The Sand Pebbles (76 page)

“I’ll get it back on the line,” Harris said.

The guns still clamored, shaking the ship. The engine rolled on powerfully. A great new bulge in the side had sprung a steam flange and blown the gasket. Holman ran for wrenches. The lights came up. Harris joined him and began hacking out a new gasket. The bolts were stretched and the threads jammed. Holman twisted them in two by main strength. Franks’ great voice came down the skylight.

“Fire!
Main deck aft!
Fire!
Main deck aft!”

They raced the job, careless of their hands. The firing stopped.
Bells jangled. Lynch slowed the engine. Feet thudded on the boat deck. Bordelles ran in on the gratings.

“Below there!” he shouted. “For God’s sake give us more pressure on the fire main!”

“Aye aye! Any minute!” Holman shouted back.

They used two spare bolts and two C-clamps and wrapped Harris’ shirt around the flange to hold the hiss and drip. Holman started the pump clanking and built the fire main pressure as high as he could. Krebs had come out to see what was wrong. Slow speed meant a breather for them in the fireroom. Harris stared at his trembling, blistered hands. He was an old man for a job like that.

“I’d give my God damned soul for a cup of coffee!” Harris said.

“Hand it over,” Krebs said. “Stawski’s right this minute brewing a bucketful. I come out to tell you.”

A stinkpot had shattered on the port side of the crew’s compartment. The sticky black stuff splashed all along the deck and side and bit fire into the wood. When they got pressure on the fire main, the water only spread the flames. Lt. Collins sent all the men down to fight the fire. Only Bronson was left, at the wheel.
San Pablo
was drifting back with the current, nearly out of range already.

The junks stopped firing. Lt. Collins studied them through the long glass. The command junk was splintered and smoking but obstinately afloat. You could not sink a junk with gunfire. On the junks Chinese were dancing all over the topsides. They thought they had won. A few wore yellowish uniforms, but most of them were plain coolies. They were all dancing in joy at their great victory.

Lt. Collins smiled coldly. One of the sacred sayings came into his mind:
No captain can do very wrong if he lay his ship alongside that of his enemy
. He kept repeating it in his mind. Vincent came into the bridge, panting and blackened and hatless. He saluted anyway.

“Mr. Bordelles sends respects and the fire is under control, sir.”

“Very well. Go back down.” Lt. Collins turned to Bronson. “I’m going down there too. Hold the ship in mid-channel.” It was the first word he had spoken to Bronson all day.

“Aye aye, sir!” Bronson said eagerly.

The fire was not yet out. Lt. Collins stood by the galley and watched them fight it with hoses and axes. They chopped burning wood away and pitched it over the side. The whole portside aft was gone, above the steel hull. The boat deck sagged there, burnt through in places. Franks and Farren were shoring it.

Jennings came up to report formally that he had moved the sickbay to the old Chinese quarters in the steel hull. The only battle casualty so far was Tullio, with a bullet in his leg he had not known about. Some men were burnt and some choked with fumes. None were disabled. Jennings was very precise and formal with his report.

“Very well,” Lt. Collins said. “Carry on, Jennings.”

It took a long time to put the fire all the way out. The crew’s compartment was gutted. The low sun turned the long reach of river a dull red. Bordelles came over, black and weary and grinning. The men crowded behind him. They were expecting praise. Lt. Collins was not yet ready to praise them.

“Can we serve out food, sir, some rest and water, before we try again?” Bordelles asked.

“There’s not enough daylight left. Serve out cutlasses and pistols,” Lt. Collins said. “I’m going to grapple and board.”

They all knew the plan, but he reviewed it rapidly. They would keep two machine guns and the bow gun manned, to hold down fire from the flanking junks. They would keep a minimum crew in the engine spaces. Everyone else would board. As he talked, he could see the men nerving themselves to the prospect. They stood proudly. They would not falter. He was proud of them, but he would not let his manner show it.

“I want Harris and Holman from the engineers,” Lt. Collins said. “Have them standing by here in the passageway.”

“Aye aye, sir!” Bordelles said.

Holman waited with his axe in the midship passageway. The boarding party would come down the port ladder and he would tail on. He would board the junk and cut the bamboo cable.

Harris was there too, with a pistol and cutlass. The smell of burning was all around. The two men did not speak. Both were pink from a light steam burn and Harris had bandaged hands. He kept hefting and balancing his cutlass and sighting along it.

Holman kept drying his palms on his hips so that he would have a good grip on the axe when the time came.

The sun was low behind the boom. The junks darted long shadows.
San Pablo
closed the range fast this time.
San Pablo
was plunging in fast for the kill. On either side of Lt. Collins his machine guns hammered with berserk fury. From the enemy line of battle the pale winks and the black, rose-shot bloomings grew and grew in crackling thunder. They made the air sing around
San Pablo
. They made the air alive with hurtling death.

Slam; bark; clatter! Thud; thud; thud!
Faster and faster past endurance the rhythmic litany built onward and upward. Lt. Collins thrilled with a mounting exaltation. The men at the guns felt it. They showed it in eyes ablaze and lips writhed back, shoulders shaking and hips weaving as they drove their bucking guns. The coolies up ahead felt it, leaping and waving steel and voicing a thin, high devil screech through their billowing powder smoke. The mast with the gearwheel flag toppled. The Sand Pebbles set up a wolfish cheering.

Lt. Collins was a spring wound tight to snapping. It was new and terrible in pure intensity. It was uncontainable in flesh.
San Pablo
was very near.

“Half speed!
Cease
firing!
Cease
firing!” Lt. Collins shouted. “Boarding party, take arms!”

They scrambled for them. Lt. Collins threw off cap and tunic.

“Take her now!” he told the smudged and grimy Bordelles. “Lay her alongside!”

He flourished his gleaming cutlass and glanced down at his white undershirt and trousers. He was the only clean white one left aboard. The men formed up behind him. Bells jangled and the engine beat changed. The ruined junk stern, all smoke and yellow splinters, slid by close aboard. Lt. Collins made his voice ring like bell metal.

“Awa-a-a-a-ay … the boarding party!”

He led them all in a roaring rush, forward and up and over the wooden bulwark to the junk’s foredeck. He slashed and fired and darted through and leaped to the deckhouse. He raced along the top of it to meet them bursting out of the ruined poop, a hedge of steel and screaming faces. Cutlass high, he leaped down to the short after deck and turned his ankle on a dead man’s arm. He went to his knees. The gleaming halberd blade slashed down at him and he slugged a bullet to the bare belly and someone from behind thrust in to take the blow. They all went down in a heap and feet trampled them. A storm of shots and clashing steel and screaming human voices raged over their heads.

He struggled to rise and could not. Warm blood pumped rhythmically into his face and blinded his eys. He struggled and blinked his eyes and saw through rosy mist the bristling white hair on the almost-severed head. He knew in a final, flooding weakness that his savior was Harris.

Steel rang. Shots blasted. Men screamed. Feet thumped and scrambled. Holman, running to the great cable across the junk bow, slipped in blood.

Grunting with full arm swings, he hacked the cable. It was a great, beautiful, complexly interwoven pale-green-and-yellow snake thick as his own body. Bullets keened over. The axe turned and glanced off the resilient bamboo.
Arf! Arf!
somewhere the Red Dog went and
bark … bark …
the bow gun went and the muzzle blast came in hot pats to Holman’s sweaty face. He swung the axe harder, in a driven fury of haste.

Strand by chip by chunk it broke apart, under the splintering axe. Aft on the junk coolies leaped overboard. Men carried one, helped other white-clad, red-splashed shipmates back aboard
San Pablo
. The cable raveled and creaked and stretched. The axe never stopped. Men crossed with metal cans, and kerosene splashed the junk’s splintered wood. Flame in a crackling roar warmed Holman’s back. He drove the axe with savage desperation. The cable remnant parted with a squeal and a pop and the flaming junk lurched free.

Instantly, the current had it. Holman climbed to the bulwark and made a great leap across to the bow of
San Pablo
. He landed sprawling on knees and elbows, knowing he had skinned them badly, and he saw stupidly that he still had the axe. He stayed down, for the shelter of the steel bulwark.

On the bridge they were cheering and clasping hands above their heads. The firing had stopped. Holman’s ears rang with silence.

“Yump, Yake, yump!” Farren shouted down to him. “If you can’t make it in one yump, yump twice!”

Grinning self-consciously, Holman stood up. The brown current was sweeping the sundered halves of the boom apart each way like gates opening. Fire doors clanged below. The engine throb gained power. With sparks from her dogleg stack fountaining triumphantly into the twilight,
San Pablo
steamed through.

The three men ate cold corned beef and hardtack by the light of a candle stuck in an ashtray.
San Pablo
was anchored in midstream below Paoshan, with all topside lights out because of snipers on the south bank. Bordelles was pleading that he might lead the rescue party to China Light. Lynch seconded him. Lt. Collins prepared to say concisely one more time what he had already told them in detail.

“That rescue is our primary mission and so I must lead it myself,” he said.
“San Pablo
and every man of us in her are secondary to that.” He spoke with sharp finality. “They will try to repair the boom. You haven’t the strength to break it a second time,” he told Bordelles. “If I am not back by full daylight, you must consider the primary mission has failed and sail without me. That is all and that is an order.”

He stood up. The others rose also. Candlelight showed feeling struggling in their faces. Lynch was about to say something sentimental.

“As you were. Finish your meal,” Lt. Collins said, to forestall that. “I expect it will be dark enough to leave in a few more minutes. I don’t want you to come out.”

He stopped outside by the boat deck rail. An occasional bullet was still striking the ship or whining over. He would have to wait until
his eyes adjusted before he could judge whether it was dark enough for a small boat to risk those snipers. He heard Lynch speak inside.

“I’m scared he don’t figure to come back, Mr. Bordelles.”

Lt. Collins moved aft along the rail. He did not want to hear. Below him on the quarterdeck Farren was assembling the boat party. The motor sampan was already waiting at the gangway. Lt. Collins stood there in darkness and thought about the day with mixed feelings.

San Pablo
was purged of guilt and shame. The men were sound and whole again. Not counting engineers, hardly a man but bore his wound. Shanahan and Ellis lay gravely hurt. Franks and three others were immobilized. Harris lay dead at the side of the quarterdeck. He was covered with the day’s battle flag. Tomorrow out in the lake they would bury Harris with full honors. Perhaps Shanahan too, by then.

Yet somehow he still could not forgive them. He himself had a sprained ankle, well taped now. He bounced his weight on his right foot. The ankle twinged sharply. He held up his hand at arm’s length and he could barely make out the separate fingers. It was almost dark enough. The men on the quarterdeck were just hushed voices down there in blackness.

“Well, guys, I guess we showed them worker-pissants who’s boss on the river,” someone said comfortably.

“We did! We sure as hell did!”

“Old Harris. I guess he’s in them happy hunting grounds.”

“Harris was all right.”

“He was a good shipmate.”

“He saved the skipper’s life. I saw him do it.”

“They’ll name a tin can after him.”

“They don’t name destroyers after enlisted men.”

“Sure they do! How about the
Edsall
, two-nineteen?”

“Who the hell was Edsall?”

“A seaman. He got killed fighting kanakas down in Samoa.”

“Quarterdeck, there!” Lt. Collins said crisply. “Man the boat!”

They were burning bean oil with a wick in a saucer, to save kerosene. It made a very dim light and an acrid smell in the small parlor. Mr. Craddock sat with hands folded and lips moving silently. Shirley could
not think of anything to say. For hours they had been saying the same things over. Gillespie stood up.

“Please don’t pace, Walter,” she said. “It makes the light flicker so. I’m getting a headache.”

He sat down. “Even if nothing more happened, Cho-jen should have sent another messenger by now!” he said, for the tenth time.

One of the youngest boys had come home, sent with news of a great victory. The gunboat had been hurled back downriver in flames. But midway in his journey the boy had heard more cannonading, and they still did not know.

“Someone will come soon,” Mr. Craddock said.

Shirley spoke one of the thoughts that had been haunting them all evening. No one had yet ventured to say it.

“What if the gunboat breaks through? What will they do then?”

“Come here, no doubt. But that one is too old and weak to break through, God grant.” Gillespie stood up again. “I can’t just sit here,” he said. “I’m going back out to the gate and talk to old Wang. Maybe he’s heard something.”

Wang was the gateman. All rumors from outside seemed to reach him first. Gillespie went out, striding nervously. The wind of his motion set the naked lamp flame jumping. Shadows danced wildly all around the small parlor and Shirley closed her eyes.