Uncharted Seas (36 page)

‘How soon will he wake?’ De Brissac inquired.

‘We go see ’um,’ Li Foo replied. ‘Dissa fella give plenty dream dope in his drink, but he sleep long time, ten hour now.’

They went along to Luvia’s cabin and found him still comatose but the Chinaman smiled blandly and produced a small phial from the inner pocket of his blue linen coat.

‘You won’ wake ’um,’ he lisped. ‘Me makeum plentee betteh soon,’ and he dissolved a couple of pellets from the little bottle in half a glass of water.

They opened Luvia’s mouth and forced the drug down his throat. ‘Prap ten minute now,’ said Li Foo, ‘prap half-hour—we see. Dissa veh good for fella wantum wakeup for duty watch.’ My flen givum me, I givum my flen, plentee time.’

‘We’ll have to wait a bit then,’ remarked De Brissac, ‘until he comes round.’

‘But what the hell are we going to do?’ moaned Basil. ‘Unity—Synolda—just think of it, God knows what those swine’ll do to them.’

Deveril placed a hand kindly on his shoulder. ‘You have all my sympathy, sir. I well recall my sufferings the day before yesterday, and all through the night you spent on the island of the giant crabs, when I believed that those fiends had dearest Yonita at their mercy in their Marriage House.’

‘Oh God, I shall go mad!’ Basil exclaimed. ‘What can we do? We must
do
something! We can’t stand here!’

‘I fear that there is little we can do,’ Sir Deveril said sadly.

‘On the contrary,’ De Brissac took him up quickly, ‘we have the balloons of all the blacks who have been killed. There’s a great stack of them by the poop; we’re going after those devils like smoke as soon as poor Luvia comes round.’

Basil’s face suddenly lit up. ‘Bless you for that. I’d forgotten the balloons. For heaven’s sake let’s get going.’

‘Try to be patient for a little,’ De Brissac said softly. ‘Luvia will be as anxious about the girls as you are, and it would not be right or sensible to go without him. We shall need every gun we can get.’

Sir Deveril slowly shook his head. ‘I fear you will only be
throwing your lives away. It is true that they have no firearms, but how can three of you, however brave, hope to overcome such scores of them?’

‘Frankly, I was counting on your help.’ The Frenchman gave him a sharp glance.

‘Gad, yes! I will accompany you willingly if you can devise a plan which shows some prospect of our succouring your ladies, but there’s little sense in throwing our lives away to no purpose. If the four of us land on Satan’s Island, what chance have we against such odds?’

‘This is my plan,’ De Brissac announced. ‘It came to me immediately we found the girls’ cabins were empty. I felt certain they had been carried off. There must be anything from fifteen to twenty freshly filled gas bladders in that great stack on the after-deck of the ship. I see no reason why each of them should not be weighed down so that it floats about ten feet above the weed. You could then tow a whole string of them back to your island carrying the ski-sticks and stilts strapped across your shoulders. If you could take a dozen balloons they would transport eleven of your friends or relatives and yourself across the channel to Satan’s Island. One of you could tow the string back again and so bring over another eleven men. The process could be repeated until we had assembled all your people, who are capable of bearing arms, on the enemy’s shore. Even then we should be nothing like equal in numbers to the blacks, but we have firearms and they have not. If we march on their village in a body and make a surprise attack I think we may succeed in rescuing the women.’

‘Why, stap me!’ exclaimed Sir Deveril, ‘but ’tis a marvellous notion. Our ancestors have suffered for nearly eighty years from the Negro raids. There’s not a man among us who would not welcome the chance of having a cut at these heathens. We would have wiped them out long since had it not been that never before have we captured more than a couple of their balloons at one time.’

‘The plan’s sound enough,’ Basil agreed, ‘but I was looking at a rough sketch map of Satan’s Island this afternoon. The village is miles away—nearly at its other end—and if our attack succeeds we’ve got to get the girls away.’

‘You mean the blacks will surround us and cut us off before we can get back to the shore?’ De Brissac asked.

‘Yes. I’m game, anyhow, but it’s going to be a pretty desperate
business even if Sir Deveril can muster three or four dozen men with guns or rifles.’

‘Is there no way in which we can spread terror among them so that we can get a clear start after our rescue?’ Sir Deveril suggested.

‘
Ciel
! I have it!’ cried De Brissac. ‘My machine-gun! My invention which is packed up down in the hold. With it there are a thousand rounds of ammunition supplied to me to make my quick-firing tests for heat, which I had no time to do before leaving Madagascar. The gun is light, and it will take me no great time to assemble it. If we could transport that to the island we should have a weapon as good as a hundred bayonets with which to spread the terror you speak of.’

Basil started for the doorway. ‘Come on, let’s get it!’

‘Wait!’ called Sir Deveril. ‘None of my people will be able to do aught until I return. Surely the first thing is for me to set forth with these balloons.’

‘You’re right,’ De Brissac agreed quickly. ‘Quick—to the after-deck!’

Working with frantic speed they sorted out the great tangle of gas-filled bladders and found that, including the two which were still strapped to the backs of the dead natives, they had altogether twenty-one, but two of them had been shot through and were useless. De Brissac tethered six of them. The largest was strapped on to Sir Deveril’s back and the remaining twelve were hitched one to another, on to long lengths of line and each weighted down with sacks of potatoes from the store. They were a little uncertain whether Sir Deveril’s weight and that of the potatoes would be sufficient to keep the whole string down, but tried out the arrangement along the length of the ship and after adjusting the contents of some of the sacks found that it worked well enough.

The evening mist was now rising from the weed and they hurried forward their preparations with the utmost speed, but no cloud obscured the sun this evening and the ship had come so much nearer to Yonita’s island in the past two days that there did not seem any risk of Sir Deveril becoming lost on his way ashore as the others had been two nights before.

It was agreed that the machine-gun party should take lanterns with them and place these at a point well up from the weed and above the mist on the shore of Satan’s Island to show Sir Deveril where they were, so that he could land his men without having to hunt a mile of coast to find the advance-guard.

An hour and a half had slipped by since they had reached the
Gafelborg
but by half past six all was ready and Deveril launched himself out on to the weed with the long string of balloons trailing behind him. At first they feared that he would lose his balance owing to the extra buoyancy which the additional balloons gave him, but there was no wind upon the silent sea to carry him off his course, and he soon adjusted his strokes with stilts and ski-sticks to suit the slower motion necessitated by the long chain of bladders.

Directly they had assured themselves that he was progressing safely, Basil and De Brissac hurried back with Li Foo to Luvia’s cabin. He had woken in their absence and was sitting on the edge of his bunk with his head buried in his hands. As they came in he started up and grabbed at a revolver that lay on a shelf at his bunk side, but immediately he realised who it was a look of immeasurable relief spread over his tired face.

They told him, as briefly as possible, what had occurred since he had been knocked out and fallen down the funnel, while he berated himself miserably; cursing at his own folly at having been the cause of all the terrible events which had taken place since they left the ship.

Basil tried to hearten him by saying that Harlem had probably intended to make off to Satan’s Island in any case, but Luvia was difficult to cheer. He felt that Jansen’s death lay at his door and that he would have been in a better case to defend the ship if he had not been suffering from such an appalling hang-over.

While Luvia was dressing, De Brissac and Li Foo went down to the hold to get the machine-gun and ammunition, but Basil remained to learn further particulars of the raid.

Juhani had little to add to Li Foo’s version of the massacre, but in jerky sentences gave an account of events the night of the scrap. He blamed himself entirely for the row with Vicente although it seemed to Basil that Synolda was really the cause of the trouble through having led both men on to such a pitch of jealousy. Luvia could give no explanation of her conduct as he had not seen or spoken to her the following day.

‘I don’t wonder you were sick,’ Basil remarked: ‘she seems to have behaved abominably.’

Luvia looked up suddenly from pulling on a sock. ‘What the dame’s done doesn’t matter two hoots now. She’s right to amuse herself her own way I reckon, and anyhow I was the mug. The thing that’s been biting me ever since I came up for air is what
they’ll do to her tonight. I’d risk my neck to get any dame out of their clutches however much dirt she’d done me.’

‘I know, I know,’ moaned Basil. ‘For God’s sake don’t talk of it. Unity’s there too.’

They fell into a miserable silence until De Brissac and Li Foo joined them. The Frenchman rapidly set about assembling the parts of his gun while Li Foo went down again with Basil into the hold to bring up the ammunition. They all worked with feverish haste but it was a quarter to eight before the gun was assembled, and darkness had fallen by the time they got out on deck again.

There was one balloon left for each of the four men and two over, to which they tethered the heavy cases containing the belts of machine-gun bullets. De Brissac decided to carry the precious gun himself and the others lashed it across his shoulders under the balloon. The two bladders supporting the ammunition were attached by lines to Luvia and Basil, who, with Li Foo, each took two of the six rifles and a knife or cutlass from one of the dead Negroes on the deck. It was pitch dark now except for the bright patch of light made by the two lanterns which Li Foo had strapped to his waist.

De Brissac told the Chinaman to put them out so that any of the savages watching from the island should not be warned of their approach. They had no fear of being lost in the mist and darkness this time as Satan’s Island presented a much longer stretch of coastline than the promontory at the foot of the cross that formed Yonita’s island, and the
Gafelborg
had now drifted to within half a mile of the entrance of the channel that separated the two.

About the ship was all the silence of the night with only an occasional plop to show that some vile creature was stirring in the weed beneath them. After a last look round to see that nothing had been forgotten they left the deck of the
Gafelborg
with its cargo of dead men.

It was half past eight when they landed on Satan’s Island and they had a mile of dark foreshore to cover in rounding the curve of the island until they could reach the beach nearest to the promontory from which Deveril’s people would set off. Keeping as far as possible from the water-line, from fear of giant crabs that might come up out of it, they struggled forward over the rough ground in single file; by nine they had reached the beach where they hoped that Deveril’s force would be able to land.
Scrambling up the slope away from the weed De Brissac chose a promontory well above the mist. They weighed down their balloons and showed a light.

Almost at once an answering flash came from the opposite shore. It went out but then came on again flickering rhythmically.

‘They’re Morsing us,’ exclaimed Luvia. ‘Fancy their knowing Morse.’

‘Nothing strange in that,’ said Basil; ‘all of them are the children or descendants of sailors.’

‘Hi! Give me that lamp.’ Luvia snatched the lantern from Li Foo and pulling off his coat flung it over the steady light so as to obscure it entirely for the moment. By lifting the coat up and down, so as to show the light in long and short intervals, he was able to reply.

Sir Deveril signalled that he had six men with him and that another forty-one men and youths were being fetched from various parts of the island. All would carry firearms although some of these would be of an oldfashioned kind. As soon as enough men arrived to form a first detachment of thirteen he would send them across but as it would probably be the best part of half an hour before the first lot had collected and set off, he did not think they could reach Satan’s Island under the hour.

‘An hour,’ gasped Basil, ‘but just think what may be happening to those girls!’

‘The natives will almost certainly hold a feast of victory and the girls will be all right till then.’ De Brissac tried to comfort him.

‘But it’s nine o’clock already and we’ve got to cross the island.’

‘An’ the balloons’ll have to make seven trips before all four lots of Deveril’s folk get over,’ Luvia added. ‘Holy Mike! I hadn’t thought of that. It’ll be close on two before they’ve all landed.’

‘We can’t possibly wait all that time,’ Basil broke out. ‘I’ll go mad if I stay here.’

De Brissac made a wry grimace. ‘I know what you must feel,
mon vieux
, but what else can we do?’

‘Go ahead without waiting for the rest; spy out the land and try to create some sort of demonstration to keep those devils busy until Deveril’s people come up.’

‘That would be a forlorn hope indeed,’ De Brissac shrugged. ‘We are almost certain to be caught and killed and, in any case,
having the best part of five hours’ start of the main body how could we possibly occupy the natives for so long?’

‘If we can find a good hiding-place near their village we could shoot down into it. That would give them something to think about. If we wait for the rest we won’t get there before daybreak and God knows what will have happened to the girls by then. We must go on—
we must.
’

‘I’m with you,’ Luvia muttered thickly, ‘but how’ll we know the way to go?’