Plotting in Pirate Seas Part 22

"Now, the air, as you know, is held to the earth's surface by gravitation, but, being gaseous, it is not held as closely as if it were in a solid state. Also, there is centrifugal force to be considered.

Also the fact that the earth is not round, but flattened at the poles.

Also the important fact that air at the equator is more heated than at the Polar regions. All these things together keep the air in a constant commotion. The combined effect of these, in the northern hemisphere, is that air moving along the surface of the earth is deflected to the right. Thus in the case we are considering, the lower currents, approaching the heated center, do not come in equally from all directions, but are compelled to approach in spirals. This spiral action once begun increases, of itself, in power and velocity. This is a hurricane in its baby stage."

Another squall struck.

Speech again became impossible. As before, sheets of water--which bore no relation to rain, but seemed rather as though the earth were at the foot of a waterfall from which a river was leaping from on high--were hurled over the land. The shrieking of the wind had a wild and maniacal sound, the sound which Jamaicans have christened "the h.e.l.l-cackle of a hurricane." This squall lasted longer, five minutes or more, and when it pa.s.sed, the wind dropped somewhat, but did not die down. It raged furiously, its shriek dropped to a sullen and menacing roar.

"Such a hurricane as this," the "Ol' Doc" continued, "has taken many days to brew. Day after day the air has remained in its ominous quietude over the surface of the ocean, becoming warmer and warmer, gathering strength for its devastating career. The water vapor has risen higher and higher. Dense c.u.mulus clouds have formed, the upper surfaces of which have caught all the sun's heat, intensifying the unstable equilibrium of the air. The powers of the tempest have grown steadily in all evil majesty of destructiveness. Day by day, then hour by hour, then minute by minute, the awful force has been generated, as steam is generated by fierce furnace fires under a s.h.i.+p's boilers.

"Why, Stuart, it has been figured that the air in a hurricane a hundred miles in diameter and a mile high, weighs as much as half-a-million Atlantic liners, and this incredibly huge ma.s.s is driven at twice the speed of the fastest s.h.i.+p afloat. In these gusts, which come with the rain squalls, the wind will rise to a velocity of a hundred and twenty miles an hour. It strikes!"

A crack of thunder deafened all, and green and violet lightning winked and flickered continuously. The hiss of the rain, the shrieking of the wind and the snapping crackle of the thunder defied speech. The heat in the hurricane wing was terrific, but Stuart s.h.i.+vered with cold. It was the cold of terror, the cold of helplessness, the cold of being powerless in such an awful evidence of the occasional malignity of Nature.

Between the approach of night and the closing in of the clouds, an inky darkness prevailed, though in the intervals between the outbursts of lightning, the sky had a mottled copper and green coloration, the copper being the edges of low raincloud-ma.s.ses, and the green, the flying scud above.

Squall followed squall in ever-closer succession, the uproar changing constantly from the shriek of the hundred-mile wind in the squall to the dull roar of the fifty-mile wind in between. The thunder crackled, without any after-rumble, and the trembling of the ground could be felt from the pounding of the terrific waves half a mile away. Then, in a long-drawn-out descending wail, like the howl of a calling coyote, the hurricane died down to absolute stillness.

"Whew!" exclaimed Stuart, in relief. "I'm glad that's over."

"Over!" the scientist exclaimed. "The worst is to come! We're in the eye of the hurricane. Look!"

Overhead the sky was almost clear, so clear that the stars could be seen, but the whirl of air, high overhead, made them twinkle so that they seemed to be dancing in their places. To seaward, a violet glow, throbbing and pulsating, showed where the lightning was playing.

"I'm going out to see if all's safe," said the scientist. "Do you want to come?"

Stuart would have rather not. But he dared not refuse. They had hardly left the hurricane wing and got to the outside, when "Ol' Doc" sniffed.

"No," he said, "we'll go back. We're not full in the center. The edge will catch us again."

He pointed.

Not slowly this time, but with a swiftness that made it seem unreal, a shape like a large hand rose out of the night and blotted out the stars.

A distant clamor could be heard, at first faintly, and then with a growing speed, like the oncoming of an express train.

"In with you, in!" cried the scientist.

They rushed through the low pa.s.sage and bolted the heavy door.

Then with a crash which seemed enough to tear a world from its moorings, the opposite side of the hurricane struck, all the worse in that it came without even a preparatory breeze. The noise, the tumult, the sense of the elements unchained in all their fury was so terrible that the boy lost all sense of the pa.s.sage of time. The negroes no longer moaned or prayed. A stupor of paralysis seized them.

So pa.s.sed the night.

Towards morning, the painful rarefaction of the air diminished. The squalls of rain and all-devouring gusts of wind abated, and became less and less frequent.

The sky turned gray. Upon the far horizon rose again the cirrus arc, but with the dark above and the light below. Majestically it rose and spanned the sky, and, under its rim of destruction, came the sunrise in its most peaceful colors of rose and pearl-gray, sunrise upon a ravaged island.

Over three hundred persons had been killed that night, and many millions of dollars of damage done. Yet everyone in Barbados breathed relief.

The hurricane had pa.s.sed.

CHAPTER X

THE LAKE OF PITCH

Still weak from his illness after the manchineel poisoning, and exhausted as he was after a sleepless night in the grip of a hurricane, yet Stuart's first thought on leaving the hurricane wing was to get a news story to his paper. The spell of journalism was on him.

Around the "Ol' Doc's" place, the hurricane seemed to have done little damage. Not a building had fallen. Trees were stripped bare of their leaves, cane-fields laid low, but when the boy commented on this escape, the old scientist shook his head.

"I built these structures with hurricanes in view," he said. "This old place will stand like a lighthouse. But you'll find it different in the negro quarters. Alas! You will find mourning, everywhere."

At the boy's urgency the botanist agreed to lend him a horse and light carriage and bade one of the negroes drive the lad to Bridgetown. A hasty breakfast was swallowed, and, before six in the morning, Stuart was on his way back across the island, his faithful typewriter beside him.

They had not gone far before the real tragedy of the hurricane began to show itself. Here was a house in splinters, and a group of people, crying, with bowed heads, told that death had been there. The fields were stripped bare. Near Corrington, a sugar factory showed a piece of broken wall as all that remained. The road had been washed away by the torrential floods.

In a small settlement, some negroes were working in a frenzy around a ma.s.s of ruined cottages, from beneath which sounded dolorous cries. The carriage stopped and both Stuart and the driver leaped out to aid. Ten minutes' work unearthed three sufferers, two but slightly hurt, the third with his leg broken. Alas! Others were not so fortunate.

Rising smoke, here and there, showed where fire had followed the hurricane. Instead of the songs of labor in the fields, nothing was to be heard but cries of distress. As the country grew more thickly settled, on the way to Bridgetown, so was the suffering more intense and the death-roll heavier. The drive, not more than twelve miles in all, took over four hours, so littered was the road with fallen trees and the debris of houses.

In the ruins of Bridgetown, Stuart met one of his newspaper friends, the news instinct still inspiring him to secure every detail of the catastrophe, though there was no newspaper office, the building being in ruins and the presses buried under an avalanche of brick.

"The wires are down, too," said this newspaper man, "if I were you, I'd chase right over to Trinidad. The mail steamer, which should have gone last night, hasn't left yet, or, at least, I don't think she has. She couldn't leave till the hurricane pa.s.sed and the sea calmed down a bit.

At present, we are cut off from the world. It'll take two or three days, a week, maybe, before the sh.o.r.e ends of the submarine cables are recovered. If you can catch that steamer, you'll be in Trinidad this evening."

"But suppose the cables are broken there, too?" suggested Stuart.

"They're not likely to be," his friend replied, "we just caught the southern end of the hurricane here--lucky we didn't get the middle!--and so Trinidad is likely to have escaped entirely. But you'll have to hurry to catch that steamer. I'll get in touch with Ol' Doc, the best way I can, and send your trunk on to you down there. Got your typewriter?

That's all right, then. Write your story on the boat. Now, hurry up!

Here!"

He shouted to a pa.s.sing negro.

"Go down to the pier, Pierre, get a boat, any boat, and take this pa.s.senger. He's got to catch the steamer."

"Me catch um!"

And he did, though it was by the narrowest margin, for the mail steamer had steam up, and only waited until this last pa.s.senger should come aboard.

Stuart had counted on being able to enrich his account of the hurricane with personal stories from the pa.s.sengers on the steamer, all of whom had been through the disaster, some on board s.h.i.+p and some ash.o.r.e. There was no chance of this. Although a glorious day, not a soul among the pa.s.sengers was on deck. All were sleeping, for all, alike, had waked and watched.

Stuart was dropping with weariness and sleep, but he remembered what the Managing Editor had said to him about a "scoop" and he thought that this might be the great opportunity of his life to make a reputation for himself on his first trip out. A well-placed half-sovereign with the deck steward brought him a cup of strong coffee every two hours, and though his mind was fogged with weariness, so vivid had been his impressions that they could not help but be thrilling.

Though one of the most richly verdant of all the West India islands, Trinidad had little beauty to Stuart, on his first sight of it. He saw it through a haze of weariness, his eyes red-rimmed through lack of sleep. The harbor is shallow, and Stuart, like other pa.s.sengers, landed in a launch, but he had eyes only for one thing--the cable office. Since his only luggage consisted of a portable typewriter--his trunk having been left behind at "Ol' Doc's"--the customs' examination was brief.

At the Cable Office, Stuart learned, to his delight, that not a message had either reached the office or gone out about the Barbados hurricane.

He had a scoop. He put his story on the wires, staggered across the street to the nearest hotel, threw off coat and boots and dropped upon the bed in an exhausted slumber. And, as an undercurrent to his dreams, rang the triumph song of the journalist: