Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/105

Rh face were full of glittering mockery. He adopted an attitude of complacent superiority to me, and when he eluded my bullets with an intuition that I will never understand he leered at me with scorn.

"Gentlemen, I shot at that rat a hundred times, and my hatred increased when I became aware of the fact that I could not hit him. It may have been that my anger made my hand unsteady, but I have turned from missing him and drilled a bullet into a mark no bigger than a half dollar, and twice as far away.

"As I had given up trying to rid the ship of his children, I gave up trying to hit the patriarch, I knew that the whole thing was impossible, and I knew that too much tackling of the impossible leads straight to madness. I knew a man who tried for fourteen years to kill a dog, and he went crazy and shot himself. The dog dragged him to his own door.

Y LATVIAN came to me on the bridge one morning and asked, throwing one thumb in the direction of a rat which was nibbling tentatively at a coil of rope.

You want me to kill 'em?'

No,' I said, 'It's no use. You go back to your work.'

"He smiled, bowed down to the deck, threw out palms of his hands and went away. I did not suspect then what it was that he meant.

"Because of the rats, our course was impeded. Daily some little thing would go wrong. The rats chewed at everything, and it was no wonder that things broke at the least strain. It was more by vexation than by delay that we were hindered. My men grew nervous under the irritation of the rodents; they talked of nothing else. Almost any other crew would have given trouble to its master. Anxious to end the trip that was growing so distasteful, my men tried to expedite matters, and in their haste they caused more delays, and added to the multiplicity of things which fretted us.

"And so there was a general feeling of relief on the evening that preceded the day we expected to sight our island. I alone was a little worried. A vague premonition had taken charge of my mind, and I glanced back along our wake too often.

"In the piercing light which comes just before darkness, I saw a sail behind us.

"My presentiment became a positive worry. The island was not in the path of the run of sea traffic, or we would certainly never have chosen it as a rendezvous. I had not counted on seeing a ship for three days before we reached it.

"The more consideration I gave the identity of the boat, the more firmly I was convinced that we were its goal; that it bore the infuriated fanatics whom the priest of the ravished temple had sent to bring back the stolen treasures.

How could they know?' I wondered, but in my heart I knew that intelligence has strange channels of transmission in the Orient.

"There was a dead silence on the water, and the splash of our own procedure was the only relief to the ear. The setting sun beat a long red welt into the breast of the sea, and the dreaded sail stuck up over the horizon like the fin of a leviathan.

"I ordered my men to put themselves in readiness for trouble, and at the moment of my speaking the sun popped into the water, and darkness gathered with the speed of an epidemic. All night I watched, but there was nothing to see and nothing to hear. Long before the dawn I found myself trying to persuade my heart that my suspicions were groundless—that the sail concerned me in no way at all—a tramp off its course—smugglers of pearls.

"But the first dim light of morning banished these illusions. The vessel stood by, so near that I marveled at the silence with which she had come upon us. We prepared for defense.

"You understand, of course, that we carried no ordnance, I think the recoil of one piece would have jarred that groaning churn apart. Besides, we wanted whatever appearance of innocence we could summon. The temptation in our hold would have upset the chastity of a warship.

"We were armed with automatic pistols and carbines, and most of my men were fond of knives.

"I am partial to knife-men, gentlemen. They are clean and they fight in the open. A gun-man is the lowest form of life; he lurks in a doorway and shoots into the back. The knife-man fights his enemy knee to knee, and his blade is part of his body.

"Our first message from the temple crusaders was a ball across our bow in the sweet old pirate style. We made no answer. I knew they would not try to subdue us with cannon. It would have been too dangerous to the sacred jewels of the provincial deity whose property they were replevining.

"There was no need of an attempted flight. A glance would have shown the greenest landsman that she had twice our speed. We stood by to fight when the boarders should come, and, to be truthful, I was not greatly concerned. The worry of the night had given way to the actuality of the dawn, and battle was better than suspense. I knew the temper of my men as well as I knew the temper of my own blade; I had tried the blade and the men before.

"We waited until the first boatload of little men was almost under our rail before we riddled them with lead. Our first round must have accounted for half the boat's personnel. But before we shot again, three other boats had put out, and more were being lowered.

One boat at a time,' I directed, and my men nodded.

T MUST have been Hell itself in those open boats, clearly exposed to our fire, perfect targets. We emptied two of them completely. But there was no dismaying the brown devils that were heading over the dimpled waters on that sparkling morning. They were not fighting for glory or gold or the love of fighting. They were fighting for the love of a god, and there is no bullet which stops such men.

"They swarmed up our sides at a half dozen places almost simultaneously, and our decks were red.

"Side by side with me, in the horrid phantasma of battle, there moved a fighting shadow, protecting me, seconding me, keeping always with me. I knew, without looking, that it was my Latvian, keeping his pledge.

"At the first contact of fighting, the rats disappeared. Down the hatches they went, like roaches scurrying into a crack when one turns a light upon them. I recall a feeling of relief in the thought that in the fighting, at least, we would not be troubled by them.

"Gentlemen, I have fought much, and there is such a thing as pleasant battle, but that was not. It was like being thrown into a cistern filled solid with flies. The brown fanatics were on all sides of us. They fought with knives, and a few had old-fashioned firearms, but it was with their numbers that they fought principally. Many of them fell, but they were choking our defense as one may choke a mill by throwing too much wheat into it. An almost interminable stream of them came over our gunwales.

"Vaguely, I wondered that so small a vessel could hold so many men.

"The bright arc of a knife flying end over end loomed swiftly up before me, and the shadow which had been at my side sprang before me and crumpled. My Latvian was down.