The Black Bag - Louis Joseph Vance (best reads of all time txt) 📗

swales; and left a

boiling wake behind her,—urging ever onward, hugging the wind in her wisp

of blood-red sail, and boring into it, pulling at the tiller with the

mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.

 

Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had

freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and now

and again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary would

heel her over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing, and the

rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some racing billow,

the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood’s hands. Again and again

this happened; and those were times of trembling. But always the cat-boat

righted, shaking the clinging waters from her and swinging her stem into

the wind again; and there would follow an abbreviated breathing spell,

during which Kirkwood was at liberty to dash the salt spray from his eyes

and search the wind-harried waste for the brigantine. Sometimes he found

her, sometimes not.

 

Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they began to close

in upon each other. He could see that even with shortened canvas she was

staggering drunkenly under the fierce impacts of the wind. For himself, it

was nip-and-tuck, now, and no man in his normal sense would have risked a

sixpence on the boat’s chance to live until she crossed the brigantine’s

bows.

 

Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit,

steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and

keeping his eyes religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It was

heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could not last

much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal

strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every bone,

muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course; though for

a time it might cope with and solve the problems presented by each new,

malignant billow and each furious, howling squall, the end inevitably must

be failure. To struggle on would be but to postpone the certain end …

save and except the possibility of his gaining the brigantine within the

period of time strictly and briefly limited by his powers of endurance.

 

Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant drenchings of

icy spray, that piled in over the windward counter, keeping the bottom

ankle-deep regardless of his laborious but intermittent efforts with the

bailing dish. And the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were drawing

together with appalling deliberation.

 

A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often plucked up hope;

as the minutes wore on and he kept above water, he began to believe that if

he could stick it out his judgment and seamanship would be justified …

though human ingenuity backed by generosity could by no means contrive

adequate excuse for his foolhardiness.

 

But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he fought it out.

 

But that his voice stuck in his parched throat, he could have shouted in

his elation, when eventually he gained the point of intersection an eighth

of a mile ahead of the brigantine and got sight of her windward freeboard

as, most slowly, the cat-boat forged across her course.

 

For all that, the moment of his actual triumph was not yet; he had still to

carry off successfully a scheme that for sheer audacity of conception and

contempt for danger, transcended all that had gone before.

 

Holding the cat-boat on for a time, he brought her about handsomely a

little way beyond the brigantine’s course, and hung in the eye of the wind,

the leach flapping and tightening with reports like rifle-shots, and

the water sloshing about his calves—bailing-dish now altogether out of

mind—while he watched the oncoming vessel, his eyes glistening with

anticipation.

 

She was footing it smartly, the brigantine—lying down to it and snoring

into the wind. Beneath her stem waves broke in snow-white showers, whiter

than the canvas of her bulging jib—broke and, gnashing their teeth in

impotent fury, swirled and eddied down her sleek dark flanks. Bobbing,

courtesying, she plunged onward, shortening the interval with mighty,

leaping bounds. On her bows, with each instant, the golden letters of her

name grew larger and more legible until—Alethea!—he could read it plain

beyond dispute.

 

Joy welled in his heart. He forgot all that he had undergone in the

prospect of what he proposed still to do in the name of the only woman the

world held for him. Unquestioning he had come thus far in her service;

unquestioning, by her side, he was prepared to go still farther, though all

humanity should single her out with accusing fingers….

 

They were watching him, aboard the brigantine; he could see a line of heads

above her windward rail. Perhaps she was of their number. He waved

an audacious hand. Some one replied, a great shout shattering itself

unintelligibly against the gale. He neither understood nor attempted to

reply; his every faculty was concentrated on the supreme moment now at

hand.

 

Calculating the instant to a nicety, he paid off the sheet and pulled up

the tiller. The cat-boat pivoted on her heel; with a crack her sail flapped

full and rigid; then, with the untempered might of the wind behind her, she

shot like an arrow under the brigantine’s bows, so close that the bowsprit

of the latter first threatened to impale the sail, next, the bows plunging,

crashed down a bare two feet behind the cat-boat’s stern.

 

Working in a frenzy of haste, Kirkwood jammed the tiller hard alee,

bringing the cat about, and, trimming the mainsheet as best he might, found

himself racing under the brigantine’s leeward quarter,—water pouring in

generously over the cat’s.

 

Luffing, he edged nearer, handling his craft as though intending to ram the

larger vessel, foot by foot shortening the little interval. When it

was four feet, he would risk the jump; he crawled out on the overhang,

crouching on his toes, one hand light upon the tiller, the other touching

the deck, ready … ready….

 

Abruptly the Alethea shut off the wind; the sail flattened and the cat

dropped back. In a second the distance had doubled. In anguish Kirkwood

uttered an exceeding bitter cry. Already he was falling far off her

counter….

 

A shout reached him. He was dimly conscious of a dark object hurtling

through the air. Into the cockpit, splashing, something dropped—a coil of

rope. He fell forward upon it, into water eighteen inches deep; and for the

first time realized that, but for that line, he had gone to his drowning in

another minute. The cat was sinking.

 

As he scrambled to his feet, clutching the life-line, a heavy wave washed

over the water-logged craft and left it all but submerged; and a smart tug

on the rope added point to the advice which, reaching his ears in a bellow

like a bull’s, penetrated the panic of his wits.

 

“Jump! Jump, you fool!”

 

In an instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was luffing; none the

less much of the line had already been paid out, and there was no reckoning

when the end would be reached. Without time to make it fast, he hitched it

twice round his waist and chest, once round an arm, and, grasping it above

his head to ease its constriction when the tug should come, leaped on the

combing and overboard. A green roaring avalanche swept down upon him and

the luckless cat-boat, overwhelming both simultaneously.

 

The agony that was his during the next few minutes can by no means be

exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not fitted adequately

to cope; it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and

incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood

underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated

and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of

suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel—limb

rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that threatened momentarily

to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim swirling green

half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding white; of thunderings in

his ears like salvoes from a thousand cannon….

 

And his senses were blotted out in blackness….

 

Then he was breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing his lungs, the

while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of brilliance. His mouth

was full of something that burned, a liquid hot, acrid, and stinging. He

gulped, swallowed, slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted to sit up, was

aware that he was the focal center of a ring of glaring, burning eyes, like

eyes of ravening beasts; and fainted.

 

His next conscious impression was of standing up, supported by friendly

arms on either side, while somebody was asking him if he could walk a step

or two.

 

He lifted his head and let it fall in token of assent, mumbling a yes; and

looked round him with eyes wherein the light of intelligence burned more

clear with every second. By degrees he catalogued and comprehended his

weirdly altered circumstances and surroundings.

 

He was partly seated, partly held up, on the edge of the cabin skylight,

an object of interest to some half-dozen men, seafaring fellows all, by

their habit, clustered round between him and the windward rail. Of their

number one stood directly before him, dwarfing his companions as much by

his air of command as by his uncommon height: tall, thin-faced and sallow,

with hollow weather-worn cheeks, a mouth like a crooked gash from ear to

ear, and eyes like dying coals, with which he looked the rescued up and

down in one grim, semi-humorous, semi-speculative glance. In hands both

huge and red he fondled tenderly a squat brandy flask whose contents had

apparently been employed as a first aid to the drowning.

 

As Kirkwood’s gaze encountered his, the man smiled sourly, jerking his head

to one side with a singularly derisive air.

 

“Hi, matey!” he blustered. “‘Ow goes it now? Feelin’ ‘appier, eigh?”

 

[Illustration: “Hi, matey!” he blustered. “‘Ow goes it now?”]

 

“Some, thank you … more like a drowned rat.” Kirkwood eyed him

sheepishly. “I suppose you’re the man who threw me that line? I’ll have to

wait till my head clears up before I can thank you properly.”

 

“Don’t mention it.” He of the lantern jaws stowed the bottle away with

jealous care in one of his immense coat pockets, and seized Kirkwood’s

hand in a grasp that made the young man wince. “You’re syfe enough now.

My nyme’s Stryker, Capt’n Wilyum Stryker…. Wot’s the row? Lookin’ for a

friend?” he demanded suddenly, as Kirkwood’s attention wandered.

 

For the memory of the errand that had brought him into the hands of Captain

William Stryker had come to the young man very suddenly; and his eager eyes

were swiftly roving not along the decks but the wide world besides, for

sight or sign of his heart’s desire.

 

After luffing to pick him up, the brigantine had been again pulled off on

the port tack. The fury of the gale seemed rather to have waxed than waned,

and the Alethea was bending low under the relentless fury of its blasts,

driving hard, with leeward channels awash. Under her port counter, a mile

away, the crimson lightship wallowed in a riot of breaking combers.

Sheerness lay abeam, five miles or more. Ahead the northeast headland

of the Isle of Sheppey was bulking large and near. The cat-boat had

vanished….

 

More important still, no one aboard the brigantine resembled in the

remotest degree