Captain Caution (22 page)

Marvin walked to the chalk mark in the center of the ring. He stood there alone. In the opposite corner lay Little White. Marvin, watching him, saw one black eyelid flutter. The marine pulled at the negro's arm. He just lay there.

On the quarter-deck a woman screamed; and as if the scream had been a signal, the hulk became a bedlam of cursing, uproarious prisoners.

Newton, uttering unintelligible sounds, clambered through the ropes to throw his arms around Marvin's neck. Argandeau, tears streaming down his cheeks, embraced them both. "We winl" he blubbered. "Ah, my Godl My Godl I am exciter I choker I diel We winl We winl"

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Above them Stannage shook his fist at the prostrate form of Little White. "I've been soldl" he cried in his girlish voice. He leaned over the rail to point an accusing finger at Marvin. "You had no right to winl There was something wrong with it, but I don't know whatl You don't deserve your twenty guineas, and I've a mind not to give them to your" He stared about him indecisively, as if to seek support. Finding none, he fumbled in his pocket, tied some coins in a handkerchief and tossed them petulantly to Marvin; then turned suddenly to Osmore.

"Here," he said. "Where's my dog? I've been wanting to ask you all through the fight. Look at thatI" He held up the empty strap and dangled it in Osmore's face.

Osmore stared at it blankly. "Your dog?" he asked. "Your dog is gone? When did you see him last?"

"After dinner," Stannage said. "One of the ladies was feeding him a sweet."

"What? You were foolish enough to let that dog run loose on this shipl" Osmore cried aghast. "I told you a week ago we had more than a dozen of these men sick from eating ratsl"

Captain Stannage turned pallidly toward his six fair friends, whose sympathetically dismal exclamations pierced the air, yet went all unheard, lost under the thunder of cheering from the ragged deck below.

xx

A~rnouGn an early afternoon sun slanted through the heavily barred ports of the lower battery, the entire deck was a turmoil of sound, and the noisiest portion of that cavernous place was the corner in which Newton's hammock hung at night. In that corner was a school of fencing in which three pairs of fencers lunged and panted, their blades rasping and their clumsy shoes a-clatter. In that corner, too, between the fencers and the ports, a dozen men from Jittery and Portsmouth worked with files and saws, fashioning tiny planks from soup bones. As they worked, they argued; and their arguments were deafening.

Behind this human screen four men were stretched upon the deck, close to the planking of the vessel's side. Sweat dripped from their foreheads and cut furrows through the grime that smeared their cheeks. Their breathing was labored and their work unceasing.

One, an Indian, drew a small bow backward and forward. The string of the bow was looped around a drill, a small drill made from a broken fencing foil.

Marvin, beside the Indian, held this rude tool tight against the side of the prison ship, pressed there by the bottom of a bottle. The bowstring, moving rapidly, turned the drill, so that it bit slowly into the oak.

Argandeau, strangely cramped, toiled with a saw made from a barrel hoop, joining the holes already drilled. The handle of the saw was a ball of rags; and the hand with which the Frenchman clutched it was bloody.

Between and beneath these three moved Newton, filling holes and cuttings with a mixture of grease and oak dust.

At two o'clock that night a bitter wind slapped the salt waves of Gillingham Reach against the bends of the Crown Prince hulk. The hulk strained at her moorings and rolled a little, as if uneasy with the stirrings of the miserable freight within her. A shivering sentry paced the narrow gallery three feet above the water. He came reluctantly from behind the shelter of the stern, peered with moist eyes at the distant lights of Gillingham, bawled a hoarse "All's welll";

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then vanished silently, seeking the protection of the hulks high galleries.

Out from the blackness of the misshapen vessel there sprouted a splotch of paleness a splotch that lengthened into the naked figure of a man; a figure smeared with grease and humpbacked with a bundle lashed high on its shoulders. Almost like a wisp of windblown fog, it wavered outward from the hulk and disappeared. Three other figures followed, wraithlike, to plunge without a sound into the dark river. The sentry reappeared, snuffling. He peered quickly at the inky water and the bulging sides of the hulk. "All's welll" he droned, his voice trembling with the cold; then, huddled turtle-like in his greatcoat, he shuffled hastily sternward to escape the wind's shrewd blast.

The frigid chop of the Medway stung the faces of the four swimmers. The swift current wrenched at their legs and pressed like violent icy hands against their chests. Close together, they swam onward into the endless blackness that stretched before them and weighed them down. White gouts of foam rose angrily to leap at their twisted mouths.

A wave washed over Newton's head. His arms thrashed and the quick current bore him upstream. He cried a strangled cry, and choked. Marvin's voice was close beside him a strained and harried voice: "Easy ... almost there ... almost.... Easyl" Newton groaned and moved forward slowly, half in the shelter of Marvin's great body.

The piercing wind flagged and lulled, leaped at them half- heartedly and lulled again. The angry chop lessened and slapped less fiercely at their numb lips. The water stilled; the current slackened almost drew them shoreward. Marvin stood upright, caught at Newton and held him. He hung limp in Marvin's arms, coughed weakly and gagged. A smell of cold decay hung over them. There was a faint splashing near at hand. Half swimming and half crawling, Argandeau came up to them, with Steven close behind. In Marvin's arms, Newton groaned and coughed again. The other three stared, panting, at the dim and noisome mud.

Newton stood upright at last, swaying and shuddering in the shallows. Marvin eyed him, then turned from him abruptly and made for the shore. At the water's edge he sank knee-deep in ooze. Gripped by it, he lurched from side to side in a slow and clumsy caper. Laboriously he withdrew one foot and then the other; and with the effort there was a sound of sucking and the issuing of a

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stench, dank and horrible. He lost his balance, pitching forward against the foul grey slope. His arms, thrust downward for support, disappeared; and when he struggled to his feet, the arms were black with slime. His face was black, and his body as well. He threw himself flat on the bank and wallowed forward, spiderlike. Huddled on the slope, he gasped an order to Argandeau, who laid hold of Newton and hurled him roughly upward. Marvin reached backward, caught Newton by the hair and dragged him to his side. "Mover" Marvin told him hoarsely, his voice as thick as though it rose from muddy depths. "Move or you'll sinkl" They squirmed and rolled on the yielding, quaking mud like two hurt animals.

Argandeau and the Indian floundered upward through the slime to lie, spent, beyond them. Marvin gained his feet, heaving at Newton's frail body. Argandeau reached back a hand, and between them they dragged and pushed their small companion over the crest of the slope and to the flat surface of the bank a surface that shook like jelly and sucked hungrily at their naked bodies.

This trembling mass was soft as glue, seeming to have no substance. In it their feet sought vainly for a hold, and while they sought, the surface clutched their upper legs and drew them deeper.

Gripped by this noxious treacle, the four black figures reeled forward in a wavering and dreadful dance. Gasping, they wrenched themselves half free, only to sink again and on the instant strive once more for partial freedom. They groaned and sweated in the bitter wind. Mud filled their eyes and mouths, so that each one moved in blackness, seeing nothing and hearing only faintly the rattle of his labored breathing. They lurched and fell and rose; and with each move, the slime in which they groveled was vocal, seeming to smack its lips and slobber at their agony.

There was a flame in Marvin's chest a flame that stabbed and crackled. Dark fears smoked upward from it, and the weakness of despair. Through its cracklings Newton's thin voice reached him a voice shrill with terror. "DanI" it called, "Dam Wait! I can't can't "

Marvin floundered toward the voice and got his hands on Newton. "Stuck!" Newton gasped. "Can't make ill"

Panting, Marvin dragged at the smaller man, who retched. The mud held him. Marvin groaned and heaved, and Newton, struggling weakly, came slowly out. Marvin's legs churned in the stinking ooze. He fell backward in it, pitching Newton over him in his fall.

Here was the end, he thought. His leaden arms, reaching for support, found only slimy thickness, into which his weary legs and body

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settled. Cold sickness caught his throat. Small homely pictures of his youth swam slowly through his brain: Himself, a boy once more, bathing his scrawny body in a lamp-lit kitchen beneath his mother's watchful glance; a nest of helpless field mice on the hot Arundel marshes; a sweaty minister with uplifted eyes, droning hell and endless torment, and in a near-by pew Corunna Dorman, eyeing him aslant through fingers that devoutly screened her face. Up through these little pictures came the face of Slade, staring and smiling in sardonic mirth.

In desperation Marvin reared and twisted. Uncomprehendingly he heard a splashing near at hand. Fingers clawed his ear; clutched at his arm and slipped; then clutched again. Marvin wallowed forward, hung on a sloping surface and rolled heavily into the water of the lagoon that lay between the mud bank and the meadows of Gillingham.

The distant hulks bulked against the paleness of the coming dawn. In the heart of a haystack on a field in Kent lay four exhausted men, sick from their efforts, but for the moment safe.

XXI

A BLIND his face shadowed by a soiled and bulbous turban and his bare brown shoulders protruding from the folds of oncewhite cotton in which he was swathed, sat by the dusty roadside on the outskirts of the small Channel town of Ramsgate, while his ragged attendant, a sharp-nosed, tow-headed youth, directed the attention of passers-by to the brown man's peculiar ability.

"'E kin mike fire wiff nuffin' but a bit o' string an' a toolpickl Couple o' coppers, friends, fer to see a sight you'll be a-tellin' your children abaht fer the next 'undred yearsl"

A few citizens of Ramsgate stood stolidly before the two, seemingly hopeful that the requisite pennies would be donated by others. Two sentries, evidently stationed on the edge of the town for the inspection of strangers, peered over the shoulders of the citizens.

A provision cart, laden with straw and live chickens, drew up, creaking. One of the slouching countrymen on the driver's seat tossed two pennies into the dust at the brown man's feet. The sharpnosed youth seized them; then shook the Hindu's bare brown arm.

"'Erel" he cried. "Git it ahtl"

The brown man, fumbling in his cotton swathings, produced a small board, a pointed stick and a diminutive bow. Then, his sightless eyes staring over the heads of his audience, he looped the string of the bow around the stick and adjusted its point to a depression in the board. The bow moved rapidly; the pointed stick spun round. From the depression in the board rose a faint wisp of smoke.

The audience shifted and murmured. The horse of the provision cart, panic-struck, bolted forward into Ramsgate. The driver, shouting angrily, rose to his feet and sawed at the reins; but so keen was the interest of the audience in the smoke rising from the depression in the Hindu's board that not even the two soldiers turned to watch the bolting horse.

The horse slowed to a walk and stared around reproachfully at the driver. The cart skirted the sandy beach of Ramsgate and bore off toward the sheltering chalk cliff under which twoscore cutters, tuggers and other small craft lay at anchor. Somnolent men in blue

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jerseys reclined against ancient docks and wharf houses, seemingly oblivious to both the cart and its occupants.

The cart came at length to a decrepit house in the doorway of which sat a whiskered man with bare feet. At sight of the carters he thrust a great toe through the meshes of a seine to hold it taut, while with his teeth and his two hands he set busily to work repairing a rip.

The driver, a tall man with knuckles strangely scarred, stared down at the net mender. "How's fishing?" he asked.

The whiskered man replied cryptically that there was a hole in nearly every net.

"I was told," Marvin said, "that a net mender by the name of Clay in Ramsgate was needing some poultry."

"I'm Clay," the whiskered man said. He withdrew his great toe from the seine and came to examine the hens in the back of the cart.

"Aye," he added, "them's 'ens, them isl"Under his breath he added with an air of finality, "Cost you ten guineas beach. Ten guineas to Calais."

"No, not Calais," Marvin said. "Morlaix."

Clay shook his head. "Calais, you'll go to," he replied sourly. "Calais, and lucky to get there." He snorted. "Morlaixl What you think we're running here? Blooming hexcursion boats?"

Marvin stared hard at the net mender and drew a deep breath. Before he could speak, Argandeau murmured quickly in his ear.

Marvin laughed, glanced appraisingly at the sky and vaulted lightly from the cart. "Calais it is," he said, "at ten guineas a man. There's two more of us on the edge of town a brown man in an old sheet, doing tricks, and a boy leading him. Bring 'em in safe and we'll show you the color of our money."

It was close on to midnight when Clay put them aboard the lugger Hirondelle; and the captain, a squat Frenchman with legs so bowed a full-grown pig could have run between them without touching either, welcomed them politely and locked them in the rugger's tiny cabin.

To the four men, huddled in the dark, came the rattle of the lug sail rising. The Hirondelle's head fell off and the little vessel pitched uneasily in the Channel chop.

Argandeau fumbled at the cabin door. "Yes," he said, "this lock has four small fastenings. You bore beside them and we wrench it off Pouff! Like thatl" He snapped his fingers.