CHAPTER XXIII.

WE DEFY THE ROGUES.

And Receive an Ultimatum from Them.

It is a human experience, I believe, that men’s faculties often serve them best in moments of grave danger. In my own case, to be sure (but this may be a habit of the mind), I am often mastered by a strange lethargy during the hours of a common day. Events have been no other than a dreamy significance for me. I do not set them in a profitable sequence or take other than a general and an indifferent survey of that which is going on about me. But let a crisis of actual peril arrive and my mind is all awake, its judgment swift, its analysis rarely mistaken. Such a moment came to me upon the deck of the White Wings when I discovered my little Joan at the taffrail of the Diamond Ship and knew that my errand had not been in vain. Instantly I detected the precise nature of the risk we ran and the causes which contributed to it. The situation, hitherto vague and objectless, became as plain as the simplest sum in a child’s arithmetic book.

“Larry,” I said to the Captain, “they will discover our presence inside ten minutes, and we shall learn how they can shoot. This is too easy a target for my comfort. Let us back out while we have the chance.”

Captain Larry, as intent upon the spectacle of the strange ship as any cabin boy, turned about quickly like a man roused up from a dream.

“I was thinking of it before the relief came alongside,” said he; “the steam blast may give us away any minute, doctor. We lie right under their stern, however, and that is something. So long as they don’t send their limelight whizzing?——”

“That is exactly what they are about to do, Captain. They are going to look round for the unknown ship which has been sending them false messages by marconigram. Watch with me and you may follow the story. That is the first chapter of it.”

I pointed to the deck of the great ship, whence the figure of my little Joan had disappeared as mysteriously as it came; and there I showed to Larry a group of men in earnest talk with a newcomer from the steamer which now lay almost alongside the larger vessel. The quick movements, the gestures of this company betrayed the curiosity which the stranger’s words awakened and the astonishment that rightly followed upon it. Imagining myself to be a spy among them, I heard, in imagination, every word of that fateful conversation. “We sent no message.” “You’ve been fooled right enough.” “There’s mischief afloat.” “No, we had no accident—what in thunder are you talking about?—it’s a lie.” So the new hand must be telling the astonished crew. It needed no great prescience to say what would follow after. Even Timothy McShanus arrived at it before I had finished.

“Would that be Colin Ross gone aboard?” he asked me, wheeling about suddenly.

I told him it would hardly be another.

“Then he’ll tell ’em the truth about the cables, or I’m a liar.”

“He will tell them the truth about the cables, and you are not a liar, Timothy. He is doing so at this very moment.”

“Faith, man, they’ll be firing shots at us then.”

“It is possible, Timothy. If you are curious on the point?——”

“Curious be d——d. Would ye have me in the sea?”

“In the sea or out, I would have you keep a cool head, Timothy. They are going to fire at us, but that is not to say that they are going to hit us. Our turn comes after. Neither to-day nor to-morrow may see the end of it. I am only beginning with them, Timothy. When I have done, God help some of them, the Jew above the others. Now wait for it and see. Here’s the lantern busy. They are putting the story to the proof, you will observe. Let us hope that their astonishment may not be too much for them.”

So a commonplace chatter went on, and yet the mad intoxication of that interval of suspense had come upon us all as a fever. No man might measure his words, be sure. There we were, sagging in the trough of the seas some three hundred yards, it may be, from the great ship’s guns, our crew muttering in deep whispers, the steam hissing from our valves, the smoke drifting to the north in a dense suffocating cloud. Aware of the few moments of grace possible to us, we had given the word down to Mr. Benson to go full speed astern; and running thus for the half of a mile, we then swung the yacht round and headed due south at all the speed of which we were capable.

Now, indeed, the tense hour of our doubt began. We counted the very minutes until the beams of the monster searchlight should ensnare us once more. Brief exclamations, cheery words of hope flashing from man to man gave passage to that current of human electricity which burned up as a flame. Would the light never fall? Ay, yonder it strikes the sea, and yonder and yonder—compassing the horizon around in a twinkling, a blind glory, a very pharos of the unknown world. And now it falls upon us, and man can look upon the face of man as though he stood beneath the sun of day; and all is stillness and silence, and the unspoken question.

Far away as we were, a roar of triumph could be heard across the sea when the Jew’s ship discovered us, and the great beams of the searchlight rested upon us exultingly. In turn, the smoke from our funnel forbade us any longer to locate the enemy or to form an opinion as to his movements. Certainly, no gunshot followed immediately upon his achievement; and when a little gust of the south wind, veering a point or two, carried the loom from our furnaces away, we espied the two ships drifting as before, and even boats passing from one to the other. From this time, moreover, the darkness failed us somewhat, and a great moon tempered the ocean with its translucent beams of silvery light. Our safety lay in our speed. We burned the precious coal without stint, since our very lives were in the furnace’s keeping.

“What stops them, Larry—what are they waiting for?” I asked him presently. He had deserted the bridge and stood aft with me to watch the distant steamers. McShanus, meanwhile, paced the decks like a lion at the hour of feeding. It was his way of saying that he found the suspense intolerable.

“I don’t think we shall have to wait long, sir,” Larry rejoined presently. “You see, they would hardly be ready to fire their guns, and not overmuch discipline among them, I suppose. If they hit us, it will be something by way of an accident.”

“And yet one that might happen, Larry. Well, here it comes, anyway. And a wicked bad shot I must say.”

It was odd that they should have fired at the very moment I replied to him; yet such was the fact and such the coincidence. Scarcely had I uttered the words when a monstrous yellow flame leaped out over the bows of the Diamond Ship (which now had put about to chase us), and spreading itself abroad upon the waters left a heavy cloud of black smoke very baffling to their gunners. As for the shell, I know not to this day where it fell. We heard neither explosion nor splash; saw no spume or spray upon the hither sea, and were, not a man of us, a penny the worse for their endeavour. A second attempt achieved no better result. True, we detected the shell this time, for it fell plump into the sea, near the fifth part of a mile from our starboard quarter; but the wretched shooting, the long interval between the shots and the speed at which we travelled, inspired confidence anew, and so surely that my men began to cheer the gunners ironically, and even to flash a signal to them across the sea.

“It’s as I thought, Larry,” said I, “they carry a gun and have no more idea how to use it than a lady in charge of a boarding school. The Jew has been living as near to a fool’s paradise as such a man is ever likely to get to paradise at all. I think we need waste no more coal. Let us lie to and take our chances. The risk is too small to think about.”

“Yon man would never hit cocoanuts at a fair,” chimed in McShanus, who had come up. “What will ye be flying over the ocean for? Is it coal we have to steam to China and back? Sure, the docthor is wise entirely, and be hanged to them. We lie here as safe as a babe in a mother’s lap.”

We laughed at his earnestness, but the order was rung down nevertheless, and presently the yacht lay rolling to the swell and we could hear the stokers drawing a furnace below. Who is justly to blame for the accident which followed I do not dare to tell myself. Sometimes I have charged myself with it and complained bitterly of the opinions I had ventured. I can only tell you that the yacht had scarcely been slowed down when the rogues’ ship fired at us again, and the shot, crossing our forward decks at an angle of some fifty-five degrees, struck a fine young seaman of the name of Holland and almost annihilated him before our very eyes. The tragedy had a greater significance because of the very mirth with which we had but a moment before regarded the Jew’s gunners and their performance. Death stood there upon the heels of laughter; a cry in the night was the answer to an honest man’s defiance and my own bravado. As for poor Holland, the shot took him about the middle and cut him absolutely in two. He could have suffered no pain—so instantaneously was he hurled into eternity. One moment I saw him standing at the bulwarks watching the distant searchlight; at the next, there remained but a dreadful something upon the deck from which men turned their eyes in horror and dare not so much as speak about.

You are to imagine with what consternation and dismay this accident fell upon us. For many minutes together no man spoke a word to another. Such a deathly silence came upon the ship that our own act and judgment might have brought this awful disaster, and not the play of capricious change. To say that the men were afraid is to do them less than justice. In war time, it is the earliest casualties which affright the troops and send the blood from the bravest faces. Our good fellows had gone into this adventure with me thinking that they understood its risks, but in reality understanding them not at all. The truth appalled them, drove challenge from their lips and laughter from their eyes. They were new men thereafter, British seamen, handy-men who worked silently, methodically, stubbornly as such fellows ever will when duty calls them. Had I suggested that we should return immediately to Europe they would have broken into open mutiny on the spot. Henceforth no word of mine need advocate my work or ask of them true comradeship. I knew that they would follow me to the ends of the earth if thereby they might avenge their shipmate.

“Larry,” I said, “the blame of that is upon me. God forgive my rashness. I feel as though my folly had cost me the life of one of my own sons.”

“Sir,” was his answer, “you had no more to do with it than the King himself. I will not hear such talk. The chances are the same for all of us. It might have been yourself, sir.”

McShanus was no less insistent.

“’Tis to do our duty we are here,” he said. “If there is a man among us who is ashamed of his duty, let us be ashamed of him.”

I did not answer them. The seamen, awakened from their trance, ran to the help of a comrade long past all human help. Far away over the waters, the Diamond Ship still fired her impotent shells at us. Their very impotency convinced me how surely an accident had killed poor Holland. I said that it had been the will of God, indeed, that one should perish on the altar of our justice, and his life to be the first sacrifice to be asked of us. In my own cabin, alone and bitterly distressed, a greater depression fell upon me so that I could ask myself why I had been chosen for the part at all or how it befell that of the thousands who had been robbed of Valentine Imroth, the Jew, I, alone, must set out to discover him. Vain, indeed, did triumph appear now. We had defied the rogues and they had answered us—not with a final answer, truly, but with that hush and awe of death which is never so terrible as upon the lonely waste of the great silent ocean.

Nor was the hour to pass without further news of them. Impotent at the guns, they fell to words, rapped out by our receiver so plainly that a very child of telegraphy could have read them.

“The message of Valentine Imroth to the Englishman, Fabos.—I take up your challenge. Joan Fordibras shall pay your debt in full.”