WHAT WE FOUND IN THE CABIN
Now some one called, "Ben! Ben Lathrop! Where are you?"
"Here I am," I cried as loudly as I could.
"Well, Ben, what's this? Are you wounded?"
It was Roger, and when he saw with whom I was talking he smiled.
"Well, Bennie," he cried, "so we've got a prisoner, have we?"
"No, sir," whimpered the man from Boston, "not a prisoner. I come over, I
did."
"You what?"
"I come over--to your side, sir."
"How about it, Ben?"
"Why, so he says. We were having a pretty hard wrestling match, but he says
it was to cover up his escape from the other party."
"How was I to get away, sir, if I didn't have a subterfoog," the prisoner
interposed eagerly. "I _had_ to wrastle. If I hadn't have, they'd 'a' shot
me down as sure as duff on Sunday."
For my own part I was not yet convinced of his good faith. He had gripped
my throat quite too vindictively. To this very day, when I close my eyes I
can feel his hard fingers clenched about my windpipe and his knees forcing
my arms down on the bloody deck. He had let me go, too, only when we both
knew that Captain Falk and his men had put off from the ship. It seemed
very much as if he were trying to make the best of a bad bargain. But if,
on the other hand, he was entirely sincere in his protestations, it might
well be true that he did not dare come over openly to our side. The problem
had so many faces that it fairly made me dizzy, so I abandoned it and tore
open my clothes to examine the flesh wound on my shoulder.
"Ay," I thought, when I saw where the musket-ball had cut me at close
range, "that was a friendly shot, was it not?"
Roger himself was not yet willing to let the matter fall so readily. His
sharp questions stirred the man from Boston to one uneasy denial after
another.
"But I tell you, sir, I come over as quick as I could."
Again Roger spoke caustically.
"But I tell you, sir, I did. And what's more, I can tell you a lot of
things you'd like to know. Perhaps you'd like to know--" He stopped short.
Roger regarded him as if in doubt, but presently he said in a low voice,
"All right! Say nothing of this to the others. I'll see you later."
Captain Falk and his crew, meanwhile, had moved away almost unmolested.
Their pikes and guns had held off the few natives who made a show of
pursuing them, and the great majority of our allies were running riot on
the ship, which was a sad sight when we turned to take account of the
situation.
Three natives were killed and two were wounded, not to mention my injured
shoulder among our own casualties; and two members of the other party in
the crew were sprawled in grotesque attitudes on the deck. Counting the one
who was hit by a spear and who had fallen out of the boat, it meant that
Falk had lost three dead, and if blood on the deck was any sign, others
must have been badly slashed. In other words, our party was, numerically,
almost the equal of his. Considering the man from Boston as on our side, we
were seven to their eight. The lantern that we now lighted revealed more of
the gruesome spectacle, and it made me feel sick to see that both the man
from Boston and I were covered from head to foot with the gore in which we
had been rolling; but to the natives the sight was a stupendous triumph;
and the cook, when I next saw him, was walking down the deck, looking at
the face of one dead man after another.
By and by he came to me where, overcome by a wave of nausea, I had sat down
on the deck with my back against the bulwark. "Dey ain't none of 'em
Kipping," he said grimly. Then he saw my bleeding shoulder and instantly
got down beside me. "You jest let dis yeh ol' nigger took a hand," he
cried. "Ah's gwine fix you all up. You jest come along o' me!" And helping
me to my feet, he led me to the galley, where once more he was supreme and
lawful master.
In no time at all he had a kettle of water on the stove, in which the coals
of a good fire still lingered, and with a clean cloth he washed my wound so
gently that I scarcely could believe his great, coarse hands were actually
at work on me. "Dah you is," he murmured, bending over the red, shallow
gash that the bullet had cut, "dah you is. Don' you fret. Ah's gwine git
you all tied up clean an' han'some, yass, sah."
The yells and cries of every description alarmed and agitated us both. It
was far from reassuring to know that that mob of natives was ranging the
ship at will.
"Ef you was to ask me," Frank muttered, rolling his eyes till the whites
gleamed starkly, "Ah's gwine tell you dis yeh ship is sottin', so to speak,
on a bar'l of gunpowder. Yass, sah!"
An islander uttered a shrill catcall just outside the galley and thrust his
head and half his naked body in the door. He vanished again almost
instantly, but Frank jumped and upset the kettle. "Yass, sah, you creepy
ol' sarpint," he gasped. "Yass, sah, we's sottin' on a bar'l of gunpowder."
I am convinced, as I look back on that night from the pinnacle of more than
half a century, that not one man in ten thousand has ever spent one like
it. Allied with a horde whose language we could not speak, we had boarded
our own ship and now--mutineers, pirates, or loyal mariners, according to
your point of view--we shared her possession with a mob of howling heathens
whose goodwill depended on the whim of the moment, and who might at any
minute, by slaughtering us out of hand, get for their own godless purposes
the ship and all that was in her.
The cook cautiously fingered the keen edge of his cleaver as we looked out
and saw that dawn was brightening in the east.
"Dat Falk, he say he gwine git us yet," the cook muttered. "Maybe so--maybe
not. Maybe we ain't gwine last as long as dat."
"All hands aft!"
Frank and I looked at each other. The galley was as safe and comfortable as
any place aboard ship and we were reluctant to leave it.
"_All hands aft!_" came the call again.
"Ah reckon," Frank said thoughtfully, "me and you better be gwine. When
Mistah Hamlin he holler like dat, he want us."
Light had come with amazing swiftness, and already we could see the deck
from stem to stern without help of the torches, which still flamed and sent
thin streamers of smoke drifting into the mist.
As we emerged from the galley, I noticed that the after-hatch was half
open. That in itself did not surprise me; stranger things than that had
come to pass in the last hour or two; but when some one cautiously emerged
from the hold, with a quick, sly glance at those on the quarter-deck, I'll
confess that I was surprised. It was the man from Boston.
Smiling broadly and turning his black rat-like eyes this way and that, the
chief of our wild allies, who held a naked kris from which drops of blood
were falling, stood beside Roger. Blodgett was at the wheel, nervously
fingering the spokes; Neddie Benson stood behind him, obviously ill at
ease, and Davie Paine, who had got from the cabin what few of his things
were left there, to take them forward, was a little at one side. But the
natives were swarming everywhere, aloft and alow, and we knew only too well
that no small movable object would escape their thieving fingers.
"Ef on'y dem yeh heathen don't took to butcherin'!" the cook muttered.
The prophetic words were scarcely spoken when what we most feared came to
pass. One of the islanders, by accident or design, bumped into Blodgett,--
always erratic, never to be relied on in a crisis,--who, turning without a
thought of the consequences, struck the man with his fist a blow that
floored him, and flashed out his knife.
That single spark threatened an explosion that would annihilate us. Spears
enclosed us from all sides; krises leaped at our throats.
"Come on, lads! Stand together," Blodgett shrieked.
With a yell of terror the cook sprang to join the others, and bellowing in
panic, swung his cleaver wildly.
The man from Boston and Neddie Benson shrank back against the taffrail as a
multitude of moving brown figures seemed to swarm about us. Then I saw
Roger leap forward, his arms high in air, his hands extended.
"Get back!" he cried, glancing at us over his shoulders.
As all stopped and stared at him, he coolly turned to the chief and handed
him his pistol, butt foremost. Was Roger mad, I wondered? He was the sanest
man of all our crew. The chief gravely took the proffered weapon and looked
at Blodgett, whose face was contorted with fear, and at the Malay, who by
now was sitting up on deck blinking about him in a dazed way. Then he
smiled and raised his hand and the points of the weapons fell.
In truth I was nearly mad myself, for now it all struck me as funny and I
laughed until I cried, and all the others looked at me, and soon the
natives began to point and laugh themselves. I suppose I was hysterical,
but it created a diversion and helped to save the day; and Neddie Benson
and the man from Boston, whom Roger had sent below, returned soon with
bolts of cloth and knives and pistols and threw them in a heap on the
quarter-deck.
Some word that I suppose meant gifts, went from lip to lip and our allies
eagerly crowded around us.
"Get behind me, men," Roger said in an undertone. "Whatever happens, guard
the companionway. I think we're safe, but since by grace of Providence
we're all here together, we'll take no chances that we can avoid."
The first rays of sunlight shone on the heap of bright stuffs and polished
metal, but the sun itself was no brighter than the face of the chief when
Roger draped over him a length of bright cloth and presented him with a
handsome knife. He threw back his head, laughing aloud, and strutted across
the deck. Turning in grave farewell, he grasped his booty with one arm and,
after a few sharp words to his men, swung himself down by the chains with
the other. To man after man we gave gaudy cloths or knives or, when all
the knives were given away, a cutlass or a gun; and when at last the only
canoes in sight were speeding toward shore like comets with tails of red
flannel and purple calico, we breathed deeply our relief.
"Now, men," said Roger, "we have a hard morning's work in front of us.
Cook, break out a cask of beef and a cask of bread, and get us something to
eat. Davie, you stand watch and keep your eye out either for a native canoe
or for any sign of Falk or his party. The rest of you--all except Lathrop--
wash down the deck and sew those bodies up in a piece of old sail with
plenty of ballast. Ben, you and I have a little job in front of us. Come
into the cabin with me."
I gladly followed him. He was as composed as if battle and death were all
in the routine of a day at sea, and I was full of admiration for his
coolness and courage.
The cabin was in complete disorder, but comparatively few things had been
stolen. Apparently not many of the natives had found their way thither.
"Fortunately," Roger said, unlocking Captain Whidden's chest of which he
had the key, "they've left the spare quadrant. We have instruments to
navigate with, so, when all's said and done, I suppose we're lucky."
He closed the chest and locked it again; then he took from his pocket a
second key. "Benny, my lad," he said, "let's have a look at that one
hundred thousand dollars in gold."
Going into the captain's stateroom, we shut the door and knelt beside the
iron safe. The key turned with difficulty.
"It needs oil," Roger muttered, as he worked over it. "It turns as hard as
if some one has been tinkering with it." By using both hands he forced it
round and opened the door.
The safe was empty.
[Illustration: ]
VI
IN WHICH WE REACH THE PORT OF OUR DESTINATION
[Illustration]