Crab Reef/Chapter 3

sunset, Sailor Penny took Peter Griffon to the edge of the cliff before the shelter and pointed downward. Griffon saw a strip of still water about one hundred yards in width and three times as long at the foot of the cliff. This was sheltered from the outer commotion by a crescent of black reef against which the seas rocked up and rode straight and burst to froth as white as snow. Midway the reef, where it was highest and widest, squatted a fragment of an old hulk—twenty feet or so of stove keel, unplanked ribs crusted with shells and weeds, a ragged butt of bowsprit and a stump of foremast.

"It be a proper island at, an' no more nor a strip at full an' all a-wash at flood," said Penny. "I've set here many's the time for hours o' moonlit nights picturin' Caleb Stave on that there reef without boat nor raft to bring 'im off."

"You have?" queried Griffon, surprised. "So you know him, too?"

"I've heard tell of 'im from more nor yerself, mate, up an' down the islands these many years, ashore an' afloat. He'd look uncommon well on that there reef without raft nor boat, blast his fishy deadlights!"

"He'd swim ashore. You don't know the inhuman beastliness of that old man, or ye'd wish him worse than that, as I do. I wish him in hell! He's had me in hell, down in the red hot slime of it, these three years, torturing me soul and body. That's where I wish Caleb Stave—for a thousand years!"

"He wouldn't swim ashore, no fear! Sharks, me lad! They be down there a-plenty. I encourages 'em. He'd find Crab Reef hell enough."

"You would starve him? Good!"

"Nay, he wouldn't starve."

"Not starve? What then?"

"That be an uncommon bit o' reef, lad. I've seen the same north about the Tortugas. But come along now an' I'll show 'e somethink else afore dark."

He led the way back to the shelter, went to the rear of it and thrust a hand up into the thatch. A flake of dull metallic surface was exposed to view.

"What is it?" asked Griffon, who was beginning to entertain suspicions of Sailor Penny's mental condition.

"A pewter dish," answered Penny. "A lookout forrard. A sentinel. Safety."

Griffon smiled indulgently and shook his head.

"It shows from the outside, broad an' bright," continued the other. "But only from one angle. Over yonder scouts the Turtle, along me brook an' strip o' clearance, from sunup to sundown—an' he knows the angle. If he sights a stranger, up he climbs into the highest o' the right trees, up to the angle for a glimpse o' this here pewter dish, an' takes a shoot at it. Maybe two o' us be settin' here in the cool—or three, maybe—when ping goes the pewter dish, an' down we goes underground, leavin' nothink for a stranger to see save this here old shelter what a shipwrecked sailor might rig an' sleep under a night or two."

Griffon was impressed and puzzled.

"But the turtle? What d'ye mean by a turtle climbing trees?"

"Injun. Carib. Good lad, the Turtle—an' smart as paint."

"Ah! An aborigine. What does he shoot with?"

"Me own cross-bow, the best that ever sped iron tipped quarrel. I took it off a Flemming shipmaster years ago. It shoots farther an' truer nor dag or pistolet, an' without the bang. An' now I'll show 'e somethink else."

They left the shelter and entered the edge of the jungle at a point about twenty yards away. Sailor Penny lay flat and wriggled forward beneath the tangle a distance of six or eight yards. Griffon followed him close. Penny got to his feet and climbed into the branches of a tree of dense growth and low branches, disappearing in a few seconds in the upper tangle of green and brown. Griffon followed slowly, with considerable difficulty.

He reached a narrow platform of sticks lashed securely together to form an aerial den in the upper depths of green obscurity and jungle mystery. There Penny was waiting for him and led him halfway around the tree trunk on foot ropes of living vines re-enforced with cordage, and along a horizontal limb on hands and knees, where they were enveloped in screens of hanging tangle. Penny swung beneath the limb on the twisted jungle net, went down hand under hand and in a second was swallowed from Griffon's sight. Griffon followed, awkwardly because of his disabled left arm. But the descent was not difficult, for good hemp cordage was rove among the vines and ratlines were set as in a ship's shrouds.

He sank into a dense tide of snarled vegetation and found Penny waiting for him again among the roots of things, in a space circumscribed as a ship's forecastle hatch, walled and roofed with foliage and stem and tendril. The only light was an amber dusk from high overhead. Penny chuckled, stooped1, fumbled at the ground for a second, then raised the lid of a black hole.

"The after hatch," he said, swinging it lightly up and back until it reclined against the jungle wall. He lowered himself into the hole shoulder deep; Griffon joined him there; whereupon Penny reached over and brought the light, hinged door of wicker work and woven grass into place above their bowed heads.

Sailor Penny had an extraordinary establishment underground, which he shared with an extraordinary company. Here was a cave in the living rock older than humanity and almost as crooked as the ways of Caleb Stave, with a seaweed vent halfway up the face of the seventy-foot cliff. This vent, a horizontal crack in the rock, had been originally of considerable extent, but had been filled up with roughly dressed stone from both ends to within six feet of the center.

This aperture, as wide as a gate, but no more than two feet high, was hidden from seaward eyes—so Penny said—by a narrow ledge just below it across the face of the cliff and a thin veil of creepers pendent from above. It stood wide open to a drift of salty breeze when Griffon first glanced through it at the dimming sea and the first stars; but a moment later, at a word from Penny, two black fellows closed it with a grating of oak and rusty iron.

"D'ye fear an attack from the sea to-night?" asked Griffon.

"Aye, we'll be attacked to-night, same as usual," replied Penny casually.

"Same as usual? I thought this a secret stronghold!"

"Aye, secret enough from our human enemies."

Again Griffon felt a doubt of the old man's sanity; and, at the same moment, a daunting sensation of chilliness between his shoulder blades and up the back of his neck. He cast an apprehensive glance at the grating and the fast deepening night beyond it.

"But what else d'ye fear?" he asked with scores of old tales of sea devils and sea ghosts stirring in his mind.

Sailor Penny ignored the question, took him by a hand and led him back to an inner chamber of the cave. Here, against one rocky wall and screened by hanging mats of woven grass, burned a clear fire beneath two iron pots. The thin smoke from the firm, dry fuel crept up a vertical crevice in the wall and vanished in the gloom high overhead. The runaway slave named Henry was in attendance upon the pots: and Big Tom and two other negroes and a small man as dark as they, but thin featured and straight haired, squatted close at hand.

This last was the Turtle, the Carib, the watchman with the Flemish cross-bow. The strange blacks were runaway slaves from the south side of the island, who had escaped to Sailor Penny's sanctuary three months before.

"I've had as many as eight below hatches here at the one time, not countin' the Turtle," explained Penny. "Eight runaways, an' two of 'em 'dentured white men like yerself, mate. One o' that lot died for lack o' the blood he lost breakin' away."

"What became of the others?" asked Griffon.

"I got 'em clean off—but me signal was flyin' nigh onto a month before I could ship 'em. Some of 'em be coral now, like enough, an' some of 'em under overseers' lashes agin, maybe—but I done me best—give 'em their freedom an a clean run to hold it."

"You shipped them away from her?"

"Aye, an' dozens afore that lot an' maybe a dozen since. I been here fifteen years, lad."

"And yet you've not escaped yourself?"

"Escaped! I be a free man, mate—me own master!"

"Yet you remain here in hiding and succor runaway slaves at risk of your life!"

"A diversion, lad. It passes the time o' waitin'. Henry, serve the stew."

Griffon asked more questions of his host during supper, but failed to get anything better than a wag of the head for answer; and immediately after supper he was shown to a far corner of the cave, where a thin mattress was spread for him beside Penny's couch. He lay down and was within a blink of sleep when he was disturbed by the poke of a finger in the ribs.

"Where were 'e when 'e seen Stave bury the blunt?" whispered Penny.

"In the loft," he replied impatiently, longing to resign himself to the sweet, light pressure on lids and brain.

"An' ye seen him lift the floor an' bury it in a corner?"

"Yes. Nay, not in a corner. Behind the counter—midway—with coils of rope atop."