The Max Brand Megapack

by Max Brand

  “Black McTee! Oh, Black McTee!”

  The Scotchman raised his hand as a token that he heard.

  “You’re done for, McTee, you and all the rest. You’re bound to starve, and when you’re weak, we’ll come and carry you forward, and you’ll die by inches as the other three are going to die; but if you want to live—you and the girl and all of you, give us White Henshaw to treat as he ought to be treated. Give us him, an’ the rest of you’ll be saved. If you won’t trust us, we’ll bring you food and water enough to keep you alive till we reach shore. Give us Henshaw and—”

  He broke off, for he heard the harsh, ringing laughter of White Henshaw. The captain held up his revolver.

  “No use, Hovey,” he called. “I fired five shots, but I saved one for myself. Ha, ha, ha!” And his mirthless cackle broke out once more.

  “Look!” cried Kate, and pointed at the captain.

  Down the left side of Henshaw, bright against the white of his coat, was a rapidly growing stain of red. They could see the small slit in the cloth where a knife thrust had entered his side, but the old buccaneer would give no sign of his injury. He waved his gun toward Kate as she advanced an impulsive step toward him.

  “Keep back!” he commanded. “Woman and man, I trust none of you. Give me distance or I’ll use this bullet on the first of you and give what’s left of me to the sea.”

  “By the Lord, he’s wounded!” cried Harrigan. “Steady, old heart of oak, you’ve nothing to fear from us. Hovey! Oh-h, Hovey, we’ll see you damned before we give up the captain!”

  The bos’n, choking with his fury, shook his clenched fist at them and disappeared into the cabin.

  “Now lie down,” said McTee to the captain, “and we’ll fix you up. Are you badly hurt?”

  “Enough to finish me,” said Henshaw calmly, “but keep off! I’ll have none of you! None of your tricks!”

  His old body was trembling with the pain of his wound, but the hand which held the gun leveled on McTee was as steady as a rock. Kate pushed McTee aside and turned a glance of scorn on the others.

  “You’d let him die among you—for fear of an old man and his wretched revolver?”

  She faced Henshaw.

  “Go into the wireless house, Captain Henshaw, and I will go in alone with you. If you don’t trust me, you can keep your revolver at my breast while I dress your wound—but see!—you will bleed to death in a short time!”

  He laughed again, saying: “Girl, there’s nothing between heaven and hell that can make me die by anything but fire—fire at sea—blue fire.”

  She whitened at sight of his frenzied, yellow face, and then she saw Harrigan slipping around to take the captain from the rear. He saw the shadow of the Irishman just too late, and whirled with a curse at the same time that Harrigan’s iron hand seized the gun. For an instant he struggled, but those mighty arms gathered him as easily as a woman lifts a stubborn child, and he was carried into the wireless house and placed on Sloan’s bunk. As soon as he discovered that he was helpless in their hands, he ceased struggling and lay without a motion while they tore away his coat and shirt and Kate started to dress the deep, ugly wound.

  She had scarcely finished when a shout, or rather a scream, from fifty throats brought them running out of the wireless house. Again and again that cry was repeated from the main cabin, and they could not tell whether it was despair or agony that inspired it.

  Neither of these emotions caused it. All that time Hovey had been kneeling in front of the captain’s safe working at the combination, for he had seen Henshaw open it several times and thought that he could imitate the captain’s motions. But he failed. Around him packed the sailors in both cabins, a serried mass of intent faces and burning eyes. But at last Hovey stood up and announced his failure—he could not work the combination. Then came that yell which those in the wireless house heard, a cry of mingled rage and disappointment. Gold in untold quantities was here just within their reach—and yet just beyond it. A few inches of steel kept the gold safe.

  Men beat it with their bare hands in a senseless fury, till Garry Cochrane slipped through the dense mass of sailors.

  “I know something about locks. What do I get, lads, if I open this one?”

  “Five shares!”

  “Ten shares!”

  “Ten shares!” nodded Cochrane. “Good! Now keep still. I need quiet.”

  They were mute; not a breath was drawn; they scarcely dared move their eyes lest he should be disturbed. Cochrane touched the lock lightly and then rubbed his fingertips vigorously back and forth on the carpet— anything to stimulate those fine nerves which are as valuable to some criminals as eyes are to normal people.

  With ear pressed close to the combination, he turned it slowly, by delicate degrees, waiting for the telltale click. They saw him set his teeth and grow eager as a hound on a scent of blood; they saw the fingers move rapidly and nervously, and then came a click which was audible through the entire room, and the door of the safe swung open. Still no one stirred, no one breathed. He took out a small canvas bag, he untied the top, he spilled the contents out, and then they saw bright gold, gold which inspires, and gold which destroys, gold the tempter and the murderer.

  A wild scramble followed. They swept the gold up in handfuls and tossed it into the air, laughing like madmen as the light gleamed on the yellow surfaces. And at length when they were wearied of touching it and caressing it, Hovey apportioned the spoils: to Cochrane, by common assent, the ten shares, a fortune; to Sam Hall, Kyle, and Flint, two shares each, for they had been leaders in the fight; to himself ten shares, also by universal voice, and to each of the others, forty in all, his portion.

  There was no fighting or complaint over the division of the spoils. What difference did a few hundred pieces here or there matter? Gold in floods, gold in oceans, was before them, and each man gathered his own share close.

  But where there is gold there is death. One of the firemen said in the ear of Hovey: “The second assistant—Fritz Klopp—he is dying.”

  It was upon Klopp that they depended for the running of the Heron. Hovey merely laughed: “Carry him in here. He’ll come to life when he sees this!”

  They had left Klopp lying on the deck. He had been one of the first to leap at White Henshaw, and a bullet from the captain’s revolver had torn its way through his lungs; his eyes were glazing fast when two of the firemen carried him into the outer cabin of White Henshaw and placed him in an armchair beside the desk.

  “How are you, Klopp?” asked Hovey.

  “I am dying,” answered the engineer, and a faint pink froth bubbled to his lips as he spoke.

  Hovey merely laughed; he spilled Klopp’s share of the gold across the surface of the table, a gleaming pile.

  “How are you, Klopp?” he repeated.

  “I will live,” croaked the dying man, and instantly his clutches were among the hundreds of coins, and his red mouth grinned with a ghastly joy. He had forgotten death.

  “You will live!” rumbled Sam Hall. “A man would be a fool to die when there’s so much money in sight. Where’s your hurt?”

  “I have no hurt,” whispered Klopp hoarsely, “but I’m on fire inside. Water! Something to drink!”

  “Something to drink, but not water,” responded Hovey. “Hey, Kamasura! Drink! Whisky!”

  Instantly Kamasura, who had evidently anticipated the order, came staggering into the room with a literal armful of bottles. Hovey himself brought a glass and placed it in the hand of Klopp and filled it to the brim.

  “Drink!” shouted Hovey, and sprang upon a chair so that all might see him. “Drink to Fritz Klopp! White Henshaw potted him, but he laughs at death, and he’ll bring the old Heron to shore. Here’s to Fritz Klopp!”

  Many a glass was raised high. They drank with a shout of applause to Fritz Klopp, who sat without stirring his glass, one hand upon it, and the other buried among the heaps of gold, his head resting against the back of the chair, and his red mouth still
ajar in that horrible grin.

  “What ye laughin’ at?” yelled Sam Hall in his ear. “Are ye drunk at the sight of the money, man?”

  There was no answer. Hall caught him by the shoulder to rouse him, but Klopp’s head merely sagged far to one side, though his glazed eyes still seemed to be fixed upward upon the same spot on the ceiling at which he had been staring before.

  “What is it?” cried one or two. “What does he see?”

  “Death, you fools!” answered Hovey. “And how the devil will we bring the Heron to land without an engineer?”

  CHAPTER 33

  “Make Campbell run the ship,” said Cochrane.

  “You can’t make a Scotchman do anything.”

  “Persuade him, then,” went on Cochrane. “He’d sell his soul for a drink of that whisky. But if you can’t persuade him, I’d trust to those fellows to make him do what you want.”

  And he pointed to the firemen.

  “I’ll let ’em play their little game till they’re tired of it,” answered Hovey, “an’ then we’ll bring up Campbell an’ try what we can do with him.”

  The “little game” had now become a wild debauch. Except for the few unfortunates who had been detailed by Hovey to guard the prisoners and see that the fugitives in the wireless house made no attempt to rush the main cabin as a forlorn hope, every man of the crew was gathered in the captain’s cabins or on the deck nearby. The fireroom was deserted; the engines stopped; the Heron floated idly on the swell of the sea; but heedless of this the mutineers celebrated their victory.

  They divided their attention between drinking and gambling. They seemed feverishly eager to throw away their piles of gold. Some of them flipped coins at ten dollars a throw. Others tossed dice. One group of four sat around a greasy pack of cards betting on which man would draw the first jack.

  Those who lost did not envy the winners. They looked about; gold was on all sides, heaps of it; if their hands were empty, their eyes were rich. Sam Hall lost his entire share within an hour, betting recklessly. He approached a gigantic fireman who squatted by the wall with a canvas bag clutched in one hand and a broken bottle in the other. The whisky had run out on the floor, but the fellow was too far gone to know the difference, and from time to time he raised the empty bottle to his lips.

  “Money gone,” said Hall. “Gimme!” And he held out his hand.

  The fireman, with a vast grin, delved his hand into the bag and brought it forth loaded with gold, which Hall took without a word and returned to his game of rolling dice, one throw at five hundred dollars a throw. In ten minutes he went back to the fireman with a double handful of corns.

  “Principal an’ interest,” grunted the big sailor, and dumped his gold into the canvas bag which, filled to overflowing, spilled a dozen coins upon the floor.

  The fireman, with a groan of dull content, slipped prone on the floor and was instantly asleep, embracing the canvas bag in both arms. Every man in the crew was in a somewhat similar condition, saving Hovey, with his gray-blue, steady eyes, and Cochrane, with his glittering, shifty black. These two watched the rest descend toward swinish unconsciousness; they saw, and waited coolly, and now and then glanced at each other with faint smiles of understanding.

  Somewhere in the waist of the ship Jacob Flint was singing shrill songs of infinite profanity, but otherwise there was no sound on the Heron as the sun went down, and all night long the old freighter wallowed sluggishly up and down on the waves, as if she waited for dawn before resuming her journey toward the shore.

  There was a wisdom, however, in Hovey’s laxness of discipline during the first day of his mastery. The next morning the men slept late, sprawling about the deck, and Hovey and Cochrane first roused ominous Jacob Flint and Sam Hall and Kyle. With this nucleus of five mighty men, men to be feared on land or sea, Hovey started to rouse the rest of the mutineers. They woke cursing and sad of stomach and head, and to the first orders they responded with cursing; the reply was a sledge-hammer blow from the fist of Hall or Kyle, and while the man lay on the deck, it was explained curtly and forcibly to him that while the Heron was at sea, he would have to obey Bos’n Hovey; but as soon as the ship reached land, each man could be his own master.

  First of all the firemen were commanded to the hole to get up steam, but when this was done, it was found that there was some minor trouble with the machinery. An engineer was needed; Hovey, with Cochrane, Flint and Hall beside him, sent for Campbell, and retired to the cabin to await his coming.

  There sat the body of Fritz Klopp as it had remained ever since the beginning of the revels the day before, grinning up at the ceiling. Hall and Flint raised the body, and the clutching fingers were found to be frozen by death immovably around a whole handful of gold. As Hall suggested, this would serve as lead to take him to the bottom of the sea. The others applauded the thought, and with his hand still full of gold, they carried Fritz Klopp to the rail and dumped him into the water.

  As they re-entered the cabin, Campbell was kicked in from the opposite door. His hands were manacled behind him, and the force of the kick, together with a sway of the ship, threw him off his balance. He crashed on his face at the feet of Hovey. The bos’n grew positively pale with pleasure. He selected a cigar from an open box on the table and lighted it leisurely.

  At last he ordered: “Pick him up.”

  The chief engineer was jerked to his feet and stood with a trickle of blood running down from his split lip. His face was rather purple than red, and the dark pouches underneath his eyes told the horror of the night he had passed. Nevertheless, the eyes themselves were bright.

  Far away, half heard, and drowned by any noise near at hand, was a sound of singing. It was Black McTee in the wireless house, half maddened by thirst and hunger and despair, and singing in defiance songs of bonny Scotland.

  “There’s been trouble aboard, chief,” he said, “but now trouble’s over. All over! We want you to take charge of the engines again and bring us to shore.”

  Campbell waited, not as if he had not heard. In spite of himself, Hovey stirred a trifle and grew uneasy. From a corner of the room he picked up a canvas bag and dropped it with a melodious jingling on the table in front of the engineer.

  “This is your share,” he said.

  Campbell smiled faintly.

  “And this,” said Hovey, with a glance at his companions.

  The smile had not altered on the lips of the Scotchman.

  “With this money,” said Hovey, forcing himself to remain calm, “you can retire from active work. You can get yourself a little place on the coast somewhere”—he had heard Campbell name some of his dreams—“and have a little cellar full of the right stuff, and have your friends run out to see you now an’ then, an’ talk over things that’re goin’ on at sea—where you ain’t.”

  Here he placed a third bag of money on the table.

  “You could do all that and more, chief—a lot more—with this money.”

  Hovey cut the lace which tied the mouth of one of the bags; he poured the gleaming contents across the table.

  “Well?” he asked softly.

  “Damn you!” whispered Campbell, and then, “You fool, am I not Scotch?”

  “At least,” went on the bos’n easily, “think it over, chief, and while you’re thinkin’, what d’you say to a drop of the real stuff?”

  Campbell had not tasted either food or liquid since early the day before, and his eyes were moist as they stared at the two bottles.

  “Set his hands free,” said Hovey, “so that the chief can drink. We ain’t half-bad fellers, Campbell; but we’ve got good cause for raisin’ the hell you’ve seen on the Heron.”

  While he spoke, the arms of Campbell were set free, and glasses were shoved toward him, one full of Scotch and the other of seltzer. The mutineers were already raising their drinks for a toast when Campbell took his with a violently trembling hand. But as he lifted the liquor, he was fully conscious for the first time of a singing whic
h had been faint in the air for some time, the songs of Black McTee in the wireless house, and now the big-throated Scotchman swung into a new air, plaintive and rapid in cadence, a death song and a war song at once, the speech of Bruce before Bannockburn, as Burns conceived it. Loud and true rang the voice of Black McTee, breaker of men:

  “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,

  Scots wham Bruce hae aften led,

  Welcome to your gory bed,

  Or to victory!”

  And the hand of Campbell checked on its way to his lips. “We’re lookin’ in your eyes, chief,” said Hovey. And the song broke in:

  “Wha would be a traitor slave,

  Let him turn and flee!”

  Campbell was staring at the wall like one who sees a vision but cannot make out its meaning.

  The voice of Black McTee swelled high and strong:

  “Wha for Scotland’s king and law

  Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,

  Freemen stand and freemen fa’,

  Let him on wi’ me!”

  And the glass dropped from the lips of the Scotchman. It crashed against the hard floor. Broad Scotch was on his tongue.

  “I canna drink wi’ murderers!” he cried.

  “Damn you!” said Hovey, and drove his fist into Campbell’s face, hurling him to the deck.

  The manacles were clapped on his wrists again; he was dragged once more to his feet.

  “Take him out,” said Hovey to the grinning sailors who had lingered in the door. “Take him back to the waist of the ship before the wireless house. Wait for me there. And see that Van Roos and Borgson are brought there also.”

  CHAPTER 34

  As Campbell was dragged away, the bos’n said to his companions: “Now, lads, you see where Campbell stands!”

  They growled for answer.

  “But I’ll get him!” went on Hovey. “I’m going to kill Van Roos and Borgson by inches before his eyes. And when he sees ’em die—they’ll have to die, anyway, before we reach shore—Campbell will be water in our hands. He’ll see ’em die, an’ them in the wireless house will see ’em die. Their throats are thick with thirst by now. We’ll show ’em water an’ food, an’ offer it to ’em if they’ll give up Henshaw. If they won’t, we’ll show ’em how we’ll kill ’em when they’re too weak to resist. They’ll see a sample in Van Roos and Borgson. Every yell they let out’ll be an argument for us. We’ll have Henshaw before the day’s done.”