MAROONED
After a quick handclasp with the other two, Sam counseled delay. “Better
to tell me what has happened to you,” he said. “There are men hiding on
that ship, waiting till the men in the boat get all their dunnage on
board——”
“Dunnage!” interrupted Nicky. “Sam—it’s gold!”
Sam’s eyes rolled with excitement.
“They went and found it!” he gasped.
“We did, and they took it away from us,” Tom explained.
“Who’s hiding?” Cliff asked.
Sam suggested that they had better tell him their story first, and he
laid on the oars and listened as they gave him a brief history of their
adventures.
In his turn he told them his story.
“When I got my head full of crazy scares,” he said, “I left you on
Crocodile Key, and sailed for the open water. Later on a revenue cutter
overhauled me. Mr. Neale was with the men.”
“Then he was all right?” Nicky asked.
“Yes,” Sam replied, “all right, and mad. When he found out what I’d went
and done he gave me an awful talking to, and then they turned the cutter
about and went back to look for you.”
After that, Sam explained, his conscience bothered him, but he decided
that the boys must be all right, and so held on his course toward
Jamaica. But during the late afternoon clouds gathered, wind came up,
rain squalls blew over and his work was cut out for him.
“I judged it was a ‘judgment’ on me from On High,” Sam declared. “I had
more’n I could do, handling the sails to get them down, and all I could
do I couldn’t get them reefed quick enough——”
“And you lost your boat?” broke in Nicky.
“No, sar,” Sam replied. “Wait—let me tell you. I had to run before the
wind and when daylight came and the wind dropped I was so wore out with
a sight at the tiller that I just fell down and slept. I let the
_Treasure Belle_ drift.”
When he had awakened, he went on, he did not know where he was, but from
the direction in which the wind had blown, he guessed that he must be
well into the Gulf of Mexico. He trimmed his sails and with the old,
heavy-duty engine for a kicker, he set a course Eastward. It brought
him, in time, within sight of what he discovered to be the lower end of
the Ten Thousand Island archipelago, almost opposite to the wrecked
_Senorita_.
“I saw somebody making a signal with a flag, and the flag at the
masthead was upside down—a sign of distress,” Sam pursued his story, “I
ran close in and found out that the _Senorita_ was a wreck.”
“We were on it when it happened—but we told you. Go on,” said Tom. Sam
finished quickly.
“There was a colored cook, a Spaniard, a man named Tew, and some sailors
and the engineer,” Sam concluded. “They offered me money to take them
aboard the _Treasure Belle_. I did, but instead of going back around
Cape Sable, they took me and tied me up and threw me in the little
cabin. They talked about capturing a boat or something and the first
thing I knew, they had passed the _Libertad_, here, and went on beyond
during the night. That was at night—last night. They hauled the
_Treasure Belle_ out of sight between two islands, a little North of
here. There they laid quiet all today. One man swam off from my sloop
and came back and they all talked. Towards evening they started the
engine, came down, hauled alongside and got on board the _Libertad_.
They had untied me and told me to swim onto one of the islands and
stay—or starve, for all they cared. Then they held guns on me until I
swam to the Key. They said if I warned anybody I saw, they’d pepper me
full of lead. So I hid, and when I saw two white men and a Negro rowing
towards _Libertad_, I didn’t dare to say anything. But nothing happened
to them, and when I saw your boat I guessed it was safe to hail, because
the men on the _Libertad_ must be hiding and couldn’t hurt me. And so I
found you.”
“And I’m glad of it,” said Tom.
“I’m right sorry sars, for what I done, and I’ll try to make it up to
you,” Sam said.
“It’s all right,” Nicky stated. “We won’t hold it against you. But you
didn’t say what happened to your sloop.”
“They put two sailors into her and sailed her away down the coast,” Sam
replied. “To tell somebody something about bringing up some cases or
something like that. I couldn’t hear much. They talked about lots of
things—Indians and sharks and—oh, lots!”
“But why don’t we row to the _Libertad_?” demanded Nicky.
As he spoke the reason became apparent. Jim, in the boat, handed up onto
the deck to the white men the last bars of gold.
“Come aboard,” was presumably his order; the chums and Sam were too far
away to hear. They did see sudden flashes, hear a subdued commotion,
hear splashes in the water. Guns were being fired, and people were
shouting.
Almost immediately, before the shots died down, in fact, they heard the
roar of _El Libertad’s_ motor, saw her swing to her anchor, and, as it
lifted from the coral, turned in a wide sweep, while shots flashed their
spurts of flame through the darkness from her stern.
Then she swung onto a Northerly course and disappeared swiftly beyond an
island at the Northern side of the channel.
“They’ve shot those men who took our gold,” Nicky declared. “Sam, and
Cliff, row there, quick! We ought to try to pick them up—maybe they’re
badly hurt.” Sam and Tom dipped their oars with a will.
Cliff having donned his clothes, of course, before he took the oars as
they rowed out from the treasure islet, took the tender’s light tiller
from the floor where it lay while they navigated the shoal water,
shipped it and its attached rudder, and steered so that the rowers could
put more force into their strokes and thus cover the water more quickly.
They soon reached the spot, and saw several figures struggling with a
third.
Sam and Nicky hailed. An answer came, “Jim, here, was knocked overside
when he tried to scramble onto our ship. Help us get him to shore. His
head hit the coral, we think! They sank the rowboat.”
They pulled close and with some difficulty the inert colored man was
lifted over the gunwale and dropped into the tender’s bottom. Then Mr.
Coleson, with a smarting flesh wound in his arm, and Ortiga, who was too
busy expressing an unfavorable opinion of his renegade brother to
examine his hurts, seemed to have escaped with a scratched hand.
They began to row toward the island but Nicky made a suggestion.
“Let’s pull for the wrecked _Senorita_,” he urged. “There’s most likely
to be a medicine kit on board her, and food as well.”
It took quite a while to get back down the shore line to the point
almost opposite the Shark River where the _Senorita_ had grounded; but
when they got there Nicky’s prophecy proved to be correct and Senor
Ortiga, when the surgical and medicinal appliances were brought, made an
examination of Jim, and then dressed a rather bad scalp wound, bringing
its edges together with surgical thread after washing it with
antiseptics.
Jim came to himself before the bandaging was completed. Though weak and
a little bit uncertain in speech, he was in no way permanently injured
in his brain. Rest would restore his usual vigor and help nature to heal
his hurt.
Weary and discouraged, because there was nothing to be done toward the
recovery of their lost treasure, the chums, after a midnight meal, threw
themselves onto bunks in the engine room, preferring these to more
comfortable wall berths with the two white men who had done them so mean
a turn.
Sam elected to stay with his own companions, and Jim was put in the
forecastle to be alone while he rested.
“I certainly am grateful to you for saving us, just now,” said Mr.
Coleson as they separated for the night.
“After the way he acted, he ought to be,” Nicky confided to his
comrades, when they were alone.
They slept peacefully, thoroughly wearied by hard work and worn down by
the nerve tension of the last few days.
It was Sam who shook them awake.
“That man, Coleson, wasn’t so grateful, after all,” he said when the
chums had rubbed some sleep out of their eyes in the early dawn. “The
tender is gone. The two white men—gone too!”
“The ungrateful—” began Nicky. But what would calling names do for them?
Certainly it wouldn’t help any.
“We are not on an island, and we’ve got food,” Nicky observed,
recovering his usual trust in the eventual justice of life. “But we are
marooned! And yet—and yet, I’ll say it again—we’ll come out best in the
long run. You wait and see!”