Bindloss Harold
Long Odds

CHAPTER XXI
ON THE BEACH

Desmond was asleep when the men his comrade had left behind came in, but the negroes' sense of hearing was quicker than his, and when he rose drowsily to his feet there was already a bustle in the camp. Ormsgill, who was giving terse directions, turned to him.

"These boys have brought me word that there is a handful of troops in a village a few hours' march away," he said, pointing towards two half-seen men who were talking excitedly to the dusky carriers. "As they know where we are heading for they will probably be upon our trail as soon as the sun is up." He did not seem very much concerned, and when he once more turned to the negroes, Desmond, reassured by his quietness, glanced about him. The fire had died out, and there was no longer any moonlight, but the palms cut with a sharp black distinctness against the eastern sky. It was also a little cooler. Indeed, Desmond shivered, for he was stiff and clammy with the dew. The negroes were hurrying to and fro, apparently getting their loads together, and the seamen were asking each other disjointed questions as they scrambled to their feet. Desmond could see their faces faintly white which he had not been able to do when he went to sleep.

"Well," he said, "I suppose we'll have to make a move of some kind?"

"It would be advisable," said Ormsgill. "Fortunately, it will be daylight in a few minutes. You will start for the coast as soon as you are ready, and take most of the boys I brought down along. It would be wiser to push on as fast as possible, though it's scarcely likely that the troops will come up with you. If they do, you will give the boys up to them, but in that case one of the carriers will slip away and bring me word. Any resistance you could make would be useless and very apt to involve you in serious difficulties."

Desmond smiled dryly, and did not pledge himself. He was not a man who invariably did the most prudent thing.

"You are not coming with us?" he said.

"No," said Ormsgill. "There are six boys not accounted for yet. I am going back inland for them. The troops will, of course, pick up your trail, and they will probably be content with that. It's scarcely likely to occur to them that there might be another."

Desmond exerted all his powers of persuasion during the next minute or two, and it was not his fault if his comrade did not realize that it was a folly he was undertaking. Desmond, at least made a strenuous attempt to impress that point on him, in spite of the fact that it was a folly he would in all probability have been guilty of himself. Ormsgill, however, only smiled.

"As you have pointed out, anything I can do to straighten out things in this country is scarcely worth while," he said. "I'm also willing to admit that it's not exactly my business, and I'm far from sure that the rôle of professional philanthropist is one that fits me. Still, you see, I have undertaken the thing, and I can't very well leave it half done." He stopped a moment, and laughed, a trifle harshly. "Especially as it's scarcely probable that I shall have an opportunity of doing anything of the kind again."

Then he turned to the negroes, and spoke to them for several minutes in scraps of Portuguese and a native tongue. Their villages on the inland plateau had been burned, he said, and there was, so far as he knew, no one he could trust them to in the country. If they stayed in it some white man would in all probability claim them, and they would be sent to toil for a term of years upon the plantations. They knew what that meant.

They certainly appeared to do so by the murmurs that rose from them, and Ormsgill pointed to Desmond. He had pledged himself to set them at liberty, he said, and his friend would take them to a country where negroes were reasonably paid for their services, and, unless they deserved it, very seldom beaten. What was more to the purpose, if they did not like the factory they worked at they could leave it and go to another, which was a thing that appeared incomprehensible to them, until a man with a blue stripe down his forehead stood up and told them it certainly was as Ormsgill had said. He had himself earned as much by twelve months' labor at a white man's factory as would have kept him several years in luxury. Then one of the boys, a thick-lipped, woolly-haired pagan with nothing about him that suggested intelligence or sensibility asked Ormsgill a question in the native tongue, and the latter looked at Desmond.

"He asks if I can give my word that they will not be ill-used in Nigeria, and it's a good deal to assure them of," he said. "Still, I think it could be done. There are outcasts in those factories, men outside the pale, and it's possible that some of them occasionally belabor a nigger with a wooden kernel-shovel, but considering what the negro is accustomed to in this country that is a little thing, and they usually stop at it. After all, it is not men of their kind who practice systematic oppression or grind the toiler down. When I was a ragged outcast it was the men outside the pale who held out their hands to me."

He turned to the negro saying a few words quietly, and there was a low murmuring until one of the boys pointed to Desmond.

"Then," he said, "we are ready to go with him."

Even Desmond could understand all that this implied, and it stirred the hot Celtic blood in him. It was a crucial test of faith, for it seemed that these half-naked bushmen had a confidence in his comrade which no one acquainted with the customs of the country could reasonably have expected of them. They knew how their fellows were driven by men of his color, but in face of that his word that it should not be so with them was, it seemed, sufficient.

"You already understand my wishes, and here are the letters for the two traders in Nigeria," said Ormsgill quietly. "There is nothing more to say."

"There's just this," said Desmond turning towards the Palestrina's men, who had naturally been listening. "If it costs me the yacht to do it I'll see these boys safe into the right hands."

The men from Belfast Lough and Kingston grinned approvingly. They and their leader were, after all, of the same temperament, and one of them carried a sharp-pointed iron bar and others stout ash stretchers which they had, somewhat to their regret, not been called upon to do anything with yet. Desmond, however, walked a little apart with Ormsgill.

"When will you be back?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Ormsgill. "There is a good deal against me just now. In any case, I expect nothing further from you. You have done more than I would have asked of anybody else already."

"Will two months see you through?"

"It may be four, very probably longer."

"Exactly," said Desmond with a little smile. "In the meantime the Palestrina is going to Nigeria. I don't quite know where she'll go after that."

They said very little more until Ormsgill shook hands with him and calling to his carriers marched out of camp. The sun had just lifted itself above a rise to the east, and for awhile Desmond watched the line of dusky men with eyes dazzled by the fierce light, and then turned to give instructions to his seamen. They had already been busy, and in another few minutes they and the boys that had been Lamartine's had started for the coast.

It proved an arduous march, for before the sun had risen its highest it was blotted out by leaden cloud and the wide littoral was wrapped in dimness until the lightning blazed. It ceased in a few minutes, but the men crouched bewildered for another half hour ankle-deep in water while a pitiless blinding deluge thrashed them. Then they went on again dripping, and every league or so were lashed by tremendous rain while mad gusts of wind rioted across the waste in between. The next day there was scorching sunshine, and the men were worn-out, parched, and savage, when at last one of the boys who had served Lamartine, climbing a low elevation, assured his comrades that there were soldiers behind them. He said they would be, at least, an hour in reaching that spot, but there was haste and bustle when the information was conveyed to Desmond. The latter fancied it would be several hours before he made the beach.

He and the white men had occasion to remember the rest of that journey. They strained every aching muscle as they plodded on with the perspiration dripping from them and the baked mire crumbling and slipping beneath their feet while a dingy haze once more crept across the sky and the heat became intolerable. It was dark when they reached the beach, and Desmond gasped with relief when the roar of the Palestrina's whistle rang through the thunder of the surf in answer to a rifle shot. It was evident that she had steam up. He sent two men back to keep watch on the crest of the bluff, and then set about getting the boat down with the rest.

She was big and heavy. The sand was soft, and the rollers instead of running over it bedded themselves in it. The boys from the interior were also of little use at that task, and though the seamen toiled desperately it was almost beyond their accomplishing. The tide was at low ebb, and the sand grew softer as they ran her down a yard at a time, until at last they stopped gasping. Then one of the men came running from the bluff.

"The soldiers are not far away," he said.

Desmond asked him no questions, but turned to the seamen. "We have got to do it, boys," he said. "Shift that after roller under her nose."

They drew breath, and toiled on again. Their progress was not reassuring in view of the fact that the troops were close at hand, but they made a little, and in front of them the spray beyond which lay the Palestrina whirled in a filmy cloud. Every now and then there was a thunderous roar in the midst of it, and part of the beach was hidden in a tumultuous swirl of foam. Gasping, straining, slipping, but grimly silent, they toiled on, moving her a foot with every desperate effort, until at last a yeasty flood surged past them knee-deep, and hove her away from them grinding one bilge in the sand. Then Desmond raised a hoarse voice.

"Hang on to her," he said. "Oh, hang on. Down on her bilge, and let her go when the sea sucks out again."

They went out with her and it amidst a sliding mass of sand, and somehow contrived to hold her when the next sea came in. It broke across her, and some of them went down, but when the seething flood swept on up the beach she was there still, and they went out again waist-deep in the downward swirl of it. Then they were up to the shoulders with a great hissing wall of water close in front of them, and black man and white scrambled in over the gunwale and floundered furiously in the water inside her, groping for oar and paddle. Still, they were perched on the gunwale, and the man with the blue-striped forehead had the big steering oar before the sea fell upon them, and straining every muscle they drove her through the breaking crest of it.

She lurched out, half-full and loaded heavily, to face the next, and Desmond was never certain how she got over it, but at least, he was not washed out of her as he had half expected. He fancied there was a faint shouting on the bluff, but nobody could have been sure of that through the din of the surf, and all his attention was occupied by his paddle. Very slowly, fighting for every fathom, they drove her outshore, until the combers grew less steep and their crests ceased to break, and Desmond gazing seawards could see the Palestrina when she lifted. She swung with the swell, a dim, blurred shape, without a light on board her, but a sharp jarring rattle told him that his instructions were being carried out. Winthrop the mate was already heaving his anchor. That was satisfactory, for Desmond knew that nobody could see the yacht through the spray that floated over bluff and beach.

They were alongside in some twenty minutes with another troublesome task before them. The yacht was rolling heavily, and the big half-swamped boat swung up to her rail one moment and sank down beneath a fathom of streaming side the next. It was a difficult matter to reach her deck, and Lamartine's boys were bushmen who knew nothing of the sea. They crouched in the boat's bottom stupidly until their white companions who found thumps and pushes of no avail seized them by their woolly hair and dragged them to their feet. They were sent up one by one, and when at last the boat was hove in by the banging winch Desmond scrambled with the brine running from him to his bridge. The windlass rattled furiously for another minute or two, and then with a quickening throb of engines the Palestrina swept out into the night. A little while later Winthrop the mate climbed to the bridge, and Desmond laughed when he asked him a few questions.

"I don't think those folks ashore got a sight of the yacht or boat," he said. "It will be morning before they find out where we've gone, and we should be a good many miles to the north by then. I don't suppose they know Ormsgill isn't with us either, and that will probably put them off his trail for a time, at least. In the meanwhile you'll head her out a point or two more to the westwards for another hour, and have me called at daylight. I'm going down to change my clothes."

He had just dressed himself in dry garments when a steward tapped at the door of his room.

"I don't know what's to be done with those niggers, sir," he said. "The men won't have them in the forecastle."

"Ah," said Desmond a trifle sharply, "that's a thing I hadn't thought of, though, of course, it might have struck me. They're on deck still? Bring me a lantern."

The man got one, and Desmond who went out with him held it up when they stood beside the little group of dusky men who sat huddled together upon the sloppy deck. A seaman stood not far away from them, and he turned to Desmond.

"We can't have them down forward with us, sir," he said.

There was a certain deference in his tone, but it was very resolute, and Desmond made a little gesture of comprehension as he glanced at the huddled negroes. Most of them were naked save for a strip of tattered waistcloth, and their thick lips, wooly hair, and heavy faces were revealed in the lantern light. He realized that there was something to be said for the seaman's attitude. They had done what they could for these Africans, and had done it gallantly, but now they were afloat again they would not eat with them or sleep in their vicinity. Color is only skin-deep, a question of climate and surroundings, but Desmond, who admitted that, felt that, after all, there was a wide distinction between himself and the seamen and these aliens. It was one that could not be ignored. The theory of the brotherhood of humanity went so far, and then broke down.

"We have a few strips of pine scantling among the stores," he said, after a moment's thought. "You can screw one or two of them down on deck – but I can't have more than a couple of screws in each. Then if you ranged a bass warp in between it would keep them off the wet. There's an old staysail they can have to sleep in. We could toss it overboard when they have done with it."

He turned away, and, soon after a meal was brought him, went to sleep while the Palestrina sped on as fast as her engines could drive her towards the north. In due time she also crept into one of the many miry waterways which wind through the mangrove forests of Lower Nigeria, and Desmond sent a boat up it with a letter Ormsgill had given him to a certain white trader. An hour or two later a big gaunt man in white duck came back with the boat and drank a good deal of Desmond's wine. Then after asking the latter a few questions he looked at him with a twinkle in his eyes.

"Well," he said, "Ormsgill is rather a friend of mine, and what you have been telling me is certainly the kind of thing one would expect from him. It is by no means what I would do myself, but he always had – curious notions. Most of us have, for that matter, though, perhaps, it's fortunate they're not all the same. Well, I'll be glad to have the boys, especially as it's difficult to get Kroos enough from Liberia just now."

"I think there were certain conditions laid down in Ormsgill's letter," said Desmond reflectively.

The trader laughed. "There were," he said. "Well, I'm willing to admit that I have once or twice pitched a nigger who was a trifle impudent over the veranda rails. It's one of the things you have to do, and if you do it in one way they don't seem to mind. No doubt they understand it's only natural the climate and the fever should make you a trifle hasty. Still, I don't think a Kroo was ever done out of his earnings, or had things thrown at him when he didn't deserve it, in my factory."

Desmond fancied that this was probable, for he liked the man's face. There was rough good-humor in it, and the twinkle in his eyes was reassuring. As a matter of fact, he was, like most of those who followed his occupation in those swamps, one who lived a trifle hard and grimly held his own with a good deal against him. His code of ethics was, perhaps, slightly vague, but there were things he would not stoop to, and though now and then he might in a fit of exasperation hurl anything that was convenient as well as hard words at his boys, they knew that such action was not infrequently followed by a fit of inconsequent generosity. There are men of his kind in those factories whose boys will not leave them even when a rival offers them more gin cases and pieces of cloth for their services. In a moment or two Desmond made up his mind.

"Shall I send the boys ashore with you?" he asked.

"No," said the trader reflectively. "After what you've told me it might be wiser if I ran them up river in the launch to our factory higher up after dark. You see, nobody would worry about where they came from there. In the meantime you had better go up and ask the Consul down to dinner. You needn't mention the boys to him, and it's fortunate that a yacht owner escapes most of the usual formalities. I'll be back with the launch by sunset."

He kept his word, but while he was getting the boys on board his launch just after darkness closed down a little white steamer swept suddenly round a bend, and before the launch was clear two white officers stepped on board the Palestrina. A thick white mist rose from the river, but Desmond was a trifle anxious when one of the officers leaned over the yacht's rail looking down on the launch.

"You seem to have a crowd of boys with you, Brinsley," he said.

The trader stepped back on to the Palestrina's ladder. "I could do with more. Those folks up river are loading me up with oil. Anyway, I'd like a talk with you about that gin duty your clerk has overcharged me."

Then he turned to a man in the launch below. "Go ahead," he said. "You can tell Nevin he must send me that oil down if he works all to-morrow night."

A negro shouted something back to him, and with engines clanking the launch swept away up the misty river, while it was with relief Desmond led Brinsley and his guests into the saloon where dinner was set out.

CHAPTER XXII
UNDER STRESS

When Desmond left him Ormsgill did not march directly east towards the interior, but headed northwards for several days. There were reasons which rendered the detour advisable, especially as he desired to avoid the few scattered villages as much as possible, but he had occasion to regret that he had made it. He pushed on as fast as possible until one hot afternoon when the boys wearied with the march since early morning lay down in the grass, and he wandered listlessly out of camp. Their presence was irksome, and he wanted to be alone just then.

There are times when an unpleasant dejection fastens upon the white man in that climate, and when he is in that state a very little is usually sufficient to exasperate him. The boys were muttering drowsily to one another, and Ormsgill felt he could not lie still and listen to them. He had also a tangible reason for the bitterness he was troubled with. Desmond had brought him no message from Ada Ratcliffe, and though she had as he knew no sympathy with what he was doing and had never shown him very much tenderness, it seemed to him that she might, at least, have sent him a cheering word. It was, in view of what it would cost him to keep faith with her, and that was a thing he resolutely meant to do, a little disconcerting to feel that she did not think of him at all.

In the meanwhile it was oppressively hot, and the air was very still. His muscles seemed slack and powerless, his head ached, and the perspiration dripped from him, but he wandered on until he reached a spot where a little patch of jungle rose amidst a strip of tall grass in the mouth of a shallow ravine. Ormsgill stood still in its shadow and looked about him. Not a leaf shook, and there was not a movement in the stagnant air. In front of him the patch of jungle cut harshly green against the glaring blue of the sky, and beyond it there was sun-baked soil and sand on the slopes of the ravine.

Then there was a flash in the shadow and one of his legs gave away. He staggered and reeled crashing into a thicket, and when a minute later he strove to raise himself out of it one leg felt numb beneath the knee except for the spot where there was a stinging pain. Ormsgill also felt more than a little faint and dizzy, and for a few moments lay still again blinking about him. A wisp of blue smoke still hung about the leaves, and he could hear a low crackling that grew fainter as he listened. It was evident that the man who had shot him was bent on getting away, and he made shift to roll up his thin duck trousers, and looked down at his leg. There was a bluish mark in the middle of the big muscle with a little dark blood about it, and he took out his knife. He set his lips as he felt the point of it grate on something hard, and then closed the knife and sat still again with a little gasp of pain.

There was, he knew, a piece of the broken cooking pot the West African usually loads his flintlock gun with embedded in his leg. That, at least, was evident, but he did not know who had shot him, and, indeed, was never any wiser on that point. It was, perhaps, a negro who had supposed him to be a trader or official against whom he had some grievance, but, after all, that seemed scarcely likely, and Ormsgill fancied it was some dusky sportsman who had fired at a venture when he heard a movement, and had then gone away as fast as possible when he saw that he had hit a white man. This appeared the more probable because they were not very far from the coast, where men do not often attempt each other's life, and Ormsgill had only been struck by one piece of iron.

In any case, the faintness was leaving him by the time the startled boys came up and found him sitting in the shadow. It was evident that the wound was not very serious in itself, but he realized that a man could not expect to travel far in that climate with a piece of iron rankling in his leg. Somebody must cut it out for him, and he did not care to entrust any of his thick-headed carriers with the operation. Without being much of a physiologist he knew that there are arteries in one's leg which it is highly undesirable to sever. He also recognized that while the thing was, perhaps, possible to one with nerve enough, he could not get it out himself, which was, however, rather more than one could reasonably have expected of a man born and brought up in a state of civilization, for there are a few points on which the primitive peoples excel us. Still, the life he had led had made him hard, and when he had quieted the boys he bound up the wound, and filling his pipe with hands that were tolerably steady, lay still awhile to consider.

He could not push on towards the interior as he was, and there were, he believed, one or two doctors in the city, which was not very far away. He was aware that he was liable to be arrested there, but it seemed possible that he might enter it unobserved at night and purchase secrecy from any one who took him in. In such a case he would be the safer because it was about the last spot in which those interested in his capture would expect to come across him, and in a few more minutes he had made up his mind. Though the hammock is not so frequently used as a means of conveyance in that country where the trek-ox is generally available as it is in most other parts of Western Africa, he had provided himself with one.

"Get the hammock slung," he said. "We will go on towards the west when you are ready."

Half an hour later the bearers hove the pole to their woolly crowns, and plodded on again. They were not men of any great intelligence, and were usually content to do what they were told without asking questions, which was a custom that had its advantages. They had also an unreasoning and half-instinctive confidence in the man who led them, and in due time they plodded into sight of the town one night when the muggy land breeze was blowing. Like other West African towns, the place straggles up and back from the seaboard bluff, with wide spaces between the houses, and nobody seemed stirring when Ormsgill's boys marched into the outskirts of it. Remembering what the priest of San Thome had told him of the man whose wife he had sent the girl Anita to, he presently bade them stop outside the building which stood well apart from the rest. Some of them were roofed with corrugated iron, and some with picturesque tiles, but the top of this one was flat, which Ormsgill was pleased to see. He recognized that it was built in the older Iberian style which is not uncommon in Western Africa and ensures the inmates privacy. There are no outbuildings where this plan is adopted. The house stands four-square and self-contained, presenting an almost unbroken wall to the outer world, though there is usually an open patio in the midst of it. One of the boys rapped upon a door, and when it was opened by a negro his comrades unceremoniously marched down an arched passage under the building until they reached the enclosed patio. Ormsgill had impressed them with the fact that the most important thing was to get in.

Then lights appeared at one or two windows, and when a little, olive-faced gentleman in white linen with a broad sash about his waist came down the stairway from a veranda Ormsgill raised himself in the lowered hammock.

"You will forgive this intrusion, Señor," he said.

The other man made him a little formal salutation. "I," he said dryly, "await an explanation."

Ormsgill offered him one, and the little gentleman looked at him thoughtfully for a moment or two.

"I have heard of you – from the fathers up yonder who are friends of mine," he said. "Perhaps it is my duty to inform the Authorities that you are here, but in the meanwhile that is a point on which I am not quite certain. You can, at least, consider this house as yours until we talk the matter over. The boys may sleep in the patio to-night, but they will first carry you in."

They did it at Ormsgill's bidding, and left him sitting in a basket chair in a big, cool room, after which his host brought in a few cigars and a flask of wine.

"They are at your service, señor," he said. "I would suggest that you give me a little more information. I am one who can, at least, now and then respect a confidence."

Ormsgill looked at him steadily, and made up his mind. It was clear that if his host meant to hand him over to the Authorities there was nothing to prevent him doing so, and reticence did not appear likely to serve any purpose, since he was wholly in his hands. He spoke for a few minutes, and the other nodded.

"I think it was wise of you to tell me this," he said. "There are, I may mention, others besides myself who desire to see certain changes made in our administration, and they would, I think, sympathize with you. Some of them are gentlemen of influence, but we have confidence in Dom Clemente and another man of greater importance – and we are waiting. To proceed, I think it would not be difficult to keep you here awhile without anyone we would not wish to know becoming aware of it. The thing is made easier by the fact that my wife and the girl Anita are away, and my sister, who is very deaf and does not like society, rules the household. Now if it is permissible I will examine your leg."

He did so, and looked a trifle grave after it. "I know a little of these matters, and it is advisable that this should be seen to," he said. "Now the Portuguese doctor is not exactly a friend of mine, and might ask questions as to how you got hurt and where you came from, but there is a half-breed who I think is clever, and he would probably refrain from mentioning anything that appeared unusual if he is remunerated sufficiently. It is" – and he made a little expressive gesture, "a thing he is accustomed to doing."

Ormsgill suggested that the man should be sent for early next morning, and went to sleep an hour later in greater comfort than he had enjoyed for a considerable time. He did not, however, sleep soundly, and was awake when the half-breed doctor came into his room next morning. The latter set to work and managed to extract the piece of iron, but before nightfall the fever which had left him alone of late had Ormsgill in its grip. It shook him severely during several days, and then, as sometimes happens, left him suddenly, limp and nerveless in mind and body. He was content to lie still and wait almost unconcernedly. Nothing seemed to matter, and he felt that effort of any kind was futile.

He lay one morning in this frame of mind when there were footsteps on the veranda outside his door, and he heard a voice that sounded curiously familiar. Then the door opened, and Benicia Figuera who came into the room started when she saw him. Ormsgill, however, betrayed no astonishment. He was too languid, and he lay still gravely watching her. The sunlight that streamed in through the open door fell full upon her, gleaming on her trailing white draperies and forcing up bronze lights in her dusky hair. He did not see the faint tinge of color that crept into the ivory of her cheek, but he vaguely noticed the pity shining in her eyes. She seemed to him refreshingly cool and reposeful.