CHAPTER XVI
In Which I Return to the Gullwing—and With My Arms Full
I hadn’t breath enough left at first to answer Thankful Polk’s hail. And when my eyes fell upon the contents of the drifting boat that we had pulled so far to reach, what I saw was not calculated to aid me to easy breathing. Lying upon his back, face upwards, in the glare of the morning sun, lay a man, bareheaded and barefooted, dead.
And such an awful death as he must have died! His face was quite black, although he was a white man by nature, it was as though the blood had been congested in his face. His tongue had protruded slightly from between his firm, white teeth. His legs were drawn up as though in a convulsion and the corpse had stiffened that way. His limbs had not been composed by any kindly hand after the spirit had left its body.
He was a sailor. There was tattooing on his chest and arms. He had a short, bushy beard. I believed at first glance that he was a British seaman. And almost at this first moment of glancing into the boat I made another discovery. I learned how the man had died.
His tongue was not black; and although he was much emaciated, neither thirst nor hunger had hounded the sailor to his dreadful end.
He wore a gully slung by a lanyard around his neck. That knife was twisted tightly in the cord, and the cord itself was imbedded in the flesh of the dead man’s throat. Actually a tournequet had been made of the knife and cord, and the sailor had been strangled. He was a horrid sight, as he lay with his feet to the empty stern and his touseled head thrown back over a seat.
Perhaps many of the details of this awful scene were a matter of later observation; but it seems to me now as though everything about the dead man was photographed upon my brain at the first glance.
And then my gaze roved beyond him. There was a piece of sailcloth laid across the bow of the open boat beyond the stump of the mast. It was dark under that awning. But right at the entrance lay something white and gold.
Without waiting for any order from Mr. Barney, I stood up and leaped into the half wrecked boat. I heard none of the other men speak a word. All my attention was given to the object which my dazzled eyes now rested upon.
A young girl—the prettiest, most appealing child I had ever seen—lay under the awning. Her head was toward me. Her face was as white as milk, and the blue veins showed plainly at her temples and were traced along her throat. Her cheeks were without an iota of color.
She was all white—her face, her thin, ruffled dress—the bare arm from which the sleeve had been pushed back to her elbow. All white, save the great mass of her hair. That was gold—pure gold. Such a beautiful child I had never imagined before. She was twelve or thirteen years old.
“What’s that you got there, Webb?” I heard Mr. Alf Barney shout.
I had dropped on my knees beside the unconscious girl. I saw that she was only delicate and exhausted. There was a breaker of water lashed to the gunwale right beside her, and a cup with water in it. I saw no food; but I knew well enough that the girl was not dying of thirst. No more than the sailor had died of thirst!
I gathered the girl up in my arms. She was a light weight. I thought she sighed and her eyelids fluttered.
And then suddenly sounded a raucous bellow, in a strange tongue, from within the decked-over portion of the boat. Something moved. I leaped back and almost trod upon the dead man.
Out from under the awning crept a tall, lean, lithe brown man, dressed in torn sailor togs, but with a dirty turban around his head. He was a wild-eyed, yelling fiend. In a moment there flashed out of his dress, from some secret place, a long, glittering blade. With this raised above his head he bounded in his bare feet the length of the boat after me.
At that moment the boat from the Gullwing scraped alongside the wreck. As I whirled to escape this murderer, this boat was nearest to me. Thankful Polk, his red face transfixed with horror, shouted to me:
“Here, Sharp! Quick! This way!”
Their boat was really nearest me. I leaped into it. Thank shoved off with his oar and the boat and the wreck were separated by a growing streak of sea.
The men in both boats all talked at once; and the two Mr. Barneys shouted; but above all the uproar I could hear the frenzied shrieks of the brown man in the turban.
“Come back, here, Webb!” cried the second officer in the Seamew’s boat. “We’ll take that child with us.”
“Sit down, Clint!” commanded Mr. Jim Barney, quietly. “You’ll have us swamped.”
I obeyed him quickly. Thank smote me a hearty blow between the shoulders.
“Sharp! you’re a daisy! I knowed they couldn’t never drown you,” he declared.
But I couldn’t reply to him. I still held the girl in my arms. There seemed to be no good place there in the stern to lay her down. And she was so frail, and soft, and pretty! I had never seen such a delicate creature before.
We were still moving from the wreck and the Seamew’s boat, the men backing water. There was a splash and a louder yell from the Seamew’s men. I glanced over my shoulder. I could see the turbanned head of the wild man and his thin, bare arms beating the water. He was swimming desperately after our boat.
“That monkey’ll be drowned,” Thank cried.
“We kin get away from him easy,” said another of the rowers.
“He’ll be drowned,” I said to Mr. Barney. “We’ll have to take him in.”
“I reckon that’s so, Webb,” said the second mate. “The Seamew is welcome to the old tub—and the dead man.”
The brown man came to the side of our boat, panting and moaning. He was near spent.
“I believe he belongs to this girl and he thinks we’re running off with her,” said Mr. Barney.
“He’s crazy as he can be,” said Thank.
“Help him in. See that he doesn’t have that knife. If he doesn’t behave, we can lash his wrists together,” said Mr. Barney.
The foreign looking man was hauled in. He lay panting on the bottom, between Mr. Barney and I. We were being hailed from the other boat.
“Let that Webb come back with us, you fellows!” cried Mr. Alf Barney. “Cap’n Si will be furious.”
“He belongs to the Gullwing,” said our Mr. Barney, promptly. “You can’t have him.”
“We’ll see about that—”
“See about it, then,” said the officer, shortly. Then to his own crew he said: “Give way, men! Altogether, now.”
We swept away on a graceful curve and headed for the Gullwing. Mr. Barney nodded to me with a smile.
“You certainly had a close call for your life, Clint,” he said. “Luck was with you when you went overboard from the Gullwing, after all. Everybody gave you up for lost—save Thank there. He swore that if you went to the bottom you could walk ashore, somehow.”
At that moment the brown man drew a longer breath and struggled to his knees. Mr. Barney reached forward to seize him; but I saw that the foreigner’s eyes glowed no longer with the wild light that had made him look so savage.
“Sahib,” he said softly, “is Her Innocence safe? Is the Missee unharmed? Is it well with her?”
I looked down at the child’s face. She was breathing quietly, but her eyes were still closed.
“She is asleep. She does not seem to be harmed,” I said.
“Sahib! I was overcome. I had watched so long. Two long weeks have we been in that boat. Water we had, but little food. That food I had brought myself for Missee. One man become touched of the finger of the gods and leaped overboard. The other desired the fragments of food which only remained for Her Innocence. I felt myself fast losing the thread of life. Then—the other man died.”
I knew what he meant. I understood how that man had been strangled by the lanyard around his neck that the food might be saved for the girl. I guess this strange man was pretty nearly a savage; but I believed then—and I believe now—that he had done right.
“I—Dao Singh—then fell asleep, Sahib. I believed it was to be my last sleep. But the Missee had her food and the water.”
“I see,” I said, for he spoke only to me, even ignoring Mr. Barney. “Now you will both be saved. Our ship is at hand.”
“It is well, Sahib,” he sighed. “Dao Singh—is the Sahib’s—servant—”
He fell back into the bottom of the boat and his eyes closed. I feared he had died then and there; but Mr. Barney bent over him, opened his shirt, felt of his heart, and then nodded to me with encouragement.
“He’s asleep,” he said. “Just done up—plucky brown devil. A Hindoo, I take it. These folks were from a British ship; but that boat had no name on her.”
Half an hour later we pulled under the Gullwing’s rail. All hands were there to eagerly welcome us. We caught the falls and they hauled us up to the davits, heavy as the boatload was.
As we swung inboard I leaped down to the deck, still bearing the unconscious girl in my arms.