The Filibusters, Charles John Cutcliffe Hyne [best book clubs .TXT] 📗

I’m not wearing my nervousness this evening; and if I choose to stick here on my own upper bridge, yes, sir, or sit a-cock-stride of a boat davit, I should dam’ well like to see the man who will turn me off.”

“Captain Evans,” said the General, ” I believe I have to apologise to you on several counts. I won’t begin now, because to do the thing properly requires time and champagne, and at present neither are handy. Besides, here comes Birch with an armful of rifles and a bucket-load of cartridges. Now, captain, may I trespass on your forbearance a little further? You know your crew; I do not. Might I ask you to deal out a Marlin to any man who has sufficient command over the weapon not to shoot one of ourselves?”

The captain grinned acidly. ” Now,” he said, “that’s asking for what you won’t get. You mustn’t expect, sir, an old sailor to be a blooming marksman. I can find you let’s see yes, ten men who can load your guns and pull ‘em off. but if you want me to bet on what the fools will hit well, that’s a form of gambling which is too wild for me.”

“Thank you,” said the General, ” that will do. The er the boats are coming off now, I fancy, captain.”

“That is so,” said Evans, and proceeded leisurely to call up ten of the ship’s company one by one, and deal out the weapons and parcels of cartridges. The men were all hanging about the decks in restless groups, many of them (I think) a good deal uneasy at the turn affairs were taking. The ten who had Marlins offered took them eagerly enough, and, on the whole, handled them like workmen. They ranged themselves along the bulwarks and the rail; and the rest of the crew, getting ready their sheath-knives or whatever other weapon they could lay grip upon, took up station between them.

The captain stood in the middle of the upper bridge, puffing at a ” Colorado ” cigar and scrubbing at the locks of his 12-bore with a piece of oily rag. Because he stayed, I suppose, the General saw fit to remain also; and because the General did not .get under cover, I could not see my way to do so either, though I didn’t fancy setting myself up as a gratuitous cockshy with no advantage to be gained out of it.

By this time the boats were well under way; we could hear the ” cheep ” of oars in the rowlocks, coming through the night like the cry of sea fowl; and presently the outline of the boats themselves began to loom through the darkness. There were three of them in all, heavy ship’s boats every one, rowing in a string, one behind the other.

Nearer they drew and nearer, and looking along our decks I saw the ragged figures of the merchant seamen and engineers lying down in wait for them, with the repeating rifles shouldered, and forefingers dallying with the triggers. The General must have been looking too, for that moment he gave his first command and asked them to be steady. ” Keep your heads, boys,” he said, ” and don’t let off a shot till I say the word.”

“But give ‘em hell,” the skipper supplemented, “when you’re told to shoot, and then pump in a fresh cartridge and give it to ‘em again.”

For myself I was watching the boats, which, with their straddling oars, looked like some uncouth beetles crawling up out of the gloom. I could see them accurately. They were sticking to a direct line, steering to a hair. They were heading to pass the steamer twenty yards away along her starboard side, but I guessed they would port their helms when they got close and run us on board against the lower foredeck.

In the middle boat a man was groaning heavily, but except for this, and the noise of the oars, and the faint tinkle of water from their stems, they came on in silence. I pictured every man of their crew with a weapon resting ready on the thwart beside him, and wondered if they had lanyards made fast to their boat hooks.

Presently they came to the spot where I had told myself they would shift their helms and they passed it. ” Fools! ” I thought, ” they are going to try and board further aft. Well, so much the better for us; they have missed their best chance.”

But they swept twice the steamer’s length further on; they drew abeam; they rowed stolidly on till they began to dissolve into filmy, nebulous shapes away astern; and never once did they swerve a tiller’s breadth from that dead straight course. Finally they vanished down the narrows, and the sound of them died in the distance.

If I was puzzled myself, there were others more so. The men on the decks below, after being wound up to the thought of a desperate engagement, were exhibiting a most lively ingratitude at the let-off, chiefly in the form of oaths. Captain Evans, beside me, was a strange figure of bewilderment, with the shotgun nursed in the crook of his left arm, and his bared teeth gleaming white in the gloom, with the cold stump of the cigar gripped between them.

But if the matter was strange to all of us, it was a perfect network of mystery to the General. He had a knowledge of the place; he had formed a definite idea of what might be expected from the boats; and when they passed us by all his theories went crash, and he was left to form an entirely new set.

“And the worst of it is,” he explained to me, with a worried laugh, ” I’m at the end of my tether. Those people are clearly not the crew I took them for, or they certainly would have honoured me with a twenty-one guns salute at the very least; but who out of the whole rest of the universe they may be, I haven’t a notion.”

“Hullo,” I said, ” they’re sending up a rocket. That’ll be from just past the entrance to the narrows. And, by Jove, there’s another rocket from the sea.”

The captain ordered up a quartermaster to the fore cross-trees, and the man reported a steamer lying-to a mile off the Key. ” I can make out all three of her lights, sir,” he said.

“Well, that settles where the boats came from, any way,” said the captain, “and perhaps it explains why they didn’t meddle with us. They’ll come down on us, steamboat and all, when daylight shows. That’s their little game. And we shall have our ends knocked in. Wait a minute, though; there’s another tea-party to be gone through first. Listen to that.”

From the head of the bay there had suddenly sprung up the quick thudding of a propeller, and presently from out of the gloom the long, lean form of a slate-coloured naphtha launch slid out, making directly for us.

“Stand to your guns there, all hands! ” the captain sung out (quite forgetting in his excitement that he had handed away the command). ” Quartermaster!”

A quartermaster came trotting up the ladder.

“Blue light, quartermaster. We’ll see this beggar.”

The quartermaster took a blue light out of the chest beside the binnacle, and as he struck it, and the flame hissed out, making everything lurid and ghastly, the naphtha launch was just slowing down a score yards from our starboard bow.

Then we saw a strange thing happen. The man who was steering her (who wore a great white sombrero) had ported his helm with the evident wish to run alongside. But four other men from the floor of the launch sprang upon him, and in spite of his furious struggles wrenched him away from the tiller. A revolver cracked twice, and one of the men tossed up his arms and fell backwards; but the others seemed to bear the steersman down, and one of them, just as the launch was going to send her stem into our plates, shoved over the helm with his back, so that she swung clear a bare foot from the Clarindella’s side.

For a moment we could see down clearly into the launch, every stain in her standing out plain in the glare of the firework, and we reckoned up four dead or wounded men on the floor of her, the one just shot, who was also hors de combat, and the trio struggling in the stern, and then, with a final ” faff,” the blue light died away, and the launch slid like a thin grey wraith astern of us.

“It wasn’t the fault of that fellow who was steering that we are not fighting this moment,” said the General thoughtfully. ” He must be a pretty plucky sort of pirate to want to attack us with only four sound men at his heels. What do you say, captain?”

“These theatricals are not of my line,” the master replied. ” I don’t seem to catch the plot of them. Appears to me we’ve come in at half-time, and the part of the show which explains the whole lot is just the bit we missed. The only thing I want to know now is, are we through, or are we going to have any more? There’s two of these curious picnic parties passed us outwards; there’s a big steamboat sprung up out of nowhere and hanging about outside; and the Lord knows how many more of the troupe’s on the prowl about the neighbourhood.”

“The probabilities are,” said the General thoughtfully, ” that we’ve seen the last of them.”

“I’m glad you think so,” the master of the Clarindella retorted. ” It’s a comfortable way to feel. For myself, I’m not so sweet on probabilities just now, because this programme up to date seems to have been run with a high-minded contempt for men. What’s likely to happen is just the very thing you don’t expect; and so, by way of being on the safe side, I’m going to keep my weather eye lifting for everything that’s unpleasant.”

“Quite right,” said Briggs; ” we will have all hands to lie upon their arms, at any rate till daybreak.”