Plundered Cargo/Chapter 20

OR an instant the onlookers caught in breathless astonishment were frozen in their poses: Karelia wide-eyed before the grinning yellow man who had disarmed her so neatly; Hansen at his winch, mouth agape; up on the high bridge Captain Judah half risen out of his chair.

Karelia's scream, which was like a battle cry of the ancient fen people, her ancestors, broke tension. She whirled away from the Chinaman and with a bound was at the side of the hatch looking down the shaft of yellow sunlight where it illumined a square of blackness below. There a block of cotton bales arose like an island from the midst of inky water ten feet below the deck level. A squirming mass of legs and heads writhed atop this pedestal.

“Mate!” she called, and jumped.

Spike Horn in his plunge down the hatch had been lucky. He struck, head and shoulders, on two bent backs of Chinamen stooping over the lashings of a bale about to be hoisted. His breath was jarred out of him but otherwise he was uninjured. Before he could recover from the double shock of his surprise and his fall five half naked bodies hurled themselves upon him. On his back and fighting furiously, Spike felt himself being forced along the rasping surface of burlap toward the edge of the square of bales lifting above the bilge; below that was water—and drowning.

Then Karelia's cry and the jar of her body as it plumped squarely upon the tangled knot of bodies covering his. Spike with a supreme effort made a wrestler's “bridge” which lifted the squirming mass. What with the surprise of Karelia's flying attack, holds om Spike were loosened. Now with the bowing of his back he managed to send two of his assailants slipping and clawing desperately to save themselves from dropping off the cotton island.

Spike, looking up under a smothering armpit, caught just a glimpse of a fighting fury. Karelia, on one knee, was striking out right and left with short arm jabs. Coolly. Craftily. Like any ring general, she landed her blows where they would have most telling effect and parried the clawing hands that reached for her throat. With every piston stroke of her arms the heavy cables of her hair leaped from her bosom as if enlivened with some fighting reflex.

Came a bawl in Cantonese down the hatch from the possessor of two precious revolvers on the deck. Instantly the five Chinamen on the cotton pillar ceased fighting and made for the iron ladder giving egress from the hold. They went up the rungs like frightened monkeys. Karelia, taken back by this sudden shift of tactics, sat back on propped hands and let them go unhindered. She was breathing hard.

Spike gave her a look of mingled awe and admiration. “Girl, you're a wonder!” he wheezed between labored breaths. “If you hadn't taken the high dive down here I'd've been a goner.”

“Come; we've got to get out of here and find out what all this means.” Karelia strode to the ladder and began mounting it. Spike was following when he saw the girl above him suddenly recoil. A yellow hand gripping a knife had swung a menacing arc just above her mounting head. A simian face was pushed over the coaming.

“Mo' bettah you no come topside.” Implication in that gibberish was sufficiently plain. After a second's indecision the two on the ladder accepted a situation they could not combat—swish of cold steel at unprotected throats—and they descended to the cotton.

There in the square of dazzling sunlight which made the rest of the hold all the more black by contrast the two exchanged sober looks.

“Somebody else's move—not ours!” was Spike's trenchant comment.

“Not hard to guess who that somebody is, Mate,” came bitterly from the girl. “You and I were great boobies to risk coming aboard here and stumbling into Cap'n Storrs' trap.”

Spike shook his head argumentatively. “Not so sure ole Storrs has a hand in this business, unless it's his game to get hold of our guns. They've been getting this cotton. You saw it spread all over the deck. Maybe if the Chinks've found out what's in these bales they've decided to count themselves in on the deal. An' they drew two fine aces when they saw them handy in our belts.

“Anyway,” he bravely appended, “we're not in bad for long. Over on the schooner the doc and the Iron Man—when they don't see us come back—well, they've got two rifles an' they'll come across to find out what for.”

Karelia had a reply on her lips when a harsh sound interrupted. It was a grinding and heavy dragging on the deck above; over that the thin whine of the winch. A shadow fell athwart their well of sunlight.

“The hatch cover!” Karelia gasped and bounded for the ladder. “They're shutting us in!”

Again that bared yellow arm and icicle glint of a knife at the ladder's top—a shaven poll and snail-like eye.

“Mo' bettah no come up.” The head darted back.

Something slammed down like the clapping on of a mausoleum's sealing plate. Darkness engulfed them.

Meanwhile there was interesting comedy-drama on the deck above the trapped twain.

When Captain Judah Storrs witnessed the lightning-quick transfer of power resident in two small contraptions of steel and vulcanized rubber his heart turned to water. Just by so much had he lost his last chance to possess a fortune in black gum; he with his two butcher knives opposed to six Chinamen possessing two revolvers. Last chance gone unless, desperate hope, he could out-think the Celestials; oppose guns with guile. The man's resourceful brain steeled itself for the encounter when he saw the five entombed Chinese hailed out of the hold by the sixth on deck who had turned the trick of possessing the weapons and eyed the six yellow rats standing with slant eyes turned up to the bridge,

Captain Storrs found his first inspiration when he witnessed the pantomime of the swinging knife played over Karelia's ascending head. “Mr, Hansen,” he bellowed, “hoist out your tackle and couple onto the hatch cover ready to lower away.”

The skipper was counting on the Chinamen's acquiescence in his move; it would appear he was playing their game when he ordered the sealing of the two invaders' prison. Nor did he misjudge the effect of his strategy. Two of the Chinamen jumped to couple the swinging block hook to the ring of the hatch cover. Hansen threw power into the winch. The steel framed cover dropped into place with a ringing clatter.

Then once more the mutinous yellow men clotted into a knot about the man with the two revolvers, their shifting little eyes turned up to the huddled body of Skipper Judah in his chair on the bridge. In the absence of any provocative move from him, initiative was slow to form with the men so long accustomed to bend their backs under authority. Their Number One man, he who had lifted the revolvers, consulted with his fellows in low tones.

Captain Storrs played a desperate card: “You there; bring those guns up here to me.”

Number One shot back a defiant grin. “No can do.”

The fetter of whisker about the master's mouth tightened in old time determination. He sternly repeated his order. For answer the Number One man passed one of the weapons to a fellow and together, ignoring Hansen at the winch, they walked down the deck to the foot of the ladder leading up the Storrs citadel.

“Stop right where you are!” The white man made a mendacious move of his left hand to an empty coat pocket. Number One grinned up at him out of tiny eye slits.

“No fool-ee me. I t'ink maybe-so levolvah you no hab got. I t'ink maybe-so mo' bettah we mak-ee chin-chin.”

Storrs temporized, though the soul of him was cold.

“What've we got to talk about—that crazy man and woman down in the hold?” he asked.

“We talk-ee opium mo' bettah. How much-ee opium go China-boy if he no shoot you?” Storrs tipped back his head in a laugh which cost him some pains to achieve.

“Ho-ho! So that's the game, eh? Suppose I say not a damn' bit of it? What then?”

Captain Judah's high hand seemed in a fair way of carrying through. Possessing initiative on their side and convinced through the white man's temporizing, so unusual a procedure for him, that force, the final argument, was in truth theirs, yet the yellow ruffians were baffled by the other's cool attitude of self-sureness. Sheer force of personality—call it brain power—gave Judah Storrs a weapon the Chinaman did not know how to fend.

Seeing their hesitancy, the man on the bridge pushed precarious advantage.

“Look here, you Mow-lows! What's all this talkee-talk about? You know yesterday Doctor fellow shot me here—” he pointed to his wounded shoulder—“and Horn fellow moved you all over this steamer side. Stole my schooner, Doctor fellow and Horn fellow did. No schooner, no get away—no get back to Frisco, eh? All right. Now we get Horn fellow down below. Got his gun—two guns. Got his boat. Why not go over to schooner and catch her when we can? Then when we catch schooner we'll talk about opium.”

The two armed Celestials blinked dully up to Captain Storrs as they digested his suggestion. Evidently it found weight with them, for they turned back up the deck for a conference with their fellows. For several minutes the white diplomat on the bridge heard the parroting of outlandish voices. He hardly dared breathe while the issue of his daring attempt at a digression hung in the balance. Finally Number One came back to the ladder foot.

“Chinaboy tink plitty good first catch-um schoonah.”