Читать книгу King of The Rocks - Ambrose Pratt - Страница 5

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"IT is no use talking, men; my terms or none."

Manville, owner of the Swallow, spoke. He was standing, his back to the mizzenmast, his hands and feet lashed firmly to the spar while before him skulked a dozen mutineers, all that remained alive from the fight in which the chief officer and half the crew had been killed, and he himself taken prisoner.

"Give him another turn, Somers!" said Raglan, formerly ship's carpenter, but now head of the mutineers, and master of the Swallow.

A sailor at the word twisted a rope, an end of which he held in either hand; and as this rope passed round Manville's throat, the captive groaned and choked, struggling in vain against the hempen torture.

"Stop!" said Raglan presently, and again addressed his prisoner. "Will you listen to reason now, you fool? Navigate us into Valparaiso, and a third of the gold is yours."

Manville laughed evilly. "Navigate yourself, you hound!" he gasped.

"Keep a civil tongue, or I'll slit your weazand for you!"

"Go on, you cur; I can't stop you!"

Raglan, with an oath, took a knife from his belt and advanced to the mast, but a sailor intervened.

"Out of the way, you whelp!" shouted the carpenter, and slashed at the sailor with his knive.

But Somers and some others threw themselves upon their chief and soon disarmed him.

Somers then advanced to his late captain with a deprecative air.

"Look you, Cap'n Manville, it's this way. We can't do without you, an' you can't do without us. I'm not above givin' you a fair thing since 'twas you that scooped the pool and shoved the shiners in our way. But bless yer, half's too tall, and then to kill Raglan, that's ridiculous. But you take us into port and I'll see you get a fair divvy, s'elp me Gord; a full third to you, and we 'uns 'll split the rest a'tween us."

Manville sneered as he answered:

"No use, Somers. If you want to reach Valparaiso you must release me, then throw your weapons overboard, next surrender Raglan bound to my mercy"—he gritted his teeth—"then I'll talk to you."

Somers, looking vastly disappointed, returned to his fellows, whence a bitter colloquy ensued, and the decision at length arrived at, that Manville must be starved into submission.

For three days more the Swallow floundered on in an aimless way at half-speed through the extreme South Pacific, her general course north-east. Three weeks had passed since she had left the waters of the Indian Ocean; no one on board but Manville knew her whereabouts; coal was running low, provisions, too, were giving out, and she was far from the ordinary track of ships. In all those three days Manville had not tasted food or drink, but his resolution was of iron still, and the baffled mutineers retired each day from the cabin into which they had thrust him, helplessly raging against the strength of their bound master's will.

On the fourth morning a hideous discovery was made—all the Swallow's fresh-water tanks were dry. The men tapped a barrel of rum to brace their spirits against this news, and by noon were raving drunk. They decided in their madness to delay no longer the execution of their prisoner, and were about to carry their purpose into practice when land was sighted suddenly.

A long, low ocean atoll it was, horse-shoe in shape, with one narrow inlet leading into a glass-still, landlocked harbour, fringed with a thin stretch of palm-tufted, rocky ground.

With a reckless dash the Swallow was steered by her drunken pilots through the narrow passage, and by wonderful good fortune carried clear of the snarling rocks of the entrance, which showed their cruel grey teeth and mumbled hungrily through their curling lips of spray as the vessel passed.

A mile farther on the engines were stopped and the anchor lowered with a sullen splash into the crystal water of the lagoon.

"Shore!" was the cry, and one and all the mutineers hastened into the long-boat and pushed off for the land. With clumsy carelessness they moored their boat to the rocks on the beach, and splashing through the low-tide mud, scrambled like a pack of school-boys to explore their new domains. Water they soon found in abundance by the palm trees, but despising this treasure now that they had found it, they strolled in groups around the island slowly and carelessly, since time was of no moment to them.

But while they wandered, steadily the tide flowed in, and with the tide a thin, mysterious current that poured in from the inlet through the mid lagoon, then set again in a strong sweep seawards along one coastline of the bay. At dusk the sailors, sober now and weary of their island, sought to return to the ship, but the boat had disappeared, and the silent Swallow, swinging at her anchor, was the sole inhabitant of the lagoon. Somers threw off his clothes with a laugh, and plunged into the sea to swim off to the ship, a bare five hundred yards from shore. The space of sixty feet he traversed while his comrades watched him, then he threw up his arms, with a sharp scream of pain, and vanished.

"Shark," said Raglan. "Your turn, Duggan."

But Duggan, awed by the fate of Somers, refused, and the night was spent by the mutineers among the palm trees. Next morning, when the tide was low, Duggan slipped into the water and swam scarce fifty feet before his doom took him. There remained on the island ten men, who set to work with their sheath knives to cut down palm trees for a raft. By the evening of the third day they had half cut through a single trunk, but their knives were either broken or worn out. Three of them who wore revolvers fired every shot into the stubborn wood, but their powder was wasted, and the tree shook its slender fronds in derision at their futile efforts. Shell-fish fed them for a week, then dysentery came to rob them of their manhood. On the ninth day ten wan and desperate wrecks of men sprang together into the water and swam off towards the Swallow, yelling and splashing as they went. Nine were torn to pieces in a moment. Raglan, head mutineer, and last alive, was drawn under by a mighty shell-back six feet from safety, and his death shriek ringing over the bay reached the ears of a living skeleton, who lay in horrible agony in the vessel's cabin. That scream, as nothing else could, lightened the horrors of his awful solitude, and Manville, iron soul, died a little later, as he had lived, unconquered, in spite of his sufferings, a sneer curling the edges of his lips.

At that very moment the English world was ringing with the news of a terrible shipping disaster. The Alemene had disappeared mysteriously between Albany and Aden, leaving nothing behind her to explain the fate which had engulfed in the silence of death a magnificent liner, with her five hundred passengers and crew. The nine days' wonder was still further intensified by a startling communication made to the daily papers by the police of Scotland Yard.

Crushing proofs had suddenly come to light, which on investigation clearly damned Captain Standish, commander of the ill-fated vessel, as the perpetrator of a horrible and mysterious murder, which had shocked England some years before.

For weeks the cables worked, carrying pregnant messages to and from Australia, but the Alemene, lying in the slime of the ocean a thousand fathoms deep, gave no answer to the watchers who waited for her to return. It never rains but it pours. Fast on the heels of one disaster came news of a second. The Swallow, an ocean tramp steamer of some 2000 tons, owned and commanded by one Gerald Manville, had set out from Sydney for New Zealand. Since then the Swallow had not been seen nor heard of, and as a frightful storm had swept up from the south soon after her departure from Port Jackson, it was thought she must have foundered in the open sea. No connection was imagined by the wildest dreamer between the hidden fates attending either vessels; but for long after, when storms raged at sea, men secure on shore shuddered at the eccentric cruelties of the ocean, to which they attributed each dreadful loss.