“Perish me! Rot and wither my soul and eyes if it ain’t Saïd!” exclaimed
Captain Benjamin MacBride, hopping across the court, his square hand
extended.
“Saïd, my bully, where d’you hail from?”
“I’m on the bodyguard at Rabat. The Sultan’s building there now. Skalas
all round and seven new mosques are the order, I hear—we’ll all be
carrying bricks soon. I rode over to see you.”
“You ain’t looking too proud,” said MacBride; “sort of wasted-like, and
God ha’ mercy. Flux?”
Ortho shook his head. “No, but I’ve had my troubles, and”—indicating
the sailor’s bandaged eye and his crutch—“so have you, it seems.”
“Curse me, yes! Fell in with a fat Spanisher off Ortegal and mauled him
down to a sheer hulk when up romps a brace of American ‘thirties’ and
serves me cruel. If it hadn’t been for nightfall and a shift of wind I
should have been a holy angel by now. Bad times, boy, bad times. Too
many warships about, and all merchantmen sailing in convoy. I tell you I
shall be glad when there’s a bit of peace and good-will on earth again.
Just now everybody’s armed and it’s plaguy hard to pick up an honest
living.”
“Governor here, aren’t you?” Ortho inquired.
“Aye. Soft lie-abed shore berth till my wounds heal and we can get back
to business. Fog in the river?”
“Thick; couldn’t see across.”
“It’s lying on the sea like a blanket,” said MacBride. “I’ve been
watching it from my tower. Come along and see the girls. They’re all
here save Tama; she runned away with a Gharb sheik when I was
cruising—deceitful slut!—but I’ve got three new ones.”
Ayesha and Schems-ed-dah were most welcoming. They had grown somewhat
matronly, but otherwise time seemed to have left them untouched. As ever
they were gorgeously dressed, bejeweled and painted up with carmine,
henna and kohl. Fluttering and twittering about their ex-slave, they
plied him with questions. He had been to the wars? Wounded? How many men
had he killed? What was his rank? A kaid rahal of cavalry. . . . Ach!
chut, chut! A great man! On the bodyguard! . . . Ay-ee! Was it true the
Sultan’s favorite Circassians ate off pure gold? Was he married yet?
When he told them the recent plague in Morocco had killed both his wife
and son their liquid eyes brimmed over. No whit less sympathetic were
the three new beauties; they wept in concert, though ten minutes earlier
Ortho had been an utter stranger to them. Their hearts were very tender.
A black eunuch entered bearing the elaborate tea utensils. As he turned
to go, MacBride called “_aji_,” pointing to the ground before him.
The slave threw up his hands in protest. “Oh, no, lord, please.”
“Kneel down,” the sailor commanded. “I’ll make you spring your ribs
laughing, Saïd, my bonny. Give me your hand, Mohar.”
“Lord, have mercy!”
“Mercy be damned! Your hand, quick!”
The piteous great creature extended a trembling hand, was grasped by the
wrist and twisted onto his back.
“Now, my pearls, my rosebuds,” said MacBride.
The five little birds of paradise tucked their robes about them and
surrounded the prostrate slave, tittering and wriggling their
forefingers at him. Even before he was touched he screamed, but when the
tickling began in earnest he went mad, doubling, screwing, clawing the
air with his toes, shrieking like a soul in torment—which indeed he
was.
With the pearls and rosebuds it was evidently a favorite pastime; they
tickled with diabolical cunning that could only come of experience,
shaking with laughter and making sibilant noises the
while—“Pish—piss-sh!” Finally when the miserable victim was rolling up
the whites of his eyes, mouthing foam and seemed on the point of
throwing a fit, MacBride released him and he escaped.
The captain wiped the happy tears from his remaining eye and turned on
Ortho as one recounting an interesting scientific observation.
“Very thin-skinned for a Sambo. D’you know I believe he’d sooner take a
four-bag at the gangway than a minute o’ that. I do, so help me; I
believe he’d sooner be flogged. _Vee-ry_ curious. Come up and I’ll show
you my command.”
The Atlantic was invisible from the tower, sheeted under fog which,
beneath a windless sky, stretched away to the horizon in woolly white
billows. Ortho had an impression of a mammoth herd of tightly packed
sheep.
“There’s a three-knot tide under that, sweeping south, but it don’t
’pear to move it much,” MacBride observed. “I’ll warrant that bank ain’t
higher nor a first-rate’s topgallant yard. I passed through the western
squadron once in a murk like that there. Off Dungeness, it was. All
their royals was sticking out, but my little hooker was trucks down, out
o’ sight.” He pointed to the north. “Knitra’s over there, bit of a kasba
like this. Er-rhossi has it; a sturdy fellow for a Greek, but my soul
what a man to drink! Stayed here for a week and ’pon my conscience he
had me baled dry in two days—_me_! Back there’s the forest, there’s pig
. . . what are you staring at?”
Ortho spun about guiltily. “Me? Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing. What were
you saying? The forest . . .”
He became suddenly engrossed in the view of the forest of Marmora.
“What’s the matter? You look excited, like as if you’d seen something,”
said MacBride suspiciously.
“I’ve seen nothing,” Ortho replied. “What should I see?”
“Blest if I know; only you looked startled.”
“I was thinking.”
“Oh, was you? Well, as I was saying, there’s a mort o’ pigs in there,
wild ’uns, and lions too, by report, but I ain’t seen none. I’ll get
some sport as soon as my leg heals. This ain’t much of a place though.
Can’t get no money out of charcoal burners, not if you was to torture
’em for a year. As God is my witness I’ve done my best, but the sooty
vermin ain’t got any.” He sighed. “I shall be devilish glad when we can
get back to our lawful business again. I’ve heard married men in England
make moan about _their_ ‘family responsibilities’—but what of me? I’ve
got _three_ separate families already and two more on the way! What
d’you say to that—eh?”
Ortho sympathized with the much domesticated seaman and declared he must
be going.
“You’re in hell’s own hurry all to a sudden.”
“I’m on the bodyguard, you know.”
“Well, if you must that’s an end on’t, but I was hoping you’d stop for
days and we’d have a chaw over old Jerry Gish—he-he! What a man! Say,
would you have the maidens plague that Sambo once more before you go?
Would you now? Give the word!”
Ortho declined the pleasure and asked if MacBride could sell him a boat
compass.
“I can sell you two or three, but what d’you want it for?”
“I’m warned for the Guinea caravan,” Ortho explained. “A couple of
_akkabaah_ have been lost lately; the guides went astray in the sands. I
want to keep some check on them.”
“I thought the Guinea force went out about Christmas.”
“No, this month.”
“Well, you know best, I suppose,” said the captain and gave him a small
compass, refusing payment.
“Come back and see us before you go,” he shouted as Ortho went out of
the gate.
“Surely,” the latter replied and rode southwards for Sallee at top
speed, knowing full well that, unless luck went hard against him, so far
from seeing Ben MacBride again he would be out of the country before
midnight.
While Ourida lived, life in Morocco had its compensations; with her
death it had become insupportable. He had ridden down to the sea filled
with a cold determination to seize the first opportunity of escape and,
if none occurred, to make one. Plans had been forming in his mind of
working north to Tangier, there stealing a boat and running the blockade
into beleaguered Gibraltar, some forty miles distant, a scheme risky to
the point of foolhardiness. But remain he would not.
Now unexpectedly, miraculously, an opportunity had come. Despite his
denials he _had_ seen something from MacBride’s tower; the upper canvas
of a ship protruding from the fog about a mile and a half out from the
coast, by the cut and the long coach-whip pennant at the main an
Englishman. Just a glimpse as the royals rose out of a trough of the fog
billows, just the barest glimpse, but quite enough. Not for nothing had
he spent his boyhood at the gates of the Channel watching the varied
traffic passing up and down. And a few minutes earlier MacBride had
unwittingly supplied him with the knowledge he needed, the pace and
direction of the tide. Ortho knew no arithmetic, but common sense told
him that if he galloped he should reach Sallee two hours ahead of that
ship. She had no wind, she would only drift. He drove his good horse
relentlessly, and as he went decided exactly what he would do.
It was dark when he reached the Bab Sebta, and over the low-lying town
the fog lay like a coverlet.
He passed through the blind town, leaving the direction to his horse’s
instinct, and came out against the southern wall. Inquiring of an unseen
pedestrian, he learnt he was close to the Bab Djedid, put his beast in a
public stable near by, detached one stirrup, and, feeling his way
through the gate, struck over the sand banks towards the river. He came
on it too far to the west, on the spit where it narrows opposite the
Kasba Oudaia of Rabat; the noise of water breaking at the foot of the
great fortress across the Bon Regreg told him as much.
Turning left-handed, he followed the river back till he brought up
against the ferry boats. They were all drawn up for the night; the
owners had gone, taking their oars with them. “Damnation!” His idea had
been to get a man to row him across and knock him on the head in
midstream; it was for that purpose that he had brought the heavy
stirrup. There was nothing for it now but to rout a man out—all waste
of precious time!
There was just a chance some careless boatman had left his oars behind.
Quickly he felt in the skiffs. The first was empty, so was the second,
the third and the fourth, but in the fifth he found what he sought. It
was a light boat too, a private shallop and half afloat at that. What
colossal luck! He put his shoulders to the stem and hove—and up rose a
man.
“Who’s that? Is that you, master?”
Ortho sprang back. Where had he heard that voice before? Then he
remembered; it was Puddicombe’s. Puddicombe had not returned to Algiers
after all, but was here waiting to row “Sore Eyes” across to Rabat to a
banquet possibly.
“Who’s that?”
Ortho blundered up against the stem, pretending to be mildly drunk,
mumbling in Arabic that he was a sailor from a trading felucca looking
for his boat.
“Well, this is not yours, friend,” said Puddicombe. “Try down the beach.
But if you take my advice you’ll not go boating to-night; you might fall
overboard and get a drink of water which, by the sound of you, is not
what thou art accustomed to.” He laughed at his own delightful wit.
Ortho stumbled into the fog, paused and thought matters over. To turn a
ferryman out might take half an hour. Puddicombe had the only oars on
the beach, therefore Puddicombe must give them up.
He lurched back again, steadied himself against the stem and asked the
Devonian if he would put him off to his felucca, getting a flat refusal.
Hiccuping, he said there was no offense meant and asked Puddicombe if he
would like a sip of fig brandy. He said he had no unsurmountable
objection, came forward to get it, and Ortho hit him over the head with
the stirrup iron as hard as he could lay in. Puddicombe toppled face
forwards out of the boat and lay on the sand without a sound or a
twitch.
“I’m sorry I had to do it,” said Ortho, “but you yourself warned me to
trust nobody, above all a fellow renegado. I’m only following your own
advice. You’ll wake up before dawn. Good-by.”
Pushing the boat off, he jumped aboard and pulled for the grumble of the
bar.
He went aground on the sand-spit, and rowing away from that very nearly
stove the boat in on a jag of rock below the Kasba Oudaia. The corner
passed, steering was simple for a time, one had merely to keep the boat
pointed to the rollers. Over the bar he went, slung high, swung low,
tugged on to easy water, and striking a glow on his flint and steel
examined the compass.
Thus occasionally checking his course by the needle he pulled due west.
He was well ahead of the ship, he thought, and by getting two miles out
to sea would be lying dead in her track. Before long the land breeze
would be blowing sufficient to push the fog back, but not enough to give
the vessel more than two or three knots; in that light shallop he could
catch her easily, if she were within reasonable distance.
Reckoning he had got his offing, he swung the boat’s head due north and
paddled gently against the run of the tide.
Time progressed; there was no sign of the ship or the land breeze that
was to reveal her. For all he knew he might be four miles out to sea or
one-half only. He had no landmarks, no means of measuring how far he had
come except by experience of how long it had taken him to pull a dinghy
from point to point at home in Monks Cove; yet somehow he felt he was
about right.
Time went by. The fog pressed about him in walls of discolored steam,
clammy, dripping, heavy on the lungs. Occasionally it split, revealing
dark corridors and halls, abysses of Stygian gloom; rolled together
again. A hundred feet overhead it was clear night and starry. Where was
that breeze?
More time passed. Ortho began to think he had failed and made plans to
cover the failure. It should not be difficult. He would land on the
sands opposite the Bab Malka, overturn the boat, climb over the walls
and see the rest of the night out among the Mussulman graves. In the
morning he could claim his horse and ride into camp as if nothing had
happened. As a slave he had been over the walls time and again; there
was a crack in the bricks by the Bordj el Kbir. He didn’t suppose it was
repaired; they never repaired anything. Puddicombe didn’t know who had
hit him; there was no earthly reason why he should be suspected. The
boat would be found overturned, the unknown sailor presumed drowned.
Quite simple. Remained the Tangier scheme.
By this time, being convinced that the ship had passed, he slewed the
boat about and pulled in. The sooner he was ashore the better.
The fog appeared to be moving. It twisted into clumsy spirals which
sagged in the middle, puffed out cheeks of vapor, bulged and writhed,
drifting to meet the boat. The land breeze was coming at last—an hour
too late! Ortho pulled on, an ear cocked for the growl of the bar. There
was nothing to be heard as yet; he must have gone further than he
thought, but fog gagged and distorted sound in the oddest way. The
spirals nodded above him like gigantic wraiths. Something passed
overhead delivering an eerie screech. A sea-gull only, but it made him
jump. Glancing at the compass, he found that he was, at the moment,
pulling due south. He got his direction again and pulled on. Goodness
knew what the tide had been doing to him. There might be a westward
stream from the river which had pushed him miles out to sea. Or possibly
he was well south of his mark and would strike the coast below Rabat.
Oh, well, no matter as long as he got ashore soon. Lying on his oars, he
listened again for the bar, but could hear no murmur of it. Undoubtedly
he was to the southward. That ship was halfway to Fedala by now.
Then, quite clearly, behind a curtain of fog, an English voice chanted:
“By the Deep Nine.”
Ortho stopped rowing, stood up and listened. Silence, not a sound, not a
sign. Fichus and twisted columns of fog drifting towards him, that was
all. But somewhere close at hand a voice was calling soundings. The ship
was there. All his fine calculations were wrong, but he had blundered
aright.
“Mark ten.”
The voice came again, seemingly from his left-hand side this time. Again
silence. The fog alleys closed once more, muffling sound. The ship was
there, within a few yards, yet this cursed mist with its fool tricks
might make him lose her altogether. He hailed with all his might. No
answer. He might have been flinging his shout against banks of cotton
wool. Again and again he hailed.
Suddenly came the answer, from behind his back apparently.
“Ahoy there . . . who are you?”
“’Scaped English prisoner! English prisoner escaped!”
There was a pause; then, “Keep off there . . . none of your tricks.”
“No tricks . . . I am alone . . . _alone_,” Ortho bawled, pulling
furiously. He could hear the vessel plainly now, the creak of her tackle
as she felt the breeze.
“Keep off there, or I’ll blow you to bits.”
“If you fire a gun you’ll call the whole town out,” Ortho warned.
“What town?”
“Sallee.”
“Christ!” the voice ejaculated and repeated his words. “He says we’re
off Sallee, sir.”
Ortho pulled on. He could see the vessel by this, a blurred shadow among
the steamy wraiths of mist, a big three-master close-hauled on the port
tack.
Said a second voice from aft: “Knock his bottom out if he attempts to
board . . . no chances.”
“Boat ahoy,” hailed the first voice. “If you come alongside I’ll sink
you, you bloody pirate. Keep off.”
Ortho stopped rowing. They were going to leave him. Forty yards away was
an English ship—England. He was missing England by forty yards, England
and the Owls’ House!
He jerked at his oars, tugged the shallop directly in the track of the
ship and slipped overboard. They might be able to see his boat, but his
head was too small a mark. If he missed what he was aiming at he was
finished; he could never regain that boat. It was neck or nothing now,
the last lap, the final round.
He struck to meet the vessel—only a few yards.
She swayed towards him, a chuckle of water at her cut-water; tall as a
cliff she seemed, towering out of sight. The huge bow loomed over him,
poised and crushed downwards as though to ride him under, trample him
deep.
The sheer toppling bulk, the hiss of riven water snapped his last shred
of courage. It was too much. He gave up, awaited the instant stunning
crash upon his head, saw the great bowsprit rush across a shining patch
of stars, knew the end had come at last, thumped against the bows and
found himself pinned by the weight of water, his head still up. His
hands, his unfailing hands had saved him again; he had hold of the
bob-stay!
The weight of water was not really great, the ship had little more than
steerage way. Darkness had magnified his terrors. He got across the stay
without much difficulty, worked along it to the dolphin-striker, thence
by the martingale to the fo’csle.
The look-out were not aware of his arrival until he was amongst them;
they were watching the tiny smudge that was his boat. He noticed that
they had round-shot ready to drop into it.
“Good God!” the mate exclaimed. “Who are you?”
“The man who hailed just now, sir.”
“But I thought . . . I thought you were in that boat.”
“I was, sir, but I swam off.”
“Good God!” said the mate again and hailed the poop. “Here’s this fellow
come aboard after all, sir. He’s quite alone.”
An astonished “How the devil?”
“Swam, sir.”
“Pass him aft.”
Ortho was led aft. Boarding nettings were triced up and men lay between
the upper deck guns girded with side arms. Shot were in the garlands and
match-tubs filled, all ready. A well-manned, well-appointed craft. He
asked the man who accompanied him her name.
“_Elijah Impey._ East Indiaman.”
“Indiaman! Then where are we bound for?”
“Bombay.”
Ortho drew a deep breath. It was a long road home.