Bindloss Harold
For Jacinta
CHAPTER XXIV
AUSTIN FINDS A CLUE
The grey light was growing clearer, and the mangroves taking shape among the fleecy mist, when Austin stood looking down upon the creek in the heavy, windless morning. There was no brightness in the dingy sky, which hung low above the mastheads, but the water gleamed curiously, and no longer lapped along the steamer's rusty plates. It lay still beneath her hove-up bilge, giving up a hot, sour smell, and Jefferson, who came out of the skipper's room, touched Austin as he gazed at it.
"The stream should have been setting down by now. Something's backing up the ebb," he said. "A shift of wind along the shore, most likely. The rain's coming!"
Austin glanced up at the lowering heavens, but there was no change in their uniform greyness, and no drift of cloud. The smoke of the locomotive boiler went straight up, and the mist hung motionless among the trees ashore. Still, there was something oppressive and portentous in the stillness, and his skin was tingling.
"If it doesn't come soon we'll not have a man left," he said. "It isn't in flesh and blood to stand this much longer."
"Then," said Jefferson drily, "the sooner we get to work the better. There's a good deal to do, and you're not going to feel it quite so much once you get hold of the spanner."
The pump had just stopped, and Tom came towards them, rubbing his greasy hands with a cotton rag, as they moved in the direction of the engine room. The lower part of it was dripping when they went down, and a foot or two of water still lay upon the floor-plates where they met the depressed side, but it was evident that another hour's work of the big pump would leave the place almost dry. Austin sat down on a tool-locker lid, with Jefferson standing beside him, but Tom floundered away towards the stoke-hold, and they could hear him splashing in the water. When he reappeared with a blinking lamp he crawled up the slippery ladder as though working out a clue, while it was several minutes before he came back and leaned against a column opposite Jefferson with the look of a man who had not found quite what he had expected.
"Sea-cocks shut!" he said. "Ballast tank full-way cock is screwed up, too. Of course, they could have closed that with the overhead screw-gear. You'll remember that manhole cover was off the forward section."
Jefferson glanced at Austin, though it was Tom he spoke to. "Did you expect to find them open?"
"Well," said the donkey-man, "to be quite straight, I did."
"I wonder why?"
Tom glanced at him with a little suggestive grin. "She has two plates started, but with the boiler blowing away half her steam we haven't very hard work to run all that came in that way down, and her bilge pump would have kept her clear. What I want to know is, what all that water was doing in her?"
"Ah," said Jefferson, "you must ask another. I guess nobody's going to find the full answer to that conundrum. There are only two or three men who could have told us, and we're not going to have an opportunity of worrying them about it, unless we get the fever, too."
"Well," said Tom, "the mill's looking good, but it's about time we made a start on her and got the cylinder covers off and hove the pistons up. It's quite likely we'll want to spring new rings on them. There should be some of the spanners in that locker, Mr. Austin."
Austin rose and lifted the lid, while Tom held the lamp, but the first thing he saw was a sodden book. He drew it out, dripping, and opened it; but while a good many of the pulpy pages had fallen out, there were enough left to show that it was one of the little tables of strengths and weight of materials an engineer often carries about with him. There was a rather wide margin round the tabulated figures, and as he vacantly pulled out one of the wet pages he noticed a little close pencil writing upon a part of it.
"Hold that light nearer, Tom. Here's something that looks interesting," he said. "'Buried Jackson this morning – memo hand his share over to Mary Nichol.'"
He signed Tom to move the light again. "There follows an obliterated address, and the words, 'scarcely think she'll ever get it. My left arm's almost rotten now.'"
He stopped again a moment, and his face had grown hard when he went on: "You see, the thing – is – contagious, and that devil Funnel-paint, or somebody, has played the same trick before. I wonder if the man who wrote this looked quite as bad as the nigger did."
"Hold on!" said Jefferson sharply. "I guess none of us have any use for that kind of talking, and you swilled yourself with permanganate, any way."
"The result will probably be the same, whether one thinks of it or not. You will, however, notice that the man's name was Jackson, and the woman's Mary Nicol."
It was evident that this was a forced attempt to break away from the subject, and though Tom grinned, it was in a sickly fashion.
"That's no how astonishing. She was the last," he said. "Hadn't you better turn over, and see if there's any more of it?"
Austin contrived to lift another of the pulpy pages, and once more the close writing appeared, but it was difficult to make out, and their faces were close together when Tom lowered the lamp. They showed curiously grave, as well as hollow, in the smoky light, for there was reason for believing that the man who had made those notes was dead, and it was clear that the horrible thing which had stricken him might also come upon them.
"The last of the bags buried this afternoon," Austin read. "Watson took a new bearing. W. half N. to the cottonwood, with twist of creek in line. Forty paces – he made it thirty-nine. Graham says one packet left in the old place where the niggers got scent of it, and the quills on the second islet; memo, it makes £50 to me."
He dropped the book, and Tom came near letting go the lamp, while for a moment or two afterwards they stared at one another. Austin was quivering a little, but Jefferson made a restraining gesture as he laid a hand upon his shoulder.
"Steady! I guess we've got the clue," he said. "There are two islets two or three leagues back down the creek. You passed them coming up. Still, what do they put up in quills?"
"Gold-dust! The niggers bring it down from the Western Soudan, and I believe they're ostrich quills. One of the trader fellows told me a good deal about them over a dinner at the Metropole. A bushman had once stuck him with a lot of brass filings. Are you going down to look for them?"
Jefferson, it was evident from his face, laid a strong restraint upon himself.
"No," he said, with curious quietness. "Funnel-paint knows nothing about these islets yet, or he wouldn't have come to you, and it's my first business to heave this steamer off. To do it we'll want her engines, and there's a heavy job in front of us before we start them. The rains won't wait for any man."
He broke off, for a glare of blue light fell through the open frames above and flooded the engine room. It flickered on rusty columns and dripping, discoloured steel, and vanished, leaving grey shadow behind it, amidst which the smoky lamplight showed feeble and pale. Then there was a crash that left them dazed and deafened, and in another moment was followed by a dull crescendo roar, while a splashing trickle ran down into the engine room. The glass frames quivered under the deluge, and one could almost have fancied that the heavens had opened. Jefferson whirled round and gripped the donkey-man's arm, shaking him as he stood blinking about him in a bewildered fashion.
"If you tell any of the rest what you have heard, I'll fling you into the creek! And now up with you, and bring every man who is fit to work. There's no time to lose," he said.
Tom made for the ladder, and Austin, who went with him, carrying the book, was drenched before he reached the skipper's room. The air was filled with falling water that came down in rods, and blotted out the mangroves a dozen yards away. Steam rose from the sluicing deck, the creek boiled beneath the deluge, but there was no longer any trace of the insufferable tension, and he stood a moment or two relaxing under the rush of lukewarm water that beat his thin clothing flat against his skin. Then he splashed forward to the forecastle, where Tom had little difficulty in rousing the men. They crawled out, gaunt and haggard, in filthy rags, some of them apparently scarcely fit to stand, for the rain had come, and every inch the water rose would bring them so much nearer home. There was no need to urge them when they floundered into the engine room, and hour after hour they strained and sweated on big spanner and chain-tackle willingly, while the big cylinder-heads and pistons were hauled up to the beams. The one thought which animated them was that the engines would be wanted soon.
It mattered little that platform-grating and slippery floor-plates slanted sharply under them, and each ponderous mass they loosened must be held in with guy and preventer lest it should swing wildly into vertical equilibrium. That was only one more difficulty, and they had already beaten down so many. So day after day they worked on sloping platforms, slipping with naked feet, and only grinned when Tom flung foul epithets, and now and then a hammer, at one of them. Much of what he said was incomprehensible, and, in any case, he was lord supreme of the machinery; and Bill, whose speech was also vitriolic, acted as his working deputy. The latter had served as greaser in another steamer, and for the time being even Jefferson deferred to him.
They stripped her until the big cylinders stood naked on their columns, and the engine room resembled the erecting shop of a foundry, and then the work grew harder when the reassembling began. Since the skeleton engines slanted, nothing would hang or lower as they wanted it, and they toiled with wedge and lever in semi-darkness by the blinking gleam of lamps, while the rain that shut the light out roared upon the shut-down frames above. It was very hot down in the engine room, and when a small forge was lighted to expand joints they could not spring apart, and to burn off saponified grease, men with less at stake would probably have fancied themselves suffocated. Still, each massive piece was cleaned and polished, keyed home, or bolted fast, and, when the hardest work was over, the slope of the platforms lessened little by little as the Cumbria rose upright. It was evident to all of them that the water was rising in the creek.
In a month her deck was almost leveled, but the muddy flood that gurgled about her still lay beneath her corroded water line, and Jefferson seized the opportunity of laying out an anchor to heave on before the stream ran too strong. The launch's boiler had given out, and they lashed her to the surfboat, with the hatch covers as a bracing between, but they spent an afternoon over it before Jefferson was satisfied, and the thick, steamy night was closing in when they warped the double craft under the Cumbria's forecastle. It rose above them blackly, with a blaze of flickering radiance over it where the blast-lamp hurled a shaft of fire upwards into the rain. Floundering figures cut against the uncertain brilliancy, voices came down muffled through the deluge, and there was a creaking and groaning as the ponderous stream anchor swung out overhead.
Austin stood, half naked, on the platform between launch and surfboat, with the water sluicing from him, and though he had toiled since early dawn, he was sensible only of a feverish impatience, and no weariness at all. He had had enough of the dark land, and what they were about to do was to ensure a start on the journey that would take them out of it. It grew rapidly darker, the long hull faded, and the flare of the lamp alone cut, a sheet of orange and saffron, against the blackness above them. Jefferson's voice fell through it sharply.
"Stand by!" he said. "We'll ease her down!"
There was a fresh groaning and creaking. Something big and shadowy that racked the complaining chain descended towards them, and then there was a scuffle and a shout on the deck above. Austin heard the rattle of running chain and a hoarse cry.
"Jump on it!" Jefferson's voice ran out, fierce with alarm. "Nip the slack around the bollard. Hang on! Oh, hang on, until he gets a turn!"
Feet shuffled about the light, there was stertorous gasping, another cry, and a scream, and again Jefferson's voice broke through the confused sounds:
"Stand from under – for your life!" it said.
The warning was unnecessary, for the Canarios were already crouching forward in the surfboats bottom, and as Austin sprang in among them there was a whirr and a crash. The craft swayed beneath him; he could feel her dipping in the flood, but she rose with a staggering lurch, slanted slightly, and held down by something huge and heavy.
"Are you still on top there?" Jefferson asked.
"We seem to be," said Austin. "Something's gone, but it's too dark to see. How d'you come to let her go with a run?"
"Wall-eye let her surge too soon," said Jefferson. "He was getting an extra turn on, and nipped his hand in. She has 'most wrung it off him. Handspike your anchor where you can tilt her clear before we slack cable."
They contrived to do it somehow, with the flare that was lowered from the cat-davit dropping blazing oil about them, and then coiled down a length of the ponderous cable. One of the twin craft was tilted to the water's edge now, and still the massive iron links came clanking down. Then, as the last fell with a crash, Jefferson leaned out over the rails above.
"Bend the wire on below the break. You'll want a clear link for the shackle when we couple her up," he said. "Hang on to your anchor until you're in the mangroves on the other bank. We want to heave towards deep water out in the stream."
More barefooted men came swinging down the hanging wire, and they slid away into the blackness, bumping against the steamer's plates. The twin craft were top-heavy, and lurched in the grip of the stream. It was a minute or two before they had cleared the Cumbria, and by then they were almost under her quarter; while when they had crept away from her a fathom or two all of them knew there was a task in front of them that would severely tax all their strength.
They had the uncoiling wire rope to drag them back into line, the stream swept them down a fathom for every one they made ahead, and, as ill luck would have it, bore upon the launch's pressed down side so that they could hear the water gurgling into her in ever faster swirl. Still, they had to reach the opposite bank, or be hauled back to commence the task again, and, gasping and panting, they heaved on the wet rope that led into the rain ahead. Most of them were used to work of that kind, but during the first five minutes Austin felt his arms grow weary and nerveless, and the veins distend on his forehead, while a curious singing commenced in his ears. He choked with every fresh grasp he laid upon the rope, and a Canario behind him gasped out breathless snatches of Castilian obscenity.
Still, in spite of all they could do, the blaze of red light leaping in the rain showed that they were making nothing, and now and then the rope ran out again through their clinging hands. There was no sign of the mangroves on the opposite bank, while the tilt of the platform grew steeper, and it was evident that the launch was filling under them. Then, little by little, the wire rope that ran out into the darkness astern commenced to curve – they could hear the swirl of the stream across it – and after another five minutes' tense effort they swung into a slacker flow or reflex eddy. There was, however, no slackening of the strain, and it was not until a dim, black wall rose up above them that Austin loosed his grasp upon the rope, and, floundering and stumbling in the rain and darkness, they strove to clear the anchor.
It went over with a mighty splash, the platform rose with a jerk under them; then, as they backed clear, there was a rattle of cable, and they seized the wire. The lashed craft swung like a pendulum athwart the stream, the rattling winch hauled them back fathom by fathom to the Cumbria, while, when he had crawled on board her, Austin dropped limply, and a trifle grey in face, on to the settee in the skipper's room.
"Well," he said, "that's done, though I think a little more of it would have made an end of me. It is rather an astonishing thing, but while I felt fiercely anxious to get that anchor out before we started, it hardly seems worth the trouble now."
"We couldn't heave her off without it," said Jefferson. "That means going home – eventually."
"I suppose it does," said Austin, with a little mirthless smile. "Still, I haven't any home, you see, and I'm not sure that a lazar hospital of some kind isn't what is awaiting me. You will remember the encouraging words that fellow left – 'My arm's almost rotten now.'"
Jefferson slowly clenched one scarred hand. "That's a thing we are neither of us strong enough to think about. It's a little too horrible – it couldn't happen!"
"It's scarcely likely in your case, at least. He didn't put his arm round you, and I had nothing worth mentioning on that night. Men do die rotten, and I fancied once or twice I felt a suggestive tingling in my skin."
Jefferson seemed to be holding himself in hand with a struggle, but Austin smiled.
"Well," he said, "if it comes at all, it will get the right one. I'm not going home to be married. In fact, I was told that it would be rather a graceful thing to come back upon my shield, though I don't know that I would like to do so looking as that nigger did. In the meanwhile, I had, perhaps, better see to Wall-eye's hand."
He went out into the darkness, and Jefferson stood still, with his lips set tight, leaning on the table. He was, in some respects, a hard man, and his sojourn in Africa had not roused his gentler qualities, but just then he felt an unpleasant physical nausea creeping over him again.
CHAPTER XXV
HOVE OFF
The rain came down in sheets, and the mangrove roots were hidden by the yellow flood, when Jefferson stood, dripping, on the Cumbria's bridge. Her iron deck was level, the stumpy pole masts ran upright into the drifting mist, and a column of black smoke floated sluggishly from her rusty funnel. Dingy vapour also rose from the slender one of the locomotive boiler, and cables – hemp and wire and chain – stretched between the mangroves and the steamer's bow and stern. Jefferson, leaning heavily on the bridge rails, considered them each in turn. He shivered a little, though the rain was warm, and his wet face looked unusually gaunt and worn; but his eyes were intent and steady, for at last all was ready for the supreme effort of heaving the Cumbria off.
He looked down when Austin stopped at the foot of the ladder. His face and hands were black, and the thin singlet, which was all he wore above his duck trousers, seemed glued to him.
"Hadn't you better keep inside the wheelhouse until we start the mill?" he said.
Jefferson smiled drily. "Do you think you could? What are you wandering up and down the deck for?"
"I'm not. I've been firing the locomotive boiler, and spent the last twenty minutes in the forecastle. It isn't as dry as it should be there."
He spoke lightly, though there was a suggestion of tension in his voice, and it was evident that both of them were anxious. Indeed, Jefferson fancied that his comrade found it difficult to stand still at all.
"Well?" he said.
"There are a third of them I daren't turn out, and two or three of the others who are down with Tom look a good deal shakier than I care about. Still, you see, I couldn't keep them in. They've had about enough of this country, and I don't blame them. You can figure on about half of us as reasonably effective, but what everybody wants to know is, when we are to begin."
"When you can give me eighty pounds of steam. Then we'll shake her up for an hour or two with reversed propeller, and heave on everything when you get up to the hundred. Still, although we have blown a good deal of the mud out forward, I expect she'll want another fifty before she'll move."
Austin glanced at the gap in the forest beneath the bows, across which the shattered mangroves were strewn. He and Jefferson had gone over all this before, but since he had stopped by the ladder they must talk of something, for silence would have been intolerable just then.
"I'll go down and stir them up, though I'm not sure that they need it," he said.
He disappeared round the deck-house, and now there was nobody to see him, Jefferson paced feverishly up and down the bridge, until Wall-eye, the steward, came pattering barefoot along the deck, with his arm in a sling. Jefferson stopped him with a sign.
"Slip into Mr. Austin's room, and bring me the thermometer he keeps in the little case," he said. "As usual, no comprenny? Casetta de cuero, very chiquitita."
The man went away, and when he came back Jefferson, who went into the wheelhouse, sucked the little clinical thermometer gravely for a minute or two. Then he frowned as he looked at it.
"Ninety-nine, point something. I guess it's coming on again," he said. "Well, one can go on working when it's a good deal more than that, especially when he has to."
He came out, and, leaning down, dropped the case into the hands of the man below.
"Put it back, and don't let Mr. Austin know," he said. "Señor Austin no savvy, you comprenny?"
Wall-eye grinned as he went away. He could, of course, hold his tongue, but the little case was sodden already, and it could not have got so wet as that in Austin's room.
In the meanwhile Austin had gone down to the stoke-hold. The place was dimly lighted, and insufferably hot, for, with the Cumbria stationary, no more air came down the ventilator shafts than the fires would draw, and they were burning sulkily. In fact, it was only by strenuous labour that steam could be raised at all. Here and there the pale flicker of an oil lamp emphasised the gloom, though there were three half-moon patches of brightness in each of the two boilers, until a fierce red glow beat out as Tom, the donkey-man, flung open a furnace door. Then Austin gained some impression of his surroundings.
The bent figures of half naked men with shovels were forced out of the shadows. Another man, dripping with perspiration, pushed a clattering truck, and several more lay, apparently inert, upon the floor-plates, with water thick with coal grime trickling from them. Only two of them were professional firemen, and all were weakened by the climate or shaken by the fever, while as the red light touched them, Austin could see how worn they were, and the suggestive hollows in their uncovered skin. There are also things which it is unfit that a white man should do, and firing in a calm in the tropics is one of them. Austin, however, had little time to look about him in, for Tom thrust an iron bar into one of the Spaniards's hands.
"Stand by with the bucket, you. Now, out with the clinker!" he said.
It is probable that the last man addressed did not understand what was said, but he knew how to clean a fire, and stood, half crouching, before the furnace, with face averted, while he plied the bar. There was a rattling beneath the grate-bars and an overpowering wave of heat, in the midst of which the man stood bowed, with thin garments scorching and his hair frizzling visibly. Austin could hear his gasping breath, and became possessed by a sense of futile indignation. Toil of that kind was, he felt, more than could be expected of anything made in the image of a man. Then the Canario let the bar fall clanging, and seized another, while the heat grew more intense when he raked out the ash and glowing clinker from the flaming tunnel. Austin shrank back with a hand upon his eyes and singlet singeing, and his voice broke through Tom's cry of "Damp her down!"
"Por misericordia," he said, "echadle agua!"
Somebody swung a bucket, and a cloud of steam whirled up; but the man who had cleaned the fire let his scraper fall, and lurching with a half strangled cry, went down amidst the vapour. He lay with scorched chest and arms on the floor-plates, making little stertorous noises, until Tom, who tore the bucket from his comrade's hands, flung the rest of its contents over him.
"Drag him away!" he said, and turned to Austin. "He's the second one, but he'll come round by and by. Did you come down to look on or give us a hand?"
He flung open another door, and Austin took a shovel from a weary man. He had studied the art of firing up on deck, where it was considerably cooler, before the locomotive boiler, but he discovered that the work now demanded from him was an entirely different matter. The heat was overpowering, the bed of glowing fuel long, and it was only by the uttermost swing of shoulders and wrench of back and loins that he could effectively distribute his shovelful. He felt his lowered face scorching, and the sweat of effort dripped from him, but he toiled on in Berserker fury while Tom encouraged him.
"Spread it!" he said. "Next lot well down to the back end. You needn't be afraid to move yourself. Keep her thin!"
Austin wondered whether he had any eyebrows left when that furnace was filled, but it was done at last, and then there was coal to be trimmed from the bunkers. The dust that whirled about the shovels blackened and choked him, but he worked on savagely. Every man was needed, with half the Spaniards sick, and he felt that if this was the cost of success it was not fitting that he should shirk his part in it. Social distinctions counted for nothing there; the barriers of creed and nationality had also melted. They were all privates in that forlorn hope, with death as the penalty of failure, and while they could not be more, none of them that day dared be less, than men.
He never remembered all he did. There was a constant clanging of shovels, whirring of coal trucks, and slamming of iron doors that opened to let out fiery heat and radiance and take the flying fuel in. Men came and went like phantoms, gasping, panting, groaning now and then, and the voice of their leader rose stridently at intervals. He was a man of low degree, and his commands were not characterised by any particular delicacy, but he was the man they needed, and when he emphasised his instructions with a grimy hand, and now and then the flat of the shovel, nobody resented it. During one brief interlude he found breath for a deprecatory word or two with Austin.
"If she was doing her eight or ten knots it wouldn't be as hard as this," he said. "Then the ventilators would cool her down. The fires won't burn themselves now – you have got to make them; but you'll find her steam sweet and easy when she's going up the trades head to breeze."
"I wonder," said Austin grimly, "how many of us will be left when she gets there."
Then Bill, who had been busy at the locomotive boiler, came down the ladder with a message, and he and Tom vanished into the engine room, while Austin, who greatly desired to go with them, put a restraint upon himself. For some minutes he felt his heart beat as he listened to a premonitory wheezing and panting, and then his blood seemed to tingle as this merged into the steady rumble of engines. The faint quiver of the floor-plates sent a thrill through him, and he drew in a great breath of relief when beam and angle commenced to tremble. The rumbling grew steadily louder, the whirl of the reversed propeller shook the ship, and it was evident that the engines were running well.
After that, however, the work became harder still, for the big cylinders must be fed, and it was with a sensation of thankfulness that he had not broken down beneath the strain Austin dragged himself up the ladder when a message was brought him that he was wanted to drive the after winch. It was raining heavily, but he found it a relief to feel the deluge beat upon his beaded face and scorched skin, though he could scarcely see the mangroves to which the wire that ran from the winch drum led. It was shackled to a big bridle, a loop of twisted steel that wound in and out among a rood or two of the stoutest trees. The winch was also powerful, and it remained to be seen whether it would heave the Cumbria out of her miry bed, or pull that portion of the watery forest up bodily. A great cable that slanted back towards him rose out of the water forward in a curve, and he could dimly see Jefferson's lean figure outlined against the drifting mist high up on the bridge. On the forecastle beyond it more shadowy men stood still, and Austin wondered whether their hearts beat as his did while they waited. The man beside him stooped ready, with body bent in a rigid curve, and bare, stiffened arms, clenching the wire that led to the winch-drum. There was a minute's waiting, and then Jefferson, moving along the bridge, flung up a hand.
"Heave!" he said.
Austin felt his pulses quicken and a curious sense of exultation as he unscrewed the valve, for it seemed to him that flesh and blood had borne the strain too long, and now they had steel and steam to fight for them. The deck beneath him quivered as the screw whirled faster, and he could see the poop shaking visibly. Then the winch wheezed and pounded, and there was a groaning forward as the rattle of the windlass joined in. Wire and hemp and studded chain rose ripping from the river, creaked and groaned and strained, but when they had drawn each curve out they could get no inch of slack in. Austin clenched his fingers on the valve-wheel, but his eyes were fixed on the lonely figure pacing feverishly up and down the bridge, and just then he felt all the bitterness of defeat. The rattle forward died away, and though the winch still whirred and hammered, none of the wire rope ran over the drum into the crouching Spaniard's hands. The tension lasted for some minutes, and then Jefferson's voice came down harshly through the rain.
