Pirates' Hope

"Rummy old go, that," he commented, when the tale was told. "Dashed easy to see how a chap might lose out on all the little decencies when the belly-pinch takes hold. Are we likely to come a cropper into that ditch before some bally old tub turns up to take us off?"

"I'm hoping not," I said.

He was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say: "We've eighteen mouths to fill, old dear; how long can we fill 'em out of the blooming tins; eh? what?"

I shook my head. "Van Dyck and I checked the provisions over this morning while we were storing them. We shall do well enough for two or three weeks; maybe longer, if we're careful not to waste any of the food."

At this my fellow watcher swore roundly in good, plain American.

"Saw Holly Barclay turn up his damned nose and pitch his ship's biscuits into the lagoon this morning," he explained. "Said something about their not bein' fit for a human being to eat, by Jove!"

"He'll sing another tune if we have to come down to cocoanuts and sea worms," I prophesied. Even this early in the game it was plainly evident that Barclay, the major, and Hobart Ingerson were going to be our sorest afflictions when the pinch should come.

In such fashion we wore out the afternoon, blinding our eyes, as I had many times blinded mine in other days, with fruitless searchings of the unresponsive waste of waters. At dusk we built up the signal fire to make it last as long as possible and returned to the camp at the other end of the island. When we came in sight of it, Mrs. Van Tromp and two of her girls were putting the supper for the eighteen of us on a clean tarpaulin spread upon the beach. Van Dyck met us just before we joined the others.

"Nothing?" he queried.

"Nothing," we answered.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

IX
THE BULLY

That remark of Edith Van Tromp's, to the effect that the illusions would all be swept away, had its confirmation before we had tholed through the first week of our island captivity. Little by little the masks slipped aside, and some of the revealments of the true character hiding behind them – some of the revelations, but not all – were grimly illuminating.

Before the week's end I saw the major slyly slip the last box of the precious cigars under his coat when he thought no one was looking and go off to hide it in a shallow hole scooped in the dry sand of the beach edge at a safe distance from the camp. Later, I came upon him as he was burying a couple of bottles of the diminishing supply of liquor in the same place – and he lied to me and said he was digging for shell-fish.

Two or three days earlier than this, Holly Barclay had taken to his hammock bed in a fit of purely imaginary illness, exacting constant attendance and pampering in which he made a toiling slave of his pretty daughter. When the pampering began and continued with no sign of abatement in the querulous demands Barclay was making upon Madeleine, Van Dyck grew gloomy and snappish, and I knew that the day was only postponing itself when Bonteck would flame out at the sham invalid and tell him exactly and precisely what a selfish malingerer he was.

Still lower in the unmasking scale came Ingerson – the real Ingerson – who had lapsed into a sullen barbarian; unshaven, unbathed, and with the coarse warp and woof of him showing at every threadbare seam. What time he had free access to the liquor, he drank himself ugly at least once in every twenty-four hours; and when Mrs. Van Tromp finally shamed him out of his daylight attacks upon the liquor chest, he took to raiding it after the camp was asleep, keeping this up until one night when he found that the remainder of the bottled stuff had disappeared. After this he became a morose threat to everybody, and even Mrs. Van Tromp ignored his millions and turned a cold shoulder upon him.

Three nights after his unsuccessful effort to turn up another bottle of whiskey in the stores, the drink maniac tried it again, and this time Van Dyck awoke and caught him at it.

"Looking for something you haven't lost, Ingerson?" he said, speaking quietly to keep from disturbing the others.

Ingerson backed out of the palmetto-thatched store shelter and whirled upon Van Dyck with a face which, as the firelight showed it to me, was that of a devil denied.

"Where have you hid it?" he demanded hoarsely. "Tell me, or I'll wring your damned neck!"

Van Dyck's smile was almost as devilish as Ingerson's teeth-baring snarl.

"You needn't make a racket and wake the camp," he said in the evenest of tones. "I did hide it, and it was partly to give you a decently fair chance. Come with me." And he got up and the pair of them disappeared among the palms.

Not trusting Ingerson any more than I would have trusted a snake, I rose silently and followed them into the shadows, coming in sight of them again as they entered a little open glade on the opposite side of the island. Ingerson had halted and was gesticulating angrily.

"I want to know here and now what you meant by that 'decent chance' break you made at me!" he was saying. "If you mean Madge Barclay, I can tell you right off the bat that you're a dead one!"

"We will leave Miss Barclay quite out of it, if you please," said Bonteck, still apparently as cool as Ingerson was hot. "You want liquor, and I've brought you here to give it to you."

"We'll settle that other little thing first," Ingerson broke in truculently. "You put up this winter cruise, that you've bungled and turned into a starvation picnic, with the notion that you were going to corner the market for yourself, I suppose. I'm here to tell you that you lose out. Barclay makes this deal without any brokers, and I hold an option on him."

"You will have to make that part of it a little plainer, I'm afraid," said Van Dyck; and now there was a dangerous softness in his voice.

"You can have it straight, if you want it that way. Barclay's in a hole for money; he's always in a hole. I've agreed to pay him out, once for all, and he's accepted the bid."

"And the price?" queried Bonteck gently – very gently.

"You can ask Madge about that," was the surly rejoinder. And then: "Get a move: where have you hid that whiskey?"

"You shall have the whiskey presently, Ingerson; but first I'm going to give you something you've been needing a good bit worse for a long time. Put up your hands, if you know how!"

It was a very pretty fight, out there in the moonlit glade, with the camp far enough removed to make the privacy of it safe, and with no ring-side audience, so far as either of the combatants knew, to hiss or applaud. Ingerson was no coward, neither was he lacking in bull strength, nor in the skill to make fairly good use of it. Though he went in at the beginning with a handicap of blind rage, the first few passes steadied him and for a minute or so it looked as if Bonteck had taken on a full load.

But, as a very ordinary prophet might have foretold, Ingerson's late prolonged soak – for it was nothing less – presently got in its work. Twice Van Dyck landed swinging body blows; and though neither of these would have winded a sober man, the second left Ingerson gasping and with his jaw hanging. I thought that settled it, and it did, practically, though the bully was still game. Handling himself as coolly as if he were giving a boxing lesson on a gymnasium floor, Van Dyck landed again and again, and each blow was sent home with an impact that sounded like the kick of a mule.

Ingerson stood up to it as long as he could, and when his wind was gone he went into a clinch. Bonteck broke the clinch with a volley of short-arm jabs that was little less than murderous, and when he was hammered out of the clinch, Ingerson staggered and went down. I looked to see him stay down, but he didn't. After a moment of breath-catching he was up and at it again, and it took three more of the well-planted body blows to drive him into a second clinch. As before, he failed to pinion Van Dyck's right arm, and I made sure he tried to set his teeth in Van Dyck's shoulder.

At this, Bonteck shifted his short-arm jabs from the ribs and swung upon the unguarded jaw; whereupon Ingerson lost his grip and curled up on the ground like some huge worm that had been stepped on.

Van Dyck stood over him, breathing hard.

"Have you had enough?" he demanded; and when the vanquished one made some sort of grunting acknowledgment, Bonteck brought water from the near-by spring in a folded leaf of a giant begonia and held it while Ingerson struggled to his knees and bathed the battered jaw.

"Now I'll get you your whiskey," said Van Dyck shortly; and leaving Ingerson to dabble his hands in the cooling water, he went aside into the jungle, returning after a minute or so with a case-bottle. "Here you are," he said, giving the bottle to the beaten bully; "take it and make a brute of yourself, if that's what you want to do." And then I had to hurry to be before Bonteck in the camp clearing; to be in my place beside the handful of night fire before he should return and catch me out of it. For I had no notion of marring the perfect joy of victory which I knew must be filling his soul.

After this there were other days merging slowly into weeks; days of back-slippings into deeper depths of the primitive, a retrogradation in which we all participated more or less; days in which we stolidly maintained the signal fires at either extremity of the island and wore out the dragging hours as best we could, scanning the horizon for the coming sail of rescue, though each succeeding day with less hope of seeing it, I think.

More and more markedly the conventions withdrew into a past which was daily growing to seem more like life in a former avatar than a reality once ours to possess. From merely slipping aside now and again, the masks were carelessly dropped and suffered to remain where they fell. Seen in the new perspective, there were many surprising changes, and not all of them were disappointing. For example: Mrs. Eager Van Tromp, in her normal state a good lady driven to distraction by her efforts to hold her footing on the social ladder and so to marry her daughters adequately, became, en séquestre, the good-natured, plain-spoken mother of us all, and a past mistress in the fine art of camp cooking – a specialty in which she was ably seconded by all three of her daughters, also, when she would permit it, by Mrs. Sanford, Annette Grey and Conetta.

Courageous fortitude best describes the change that had come over Madeleine Barclay. With her irritable father to placate and wait upon, and with Ingerson's attitude toward her coming to be that of blunt possessorship, she was by turns the patient nurse to the malingerer and the cheerful heartener of the rest of us. Never, in all those depressing days of hope deferred, did I hear her complain; and always she had a steadying word for the despairing ones: if a ship didn't come for us to-day, it would come to-morrow, and into the most dejected she could put new life – for the moment, at least.

In John Grey and Annette, and in the professor and his wife, the changes were the least marked. For the newly married couple nothing much seemed to matter so long as they had each other. Once or twice, indeed, I surprised Grey with a look in his eyes that told of the dread undercurrent that must have been underlying his every thought of the future and what it might hold for Annette, but that was all. And as for the older couple – well, perhaps they had attained to a higher and serener plane than any to which we younger ones could climb. Day in and day out, when he was not doing his apportioned share of the common camp tasks, the professor was immersed to the eyes in a study of the lush flora of the island, thumbing a little pocket Botany until its leaves were worn and frayed with much turning. And where he wandered, his wife wandered with him.

In Miss Mehitable, too, a transformation of a sort was wrought. For many days she held sourly aloof and had bitter words for Van Dyck, and black looks for me when by any chance I was able to deprive her for a time, long or short, of Conetta's caretaking and coddling. But with the lapse of time I fancied that even this crabbed lady was beginning to lose her sense of the mere money distinctions, and I was rash enough to say as much to Conetta on a day when I was so fortunate as to secure her for a companion in the signal-fire watch which Bonteck still made us maintain.

"You shouldn't say such things about poor Aunt Mehitable," was the reproof I got. "This is a very terrible experience for her – as it would be for any woman of her age – and she is really more than half sick."

"Don't mistake me," I made haste to say. "I meant it wholly in a congratulatory sense."

"She has changed," Conetta admitted, adding: "But dear me! we have all changed."

"'All the world's queer, excepting thee and me, and sometimes even thee's a little queer'," I quoted. "What changes have you remarked – particularly?"

"For one, Major Terwilliger is just a selfish, peevish old man, utterly impossible to live with," she said calmly.

"Amen to that. Yet, one of these days you will probably have to reckon with him as a member of your household. Go on."

She went on, paying no attention to what I had said about householding the major.

"The professor is a dear, just as you'd expect him to be, and so is Mrs. Professor. Annette is as brave as brave, and the way she is keeping up is only equaled by Jack's adorable care of her, which is at the bottom of his constant breezy assurances that each day will be the last of our Crusoeing."

"And Billy?" I prompted.

"Billy is a dear, too. He has changed less than any one, I think. Yesterday, at supper-time, he nearly broke my heart. Perhaps you remember that he got up and went away while we were eating, saying that he'd forgotten something. A few minutes later I went back to the spring to get some fresh water for Aunt Mehitable and found him sharing his supper with Tige. He'd heard what Major Terwilliger had said about our wasting food on the dog when we'd probably need it ourselves. Wouldn't that make you weep?"

"The dog is much more worthy of his rations than the major is of what he consumes," I averred. "Tige is at least willing to do his best if anybody will show him how. Any more transmogrifications?"

"Lots of them. Possibly you've noticed that Mrs. Van Tromp no longer tries to shoo Billy away from Edie. That's a miracle in itself. Then there is Madeleine: I have always thought her rather – um – well, you know; rather stand-offish and maybe a bit self-centered. Dick, she is an angel! The way she devotes herself, body and soul, to that father of hers, and still finds time and the heart to chirk the rest of us up, is beyond all praise."

"You can't get a quarrel out of me on that score," I returned. "Madeleine is all that you say she is, and more. As for her father, I guess we can pass him up. Between us two, he is no more sick than I am. And I don't believe he has changed a particle; we are merely coming to know him better as he really is, and always has been."

"I have known him for a long time," Conetta said thoughtfully. Then she agreed with me: "We'll leave him out; he cancels himself on the minus side of the equation, as you used to say of certain people we knew in the old days at home."

I wasn't half sure enough of myself to be willing to have her drag in the old days, so I urged her to go on with her cataloguing of our fellow castaways, saying: "You haven't completed the list yet."

"There is one more to be omitted – Hobart Ingerson," she said soberly, with a shadow of deep disgust coming into her eyes.

"Will Madeleine omit him?" I asked quickly.

"If she doesn't – after what we've been compelled to see and feel and endure! Dick, it's dreadful; simply dreadful!"

"Yet she will marry him," I insisted – purely to hear what my companion would say to that.

"It is unbelievable. What possible motive could she have in doing such an unspeakable thing?"

"A few minutes ago you called her an angel; perhaps it will be the angelic motive. Her father needs money; needs a very considerable sum of money, and needs it badly. She knows of the need – though I think she doesn't know the immediate and exciting cause of it – and she also knows that Ingerson is willing to buy and pay."

"How perfectly horrible!" said my watchmate, with a shudder. And then: "What a pity it is that Madeleine's money was all swallowed up in that bank failure out West."

I smiled when she said that. Madeleine's fortune hadn't gone in any bank failure, neither out West nor back East. This was only another of Holly Barclay's plausible little fictions.

"You mean? – " I suggested.

"I mean that if she had money of her own she might buy her freedom. I imagine it is purely a financial matter with Mr. Holly Barclay. If she could only find some of the Spaniards' gold – find it for herself so that it would belong to her… Wouldn't that be splendid!"

This was something entirely new to me, and I said: "What gold is this you are talking about?"

She looked around at me with wide-open eyes.

"Why – haven't you heard?" Then: "Oh, I remember; Bonteck was telling us the story last evening, while you and the professor were out at the other signal fire." And thereupon she repeated the old tale of the siege and wreck of the Spanish galleon in Queen Elizabeth's reign, with the tradition of the hidden treasure whose hiding place the survivors had refused to betray – paying for their refusal with their lives.

"Of course, that is only a sea yarn – one of the many that are told about those old days and the doings in them," was my comment. "You knew that while you were listening to it, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes; I supposed it wasn't true. I kept telling myself that Bonteck was only trying to start some new interest that would keep us from going stark mad over this wretched imprisonment, and the watching and waiting that never amounts to anything. It's serving a purpose, too. Most of the young ones are turning treasure hunters – going in couples. Jerry Dupuyster was trying to persuade Beatrice to slip away just as we left the camp. I heard him."

That small reference to Jerry and his disloyalty – which was becoming daily more and more apparent, and which I may have omitted to mention – moved me as one of the Yellowstone Park geysers is said to be moved by the dropping into it of a bar of soap.

"One of these fine days I'm going to beat Jerry Dupuyster until his best friend wouldn't recognize him," I said savagely.

Conetta laughed; the silvery little laugh that I was once besotted enough to believe that she kept especially for me.

"There goes your temper again. That is one thing that hasn't changed," she said. And then: "Poor Jerry! You'd have to have one hand tied behind you, wouldn't you? – just to be reasonably fair, you know."

There had been a time when I should have admitted that her gibe hit the mark, but that was before the transformed – or transforming – Jerry had been revealed to me.

"Nothing like that," I said. "He may not have confided it to you, but Jerry is a man of his hands. Hasn't he ever shown you the medal he won in England?"

She shook her head. "There are lots of things Jerry hasn't shown me – yet."

"Well, he has the medal, and it says he was the top-notcher in his class in some London boxing club. I give him credit for that; but just the same, there have been times during the past few days when I've had a curious longing to see how near I could come to throwing him bodily across the lagoon."

Again she said, "Poor Jerry!" and had the calm assurance to ask me what he had done to incur my ill will.

"Done!" I exclaimed. "What hasn't he done? If he thinks he is going to be allowed to play fast and loose with you for a chit of a girl like Beatrice Van Tromp – "

Once more her silvery laugh interrupted.

"Beatrice will be twenty-three on her next birthday. She is quite well able to fight her own battles, Mr. Dickie Preble."

"Oh, confound it all; you know what I mean!" I fumed hotly. "He has asked you to marry him, hasn't he?"

"He has," she replied quite calmly.

"Well, isn't that enough?"

"Don't be silly," she said. "You must try to control that dreadful temper of yours. You're miles too touchy, Dickie, dear."

That remark was so true that I was constrained to wrench the talk aside from Jerry and the temperamental things by main strength.

"This treasure-hunting business," I said. "I'm wondering if that is what Bonteck has had on his mind? He has been acting like a man half out of his senses for the past few days. Surely you have noticed it?"

"Yes; and I've been setting it down as one of the most remarkable of the changes we have been talking about. You know how he was at first; he seemed to take everything as a matter of course, and was able to calm everybody's worries. But lately, as you say, he has been acting like a man with an unconfessed murder on his soul. I was so glad when he told us that galleon story last night. He was more like himself."

"He feels his responsibility, naturally," I suggested, "and it grows heavier the longer we are shut up here. While I think very few of us blame him personally for what has happened to us, he can't help feeling that if he hadn't planned the cruise and invited us, the thing wouldn't have happened at all."

"Of course; anybody would feel that way," she agreed, and after that she fell silent.

The weather on this day of our morning watch under the western palm-tree signal staff was much like that of all the other days; superlatively fine, and with the sun's warmth delightfully tempered by the steady fanning of the breeze which was tossing miniature breakers over the comb of the outer reef. Conetta's gaze was fixed upon the distant horizon, and when I looked around I saw that her eyes were slowly filling with tears.

We had been comrades as well as lovers in the old days; which was possibly why I took her hand and held it, and why she did not resent the new-old caress.

"Tell me about it," I urged. "You used to be able to lean upon me once, Conetta, dear."

"It's just the – the loneliness, Dick," she faltered, squeezing the tears back. "We've all been dropping the masks and showing what we really are; but there is one mask that we never drop – any of us. We laugh and joke, and tell one another that to-morrow, or the next day at the very farthest, will see the end of this jolly picnic on Pirates' Hope. But really, in the bottom of our hearts, we know that it may never end – only with our lives. Isn't that so?"

I did not dare tell her the bald truth; that it might, indeed, come to a life-and-death struggle with starvation before our slender chance of rescue should materialize.

"I don't allow myself to think of that," I said quickly – and it was a lie out of the whole cloth. "And you mustn't let your small anchor drag, either, Connie, girl."

"I know; but I can't help hearing – and seeing. This morning early, before most of them were up, I saw Billy and Jack Grey trying to make some fishing lines and hooks; they were jollying each other about the fun they were going to have whipping the lagoon for a change of diet for us. And yesterday I happened to overhear the professor telling Bonteck that he had made a careful search of the island for the edible roots that grow wild in the tropics, and hadn't been able to find any. Naturally, I knew at once what these things meant. The provisions are running low."

I nodded. It didn't seem worth while to try to lie to her.

"How far has it spread?" I asked. "Mrs. Van Tromp has been trying to keep the scarcity in the background. Does any one else know?"

"I can't say. But I do know that Mrs. Van Tromp is anxious to hide it from her girls – and from Madeleine."

"Why from Madeleine in particular?"

Again Conetta let her honest eyes look fairly into mine.

"Because Bonteck will not have Madeleine told. He means to spare her to the very last, no matter how much she has to waste upon her father's finicky appetite. Only this morning, she had to throw his entire breakfast away – after he'd messed with it and spoiled it – and get him another one!"

This was growing serious; much more serious than I had suspected; and I made a mental resolve to get the men of our party together on a short-rations basis at once. We had been hideously reckless with our stores; no one could deny that.

"This smudge will smoke for an hour or so longer," I pointed out, rising and helping Conetta to her feet. "Suppose we take a walk around on the south beach and look over toward my old stamping ground in Venezuela."

She made no objection, and once we were in motion we kept on, since the southern horizon was just as likely to yield the hopeful sign for which we were straining our eyes as any other. I am morally certain that I had no hunch to prompt the change of view-point, and if my companion had, she didn't mention it. Nevertheless, when we had measured something less than half the length of the island, tramping side by side in sober silence over the white sands, the thing we had looked for in vain through so many weary hours appeared, and we both saw it at the same instant – the long, low smoke trail of a steamer blackening the line where sea and sky came together.

There was nothing to be done; absolutely nothing that we could do to attract the attention of those people who were just out of sight below the blurred horizon. For so long as we could distinguish the slowly vanishing harbinger of rescue we stood transfixed, hardly daring to breathe, hoping against hope that the steamer's course was laid toward us instead of away from us. But when the black of the smoke trail had faded to gray, and the gray became so faint that it was no longer separable from the slight haze of the sky-line, Conetta turned and clung to me, sobbing like a hurt and frightened child. It was too much, and I took her in my arms and comforted her, as I had once had the right to do.

And at that climaxing moment, out of the jungle thicketing behind us came Jerry Dupuyster and Beatrice Van Tromp. Beatrice was laughing openly, and on Jerry's face there was an inane smile that made me wish very heartily to kill him where he stood.