Chapter XI: The Valor of Simon (1)

Henderson had waited all that day in the appointed place for Toberman, who was to bring him news of what he had learned regarding the feasibility of escaping out of that country by the northern road. It was within half an hour of sunset now, and no sign of Toberman.

Although he was well equipped with horse, pistol and clothing which Toberman had supplied him, out of his own resources, the overseer had given him to understand, placing the fugitive under no obligation on that score to the owner of the ranch, Henderson hesitated over making a start toward Monterey. Since coming to the Sprague ranch he had learned more of Abrahan Garvanza's power and influence in that part of California. A feudal baron never lived who could stretch a longer arm.

The governor of California, now stationed at Los Angeles, that pueblo having been made the capital lately, was a man under Don Abrahan's control. The forty soldiers who garrisoned the capital, given the choice between service in this distant land and completing their sentences for various felonies in the prisons at home, were at the beck and call of Don Abrahan, the general in command being a relative of the Garvanza family, owing his station to its wide influence.

Toberman had told Henderson, and Helena Sprague had confirmed it, that the news of his escape from Don Abrahan's enforced service would have been carried to Monterey by the third day, incredible as it appeared to him. News spread with great rapidity among the Indians and lawless Mexicans who worked on the cattle ranches, and Don Abrahan had posted a reward of twenty dollars, gold, for the fugitive's capture and return.

Twenty dollars gold on the California coast in those pastoral days was equal to four head of cattle. A laborer would toil many months to earn that much. A _vaquero_ did not gain a sum like it in half a year's riding after the herds. It would not be a matter of enmity toward him, Henderson understood, but the plain business one of making a handsome sum of money quickly, that would set the hand of every man, high and low, between Los Angeles and Monterey against his passage.

But there was an obscure way through the mountains, Toberman had told him, long and rough, that might lead to freedom if a trustworthy guide could be found. There seemed to be none in his employ whom he would trust in that capacity. It was on this business that Toberman had engaged to return this day and report.

Henderson watched the valley for his coming from the peak of a hill which seemed a mountain that had sunk into the earth, a feature common to those rugged foothills. There was spread in the broad valley, running up into the inlets of the canyons, a haze of such density that it seemed as if the sea must have swept in to reclaim its ancient domain. This was as blue as the smoke of wood-fires, the Indian summer haze of other lands intensified until it seemed almost palpable; blue as the upper ether of the clearest October skies.

This strange inflooding of what seemed smoke from mysterious and hidden fires obscured the view of the valley, where it stood at a level against the walls of the hills as definitely marked as water. Above this level the little mountains stood clear and sharp. Henderson gazed out over this transformation, moved by a strange feeling of friendliness and desire for this land.

An hour ago the sun had fallen brightly upon garish shoulder of scrub-patched hill, upon yellow break of sand in the valley among the green. It had revealed harshly the forbidding features of the country, as daylight strips an aged beauty of her sad pretense. Now a veil had been drawn; the sublimity of the change was such as hurt the heart with longings for the sympathetic vibration that could quiver with it and make it wholly understood.

Henderson gave up his vigil on the hilltop at dusk, returning to his camp. This was a little hut built of boulders from a mountain stream, laid together with mud, a sheep herder's shelter against the winter rains. The place was a sequestered canyon, many miles from the homestead of the ranch, unfrequented by herdsmen at this season. Toberman had assured the fugitive that he might rest in security there until his affairs took a better turn.

This feeling, doubtful at first, had gradually laid its spell over Henderson as the days passed without sight of any human invasion. Toberman had conducted him to the place secretly, at night, by cunning ways which he believed left no track. Henderson's surprise was the greater, as a consequence of all this caution, to find Simon sitting placidly in the cabin door when he came down from watching the valley for Toberman.

Simon sat with his long knees updrawn, hands idly hooked in front of them, in the patient, immobile fashion such as becomes a habit in people only who have served long in subjugation and waited without hope. The tragedy of his race was in his pose, the watcher who had been set over other men's treasures, none of which he ever was destined to touch or share. But in Simon's case, at least, it was only a racial trait. There was nothing of humility in him, even in the presence of Don Abrahan, although of patience for long and unrewarded vigils he must have owned his share.

He rose at Henderson's approach, unfolding his thin length with considerable spryness, advancing with hand extended in demonstration of keen friendship.

"Is it you, my little friend Gabriel?" he hailed, great pleasure in his voice. "I thought you were dead, I thought the wolves had made a dinner on you. Come on, my boy. How are you, how have you passed?"

Henderson's horse was picketed some distance down the canyon; Simon was directly in the way between them. Henderson distrusted the friendly show, although Simon appeared to be unarmed and quite genuine in his expression of pleasure.

Henderson replied to the flood of affectionate inquiry that all was well with him; asked of Simon's family, according to the custom, shook hands with him, accepted a cigarette. He wondered whether Toberman had betrayed him, dismissing the suspicion at once as unworthy.

He could not know, certainly, of the little talk between Don Abrahan and Simon the night before, or of the small pieces of gold that had passed from the patron's hand in the dark. He could not have known, indeed, that the old men who sit in the sun, wrapped in introspection, see more than passes by them in the road.

"So, then, all is forgiven, my little Gabriel," Simon hastened to explain, with evidence of great joy in his news. "Don Abrahan has sent me, on the directions for finding you that the good John Toberman gave us. I have come with Don Abrahan's forgiveness in my hand for the wrong you did the good patron in running away from him. As for the little blow you gave Roberto, there is nobody in thirty miles that does not say bravo to that good deed."

"Toberman told you where to come, did he?"

Henderson questioned that declaration; it set a new current of suspicion and distrust running. Yet, on the other hand, Toberman might have sent Simon, saving himself the time from his activities that the journey would take. It seemed only the natural thing for a man of Toberman's consequence to do. He could not be expected to ride messenger in a matter that had lost its bottom like a barrel in the sun.

It must be that Don Abrahan had seen a new light. Perhaps the long-expected news had come from the north that the United States had seized California and added it to its domain. In such case, Don Abrahan's forgiveness would find a ready explanation.

"He says to tell you," Simon replied, "that there is no longer any need for you to think of going away to the north, and Don Abrahan speaks in the same voice. Don Abrahan says he will get you a ticket home in a ship that is in the harbor now, loading hides. It is a Boston ship, with such trees sticking out of it that it made my head swim to look at the tops of them. Yes. I, myself, saw this ship three days ago at the harbor. So you will return?"

"Are you here alone, Simon? There's no treachery in this?"

"As I hope to have two teeth when I am ninety, I am here alone, Gabriel."

"Where is your horse?"

"Down there in the canyon with yours, like a man that has come to dinner with his friend."

"And Don Abrahan said he'd let it all pass, the little trouble with Roberto, and everything?"

"Don Abrahan said, 'Tell my little son, Gabriel, that all is forgiven.' He said the ship would sail in three days. We must hurry, Gabriel."

"First, we can't do better than imitate our horses," Henderson said, his confidence growing, suspicion all but dispelled. "Let's get some supper before we start, Simon. I'm hungry; your news is good for the appetite."

Although largely assured by Simon's manner of open honesty, Henderson watched him closely. He had heard the mule driver air his peculiar morals often enough to ground deep and abiding distrust of his ability to do anything exactly straightforward. Simon was apparently unarmed, but Henderson suspected that a pistol was concealed somewhere in his loose clothing, ready to his hand.

"Don Abrahan has come to Helena Sprague's ranch, where he is waiting to welcome you and take you to his breast," Simon said, sitting in the light of the little fire after the hastily-prepared supper had been eaten. "We think he has found out something about you, that you are the son of a family, or something grand."

"And Roberto, is he there?"

"Roberto went on to Monterey today, I heard it said. What dark night it is here in the hills!"

"It will be darker before it's lighter. We'd better go."

"Yes, the ship will not wait, Don Abrahan will wonder at our delay. What was that?"

Simon started, listening, hand lifted to impose silence.

"Coyotes, very likely," Henderson replied, unconcerned. "They come around here at night."

"It sounded like a horse." Simon rose, leaning into the dark, listening hard, "If mine has got loose!"

He walked away a little distance, going softly, almost immediately disappearing in the dark, which was deeper for the wooded side of the canyon forming the background of the camp. Henderson heard him swearing presently around the corner of the hut, disturbing the bushes softly as if he sought a passage through.

"A bird in the bushes, I think," Simon said, turning back. "Do you leave your fire uncovered these dry days?"

"I drown it," Henderson said.

"Go ahead, then; we must get down out of this dark place. Don Abrahan will think I'm slower than seven doctors."

Henderson took up the pail to pour what water it contained over the dying fire. He was standing with it poised, held in both hands, when something came toward him from Simon's direction with the swishing sound of a bird's wing. Quick as the leaping of his intuitive warning that treachery was afoot behind him, Henderson stooped and sprang aside.

But Simon, with all the _vaquero's_ cunning in casting the lariat, had planned his part too carefully, and risked too much, to fail. The rope fell true to calculation, tightening with Simon's vicious jerk, binding Henderson's arms to his body, one impotent hand within a few inches of his pistol. Simon threw all his sinewy strength into the struggle that followed, cutting Henderson's resistance short by dragging him to the ground. In a moment additional coils of rope webbed the over-trustful sailor as a spider binds a bug.

Nothing was said between the men while this treacherous capture and desperate resistance were going forward. Now, when Simon had his prize securely tied and thrown on the ground, he stirred up the fire, added branches of dry cedar, and blew it to a blaze.

"So I, without a pistol on my body, take this smart Yankee and tie him like a hog," Simon boasted, great and arrogant satisfaction in his voice. He lifted his arms to display his body free of a belted pistol, and sat down near the fire, his back against a small tree.

"I'll remember this treachery, Simon, in the day that will come," Henderson said.

"The day that is coming for you is one when Roberto will cut you to pieces with his whip," Simon sneered. "Well, there is no hurry now. We will wait till daylight comes, then ride down the canyon. It would be foolish to arrive at midnight, for Don Abrahan would be asleep."

Simon smoked a while, legs stretched toward the fire, blowing smoke luxuriously, chin lifted high.

"What did I say to them when I left my pistol behind, all the foolish ones looking at me like men whose jaws were out of joint? I said, 'I need no pistol for this work. I am going to catch a Yankee, and that is not the same as a man.' When they see me come back with you, tied like a pig for sale in the plaza! seven doctors, what a laugh!"

(_To be continued in the next issue of_ SHORT STORIES)

THE PACKET ADMIRAL

BY WARREN ELLIOT CARLETON

_Author of "The Final Test," "The Harpoon Heritage," etc._

THE TRADITION OF THE SEA DIES HARD AMONG THE YANKEE SKIPPERS OF THE
OLD SCHOOL--AND THE TRADITION IS FAITHFULLY LIVED UP TO

"Jumpin' Jehossyfat! I didn't know there was that many!"

Captain Ed Pierce preened his bushy gray mustache, his brown eyes staring at the six two-masted schooners comprising the Crosby fleet. Beside him, on the deck of the Boston and Howesport packet schooner, _Bessie Barker_, Captain Bert Blackmer also studied them. The Crosby fleet was lying at anchor in the "cowyard," the sheltered outer harbor of the decadent Cape Cod fishing town of Howesport.

"Looks like they mean business, don't it?" Captain Ed commented. "Bert, seems like perhaps you'd be wise to sell out while the sellin's good."

Captain Bert bit his lip. There was good sense in what Captain Ed had suggested. Captain Ed was shrewd. His investments had brought him opulence, made him Howesport's wealthiest citizen. Yes, Captain Ed's opinion was always worth weighing.

Captain Bert's tall, erect, thin yet sinewy frame, legs thrust wide apart, would have graced the quarterdeck of a finer craft than even the trim _Bessie Barker_. For twenty years he had successfully carried on the shipping business between Howesport and Boston. It was hard for him to give up now. His black hair and short beard, draping bold aquiline features, were turning gray. The old muscular strength of the days when he was in the South American trade had diminished with his increasing years, which had now piled up to sixty-four.

When he had discarded the _Mary Chilton_ and bought the _Bessie Barker_ two years ago, he had thought, "She'll last a lifetime. A few years more of service, and then--life ashore. Perhaps owner of a fleet of packets----"

He had never thought of such a thing as competition. People had laughed at him when he started the packet business twenty years ago. Howesport had the railroad. At best, it was a dead port.

"He'll never make it pay," they had said, and in derision had dubbed him "the Packet Admiral."

Yet he had made it pay. It hadn't made him rich like Captain Ed, but give him a few years' lease of life and with business growing as it had lately, and--Well, he _would_ be an admiral, of a line of packets plying between various ports and bringing him a small fortune, perhaps even wealth. That was all he asked--a few more years like the last five. But now--the Crosby Company.

"They've sold stock in town, too," said Captain Bert. "Mis' Mehitable Barnes fired a broadside into my hull this afternoon by informin' me that she'd bought twenty shares of it."

"Lord sakes--that so? I didn't know she was that well-to-do."

"She ain't. Took about her last cent. Seems she knows Crosby--he used to come here summers--and he coaxed her into it. Misrepresented things to her, too. Didn't tell her they intend to operate a packet business against me and cut my throat, in addition to their regular coastwise shippin'. No; Crosby outlined it to her wholly as a fleet of coastwise schooners."

"I vum!"

"Mehitable usually tells me all her business. But she sorter kept this a secret from everybody. You know women do that--once in a while."

"Folks here have said you've been kinder courtin' her late years. Funny she ain't let the cat out o' the bag 'fore this."

"Oh--just intimate friends, that's all." Captain Bert cleared his throat. "Still, for her it may be a good investment. But cripes! The air was sizzlin' when I told her Crosby's goin' to put a packet on 'tween here and Boston to compete with me!" he chuckled.

"Didn't like it, eh?"

"She vowed she'd git rid of them shares and give Crosby a piece of her mind to boot. But I told her to hang on to 'em, that it's an ill wind that blows nobody good, and she sorter calmed down. But I left her nigh cryin'."

A stalwart fellow jumped aboard from the wharf.

"Well, nigh supper time. Guess I'll be goin'," said Captain Ed, stepping on the rail and hoisting himself on to Robbins Wharf. "Looks like you're competin' against an awful stack of capital, Bert. But keep up your courage if you do fight it out. What you told the widder 'bout that ill wind might apply to you, too."

Whistling, Captain Ed walked down the wharf.

"The _Mary Chilton's_ all ready, Cap'n," spoke the big newcomer in a deep voice. He pointed over his shoulder at the old schooner, unused and falling to pieces on the other side of Robbins Wharf. "Everything's ready, sir," he repeated while Captain Bert hesitated before answering.

"All right, Bill."

Bill Hyde's speech and appearance--bulldog jaw, swarthy face and curly black hair sticking out from a shabby blue yachting cap--branded him a Yankee, but foreign to the Cape. Captain Bert had hired him two weeks ago at a Boston agency, after a long list of drunkards, thieves, and even one murderer who had sailed with him as his sole companion, first on the old _Mary Chilton_, and subsequently on the _Bessie Barker_. The captain liked Bill. He was frank, decisive, still exuberant with youth, and an all-round good shipmate. And the customer Bill had found him in Gloucester for the decrepit _Mary Chilton_----

"We'll clear for Gloucester in the _Mary Chilton_ right away," said the captain, "and come back on the mornin' train so's we can take the _Bessie_ to Boston tomorrow afternoon. You're sure, Bill, this customer you've got me ain't goin' to be disappointed in his bargain?"

"Disappointed? 'Course not. He isn't buying a yacht. Old hulks are what he always buys for hauling stone. He'll have her hull fixed up and she'll do well enough for a barge."

Across the harbor over the Herringbone a sandy strip of land running parallel to the Howesport waterfront and sheltering the outer harbor, the sun had set, only the rim of its globe now peering above the horizon. The decaying old fish piers on both sides of Robbins Wharf loomed hoary, deserted and sinister, ghosts of palmier days. Not a sound broke the silence save the squawk of a passing gull and the wash of the sea on the sides of the schooner.

Captain Blackmer still stood with a Napoleonic pose, looking out toward the vanishing sun.

"If 'twa'n't for the Widder Barnes," he remarked when its last radiance had faded and night shrouded the after-glow, "I'd be tempted to sail out and scuttle that whole Crosby fleet."

"And why stop because of the Widow Barnes?" asked Bill, suddenly interested. "I'm game to do it. I don't want to see you done out of business by that Crosby outfit. Jobs are scarce, and I'm quite satisfied with this one. Will you give me leave to dispose of those schooners for you?"

"Why, of course not! I just--was thinkin'--how anybody _might_ do it--that's all."

"It would be easy as----"

"Let's drop the subject. Come on aboard the _Mary_, Bill."

But the thought of striking underhandedly at the Crosby fleet was planted in Captain Bert's brain. The schooners had all been towed to Howesport from the shipyards by tugboats. It was doubtful whether their crews were yet organized; probably only a few men kept watch on the vessels while they lay in the Cowyard waiting for the Crosby Company to begin shipping operations.

"I've knocked around the water long enough to know that a new company like this Crosby outfit has fired all its ammunition in its opening shot," insisted Bill, while they prepared the _Mary Chilton_ for clearing Robbins Wharf. "Who ever heard of a new company in coastwise shipping starting out bang with six vessels? Two would be a plenty, for an opener. And they're all brand new two-masters, too. Must have cost a bunch of money. Cap'n, if we dispose of those schooners somehow, the Crosby Company is dead."

Captain Bert was silent a moment. It did seem logical. But the widow--she was so tormented scrupulous. Being honest, doing nobody wrong--that was about all he heard when he took frequent suppers and Sunday dinners with her. He had even dreamed that some day, if the packet business held good, he would make those meals permanent fixtures in his life by marrying the widow.

"Those old barrels in the hold--they're some the _Mary's_ owner-to-be asked me to fetch him," continued Bill. "There's a lot of dunnage in there with them. Lord, the _Mary's_ a regular floating junk shop!"

"She always was," drily commented the captain. "Leaks, rolls, and the deck is so rotten in places you'd go through if you stepped out a hornpipe. Any man who can sell her ought to be Secretary of the Navy."

It was nine o'clock when the _Mary Chilton_ cast off and headed under full sail down the harbor toward Cape Cod Bay. There was no moon, and a thin fog blew over the water in a fair June breeze. Captain Blackmer stood aft at the wheel. Bill was puttering around, first in the foc'sle, then in the hold.

The southwesterly breeze began to pick up off-shore. Dead ahead in the fog veil loomed the six schooners. Salt water politics! Captain Bert recollected that he had played them before. There was the time, when he was an A. B., that the old bark _Shannon Magec_ rammed the Dutch brig off the Brazilian coast, and he and the rest of the crew looted her cargo. He had never told Widow Barnes about that. Then, too, there were other things he had never told her--but what she didn't know wouldn't harm her.

Bill came up from the hold. He peered off through the fog toward the Crosby fleet.

"Lordy!" he exclaimed, coming aft toward the captain. "If we'd moored them ourselves we couldn't have placed them better for disposing of 'em. Look at 'em! Less than eight fathoms between 'em. Now ain't that just like a fool tugboat skipper and a company of greenhorns!"

Captain Bert bit his lip. Was he a coward? He--guided by the silly sentiments of a woman, a woman who had never gone to sea, who didn't own a packet that was to be run out of business; a woman who had bought shares in that damned Crosby fleet.

Bill had gone back to the hold. The captain hated to think of having to give up the packet and of losing his genial new shipmate. He recalled the former mates whom he had shipped on his two schooners. He thought of how this new one had taken hold, his ability as a navigator, his reliability as a companion. Bill had suggested striking at the Crosby fleet largely to safeguard his own job. But in so doing also to stabilize the captain's packet business. And if the widow were deprived of the money she had invested in the Crosby Company, it would make her all the more willing to be his wife--when he was ready to ask her.

Out of the hold wriggled a little braid of smoke. A small cloud puffed from the open hatch, followed by a dense black column that might have streamed from the funnel of an ocean liner. Bill emerged, coughing, and the crackling of burning wood sounded from below.

"God almighty!" shouted the captain. "What have you done?"

"The small boat's close to the companion," replied Bill calmly, designating the dinghy aft. "Head for the Crosby fleet--the nearest schooner."

"You damned traitor!" snarled the captain, starting forward. Bill blocked his way.

"I'm doing this--for you," he declared. "Those empty tar barrels in the hold--the _Mary's_ doomed. So is the Crosby fleet. It's self-preservation for you, sir. Such things have happened accidentally before. Nobody will ever suspect that this didn't. Get out the way; give me the wheel!"

Captain Bert felt himself shoved aside by a quick-moving giant who dashed to the wheel and swung it--then the lurch of the schooner--the creaking of the boom. Flames from the hold licked out of the hatch, and smoke poured to leeward toward the fleet.

"--the wind's right--their position's right. They're fresh with paint and varnish. Good-by, old Crosby fleet!" sang the fiend at the wheel.

Captain Bert was upon him. He had been a skilled fighter in his day. He struck out with his left fist at Bill's grinning face. But the mate stepped nimbly aside, ducked, and letting go the wheel, floored the captain with an uppercut to the chin.

"No time for fooling!" Bill roared. "Stay there, and do what I tell you. I'm in command until we've seen this thing through."

The ancient _Mary Chilton_ was a floating tinder box above her waterline. So rapidly did the flames catch on to the decks and bulkheads, it was doubtful whether a man could stay at the wheel long enough to bear down on the first schooner of the down-wind fleet.

"She's a floating hell!" bellowed Bill above the crackle and roar of the fire. "Get on your feet, old man! I need you. This is no one-man job."

Captain Bert, still groggy, his mind clouded by the blow Bill had given him, crawled to his feet. The smoke stifled him. Yes; Bill was right--it was not a one-man job. It wasn't a job for any man. Bill's eyes ran tears. Black smoke rolling out of the companionway shrouded him.

"Here--the wheel--take it!" Bill choked. Captain Bert grasped its spokes and held it steady, holding his breath in the dense smoke as long as he could, then stepping aside to clearer air, exhaling quickly and breathing again.

The wind, as if a partner in Bill's scheme, moved the smoke off the port quarter. Dimly, but looming more distinctly, the captain discerned the first schooner ahead. By standing at the starboard side of the wheel, Bill and he could keep their eyes on the fleet.

"Look!" Captain Blackmer's eyes were focused on the bow of the first schooner. There stood a man waving his arms. Another form in oilskins stood near him.

"They're all safe," encouraged Bill. "We're getting away with it fine. Fire--the wind took us--we lost control. Hold her steady! See--they've got a dinghy in the water--" pointing at the small boat floating beside the big schooner.

"But--but look! Look at that name on her bow! Read it!"

The bow of the schooner ahead was aglow with the red light from the _Mary Chilton_.

"_Mehitable Barnes_," read Bill aloud. "You damned old fool, give me the wheel!"

Captain Bert swung the wheel and held on, even after Bill had pounced on him, bearing him to the deck under his greater strength. Like rivets the captain's fingers clung, Bill clawing at them, tearing at them, to wrench them from their hold. Fire tore through the rigging. The blazing craft heeled to starboard, flames shriveling sails and snapping stays and halyards. Over the heads of the two men struggling at the wheel the crimson curtain spread, swept by the rush of the wind at the quick veering movement of the vessel.

It was sheets of flame and not canvas that carried the schooner on her course out of the shadow of the _Mehitable Barnes_. Men shouted on the _Mehitable's_ bow as the _Mary Chilton_ floundered past. Blistering heat bore down from the blazing mainsail upon the contestants for the wheel, surged up from below, like the ends of fiendish tongs, gripping the two between.

But Captain Bert did not hear the curses of his mate; did not even wince at Bill's nails clawing at his hands that grasped the wheel. All he felt--all he was conscious of--was the swirl of water from the sides of the ungainly _Mary Chilton_ mingled with the crackle and roar from below and overhead--her sluggish departure from the Crosby fleet lying increasingly but slowly astern. And somewhere in the distance that dim gray shore-line of the Herringbone showed faintly through illuminated fog and smoke--it seemed miles and miles away. Then the mainsail descended in a streamer of fire, and the oppressive weight of Bill rolled off his back.

The form of a man groveled at his feet. Captain Bert pulled himself up by the wheel.

"Bill!" he raved. "Bill--you damned scoundrel! I've beaten you! _Beaten you!_ Look astern. Not a schooner of 'em even scorched. Come, Bill--your trick at the wheel now. But you can't turn back. Our canvas is all burnt away. What's left won't hold a paper-bagful of wind."

The captain's face smarted as with the stings of a thousand bees. His eyes--were they burned out? He couldn't really see now. He rather felt the presence of the crumpled mate, roasting on the gridiron of a quarterdeck. Into his arms he gathered the limp body, ran with it, he knew not where. His feet tangled in a line. He fell--and water closed over his head.

Yet was it water? The fire itself had not been so hot. He had scarcely felt the heat of the schooner's blazing wood and mainsail that had encompassed him--but this! It was boiling pitch, scalding him to the marrow. But he clung to the man in his arms, and they bobbed up to the surface together, the captain gasping for breath in the open air.

He knew it was salt water--cold salt water--that scalded his hot flesh. The man he clung to must be dead. It would do him no good even if the captain swam with him to the distant Herringbone. Was it worth while to drag a dead body with him, a body that would hinder his own chances of saving himself? Yes, he must do it. Bill was a scoundrel, but there might be a spark of life in him yet. Even a scoundrel--any human being--was worth saving. It was the law of the sea.

The line binding his leg, he kicked to disengage it. A dark shadow moved in the red light of the water. It was the boat, the dinghy which Bill had left near the companion for their getaway. Clinging to Bill with one hand, he hauled at the line with the other. Finding that he made no progress, he fastened his teeth into Bill's charred shirt and hauled on the line hand over hand. As he suspected, it was fast to the dinghy.

Over the gunwale of the small boat he threw one arm, supporting Bill with the other. To leeward, safely out of the Cowyard, drifted the glowing fragment of the _Mary Chilton's_ hull. But the other light--it was brighter. It illumined the entire wide harbor like day, from the Herringbone to the Howesport waterfront. A yellow light, almost like a big lamp.

The captain's heart sank. He clung grimly to the boat and the limp body, and turned his head toward the Crosby fleet. The _Mehitable Barnes_ was a sheet of leaping, crackling fire from stem to stern!

The captain stared, fascinated. And even while he watched, the flames jumped to the next schooner. The wind caught the fire and swept it in a sheet of gold the length and breadth of the fleet. One after the other, four of the schooners burst into flames. The fifth and sixth, in the path of the cyclone of swirling fire, were already smoking like smoldering logs.

But he--he had a bigger proposition on his hands now than watching a fleet burn up. The inert form he supported wriggled slightly--its mouth breathed, feebly spat out water. If it weren't for Bill he could crawl over the gunwale into the dinghy, run ashore to the Herringbone--but what then? Nothing but the memory of the disaster he had caused by first putting such an idea in Bill's head. He could never look Mehitable in the eyes again. His rivalry with the Crosby Company, the mysterious sailing of the _Mary Chilton_ at night--who would believe his story of Bill's treachery? He could end it all by letting go of the dinghy and sinking--with Bill. Yet Bill was alive. The law of the sea----

But why should he rescue Bill? Bill had deliberately planned and executed the whole disaster; planned it even before the captain had mentioned scuttling the fleet, evidenced by the tar barrels. Why should the _Mary Chilton's_ buyer, a stone carrier, want tar barrels? The captain had done his best to avoid the _Mehitable_--fought for it, almost died for it. It was Bill's doing, the whole outrageous business.

Yet Bill had done it for him. Wrong, to be sure, but still out of a sort of devotion--such devotion as a savage might show to his chief. A fellow who would do that for his skipper was worth saving. Captain Bert gripped the gunwale and Bill with an iron clutch and let the waves and wind do the rest.

He knew that he must be badly burned; that Bill's burns must be even worse. Bill had been buried in the burning mainsail when it fell. Bill had caught it all on his back, thus shielding the captain while they struggled.

There were boats headed from Howesport village to the burning fleet. On the Herringbone the captain made out lights moving back and forth. He wondered whether the men he had glimpsed on the schooner were safe. No doubt the lights on the Herringbone were those men hauling up their boats.

If he could only get Bill into his own boat, get into it himself. It would be so much easier. The strain of holding up a man and clinging to the gunwale at the same time, with that scalding water tingling through every pore of his tender body--it was telling on him. But the Herringbone looked nearer, its illumined shore-line showing white less than a mile away.

A mile! One mile or one hundred miles, Captain Bert knew that his strength was unequal to his task. The man held up by his arm locked with the captain's moaned, and his puffed eyes opened, narrow slits encased in swollen, sooty flesh.

"You--you--I thought--" he gasped. "The Crosby fleet----"

"Never mind them," said the captain tenderly. "We've got a mile to go yet. Take it easy."

"Where is she?"

"Who?"

"The _Mary Chilton_?"

"Oh--her!" disgustedly. "She's all right. So are the Crosby vessels."

"You lie! They're burned--every one of them!" He turned his head with a great effort and looked toward the paling flare of what had been the Crosby fleet.

But Captain Bert was interested in the gray sloop bearing down on them. He needed his strength, even that which he would spend in the effort of speaking.

"Bill," he nevertheless exclaimed, "can't you--grab the gun'le--yourself? My arm--it's about gone. My back----"

Bill groaned and stiffly raised one arm from the water, but it fell back heavily. Captain Bert gritted his teeth and his fingers tightened on the gunwale until it seemed that they must gouge into the wood.

That was what had tired him--holding on to the gunwale. It wasn't Bill's dead weight that exhausted him. It was the resistance of the jerking little boat upon which their lives depended. Either the light of the burning schooners was dimming fast, or the fog was thickening. The water rippling in the glow grew hazy. It was as if they were rising, he and Bill--rising into a cloud. Dizziness--nausea--scalding water, torturing salt water like acid--the onrushing gray sloop expanding to gigantic proportions like an inflating balloon--voices.... He couldn't stand it. His fingers fell from the gunwale, and water closed soothingly over his head.

* * * * *

The fog lifted ... two men were talking. Captain Bert looked into the sharp, pale features of a stranger with a small black mustache. The stranger was bending over him, daubing his chest and arms with grease. The wood the captain was lying on was the quarterdeck of Captain Ed Pierce's sloop, and Captain Ed stood nearby at the wheel.

Captain Bert felt cool. He smelt camphor. And the gladdening thought that he was not seriously burned was checked by the sight of a heap of canvas lying at his side.

"Bill!" he spoke in a far-away voice. "Where's Bill?"

But he knew well enough that the canvas hid what had been Bill.

"But why torment him? Cap'n Bert never done it," declared Captain Ed. "I've known him since we was boys----"

The stranger checked him, and addressing Captain Bert, asked, "Why did you burn the Crosby fleet?" The abruptness of the question brought Captain Bert to his senses.

"I ain't so sure I did," he replied.

"But your schooner was afire. It ran into them----"

"That's a lie!" insisted Captain Bert. "If my schooner had rammed one of the fleet, how come it she fetched up to the east'ard of the Cowyard? A burnin' schooner that rams a vessel ain't likely to recover herself and make a half-turn against the wind."

"By gum, that's right!" agreed Captain Ed. "I told ye Bert never done it----"

"And the light--did ye notice?" Captain Bert went on. "'Twas yellow and the _Mary's_ was red. The _Mehitable_ never caught fire from the _Mary_. She was set afire from the inside. Part of that yellow light was kerosene."

The stranger looked at Captain Ed and smiled.

"I admit the idea of scuttlin' the fleet come to me," Captain Bert went on, "but I never sanctioned Bill to set the _Mary_ afire. He done it without my knowin'. Said he'd got a customer for the old hulk in Gloucester--got me to sail there with her tonight."

"A fake trip," put in Captain Ed. The stranger held up a hand to restrain him.

"I fought for the wheel when he set the _Mary_ afire--and I got it. I sheered the _Mary_ off from the fleet, and 'twas while Bill and me fought for the wheel that the mains'l fell blazin' on Bill--and I done my best to save him----"

"It was that burn on his back that killed Bill," Captain Ed explained. "Mr. Clyde, as a friend of Cap'n Bert's, I forbid ye to tantalize him any longer."

"I'm accepting your orders," smiled the stranger. "Cap'n Blackmer, don't think we're blind to what you did. We were trailing the _Mary Chilton_ in the fog. We saw everything that happened."

"You trailed us!"

"We've suspected it all along. The Crosby Company had sunk too much money in its fleet."

"That's what Bill told me." Captain Bert's eyes were wide.

"The Crosby Company was left bankrupt with a fleet it could not get rid of, although they succeeded in keeping the news from getting out. It had no capital to operate such a fleet with, but the vessels were insured up to the last dollar of their value."

"Tell him about Bill," interposed Captain Ed.

"Wait." And to Captain Bert again, "The Brisfield Insurance Company sent me as its inspector to keep the fleet under observation while it was in this harbor. Cap'n Pierce is a stockholder in the insurance company. So as soon as I got here--about an hour or so ago on the night train from Boston--I looked him up."

"I'd be in consider'ble money if ye'd come an hour or so sooner," commented Captain Ed. "But go on."

"Cap'n Ed said you were starting for Gloucester in an old hulk you'd discarded--with a new mate--and we agreed it looked suspicious. So we trailed you in his sloop."

Captain Bert sat bolt upright.

"We stayed to wind'ard of the Crosby fleet to make observations," Mr. Clyde went on. "That's why we didn't pick you up earlier. The last we saw of you and Bill, you were fighting for the wheel with fire all around you. We had to get complete evidence that the Crosby fleet was set afire from the inside of the _Mehitable_."

"Tell him about--" insisted Captain Ed.

"Oh yes--Bill." The stranger paused and glanced at the form shrouded with canvas. "Well, Bill was Crosby's professional crook who did all his dirty work for him. You see, Crosby has done this sort of thing before--got up companies, failed, and usually ended by collecting full insurance after his establishment had burned up. This is his first marine venture. All his others were in business ashore. But we got inside information on his past record--and Bill's--that opened our eyes."

"Then Bill was workin' for him--and against me--all the time?"

"Using you for the goat, to lay the burning of the fleet on to you," said Mr. Clyde. "Bill got his just reward tonight."

"And how about the insurance?" Captain Bert's voice was husky.

"Not a cent will be paid. We saw the _Mehitable_ set on fire from her foc'sle when the Mary sheered off from her. We saw the escape of the men who did it. Our next step will be to get the goods on Crosby himself."

"But the Widder Barnes--all her money is tied up in the Crosby Company," protested Captain Bert.

"Don't worry about her," exploded Captain Ed. "It's me who's stung--not her. I bought all her shares in the Crosby Company after I left you this afternoon."

"Godfrey!"

"Serves me right, too, for judgin' the strength of that Crosby Company by the show their fleet made in the harbor. That ill wind of yourn sorter shifted, Bert, and left me becalmed.

"But you, Bert," he added with determination, "you pop the question to the widder as soon as your feet hit dry land. Say, she'd 'a' given me that Crosby stock free gratis if I hadn't had a two-thousand-dollar check all made out to her in my hand. With her luck and your judgment, you'll form a team that will make you a packet admiral yet!"

HENRY HORNBONE'S ONE-MAN WAR

BY HELEN TOPPING MILLER

_Author of "White Collar Stuff," "Pitch," etc._

PREJUDICES OF THE OLD-TIMERS DIE HARD. BUT A RAILROAD IS A POWERFUL
THING FOR ONE OLD-TIMER TO FIGHT--AND WHEN OTHERS ENTER THE FEUD,
THINGS BEGIN TO LOOK DIFFERENT

In his sooty kitchen with the coal oil lamp sending a plume of smoke aloft and four kittens rolling under the three-legged stove, Henry Hornbone sat and went through the motions of a man eating his supper.

He fished sausages out of a skillet, he cut them carefully into small bits, he smeared oleomargarine on thick slabs of baker's bread and he stirred sugar into his tea, one spoonful after another, but he did not eat.

Henry was listening. His ears were listening, straining till he could almost see them standing out batlike from his knobby old head. His whole gaunt ridiculous body was listening, and his soul, such cramped and curious sort of soul as he owned, stood stock still in a cold tremor of mingled triumph and dread.

Henry was listening for the wreck of the Oriole Limited.

While he spooned sugar into his cup, staring off into the blackness with a sort of fascinated paralysis, he was waiting for the hideous crashing, the roar and rending, the sickening upheaval, the booming rush of steam when the proud steel train should go hurtling into the frozen muck of his turnip patch. Inch by inch past block after block, he followed the Oriole Limited in his mind through the black night to her doom. Now she would be streaking through Hodges Siding; a great whooping serpent with a thousand gleaming eyes and a tongue of flame.

He took out his old silver watch, calculated the difference between sun time and railroad time--speculated. Four minutes out of Hodges now--eight minutes more. Eight minutes, and he would be even with the B. & A.!

Nothing on earth could save the Oriole Limited. Henry had fixed everything himself. He had turned the abandoned old switch that in the past had served the guano factory and spiked it himself. To be certain that nothing could prevent the destruction he planned he had put two heavy plow beams on the rails near the switch frogs and had weighted them down with rocks and brickbats. All this after dark and so near to train time that there was small chance for a prowling section hand to discover his work.

It had taken Henry eighteen years to accumulate courage enough to spike that switch. Half his queer, isolated life had been devoted to a lonely vendetta against the B. & A.--a one-man war which no one beside himself suspected. Sixteen years since, when the spur to the guano plant was first laid, Henry had made a wedge of steel, long and sharp. Twelve years later, when the factory had yielded its malodorous ghost and its red tin roof began to sag and the old spur track to rust, he had begun a long series of abortive and secret attempts at train wrecking.

Every dark and rainy night for years he had crept out through his pie-plant row and past his humming beehives, slipped over the white fence and spiked the switch open with a few quick, practised strokes. But always about the time the Oriole Limited pulled out of Hodges Siding his courage had failed him, and he had rushed out with mallet and sledge to remove the menace he had created.

Whenever a work train pulled into Elsie, Henry always suffered a cold apprehension for fear the useless old spur would be torn up before he had screwed up enough nerve to do his work of sabotage. But for some reason the grass-grown length of abandoned spur remained. And now the switch was open, grimly spiked, waiting for the arrogant engine of the Limited to come crashing, amazed, to her tragedy.

Six minutes!

Henry tasted his tea. It was syrupy and nauseous. He spat it out nervously, turned his eyes toward the black window and wrested them away again by main force. He had purposely locked the door and hidden the key in a sack of nails and bolts where it would take half an hour to find it. The front door was locked fast also; indeed the front door had been locked fast for so many years that it was doubtful if the rusty old lock would turn at all.

He had taken off his shoes, carried them deliberately to the attic and hung them over the rafters. Every precaution against a last-minute sagging of his nerve had been taken. He had even dropped the sledge hammer in the cistern, half to guard against his own weakness and half as alibi. The wreck, he had decided, would be laid to train robbers who had been operating on the B. & A. at frequent intervals. Nobody would suspect old Henry Hornbone who fathered every deserted cat for miles around and sat always on the front seat at prayer meeting with his useless ear trumpet slung around his shoulder on a buckskin cord; because nobody ever had suspected him though he had carried on his one-man war against the road for eighteen years.

No one, not even the B. & A. officials themselves, were aware that a state of hostilities had existed between Henry and the road since the first surveyors had come dragging their numbered stakes through his little peach orchard. A few engineers had laughed when they saw the absurd old fellow in his flapping clothes standing beside the new roadbed brandishing angry fists. But when, not long since, a trio of gondolas had broken loose from a slow-crawling freight and gone bumping joyfully down to the station where they crashed through fifty feet of platform, demolished a dozen telegraph poles and a water crane, nobody so much as thought of old Henry. Henry's very appearance was an alibi. He looked like a motherless child, grown to man's stature, grizzled, bewildered, eagerly friendly.

Since his boyhood Henry had been stone deaf. Such fragments of speech as remained to him, made timorous by the vast closing in of silence, were uttered in a shrill yell which the unthinking and strangers assumed to be the babbling of a moron. The amused pity with which his attempts at conversation were received had not escaped Henry's sharp eyes, and he had grown to depend more and more upon his grin as a means of communication with the world, and upon a jerky code of signs and syllables.

No one would have believed that grisly plots were hatched behind the glow of that ingenuous grin. No one in Elsie, he knew, would ever suspect that the sharpened wedge and the plow beams were the work of a simple, grinning old mute. He was safe enough if he could just sit still.

Four minutes!

In four minutes he would be revenged for the invading of his little plot of ground, which his mother had left to him, by men who had cursed him and by steel rails and yelping engines. In four minutes he would have been paid for the dazed wretchedness which had been his when men with law at their backs had come and gabbled things which he could neither hear nor comprehend, but which, it appeared, gave to the B. & A. the little earth he had tended, gave them the right to shower his roof with hot cinders, to slay his quince bushes with sulphurous smoke, to rattle his puttyless window panes loose with the thunder of locomotives.

Four minutes! He held his elbows in a grip that hurt. He twisted his old legs about each other till they ached. His face, with its three-day growth of sandy beard, writhed and twitched. But he sat still.

Coming! Coming! He felt the first premonitory shudder of his floor sills that told him the train had crossed the bridge below the yards. Every pulse in him spun as though a gigantic current galvanized him. His head roared. His chest hurt.

Nearer! Almost here! His grip held. His body grew numb.

Then something snapped. Some grim gripping gave way. He went limp. He retched. He was old Henry Hornbone again, simple, kindly old Henry who mothered cats.

He went through the window kicking the sash to flinders. Shoeless he leaped like a wild old warlock through his garden, over the fence, up to the right of way. The headlight of the Oriole Limited flared upon him--a dancing ghost with waving arms--as the train came to a grinding stop thirty feet from the spiked switch and the plow beams.

Charlie Sanders, who ran the Limited, sprang out of the cab. Newt Murphy, the conductor, sprinted down the cinders. To them old Henry waved wild hands and cackled unintelligible things. The flag-man, an officious person, thudded ahead and discovered the open switch.

"By George, old Henry sure saved all our lives," Charlie Sanders explained to the passengers who came swarming up. "Looka that--the way we was running old Fifteen-eighty would have turned plumb end over end when she hit that spur."

Henry Hornbone found himself the center of a crowd, and a hero. Men shook his hand, women's cold, shaking fingers clapped his own. They shouted questions at him till Newt Murphy came to his relief.

"He's deef--can't hear a thing, Henry can't. Harmless old guy, but stone deef."

Someone was moving through the crowd gathering up money, a girl with red hair and a little gray hat tipped over one eye. She brought the donation to Henry in her cupped hands--little hands--bills and silver dollars and a few quarters and halves.

"Take it," she urged, "it's for you."

Henry backed away. All his life he had been terrified in the presence of women.

"He can't hear you, lady," explained Charlie Sanders.

"Oh--make him understand, somebody." The girl followed Henry with her double handful of currency, but he backed further, sidling, his lips lifted at the corners.

He was in a cold agony, a wretchedness of shaking relief and anguish of conscience. He wanted to be let alone. He wanted to creep into his old bed under the wool quilts, deep down where he could shut his ears against the penetrating jeers that clanged like sleighbells in his brain. The girl's insistence drew from him a painful burst of his rare, dreadful speech.