Part 16

Captain Michael O’Shea said a word to Johnny Kent, who pulled his revolver from the breast of his shirt. Twenty of the passengers were ready for the order. Some had armed themselves with pieces of steel piping unscrewed from the frames of the state-room berths. Others flourished clubs of scantling saved from the wreckage of the fire. They were men unused to violence--lawyers, merchants, even a clergyman--but they were ready to risk their lives to win freedom from their shameful plight.

The compact little band swept out on deck like a cyclone. O’Shea and Johnny Kent opened fire, shooting to kill. The enemy was taken in flank and in rear. Those who were busied with the boats tumbled into them. Before the rush of the passengers could be checked they had cleared a path forward and gained the stairway to the bridge-deck. Scattering shots wounded one or two, but shelter was found behind the wheel-house and chart-room.

O’Shea ran to the captain’s quarters and entered with fear in his heart. The room was empty, but there was blood on the floor and signs of a struggle.

“They did away with him,” O’Shea cried, his voice choked. “He died like a brave sailor. Now for the officers.”

Snatching an axe from the rack in the wheel-house, he jumped for the row of cabins. The first door was locked and he smashed it in with mighty blows. The chief officer of the _Alsatian_ was discovered within, irons on his wrists, a nasty wound slanting across his forehead.

“Take me out of this and give me a gun,” sobbed the stalwart Englishman.

“How about the rest of ye?” shouted O’Shea.

“They shot the old man and clubbed Hayden, second officer, to death. The others are alive.”

“Lay your hands on the rail yonder and hold steady,” O’Shea commanded him. “I will shear the links of those bracelets with the axe.”

This done they broke into the other rooms and released the surviving junior officers who had been surprised while asleep. Raging and cursing, they caught up axes and iron belaying-pins and joined O’Shea in the sally to release the seamen locked up in the forecastle and the stewards penned below. Recognizing the grave danger, Vonderholtz tried to rally his armed men and hold the boat-deck against attack. But his force was divided and disorganized and part of it was in the boats. His power had crumbled in a moment. He was on the defensive, fighting for life.

Now the crew of the _Alsatian_ came swarming against him, even the stewards no longer obsequious slaves of the tray and napkin but yelping like wolves. Heedless of bullets, the large force led by O’Shea, Johnny Kent, and the chief officer of the _Alsatian_ charged with irresistible ferocity. They penned forty of the Communal Brotherhood between the rail and the deck-house amidships, and fairly hammered and jammed them through the nearest doorway and made them prisoners.

Vonderholtz comprehended that the ship was lost to him and that it was every man for himself and flight into the boats. He somehow got clear of the whirling conflict, found room to turn, and stood with his back to a derrick-mast while he let drive with his pistol and put a bullet through O’Shea’s arm.

Roaring vengeance, Johnny Kent would have killed the blond leader in his tracks, but just then Miss Jenness ran swiftly to Vonderholtz, caught hold of his hand, and urged him frantically toward the nearest boat. Johnny Kent forbore to shoot. He could not hit his target without driving a bullet through the girl. Nor did any man hinder them, as Vonderholtz and Miss Jenness, dark, tragic, incomprehensible, moved quickly to the edge of the ship and leaped into the crowded boat that had just swung clear. It descended from the overhanging davits and plopped into the smooth sea. As the falls were unhooked at the bow and stern, the men on the thwarts set the long oars in the thole-pins and clumsily pushed away from the side of the liner.

It would have been easy to shoot Vonderholtz from the deck above, but he crouched in the stern-sheets with the girl clinging close at his side, so that she seemed to be trying to shield him. No one was willing to risk killing the woman in order to deal retribution to the chief criminal.

“Blaze away at the other boats! Kill all you can!” shouted the chief officer of the _Alsatian_. “Shoot into the thick of them before they pull out of range!”

“Let them go,” gravely counselled O’Shea, who was trying to bandage his bleeding arm. “God Almighty will hand out justice to them. Those boats will not live through the first squall, for they are overcrowded and there are few seamen amongst them.”

The lawful crew of the _Alsatian_ gathered together and watched the boats drift to leeward. There was no more shooting by either side. It was as if a truce had been declared. Johnny Kent made a trumpet of his hands and shouted in tremendous tones to the boat in which Vonderholtz had escaped:

“We tricked you and we whipped you, you cowardly dogs. The ship will float and she’ll be towed to port. The laugh is on you, and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, my gay chemical professor.”

Cries of rage arose from the boats, but there was no returning to the liner, no possible way of scaling her towering sides. Her own crew held possession of her as securely as if they were in a fortress. The wind freshened briskly and the boats drifted farther and farther away to leeward. The men who filled them must face the dreadful perils and sufferings of castaways in mid-ocean. At length the boats became no more than white specks, and then they vanished beyond the misty horizon.

“If Vonderholtz could have had his way he would have destroyed the ship with every soul in her before he abandoned her,” said O’Shea.

“He had me on the list,” piped up Jenkins P. Chase, who strutted importantly, for he had knocked down a foeman and clubbed him into submission. “Now, about that young woman, Miss Jenness. Hanged if she wasn’t a fine-looking proposition. There’s a romance for you, eh?”

“’Tis my guess that she loved him but could not stand for his violent doctrines,” said O’Shea. “And she was afraid to oppose him for fear she would lose him entirely. And maybe he persuaded her to make this voyage with him and he would take her away to live with him somewhere and be happy. ’Twas an evil day for her when she met him, wherever it was, but she was ready to die for him. The love of women!”

Four days later an unlovely little British cargo tramp, wandering across from South America with an empty hold, sighted the _Alsatian_ helpless and flying signals of distress. The humble skipper of this beggarly craft could not believe his eyes. His wildest, most fantastic dreams of salvage were about to come true. As he steamed alongside the chief officer of the liner shouted:

“Tow us to New York and settle with the owners.”

“Will I?” bawled the bewhiskered skipper, dancing a jig. “I’ll hang onto my end of the bloomin’ hawser as long as this hooker of mine will float. Are you stove up inside? Broke a shaft?”

“No. Engine-room full of water. We opened the sea-cocks on purpose.”

“You’re drunk or crazy,” cried the skipper; “but I will tow you to hades for the price that will be awarded for this job.”

It was a plucky undertaking for the under-engined, under-manned tramp, but the _Alsatian_ sent extra hands aboard, and the two vessels crept slowly in toward the Atlantic coast, swung to the northward, and after a tedious voyage came in sight of Sandy Hook. The wild and tragic experience through which she had passed seemed incredible to those on board. So many days overdue was this crack liner of the International service that tugs had been sent to search for her. The newspapers reported her as missing and probably lost.

“You and Johnny Kent will be grand-stand heroes,” said Jenkins P. Chase to Captain Michael O’Shea. “You have done a tremendously big thing, you know. By jingo, nothing is too good for you. Of course, the company will treat you handsomely and come down with the cash. But don’t forget my proposition. It still holds good. Come to my office and fill out a blank check and I’ll sign it like a shot. That murderous scoundrel, Vonderholtz, intended to throw me overboard. I saw it in his eyes.”

“About that check, Mr. Chase,” said O’Shea with a friendly smile, “forget it. You are a great little man, and we forgive you for being so rich, but ’twas not the kind of a job that seafarin’ men take money for from a shipmate. Johnny and me had to find a way out. It was a matter of professional pride, as ye might say.”

The rubicund engineer beamed his indorsement of this sentiment and added cheerily:

“What the company chooses to give us will be our lawful due, which we earned in savin’ property and treasure. And if my share amounts enough to buy me a tidy little farm in the grand old State o’ Maine, I won’t envy you and your millions one darned solitary mite, Mr. Jenkins P. Chase. And I won’t feel like joining any Communal Brotherhood to take ’em away from you.”

THE BRANDED MAN

I

An elderly man of ample girth was plying a hoe in a very neat and tidy vegetable garden. His battered, good-natured visage reflected pleasure in the task and contentment with existence. Blue overalls were hitched to his shoulders by a pair of straps. A lock of gray hair poked itself through a hole in his ragged straw hat. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up to display a pair of ponderous, sunburnt arms upon which were tattooed an anchor and a pink-eyed mermaid. Ever and anon this bucolic person turned his attention to a boy who was weeding the onion bed on his hands and knees, and thundered admonitions at him in a voice that carried across the pasture and startled the grazing cows.

The youth thus bombarded showed no signs of terror. In fact, he grinned quite amiably as if hardened to threats of being skinned alive or triced up by the thumbs. Obviously, he considered his employer’s bark worse than his bite. At length the latter leaned on his hoe to remark with heated candor:

“Say, Bub, those weeds grow faster than you pull ’em up. Is there anything slower than you in this part of the country?”

The boy turned from watching a woodchuck meander toward its hole and promptly answered with a touch of pride:

“It runs in the family, Mr. Kent. My pa is the slowest man in the village, an’ my grand-dad was slower than he be, so ma says. Us Perkinses is all slower’n molasses in January.”

“Well, if I could find another boy, I’d lift you off this farm by the slack of your pants,” snorted Johnny Kent. “You make me peevish in spots, and I aim to be the happiest man on earth.”

“You can’t find another boy,” was the unruffled reply. “They’re all off hayin’. Say, Mr. Kent, it’s a great day to go fishin’. An’ this garden is jes’ full of fat, juicy angle-worms.”

“Doggone it, Bub, I’ll have to go you,” cried the elderly gardener with smiling animation. “You dig the bait and we’ll start right after dinner.”

He forsook the vegetables and moved at a leisurely gait in the direction of a small white cottage with green blinds, in front of which blazed a gorgeous profusion of hollyhocks. At the porch he halted to drop into a canvas hammock, the ropes of which were spliced sailorwise, and sought his ease for a few minutes while he fondly contemplated his landed possessions. The green fields, rolling and pleasantly diversified by patches of woodland, were framed by ancient stone-walls. In the foreground loomed the capacious barn, flanked by the hen-house and wood-shed. To the right of the cottage extended an apple orchard whose gnarled trees were laden with fruit.

It was here that Johnny Kent had cast anchor, in the haven of his dreams, and he roundly swore that the sea should know him no more. He was done with nursing crippled engines and hammering drunken stokers. The hazards of his calling were for younger men. A stroke of good fortune during his last voyage with Captain Michael O’Shea, in the liner _Alsatian_, had given him the cash in hand to pay for the longed-for “farm in the grand old State o’ Maine” and a surplus to stow in the bank.

“Here I am,” he said to himself as he swung his legs in the hammock, “and it’s too blamed good to be true, honest it is. Fightin’ potato-bugs is all the excitement I pine for, and when the red cow lets go her hind foot and capsizes me and the pail and the milkin’-stool, it’s positively thrilling. No watches to stand and nothing to pester me, barrin’ that lazy, tow-headed Perkins boy. And I’m going fishin’ with him this afternoon just to show myself how independent I am of skippers and owners and charters and such foolishness.”

With this the retired chief engineer entered the cottage and passed into the kitchen. The floors had been scrubbed white with sand and holy-stone. The brass door-knobs and andirons were polished like gold. The woodwork glistened with speckless white paint. What furniture there was consisted of solid, old-fashioned pieces, such as Windsor chairs, a highboy, a claw-footed table or two, and a desk of bird’s-eye maple. No bric-a-brac cluttered them. Habit had schooled this nautical housekeeper to dispense with loose stuff which might go adrift in a heavy sea-way.

Kicking himself out of his overalls, he tied a white apron about his waist and bent his attention to the kitchen stove. The green peas were boiling merrily, the potatoes were almost baked, and it was time to fry the bacon and eggs. He cooked his own dinner with as hearty good-will as he had hoed the garden. It was all part of the game which he enjoyed with such boyish zest.

Stepping to the back door, he blew a blast on a tin horn to summon the Perkins boy. That lazy urchin sped out of the onion bed as if he had wings, and Johnny Kent was moved to comment:

“Be careful, Bub, or your family’ll disown you. You came bowlin’ along to your vittles like you were actually alive! Right after dinner you wash the dishes and scour them tins, and if you leave a spot on ’em no bigger than a flea’s whisker, I’ll nail your hide to the barn door. Then we’ll hitch up the mare and jog along to East Pond with our fish-poles.”

“Folks in town think it kind o’ queer you don’t hire a woman to keep house,” said the Perkins offspring as he took the wash-basin down from its hook.

“You can tell ’em with my compliments that they’re a gabby lot of gossips and ought to have a stopper put on their jaw-tackle,” returned Johnny Kent with surprising heat and a perceptible blush. “I can look after myself without any advice from the village.”

Young Perkins snickered and thought it wise to change the subject. When they sat down to table, the host was in the best of humor as he declaimed with tremendous gusto:

“Did you ever taste such peas? Raised ’em myself. Cooked in cream from my own cow. Early Rose potatoes from my own garden. Eggs from my own hens. They lay ’em every day.”

“Hens have to lay or bust this time o’ year,” prosaically replied the youth. “An’ peas is peas.”

“Romance was plumb left out of your system,” sighed the mariner. “All the years I was wanderin’ over the high seas seem tame and monotonous alongside this.”

Before the meal was ended there came an interruption. Johnny Kent dropped knife and fork and suspiciously sniffed the breeze which drew through the open windows. “Bub” Perkins likewise showed uneasy symptoms and cocked his freckled snub nose to sniff the air. It was a tableau evidently of some importance. Presently they both arose without a word and hastened out of doors to scan the peaceful landscape far and near.

“I smelled wood smoke, sure as guns,” said Johnny Kent.

“So did I. I bet a cooky it’s another fire,” excitedly cried young Perkins. “I can’t see anything, can you?”

“Not yet. The woods have been afire seven times in the last week, and it ain’t accidental, Bub. The buildings will begin to go next. My farm has been spared so far.”

The boy was climbing into an apple-tree, from which perch he was able to gaze over the hill beyond the pasture. He could see a hazy cloud of smoke drifting among the pine growth of a neighboring farm and in the undergrowth glowed little spurts of flame like crimson ribbons. The fire had gained small headway, but unless speedily checked it might sweep destructively over a large area.

“No fishin’ trip to-day,” sorrowfully muttered Johnny Kent. “Pick up the shovels and hoes and some empty grain sacks, Bub, while I put the mare in the buggy. It’s a case of all hands turnin’ out again.”

The call of duty had never found the stout-hearted mariner indifferent, and a few minutes later he was driving down the country road under forced draught, the vehicle bounding over rocks and ruts, and the Perkins boy hanging on with both hands. Already the alarm had spread, and farmers were leaving their mowing machines and hay-racks in the fields to hurry in the direction of the burning woodland. Wagons loaded with men came rattling out from the village. Two or three of the recent fires, so mysteriously frequent, had done much damage, and the neighborhood was alert to respond.

Experience had taught the volunteer force how to operate. They dashed into the woodland and fought the fire at close range. Some wetted sacks in a near-by brook and beat out the flying embers and the blazing grass. Others shovelled sand and earth upon the creeping skirmish-line of the conflagration. The most agile climbed the trees, which were just beginning to catch, and chopped off the flaming, sizzling branches. They toiled like heroes, regardless of the wilting heat and blinding, choking smoke.

Johnny Kent was not a man to spare himself, and he raged in the fore-front of the embattled farmers, exerting himself prodigiously, shouting orders, taking command as a matter of habit. The others obeyed him, being afraid to do anything else, although they knew more about fighting forest fires than he. The elderly marine engineer had grown unaccustomed to such violent endeavor, and he puffed and grunted hugely and ran rivers of perspiration.

So promptly had the neighbors mustered that the flames were conquered before they could jump into the thickest part of the woodland and swirl through the tops of the pines. Leaving a patrol to search the undergrowth in search of stray sparks, the farmers withdrew from the blackened area and gathered together to listen to the excited story of a young man armed with a shot-gun.

“This ain’t the first fire that’s been set on my property,” said he. “My pasture was touched off in three places last Saturday night, but a heavy shower of rain come along and put it out. Next mornin’, just before day, my corn-crib was burnt to the ground. Since then I’ve been lookin’ around in the woods whenever I could spare the time----”

“It’s spite work or there’s a lunatic firebug roamin’ the country,” put in the first selectman of the village.

“The spite ain’t aimed at me in particular,” resumed the young man with the gun. “Mark Wilson’s wood lot has been set, and the Widow Morgan’s back field, and nobody knows where it will happen next. As I was about to say, when I fust seen the smoke this afternoon I was on the other side of the young growth, and I put for it as hard as I could. And I saw a man sneakin’ away from the fire. I threw up my gun to give him a dose of buckshot, but he dodged among the trees and was over the hill and down in the hollow before you could say Jack Robinson. I ain’t very speedy since I was throwed out of the dingle-cart and broke my leg, and the strange man got away from me.”

“He’s the crittur that’s been settin’ all the fires,” exclaimed the first selectman. “What in thunder did he look like, Harry? Give me a description, and I’ll call a special meeting of the board to-night, and we’ll offer a reward, mebbe as much as twenty dollars.”

“I can’t say exactly. He was six feet tall, or five, anyhow, and light-complected, though he might have been dark, and he had on brown clothes, but I ain’t quite sure about the color. Anyhow, he’s the man we’ve got to ketch before we can sleep easy in our beds.”

Johnny Kent was too weary to take much interest in a man-hunt, even with the magnificent largeness of twenty dollars in prospect. Summoning the Perkins boy, who was heaving rocks at a small turtle on the bank of the brook, he clambered heavily into the buggy and turned the mare toward the road. The afternoon had been spoiled and the worthy mariner was in a disgruntled mood. A serpent had entered his Eden. Likely enough the scoundrel who was starting conflagrations all over the landscape would soon give his attention to the beloved farm with the white cottage and the very neat and tidy vegetable garden.

The owner thereof ambled to the porch with the gait of one utterly exhausted and dumped himself into the nearest chair. His face was well blackened with smoke and soot. His raiment had been torn to rags by the thickets through which he had so gallantly plunged. He looked like an uncommonly large scarecrow in the last stages of disrepair. Moreover, his eyes were reddened and smarted acutely, he had a stitch in the side, and his stomach ached.

While he reposed in this state of ruin, there came briskly walking through his front gate a ruddy, well-knit figure of a man, young in years, whose suit of blue serge became him jauntily. Halting to survey the trimly ordered flower-beds and vine-covered portico, he ceased whistling a snatch of a sea chantey and nodded approvingly. Following the path to the side of the cottage, he beheld the disreputable person seated in a state of collapse upon the porch. Instead of expressing courteous sympathy, the visitor put his hands on his hips and laughed uproariously.

Stung by this rude levity, Johnny Kent heaved himself to his feet and hurled the chair at the head of the heartless young man, who dodged it nimbly, ducked the swing of a fist big enough to land him in the middle of next week, if not farther, and shoved the engineer into the canvas hammock where he floundered helplessly and sputtered:

“Howdy, Cap’n Mike! It’s a low-down Irish trick to laugh at a man that’s all wore out and tore up the way I am.”

Captain Michael O’Shea strove to check his unseemly mirth and thumped his old comrade affectionately as he explained:

“So this is the happy, simple life that ye cracked on about for years. You look it, Johnny. Was it an explosion that wrecked you or have ye been cleaning boilers? And is every day like this on the dear old homestead?”