Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

or so at nights in the 'tween-
decks; but nothing much hap-
pened to amount to anything
until two coolies died of beri-
beri, and there was a riot be-
cause we dumped them over
the side. It seems their friends
wanted to keep 'em and bury
them in China; but we couldn't
keep any corpses aboard, of
course, and Finch had to climb
up on the after-hatch and tell
'em so. Things looked nasty
for a bit, but when they burst
out laughing at something he'd
said, I knew Finch had man-
aged to fix 'em. He told me
afterwards what the joke was.
'I told 'em,' he says, 'we
didn't feel like keeping any
corpses about the place this
hot weather, but the next man
that died, his friends could have
him-and welcome. And then
I offered to bet ten dollars Mex.
to a ticcy they wouldn't keep
him for more than three days.
They saw the sense of the thing
then, and that settled it.' Finch
said he didn't mind that kind
of trouble, and how it was
simple enough to settle just
ordinary foolishness like that
with nothing ugly behind it.

sugar. Well, I tell you, with chow, of course, and a scrap that cargo aboard, I daren't sleep! What worried me most was that I couldn't do anything about it. I knew, against that crowd of Chinamen, we nine whites were helpless. They could have knocked us on the head and thrown us all overboard any night they liked. That grill amidships the charterers were so proud about was really as much use as nothing, because it didn't prevent anyone from climbing over the engine-room casing and dropping down on us from the top of the fiddley. Then the Indian Ocean's a lonely place. Ships didn't carry wireless then, remember, and there was no port I could run into. Even if there had been I didn't see what excuse I could give for calling in anywhere. It's a serious thing for a master to deviate out of his proper voyage. means expense to the owners, waste of time and bunkers, with the insurance on the ship invalidated, and the Lord knows what else. You've got to have some mighty good reasons before you dare deviate-and what reasons could I give? I should have looked pretty blowing in somewhere, and saying I'd come because I was scared of what my cargo might get up to. No, I could see I'd got to get the ship to Ching-WanTau or nowhere. You see, I was in a nasty fix-and no way out of it.

"For the first week things kept more or less quiet. There was a lot of grousing about the

666

What worries me,' he says, is this small knife outfit the beggars have started. How they smuggled the knives through beats me, especially when I think of the way I went through 'em as they came aboard. I could have sworn there wasn't a weapon of any sort on the lot, and now here's these damned small knives turned up. I don't know how

6

many there are yet, or who's got them; but I reckon there's maybe a dozen or twenty coolies aboard each with a knife on him. And Cap., these are the birds we've got to look out for. They'll get together; and, in fact, as far as I can make out, they've formed themselves into a sort of a gang already. It's in the nature of a Chinaman to do that sort of thing. A secret society's a regular institution with 'em, and a secret society's just what these swine with the knives have formed. It's secret all right, because I'll be hung if I can find out who's in it; but what they call themselves -to give you the English of it-is Small Knife Society.' I've managed to find that much out, anyway. I was anxious I was anxious enough about this trip of ours right from the start; but now this thing's happened-well, I'm scared, and I'll admit it. It's all very well to say they've only got little pocket-knives, which is the only kind of a knife they could have hidden; but the point is, they are armed. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is boss,' so twenty men with knives on 'em and working together are going to run the rest of this bunch. They'll run them like sheep. They'll run them and they'll rob them; and if anybody objects they'll cut him up in small bits. I know these birds, Cap. I've worked with Chinese most of my life, and I can see what's going to happen as plain as if I was sitting in a movie, with

VOL. CCXXI.—NO. MCCCXXXV.

the picture running in front of my eyes and the man in the corner explaining it all through a megaphone. You mark what I say! Before we get to

Ching-Wan-Tau the men who've got the knives will be the men who've got hold of most of the money too. They know, as well as we do, the minute this ship arrives she's going to be filled with police. Chinese police. And who'll collect that money then? Why, the police; and you can't tell me those Small Knife blighters are going to wait for that. No, sir! As sure as my name's Bill Finch, they'll try to do us in and then pile this ship of yours up somewhere handy, and clear out with what they've got. got. That is, they will if I can't stop 'em. I don't know if I can; but I'm going to have a shot at it.'

"It was about then that I began to think a lot more of Finch than I did when I first saw him. I think, if he hadn't been rash, he might perhaps have managed to settle the trouble. But he was rash. His notion was to jump right into the middle of a mess and try and clean it up that way, instead of skirmishing about a bit, like a wise man, and then putting his smack in where it was likely to do the most good. One morning he didn't show up at breakfast. He didn't turn up at all, although I turned the ship inside out looking for him. He just vanished."

"Good Lord!"

said I. A 2

66

What do you mean? What happened?"

or a sideways look from a face chock-full of evil; and I'd feel

"I don't know," went on like you do when you go to the Skipper. "But I can guess. He must have made too much of a nuisance of himself for those Small Knife people, and I suppose they just laid for him one night when he was going his rounds, and then slipped him over the side. I should think that was about what happened. However, there he was-gone; and it seemed to me at first that it put the lid on things properly. The job was up to me then-and I couldn't see how I was going to tackle it. The worst of it was, Finch was the only man in the ship who could talk Chinese, and I couldn't find one coolie out of the lot who understood English. So there we were, you see, with the ship a regular powder magazine, a sleeping volcano and a tower of Babel all rolled into one, and me tonguetied and pretty well helpless.

'And I tell you, with Finch gone and out of the way, things didn't take long to warm up. The daytime wasn't so bad just that crowd of yellow beggars squatting all over the after-deck and chattering a language that didn't sound human. I'd go and take a look at them through the bars of that grill, and I'd say to myself, 'There they are, my son. Just ordinary John Chinamen, taking it easy and doing nothing. No need to be scared of them.' And then I'd catch the glint of an eye maybe,

the Zoo and look at the lions
and tigers-specially the tigers.
It was the nights, though, that
got on your nerves. There was
hell to pay at night down
those after-holds. You could
hear it. I didn't know what
was going on, you understand,
because we never dared go aft
in the dark at all.
But you
could hear things happening
all right. Plenty of things, and
it was awful. Those Small
Knife devils were doing it all,
just as Finch warned me they
would. I had plain proof of
it. Da Silva, our Doc., was a
better man than I'd thought.
He wouldn't face that hospital
of his on top of the wheel-house
at night; but each morning
he'd go aft and attend to what
would be waiting for him.
And every day there'd be
maybe six or a dozen poor
devils, all cut about and bleed-
ing, for him to sew up and
bandage. I used to go aft
too, and lend him a hand, and I
noticed the wounds were all
about the same-just slashes
and long shallow cuts as if
they'd been done with razors or
small sharp knives. I don't
remember that we ever had a
real deep wound to deal with;
but all the same we had some
horrible-looking cases. And five
of 'em died-from loss of blood,
I guess, as there wasn't much
whole skin left on any of 'em.
That Small Knife lot was put-
ting its trade-marks on the
rest of the bunch all right.

"It was plain enough what they were up to just robbing the rest, as Finch said they would, and if any one kicked or tried to make a fight of it, then they sliced him up, and Da Silva and me we'd have to fix up the results in the morning. At the rate they were working I could see it wouldn't be long before they'd have every coolie in the ship cleaned out, and then, as likely as not, it would be our turn. If I could only have talked the lingo I might have done something. Roused up the rest of the Chinks, perhaps, and made 'em set about those Small Knife birds. Or at least I might have found out who they were, and then we whites could have had a go at them. As it was, I was helpless; but I did what I could, of course. I got the engineers to connect up some flexible hose to the deck steampipes. We led the hoses up on the bridge, so that if steam was turned on they'd squirt straight down both bridge ladders. We reckoned to gather on the bridge if things got desperate, and give the beasts a dose of high-pressure live steam, and boil a few of them at any rate before they scuppered us.

[blocks in formation]

make up my mind whether or not to take the ship into Singapore-and chance getting fired for it,-when I caught sight of somebody leaning on the rail right up in the bows. It was dark, but I could make out the shape of the man against the sky, and I saw he was a Chinaman. It startled me, because the fore part of the ship wasn't a place where any coolie ought to have been. I could see the man wasn't one of the crew, for, even at night, it's easy to tell the difference between a Chinaman and a Lascar. It wasn't natural, anyhow, for any of the hands to be knocking about forward at that time of night; and you know our look-out man is stationed up in the crow's-nest and never on the fo'c'sle head. Well, things being in the state they were, I thought I'd better go forward and see what the fellow was up to. I had on my carpet slippers, so I sneaked quietly along the deck; and when I tell you I felt in my pocket to see if I had my gun on me, you'll understand the state of mind I'd got into during that last week or two.

"The chap was standing right up in the eyes of the ship, and I'd got about abreast of the windlass before he heard me. I startled him all right, and he jumped round and stared at me with his mouth open. And then it was my turn to jump. I recognised him at once. He was the bird who should have been ironed to a stanchion down No. 1

No

He

hold the murderer, in fact, that Finch had made such a fuss about when he'd first come aboard. I'd clean forgotten all about him, and it gave my poor nerves an awful shock to run suddenly up against the beggar like that. I suppose I must have got rattled, because, though I don't remember pulling out my gun, I can still see myself jumping about behind the windlass like some fool in the movies and pointing my revolver in the general direction of that poor man. wonder I scared him. dodged about, too. Then, 'Don't shoot!' he sings out. 'It's all right. Don't shoot.' And I was so surprised at hearing English from him that I couldn't have stopped him if he'd come for me. However, he didn't show any signs of that, and when he'd got over his scare and I'd got over mine, we just stood there looking at each other and feeling sheepish -at least, I know I did. I think it struck both of us that a grown man can make a terrible ass of himself if he isn't careful.

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

when he suddenly put out his hand to me and said, 'Don't.' Like that he said it; just 'Don't,' and there was something about the way he spoke that I-well, I didn't. I asked him again who he was and how he'd come by his English, and after a bit he went right ahead and told me his trouble. I can't remember his words, of course, but if you'll believe me, he talked better English than I do myself. It turns out he'd lived in London for seven years or so, learning to be a doctor, which accounted for things. He asked me if I was an officer, and when I told him who I was he opened out a lot. He said an Englishman would give him a square deal if any one would, and then he asked me to give him a chance. A few days after we'd started, it seems he'd discovered he could slip his wrist out of his handcuff. He was left quite alone down the hold, and the only time he saw anybody was when one of the cooks brought his chow down to him in the morning. He'd lie low all day, he said; but on some nights, when things were quiet on deck, he'd venture up for a bit and get some clean air. He said he'd made up his mind to wait and drop over the side one night and swim for it if we passed close enough to any land. It was a mighty slim chance; but the man was desperate, and I could see he meant to do what he said. I was the only soul aboard who knew he could slip his irons, and he begged

« AnteriorContinuar »