The Mutineers Part 10

"Who dah," the cook cried in his usual brusque voice. "Who dah knockin' at mah door?"

Coming out, he brushed past me, and stood staring fiercely from side to side. I knew, of course, his curiously indirect methods, and I expected him by some quick motion or muttered command to summon me, as always before, into his hot little cubby-hole. Never was boy more taken aback! "Who dah knockin' at mah door?" he said again, standing within two feet of my elbow, looking past me not two inches from my nose. "Humph! Somebody knockin' at mah door better look at what dey doin' or dey gwine git into a peck of trouble."

He turned his back on me and reentered the galley.

Then I looked aft, and saw Kipping and the steward grinning broadly.

Before, I had been disconcerted. Now I was enraged. How had they turned old black Frank against me, I wondered? Kipping and the steward, whom the negro disliked above all people on board! So the steward and the carpenter and Kipping were working hand in glove! And Mr. Falk probably was in the same boat with them. Where was Roger Hamlin, and what was he doing as supercargo to protect the goods below decks? Then I laughed shortly, though a little angrily, at my own childish impatience.

Certainly any suspicions of danger to the cargo were entirely without foundations. Mr. Falk--Captain Falk, I must call him now--might have a disagreeable personality, but there was nothing to indicate that he was not in most respects a competent officer, or that the s.h.i.+p and cargo would suffer at his hands. The cook had been companionable in his own peculiar way and a very convenient friend indeed; but, after all, I could get along very well on my own resources.

The difference that a change of officers makes in the life and spirit of a s.h.i.+p's crew is surprising to one unfamiliar with the sea. Captain Whidden had been a gentleman and a first-cla.s.s sailor; by ordering our life strictly, though not harshly or severely, he had maintained that efficient, smoothly working organization which is best and pleasantest for all concerned. But Captain Falk was a master whose sails were cut on another pattern. He lacked Captain Whidden's straightforward, searching gaze. From the corners of his mouth lines drooped unpleasantly around his chin. His voice was not forceful and commanding. I was confident that under ordinary conditions he never would have been given a s.h.i.+p; I doubted even if he would have got a chief mate's berth. But fortune had played into his hands, and he now was our lawful master, resistance to whom could be construed as mutiny and punished in any court in the land.

Never, while Captain Whidden commanded the s.h.i.+p, would the steward and the carpenter have deserted their work and have hidden themselves away in the cook's galley. Never, I was positive, would such a pair of officers as Kipping and old Davie Paine have been promoted from the forecastle. To be sure, the transgressions of the carpenter and the steward were only petty as yet, and if no worse came of our new situation, I should be very foolish to take it all so seriously. But it was not easy to regard our situation lightly. There were too many straws to show the direction of the wind.

CHAPTER X

THE TREASURE-SEEKER

It was a starlit night while we still lingered off the coast of Sumatra for water and fresh vegetables. The land was low and black against the steely green of the sky, and a young moon like a silver thread shone in the west.

Blodgett, the new man in our watch, was the centre of a little group on the forecastle.

He was small and wrinkled and very wise. The more I saw and heard of him, the more I marveled that he had not attracted my attention before; but up to this point in the voyage it was only by night that he had appeared different from other men, and I thought of him only as a prowler in the dark.

In some ways he was like a cat. By day he would sit in corners in the sun when opportunity offered, or lurk around the galley, s.h.i.+rking so brazenly, that the men were amused rather than angry. Even at work he was as slow and drowsy as an old cat, half opening his sleepy eyes when the officers called him to account, and receiving an occasional kick or cuff with the same mild surprise that a favorite cat might show. But once darkness had fallen, Blodgett was a different man. He became nervously wakeful. His eyes distended and his face lighted with strange animation. He walked hither and yon. He fairly arched his neck. And sometimes, when some ordinary incident struck his peculiar humor, he would throw back his head, open his great mouth, and utter a screech of wild laughter for all the world like the yowl of a tom-cat.

On that particular night he walked the forecastle, keeping close to the bulwarks, till the rest of us a.s.sembled by the rigging and watched him with a kind of fascination. After a time he saw us gathered there and came over to where we were. His eyes were large and his wrinkled features twitched with eagerness. He seemed very old; he had traveled to the farthest lands.

"Men," he cried in his thin, windy voice, "yonder's the moon."

The moon indeed was there. There was no reason to gainsay him. He stood with it over his left shoulder and extended his arms before him, one pointing somewhat to the right, the other to the left. "The right hand is the right way," he cried, "but the left we'll never leave."

We stared at the man and wondered if he were mad.

"No," he said, smiling at our puzzled glances, "we'll never leave the left."

"Belay that talk," said one of the men sharply. "Ye'll have to steer a clearer course than that if you want us to follow you."

Blodgett smiled. "The course is clear," he replied. "Yonder"--he waved his right hand--"is Singapore and the Chinese Sea and Whampoa. It's the right course. Our orders is for that course. Our cargo is for that course. It's the course that will make money for the owners. It's the right--you understand?--my right hand and the right course according to orders. But yonder"--this time he waved his left hand--"is the course that won't be left. And yet it's the left you know--my left hand."

He explained his feeble little joke with an air of pride.

"Why won't it be left?" the gruff seaman demanded.

"Because," said Blodgett, "we ain't going to leave it. There's gold there and no end of treasure. Do you suppose Captain Falk is going to leave it all for some one else to get? He's going to sail through Malacca Strait and across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta. That's what he's going to do. I've been in India myself and seen the heaps of gold lying on the ground by the money-changer's door and no body watching it but a sleepy Gentoo."

"But what's this treasure you're talking about," some one asked.

"Sure," said Blodgett in a husky whisper, "it's a treasure such as never was heard of before. There's barrels and barrels of gold and diamonds and emeralds and rubies and no end of such gear. There's idols with crowns of precious stones, and eyes in their carved heads that would pay a king's ransom. There's money enough in gold mohurs and rupees to buy the Bank of England."

It was a c.o.c.k-and-bull story that the little old man told us; but, absurd though it was, he had an air of impressive sincerity; and although every one of us would have laughed the yarn out of meeting had it been told of Captain Whidden, affairs had changed in the last days aboard s.h.i.+p.

Certainly we did not trust Captain Falk. I thought of the cook's dark words, "A little roun' hole in the back of his head--he was shot f'om behine!" As we followed the direction of Blodgett's two hands,--the right to the northeast and the Chinese sh.o.r.e, the left to the northwest and the dim lowlands of Sumatra that lay along the road to Burma,--anything seemed possible. Moon-madness was upon us, and we were carried away by the mystery of the night.

Such madness is not uncommon. Of tales in the fore-castle during a long voyage there is no end. Extraordinary significance is attributed to trivial happenings in the daily life of the crew, and the wonders of the sea and the land are overshadowed completely by simple incidents that superst.i.tious s.h.i.+pmates are sure to exaggerate and to dwell upon.

After a time, though, as Blodgett walked back and forth along the bulwark, like a cat that will not go into the open, my sanity came back to me.

"That's all nonsense," I said--perhaps too sharply; "Mr. Falk is an honest seaman. His whole future would be ruined if he attempted any such thing as that."

"Ay, hear the boy," Blodgett muttered sarcastically. "What does the boy think a man rich enough to buy all the s.h.i.+ps in the king's navy will care for such a future as Captain Falk has in front of him? Hgh! A boy that don't know enough to call his captain by his proper t.i.tle!"

Blodgett fairly bristled in his indignation, and I said no more, although I knew well enough--or thought I did--that such a scheme was quite too wild to be plausible. Captain Falk might play a double game, but not such a silly double game as that.

"No," said Bill Hayden solemnly, as if voicing my own thought, "the captain ain't going to spoil his good name like that." Poor, stupid old Bill!

Blodgett snorted angrily, but the others laughed at Bill--silly old b.u.t.t of the forecastle, daft about his little girl!--and after speculating at length concerning the treasure that Blodgett had described so vaguely, fell at last into a hot argument about how far a skipper could disobey the orders of his owners without committing piracy.

Thus began the rumor that revealed the scatterwitted convictions so characteristic of the strange, cat-like Blodgett, which later were to lead almost to death certain simple members of the crew; which served, by a freak of chance, to involve poor Bill Hayden in an affair that came to a tragic end; and which, by a whim of fortune almost as remote, though happier, placed me in closer touch with Roger Hamlin than I had been since the Island Princess sailed from Salem harbor.

An hour later I saw the cook standing silently by his galley. He gave me neither look nor word, although he must have known that I was watching him, but only puffed at his rank old pipe and stared at the stars and the hills.

I wondered if the jungle growth reminded him of his own African tropics; if behind his grim, seamed face an unsuspected sense of poetry lurked, a sort of half-beast, half-human imagination.

Never glancing at me, never indicating by so much as a quiver of his black features that he had perceived my presence, he sighed deeply, walked to the rail and knocked the dead ashes from his pipe into the water. He then turned and went into the galley and barricaded himself against intruders, there to stay until, some time in the night, he should seek his berth in the steerage for the few hours of deep sleep that were all his great body required. But as he pa.s.sed me I heard him murmuring to himself, "Dat Bill Hayden, he betteh look out, ya.s.s, sah. He say Mistah Captain Falk don't want to go to spoil his good name. Dat Hay den he betteh look out."

With a bang of his plank door the old darky shut himself away from all of us in the darkness of his little kingdom of pots and pans.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

III

WHICH APPROACHES A CRISIS

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XI

A HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS IN GOLD

Unquestionably the negro had known that I was there. Never otherwise could he have ignored me so completely. I was certain too, that his cryptic remarks about Bill Hayden were intended for my ears, for he never acted without a reason, obscure, perhaps, and far-fetched, but always, according to his own queer notions, sufficient.