THE BLUE RAIDER.
by Herbert Strang.
CHAPTER I
A BEACH IN NEW GUINEA
""Tis a matter of twenty-five years since I was in a fix like this "ere," said the boatswain, ruminatively, turning a quid in his cheek.
"Ephraim, me lad, you can bear me out?"
"I can"t rightly say as I can, Mr. Grinson," said Ephraim, in his husky voice, "but I "ll try."
The boatswain threw a leg over the stern-post of the much-battered ship"s boat that lay listed over just beyond the breakers of a rough sea, and cast a glance at the two young men who stood, with hands in pockets, gazing up at the cliffs. Their backs were towards him; they had either not heard, or were disinclined to notice what he had said.
"Ay, "twas twenty-six year ago," he resumed, in a voice like the note of an organ pipe. "We was working between Brisbane and the Solomons, blackbirding and what not; "twas before your time, young gents, but----"
"What"s that you "re saying?" demanded one of the two whose backs he had addressed.
"I was saying, sir, as how I was in a fix like this "ere twenty-seven year ago, or it may be twenty-eight: Ephraim"s got the head for figures.
We was working between Brisbane and the Carolines--a tight little schooner she was, light on her heels. You can bear me out, Ephraim?"
"If so be "twas the same craft, light and tight she was," Ephraim agreed.
"Well, a tidal wave come along and pitched her clean on to a beach like as this might be--not a beach as you could respect, with bathing-boxes and a promenade, but a narrow strip of a beach, a reg"lar fraud of a beach, under cliffs as high as a church..."
"Say, Grinson, get a move on," drawled the second of the two younger men. "What about your beach? How does it help us, anyway?"
"Well, look at the difference, sir. There we was: schooner gone to pieces, a score of us cast ash.o.r.e, three of us white men, the rest Kanakas. "Tis thirty years since, but the recollection of them awful days gives me the "orrors. My two white mates--the Kanakas ate "em, being "ungry. I drops a veil over that "orrible tragedy. Being about a yard less in the waist than I am to-day, I was nimble as a monkey, and went up those cliffs like greased lightning, broke off chunks of rock weighing anything up to half a ton, and pitched "em down on the Kanakas scrambling up after me, panting for my gore. For three days and nights I kept "em at bay, and my arms got so used to flinging down rocks that when I was rescued by a boat"s crew from a Dutch schooner they kept on a-working regular as a pendulum, and they had to put me in a strait jacket till I was run down. You can bear me out, Ephraim, me lad?"
"I can"t exactly remember all them particlers, Mr. Grinson, but truth "s truth, and "tis true ye "ve led a wonderful life, and stranger things have happened to ye--that I will say on my oath."
"You were one of the two that were eaten, I suppose?" said the young man who had first spoken, eyeing Ephraim with a quizzical smile.
"Gee! That"s the part Grinson dropped a veil over," said the other.
"What"s the moral of your pretty fairy story, Grinson?"
"Moral, sir? "Tis plain." He opened his bra.s.s tobacco-box, and deliberately twisted up another quid. Then he said impressively: "Dog don"t eat dog; otherways we "re all white men, and there "s no Kanakas."
Phil Trentham laughed, a little ruefully.
"We may have to eat each other yet," he said. Then, waving his arms towards the cliffs, he added: "The prospect doesn"t please--what do you make of it?"
The situation in which the four men found themselves had certainly no element of cheerfulness. They were the sole survivors from a tramp steamer which, on the previous day, had fallen a prey to a German raider. After a night"s tossing in their small open boat, they had been cast up on this unknown sh.o.r.e, and when they examined the craft, marvelled that they escaped with their lives. Collision with a rock that just peeped above the breakers some fifty yards out had stove, in her garboard-strakes, a hole through which a man might creep. Luckily, the bag of ship"s biscuits, which, with a keg of water, formed their whole stock of provisions, had not been washed out or injured.
But what of the future? The narrow strip of sandy beach on which they had been thrown stretched along the foot of high precipitous cliffs that showed a concave arc to the sea. At each horn a rocky headland jutted far out, its base washed high by the waves. The cliffs were rugged and appeared unscalable, even with the aid of the tufts of vegetation that sprouted here and there from fissures in their weather-beaten face. It seemed that they were shut in between the cliffs and the sea, penned between the headlands, confined to this strip of sand, perhaps two miles long, from which there was apparently no landward exit. Their boat was unseaworthy; there was no way of escape by land or sea.
Phil Trentham, working copra on a remote island of the South Pacific, had learnt of the outbreak of war some months after the event, and taken pa.s.sage on the first steamer that called, intending to land at the nearest port and thence to make his way to some centre of enlistment.
Among the few pa.s.sengers he had chummed up with a young fellow about his own age--one Gordon P. Hoole, who hailed from Cincinnati, had plenty of money, and was touring the Pacific Islands in tramp steamers for amus.e.m.e.nt. Each was in his twentieth year, stood about five feet ten, and wore a suit of ducks and a cowboy hat; there the likeness between them ended. Trentham was fair, Hoole dark. The former had full ruddy cheeks, broad shoulders, and ma.s.sive arms and calves; the latter was lean and rather sallow, more wiry than muscular. Trentham parted his hair; Hoole"s rose erect from his brow like a short thick thatch. Both had firm lips and jaws, and their eyes, unlike in colour, were keen with intelligence and quick with humour.
Their two companions in misfortune presented an odd contrast to them and to each other. Josiah Grinson, forty-eight years of age, was five feet six in height, immensely broad, with a girth of nearly sixty inches, arms as thick as an average man"s legs, and legs like an elephant"s.
His broad, deeply bronzed face, in the midst of which a small nose, over a long clean upper lip, looked strangely disproportionate, was fringed with a thick ma.s.s of wiry black hair. Little eyes of steely blue gazed out upon the world with a hard unwinking stare. He wore a dirty white sweater, much-patched blue trousers, and long boots. His big voice was somewhat monotonous in intonation, and he had been known to doze in the middle of a sentence, wake up and continue without a flaw in the construction.
Ephraim Meek, who had been mate to Grinson"s boatswain for about a quarter of a century, was a head taller, but lost the advantage of his inches through a forward stoop of his gaunt frame. Where Grinson was convex Meek was concave. His hollow cheeks were covered with straggling, mouse-coloured hair; his long thin nose made him look more inquisitive than he really was; his faded grey eyes, slightly asquint, seemed to be drawn as by a magnet to the countenance of his superior.
Meek was a whole-hearted admirer of the boatswain, and their long a.s.sociation was marred by only one thing--a perpetual struggle between Meek"s personal devotion and his conscientious regard for veracity. No one knew what pangs Grinson"s frequent appeals to "Ephraim, me lad," to "bear him out" cost the anxious man. But he had always managed to satisfy the boatswain without undue violence to his own scruples, and Grinson had never felt the strain.
"What do I make of it?" repeated Hoole. "Nix!"
"Where do you suppose we are, Grinson?" asked Trentham.
"I ain"t good at supposing, sir, but I know we "re somewheres on the north coast of New Guinea," Grinson replied. "Which I mean to say it"s inhabited by cannibals, and I was nearly eat once myself. "Twas twenty or maybe twenty-one years ago, when----"
"By and by, Grinson," interrupted Trentham. "It"s a gruesome story, no doubt, and we "ll fumigate it with our last go-to-bed pipe."
"Just so," Hoole put in. "I guess we "d better explore. It don"t feel good on this beach."
"Certainly. To save time we "d better split up. You take Grinson and go one way; I "ll go the other with Meek. Whoever sees a way up the cliffs, signal to the others."
They paired off, and walked in opposite directions along the sand. A line of seaweed some thirty feet from the cliffs indicated high-water mark, and relieved them of any fear of being engulfed by the tide.
Trentham and Meek had struck off to the west, and as they went along they scanned the rugged face of the cliffs for a place where it would be possible to scale them. For nearly half a mile they roamed on in silence; Meek was one of those persons who do not invite conversation.
Then, however, the seaman came to a halt.
"I wouldn"t swear to it, sir," he said in his deprecating way, "but if you "ll slew your eyes a point or two off the cliffs, I do believe you "ll see the stump of a mast."
He raised his lank hand and pointed.
"That won"t help us much," said Trentham, looking towards a pocket of sand some distance above high-water mark, and surrounded by straggling bushes. "We can"t sail off in a wreck."
"That"s true as gospel, sir, but it came into my mind, like, that where there "s a mast there "s a hull, and p"r"aps it "ll give us a doss-house for the night."
"It "ll be choked with sand. Still, we "ll have a look at it."
They walked towards the spot where four or five feet of a jagged mast stood up apparently from the embedding sand. As they emerged from the surrounding bushes they discovered parts of the bulwarks projecting a few inches above a mound of silted-up sand, a little higher than their heads. Clambering up the easiest slope, and stepping over the rotting woodwork, Trentham gave a low whistle of surprise.
"Come up and have a look at this, Meek," he said to the man standing in his bent-kneed att.i.tude below.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "COME UP AND HAVE A LOOK AT THIS, MEEK."]
Meek came to his side, and drew his fingers through his thin whiskers as he contemplated the scene before him. Then he turned his eyes on Trentham, and from him to the cliffs and the beach around.
"Rum, sir!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Uncommon rum!"
While the greater part of the vessel was deep in sand, a certain area of the deck around the base of the mast was covered with only a thin layer, through which the iron ring of a hatch was clearly visible. On all sides of it the sand appeared to have been cleared away, and heaped up like a regular rampart.
"Some one has been here, and not so long ago," said Trentham. "It"s certainly queer. See if you can lift the hatch; we may as well go below."