Читать книгу Pirates' Hope - Lynde Francis - Страница 5

As an easy matter of course, Major Terwilliger won the pool. The land sighted proved to be Cape Gracias á Dios, the easternmost point of Nicaragua. It would say itself that the Mosquito Coast, low, swampy, and with only three practicable harbors along its three-hundred-mile sweep, could have no attractions for a party of winter pleasurers, and we were leaving Cape Gracias astern when the Andromeda's course was suddenly changed and she was headed for land.

Climbing to the bridge a little later, where I found Van Dyck setting the course for the Madeira-man who had the wheel, I learned the reason for the unannounced change.

"Trouble in the engine-room," Van Dyck explained. "The port propeller shaft is running hot and threatening to quit on us. We'll have to lay up for a few hours until Haskell can find out what has gone wrong."

"The shaft hasn't been giving any trouble heretofore, has it?" I asked.

"No; Haskell says it began to heat all at once, shortly after we sighted land."

"You'll put in at Gracias?"

He nodded. "The harbor isn't much, and the town is still less. But we don't need anything but an anchorage. Haskell thinks we won't be held up very long."

That was a cheering prediction, but the event proved it to be too optimistic. The mechanical trouble turned out to be in the thrust bearing of the propeller shaft, and it was more serious than Haskell, chief of the engine-room squad, had supposed it would be. The bearing which, like everything else on the yacht, had been cared for with warship thoroughness, had apparently run dry and it was badly scored and "cut," as a machinist would say. The repair called for hours of patient scraping and filing, and Haskell, who had served as an assistant engineer in the Navy, was properly humiliated.

"It sure gets my goat, Mr. Preble," he confided to me when I climbed down into his bailiwick some three or four hours after we had dropped anchor in Gracias á Dios harbor. "It looks as if it was on me, and maybe it is, but I've never had anything like this happen to me before – not since I began as an oiler on one of the old Cunarders. We have automatic lubrication; all the latest wrinkles; and yet that cussed shaft's tore up like it had been runnin' dry for a week. You're an engineer – I just wish you'd look at it."

To oblige him I donned overalls and crawled down into the shaft tunnel. A glance at the excoriated bearing showed that Haskell hadn't exaggerated. Quinby, Haskell's first assistant, was scraping and smoothing in a space that was too confined to let a man take the kinks out of his back, and in which there was no room for two men to work.

"That is no hurry job," I told Haskell, after I had crawled out. "I think I may safely tell our people that they may have shore leave, if they want it."

"You can that," Haskell grinned. "We'll be right here to-morrow morning, and blamed lucky if we can heave up the mud hook by some time to-morrow afternoon."

It was too late to spread the news after I left the engine-room. When I reached the main deck all of our ship's company had apparently turned in, though there were lights in the smoking-room to hint that the card-players were still at their favorite pastime. But as I went aft to smoke a bed-time pipe I found Madeleine Barclay curled up in one of the deep wicker chairs.

"Pardon me," I said; "I didn't know there was any one here. Don't let me disturb your maiden meditations. I'll vanish."

"You needn't," she returned quite amiably; then, seeing the pipe: "And you may smoke if you want to. You know well enough that I don't mind. How long do we stay here?"

"That is upon the knees of the gods. I've just been below, and I should say we are good for twenty-four hours, or maybe more, though Haskell thinks we may get out by to-morrow afternoon."

"Do we go ashore?"

I shook my head. "The others may if they want to; I shan't."

"Why not?"

"The Andromeda after-deck is much more comfortable than anything to be found ashore in this corner of Nicaragua."

"You have been here before?"

"Yes; I came around here once, something over a year ago, on a steamer from Belize. We made a stop of a few hours and I was besotted enough to leave the ship. I shan't make any such mistake again."

"Gracias á Dios," she said musingly. "I wonder who said it first – and why he was thanking God – particularly?"

I laughed. "Some storm-tossed mariner of the early centuries, I imagine, who was glad enough to make a landfall of any sort."

"Storm-tossed," she repeated. "Aren't we all more or less storm-tossed, Richard?"

"I suppose we are, either mentally, morally, or physically. It's a sad enough world, if you want to take that angle."

"But I don't want to take that angle. When I do take it, it's because I have to."

Being as much of a hypocrite as any of those whom Van Dyck had proposed putting under his analytical microscope, I said: "But there are no constraining influences at work upon any of us aboard this beautiful little pleasure ship – there can't be."

"Do you think not?" she threw in; and then, without warning: "How about you and Conetta, Richard?"

In common justice to Conetta I had to feign an indifference I was far from feeling – which was more of the hypocrisy.

"That was all over and done with three years ago, as you must know, Madeleine. She wasn't aware of the fact that I was to be in the Andromeda party; and I didn't know she was to be – at least, not until after I had committed myself to Bonteck. Of course we promptly quarreled the moment we met. Perhaps you may have noticed that we've been quarreling ever since."

She smiled soberly.

"You have made it obvious – both of you; perhaps a little too obvious." Then, after a momentary silence: "Did Miss Mehitable give the real reason for that other and mortal quarrel, three years ago, Richard?"

"The reason she gave was enough, wasn't it?"

"Some of us thought it wasn't. I don't know how you were acting, but Conetta didn't give a very good imitation of a person who has 'agreed to disagree.'"

"I can fill out the picture for you," I said grimly. "I was acting like a man who had been fool enough to lose his temper at the invitation of a crabbed and rather spiteful person who was old enough to be his mother."

"Ah!" she said; "I thought it was Miss Mehitable." Then: "Was it because you had lost your money?"

"Yes," I said, merely because the simple affirmative seemed to afford the easiest way of brushing aside explanations which might not explain.

It was then that Miss Madeleine Barclay became a plagiarist, stealing the very words uttered so hotly by Edie Van Tromp only a few hours earlier.

"Money – always money! I hate it, Dick Preble!"

I did not answer her as I had answered Edith.

"It is a holy hatred, Madeleine. The love of money, and what money will buy, has proved the undoing of – but I don't need to preach to you. Let's talk about something pleasant. Have you ever seen a finer night than this?"

"A fine night, and ideal conditions. In a way, we've almost left the strugglesome, toiling, avariciously dollar-chasing old world behind us, haven't we?"

"You say 'almost'; why not quite?"

She made a little gesture inclusive of the Andromeda as a whole.

"Too many reminders of the money and what it will buy. We'd need to be shipwrecked upon some uninhabited island to make the isolation perfect. As that isn't going to happen, I think I'll make the most of what we have and go to bed. Good-night." And she left me.

My pipe had gone out and I refilled it. While I had called the night fine, it was measurably warm. With the yacht at anchor there was little breeze, and what little there was came from sea. My stateroom was on the port side, and as the Andromeda was lying with that side toward the land, I was reluctant to leave the open air for the closer quarters between decks.

It was while I was smoking a second pipe in comfortable solitude that I fell asleep. The lapse into unconsciousness seemed only momentary, but when I picked up the pipe which had fallen into my lap there was no fire in it and the bowl had grown cold. Also, in the interval, long or short, the yacht's lights had been switched off and the after-deck was shrouded in the soft darkness of the tropical night. From somewhere in the under-depths came a faint clatter of tools to tell me that Haskell and his men were still at work on the disabled shaft, but apart from this the silence was unbroken.

Descending the cabin stair I groped my way to the door of my room, which was the farthest forward on the port side, and I remembered afterward that I thought it odd that the saloon lights were all off. On all other occasions when I had been up late I had found a single incandescent left on; one, at least.

Inside of the luxurious little sleeping-room that had been assigned to me I felt for the wall switch and snapped it. Nothing happened. I snapped it back and on again, and still nothing happened. Down in the machinery hold I could hear the fluttering murmur of the small auxiliary engine which ran the lighting dynamo, and since it was running, there seemed to be no reason why the lights shouldn't come on. But they wouldn't.

While I was speculating upon this curious failure of the lighting system and wondering if it were worth while to go below to ask Haskell what was the matter with the cabin circuit, sounds like the subdued splashing of oars cautiously handled came floating in through the open port. Since I judged it must be midnight or worse, it was only natural that I should want to know why a boat should be coming off to the Andromeda after all the yacht's people save myself were abed and asleep. Not being able to see anything from the stateroom port-light, I hurried back through the darkened saloon and up to the deck. From the rail on the shoreward side I could make out the dim shape of the approaching craft. As nearly as I could determine, it was a large row-boat with at least four men in it; at all events there were four oars. I could see and count the phosphorescent swirls as the blades were dipped.

It was evident at once that the boat was coming off to the Andromeda. We were anchored well out in the harbor, and there was nothing beyond us; nothing but the harbor mouth and the open sea. Visions of banditry began to flit through my brain. When I had been last in the Caribbean, some three months earlier, Nicaragua had been in the throes of one of its perennial guerrilla wars. A rich man's yacht, offering dazzling loot, might easily be a tempting bait to any lawless band happening to be within striking distance.

While I was straining my eyes to get a better sight of the approaching boat, and deliberating as to whether or not I hadn't better call Van Dyck or the sailing-master, a voice at my elbow said: "So you are up late, too, are you, Dick?" and I faced about with a prickling shock of surprise to find Bonteck standing beside me.

"I must be getting weak-kneed and nervous," I said. "I thought I was the only person awake at this end of things, and you gave me a start. What boat is that?"

"A shore boat, I suppose," he answered evenly. "After I found that we were likely to be delayed until to-morrow, I told Goff he might give some of his men shore leave for a few hours. They were asking for it."

"But that isn't one of the Andromeda's boats," I objected.

"No; they didn't take one of our boats; they hailed a harbor craft of some sort. I fancied they'd make a night of it, but it seems they didn't."

"What time is it now?" I asked.

"Two bells in the middle watch – otherwise one o'clock."

While we were talking, the boat was pulled up to the port bows of the yacht and a number of men, some half-dozen or more, came aboard. We could see dark figures climbing the rail, but since the yacht was painted white, and Van Dyck and I were both wearing yachting flannels, I suppose we were invisible to the group at the bows. In a minute or so the boat pushed off, cut a clumsy half circle in turning, and headed for the shore, and there was just enough of my foolish nervousness left to suggest that the oarsmen were still trying not to make any more noise than they could help. But the second thought made me smile at the remains of the nervousness. What more natural than that our returning shore-leave men had cautioned the boatmen against making a racket and waking everybody on the Andromeda?

"I take it you've been down with Haskell," I said to Bonteck, after the shore boat had become a vanishing blur in the darkness.

"Yes. He is as sore as a boil about that propeller shaft. Says he never had anything like that happen to him before, and that it reflects upon him as chief. He tried to tell me how unaccountable it was, but I hardly know enough about mechanical things to keep me from spoiling."

"It is rather unaccountable," I offered. "I was down a few hours ago and crawled into the shaft tunnel to have a look at it. Ordinarily, when a bearing as large as that begins to run dry, it gives warning some little time beforehand. But Quinby, Haskell's second, says he put his hand on it less than an hour before it began to complain, and it was perfectly cool."

"Oh, well," was Van Dyck's easy-going rejoinder, "such things are all in a life-time. We're in luck that it didn't 'seize,' as Haskell says, and twist itself off. You're yawning as if you were sleepy. Better turn in and get whatever this hot night will let you have. Good-night."

That was the end of the day for me, save that when I went to my stateroom and once more tried the wall switch the lights came on as usual.

The next morning, after a breakfast so early that I sat alone at the long table in the white-lacquered saloon, I went below and offered my services as those of a highly educated jack-of-all-trades to Haskell.

"By golly, you're saving my life, Mr. Preble," said our chief mechanic, whose eyes were looking like two burned holes in a blanket. "If you'll boss the job and let me get about a couple of hours in the hay – "

"Sure," I agreed; and crawling into the extra suit of overclothes, I proceeded to do it, becoming so mechanically interested in a short time that I not only neglected to call Haskell when his two hours were up, but also let the luncheon hour go by unheeded.

By keeping faithfully at it, our gang got the recalcitrant thrust bearing in shape by the middle of the afternoon, the fires were broken out and the blowers put on, and by four o'clock the Andromeda was once more under way and pointing her sharp nose for the open water. As I came up out of the engine-hold to make a bolt for a bath and clean clothes, I saw that Van Dyck had the wheel and was apparently heading the ship straight out toward the Mosquito Cays. As the trim little vessel – which was little only by comparison with the great liners of which it was a copy in the small – went shearing its way at full speed through the heaving ground swell with the westering sun fairly astern, I could not help wondering what our next port of call would be, and if it would be a disabled piece of machinery which would drive us into it.