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: 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.
“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 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.
“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 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 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!”