Then Hank’s taut-stretched nerves nearly snapped and he bit his lips to keep from crying out in alarm. A cold and clammy hand was touching his under the table! Sweat started out on the chief’s forehead, and his mouth was sticky and dry. Then he remembered and was reassured by that look in Soapy’s eyes.
That was no hand—merely McDowell’s dexterous foot, slipped out of those oversize regulation shoes! It drew back for a second, then came up again and Hank Miller felt the cold steel of Captain Jonathan’s pocketknife, held between Soapy’s toes!
* * * *
The loquacious captain was still praising the virtues of the soap he had found; Hank thought he was going to eat it. He even cast rank and station aside for a moment and allowed the two burly seamen to smell its fragrance, and their little pig eyes glittered.
“We regret that your pop-gun is too heavy to take away, since we really have no time to rig a boom and tackle!” the captain declared. “However, the sights and breech plug, as well as a few brass fittings, will come in very useful. This has been a very profitable ship— considering that it hardly appeared to be worth a shell. For my part, I—”
He never finished that sentence. Hank Miller felt the knife cut through the last thong. His hands wrenched free. He jerked them upward and snatched the Luger off the table and shot one of the German seamen where he stood. He grabbed Herr Hauptmann by the collar and used him as a shield while he turned the Luger on the other seaman.
The sailor let his gun fall, and Hank released the skipper, who staggered back against the bulkhead, his hands upraised, his mouth agape with dismay.
“Now, you lousy Krauts, stand by for a ram!” Hank ordered. “Here, Riley, get those guns!”
He stooped and retrieved the knife, slashing the thongs that held the gunner’s mate.
Riley freed the others rapidly. There were six other Germans, still busy ransacking the stores. They must have heard the shot.
“Quick, Riley! You and Morgan and Jones! Take the other two Lugers and slip out on the port side here. Keep behind cover so they can’t see you from the sub. Get below and get those other Heinies. And listen—I got a plan! When you’ve got ’em, slip on their uniforms and report back here. Bring an extra uniform!”
“You bet, chief!”
“Very nice, Schweinhund!” the captain snarled. “But if you remember, my crew has a gun trained on you! I have changed my mind about leaving you aboard. Put down your gun and I give you my word of honor you’ll be treated like prisoners of war.”
“What honor?” sneered Hank. “You’re in a hell of a position to be telling me what you’ll do and what you won’t do. We’ve got you licked. Listen!”
There was a short, sharp scuffle below decks. Riley and his men had caught the Germans coming out of the storeroom with cases of canned goods burdening them. Five minutes later, the little gunner’s mate and the other two sailors reappeared, wearing the jackets and the unbecoming flat hats of the vanquished submarine sailors.
“All right!” Hank told them. “Now get me this bird’s uniform. With that gold, I guess I’ll rate something!”
He motioned with the Luger.
“Sit down, Krauts. We’ll see how you like being tied.”
* * * *
From the deck of the German submarine, the gun crew and the underofficer watched as their men came on the deck of the Crescenta and went aft to the gun, preparing to take its sights and other pieces. Deutschland uber alles, but it was a great day for the U-boats! There’d be the telling of this and other victories over many a stein when they got back in the Kiel Canal for a period of rest and overhaul!
It wasn’t a suspicious move, that gun muzzle swinging around toward them. Someone was about to hammer off part of the breech mechanism—see, they had swung it open, and they crowded about it so you couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing. Maybe Mueller was having his little joke, pointing the enemy’s disabled gun at his own ship—Mueller was a droll fellow, anyway.
Nobody on the sub knew how it happened. No one of the sub’s gun crew lived to tell, but that gun on the Crescenta’s deck suddenly belched flame and smoke. A shell struck the sub’s deck gun and demolished it, and the men around it were blown into the water, torn, lifeless things.
“That leaves five shells!” announced Hank Miller as he stood by the Crescenta’s gun in Herr Hauptmann’s uniform. “Now if she surrenders, hold your fire. If she tries to dive, give her hell!”
The panic-stricken underofficer made the conning tower and chose to dive. The hatch clanged shut, the whaleback went awash and slanted forward.
Boom!
A gaping, jagged hole appeared at the base of the conning tower. Water began to pour in. At such close range, the Crescenta’s armed guard couldn’t miss.
Boom!
She heeled over, torn and dying. Her stern shot into the air, propeller whirling helplessly, then she went down, leaving great patches of scummy oil blubbering up on a silent sea.
Hank Miller turned toward his gun crew, and they saw the pity that was in his eyes. He regarded them silently for a few seconds.
“Well, now we’ll have to stay on this packet till we get help, or take to that other lifeboat with a crowd of Krauts!” he said. “But, for the benefit of you gobs that don’t savvy just how this thing happened, let me recite a little verse I learned in the Third Reader.”
He faced Soapy McDowell and jokingly began to recite:
“Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy with cheek of tan—”
GODS OF BASTOL, by H.P. Holt
There were four of us sitting in the cabin of the Tumbril, filling it with tobacco smoke—four men who had just sworn to cling together like the ivy on the old garden wall. And I fear we were not a very practical quartet, either. There was Thurston, the doctor, who could have charmed flocks of patients toward him in any civilized city, but cities bored him; there was Finny, assistant manager of the late, lamented Company that had just gone up in smoke and left us all stranded; Ingle, the Tumbril’s chief engineer; and I had been mate of the Tumbril.
Finney’s weakness was a delusion that he ought to be growing oranges in Florida. Ingle’s acquaintance with bottled goods had retarded his advance on the road to fortune.
That morning, after a rusty old freighter had called at the island and dropped a bag of mail, Ditson, the resident manager of the Company, a very decent sort of a chap, had given us news of the crash. He also gave us the straight tip that there weren’t any funds left, that everything had gone, and that the best thing we could do was to look after ourselves as well as we could.
The Tumbril belonged to the Company and was used for pottering about. Her skipper got wind of the crash before the old mail-boat left again, so he packed up his traps and cleared out in her to seek pastures new. We four had drifted together on the Tumbril by common instinct to weigh up the situation. Ratoa, our island home, and also the home of the Company’s affair, was so far from Broadway as the crow flies that that crow would never have arrived there even if it carried a spare pair of wings.
We four were all suffering from temporary financial embarrassment in consequence of the Company having failed to pay any salaries for two consecutive months. And because we had all been inseparable while fortune had seemed to smile on us, we now solemnly swore to sink or swim together. It was heroic, for all we had to swim in was the broad Pacific Ocean, and our plight was thus peculiar. With the last of a bottle of rum distributed among four tumblers, we rose, hoisted our glasses, and drank our pledge. After which, for some unaccountable reason, we felt better.
But that was not all. There was a complication, or rather a series of complications. One of them was the disappearance of Dimmick, the best of pals and the whitest man that ever drew breath. He was the Company’s mechanical expert. The only fault we had to find about him was that he had a girl in the background, and that made him seem different from us. There wasn’t a maiden on earth who would have shed a single tear if we fou
r had all gone to glory. Dimmick didn’t really bore us very much by talking about his girl, but, from what he did say we knew he had it badly. The description he gave of her sounded as if it would have fitted something straight out of heaven, but we discounted that because he was in love with her, and forgave him because, though we didn’t say so, we all loved him.
Well, Dimmick’s girl was a sea-captain’s daughter and a distant relation of Ditson, the Company’s resident manager. She used to travel with her father on the Flying Sylph a lot, and it was arranged that, as they were in that part of the South Pacific just then, she was to come to the island of Ratoa and stay there as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Ditson for a while. Naturally, Dimmick exhibited symptoms of hysterical insanity; but a couple of months ago news had come from Fiji that the Flying Sylph had been lost with all hands. There was no question about the authenticity of the information. The steamer had been found floating bottom-up, and no trace had been found of anybody on board.
When he heard this, Dimmick walked about dazed for a week, and we thought he was going mad. He would have taken the next boat to Fiji, but there wasn’t any boat to Fiji, and it wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. He tried to settle down to work, but it was a dismal failure, so the chief told him to take a vacation and fish. Dimmick was an enthusiastic fisherman. At first he refused, but we persuaded him, and so he went off in a ketch with two Kanakas who could have kept the vessel afloat in a typhoon.
They came back without him. That was on the day before the Company’s crash. According to the Kanakas’ story, Dimmick was in the ketch’s small boat, angling for tappi, quite close to the island of Bastol, when he fell overboard and was drowned. If a Kanaka tells you a lie, you generally don’t know it, so when you are accustomed to them you assume they tell nothing but lies and you act accordingly. Therefore we had grave doubts whether Dimmick had died in the way the Kanakas said.
And now, on the mail steamer, came the staggering surprise. I won’t call her an angel, because you couldn’t kiss an angel if she’d let you. And I won’t call her a fairy, because after all you know a fairy would make a most unsatisfactory and uncertain wife. She came off the gangway the minute the steamer tied up, with her wonderful eyes just ablaze with happy expectation. She looked all around and seemed a bit disappointed at not finding what she sought. Then Thurston, who has more self-possession than any of us, drifted up alongside of her, and went as white as a sheet when she asked for Tom Dimmick.
“Tom Dimmick!—oh—ah—yes,” I heard him stutter. “Tom’s not here just now. Are you—er—”
I could see he was anticipating the worst. Somehow I myself felt sure of it.
“I am Nancy Carew,” she said.
That was the name of Dimmick’s girl. And Dimmick’s death had just been reported.
“Of course—of course.” said Thurston, bending his helmet all out of shape, “You’re going to stay with the Ditsons, aren’t you? Pardon me, I’ll slip up to their place and see about a conveyance. Would you mind waiting here a moment?”
His face was like a piece of uncooked bread, but he actually worked up a smile. Then he came over to me.
“Here’s Dimmick’s girl in the flesh, and if any of the follows blurt out the fact that he’s dead, it’ll probably half kill her,” he said in a low voice. “For God’s sake, pass the word around, quick, to be careful. Maybe we can break it gently—or—oh, I don’t know!”
The color was coming back to his face, but he was a badly worried man. While I slipped along and told the rest of the boys, he shot up to the resident manager’s house and put the matter squarely up to little Mrs. Ditson. She was a dear soul and a jewel, but she was no fool and saw the folly of hiding the bad news too long.
“Not a word about it this afternoon,” she declared. “We’ll let her understand that he has gone fishing. Then somehow tonight I will try to tell her.”
* * * *
And so Nancy Carew landed at Ratoa under the impression that the man she loved would be with her next day; but Mrs. Ditson, with a task in hand that nobody else on the island would have cared to tackle, did her part bravely and gently. They both had a good cry, and when we saw Nancy Carew next day—the day of the crash—we voted severally and collectively that she was the pluckiest damsel between Siam and Seattle. She was very pale and seemed to have grown thin since the previous day, but she kept a stiff upper lip, and absolute adoration for her came to us all quite naturally.
The mystery of her appearance after the loss of her father’s steamer was explained simply enough. The Flying Sylph, which, by the way, was fully insured, struck a mass of floating wreckage, had her plates stove in, and began to founder. The crew took to the boats and were picked up by a vessel which did not touch port for a couple of weeks. Hence the erroneous belief that all had perished.
They landed eventually at Fiji, where the girl’s father took a temporary job as shore superintendent for a shipping company, and when Miss Carew learned that a trading steamer was leaving there for Ratoa, she gleefully sought that opportunity of paying us a visit, without knowing we even dreamed that her father’s vessel had come to grief.
Meanwhile, we four had found sorrow of our own, though sorrow of a very small order compared with hers, in the demise of the Company. We had just gone through the ceremony with the rum and sprawled in our respective seats once more when Thurston thumped the table with his fist.
“I’ve got an idea—an idea about Dimmick,” he said.
“Well?” Finney invited.
“If he’d been here and alive he would have been the first one among us to suggest that pledge, wouldn’t he?”
“But he isn’t here,” drawled Ingle.
Thurston whipped round to face the ship’s engineer.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” the doctor asked slowly; and there was a queer silence.
“Why, I dunno,” replied Ingle at length. “I’ve wondered. He probably is dead, but there’s no believing these darned natives.”
“And I’ve wondered too,” declared Thurston, “especially since … since Miss Carey landed here. It’s a damnable, situation for her. There’s a mystery about the thing, to my mind.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” queried Finney, a little more awake than usual.
“First of all,” said Thurston, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully, “the Kanakas swore that Dimmick fell out of the small boat and was drowned, but they came back without the small boat. What happened to it? They say it disappeared. That sounds fishy, because the sea must have been fairly calm. Then, Dimmick wasn’t a bad swimmer. He could have kept afloat for fifteen minutes at least, unless, of course, he got tangled up, or a shark grabbed him. Also, this happened near the island of Bastol, and we don’t know Dimmick never got ashore there. As far as I can make out from the Kanakas, they weren’t so far off the island.”
“Well?” said Finney, sitting bolt upright.
“I propose,” said Thurston calmly, “that we run over to Bastol in the old Tumbril and see if we can find any trace of him.”
“I’m game,” Finney replied.
“Count me in,” agreed Ingle. “We’ve coal a plenty aboard for the trip. As there’s no Company left, I don’t know who owns this boat now, but that’s a small matter.”
“What about navigation?” Thurston shot at me.
“That’s easy,” I replied. “Bastol is about three hundred miles away, to the so’west.”
“Then we’ll start now,” said Thurston decisively; and nobody questioned the point.
* * * *
But it took three hours to get steam up, and after a consultation, we had decided to tell Miss Carew what we were up to—to tell her there was nothing for her to base optimism on, but that we meant to have a look around in the neighborhood of Bastol. To our surprise, Nancy Carew immediately packed a small bag and announced her intention of going with us. She agreed that it was a hopeless sort of task, but said if there remained a single stone worth overturning, she me
ant to have a hand in the overturning of it. Also, naturally, we took with us the two Kanakas who had gone with Dimmick on his fishing excursion.
The clanking Tumbril reached Bastol in thirty-six hours. Up to the time its shores loomed up, not a word had been said to the Kanakas about our destination, but the moment they recognized the island, they began to chatter together in their own lingo. Our plan was to drop anchor near the beach, and when Thurston asked the blacks to point out the spot where Dimmick had been lost, their manner gave us the first clue that something peculiar was in the wind. One of them indicated a place about a mile to the west of Bastol, but, prompted by his companion, he then pointed away out to sea and began to exhibit signs of fear.
“They’re lying, and lying badly for Kanakas,” declared Thurston. “There’s something wrong, you may depend on it. However, I’m going ashore. Meanwhile,” he added, reaching for the siren lanyard and hanging on to it, “if Dimmick’s alive and on the island, it’ll do him good to hear this.”
The wail of the siren rose piercingly, fell, rose again and ended in five long ear-splitting shrieks. It was the signal with which the fussy Tumbril had always announced, from afar, her return to Ratoa, and it was unmistakable.
Then, for a considerable time, we scanned the coast-line, hoping against hope for some answering signal. Again the siren screamed. There was something gruesome about it all. I noticed that Thurston glanced more than once from the skimmering beach to the two Kanakas.
“I don’t pretend to understand the inside of natives’ heads any better than the next fellow,” he said, “but those two chaps are guilty of something, and the Lord only knows what! If I find they’ve done Dimmick in, they’ll have about five minutes left to live.”
* * * *
Nancy Carew would have joined the landing party, but Thurston would not hear of it, being distinctly uncertain what kind of reception the natives might offer. One of us had to stay behind with her, and Ingle, who had recently sprained his knee, was chosen for that purpose.
When the two Kanakas were ordered to man the rowboat, they refused point blank to go any way near Bastol. I took them each by an ear and was prepared to deal with them none too gently, when they howled out that Bastol was full of devil-devils.
The Adventure Megapack: 25 Classic Adventure Stories Page 36
