The H. Bedford-Jones Pulp Fiction Megapack

by H. Bedford-Jones

  “Are you going to head for the coast and land me at Ben-Ho?” she demanded quietly.

  “Grand Dieu!” cried the Manchu, staring at her. “Have you no reason in you?”

  “That is not the question,” she returned acidly. “Do I understand, then, that you refuse to fulfill your contract with me?”

  “I? I refuse nothing. I shall go this instant and give the orders—”

  Prince Chan started to his feet as he spoke, an air of resignation masking his face and took a step forward. Then, without warning, he lurched against the girl. She fired, but he had struck her hand aside, and the bullet went into the ceiling. He struck again, and she staggered under the blow that smote her cheek.

  She had not expected this actual physical encounter, although she had invited it, and she was taken unawares. The Manchu swept the door open before she could fire again, and was gone. She could hear his voice shrilling commands, and then caught the thin, clear note of a whistle.

  With that, she left the cabin and turned into her own doorway. She had failed, and did not know what to expect of her failure; she locked her door and waited, weapon in hand. The anger that seethed within her was furious, and against her pale cheek the mark of the blow stood out redly. The very fact that she had failed so utterly, that her impulsive actions had ended in such a fiasco, made her the more furious. She might have expected a blow from the Manchu, but it had not occurred to her that he would behave to her as to a man. She failed to realize that his blows had provided the gentlest method of escape from her weapon.

  It is quite idle to assert that the mind of a woman runs in the same grooves as the mind of a man—particularly as regards cause and effect. It does not. It has grooves all its own. Rosemonde Burley considered that she had reason to fight; she had begun to fight, and she intended to go on fighting. She entirely ignored the fact that Prince Chan had displayed an amazing trust in giving her the details of his enterprise—an absolutely illegal enterprise. She ignored his attempt to reason with her. She remembered only his concluding words, which constituted either a bribe or a threat, and his blow.

  Presently she heard a gentle knock at her door, and she lifted her weapon.

  “Madame!” sounded the voice of the Manchu. There was a new note in the voice, a note of purring menace. “Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock we reach our destination. If you will yield to reason and—”

  Rosemonde had been calculating from which side of the door that voice had come; she knew that the speaker was not standing squarely before the door. Now she aimed carefully and pulled the trigger. The deafening roar of the explosion filled the cabin, and a round hole appeared in the door panel.

  For a moment there was no indication of the result of her shot. The door, being in a Chinese junk, opened outward. Watching the door, Rosemonde saw it shiver and thud suddenly, as though something had fallen against it. Then she heard the voice of Prince Chan again.

  “Very well, madame,” said the Manchu. “We accept your verdict—and you shall be tamed. When you have had enough of thirst and hunger you may surrender; until then you stay where you are. I need another wife, madame; a white wife this time. That honor shall be yours. Au revoir!”

  Rosemonde fired once again, but only a laugh mocked her aim. Once more the door gave a shivering thud, and again. Stepping toward it, she unlocked and tested it; the door was solidly blocked shut, probably by coils of line. She locked it again.

  Turning, the girl opened her suitcase, which lay upon the bunk. She took out rolls of chocolate, tins of French biscuit, a package of tinned delicacies which had been given her by a Saigon official, and a folding stove with hard alcohol burners.

  “Hunger? Bah!” She shrugged her shoulders. Her gaze went to the water pitcher in the corner, which had been filled that morning. “Thirst? Nonsense!” She looked at the large square port, which was open, and smiled at the sunlit sea. “Marriage? There is the escape. He is a fool, this yellow prince!”

  And, sitting down, she composedly began to clean her automatic pistol.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE SEA TRYST

  Captain Canaughan, Desmond, and O’Sullivan sat smoking in their cabin the afternoon after Canaughan’s rescue. All three had slept long and lustily, but the skipper was chafing under enforced inaction. He had adopted a growling acquiescence in the situation, but reserved his right to the utmost freedom of speech. Juliana was in her own apartment.

  “What I want to know,” said the skipper, glaring at Desmond, “is why ye don’t get to work. Take the ship by tomorrow night, ye said. Well, it’s tomorrow night tonight, ye lazy hound, and you sitting there grinning!”

  “I mind reading a poem,” said O’Sullivan softly and reminiscently, ruffling up his long black hair, “in a magazine. ’Twas wrote about Ireland, which was called Erin, and it was wrote by a guy named Kennedy, only he spelled his name ‘Cinneidhe’ to show he had the Gaelic, in which he was a liar because he spelled ‘mhuirnin’ like Tom Moore spelled it, and Heaven knows there’s no Gaelic in it that way—”

  “What are ye interrupting me for, blast your impudence?” exclaimed Captain Canaughan. “What’s this fool poem of yours got to do with what I’m sayin’?”

  “I’m comin’ to that,” retorted the fiddler. “D’ye mind there was only one true word in that poem, sir? For a fact there was! And that was where he spoke about an Ulsterman always improving—”

  “True for ye there,” interjected the skipper. “An Ulsterman always does improve—”

  “—like bad fish in July,” added O’Sullivan slyly, throwing Desmond a wink.

  “Hell’s bells!” roared the skipper furiously. “If ye were not a little runt of a man not worth me attention I’d break your back over me knee, ye little herring! Oh, laugh, blast the two of ye! Wait till we set foot ashore, you, Desmond, and I’ll wipe the laugh off that mug of yours! When are ye going to put a bullet into that slimy Arevalo, will ye tell me?”

  “Give him until tomorrow noon,” chuckled Desmond, puffing contentedly at a cheroot. “What’s ailing you, anyhow? We’re comfortable here; it’s Arevalo that’s doing the work and the worrying! If we haven’t discovered what his game is by noon, or why he’s heading into the China Sea, we’ll take back the ship and go home. Does that suit ye?”

  Canaughan frowned over his pipe. “I’ll tell ye what,” he said. “I don’t like it! Before we left port Arevalo came to me and wanted to run a bit of dope—opium, mind. I’ll not say but what I’d obliged him before in a small way—”

  “And you a righteous man?” queried Desmond whimsically. “But never mind. Go on.”

  “But he had somethin’ big on his mind,” proceeded the skipper. “And, having the owner aboard, I told him no. So he gave it up, and wanted a passage down to Mindoro, which I was glad enough to grant. Now, then, I’m thinking that maybe he’s trying to put over the opium game somehow. What it is I don’t know, for he would not go into details.”

  “Likely enough,” said Desmond indifferently. “Well, let him go to it!”

  “But don’t ye see the authorities would raise hell with us?” Canaughan glared at him. “Heaven knows it’s a fishy enough story we’ll have to tell, and it the honest truth from start to finish! But if there’s a smell of dope to it, then—”

  “Don’t fret,” and Desmond yawned. “Instead of killing him, we’ll take him in alive—”

  “Blast your bloody bored teeth!” roared the skipper, exasperated. “Have ye no atom of sense? Cannot ye see that—”

  At this point O’Sullivan produced his fiddle, and, the bridge muted, drew his bow across the strings in a wailing air that filled the cabin with a croon of melody. The burly skipper was hushed instantly, and did not speak until O’Sullivan paused. Then:

  “Ye have the gift,” he exclaimed grudgingly. “I suppose ye never heard a tune that went by the name of ‘Mayo County’ or some such thing? I remember me old grandmother, who had a bent for them Papistical airs, used to hum it—”

&nb
sp; The fiddler tightened a peg and struck into the slow-swinging minors requested, and grizzled old Canaughan sat with pipe gripped hard in his teeth until the last note had died. Then he sighed and rose to make ready for bed.

  Despite his apparent carelessness, Desmond thought long and hard that night as he stared into the darkness while the San Gregorio lurched westward. He felt that trouble was brewing; Arevalo had not molested them, which boded ill, and Desmond wondered if it were wise to postpone retaking the ship.

  Still, on the morrow both he and Canaughan would be fully recovered, fully themselves. The schooner would not be regained without a fight, that was certain, and thus far Desmond had formed no scheme for managing the fight without bloodshed. His chief worry was Doña Juliana, whose nature demanded protection and shielding rather than a share in the fray.

  “Poor little girl!” he thought pityingly. “She’s bearing up bravely under it all, and we’ll get her safe home again somehow. It’s a sweetheart she has, and no mistake! Now that she knows we’re all gentlemen she’s warming up to us elegantly. All the fine lady of her and the high-born airs will be gone in another day or two, and she’ll be a fine jewel of a girl for any man alive to be dreaming about—Oh, well! You’re a poor divil of a broken Irishman, Gerald Desmond, with nothing ahead of ye except maybe to go to America like your ancestors and see what the land o’ freedom has to offer ye. There’s no thinking of marriage for the likes of you, me lad.”

  He smiled into the darkness.

  “Maybe, now,” he reflected, “there’ll be a bit of luck waiting around the corner to hit me over the head. Maybe I’ll strike a fortune like the lads in books, or find a bag of pearls somewhere in these seas or strike a guano island. What the devil is guano, I wonder? If it smells anything like what Arevalo burned when he shuffled Don Gregorio into paradise, then an island of it would want no finding, I’m thinking—” He slid into sleep, unworrying about the morrow.

  As for Juliana, she had to some extent laid aside her grief for her father and was applying her energies to the present moment. She was entirely aware of her own beauty and within the past twenty-four hours had become aware of something else; namely, that Gerald Desmond was the only man she had ever met who seemed oblivious to her beauty!

  To be sure, he was as gallant as anyone in Manila had been; he uttered warm phrases and the most adroit flatteries, and he had established himself upon an intimate and familiar footing such as Juliana had never dreamed she would grant to any man—even her future husband! Yet, somehow, she was disagreeably aware that Desmond would have acted precisely in the same fashion with anyone else whom he had happened to like, and that his familiarity and intimacy were entirely as aloof and respectful as were the dumbly admiring stares of O’Sullivan. She was getting to understand Desmond, or, rather, to appreciate him.

  She could not forget, too, that he was an extremely handsome man; his eyes were handsome and warm, and while his finely chiseled features had nothing of the Adonis in them they were alive with a tremendously virile strength and sureness. And he was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, filled with a high courtesy and chivalry which the girl divined and which struck fire from her Gothic blood. She congratulated herself that such a man had been at hand to checkmate Arevalo, for whom she felt only repulsion and hatred.

  With the following morning, Juliana, moved by obscure impulses, descended into the rat-ridden darkness of the run, got up cabin stores, worked for an hour, and aroused the three men in the adjoining cabin with a beaming summons to breakfast. She was delighted by their astonishment, although none of them perhaps realized that it was about the first useful thing she had ever done in her life. But Juliana was awakening.

  “Stand by until noon,” commanded Desmond, when Captain Canaughan renewed his importunities. “If nothing’s turned up by then we’ll turn up ourselves. The only way we can get out, since they’ve barricaded the door, is to use the window and climb over the rail. And who’s going first, eh?”

  “I’ve a pack o’ cards in me fiddle case,” suggested O’Sullivan. “We might have a bit game, unless it would offend the righteousness of the skipper—”

  “It would not,” said Canaughan gloomily. “Although there’ll be no blessin’ on such ungodly doin’s, to my way of thinking. And as to going first, I’m willing enough.”

  “Settle it with the cards,” approved Desmond, more to keep the skipper occupied than anything else.

  “But,” queried Juliana; looking from one to the other, “where shall I be?”

  “Right here, jewel of the world!” and Desmond laughed. “And when it’s all over—”

  At that minute the schooner gave a shuddering lurch which nearly threw them out of their seats.

  “Aground!” cried the fiddler, running to the stern windows; which were kept shuttered and bolted against any possible attempt from Arevalo to gain entrance that way.

  “Aground where?” cried Canaughan scornfully. “There’s no reef the way we’ve been driving. Not a speck o’ coral even. We’ve run alongside another ship, that’s what. Feel her lift an’ heave? Someone’s had sense enough to put out fenders; Balderson most like. He’s the one good seaman in all that scum, blast him!”

  O’Sullivan got the iron shutters torn open by the time they joined him; his pinched, eager face was framed against the blue sky. The silence of incredulity fell upon them as they crowded beside him, until presently Canaughan spoke.

  “Plain enough now,” he said bitterly. “Arevalo and that blasted mate o’ mine were in together on the deal. The mate laid a course for here, smashed my telltale and smashed the engines likewise, so that I’d be able to make no trouble in case I was locked below. Well, the mate’s got his deserts, praise be! Would ye look at that now? Oh, the blasted lubbers! Look at ’em handle the lines!”

  Beside the schooner lay a Chinese junk; rather, she had lain beside a moment before, but was now drifting slightly astern, and thus within the range of vision of those at the San Gregorio‘s stern window.

  There was a long, swinging swell to the ocean, because of which it had obviously been found impracticable that the two craft could lie side by side. As Canaughan explained it to the other three, the schooner was slowly forging ahead under reduced canvas, thus holding the junk slightly astern; a cable had already been made fast, and a second cable was now being made fast in the rigging of the junk, upon whose deck great activity was manifest.

  “Talk about your bold simplicity!” growled the skipper, watching through his glasses. “That junk has come out into the China Sea with a cargo of opium, and she’s goin’ to transfer the dope to us, and Arevalo runs it back into the islands. He can land the whole blasted lot at Mindoro and never a question asked.”

  “Would he land it at our plantation?” asked Juliana.

  “Most like. They’re rigging up a conveyor on that second cable aloft, and in ten minutes they’ll be shooting the stuff over, blast ’em!”

  “Give me those binoculars, Canaughan,” said Desmond suddenly. “I’ve seen something.”

  The skipper grunted and complied. Desmond raised the glasses and focused upon a square window amidships of the junk, at which his eyes had caught a flutter of white.

  As he gazed he saw the window swing open, and the binoculars brought to him every detail of the woman’s face which was framed in the opening. The others were absorbed in watching the preparations to transship cargo, and Desmond said nothing of his discovery. He saw the woman standing staring at the schooner, and she was a white woman. For an instant he shifted his gaze and scanned the decks of the junk, but could see no white man aboard. Returning to the woman, searching her features with puzzled eyes, he could not resist the impression that she was white, frightened, tragic. Desmond slowly moved his hand across his breast as in signal, and she answered with a like gesture.

  “Miss Juliana!” Desmond turned and beckoned the girl beside him to the window. “Look yonder! See if that woman answers your gestures and motion her to be ca
reful.”

  A scant fifty feet of water separated the two vessels. Doña Juliana made signals, as Desmond had requested, then laid her finger to her lips and turned around.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. “Who is that woman?”

  “I don’t know,” said Desmond, “but I’ll find out. Mr. Canaughan, who’s bawling out in Chinese from up above? Is that cook of yours an old hand?”

  “A new one—just shipped him in Manila,” said the skipper, who with O’Sullivan was now scrutinizing the woman aboard the junk. “Ah, she’s gone! Why, that’s the cook talkin’, I expect. Think he was an agent in this blasted dope running?”

  “Sure of it,” assented Desmond. “They look like Manchus aboard the junk there, and he was a Manchu, too; straight eyes, you know, and a different air.”

  A Celestial with a megaphone was standing in the bows of the junk, talking with someone on the schooner’s deck. For the present, however, Desmond was confident that every one concerned had been too absorbed in the work on hand to notice either the woman at her window or the figures at the stern window of the schooner.

  Leaving the other three to discuss the junk, Desmond went into the forward cabin. He felt himself once more, and he was ready for action. Gerald Desmond was essentially unable to depend upon anyone but himself; he was made that way. When he wanted a thing done he did it in his own fashion. He had learned to be aggressively self-dependent, and it was at times a bad habit, but when it came to action Desmond was all alone in his special field. In action he was transformed. The lounging drawl, the slow-moving indolence, was gone from him in a flash. One realized suddenly what tremendous possibilities lay in the man. He became a living flame of audacity.

  Feeling one of the mattresses which he and the fiddler had brought in from the other cabin, Desmond found what he sought—a filling of straw. He carried it back into the other cabin, ripping at it with his knife.

  “Now, then,” he said, and at the ring in his voice the others turned from the window, “stay away from there a few minutes, if ye please; we don’t want to attract attention. That’s right; leave the window open, but keep out o’ sight from the junk.”