Читать книгу The Missourian - Eugene P. Lyle - Страница 8

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“God forbid I should be so bold as to press to heaven in my young days.”

–Titus Andronicus.

The feathering buckets of the paddle wheels began to turn; and La Luz, long, low, narrow, and a racer, moved noiselessly out into the bay. A few yards only, and the loungers on the wharf could neither see nor hear her. Except for the muffled binnacle light, there was neither a ray nor a spark. The anthracite gave almost no smoke. The hull, hardly three feet above water amidships, was “Union color,” and invisible at night. The waves slipped over her like oil, without the sound of a splash, almost without breaking. She glided along more and more swiftly. The silent engines betrayed no hint of their power, though breathing a force to drive a vessel five times as large.

There were many entrances to the bay, and Murguía had had his steamer built of light draft especially, to profit by any outlet offering least danger from the vigilant patrol outside. The skipper had already chosen his course. Because of the gale, he calculated that the blockaders would get a considerable offing, lest they flounder mid the shoal waters inshore. He knew too, even if it were not so dark, that a long, foamy line of surf curtained the bay from any watchful eye on the open sea. By the time she reached the beach channels, La Luz had full speed on. Then, knifing the higher and higher waves, she made a dash for it.

35For a slender steamer, and in such weather, the risk was desperate. The skipper hoped that the blockaders would never credit him with quite the insanity of it. He held the wheel himself, while beside him his keenest-sighted quartermaster stood guard with a glass. The agitated owner was there also, huddled in his black shawl, but the binoculars glued to his eyes trembled so that he could hardly have seen a full-rigged armada in broad daylight.

Suddenly the quartermaster touched the skipper’s arm under the shrouded binnacle. “I s’y sir,” he whispered excitedly, “they’re–there! There, anchored at the inshore station, just off the bar! My eye, but hain’t they beastly idiots? They’ll smash to pieces.”

The skipper looked and Murguía tried to look. But they saw nothing. Except for the booming of the surf, they might have been on a landless sea, alone in the black night. Don Anastasio was shaking at such a rate that his two companions in the dark wheelhouse were conscious of it. He cursed the quartermaster for a pessimist. The skipper, though, was brave enough to believe.

“We’re expected, that’s gospel,” he muttered. But he did not change his course, for he knew that on his other side there was a second fleet, tugging at drift leads off the entrance to the main ship channel. It was near hopeless, but he meant to dart between the two.

“Now for a reception as ’ull touch us to the quick, as Loo-ee Sixteenth said––” The skipper cut himself short. “Aye, aye, sir,” he cried, “they’ve spied us!”

“They haven’t!” groaned Murguía. “How could they?”

“’T’aint important now, sir, how they could. There might be a gleam in our wake. But any’ow they ’ave.”

They had indeed. Less than a mile to port there suddenly appeared two red lights, two sullen eyeballs of fire. Then, a rocket cleft the darkness, its slant proclaiming the fugitive’s 36course. Hurriedly the Luz’s quartermaster sent up a rocket also, but in the opposite direction. It was useless. A third rocket from the signaling blockader contradicted him.

“We’re bein’ chased,” announced the skipper. “One of ’em ’as slipped her chain and got off.”

As La Luz had gained the open, the skipper let his quartermaster take the wheel. “’Old her to the wind, lad,” he cautioned. “A beam sea ’ud swamp us.” Next he whistled down to the engine room. They were to stoke with turpentine and cotton. At once Murguía began to fidget. “It, it will make smoke,” he whined.

“An’ steam. We’re seen a’ready, ain’t we, sir?”

“But it costs more.”

“Not if it clears us. Soft coal ’ud seem bloomin’ expensive, sir, if we got over’auled.”

The race was on. In smooth water it would scarcely have been one. But the boiling fury cut knots from the steamer’s speed, while the Federals sent after her only their sailing vessels, which with all canvas spread bent low to the chase. They had, however, used up time to unreef; and with the terrific rolling they would not dare cast loose a gun.

When morning dawned thickly behind the leaden sky, the three men in the wheelhouse made out a top-gallant sail against the horizon. “By noon,” said the skipper, “the beggars ’ull ’ave us.”

He was a small pert man, was the skipper, with a sharp face, an edge to his voice, and two little points of eyes that glowed. Salt water had not drenched his dry cockney speech, and he was a gamin of the sea and as keen to its gammon ways as in boyhood he had been to those of pubs around the old Bow Bells.

Don Anastasio heard the verdict with a shudder. Given the nature of the man, his mortal fear was the dreadfullest torture that could be devised. The game little cockney peered into 37his distorted face, and wondered. Never was there a more pitiful coward, and yet the craven had passed through the same agony full twenty times during the last few years. Murguía knew nothing of the noble motives which make a man stronger than terror, but he did know a miser’s passion. He begrudged even the costlier fuel that was their hope of safety.

“Your non-payin’ guest, sir,” said the skipper, pointing downward. “’Spose he wants to buy them ’ere smokestacks?”

The trooper had appeared on deck. He was clinging to a cleat in the rail with a landsman’s awkwardness and with the cunning object of proving to the ship that he wasn’t to be surprised off his feet another time. He swayed grandly, generously, for’ard and aft, like a metronome set at a large, sweeping rhythm. Every billow shot a flood from stern to bow, and swished past his boots, but he was heedless of that. His head was thrown back, a head of stubborn black curling tufts, and he seemed absorbed in the Luz’s two funnels. They gave out little smoke now, for with daylight the skipper had changed to anthracite again, in the forlorn hope of hiding their trail. But it had lessened their steam pressure, and in a short time, the skipper feared, the pursuer would make them out, hull and all.

A moment later the passenger climbed into the wheelhouse. “Look here–Mur–Murgie,” he said, “for a seven-hundred-dollar rate that was a toler’ble unsteady cabin I had last night; restless, sort of. It’s mighty curious, but something’s been acting up inside of me, and I can’t seem to make out what it is!” As he spoke, he glanced inquiringly from owner to skipper. He might have been another Panurge envying the planter of cabbages who had one foot on solid earth and the other not far away. He looked pale.

It afforded Don Anastasio little satisfaction to find a young man not more than twenty-two or three. Without his great coat the Southerner proved lithe rather than stocky. There 38was even an elusive angular effect to him. Yet the night before he had looked as wide and imposing as the general of an army. His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and hard and brown from the weathering of sun and blizzard. His features had that decisive cleanliness of line which makes for strong beauty in a man. Evidently nature had molded them boyishly soft and refined at first, but in the hardening of life, of a life such as his, they had become rugged. Most of all, the face was unmistakably American. The large mouth had that dry, whimsical set, and that sensitiveness to twitching at the corners, which foretells a smile. The brown eyes sparkled quietly, and contour and expression generally were those which one may find on a Missourian, or a Texan, or on a man from Montana, or even on a New Yorker born; but never, anywhere, except on an American. Whatever is said to the contrary, the new Western race in its fusing of many old ones has certainly produced not one but several peculiarly American types, and Driscoll’s was American. It was most so because it had humor, virility, and the optimism that drives back despair and holds forth hope for all races of men.

Murguía was right, his passenger seemed a boy. But war and four years of hardest riding had meant more of age than lagging peace could ever hold. Sometimes there flitted across the lad’s face a vague melancholy, but being all things rather than self-inspecting, he could never quite locate the trouble, and would shake himself out of it with a sort of comical wonder. Bitterness had even touched him the night before, as it did many another Southerner on the eve of the Surrender. Yet the boy part in him made such moods rare, and only passing at their worst. On the other hand the same boy-part gave a vigor and a lustre to his occupation, though that occupation was–fighting. He knew no other, and in that the young animal worked off excess of animal life with a refreshing gusto. Even his comrades, of desperado stripe that they were, had dubbed him the Storm Centre. And so he was, in every tempest of arms. The very joy of living–in killing, alas!–always flung him true to the centre. But once there, he was like a calm and busy workman, and had as little self consciousness of the thing–of the gallantry and the heroism–as the prosiest blacksmith. He had grown into a man of dangerous fibre, but he was less aware of it than of his muscles.