly drawn towards Ezra. The simple old fellow had followed the body of the captain’s son up there to the grave on the hill, and had wept sincerely in the captain’s sorrow. Together, Briggs and Ezra had kept the cemetery lot in order. Evenings without number, after little Hal had been tucked into bed, the two ageing men had sat and smoked together.

Almost as partners in a wondrous enterprise, they two had watched Hal grow. Ezra had been just as proud as the captain himself, when the sturdy, black-haired, blue-eyed boy had entered high school and had won his place at football and on the running-track.[99] When “Hal” had become “Master Hal,” for him, on the boy’s entering college, the old servitor had come to look upon him with something of awe, for now Hal’s studies had lifted him beyond all possible understanding. Old Ezra had thrilled with pride as real and as proprietary as any Captain Briggs had felt.

Thus, the belovèd idol of the two indulgent old sea-dogs, Hal had grown up.

A VISITOR FROM THE LONG AGO

As the captain sat there expectantly on the piazza, telescope across his knees, dog by his side, a step sounded in the hallway of Snug Haven, and out issued Ezra, blinking in the sunshine, screwing up his leathery, shrewd, humorous face, and from under a thin palm squinting across the harbor.

“Ain’t sighted him yit, cap’n?” demanded he, in a cracked voice. “It’s past six bells o’ the aft’noon watch. You’d oughta be sightin’ him pretty soon, now, seems like.”

“I think so, too,” the captain answered. “He wrote they’d leave Boston this morning early. Seems as if they should have made Endicutt Harbor by now.”

“Right, cap’n. But don’t you worry none. They can’t of fell foul o’ nothin’. Master Hall, he’s an A1 man. He’ll make port afore night, cap’n, never you fear. He’s gotta! Ain’t I got a leg o’ lamb on to roast, an’ ain’t I made his favorite plum-cake with butter-an’-sugar sauce? Aye, he’ll tie up at Snug Haven afore sundown, never you fear!”

The captain only grunted; and old Trefethen, after careful but fruitless examination of the harbor, went back into the house again, very much like those figures on toy barometers that come out in good weather and retire in bad.

Left alone once more, the captain drew deeply at his pipe and glanced with satisfaction at his cozy domain. A pleasant place it was, indeed, and trimly eloquent of the hand of an old seafaring man. The[101] precision wherewith the hedge was cut, the whitewashed spotlessness of the front gate—a gate on the “port” post of which was fastened a red ship’s-lantern, with a green one on the “starboard”—and even the sanded walks, edged with conch-shells, all spelled “shipshape.”

Trailing woodbine covered the fences to right and left, and along these fences grew thrifty berry bushes. Apple-trees, whereon green buttons of fruit had already set, shaded the lawn, interspersed with flower-beds edged with whitewashed rocks—flower-beds bright with hollyhocks, peonies and poppies.

Back of the house a vegetable-garden gave promise of great increase; and in the hen-yard White Leghorns and Buff Orpingtons pursued the vocations of all well-disposed poultry. A Holstein cow, knee-deep in daisies on the gentle hill-slope behind Snug Haven, formed part of the household; and last of all came the bees, denizens of six hives not far from the elm-shaded well.

But the captain’s special pride centered in the gleaming white flagpole, planted midway of the front lawn—a pole from which flew the Stars and Stripes, together with a big blue house-flag bearing a huge “B” of spotless white. This flag and a little cannon of gleaming brass, from which on every holiday the captain fired a salute, formed his chief treasures; by which token you shall read the heart of the old man, and see that, for all his faring up and down the world, a certain curious simplicity had at the end developed itself in him.

Thus that June afternoon, sitting in state amid his possessions, the captain waited. Waited, dressed in his very best, for the homecoming of the boy on whom was concentrated all the affection of a nature now powerful to love, as in the old and evil days it[102] had been violent to hate. His face, as he sat there, was virile, patriarchal, dignified with that calm nobility of days when old age is “frosty but kindly.” With placid interest he watched a robin on the lawn, and listened to the chickadees’ piping monotone in the huge maple by the gate. Those notes seemed to blend with the metallic music of hammer and anvil somewhere down the village street. Tunk-tunk! Clink-clank-clink! sang the hammer from the shop of Peter Trumett, as Peter forged new links for the anchor-chain of the Lucy Bell, now in port for repairs. Then a voice, greeting the captain from the rock-nubbled roadway, drew the old man’s gaze.

“How do, cap’n?” called a man from the top of a slow-moving load of kelp. “I’m goin’ up-along. Anythin’ I kin do fer you?”

“Nothing, Jacob,” answered Briggs. “Thank you, just the same. Oh, Jacob! Wait a minute!”

“Hoa, s-h-h-h-h!” commanded the kelp-gatherer. “What is it, cap’n?”

The old man arose, placed his telescope carefully in the rocking-chair, and slowly walked down toward the gate. The Airedale followed close. The dog’s rusty-brown muzzle touched the captain’s hand. Briggs fondled the animal and smiling said:

“I’m not going to leave you, Ruddy. None of us can go anywhere to-day. Hal’s coming home. Know that? We mustn’t be away when he comes!” The captain advanced once more. Half-way down the walk he paused, picked up a snail that had crawled out upon the distressful sand. He dropped the snail into the sheltering grass and went forward again. At the gate he stopped, leaned his crossed arms on the clean top-board, and for a moment peered at Jacob perched on the load of kelp that overflowed the time-worn, two-wheeled cart.

[103]

“What is it, cap’n?” Jacob queried. “Somethin’ I kin do fer you?”

“No, nothing you can do for me, but something you can do for Uncle Everett and for yourself, if you will.”

At sound of that name the kelp-gatherer stiffened with sudden resentment.

“Nothin’ fer him, cap’n!” he ejaculated. “He’s been accommodatin’ as a hog on ice to me, an’ the case is goin’ through. Nothin’ at all fer that damned—”

“Wait! Hold on, Jacob!” the old man pleaded, raising his hand. “You can’t gain anything by violence and hate. I know you think he’s injured you grievously. He thinks the same of you. In his heart I know he’s sorry. You and he were friends for thirty years till this petty little quarrel came up. Jacob, is the whole boat worth cutting the cables of good understanding and letting yourselves drift on the reefs of hate? Is it, now?”

“You been talkin’ with him ’bout me?” demanded Jacob irefully.

“Well, maybe I have said a few words to Uncle Everett,” admitted the captain. “Uncle’s willing to go half-way to meet you.”

“He’ll meet me nowheres ’cept in the court-room down to ’Sconset!” retorted Jacob with heat. “He done me a smart trick that time. I’ll rimrack him!”

“We’ve all done smart tricks one time or another,” soothed the old captain. The sun through the arching elms flecked his white hair with moving bits of light; it narrowed the keen, earnest eyes of blue. “That’s human. It’s better than human to be sorry and to make peace with your neighbor. Uncle Everett’s not a bad man at heart, any more than you are. Half a dozen words from you would caulk up[104] the leaking hull of your friendship. You’re not going to go on hating uncle, are you, when you could shake hands with him and be friends?”

“Oh, ain’t I, huh?” demanded Jacob. “Why ain’t I?”

“Because you’re a man and can think!” the captain smiled. “Harkness and Bill Dodge were bitter as gall six months ago, and Giles was ready to cut Burnett’s heart out, but I found they were human, after all.”

“Yes, but they ain’t me!”

“Are you less a man than they were?”

“H-m! H-m!” grunted Jacob, floored. “I—I reckon not. Why?”

“I’ve got nothing more to say for now,” the captain answered. “Good-by, Jacob!”

The kelp-gatherer pushed back his straw hat, scratched his head, spat, and then broke out:

“Mebbe it’d be cheaper, after all, to settle out o’ court rather ’n’ to law uncle. But shakin’ hands, an’ bein’ neighbors with that—that—”

“Good day, Jacob!” the captain repeated. “One thing at a time. And if you come up-along to-morrow, lay alongside, and have another gam with me, will you?”

To this Jacob made no answer, but slapped his reins on the lean withers of his horse. Creakingly the load of seaweed moved away, with Jacob atop, rather dazed. The captain remained there at the gate, peering after him with a smile, kindly yet shrewd.

“Just like the others,” he murmured. “Can’t make port all on one tack. Got to watch the wind, and wear about and make it when you can. But if I know human nature, a month from to-day Jacob Plummer will be smoking his pipe down at Uncle Everett’s sail-loft.”

[105]

The sound of piping voices, beyond the blacksmith-shop, drew the old captain’s attention thither. He assumed a certain expectancy. Into the pocket of his square-cut blue jacket he slid a hand. Along the street he peered—the narrow, rambling street sheltered by great elms through which, here and there, a glint of sunlit harbor shimmered blue.

He had not long to wait. Round the bend by the smithy two or three children appeared; and after these came others, with a bright-haired girl of twenty or thereabout. The children had school-bags or bundles of books tightly strapped. Keeping pace with the teacher a little girl on either side held her hands. You could not fail to see the teacher’s smile, as wholesome, fresh and winning as that June day itself.

At sight of the captain the boys in the group set up a joyful shout and some broke into a run.

“Hey, lookit! There’s cap’n!” rose exultant cries. “There’s Cap’n Briggs!”

Then the little girls came running, too; and all the children captured him by storm. Excited, the Airedale set up a clamorous barking.

The riot ended only when the captain had been despoiled of the peppermints he had provided for such contingencies. Meanwhile the teacher, as trimly pretty a figure as you could meet in many a day’s journeying, was standing by the gate, and with a little heightened flush of color was casting a look or two, as of expectancy, up at Snug Haven.

The old captain, smiling, shook his head.

“Not yet, Laura,” he whispered. “He’ll be here before night, though. You’re going to let me keep him a few minutes, aren’t you, before taking him away from me?”

She found no answer. Something about the captain’s smile seemed to disconcert her. A warm flush[106] crept from her throat to her thickly coiled, lustrous hair. Then she passed on, down the shaded street; and as the captain peered after her, still surrounded by the children, a little moisture blurred his eyes.

“God has been very good to me in spite of all!” he murmured. “Very, very good, and ‘the best is yet to be’!”

He turned and was about to start back toward the house when the cloppa-cloppa-clop of hoofs along the street arrested his attention. Coming into view, past Laura and her group of scholars, an old-fashioned buggy, drawn by a horse of ripe years, was bearing down toward Snug Haven.

In the buggy sat an old, old man, wizen and bent. With an effort he reined in the aged horse. The captain heard his cracked tones on the still afternoon air:

“Pardon me, but can you tell me where Captain Briggs lives—Captain Alpheus Briggs?”

A babel of childish voices and the pointing of numerous fingers obliterated any information Laura tried to give. The old man, with thanks, clucked to his horse, and so the buggy came along once more to the front gate of Snug Haven. There it stopped.

Out of it bent a feeble, shrunken figure, with flaccid skin on deep-lined face, with blinking eyes behind big spectacles.

“Is that you, captain?” asked a shaking voice that pierced to the captain’s heart with a stab of poignant recollection. “Oh, Captain—Captain Briggs—is that you?”

The captain, turning pale, steadied himself by gripping at the whitewashed gate. For a moment his staring eyes met the eyes of the old, withered man in the buggy. Then, in strange, husky tones he cried:

“God above! It—it can’t be you, doctor? It can’t be—Dr. Filhiol?”

TWO OLD MEN

“Yes, yes, it’s Dr. Filhiol!” the little old man made answer. “I’m Filhiol. And you—Yes, I’d know you anywhere. Captain Alpheus Briggs, so help me!”

He took up a heavy walking-stick, and started to clamber down out of the buggy. Captain Briggs, flinging open the gate, reached him just in time to keep him from collapsing in the road, for the doctor’s feeble strength was all exhausted with the long journey he had made to South Endicutt, with the drive from the station five miles away, and with the nervous shock of once more seeing a man on whom, in fifty years, his eyes had never rested.

“Steady, doctor, steady!” the captain admonished with a stout arm about him. “There, there now, steady does it!”

“You—you’ll have to excuse me, captain, for seeming so unmanly weak,” the doctor proffered shakily. “But I’ve come a long way to see you, and it’s such a hot day—and all. My legs are cramped, too. I’m not what I used to be, captain. None of us are, you know, when we pass the eightieth milestone!”

“None of us are what we used to be; right for you, doctor,” the captain answered with deeper meaning than on the surface of his words appeared. “You needn’t apologize for being a bit racked in the hull.[108] Every craft’s seams open up a bit at times. I understand.”

He tightened his arm about the shrunken body, and with compassion looked upon the man who once had trod his deck so strongly and so well. “Come along o’ me, now. Up to Snug Haven, doctor. There’s good rocking-chairs on the piazza and a good little drop of something to take the kinks out. The best of timber needs a little caulking now and then. Good Lord above! Dr. Filhiol again—after fifty years!”

“Yes, that’s correct—after fifty years,” the doctor answered. “Here, let me look at you a moment!” He peered at Briggs through his heavy-lensed spectacles. “It’s you all right, captain. You’ve changed, of course. You were a bull of a man in those days, and your hair was black as black;—but still you’re the same. I—well, I wish I could say that about myself!”

“Nonsense!” the captain boomed, drawing him toward the gate. “Wait till you’ve got a little tonic under your hatches, ’midships. Wait till you’ve spliced the main brace a couple of times!”

“The horse!” exclaimed Filhiol, bracing himself with his stout cane. He peered anxiously at the animal. “I hired him at the station, and if he should run away and break anything—”

“I’ll have Ezra go aboard that craft and pilot it into port,” the captain reassured him. “We won’t let it go on the rocks. Ezra, he’s my chief cook and bottle-washer. He can handle that cruiser of yours O. K.” The captain’s eyes twinkled as he looked at the dejected animal. “Come along o’ me, doctor. Up to the quarterdeck with you, now!”

Half-supported by the captain, old Dr. Filhiol limped up the white-sanded path. As he went, as if in a kind of daze he kept murmuring:

[109]

“Captain Briggs again! Who’d have thought I could really find him? Half a century—a lifetime—Captain Alpheus Briggs!”

“Ezra! Oh, Ezra!” the captain hailed. Carefully he helped the aged doctor up the steps. Very feebly the doctor crept up; his cane clumped hollowly on the boards. Ezra appeared.

“Aye, aye, sir?” he queried, a look of wonder on his long, thin face. “What’s orders, sir?”

“An old-time friend of mine has come to visit me, Ezra. It’s Dr. Filhiol, that used to sail with me, way back in the ’60’s. I’ve got some of his fancy-work stitches in my leg this minute. A great man he was with the cutting and stitching; none better. I want you men to shake hands.”

Ezra advanced, admiration shining from his honest features. Any man who had been a friend of his captain, especially a man who had embroidered his captain’s leg, was already taken to the bosom of his affections.

“Doctor,” said the captain, “this is Ezra Trefethen. When you get some of the grub from his galley aboard you, you’ll be ready to ship again for Timbuctoo.”

“I’m very glad to know you, Ezra,” the doctor said, putting out his left hand—the right, gnarled and veinous, still gripped his cane. “Yes, yes, we were old-time shipmates, Captain Briggs and I.” His voice broke pipingly, “turning again toward childish treble,” so that pity and sorrow pierced the heart of Alpheus Briggs. “It’s been a sad, long time since we’ve met. And now, can I get you to look out for my horse? If he should run away and hurt anybody, I’m sure that would be very bad.”

“Righto!” Ezra answered, his face assuming an air of high seriousness as he observed the aged animal half asleep by the gate, head hanging, spavined knees[110] bent. “I’ll steer him to safe moorin’s fer you, sir. We got jest the handiest dock in the world fer him, up the back lane. He won’t git away from me, sir, never you fear.”

“Thank you, Ezra,” the doctor answered, much relieved. The captain eased him into a rocker, by the table. “There, that’s better. You see, captain, I’m a bit done up. It always tires me to ride on a train; and then, too, the drive from the station was exhausting. I’m not used to driving, you know, and—”

“I know, I know,” Briggs interrupted. “Just sit you there, doctor, and keep right still. I’ll be back in half a twinkling.”

And, satisfied that the doctor was all safe and sound, he stumped into the house; while Ezra whistled to the dog and strode away to go aboard the buggy as navigating officer of that sorry equipage.

Even before Ezra had safely berthed the horse in the stable up the lane, bordered with sweetbrier and sumacs, Captain Briggs returned with a tray, whereon was a bottle of his very best Jamaica, now kept exclusively for sickness or a cold, or, it might be, for some rare and special guest. The Jamaica was flanked with a little jug of water, with glasses, lemons, sugar. At sight of it the doctor left off brushing his coat, all powdered with the gray rock-dust of the Massachusetts north shore, and smiled with sunken lips.

“I couldn’t have prescribed better, myself,” said he.

“Correct, sir,” agreed the captain. He set the tray on the piazza table. “I don’t hardly ever touch grog any more. But it’s got its uses, now and then. You need a stiff drink, doctor, and I’m going to join you, for old times’ sake. Surely there’s no sin in that, after half a century that we haven’t laid eyes on one another!”

[111]

Speaking, he was at work on the manufacture of a brace of drinks.

“It’s my rule not to touch it,” he added. “But I’ve got to make an exception to-day. Sugar, sir? Lemon? All O. K., then. Well, doctor, here goes. Here’s to—to—”

“To fifty years of life!” the doctor exclaimed. He stood up, raising the glass that Briggs had given him. His eye cleared; for a moment his aged hand held firm.

“To fifty years!” the captain echoed. And so the glasses clinked, and so they drank that toast, bottoms-up, those two old men so different in the long ago, so very different now.

When Filhiol had resumed his seat, the captain drew a chair up close to him, both facing the sea. Through the doctor’s spent tissues a little warmth began to diffuse itself. But still he found nothing to say; nor, for a minute or two, did the captain. A little silence, strangely awkward, drew itself between them, now that the first stimulus of the meeting had spent itself. Where, indeed, should they begin to knit up so vast a chasm?

Each man gazed on the other, trying to find some word that might be fitting, but each muted by the dead weight of half a century. Filhiol, the more resourceful of wit, was first to speak.

“Yes, captain, we’ve both changed, though you’ve held your own better than I have. I’ve had a great deal of sickness. And I’m an older man than you, besides. I’ll be eighty-four, sir, if I live till the 16th of next October. A man’s done for at that age. And you’ve had every advantage over me in strength and constitution. I was only an average man, at best. You were a Hercules, and even to-day you look as if you might be a pretty formidable antagonist.[112] In a way, I’ve done better than most, captain. Yes, I’ve done well in my way,” he repeated. “Still, I’m not the man you are to-day. That’s plain to be seen.”

“We aren’t going to talk about that, doctor,” the captain interposed, his voice soothing, as he laid a strong hand on the withered one of Filhiol, holding the arm of the rocker. “Let all that pass. I’m laying at anchor in a sheltered harbor here. What breeze bore you news of me? Tell me that, and tell me what you’ve been doing all this time. What kind of a voyage have you made of life? And where are you berthed, and what cargo of this world’s goods have you got in your lockers?”

“Tell me about yourself, first, captain. You have a jewel of a place here. What else? Wife, family, all that?”

“I’ll tell you, after you’ve answered my questions,” the captain insisted. “You’re aboard my craft, here, sitting on my decks, and so you’ve got to talk first. Come, come, doctor—let’s have your log!”

Thus urged, Filhiol began to speak. With some digressions, yet in the main clearly enough and even at times with a certain dry humor that distantly recalled his mental acuity of the long ago, he outlined his life-story.

Briefly he told of his retirement from the sea, following a wreck off the coast of Chile, in 1876—a wreck in which he had taken damage from which he had never fully recovered—and narrated his establishing himself in practice in New York. Later he had had to give up the struggle there, and had gone up into a New Hampshire village, where life, though poor, had been comparatively easy.

Five years ago he had retired, with a few hundred dollars of pitiful savings, and had bought his way into the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Home, at Salem, Massachusetts.[113] He had never married; had never known the love of a wife, nor the kiss of children. His whole life, the captain could see, had been given unhesitatingly to the service of his fellow-men. And now mankind, when old age had paralyzed his skill, was passing him by, as if he had been no more than a broken-up wreck on the shores of the sea of human existence.

Briggs watched the old man with pity that this once trim and active man should have faded to so bloodless a shadow of his former self. Close-shaven the doctor still was, and not without a certain neatness in his dress, despite its poverty; but his bent shoulders, his baggy skin, the blinking of his eyes all told the tragedy of life that fades.

With a pathetic moistening of the eyes, the doctor spoke of this inevitable decay; and with a heartfelt wish that death might have laid its summons on him while still in active service, turned to a few words of explanation as to how he had come to have news again of Captain Briggs.

Chance had brought him word of the captain. A new attendant at the home had mentioned the name Briggs; and memories had stirred, and questions had very soon brought out the fact that it was really Captain Alpheus Briggs, who now was living at South Endicutt. The attendant had told him something more—and here the doctor hesitated, feeling for words.

“Yes, yes, I understand,” said Briggs. “You needn’t be afraid to speak it right out. It’s true, doctor. I have changed. God knows I’ve suffered enough, these long years, trying to forget what kind of a man I started out to be; trying to forget, and not always able to. If repentance and trying to sail a straight course now can wipe out that score, maybe[114] it’s partly gone. I hope so, anyhow; I’ve done my best—no man can do more than that, now, can he?”

“I don’t see how he can,” answered the doctor slowly.

“He can’t,” said the captain with conviction. “Of course I can’t give back the lives I took, but so far as I’ve been able, I’ve made restitution of all the money I came by wrongfully. What I couldn’t give back directly I’ve handed over to charity.

“My undoing,” he went on, then paused, irresolute. “My great misfortune—was—”

“Well, what?” asked Filhiol. And through his glasses, which seemed to make his eyes so strangely big and questioning, he peered at Captain Briggs.

THE CAPTAIN SPEAKS

The captain clenched his right fist, and turned it to and fro, studying it with rueful attention.

“My undoing was the fact that nature gave me brute strength,” said he. “Those were hard, bad days, and I had a hard, bad fist; and together with the hot blood in me, and the Old Nick, things went pretty far. Lots of the things I did were needless, cruel, and beyond all condemnation. If I could only get a little of the guilt and sorrow off my mind, that would be something.”

“You’re morbid, captain,” answered Filhiol. “You’ve made all the amends that anybody can. Let’s forget the wickedness, now, and try to remember the better part. You’ve changed, every way. What changed you?”

“Just let me have another look through the glass, and I’ll tell you what I can.”

Briggs raised his telescope and with it swept the harbor.

“H-m!” said he. “Nothing yet.”

“Expecting some one, captain?”

“My grandson, Hal.”

“Grandson! That’s fine! The only one?”

“The only one.” Briggs lowered his glass with disappointment. “He’s the sole surviving member of the family, beside myself. All the rest are up there, doctor, in that little cemetery on the hilltop.”

Filhiol’s eyes followed the captain’s pointing hand,[116] as it indicated the burial-ground lying under the vagrant cloud-shadows of the fading afternoon, peaceful and “sweet with blade and leaf and blossom.” In a pine against the richly luminous sky a bluejay was scolding. As a contrabass to the rhythm of the blacksmith’s hammer, the booming murmur of the sea trembled across the summer air. The captain went on:

“I’ve had great losses, doctor. Bitter and hard to bear. After I fell in love and changed my way of life, and married and settled here, I thought maybe fate would be kind to me, but it wasn’t. One by one my people were taken away from me—my wife, and then my son’s wife, and last of all, my son. Three, I’ve lost, and got one left. Yet it isn’t exactly as if I’d really lost them. I’m not one that can bury love, and forget it. My folks aren’t gone. They’re still with me, in a way.

“I don’t see how people can let their kin be buried in strange places and forgotten. I want to keep mine always near me, where I can look out for them, and where I know they won’t feel lonesome. I want them to be right near home, doctor, where it’s all so friendly and familiar. Maybe that’s an old man’s foolish notion, but that’s the way I feel, and that’s the way I’ve had it.”

“I—think I understand,” the doctor answered. “Go on.”

“They aren’t really gone,” continued Briggs. “They’re still up there, very, very near to me. There’s nothing mournful in the lot; nothing sad or melancholy. No, Ezra and I have made it cheerful, with roses and petunias and zinnias and all kinds of pretty flowers and bushes and vines. You can see some of those vines now on the monument.” He pointed once more. “That one, off to starboard of the big[117] elm. It’s a beautiful place, really. The breeze is always cool up there, doctor, and the sun stays there longest of any spot round here. It strikes that hill first thing in the morning, and stays till last thing at night. We’ve got a bench there, a real comfortable one I made myself; not one of those hard, iron things they usually put in cemeteries. I’ve given Hal lots of his lessons, reading and navigation, up there. I go up every day a spell, and take the dog with me, and Ezra goes, too; and we carry up flowers and put ’em in jars, and holystone the monument and the headstones, and make it all shipshape. It’s all as bright as a button, and so it’s going to be, as long as I’m on deck.”

“I think you’ve got the right idea, captain,” murmured Filhiol. “Death, after all, is quite as natural a process, quite as much to be desired at the proper time, as life. I used to fear it, when I was young; but now I’m old, I’m not at all afraid. Are you?”

“Never! If I can only live to see Hal launched and off on his life journey, with colors flying and everything trig aloft and alow, I’ll be right glad to go. That’s what I’ve often told my wife and the others, sitting up there in the sunshine, smoking my pipe. You know, that’s where I go to smoke and think, doctor. Ezra goes too, and sometimes we take the old checkerboard and have a game or so. We take the telescopes and sextant up, too, and make observations there. It kind of scandalizes some of the stiff-necked old Puritans, but Lord love you! I don’t see any harm in it, do you? It all seems nice and sociable; it makes the death of my people seem only a kind of temporary going away, as if they’d gone on a visit, like, and as if Hal and Ezra and I were just waiting for ’em to come back.

“I tell you, doctor, it’s as homy and comfortable as anything you ever saw. I’m truly very happy, up[118] there. Yes, in spite of everything, I reckon I’m a happy man. I’ve got no end of things to be thankful for. I’ve prospered. Best of all, the main thing without which, of course, everything else wouldn’t be worth a tinker’s dam, I’ve got my grandson, Hal!”

“I see. Tell me about him, captain.”

“I will. He’s been two years in college already, and he’s more than made good. He’s twenty-one, and got shoulders on him like Goliath. You ought to see him at work in the gym he’s fitted up in the barn! Oh, doctor, he’s a wonder! His rating is A1, all through.”

“I don’t doubt it. And you say he’s coming home to-day?”

“To-day—which makes this day a great, wonderful day for his old grandfather, and that’s the living truth. Yes, he’s coming home for as long as he’ll stay with me, though he’s got some idea of going out with the fishing-fleet, for what he calls local color. He’s quite a fellow to make up stories; says he wants to go to sea a while, so he can do it right. Though, Lord knows, he’s full enough of sea-lore and sea-skill. That’s his grandfather’s blood cropping out again, I suppose, that love for blue water. That’s what you call heredity, isn’t it, doctor?”

“H-m! yes, I suppose so,” answered Filhiol, frowning a little. “Though heredity’s peculiar. We don’t always know just what it is, or how it acts. Still, if a well-marked trait comes out in the offspring, we call it heredity. So he’s got your love of the sea, has he?”

“He surely has. There’s salt in his blood, all right enough!”

“H-m! You don’t notice any—any other traits in him that—remind you of your earlier days?”

“If you mean strength and activity, and the love of hard work, yes. Now see, for example. Any[119] other boy would have come home by train, and lots of ’em would have traveled in the smoker, with a pack of cigarettes and a magazine. Does Hal come home that way? He does not! He writes me he’s going to work his way up on a schooner, out of Boston, for experience. That’s why I’m keeping my glass on the harbor. He told me the name of the schooner. It’s the Sylvia Fletcher. The minute she sticks her jib round Truxbury Light, I’ll catch her.”

“Sylvia Fletcher?” asked the doctor. “That’s an odd coincidence, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Why, just look at those initials, captain. Sylvia Fletcher—S.F.”

“Well, what about ’em?”

“Silver Fleece. That was S.F., too.”

The captain turned puzzled eyes on his guest. He passed a hand over his white hair, and pondered a second or two. Then said he:

“That is odd, doctor, but what about it? There must be hundreds of vessels afloat, with those initials.”

“By all means. Of course it can’t mean anything. As you say, S.F. must be common enough initials among ships. So then, Hal’s amphibious already, is he? What’s he going to be? A captain like yourself?”

“I’d like him to be. I don’t hardly think so, though,” Briggs answered, a little distraught. Something had singularly disturbed him. Now and then he cast an uneasy glance at the withered little man in the chair beside him.

“It’s going to be his own choice, his profession is,” he went on. “He’s got to settle that for himself. But I know this much—anything he undertakes, he’ll make a success of. He’ll carry it out to the last inch. He’s a wonder, Hal is. Ah, a fellow[120] to warm the heart! He’s none of your mollycoddles, in spite of all the high marks and prizes he’s taken. No, no, nothing at all of the molly-coddle.”

The captain’s face lighted up with pride and joy and a profound eagerness.

“There isn’t anything that boy can’t do, doctor,” he continued. “Athletics and all that; and he’s gone in for some of the hardest studies, too, and beaten men that don’t do anything but get round-shouldered over books. He’s taken work outside the regular course—strange Eastern languages, doctor. I hear there never was a boy like Hal. You don’t wonder I’ve been sitting here all afternoon with my old spy-glass, do you?”

“Indeed I don’t,” Filhiol answered, a note of envy in his feeble voice. “You’ve had your troubles, just as we all have, but you’ve got something still to live for, and that’s more than I can say. You’ve got everything, everything! It never worked out on you, after all, the curse—the black curse that was put on you fifty years ago. It was all nonsense, of course, and I knew it wouldn’t. All that stuff is pure superstition and humbug—”

“Of course! Why, you don’t believe such rubbish! I’ve lived that all down half a lifetime ago. Two or three times, when death took away those I loved, I thought maybe the curse of old Dengan Jouga was really striking me, but it wasn’t. For that curse said everything I loved would be taken away, and there was always something left to live for; and even when I’d been as hard hit as a man ever was, almost, after a while I could get my bearings again and make sail and keep along on my course. Because, you see, I always had Hal to love and pin my hopes to. I’ve got him now. He’s all I’ve got—but, God! how wonderfully much he is!”

[121]

“Yes, yes, you’re quite right,” the doctor answered. “He must be a splendid chap, all round. What does he look like?”

“I’m going to answer you in a peculiar way,” said Briggs. “That boy, sir, that grandson of mine, he’s the living spit and image of what I was, fifty-five or sixty years ago!”

“Eh, what? What’s that you say?”

“It’s wonderful, I tell you, to see the resemblance. His father—my son—didn’t show it at all. A fine, handsome man he was, doctor, and a good man, too. Everybody liked him; he never did a bad thing in his life. He sailed a straight course, and went under his own canvas, all the way; and I loved him for an honest, upright man. But he wasn’t brilliant. He never set the world on fire. He was just a plain, good, average man.

“But, Hal! Hal—ah, now there is something for you! He’s got all the physique I ever had, at my best, and he’s got a hundred per cent. more brains than ever I had. It’s as if I could see myself, my youth and strength, rise up out of the grave of the past, all shining and splendid, doctor, and live again and make my soul sing with the morning stars, for gladness, like it says in the Bible or somewhere, sir!”

The old captain, quite breathless with his unaccustomed eloquence, pulling out a huge handkerchief, wiped his forehead where the sweat had started. He winked eyes wet with sudden moisture. Filhiol peered at him with a strange, brooding expression.

“You say he’s just like you, captain?” asked he. “He’s just the way you used to be, in the old days?”

“Why—no, not in all ways. God forbid! But in size and strength he’s the equal of me at my best, or even goes ahead of that. And as I’ve told you before, he’s got no end more brains than ever I had.”

[122]

“How’s the boy’s temper?”

“Temper?”

“Ever have any violent spells?” The doctor seemed as if diagnosing a case. Briggs looked at him, none too well pleased.

“Why—no. Not as I know of,” he answered, though without any emphatic denial. “Of course all boys sometimes slip their anchors, and run foul of whatever’s in the way. That’s natural for young blood. I wouldn’t give a brass farthing for a boy that had no guts, would you?”

“No, no. Of course not. It’s natural for—”

“Ship ahoy!” the captain joyfully hailed. His keen old eye had just caught sight of something, far in the offing, which had brought the glass to his eye in a second. “There she is, doctor! There’s the Sylvia Fletcher, sure as guns!”

“He’s coming, then?”

“Almost here! See, right to south’ard o’ the light? That’s the Sylvia, and my boy’s aboard her. She’ll be at Hadlock’s Wharf in half an hour. He’s almost home. Hal’s almost home again!”

The captain stood up and faced the doctor, radiant. Joy, pride, anticipation beamed from his weather-beaten old face; his eyes sparkled, blue, with pure happiness. He said:

“Well, I’m going down to meet him. Do you want to go, too, doctor?”

“How far is it?”

“Mile, or a little better. I’ll make it, easy, afore the Sylvia gets in. I’ll be on the wharf, all right, to welcome Hal.”

“I—I think I’ll stay here, captain,” the other answered. “I’m lame, you know. I couldn’t walk that far.”

“How about the horse? Ezra’ll hitch up for you.”

[123]

“No, no. It tires me to ride. I’m not used to so much excitement and activity. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just sit here and wait. Give me a book, or something, and I’ll wait for you both.”

“All right, doctor, suit yourself,” the captain assented. The relief in his voice was not to be concealed. Despite his most friendly hospitality, something in the doctor’s attitude and speech had laid a chill upon his heart. The prospect of getting away from the old man and of meeting Hal quite alone, allured him. “I’ll give you books enough for a week, or anything you like. And here in this drawer,” as he opened one in the table, “you’ll find a box of the best Havanas.”

“No, no, I’ve given up smoking, long ago,” the doctor smiled, thinly. “My heart wouldn’t stand it. But thank you, just the same.”

The figure of Ezra loomed in the doorway, and, followed by the dog, came out upon the porch.

“Sighted him, cap’n?” asked the old man joyfully. “I heered you hailin’. That’s him, sure?”

“There’s the Sylvia Fletcher,” Briggs made answer. “You’ll see Hal afore sundown.”

“Gosh, ain’t that great, though?” grinned Ezra, his leathery face breaking into a thousand wrinkles. “If I’d of went an’ made that there cake, an’ fixed that lamb, an’ he hadn’t of made port—”

“Well, it’s all right, Ezra. Now I’m off. Come, Ruddy,” he summoned the Airedale. “Master’s coming!”

As the dog got up, the doctor painfully rose from his chair. Cane in hand, he limped along the porch.

“It’s just a trifle chilly out here, captain,” said he, shivering slightly. “May I go inside?”

“Don’t ask, doctor. Snug Haven’s yours, all yours, as long as you want it. Make yourself at home![124] Books, papers, everything in the library—my cabin, I call it. And if you want, Ezra’ll start a fire for you in the grate, and get you tea or coffee—”

“No, no, thank you. My nerves won’t stand them. But a little warm milk and a fire will do me a world of good.”

“Ezra’ll mix you an egg-nog that will make you feel like a fighting-cock. Now I must be going. Hal mustn’t come ashore and not find me waiting. Come, Ruddy! Good-by, doctor. Good-by, Ezra; so long!”

“Tell Master Hal about the plum-cake an’ the lamb!” called the faithful one, as Captain Briggs, a brave and sturdy figure in his brass-buttoned coat of blue and his gold-laced cap tramped down the sandy walk. “Don’t fergit to tell him I got it special!”

At the gate, Briggs waved a cheery hand. The doctor, peering after him with strange, sad eyes, shook a boding head. He stood leaning on his stick, till Briggs had skirted the box-hedge and disappeared around the turn by the smithy. Then, shivering again—despite the brooding warmth of the June afternoon—he turned and followed Ezra into the house.

“After fifty years,” he murmured, as he went. “I wonder if it could be—after fifty years?”

VISIONS OF THE PAST

Comfortably installed in a huge easy-chair beside the freshly built fire in the “cabin” of Snug Haven and with one of Ezra Trefethen’s most artful egg-nogs within easy reach, the aged doctor leaned back, and sighed deeply.

“Maybe the captain’s right,” said he. “Maybe the boy’s all right. It’s possible; but I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Blinking, his eyes wandered about the room, which opened off from an old-fashioned hallway lighted by glass panels at the sides of the front door, and by a leaded fanlight over the lintel; a hallway with a curved stairway that would have delighted the heart of any antiquarian. The cabin itself showed by its construction and furnishing that the captain had spent a great deal of thought and time and money. At first glance, save that the fireplace was an incongruous note, one would have thought one’s self aboard ship, so closely had the nautical idea been carried out.

To begin with, the windows at the side, which opened out upon the orchard, were circular and rimmed with shining brass, and had thick panes inward-swinging like ships’ portholes. A polished fir column, set a trifle on a slant, rose from floor to ceiling, which was supported on white beams, the form and curve of which exactly imitated marine architecture. This column measured no less than a foot and a half in diameter, and gave precisely the impression of a ship’s[126] mast. On it hung a chronometer, boxed in a case of polished mahogany, itself the work of the captain’s own hand.

All the lamps were hung in gimbals, as if the good captain expected Snug Haven at any moment to set sail and go pitching away over storm-tossed seas. The green-covered table bore a miscellany of nautical almanacs; it accommodated, also, a variety of charts, maps and meteorological reports. The captain’s own chair at that table was a true swinging-chair, screwed to the floor; and this floor, you understand, was uncarpeted, so that the holystoned planking shone in immaculate cleanliness as the declining sun through the portholes painted long, reddish stripes across it. Brass instruments lay on the table, and from them the sun flecked little high-lights against the clean, white paint of the cabin.

At the left of the table stood a binnacle, with compass and all; at the right, a four-foot globe, its surface scored with numerous names, dates and memoranda, carefully written in red ink. The captain’s log-book, open on the table, also showed writing in red. No ordinary diary sufficed for Alpheus Briggs; no, he would have a regulation ship’s log to keep the record of his daily life, or he would have no record at all.

In a rack at one side rested two bright telescopes, with an empty place for the glass now out on the piazza. Beneath this rack a sextant hung; and at one side the daily government weather-report was affixed to a white-painted board.

A sofa-locker, quite like a ship’s berth, still showed the impress of the captain’s body, where he had taken his after-dinner nap. One almost thought to hear the chanting of sea-winds in cordage, aloft, and the creak and give of seasoned timbers. A curious, a wonderful room, indeed! And as Dr. Filhiol studied it, his face[127] expressed a kind of yearning eagerness; for to his fading life this connotation of the other, braver days brought back memories of things that once had been, that now could never be again.

Yet, analyzing everything, he put away these thoughts. Many sad years had broken the spirit in him and turned his thoughts to the worse aspects of everything. He shook his head again dubiously, and his thin lips formed the words:

“This is very, very strange. This is some form of mental aberration, surely. No man wholly sane would build and furnish any such grotesque place. It’s worse, worse than I thought.”

Contemplatively he sipped the egg-nog and continued his observations, while from the kitchen—no, the galley—sounded a clink of coppers, mingled with the piping song of old Ezra, interminably discoursing on the life and adventures of the unfortunate Reuben Ranzo, whose chantey is beknown to all seafaring men. The doctor’s eyes, wandering to the wall nearest him, now perceived a glass-fronted cabinet, filled with a most extraordinary omnium gatherum of curios.

Corals, sponges, coir, nuts, pebbles and dried fruits, strange puffy and spiny fishes, specimens in alcohol, a thousand and one oddments jostled each other on the shelves.

Nor was this all to excite the doctor’s wonder. For hard by the cabinet he now perceived the door of a safe, set into the wall, its combination flush with the white boards.

“The captain can’t be so foolish as to keep his money in his house,” thought Filhiol. “Not when there are banks that offer absolute security. But then, with a man like Captain Briggs, anything seems possible.”

He drank a little more of Ezra’s excellent concoction, and turned his attention to the one remaining[128] side of the cabin, almost filled by the huge-throated fireplace and by the cobbled chimney.

“More junk!” said Dr. Filhiol unsympathetically.

Against the cobble-stones, suspended from hooks screwed into the cement, hung a regular arsenal of weapons: yataghans, scimitars, sabers and muskets—two of them rare Arabian specimens with long barrels and silver-chased stocks. Pistols there were, some of antique patterns bespeaking capture or purchase from half-civilized peoples. Daggers and stilettos had been worked into a kind of rough pattern. A bow and arrows, a “Penang lawyer,” and a couple of boomerangs were interspersed between some knobkerries from Australia, and a few shovel-headed spears and African pigmies’ blow-guns. All the weapons showed signs of wear or rust. In every probability, all had taken human life.

Odd, was it not, that the captain, now so mild a man of peace, should have maintained so grim a reliquary? But, perhaps (the doctor thought), Briggs had preserved it as a kind of strange, contrasting reminder of his other days, just as more than one reformed drunkard has been known to keep the favorite little brown jug that formerly was his undoing.

Filhiol, however, very deeply disapproved of this collection. Old age and infirmity had by no means rendered his disposition more suave. He muttered words of condemnation, drank off a little more of the egg-nog, and once again fell to studying the collection. And suddenly his attention concentrated, fixing itself with particular intentness on a certain blade that until then had escaped his scrutiny.

This blade, a Malay kris with a beautifully carved lotus-bud on the handle, seemed to occupy a sort of central post of honor, toward which the other knives converged. The doctor adjusted his spectacles and[129] studied it for a long minute, as if trying to bring back some recollections not quite clear. Then he arose lamely, and squinted up at the blade.

“That’s a kris,” said he slowly. “A Malay kris. Good Lord, it couldn’t be—the kris, could it?”

He remained a little while, observing the weapon. The sunlight, ever growing redder as the sun sank over Croft Hill and the ancient cemetery, flicked lights from the brass instruments on the table, and for a moment seemed to crimson the vicious, wavy blade of steel. The doctor raised a lean hand to touch the kris, then drew back.

“Better not,” said he. “That’s the one, all right enough. There’s the groove, the poison groove. There couldn’t be two exactly alike. I remember that groove especially. And curaré lasts for years; it’s just as fatal now, as when it was first put on. That kris is mighty good to let alone!”

A dark, rusty stain on the blade set him shuddering. Blood, was it—blood, from the long ago? Who could say? The kris evoked powerful memories. The battle of Motomolo Strait rose up before him. The smoke from the fire in the grate seemed, all at once, that of the burning proa, drifting over the opalescent waters of that distant sea. The illusion was extraordinary. Dr. Filhiol closed his eyes, held tightly to the edge of the mantel, and with dilated nostrils sniffed the smoke. He remained there, transfixed with poignant emotions, trembling, afraid.

It seemed to him as if the shadowy hand of some malignant jinnee had reached out of the bleeding past, and had laid hold on him—a hand that seized and shook his heart with an envenomed, bony clutch.

“God!” he murmured. “What a time that was—what a ghastly, terrible time!”

He tried to shake off this obsessing vision, opened[130] his eyes, and sank down into the easy-chair. Unnerved, shaking, he struck the glass still holding some of the egg-nog, and knocked it to the floor.

The crash of the breaking glass startled him as if it had been the crack of a rifle. Quivering, he stared down at the liquor, spreading over the holystoned floor. Upon it the red sunlight gleamed; and in a flash he beheld once more the deck of the old Silver Fleece, smeared and spotted with blood.

Back he shrank, with extended hands, superstitious fear at his heart. Something nameless, cold and terrible fingered at the latchets of his soul. It was all irrational enough, foolish enough; but still it caught him in its grip, that perfectly unreasoning, heart-clutching fear.

Weakly he pressed a shaking hand over his eyes. With bloodless lips he quavered:

“After fifty years, my God! After fifty years!”

THE LOOMING SHADOW

Old Captain Briggs, meanwhile, absorbed in the most cheerful speculations, was putting his best foot forward on the road to Hadlock’s Wharf. A vigorous foot it was, indeed, and right speedily it carried him. With pipe in full eruption, leaving a trail of blue smoke on the late afternoon air, and with boots creaking on the hard, white road, the captain strode along; while the Airedale trotted ahead as if he, too, understood that Master Hal was coming home.

He made his way out of the village and so struck into the road to Endicutt itself. “The mingled scents of field and ocean” perfumed the air, borne on a breeze that blent the odors of sea and weedy foreshore and salt marsh with those of garden and orchard, into a kind of airy nectar that seemed to infuse fresh life into the captain’s blood. His blue eyes sparkled almost as brightly as the harbor itself, where gaily painted lobster-pot buoys heaved on the swells, where dories labored and where gulls spiraled.

Briggs seemed to love the sea, that afternoon, almost as he had never loved it—the wonderful mystery of tireless, revivifying, all-engendering sea. Joy filled him that Hal, in whose life lived all the hopes of his race, should have inherited this love of the all-mother, Ocean.

Deeply the captain breathed, as he strode onward, and felt that life was being very good to him. For the most part, rough hillocks and tangled clumps of[132] pine, hemlock and gleaming birch hid the bay from him; but now and again these gave way to sandy stretches, leaving the harbor broad-spread and sparkling to his gaze. And as the old man passed each such place, his eyes sought the incoming canvas of the Sylvia Fletcher, that seemed to him shining more white, uprearing itself with more stately power, than that of any other craft.

Now and then he hailed the boy as if Hal could hear him across all that watery distance. His hearty old voice lost itself in the ebbing, flowing murmur of the surf that creamed up along the pebbles, and dragged them down with a long, rattling slither. Everything seemed glad, to Captain Briggs—dories hauled up on the sand; blocks, ropes and drying sails; lobster-pots and fish-cars; buoys, rusty anchors half-buried—everything seemed to wear a festive air. For was not Hal, now homeward bound, now almost here?

So overflowing were the old man’s spirits that with good cheer even beyond his usual hearty greeting he gave the glad news to all along the road, to those he met, to those who stopped their labors or looked up from their rest in yards and houses, to give him a good-evening.

“It is a good evening for me, neighbor,” he would say, with a fine smile, his beard snowy in the sun now low across the western hills. “A fine, wonderful evening! Hal’s coming home to-night; he’s on the Sylvia Fletcher, just making in past the Rips, there—see, you can sight her, yourself.”

And then he would pass on, glad, triumphant. And as he went, hammers would cease their caulking, brushes their painting; and the fishers mending their russet nets spread over hedge or fence would wish him joy.

Here, there, a child would take his hand and walk[133] with him a little way, till the captain’s stout pace tired the short legs, or till some good mother from a cottage door would call the little one back for supper. Just so, fifty years ago, yellow-skinned Malay mothers had called their children within doors, at Batu Kawan, lest Mambang Kuning, the demon who dwelt in the sunset, should do them harm. And just so the sunset itself, that wicked night at the Malay kampong, had glowered redly.

A mist was now rising from the harbor and the marshland, like an exhalation of pale ghosts, floating vaguely, quite as the smoke had floated above Batu Kawan. The slowly fading opalescence of the sky, reddening over the hills, bore great resemblance to those hues that in the long ago had painted the sky above the jagged mountain-chain in that far land. But of all this the captain was taking no thought.

No, nothing could enter his mind save the glad present and the impending moment when he should see his Hal again, should feel the boy’s hand in his, put an arm about his shoulder and, quite unashamed, give him a kiss patriarchal in its fine simplicity and love.

“It is a good evening!” he repeated. “A wonderful evening, friends. Why, Hal’s been gone nearly six months. Gone since last Christmas. And now he’s coming back to me, again!”

So he passed on. One thing he did not note: this—that though all the folk gave him Godspeed, no one inquired about Hal. That after he had passed, more than one shook a dubious head or murmured words of commiseration. Some few of the fisherfolk, leaning over their fences to watch after him, talked a little together in low tones as if they feared the breeze might bear their words to the old man.

Of all this the captain remained entirely unaware. On he kept, into the straggling outskirts of Endicutt.[134] Now he could see the harbor only at rare intervals; but in the occasional glimpses he caught of it, he saw the Sylvia Fletcher’s tops’ls crumpling down and perceived that she was headed in directly for the wharf. He hurried on, at a better pace. Above all things Hal must not come, and find no grandfather waiting for him. That, to the captain’s mind, would have been unthinkable treason.

The captain strode along the cobblestoned main street, past the ship-chandlers’ stores, the sail-lofts and quaint old shops, and so presently turned to the right, into Hadlock’s Wharf. Here the going was bad, because of crates and barrels of iced fish and lobsters, and trucks, and a miscellany of obstructions. For a moment the captain was entirely blocked by a dray across the wharf, backing into a fish-shed. The driver greeted him with a smile.

“Hello, cap!” cried he. “Gee, but you’re lookin’ fine. What’s up?”

“It’s a great day for me,” Briggs answered. “A rare fine day. Hal, my boy, is coming home. He’s on the Sylvia Fletcher, just coming in from Boston. Can’t you let me past, some way?”

“Why, sure! Back up!” the driver commanded, savagely jerking at the bit. “You can make it, now, I reckon.”

Then, as Briggs squeezed by, he stood looking after the old, blue-clad figure. He turned a lump in his cheek, and spat.

“Gosh, ain’t it a shame?” he murmured. “Ain’t it a rotten, gorrammed shame?”

By the time Captain Briggs, followed by the faithful Ruddy, reached the stringpiece of the wharf, the schooner was already close. The captain, breathing a little fast, leaned against a tin-topped mooring-pile, and with eager eyes scrutinized the on-coming vessel.[135] All along the wharf, the usual contingent of sailors, longshoremen, fishers and boys had already gathered. To none the captain addressed a word. All his heart and soul were now fast riveted to the schooner, from whose deck plainly drifted words of command, and down from whose sticks the canvas was fast collapsing.

With skilful handling and hardly a rag aloft, she eased alongside. Ropes came sprangling to the wharf. These, dragged in by volunteer hands, brought hawsers. And with a straining of hemp, the Sylvia hauled to a dead stop, groaning and chafing against the splintered timbers.

Jests, greetings, laughter volleyed between craft and wharf. The captain, alone, kept silent. His eager eyes were searching the deck; searching, and finding not.

“Hello, cap’n! Hey, there, Cap’n Briggs!” voices shouted. The mate waved a hand at him, and so did two or three others; but there seemed restraint in their greetings. Usually the presence of the captain loosened tongues and set the sailormen glad. But now—

With a certain tightening round the heart, the captain remained there, not knowing what to do. He had expected to see Hal on deck, waving a cap at him, shouting to him. But Hal remained invisible. What could have happened? The captain’s eyes scrutinized the deck, in vain. Neither fore nor aft was Hal.

Briggs stepped on the low rail of the schooner and went aboard. He walked aft, to the man at the wheel. Ruddy followed close at heel.

“Hello, cap’n,” greeted the steersman. “Nice day, ain’t it?” His voice betrayed embarrassment.

“Is my boy, Hal, aboard o’ you?” demanded Briggs.

“Yup.”

[136]

“Well, where is he?”

“Below.”

“Getting his dunnage?”

“Guess so.” The steersman sucked at his cob pipe, very ill at ease. Briggs stared at him a moment, then turned toward the companion.

A man’s head and shoulders appeared up the companionway. Out on deck clambered the man—a young man, black-haired and blue-eyed, with mighty shoulders and a splendidly corded neck visible in the low roll of his opened shirt. His sleeves, rolled up, showed arms and fists of Hercules.

“Hal!” cried the captain, a world of gladness in his voice. Silence fell, all about; every one stopped talking, ceased from all activities; all eyes centered on Hal and the captain.

“Hal! My boy!” exclaimed Briggs once more, but in an altered tone. He took a step or two forward. His hand, that had gone out to Hal, dropped at his side again.

He peered at his grandson with troubled, wondering eyes. Under the weathered tan of his face, quick pallor became visible.

“Why, Hal,” he stammered. “What—what’s happened? What’s the meaning of—of all this?”

Hal stared at him with an expression the old man had never seen upon his face. The boy’s eyes were reddened, bloodshot, savage with unreasoning passion. The right eye showed a bruise that had already begun to discolor. The jaw had gone forward, become prognathous like an ape’s, menacing, with a glint of strong, white teeth. The crisp black hair, rumpled and awry, the black growth of beard—two days old, strong on that square-jawed face—and something in the full-throated poise of the head, brought back to the old captain, in a flash, vivid and horrible memories.

[137]

Up from that hatchway he saw himself arising, once again, tangibly and in the living flesh. In the swing of Hal’s huge fists, the squaring of his shoulders, his brute expression of blood-lust and battle-lust, old Captain Briggs beheld, line for line, his other and barbaric self of fifty years ago.

“Good God, Hal! What’s this mean?” he gulped, while along the wharf and on deck a staring silence held. But his question was lost in a hoarse shout from the cabin:

“Here, you young devil! Come below, an’ apologize fer that!”

Hal swung about, gripped both sides of the companion, and leaned down. The veins in his powerful neck, taut-swollen, seemed to start through the bronzed skin.

“Apologize?” he roared down the companion. “To a lantern-jawed P. I. like you? Like hell I will!”

Then he stood back, lifted his head and laughed with deep-lunged scorn.

From below sounded a wordless roar. Up the ladder scrambled, simian in agility, a tall and wiry man of middle age. Briggs saw in a daze that this man was white with passion; he had that peculiar, pinched look about the nostrils which denotes the killing rage. Captain Fergus McLaughlin, of Prince Edward’s Island, had come on deck.

“You——!” McLaughlin hurled at him, while the old man stood quivering, paralyzed. “If you was a member o’ my crew, damn y’r lip—”

“Yes, but I’m not, you see,” sneered Hal, fists on hips. “I’m a passenger aboard your rotten old tub, which is almost as bad as your grammar and your reputation.” Contemptuously he eyed the Prince Edward’s Islander, from rough woolen cap to sea-boots, and back again, every look a blistering insult. His[138] huge chest, rising, falling, betrayed the cumulating fires within. The hush among the onlookers grew ominous. “There’s not money enough in circulation to hire me to sign articles with a low-browed, sockless, bean-eating—”

McLaughlin’s leap cut short the sentence. With a raw howl, the P. I. flung himself at Hal. Deft and strong with his stony-hard fists was McLaughlin, and the fighting heart in him was a lion’s. A hundred men had he felled to his decks, ere now, and not one had ever risen quite whole, or unassisted. In the extremity of his rage he laughed as he sprang.

Lithely, easily, with the joy and love of battle in his reddened eyes, Hal ducked. Up flashed his right fist, a sledge of muscle, bone, sinew. The left swung free.

The impact of Hal’s smash thudded sickeningly, with a suggestion of crushed flesh and shattered bone.

Sprawling headlong, hands clutching air, McLaughlin fell. And, as he plunged with a crash to the planking, Hal’s laugh snarled through the tense air. From him he flung old Briggs, now in vain striving to clutch and hold his arm.

“Got enough apology, you slab-sided herring-choker?” he roared, exultant. “Enough, or want some more? Apologize? You bet—with these! Come on, you or any of your crew, or all together, you greasy fishbacks! I’ll apologize you!”

Snarling into a laugh he stood there, teeth set, neck swollen and eyes engorged with blood, his terrible fists eager with the lust of war.

HAL SHOWS HIS TEETH

Fergus McLaughlin, though down, had not yet taken the count. True, Hal had felled him to his own deck, half-stunned; but the wiry Scot, toughened by many seas, had never yet learned to spell “defeat.” For him, the battle was just beginning. He managed to rise on hands and knees. Mouthing curses, he swayed there. Hal lurched forward to finish him with never a chance of getting up; but now old Captain Briggs had Hal by the arm again.

“Hal, Hal!” he entreated. “For God’s sake—”

Once more Hal threw the old man off. The second’s delay rescued McLaughlin from annihilation. Dazed, bleeding at mouth and nose, he staggered to his feet and with good science plunged into a clinch.

This unexpected move upset Hal’s tactics of smashing violence. The Scot’s long, wiry arms wrapped round him, hampering his fist-work. Hal could do no more than drive in harmless blows at the other’s back. They swayed, tripped over a hawser, almost went down. From the crew and from the wharf ragged shouts arose, of fear, anger, purely malicious delight, for here was battle-royal of the finest. The sound of feet, running down the wharf, told of other contingents hastily arriving.

“By gum!” approved the helmsman, forgetting to chew. He had more than once felt the full weight of McLaughlin’s fist. “By gum, now, but Mac’s in f’r[140] a good takin’-down. If that lad don’t fist him proper, I miss my ’tarnal guess. Sick ’im, boy!”

Blaspheming, Hal tore McLaughlin loose, flung him back, lowered his head and charged. But now the Scot had recovered a little of his wit. On deck he spat blood and a broken snag of tooth. His eye gleamed murderously. The excess of Hal’s rage betrayed the boy. His guard opened. In drove a stinging lefthander. McLaughlin handed him the other fist, packed full of dynamite. The boy reeled, gulping.

“Come on, ye college bratlin’!” challenged the fighting Scot, and smeared the blood from his mouth. “This here ain’t your ship—not yet!”

“My ship’s any ship I happen to be on!” snarled Hal, circling for advantage. Mac had already taught him to be cautious. Old Captain Brigg’s imploring cries fell from him, unheeded. “If this was my ship, I’d wring your neck, so help me God! But as it is, I’ll only mash you to a jelly!”

“Pretty bairn!” gibed McLaughlin, hunched into battle-pose, bony fists up. “Grandad’s pretty pet! Arrrh! Ye would, eh?” as Hal bored in at him.

He met the rush with cool skill. True, Hal’s right went to one eye, closing it; but Hal felt the bite of knuckles catapulted from his neck.

Hal delayed no more. Bull-like, he charged. By sheer weight and fury of blows he drove Mac forward of the schooner, beside the deck-house. Amid turmoil, the battle raged. The jostling crowd, shoved and pushed, on deck and on the wharf, to see this epic war. Bets were placed, even money.

McLaughlin, panting, half-blind, his teeth set in a grin of rage, put every ounce he had left into each blow. But Hal outclassed him.

A minute, two minutes they fought, straining, sweating, lashing. Then something swift and terrible connected[141] with Mac’s jaw-point in a jolt that loosened his universe. Mac’s head snapped back. His arms flung up. He dropped, pole-axed, into the scuppers.

For the first time in five-and-twenty years of fighting, clean and dirty, Fergus McLaughlin had taken a knockout.

A mighty shout of exultation, fear and rage loosened echoes from the old fish-sheds. Three or four of the crew came jostling into the circle, minded to avenge their captain. Sneering, his chest heaving, but ready with both fists, Hal faced them.

“Come on, all o’ you!” he flung, drunk with rage, his face bestial. A slaver of bloody froth trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Come on!”

They hesitated. Gorilla-like, he advanced. Back through the crowd the overbold ones drew. No heart remained in them to tackle this infuriated fighting-machine.

Hal set both fists on his hips, flung up his head and panted:

“Apologize, will I? I, a passenger on this lousy tub, I’ll apologize to a bunch of down-east rough-necks, eh? If there’s anybody else wants any apology, I’m here!”

None caught up the gage of battle. Bursting with fury that had to vent itself, Hal swung toward McLaughlin. The Scot had landed on a coil of hawser in the scuppers, that had somewhat broken his fall. Hal reached down, hauled him up and flung him backward over the rail. Thrice he struck with a fist reddened by McLaughlin’s blood. He wrenched at the unconscious man’s arm, snarling like an animal, his face distorted, eyes glazed and staring. A crunching told of at least one broken bone.

Shouts of horror fell unheeded from his ears. He glared around.

[142]

“My Gawd, he’s a-killin’ on him!” quavered a voice. “We can’t stan’ by an’ see him do murder!”

Old Briggs, nerved to sudden action, ran forward.

“Hal! For God’s sake, Hal!”

“You stand back, grandad! He’s my meat!”

Hal raised McLaughlin high above his head, with a sweep of wonderful power. He dashed the Scot to the bare planks with a horrible, dull crash, hauled back one foot and kicked the senseless man full in the mangled, blood-smeared face.

A communal gasp of terror rose up then. Men shrank and quivered, stricken with almost superstitious fear. All had seen fights aplenty; most of them had taken a hand in brawls—but here was a new kind of malice. And silence fell, tense, heart-searching.

Hal faced the outraged throng, and laughed with deep lungs.

“There’s your champion, what’s left of him!” cried he. “He won’t bullyrag anybody for one while, believe me. Take him—I’m through with him!”

Of a sudden the rage seemed to die in Hal, spent in that last, orgiastic convulsion of passion. He turned away, flung men right and left, and leaped down the companion. Swiftly he emerged with a suit-case. To his trembling, half-fainting grandfather he strode, unmindful of the murmur of curses and threats against him.

“Come on, grandpop!” he said in a more normal tone. His voice did not tremble, as will the voice of almost every man after a storm of rage. His color was fresh and high, his eyes clear; his whole ego seemed to have been vivified and freshened, like a sky after tempest. “Come along, now. I’ve had enough of this rotten old hulk. I’ve given it what it needed, a good clean-up. Come on!”

He seized Captain Briggs by the elbow—for the[143] old man could hardly stand, and now was leaning against the hatchway housing—and half guided, half dragged him over the rail to the wharf.

“Shame on you, Hal Briggs!” exclaimed an old lobsterman. “This here’s a bad day’s work you’ve done. When he was down, you booted him. We wun’t fergit it, none of us wun’t.”

“No, and he won’t forget it, either, the bragging bucko!” sneered Hal. “Uncle Silas, you keep out of this!”

“Ef that’s what they l’arn ye down to college,” sounded another voice, “you’d a durn sight better stay to hum. We fight some, on the North Shore, but we fight fair.”

Hal faced around, with blazing eyes.

“Who said that?” he gritted. “Where’s the son of a pup that said it?”

No answer. Cowed, everybody held silence. No sound was heard save the shuffling feet of the men aboard, as some of the crew lifted McLaughlin’s limp form and carried it toward the companion, just as Crevay had been carried on the Silver Fleece, half a century before.

“Come on, gramp!” exclaimed Hal. “For two cents I’d clean up the whole white-livered bunch. Let’s go home, now, before there’s trouble.”

“I—I’m afraid I can’t walk, Hal,” quavered the old man. “This has knocked me galley-west. My rudder’s unshipped and my canvas in rags. I can’t navigate at all.” He was trembling as with a chill. Against his grandson he leaned, ashen-faced, helpless. “I can’t make Snug Haven, now.”

“That’s all right, grampy,” Hal assured him. “We’ll dig up a jitney if you can get as far as the street. Come on, let’s move!”

With unsteady steps, clinging to Hal’s arm and followed[144] by the dog, old Captain Briggs made his way up Hadlock’s Wharf. Only a few minutes had elapsed since he had strode so proudly down that wharf, but what a vast difference had been wrought in the captain’s soul! All the glad elation of his heart had now faded more swiftly than a tropic sunset turns to dark. The old man seemed to have shrunken, collapsed. Fifteen little minutes seemed to have bowed down his shoulders with at least fifteen years.

“Oh, Hal, Hal!” he groaned, as they slowly made their way towards the street. “Oh, my boy, how could you ha’ done that?”

“How could I? After what he said, how couldn’t I?”

“What a disgrace! What a burning, terrible disgrace! You—just back from college—”

“There, there, grandpop, it’ll be all right. Everybody’ll be glad, when they cool off, that I handed it to that bully.”

“This will make a terrible scandal. The Observer will print it, and—”

“Nonsense! You don’t think they’d waste paper on a little mix-up aboard a coasting-schooner, do you?”

“This is more than a little mix-up, Hal. You’ve stove that man’s hull up, serious. There’s more storm brewing.”

“What d’you mean, more storm?”

“Oh, he’ll take this to court. He’ll sue for damages.”

“He’d better not!” snapped Hal, grimly. “I’ve got more for him, where what I handed him came from, if he tries it!”

“Hal, you’re—breaking my old heart.”

“D’you think, grandpa, I was going to stand there and swallow his insults? Do you think I, a Briggs,[145] was going to let that slab-sided P.I. hand me that rough stuff? Would you have stood for it?”

“I? What do you mean? How could I fight, at my age?”

“I mean, when you were young. Didn’t you ever mix it, then? Didn’t you have guts enough to put up your fists when you had to? If you didn’t, you’re no grandfather of mine!”

“Hal,” answered the old man, still holding to his grandson as they neared the street, “what course I sailed in my youth is nothing for you to steer by now. Those were rough days, and these are supposed to be civilized. That was terrible, terrible, what you did to McLaughlin. The way you flung him across the rail, there, and then to the deck, and—kicked him, when he was down—kicked him in the face—”

“It’s all right, I tell you!” Hal asserted, vigorously. He laughed, with glad remembrance. “When I fight a gentleman, I fight like a gentleman. When I fight a ruffian, I use the same tactics. That’s all such cattle understand. My motto is to hit first, every time. That’s the one best bet. The second is, hit hard. If you’re in a scrap, you’re in it to win, aren’t you? Hand out everything you’ve got—give ’em the whole bag of tricks, all at one wallop. That’s what I go by, and it’s a damn good rule. You, there! Hey, there, jitney!”

The discussion broke off, short, as Hal sighted a little car, cruising slowly and with rattling joints over the rough-paved cobbles.

THE CAPTAIN COMMANDS

The jitney stopped.

“Oh, hello, Sam! That you?” asked Hal, recognizing the driver.

“Horn spoon! Ef it ain’t Hal!” exclaimed the jitney-man. “Back ag’in, eh? What the devil you been up to? Shirt tore, an’ one eye looks like you’d been—”

“Oh, nothing,” Hal answered, while certain taggers-on stopped at a respectful distance. “I’ve just been arguing with McLaughlin, aboard the Sylvia Fletcher. It’s nothing at all.” He helped his grandfather into the car and then, gripping the Airedale so that it yelped with pain, he pitched it in. “How much do you want to take us down to Snug Haven?”

“Well—that’ll be a dollar ’n’ a half, seein’ it’s you.”

“You’ll get one nice, round little buck, Sam.”

“Git out! You, an’ the cap’n, an’ the dog, an’ a tussik! Why—”

Hal climbed into the car. He leaned forward, his face close to Sam’s. The seethe of rage seemed to have departed. Now Hal was all joviality. Swiftly the change had come upon him.

“Sam!” he admonished. “You know perfectly well seventy-five cents would be robbery, but I’ll give you a dollar. Put her into high.”

The driver sniffed Hal’s breath, and nodded acceptance.

[147]

“All right, seein’ as it’s you,” he answered. He added, in a whisper: “Ain’t got nothin’ on y’r hip, have ye?”

“Nothing but a bruise,” said Hal. “Clk-clk!”

The jitney struck its bone-shaking gait along the curving street of Endicutt. No one spoke. The old captain, spent in forces and possessed by bitter, strange hauntings, had sunk far down in the seat. His beard made a white cascade over the smart blue of his coat. His eyes, half-closed, seemed to be visioning the far-off days he had labored so long to forget. His face was gray with suffering, beneath its tan. His lips had set themselves in a grim, tight line.

As for Hal, he filled and lighted his pipe, then with a kind of bored tolerance eyed the quaint old houses, the gardens and trim hedges.

“Some burg!” he murmured. “Some live little burg to put in a whole summer! Well, anyhow, I started something. They ought to hand me a medal, for putting a little pep into this prehistoric graveyard.”

Then he relapsed into contemplative smoking.

Presently the town gave place to the open road along the shore, now bathed in a thousand lovely hues as sunset died. The slowly fading beauty of the seascape soothed what little fever still remained in Hal’s blood. With an appreciative eye he observed the harbor. The town itself might seem dreary, but in his soul the instinctive love of the sea awoke to the charms of that master-panorama which in all its infinite existence has never twice shown just the same blending of hues, of motion, of refluent ebb and fall.

Along the dimming islands, swells were breaking into great bouquets of foam. The murmurous, watery cry of the surf lulled Hal; its booming cadences against the rocky girdles of the coast seemed whispering alluring, mysterious things to him. In the offing a few faint[148] specks of sail, melting in the purple haze, beckoned: “Come away, come away!”

To Captain Briggs quite other thoughts were coming. Not now could the lure of his well-loved ocean appeal to him, for all the wonders of the umber and dull orange west. Where but an hour ago beauty had spread its miracles across the world, for him, now all had turned to drab. A few faint twinkles of light were beginning to show in fishers’ cottages; and these, too, saddened the old captain, for they minded him of Snug Haven’s waiting lights—Snug Haven, where he had hoped so wonderfully much, but where now only mournful disillusion and bodings of evil remained.

The ceaseless threnody of the sea seemed to the old man a requiem over dead hopes. The salt tides seemed to mock and gibe at him, and out of the pale haze drifting seaward from the slow-heaving waters, ghosts seemed beckoning.

All at once Hal spoke, his college slang rudely jarring the old captain’s melancholy.

“That was some jolt I handed Mac, wasn’t it?” he laughed. “He’ll be more careful who he picks on next time. That’s about what he needed, a good walloping.”

“Eh? What?” murmured the old man, roused from sad musings.

“Such people have to get it handed to them once in a while,” the grandson continued. “There’s only one kind of argument they understand—and that’s this!”

He raised his right fist, inspected it, turning it this way and that, admiring its massive power, its adamantine bone and sinew.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Hal, don’t do that!” exclaimed the captain. With strange eyes he peered at the young man.

Hal laughed uproariously.

[149]

“Some fist, what?” he boasted. “Some pacifier!”

As he turned toward the old man, his breath smote the captain’s senses.

“Lord, Hal! You haven’t been drinking, have you?” quavered Briggs.

“Drinking? Well—no. Maybe I’ve had one or two, but that’s all.”

“One or two what, Hal?”

“Slugs of rum.”

“Rum! Good God!”

“What’s the matter, now? What’s the harm in a drop of good stimulant? I asked him for a drink, and he couldn’t see it, the tightwad! I took it, anyhow. That’s what started all the rough-house.”

“Great heavens, Hal! D’you mean to tell me you’re drinking, now?”

“There, there, gramp, don’t get all stewed up. All the fellows take a drop now and then. You don’t want me to be a molly-coddle, do you? To feel I can’t take a nip, once in a while, and hold it like a gentleman? That’s all foolishness, grampy. Be sensible!”

The old man began to shiver, though the off-shore breeze blew warm. Hal made a grimace of vexation. His grandfather answered nothing, and once more silence fell. It lasted till the first scattering houses of South Endicutt came into view in the fading light.

The driver, throwing a switch, sent his headlights piercing the soft June dusk. The cones of radiance painted the roadside grass a vivid green, and made the whitewashed fences leap to view. Hedges, gardens, gable-ends, all spoke of home and rest, peace and the beatitude of snug security. Somewhere the sound of children’s shouts and laughter echoed appealingly. The tinkle of a cow-bell added its music; and faint in the western sky, the evening star looked down.

And still Captain Briggs held silent.

[150]

A little red gleam winked in view—the port light of Snug Haven.

“There’s the old place, isn’t it?” commented Hal, in a softer tone. He seemed moved to gentler thoughts; but only for a moment. His eye, catching a far, white figure away down by the smithy, brightened with other anticipations than of getting home again.

“Hello!” he exclaimed. “That’s Laura, isn’t it? Look, gramp—isn’t that Laura Maynard?”

Peering, Captain Briggs recognized the girl. He understood her innocent little subterfuge of being out for a casual stroll just at this time. His heart, already lacerated, contracted with fresh pain.

“No, no, Hal,” he exclaimed. “That can’t be Laura. Come now, don’t be thinking about Laura, to-night. You’re tired, and ought to rest.”

“Tired? Say, that’s a good one! When was I ever tired?”

“Well, I’m tired, anyhow,” the captain insisted, “and I want to cast anchor at the Haven. We’ve got company, too. It wouldn’t look polite, if you went gallivanting—”

“Company? What company?” demanded Hal, as the car drew up toward the gate.

“A very special friend of mine. A man I haven’t seen in fifty years. An old doctor that once sailed with me. He’s waiting to see you, now.”

“Another old pill, eh?” growled the boy, sullenly, his eyes still fixed on the girl at the bend of the road. “There’ll be time enough for Methuselah, later. Just now, it’s me for the skirt!”

The car halted. The captain stiffly descended. He felt singularly spent and old. Hal threw out the suit-case, and lithely leaped to earth.

“Dig up a bone for Sam, here,” directed Hal.[151] “Now, I’ll be on my way to overhaul the little dame.”

“Hal! That’s not Laura, I tell you!”

“You can’t kid me, grampy! That’s the schoolma’m, all right. I’d know her a mile off. She’s some chicken, take it from me!”

“Hal, I protest against such language!”

“Oh, too rough, eh?” sneered the boy. “Now in your day, I suppose you used more refined English, didn’t you? Maybe you called them—”

“Hal! That will do!”

“So will Laura, for me. She’s mine, that girl is. She’s plump as a young porpoise, and I’m going after her!”

The captain stood aghast, at sound of words that echoed from the very antipodes of the world and of his own life. Then, with a sudden rush of anger, his face reddening formidably, he exclaimed:

“Not another word! You’ve been drinking, and you’re dirty and torn—no fit man, to-night, to haul up ’longside that craft!”

“I tell you, I’m going down there to say good evening to Laura, anyhow,” Hal insisted, sullenly. “I’m going!”

“You are not, sir!” retorted Briggs, while Sam, in the car, grinned with enjoyment. “You’re not going to hail Laura Maynard to-night! Do you want to lose her friendship and respect?”

“Bull! Women like a little rough stuff, now and then. This ‘Little Rollo’ business is played out. Go along in, if you want to, but I’m going to see Laura.”

“Hal,” said the old man, a new tone in his voice. “This is carrying too much canvas. You’ll lose some of it in a minute, if you don’t reef. I’m captain here, and you’re going to take my orders, if it comes to that. The very strength you boast of and misuse so brutally is derived from money I worked a lifetime for, at sea,[152] and suffered and sinned and bled and almost died for!” The old captain’s tone rang out again as in the old, tempestuous days when he was master of many hard and violent men. “Now, sir, you’re going to obey me, or overside you go, this minute—and once you go, you’ll never set foot on my planks again! Pick up your dunnage, sir, and into the Haven with you!”

“Good night!” ejaculated Hal, staring. Never had the old man thus spoken to him. Stung to anger, though Hal was, he dared not disobey. Muttering, he picked up the suit-case. The dog, glad to be at home once more, leaped against him. With an oath, Hal swung the suit-case; the Airedale, yelping with pain, fawned and slunk away.

“Into the Haven with you!” commanded Briggs, outraged to his very heart. “Go!”

Hal obeyed, with huge shoulders hulking and drooping in their plenitude of evil power, just like the captain’s, so very long ago. Alpheus Briggs peered down the street at the dim white figure of the disappointed girl; then, eyes agleam and back very straight, he followed Hal toward Snug Haven—the Haven which in such beatitude of spirit he had left but an hour ago—the Haven to which, filled with so many evil bodings, he now was coming back again.

“Oh, God,” he murmured, “if this thing must come upon me, Thy will be done! But if it can be turned aside, spare me! Spare me, for this is all my life and all my hope! Spare me!”

SPECTERS OF THE PAST

Hal’s boots, clumping heavily on the porch, aroused the captain from his brief revery of prayer. Almost at once the new stab of pain at realization that Dr. Filhiol must see Hal in this disheveled, half-drunken condition brought the old man sharply back to earth again. Bitter humiliation, brutal disillusionment, sickening anti-climax! The captain stifled a groan. Fate seemed dealing him a blow unreasonably hard.

A chair scraped on the porch. Briggs saw the bent and shriveled form of Dr. Filhiol arising. The doctor, rendered nervous by the arsenal and by the cabinet of curios, which all too clearly recalled the past, had once more gone out upon the piazza, to await the captain’s return. Warmed by the egg-nog within, and outwardly by a shawl that Ezra had given him, now he stood there, leaning on his cane. A smile of anticipation curved his shaven, bloodless lips. His eyes blinked eagerly behind his thick-lensed glasses.

“Home again, eh?” he piped. “Good! So then this is the little grandson back from college? Little! Ha-ha! Why, captain, he’d make two like us!”

“This is Hal,” answered the captain briefly. “Yes, this is my grandson.”

The doctor, surprised at Briggs’s curt reply, put out his hand. Hal took it as his grandfather spoke the doctor’s name.

“Glad to know you, doctor!” said he in a sullen voice, and let the hand drop. “Excuse me, please! I’ll go in and wash up.”

[154]

He turned toward the door. With perturbation Filhiol peered after him. Then he glanced at the captain. Awkwardly silence fell, broken by a cry of joy from the front door.

“Oh, Master Hal!” ejaculated Ezra. “Ef it ain’t Master Hal!”

The servitor’s long face beamed with jubilation as he seized the suit-case with one hand and with the other clapped Hal on the shoulder. “Jumpin’ jellyfish, but you’re lookin’ fine an’ stout! Back from y’r books, ain’t ye? Ah, books is grand things, Master Hal, ’specially check-books, pocketbooks, an’ bank-books. Did the cap’n tell ye? He did, didn’t he?”

“Hello, Ez!” answered Hal, still very glum. “Tell me what?”

“‘Bout the plum-cake an’ lamb?” asked Ezra anxiously as Hal slid past him into the house. “I remembered what you like, Master Hal. I been workin’ doggone hard to git everythin’ jest A1 fer you!”

His voice grew inaudible as he followed Hal into Snug Haven. The captain and the doctor gazed at each other a long, eloquent moment in the vague light. Neither spoke. Filhiol turned and sat down, puzzled, oppressed.

Briggs wearily sank into another chair. Hal’s feet stumbling up the front stairs echoed with torment through his soul. Was that the stumbling of haste, or had the boy drunk more than he had seemed to? The captain dropped his cap to the porch-floor. Not now did he take pains to hang it on top of the rocking-chair. He wiped his forehead with his silk handkerchief, and groaned.

The doctor kept silence. He understood that any word of his would prove inopportune. But with pity he studied the face of Captain Briggs, its lines accentuated by the light from the window of the cabin.

[155]

Presently the captain sighed deep and began:

“I’m glad you’re here on my quarterdeck with me to-night, doctor. Things are all going wrong, sir. Barometer’s way down, compass is bedeviled, seams opening fore and aft. It’s bad, doctor—very, very bad!”

“I see there’s something wrong, of course,” said Filhiol with sympathy.

“Everything’s wrong, sir. That grandson of mine—you—noticed just what was the matter with him?”

“H-m! It’s rather dark here, you know,” hedged Filhiol.

“Not so dark but what you understood,” said Briggs grimly. “When there’s a storm brewing no good navigator thinks he can dodge it by locking himself in his cabin. And there is a storm brewing this time, a hurricane, sir, or I’ve missed all signals.”

“Just what do you mean, captain?”

“Violence, drink, women—wickedness and sin! You smelled his breath, didn’t you? You took an observation of his face?”

“Well, yes. He’s been drinking a little, of course; but these boys in college—”

“He very nigh killed the skipper of the Sylvia Fletcher, and there’ll be the devil to pay about it. It was just luck there wasn’t murder done before my very eyes. He’s been drinking enough so as to wake a black devil in his heart! Enough so he’s like a roaring bull after the first pretty girl in the offing.”

“There, there, captain!” The doctor tried to soothe him, his thin voice making strange contrast with the captain’s booming bass. “You’re probably exaggerating. A little exuberance may be pardoned in youth,” his expression belied his words. “Remember, captain, when you were—”

“That’s just what’s driving me on the rocks with[156] grief and despair!” the old man burst out, gripping the arms of the rocker. “God above! It’s just the realization of my own youth, flung back at me now, that’s like to kill me! That boy, so help me—why, he’s thrown clean back fifty years all at one crack!”

“No, no, not that!”

“He has, I tell you! He’s jumped back half a century. He don’t belong in this age of airplanes and wireless. He belongs back with the clipper-ships and—”

“Nonsense, captain, and you know it!”

“It’s far from nonsense! There’s a bad strain somewhere in my blood. I’ve been afraid a long time it was going to crop out in Hal. There’s always been a tradition in my family of evil doings now and then. I don’t know anything certain about it, though, except that my grandfather, Amalfi Briggs, died of bursting a blood-vessel in his brain in a fit of rage. That was all that saved him from being a murderer—he died before he could kill the other man!”

Silence came, save for the piping whistle of an urchin far up the road. The ever-rising, falling suspiration of the sea breathed its long caress across the land, on which a vague, pale sheen of starlight was descending.

Suddenly, from abovestairs, sounded a dull, slamming sound as of a bureau-drawer violently shut. Another slam followed; and now came a grumbling of muffled profanity.

“All that saved my grandfather from being a murderer,” said Briggs dourly, “was the fact that he dropped dead himself before he could cut down the other man with the ship-carpenter’s adze he had in his hand.”

“Indeed? Your grandfather must have been rather a hard specimen.”

“Only when he was in anger. At other times you[157] never saw a more jovial soul! But rage made a beast of him!”

“How was your father?”

“Not that way in the least. He was as consistently Christian a man as ever breathed. My son—Hal’s father—was a good man, too. Not a sign of that sort of brutality ever showed in him.”

“I think you’re worrying unnecessarily,” judged the doctor. “Your grandson may be wild and rough at times, but he’s tainted with no hereditary stain.”

“I don’t know about that, doctor,” said the captain earnestly. “For a year or two past he’s been showing more temper than a young man should. He’s not been answering the helm very well. Two or three of the village people here have already complained to me. I’ve never been really afraid till to-night. But now, doctor, I am afraid—terribly, deadly afraid!”

The old man’s voice shook. Filhiol tried to smile.

“Let the dead past bury its dead!” said he. “Don’t open the old graves to let the ghosts of other days walk out again into the clear sunset of your life.”

“God knows I don’t want to!” the old man exclaimed in a low, trembling voice. “But suppose those graves open themselves? Suppose they won’t stay shut, no, not though all the good deeds from here to heaven were piled atop of them, to keep them down? Suppose those ghosts rise up and stare me in the eyes and won’t be banished—what then?”

“Stuff and nonsense!” gibed Filhiol, though his voice was far from steady. “You’re not yourself, captain. You’re unnerved. There’s nothing the matter with that boy except high spirits and overflowing animal passions.”

“No, no! I understand only too well. God is being very hard to me! I sinned grievous, in the long ago! But I’ve done my very best to pay the reckoning.[158] Seems like I haven’t succeeded. Seems like God don’t forget! He’s paying me now, with interest!”

“Captain, you exaggerate!” the doctor tried to assure him, but Briggs shook his head.

“Heredity skips that way sometimes, don’t it?” asked he.

“Well—sometimes. But that doesn’t prove anything.”

“No, it don’t prove anything, but what Hal did to-night does! Would a thing like that come on sudden that way? Would it? A kind of hydrophobia of rage that won’t listen to any reason but wants to break and tear and kill? I mean, if that kind of thing was in the blood, could it lay hid a long time and then all of a sudden burst out like that?”

“Well—yes. It might.”

“I seem to remember it was the same with me the first time I ever had one of those mad fits,” said the captain. “It come on quick. It wasn’t like ordinary getting mad. It was a red torrent, delirious and awful—something that caught me up and carried me along on its wave—something I couldn’t fight against. When I saw Hal with his teeth grinning, eyes glassy, fists red with McLaughlin’s blood, oh, it struck clean through my heart!

“It wasn’t any fear of either of them getting killed that harpooned me, no, nor complications and damages to pay. No, no, though such will be bad enough. What struck me all of a heap was to see myself, my very own self that used to be. If I, Captain Alpheus Briggs, had been swept back to 1868 and set down on the deck of the Silver Fleece, Hal would have been my exact double. I’ve seen myself just as I was then, doctor, and it’s shaken me in every timber. There I stood, I, myself, in Hal’s person, after five decades of weary time. I could see the outlines of the same black[159] beard on the same kind of jaw—same thick neck and bloody fists; and, oh, doctor, the eyes of Hal. His eyes!”

“His eyes?”

“Yes. In them I saw my old, wicked, hell-elected self—saw it glaring out, to break and ravish and murder!”

“Captain Briggs!”

“It’s true, I’m telling you. I’ve seen a ghost this evening. A ghost—”

He peered around fearfully in the dusk. His voice lowered to a whisper:

“A ghost!”

Filhiol could not speak. Something cold, prehensile, terrible seemed fingering at his heart! Ruddy, the Airedale, raised his head, seemed to be listening, to be seeing something they could not detect. In the dog’s throat a low growl muttered.

“What’s that?” said the captain, every muscle taut.

“Nothing, nothing,” the doctor answered. “The dog probably hears some one down there by the hedge. This is all nonsense, captain. You’re working yourself into a highly nervous state and imagining all kinds of things. Now—”

“I tell you, I saw the ghost of my other self,” insisted Briggs. “There’s worse kinds of ghosts than those that hang around graveyards. I’ve always wanted to see that kind and never have. Night after night I’ve been up there to the little cemetery on Croft Hill, and sat on the bench in our lot, just as friendly and receptive as could be, ready to see whatever ghost might come to me, but none ever came. I’m not afraid of the ghosts of the dead! It’s ghosts of the living that strike a dread to me—ghosts of the past that ought to die and can’t—ghosts of my own sins that God won’t let lie in the grave of forgiveness[160]—”

“S-h-h-h!” exclaimed the doctor. He laid a hand on the captain’s, which was clutching the arm of the rocker with a grip of steel. “Don’t give way to such folly! Perhaps Hal did drink a little, and perhaps he did thrash a man who had insulted him. But that’s as far as it goes. All this talk about ghosts and some hereditary, devilish force cropping out again, is pure rubbish!”

“I wish to God above it was!” the old man groaned. “But I know it’s not. It’s there, doctor, I tell you! It’s still alive and in the world, more terrible and more malignant than ever, a living, breathing thing, evil and venomous, backed up with twice the intelligence and learning I ever had, with a fine, keen brain to direct it and with muscles of steel to do its bidding! Oh, God, I know, I know!”

“Captain Briggs, sir,” the doctor began. “This is most extraordinary language from a man of your common sense. I really do not understand—”

“Hush!” interrupted the captain, raising his right hand. On the stairway feet echoed. “Hush! He’s coming down!”

Silent, tense, they waited. The heavy footfalls reached the bottom of the stair and paused there a moment. Briggs and the doctor heard Hal grumbling something inarticulate to himself. Then he walked into the cabin.

DR. FILHIOL STANDS BY

Through the window both men could see him. The cabin-lamp over the captain’s table shed soft rays upon the boy as he stood there unconscious of being observed.

He remained motionless a moment, gazing about him, taking account of any little changes that had been wrought in the past months. At sight of him the old captain, despite all his bodings of evil, could not but thrill with pride of this clean-limbed, powerful-shouldered grandson, scion of the old stock, last survivor of his race, and hope of all its future.

Hal took a step to the table. The lithe ease and power of his stride impressed the doctor’s critical eye.

“He’s all right enough, captain,” growled Filhiol. “He’s as normal as can be. He’s just overflowing with animal spirits, strength, and energy. Lord! What wouldn’t you or I give to be like that—again?”

“I wouldn’t stand in those boots of his for all the money in Lloyd’s!” returned the captain in a hoarse whisper. “For look you, doctor, I have lived my life and got wisdom. My fires have burned low, leaving the ashes of peace—or so I hope. But that lad there, ah! there’s fires and volcanoes enough ahead for him! Maybe those same fires will kindle up my ashes, too, and sear my heart and soul! I thought I was entitled to heave anchor and lay in harbor a spell till I get my papers for the unknown port we don’t any of us come[162] back from, but maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe that’s not to be, doctor, after all.”

“What rubbish!” retorted Filhiol. “Look at him now, will you? Isn’t he peaceful, and normal enough for anybody? See there, now, he’s going to take a book and read it like any well-behaved young man.”

Hal had, indeed, taken a book from the captain’s table and had sat down with it before the fireplace. He did not, however, open the book. Instead, he leaned back and gazed intently up at the arsenal. He frowned, nodded, and then broke into a peculiar smile. His right fist clenched and rose, as if in imagination he were gripping one of those weapons, with Fergus McLaughlin as his immediate target.

Silence fell once more, through which faintly penetrated the far-off, nasal minor of old Ezra, now engaged upon an endless chantey recounting the adventures of one “Boney”—alias Bonaparte. Peace seemed to have descended upon Snug Haven, but only for a minute.

For all at once, with an oath of impatience, Hal flung the book to the floor. He stood up, thrust both hands deep into his pockets, and fell to pacing the floor in a poisonous temper.

Of a sudden he stopped, wheeled toward the captain’s little private locker and strode to it. The locker door was secured with a brass padlock of unusual strength. Hal twisted it off between thumb and finger as easily as if it had been made of putty. He flung open the door, and took down a bottle.

He seized a tumbler and slopped it levelful of whisky, which he gulped without a wink. Then he smeared his mouth with the back of his hand and stood there evil-eyed and growling.

“Puh! That’s rotten stuff!” he ejaculated. “Grandpop certainly does keep a punk line here![163]” Back upon the shelf he slammed the bottle and the glass. “Wonder where that smooth Jamaica’s gone he used to have?”

“God above! Did you see that, doctor?” breathed the old captain, gripping at the doctor’s hand. “He downed that like so much water. Isn’t that the exact way I used to swill liquor? By the Judas priest, I’ll soon stop that!”

Filhiol restrained him.

“Wait!” he cautioned as the two old men peered in, unseen, through the window. “Even that doesn’t prove the original sin you seem determined to lay at the boy’s door. He’s unnerved after his fight. Let’s see what he’ll do next. If we’re going to judge him, we’ve got to watch a while.”

Old Briggs sank back into his chair, and with eyes of misery followed the boy, hope of all his dreams. Hal’s next move was not long delayed.

“Ezra!” they heard him harshly call. “You, Ezra! Come here!”

The chantey came to a sudden end. A moment, and Ezra appeared in the doorway leading from the cabin to the “dining-saloon.”

“Well, Master Hal, what is it?” smiled the cook, beaming with affection. In one hand he held a “copper,” just such as aboard the Silver Fleece had heated water for the scalding of the Malays. “What d’you want, Master Hal?”

“Look here, Ezra,” said the boy arrogantly, “I’ve been trying to find the rum grandpop always keeps in there. Couldn’t locate it, so I’ve been giving this whisky a trial, and—”

“When whisky an’ young men lay ’longside one another, the whisky don’t want a trial. It wants lynchin’!”

“I’m not asking your opinion!” sneered Hal.

[164]

“Yes, but I’m givin’ it, Master Hal,” persisted Ezra. “When the devil goes fishin’ fer boys, he sticks a petticoat an’ a bottle o’ rum on the hook.”

“Get me the Jamaica, you!” demanded Hal with growing anger. “I’ve got no time for your line of bull!”

“Lots that ain’t got no time for nothin’ in this world will have time to burn in the next! You’ll get no rum from me, Master Hal. An’ what’s more, if I’d ha’ thought you was goin’ to slip your cable an’ run ashore in any such dognation fool way on a wave o’ booze, I’d of hid the whisky where you wouldn’t of run it down!”

“You’d have hidden it!” echoed Hal, his face darkening, the veins on neck and forehead beginning to swell. “You’ve got the infernal nerve to stand there—you, a servant—and tell me you’d hide anything away from me in my own house?”

“This here craft is registered under your grandpa’s name an’ is sailin’ under his house-flag,” the old cook reminded him. His face was still bland as ever, but in his eyes lurked a queer little gleam. “It ain’t the same thing at all—not yet.”

“Damn your infernal lip!” shouted Hal, advancing. Captain Briggs, quivering, half-rose from his chair. “You’ve got the damned impudence to stand there and dictate to me?”

“Master Hal,” retorted Ezra with admirable self-restraint, “you’re sailin’ a bit too wide wide o’ your course now. There’s breakers ahead, sir. Look out!”

“I believe you’ve been at the Jamaica yourself, you thieving son of Satan!” snarled Hal. “I’ll not stand here parleying with a servant. Get me that Jamaica, or I’ll break your damned, obstinate neck!”

“Now, Master Hal, I warn you[165]—”

“To hell with you!”

“With me, Master Hal? With old Ezra?”

“With everything that stands in my way!”

Despite Hal’s furious rage the steadfast old sailor-man still resolutely faced him. Captain Briggs, now again hearing almost the identical words he himself had poured out in the cabin of the Silver Fleece, sank back into his chair with a strange, throaty gasp.

“Doctor!” he gulped. “Do you hear that?”

“Wait!” the doctor cautioned, leaning forward. “This is very strange. It is, by Jove, sir! Some amazing coincidence, or—”

“Next thing you know he’ll knock Ezra down!” whispered the captain, staring. He seemed paralyzed, as though tranced by the scene. “That’s what I did to the cabin-boy, when my rum was wrong. Remember? It’s all coming round again, doctor. It’s a nightmare in a circle—a fifty-year circle! Remember Kuala Pahang? She—she died! I wonder what woman’s got to die this time?”

“That’s all pure poppycock!” the doctor ejaculated. He was trembling violently. With a great effort, leaning heavily on his stick, he arose. Captain Briggs, too, shook off the spell that seemed to grip him and stood up.

“Hal!” he tried to articulate; but his voice failed him. Turning, he lurched toward the front door.

From within sounded a cry, a trampling noise. Something clattered to the floor.

“Hal! My God, Hal!” the captain shouted hoarsely.

As he reached the door Ezra came staggering out into the hall, a hand pressed to his face.

“Ezra! What is it? For Heaven’s sake, Ezra, what’s Hal done to you?”

The old man could make no answer. Limply he[166] sagged against the newel-post, a sorry picture of grief and pain. The captain put an arm about his shoulders, and with burning indignation cried:

“What did he do? Hit you?”

Ezra shook his head in stout negation. Even through all the shock and suffering of the blow, his loyalty remained sublimely constant.

“Hit me? Why, no, sir,” he tried to smile, though his lips were white. “He wouldn’t strike old Ezra. There’s no mutiny aboard this little craft of ours. Two gentlemen may disagree, an’ all that, but as fer Master Hal strikin’ me, no, sir!”

“But I heard him say—”

“Oh, that’s nothin’, cap’n,” the old cook insisted, still, however, keeping his cheek-bone covered with his hand. “Boys will be boys. They’re a bit loose with their jaw-tackle, maybe. But there, there, don’t you git all har’red up, captain. Men an’ pins is jest alike, that way—no good ef they lose their heads. Ca’m down, cap’n!”

“What’s that on your face. Blood?”

“Blood, sir? How would blood git on my doggone face, anyhow? That’s—h-m—”

“Don’t you lie to me, Ezra! I’m not blind. He cut you with something! What was it?”

“Honest to God, cap’n, he never! I admit we had a bit of an argyment, an’ I slipped an’ kind of fell ag’in’ the—the binnacle, cap’n. I’ll swear that on the ship’s Bible!”

“Don’t you stand there and perjure your immortal soul just to shield that boy!” Briggs sternly reproved, loving the old man all the more for the brave lie. “But I know you will, anyhow. What authority have I got aboard my own ship, when I can’t even get the truth? Ezra, you wouldn’t admit it, if Hal took that kris in there and cut your head off!”

[167]

“How could I then, sir?”

“That’ll do, Ezra! Where is he now?”

“I don’t know, sir.”