The Max Brand Megapack (12 page)
Read The Max Brand Megapack Online
Authors: Max Brand,Frederick Faust
Tags: #old west, #outlaw, #gunslinger, #Western, #cowboy
“Would you bet on me against Black McTee?” queried the engineer, deeply moved. “Well, lad, McTee’s a dour man, but dour or not he shall not run the engine room of the
Heron
.”
And he banged on the table for emphasis.
“Scrub down the bridge every morning, as they tell you, but when they send you below to pass the coal, come and report to me first. I’ll have work for you to do—chiefly practicing the right accent for Bobbie’s songs. Is not that a man’s work?”
CHAPTER 19
To make good this promise, Campbell straightway sang for Harrigan’s delectation two or three more of his favorite selections. It was evening, and the shift in the fireroom was ended before Harrigan left the engineer’s room. On his way to the deck he passed the tired firemen from the hole of the ship. They stared at the Irishman with wide eyes, for it was known that he had been in the chief engineer’s room for several hours; they looked upon him as one who has been in hell and has escaped from thence to the upper air.
He was, in fact, a marked man when he reached the forecastle. Rumor travels through a ship’s crew and it was already known that Black McTee hated the Irishman and that White Henshaw had commenced to persecute him in a new and terrible manner.
This would have been sufficient tragedy to burden the shoulders of any one man, however strong, and when to this was added the fact that he had been kept by the grim chief engineer for several hours in the chief’s own room, and finally considering that this man had passed through a shipwreck, one of three lone survivors, it is easy to understand why the sailors gave him ample elbow room.
It was evidently expected that he would break out into a torrent of abuse, and when he, perceiving this, remained silent, their awe increased. All through supper he was aware of their wondering glances; above all he felt the gray, steady eyes of Jerry Hovey, the bos’n, yet he ate without speaking, replying to their tentative questions with grunts. Before the meal was finished and the pipes and cigarettes lighted, he was a made man. Persevering in his role, as soon as he had eaten he went out on deck and sat down in the corner between the rail and the forecastle upon a coil of rope.
As deep as the blue sea in the evening light was the peace which lay on the soul of Harrigan, for the day had brought two great victories, one over McTee and the other over the chief engineer. It was not a stolid content, for he knew the danger of the implacable hate of McTee, but with the aid of Campbell he felt that he would have a fighting chance at least to survive, and that was all he asked.
So he sat on the coil of rope leaning against the rail, and looked ahead. It was almost completely dark when a hand fell on his shoulder and he looked up into the steady, gray-blue eyes of the bos’n.
“I promised to talk to you tonight,” said that worthy, and sat down uninvited on a neighboring coil of rope.
He waited for a response. As a rule, sailors are glad to curry favor with the bos’n. Harrigan, however, sat without speaking, staring through the gloom.
“Well?” said Hovey at length. “You’re a silent man, Harrigan.”
There was no response.
“All right; I like a silent man. In a way of speakin’, I need ’em like you! If you say little to me, you’re likely to say little to others.
“I don’t talk much myself,” went on Hovey, “until I know my man. I ain’t seen much of you, but I guess I figure you straight.”
He grew suddenly cautious, cunning, and the steady, gray-blue eyes reminded Harrigan of a cat when she crouches for hours watching the rathole.
“You ain’t got much reason for standing in with White Henshaw?” he purred.
“H’m,” grunted the Irishman, and waited.
“Sure, you ain’t,” went on Hovey soothingly, “because McTee has raised hell between you. They say McTee tried his damnedest to break you?”
The last question was put in a different manner; it came suddenly like a surprise blow in the dark.
“Well?” queried Harrigan. “What of it?”
“He tried all the way from Honolulu?”
“He did.”
“Did he try his fists?”
“He did.”
Jerry Hovey cursed with excitement.
“And?”
“I carried him to his cabin afterward,” said Harrigan truthfully.
“Would you take on McTee again? Black McTee?”
“If I had to. Why?”
“Oh, nothin’. But McTee has started White Henshaw on your trail. Maybe you know what Henshaw is? The whole South Seas know him!”
“Well?”
“You’ll have a sweet hell of a time before this boat touches port, Harrigan.”
“I’ll weather it.”
“Yes, this trip, but what about the next? If Henshaw is breakin’ a man, he keeps him on the ship till the man gives in or dies. I know! Henshaw’ll get so much against you that he could soak you for ten years in the courts by the time we touch port. Then he’ll offer to let you off from the courts if you’ll ship with him again, and then the old game will start all over again. You may last one trip—other men have—one or two—but no one has ever lasted out three or four shippings under White Henshaw. It can’t be done!”
He paused to let this vital point sink home. Only the same dull silence came in reply, and this continued taciturnity seemed to irritate Hovey. When he spoke again, his voice was cold and sharp.
“He’s got you trapped, Harrigan. You’re a strong man, but you’ll never get his rope off your neck. He’ll either hang you with it or else tie you hand and foot an’ make you his slave. I
know
!”
There was a bitter emphasis on the last word that left no doubt as to his meaning, and Harrigan understood now the light of that steady, gray-blue eye which made the habitual smile of good nature meaningless.
“Ten years ago I shipped with White Henshaw. Ten years ago I didn’t have a crooked thought or a mean one in my brain. Today there’s hell inside me, understand? Hell!” He paused, breathing hard.
“There’s others on this ship that have been through the same grind, some of them longer than me. There’s others that ain’t here, but that ain’t forgotten, because me an’ some of the rest, we seen them dyin’ on their feet. Maybe they ain’t dropped into the sea, but they’re just the same, or worse. You’ll find ’em loafin’ along the beaches. They take water from the natives, they do.”
He went on in a hoarse whisper: “On this ship I’ve seen ’em busted. An’ Henshaw has done the bustin’. This is a coffin ship, Harrigan, an’ Henshaw he’s the undertaker. He don’t bring ’em to Davy Jones’s locker—he does worse—he brings ’em to hell on earth, a hell so bad that when they go below, they don’t notice no difference. Harrigan, me an’ a few of the rest, we know what’s been done, an’ some of us have thought wouldn’t it be a sort of joke, maybe, if sometime what Henshaw has done to others was done to himself, what?”
The sweat was standing out on Harrigan’s face wet and cold. It seemed to him that through the darkness he could make out whole troops of those broken men littering the decks. He peered through the dark at the bos’n, and made out the hint of the gray-blue eyes watching him again as the cat watches the mousehole, and the heart of Harrigan ached.
“Hovey, are you bound for the loincloth an’ the beaches, like the rest?”
“No, because I’ve sold my soul to White Henshaw; but you’re bound there, Harrigan, because you can never sell your soul. I looked in your eyes and seen it written there like it was in a book.”
He gripped the Irishman by the shoulder.
“There’s some say this is the last voyage of White Henshaw, but me an’ some of the rest, we know different. He can’t leave the sea, which means that he won’t take us out of hell. Now, talk straight. You stood up to McTee; would you stand up to Henshaw?”
Harrigan muttered after a moment of thought: “I suppose this is mutiny, bos’n?”
“Aye, but I’m safe in talkin’ it. White Henshaw trusts me, he does, because I’ve sold my soul to him. If you was to go an’ tell him what I’ve said, he’d laugh at you an’ say you was tryin’ to incite discontent. What’s it goin’ to be, Harrigan? Will you join me an’ the rest who can set you free an’ make a man of you, or will you stay by McTee and White Henshaw and that devil Campbell?”
“How could you set me free?”
“One move—altogether—in the night—we’d have the ship for our own, an’ we could beach her and take to the shore at any place we pleased.”
Harrigan repeated: “One move—altogether—in the night! I don’t like it, bos’n. I’ll stand up to my man foot to foot an’ hand to hand, but for strikin’ at him in the dark—I can’t do it.”
He caught the sound of Hovey’s gritting teeth.
“Think it over,” persisted the bos’n. “We need you, Harrigan, but if you don’t join, we’ll help McTee and Henshaw and Campbell to make life hell for you.”
“I’ve thought it over. I don’t like the game. This mutiny at night—it’s like hittin’ a man who’s down.”
“That’s final?”
“It is.”
“Then God help you, Harrigan, for you ain’t the man I took you for.”
CHAPTER 20
He rose and left Harrigan to the dark, which now lay so thick over the sea that he could only dimly make out the black, wallowing length of the ship. After a time, he went into the dingy forecastle and stretched out on his bunk. Some of the sailors were already in bed, propping their heads up with brawny, tattooed arms while they smoked their pipes. For a time Harrigan pondered the mutiny, glancing at the stolid faces of the smokers and trying to picture them in action when they would steal through the night barefooted across the deck—some of them with bludgeons, others with knives, and all with a thirst for murder.
Sleep began to overcome him, and he fought vainly against it. In a choppy sea the bows of a ship make the worst possible bed, for they toss up and down with sickening rapidity and jar quickly from side to side; but when a vessel is plowing through a long-running ground swell, the bows of the ship move with a sway more soothing than the swing of a hammock in a wind. Under these circumstances Harrigan was lulled to sleep.
He woke at length with a consciousness, not of a light shining in his face, but of one that had just been flashed across his eyes. Then a guarded voice said: “He’s dead to the world; he won’t hear nothin’.”
Peering cautiously up from under the shelter of his eyelashes, he made out a bulky figure leaning above him.
“Sure he’s dead to the world,” said a more distant voice. “After the day he must have put in with Campbell, he won’t wake up till he’s dragged out. I know!”
“Lift his foot and let it drop,” advised another. “If you can do that to a man without waking him, you know he’s not going to be waked up by any talkin’.”
Harrigan’s foot was immediately raised and dropped. He merely sighed as if in sleep, and continued to breathe heavily, regularly. After a moment he was conscious that the form above him had disappeared. Then very slowly he turned his head and raised his eyelids merely enough to peer through the lashes. The sailors sat cross-legged in a loose circle on the floor of the forecastle. At the four corners of the group sat four significant figures. They were like the posts of the prize ring supporting the rope; that is to say, the less important sailors who sat between them. Each of the four was a man of mark.
Facing Harrigan were Jacob Flint and Sam Hall. The former was a little man, who might have lived unnoticed forever had it not been for a terrible scar which deformed his face. It was a cut received in a knife fight at a Chinese port. The white, gleaming line ran from the top of his temple, across the side of his right eye, and down to the cheekbone. The eye was blind as a result of the wound, but in healing the cut had drawn the skin so that the lids of the eye were pulled awry in a perpetual, villainous squint. It was said that before this wound Flint had been merely an ordinary sailor, but that afterward he was inspired to live up to the terror of his deformed face.
Sam Hall, the “corner post,” at Flint’s right, was a type of blond stupidity, huge of body, with a bull throat and a round, featureless face. You looked in vain to find anything significant in this fellow beyond his physical strength, until your glance lingered on his eyes. They were pale blue, expressionless, but they hinted at possibilities of berserker rage.
The other two, whose backs were toward Harrigan, were Garry Cochrane and Jim Kyle. The latter might have stood for a portrait of a pirate of the eighteenth century, with a drooping, red mustache and bristling beard. The reputation of this monster, however, was far less terrible than that of any of the other three, certainly far less than Garry Cochrane. This was a lean fellow with bright black eyes, glittering like a suspicious wolf’s.
Between these corner posts sat the less distinguished sailors. They might have been notable cutthroats in any other assemblage of hard-living men, but here they granted precedence willingly to the four more notable heroes.
Around the circle walked Jerry Hovey like a shepherd about his flock. It was apparent that they all held him in high favor. His chief claim to distinction, or perhaps his only one, was that he had served as bos’n for ten years under White Henshaw; but this record was enough to win the respect of even Garry Cochrane.
It was Jim Kyle who had peered into the face of Harrigan, for now he was pushing to one side the lantern he had used and settling back into his place in the circle. He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb.
“How’d you happen to miss out with the Irishman, Jerry?”
“Talk low or you may wake him,” warned Hovey. “I lost him because the fool ain’t sailed long enough to know White Henshaw. He has an idea that mutiny at night is like hittin’ a man when he’s down—as if there was any other way of hittin’ Henshaw an’ gettin’ away with it!”
The chuckle of the sailors was like the rumble of the machinery below, blended and lost with that sound.
“So he’s out—an’ you know what that means,” went on Hovey.
A light came into the pale eyes of Sam Hall, and his thick lips pulled back in a grin.
“Aye,” he growled, “we do! He’s a strong man, but”—and here he raised his vast arms and stretched them—“I’ll tend to Harrigan!”
The voice of the bos’n was sharp: “None o’ that! Wait till I give orders, Sam, before you raise a hand. We’re too far from the coast. Let old Henshaw bring us close inshore, an’ then we’ll turn loose.”
