Part 5

“And how did they take it?”

“Very well, indeed. Miss Hollister has been rather hysterical, but one can scarcely blame her.”

“Well, the worst may be over, and again it may not,” thoughtfully explained O’Shea. “Now, ’tis this way. I can set you people ashore, and ye can take a chance that the Cuban army will be able to send you inside the Spanish lines under a flag of truce. But there may be weeks of hard living and fever and exposure before ye get anywhere at all. And it may be the death of the ladies. Or you can stay with me, if we get this vessel off, and I will carry you back to the United States.”

“It isn’t a hilarious proposition either way,” replied Van Steen. “I rather think, though, that we had better stick to you.”

The mate returned aboard with the tidings that more than half the crew of the gun-boat had been rescued by the life-raft and in boats which had drifted to the beach.

“We ought to have those boats in case we need them,” said the skipper; “but if the ship can be worked off this tide, and is fit to go to sea, I will not wait for them or anything else.”

The tide was rising fast and the company worked like mad to heave the cargo overboard. At length Johnny Kent set his engines going hard astern and the _Fearless_ began to slide along her coral bed. Halting, bumping, grinding, she gradually moved into the deeper water of the channel and rolled in the swell that ran past the headlands. Collision and stranding had fearfully racked and strained her hull, and the captain was not surprised when Johnny Kent bellowed from below:

“We’re leakin’, of course. I guess every rivet in her must have pulled loose. You’d better pray for a spell of good weather.”

“Would ye rather be shot or drowned decent in a gale of wind, Johnny? ’Tis suicide to stay on this coast till daylight.”

The forlorn tug limped out to sea at her best speed, which was not much. The fire-room gang was more or less disabled and the engines needed a deal of tinkering. Drop an able-bodied man from a third-story window and he may not break his neck, but his gait is not apt to be brisk.

“By the holy poker!” ejaculated O’Shea to the mate as they watched the shadowy mountains drop astern. “We delivered the cargo, though it is in a few feet of water, but I have some patriots left. I could think of only one thing at a time. What will I do with them?”

“You can search me, sir. Dump ’em ashore at Key West, if we ever get that far.”

“I will not run into this coast again with a leaky old crab of a ship and no more than coal enough to carry me to a friendly port.”

Men must sleep, and when the _Fearless_ had left the coast twenty miles behind her Captain O’Shea set the regular watches and curled up on the wheel-house transom for a nap before daylight. Johnny Kent, after a sorrowful survey of his engines and boilers, crawled into his bunk and presently his snores rose and fell with the cadenced beat of the steam-pump that fought to keep the water from rising in the leaky hold. The sea was smooth, the clouds no longer obscured the stars, and the weary crew was suffered to rest before clearing away the wreckage and patching the broken upper works.

When O’Shea awoke the dawn was bright and a fresh breeze whipped across an empty sea. George, the cook, greeted him with melancholy demeanor.

“You-all suttinly did play th’ mischief with mah galley when you kerbumped that gun-boat, cap’n. Every las’ dish is busted.”

“Where were you, George?”

“Hidin’ behind th’ range, please, suh. An’ when that there Spaniard blew up it broke all th’ galley windows an’ filled me plumb full of glass. Ain’t we had mos’ excitement enough?”

“I hope so. Did your friend, big Jiminez, swim ashore last night?”

“No, suh. He’s in th’ galley helpin’ me straighten things out. Him an’ me ain’t a mite hostile. Mistah Gorham suttinly did knock a heap o’ sense into that niggah’s skull.”

The breeze blew with steadily increasing weight and began to kick up a choppy sea which racked the sluggish, laboring tug. Johnny Kent reported that the pump was not keeping the water down as easily as during the night. O’Shea chewed over this disquieting news and was undecided whether to attempt the long passage around Cape San Antonio into the Gulf of Mexico. The alternative was to run for Jamaica and take refuge in the nearest neutral port. The English government would probably seize his ship, but her company would be safe against arrest and condemnation as pirates by the Spanish authorities.

While he was considering this grave problem his eyes were gladdened by the sight of Nora Forbes, who came on deck and halted to gaze with amazement at the wrecked appearance of the vessel. Her splendid color paled and she smiled rather tremulously at Captain O’Shea, who reassured her:

“We are still afloat, but we look like a junk heap. And how did ye pull through? And is your aunt getting the upper hand of that nervous prostration?”

“Miss Hollister was terribly frightened, and--and--so was I. I would rather not hear about all that happened last night--not just yet.”

“And I would rather not think of it, just now, Miss Forbes. Perhaps I ought to have set ye ashore among the Cubans. I hope you will not be worse off at sea again.”

“I am glad to be at sea again, with you, Captain O’Shea,” said Nora, and she looked him in the eyes like a true viking’s daughter who scorned subterfuge and spoke as her heart moved her.

It was perhaps as well that Gerald Van Steen decided to join them just then.

“And are ye convinced that the Spanish are not a courteous people when ye meet them by night?” O’Shea cheerfully asked him.

“Do you know, I begin to like this filibustering,” answered the industrious young man, who looked as trampish as any of the crew. “One feels so well pleased after he has pulled out of one of these scrapes that it is almost worth while running into it.” He turned to Nora and addressed her with a shade of appeal in his voice: “Will you sit down with me for a while? I have no end of things to talk about.”

“Why, certainly, Gerald. Good-by, Captain O’Shea. The top o’ the morning to ye.”

The captain bowed and raised his straw hat. His ingenuous countenance wore a somewhat puzzled expression, as if he beheld a new complication in this tumultuous voyage of his.

It was well into the forenoon before Johnny Kent found a breathing-spell and climbed above to confer with the skipper. The indomitable engineer appeared aged and haggard. The pain of his burns distressed him and he was spent with worry and weariness. His hands trembled as he pulled himself up the bridge stairway.

“I ain’t as young as I was, Cap’n Mike,” he huskily exclaimed. “Blamed if I don’t feel kind of strained and shook up, same as the poor old _Fearless_. Looks like one of them fair-weather gales, don’t it? Bright sky and a big sea and wind to peel your whiskers off before night.”

“’Tis a good guess,” soberly replied O’Shea. “Can we weather it, Johnny?”

“I don’t want to make the ladies nervous and fretty,” confided the chief, “but we ain’t keepin’ the water down, Cap’n Mike. It will be in the fire-room before dark at this rate----”

“And then she will fall off into the trough of the sea and founder,” said O’Shea. “And we have no boats. Will your men stay on duty and keep her going?”

“They will, Cap’n Mike. The big nigger feels spry enough to turn to, and the gang is scared to death of him. They believe he’ll murder ’em if they quit on me.”

“Well, Johnny, make steam as long as ye can, and if the weather will not moderate I can try to fetch up somewhere before she goes to the bottom.”

“I ain’t particularly anxious, Cap’n Mike. I never saw you in a hole you couldn’t work your way out of. Of course, there’s the ladies. How are they, anyhow? The young one is on deck, lookin’ like a morning-glory. But what about Miss Hollister? She ain’t sick, is she?”

“Van Steen says the flurry last night gave her a sort of nervous prostration,” answered O’Shea. “She is up and dressed now and taking it easy in her room. Maybe ye would like to duck in and hand her a few kind words.”

“I sure would,” and Johnny Kent beamed. “Ladies like her are mighty refined and delicate and sensitive, and they’re liable to be took with this nervous prostration. I don’t blame her a bit, Cap’n Mike. Why, when we piled up on that reef and the gun-boat was fixin’ to shoot us all to hell-and-gone, I felt nervous myself. Honest I did.”

“Go to it, Johnny, but don’t mention the fact that we are due to founder as the next act of this continuous performance.”

It was really extraordinary to see how much animation came into the face of Miss Hollister when Johnny Kent poked his gray head inside the open door and grinned a bashful greeting. Never did a hero wear a more unromantic aspect, but the spinster had selected him as her own particular hero, nevertheless. He was rugged, elemental, as she had come to regard him, and, in fact, there was something uncommonly attractive to the discerning eye in the modest courage, inflexible devotion to duty, and simple kindliness of this grizzled old sea rover.

“I’m ashamed that we had to give you such a scare last night, ma’am,” he began. “It’s a hoodooed voyage, any way you look at it. Why, Cap’n Mike and me ran a cargo into Hayti last summer and you would have enjoyed it. Stuff on the beach in three hours and a funny old stone fort bangin’ away at us just enough to keep all hands amused.”

“But after this experience, you will not dream of going filibustering again, will you?” Miss Hollister asked him.

Johnny Kent tugged at his gray mustache and looked rather blank as he ejaculated:

“Why not? I ain’t fit for anything else. Of course, I get big wages for runnin’ these risks, and if I can ever save some money, I’m hopin’ to buy a farm down in Maine and raise chickens and such truck. That’s what I call really excitin’ and romantic.”

Miss Hollister responded eagerly:

“And a vegetable garden and cows, and----”

“Yes, ma’am. And flowers in the front yard--hollyhocks, and asters, and peonies, and a lilac bush by the front door-step. I set and think about it a lot.”

It did not appeal to the chief engineer as at all incongruous that the conversation should have taken this turn while the ship was slowly sinking beneath them.

“I have been very successful with flowers,” brightly returned Miss Hollister. “I shall be delighted to send you some seeds and cuttings whenever you return to New England to live on that wonderful farm of yours.”

“Thank you. Now when it comes to chickens, for all-round service there ain’t a bird to beat the Plymouth Rock. I subscribe to the _Poultry Journal_, and always bring it to sea to read----”

The mate dodged out of the wheel-house to shout:

“You’re wanted below, chief. The assistant sends up word that the loose coal is sucking into the pump and she’s chokin’ up.”

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” gently spoke Johnny Kent as he ceremoniously shook Miss Hollister’s hand. “Engines and pumps are provokin’ critturs and they’re always getting out of kilter.”

He paused outside to ask Captain O’Shea:

“What’s the answer? Do we win or lose? There’s bad news from below. The bunker coal is awash. The pump is liable to quit on me ’most any time.”

“I have overhauled the charts, Johnny, and there is a bit of a coral key marked down thirty miles from our present position, bearing sou’-sou’west. I have changed me course to head for it.”

“Thirty miles! Five hours or more at the speed we’re makin’. It will be a close finish, Cap’n Mike.”

“Life seems to be a game of close finishes for you and me, Johnny.”

The _Fearless_ wallowed sluggishly over a rolling, foamy, blue sea. Already the water in the holds had diminished her natural buoyancy. The waves leaped through her broken bulwarks and flung themselves across the deck. The crew and the remaining Cubans had a listless, discouraged demeanor. Their energy was deadened by misfortune. The voyage was ill-fated. Jack Gorham, by contrast, undertook whatever duty came handiest with a kind of machine-like, routine fidelity, unhurried, efficient, his melancholy countenance reflecting neither fear nor impatience. Now and then Jiminez emerged from the stoke-hole to sluice his huge body with pails of salt water. At such times Gorham crossed the deck to slap the negro on his bare back and speak words of approval in broken Spanish. The responsive grin of Jiminez showed every big, white tooth in his head. He had found a master whom he vastly respected, and there was no ill-will between them.

Long before the thirty miles had been run down Captain O’Shea was searching the sea with his glasses to find the tiny coral islet where he hoped to find refuge. It was out of the track of steamer traffic, and so far from the Cuban coast that the danger of discovery by the Spanish navy seemed fairly remote. The chart failed to indicate any harbor, but O’Shea had no expectation of saving his ship. He would drive her ashore and try to put his people on the beach.

At length he was able to descry a low, sandy strip almost level with the sea, along which the breakers flashed white and green. It was the key, and as the _Fearless_ moved nearer it was seen that the vegetation comprised only a few ragged bushes. Desolate, sun-baked, and wind-swept was the place, but it was dry land, and better than the deep sea in a foundering ship.

Captain O’Shea laid down his glasses and called Van Steen.

“’Tis not what I expected, but the _Fearless_ is done for,” said he. “We have fresh water and stores to last some time. And I have faith enough in me luck to feel sure we will be picked off that bit of a key yonder. Please ask the ladies to pack their traps, and you will put life-belts around them.”

As the _Fearless_ lurched drunkenly toward the beach, it seemed as though every comber would stamp her under. The water in the hold had covered the fire-room floor, and was hissing and swashing under the furnaces. The deck-hands were strung along the ladder and hatch, bailing with buckets to aid the choking, sputtering steam-pump.

“I ain’t got any business to be drowned in this lump of a tug,” said Johnny Kent to the first assistant. “I’m thinkin’ about that farm with the hollyhocks and Plymouth Rocks.”

“If that pump stops, which it has symptoms of doing, you’d better be thinking of your wicked old soul,” growled the assistant.

“I can’t swim a lick,” muttered the chief engineer.

“You’d better learn quick. There go the fires,” yelled the other as clouds of steam poured out of the engine-room, and the men below came up the ladder, fighting, scrambling, swearing. Johnny Kent dodged the wild rush, glanced out to sea, and shouted, “Breakers ahead! There are a few more kicks in the old packet and she’ll hit the beach yet.”

As the steam pressure rapidly ran down, the dying engines turned over more and more feebly, but the propeller continued to push the vessel very languidly into the shoal water. Presently she ceased to move, there was a slight jar, and she heeled to starboard. The doomed tug rested upon a sandy bottom.

Now that she was inert, aground, lifting no more to the heave and swing of the seas, the breakers shook her with an incessant bombardment. Spray flew over the bridge and pelted into the cabin windows. The key was about three hundred yards distant from the tug. Between her and the dry land was a strip of deeper water than the shoal on which she had stranded, and then the wide barrier of surf where the breakers tossed and tumbled in a thundering tumult.

Captain O’Shea scanned the angry water and wondered how he could send his people through it. The clumsy life-raft was all he had to put them on. It was buoyant enough, but unmanageable in such boisterous weather as this, and would most likely be blown out to sea and miss the key entirely. To remain on board and hope for quieter weather on the morrow was to risk pounding to pieces overnight.

Then O’Shea caught sight of the jagged timbers of an ancient wreck half covered by the sand on the ridge of the key. If a line could be carried from the ship and made fast to one of those stout timbers, the life-raft might be hauled through the surf.

“’Tis a terrible swim to undertake,” he painfully reflected. “I will try it meself, but if I go under there is nobody to take charge of these people. My men are a rough lot, and it will be hard living on this God-forsaken bit of a key.”

As if Jack Gorham had read what was in the skipper’s mind, he crawled across the sloping deck and shouted something in the ear of Jiminez. The negro nodded and waved an arm in the direction of the beach. The soldier was urging and explaining, the other eagerly assenting. Gorham shouted to the bridge:

“This fine big nigger of mine will carry a rope ashore. He can swim like a duck, and there’s nobody aboard with half his strength.”

“Aye, aye, Jack!” exclaimed O’Shea. “I will give him a heaving-line, and when he hits the beach he can haul a light hawser ashore and make it fast.”

Jiminez had no need to strip for active service, clad as he was only in tattered dungaree breeches chopped off above the knees. It was apparent that he proposed risking his life because the soldier had asked it of him. For the lives of the others he cared not a snap of his finger. Knotting an end of the heaving-line around his waist, he poised himself upon the guard-rail, a herculean statue of ebony. Gorham grasped his hand and said in farewell:

“You keep on going, Jiminez, old boy, or I’ll cave in your cocoanut with the butt of my Springfield.”

The negro grinned and shot downward into the foaming sea. His round head and gleaming shoulders emerged for an instant and then he dived again to pass under the toppling crest of a breaker. A few overhand strokes, and he was in the deeper water with a hundred yards of comparatively easy swimming. He ploughed through it with tremendous ease and power while Captain O’Shea paid out the heaving-line in his wake. Turning on his back, Jiminez rested before the final struggle with the surf on the beach.

The people on the _Fearless_ forgot their forlorn situation. They were absorbed in the picture of the bright, hot sand, the dazzling wall of surf, with the gulls dipping and screaming overhead, and the tossing figure of the black swimmer. Jiminez vanished in the outer line of breakers, bobbed into view for an instant, and was whirled over and over. The undertow caught him and pulled him down, but he fought clear and came to the surface, now beaten seaward, now gaining a yard or so.

From the tug it looked as though he were being battered about like a piece of drifting wreckage, but the sea could not drown him. More than once the beholders were sure he had been conquered. Then they shouted as they saw him shoot landward on the crested back of a rearing comber. He felt the sand with his feet. He was knocked down and rolled back, but regained a foothold and resisted the drag of the out-rushing waves. Wading powerfully, he stumbled into shallow water and fell on his knees, too exhausted to walk, and crawled on all fours to the dry sand. There he sprawled on his back like a dead man, while the hearts of those on board the _Fearless_ beat slow and heavy with suspense. A little while and Jiminez staggered to his feet, shook himself like a dog, and made for the timbers of the old wreck. Making the end of the heaving-line fast, he threw his arms over his head as a signal.

Captain O’Shea bent to the other end of the line the strong rope which he had used for towing the surf-boats. Jiminez sat himself down, dug his heels in the sand, and began to haul in like a human capstan. The rope trailed slowly through the surf without mishap, and the negro firmly belayed it to one of the embedded timbers. Having accomplished what he had set out to do, Jiminez sensibly rolled over, pillowed his head on his arm, and let the other men rescue themselves.

The life-raft was now shoved overboard and secured to the swaying rope by means of pulley blocks. Four picked men and the mate were detailed to make the first trip, which was in the nature of an experiment. They paddled the life-raft across the strip of quieter water, the pulleys holding them close to the fastened hawser. When the raft reached the surf, they laid hold of the hawser and lustily hauled their careering craft shoreward, hand over hand. Drenched and breathless, they gained the beach and sought a few minutes’ rest before undertaking the return journey.

As soon as the raft had safely come back to the _Fearless_ Captain O’Shea shouted:

“Now for the ladies! ’Tis time they quit the poor old hooker.”

Nora Forbes was waiting, a lithe round arm about Miss Hollister’s waist. The spinster was white to the lips, and her eyes sought, not the protecting care of Gerald Van Steen, but the bracing presence of that stout-hearted old pirate Johnny Kent, who was profanely wrestling with the fresh-water barrels.

“You will get wet, ladies,” said O’Shea, “but ’tis not at all dangerous. The raft will take you through the surf like a toboggan. Mr. Van Steen will go with you. Ye are a brave pair, and I would ask no better shipmates.”

The raft was pitching and bucking alongside, but the lower deck of the vessel was now level with the sea. O’Shea caught Miss Hollister in his arms, waded to the rail with her and waited until Van Steen and the other men were ready to catch her. Then with a wrenching heave, O’Shea tossed her into their outstretched arms. It was Nora Forbes’s turn to leave the vessel.

“You will pardon the liberty,” O’Shea whispered in her ear, “but this is no small consolation for losing me ship.”