Читать книгу Seibert of the Island - Gordon Young - Страница 8

One rainy night, when the wind was splashing among the palms and mournful creaking went on all through the big house, in which three or four families could have lived without crowding, Combe sat with a cold pipe in his hand and dozed in a chair at the bedside. He sat upright, but his head drooped like a dummy's on a broken neck. The lamp was nearly out of oil, and the flame had sunk to a dirty yellow.

"Tom! Tom, that's rain I hear? It is rain?"

Combe sat up with a start, dropping his pipe, and looked quickly about, as if coming out of a nightmare. Waller had been rambling strangely during the day, and now for a long time he lay motionless, listening. His sunken black eyes were full of fever.

"That is rain? You're not just saying it? We played a trick on life, eh, Tom? Now she's evening up on me. Damn life, anyway. I got the best o' her. I'm dying rich—in a great fine house!

"It's all yours now, Tom. Everything. People'll try to rob you. Don't ever trust anybody but Brundage and Williams. Don't you believe Seibert, Tom. He says I owe him—no matter what he says, Tom, don't you ever pay him anything. Hear me? Promise that. I swore I would take it out on some Dutchman. I got the best of every one o' them on Pulotu! If he crowds you, Tom, don't fight. You're no manager. You've been right not to try. You just wait till you can get word to Williams. He'll come. He'll never forget you!

"Ah, I'm glad it is rain—like it was that night in the prison yard there, when they swung three o' them at sunset. Came near being overlooked, we heard. Just did get 'em hung that day. Some kind of a slip like they were always making, as when they gave you eighty lashes for the man in the cell next yours.

"In the yard there they hung three o' them. He was the last. Our gang was last, too. One after another they hung 'em, and us standing there in the rain at sundown waiting for him to die so we could cart him off.

"Raining an' getting dark fast. Us with leg irons on, wearing yellow an' black, me with arrowheads sewed on to show that I was bad. There we stood in the mud, you an' me an' Brundage, waiting for him to die. An' the doctor there, jiggling his big watch and cursing because he had to wait for the third man to die 'fore he could go to his supper.

"An' we stood there in the dark an' rain, and him up there like a darker something than the black sky, with lightning all about overhead.

"Then they kicked him off. He dropped—cr-r-ack! No other sound like the sound o' bones breaking in flesh. You don't hear it—you just sort o' feel it in your own neck.

"Right off that doctor said, 'Dead an' damned—curse him! I'm late for supper now!' And off he walked, splashing and slipping an' swearing.

"When we took him up all limber there in the dark, and the wet on him made us think of blood, it was you; you whispered: 'God ha' mercy—this lad's alive!'

"The warder he hears an' says, 'He won't be long when we stick him in his hole. An' no more talking, or it's a supper o' cat tails for you, all you!'

"Then we went slipping through the mud in the dark an' rain. By that pile o' sacks and lumber Brundage he slipped down, tripping me, then you stumbled, and he fell, too—off the cart. Brundage comes up with a sack o' something—oakum, I think—instead of a man. An' I grabs hold. You too. An' no word spoke but the curses to hide our feelings—and on we go, holding our breath that the warder don't step on the body there an' yell out. But on we go, with the warder just swearing at the three of us there in the dark; and we dumped a sack of oakum in the hole an' covered it with lime an' mud! The lime, it hissed like fire. It knew it had been cheated, that lime.

"And he, before morning, he crawled in among the sacks and stuff. For days he hid there. We knew he had crawled away an' was hiding, because if he had been found we would have been beat to death. An' of course nobody was searching for him. A lad we didn't know, an' had never seen before, but we took the chance to do it just to cheat the damned old gibbet an' the lime-hole that we hated!

"And you an' me an' Brundage, we saved bits of bread and dropped it when we'd go by. Hungry we'd go to scatter it around that old lumber pile. He crawled out nights to get it. He watched days, too, and put our faces down in his head—watched an' saw who dropped the food, an' knew by that who'd saved him from the lime-hole. An', Tom, we know he never forgets.

"That morning a year an' more after, when we were breaking rock up the creek for a road—of a sudden he comes out o' nowhere, with his hands on that soldier's neck. Not a shot or a squeak! For weeks, Tom, he'd been waiting, watching for a chance to get us off. That's his way. He took off that soldier's clothes an' put 'em on himself. He took that soldier's musket and marched us off. Guards saw us from a distance and thought all was well. When we were in the woods he got out the chisels and a hammer.

"We cheated life, us fellows, all of us. She's tried to even up, but we got the best of her that day.

"He showed us the way back through the bush, an' fifteen miles up the beach where his schooner was, an' we were free men!

"It was a German, a big fellow like that Seibert, that got me deported. Ten years. But in prison I was bad. They put arrowheads on me an' kept adding till it was life. But I've squared up all round. I've got the best of life, an' of every Dutchman on this island, an' I'm dying rich. And if Seibert crowds you, Tom, you send for Williams.

"That is rain. I like it. Mildew the copra—but that's your trouble now."

He died a day or so afterwards, going out as a strong man goes, without a word for his pain or a groan of fear as he looked across. He had been cursed, whipped, and branded too much to care what lay beyond.