Part 29

The romance of caravan routes, and pale kerosene lamps burning in Tartar tents, escaped both Ezra Morgan and Richter; they went about their business of changing American and English minted gold for certain contrabands much wanted in the States. The chief engineer favored gum-opium as a road to riches; Ezra dealt in liquors and silks, uncut gems and rare laces.

Fortunately for the chief engineer’s peace of mind, the spare, double-end Scotch boiler was not used on the Russian voyage. Gathright was forgotten and Hylda, safe in an eastern music school, was not likely to take up with another objectionable lover. Richter, relieved of a weight, went about the engine-room and boiler-room humming a score of tunes, all set to purring dynamos, clanking pumps, and musical cross-heads.

At mid-Pacific, on a second voyage—this time to an oilless country, if ever there were one, Mindanao—a frightened water-tender came through the bulkhead door propelled by scalding steam, and there was much to do aboard the _Seriphus_. The port boiler had blown out a tube; the spare, midship boiler was filled with fresh water and the oil-jets started.

Richter, stripped to the waist, it being one hundred and seventeen degrees hot on deck, drove his force to superhuman effort. Ezra Morgan, seven hours after the accident, had the steam and speed he ordered, in no uncertain tones, through the bridge speaking-tube.

Fergerson, a quiet man always, had occasion, the next day, to enter the chief’s cabin, where Richter sat writing a letter to Hylda, which he expected to post via a homeward bound ship. Richter glared at the second engineer.

“That spare boiler—” began Fergerson.

“What of it?”

“Well, mon, it’s been foamin’ an’ a gauge-glass broke, an’ there’s something wrong wi’ it.”

“We can’t repair th’ port boiler until we reach Mindanao.”

Fergerson turned to go.

“Ye have m’ report,” he said acidly. “That boiler’s bewitched, or somethin’.”

“Go aft!” snarled Richter, who resumed writing his letter.

He hesitated once, chewed on the end of the pen, tried to frame the words he wanted to say to Hylda. Then he went on:

“—_expect to return to San Francisco within thirty-five days. Keep up your music—forget Gathright—I’ll get you a good man, with straight shoulders and a big fortune, when I come back and have time to look around._”

Richter succeeded in posting the letter, along with the Captain’s mail, when the _Seriphus_ spoke a Government collier that afternoon and sheered close enough to toss a package aboard. Ezra Morgan leaned over the bridge-rail and eyed the smudge of smoke and plume of steam that came from the tanker’s squat funnel. He called for Richter, who climbed the bridge-ladder to the captain’s side.

“We’re only logging nine, point five knots,” said Ezra Morgan. “Your steam is low—it’s getting lower. What’s th’ matter? Saving oil?”

“That spare boiler is foaming,” the chief explained.

“Damn you and your spare boiler! What business had you leaving San Francisco with a defective boiler? Your report to Mr. Henningay stated that everything was all right in engine-room and boiler-room.”

“Foam comes from soap or—something else in the water.”

“Something else—”

Richter got away from Ezra Morgan on a pretense of going below to the boiler-room. Instead of going below, however, he went aft and leaned over the taffrail. Somehow or other, he feared that spare boiler and the consequence of conscience.

Limping, with three-quarters of the necessary steam pressure, the _Seriphus_ reached Mindanao and was forced to return to California without repairs to the port boiler. While repairs, new tubes and tube-sheet were put in place by boilersmiths, Richter saw his daughter, who had come west from music school.

The change in her was pronounced; she spoke not at all of Gathright, whose disappearance she could not understand; and Richter, keen where his daughter was concerned, realized that her thinness and preoccupation was on account of the missing electrician.

“I get you a fine fellow,” he promised Hylda.

He brought several eligible marine engineers to the house. Hylda snubbed them and cried in secret.

An urgent telegram called Richter back to the _Seriphus_. He made two long voyages, one down Chili-way, the other half around the world, before the tanker’s bow was turned toward California. Much time had elapsed from the night he had thrust Gathright into the spare boiler and turned on the oil-jets beneath its many tubes. Once, in Valparaiso, an under engineer pointed out red rust leaking from the gauge-glass of the spare boiler.

“Looks like blood,” commented this engineer.

Richter scoffed, but that afternoon he drank himself stupid on kummel, obtained from an engineer’s club ashore. Another time, just after the tanker left the port of Aden on her homebound passage, a stowaway crawled out from beneath the cold boiler and gave Richter the fright of his life.

“Why, mon,” said Fergerson, who was present in the boiler-room, “that’s only a poor wisp o’ an Arab.”

“I thought it was a ghost,” blabbered Richter.

Barometer pressure rose when the _Seriphus_ neared mid-Pacific. Ezra Morgan predicted a typhoon before the tanker was on the longitude of Guam. Long rollers came slicing across the _Seriphus’_ bow, drenched the forecastle, filled the ventilators and flooded the boiler-room.

Richter went below, braced himself in the rolling engine-room, listened to his engines clanking their sturdy song, then waddled over the gratings and ducked below the beam that marked the bulkhead door. An oiler in high rubber-boots lunged toward the chief engineer.

“There’s something inside th’ spare boiler!” shouted the man. “Th’ boiler-room crew won’t work, sir.”

Richter waded toward a frightened group all of whom were staring at the spare boiler. A hollow rattling sounded when the tanker heaved and pitched—as if some one were knocking bony knuckles against the stubborn iron plates.

“A loose bolt,” whispered Richter. “Keep th’ steam to th’ mark, or I’ll wipe a Stillson across th’ backs of all of you,” he added in a voice that they could hear and understand.

Superstition, due to the menacing storm and high barometer, the uncanny noises in the racked boiler-room, Richter’s bullying manner, put fear in the hearts of the deck crew. Oil-pipes clogged, pumps refused to work, valves stuck and could scarcely be moved.

“I’ve noo doot,” Fergerson told his Chief, “there’s a ghost taken up its abode wi’ us.”

Richter drank quart after quart of trade-gin.

* * * * *

The barometer became unsteady, the sky hazy, the air melting hot, and a low, rugged cloud bank appeared over the _Seriphus’_ port bow.

Down fell the barometer, a half-inch, almost, and the avalanche of rain and wind that struck the freighter was as if Thor was hammering her iron plates.

Ezra Morgan, unable to escape from the typhoon’s center, prepared to ride out the storm by bringing the _Seriphus_ up until she had the sea on the bow, and he had held her there by going half speed ahead. A night of terror ruled the tanker; the decks were awash, stays snapped, spume rose and dashed over the squat funnel aft the bridge.

Morning, red-hued, with greenish patches, revealed a harrowed ocean, waves of tidal height, and astern lay a battered hulk—a freighter, dismasted, smashed, going down slowly by the bow.

“A Japanese tramp,” said Ezra Morgan. “Some _Marau_ or other, out of the Carolines bound for Yokohama.”

Richter, stupid from trade-gin, was on the bridge with the Yankee skipper.

“We can’t help her,” the engineer said heavily. “I think we got all we can do to save ourselves.”

Ezra Morgan entertained another opinion. The storm had somewhat subsided, and the wind was lighter, but the waves were higher than ever he had known them. They broke over the doomed freighter like surf on a reef.

“Yon’s a distress signal flying,” said Ezra Morgan. “There’s a few seamen aft that look like drowned rats. We’ll go before th’ sea—I’ll put th’ sea abart th’ beam, an’ we’ll outboard oil enough to lower a small-boat an’ take those men off that freighter.”

The maneuver was executed, the screw turned slowly, oil was poured through the waste-pipes and spread magically down the wind until the freighter’s deck, from aft the forehouse, could be seen above the waves.

Over the patch of comparative calm oars dipped, and a mate, in charge of the small boat lowered from the _Seriphus_, succeeded in getting off the survivors who were clinging to the freighter’s taffrail.

The small boat lived in a sea that had foundered big ships. It returned to the tanker’s bow; and the four men, bruised, broken, all half-dead from immersion, were hoisted to the forepeak and taken aft. Two were Japanese sailors and two were Americans—a wireless operator and an engineer. The engineer had a broken leg which required setting, and the wireless operator was in a bad fix; wreckage had stove in his features, and twisted his limbs.

Ezra Morgan was a rough and ready surgeon-doctor; he turned the _Seriphus_ over to the first-mate and made a sick room out of Richter’s cabin. The chief protested.

“Get below to your damn steam!” roared Ezra Morgan. “You hated to see me bring aboard these poor seamen; you said I wasted fuel oil; your breath smells like a gin-mill. Below with you, sir!”

The engine-room and boiler-room of the tanker, she being in water ballast, was not unlike an inferno; the first-mate, acting on Ezra Morgan’s instructions, drove the _Seriphus_ at three-quarter speed into a series of head-on waves; the ship rolled and yawed, tossed, settled down astern, then her screw raced in mingled foam and brine.

Richter’s stomach belched gas; he became sea-sick, climbed into a foul-smelling “ditty-box” of a cabin, aft the engine-room, and attempted to sleep off the effect of the gin. Picture-post-cards, mostly of actresses, a glaring electric over the bunk, oil and water swishing the metal deck below, and the irritating clank of irregular-running engines drove sleep away from him.

Fergerson, the silent second-engineer, came into the “ditty-box” at eight bells, or four o’clock. Fergerson’s thumb jerked forward.

“I’ll have t’ use that spare boiler,” said he.

“What’s th’ matter, now?”

“Feed-pipes clogged in starb’ard one, sir.”

“Use it,” said Richter.

Steam was gotten up on the spare, double-end Scotch boiler; the starboard boiler was allowed to cool; Fergerson, despite the tanker’s rolling motion, succeeded in satisfying Ezra Morgan by keeping up the three-quarter speed set by the skipper.

Richter sobered when the last of the trade-gin was gone; the _Seriphus_ was between Guam and ’Frisco; the heavy seas encountered were the afterkick of the simoon.

Rolling drunkenly, from habit, the chief went on the bridge and asked about getting back his comfortable cabin aft. Ezra Morgan gave him no satisfaction.

“Better stay near your boilers,” advised the captain. “Everything’s gone to hell, sir, since you changed from kummel to gin!”

“Are not th’ injured seamen well yet?”

“Th’ wireless chap’s doing all right—but th’ engineer of that Japanese freighter is hurt internally. You can’t have that cabin, this side of San Francisco.”

“What were two Americans doing in that cheap service?”

Ezra Morgan glanced sharply at Richter.

“Everybody isn’t money mad—like you. There’s many a good engineer, and mate, too, in th’ Japanese Merchant Marine. Nippon can teach us a thing or two—particularly about keeping Scotch boilers up to th’ steaming point.”

This cut direct sent Richter off the bridge; he encountered a bandaged and goggled survivor of the freighter’s wreck at the head of the engine-room ladder. The wireless operator, leaning on a crutch whittled by a bo’sain, avoided Richter, who pushed him roughly aside and descended the ladder, backward.

White steam, lurid oaths, Scotch anathema from the direction of the boiler-room, indicated more trouble. Fergerson came from forward and bumped into Richter, so thick was the escaping vapor.

“Out o’ my way, mon,” the second engineer started to say, then clamped his teeth on his tongue.

“What’s happened, now!” queried Richter.

“It’s that wicked spare boiler—she’s aleak an’ foamin’, an’ there’s water in th’ fire-boxes.”

Richter inclined his bullet shaped head; he heard steam hissing and oilers cursing the day they had signed on the _Seriphus_. A blast when a gasket gave way, hurtled scorched men between Richter and Fergerson; a whine sounded from the direction of the boiler-room, the whine rose to an unearthly roar: Richter saw a blanket of white vapor floating about the engine’s cylinders. This vapor, to his muddled fancy, seemed to contain the figure of a man wrapped in a winding shroud.

He clapped both hands over his eyes, hearing above the noise of escaping steam a call so distinct it chilled his blood.

“_Hylda!_”

* * * * *

Now there was that in the ghostly voice that brought Richter’s gin-swollen brain to the realization of the thing he had done in disposing of Gathright by bolting him in the spare boiler.

No good luck had followed that action; Hylda was still disconsolate; trade and smuggling was at a low ebb; there was talk, aboard and ashore, of reducing engineers’ and skippers’ wage to the bone.

Richter had a Teutonic stubbornness; Ezra Morgan had certainly turned against his chief engineer; the thing to do was to lay the ghostly voice, make what repairs were necessary in the boiler-room, and give the tanker’s engines the steam they needed in order to make a quick return passage to San Francisco and please the Henningays.

An insane rage mastered Richter—the same red-vision he had experienced when he threw Gathright out of his daughter’s house. He lowered his bullet head, brushed the curling vapors from his eyes, and plunged through the bulkhead door, bringing up in scalding steam before the after end of the midship, or spare boiler.

Grotesquely loomed all three boilers. They resembled humped-camels kneeling in a narrow shed by some misty river. Steam in quantity came hissing from the central camel; out of the furnace-doors, from a feed-pipe’s packing, around a flange where the gauge-glass was riveted.

The _Seriphus_ climbed a long Pacific roller, steadied, then rocked in the trough between seas; iron plates, gratings, flue-cleaners, scrapers, clattered around Richter who felt the flesh on neck and wrist rising into water blisters.

No one had thought to close the globe-valve in the oil supply line, or to extinguish the fires beneath the spare and leaking boiler. Richter groped through a steam cloud, searching for the hand-wheel on the pipe line. All the metal he touched was simmering hot.

A breath of sea air came down a ventilator; Richter gulped this air and tried to locate the globe-valve with the iron wheel. Vision cleared, he saw the red and open mouth of the central camel—the flannel-like flames and he heard through toothed-bars a voice calling, “Hylda!”

Fergerson and a water tender dragged their chief from the boiler room by the heels; blistered, with the skin peeled from his features, Richter’s eyes resembled hot coals in their madness. Blabbering nonsense, the engineer gave one understandable order:

“Put out th’ fire, draw th’ water, search inside th’ spare boiler—there’s something there, damit!”

Ezra Morgan came below, while the spare boiler was cooling, and entered Richter’s temporary cabin—the “ditty-box” with the play actresses’ pictures glued everywhere. Fergerson had applied rude doctoring—gauze bandages soaked in petroleum—on face and arms.

“What’s th’ matter, man?” asked Ezra Morgan. “Have you gone mad?”

“I heard some one calling my daughter, Hylda.”

“Where do you keep your gin?”

“It’s gone! Th’ voice was there inside th’ spare boiler. Did Fergerson look; did he find a skeleton, or—”

Ezra Morgan pinched Richter’s left arm, jabbed home a hypodermic containing morphine, and left the chief engineer to sleep out his delusions. Fergerson came to the “ditty-box” some watches later. Richter sat up.

“What was in th’ spare boiler?” asked the chief.

“Scale, soda, a soapy substance.”

“Nothing else?”

“Why, mon, that’s enough to make her foam.”

Richter dropped back on the bunk and closed his lashless eyes.

“Suppose a man, a stowaway, had crawled through th’ aft man-hole, an’ died inside th’ boiler? Would that make it foam—make th’ soapy substance?”

“When could any stowaway do that?”

Richter framed his answer craftily: “Say it was done when th’ _Seriphus_ was at Oakland that time th’ boilers were repaired in dry-dock.”

Fergerson drew on his memory. “Th’ time, mon, ye went aboard an’ tested th’ spare boiler? Th’ occasion when ye took th’ trouble to rig up a shore-hose in order to fill th’ boiler wi’ water?”

“Yes.”

“Did ye ha’ a man-hole plate off th’ boiler?”

“I removed th’ after-end plate, then went for th’ hose. We had no steam up, you remember, and our feed-pumps are motor-driven.”

“Ye think a mon might ha’ crawled through to th’ boiler during your absence?”

“Yes!”

“Ye may b’ right—but if one did he could ha’ escaped by th’ fore man-hole plate. I had that off, an’ wondered who put it back again so carelessly. Ye know th’ boiler is a double-ender—wi’ twa man-holes.”

Richter was too numbed to show surprise. Fergerson left the “ditty-box” and pulled shut the door. The tanker, under reduced steam, made slow headway toward San Francisco.

One morning, a day out from soundings, the chief engineer awoke, felt around in the gloom, and attempted to switch on the electric light.

He got up and threw his legs over the edge of the bunk. A man sat leaning against the after plate. Richter blinked; the man, from the goggles on him and the crutch that lay across his knees, was the wireless operator who had been rescued from a sea grave.

“No need for light,” said the visitor in a familiar voice. “You can guess who I am, Richter.”

“A ghost!” said the chief. “Gathright’s ghost! Come to haunt me!”

“Not exactly to haunt you. I assure you I am living flesh—somewhat twisted, but living. I got out of that midship boiler, while you were bolting me in so securely. I waited until you went on deck for a hose, and replaced the after man-hole cover. I was stunned and lay hidden aboard for two days. Then I looked for Hylda. She was gone. I shipped as electrician for a port in Japan. I knocked around a bit—at radio work for the Japanese. It was chance that the _Seriphus_ should have picked me up from the _Nippon Maru_.”

“That voice calling for Hylda,” cried Richter.

“Was a little reminder that I sent through the boiler-room ventilator; I knew you were down there, Richter.”

The marine engineer switched on the electric light.

“What do you want?” he whined to Gathright.

“Hylda—your daughter!”

Paul Richter covered his eyes.

“If she will atone for the harm I have done you, Gathright, she is yours with her father’s blessing.”

[Illustration]

The Invisible Terror

_An Uncanny Tale of the Jungle_

_By_ HUGH THOMASON

Old man Jess Benson, cattleman and mine owner, rode across the high plateau, which divided the rich grazing lands between Rock Valley and Slater Canyon, and let his horse pick its way down the steep slope to Slater Creek. Here, as the sorrel slaked its thirst, the big man in the saddle filled and lighted his pipe, while his eyes roved slowly through the sprinkle of cottonwoods which fringed the creek.

About fifty feet upstream, close to a large bowlder and partly behind a clump of stunted plum bushes, half a dozen magpies were quarreling over something that the rider could not clearly distinguish. He could merely see a dark blotch behind the bushes—the carcass of a cow or steer probably—and he watched the beautiful black-and-white birds speculatively as they uttered their shrill, raucous cries, and fluttered about the thicket.

Since there was a possibility, however, that the dead animal might be carrying his own brand, Benson finally turned his horse in the direction of the birds. Half a minute later, having reached a spot from which he could command a clear view of the thing that lay behind the bushes, his tanned cheeks went ashen, and he swung himself to the ground with an exclamation of horrified surprise.

Close to the thicket, and five or six feet from the rock, the body of a man was huddled in the horrible posture of one who has met a violent end.

He was lying partly on his side, one leg drawn up, the other outstretched, while both arms were bent under him. His face and neck were terribly torn and mangled, and his flannel shirt had been ripped half off his body, which was bruised and covered with wounds. Several paces away was a trampled felt hat, and the muzzle of a revolver peeped from beneath the body, its butt evidently clutched in the stiffened fingers of one hand. For a dozen feet the ground was torn and trampled, as though a terrible struggle had taken place.

For several minutes Benson stood still and eyed the ghastly thing in horrified fascination. Long experience as a range rider told him that the body and the signs of conflict about it could not be more than forty-eight hours old—the thing had happened since a heavy rain of two days before—and it slowly dawned on the cattleman that the dead man was Nathan Smith, a neighbor of his, who owned a small farm some five or six miles away.

For some time he studied the body and the surrounding soil very carefully, noting especially that the soft earth was covered with large, doglike tracks; then he went to his horse and untied his slicker from the back of the saddle. With this garment he managed to cover the body so that the magpies could no longer reach it. Then he mounted his horse and rode off toward Elktooth, ten miles away.

Sheriff Parker and Doctor Morse, the coroner, happened to be together in the latter’s office when Benson entered and told his story. Both men listened without any particular comment, and at the end the sheriff got to his feet.

“I’ll run you out in the car, Horace,” he informed the coroner. “We can reach the spot easily enough by following the old road up the creek. From what Benson says, the thing does not look like a crime exactly—it seems more like the work of wolves, though I never heard of any attacking a man in this region; but you can never tell. At any rate, we’d better look into it as soon as we can.”

It was about an hour later when the three men got out of the machine and walked the few feet which separated them from the scene of the tragedy. Lifting the slicker, Doctor Morse stooped over the gruesome object beneath it, while Sheriff Parker gazed at the trodden ground with interest. While the coroner made his examination, the little officer paced around the thicket, eying the tracks thoughtfully; more than once he stooped to apply a pocket rule to some especially distinct impression, and twice he whistled softly to himself. By the time the doctor’s examination had ended, he was turning a speculative eye toward a dim trail which led off at right angles through the cottonwoods.

Returning from washing his hands at the edge of the stream, Doctor Morse looked at his friend in contemplative silence, as he lighted a cigar and puffed at it nervously.

“Well?” the sheriff questioned, at length. “What was it? What killed him, Horace?”

“Bless me if I know, Bert. I never saw anything like this before in all my experience. It was an animal of some kind, I should say; a wolf, perhaps, although, as you said, the few wolves we have hereabouts have never been known to attack humans. But the man is frightfully mangled, his jugular vein is quite torn out of him. Had his gun in his hand, too. It’s empty. He must have fought the thing hard, whatever it was. I wonder—could it have been the ‘plague’?”