Ramon Porfirio
After four days and four nights of captivity, during which period the
_Donibristle_ had covered about 600 miles, the engines ceased their
steady throb, and the prisoners heard the muffled roar of a
chain-cable running through the hawse-pipe.
Speculation was rife as to where the captured merchantman had
brought-up, while the majority of the captives expressed an opinion
that, provided they found themselves in the open air, the locality of
the anchorage didn't very much matter just at present. After nearly a
hundred hours of close confinement, fed on meagre and monotonous
fare, unwashed and unkempt, they welcomed the prospect of a change.
Their guards, too, had been removed. Evidently the pirates were now
satisfied that the prisoners were no longer in a position to cause
trouble; while in support of that theory a half-caste South American
appeared and unbolted the dead-lights.
The flow of pure, balmy air through the now opened scuttles was like
a draught of the sweetest nectar to the jaded and dishevelled men.
There was a rush to see where the ship was lying, until at every
scuttle two or three people were simultaneously trying to look out.
The _Donibristle_ was lying in a circular and apparently completely
landlocked harbour surrounded by tall cliffs. Further examination
revealed a narrow gap, which, in turn, was fronted on the seaward
side by a lofty ridge of rock, which, harmonizing with the cliffs of
the island, presented at first sight an appearance of continuity. The
cliffs were so high and close to the water's edge that from the
_Donibristle_ it was impossible to see what lay beyond--whether the
ground rose to a still greater height, whether it was wooded or
otherwise, or whether the island was of large or small extent.
About two cables away lay the _Malfilio_, also at anchor, while
closer in shore were two vessels that Burgoyne rightly concluded were
the ill-fated _Alvarado_ and _Kittiwake_. A few sailing craft,
_bêche de mer_ traders seized by the pirates, were also to be seen,
some of them lying aground with a heavy list.
It was now close on sunset. The tranquil waters of the harbour were
shrouded in deepening shadow, while the horizontal rays of the
setting sun bathed the summit of the eastern cliffs in a glint of
reddish gold. Beyond that serrated line of sun-bathed cliff the sky
was broken by three thin columns of smoke rising slowly in the still
air.
"It's a snug berth at all events," observed Burgoyne, with a sailor's
unerring instinct for a safe harbour. "But it would puzzle a stranger
to find his way in."
"Will they set us ashore to-night, do you think?" asked Colonel
Vivian.
Before Alwyn could reply the door was thrown open, and the engineer
officers of both watches entered. That was a sign that their work in
the engine-room was finished.
In the dim light no one noticed that Withers was not with them, but
that instead there was a stranger, a tall, slender fellow of almost
Withers's height and build, rigged out in the company's uniform, and
with the peaked cap raked jauntily over the left eye. And until the
"fellow" went straight up to the Colonel and took hold of his hands,
even Burgoyne failed to recognize Hilda Vivian.
"We couldna let the wee lassie bide there," declared Angus
apologetically, as if he were ashamed of having brought her along.
"An' ye ken fine why."
"And where's Withers?" asked Burgoyne.
The old Scot shook his head.
"A' would do it," he declared, and went on to explain that the Second
Engineer had insisted in donning a fireman's boiler-suit and giving
his uniform to Miss Vivian.
"An' in the gloamin' they'll no ken the difference," he concluded.
"So far so good," soliloquized Alwyn. "But in daylight there may be
quite a different story. The rascals have seen Withers and the other
fellow going in and out of the engine-room. They'll twig a strange
officer in a trice, I'm afraid."
But a glance at Hilda convinced him that running the risk had its
compensations. The girl, even in her sorrow at her mother's death,
was happy at being reunited to her father--her sole surviving
relative. Clearly she was taking little or no thought for the morrow.
When it became a practically assured fact that the prisoners were to
remain on board at least another night, there was general activity on
the part of all the able-bodied men, with one exception, to fix up
Miss Vivian in her new quarters. Willing hands quickly cleared
out--it could not truthfully be said "cleaned out"--one of the cabins
for her use, making far less fuss about having to sleep uncomfortably
crowded than they had when they had fifteen hundred cubic feet more
space.
[Illustration: BLACK STROGOFF ADDRESSES THE "DONIBRISTLE'S" CREW]
The exception was Jules Miles, the Canuk bagman. At daybreak the
survivors of the _Donibristle's_ original crew were ordered on deck.
Evidently the pirates were in a desperate hurry, for the _Malfilio_
was lying with steam raised ready to proceed to sea. During the night
she had coaled, receiving her coal from the captured _Alvarado_.
So, without even the formality of a search, the prisoners were sent
ashore, the wounded being carried in strips of canvas cut from
discarded awnings.
The undamaged boats of the _Alvarado_ were employed to convey the
prisoners from the _Donibristle_ to the beach, and in consequence the
journey was a painful one for the wounded.
But in the hasty performance of the operations Hilda Vivian escaped
detection, and once again Burgoyne, in his capacity of senior
unwounded officer, thanked Heaven that so far the villainous pirates
had so far failed to penetrate the deception. Incidentally he was
thankful that the prisoners had had no opportunity to wash during
their four days incarceration. Their faces were black with the grime
of battle, and thus Hilda Vivian was furnished with an additional
disguise.
On landing, the _Donibristle's_ crew were formed up in a hollow
square, with armed guards patrolling the outer face of the formation.
Here they were kept in suspense for more than a quarter of an hour,
until the arrival of the pirate captain, Don Ramon Porfirio, attended
by his lieutenants, Pablo Henriques and Black Fritz Strogoff.
Ramon Porfirio was a Bolivian by birth, but had spent most of his
time since the age of sixteen in various seaports of Chili and Peru.
He was about thirty-five years of age, of medium height, and inclined
to corpulence. His features were remarkable, his face being round and
flabby; but instead of the broad short nose usually associated with
this type of countenance his nasal organ was very pronounced, and
beaked like a parrot's. His hair, bluish black and liberally oiled,
hung a good six inches below the back of his gilt-braided cap. With
the exception of closely-cropped side-whiskers he was clean shaven,
although the bluish tint of the lower part of his face pointed
clearly to the fact that he had not renewed his acquaintance with the
razor that morning.
The pirate captain was rigged out in the undress uniform of an
admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy. The tarnished buttons still
displayed the double-headed eagle of the Romanoffs; the salt-stained
blue coat was considerably the worse for wear. Burgoyne found himself
wondering what had been the fate of the original wearer of the
uniform, and by what roundabout way it had come into the possession
of Ramon Porfirio.
Pablo Henriques requiring no further introduction, it will be
necessary only to portray the third pirate officer, "Black" Fritz
Strogoff.
He was short in stature, being only about five feet four inches, and
grotesquely broad in proportion to his height. He had hardly any
neck, literally speaking, although figuratively he possessed plenty.
His features were swarthy, while by a curious contrast his hair was
of a light straw colour. In point of age he was the eldest of the
three. Although the date of his birth was unknown to him, he was fond
of announcing that he entered the University of Dorpat in 1893; so,
assuming him to be seventeen or eighteen at that time, he was now
about forty-four or forty-five.
He could speak three languages fluently--Russian, German, and
Spanish--and had a useful knowledge of English, French, and some of
the dialects of Eastern Asia. In the days of the Russian Empire he
had experienced the horrors of Siberia. During the war he had played
no unimportant part in the intrigue between Soviet Russia and
Germany. Not receiving what he deemed to be adequate reward from
Lenin and Trotsky, he made his way, via Vladivostok, to one of the
South American republics, where he came in contact with Ramon
Porfirio.
It was Fritz Strogoff who engineered most of the latter's
enterprises. He was the brains of the pirate organization, and while
up to the present he was content to let Porfirio take precedence, he
was merely awaiting a favourable opportunity of cutting his
connection with the _Malfilio_, taking with him considerably more
than the agreed share of the ill-gotten booty. He did not believe in
playing too long with Fate.
Ramon Porfirio was literally the tool of his second lieutenant,
although, with the arrogance of a Spaniard with a decided dash of
Indian blood, he failed utterly to recognize Strogoff's influence. Of
an imaginative, reckless, and hot-tempered disposition, he firmly
believed that he was a leader of men, and a worthy successor to
Morgan, Mansfield, and other famous buccaneers.
Beginning his career as a small public official at Lima, Porfirio
soon found that existence was far too tame. He absconded, taking
20,000 dollars of public money, and found a temporary refuge in
Chile. At Talcahuano he came in touch with German agents, who were at
that time busily engaged in picking up news in order to keep von Spee
informed of the movements of Craddock's squadron. At that time there
was hardly such a thing as British propaganda, and Porfirio, through
his German associates, was well primed with utterly erroneous ideas
of the might of Britain's sea-power.
It was to the Huns at Talcahuano that he owed the thought of becoming
a sea-corsair, and preying upon unprotected British shipping. The
idea grew and took tangible form. After acquiring a smattering of the
arts of seamanship and navigation, he felt confident enough to embark
upon his career of piracy, but the difficulty was to find a vessel
suitable to his pocket and his needs.
About this time he met Strogoff. Hinting at his ambition and his
difficulties, Porfirio found, as he thought, a kindred spirit.
Strogoff suggested that the Kamtchatkan port of Petropavlovsk would
furnish the necessary vessel. It was about that time that Siberia
succumbed to Bolshevism, and several Russian light cruisers and
gunboats were lying at Petropavlovsk. Since it was hopeless for them
to return either to the Black Sea or the Gulf of Finland, it was more
than likely that an armed vessel might be acquired at a reasonable
price.
Incidentally Strogoff mentioned that he knew of a secret naval base,
situated in a remote island in the North Pacific. It had been
prepared some years before the Great War for the use of the German
squadron stationed in these waters, so that when "der Tag" dawned the
Hun commerce-destroyers would have a base to operate from should
Kiao-Chau prove useless--as it quickly did--to the squadron.
Fortunately, owing to the total destruction of von Spee's ships, and
the transference of the _Emden's_ and _Königsburg's_ activities to
the Indian Ocean, the secret base was not brought into operation. The
garrison of German marines "stuck it" for nearly a twelvemonth in
total ignorance of what was going on in the outside world. At length
they abandoned the island, sailing, it was assumed, in a small vessel
attached to the base. But no one in Germany or elsewhere ever heard
more of the lost garrison, and the fate of that handful of Hun
marines remains an unsolved mystery.
Enlisting the services of Pablo Henriques, master of a Chilian
trading schooner, Porfirio and Strogoff, accompanied by a nucleus of
half-castes of doubtful character, arrived at Petropavlovsk a few
weeks before the port was due to be come icebound. Under hatches they
carried six casks of wine, a quantity of woollen blankets, and two
thousand dollars in gold. Before they reached the Kamtchatkan coast
the cargo was augmented by booty forcibly removed from a couple of
Kanaka-manned traders. The Kanakas were easily persuaded to become
members of the pirate band.
The acquisition of the light cruiser _Zarizyno_ was accomplished so
easily that even Strogoff opened his eyes in astonishment. A
Bolshevik official, Lipski by name, readily agreed to hand over the
ship in exchange for the wine, blankets, and half the gold. He, too,
had an eye for the main chance, and had no great faith in the
stability of the Soviet Government. Moscow and Petrograd were
thousands of miles away. Before Lenin and Trotsky could demand an
account of his stewardship, Lipski would also be miles away, with his
nest well feathered, to seek an asylum in Chicago, in the vast
Slavonic family domiciled under the protection of the Stars and
Stripes.
Augmenting their numbers by the enlistment of Chinese and Malay
seamen, together with a handful of Slav desperadoes otherwise
marooned in Petropavlovsk, Porfirio and his two lieutenants took the
_Zarizyno_ to sea. Slightly disguised by means of different
funnel-markings, and given the name of _Malfilio_, she was taken to
the secret base, where her active career as a pirate began.
On the island they found an abundance of Welsh steam-coal, tinned
provisions, clothing, quick-firing guns, machine-guns, and rifles,
with a large quantity of suitable ammunition in fair condition.
At first Porfirio was content to confine his activities to the
capture of small trading vessels plying between Hawaii and the
archipelagoes south of the line; then, becoming bolder, he directed
his attention to bigger game.
The _Kittiwake_, his first big prize, was a comparatively easy
capture. She furnished him mainly with flour consigned for Japan,
where quite recently a large demand for wheat had arisen in place of
rice, this demand being one of the causes of the shortage of flour in
Europe.
The _Kittiwake_ was taken without loss of life. Porfirio had rather
shrunk from murder, owing to a mistaken idea on his part,
communicated by his German friends at Talcahuano, that piracy without
murder was not a hanging matter. Ramon had a strong objection to a
hempen rope.
But with the capture of the _Alvarado_, which yielded a richer booty,
his record for milk-and-water piracy ended. Nor did he know that the
prize was a Yankee until he was in possession of her, and fifteen
corpses lay in her scuppers.
Having crossed the Rubicon, he was less scrupulous in his methods,
but he refrained from taking life except in actual fight, or for
disregard of his orders on the part of his prisoners. To impress upon
the survivors of the _Donibristle_ his views on the subject, he had
caused them to be formed up in a hollow square on the beach of the
secret base.
Ramon Porfirio's knowledge of English being, to say the least,
imperfect, he called upon Black Strogoff to address the assembly.
This the Russian proceeded to do, his speech including a number of
words and sentences of an academic nature interspersed with the
vernacular of Wapping.
He informed the _Donibristle's_ crew that they would be well treated
if they behaved, and dealt with severely if they did not. They would
have to work under their own officers. Failure to perform their
allotted tasks would be punished by reduction of rations, solitary
confinement, and in exceptional cases by death.
He also mentioned in an off-hand kind of way that there were
vacancies in the crew of the _Malfilio_, vacancies which offered a
life that would appeal to the adventurous, with prospects of becoming
rich in a very short space of time. He did not propose to ask for
volunteers at that moment (he knew that none would be forthcoming,
although it was possible that later on some of the _Donibristle's_
crew would secretly hand in their names) but he would be willing to
consider applications in due course.
The men heard his appeal in stolid silence. The offer fell on deaf
ears. They were "not having any". Ramon Porfirio would have to cast
his net elsewhere to obtain his recruits.