Chapter XI: To-Night

Another day and another sky. Now the blue Gulf waters were as leaden and dense as that one looks upon in a hard North Sea gale; and the heavens overhead were full of lurid grays which raced one another in sliding chase till they were lost in the northern mist drifts. The steamer rolled heavily to a steep beam sea; and when it could be seen, the iron of her lower decks, forward and aft, gleamed as though it had been new-coated with ocher varnish. But this was not often, for four minutes out of every five the decks were filled with a clamoring, hissing pond of green and cotton-white, which the scuppers could only empty piecemeal.

The time was evening—twenty hours after the quelling of the mutiny, and the three tenants of the upper bridge were the only human beings on any of the outer decks. On the midship grating stood a high-heeled quartermaster holding on to the spokes of the steam wheel, browsing on plug tobacco, and keeping his eyes mechanically fixed on the jumping compass card. Alternately climbing and descending athwartships as the bridge swung under him, the third mate took his sea constitutional in rubber thigh-boots, with hands thrust into the waistbelt of his breeches. As officer of the watch, every time he passed the binnacle he faced front and took a regulation peer round the foggy line of horizon, with an utter lack of interest. He was an elderly man, the third mate, and the sea held no more surprises for him, and no more interest, and no more pleasures. If ever he had ambition, he had lost it years since. His aim in life was to hold a position of small responsibility, and earn a monthly wage with the smallest possible outlay of exertion, either mental or physical.

The remaining occupant of the bridge sat on a camp-stool under the lee of the weather dodger, with his red peaked beard on his chest, his slippered feet stuck out in front, his elbows crooked out behind him, and hands deep in his jacket pockets. Every time the third mate’s footsteps neared him his eyes opened, and for an instant flashed round to the right-hand angle of their orbits. Between whiles he slept. It was owing to this faculty of literally snatching moments of rest that Captain Kettle, at the end of his twenty hours’ spell on the upper bridge, was as fresh as though he had just got up from a clear night’s sleep. This watchfulness was necessary, for, as the experienced skipper was quite aware, fully half the hands would have gladly tossed him overboard if they could have grappled him without danger to themselves.

Presently, however, he dropped his doze with a snap, and slewed round to face the head of the bridge ladder, entirely wakeful.

A head showed itself, black-haired, with a clean-shaven, bright, determined face. The corresponding body followed—lean, tall, muscular.

“Ah, Mr. Onslow, you’ve brought me some provender? Thanks indeed. What? Sandwich and tea? Couldn’t be better.”

“I have whisky in my pocket.”

“Not for me now. Wait till we get ashore, and then I’ll booze with any man to his heart’s content. The game I’m on now is like a boat-race—if a man wants to win he’s got to diet himself.”

The third mate, to show to any chance onlooker that he was not in sympathy with the unpopular captain, planted himself in the angle of the lee dodger, which was the greatest distance that the ties of duty would allow him to depart. Kettle, with an acid grin, drew his companion’s attention to this move.

“What’ll that chap do to-night when the fun begins?”

“Bolt like a rat with the first alarm. He’d show pluck if he was paid for it, would my third mate; but not being paid, he’ll take the best care possible of his own ugly hide. He isn’t a fellow who’d ever like a tight corner for its own sake. There’s not an atom of the sportsman about him.”

Onslow laughed. “You’re just the other way, Captain.”

Kettle’s face clouded. “It’s a fact,” he said. “Times I am that way—curse my cantankerous luck.”

“Your weakness in that direction came in handily for me yesterday.”

“You’re right, Mr. Onslow, right all through. By George, I’d half a mind to chip in with these rogues and grab what I could. It was a tempting chance, and it would have been a deal more profitable to me than what I’m in for now. As for the honesty of the thing, there wasn’t a pin to choose between it and this racket of yours and Mr. Shelf’s. But it was that Dutchman’s gall that put me off. If he’d held his silly jaw, and if those other bladder-heads had let me understand I was to hold the pistol-hand over them, well, the _Port Edes_ would have coral rock spouting through her bottom plates this minute, and I’d be a man owning a matter of three to five thousand pounds. That’s putting it straight.”

“So,” said Onslow, “I suppose I have to thank the said Dutchman for carrying a sound windpipe this minute?”

“No,” replied Kettle thoughtfully, “I don’t think it. I fancy you’d have behaved reasonable over the new deal, and then I’d have stood by you. Especially,” he added slowly, as though from after-thought, “especially if those dogs thought that you’d have been safer out of the way. What,” he asked with a sudden frown, as though the subject annoyed him—“what have you been doing with yourself this afternoon?”

“Physicking a sick fireman principally. The stokehold temperature was 105 degrees, and as he amused himself drinking condensed water by the quart together, the somewhat natural consequence was cramp in the stomach. They sent him up by the ash-lift, and your steward dosed him with chlorodyne and laudanum, and tincture of rhubarb. The result wasn’t encouraging.”

“Oh, there’s never any knowing what to do with a sick stoker’s inside. But one of those drugs ought to have fetched him.”

“Perhaps one did; but the other two didn’t seem to fit his ailment.”

“Well, he had them for nothing, so I don’t see what call he had to complain. I never saw such a crew for physic. They’ve drunk that big chest half dry as it is, and if I’d let ’em, they’d have drunk it three times over. What did you do to the chap? Fill him up on the same again, or try a pill? There’s ten sorts of pills in that chest, beauties some of them. You should have tried him on those little silver-coated chaps marked C. They’re regular twisters.”

“Well, you see, he was twisted enough already, poor devil, and if it hadn’t been for the donkeyman holding him, he’d have been overboard through the ash-shoot to be rid of his misery. So as it was I gave him a tumblerful of raw whisky, and that seemed gradually to untie him again out of his knots.”

The captain snorted. “You’re greener than I thought, Mr. Onslow. If we’d been going on, you’d have had half the crew sick on your hands for a dose of that kind. They’re bad enough after sour, square doctor’s physic, but for a tumbler of liquor and a spell of idleness, an old sailor would have an ear and three toes cut off any day. However,” he added, rising stiffly to his feet and stretching, “the chief and donkeyman’ll see he doesn’t malinger for long. They are none of them sweet on doing another man’s work, that gang. Heigh-ho! See that line of surf we’re bringing over the lee quarter?”

“The Tortugas?”

“The Dry Tortugas. There’s a Yankee convict station on one of them.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Kettle grinned. “We shall have made enough westing soon, and then our course will be pretty nearly due north, so as to dodge the Gulf Stream as much as possible, and,” he added, in a lower tone, “to get the ship as near as may be to your channel into Florida before we jettison the crew.”

“We shall run into the ship tracks from all the northern Gulf ports to Europe.”

“I know, and we must take our chance of not being spotted. For a western sea there’s a regular string of traffic tailing down to the Dry Tortugas. There you are, for one. Look at that old wind-jammer.”

He jerked with his thumb towards a green-painted wooden Italian barque, which was squattering past less than a quarter of a mile away, right athwart the last rays of the windy sunset. She was driving merrily homewards, sending her bows into it till the seas creamed against her cat-heads and darkened her jibs with brine up more than half their height. She was methodically reducing sail, and a dozen many-hued, picturesque tatterdemalions were aloft on the fore-topgallant yard hammering the struggling canvas into the gaskets.

“The cowardly Dagos,” said Kettle; “that’s always their way. Snug down to topsails as soon as it gets dark, even if there’s only a cat’s-paw blowing. By James! with a breeze like this I’d be carrying royals on that old tub. And yet,” he went on, with his beard in the heel of his fist, and his eyes gazing out over the tumbling waters—“and yet they say there used to be poetry in a craft of that sort, whilst there never was, and never will be, with a steamer. I suppose the reason is, that a poet has to be a man who knows nothing whatever about what he writes upon. I know that some chaps who string verses nowadays have been on a steamboat and smelt the smells of her, and seen her lines, and watched the men who do the work; and yet they make no poetry about it. But of the old crew who wrote about moaning harbor-bars, and fair white pinions, and lusty wooden walls, and trusty hearts of oak—why, they knew no more about the thing than a London bobby does of angels. And that, I suppose, was why their stuff is called poetry, and the lubberly old wind-jammers poetical. You give me a smart steamboat, Mr. Onslow; there’s all the romance on her an old sailorman’s got any use for; and he understands it, too, even if he can’t put it down on paper.”

“I believe you’re right,” said Onslow thoughtfully, “and some day a new Dana or a new Michael Scott will come ashore from the upper bridge, or from an electric-lighted forecastle, or from a forced-draught engine-room, and show it to us plainly; whereupon we shall swear that we saw it for ourselves all along. But,” he went on, with a sudden frown, “for the present let that drift. You and I have enough to think of in our immediate present without speculating over a possible prophet which is to arise.”

“We have; but so much must be arranged by the chance of the moment that I don’t see we can do much good by talking it over now. All arrangements that can be made ahead, I fancy we’ve got fixed up already. By the way, I suppose you are sure that your explosion in the forehold won’t be too big? It would be an awkward do for us if the old ship’s bottom was really blown out in sober earnest.”

The sun had gone entirely out by this time, and the young moon was sailing high amid scurrying cloud-banks. In the white and shifting light, Patrick Onslow’s face looked pale and anxious.

“You’re sure,” Kettle repeated, “it won’t be a case of the engineer being hoisted with his own thingammy?”

“No, I’m not sure; and that’s what bothers me. You see, one couldn’t quite get an expert to measure out the precise necessary dose, and I’ve had to guess at it. I daren’t undercharge my bomb. If our explosion was a fizzle, and the crew didn’t get scared and run, why then they’d take her up to New Orleans whether we liked it or not; and she’d be examined. Then that intake valve couldn’t be missed, and it couldn’t be explained away. Man, as you know, the thing’s as big as a sluice-gate!”

“All the bilge pumps in the Gulf of Mexico couldn’t make headway against that valve, once it was fairly opened. It’s the quickest and cleverest way of scuttling a steamboat I ever heard of or read about. But I don’t quite see how the valve is going to be turned.”

“You leave that to me.”

“You seem used to the game,” said Kettle, with a half sneer.

“No, I’m not,” returned the other quickly. “I’ve never had my fingers in anything so ugly or so dirty before; and because I don’t want to have the experience over again, I’m going to make this turn to a big profit, or get killed in the trying. I’m tired and sick of this wild, bucketing life. A woman drove me to it; but I believe, if I had the means to settle down in comfort now, I could forget all about her, and wake up other new interests.”

“Well,” said Kettle, “I hope we may each of us buy a farm out of this racket; but, I tell you straight, I’m not over sweet on the chances. To begin with, you and I can’t handle this steamboat alone. It’s an absolute certainty we must have another hand to help us. You’ll have to take the wheel and pilot her through if you can, though that’s a mighty big job for one man, and the odds are about ten to one you’ll pile her up somewhere. I’ve got to be below. At a pinch I might drive the engines, though I don’t know much of the trade; but I can’t do that and fire six two-hole boilers, and wheel coals out of the bunkers as well. Now, I think the donkeyman is the chap we want. He understands his way about down there, he’s as strong as a winch, and I fancy he knows which side his biscuit’s margarined.”

“Yes, I’m with you there. We’ll have the donkeyman if he’ll come.”

“Then why not sound him now?”

“Because I’ll hint of this infernal scheme to no one till it’s fairly ablaze. Man! if a ghost’s whisper of it got about, the crew would rise and grab us, pistols or no pistols. They have that amount of scare in them they’d walk straight up to a Maxim gun. They’d trample us out of existence before we could fairly look round. No, my neck itches enough as things are at present; and if another on board now besides you knew what was going to be done to-night, I should feel a bowline noose inside my collar, with half a dozen hangmen beginning to tug at it.”

“See here, Mr. Onslow,” said the shipmaster, “are you getting sorry you came out on this trip?”

The other laughed harshly. “Sorry? Whatever have you got in your head now? If I do a thing, I do it with my eyes open, and I make a point of never indulging in useless regrets afterwards. No, Captain Kettle, I’m going through with this matter, whether it succeeds or it fails; whether it is brought about without injury to a single human soul, or whether it costs the last pant of breath for every one in this ship. But I own to you I am nervous. The only things which we can be sure will happen, are the unexpected; and we can’t prepare for those; and the want of preparation may ruin us.”

“It’s a big gamble,” assented Kettle, “and I wish I could say, ‘May the Lord defend the right!’ But I can’t, and you can’t, and, least of all, Shelf can’t. It’s a devil’s job anyway, and he don’t always stand by his men. The only thing is, even Nick can’t diddle my wife and kids out of the insurance I made for them; so, personally speaking, I don’t much care what happens. You go below to your room now, and get a caulk of sleep. You’ll want it. And, first, if you please, I’ll shake hands with you. We’ve never done it before, because a nod’s been enough other times; but this is different. You’re a decentish sort; and I fancy if that woman hadn’t meddled, you wouldn’t have been shipmates here with me to-night.”

They exchanged a quick handgrip, each looking rather ashamed of himself; and then Onslow went down the bridge ladder whistling, and Owen Kettle resettled himself on his camp-stool. When next they met, the tragedy of the _Port Edes_ would have begun, and in it perhaps both would die by any out of ten violent deaths.