The Sea Wolves/Chapter 14

first thought as he saw this man was one which sprang from his natural pugnacity. He was not altogether wanting the conviction that a Briton is more than the equal of three Frenchmen and a "Portugee," as the old rhyme goes; and the fellow who stood in his path, though a man of great stature, did not alarm him overmuch. Yet he remembered Messenger's injunction that he should not bring a brawl about him if it were to be avoided; and, with this in his mind, he stood looking at the Spaniard for a moment, and then jumped lightly from the path to the thickness of the undergrowth at the side of it.

Here was an abundance of long grass and shrubs, but principally of sharp-cutting thorns; while the ground was soft and boggy, and the weed clinging and tenacious. It seemed to him that a few paces in a marshy slough like this would put all danger behind him; but as he went on forcing his way through the thickness of the bramble there came the whip-like sound of shot about his ears; and he looked back, to see the heads of two other men showing between the trees upon his left hand, and he knew that the adventure had become serious.

A second loud report now echoed in the woods, and a great eagle-hawk that he could see stooping down from the infinitely blue sky stopped in his descent and winged away to the distant hills. This time two of the shots stung him upon the left arm, but he had no other hurt; and he fell upon his hands and knees, leaving the precious basket behind him, and wormed his way with wondrous quickness, though his flesh was cut and his clothes torn to ribbons by the briar through which he went. He could now hear the pursuers crashing through the bracken behind him, and their fierce shouts, answered again from two or three points in the wood, told him that they set some price upon his capture—indeed, that they meant the worst to him; and, while he was prompted to use his revolver, he hesitated because of Messenger's words and of his own hope of safety.

The way had now become more open, and there was grass in lieu of marsh; but the vociferations of the shoremen were louder; and it seemed to him that they had all come together and were crashing through the brushwood, which rose almost to their chests. They did not shoot any more, however; and when he came to the clearing, it was plain to him that he must either up and run for it, taking the risk of the shot, or remain to be knocked on the head for a certainty in the semi-darkness of the glade. He had but the vaguest notion whither the journey would carry him; but he judged that it must be in the way of coming at the creek again; and even as he started to run he remembered the importance of keeping hid the knowledge of the cave and of the men it sheltered. With this thought he rose up from the ground, and, hunching up his shoulders, he fled like a deer that is hunted, hearing the savage cries redouble as he showed himself, but no gun shot, which surprised him. Anon he found himself panting up a steep hill-side where firs grew thick, but not so as to hamper him; and as the Spaniards roared the louder and then fell to silence in the ardour of pursuit he longed for a sight of the sea with a longing he had never known before.

Now the place where all this happened was a mile or more from the lagoon in which the longboat had been made fast; and Fisher, who thought that he was running toward the neck of the bay, was, in truth, moving in a line parallel to it. His path, after it had carried him through the woods (the Spaniards being close upon his heels in the going), brought him at length to the ravine down which the river passed to the sea; and when, panting and breathless, he came out of the woodland, he found himself on the edge of a cañon, at he bottom of which the mountain stream ran swiftly. His position at this time was one of great hazard. His flight had been for the chief part upward, over heavy ground. One of the ragged shoremen following him was not then a hundred yards away; there was before him a precipice with a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more, and he knew that other Spaniards were coming up through the wood, and awaited momentarily to see them.

Driven by the need of the situation, he did then what he had before thought of doing, and fired one shot from his revolver. It was answered by a single shot from another pistol, but upon the other side of the ravine. A moment after Messenger appeared upon the rocky path which ran along the opposing precipice, and, observing the hazard at a glance, he shouted with echoing strength of voice—

"To the left, man! there's a bridge a hundred yards below you."

Fisher needed no other word than this. Although the bridle-track on which he stood presently inclined so steeply that it fell sheer against the face of an iron cliff, he began to run steadily, with one of his pursuers upon his very heels. A moment after another appeared on the summit of the rock which shot up on the right hand of his path, and took a heavy stone in his hand, waiting for the runner to pass beneath to hurl it down. Thus the situation stood that upon one side of the ravine there ran Messenger, and upon the other Fisher, who had a Spaniard at his heels, a second upon the cliff under which he was to pass, and more after him in the shelter of the higher woods. Some of the latter now showed themselves, but upon the upland, debouching from the woods, to cut off the runner before he could reach the bridge of logs which lay a furlong away down the cañon. Had these men possessed muskets the race would scarce have been run; but, beyond the one fellow who had shot at Fisher in the woods, there was none with better equipment than a cudgel, or a great stone snatched from the path, and they could but run, in the hope of coming up with him at the bridge, or striking him down as he trod the ribbon-like track upon the hillside.

Half-way down the path a shout from Messenger compelled Fisher to stop abruptly. As he did so he looked to the height above him, and saw that he had come to the place where one of the Spaniards stood poising a great stone and waiting for his coming. The man was in the very act of hurling the boulder when Messenger fired at him, and the fellow, being hit in the hand, let the rock go crashing down with a reverberating note to the depths of the chasm. At the same moment a warning cry from Messenger awakened Fisher to the danger behind him, and he turned on his heel sharply, to find the man who had pursued him already within arm's-length. The fellow had even raised his cudgel for the blow; but, Fisher quickly closing with him, he dropped backward upon the path with the lad holding to his throat.

There never was, it may be, a more hazardous place upon which two men might struggle than this. The track was not three feet wide; the rock rose up sheer on the one side of it; there was the chasm upon the other. Fisher himself had been dragged down upon the burly Spaniard in the fall; and the man had now gripped him about the waist and was making Herculean efforts to hurl him over the precipice. He, in turn, had his knee in the fellow's ribs and his hands about his throat; but the man, even in the face of the semi-suffocation from which he suffered, drew a sheath-knife from his belt, and made Fisher let go at the throat and clutch the arm which threatened him. But the lad's muscles strained and stood out as he twisted the fellow's hand downward upon him, and presently so mastered him that the point of the blade stood turned toward his chest.

In this convulsive and silent fight for sheer footing and for life the two men were watched by the other Spaniards and by Messenger, none of them for a space moving or crying out; but when some minutes had gone, the latter called with all his strength to Fisher that he should free himself, for the others were now running swiftly down the path to the help of their man. At this cry the lad raised himself backward by one surpassing effort, and then dropped with his weight again upon the Spaniard, driving the knife deep into his chesty so that the man gave one long groan and then lay still. But Fisher, fearing nothing now but the coming of the others, fled down the path with the shouts of the shoremen in his ears, and was at the hither side of the bridge while the Spaniards yet raved about the body of their man.

Being safely come over the chasm, the two Englishmen now hurried through the woods to the  shore, finding as they went that pursuit was not continued. At the foot of the mountain path, when they had crossed a shallow wood, they came out upon the creek at the opposite side to that by which their boat lay; and, the Spaniards being not in sight, they whistled twice, and the craft put out for them; but no sooner had they made her fast in the cave again when there was sound of voices in the wood above them, and a boat, which appeared to be that of the coast-guard, appeared in the bay.