THE FIGHT AT THE LANDING
As we ran down the footpath, we heard them after us like hounds on
the trail, and I tell you, it galled me to run from that cowardly
pack. Oh, for one good fight, I thought! For a chance to avenge Seth
Upham, who lay miles away beside the spring at the king's grave, to
avenge the stern man who had fallen so bravely in front of the
mission! For a chance to show the black curs that we would and could
meet them, though the odds against us were a hundred to one! A
chance to hold our own with them in defiance of their arms and
numbers!
The hot pride of youth burned in my cheeks, and I was actually
tempted to turn on them there and then; but now I thought of
something besides myself, of something besides Seth Upham's rights
and my own: I thought of the girl who ran ahead of me so lithely and
easily. Be the hazards what they might, be the shame of our retreat
ever so great, she must not, while one of us lived, be left to that
herd at our heels.
So, running thus in headlong flight, out we came on the river bank.
There was a boat on the river, made fast to a peg on the bank, and
there was a long canoe drawn up in the bushes. But at a great
distance, where a narrow channel led through the mangroves, we saw
titanic waves rolling on the bar in shining cascades from which the
sun was brightly reflected, and which, one after another, hurled ton
upon ton of water into a welter of foaming whirlpools. And over the
lifting crests of the surf we saw, standing offshore, the topsails
of a brig. The prospect of riding that surf in any boat ever built
gave me, I confess without shame, a miserably sick feeling; and as
if that were not enough, in through the mangroves to the shore in
front of us shot three canoes of the war, and cut us off from the
river.
Our time now had come to fight. With blacks behind us and blacks
before us, we could no longer double and turn. The river, we knew,
was alive with the canoes of the war. Already the black hornets were
swarming through the woods and swamps around us. Three times now we
had eluded them; this time we must fight. Our guns were lost and
only pistols were left. No longer, as in that fatal hut on the
king's grave,--in my heart I cursed the bull-headed stupidity of the
man who built it and who had paid but a fraction of the price with
his own life!--could we hold them at a distance by fear of firearms.
Their frenzy by now brooked no such fear. To the brig, whose
topsails we could descry miles off shore, we must win our way; there
lay our only hope.
I thought of the voice of the wizard--"White man him go Dead Land."
Verily to the door of his Dead Land we had come; and it seemed now
that we must surely follow Bull and Seth Upham and Bud O'Hara and
many another over the threshold.
"Men," said Arnold Lamont,--and his voice, calm, precise, cutting,
brought us together,--"stones and clubs are not weapons to be
despised in an encounter hand to hand."
"Have into 'em, then!" Gleazen gasped. "All hands together!"
"Mademoiselle," said Arnold, "keep close at our heels."
The girl was beside me now. Her eyes were wide, but her lips were
set with a courage that rose above fear. "Come," she cried, and set
my heart beating faster than ever, if it were possible, "they're
upon us from the rear!" Then she spoke to her great negro in a
language that I had never heard, and came close behind us when we
charged down on the blacks ahead.
I fired my pistol and saw that the ball accounted for one of our
enemies. I reeled from a glancing blow on the head, which knocked me
to my knees; but, rising, I lifted a great rock on the end of a
rope, which evidently the girl or her father had used for an
anchor,--never negro tied that knot!--and swinging the huge weapon
round my head, brought down one assailant with his shoulder and half
his ribs broken. Now Arnold fired his pistol; now Matterson pitched,
groaning, into the boat. Now, with my bare hand, I parried a
spear-thrust and, again swinging my rock, killed a negro in his
tracks.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the girl had shoved the canoe
into the water. She was calling to us eagerly, but neither I nor the
others could distinguish her words.
As Gleazen, with an oath, cut the painter of the boat and leaped
into her, the impulse of his jump carried her ten feet out from
shore; and instantly thrusting out the oars, he started to row away
with Matterson and desert us.
"Come back, you yellow cur!" Arnold cried.
The trader, who had fought industriously but to no great purpose,
now ran down the bank and, flinging himself full length into the
river, caught the stern of the boat, with outstretched fingers, and
dragged himself into her, and at the same moment Abe Guptil,
obviously with the intention of holding the boat until the rest of
us should have a chance to embark, too, not of saving himself,
fought his own way aboard and, in spite of violent efforts to lay
hands on the oars, was carried, protesting, away.
It is not to be thought that Gleazen had the remotest notion of
saving _our_ lives. Having got rid of Arnold and me, he could, as he
very well knew, do what he pleased with the brig when once he had
silenced Gideon North. But although he had every desire not to help
us, he in truth did help us in very spite of himself: no sooner did
he appear to be getting safely out into the river, than the blacks,
who had us all but at their mercy, suddenly bent every effort to
keep him, too, from escaping.
"Let them go! Let them go! Oh, will you not come this way?"
It was the girl again. There was not a drop of cowardly blood in her
veins. She, in the bow of the canoe and her big black servant in the
stern, held the craft against the bank.
Taking advantage of the momentary respite that we got while the
enemy was putting after Gleazen, Arnold and I fairly trembling in
our haste--Arnold missed his footing and plunged waist-deep into the
river--climbed in after them.
All this, which has taken a long time to tell, happened like so many
cracks of the whip. Each event leaped sharply and suddenly at the
heels of another, so that it was really but a few seconds--at all
events less than a minute--after our arrival at the shore when we
found ourselves gliding swiftly and noiselessly through a tiny
channel among the mangroves, of which Gleazen had never dreamed. A
turn of the paddle carried us out of sight of the struggle behind
us, and it now appeared that, once out of sight, we were likewise
out of mind.
"Mademoiselle," said Arnold, with a manner at once so deferential
and in itself so proud, that it puzzled me more than a little,
"shall we not paddle? Permit me to take your place."
"Thank you, no," she said.
"It is not fitting--" he began.
"I know the canoe, the river and the surf," she said. "It is _safer_
that I keep the paddle."
And to my surprise, as well as Arnold's, she did keep it and handled
it in a way that would have shamed our efforts had we been permitted
to try. It was a strange thing in those days, when most women laced
tightly, and fainted gracefully if ever occasion required, and
played at croquet and battledore and shuttlecock, to see a slender
girl swing a paddle with far more than a man's deftness and skill to
make up for what she lacked of a man's strength. But though she
appeared so slender, so frail, there was that in her bearing which
told us that her life in that wild place had given her muscles of
steel. The big Fantee, too, drove the long craft ahead with sure,
powerful strokes; so we shot out of the mangroves, out of the mouth
of the river, into the full glare of the sun.
For a time the sails of the brig had grown small in the distance,
but already we saw that she had come about and was standing in
again. Why, I wondered, did Gideon North not anchor? Why should he
indefinitely stand off and on? How long had he been beating back and
forth, and how long would he continue to wait for us if we were not
to come? We were long overdue at the meeting-place.
"To think," I said, "that now we can go home to Topham!"
"To Topham?" said Arnold. There was a question in his voice. "I
should be surer of going home to Topham if we were rid of Gleazen.
Also, my friend, we must ride that surf to the open sea."
The negro in the stern of the canoe now spoke up in gutturals.
"See!" Arnold cried.
Looking back up the river, we saw Gleazen and Abe Guptil, whom we
had outdistanced by our short cut, now rowing madly downstream. Big
and heavy though the boat was, they rowed with the strength that
precedes despair, and sent her ploughing through the river with a
wake such as a cutter might have left. In the stern beside the
trader lay Matterson; and though his face, we could see, was
streaked with blood, he menaced the negroes upstream with a loaded
pistol. Arrows flew, and then a long spear hurtled through the air
and struck the bow of the boat. But for all that, they bade fair to
get clean away, and none of them appeared aware that we had slipped
ahead of them in the race for life.
Now we in the canoe had come to the very edge of the surf, where the
surge of the breakers swept past us in waves of foam. Beyond that
surf was the open sea, the brig and safety. Behind it were more
terrors than we had yet endured. For a moment the canoe hung
motionless in the boiling surge; then, taking advantage of the
outward flow and guided and driven by the hands of the great negro
and the white, slender girl, she shot forward like a living
creature, rose on the moving wall of an incoming wave, yielded and
for a brief space drew back, then shot ahead once more and passed
over the crest just before the wave curled and broke.
I heard a cry from behind us and knew that the others had discovered
us ahead of them.
Turning, as we pitched on the heavy seas at a safe distance from the
breakers, I watched them, too, row into the surf. I faintly heard
Matterson's pistol spit, then I saw Gleazen drive the boat forward,
saw her hesitate and swing round, lose way and go over as the next
wave broke.
Then we saw them swimming and heard their cries.
As a mere matter of cold justice we should, I am convinced, have
left that villainous pair, Matterson and Gleazen, to their fate.
They had been ready enough to leave us to ours. Their whole career
was sown with fraud, cruelty, brazen effrontery, and downright
dishonesty. But even Arnold and I could scarcely have borne to do
that, for the trader was guiltless enough according to his lights,
and Abe Guptil was struggling with them in the water.
The girl, turning and looking back when she heard their shouts,
spoke to the great negro in his own language. The canoe came about.
Again we paused, waiting for a lull. Then we shot back on the crest
of a wave, back down upon the overturned boat, and within gunshot of
the flotilla of canoes that were spreading to receive us.
As we passed the wallowing boat I leaned out and caught Gleazen's
hands and drew him up to the canoe. The negro cried a hoarse
warning, and the canoe herself almost went over; but by as clever
use of paddles as ever man achieved, the girl and the negro brought
us up on an even keel, and Arnold and I lifted Gleazen aboard, half
drowned, and gave a hand to Abe Guptil, who had made out to swim to
the canoe. Of Matterson and the trader we saw no sign.
Then Abe, himself but newly rescued, gave a lurch to starboard, and
with a clutch at something just under water, was whipped, fiercely
struggling to prevent it, clean overboard.
We could neither stop nor turn; either would have been suicide.
Would we or would we not, we went past him and left him, and drove
on in the wash of the breaking waves down upon the grim line of
canoes.
To them we must have seemed a visitation. When I sit alone in the
dark I can see again in memory, very clearly, that white girl, her
eyes flashing, that great, black Fantee, his bared teeth thrust out
between his thick lips. The long breakers were roaring as they swept
across the bar and crashed at slow intervals behind us. In those
seething waters the fiercest attack would have been futile; the very
tigers of the sea must have lain just beyond the wash of the surf,
as did the war. To one who has never seen a Fantee on his native
coast, the story that I tell of that wild canoe-ride may seem
incredible. It was an appalling, horrifying thing to those of us who
were forced passively to endure it, who a dozen times were flung to
the very brink of death. And yet every word is true. Though I could
scarce draw breath, so swiftly did we escape one danger only to meet
another, the big black, trained from childhood to face every peril
of the coast, with the white girl paddling in the bow, brought the
canoe through the surf and shipped no more than a bucket of water.
And then that negro and that slim girl turned in the surge, as
coolly as if there were no enemy within a thousand miles, and
started back, out again through the surf, to the Adventure.
Were we thus, I thought, to lose Abe Guptil, whom but now we had
rescued--good old Abe Guptil, into whose home I had gone long since
with the sad news that had forced him to embark with us on Gleazen's
mad quest? The thunder of the seas was so loud that I could only
wait--no words that I might utter could be heard a hand's-breadth
away.
For a moment the canoe hung motionless on the racing waters as a
hummingbird hangs in the air, then she shot ahead; and up from the
sea, directly in her path, came a tangle of bodies. Leaning out,
Arnold and I laid hands on Abe and Matterson; and while the negro
held the canoe in place, the girl herself reached back and caught
that rascal of a trader by the hair. Now tons of water broke around
us and the canoe half filled. Now the big negro, by the might of his
single paddle, drove us forward. The wash of water caught us up and
carried us on half a cable's length; the negro again fairly lifted
us by his great strength; we went in safety over the crest of the
next wave, then as we drew the last of the three into the canoe, we
began to pitch in the heavy swell of the open sea.
With our backs turned forever on the war, we paddled out to meet the
brig. Our great quest had failed. We had left a trail of dead men,
plundered goods, and a broken mission. But though all our hopes had
gone wrong, though Gleazen had lost all that he sought, there was
that in his face as he lay sick and miserable in the canoe which
told me that he had other strings for his bow; and when I looked up
at the brig, I vowed to myself that I would defend my own property
with as much zeal as I would have defended my uncle's.
"See!" Arnold whispered. "Yonder is a strange ship!"
I saw the sail, but I thought little of it at the time. I had grown
surprisingly in many ways, but to this very day I have not acquired
Arnold Lamont's wonderful power to appraise seemingly insignificant
events at their true value.
I only thought of how glad I was to come at last to the shelter of
the brig Adventure, how strangely glad I was to have brought off the
girl from the mission.
And when we came up under the side of the brig and saw honest Gideon
North and all the others on deck looking down at us, the girl let
her paddle slide into the water and bent her head on her hands and
cried.
VII
THE LONG ROAD HOME
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