WE DEFY THE ROGUES.
_And Receive an Ultimatum from Them._
It is a human experience, I believe, that men’s faculties often serve
them best in moments of grave danger. In my own case, to be sure (but
this may be a habit of the mind), I am often mastered by a strange
lethargy during the hours of a common day. Events have been no other
than a dreamy significance for me. I do not set them in a profitable
sequence or take other than a general and an indifferent survey of that
which is going on about me. But let a crisis of actual peril arrive and
my mind is all awake, its judgment swift, its analysis rarely mistaken.
Such a moment came to me upon the deck of the _White Wings_ when I
discovered my little Joan at the taffrail of the Diamond Ship and knew
that my errand had not been in vain. Instantly I detected the precise
nature of the risk we ran and the causes which contributed to it. The
situation, hitherto vague and objectless, became as plain as the
simplest sum in a child’s arithmetic book.
“Larry,” I said to the Captain, “they will discover our presence inside
ten minutes, and we shall learn how they can shoot. This is too easy a
target for my comfort. Let us back out while we have the chance.”
Captain Larry, as intent upon the spectacle of the strange ship as any
cabin boy, turned about quickly like a man roused up from a dream.
“I was thinking of it before the relief came alongside,” said he; “the
steam blast may give us away any minute, doctor. We lie right under
their stern, however, and that is something. So long as they don’t send
their limelight whizzing——”
“That is exactly what they are about to do, Captain. They are going to
look round for the unknown ship which has been sending them false
messages by marconigram. Watch with me and you may follow the story.
That is the first chapter of it.”
I pointed to the deck of the great ship, whence the figure of my little
Joan had disappeared as mysteriously as it came; and there I showed to
Larry a group of men in earnest talk with a newcomer from the steamer
which now lay almost alongside the larger vessel. The quick movements,
the gestures of this company betrayed the curiosity which the stranger’s
words awakened and the astonishment that rightly followed upon it.
Imagining myself to be a spy among them, I heard, in imagination, every
word of that fateful conversation. “We sent no message.” “You’ve been
fooled right enough.” “There’s mischief afloat.” “No, we had no
accident—what in thunder are you talking about?—it’s a lie.” So the
new hand must be telling the astonished crew. It needed no great
prescience to say what would follow after. Even Timothy McShanus arrived
at it before I had finished.
“Would that be Colin Ross gone aboard?” he asked me, wheeling about
suddenly.
I told him it would hardly be another.
“Then he’ll tell ’em the truth about the cables, or I’m a liar.”
“He will tell them the truth about the cables, and you are not a liar,
Timothy. He is doing so at this very moment.”
“Faith, man, they’ll be firing shots at us then.”
“It is possible, Timothy. If you are curious on the point——”
“Curious be d——d. Would ye have me in the sea?”
“In the sea or out, I would have you keep a cool head, Timothy. They are
going to fire at us, but that is not to say that they are going to hit
us. Our turn comes after. Neither to-day nor to-morrow may see the end
of it. I am only beginning with them, Timothy. When I have done, God
help some of them, the Jew above the others. Now wait for it and see.
Here’s the lantern busy. They are putting the story to the proof, you
will observe. Let us hope that their astonishment may not be too much
for them.”
So a commonplace chatter went on, and yet the mad intoxication of that
interval of suspense had come upon us all as a fever. No man might
measure his words, be sure. There we were, sagging in the trough of the
seas some three hundred yards, it may be, from the great ship’s guns,
our crew muttering in deep whispers, the steam hissing from our valves,
the smoke drifting to the north in a dense suffocating cloud. Aware of
the few moments of grace possible to us, we had given the word down to
Mr. Benson to go full speed astern; and running thus for the half of a
mile, we then swung the yacht round and headed due south at all the
speed of which we were capable.
Now, indeed, the tense hour of our doubt began. We counted the very
minutes until the beams of the monster searchlight should ensnare us
once more. Brief exclamations, cheery words of hope flashing from man to
man gave passage to that current of human electricity which burned up as
a flame. Would the light never fall? Ay, yonder it strikes the sea, and
yonder and yonder—compassing the horizon around in a twinkling, a blind
glory, a very pharos of the unknown world. And now it falls upon us, and
man can look upon the face of man as though he stood beneath the sun of
day; and all is stillness and silence, and the unspoken question.
Far away as we were, a roar of triumph could be heard across the sea
when the Jew’s ship discovered us, and the great beams of the
searchlight rested upon us exultingly. In turn, the smoke from our
funnel forbade us any longer to locate the enemy or to form an opinion
as to his movements. Certainly, no gunshot followed immediately upon his
achievement; and when a little gust of the south wind, veering a point
or two, carried the loom from our furnaces away, we espied the two ships
drifting as before, and even boats passing from one to the other. From
this time, moreover, the darkness failed us somewhat, and a great moon
tempered the ocean with its translucent beams of silvery light. Our
safety lay in our speed. We burned the precious coal without stint,
since our very lives were in the furnace’s keeping.
“What stops them, Larry—what are they waiting for?” I asked him
presently. He had deserted the bridge and stood aft with me to watch the
distant steamers. McShanus, meanwhile, paced the decks like a lion at
the hour of feeding. It was his way of saying that he found the suspense
intolerable.
“I don’t think we shall have to wait long, sir,” Larry rejoined
presently. “You see, they would hardly be ready to fire their guns, and
not overmuch discipline among them, I suppose. If they hit us, it will
be something by way of an accident.”
“And yet one that might happen, Larry. Well, here it comes, anyway. And
a wicked bad shot I must say.”
It was odd that they should have fired at the very moment I replied to
him; yet such was the fact and such the coincidence. Scarcely had I
uttered the words when a monstrous yellow flame leaped out over the bows
of the Diamond Ship (which now had put about to chase us), and spreading
itself abroad upon the waters left a heavy cloud of black smoke very
baffling to their gunners. As for the shell, I know not to this day
where it fell. We heard neither explosion nor splash; saw no spume or
spray upon the hither sea, and were, not a man of us, a penny the worse
for their endeavour. A second attempt achieved no better result. True,
we detected the shell this time, for it fell plump into the sea, near
the fifth part of a mile from our starboard quarter; but the wretched
shooting, the long interval between the shots and the speed at which we
travelled, inspired confidence anew, and so surely that my men began to
cheer the gunners ironically, and even to flash a signal to them across
the sea.
“It’s as I thought, Larry,” said I, “they carry a gun and have no more
idea how to use it than a lady in charge of a boarding school. The Jew
has been living as near to a fool’s paradise as such a man is ever
likely to get to paradise at all. I think we need waste no more coal.
Let us lie to and take our chances. The risk is too small to think
about.”
“Yon man would never hit cocoanuts at a fair,” chimed in McShanus, who
had come up. “What will ye be flying over the ocean for? Is it coal we
have to steam to China and back? Sure, the docthor is wise entirely, and
be hanged to them. We lie here as safe as a babe in a mother’s lap.”
We laughed at his earnestness, but the order was rung down nevertheless,
and presently the yacht lay rolling to the swell and we could hear the
stokers drawing a furnace below. Who is justly to blame for the accident
which followed I do not dare to tell myself. Sometimes I have charged
myself with it and complained bitterly of the opinions I had ventured. I
can only tell you that the yacht had scarcely been slowed down when the
rogues’ ship fired at us again, and the shot, crossing our forward decks
at an angle of some fifty-five degrees, struck a fine young seaman of
the name of Holland and almost annihilated him before our very eyes. The
tragedy had a greater significance because of the very mirth with which
we had but a moment before regarded the Jew’s gunners and their
performance. Death stood there upon the heels of laughter; a cry in the
night was the answer to an honest man’s defiance and my own bravado. As
for poor Holland, the shot took him about the middle and cut him
absolutely in two. He could have suffered no pain—so instantaneously
was he hurled into eternity. One moment I saw him standing at the
bulwarks watching the distant searchlight; at the next, there remained
but a dreadful something upon the deck from which men turned their eyes
in horror and dare not so much as speak about.
You are to imagine with what consternation and dismay this accident fell
upon us. For many minutes together no man spoke a word to another. Such
a deathly silence came upon the ship that our own act and judgment might
have brought this awful disaster, and not the play of capricious change.
To say that the men were afraid is to do them less than justice. In war
time, it is the earliest casualties which affright the troops and send
the blood from the bravest faces. Our good fellows had gone into this
adventure with me thinking that they understood its risks, but in
reality understanding them not at all. The truth appalled them, drove
challenge from their lips and laughter from their eyes. They were new
men thereafter, British seamen, handy-men who worked silently,
methodically, stubbornly as such fellows ever will when duty calls them.
Had I suggested that we should return immediately to Europe they would
have broken into open mutiny on the spot. Henceforth no word of mine
need advocate my work or ask of them true comradeship. I knew that they
would follow me to the ends of the earth if thereby they might avenge
their shipmate.
“Larry,” I said, “the blame of that is upon me. God forgive my rashness.
I feel as though my folly had cost me the life of one of my own sons.”
“Sir,” was his answer, “you had no more to do with it than the King
himself. I will not hear such talk. The chances are the same for all of
us. It might have been yourself, sir.”
McShanus was no less insistent.
“’Tis to do our duty we are here,” he said. “If there is a man among us
who is ashamed of his duty, let us be ashamed of him.”
I did not answer them. The seamen, awakened from their trance, ran to
the help of a comrade long past all human help. Far away over the
waters, the Diamond Ship still fired her impotent shells at us. Their
very impotency convinced me how surely an accident had killed poor
Holland. I said that it had been the will of God, indeed, that one
should perish on the altar of our justice, and his life to be the first
sacrifice to be asked of us. In my own cabin, alone and bitterly
distressed, a greater depression fell upon me so that I could ask myself
why I had been chosen for the part at all or how it befell that of the
thousands who had been robbed of Valentine Imroth, the Jew, I, alone,
must set out to discover him. Vain, indeed, did triumph appear now. We
had defied the rogues and they had answered us—not with a final answer,
truly, but with that hush and awe of death which is never so terrible as
upon the lonely waste of the great silent ocean.
Nor was the hour to pass without further news of them. Impotent at the
guns, they fell to words, rapped out by our receiver so plainly that a
very child of telegraphy could have read them.
“The message of Valentine Imroth to the Englishman, Fabos.—I take up
your challenge. Joan Fordibras shall pay your debt in full.”