Where the Pavement Ends Part 48

I think I might have been less shocked to see some change, some altered trait to veil the normal image of him. But there was none. He was the same, the same weather-beaten old tinker with the lean, long face and hard-set jaw and the dour eye that could quell a mutinous stokehole at a glance. In the midst of this evil and fantastic luxury he still wore the same old s.h.i.+ny alpaca too, his regular sh.o.r.e-going and Sunday garb, and a ragged bit of ribbon at his throat. Somehow that cut me all up.

"Wickwire!" began Raff again. "Come away out of that. What are y' doin'

here?"

No answer; the smoker's concern was for his pipe.

"Chief, d'you hear me? You're needed on board." The captain shook him gently, and then not so gently.

"Drop it. We've come to bring you away. For any sakes quit that devilment, now, will y'!"...

The figure on the couch made a languid effort.

"I'll grant ye--I'll grant ye the siller's weel enough for a change.

Aye, it makes a change." He wagged his head at us confidentially. "But the bamboo's the best. It smokes sweet--varra sweet it smokes. An' that unhandy thief of a boy--" He paused to draw lazily at the mouthpiece and loosed a slow gout of vapor. "He's always mislayin' it somewhere--"

Raff cried a round oath and s.n.a.t.c.hed the pipe from him; flung it down.

But the chief only sank back among the pillows and closed his eyes, even smiling a little to himself, as one accustomed to the vagaries of phantom guests....

For the last few moments he had forgotten our appointed guide and leader. He had been standing by, a stricken witness, but with a common impulse the captain and I turned on him, and he started from contemplation of his handiwork as if he had pulled a secret wire.

"You brought us here," roared Raff, accusing.

"I--I didn't think he was as bad as this."

"Bad! He's crazy as a coot. What were you going to do about it?"

The flurry of our pa.s.sage had begun to draw in behind us in a back-lash wave. The house seemed to hum under our feet. A door opened on a gust of muttering voices. Down by the entrance to the gallery a knot of vague shadows had gathered. It occurred to me, and time enough you might suppose, that we were very far from possible aid in a region where visitors are a poor risk. And suddenly, out of s.p.a.ce for all I knew, appeared a little noiseless silken apparition of a Chinese who regarded us from twin lenses with a phosph.o.r.escent gleam.

It was of a piece with the whole mysterious side of the affair that he should address Sutton a screed in the vernacular and that the mate should answer. I was long past wonder--anything might happen now--and I only noted that our companion could be wheedling and plausible in more than one language. But Raff seemed curiously put out and broke upon their chatter.

"Friend of yours?" he rumbled.

Sutton span around nervously.

"He--he says we've got to go away quick. He says we've no business here."

"Tell him sure thing, soon as we get our friend."

"But he says--he says Chris is his lodger, in a private house, and mustn't be disturbed."

"Oh, he does, hey? Well, we'll give him a chance to explain to the police in another minute!"

"That's no good either."

"Does he figger we can't get no police?"

"'Tisn't that, sir. The police couldn't help."

"Why not?"

"Why, it seems he's breaking no law. There's no bar to private smoking.

I've been trying to get around him somehow, but there doesn't seem to be anything we can do. He says the white man has a right to stay here, and he has a right to keep him."...

"Keep him! Well, by G.o.d!"

"I suppose Chris must have a little money banked somewhere," continued the mate miserably. "Li Chwan'll never let go of him while it lasts."

"And you mean we got to leave him after all--leave the ol' chief to rot where he lays?"

"Unless he wants to--to come away of his own motion," stammered Sutton.

"I thought he'd come quite easy when he saw the three of us. But he won't. He doesn't want to--and that's the dreadful fact. And--and--only look at him now!"

His fascinated gaze had coasted back to the face on the cus.h.i.+ons. It might have been cut from tan marble, impa.s.sive and stern, and we saw what he meant--though perhaps not as vividly as he saw--the wretched incongruous tragedy of such a face in such a setting.

"So this is the end of your grand scheme!" said Captain Raff bitterly.

Well, you see, it came rather rough on a superior young optimist. For the very first time in his life, I suppose, Sutton found himself called to account without a chance either to smile or to sulk, to palter or to play at clever tricks. Whatever his share in the unhappy business had been--and we had never fully fathomed it, you remember--he was facing the result of that folly without the possibility of disguise or excuse or easy escape. Here was actual, physical h.e.l.l to equal Wickwire's own preaching--the murky depth of it. And here was Wickwire himself, condemned to the dreariest fate ever devised by unamusing devils. And who to blame?...

What he suffered we had a guess even then. Being the sort of chap he was, he fought a very pretty little fight with himself in that moment--which we might have guessed as well. His face was gridironed, studded with sweat, and his hands clenched and opened. He turned here and there, seeking the careless word or the flippant gesture, some relief to an intolerable sense of guilt. But writhe as he liked, his darting glances always painfully returned to the still victim on the charpoy.

The Chinese touched his arm....

"No," he quavered. "No--no, by gum, _no_! It's not the end. Keep off of me!" Like a man who clears himself of a vileness, he slung Li Chwan across the room. "And you--" he cried to us "--hoist the chief up out of that, and lively. There's a way yet if we take the straight of it. Grab him!"

We responded--just as we had hesitated before--to some subtle quality behind the words, and while we were gathering the limp body Sutton himself was laying wide hold on the draperies across the wall. They ripped and swayed, swirled down about him so that he stood waist deep wrestling with figurative monsters until the whole blue screen tore away and revealed the gla.s.s part.i.tion which closed the end of the gallery.

Solid at the base, it was latticed above with small panes, and, taking the straight way with a vengeance, he flung himself literally and bodily against it. The jingling crash brought a howl from the stairhead, but he broke a gap with his bleeding fists, wrenched out the crosspieces.... A spatter of warm rain blew in upon us.

"There's only the street below!" I gasped.

"Out!" was Sutton's crisp order. "Out--and through--and over with you!"

We had no choice; his furious energy drove us. Wickwire hung a dead weight in our arms, but we propped him on the jagged sill and scrambled after, any fas.h.i.+on. Clinging there, we had one last glimpse into the gallery behind us, set like a stage for our benefit.

We saw the little Chinese come on with uplifted knife, spitting and glaring like a wildcat, saw the k.n.o.bbed, bare shoulders and coppery, brute faces of his crew, saw Sutton turning back. He had no weapon, but he armed himself. He dragged the big green joss from its niche, lamps, incense, and all, twirled it over his head, exultant, transformed with berserk fury, shouting some free battle cry of his own--and met them.

Thereafter the place went dark in a babble of shrieks, and we dropped like slugs from a garden wall.

So we brought Chris Wickwire home again--what was left of him....

There was small joy in that homecoming, you can figure. Dawn broke weeping as we were hurrying aboard with our unconscious burden. The reaches of the river were beginning to show slaty downstream and a little damp wind running with the day was like a chill after fever, unfriendly and comfortless. The lamp in the chief engineer's cabin had paled from saffron to citrine in the morning light when the officers of the _Moung Poh_ took stock of themselves once more, and of each other and an ill prospect.

Wickwire had neither spoken nor stirred, though his breathing was regular and he seemed to have taken no immediate hurt from his fall except the reopening of an old, ragged wound above the ear. Captain Raff had done the bandaging: he stood back from the last neat pleat.

"A clip over the head, as you say," he observed, addressing me pointedly while he wiped his clumsy great hands that yet had wrought as tenderly as a woman's. "And pretty lucky at that. H'll do well enough now till we get a doctor. You better dig out after one yourself--try the Port Office; they'll have to be notified anyway, I judge, when he wakes."

We looked at the sh.e.l.l of a man on the bunk. "It's got to be the--the hospital, then?" I asked.

"I believe that's what they call it," said Raff gruffly.