"This is quite the best place in the ship," she said. "I am very comfortable, thank you. Please don"t send us away, captain."
Before Courtenay could answer, the officer of the watch looked in.
"Cape Caraumilla bearing sou"west of the Buei Rock, sir," he announced, and vanished again.
"Don"t hurry," said Courtenay, taking up his cap. "I must leave you for a few minutes."
He was gone, with Joey at his heels, and there was a brief silence.
"Really, Isobel, we should go back on deck," urged Elsie, uneasily.
Already she half regretted the impulse which led her to intervene in her friend"s special hobby.
"I like that. I didn"t credit you with such guile, Elsie Maxwell. You snap up my nice captain beneath my very nose, and coolly propose that I should vacate the battlefield. Oh dear, no! I can"t talk literature, but I _can_ flirt, and I have not finished with Arthur yet by a long chalk."
"Isobel, if you knew how you hurt me--"
Miss Baring crossed her pretty feet, folded her arms, and gave her companion a smiling glance.
"So artful, too. "Love me, love my dog," eh? You actually took my breath away."
"It may amaze you to learn that I meant to achieve that much, at any rate," was Elsie"s quiet retort as she turned to select a volume from the queer miscellany in the bookcase.
"Oh, don"t be cruel. Leave me my Frenchman! Say you won"t wheedle Edouard by quoting the cla.s.sics of his native tongue! Poor me! Here have I been warming a serpent in my bosom."
With a _moue_ of make-believe anguish Isobel leaned back in her chair.
She was insolently conscious of her superior attractions. Was she not the richest heiress in Valparaiso? Had not her father chartered this ship? And was not Elsie even now flying from an unwelcome suitor? She knew full well that her friend would resent the slightest semblance of love-making on the part of any man on board. Already her astonishment at Elsie"s unlooked-for vivacity was yielding to the humor of meeting such a rival. The Count might serve as a foil, but the real quarry now was the captain. That very night there would be a moon. And the sea was calm as a sheltered lake. Isobel"s lips parted in a delighted smile as she tried to imagine Courtenay deserting her to discuss those celebrities whom Elsie had made the most of. And how she would play off the Count against the captain! They ought to be at daggers drawn long before the Straits of Magellan were reached. Certainly she never expected such sport on board such a humdrum ship as the _Kansas_.
Suddenly they both heard an excited bark from the dog, and the quick rush of feet along the deck; Courtenay"s voice reached them with a new and startling note in it.
"Stop that!" he shouted.
There was an instant"s pause. Their alert ears caught the sounds of a distant scuffle. Then a pistol shot jarred the peaceful drone of the ship.
"Sheer off, there!" roared Courtenay again. "Next time I shoot to kill!"--
With terror in their eyes, with blanched cheeks, they rushed to the door and peeped out. Courtenay was not to be seen, but the officer of the watch was swinging himself over the canvas shield of the bridge.
He disappeared. Joey, barking furiously, trotted into view and ran back again. Creeping forward, they saw the stolid sailor within the chart-house squint at the compa.s.s and give the wheel a slight turn.
That was rea.s.suring. Yet another timorous pace, and through the curving window they could discern Courtenay, holding a revolver in his right hand, but behind his back.
Even in their alarm they realized that nothing very terrible would happen now. But why had the shot been fired, and what had given that tense ring to Courtenay"s threat?
Venturing a little further, they gained the bridge. On the main deck, a long way beneath, near an open hatch, a half-caste Chilean was lying on his back. He had evidently been wounded. Blood was flowing from his leg; it smeared the white deck. The officer who had climbed down so speedily from the bridge was directing two other men how to lift him. Close by, the chief officer, Mr. Boyle, was stanching a deep cut on his chin with a handkerchief. At the same time he curtly ordered off such deck hands and stewards as came running forward, attracted by the disturbance.
The girls were gazing wide-eyed at this somewhat unnerving scene, when Courtenay approached.
"Better go below," he said quietly. "I am sorry this trouble should have happened, at the beginning of the voyage, too. I hope it will not upset you. That rascally Chilean tried to knife Mr. Boyle, and those other blackguards were ready to side with him. I had to shoot quick and straight to show them I meant what I said."
"Is he dead?" asked Isobel, with a contemptuous coolness as to the fate of the mutineer which Courtenay found admirable.
"Not a bit of it. Fired at his legs. Only a flesh wound, I fancy."
"Poor wretch!" murmured Elsie. "Was there no other way?"
"There is only one way of dealing with that sort of skunk," was the gruff answer. The pity in her voice implied a condemnation of his act.
He resented it. He knew he had done rightly, and she knew that she had given offence by her involuntary sympathy with the suffering Chilean, who, with the pa.s.sing of the paralyzing shock of the bullet, was howling dolefully now as the sailors carried him towards the forecastle.
The man"s groans tortured her. Her eyes filled with tears. Joey, yelping with frenzy, leaped up to invite her to lift him above the canvas screen so that he might see what was going on. But Elsie could only reach blindly for the rail of the companion-way, and Isobel, after a smiling word of farewell to Courtenay, followed her.
So it came to pa.s.s that neither Stevenson nor the moon had power to draw the captain of the _Kansas_ to the promenade deck that night.
CHAPTER II
WHEREIN THE CAPTAIN KEEPS TO HIS OWN QUARTERS
Doctor Christobal brought some additional details to the dinner-table.
He was not the ship"s doctor. The _Kansas_, built for freight rather than pa.s.sengers, did not carry a surgeon on her roll; Dr. Christobal"s presence was due to Mr. Baring"s solicitude in his daughter"s behalf.
It chanced that the courtly and gray-haired Spanish physician had relinquished his practise in Chile, and was about to pay a long-promised visit to a married daughter in Barcelona. Friendship, not unaided by a good fee, induced him to travel by the _Kansas_.
He had been called on to attend Mr. Boyle and the wounded Chilean, and he reported now that the chief officer"s injury was trifling, but the Chilean"s wound might incapacitate him during the remainder of the voyage.
"So far as I can gather," he said, "Mr. Boyle had a narrow escape.
These half-breeds have a nice anatomical knowledge of the situation of the lung; they also know the easiest way to reach it with a sharp instrument. Captain Courtenay fired as the knife fell, otherwise our first mate would have attended his own funeral this evening."
"What was the cause of the affair?" Isobel asked.
"The man is not one of the ship"s crew, I understand. His name is Frascuelo, and it appears that he was engaged to place some bunker coal aboard early this morning. He says that he was drugged, and his clothes stolen; that he came off to the ship at a late hour, and that some one flung him headlong into a hold which, luckily for him, was nearly full of cotton bales. He was stunned by the fall, and were it not for Captain Courtenay"s custom of having all hatches taken off and a thorough examination of the cargo made before the holds are finally battened down for the voyage, Frascuelo might now be in a tight place in more than one sense."
Dr. Christobal was proud of his idiomatic English. He spoke the language with the careless freedom of a Londoner.
"Frascuelo seems to have pa.s.sed an eventful day," said the little French Comte, who had been waiting anxiously for a chance to join in the conversation.
"But why should he want to kill poor Mr. Boyle?" inquired Isobel, after giving the Frenchman an encouraging glance. Incidentally, she smiled at Elsie. "Why puzzle one"s brains over foreign tongues when all the world speaks English?" she telegraphed.
"Mr. Boyle is a peculiar person," said the doctor dryly. "I happen to have known him during some years. You and I might regard him as a man of few words, but he has acquired a wonderful vocabulary for the benefit of sailor-men. I believe he can swear in every known lingo.
His accomplishment in that direction no doubt annoyed Frascuelo, who became frantic when he heard that the ship would not call at any South American port. I imagine, too, that the unfortunate fellow is still suffering from the drug which, he says, was administered to him.
Anyhow, you know how the affair terminated."
"I, for one, think some consideration might have been shown him," said Elsie.
"There is no time for argument when a Chilean draws a knife, Miss Maxwell."
"But, if his story is true--"
"There never yet was a stowaway who did not invent a plausible yarn.
Nevertheless, I believe, and Mr. Boyle agrees with me, that the man is not lying."