Читать книгу The White Blackbird - Robert Aitken - Страница 12

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"Who's that, Rube?—there, by the hatch," whispered Sallie, and pointed to where a pair of white eyeballs had been uncannily visible for a moment and then disappeared. She was nervous and overwrought in the midst of so many uncertainties.

Yoxall had stepped quickly in front of her. He caught sight of a shadow crawling away in the dark on the deck below.

"One of the niggers," he told her, and turned. "He's come scouting aft more than once while you were ashore. Most of the men are asleep, I suppose, but there are sure to be some standing guard—they won't run any risk of being caught napping by Captain Dove."

She fell into step with him again, and presently, pacing the poop at his side, slipped an arm into one of his. He shivered a little.

"Aren't you feeling all right?" she asked anxiously. "You're not going to have fever, are you?"

"No, lass," he answered at once. "Not much! I'm all right, of course. It would never do for me to fall sick now, would it?"

"It would be the last straw!" she agreed, and shivered also. For she was counting on him in case the worst should come to the worst.

"I don't know what I'd do without you, Rube," she said. And the big Englishman blushed like any boy as she peered up into his face. "You're the only real friend I have in the world. If it weren't for you—I'd be quite desperate; I'm so unhappy here now."

Reuben Yoxall pressed the arm that lay within his, and gulped. "Then why won't you come away out of it, Sallie?" he asked in a husky voice he could scarcely control. "It wouldn't be so very difficult—if Captain Dove just manages to keep the men in hand till we make some port. And we must call somewhere soon, for we're short of coal.

"I have some money laid by—I'll work harder than ever for you. There's a snug little farm in Cumberland that one of these days will be mine, and till then the old folk would make you and me more than welcome there." He was speaking very quickly, bent on making the most of that unusual opportunity.

"I'm not much of a man, I know," he went on, "but—such as I am, I'm yours. And I'll always be yours, to do whatever you like with. You might come to care more for me, Sallie, if you knew me better. Will you not try? Just give me the chance, and I'll soon have you safely out of the Old Man's clutches. But—so long as you insist on sticking to him, I can't do any more for you than I'm doing."

Her eyes grew dim as she thought of the dog-like devotion which he had shown her, although she had so often told him that she could never repay it as he would have liked.

"I wish I could, Rube," she assured him again, "but—I can't. I'm not ungrateful, and I hate to hurt you, but—I just can't. And you wouldn't want me to sell myself—even for a home and a husband, would you, Rube? I'll never marry anyone. Jasper Slyne says that Captain Dove's going to give me to him—but he doesn't know.... And—I'm not afraid."

Reuben Yoxall sighed, very softly. But she heard, and her own heart grew heavier. Life had become so difficult, and there was still so much to be done, so many troubles to think about, while she did not even know yet what Captain Dove was going to do next.

She had just finished telling Yoxall about the man in the scarlet mask and what she had promised to do for him, when sounds of stealthy bustle from forward told her that the mutineers were once more mustering on deck. She called down to Captain Dove, and he shortly came up from the saloon, followed by Jasper Slyne in a neutral-tinted, workmanlike semi-uniform, at whose belt hung a heavy-calibre Colt revolver.

Under the sharp spur of necessity, Captain Dove appeared to have quite overcome the physical weakness by which he had been oppressed. He stepped briskly to the stair-head rail and thence looked down on the shadowy, moving mass of armed men who had by that time gathered at the after-hatch again. Aware of his presence, they ceased to shuffle about. A tense silence ensued, and Captain Dove cleared his throat.

"Are all hands aft?" he asked sharply, and "Ay, ay, sir," a voice answered. "All hands but the engine-room crew. D'ye want them too?"

"I do not," he declared, and Sallie felt dumbly thankful that the engineers and their underlings were still, apparently, loyal to him.

"Where's Mr. Hobson—and the third mate?" he demanded, and, "Here," answered simultaneously two other very sullen, suspicious voices.

"Listen, then, all of you," ordered Captain Dove, bristling in the dark at that traitorous pair, and, raising his voice again, "I've got a fine plum ripe for your picking to-night, lads!" cried he at his heartiest. "There's a caravan camped ashore here, on its way to the Rio de Oro, with close on a hundred camel-loads of such things as silk and ivory—and jewels—and gold—and girls. I got a word of it from a friend of mine at the Rio when we were in there, and—now's our chance! You can see the flare of the camp-fires on the sky beyond the beach. I've been in here before and I know the place. If you follow me now as you've followed me in the past, I'll guarantee that you'll open your eyes at what's waiting for you ashore."

Slyne, safe in the background, listening, laughed furtively to himself.

"But—if you're going back on me now, I give it up. Strike a light and put a bullet through me right away, if you feel like that. I've only one hand—I won't lift even that against you. And my share of what little money there is on board you can divide among you."

A general murmur of approval greeted this blatant speech. And not even the two malcontent mates could pick any hole in that proposal. A faint crimson glow amid the darkness beyond the surf on the shore served to corroborate his statement in part. That he meant to accompany them was his strongest guarantee of good faith. They were evidently ready and willing, for such a prospect as he had held out to them, to follow him wherever he liked to lead them. The two mates began to tell the men off to the boats and get these swung outboard. A temporary atmosphere of peace and good-will prevailed.

Captain Dove turned to Reuben Yoxall. "You'll stay on board," he whispered very brusquely, "in charge of the ship. I'll tell the chief engineer to lend you two or three men, and you'll see to it that they don't lay their hands on any more guns.

"You'll stick by me," he told Slyne, in the background, and Slyne merely shrugged his shoulders impatiently as the old man passed on to where Sallie was waiting to hear what her part was to be. She did not know in the least what to make of his newly-declared intentions.

"Am I to go with you?" she asked on the spur of the moment. And Captain Dove stared at her.

"No, you are not," he declared emphatically. "D'you want to be shot—or kidnapped—or what! Get away down below, girl, and stay there till I come aboard again. You must be mad!"

She turned obediently toward the companion-hatch, and stopped there. He went forward then, the men making way for him readily, and disappeared into the engine-room. When he climbed carefully back on deck through the fiddley-hatch in the skylight, he found all the boats afloat and only one boat's crew remaining on board, under charge of the second mate, Hobson, with the evident aim of making sure that he did not somehow give them the slip or otherwise take any advantage of them. In response to a shout from him, Jasper Slyne went jauntily forward, and, with commendable promptitude, let himself down the falls overside. One of these, unhooked, served Captain Dove for a sling, and he was soon seated at the boat's tiller. The men followed swiftly, and the second mate went last, no doubt satisfied by then that all would be well.

"Give way, lads!" cried Captain Dove to those at the sweeps, "and we'll show the others the short road ashore. I'm in no end of a hurry to get what's coming to me from that caravan."

Midnight lay very black on the bight where the Olive Branch was riding easily to a single anchor; as the dark hours sped they seemed to grow always darker. The boats which had just put off from her were almost instantly hidden from Sallie's sight. She stepped quietly out on deck beside Reuben Yoxall.

"Rube," she said in a low, determined voice. "I must be going too, now. Will you help me to get out the canvas boat?"

He stared at her, as Captain Dove had done, and swallowed down a lump in his throat.

"It's madness now!" he declared. "But—I'll go myself. You must stay where you are. It would be worse than madness for you—"

She was smiling very gratefully up into his unhappy, stubborn face.

"We'll go together, Rube," she said, "or not at all. And, even although it does seem hopeless, I know you wouldn't want me to break my promise. So you get the boat launched while I go and tell Mr. Brasse."

She turned and ran lightly down the steps and along the main-deck, leaving the mate, sorely perturbed and uncertain, to carry out her instructions or not, as he chose. As she reached the engine-room skylight on the quarter-deck an unobtrusive shadow emerged from it and would have passed her with a nod on its way toward the bridge.

"Mr. Brasse," she said appealingly, and it halted to peer at her through a single eye-glass, after touching its cap in a very precise salute.

"Miss Sallie?" it answered in a surprised but courteous tone which told that the speaker was, or had once been, a gentleman.

"I'm going ashore," she went on in a hurry, "and Mr. Yoxall is going with me. Will you look after things for him until we get back? Every one else has gone already."

"I have Captain Dove's orders to be on the bridge—for another purpose," the chief engineer of the Olive Branch informed her, "and I'll do my best, of course, to make sure that nothing goes wrong in the chief mate's absence. But—is it safe for you—"

"Quite safe," she assured him. "And—Mr. Brasse, if I bring—I'm going ashore to try to save a man—a white man the Arabs mean to murder to-night. If I manage to bring him on board, will you help me to hide him?—so that Captain Dove won't know?"

The chief engineer of the Olive Branch was obviously much perplexed. But he was also obviously much better disposed toward Sallie than to Captain Dove.

"If he's willing to work in the stokehold," he stipulated, "I don't think Captain Dove would ever know he's on board the ship. And then he can slip ashore at the first safe port we manage to make."

Sallie's lower lip trembled a little. She did not quite know how to thank the punctilious engineer who had proved himself such a friend in need. And time was passing.

"You're always very good to me, Mr. Brasse," she said timidly.

"Not at all," he returned with formal politeness, and, having saluted again, went on his own way toward the bridge.

When Sallie got back to the poop she found Reuben Yoxall awaiting her there and the canvas boat already afloat. The mate, however slow-witted, was smart enough in all his movements once he had made up his mind. He helped her over the side without any more words, and was soon driving the light boat along a straight, swift line for the landing-place.

Sallie's sense of direction enabled her to show him that, and also brought them safely across the bar into the lagoon where the other boats from the Olive Branch were lying empty, afloat. The third mate and some of the men had seemingly been left there in charge of them. Sallie caught sight of the former's sullen, furtive features in the sudden, foolhardy light of a match he was holding over the pipe whose bowl his hands hid. And there were shapes moving about him. She laid a shaky hand on one of Yoxall's, and the oar in his, dipping, shifted their course.

The boom of the breakers, behind them, killed all other sound. But she lifted a finger to her lips, and he proved sufficiently quick-witted then. Between them, they beached their own boat in the dark a couple of hundred yards nearer the camp, and waded ashore with it, and left it there, up-side down on the sand.

The same magnetic instinct which had brought them safely across the bar to the beach led her almost straight to the mouth of the narrow ravine through which Captain Dove and she had reached the red-haired Emir's camp. And Reuben Yoxall followed her, blind, through the night.

"It was here that he was to meet us," she whispered breathlessly, her heart in her mouth. They had met no one at all by the way, and there seemed to be no one there.

Yoxall scowled about him, unseeingly, and bit his lip, in helpless dissatisfaction with everybody and everything. Then he sniffed inquiringly, and in an instant all his relaxed muscles were taut again. A faint whiff of tobacco-smoke had reached his nostrils on the hot, humid night-air.

Sallie was aware of it too, and had snatched at his hand, to draw him on tiptoe toward the base of the great rock-wall that cropped up out of the sand there. They reached its shelter unseen and unheard as a harsh, suppressed voice spoke from round the corner, within the velvet-black mouth of the gorge. It was Hobson's, the second mate's.

"Put out that pipe," it ordered furiously, and was answered by a low, mocking laugh. There followed the sound of a smashing blow, and a short, sharp struggle that was interrupted by a muffled shout from high overhead. "Hobson ahoy!"

It was Captain Dove who had called cautiously down from the summit of the ridge at one side of the ravine, and the second mate panted a quick response.

"You can get a move on now," cried the old man above the roar of the surf. "The others will all be in position by the time you've pushed through. Open fire as soon as ever you sight the camp. D'ye hear?"

"Ay, ay, sir," answered the second mate, the habit of years still strong upon him, and went on to issue his own commands in the curt growl of custom. The fellow who had lighted a pipe in defiance of him was apparently quelled.

It seemed that he meant to leave some of his men to guard that end of the gorge. "And you'll keep a sharp look-out," he instructed them very threateningly. "If we're trapped in this damned tunnel there will be all hell to pay—and you'll pay it!

"Move on now, in front. Feel your way with your bayonets. And don't fire so long as cold steel will serve."

The two listeners could hear the dull clink and shuffle of the advance. That soon died away. The men who had been left behind began a low, intermittent grumbling over their own hard lot; they did not believe for a moment that their comrades would share the loot fairly with them. Hobson was a coward at heart, said one, or why, otherwise, would they be wasting their time there? They were all smoking by then.

"The whole thing's a cinch," declared the same speaker more loudly. "I'll swear there isn't an Arab outside the ring-fence we've drawn round 'em, and—I'm going on along inside, to get what I want for myself. I'm not afraid of Mr. Blasted Hobson!"

He came out into the open and stood for a moment or two listening intently, within a few feet of where Sallie and Reuben Yoxall were crouching, their backs toward him. But the ceaseless crash and rumble of the breakers was all there was to be heard.

He turned back, and tramped off into the gorge, with two of the others for company. But three remained.

Sallie felt Reuben Yoxall tug at her sleeve and began to move softly away after him. From somewhere in the distance a shot suddenly rang out. More followed, in quick succession. The irregular crackle of independent rifle-fire soon made it clear that the concentric attack on the camp had begun. The three men in the mouth of the gorge were shouting excitedly to each other.

"We must get away back on board—at once," Yoxall whispered peremptorily. "We can't search the whole Sahara, blind, for a man you wouldn't even know if you saw him. You've done all you can, Sallie. You've kept your promise. Come away, now."

She suppressed a hopeless sob with an effort. It seemed so inexpressibly hard that they should have gained nothing at all by the grave risk they were still running. But hope had failed her, too.

"We'll wait by the boat—just for a little, Rube," she begged none the less. "It may be that—"

"Come on, then," he urged again. "Let's get to the boat,—and, if you'll stay by it, I'll scout round a bit before we put off again."

"More this way," she directed him, as he moved on, impatient to get her back into at least comparative safety. And, under her guidance, they soon reached the rough, trodden path that led toward the lagoon where the boats were lying.

A hundred yards further on, he stopped her abruptly, and dropped to the ground, to set an anxious ear to it. He was up again in a second or two.

"There's a whole army coming this way," he declared in a tone of stricken dismay, "and horses with them too!

"We must make for the soft sand and lie down and burrow as deep as we can."

He turned toward the sea, one arm about her, and almost carried her across the deep, undulating drifts that clutched at her ankles like a dry quicksand. His own strength soon failed against them. He stumbled and fell on his face at the brink of a slope, and slipped on into its hollow and lay there, quite still. But he had let go his hold of her, so that she had not lost her feet: and she was soon cowering beside him, face downward also. They had both heard the nearness of those other feet—very many of them—which had seemingly crossed from the pathway to intercept them.

A hoarse murmur was audible behind them. Some one had ordered a halt. They could hear the heavy breathing of men and the restless movements of horses hock-deep in the drift. They could almost see the ghostly shapes of the white-cloaked riders, but only the leader's horse was even very dimly discernible—because it also was white. Its bridle was jingling a little, too, as none of the others' were.

He uttered a short, sharp order, and Sallie set her teeth to choke back the cry of despair which had almost escaped her. For it was the Emir himself into whose hands they seemed fated to fall, and his tone told the temper he was in.

From among his horsemen a number of men on foot seemed to have emerged, and he was speaking to one of them, in English.

"Are you there, my fine doctor?" he asked evilly, and leaned from his saddle as though he could see through the dark.

"I'm here," a level voice replied, and Sallie covered her face with her hands in helpless horror.

"You're here, you say! And here you'll stay, say I—as was promised you," hissed the Emir. "'Tis not right that the likes of you should be still drawing breath—and her-you-know-of already cold. You're quick yet, and she's dead, my fine doctor—but yours is the funeral that comes first. And you're standing over your own grave now—hell's waiting for you beneath your feet. Stand to one side, and let my men dig down to it."

There was more movement about him, and then a quick shovelling of sand.

"If it's all the same to you, I'll tell them to help you in head first," said the Emir venomously. But the man in the scarlet mask answered nothing at all to that.