The Coast of Adventure Part 13

Macallister agreed, and for four days they lounged in such shade as they could find. It was fiercely hot, not a breath of wind touched the dazzling creek, and the sun burned through the awning. The pitch bubbled up from the deck-seams, the water in the tanks was warm, and innumerable flies came off from the mangroves and bit the panting men. To make things worse, there was no coolness after sunset, when steamy mist wrapped the vessel in its folds, bloodthirsty mosquitos came down in swarms, buzzing insects dimmed the lamps, and the smell of festering mire grew nauseating. Sleep was out of the question, and when the mosquitos drove them off the deck the men lay in their stifling berths and waited drearily for another day of misery to begin.

Among other discomforts, Walthew, who was not seasoned to the climate, was troubled by a bad headache and pains in his limbs, but he said nothing about this and accompanied Grahame when the latter took the soundings in the dinghy. At last they rose at daybreak one morning to lighten the vessel, and although he felt shaky and suffered from a burning thirst, Walthew took charge of the gig, which was to be used for landing coal.

The work was hard, for when they reached a sand bar up the creek they were forced to wade some distance through mud and shallow water with the heavy bags on their backs, while the perspiration soaked their thin clothes and the black dust worked through to their skin. At noon they stopped for half an hour and Walthew lay in the stern-sheets of the gig where there was a patch of shade. He could not eat, and after drinking some tea tried to smoke, but the tobacco tasted rank and he put his pipe away. Up to the present his life had been luxurious. He had been indulged and waited on, and had exerted himself only in outdoor sports.

Now he felt very sick and worn out, but knew that he must make good.

Having declined to enter his father's business, he must prove his capacity for the career he had chosen. Moreover, he suspected that Macallister and Grahame were watching him.

When the clatter of the winch began again he hid the effort it cost him to resume his task and stubbornly pulled his oar as the gig floated up the creek with her gunwale near awash. His back hurt him almost unbearably when he lifted a heavy bag, and it was hard to keep upon his feet while he floundered through the mire. Sometimes his head reeled and he could scarcely see. The blisters on his hands had worked into bleeding sores. This, however, did not matter much by comparison with the pain in his head.

After the coal was landed they loaded loose ironwork and towed heavy spars ash.o.r.e, and Walthew held out somehow until darkness fell, when he paddled back to the _Enchantress_ with a swarm of mosquitos buzzing round his face.

He could not eat when they sat down to a frugal meal, and afterward lay in his berth unable to sleep, and yet not quite awake, lost in confused thoughts that broke off and left him conscious of intolerable heat and pain. When he went languidly on deck the next morning Grahame looked hard at him.

"You had better lie down in the shade," he said.

"I may let up when we reach open water," Walthew answered with a feeble smile. "There's not much enjoyment to be got out of a lay-off here."

Grahame reluctantly agreed. He knew something about malaria and Walthew did not look fit for work; but every man was needed, and this foul swamp was no place to be ill. The sooner they got out the better.

Steam was up when the _Enchantress_ rose with the tide, and shortly afterward the engines began to throb. Muddy foam leaped about the whirling screw, flame mingled with the smoke that poured from her funnel, and steam roared from the blow-off pipe. Then the clatter of winch and windla.s.s joined in, and Grahame stood, tense and anxious, holding a rope that slipped round the spinning drum. The winch could not shorten it, though the vessel was shaking and working in her muddy bed.

It was high-water, the tide would soon begin to fall, and the sweat of suspense and strain dripped from the man as, at the risk of breaking the warp, he tightened the turns on the drum. It gripped; to his surprise, a little slack came off, and he nodded to Walthew, who was watching him eagerly from the windla.s.s.

"Give her all, if you burst the chain!" he cried.

The windla.s.s clanked for a few moments, stopped, and clanked again; the _Enchantress_ trembled and crept a foot or two ahead. Then she stuck while the cable rose from the water, rigid as a bar, and the messenger-chain that drove the windla.s.s creaked and strained at breaking tension. While Grahame expected to see links and gear-wheels fly, there was a long s.h.i.+ver through the vessel's frame, a mad rattle of liberated machinery, and she leaped ahead.

Five minutes later Walthew walked shakily aft, scarcely seeing where he went because a confused sense of triumph had brought a mist into his dazzled eyes. This was the first big thing in which he had taken a leading part. He had made good and played the man; but there was still much to be done and he pulled himself together as he stopped near Grahame.

"She's moored where she won't ground again, but perhaps you had better see that the chain-compressors and warp fastenings are right."

"If you're satisfied, it's enough," said Grahame.

"Then I'll take the gig and get the coal on board."

"If you feel equal to it," Grahame answered.

Walthew got into the boat with a sense of elation. His eyes had met Grahame's while they spoke, and a pledge of mutual respect and trust had pa.s.sed between them. But this was not quite all. He felt he had won official recognition from a leader he admired; he was no longer on trial but accepted as a comrade and equal. The thought sustained him through a day of murderous toil, during which his worn-out muscles needed constant spurring by the unconquered mind. It was not dainty and, in a sense, not heroic work in which he was engaged, but it must be done, and he dimly saw that human nature rose highest in a grapple with obstacles that seemed too great to overcome. Whatever the odds against him were, he must not be beaten.

The heat was pitiless in the afternoon, but Walthew pulled his oar and carried the hundred-pound coal bags across a stretch of mire that grew broader as the tide ebbed. He could scarcely pull his feet out and keep the load upon his aching back, and he sometimes sank knee-deep in the softer spots. The air was heavy with exhalations from the swamps; he had thrown off his jacket and the coal wore holes in his s.h.i.+rt and rubbed raw places on his skin. He was wet from the waist downward and black above, while the gritty dust filled his eyes and nostrils. Still he held out until the work was finished, when the _Enchantress's_ cargo-light began to twinkle through the dusk; and then, losing his balance, he fell forward into the boat with his last heavy load. Miguel pushed her off, and with oars splas.h.i.+ng slackly she moved downstream. When she ran alongside the steamer, Grahame saw a limp, black figure lying huddled on the floorings. The others lifted it gently, but Walthew did not speak when he was laid on deck, and Macallister, bending over him, looked up at Grahame.

"Fever and exhaustion! I allow that ye were right about the lad. But we must do the best we can for him."

They washed off the coal-dust, and when Walthew, wrapped in thick blankets, lay unconscious in his berth, they debated earnestly over the medicine chest before administering a dose that experience in the unhealthy swamps of the tropics alone justified. They forced it, drop by drop, between his clenched teeth, and then Macallister waited with a grimy finger on his pulse, while Grahame sat down limply on the edge of the berth. His hands were bruised, his thin clothes were torn, and he felt the reaction after the day's strain. He had now an hour or two in which to rest, and then he must pull himself together to take the vessel down the creek.

When at last Macallister nodded, as if satisfied, Grahame went wearily up on deck. Except for a faint hiss of steam, everything was quiet.

Tired men lay motionless about the deck, and the mist that clung to the mangroves did not stir. After a while the lap of the flood-tide against the planks made itself heard, and the moon, which was getting large, rose above the trees.

Grahame, sitting limply on the grating, half dozing while he waited, suddenly jumped to his feet, startled. Out of the semi-darkness came distinctly the splash of oars, faint at first and then nearer.

Miguel lay nearest him. The Spaniard, quickly grasping the danger, shook his men awake while Grahame ran below to Macallister.

"The government spies!" he said briefly. "Our pilot's turned traitor!"

CHAPTER X

THE PEON PILOT

Grahame and Macallister stood on deck, peering into the moonlit jungle of mangroves. So far as they could judge, there was only one pair of oars making the splashes that had aroused them; but they could hear the blades dig deep into the water with an intense effort that could mean only haste on the part of the boatsman.

They waited; and presently the small boat appeared in the moonlight and they saw a single figure, who dropped one oar and crossed himself religiously.

"_Gracias a Dios!_" he said.

"The pilot!" Macallister gasped.

Grahame waited, tense and alert, until the pilot climbed on board. The instant the half-breed touched the deck he began gesticulating wildly and talking so rapidly that Grahame had difficulty in grasping his meaning. Miguel, who was more at home in the peon Spanish, explained--in English, for Macallister's sake.

"The government men catch him; make him tell; he escape; take short path--Indian _senda_; get here first. _Soldados_ coming. We hurry!"

Miguel had worked himself up to a state of great excitement, and when he finished, his bare feet went pattering off across the deck almost before Grahame could give the order.

Tired as the men were, they realized the necessity for haste, and they lost no time in getting under way. There was a clatter in the stokehold as the fires were cleaned, the dinghy crept across the creek, and half-seen men forward hurriedly coiled in a wet rope. Then the boat came back and the windla.s.s rattled while the propeller floundered slowly round. The anchor rose to the bows and the _Enchantress_ moved away against the flood tide.

The pilot took the wheel while Grahame stood beside him. There were broad, light patches where the water dazzled Grahame's eyes, and then belts of gloom in which the mangroves faded to a formless blur. Still, they did not touch bottom; miry points round which the tide swirled, rotting logs on mud-banks, and misty trees crept astern, and at last they heard the rumble of the swell on beaten sand.

She glided on, lifting now and then with a louder gurgle about her planks. When a white beach gleamed in the moonlight where the trees broke off, the _Enchantress_ stopped to land the faithful pilot, who had first betrayed and then saved them.

"It was a risky thing he did," Grahame said, as the half-breed, standing easily in his boat, swaying with the rhythm of his oars, rowed off into the moonlight. "Suppose they had caught him coming to us--or with us!"

"I'm thinking yon pilot's a bit of a hero," Macallister responded laconically. "Albeit a coward first!"

"Oh, it was all for Don Martin's sake that he risked his own hide to warn us. Don Martin has a wonderful hold on those peons. They'd go through fire and water for him."

The _Enchantress_ skirted a point where two sentinel cedar-trees stood out blackly against the sky; then the spray leaped about the bows as she dipped to the swell, and the throb of engines quickened as she left the sh.o.r.e behind.

Two weeks later the _Enchantress_ was steaming across a sea that was flecked with purple shadow and lighted by incandescent foam. Macallister lounged in the engine-room doorway, Grahame sat smoking on a coil of rope, and Walthew, wrapped in a dirty blanket, lay under the awning. His face was hollow, his hair damp and lank, and his hands, with which he was clumsily rolling a cigarette, were very thin. The deck was piled with a load of dyewood, which they had bought rather with the object of accounting for their cruise than for the profit that might be made on it.

"It's good to feel alive on a day like this, but I suspect it was doubtful for a time whether I'd have that satisfaction," Walthew remarked languidly. "Guess I owe you both a good deal."

They had stubbornly fought the fever that was wasting him away, and had felt that they must be beaten, but Macallister grinned.

"I'll no' deny that ye were an interesting case and gave us a chance o'