The Max Brand Megapack (22 page)

“Look at this here water,” went on Hovey, with a tempting wave of his hand. “Why not take this up an’ help yourselves—after you’ve given us Henshaw?”

Sloan crowded in between Harrigan and McTee; his voice was a slavering murmur: “For pity’s sake, boys, what we going to do?”

Harrigan and the big Scot exchanged glances. Faintly and slowly they smiled. There was a profound mutual understanding in that smile.

“I’m dying,” went on Sloan eagerly and still in that slavering voice. “I’m burnin’ up inside. For God’s sake let ’em take him and finish him off!”

And always as he spoke his quick eyes went back and forth from face to face. They had neither eye nor voice for him. They turned their attention back to Hovey, who now spoke again hastily.

“But if you don’t give us Henshaw, we’ll take him, anyway. In one more day—or maybe two at the most—we’ll come an’ get you—understand? An’ what we’ll do to you when we get you will be this!”

He gestured over his shoulder. Eric Borgson was being led out on the deck by some of the crew.

“Look him over, Cap’n McTee. He’s a big man, an’ we’re goin’ to kill him by inches. So we’re goin’ to finish Van Roos—the same way. Speak out, lads; d’you want to die like these two are goin’ to die, or will you turn over Henshaw—who needs killin’?”

McTee smiled benevolently down upon the upturned, furious faces of the mutineers, and muttered: “Harrigan, I could drink blood.”

“An’ lick your lips afther it,” groaned the Irishman softly. “An’ so could I, Angus! They’re startin’ their devil work. Let’s go inside. I can’t be standing the sight of it, McTee.”

“Go inside an’ let ’em rush the wireless house?” said McTee incredulously. “No, lad. We
got
to stay an’ watch. Besides, maybe this is the way we’ll all die—after we’re too weak to fight ’em. And I’m rather curious to learn just how I’ll die; I’ve always been!”

They were binding Borgson face down on the hatch.

“Look,” said Harrigan. “Maybe it ain’t goin’ to be so bad as we thought. They’re just goin’ to lick Borgson the way he licked the Jap.”

“They’ll do more,” replied McTee, shaking his head. “Henshaw and Borgson and Van Roos have really put those wild men through hell, and now they’re going to get it back with interest.”

In the meantime little Kamasura stepped out from the crowd. He was naked to the waist, for the raw incisions which the lash had left would not bear the weight of clothes. He carried the blacksnake in his hands, drawing it caressingly through his hands as Borgson had done. Now the tying of Borgson was completed, and the sailors spread back in a loose circle to watch their entertainment.

The Japanese took his distance carefully, shifting repeatedly a matter of inches to make sure that no stroke would be wasted. Then he whirled the blacksnake over his head. They could see Borgson wince as the lash sang above him, and the muscles of his bare back flexed and stood up in knots that glistened under the sunlight. But the stroke did not fall. Kamasura had learned the lesson of creating suspense from the very man he was now about to torture. Harrigan bowed his head in his hands.

“I can’t look, McTee,” he muttered. “I’m sick inside—sick—sick!”

The last words came in a growl from the hollow of his throat. The blacksnake whirled through the air again and fell with a sharp slap like two broad hands clapped together, but Borgson did not cry out. His body writhed mutely, and down his back appeared a red mark. The whip whirled again and fell, this time bringing a stifled curse for a response. Once more it whirled, and this time merely cracked in the air. Again and again an idle snap in the air. Broken by that grim suspense, Borgson yelled in terror.

Kamasura laughed and glanced at the circle of sailors like a ringmaster in a circus in search of applause. The whip now whirled rapidly over his head and fell again and again, and every stroke brought a fresh and louder scream from the mate. Another sound, rhythmic and barbarous, punctuated those shrieks of anguish. It was the singing of Kamasura, who as he wielded the lash remembered a chant of his native land and shouted it now in time with the blows of the blacksnake.

On the upper deck Sloan lay prone on his face, sobbing with terror; Harrigan kept his face hid and clutched at his head with both hands; McTee stared straight down upon the scene of the torture with burning eyes. Inside the wheelhouse Kate crouched beside the bunk on which Henshaw was stretched, staring straight above his head. The fever had deprived him of the last of his senses.

“Your hands!” he muttered at length.

She placed them upon his forehead. She had done that repeatedly during the past day, and each time the effect had been marvelously soothing to the old man. Now at the touch he drew a deep breath of relief.

“Even in hell,” he whispered at length—“even in hell you come to me, Beatrice! I knew you would!”

He caught her hands at the wrists; his fingers, despite his fever, were deadly cold, and a chill ate into her blood.

“I hear them yelling—the souls of the damned,” he said quietly. “You can’t hear it?”

“No, no!” she said. “I cannot hear!”

“Of course not,” he went on with the same lack of emotion; “for, you see, you’ve come from heaven, and the coolness of heaven is in your hands, Beatrice. Put them against my temples, so! For every bit of the love I have given you you are permitted to repay me with coolness— coolness and comfort in hell!”

Suddenly he broke into exultant laughter, a sound more terrible than the wild wails from the deck.

“See!” he said, and his eyes twinkled as he stretched out a gaunt arm toward a corner of the room. “There’s Johnny Carson lying naked on a bed of blue fire. Ha, ha, ha! Have you been waiting long for me to come, lad?”

She shut out the hungry, hideous light of his eyes with the palms of her hands. Now the screaming on the deck ceased abruptly.

“Beatrice!” he cried with a sudden terror.

“Yes,” answered Kate.

“Ah,” he said, and patted her hands endearingly. “When the silence came, I feared maybe you were leaving me. You won’t do that?”

“No. I’ll stay.”

“So! Then I’ll sleep. But waken me when they begin yelling again. They thought I’d come down to the same hell I sent them to, and that they’d watch me burn. But I fooled ’em, Beatrice, by loving you. You’re the chip of wood that keeps me afloat—afloat—afloat—”

And he drifted into sleep, while she leaned against the bunk, almost unconscious from fear and exhaustion.

CHAPTER 35

Kamasura, in nowise loath to bring his work to an end, stood back and laid on the whip with redoubled vigor. The lash spatted sharply against the raw and bleeding flesh. The screams sank into moans, and the moans in turn declined to a mere horrible gasping of the breath. Even this ceased at length, and the quivering of the body stopped. Kamasura leaned over and slipped his hand under the body in the region of the heart. When he straightened up again, he made a gesture of finality with his crimsoned hands. The mate was dead.

They cut his body loose at once and pitched him over the rail, then turned their attention to Van Roos. Sam Hall was the inspired man this time, and according to his directions they lashed the body of the big mate on the same blood-spotted hatch cover where Borgson had lain a moment before, but this time the victim was placed upon his back. Hall himself attended to the tying of Van Roos’s head, and he performed his work so ably that the mate could not change his position in the least particle. He was literally swathed in ropes; so much so, in fact, that it was difficult to see how he could be tormented. Sam Hall, however, insisted that this was what he wanted, and the crew consented to let him do his work.

“You’ve heard something, an’ you’ve seen something,” said Hovey at this juncture to Campbell; “but what you’ve seen and heard isn’t nothin’ to what’ll happen to you unless you start handling the engines of the
Heron
. Why, Campbell, I’m goin’ to give you to the firemen!”

“Hovey,” answered the engineer calmly, “the only place I’d run this ship would be down to hell—your home port. That’s final!”

The bos’n was white with rage.

“I’d like to tear your heart out an’ feed it to the fish,” he said, stepping close to Campbell, and then, remembering himself, he moved back and grinned: “But the men will find something better to do with you.”

He crossed the deck and held up a bucket of water toward Harrigan and McTee. He raised a dipperful and allowed it to splash back in the bucket.

“Well?” asked Hovey.

They merely stared at him as if they had not heard him speak.

“All right,” said Hovey, quite unmoved, “there’s plenty of time for you to make up your minds. But if you wait too long—well, we’ll come and get him. And the girl, too!”

He laughed and turned away.

“I thought,” muttered McTee, “that we could end it by simply dying—but I forgot the girl.”

“The girl,” answered Harrigan, “and—and them! She’s got to die before we’re too far gone. You’ll do that to save her from—them?”

McTee moistened his parched lips before he could speak.

“One of us has to do it, but it can’t be me, Harrigan.”

“Nor me, Angus. We’ll wait till tonight. Maybe a ship’ll pass and see us lyin’ like a derelict and put a boat aboard, eh?”

“But if no ship comes, then we’ll draw straws, eh?”

“Yes.”

Two sharp, sudden cries now called their attention back to the waist of the ship to the blood-stained hatch cover where Van Roos lay.

Sam Hall had approached the big mate with a knife in his hand. He kneeled beside the prostrate body and fumbled at the face an instant. No one had been able to make out the significance of his act. Then the knife gleamed, and twice he plucked with one hand and cut with the knife. The two sharp cries answered him. Then he rose; two little trickles of blood ran down the face of the mate.

“Well?” asked Jacob Flint. “When does the game begin?”

“The game is just started,” said Hall, “an’ the sun will do the rest. I’ve cut off his eyelids!”

They stared a moment in amazement, and then an understanding broke on them. Every tribe of savages in the world has been accredited with this ingenious torture which blinded their victim and usually drove him mad. The sun was now climbing the sky rapidly, and already fell on the face of the mate. The tropic sun which scorches and burns the toughest of skins was now directed full on the pupils of his eyes.

The sailors sought comfortable positions and waited for a long exhibition of pain, but they were mistaken. The torture acted far more quickly than even the whip. There was no outcry. Not once during his struggles did Van Roos make a sound from his throat, save for a quick, heavy panting. Perhaps by contrast with the yells of Borgson, which were still in the ears of the men, this silence was more horrible than the most throat-filling shrieks. They could see Van Roos twisting his head ceaselessly and vainly to escape that blinding light. His ruddy face became swollen like the features of a drowned man. And that was all that happened—only that, and the panting, the quick, choppy panting like a running man. Finally one of the sailors rose with a mallet in his hand.

“Where you goin’?” asked Hall ominously.

“Going to finish him.”

Hall caught the fellow’s arm.

“Listen!” he whispered, and such was the silence that the hoarse whisper was audible all over the deck. “Don’t you hear?”

And with one hand he kept beat for the quick breaths of the tortured man. At that moment there was a long sigh, and the breathing stopped. Hall strode angrily forward to his victim, but when he reached the hatch, Van Roos was dead. A blood vessel must have burst in his brain, and death was as instantaneous as though a bullet had struck him. So they cut him free, and his body followed that of Borgson over the rail. Then the eyes of the mutineers turned aft toward the wireless house, and then back upon Campbell. Six victims remained. One of the firemen slipped close to Hovey on naked feet. He did not speak, but his long, thin arm pointed toward the engineer.

“Not yet,” said Hovey, “not yet! Tomorrow if he doesn’t give in, we’ll turn you loose on him.”

The fireman grinned and went back on noiseless feet to his companions to spread the good tidings. Hovey approached the wireless house.

“We’ve got one show left to offer, but we’re savin’ it till tomorrow,” he said. “So brace up, hearties, and keep cheer. You’ll see Campbell go a way worse than either of these tomorrow.”

“Wait,” called Harrigan, suddenly roused. “D’you mean to say that you’d try your hellwork on a kind man like Campbell?”

“A kind man like Campbell?” echoed Hovey, and then laughed. “A kind man?”

And he retreated with no other answer, and left the fugitives aft to the merciless, sweltering heat of the sun. By the time the sun went down, they were so fevered by the need of water that they had not the strength to bless the cool falling of the dark; they still carried the fire of the sunlight in their blood.

CHAPTER 36

“This man Campbell,” said Harrigan, “he’s a true man, McTee, and he stood up to White Henshaw for my sake—for the sake of me and his Bobbie Burns. They plan to take him to hell tomorrow, Angus, and I’ve an idea that there’s one chance in the thousand that I could steal in on the dogs tonight and bring him back with me.”

“Can they do anything worse to him than they’re doing to us?”

“Maybe not, but my heart would lie easier, McTee. I’ll wait for the fever o’ the sun to go out of me head an’ for the crew to get drunk an’ a little drunker.”

So they waited while the noise of the nightly carousal waxed high and higher, and then died away by slow degrees. At length Harrigan stood up, gripped the hand of McTee in silent farewell, heard a whispered “Good luck!” and slipped noiselessly down the ladder and started across the deck in the shadow of the rail. From any portion of the main cabin eyes might be watching him; there was only the one chance in ten that the lookout whom Hovey had certainly stationed would not perceive him as he crept along under the shadow. Accordingly he went blindly forward.

If the lookout saw him, at least there was no outcry, no general alarm. He stood flat against the wall of the main cabin at length and rehearsed a plan, listening the while to the lapping of the waves against the side of the ship. Then he stole step by step up the ladder to the upper deck. His head was already above the ladder when he heard the light padding of a bare foot and saw a figure around the corner of the cabin.