Kitabı oku: «Harrigan», sayfa 4

CHAPTER 9

They climbed the rail. Plainly Harrigan had made them delay too long, for now they had not time to swim beyond the reach of the swirl that would form when the ship went down. The Mary Rogers lurched to her grave as they sprang from the rail. A wave caught them and washed them beyond the grip of the whirlpool; another wave swung them back, and the waters sucked them down. Such was the force of that downward pull that it seemed to Harrigan as if a weight were attached to either foot. He drew a great, gasping breath before his head went under and then struck out with all his might.

When his lungs seemed bursting with the labor, he whirled to the surface again and drew another gasping breath. The storm had torn a rift in the clouds and through it looked the moon as if some god were peering through the curtain of mist to watch the havoc he was working. By this light Harrigan saw that he was being drawn down in a narrowing circle. Straight before him loomed a black fragment of the wreckage. He tried to swing to one side, but the current of the water bore him on. He received a heavy blow on the head and his senses went out like a snuffed light.

When consciousness returned, there was a sharp pain in both head and right shoulder, for it was on his shoulder that McTee had fastened his grip. The captain sprawled on a great timber, clutching it with both legs and one arm. With the free hand he held Harrigan. All this the Irishman saw by the haggard moonlight. Then they were pitched high up on the crest of a wave. As Harrigan grappled the timber with arms and legs, it turned over and over and then pitched down through empty space. The wind had literally cut away the top of the wave. He went down, submerged, and then rose to a giddy height again. As he caught a great breath of air, he saw that McTee was no longer on the timber.

A shout reached him, the sound being cut off in the middle by the noise of the wind and waves. He saw McTee a dozen feet away, swimming furiously. He came almost close enough to touch the timber with his hands, and then a twist of the wave separated them. Harrigan worked down the timber until he reached the end of the stanchion which was nearest Black McTee. All that time the captain was struggling, but could not draw closer. The wood was drifting before the wind faster than he could swim.

When he reached the end of the timber, Harrigan wound his long arms tightly around it and let his legs draw out on the water. McTee, seeing the purpose of the maneuver, redoubled his efforts. On a wave crest the storm swept Harrigan still farther away; then they dropped into a hollow and instantly he felt a mighty grip fall on his ankle. They pitched up again with the surge of a wave so sharp and sudden that what with his own weight and the tugging burden of McTee behind him, Harrigan felt as if his arms would be torn from their sockets. He kept his hold by a mighty effort, and the tremendous grip of McTee held fast on his ankle until they dropped once more into a hollow. Then the captain jerked himself hand over hand up the body of Harrigan until he reached the timber. They lay panting and exhausted on the stanchion, embracing it with arms and legs.

Sometimes the wind sent the timber with its human freight lunging through a towering wave; and several times the force of the storm caught them and whirled them over and over. When they rose to a wave crest, they struggled bitterly for life; when they fell into the trough, they drew long breaths and freshened their holds.

Save once when Harrigan reached out his hand and set it upon that of Black McTee. The captain met the grip, and by the wild moonlight they stared into each other's faces. That handshake almost cost them their lives, for the next moment the full breath of the storm caught them and wrenched furiously at their bodies. Yet neither of them regretted the handclasp, for all its cost. If they died now, it would be as brothers. They had at least escaped from the greatest of all horrors, a lonely death.

It seemed as if the storm acknowledged the strength of their determination. It fell away as suddenly as it had risen. A heavy ground swell still ran, but without the wind to roughen the surface and sharpen the crests, the big timber rode safely through the sea. The storm clouds were dropping back in a widening circle beneath the moon when, as they heaved up on the top of a wave, Harrigan suddenly pointed straight ahead and shouted hoarsely. On the horizon squatted a black shadow, darker than any cloud.

All night they watched the shadow grow, and when the morning came and the tropic dawn stepped suddenly up from the east, the light glinted on the unmistakable green of verdure.

With the help of the steady wind they drifted slowly closer and closer to the island. By noon they abandoned the timber and started swimming, but the submerged beach went out far more gradually than they had expected. The last hundred yards they walked arm in arm, floundering through the gentle surf.

Then they stumbled up the beach, reeling with weariness, and sprawled out in the shade of a palm tree. They were asleep almost before they struck the sand.

It was late afternoon when they woke, ravenously hungry, their throats burning with thirst. For food McTee climbed a coconut palm and knocked down some of the fruit. They split the gourds open on a rock, drank the liquor, and ate heartily of the meat. That quelled their appetites, but the sweet liquor only partially appeased their thirst, and they started to search the island for a spring. First they went to the center of the place to a small hill, and from the top of this they surveyed their domain. The island was not more than a thousand yards in width and three or four miles in length. Nowhere was there any sign of even a hut.

"Well?" queried Harrigan, seeing McTee frown.

"We can live here," explained the captain, "but God knows how long it will be before we sight a ship. Our only hope is for some tramp freighter that's trying to find a short cut through the reefs. Even if we sight a tramp, how'll we signal her?"

"With a fire."

"Aye, if one passes at night. We could stack up wood on the top of this hill. The island isn't charted. If a skipper saw a light, he might take a chance and send a boat. But how could we kindle a fire?"

They went slowly down the hill, their heads bent. At the base, as if placed in their path to cheer them in this moment of gloom, they found a spring. It ran a dozen feet and disappeared into a crevice. They cupped the water in their hands and drank long and deep. When they stood up again, McTee dropped a hand on Harrigan's shoulder. He said: "You've cause enough for hating me."

"Pal," said Harrigan, "you're nine parts devil, but the part of you that's a man makes up for all the rest."

McTee brooded: "Now we're standing on the rim of the world, and we've got to be brother to each other. But what if we get off the island—there's small chance of it, but what if we should? Would we remember then how we took hands in the trough of the sea?"

Harrigan raised his hand.

"So help me God—" he began.

"Wait!" broke in McTee. "Don't say it. Suppose we get off the island, and when we reach port find one thing which we both want. What then?"

Harrigan remembered a word from the Bible.

"I'll never covet one of your belongin's, McTee, an' I'll never cross your wishes."

"Your hair is red, Harrigan, and mine is black; your eye is blue and mine is black. We were made to want the same thing in different ways. I've never met my mate before. I can stand it here on the rim of the world—but in the world itself—what then, Harrigan?"

They stepped apart, and the glance of the black eye crossed that of the cold blue.

"Ah-h, McTee, are ye dark inside and out? Is the black av your eye the same as the soot in your heart?"

"Harrigan, you were born to fight and forget; I was born to fight and remember. Well, I take no oath, but here's my hand. It's better than the oath of most men."

"A strange fist," grinned Harrigan; "soft in the palm and hard over the knuckles—like mine."

They went down the hill toward the beach, Harrigan singing and McTee silent, with downward head. On the beach they started for some rocks which shelved out into the water, for it was possible that they might find some sort of shellfish on the rocks below the surface of the water. Before they reached the place, however, McTee stopped and pointed out across the waves. Some object tossed slowly up and down a short distance from the beach.

"From the wreck," said McTee. "I didn't think it would drift quite as fast as this."

They waded out to examine; the water was not over their waists when they reached it. They found a whole section from the side of the wheelhouse, the timbers intact.

On it lay Kate Malone, unconscious.

Manifestly she never could have kept on the big fragment during the night of the storm had it not been for a piece of stout twine with which she had tied her left wrist to a projecting bolt. She had wrapped the cord many times, but despite this it had worn away her skin and sunk deep in the flesh of her arm. Half her clothes were torn away as she had been thrown about on the boards. Whether from exhaustion or the pain of her cut wrist, she had fainted and evidently lain in this position for several hours; one side of her face was burned pink by the heat of the sun.

They dragged the float in, and McTee knelt beside the girl and pressed an ear against her breast.

"Living!" he announced. "Now we're three on the rim of the world."

"Which makes a crowd," grinned Harrigan.

CHAPTER 10

They started working eagerly to revive her. While McTee bathed her face and throat with handfuls of the sea water, Harrigan worked to liberate her from the twine. It was not easy. The twine was wet, and the knot held fast. Finally he gnawed it in two with his teeth. McTee, at the same time, elicited a faint moan. Her wrist was bruised and swollen rather than dangerously cut. Harrigan stuffed the twine into his hip pocket; then the two Adams carried their Eve to the shade of a tree and watched the color come back to her face by slow degrees.

The wind now increased suddenly as it had done on the evening of the wreck. It rose even as the day darkened, and in a moment it was rushing through the trees screaming in a constantly rising crescendo. The rain was coming, and against that tropical squall shelter was necessary.

The two men ran down the beach and returned dragging the ponderous section of the wheelhouse. They leaned the frame against two trunks at the same instant that the first big drops of rain rattled against it. Overhead they were quite securely protected by the dense and interweaving foliage of the two trees, but still the wind whistled in at either side and over and under the frame of boards. Of one accord they dropped beside their patient.

She was trembling violently; they heard the light, continuous chattering of her teeth. After her many hours under the merciless sun, this sudden change of temperature might bring on the fever against which they could not fight. They stripped off their shirts and wound them carefully around her shivering body. McTee lifted her in his arms and sat down with his back to the wind. Harrigan took a place beside him, and they caught her close. They seemed to be striving by the force of their will to drive the heat from their own blood into her trembling body. But still she moaned in her delirium, and the shivering would not stop.

Then the great idea came to Harrigan. He rose without a word and ran out into the rain to a fallen tree which must have been blown down years before, for now the trunk and the splintered stump were rotten to the core. He had noticed it that day. There was only a rim of firm wood left of the wreck. The stump gave readily enough under his pull. He ripped away long strips of the casing, bark and wood, and carried it back to the shelter. He made a second trip to secure a great armful of the powder-dry time-rotted core of the stump.

His third expedition carried him a little farther afield to a small sapling which he could barely make out through the night. He bent down the top of the little tree and snapped off about five feet of its length. This in turn he brought to the shelter. He stopped short here, frozen with amazement. The girl was raving in her delirium, and to soothe her, McTee was singing to her horrible sailor chanteys, pieced out with improvised and foolish words.

Harrigan listened only while his astonishment kept him helpless; then he took up his work. He first stripped away the twigs from his sapling top. Then he tied the twine firmly at either end of the stick, leaving the string loose. Next he fumbled among the mass of rubbish he had brought in from the rotten trunk and broke off a chunk of hard wood several inches in length. By rubbing this against the fragment of the wheelhouse, he managed to reduce one end of the little stick to a rough point.

He took the largest slab of the rim wood from the stump and knelt upon it to hold it firm. On this wood he rested his peg, which was wrapped in several folds of the twine and pressed down by the second fragment of wood. When he moved the long stick back and forth, the peg revolved at a tremendous rate of speed, its partially sharpened end digging into the wood on which it rested. It is a method of starting a fire which was once familiarly used by Indians.

For half an hour Harrigan sweated and groaned uselessly over his labor. Once he smelled a taint of smoke and shouted his triumph, but the peg slipped and the work was undone. He started all over again after a short rest and the peg creaked against the slab of wood with the speed of its rotation—a small sound of protest drowned by the bellowing of the storm and the ringing songs of McTee. Now the smoke rose again and this time the peg kept firm. The smoke grew pungent; there was a spark, then a glow, and it spread and widened among the powdery, rotten wood which Harrigan had heaped around his rotating peg.

He tossed the peg and bow aside and blew softly and steadily on the glowing point. It spread still more and now a small tongue of flame rose and flickered. Instantly Harrigan laid small bits of wood criss-cross on the pile of tinder. The flame licked at them tentatively, recoiled, rose again and caught hold. The fire was well started.

With gusts of wind fanning it roughly, the flame rose fast. Harrigan made other journeys to the rotten stump and wrenched away great chunks of bark and wood. He came back and piled them on the fire. It towered high, the upper tongues twisting among the branches of the tree. They laid Kate Malone between the windbreak and the fire. In a short time her trembling ceased; she turned her face to the blaze and slept.

They watched her with jealous care all night. In lieu of a pillow they heaped some of the wood dust from the stump beneath her head. When their large hands hovered over her to straighten the clothes which the wind fluttered, she seemed marvelously delicate and fragile. It was astonishing that so fragile a creature should have lived through the buffeting of the sea.

Toward morning the storm fell at a breath and the rain died away. They agreed that it might be safe to leave her alone while they ventured out to look for food, and at the first hint of light they started out, one to the north, and one to the south. Harrigan started at an easy run. He felt a joyous exultation like that of a boy eager for play. He tried to find shellfish first, but without success. His search carried him far down the beach to a group of big rocks rolling out to sea. On the leeward side of these rocks, in little hollows of the stone, he found a quantity of the eggs of some seafowl. They were quite large, the shells a dirty, faint blue and apparently very thick. He collected all he could carry and started back.

As he approached the shelter, he heard voices and stopped short with a sudden pang; McTee had returned first and awakened the girl. Harrigan sighed. He knew now how he had wanted to watch her eyes open for the first time, the cool sea-green eyes lighted by bewilderment, surprise, and joy. All that delight had been McTee's. It was that dark, handsome face she had seen leaning over her when she awoke. He was firmly implanted in her mind by this time as her savior. She opened her eyes, hungered, and she had seen McTee bringing food. Harrigan drew a long breath and went on slowly with lowered head.

They sat cross-legged, facing each other. The captain was showing Kate his prizes, which seemed to consist of a quantity of shellfish. She clapped her hands at something McTee said, and her laughter, wonderfully clear, reminded Harrigan of the chiming of faraway church bells. Blind anger suddenly possessed him as he stood by the fire glowering down at them.

CHAPTER 11

"Eggs! How perfectly wonderful, Mr. Harrigan! And I'm starved!"

She looked up to him, radiant with delight; but the triumphant eye of Harrigan fell not upon her but on McTee, who had suddenly grown pensive.

"But how can we cook them? There's nothing to boil water in—and no pan for frying them," ventured McTee.

"Roast 'em," said Harrigan scornfully. "Like this."

He wrapped several eggs in wet clay and placed them in the glowing ashes of the fire which had now burned low.

"While they're cooking," said McTee, "I'm going off. I've an idea."

Harrigan watched him with a shade of suspicion while he retreated. He turned his head to find Kate studying him gravely.

"Before you came, Mr. Harrigan—"

"My name's Dan. That'll save time."

"While you were gone," she went on, thanking him with a smile, "Captain McTee told me a great many things about you."

Harrigan stirred uneasily.

"Among other things, that you had no such record as he hinted at while we were on the Mary Rogers. So I have to ask you to forgive me—"

The blue eyes grew bright as he watched her.

"I've forgotten all that, for the sea washed it away from my mind."

"Really?"

"As clean as the wind has washed the sky."

Not a cloud stained the broad expanse from horizon to horizon.

"That's a beautiful way to put it. Now that we are here on the island, we begin all over again and forget what happened on the ship?"

"Aye, all of it."

"Shake on it."

He took her hand, but so gingerly that she laughed.

"We have to be careful of you," he explained seriously. "Here we are, as McTee puts it, on the rim of the world, two men an' one woman. If something happens to one of us, a third of our population's gone."

"A third of our population! Then I'm very important?"

"You are."

He was so serious that it disconcerted her. It suddenly became impossible for her to meet his eyes, they burned so bright, so eager, with something like a threat in them. She hailed the returning figure of McTee with relief.

He came bearing a large gourd, and he knelt before Kate so that she might look into it. She cried out at what she saw, for he had washed the inside of the gourd and filled it with cool water from the spring.

"Look!" said she to Harrigan. "It's water—and my throat is fairly burning."

"Humph," growled Harrigan, and he avoided the eye of McTee.

The gourd was too heavy and clumsy for her to handle. The captain had to raise and tip it so that she might drink, and as she drank, her eyes went up to his with gratitude.

Harrigan set his teeth and commenced raking the roasted eggs from the hot ashes. When her thirst was quenched, she looked in amazement at Harrigan; even his back showed anger. In some mysterious manner it was plain that she had displeased the big Irishman.

He turned now and offered her an egg, after removing the clay mold. But when she thanked him with the most flattering of smiles, she became aware that McTee in turn was vexed, while the Irishman seemed perfectly happy again.

"Have an egg, McTee," he offered, and rolled a couple toward the big captain.

"I will not. I never had a taste for eggs."

"Why, captain," murmured Kate, "you can't live on shellfish?"

"Humph! Can't I? Very nutritious, Kate, and very healthful. Have to be careful what you eat in this climate. Those eggs, for instance. Can you tell, Harrigan, whether or not they're fresh?"

Harrigan, his mouth full of egg, paused and glared at the captain.

"For the captain of a ship, McTee," he said coldly, "your head is packed with fool ideas. Eat your fish an' don't spoil the appetites of others."

He turned to Kate.

"These eggs are new-laid—they're—they're not more than twenty-four hours old."

His glance dared McTee to doubt the statement. The captain accepted the challenge.

"I suppose you watched 'em being laid, Harrigan?"

Harrigan sneered.

"I can tell by the taste partly and partly"—here he cracked the shell of another egg and, stripping it off, held up the little white oval to the light—"and partly by the color. It's dead white, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"That shows it's fresh. If there was a bit of blue in it, it'd be stale."

McTee breathed hard.

"You win," he said. "You ought to be on the stage, Harrigan."

But Harrigan was deep in another egg. Kate watched the two with covert glances, amazed, wondering. They had saved each other from death at sea, and now they were quarreling bitterly over the qualities of eggs.

And not eggs alone, for McTee, not to be outdone in courtesy, passed a handful of his shellfish to Harrigan. The Irishman regarded the fish and then McTee with cold disgust.

"D'you really think I'm crazy enough to eat one of these?" he queried.

Black McTee was black indeed as he glowered at the big Irishman.

"Open up; let's hear what you got to say about these shellfish," he demanded.

Harrigan announced laconically: "Scurvy."

"What?" This from Kate and McTee at one breath.

"Sure. There ain't any salt in 'em. No salt is as bad as too much salt.

A friend of mine was once in a place where he couldn't get any salt food, an' he ate a lot of these shellfish. What was the result? Scurvy!

He hasn't a tooth in his head today. An' he's only thirty."

"Why didn't you tell me?" cried Kate indignantly, and she laid a tentative finger against her white teeth, as if expecting to find them loose.

"I didn't want to hurt McTee's feelin's. Besides, maybe a few of them won't hurt you—much!"

McTee suddenly burst into laughter, but there was little mirth in the sound.

"Maybe you know these are the great blue clams that are famous for their salt."

"Really?" said Kate, greatly relieved.

"Yes," went on McTee, his eyes wandering slightly. "This species of clam has an unusual organ by which it extracts some of the salt from the sea water while taking its food. Look here!"

He held up a shell and indicated a blue-green spot on the inside.

"You see that color? That's what gives these clams their name and this is also the place where the salt deposit forms. This clam has a high percentage of salt—more than any other."

Harrigan, sending a bitter side glance at McTee, rose to bring some more wood, for it was imperative that they should keep the fire burning always.

"I'm so glad," said Kate, "that we have both the eggs and the clams to rely on. At least they will keep us from starving in this terrible place."

"H'm. I'm not so sure about the eggs."

He eyed them with a watering mouth, for his raging hunger had not been in the least appeased by the shellfish.

"But I'll try one just to keep you company."

He peeled away the shell and swallowed the egg hastily, lest Harrigan, returning, should see that he had changed his mind.

"Maybe the eggs are all right," he admitted as soon as he could speak, and he picked up another, "but between you and me, I'll confess that I shall not pay much attention to what Harrigan has to say. He's never been to sea before. You can't expect a landlubber to understand all the conditions of a life like this."

But a new thought which was gradually forming in her brain made Kate reserve judgment. Harrigan came back and placed a few more sticks of wood on the fire.

"I can't understand," said Kate, "how you could make a fire without a sign of a match."

"That's simple," said McTee easily. "When a man has traveled about as much as I have, he has to pick up all sorts of unusual ways of doing things. The way we made that fire was to—"

"The way we made it?" interjected Harrigan with bitter emphasis.

Kate frowned as she glanced from one to the other. There was the same deep hostility in their eyes which she had noticed when they faced each other in the captain's cabin aboard the Mary Rogers.

"An' why were ye sittin' prayin' for fire with the gir-rl thremblin' and freezin' to death in yer ar-rms if ye knew so well how to be makin' one?"

"Hush—Dan," said Kate; for the fire of anger blew high.

McTee started.

"You know each other pretty well, eh?"

"Tut, tut!" said Harrigan airily. "You can't expect a slip of a girl to be calling a black man like you by the front name?"

McTee moistened his white lips. He rose.

"I'm going for a walk—I always do after eating."

And he strode off down the beach. Harrigan instantly secured a handful of the shellfish.

"Speakin' of salt," he said apologetically, "I'll have to try a couple of these to be sure that the captain's right. I can tell by a taste or two."

He pried open one of the shells and ate the contents hastily, keeping one eye askance against the return of McTee.

"Maybe he's right about these shellfish," he pronounced judicially, "but it's a hard thing an' a dangerous thing to take the word of a man like McTee—he's that hasty. We must go easy on believin' what he says, Kate."