Hurricane Williams/Chapter 7

cGUIRE felt, or pretended to feel, that the Mariana was depressed, hopeless, headed for the Sulphur Lake. Whatever she may have been before, whatever spirit awakened at her christening, Gunmeyer's touch had sent her hellward as surely as some men's brief ownership lose women's souls.

“Like all her sex, she's moody,” said McGuire.

A depressed atmosphere, like that found in a roomful of silent brooding people, settled upon her after the affair with the crew. She became noiseless except for the groans of rigging and bulkheads, the voice of Williams or the slow cold tones of Brundage, who had the manner of an executioner.

Even the Kanakas laughed and chattered, if at all only when out of sight. McGuire slipped about restlessly, a jester in a gloomy court, the fixed half-smile on his lips as though wisdom were given only to saddened fools.

One mid-watch he came out of the darkness, walking a little unsteadily. He idly peered through the skylight down into the chart-room where Williams sat glaring fixedly at nothing.

Then McGuire with a long look at the black face of the wheelman, glistening in the faint binnacle glow, shuffled to the rail and wearily leaned against it beside Brundage, who, straight as a soldier, as emotionless, seemed ever awaiting something that never happened.

“—just had a dream, Jake. I hate the damn things. Sneak in on a fellow when he's asleep. Jake, what's the devil goin' say to you an' me an' him”

A long arm went out. A hand closed on McGuire's shoulder, jerking him around, while Brundage bent slightly toward his face. Then in silence Brundage shoved him away, letting him fall against the rail.

“I'm not drunk,” McGuire protested against the unvoiced accusation. Williams had put all the liquor under a lock. “I'm not. Had a dream, I tell you. You got imagination.”

Brundage said something.

“Nothin' on my breath. Not a thing. An' it doesn't make any difference where I got it. Won't do you any good. All gone. You—you don't need brandy anyway. You got something in the world you hate. That keeps you warm.

“He”—a hand went vaguely toward the chart-room—“he don't need it 'cause he's got fire in him. But me, I'm just a— What's the devil goin' say to us, Jake, us three when we're all lined up each with a pitchfork-prong through his belly and the devil toyin' with the handle while he listens, waitin' for us to say something?

“Ever'body else in hell'll have a good reason for bein' there. Now the devil'll say Oh, the steward put some in duff sauce for Mr. Butler. Tray was right under my nose when I opened the door; an I followed the steward into the pantry to grow confidential. He tried to lie to me—lie to my nose.

“An' about the devil. He's goin' say to Williams: 'McGuire'd been all right but for you, Hurricane. Brundage too. Brundage was a good old sinner till he got old, dried up an' took to readin' the Bible.

“'But you, Hurricane Williams, I don't understand about you. You tore gold from my good friends an' wouldn't spend it yourself. You killed my sons without hatin' 'em. I've seen you kill a good honest devil's son-of-a-trader for beatin' a black boy because he prayed to God; an' lots o' times you've scared my—I mean the Lord's missionaries till they prayed for me to grab you.

“'I don't understand you at all, Williams. You might 've had a rip-roarin' time of it. You were damned anyway. You knew that. You didn't try to get to Heaven—like Brundage. I've watched you close. You didn't get any fun out o' earth. You lived like one o' them blasted desert saints on bread an' water an no clothes. What were you after?

“'McGuire, my son, why did you stay with this man who wouldn't let you have any fun? You knew you were headed for hell anyway!'

“An', Jake, I didn't know what to say, so he jiggled that pitchfork to wake me up. An', Jake, what are we goin' say to him? Sure to ask us that.”

McGuire fumbled with his pipe, then:

“An', Jake, I wonder did them convicts bury a dummy or did they dig Williams out o' that quicklime. He's got some funny scars. What you think?”

McGuire waited, eying him cunningly. Brundage cast a weather-eye around and aloft and remained silent, immobile, impenetrable. He had no confidential moods.

Presently the low, slow, careless voice went rambling on:

“—this ship, Jake, he doesn't want it. He's not goin' to South America. He could sell it there. In any one of a dozen rotten ports. Where there are consuls too. Specially where there are consuls.”

McGuire paused again to fumble with a match over the bowl of his pipe. The hand wavered unsteadily.

“Now—what was I sayin'? Oh, yes. Jake, do you know he's so against white men an all that, 'cause the hunger for it is right down inside o' him night an' day, gnawin', gnawin', gnawin'? I've watched him sit an' grind his teeth with his eyes on nothin' but what he can't forget. He wants it, Jake. He wants it as a drownin' man wants air—a white man's way of life. That damned mirage that shows a fellow what might've been.

“He ought 'o get drunk. That'd cure him. Cure anything. But he—he goes naked as a cannibal to punish himself for rememberin' the man that used to be—what the devil was his name? Anyway they hanged him at Sydney an' convicts saved him somehow.

“Now if they'd hanged me or you, we'd acted proper about it. Known we deserved it. You any how. But he's got something in him, Jake—something like a devil he's tamed. Isn't a devil. Isn't an angel either. I don't know what. Yes I do, too. Sometimes I get mad when a bush in the path, a box I can't lift, something seems to say I can't budge it—I get mad an' there's a glow like fire, an I can throw the box clear over my head.

“The undertow's caught me a time or two. Not much to catch hold of, but it's pulled like a great mouth sucking, an' something, I don' know what, breaks loose inside o' me an' for a minute or two I c'd swim through ice, solid ice!

“Ever'thing gives way when you're in that mood. Nothing—nothing can touch you, hurt you, hold you, stop you. You c'd blow out the flame of an archangel's sword an' break the hilt over his head. He's like that all the time, Jake. I,” McGuire added mockingly, “when I'm drunk!”

“Yes,” said Brundage slowly, catching the last phrase as he put aside his own shadowed thoughts, “you're drunk.”

“Nothin o' the kind. I'm so sober I can't sleep. What you think he's goin' to do with this ship? I know. Goin' back to Rainbow Reef with a volcano for a porch light.

“Some day more white men'll come. An missionaries. They're creepin' up. They say Williams stirs natives up to kill 'em.”

McGuire laughed, empty-voiced, mirthlessly.

“Kill 'em! 'Member that young Scotch mishy he yanked out o' Dillion Bay by the nape o' the neck? Made an awful howl, that fellow. He's still posin' as a martyr—don't know yet he was saved from the cookin'-pits.”

McGuire lapsed into groggy silence; and in a little while he said, coaxing for attention:

“Jake?”

Brundage did not look around or answer.

“Jake!”

The bark heaved with a long rhythm before the steady wind. Cordage whimpered softly. Brundage had the ears of a stone man.

“Jake!”

Brundage turned slowly, cold-eyed, bored.

“Jake, I know what I'll tell the devil. I'll say me an' Williams an' you come down to keep away from missionaries. And he'll say to me, 'You've come to the wrong place, my son. Get up-stairs, quick.'”

McGuire laughed loudly, swaying.

Angrily Brundage spoke:

“Get below, damn you. You'll put us on a reef or something!”

The Mariana continued eastward until she fell in with a little schooner that was very much amazed at the request to take off passengers and crew, although the name of Hurricane Williams explained the situation. She finally agreed to do as asked if provisions would be sent too.

The arrangements were made and passengers, officers and all the crew except the Finn were removed to the schooner.

The Finn, too, could have been transferred, but Williams was taking close care of his broken shoulder; so he was kept on board. It was like Williams to kill one man, or more than one, without a thought; and to give time and patience to an ignorant, stupid creature. He might sail, as he had sailed, a thousand miles out of his way to return a kidnaped native to his own village; then knock the native to the deck for trying to steal something from the ship as he left.

Anyway, one ship was the same as another to the Finn.

But having got rid of the crew and passengers, Williams did not turn around and head for Tinakula, the volcano near which he made the closest thing to a home that he had. He continued eastward almost to the Pautomatu reefs, where he put in many months without much success pearl-poaching.

One part of the world was about the same as another to him, or at least one part of the South Seas was about like any other; but sooner or later he would head back for the Santa Cruz group, then the wildest and least known of any of the islands except the Solomons.

All went badly enough, so McGuire said, to have satisfied their worst wisher of ill luck.

The Mariana broke off a coral arm and got a leak that did not amount to much at first. There was a variety of minor troubles, and the one most disturbing to McGuire was the fact that he never had time to be idle.

Once or twice when dirty, begrimed, worn out, and grumbling with a sort of half-amused insincerity, the trace of a smile appeared on Williams's hard lips as he listened.

He had a strong liking for that rapscallion, and McGuire knew it, presumed on it, but had to work just the same.

A man of iron will and resolute ideas would not have lasted as a companion on Williams's deck through one watch; the two men would have crossed and one gone overboard.

Brundage, in many ways pretty much of an iron man, seemed to have no wishes, but Williams gave him them; and he was like a man of infinite gratitude toward a debt that could never be paid.

McGuire guessed, but could not be sure, that Brundage had been one of the convicts that saved the still living hanged man from a quicklime grave and helped him escape; and that Williams, who ever remembered favors or other things, had in some way pulled Brundage out of what was probably a life sentence.

By more things than his erect bearing and military way of giving orders, McGuire also guessed that Brundage had been an army officer. He had a wrist like a fencing-master and swung a cutlas as a cavalryman swings a saber.

The Mariana, “homeward bound to hell” as McGuire said cheerfully, had her name changed, a coat of sullying black paint over the gilded figurehead, ports painted on her sides, an after-deck-house stuck up, and such other little things as helped to veil her identity from the casual glance of passing ships.

After the long voyage back she was sliding up the eastern coast of the New Hebrides toward the isolated reef north of Santa Cruz and under the eye of an unresting volcano.

She was going along at a good clip and well in to get the land breeze, when a three-master with a sawed-off but smokeless funnel amidships popped out from around a lee promontory about three thousand yards astern.

McGuire went to the masthead and nearly fell off, telescope and all, as he shouted down:

“Hey, Jake! Tell the skipper he's picked up a man-o'-war's tow-line. Hear me? I knew this hooker was a Jonah—an there's the whale!”

He pointed astern.

Williams, without pausing as he came through the companion, glanced scowlingly over the taffrail and passed on forward to set all sail.

Brundage took the wheel, relieving the big Kabuloo, whose weight was as good as capstan on the sheets.

It soon became evident that the gunboat was hanging on to the Mariana's course. Whether or not she was suspicious, she had the right to inquire into the business of every craft; and there was nothing for Williams to do but run for it. If a boarding-officer appeared and asked for papers

“How's that?” McGuire asked.

Brundage did not answer.

They could outsail the gunboat as she did not have steam up; and all would have been well, but with the drop of the sun they were beginning to find the leak growing worse.

When the Mariana had scraped through the coral she came off with a leak that was watched almost hourly; and from pumping once a day, it had become twice; then three times each twenty-four hours they had to make the pipes suck air, which was annoying to McGuire.

Under the extra press of canvas that had put the gunboat hull-down, something seemed to have strained below; and the men were doing twenty minute relays at the pumps and barely beating the water. If she became waterlogged all the speed would be taken out of her, and it began to look as though they might have to beach the bark before morning.

“Too bad you can't swim, Jake, 'cause we're most assuredly goin' get our feet wet—us fellows that can swim. But don't worry, Jake. Your friend back there'll be standin' by at sunrise to take you Off!”

But Williams put over the last trick that the gunboat, if she were chasing him and she seemed to be, would suspect. When the darkness was thick enough to absorb a negro, he squared away toward the west and lay hove to with the pumps going. The next morning he put into Havannah Harbor with very earnest eyes turned seaward all the time they were there. It was much like a rabbit dodging under a bush by the roadside while the hound went by.

McGuire went ashore and claimed to have got all the able-bodied cannibals for ten miles around. At high tide, with great heaving on hawsers at which they swarmed, the bark was brought up on the beach as for “boot-topping,” and Williams went after the leak.

It took five tides to get himself satisfied.

The morning of the third day a schooner came in. She had scarcely got her hook down before Williams called on her and her masts fell. She would tell no tales for a while.

With kedges and natives in boats hauling away, the Mariana was pulled off and took to sea again, leaving most of her tinned meats by way of payment. Williams set a course northward straight for old Tinakula, whose red eye, two thousand feet in air, winks at the horizon.

Stormy weather came on with low clouds night and day, much rain and some wind. But everything seemed to be going all right, which alarmed McGuire, for he said it was unnatural.

Then with half a gale under the yards and night's black cap drawn down tightly and a misty rain driving like needle-points, breakers suddenly appeared dead ahead.

At the lookout's warning shout, Williams thrust half his body over the windward rail, then wheeled with a roar:

“Down helm! Down—down—down!”

Springing aft, his arms worked in gesture as he shouted.

“Aye, down!” McGuire answered, putting his light weight against the spoke at which the mighty Kabuloo also pulled.

Williams's voice burst through the wind as he roared:

“Starboard braces! Forward there— For your lives—let go—let go—by the run. Let go!”

The Kanakas howled excitedly.

Williams jumped to the brace-pins, his voice cracking:

“Haul—haul away there!”

He leaped too late to put his weight to braces. They came around with a sweep and jerked back on the instant, tearing the slack from the men's hands before they could get the lines over the brace-pins; and the Mariana was caught aback in the breakers.

The curse that had ever followed and touched Williams again and again fell. He, who simply would not be thwarted or crushed, was ever and ever struck by hazardous luck. Given more time he might have kept her off, though he was in a bad patch of reefs. The Mariana's compasses had beaten him at last. He was miles farther west than he thought. The reefs were uncharted, but he knew them.

So it was that the devil finally got the Mariana in tow.

She came broadside to a sea that tossed her. Her canvas was torn off in explosions of wind, and rags slatted and cracked. The wheel spun from the men that fought it, trying to make the doomed bark take the reefs, bow on.

Kabuloo, massive of body, had his arms locked in the spokes like a man who has the neck of an enemy in the crook of an elbow. When the wheel kicked he was flung upward as a rag doll from a baby's hand and landed sprawlingly on the deck, unconscious.

McGuire, less tightly braced, was knocked away and, staggering, brought up against the rail with a bump that took his breath.

The wheel was loose. There was no holding it. There was none aft to hold it. There was nothing to hold it by; the rudder had parted from the stern post.

The bark tossed and rolled tempestuously, was lifted with great heaves, hurled and dropped. Men were shaken back and forth across the deck as dice are rattled in a box.

Seas came aboard. With tremendous unsteady broadside plunges the Mariana made for the reef and hit it, stern on. Her plates might as well have been of egg-shell. She rolled crunchingly, was lifted and pounded down with a jarring that shook men to the base of their necks. Rain and spray beat blindingly. The main deck was smothered.

Again and again some man with a muffled strangling cry was torn away by the seas that swept her. Those men went out into the froth-fringed blackness like rags adrift, to be torn and broken on the rocks.

The deck-houses vanished: straw would have held as well.

Overhead sail fragments cracked and whipped about, beating on the Finn lashed at the mainmast head, on other men, clawing for life in the reeling, jerking rigging. The 'midship bulwarks tore away like wet pasteboard. The maintopmast snapped. Stays screamed.

The Mariana was gone. Only her broken bones were left.

She was beaten and shifted till water filled and steadied her a little and sand scooped up by the waves was jammed around her. Pounding seas swept her like a rock at high tide. The forecastle was under to the windlass-bits. The poop slanted steeply and waves smashed at it, flooding it.

One by one some of the men made way across the quarterdeck into the swamped saloon and up where in the dawn they found McGuire in the mizzen rigging and Kabuloo on deck, silent and dully swaying against the lashings that held him to the mast. McGuire had kicked him into consciousness and coaxed him to a place of safety; but, his chest crushed by the wheel's kick, he had died in the night.

From daylight on Williams fought his way about the main deck along life-lines, helping in the three or four men who had weathered it with lashings in the rigging.

When he had helped Brundage, still erect, immobile, though weak and ready to drop, up through the steep companionway McGuire, aloft, caught sight of him and screamed:

“Jake! Didn't I tell you? When ship 'r woman goes to hell she goes—an takes all hands with her!”

They were on a scraggly path of coral and sand that at its highest point rose about twenty feet; and swept by wind and sea was as bare as a man's palm.

To the westward the purple plumage of a hilly island fifteen or twenty miles off lay like a tiny dark conical cloud all alone; but to the north, in the far distance of the clear sky could be seen the faint smoke-cloud plume of Tinakula.

There was not much tide; and between the bark and high ground water boiled continually among spikes of coral. Death seemed lying in wait there to catch whoever should attempt to leave the Mariana; but Williams, as if aware that whatever else might happen his life was safe—or maybe holding life of no value if it was to be retained without daring—took the end of a line and went over the side.

He clawed through, and eighty yards from the bark stood upright and signaled. Not even his voice would carry through the breakers.

The end of a hawser on a reel was bent to the line, and he hauled away.

Williams's skin had been scraped, scratched and gouged; but he did not pause, though the salt water burned as it would have burned any other man's broken skin. He heaved away until inch by inch the hawser came to hand; then he poked about until he got the hawser's end fast on to a loop of coral, and signaled again.

On board the ship the hawser was made fast well up on the mizzen through a snatch-block and the men toiled on, pulling it taut as they could. There was no taking it to a capstan for waves broke continually over the main deck. A traveler-block with a bosun's seat attached was set on the hawser and Brundage got into it. McGuire's sarcastic advice was for him to hold his feet well up as there were likely to be sharks. Then two natives and the Finn, one by one, were brought off.

McGuire said that he wouldn't leave the bark until some stores were put ashore because he preferred to starve where the provisions were.

Williams, hauling himself along the hawser, returned to the Mariana, and all that day he and the four men with him worked breaking out what stores they could come at. He took more care getting hammer, nails, and the ship's instruments ashore than he did with the sack of gold taken from the “treasure-chest.”

For two days they worked under a blistering sun, making a seaworthy raft. McGuire vowed he had rather have taken a board and swum to the distant island.

There was salty tinned meat and little water. But a sea-raft was made with a broad sail bent on.

Just before they put off, Williams took bearings.

While they were standing around, McGuire said to the Finn:

“Think o' that harf-million we're leaving!”

The mythic “harf-million” had been dinned into the Finn's ears by the forecastle wranglers until that was one of the things in English that he did understand; and with a directness of gaze unusual in his eyes, he turned to stare at the wreck, then grunted something like a question.

“Why? Too much to carry. Can't hide it on this blasted reef. It's safe there. Nobody'll find it—nobody will ever find it.”

The Finn stared thoughtfully at the sky while McGuire, lazily sprawled on the hot sand, regarded him with amusement for a time, then closed his eyes, dozing.

On the top of a tinned-meat box Williams figured out his reckoning, giving the position of the reef. It was hard for him to believe that he had made a miscalculation—had let the compasses beat him—and he wanted to make sure that this wasn't another reef. It wasn't. Compasses on an iron ship are the most treacherous things in the world, and they had avenged themselves just as he became sure that he knew how to compensate their errors.

He crumpled the paper, a fly-leaf from an almanac, and threw it on to the sand.

The raft with everything movable lashed fast was pushed and poled into the surf. It swamped continually, but they got it through, spread sail and started for the island.

Much of the time McGuire went into the water, swimming along by the raft like a lazy porpoise. He said that it was cooler and eased his thirst. He was taking the chance of being grabbed by a shark and knew it, for though sharks will keep out of sight when the weather is stormy they search near the surface of the water when it is a warm, pleasant day.

But McGuire was an extraordinary swimmer and knew all the tricks of the water, could very nearly go to sleep in it. Frequently with natives he had swum miles out to sea and back again, maybe having to frighten off a shark or two on the way. It was, he insisted, easier than walking; which was no doubt true. Yet he said that Williams was the best swimmer in the world.

Before the raft got within four miles of shore it was approached by natives in canoes, a hideous-looking lot of undersized savages, quite ready to fill the survivors with arrows—until in their own language they learned that Williams was among them. His name was known to savages who had scarcely seen a white man; and he was very well known among the Santa Cruzians.

They gave the raft a tow; and that night, too, they gave a feast at which most of the pigs in the village perished. The cannibals sat squatting in lively wonder about Williams.

The party was escorted a few days later by outrigger canoes forty miles to Santa Cruz itself and entered Graciosa Bay where more pigs died; for Williams was well known there, being near his home, which McGuire in irony had named Asoara—the cannibal word for Rainbow.

Inside of two months a whaler put in for wood and water.

McGuire, Brundage, the Finn and three natives were on the beach with a tale of being survivors of a ship that had burned at sea and of how they had been castaways for two years, finally making their way to a point where they heard ships sometimes came.

The whaler took them off and headed leisurely for Honolulu.

The others worked, but the Finn, McGuire insisted, was a sick man. McGuire pretended to understand his tongue and jabbered at him with words of his own coining and a wise air. The Finn was permitted to lie in.

McGuire philosophically said to Brundage that Honolulu was as good a place to buy a schooner as any. Williams wanted one, and not being quite so much of a ship-stealer as legend made him, or perhaps not having an opportunity and excuse just then, was sending them out to get whatever they could.

“To get it honestly,” said McGuire, “with a part o' that harf-million we stole.”

Brundage eyed the Finn from day to day with cold-eyed hopefulness. The man was sick; but Brundage frowned upon McGuire because in a dozen little ways out of the meager comforts to be got in the forecastle of a dirty whaler he showed the Finn kindness.

Brundage insisted that he had never seen a Finn that wasn't a bearer of ill luck; and that stupid as this one was and in spite of his inability to speak English, he knew the whereabouts of Hurricane Williams and would speak enough of it to tell what he knew.

“Jake, your soul's frost-bit. He's all knocked to pieces and he don't know within a thousand miles of where we are or where we've been. How could he? Nobody talks to him but me an nobody's going to. At Honolulu he gets all the wages due and fare paid to Frisco. Out he goes on the first ship that's goin' before anybody gets more'n a glimpse o' him. Vanishes from the earth. What can he tell if he tries?”

Brundage shook his graying head in disapproval.

That was how it came about that a Finnish seaman in a San Francisco hospital babbled feverishly in a strange tongue, but with such repetition of the word Mariana, accompanied by something that sounded so like an effort to pronounce Hurricane Williams, that newspapers speculated imaginatively.

Two Finnish seamen, brought from the water front as interpreters, said in their own thickened English that the fellow talked no sense. That was because he was a Mordvinian with a dialect they could not understand.

It happened that Gorvhalsen was in San Francisco. He knew more languages and dialects, particularly the Scandinavian, than he had fingers. His restless mind was interested in anything out of the usual. He visited the Finn, talked with him, got his story, got a doctor; but the Finn was taken away by death, so that Gorvhalsen fell heir to a piece of crumpled paper torn from the back of an almanac. On it were certain cryptic notations, plain enough to any sea-captain.

Gorvhalsen had money; but even a legendary half-million tempted him strongly; the adventurous quest perhaps more strongly. He soon showed interest in South Sea charts, talked with many skippers, got in touch with Matt Ward.

They had their heads together for nights at a time; then Ward hurried off to Honolulu and began making inquiries for two men whom nobody knew; also to make arrangements for getting together a crew that would take care of Williams and his cannibals, regarding the number and ferocity of whom the Finn had been extremely imaginative.

But Brundage and McGuire had not introduced themselves to the whaler by names used on the Mariana. They were Brundage and McGuire, and the sick Finn had not learned that. Nor had his description of the two men, coming to Ward second-hand anyway, been vivid enough to cause him to suspect the lazy well-known beach-comber just because he happened to be red-headed.

So it was that Matt Ward had awaited the coming of the Heraldr at Honolulu, and had put to sea in command of her with a drove of untamed devils in the forecastle.