JAKE
Hank had dropped Tommie into the boat and was striving with George to
push off, when the crack of the revolver came followed by the bizz of
the bullet, yards out.
“Shove her—shove her,” cried Hank. The huge brute of a scow had
settled herself comfortably in the sand as if she meant to take up her
residence there. Tommie, tumbling out of the boat nearly as quickly as
she had been thrown in, put her shoulder to the stem; Hank and George
at either gunnel clutched hard. Hank gave the word and they all heaved
together. Next moment they were on board her and she was water-borne.
Hank seized one of the ash sweeps and using it as a pole drove her half
a dozen yards, she slued round sideways, but George in the bow had a
sweep out now and with a stroke pulled her nose round whilst Hank took
his seat.
As they got away on her, McGinnis, leading the hunt, was only twenty
yards from the sea. He was holding his fire, as were the others, till
they reached the water’s edge, when the bang of an old musket that
might have landed with Padre Junipero made the echoes jump alive.
The attackers wheeled.
Down through the two defiles and fanning out on the sands, pouring like
ants, came the countryside for all it was worth, half a hundred beggars
and landed proprietors, zambos and terzerons, yellow men and men who
were almost black, armed with anything and everything and led by the
“Dredging Machine.” A fellow who had tumbled in his hurry was picking
himself up. It was his musket that had gone off by accident.
“Pull!” shouted Hank.
They were saved. The McGinnis crowd, like a pack of wild dogs chased by
wolves, were racing along the water edge towards the south horn of the
bay; the Mexicans, faced by the facts of the sand and a proposition in
Euclid, had paused for half a moment. The direct line towards the south
horn of the bay was hard going over the soft sand, but it was shorter
than making direct for the hard beach. Two sides of a triangle being
longer than the third, they took the shorter way.
The rowers as they rowed watched the race, and saw plainly that
McGinnis and his merry men were making good. Then they turned their
attention to the ship ahead. She was swinging to the current broadside
on to them, a frowsy looking two-topmast schooner, the _Heart of
Ireland_ sure enough.
“Wonder how many chaps are on board,” said George.
“We’ll soon see,” replied Hank.
As they drew closer they saw a man leaning on the rail and watching
them through a pair of binoculars. He seemed the only person on the
ship.
Closer now, the old schooner began to speak of her disreputability.
The paint, in Hank’s words, was less paint than blisters, the canvas,
hurriedly stowed, was discoloured and patched—old stuff re-done by the
hand of McGay, that stand-by of small ship owners in these days when a
new mainsail for a small boat costs anything from two hundred dollars.
Built in 1882 as a trading schooner, she had been built a bit too
small, but she had looked honest when the fitters and riggers had done
with her; honest, clean and homely, in those first days one might have
compared her to a country girl starting for market with a basket a bit
too small.
In two years this simple trader had changed her vocation; in
thirty-five years she had done pretty much everything that a ship ought
not to do, run guns, run gin and opium, fished in prohibited waters,
and in some extraordinary way she bore the stamp of it all. If some
ship lover had seen the _Mary Burton_—that was her first name—and the
_Heart of Ireland_, which was her last, he might have been excused, if
a moral man, for weeping.
“Ahoy!” cried Hank, as the boat came alongside grinding the blisters
off her. “Fling’s a rope there—why! Good Lord! It’s Jake.”
It was. Jake, looking just the same as when Hank had fired him off the
_Wear Jack_, only now, instead of a fur cap, he was wearing a dingy
white Stetson with the brim turned down. He had come along with the
McGinnis crowd, partly because he wanted a job and partly because he
wanted to see the downfall of Hank. As a matter of fact he had seen the
triumph of Hank, if you can call it a triumph, for he had been watching
the whole of the proceedings from start to finish. Recognising the
inevitable he made no bones but flung the rope.
“Well, you scoundrel,” said Hank, as he came on deck, “what you doing
here?”
“What you doin’ yourself?” said Jake.
“I’ll jolly soon show you,” said Hank, who had no time to waste in
verbal explanations. Seizing the scamp by the shoulders, he turned him
round in some extraordinary way and giving him a shove that sent him
running forward two yards. “Get the gaskets off the jib and look slippy
about it—quick now or I’ll be after you. Bud, I’m going to leave the
boat. There’s a dinghy aboard and that scow would clutter up the decks
too much. Cut her adrift and come on. Clap on to the throat an’ peak
halyards, now then, all together, yeo ho!”
Mainsail and foresail took the wind at last. And what a mainsail it
was, after the canvas of the _Wear Jack_, dirty as a dishcloth and
patched where a pilot mark had once been. And what sticks after the
spars of the _Jack_, from the main boom, that had seen better days, to
the gaff, with its wooden jaws bound to creak like a four-post bedstead!
“Now the winch,” cried Hank. “Clap on to the winch and roust her out.”
He took the wheel, whilst Jake, Tommie and Bud clapped on to the winch,
and, as he stood listening to the music of the chain coming in, he cast
his eyes away towards the south horn of the bay where the McGinnis crew
could be seen moving slowly now towards the bay beyond, followed by the
Mexicans, evidently half-beaten, but still doggedly in pursuit.
“She’s out of the mud!” cried George.
Hank turned the spokes of the wheel, and the _Heart_, with all her
canvas thrashing, took the wind, got steerage way on her, and, as the
anchor came home, lay over on the starboard tack.
She had been anchored to north of the break in the reefs and this
course would take her diagonally through the break.
Hank, who had bitten off a piece of plug tobacco, stood, working his
lantern jaws as he steered. Gulls raced them as they went and the
breeze strengthened up, whilst block, spar and cordage creaked to the
boost of the waves and the slap of the bow wash. They passed the horn
of the northern reef by a short ten yards, the out-going tide and the
south-running current foaming round the rocks like destruction gnashing
at them. Then, lifting her bowsprit, the _Heart_ took the great sea,
dipping and rising again to the steadily marching swell.
Hank held on. The wind was breezing up strong from the southwest and he
was keeping her close hauled. A few miles out, with Mexico a cloud on
the sea line and the reefs a memory, he spun the wheel and laid her on
a due westerly course.
He called Jake.
“You can steer?”
“Sure,” said Jake.
“Then catch hold and keep her as she is.” He stood watching whilst Jake
steered.
That individual, despite the shove he had received, seemed to bear no
malice. Absolutely unperturbed he stood with his hands on the spokes,
chewing, his eye wandering from the binnacle to the luff of the
mainsail.
“Whar’s the _Jack_?” he suddenly asked, turning to spit into the
starboard scupper.
“What were you doing with that gang?” countered Hank.
“Me! Them guys? Why, you saw what I was doin’, keepin’ ship, whiles
they went ashore. What were _you_ doin’ with them?”
“Mean to tell me you don’t know why they went ashore?”
“Me! nuthin’. I’m only a foremast hand, signed on ’cause I was out of
a job. I saw you all scatterin’ about on shore, then you comes off and
takes the ship—that’s all I know.”
“Look here,” said Hank. “D’you mean to tell me you didn’t put the
McGinnis crowd on to us before we left ’Frisco? D’you mean to say you
weren’t on the wharf that night when Black Mullins dropped aboard and
peeked through the skylight and saw Mr. Candon?”
“Me. Which? Me! N’more than Adam. You’re talkin’ French.”
“Don’t bother with him,” said George. “Come on down below and let’s see
what it’s like.”
They left the deck to Jake, still chewing, and came down the companion
way to the cabin, where McGinnis and his afterguard had dwelt.
Bunks with tossed blankets appeared on either side; aft lay the
captain’s cabin, door open and an oilskin swinging like a corpse from a
nail; above, and through the atmosphere of must and bad tobacco, came
the smell of the _Heart_, a perfume of shark oil, ineradicable, faint,
but unforgettable, once smelt.
George opened the portholes and Tommie took her seat on a bunk edge,
looking round her but saying nothing.
A cheap brass lamp swung from the beam above the table, the table
was covered with white marbled oilcloth, stained and stamped with
innumerable ring marks from the bottoms of coffee cups; about the whole
place was that atmosphere of sordidness and misery that man alone can
create.
Tommie sat absorbing it, whilst Hank and George explored lockers and
investigated McGinnis’ cabin. Then she rose and took off her coat.
She stripped the oilcloth from the table, said, “Faugh!” rolled it up
and flung it on the floor.
“Say!” cried she, “isn’t there any soap in this hooker?”
“Soap!” cried Hank, appearing from McGinnis’ cabin, carrying the log
book and a tin box. “I dunno. Jake will know.”
“Go up and send him down. You can take the wheel for a minute whilst I
get this place clean—Goodness!”
“You wait,” said Hank.
He went on deck, followed by George, and next minute Jake appeared.
Despite Tommie’s get-up, he had spotted her for a girl when she came on
board. Not being a haunter of the pictures he had not recognised her;
what she was, or where she had come from, he could not imagine—or what
she wanted of him. He was soon to learn.
“Take off your hat,” said Tommie. “Now, then, get me some soap and a
scrubbing brush, if there is such a thing on this dirty ship.”
“Soap!” said Jake.
“Yes, soap.”
He turned and went on deck and came back in a minute or so with a tin
of soft soap and a mop.
“I said scrubbing brush.”
“Ain’t none.”
“Well, we’ll have to make the mop do. Now go and fetch a bucket of
water.”
“Ain’t enough on board for swillin’.”
“There’s enough in the sea. We must make it do. Go on and don’t stand
there scratching your head.”
Hank, leaving George at the wheel and coming down half an hour later to
see what was going on, returned jubilant.
“She’s working that gink like a house maid, he’s washed the table an’s
scrubbing the floor and she’s stripping the blankets off the bunks.
She’s going to make him wash them. She’s a peach.”
The tin box with the ship’s money, some thousand dollars, and the
log lay on the deck. He placed them on one side and then stood erect
and walked to the rail. He gazed aft at the far-away shore as if
visualising something there.
“Bud.”
“Yep?”
“Nothing’s ever got me like she has, right by the neck. I reckon it’s a
punishment on me for having invented rat traps.”
“Oh, don’t be an ass.”
“Easy to say that.”
“Have you told her?”
“Lord, no.”
“Well, go down and tell her and get it over, same as sea sickness.”
“Bud, I could no more tell her than I could walk into a blazing fiery
furnace like those chaps in the Scriptures.”
“Why?”
“Because, Bud—well, there’s two reasons. First of all she’d laugh at
me, maybe.”
“She would, sure.”
“And then—there’s a girl—”
“Yes.”
“A girl—another girl.”
“Mrs. Driscoll?”
“Oh. Lord, no, she ain’t a girl. This one I’m telling you of is
running a little store of her own in Cable Street, kind of fancy work
business—I’ve known her a year. O’Brien is her name, Zillah O’Brien.
She’s running a fancy work—”
“I know, you’ve told me; are you engaged to her?”
“Well, we’ve been keeping company,” said Hank, “and it amounts to that.”
“You mean you are—then you’ve no right to bother about Tommie.”
“It’s she that’s bothering me.”
“Well, you may make your mind easy. So far as I can see she’s
harpooned—that fellow harpooned her.”
“B. C.?”
“Yep, remember her face when he ran away? And ever since she hasn’t
been the same—”
Hank was silent for a moment.
“But, Bud, she couldn’t care for him after the way he’s landed us?”
“No, but she cared for him before, and maybe she cares for him still,
Lord only knows—women are funny things. Anyhow, you’ve no right to
think of her with that other girl in tow. Why, Hank, you’ve always
been going on about women being saints and all that and now, you old
double-dealing—”
“It isn’t me,” said Hank. “I guess it’s human nature. But I’ll bite on
the bullet—after all it’s not so much as a girl I care for her, but
just for herself.”
“Well, bite on what’s her name as well—Beliah—”
“Zillah.”
“All the same, keep thinking of her—and catch hold of the wheel. I want
a quiet smoke.”
Half an hour later Jake wandered on deck with the mop and the bucket.
He look subdued, and a few minutes later Tommie’s head and shoulders
appeared.
“The place is pretty clean now,” said T. C. “Maybe some of you will get
at where the food’s stowed and find out what we can have to eat. I’m
going along to the galley to get the fire on.”