“’Specially on sailin’ vessels,” said Sharky.
“Yeah,” agreed Joe.
“Take that there brig, now, the Rantoul. She that was found aground on the Carragda Beach, with all sail set, an’ not a hand aboard.”
“What’s the rest of it?” asked Joe.
“There ain’t no more,” said Sharky. “Her cargo was all there, just as it was stowed. But no hide nor hair of captain or crew heard of from that day to this. It’s goin’ on two years now.”
“Real queer,” admitted Joe, swearing, “but no queerer than the case o’ Crazy Jim Clancy. Jim, he shipped on the Pelican, that there old brigantine. The Pelican, she sails out and don’t never put into port again. Jim, they picks him up drifting in a longboat. When they asks him what happened he says nothin’ didn’t happen, only all hands disappeared off the ship, one by one—so he got scared and left in the boat. But the Pelican, she ain’t been heard of since. Some say Jim’s crazy,” Joe added, “an’ some say he ain’t.”
“There’s queer things goes on in these seas,” Sharky repeated.
“There’s queer things goin’ on on this vessel,” said Joe.
And so it went. To these yarns I paid little attention, for I was familiar with their like; but Harris, when he wandered forward, drank them in silently.
As night closed down, a faint breeze fluttered the sails for a bit; but presently it died, and the night again became silent, clear, breathless. Cap Dorkin moved Joe and Sharky aft for the night. It was the first sign he had given of recognition that, aside from a peculiar accident, anything was wrong on the Terrapin.
No one slept before the dog-watch, which was Joe’s.
* * * *
I was wakened by a sudden outcry from Sharky, and in an instant I was on deck, the captain at my heels. Through the starlit dimness of the tropic night I could see Sharky leaning over the taffrail, peering down into the black water astern.
“What’s wrong—what’s wrong?”
“Joe! Joe’s gone!” Sharky answered.
Cap Dorkin shouldered past me. “Did you see what happened?” he demanded.
“I didn’t see nothin’,” Sharky whimpered. “I woke up feelin’ somethin’ was wrong. Too quiet like. I come on deck, and Joe was missin’!”
“Nothing?” Dorkin demanded again, thrusting his head forward with dog-like menace.
“Nothin’, I swear! ’Ceptin’ this here.” He indicated the taffrail.
Tied to the taffrail with a couple of loose-thrown bights, as if bent by a man in great haste, was that same length of line, trailing in the sea as before. I hauled it in, waking phosphorescent sparks in the dark waters below; there was nothing on its end.
“Put up your hands—all of you!” came the captain’s voice, low and hard. We turned to face a heavy automatic.
For the next few minutes I thought that Sharky, Harris and I were about to meet the mysterious end that had overtaken Joe and Bill Grimes and Jimmy the cook. I was convinced that a strange insanity had deranged the mind of Cap Dorkin, inciting him to uncanny and purposeless murder.
In single file, covered by the automatic, we were marched down the short ladder into the cabin. Once in the lantern-light Dorkin made us stand against the bunks while he minutely scrutinized the faces of each of us in turn. Then, after some moments of this, he stepped back. A baffled look was in the captain’s face as he put away the gun.
“No,” he said, “none of you done it. None of you done it. I’d know if you did. But you didn’t.”
There was no more sleep that night. We sat in the cabin smoking and speculating gravely. Sharky Steve spun a wild yarn about a giant octopus that once came up from unknown depths to fasten itself upon the bottom of a becalmed schooner. Three men, he said, were dragged over the side in two nights by the monster. So huge was this sea-horror that when it shifted its hold upon the bottom the ship listed. It was this slight listing of the ship in dead calm that led to the monster’s discovery.
“Be still a minute!” said Harris. “Didn’t the deck tilt a little bit just then?”
We sat silently looking at each other for a few moments, every nerve alert to discern a barely perceptible shifting of the hull. So greatly had my nerves been affected that for an instant I actually thought that the little Terrapin was listing, ever so slightly.
“There!” said Harris again. “Didn’t she tip just a little then?”
“I—I dunno whether she did or not,” Sharky Steve admitted.
“She did not list,” said Dorkin decisively, and we accepted his judgment.
Sharky told other yarns, of strange unexplained disappearances, such as we just had seen; of weird sea-curses that followed ships to their dooms; of monsters unknown to men. He thought that some evil and mysterious fate was pursuing the Terrapin, taking her sailors one by one with the intention of at last taking her. Any other time, we would have laughed.
Dawn came at last, bringing another blazing day.
The next night was the third night of the calm. It was also the last night, had we but known. The four of us did not attempt to sleep, but sat upright in the lantern-light of the cabin. How I happened to doze at last I do not know; but I remember that Harris was dozing before me.
When I woke, at the sound of feet upon the deck, Sharky Steve was gone.
The circumstances were the same as before. The same line trailed from the taffrail, without other clue. As Harris and Cap Dorkin and I looked at each other, we both knew the other’s thoughts. Who would be the next to go? We had given up asking how.
If only we could have wind! Just a capful of air—Sharky Steve was gone—
* * * *
It was morning. A breeze was coming up, very gently, and the Terrapin was beginning to forge ahead, very slowly and stodgily. Then Cap Dorkin sighted a sail.
It was evident to me that we had somehow got far out of our course, for in three days we had not sighted more than the distant smoke of a vessel of any sort. But now, plainly enough, a schooner had come into sight, a ship of about our own tonnage, headed our way.
Why Cap Dorkin wanted to take in all sail and put out the sea-anchor until the other vessel should come up I did not understand, but that is what we did. The breeze that early morning had promised did not increase, and all day long we lay waiting while the approaching vessel worked her way toward us. Slowly she drew nearer hour by hour; and at evening she answered our signal and lay to.
Captain Graves, of the Molly Bruce, wore a face totally without expression, but his gray eyes were keen. The two captains greeted each other coolly as we three from the Terrapin came aboard.
“I need men,” explained Dorkin briefly when we were in the cabin of the Molly Bruce. “What can you spare?”
“Not a man,” answered Graves. “I’m short-handed myself.”
“All right,” said Dorkin. “Will you take a passenger?”
“No,” answered Graves. “I never take passengers.”
“But I can pay!” Harris broke in. “I can pay well!”
“I’m not interested,” said Graves again.
“Look here,” cried Harris. “You don’t understand me. I tell you, I can pay almost anything!”
Slowly Graves turned and surveyed the other man. The captain’s face was still as a mask, but his eyes were hard as steel.
“I know you can,” he said.
Harris appeared taken aback, and several moments of silence followed. “Then make me a proposition,” he presently suggested.
“You know that I know who you are,” said Graves, “and yet you want a proposition from me?”
Harris hesitated.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Your name is Singleton,” said Captain Graves. “You are probably under another name just now because you had to ship out of Maranhão on either the Terrapin or the Molly Bruce—or else lay over in Maranhão waiting for one of your own ships. You wouldn’t dare ship under your own name because your business methods and the ships you inhe
rited from your father have killed the little-vessel trade in the small ports. You went out to get us, and you’ve done well at it. Yet you want a proposition from me?”
“Yes,” said Harris again, his voice cold.
Graves got out a pen and wrote for several moments, then handed the paper to the Terrapin’s passenger.
“Will you sign that?” he asked.
Harris’ face flushed as he read the sheet.
“I’ll see you in —— first!” he flashed.
Cap Dorkin had been staring gloomily through the porthole at the Terrapin lying deserted fifty yards away in the thick gloom.
“My sidelights are out,” he remarked. “I’ve got to be getting back.”
Then suddenly an oath burst from him.
“Step here,” he said, his voice low, “and see do you see what I see!”
I peered out of the porthole and saw nothing, save the Terrapin, floating lightless under bare poles in the twilight.
“What was it?”
“Lanterns! They’re gone now. No! There they are again! Look!”
He sprang up the ladder. Yes, I saw the lanterns, two of them, moving rapidly and with a peculiar smoothness along the little schooner’s starboard rail. Then they disappeared, as quickly as if quenched in a bucket.
Cap Dorkin’s hail roared from above. “Ahoy! The Terrapin, Ahoy! Answer, damn you!”
There was no answer; except that I saw the two lanterns appear again at the forward rail of the Terrapin, and slide aft with that same strangely smooth movement. It was enough to send the shivers along any man’s spine. I thought, “Ghost lanterns, Sharky Steve would have called them.”
“Kind of funny,” commented Graves, “that there’s no answer from your crew.”
Harris was beside me, staring through the port. In the young light of the cabin-lantern his face was white as surf.
“The crew?” he said in a strange voice. “There—isn’t any—crew.”
Silence held while Harris and I stared across the still water at the Terrapin, lying lonely and deserted.
“Your captain wants to leave,” said Graves. “You’d better stand by to go back to your ship.”
“Go back? Go back to the Terrapin?”
Captain Graves’ voice was like a saw on steel. “You are going back now,” he stated, “unless—you like my proposition!”
“I can’t go back there!” cried Harris.
“Then sign!” Graves shoved the paper toward him.
“It’s unreasonable—impossible—”
“Sign!”
“I can’t—”
“Then get back to your ship!”
Harris wavered, squinting through the port. “Ahoy! Ahoy, the Terrapin!” boomed Dorkin’s voice above, in a long wailing hail. But the ghost lanterns appeared no more. Unmanned and silent, the little ship looked even more hopeless than when those weird lights had slid along her rail.
“For the last time, sign or go!”
“I’ll sign,” said Harris, at last.
He signed, and sat down weakly upon a locker. I witnessed the signature, then followed the captain up the ladder. Then, as the two skippers met, once more a peculiar thing happened. The two men gripped each other’s hands and shook heartily.
“All O.K., Bob?” asked Cap Dorkin.
“All set,” answered Graves. “Good boy, Sam!”
I rowed Dorkin slowly back to the Terrapin.
“Eight years,” said Cap, “eight years we’ve bucked that yellow-backed ship owner. Eight years of fighting upwind and losing. And now we’ve got him! That paper he signed turns the tables in the small-port trade! We’ve got him at last!”
“But what about—” I began.
“All that show? All for him! Why do you suppose I got clear off our course? Why do you suppose the Molly Bruce came up just at the right time? It was all planned out, you fool! I didn’t tip you off because you’re too young—you couldn’t have faked it right. The boys had a terrible time stowed away in the hold, though. Hot and stuffy like. I’ll sure have to make it up to them!”
Jimmy the cook, and Bill Grimes, and Sharky Steve were playing poker in the cabin when we boarded the Terrapin again. And Joe Bates was complaining that he had burned his thumb on a “ghost lantern.”
“It was a phony idee anyway,” he growled. “Why not stick a gun to the mucker’s head in the first place and be done with it?”
But some of these old-timers do things in odd ways!
STORIES OF THE LEGION: CHOC, by H. De Vere Stacpoole
When France found herself faced with the problem of Algeria—that is to say, with the problem of infinite wastes of sand inhabited by a foe mobile and ungraspable as the desert wind—she formed the Legion. She called to the wastrels, the criminals, the despairing, and the impoverished—and they came. Men of genius, street sweepers, artists, doctors, engineers—it would be difficult to touch a profession, a race or a grade of intellect not to be found in the Legion. All the genius that Civilization has turned away from her doors is here at command—for a cent a day.
CHAPTER I
The first rays of the morning sun were stealing up the palm-bordered roads toward Sidi-bel-Abbés, above whose ramparts the minaret of the great mosque blazed white in the sky. Eighty miles from Oran on the coast, set away in the vague, yellow, illimitable wastes of the desert, the headquarters of the Foreign Legion, Sidi-bel-Abbés is surely one of the strangest cities on earth.
It was built by the Foreign Legion; it is swept and garnished by the Foreign Legion; it is held against the Arabs by the Foreign Legion. At night the electric lights round the band stand of the Foreign Legion on the Place Sadi Carnot blaze against the Algerian stars, while the muezzins on the balconies of the minarets keep watch over Islam, and their voices send north, south, east, and west the cry that was old in the time of Sindbad the Sailor!
All’ il Allah—God is great. But the marvel of Sidi-bel-Abbés is not the fact that here Edison and Strauss face Mahommed in the form of his priests, nor the flower gardens blooming on the face of the desert, nor the roads along which the Arabs stalk and the automobiles dash. The marvel of the Sidi-bel-Abbés lies in the Legion.
When France found herself faced with the problem of Algeria—that is to say, the problem of infinite wastes of sand inhabited by a foe mobile and ungraspable as the desert wind—she formed the Legion.
She called to the wastrels, the criminals, the despairing, and the impoverished of every country and every city—and they came.
Men of genius, street sweepers, artists, doctors, engineers—it would be difficult to touch a profession, a race, or a grade of intellect not to be found in the Legion.
General de Négrier said that the Legion could do anything—from the building of a bridge, to the writing of an opera, to the painting of a picture— all the genius that civilization has turned away from its doors is here at command—for a halfpenny a day.
* * * *
The sun had touched the upper border of the huge, blank eastern wall of the Legion’s barracks, and it was still a few minutes before reveille, when, in room No.6 of the tenth company, the garde chambre for the day slipped from his bed, stretched and yawned noiselessly, and glanced round him.
The room was like the ward of a hospital, and the likeness was made no less striking by the card above each of the twenty beds, a white card, setting out each man’s name and number.
Radoub’s number, as shown by the card on the bed he had just vacated, was 7083.
He was a small and wiry-looking individual, with the face of a gamin; that is to say, the face of a child who is a jester, who may be a cutthroat, and who is certainly, and above all things, a Parisian.
Radoub had, in fact, been an apache by profession, and Monsieur Lepine had given him the choice between a penitentiary and the Legion. He chose the Legion, because, as he said, he liked the name better.
He was quite aware that life in the Legion was worse than life in a penitentiary, and he did not care
a button about the social difference; he liked the name better, that was all. He was an artist.
He stood now, for a second, gazing at the others, nineteen men stretched in all the attitudes of slumber. Germans, French, an Englishman, an American, a Greek, and a Russian. Then, shuffling on some clothes, he left the room silently as the shadow of a moving cat.
In a moment he was back with a huge jug of steaming coffee, and, as he entered, shouting to the others to wake up, the reveille came from the barrack yard. The reveille of the French army that sounds every morning across France, to find its echo in Algeria:
Ra tat tat ta. Rat tat tat ta,
Rat tat tat ta ta ta ta
Ra tat tat ta. Rat tat tat ta,
Rat tat tat ta ta ta ta
In a moment the room was astir. Between the reveille and the muster in the barrack yard there was only half an hour, yet in that half hour the coffee was drunk, the men dressed, the beds made, and the floor swept, Radoub yelling to the others to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, as it was his duty to put the completing touch to the dusting and cleaning and fetch the water.
Then he came tearing down the stairs after the rest and out in the barrack yard, half cut in two by the blaze of the six-o’clock sun, and under a sky blue as a cornflower, the long, long lines of white-clad men fell in, while the echoes roused to the bugles.
Then, led by the bugles, the columns wheeled out of the barrack gates, making for the great drill ground, where the arms were piled and the men, in square formation now, were exercised at the double.
It was terrific; with the sun blaze now in their faces, with the sun beating now on their backs, and, now, with their sides to a furnace door, round and round and round the great parade ground they went, the dust rising and hanging about them in a haze.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and then the thunder and movement ceased and the Legionnaires, released for a moment after their first exercise of the day, broke into groups, cigarettes were lit, and the dust-hazed air filled with the fumes of caporal.
Radoub, though sweating, showed little signs of stress; he had lungs of leather. Not so Casmir, a man in his company to whom he was talking.
The Adventure Megapack Page 48
