Again he laughed, exultingly. Now for the first time in his life his will could be made law. Now he stood on his own deck, with plenty of supplies below, and—above, about him—the unlimited power of the gale to drive him any whither he should choose.
He strode to the companionway, his feet sure on the swaying deck, his body lithely meeting every plunge, and slid back the hatch-cover. Down into the cabin he pitched the cases and followed them. He struck a match. It died. He cursed bitterly, tried again, and lighted the cabin-lamp. His eyes, with the affection of ownership, roved around the little place, taking in the berths, the folding-table, the stools. He threw the suit-cases into a berth, opened one and took out a square-face, which he uncorked and tipped high.
“Ah!” he sighed. “Some class!” He set the bottle in the rack and breathed deeply. “Nice little berths, eh? Laura—she’d look fine here. She’d fit great, as crew. And if she gave me any of her lip, then—”
His fist, doubled, swayed under the lamp-shine as he surveyed it proudly.
“Great little boat,” judged Hal. “She’ll outsail ’em all, and I’m the boy to make her walk!”
Huge, heavy, evil-faced, he stood there, swaying as the Kittiwink rode the swells. He cast open his reefer, took out pipe and tobacco, and lighted up. As he sucked at the stem, his hard lips, corded throat and great jaws gave an impression of brutal power, in no wise differing from that of old Alpheus Briggs, half a hundred years ago.
“Make me go to school and wear a blue ribbon,” he gibed, his voice a contrabass to the shrilling of the wind aloft in the rig, the groaning and creaking of the timbers. “Make me go round apologizing to drunken bums. Like—hell!”
A gleam of metal from the opened suit-case attracted his eyes. He took up the kris, and with vast approval studied it. The feel of the lotus-bud handle seemed grateful to his palm. Its balance joyed him. The keen, wavy blade, maculated with the rust of blood and brine, and with the groove where lay another stain whose meaning he knew not, held for him a singular fascination. Back, forth he slashed the weapon, whistling it through the air, flashing it under the lamp-light.
“Fine!” he approved, with thickened speech. “Glad I got it—might come handy in a pinch, what?”
He stopped swinging the kris, and once more observed it, more closely still. Tentatively he ran his thumb along the edge, testing it, then scratched with some inchoate curiosity at the poison crystallized in the groove.
“Wonder what that stuff is, anyhow?” said he. “Doesn’t look like the rest. Maybe it’s the blood of some P. I., like McLaughlin. That ought to make a dirty-looking stain, same as this. Maybe it will, some of these days, if he crosses my bows. Maybe it will at that!”
CHAPTER XLI
FATE STRIKES
Hal tossed the kris into the berth, and was just about to reach for the bottle again when a thump-thump-thumping along the hull startled his attention.
“What the devil’s that, now?” he growled, stiffening. The sound of voices, then a scramble of feet on deck, flung him toward the companion-ladder. “Who’s there?”
“He’s here, boys, all right!” exulted a voice above. “We got him this time, the—”
Have you seen a bulldog bristle to the attack with bared teeth and throaty growl? So, now, Hal Briggs.
“Got me, have you?” he flung up at the invaders. “More o’ that rotten gurry-bucket’s crew, eh? More o’ Bucko McLaughlin’s plug-uglies!”
“Easy there,” sounded a caution, as if holding some one back from advancing on Hal. “He’s mebbe got a gun.”
“T’ hell wid it!” shouted another. “He ain’t gonna lambaste half our crew an’ the ole man, an’ git away wid it! Come on, if there’s one o’ ye wid the guts of a man. We’ll rush the son of a pup!”
Heavy sea-boots appeared on the ladder. Hal leaped, grabbed, flung his muscles into a backward haul—and before the first attacker realized what had happened, he landed on his back. One pile-driver fist to the jaw, and the invader quivered into oblivion, blood welling from a lip split to the teeth.
“There’s one o’ you!” shouted Hal. “One more!” He laughed uproariously, half drunk with alcohol, wholly drunk with the strong waters of battle. “Looks like I’d have to make a job of it, and clean the bunch! Who’s next?”
Only silence answered a moment. This swift attack and sudden loss seemed to have disconcerted Mac’s men. Hal kicked the fallen enemy into a corner, and faced the companionway. His strategic position, he realized, was almost impregnable. Only a madman would have ventured up to that narrow and slippery deck in the night, with an undetermined number of men armed, perhaps, with murderous weapons, awaiting him. Hal was no madman. A steady fighter, he, and of good generalship. In his heart he meant, as he stood there, to kill or cripple every one of those now arrayed against him. He dared take no chances. Tense as a taut spring, he crouched and waited.
Then as he heard whisperings, furious gusts of mumbled words, oaths at the very top of the companion, an idea took him. He snatched up the unconscious man, thrust him up the ladder and struggled behind him with titanic force. His legs, massive pillars, braced themselves against the sides of the companion. Like a battle-ax he swung the vanquished enemy, beating about him with this human flail. With fortune, might he not sweep one or two assailants off into the running seas?
He saw vague forms, felt the impact of blows, as his weapon struck. Came a rush. Overborne, he fell backward to the floor. Up he leaped, as feet clattered down the ladder, and snatched the kris.
But he could not drive it home in the bulky, dark form leaping down at him. For, lightning-swift, sinewed arms of another man behind him whipped round his neck, jerked his head back, bore him downward.
He realized that he was lost. He had forgotten the forward hatch, opening down into the galley; he had forgotten the little passageway behind him. Now one of McLaughlin’s men, familiar with the build of the Kittiwink, had got a strangling grip on him. A wild yell of triumph racketed through the cabin, as three more men dropped into that little space.
Hal knew he must use strategy. Backward he fell: and as he fell, he twisted. His right hand still held the kris; his left got a grip on the other’s throat.
That other man immediately grew dumb, and ceased to breathe, as the terrible fingers closed. Volleys of blows and kicks rained on Hal ineffectively. Still the fingers tightened; the man’s face grew horribly dusky, slaty-blue under the lamp-light, while his tongue protruded and his staring eyes injected themselves with blood.
The arm round Hal’s neck loosened, fell limp. Hal flung the man from him, groveled up under the cross-cutting slash of blows, and bored in.
The crash of a stool on his right wrist numbed his arm to the elbow; the stool, shattered, fell apart, and one leg made smithereens of the lamp-globe. The smoky flare redly lighted a horrible, fantastic war. Hal fought to snatch up the knife again; the others to keep him from it, to trample him, bash him in, smear his brains and blood on the floor. Scientific fighting went to pot. This was just jungle war, the war of gouge and bite, confused, unreal.
All the boy knew was that he swayed, bent and recovered in the midst of terrible blows, and that one arm would not serve him. The other fist landed here, there; and now it had grown red, though whether from its own blood or from the wounds of foemen, who could tell? Strange fires spangled outward before Hal’s eyes; he tasted blood, and, clacking his jaws, set his teeth into a hand and through it.
Something wrenched, cracked dully. Blasphemy howled through the smoky air, voicing the anguish of a broken arm. A rolling, swaying, tumbling mass, the men trampled the fallen one, pulping his face. Broken glass gritted under hammering bootheels, as the shards of lamp-chimney were ground fine.
Back, forth, strained the fighters, with each heave and wallow of the boat. The floor grew slippery. The folding-table, torn from its hinges, collapsed into kindling; and one of these sticks, aimed at Hal’s head, missed him, but struck the square-face.
Liquor gurgled down; the smell of whisky added its fetor to the stench of oil, bilge, sweat and blood. The floor grew slippery, and crimson splashes blotched the cabin walls.
“Kill—the son—of—” strainingly grunted some one.
Hal choked out a gasping, husky laugh. Only one eye was doing duty now; but that one still knew the kris was lying in the corner by the starboard berth.
He tugged, bucked, burst through, fell on the kris, grappled its knob and writhed up, crouching.
He flung the blade aloft to strike. Everything was whirling in a haze of dust and dancing confusion, lurid under the flare. Grinning, bleeding faces, rage-distorted, gyrated before him. He swirled the kris at the nearest.
A hand, vising his wrist, snapped the blade downward, drove it back. Hal felt a swift sting, a burning, lancinating pain in his right pectoral muscle. It seemed to pierce the chest, the lung itself.
He dropped his arm, staring. The kris, smeared brightly red, thumped to the floor.
“Got ’im, b’ God!” wheezed somebody.
“Got him—yes, an’ now it won’t be healthy fer us, if we’re caught here, neither!” panted another.
The men stood away from him, peering curiously. Hal confronted them, one arm limp. The other hand rested against the cabin bulkhead. He swayed, with the swaying of the boat; his head, sagging forward, seemed all at once very heavy. He felt a hot trickle down his breast.
“You—you’ve got me, you—” he coughed, and, leaning his back against the bulkhead, got his free hand feebly to the wound. It came away horribly red. By the smoky, feeble flare, he blinked at it. The three hulking men still on foot—vague figures, with black shadows on bearded faces, with eyes of fear and dying anger—found no answer. One sopped at a cut cheek with his sleeve; another rubbed his elbow and growled a curse. On the cabin floor two lay inert, amid the trample of débris.
“Now you’ve done it, Coombs,” suddenly spat the smallest of McLaughlin’s men. He shook a violent forefinger at the blood-smeared kris that had fallen near the ladder. “Now we got murder on our hands, you damn fool! We didn’t come here to kill the son of a dog. We only come to give him a damn good beatin’-up, an’ now see what you’ve went an’ done! We got to clear out, all of us! An’ stick, too; we got to fix this story right!”
“What—what d’you mean?” stammered Coombs, he of the bleeding cheek. He had gone ashy pale. The whiteness of his skin make startling contrast with the oozing blood. “What story? What we gotta do?”
“Get ashore an’ all chew it over an’ agree on how we wasn’t within a mile o’ here to-night. Fix it, an’ git ready to swear to it! If we don’t, we’ll all go up! Come along out o’ here! Quick!”
“Aw, hell! If he dies, serves him right!” spoke up the third man. “They can’t touch us fer killin’ a skunk!”
“You’ll soon find out if they can or not!” retorted the small man, livid with fear. “Out o’ here now!”
“An’ not fix him up none? Not bandage him ner nothing?” put in Coombs. “Gosh!”
“Bandage nothin’!” cried the small man. “Tully’s right. We got to be clearin’. But I say, set fire to her an’ burn her where she lays, an’ him in her, an’—”
“Yes, an’ have the whole damn town here, an’ everythin’! You got a head on you like a capstan. Come on, beat it!”
“We can’t go an’ leave our fellers here, can we?” demanded Coombs, while Hal, sliding down along the bulkhead, collapsed upon the blood-stained floor. He felt his life oozing out hotly, but now had no power even to raise a hand. Coombs peered down, his eyes unnaturally big. “We can’t leave them! That’d be a dead give-away. An’ we hadn’t oughta leave a man bleed to death that way, neither.”
“T’ hell with ’im!” shrilled the little man, more and more panic-stricken. “We should worry! Git hold o’ Nears an’ Dunning here, an’ on deck with ’em. We can git ’em ashore, an’ the others, too, in the dory. We can all git down to Hammill’s fish-shed an’ no one the wiser. Give us a hand here, you!”
“I’m goin’ to stay an’ fix this here man up,” decided Coombs. “I reckon I stuck him, or he stuck himself because I gaffled onta his hand. Anyhow, I done it. You clear out, if you wanta. I ain’t goin’ to let that feller—”
“You’re comin’ with us, an’ no double-crossin’!” shouted Tully, his bruised face terrible, one eye blackened and swollen. He bored a big-knuckled fist against Coombs’s nose. “If you’re caught here, we’re all done. You’re comin’ now, or, by the jumpin’ jews-harps, I’ll knock you cold myself, an’ lug you straight ashore!”
“An’ I’ll help ye!” volunteered the little man, with a string of oaths. “Come on now, git busy!”
Overborne, Coombs had to yield. The three men prepared to make good their escape and to cover all tracks. Not even lifting Hal into a berth, but leaving him sprawled face-downward on the floor, with blood more and more soaking his heavy reefer, they dragged the unconscious men to the companion, hauled them up and across the pitching, slippery deck, and dropped them like potato sacks into the dory that had brought them. Then they did likewise with the unconscious man Hal had used as a flail against them. In the dark and storm, all this took minutes and caused great exertion. But at last it was done; and now Tully once more descended to the cabin.
He looked around with great care, blinking his one still serviceable eye, his torn face horrible by the guttering oil-flame that danced as puffs of wind entered the hatch.
“What you doin’ down there, Tully?” demanded a voice from above. “Friskin’ him fer his watch?”
“I’ll frisk you when I git you ashore!” Tully flung up at him. Coombs slid down into the cabin.
“That’s all right,” said he, “but I ain’t trustin’ you much!”
“Aw, go to hell!” Tully spat. He stooped and began pawing over the ruck on the floor. Here he picked up a cap, there a piece of torn sleeve. He even found a button, and pocketed that. His search was thorough. When it ended, nothing incriminating was left.
“I reckon they won’t git much on us now,” he grinned, and contemplatively worked back and forth a loosened tooth that hardly hung to the gum. “An’ if they try to lay it on us, they can’t prove nothin’. All of us swearin’ together can git by. There ain’t no witness except him,” with a jerk of the thumb at the gasping, unconscious form. “Nobody, unless he gits well, which he ain’t noways likely to.”
He rolled Hal over, looked down with malice and hate at the pale, battered face, listened a moment to the laboring, slow râle of the breath, and nodded with satisfaction. Even the bloody froth on Hal’s blue lips gave him joy.
“You got what’s comin’ to you, all right!” he sneered. “Got it proper. Thought you’d git funny with Mac an’ his gang, huh? Always butted through everythin’, did you? Well, this here was one proposition you couldn’t butt through. We was one too many fer you, all righto!”
He turned, and saw Coombs with the kris in hand. Fear leaped into his face, but Coombs only gibed:
“You’re a great one, ain’t you? Coverin’ up the story o’ what happened here an’ leavin’ that in a corner!”
Fear gave way to sudden covetousness.
“Gimme that there knife!” demanded Tully. “There is a souvenir! That there’s a krish. I can hide it O. K. Gimme it!”
Coombs’s answer was to stoop, lay the kris down and set his huge sea-boot on it. A quick, upward wrench at the lotus-bud handle and the snaky, poisoned blade, maybe a thousand years old, snapped with a jangle of dissevered steel.
“Here, you!” shouted Tully. But already Coombs had swung to the companion. One toss, and lotus-bud and shattered blade gyrated into the dark. The waves, white-foaming, received them; they vanished forever from the world of men.
“On deck with you now!” commanded Coombs. “If we’re goin’ to do this at all, we’re goin’ to make a good job of it. You go first!”
Tully had to obey. Coombs puffed out the light and—leaving Hal
Briggs in utter dark, bleeding, poisoned, dying—followed on up the ladder. The dory pushed away, laden with three unconscious men and three others by no means unscathed of battle. Toward the shore it struggled, borne on the hungry surges.
Thus fled the men of McLaughlin’s crew—avenged. Thus, brought low by the cursèd thing that had come half-way ’round the world and waited half a hundred years to strike, Hal sank toward the great blackness.
Lotus-bud, symbol of sleep, and poisoned blade—cobra-fang from the dim, mysterious Orient—now with their work well done, lay under waves of storm in a wild, northern sea.
Above, in the black, storm-whipped sky, was the blind face of Destiny peering with laughter down upon the fulfilment of its prophecy?
CHAPTER XLII
IN EXTREMIS
It would be difficult to tell how long the wounded boy lay there, but after a certain time, some vague glimmering of consciousness returned. No light came back. Neither was motion possible to him. His understanding now was merely pain, confusion and a great roaring wind and wave. Utter weakness gripped his body; but more than this seemed to enchain him. By no effort of his reviving will could he move hand or foot; and even the slow breath he took, each respiration a stab of agony, seemed for some reason a mighty effort.
Though Hal knew it not, already the curaré was at work, the curaré whose terrible effect is this: that it paralyzes every muscle, first the voluntaries, then those of the respiratory centers and of the heart itself. Yet he could think and feel. Curaré does not numb sensation or attack the brain. It strikes its victims down by rendering them more helpless than an infant; and then, fingering its way to the breath and to the blood, closes on those a grip that has one outcome only.
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