Somewhere in the Caribbean/Chapter 12

“Whadda you mean—anchors?” said Dorgan. “I reckon I don't get you.”

“Don't you see?” I burst out. “With two anchors hanging at the bows we haven't had sense enough to carry them aft, drop them astern and put the steam capstan to the cables. And now these devils won't give us time to do it. But, by Heaven, we can try!”

That was the signal for a frenzied outburst of labor that put all our former toilings to shame. The Waikiki's anchors were of the modern stockless type, cut-down models of those with which the big liners are equipped, and they were extra heavy for the yacht's tonnage. There was only one way to carry them aft and that was by means of a float of some sort buoyant enough to support the weight, together with the drag of the cable as it should be paid out through the hawse hole at the bow.

Like most pleasure craft of her size the yacht had a life raft in her safety equipment, and luckily this had not been carried away when she struck the shoal. It was the work of a few minutes only to cut the lashings and put the raft over the side. Very coolly and courageously Alison took her place at the bow to watch for us, while José and Pedro and I towed the raft into position under the starboard anchor, with Brill, driven to it by the threat of a pistol in Dorgan's good hand—Dorgan's, mind you—riding the float to guide it to its place and hold it steady while we lowered the anchor upon it.

Though we were working in darkness—not daring to show a light on deck—the first half of the undertaking went through without a hitch. Though there was no wind as yet there was an ominous increase in the ground swell and this made Brill's part of the job, holding the raft in place while we eased the anchor down upon it, rather perilous. Nevertheless the thing was accomplished successfully and the raft proved to be buoyant enough to support not only the weight of the anchor but Brill's weight in addition; so we made him stay aboard to fend off as Pedro and I, with Hedda the strong to help, towed the tittuping float aft, José paying out the cable through the bow hawse hole as we went. Along toward the end the drag of the increasing length of cable was terrific and I doubt if we could have made it if Dorgan had not come to tail in on the towline.

Under compulsion—still under compulsion, as always—Brill tilted the raft and let the anchor slide into the deep water beneath the stern; then under the same sort of persuasion he handed the floating platform around under the yacht's overhang so that we might tow it forward on the port side. While we were hurriedly taking the lashings off the port anchor to repeat the process with it Alison broke in upon us, shaking with excitement.

“They are coming!” she announced breathlessly. “I can't see a thing—they've put their fire out—but I can hear the oars in the rowlocks!”

“Get below!” I ordered, “and take Hedda with you!” but I could not stop to see that she obeyed. If the whaleboat was on the way our time was short indeed. “Lower away—quick!” I snapped at José, who was handling the cable with the forward bitts for a snubbing post, and it was at this critical conjuncture that the quick-witted little man's dexterity failed him. In some manner the cable got away from him and the heavy anchor dropped like a plummet.

There was a splintering crash as the anchor fell upon and demolished the raft, a gurgling imprecation from Brill as the sea swallowed him and the catastrophe was a fact accomplished. As will readily be seen this accident left us in worse case than we were before. In addition to being stranded the yacht was now solidly anchored, fore and aft. And a low murmur on the windless air told us that the threatened storm was coming.

During the toiling interval in which we had been trying to make the water-jet expedient work we had kept the fires going under the boilers, and it was a hoarse roar of steam from the safety-valve escape pipe that drove me into action. I thought it might be barely possible that by winching on the one anchor astern, and adding the sternward pull of the twin screws, there was still some small chance that we might claw off the shoal before it was too late. While Pedro was throwing a line to Brill spluttering and swearing in the water under the bows I put Dorgan in command.

“I'm going to try to pull her with the single anchor,” I said, shouting to make myself heard above the raucous bellowing of the escape pipe. “Have José and Pedro throw a few turns of the cable around the capstan and be ready to take in when I put the power on. Let the other cable go slack so it can pay out if she starts. Knock Brill into it, too, if he's fit to do anything after he's fished up.”

“Aye can halp, too,” said a voice at my ear and then I saw that Hedda had not gone aft to the cabin with her mistress.

“Good girl!” I applauded; “it'll take all the hands we can muster. Jump to it—everybody!” And then I ran aft to go down to the engine room to do my part with the machinery.

In the excitement of the moment I had temporarily forgotten the other menace—the approach of the whaleboat. Now as I was running down the port side between the raised deck and the rail I thought of it and wondered if Jeffreys would have the steady nerve it would ask for if he should try to board the yacht in the rising sea which was already gurgling in the scuppers on the down-tilted side of the vessel and also in the face of an approaching storm. I was telling myself that he hadn't any such nerve when above the noise of the escaping steam and the whistling of the mounting wind in the wire rigging overhead I heard my name called; just two ear-piercing words: “Oh, Dick!”

As well as if I could have seen her peril I knew what those two words meant. They were a call for help and three bounds took me to the companion stair. In two more I was in the storm-battered white-and-gold dining saloon which was lighted by the single incandescent bulb—the only remnant of the ceiling electrolier I had been able to restore in my overhauling of the electric plant.

Withdrawn into the farthest corner of the room Alison was facing a man who had laid his rifle aside to have both hands free and as I burst in I heard him say: “Stop that shrieking and come along with me! If Ainsley interferes again I'll kill him! Don't you know there's a storm coming and the yacht will go to pieces in it? Come on, I say—if you make me put my hands on you what else”

That was as far as he got. In a white-hot fury I forgot the perilous situation of the yacht and the fact that every moment's delay made it more perilous; forgot everything but the one blood-boiling urge to slay this damnable plotter who had stolen a march on us and was threatening the woman I loved.

“Turn around and put your hands on me!” I shouted; and when he whirled to face me I saw that he was no longer the debonair, smooth-shaven idler who had coldly pronounced the sentence of exile upon me in the lobby of the Brown Palace in Denver; gaunt, haggard and with eyes ablaze, with the jaunty yachting flannels hanging in rags, he looked more like an escaped convict cornered and ready to fight to the death.

“I said I'd kill you and I will!” he cried and sprang for the gun he had laid on the cabin table. But before he could snatch it up I had swept it aside and we clinched and went down together.

It is curious to note how the primitive in human nature asserts itself when that most primitive of all springs of action, the defense of the woman beloved, comes into play. Burned, blasted, devastated with a mad desire to kill Wickham Jeffreys as a fit ending to the struggle; blind and oblivious to all the humaner promptings; I was obsessed by the savage and most un-Christian idea that I must first gouge out the eyes that had dared to look upon my love, and tear out the tongue that had threatened her, and cripple the hands that were to have been laid upon her in desecration—mere bedlam madness of passion, all this, but it sufficed to make me forget the revolver thrust under my belt which I might have drawn and clubbed and with a single blow ended the maniacal struggle on the cabin floor.

But if I was forgetting the weapon, Jeffreys wasn't. From the instant of the clinch and fall he had been trying to get hold of it and as we rolled over and over in the death grapple he continued to try. Let me say here and now that I hold no grudge against him for what he did. He was fighting for his life and he knew it. I had beaten the mouth of threatenings, and stuck a thumb into one of the offending eyes, and was cracking the bones of one of the sacrilegious hands when with the fingers of the other hand he found the butt of the revolver. Berserk as I was I still had sense enough to try to twist aside when I felt the muzzle of the pistol pressed against my body. Then came the ear-deadening crash of the explosion and Jeffreys tore himself free and sprang to his feet.

I was hit and I knew it but even if the wound had been a fatal one I think that the mad rage still possessing me would have enabled me to leap up, as I did, and to fling myself at him. But he did not wait for the second grapple, nor did he fire again. With a cry that was like the snarl of a wounded animal he flung the pistol at my head and dashed up the companion steps in flight; and with the battle madness still sustaining me I was fairly at his heels when he tumbled over the rail into the whaleboat which, in the rapidly roughening sea, two of the Waikiki's sailors were striving to hold in its place at the yacht's side.

What happened after that fills only a hazy spot in my memory. Whether I saw the whaleboat swept away from the side on the crest of a sea, or only knew that it must be swept away when the men in it loosed their hold on the yacht's rail, I cannot say. Out of the thickening cloud which seemed to be settling down upon my brain and blotting out even the details of the late savage struggle in the cabin there emerged only one fixed impulse: I had started for the engine room to set the machinery in motion and thither I must go before the storm which either was, or seemed to my distorted brain to be, already bursting upon us in blinding flashes of lightning and deafening crashes of thunder, should annihilate us.

How I ever got down into the yacht's engine room I do not know, but at the next emergence from the thickening mental cloud I found myself opening the throttles to start the engines in the reverse and working the trampling machinery up to full speed astern. When the steel hull was humming and vibrating to the powerful backward thrust of the twin propellers, another blank intervened, and at a second lucid interval I discovered with a sort of bewildered amazement that I was manipulating the valves and levers of the steam anchor capstan, quite mechanically, as it seemed, and with no clear idea of what I was doing it for.

Once more the cloud curtain shut down and I knew no more until the stroke of a gong in the closely shut-in space spurred me alive. Clang-clang it went, and almost at once, clang-clang again. Like a child whose ears have been boxed to make him pay attention, I realized dumbly that the summons was for me; that the double clang repeated was the signal for full speed ahead. Clumsily, because my hands seemed to be all thumbs and singularly useless, I spun the throttle wheels, pulled the reversing lever over into the go-ahead position, and reopened the throttles. And after that, the curtain came down and stayed down.

Coherence, or consciousness, or whatever you like to call it, came next when I opened my eyes and found them staring blankly at a white ceiling that seemed to be rocking gently and slowly endwise. Next I saw that the sun was shining in upon the foot of the brass bed in which I was lying; looking in through a round port which stood open and through which I could hear the swish and die away of swiftly passing wavelets.

Not until after I had marked the swaying ceiling and the sunshine did I realize that my body seemed to be gripped in an iron corslet; gripped and held immovable. But my head was still free and though it asked for an effort mightier than that exerted by old Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders I contrived to turn it on the pillow.

“Don't, dear; don't try to move,” cautioned a low voice from somewhere in the room and then I saw her dimly, standing beside the bed; and presently a gentle hand was slipped under my head to help me to roll it back straight—a task which I felt wholly unable to master by myself.

“What's happened to me?” I demanded querulously. “Why can't I see any better?”

She was sitting on the edge of the bed now and she had one of my hands and was stroking it.

“It is just weakness, Dick, dear. You nearly bled to death before Dorgan and José found you in the engine room. Didn't you know that Wickham shot you?”

By the supremest effort I was able to remember that much.

“Yes; but after that?”

“After that you went down into the engine room and did all the things you meant to do—and you fairly dying on your feet! But it was just like you.”

“Did I—did we get the yacht off the shoal?”

“It was just as you planned it. The one anchor held and pulled us off, and then Brill unshackled the cables and let them both go. We were just in time. A few minutes later, just after the yacht's head was got around to meet it, the storm came. But we ran out of it in the night.”

“When was all this?” I asked feebly.

“Night before last.”

“And where are we now?”

“A few miles off a point of land which Brill says marks the entrance to Bahia Honda on the northern coast of Cuba. He says we'll be in Havana harbor before dark.”

“But I don't understand!” I protested weakly. “Who is running the yacht?”

“Dorgan is first mate and chief engineer. He says he doesn't know a thing about the machinery but you set it going and all he has had to do was to keep it oiled and keep water in the boilers and fire under them. José has helped a lot, too. It seems he was once a fireman for a time on a Spanish merchant vessel.”

“And Brill has the bridge?”

“Yes; and he's been just like a lamb ever since he came so near being killed by the falling anchor. I haven't heard him swear once.”

“All right,” I said, whispering because there wasn't strength enough left in me to make a real voice noise. “All's well that ends well. You don't have to marry Wickham Jeffreys, at any rate; and that's the main thing.” Then: “Alison, dear, I think the 'other man' owes me something; don't you?”

“What other man?”

“The one you're going to marry some time, you know; you haven't told me his name.”

“But I did tell you that he doesn't care for me.”

“Are you sure he doesn't?”

“I thought I was sure of it when I told you so.”

“But now?”

“But now I know he does care and—and—oh, Dick! you mustn't die! And you must forget all about daddy's money—which isn't mine and maybe never will be! Haven't you known, all along, that you were the 'other man?'”

Truly I was more than half dead but I should have had to be altogether dead and in my coffin if I hadn't been able to reach up and pull her down beside me. And it might have been two minutes, or five, or half an hour later when she said:

“You mustn't, Dickie, dear: I l-like your arms, but if you strain yourself and make your wound start bleeding again—it isn't bandaged very well.”

“Who bandaged it?” I asked, knowing well the answer I wanted to hear.

“I did. I don't know much about such things but I did the best I could. There was iodine in the yacht's medicine chest and I used a lot of that.”

“How bad is it?”

“Oh, it's an awful thing! The bullet went all around your left side and came out at the back. It was wicked—wicked!”

“Oh, I don't know,” I said. “Jeffreys was getting his when he did it. If he isn't a one-eyed cripple with false front teeth from now on it won't be through any fault of mine. I tried to pay him all that was coming to him from you and your father, with something on my own account, while I was at it. But let's forget him and the island where he and his crowd are safe to stay until we send for them, and talk about something else. What's worrying me is what your father will say when we—when I tell him that his daughter has fallen in love with a common, everyday, shot-up construction engineer.”

But I needn't have worried about that. When we reached Havana and found that good old Father Hiram was actually there after all—having just arrived from Honduras—and I had been carted to a hospital, and all the crooked tangles had been straightened out, I suddenly found myself made vice president of the Carter Construction Company, with power to act—or at least such was to be my status after I was well enough to make the journey in the Waikiki back to New York.

“We're going to have a hard job of it, Son Dick, putting the old company back on its feet after all the robbery and crookedness that's been going on,” was the way the dear old citizen put it up to me the day he came to my room in the hospital to tell me what was what. And then he added: “I owe you a lot more than a share in the business, my boy. If it hadn't been for you”

I laughed as heartily as my sore side would let me.

“For me, and Dorgan, and the unwilling bootlegger skipper, and the two Minorcans, and the old Vesta, and a whaling lot of miracles thrown in for good measure!” I qualified. “And that reminds me; I want to do something for Dorgan and the two Minorcans; and while Brill was half a scoundrel, through it all, I wouldn't mind including him.”

“They are all here, waiting under pay, until you can get up and tell them what you want them to do and be.”

“That's fine!” I said. “Dorgan and Brill are both jolly pirates, but we can use them on some decent job, I'm sure. Perhaps you even would be good-natured enough to make a start by chartering a boat and sending them to take Jeffreys and his party off the island. Of course we don't owe Jeffreys anything like a good turn, but there are women with him”

“I've been thinking about that,” interrupted the fine old boy. “I'll do it—with the hope of never seeing Jeffreys again.”

“As for the two Spaniards, they're pure gold,” I said.

“I'll take good care of them,” he remarked, smiling.

“That settles it all but what you said about owing me; there's no owing business about it, Father Hiram,” I continued. “Hasn't Alison told you she's going to marry me? That makes me your poor debtor and hers, a thousand times over.”

“All right, Richard—if you think so,” was the quiet reply.

And I not only thought so then; I still think so to this good day.