Somewhere in the Caribbean/Chapter 7

When the Vesta shot across the comparatively quiet lagoon and came to rest with the slow shock of her grounding upon the shelving beach I think we were all more or less dazed by the sudden and unhoped-for escape from a shipwreck which would doubtless have blotted all five of us out, since the huge seas pounding on the reef would speedily have beaten the life out of the strongest swimmer.

Yet, as it presently appeared, we had missed the shipwreck on the reef only to lose the schooner in another way. Though I had jumped into the engine pit the instant we were over the barrier, and Pedro and José, yelled at by Brill, had let the foresail come down on the run our headway could not be checked quickly enough; and though Brill had spun the wheel fiercely he had only contrived to hit the land quartering and we were beached hard and fast with every sea that came over the reef ramming us still deeper into the sand.

Not to miss a chance while the seas were still sweeping in strongly enough to lift the schooner's stern we put the motor in the reverse and tried to back off. But in a few minutes Brill shouted down to me that it was no good and I stopped the motor and climbed to the deck. Brill, forgetting that but for the Providential “seventh” wave he might have joined the rest of us in providing food for the fishes, was exploding in blasphemies so horrible as to make even Dorgan call him down.

“Shut up, you cockroach!” he roared. “Ain't it enough that you've still got the breath o' life in you? Usin' it to cuss the good God that let you keep it ain't goin' to get you nowheres!”

Brill quieted down at that and presently climbed over the stranded bow with me to see how badly we were hooked up. A very cursory examination seemed to prove that the schooner was likely to stay right where she was until she rotted. Fully a fourth of her keel was bedded in the sand and my own conclusion was that nothing short of the power of the biggest wrecking tug afloat would ever pull her into deep water.

“We're high and dry,” I told Dorgan when we had climbed aboard again; then I asked Brill if he had any notion as to where we were—what land we'd made. His response was a mere guess that anybody might have thrown out; that we'd been blown upon one of the many small islands or keys with which the map of the Caribbean is dotted. Asked if these keys were inhabited he said that some of them were and others were not, adding with more of the morose cursings that it had probably been our luck to hit upon one of the uninhabited ones.

To prove or disprove this appeared to me to be the first matter of importance. Our food supply would be exhausted in three or four days at the most. If the island were inhabited we could live; if it were not—well in that case we should at least know what we were up against. Accordingly I detailed Pedro to stay in the schooner with Dorgan and took Brill and José with me on an exploring expedition.

As a means of acquiring any definite in formation about our landfall the tramp ashore was a conspicuous failure. Taking the northeastern beach first we came at a distance of perhaps half a mile from the schooner to a place where the outer reef drew in so close to the mainland as scarcely to break the huge seas which were still tumbling in. At this point and for as far as we could see beyond it the great billows were pounding upon the island beach, each one carrying a miniature tidal wave far up into the jungle. Clearly there was no thoroughfare here and after two or three half-hearted attempts to penetrate the dense tropical growth inland we turned back and tried the opposite direction.

With the exception that the cul-de-sac was somewhat farther away from our stranded ship conditions to the southwest were much the same as we had found them in the other direction. Though the barrier reef preserved its distance it was so nearly submerged that the seas broke entirely over it. Hence our exploration was cut short as before and for the same reason. This time we made another and more determined effort to penetrate to the interior of the island; did so penetrate for perhaps half a mile and then gave it up and worked our way laboriously back to the beach through thicketings as dense as a quick-set hedge. We saw no signs of human occupation in all this wandering and I doubted much if we should find any, even after the sea should go down and give us leave to circle the island by way of the beach path.

For the remainder of that day we did nothing because there was nothing much that we could do. At Dorgan's suggestion we set a distress signal flying from the schooner's mainmast and as long as daylight lasted one or another of us was constantly sweeping our half of the horizon on the chance of sighting a passing ship. But nothing came of this.

By sunset the sea had gone down and the wind, which had blown freshly out of the northwest all day, began to die away, drop ping to a dead calm shortly after dark to usher in a night of sweltering heat. Like the salamanders they were Dorgan and Brill elected to sleep in the cabin bunks and the Minorcans, European-peasantwise, shut themselves in the dog hole of a forecastle. I said the sky was all the cover I needed in such torrid weather, so spreading my blankets on the after deck and with a coil of the mainsheet for a pillow I prepared to get what sleep might be had under the double handicap of the heat and a dense cloud of voracious mosquitoes.

It was the mosquitoes that led to a discovery which banished all thoughts of sleep, for the time being at least. After I had fought the stinging pests for a while I sat up with my back against the rail and tried, with the result of half stifling myself, to make a mosquito curtain out of a fold of the blanket. Failing in this I remembered that engine oil used as an ointment was something of a deterrent and got up to grope my way to the hatch of the engine hold. In the act I was brought to face the dark mass of the forest into which the Vesta had thrust her bowsprit. Over the tops of the trees which marked a line scarcely distinguishable between the forest shadow and the black bowl of the sky shutting down upon it I saw a faint red glow.

For a moment I thought it might be the rising moon and then I remembered that it was now the dark of the moon. But if it wasn't the moon it must be a fire—and a fire meant inhabitants. Without waking any of the others I crept to the bow of the schooner, dropped to the ground and began to worm my way into the heart of the jungle thicket.

This forest treading in the dark proved to be a man-size job, right from the start. What I don't know about tropical plants and trees, as to their names and such, would fill a shelf in a library, but I can testify that I met and wrestled with at least a hundred varieties of vegetable obstacles in the next half hour, from invisible trees that took advantage of the black darkness to get squarely in the way to thorny ground palms that bayoneted me in passing and tangles of vine and brier that caught and tripped me at every step. But whenever there were openings in the dense foliage ahead I could get fresh glimpses of the faint red glow, so I pushed on.

In the course of time the lapping of little seas on a beach could be heard and then I knew I must be nearing the other side of the island. A little later I came out suddenly, not upon the sands of a beach as I had been expecting to, but upon the edge of a small glade or natural clearing open to the sea on one side and surrounded by the jungle on the other three. On the seaward side of the glade a fire was burning and a little way removed from it there were rude shelters, three of them, that looked in the firelight as if they might have been hastily built out of tree branches and palm fronds.

Around the fire there were figures of men, some of them stretched out as if asleep, others sitting up and nursing their knees. Counting, I made seven of these figures and under the rude shelters there were others dimly describable by the glow of the fire; these all recumbent as sleepers.

Naturally my first impulse was to cross to the fire and make my presence known to the men about it. But while I hesitated the singularity of this camp in the glade had time to make itself felt. Who were these people—the fire makers and shelter builders? Not natives, I decided at once. In all the surroundings there was no hint of permanent habitations or cultivated land. But if they were not islanders, who were they?

I don't know whether it was a prompting of caution or a mere prudent desire to learn more about them before making my presence known that led me to skirt the glade toward the shore to obtain a better point of view. But I did it and then the wonderful thing happened. I had barely shown myself, I suppose as a dark shape emerging cautiously from the thicket, when a figure in white sprang up from the sands almost at my feet, gave a frightened little shriek and started to run.

I think it must have been my good angel that let one of the tangling brier vines follow me out of the thicket to trip and send me stumbling on the beach directly in the path of the flying figure in white. At any rate we collided squarely and came down together in the soft sand, I with my arms around the woman and my mouth full of apologies for the awkward stumbling.

It was the apologies that saved me. As I was struggling to my feet and explaining volubly that the collision was the result of the sheerest accident the unknown sharer in the accident flung her arms about my neck, and a voice that I would have known if I had heard it in heaven or hell said:

“Oh, Dick, Dick! Is it—can it be you?”

“Alison!” I gasped. “Of all the unbelievable things”

“It's a miracle,” she said solemnly; “a heavenly miracle, Dick. Don't you know, I've been sitting here for a long time just wondering if it wouldn't be best to walk out into the water and—and make myself forget that I know how to swim and—and just end it all?”

“For Heaven's sake!” I stammered; “what under the sun has happened?”

She turned to face away from the glade and slipped an arm in mine.

“Let's walk a little way along the beach and I'll tell you—all I can. But first tell me how you come to be here.”

As we walked slowly away and out of sight of the camp fire I told her briefly of the shanghai outrage in Biscayne Bay on the night of the dinner in the Waikiki and its later outcome. When I had finished she was shuddering as if with a chill.

“What an unspeakable villain Wickham is!” she exclaimed. “If I had known that night at dinner what I know now—but I couldn't even imagine it.”

By this time I thought we were far enough from the camp in the glade to be free from any danger of interruption.

“Suppose we sit down and thrash it out?” I suggested. “The sand is dry.”

For a moment or two after we had seated ourselves she was silent. Then she said: “What did you think of me, Dick, when you found me in that hideous lot of rotters on board the Waikiki?”

“It wasn't up to me to think anything. It was your father's yacht and”

“You had a right to think anything you pleased,” she broke in, “but I can explain—a little. I didn't even know who these people were until after we had left New York and were fairly at sea. Oh, of course, I knew some of them slightly—Peggy Sefton, for one; but they were not in our set at all.”

“I'm listening,” I said.

“It's all tangled up, even now,” she went on. “A month ago daddy went to Honduras to see about a contract of some sort. I wondered a little at his going, because he hasn't taken any active part in the company for a long time. For quite a while before he left I thought he seemed worried over something but he wouldn't tell me what it was.”

I thought I knew that good old Hiram Carter had plenty of cause to worry if he had any inkling of the way in which the Jeffreys, father and son, were dragging the good name of the Carter Company in the mud, but I didn't say so to Alison.

“Is your father still in Honduras?” I asked.

“I am to suppose he is in Havana waiting for me. I had a letter from him about two weeks ago in which he asked me to meet him in Havana. He said that Wickham Jeffreys was going to take a party down in the yacht and that I was to join it. I thought it a little strange, at the time, that he should ask me to do that, because he knew I had been planning to go to the Bermudas with the Wellingtons. But there was a worse thing than that in his letter.”

“Is it tellable?”

“To you, yes. Daddy gave me to understand that he was in some sort of business trouble that involved his good name and that the trouble would vanish if I could make up my mind to marry Wickham Jeffreys. That was all; no explanations or anything.”

“Had he said anything about this before?”

“Not a single word. He knew that Wickham had asked me to marry him—I had told him that. But he had never said a word to influence me, one way or the other. All he said was that he wanted me to be happy.”

“Well?” I prompted.

“The Waikiki was lying in the Hudson and I went aboard with Hedda, my maid, one evening after dinner. Wickham was there to meet us and as he said the other members of the party wouldn't come aboard until late Hedda and I went to our stateroom and went to bed. In the morning we were at sea and I found out what I was in for.”

It sounded only a little less high-handed than my own kidnaping by Dorgan and Brill but I did not interrupt.

“I saw it was going to be the most disagreeable trip I had ever made but I thought I could shut my eyes and ears and stand it for the few days it would take us to reach Havana and daddy.”

“And then?”

“Then Wickham began on me—at the first breakfast table. Without saying it outright he practically told them all that we were—that we were engaged. I couldn't deny it—to that crowd—but I did tell Wickham what I thought of him when I had the chance. Then, Dick, if you'll believe it, he began to threaten! He said daddy—my daddy!—was in trouble, serious trouble, and that it might end in prison. Then he went on to say that his father was the only one that could save the situation but there was so much ill-feeling that he—Wickham—despaired of persuading his father to intervene.”

“All lies,” I broke in, taking a shot in the dark but with complete assurance that it would hit the mark.

“Of course I tried to think so; it was too horrible to think otherwise. But I was alone in that wretched mob of drink maniacs. Wickham kept harping on the one string continually. If we were once married it would straighten out everything. His father couldn't go to extremes, as he was meaning to, if it became a family matter—things like that. I couldn't do anything but fight for time. I told myself that the voyage couldn't last forever and that I'd see daddy in Havana and find out just how much of all this that Wickham was saying was true. Then I thought of you. I was sure you knew all about the affairs of the company and that you were somewhere near Miami and I knew that Wickham didn't know you were there. He'd been telling everybody that you were in Peru.”

Truly, I did know some things about the inner affairs of the big contracting company and I suspected a lot more. Ever since Hiram Carter had withdrawn from the active business management there had been crookedness to burn. And the two Jeffreys were at the heart of the whole disreputable business. But it didn't seem needful, just at the moment, to tell her the things that I knew and the many more that I suspected.

“Did Wickham finally persuade you?” I asked.

“No.”

“Most of your friends—your rich friends—would call it a good match. And if it were to save your father's good name”

“Even then, I'm afraid I couldn't.”

“Is it because you dislike Jeffreys?”

“I don't dislike him—that isn't the word. I”

“Is there some other man? Don't tell me if you don't want to.”

Silence for a little space and then with the old straightforwardness that had always made me love her: “I don't know of any reason why I shouldn't tell you, Dick. Yes; there is another man.”

“Ah!” said I. “That makes a difference. Do I know the other man?”

“I—I think not. But we can leave him out. He doesn't care for me and I am sure he doesn't know that I care for him. I said I don't dislike Wickham and I don't—I hate him!”

Again there was a silence. From where we were sitting on the warm beach sand I could see dimly that this side of the island was indented by a deep bay and the glare of the camp fire was in the bight of it. That there was a reef or an outer barrier of some sort on this sea front as well as the other was proved by the distant clash of breakers, quite far out it seemed, though in the darkness I couldn't see to measure distances.

As I strained my eyes and listened, the incongruities, not to call them by any stronger name, came over me with a rush. The last time I had met Alison Carter we had sat across the table from each other in the dining saloon of a richly furnished private yacht and the yacht was peacefully an chored within sight and sound of a thriving, law-abiding winter-resort city. Now, only four days later, we were sitting together on the beach of an unmarked island somewhere in the Caribbean Sea and she was telling me a story that fitted in better with some piratical romance of a past age than it did with the present.

“Suppose you begin at Miami and bring it down to date,” I suggested after the silence had grown embarrassingly long.

“The Waikiki sailed in the afternoon of the next day. Wickham let me go ashore in the morning alone. I think he knew I had made an appointment to meet you but of course he didn't interfere—didn't need to. I waited nearly all the forenoon at the hotel but nobody had seen or heard of you. As soon as I went back the yacht sailed and I found that in my absence it had been determined to cross over to the Bahamas for a few hours' stop. I knew what that meant and I was right. We put in at Bimini just long enough to stock up with liquors for the yacht's table and smoking room. Since that time, or up to early this morning, Hedda and I have been the only sober persons on board.”

“The Havana stop was cut out?”

“Postponed, Wickham said; but now I am beginning to believe that he never meant to go to Havana at all. They were all keeping something from me; I could see that plainly—and that they regarded it as a joke. It made me furious!”

“What did Jeffreys mean to do if he wasn't going to Cuba?” I asked.

“I think he meant to keep the yacht at sea until he succeeded in making me promise to marry him.”

“Ah; cave-man stuff, pure and simple,” I commented. Then: “Do you remember, as the Waikiki was steaming through the Florida Straits three days ago, she passed a schooner also headed westward?”

“We passed a number of vessels that day but I made out the name of only one.”

“Do you recall the name?”

“Yes; it was Vesta.”

“That was my ship; or rather, I should say, it became mine shortly after the Waikiki passed. I headed a mutiny and took the schooner away from the two bootleggers who were in command. You say you saw the name; did Jeffreys see it, too?”

“Yes; it was he who handed me the glass and told me to try if I could make out the lettering.”

“Exactly,” I said. “He knew I was in that hooker and he didn't propose to have it—and me—follow and overtake him. So he gave the yacht's skipper orders to play with us a while and then to go on and lose the Vesta. The hurricane did the rest.”

“And you say the Vesta is wrecked over on the other side of this island?”

“Not wrecked; beached. But she's aground hard enough to stay there until kingdom come; or until she falls to pieces.”

“And those horrid men who shanghaied you?”

“I left them asleep on board the schooner when I came away; also the two Minorcan sailors who helped me in the mutiny. But tell me about the yacht. She's here, I presume?”

“Very much here, indeed. She is a wreck—out at the mouth of this bay. We had a perfectly frightful time in the hurricane. I told you that after the stop at Bimini no body stayed entirely sober. I think that applied to Volney, our sailing master, and to the crew, as well as to the others. A lot of landlubbers couldn't have handled the yacht any worse. We couldn't tell where we were and the wireless was smashed. As nearly as I could tell we just blew wherever the storm chose to take us. It was about two o'clock in the morning of the third day when we struck.”

“Heavens!” I interjected; “what an experience for you!”

“I don't ever want to have to go through another like it. I don't know how we got off. There was the most sickening confusion; no discipline or order; nobody seemed to know what to do or how to do anything. After a terrible time one of the two life boats was got over the side. Most of the crew crowded into it, every man fighting to save himself and paying no attention whatever to anybody else. A sea crushed that boat against the side of the yacht and I think everybody in it was drowned. Then the other was lowered and the rest of us scrambled into it and got away somehow. But when our boat was finally flung up on the beach it was smashed into kindling wood.”

There was a catch in her voice as she stopped and I knew that the frightfulness of the experience was still with her. It was the rawest of tragedies; and so utterly uncalled for with a good sea boat like the Waikiki.

“Did the yacht sink?” I asked.

“No. We all thought she was sinking but she wasn't. She is lying out beyond this point just before us, some distance from shore—a wreck, I suppose.”

“How many of you were saved?”

“All of us cabin people and seven of the crew. And a single day without food has turned us all into savages.”

“Without food?” I echoed. “Do you mean to tell me there were no provisions taken in the boat?”

“Not so much as a tin of ship's biscuit. But that wasn't the worst of it—for me. Wickham Jeffreys! Oh, Dick, I can't tell you what a horrible beast he is! He says—he says I'll be glad enough to marry him when we get away from here.”

For a moment the night was no longer dark for me; it was a bright red. When I could trust myself to speak I said: “When I stumbled out of the woods back yonder a little while ago, did you think I was Jeffreys?”

“I had good reason to, Dick.” She shuddered. And then: “Oh, what a frightful nightmare it has been!”

As may be imagined it didn't take me long to decide definitely upon at least one thing; that was that she was never going back to that hell group in the glade. For a little space the impulse to go there myself to drag Wickham Jeffreys out by the neck and kill him was almost too strong to be put down. But I put it down with the thought that killing would be too good for him. He deserved something worse than sudden death.

“Your maid, Alison,” I said. “Was she among those who were saved?”

“Yes, and she has stood by me so splendidly. This evening, just after dark—if it hadn't been for Hedda” Her voice trailed off into nothing but I could fill in the break well enough, and again the murder demon whispered in my ear.

“Damn him!” I gritted and I am sure she was able to supply the missing antecedent to the pronoun. Then: “Where is this girl now?”

“I left her asleep under one of the hut shelters.”

“We must get her,” I said shortly. “You're not going back to that bunch, you know.” I got up and lifted her to her feet. “Come with me far enough to show me where your woman is; I'll do the rest.”

And together we set out to return by way of the curving beach to the glade of the camp fire.