The Sand Pebbles (43 page)

Holman had blood in his mouth and his teeth wouldn’t line up. He was afraid to clamp them together. He wished Farren and Red Dog were there. Crosley was still firing short bursts. Bordelles stood up flat against the wall and tossed something over to right and to left. There was a double explosion inside. Bordelles lunged with his shoulder at the gate. That was something he could do, Holman thought. He picked up his rifle and ran to join Bordelles, and his solid weight crashed the gate open.

“Give me your grenades!” Bordelles said. “Cover me!”

He ran to the biggest house, at the left. A man was down, crawling feebly in front of it. Bordelles tossed a grenade through an open window and ran around to the side and there were more explosions back there. Crosley shot the creeping man in the head. He and Tullio ran back to join Bordelles. An old woman was spreading a quilt over a heap of something to the right of the courtyard. She jerked and worked frantically.

Bordelles and Tullio came back through the big house. They walked springily, in a slashing, dashing way. Holman was standing there.

“They all got away out the back gate,” Bordelles said. “Say! You’re hit!”

Holman tried to say it was nothing. He could not talk well. Tullio tore open a first-aid pack. Rifle shots sounded in back and Bordelles snapped, “Spread out!” and they did. It was only Crosley. He came out grinning all over his frog face.

“I was just killing them pigs back there,” he said. He darted his eyes around the courtyard. “What about that old woman?”

“For God’s sake, Crosley! Don’t kill her.” Bordelles laughed. “Let her go. She can’t hurt anything.”

“I didn’t mean kill her,” Crosley said.

The old woman crept away. Tullio sprinkled powder on cotton and packed it in Holman’s mouth and put a clumsy battle dressing on the outside. Crosley and Bordelles found about a hundred tins of kerosene under the quilts. All the bedding in the place was piled on top of it. Maybe it was the old woman’s way of hiding it under the bed, Holman thought. She just wanted to help. He had a dull ache in his jaw. He felt as if he were one or two moves behind in a game he didn’t know how to play in the first place. The others were pulling the unpunctured cans out of the heap. Kerosene was slopping and spreading on the damp clay.

“Take the good ones down and load them in that wupan,” Bordelles said.

Tullio started down with two of them. A spatter of shots from the woods drove him jumping back.

“They’ve circled around!” he said.

“They’ll get our sampan!” Crosley was unslinging his BAR. “We’re cut off!”

“Don’t get excited, men,” Bordelles said. “Farren and Franks are coming. They’ll take them in the rear.” His happy grin was gone, however. “Count your ammunition,” he said tautly. “We’ll have to go easy, now.”

Crosley had only two magazines left. Holman had not used any of
his. They refilled two magazines for Crosley from Holman’s and Tullio’s stock. “Wasting shells on pigs!” Tullio sniffed. “The other guys are coming,” Crosley said. “They couldn’t help but hear our fire. All them grenades.” “Of course they’re coming,” Bordelles said. He spread them out, to watch both gates. It was seeming longer than it was, Holman knew. From time to time bullets from the woods whined across the wall. Then, very far away, they heard the
San Pablo’s
siren going in short, screaming pulses. It was the emergency recall signal.

They clustered around Bordelles at the front gate. “What if the other parties go back to the ship, now?” Tullio asked.

“They won’t, if they heard our firing.”

“If.” Crosley started and swore angrily. “That old woman!”

“Find her!” Bordelles snapped.

Hastily they searched the pens and shacks, but the old woman was gone. She would tell the pirates there were only four ocean devils trapped there and it would make them bold enough to attack. All of a sudden it was very bad.

“I should’ve let her have it!” Crosley said bitterly. “The only good ones are dead ones.”

“We’ll have to fight our way out of here before they can react,” Bordelles said.

They all jumped to his crisp orders. They slashed the good cans with bayonets and they set fire to the kerosene and the soaked bedding. “Too bad these damned mud houses won’t burn!” Bordelles said. The fire caught and
whooshed
in a roaring column of flame and smoke. Crosley jumped out the gate and crouched and sprayed the woods blindly with bullets while the others ran down to the jetty. Then they fired, while Crosley ran to join them. They all crashed along the creek bank, careless of noise, and their sampan was where they had left it. In seconds they were in the sampan, Holman and Tullio both poling vigorously, and in a few minutes they were well out into the reed marsh. It had all run off very smoothly, like a drill.

“Well done, men! Very well done!” Bordelles said.

They were all grinning at each other, except Holman. Far behind
them, the pirates were still shooting at nothing. Black smoke was billowing high above the trees back there, rolling, outfolding, shot through with red.

“They’ll see
that
from the ship!” Crosley said proudly.

They met Farren in the channel and the two sampans went back in company, shouting the story back and forth, and Red Dog yapped triumphantly. When they shifted to the ship’s boat at the hummock, they began being solicitous of Holman. They would not let him pole. He felt dizzy and nauseated and his jaw hurt badly. He was thirsty, and when he tried to drink from a canteen he spilled most of it. He kept thinking about ice-cold, very sweet lemonade.

In the sick bay, Jennings fussed and clucked about Holman’s jaw. Holman could feel the ship getting underway, even as they hoisted the boats in. Jennings cleaned out Holman’s mouth with an alcohol swab and packed the jaw with medicated cotton and it hurt very much.

“It looks pretty clean. I won’t probe,” Jennings decided. “We’re going straight to Changsha, and I’ll take you to the mission hospital for that. They have x-ray there.”

Holman was sicklisted. He had to take a shower in the sickbay head and put on pajamas and turn into one of the sickbay bunks. He was glad to lie down. The Sand Pebbles began coming back to see how he was and to congratulate him. Both Lt. Collins and Bordelles stopped by with cheerful words. All the chiefs looked in. Even Po-han came up, full of admiration. Big Chew made beef broth and brought it up personally for Holman’s supper. Holman drank it through a bent glass tube and it was hot and rich and good. He winked at Big Chew and wished he could tell him that he appreciated the soup more than all the other attention he had been getting.

In the evening the Sand Pebbles came back again, by twos and threes. They wanted Holman to have all the dope. General Tang was back in Changsha with some other warlord to help him, and they were pushing on down the river. They were supposed to be trying for Hankow also, and there was real fighting going on all along the lower Siang. For some reason Comyang was very excited about it and Waldhorn was glued to the radio receiver. All sorts of stuff was coming
in coded and Bordelles would be up all night decoding it.

“Clear out of here, you men!” Jennings said at last. “Can’t you see he can’t talk? He needs rest.”

It was peaceful, alone in the dark. General Tang had been all right before, and they would be all right in that courtyard in Changsha. Holman drifted uneasily toward sleep. He had not liked all the attention and praise. He had not done anything in that fight, except to get wounded. But that made him the
San Pablo’s
walking battle scar, and that was what they were proud of. They did not give any more of a damn for Jake Holman than they ever had. Except for Burgoyne and Po-han, they did not even know Jake Holman.

All next day they steamed across the lake. Holman was feverish and he slept most of the day. The ship buzzed with scuttlebutt. One of the new orders from Comyang was that gunboats could no longer shoot back when they were fired upon unless they could clearly see and identify who was shooting at them. But you could never see that. His shipmates came to cheer Holman and stayed to wrangle with each other. The new order meant they would just have to run out of range when they were fired upon, and the
San Pablo
would lose more face than it could stand losing. Half asleep on laudanum, Holman listened to them argue. Some thought it must be a mistake in decoding. Some thought it would be only for a day or two. Some thought Lt. Collins would just pretend to see the
toofay
and they would go on shooting back.

“Not that Collins,” Harris said. “He thinks orders are sacred.”

It was the nearest thing to a gripe about Lt. Collins that Holman had ever heard. The wrangling went on and on. No one could understand why Comyang was so worked up about Changsha. No one had ever heard before of the new warlord who was teamed up with General Tang. The new warlord’s name was Chiang Kai-shek.

They turned up the Siang channel early in the morning and at once began meeting junks headed downriver loaded with soldiers. Ordinary warlord troops seldom had flags around, but these junks had big flags. Being Chinese, they had to do it bass-ackward, as Farren said, and the flags were in the bow. They were bright red, with a blue field that held a white, serrated disk. No one had ever seen that flag before. The soldiers wore a strange green uniform. They seemed mostly scrawny kids, and they looked across from their junks to the
San Pablo
with bold, black, measuring eyes. They did not look at all like sloppy, hangdog, happy-go-lucky warlord soldiers.

Quite often they sighted green troop columns marching north along the banks, with the new flag out ahead of every unit. The whole countryside seemed excited and moving, streaming northward toward Hankow. There was supposed to be a big battle going on at the foot of the lake.

Twice before dinner the
San Pablo
was fired upon from ambush. Both times it was a low and deadly fusillade that smashed windows and drilled through the wooden superstructure. Both times Lt. Collins personally rang up flank speed and they ran out of range without
shooting back. Holman felt weak but clear-headed and he dressed and went down to the crew’s compartment. Farren and several others were lashing mattresses across broken windows. Tullio was sweeping up glass. They were angry and ashamed.

“He takes the wheel himself and makes everybody else on the bridge squat down behind the bulwarks,” Farren told Holman. “He keeps his face as blank as a flange.”

“He don’t like it any better than we do,” Vincent said.

None of Pappy Tung’s men would work on deck. Fortunately, the galley was included in the steel engine room and bridge portion of the superstructure, and Big Chew stayed on the job. Holman had his soup at the mess table with the others. Only about half of the crew sat down to the meal. They had barely started when more firing broke out.

“Take cover! Clear port side! Clear port side!” Franks’ voice sounded from forward. “All guns, hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

Bells jangled below and the ship picked up speed. The men at Holman’s table looked at each other. Glass tinkled and bullets thudded into wood and mattresses. Duckbutt Randall, at Bronson’s table, took his plate aft to the nonrated men’s table, which was flanked by double-deck bunks.

“Hell with it. Let’s eat chow,” Farren said.

Holman worked on his soup. He was unpleasantly aware of the door open to the port side, just behind his back.

“Them green soldiers are all
toofay,”
Restorff growled. “Them and their warlord with ’em. All
toofay
, by God!” His blunt, brown face was angry.

“I don’t get them orders,” Farren said. “When we tuck in our tails and run, we’re just asking for more of it.”

“We’ll get more,” Restorff said.

“Prong orders!” Harris said. “Let’s shoot the bastards!”

“These come right from Coolidge,” Red Dog said, from the other table.

“Prong Coolidge! What’s he know about China?”

Harris hurled his fork across the compartment. He went into a
frenzy of cursing, tossing his white hair, scrawking his voice, bulging his outraged eyes, outdoing himself. He howled new and strange obscenities. The other Sand Pebbles forgot the bullets and listened with wondering admiration. Harris cursed Coolidge and China and missionaries and most of all the new warlord, whom he called, in a strangled, throat-tearing shout, that green-assed, baby-raping, mother-defiling
Chancre Jack!
The possibly accidental nickname delighted the Sand Pebbles. The cursing was almost as satisfying as a sixteen-inch salvo in among the ambushers. When Harris subsided at last, puffing, his craggy face a dull red, the firing had stopped. The
San Pablo
had run out of range again.

“Arf! Arf! Arf!” Red Dog barked happily.

“Chancre Jack,” Farren mused, with relish. “That’s his name, all right.”

They ran a gantlet of bushwhacking rifle fire more or less all afternoon. Someone, afterward no one could remember who, coined a nickname for the hateful new flag:
gearwheel flag
, for the serrated white disk it bore as emblem. It was a good nickname, that could be growled deep in the throat. The last flurry of fire came only ten miles from Changsha itself.

The
San Pablo
anchored in her regular place. There would be no liberty until Lt. Collins came back from the consulate. Changsha was swarming like an anthill. Green uniforms were everywhere along the bund. It was a weekday, but all the treaty business places had national flags flying above the company flags. They were almost lost in the great show of gearwheel flags along the top of the city wall. Changsha was a city of flags.

A huge gearwheel flag floated from the top of the bund hotel. After sunset the hotel blazed with light and rang with music. Crosley turned the long glass on the roof garden and reported that they were all gearwheel officers up there, dancing with Chinese girls. Even some of the girls wore the green uniform. It was very gay and festive. A military band alternated playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”