Long Odds Part 26

"Lord," he said, "how little some of us are content with when we marry--a woman to sit at the head of out table, and talk prettily, one who asks for everything that isn't worth while, and sees you never do anything her friends don't consider quite fitting. Still, there is another kind, the ones who give instead of asking, and who would, for the man they loved, face the malice of the world with a smile in their eyes. I think," and he made a little vague gesture, "I have said something of the kind before, but I have to let myself go now and then. I can't help it."

"One would almost fancy you were in love with the girl yourself," said Ormsgill quietly.

Desmond leaned forward a trifle, and looked hard at him. "No. I might have been had things been different. At least, she is certainly not in love with me."

Ormsgill said nothing, but he was sensible of a curious stirring of his blood. He would not ask himself exactly what his comrade meant, or if, indeed, he meant anything in particular, for it was a consolation to remember that Desmond now and then talked inconsequently. He sat still, vacantly watching the blue smoke wreaths curl up between the palms. The boys had lain down now, and only an occasional faint rustle as one moved broke the heavy silence. Then, and, perhaps he was a trifle overwrought and fanciful, as he watched the drifting smoke wreaths a figure seemed to materialize out of them. It was filmy and unsubstantial, etherealized by the moonlight, but it grew plainer, and once more he saw Benicia Figuera as he had talked with her in the shady patio. She seemed to be looking at him with reposeful eyes that had nevertheless a little glint in the depths of them, and now the desire to see her in the flesh took him by the throat and shook the resolution out of him. At last he knew. There could no longer be any brus.h.i.+ng of disconcerting facts aside. There was one woman in the world whom he desired, and he had pledged himself to marry another one. Still, his duty remained, and he sat silent with one lean hand closed tightly and the lines on his worn face deepening until at last he became conscious that Desmond was watching him, and he roused himself with an effort.

"Well," he said quietly, "she has laid me under a heavy obligation, but we have other things to talk of."

CHAPTER XXI

ON THE BEACH

Desmond was asleep when the men his comrade had left behind came in, but the negroes' sense of hearing was quicker than his, and when he rose drowsily to his feet there was already a bustle in the camp.

Ormsgill, who was giving terse directions, turned to him.

"These boys have brought me word that there is a handful of troops in a village a few hours' march away," he said, pointing towards two half-seen men who were talking excitedly to the dusky carriers. "As they know where we are heading for they will probably be upon our trail as soon as the sun is up." He did not seem very much concerned, and when he once more turned to the negroes, Desmond, rea.s.sured by his quietness, glanced about him. The fire had died out, and there was no longer any moonlight, but the palms cut with a sharp black distinctness against the eastern sky. It was also a little cooler.

Indeed, Desmond s.h.i.+vered, for he was stiff and clammy with the dew.

The negroes were hurrying to and fro, apparently getting their loads together, and the seamen were asking each other disjointed questions as they scrambled to their feet. Desmond could see their faces faintly white which he had not been able to do when he went to sleep.

"Well," he said, "I suppose we'll have to make a move of some kind?"

"It would be advisable," said Ormsgill. "Fortunately, it will be daylight in a few minutes. You will start for the coast as soon as you are ready, and take most of the boys I brought down along. It would be wiser to push on as fast as possible, though it's scarcely likely that the troops will come up with you. If they do, you will give the boys up to them, but in that case one of the carriers will slip away and bring me word. Any resistance you could make would be useless and very apt to involve you in serious difficulties."

Desmond smiled dryly, and did not pledge himself. He was not a man who invariably did the most prudent thing.

"You are not coming with us?" he said.

"No," said Ormsgill. "There are six boys not accounted for yet. I am going back inland for them. The troops will, of course, pick up your trail, and they will probably be content with that. It's scarcely likely to occur to them that there might be another."

Desmond exerted all his powers of persuasion during the next minute or two, and it was not his fault if his comrade did not realize that it was a folly he was undertaking. Desmond, at least made a strenuous attempt to impress that point on him, in spite of the fact that it was a folly he would in all probability have been guilty of himself.

Ormsgill, however, only smiled.

"As you have pointed out, anything I can do to straighten out things in this country is scarcely worth while," he said. "I'm also willing to admit that it's not exactly my business, and I'm far from sure that the role of professional philanthropist is one that fits me. Still, you see, I have undertaken the thing, and I can't very well leave it half done." He stopped a moment, and laughed, a trifle harshly.

"Especially as it's scarcely probable that I shall have an opportunity of doing anything of the kind again."

Then he turned to the negroes, and spoke to them for several minutes in sc.r.a.ps of Portuguese and a native tongue. Their villages on the inland plateau had been burned, he said, and there was, so far as he knew, no one he could trust them to in the country. If they stayed in it some white man would in all probability claim them, and they would be sent to toil for a term of years upon the plantations. They knew what that meant.

They certainly appeared to do so by the murmurs that rose from them, and Ormsgill pointed to Desmond. He had pledged himself to set them at liberty, he said, and his friend would take them to a country where negroes were reasonably paid for their services, and, unless they deserved it, very seldom beaten. What was more to the purpose, if they did not like the factory they worked at they could leave it and go to another, which was a thing that appeared incomprehensible to them, until a man with a blue stripe down his forehead stood up and told them it certainly was as Ormsgill had said. He had himself earned as much by twelve months' labor at a white man's factory as would have kept him several years in luxury. Then one of the boys, a thick-lipped, woolly-haired pagan with nothing about him that suggested intelligence or sensibility asked Ormsgill a question in the native tongue, and the latter looked at Desmond.

"He asks if I can give my word that they will not be ill-used in Nigeria, and it's a good deal to a.s.sure them of," he said. "Still, I think it could be done. There are outcasts in those factories, men outside the pale, and it's possible that some of them occasionally belabor a n.i.g.g.e.r with a wooden kernel-shovel, but considering what the negro is accustomed to in this country that is a little thing, and they usually stop at it. After all, it is not men of their kind who practice systematic oppression or grind the toiler down. When I was a ragged outcast it was the men outside the pale who held out their hands to me."

He turned to the negro saying a few words quietly, and there was a low murmuring until one of the boys pointed to Desmond.

"Then," he said, "we are ready to go with him."

Even Desmond could understand all that this implied, and it stirred the hot Celtic blood in him. It was a crucial test of faith, for it seemed that these half-naked bushmen had a confidence in his comrade which no one acquainted with the customs of the country could reasonably have expected of them. They knew how their fellows were driven by men of his color, but in face of that his word that it should not be so with them was, it seemed, sufficient.

"You already understand my wishes, and here are the letters for the two traders in Nigeria," said Ormsgill quietly. "There is nothing more to say."

"There's just this," said Desmond turning towards the _Palestrina_'s men, who had naturally been listening. "If it costs me the yacht to do it I'll see these boys safe into the right hands."

The men from Belfast Lough and Kingston grinned approvingly. They and their leader were, after all, of the same temperament, and one of them carried a sharp-pointed iron bar and others stout ash stretchers which they had, somewhat to their regret, not been called upon to do anything with yet. Desmond, however, walked a little apart with Ormsgill.

"When will you be back?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Ormsgill. "There is a good deal against me just now. In any case, I expect nothing further from you. You have done more than I would have asked of anybody else already."

"Will two months see you through?"

"It may be four, very probably longer."

"Exactly," said Desmond with a little smile. "In the meantime the _Palestrina_ is going to Nigeria. I don't quite know where she'll go after that."

They said very little more until Ormsgill shook hands with him and calling to his carriers marched out of camp. The sun had just lifted itself above a rise to the east, and for awhile Desmond watched the line of dusky men with eyes dazzled by the fierce light, and then turned to give instructions to his seamen. They had already been busy, and in another few minutes they and the boys that had been Lamartine's had started for the coast.

It proved an arduous march, for before the sun had risen its highest it was blotted out by leaden cloud and the wide littoral was wrapped in dimness until the lightning blazed. It ceased in a few minutes, but the men crouched bewildered for another half hour ankle-deep in water while a pitiless blinding deluge thrashed them. Then they went on again dripping, and every league or so were lashed by tremendous rain while mad gusts of wind rioted across the waste in between. The next day there was scorching suns.h.i.+ne, and the men were worn-out, parched, and savage, when at last one of the boys who had served Lamartine, climbing a low elevation, a.s.sured his comrades that there were soldiers behind them. He said they would be, at least, an hour in reaching that spot, but there was haste and bustle when the information was conveyed to Desmond. The latter fancied it would be several hours before he made the beach.

He and the white men had occasion to remember the rest of that journey. They strained every aching muscle as they plodded on with the perspiration dripping from them and the baked mire crumbling and slipping beneath their feet while a dingy haze once more crept across the sky and the heat became intolerable. It was dark when they reached the beach, and Desmond gasped with relief when the roar of the _Palestrina_'s whistle rang through the thunder of the surf in answer to a rifle shot. It was evident that she had steam up. He sent two men back to keep watch on the crest of the bluff, and then set about getting the boat down with the rest.

She was big and heavy. The sand was soft, and the rollers instead of running over it bedded themselves in it. The boys from the interior were also of little use at that task, and though the seamen toiled desperately it was almost beyond their accomplis.h.i.+ng. The tide was at low ebb, and the sand grew softer as they ran her down a yard at a time, until at last they stopped gasping. Then one of the men came running from the bluff.

"The soldiers are not far away," he said.

Desmond asked him no questions, but turned to the seamen. "We have got to do it, boys," he said. "s.h.i.+ft that after roller under her nose."

They drew breath, and toiled on again. Their progress was not rea.s.suring in view of the fact that the troops were close at hand, but they made a little, and in front of them the spray beyond which lay the _Palestrina_ whirled in a filmy cloud. Every now and then there was a thunderous roar in the midst of it, and part of the beach was hidden in a tumultuous swirl of foam. Gasping, straining, slipping, but grimly silent, they toiled on, moving her a foot with every desperate effort, until at last a yeasty flood surged past them knee-deep, and hove her away from them grinding one bilge in the sand.

Then Desmond raised a hoa.r.s.e voice.

"Hang on to her," he said. "Oh, hang on. Down on her bilge, and let her go when the sea sucks out again."

They went out with her and it amidst a sliding ma.s.s of sand, and somehow contrived to hold her when the next sea came in. It broke across her, and some of them went down, but when the seething flood swept on up the beach she was there still, and they went out again waist-deep in the downward swirl of it. Then they were up to the shoulders with a great hissing wall of water close in front of them, and black man and white scrambled in over the gunwale and floundered furiously in the water inside her, groping for oar and paddle. Still, they were perched on the gunwale, and the man with the blue-striped forehead had the big steering oar before the sea fell upon them, and straining every muscle they drove her through the breaking crest of it.

She lurched out, half-full and loaded heavily, to face the next, and Desmond was never certain how she got over it, but at least, he was not washed out of her as he had half expected. He fancied there was a faint shouting on the bluff, but n.o.body could have been sure of that through the din of the surf, and all his attention was occupied by his paddle. Very slowly, fighting for every fathom, they drove her outsh.o.r.e, until the combers grew less steep and their crests ceased to break, and Desmond gazing seawards could see the _Palestrina_ when she lifted. She swung with the swell, a dim, blurred shape, without a light on board her, but a sharp jarring rattle told him that his instructions were being carried out. Winthrop the mate was already heaving his anchor. That was satisfactory, for Desmond knew that n.o.body could see the yacht through the spray that floated over bluff and beach.

They were alongside in some twenty minutes with another troublesome task before them. The yacht was rolling heavily, and the big half-swamped boat swung up to her rail one moment and sank down beneath a fathom of streaming side the next. It was a difficult matter to reach her deck, and Lamartine's boys were bushmen who knew nothing of the sea. They crouched in the boat's bottom stupidly until their white companions who found thumps and pushes of no avail seized them by their woolly hair and dragged them to their feet. They were sent up one by one, and when at last the boat was hove in by the banging winch Desmond scrambled with the brine running from him to his bridge. The windla.s.s rattled furiously for another minute or two, and then with a quickening throb of engines the _Palestrina_ swept out into the night.

A little while later Winthrop the mate climbed to the bridge, and Desmond laughed when he asked him a few questions.

"I don't think those folks ash.o.r.e got a sight of the yacht or boat,"

he said. "It will be morning before they find out where we've gone, and we should be a good many miles to the north by then. I don't suppose they know Ormsgill isn't with us either, and that will probably put them off his trail for a time, at least. In the meanwhile you'll head her out a point or two more to the westwards for another hour, and have me called at daylight. I'm going down to change my clothes."

He had just dressed himself in dry garments when a steward tapped at the door of his room.

"I don't know what's to be done with those n.i.g.g.e.rs, sir," he said.