Chapter XVI: Into the Jaws of Death

"Let terror strike slaves mute;
Much danger makes great hearts most resolute."
--MARSTON.

"Death, when unmasked, shows us a friendly face."
--GOLDSMITH.

"Rebels, turn out your dead!"

The inhuman call came down the opened hatches, and the prisoners, stupid with the foul air they had breathed all night, prepared to obey. So many times they had heard the cry that they had grown callous to its coarse brutality.

It was the end of September, and the delayed equinoctial storm would soon ravage the coast. For a week the sea-faring folk had been expecting it; and now at last the great gale or the forerunner of it was upon them, for all night the waves had been rolling in from the outside with the sound of thunder. The ship had pitched and tossed and strained at its moorings, while the living freight in its hold prayed that it might break away entirely. The hatches, when lifted, showed no blue sky, but gray clouds and scurrying mist wreaths. The men, coming up out of the hot and fetid air, shivered a little in the stiff breeze on the deck, then opening their mouths, drank it in like wine. The faces of the landsmen had an added ghastliness from seasickness, but they were all bad enough to look upon,--seamen and soldiers alike. In squads of six they took their breakfast, eating by sheer force of resolution what they loathed, that the hunger pains might not gnaw so hard.

"How many dead this morning?" demanded the warden.

"Two,--Drake and Cowles," answered Jack Bangs.

"Nay, there are three, Master Warden," said Peter Ruffin, sadly; "I found Richard Clevering lying stiff and stark beside me when I got up. The bodies are there beside the capstan."

The three were stretched upon the deck; the corner of Richard's blanket, as if by accident, fell over the upper part of his face, but the mouth below was blue and drawn. With an exclamation of surprise and sorrow Jack Bangs crossed the deck and, lifting the blanket for a moment, looked at the face beneath. Then, reverently replacing it, he made the sign of the cross above the body, and speaking a few low words to Peter, went away. The warden, who had watched the scene satirically, gave each corpse a shove with his foot, cursing the while.

"D--n 'em! had to die the worst day of the month, that the burial might be the more troublesome!" He glanced at them again, gave each another kick, and checked off their names in his book. "Here, fix these hounds up, and cut your work short so they'll be in the ground before the storm breaks."

"If you please, may I go in the boat this morning? Clevering was from my town, and I should like to pay him this last respect."

"No."

Peter knew better than to urge his plea, and so stepped quietly aside. But the warden, noticing the slow motions of one of the men to whom he had beckoned, shouted angrily, "Out of the way there, you infernal snail, or I'll fix you so you'll go in the boat and stay!"

Peter sprang into the man's place. "I will be very quick," he said, touching his cap; and without another word wrapped one of the bodies quickly in its coarse covering and took a few stitches with the needle his comrade held out. He was so deft, and the lightning was so vivid, that the warden grunted and let him go on. Under other circumstances he would have been put in irons for insubordination.

The stitches in Richard's blanket were few and slight, just enough to hold it about the body.

"What was the matter with that fellow? I never heard him say he was sick," said one of the sentinels, stopping to look on.

Peter's pulse stood still. "He has complained for some time of a pain about the heart. All last night he tossed and rolled, and just before the hatches were opened, he said to me that his time had come. He's hardly cold yet," he added hastily, as the man bent as though to touch a hand left exposed by a rent in the blanket.

"Well, he'll have time enough to get cold in the ground," the warden said, coming up behind, and mistaking Peter's words for a plea for more time before the burial.

"He was a sullen chap to whom I've been looking for trouble. I'll warrant he gets not cold between this and the devil," the guard said, giving the stiff body a parting kick.

The waves tossed furiously, but the long-boat was launched, and two of the guard took their places in it, while the man who was to assist Peter at the graves followed to receive the bodies; for the sentinels never touched them, partly through fear of contagion, and partly out of contempt. The first two were finally lowered, and then came the moment Peter had dreaded; those other two had been stiff and stark enough, but he wanted no prying eyes looking on when he lifted this one, and so before he bent over to Richard, he glanced down the deck and raised his hand, quite casually, it seemed, to his face. Instantly, as though he had been on the watch for a signal, Jack Bangs started a funeral hymn, loud and wailing.

"Stop that devilish howling!" roared the warden, wheeling around.

Quick as a flash Peter, signing to his assistant, lifted the prostrate figure at his feet and swung it over the side. The ropes grated on the rail, and when the warden looked again, it was all over. Peter slid instantly down one of the ropes, and he and his fellow grave-digger untied the cords from the body and rolled it over beside the other two in the bottom of the boat, the guards having their hands full to keep the little craft from swamping in the waves. Then they cast off and pulled for the shore.

"What makes you look at that carrion so confoundedly straight and scared," one of the soldiers asked Peter, sharply, noticing how often his eyes went to the figure at his feet.

Peter cursed himself inwardly, but he had been so afraid that the blanket would rise and fall with a strong man's involuntary breathing that he had watched it in a sort of fascination. Now he looked away, answering slowly:--

"I have known him since he was a baby; he used to play with my little boy that died, and so I keep thinking of those days."

One of the men laughed scoutingly, but the other growled out, "Let the fool have his fling, and give me a light, Carson; my pipe's gone out in this cursed spray." And while their heads were close together, Peter stretched his legs out over the body, that if so it lost for a moment its rigidity, they might not see.

It seemed to him an hour before the shore was reached and the landing effected; then he and his assistant carried the bodies high up on the sand. Richard's went first.

"He is alive," Peter whispered, as they moved up the beach, "but if you give the faintest hint of it here or on shipboard by word, act, or look, I'll throttle you like a viper."

"You need not threaten--I'm no peacher; and besides, I liked the lad, and wish him well; but his chance is slim, and if he is taken, they will torture him like the incarnate fiends."

An officer from the patrol, strolling near the boat, called out:--

"How many to-day, Carson?"

"Three."

"That is an unusual haul; you are thinning them out fast."

"Not half fast enough; looks as if the cursed dogs held on to life to spite us."

"Well, 'tis said that Howe will bring back plenty of recruits from the French fleet to fill your gaps."

"How is that? What is the news?"

But Peter was listening eagerly, hoping to catch some bit of outside information. The officer pointed to him with elevated eyebrows, and the guard drove him with imprecations to his task.

"Your shovel?--Well, there it is, you son of perdition! Go on, and mind you be quick in hiding that carrion from the crows."

Beside the boat, with guns cocked and ready, the three men then talked over the war tidings, while thirty yards up the beach the two grave-diggers fell to their task. Rapidly the two first graves were made and the occupants laid therein with only a muttered prayer from Peter; and so were closed two human chapters in the varying story of life. The wind shrieked in from the sea, edged with foam or stinging sand caught up at the water's edge, and the heavens were like a vast slaty canopy torn now and then by jagged lightning flashes. The scene was a fit setting for the mournful work in hand. Once or twice while the two laboured, one of the guards walked over to look at them, and then wandered back to the boat and his companions.

Over the first two graves the sand was heaped high, forming, as far as possible, a barrier for the third. Shallow that third grave was,--so shallow that a man could scarce lie therein and be concealed; but so it must be that the sand might not be too heavy on the body, and yet seem to be piled up. Tenderly Peter lifted that last silent figure and stretched it in the hollow made for it; then, while he still stooped, he broke the frail stitches of the blanket, and snatching two pieces of driftwood he put them crosswise over the head of the grave with their ends on the edges. The hollow space below might contain enough air to last a man a little while.

"Stay, here is piece of hollow cane in the sand," said the assistant, "keep one end of it over your mouth, Richard; we will leave the other just out of the sand; in this way you can breathe longer.--So."

"Quick, quick; the shovels! The guard is returning," cried Peter.

It seemed to them that their shovels crawled, and yet they worked like mad. If the guard got there before they finished, all was lost. Spadeful after spadeful,--was ever a man so hard to cover? Another step and the sentinel would be upon them, and the blanket scarcely hidden, and those tell-tale boards and the cane yet in sight. It was a fearful moment. Peter's heart stood still, and his comrade's hands were like ice.

"What the devil are you so long about?"

But it was only the angry voice that reached them; a blinding lightning flash ripped the heavens wide open, and the wind with a demoniacal shriek rushed down the beach, throwing the sand in a swirling cloud about the on-coming man, making him stagger with its force and snatching away his hat and rain coat. Half blinded, he raced down the sloping stretch to regain his garments which more than once eluded him. Then in the lull he came back swearing furiously; and finding the men leaning on their shovels, he stuck his bayonet into each of the three mounds. Into the third it penetrated only a little way; but he did not notice, for the wind was again gathering itself for a fresh burst of fury.

"Now then, get you to the boats!" he cried, standing behind them.

Peter paused a moment and crossed himself reverently, saying in a loud voice, "Your bodies to the earth, your souls to God's care; and may you pass to liberty in the folds of the in-rolling fog."

"Pass to hell and the devil! Get on, I say!" cried the guard, angrily, as he struck Peter across the shoulders with his bayonet. And Peter, having said his say, ran nimbly to the boat; and pushing it off, they leaped in, and were soon toiling amid the breakers to reach the ship's side.

It seemed to Richard that long months passed while he lay motionless under that weight of sand, breathing spasmodically through the bit of reed. The drift-boards kept the pressure partially from his chest so that he suffered very little. The guard's bayonet had grazed his leg without piercing it, but the thirst in his throat was something terrible. Peter's voice had penetrated through the boards and their thin covering of sand, so that he knew the fog was following the wind from the sea. It was for this he had hoped, and it was this Peter meant to tell him in those last words. Dear old Peter; how he had tried to dissuade him from this mad plan, and when that was impossible, how he had risked his own safety to aid him. Richard felt the tears on his face as he recalled his friend's unselfish offices. Several times during the wait for a stormy day he had been on the point of giving up the whole plan, lest it work a mischief for Peter; but the latter had said it would mean only a day in irons for him, and that he was willing to risk that much for his friend's liberty; it was for Richard himself that he feared. But even death had a smiling face for Richard, compared to a winter spent in the vile ship; and so the plan had gone on, and by Peter's care he was lying here in his grave, accounted of the world as dead.

By and by his limbs began to cramp and ache. Through strong will power he had kept them rigid during those terrible moments of examination and removal from the ship. He would not have dared assay the plan had he not known how superficial, through repetition, had become the warden's inspection of the corpses--just a few questions and that savage kick. Each time there had been a death during the past fortnight, he had studied the details of the preparation and burial, until he was convinced that he could carry his scheme to a successful close if only Peter was allowed to be one of his sextons.

As the minutes now passed, the ache in his limbs increased, for the pressure of the sand was stopping the circulation. Then the dryness in his throat grew and grew, until he could bear it no longer. Had he lain there a year, or only a day? Slowly and cautiously he drew his hands up to his breast, then higher, and finally placed the palms against the board over his head. The first movement brought the sand in a shower upon his shoulders; but after a while he worked it far enough back to leave a crack between it and its fellow. This he could only feel, for knowing the sand would strangle and blind him, he had not as yet taken the blanket from his face, since moving it ever so little to receive the reed into his mouth. Next, he slowly pushed the other board downward until a rush of cold air told him he was once more in the world of humanity, not forever sealed in the haunt of ghouls. Cautiously he shoved the blanket from his face and looked up into the storm-hung heavens. It was mid-afternoon, and he had thought it must be midnight. Eagerly he drew in the air, cool and laden with moisture, and tried to forget his aching limbs. He dared not stir yet lest the patrol should see him. He must wait; and while he waited, how the moments lagged!

The wind had fallen, but the waves still thundered on the shore, and the lightning now and then raced along the clouds. Afraid to raise his head, he could only lie still and stare straight above him into the square of mist and clouds. With a great throb of joy he watched the gloom deepen. He had not heard the sunset gun from the station down the beach, but the fog would befriend him; so when he could no longer bear the straitened position, he lifted his head and shoulders and looked around. The fog was everywhere; scarcely could he see the tumultuous waves that shattered themselves along the sand. He need wait no longer, no one could see him now; and painfully and carefully he finally drew his stiff limbs from under the sand. To stand at full length was not to be thought of, but he rolled over and rubbed and stretched himself until the cramp was relieved. Then he set himself to fill in and round up his vacated grave; for Peter's sake he must do this, that no suspicion might be aroused when the funeral boat brought its next cargo ashore. Swiftly he worked, using a piece of the drift-board for a shovel, and crawling from head to foot to be sure that all was right. His heart was full of gratitude when at last it was finished, and, with a sigh of relief, he threw the board aside and stood up straight,--a free man.

But at this moment something came out of the fog from the shore side, and as he steadied himself upon his feet, he found himself face to face with a man.