BY GWENDOLEN OVERTON
The whistle of the steamer saluted three times—twice short and once long—the sun which rose over the deep green mountains of Costa Rica. The signal was answered in due time. A small tug put off from the long iron pier. There was a launch at the end of its tow line, a big, flat scow of a lighter. It came out across the smooth mother-of-pearl stretch of water, jerking and bobbing over the great Pacific swells. The tug shot by the steamer, the launch threw loose the tow line, and as it came alongside the forward cargo hatchway, a lanchero pitched another rope up to the boatswain.
There followed delay. There must of necessity follow delay when the crews and captains of launches are West Coast natives—Mexican stevedores at the very best—and most of the sailors on the steamers the same. The first-officer, down on the main deck, gave orders, there was a creaking of hawsers on the strain, the rattle and squeal of blocks and tackle, and the rumble of moving freight in one of the forward cargo-spaces. The captain, immaculate in ducks, came out from his cabin. He went to the rail and looked over at La Libertad, where the white and red of its long, low houses showed clear in the daybreak among the glistening palms. Then he looked down. There were eight or ten lancheros in the lighter helping to confuse the very simple process of making her fast, or perched upon the gunwale observing with the vague placidity of their kind.
The captain had no opinion of Central American natives of any sort, much less of lancheros. He considered these ones with rather more than usual disgust.
“What’s the matter with them fellows in that launch, Marsden,” he inquired of the first-officer.
Marsden was peering down into the black hole of the hold. He drew away and looked up to the rail of the hurricane deck. “Played out, sir,” he told him; “they were loading the San Benito until she put out last night at eleven.”
The captain had no sympathy for them on that, or any other score. His eye was without mercy, as he took stock of them again. “Hullo—one of them is white,” he said. It was meant, as before, for the first-officer, but it was entirely audible to the lancheros.
The first-officer looked over into the launch, and the man who was white looked up at him. Then the first-officer turned away. “Yes, sir,” he said.
He walked to the hatchway edge. “Quartermaster,” he called. A voice from the hold answered him. “Send up those boxes of nails first,” he ordered.
There followed a banging in the cargo-space, the boatswain’s whistle began its shrill little calls, which would keep up all day, a donkey engine puffed, and a windlass rattled in the bowels of the ship; the big hook on the end of its rope swung down the hatchway, and presently a net-sling full of boxes was hoisted and deposited on the main deck.
“T. S. & Co., over X, one—Garcia, three times—Y in a diamond, two times—J. S. & Co., over X, four.” The first-officer marked the boxes with his chalk as he called their address and number, the checky for the port authorities and the freight-clerk for the ship kept tally and record in their own books; the net drew taut again at the boatswain’s whistle, and the first load of cargo swung overside and was lowered into the launch.
The first-officer went to the side and watched it. It was the white man who unhooked the sling, who spilled out the boxes, and sent the sling back empty, all with a promptness that no native lancheros could have hoped, or would have dreamed of, attempting to attain. These looked rather more than usually dead and alive. Nominally, he was not the capitan of the launch, but it was clear that he was the self-constituted boss of it. The captain of the steamer said as much—“Must make their heads swim, that fellow.”
The mate answered “Yes, sir,” again; but another net full of boxes was coming up. He went back to them. “J. S. & Co. over X, two times—Y in a diamond, one,” he called. The checky and the freight-clerk registered; and the work of the day was well under way.
But in spite of the one white man in the launch below it did not go with the speed the mate would have desired. The crew of the alternating launch was demoralized and worthless to the last degree. “Half dead—and it’s a fiesta besides, so they’re half drunk, too,” he remarked upon it to the captain. He pushed his cap back with the visor on his crown, and ran across his wet forehead the sleeve of a coat which had begun the day white. It was two o’clock of an October afternoon, and the heat was one of these things the fullness whereof can only be realized from having been experienced, which mere imagination is powerless to present.
The lancheros were fumbling aimlessly at a load of steel rails. There was no white man in this lighter, and the management of it showed as much. Three rails were swung clashing together down on some crates that smashed like match-boxes under them. The mate raised his shoulders. It was not his business—so long as the breakage was not done on the ship, he was not accountable for it. Checky and the capitan of the “lanch” could settle that on shore.
“What’s in those crates?” the captain inquired.
“Merchandise—breakable,” answered the first-officer, cheerfully.
“Brutes,” commented the captain. He gave expression to his views on black-and-tan lancheros in general.
The mate nodded. He bent over the hatchway. “Quartermaster,” he called, “send up somebody with a marlinspike to mend this sling.” Then he went over and looked down into the launch. “Despacio abajo, hurry up—eh?” he shouted by way of suggestion to four lancheros who were pulling two ways on every rail, and had managed to drop into the water a rope sling, which it was affording them much concern and confusion, and the others much chattering and amusement, to fish out again.
Marsden did not appear to be in a communicative mood, but the captain was oblivious to moods after the manner of the insistently good-humored and talkative.
“It must be infernally unpleasant for that white fellow to work with the dogs,” he opined.
“I expect so,” said Marsden. It was not a tone encouraging a pursuance of the subject. But the captain did not know it.
“The capitan won’t stand his bossing some time,” he kept it up; “there’ll be a row, and the whole crew’ll take only too much pleasure in sticking their knives into him. He looks steady. Must be in a pretty bad way to come to that. Don’t know that I ever saw a white man in the fix along here before. He’d better get out of it while his skin’s whole.”
“Wonder who he is?” he asked, presently. It was in the nature of an inquiry addressed to no one in general, and the mate in particular. The mate did not answer. He was concerning himself about a delay in the hold, and called down some orders which were superfluous, in view of the fact that the boatswain had just gone scuttling down the ladder to attend to things himself.
The captain, however, was not put off. He had nothing to do. “Do you know?” he asked, when the mate came below him again.
“Know what, sir?” Marsden was thinking his own thoughts. He had not paid much attention.
“Who that fellow is?”
“Man named Stanwood,” said the first-officer, and he tried to head the captain off by another order to the hold. It was accompanied by profanity. The delay was nobody’s fault, but, as is frequently the case, the oaths expended in one direction were inspired from another.
It was a pity the captain couldn’t go aft and work a reckoning, or talk to the passengers. Not that he objected to the captain. The captain was a very good sort. It was the topic Marsden disliked.
“Stanwood—rather imposing for a lanchero in there with all them black brutes, aint it? Not that he’s any cleaner, though. Who told you it was that?”
“Nobody,” said Marsden; “I know it.”
It broke in upon the captain then that he was being discouraged. “Oh!” he said. There followed a pause. “You’d better have a new rope through that block there when you’re ready to hoist those iron chimney stacks.”
“Yes, sir,” answered the mate. The captain strolled off to the quarter-deck to watch the second-steward fishing for sharks.
But time was not hanging heavy on Marsden’s hands. There was a look of bad weather, and if they were to get off that night, as might prove highly desirable, there had got to be a lot more hustling than the lancheros seemed capable of.
The launch alongside had about all it could carry, and its capitan was calling for the tug, the soft, mournful note of his conch shell floating over the water to the shore. Marsden, by way of losing no time himself, ran up to the hurricane-deck and on to the bridge, and the whistle screeched across the blue-green of the sea, glinting in the sun, across the little port among its palms, and beyond through the lush jungle of the piling mountains, where the trees and vines and undergrowth matted in the moist, breathless temperature of a green-house. There were black clouds piling up behind the mountains, and rolling low into the great cañons and clefts of palm and fern trees. Marsden eyed them as he went below again.
The launch alongside was loaded and sent adrift, to be picked up by the tug and towed back to the wharf. The tug was bringing out the other one—the one in which Stanwood was of the crew. Marsden wished that he were not. A man may have been your enemy. He may have brought about your finish. You may have thought for years that nothing could be too bad for him. But all the same—if he is a white man, one of your own kind, be he never so much of a scoundrel, it is not good to see him working among Central American lancheros, under a capitan of the same breed. It is a trifle too low. He is one of your own race, after all, and it hits you through the race.
Marsden stood considering, keeping his balance as the ship rolled, at an angle of forty-five degrees to the line of the deck, backward or forward, according as she went to weather or to lee. It would have taken quite all the attention of a landsman to manage the feat at any effort, and with that he would probably have gone upon his skull or his nose. But Marsden was not even thinking about it. He was thinking of the time that Stanwood had bribed a Guatemala high official—with money already a long way from clean—and had thereby established in that misgoverned little country his altogether baseless claim to Marsden’s own sugar finca and refinery. It was the kind of thing that can be, and is constantly being, done south of twenty-three. And all your American citizenship can not avail to save you; rather, in fact, the other way—one of the mishaps of which you take your chance when you go to those countries to make a fortune, away from the hustle of colder climes. But it had been a blackguardly trick, nevertheless. And it had done for Marsden financially for good and all. He had thought himself in luck afterward to get the opportunity to ship to San Francisco on a P. M. steamer as a hand. He had been down to his last real then.
It had done for him in other ways, too. Even now that he had got his master’s license, and worked up by quick stages to first-mate—well—his people on the other side of the continent lived a different sort of life, went in for another and more conventional style of thing. So did the people of the girl he had meant to make mistress of his beautiful sugar plantation. He had been in love with her since his school-days at home—pretty much ever since he could remember, so far as that went. But it had obviously been out of the question to expect her to marry a deck-hand. He had stopped writing to her before long. It had been better for her. As for himself—it didn’t matter much. His own life was very thoroughly spoiled, anyway. And the girl had married—a man of her own sort, which he himself had ceased to be.
He owed all that to Stanwood. He owed a good deal to Stanwood. He had always intended to pay it some day, too—at the first chance that should present itself. Was this the chance? Perhaps.
Evidently wrong-doing had not prospered Stanwood. He had probably come out with that degraded, dirty gang, in that “lanch” which stunk of bilge water and other filth beyond a white man’s stomach almost, for no other reason than to get an opportunity to stow, or to ask a passage up—as Marsden himself had been obliged to ask five years before. He would not try it now, of course. He had nerve enough for about anything, but hardly enough for that. He would have to wait at least a week for another ship and another first-officer.
It happened, nevertheless, that Marsden wanted another sailor. At the last port, Corinto, one of his men had gone ashore to see one of the sick mothers he kept along the coast, and that had been the last seen of him. Marsden was anxious to fill the vacancy, but Stanwood should not have it. He could work with the launch gang a while longer. It was small enough punishment for his misdeeds.
The launch swung alongside. Stanwood was in her. He was having an altercation with the capitan, too, and the capitan had been taking more tequila, apparently. It would be the course of wisdom for the Gringo lanchero to hold his peace and his tongue, if he were not looking for a speedy exit from a bad sort of life. The capitan and his gang would like nothing better than severally and collectively to stick knives into him.
Once again the launch went off, discharged her cargo, and came back for another load. This time it was before the other launch was quite ready to be towed away, so she made fast, bow and stern, to her, and the idle lancheros fell to eating some food they had brought with them as they waited. They crouched together in a group, getting a good deal of fun out of it. There were the inevitable frijoles and bread and bottled coffee, and there was besides a most unwonted treat, a leg of mutton. They passed it from one to the other, and each gnawed at it with his gleaming teeth, grinning over the game.
Stanwood crouched among them. But he was not having fun out of it. He was not grinning. He scooped up the common mess of black beans with scraps of crust. He was ragged and dirty as they were. But he did not take his degradation with their good humor. He looked sullen and lean and hungry.
Marsden watched him. It was not a pleasant sight, and he felt a kind of sick disgust and pity. But he wanted to see if the bone of meat would go to the white man in the end, and if the white man would take it. It came to the last of the natives. He picked it all but clean with a show of keen enjoyment. There were a few shreds left. He examined them. Then, with the insolence of a base breed having the upper hand, he tossed it over at Stanwood. It struck him on the chest. Marsden could see the killing hate in his eyes, and the shutting of his teeth under the ragged black beard. Then—and he was conscious of a deep relief—he saw him pick up the bone, stand in the scow, and drop it over into the water.
Marsden turned away. It was not only of relief that he was conscious, but of a killing hate of the half-breed lancheros equal to Stanwood’s own, as well.
The clouds which, at noon, had been rising behind the mountains and dropping dark into the valleys and cañons, had spread half over the sky. There was a low, whining wind, growing steadily stronger. And the seven thousand miles of sea stretching unbroken to the west was sending in heavier ground swells to the open harbor. The steamer went heaving from side to side. Even the sailors were finding it not always easy to keep their footing. And it was now that the great iron chimney stacks had to be brought up. It would not have been a small matter at the best. At present it was extremely dangerous. The loaded lighter had gone off. The tackle had been changed on the block of the foremost derrick to new hemp, yellow and strong.
There was the huge clangor and rumble of hollow iron striking against iron down in the cargo-space. The mate had taken out his own whistle. The responsibility was too great to be intrusted to subordinates here. He shrilled one order after another, or shouted them in nautical English and strange Spanish, and they were answered from the depths of the hold. The monster tube rolled into the opening guided by a man naked to the waist, on whose brown torso, swelling with muscles, the sweat rolled and glistened. The stack rose slowly upward—roaring its vast basso protests as it struck—fifty feet long, a yard in diameter, heavy, unwieldy, plunging as the ship rolled to starboard, down and down, and back to port, down and down again.
It was a formidable thing, all but unmanageable even there. But once clear of the hatchway it flung itself, charging and swinging and threshing, with the great iron bellow of warning. The sailors jumped from its way. There was only the mate to handle it. The ship gave a heavy lurch to starboard. The chimney whirled and lunged toward him with a vibrating song of onslaught, and the voice of the white man in the launch below called an involuntary “Look out!” An instant of the hesitation of fear and the mate would have been struck overboard by all the force of the great cylinder of iron. But he put out his hand and pushed it, and it swung off harmlessly enough, as docile as it was formidable.
The little whistle shrilled, the derrick moved its long arm around and out, and the stack hung overside, directly above the launch. The lancheros had retreated to the sides, ready to scramble out of the way, or to jump overboard, if need should be. They stood looking up at it uneasily. If the rope were to break or slip, if the mate were to give a wrong order——
Suddenly the steamer came over to starboard with a deep roll, and the great stack dropped with her. The mate saw the chance of mishap. His whistle piped a sharp, quick order to hoist. The lancheros cowered, their arms over their heads—all but Stanwood. He stood watching a chance. The stack swung and whirled, gigantic and awful, not a foot above his reach. But the rope had been just too short. The ship heaved back, and with a reverberation of metal thunder as it struck against the hull, the cylinder swung up again.
Courage came back to the capitan of the lighter then, and with it all his powers of mean impertinence. He shouted up curses at the first-officer. They were vile, as curses can only be vile in that “language of prayer.” And the first-officer understood them perfectly. But he had no time to take notice of them. The ship had got to get off that night. And the stacks had got to be unloaded. But it was far from simple to get even this first one lowered into the launch. Several times they dropped it almost to its place, then, because the empty scow bobbed one way in a swell, and the ship another, it had to be hoisted once more. And once the windlass refused to work at a signal. There was a delay until it could be repaired. The capitan of the lancheros waxed more impertinent and abusive; the tequila with which he had been refreshing himself on shore was beginning to take its violent effect. In the absorption of his abuse of the ship and all its crew, he forgot to order his own men. The stack was coming down once again, with a fair chance of landing squarely in the bottom at last—if the lancheros should be quick enough at guiding it. But they were doing nothing, frightened half out of their little available senses. And their capitan was yelling foul words aloft. It was a critical instant. The white lanchero knew it. He gave an order. It was all the men needed—a head. They made to obey. But the boss, in the madness of tequila, turned on his white hand. Was he the capitan? Was he in command? He had the signal conch shell in his hand. He brought it down with a cracking blow on Stanwood’s head.
The first-officer, watching the critical descent of the iron monster with all his attention, saw Stanwood spring at the boss’s throat, saw the knives of the other lancheros drawn, saw them swarming astern to the rescue of their fellow, ten of them against one. And the iron stack was swaying just above them. Another starboard roll—they would be crushed under it. And another moment lost and the Gringo would have ten knives in his neck and back. The little whistle shrilled sharply twice, and even as its order was obeyed and the windlass reversed, the first-officer was sliding overside down the manrope, had kicked himself off from the hull, and landed in the launch.
It was a short fight. The first-officer had his six-shooter, the white lanchero his knife, like another. The natives were fierce with blood lust, and the drunkenness of knife gleam and tequila. But it was a matter of coolness and of the dominant race. Before the captain on the hurricane-deck could run to his cabin for his carbine, it was over with. Two lancheros had disabling bullet wounds, and the rest had retreated to the bow, all the flush of fight gone out of them, whipped and cringing and scared.
The first-officer and the white lanchero stood astern. They had been cut, and the ducks of the first-officer were red. Blood oozed through the lanchero’s rags. He got breath for a moment clutching at the gunwale. Then he turned to the first-officer. “Thank you,” he said.
Marsden looked at him, slowly, from his shaggy black hair to his bare feet. “Don’t mention it,” he answered. Then he looked up at the ship. “Unhook that stack for the present, and send down the chair for us,” he ordered, coolly.
He considered his left arm. The blood was bubbling out just above the elbow. He knew what it meant. He had seen the thing before. It would be all right once a tourniquet should be put above it. But before that, before the doctor could get down in the chair, he would very likely faint. He was feeling light-headed already—and his eyes were glazing over. He shut his right hand hard above the wound.
“You can’t stay with this, Stanwood,” he told the lanchero. His voice sounded to himself far away and dead. He was not altogether sure what he was saying. He glanced up. Away and away overhead in a vague distance of hot blue, the chair was beginning to lower. He must make haste. He spoke carefully, with precision, swaying unsteadily as the launch rolled.
“We lost a man at Corinto,” he went on; “we—need an—other. You can ship to Frisco with us if——” he staggered, then caught himself, “if you—like.”
The chair with the doctor touched the bottom of the scow. The first-officer had fallen, and was lying quite still. The white lanchero was bending over him, clenching his two hands tight about the wounded arm.