"Engines!" he said sharply. "It's the launch."

She swung out, apparently from the mangroves, in another few minutes, and came on towards them, clanking and wheezing horribly, with the yellow foam piled about her, but Austin felt that he had never seen anything more welcome than that strip of mire-daubed hull with the plume of smoke streaming away from it. Then she stopped close alongside them, and Austin shook hands with Tom as he climbed on board.

"Did you come across any n.i.g.g.e.rs, sir?" asked the latter.

"No," said Austin. "How's Mr. Jefferson?"

"Comin' round," said Tom, with a grin. "I've worked most of the fever--an' the sunstroke--out of him. It was a big load off me when, as I took him his mixture one morning, he looks up at me. 'Who the devil are you poisoning?' says he, quite sensible, an' like himself again."

"You were coming down to look for us?"

"We were--an' uncommonly glad to see you. The blame n.i.g.g.e.rs is getting aggravating. Came down, two canoe loads of 'em, a night or two ago, an'

only sheered off when we tumbled one o' them over with a big lump o'

coal. Wall-eye dropped it on to the man in the bow of her from the bridge, an' so far as we could make out it doubled him up considerable."

Wall-eye was apparently the squinting Spaniard who acted as fireman, and when he saw Tom glance at him he stood up, with a grimy hand clenched, and unloosed a flood of Castilian invective. Austin, who smiled as he watched him, felt that while most of what he said could not be effectively rendered into cold Anglo-Saxon, it was probably more or less warranted. In the meanwhile the launch was coming round with backed propeller, and in another moment or two she was clanking away into the darkness that descended suddenly, towards the _c.u.mbria_.

CHAPTER XII

NOCTURNAL VISITORS

Jefferson was standing at the open door of the house beneath the _c.u.mbria_'s bridge when Austin first caught sight of him, as he groped his way forward along the slanted deck. The black, impenetrable obscurity that descends upon the tropic swamps when the air is full of vapour, hung over the stranded steamer, and the man's gaunt figure cut with harsh sharpness against the stream of light. The thin duck he wore clung about him, soaked with perspiration and the all-pervading damp, emphasising the attenuated spareness of his frame, and Austin could almost have fancied it was a draped skeleton he was gazing at. Still, he was a trifle rea.s.sured when he felt the firm grasp of a hot, bony hand.

"So you have come?" said the American. "It's good to get a grip of you.

I guessed you would."

He drew Austin into the deck-house, and they sat down opposite each other, and said nothing for almost a minute, though there was a little smile in Jefferson's face as he leaned back against the bulkhead. His hair, which had grown long since he left Las Palmas, hung low and wet upon his forehead, and the big cheek bones showed through the tight-stretched skin, which was blanched, though there was a faint yellow tinge in it which relieved its dead whiteness. This had its significance, for the coast fever has not infrequently an unpleasant after effect upon the white man's const.i.tution.

"It isn't quite a sanatorium," he said, as though he guessed his comrade's thoughts. "Port Royal, Santos, Panama--I know them all--aren't a patch on these swamps. Still, we needn't worry now you have come."

Austin smiled as he looked at him. "To be correct, I'm not quite sure that I did," he said, reflectively. "I mean, it wasn't exactly because I wished to."

"Ah!" said Jefferson, as comprehension dawned on him. "Then the quarter share--that offer stands good--didn't bring you? Well, I was wondering if she would make you go."

Austin was a trifle astonished, for, though he had a somewhat hardly acquired acquaintance with human nature, it had never occurred to him that the patronage Jacinta extended to her masculine friends naturally attracted some attention, or that in this particular case the onlookers might most clearly grasp the points of the game.

"I can't quite see why she should have wanted me to," he said.

There was another brief silence, during which the men looked at one another. This was not a subject either of them had meant to talk about.

Indeed, it was one which, under different circ.u.mstances, they would have kept carefully clear of, but both realised that conventional niceties did not count for much just then: They were merely men who had henceforth to face the grim realities of existence with the shadow of death upon them, and they knew that the primitive humanity in them would become apparent as the veneer wore through.

"Still," said Jefferson, "I can think of one reason. There was a time when Muriel was good to her, and Jacinta can't forget it. She's not that kind. The first day I met her I felt that she was taking stock of me, and I knew I'd pa.s.sed muster when she made you stop the _Estremedura_.

Perhaps, it wasn't very much in itself, but I was thankful. I've done a few tough things in my time, but I know I'd never have got Muriel if that girl had been against me. Still, it wasn't altogether because of Muriel she sent you."

Austin showed his astonishment this time, and Jefferson smiled. "You can't quite figure how I came to understand a thing of that kind? Well, some of you smart folks have made the same mistake before. You don't seem to remember when you waste ten minutes working a traverse round what you could say in one, that however you dress it up, human nature's much the same. Now you're astonished at me. I'm talking. Sometimes I feel I have to. You want to know just why she really sent you?"

"To be frank, I have asked myself the question, and couldn't be quite sure it was altogether because she wanted me to get this unfortunate steamboat off."

"It wasn't. You're getting as near to it as one could expect of an Englishman. It hurts some of you to let anybody know what you really think. Well, I'll try to make my notion clear to you. There was a lady in France who threw her glove among the lions long ago, but the man who went down for it was of no great account after all. He hadn't sense enough to see the point of the thing."

"There were apparently folks who sympathised with him," said Austin, with a reflective air. "I'm not sure the man could reasonably have been expected to go at all, since the lady in question evidently only wished to show everybody how far he would venture to please her."

"Now it seems to me quite likely that she meant to do a good deal more.

The man may have been content to fool his time away making pretty speeches to the court ladies and walking round dressed in silk while the rest of them rode out in steel. Can't you fancy that she wanted him to find out that he had the grit of the boldest of them, and could do something worth while, too? She probably knew he had, or she would never have sent him."

A little colour crept into Austin's face, but he laughed. "One could, no doubt, imagine a good many other reasons, and most of them would probably be as wide of the mark. Any way, they don't concern us. If the thing ever happened, it was a very long while ago. We know better now."

"Well, I guess you can't help it," and there was a twinkle in Jefferson's eyes. "Your sh.e.l.l's quite a good fit, and you don't like to come out of it, though I almost thought you were going to a moment or two ago."

"I don't like to be pulled out. One feels that it isn't decent. The sh.e.l.l's the best of some of us," said Austin.

"Then we'll come down to business. You brought the giant powder?"

"A case of it, with fuses and detonators," and Austin's relief at the change of subject was evident. "Are you contemplating blowing her up?"

"No, sir. She's worth too much. It is, however, quite likely that we'll make a hole in the mangrove forest and shake up the bottom of this creek. That is, when we're ready. There's a good deal to be put through first."

"Have you found the gum?"

"I haven't looked. She's full to the orlops, and we haven't started in to pump her out. Didn't seem much use in trying while she had so much weight in her, and we'll want all the coal we've got. When we have hove most of it and the oil out I'll start the big centrifugal. You see, she hasn't a donkey on deck. That's why, though it cost me a good deal, I bought the locomotive boiler. You folks have a library of Shipping Acts, but you don't show much sense when you let anything under 2,000 tons go to sea with her pumps run from the main engines. When you most want steam for pumping it's when your fires are drowning out."

It was once more evident to Austin that Jefferson knew his business, and had foreseen most of the difficulties he would have to grapple with.

Still, he fancied, by his face, that he had not quite antic.i.p.ated all.

"Where are you putting the oil you take out of her?" he asked.

"On a strip of sand up a creek. That's one of the few things that are worrying me. We'll have to get it on board as soon as we float her off when the rain comes, or the creek will get it ahead of us. The next point is that it will be a little rough on the men who have to watch it after working all day long."

"To watch it! Who is likely to meddle with it here?"

"n.i.g.g.e.rs," said Jefferson drily. "They cleaned most everything they could come at off the boat before I got to her, but they couldn't break out cargo with the water in her, and didn't know enough to get at the provisions in the lazaret. Still, while these particular swamps don't seem to belong to anybody, there's trade everywhere, and oil's a marketable commodity."

"Where's the Frenchman who chartered the _c.u.mbria_?"

"Dead. I've been up to his place in the launch. I found it caved in, and trees growing up in it already. Nature straightens things up quite smartly in this country. Any way, I'll show you round to-morrow; and, in the meanwhile, it's about time that Spaniard brought you some supper."

"It seems to me that everybody who had anything to do with this unfortunate vessel invariably died."

Jefferson smiled a trifle grimly. "That's a fact," he said.

Then one of the Canarios brought in a simple meal, and when they had eaten and talked for another hour, Austin stretched himself out on the settee and Jefferson climbed into his slanted bunk. They left the light burning and the door wide open, and both of them lay down dressed as they were; but while Jefferson seemed to fall into a somewhat restless doze, Austin found that sleep fled the further from him the more he courted it that night. It was very hot, for one thing, and stranded steamer and mangrove forest alike seemed filled with mysterious noises that stirred his imagination and disturbed his rest. It was only by a strenuous effort he lay still for a couple of hours, and then, rising softly, with a little sigh, went out into the night.

The darkness closed about him, black and impenetrable, when he stepped out of the stream of light before the deck-house door, and the feeble flame of the match he struck to light his pipe as he leaned upon the rail only made it more apparent. He could see nothing whatever when the match went out, but the oily gurgle of the creek beneath him suggested the height of the steamer's hove-up side. She lay, so Jefferson had told him, with her insh.o.r.e bilge deep in the mire, and two big derrick-booms slung from the wire hawser that ran from her stern to the mangroves along what should have been the bank, as a precaution against any nocturnal call by negroes in canoes. Her outsh.o.r.e side, which he looked down from, was, he surmised by the slant of deck, between ten and fifteen feet above the creek.