Gordon, for--"

"Gordon! He's no man of Leyden's, Miss Sheldon! He's my own employer's man, if you mean Gordon from the trading post. I wondered at his att.i.tude when we superseded him temporarily."

The girl darted a swift glance at Barry and suddenly cut short the chat.

She went ahead, giving no reply to the skipper's outburst, and he followed dumbly, wondering what new piece of trickery was to be revealed when Gordon's sudden illness was investigated. For fifteen minutes he followed in the girl's wake, attempting to reopen conversation and receiving brief replies; and gradually his irritation and puzzlement pa.s.sed; he was fascinated by the easy grace of the girl; every step he took was as a rivet hammered into the armor of his determination to scuttle Leyden's ark of success at the earliest possible moment.

His mind was set on means to that end when he at length looked ahead and discovered that the girl had vanished. In a dozen steps he came to a still narrower path leading riverwards, and here she was awaiting him.

"I'll take the basket now, Captain. Will you wait for me here?" she said, looking into his face with a cool and plain hint that his further attendance would be inconvenient.

"I may as well come right along," he returned, holding on to the basket.

"I know Gordon. I'm sorry he's ill. I'd like to see him."

"It will not be convenient, Captain Barry," she insisted firmly. "Mr.

Gordon is too ill to see strangers. This cannot be the Gordon you know.

He is a friend of Mr. Leyden. Please wait for me here."

"Now what the devil have I struck!" Barry grumbled, when the girl had swept out of sight. The swish of her cotton dress could be followed through the canes and lantanas, and the impulse was upon him to ignore her command and plunge after her.

"Gordon a friend of Leyden!" he soliloquized, restraining his impulse while he puzzled the problem out. "That's no mystery; suspense knocked him out when I got here first. That's no puzzle either. But how in thunder did Leyden get so solid with the little lady? That's my riddle."

The tangle was too involved for the sailor's matter-of-fact mind. He obeyed his first impulse and dived ahead into the narrow path, bound to see Gordon himself and thrash out the matter with him in front of Miss Sheldon.

He parted the cane thicket, and immediately all about him began the rustle and subtle movement of living things in concealment. He recalled in a flash that something very like this had preceded that whirring through the air, and that thud into flesh that had announced the attempt on himself and the death of Mindjee, back at the stockade gate. But no tangible obstacle fell in his way this time. It was a voice, sounding ghostly in the whispering canes, from an invisible yet very close speaker.

"You no go, sar. Go back. Fren' for you say it."

"Now by James, that's enough!" swore the sailor, leaping straight in the direction of the voice. "Come out here and let's see who's running this Pepper's Ghost hoodle!" With the challenge he pulled his pistol.

He found nothing and n.o.body. But from the spot he had just vacated came the same voice again.

"You no shoot, sar. You shoot fren's, dat's all. Go back."

"I go back when I see what this humbug means. I'll shoot man or animal that runs across my bows!"

Barry stumbled forward, and again the subtle rustling surrounded him, but no voice now. The sound seemed to vibrate and run before him, yet faster than he could travel afoot. Then, so suddenly that it startled him, he came alongside a stout tree, and other voices sounded,--voices of white people. For the moment he was at a loss; then the truth flashed upon him and he looked up into the umbrageous foliage of the tree.

Above his head almost--he was still in the shade of the cane brake--he discerned the platform of a rough tree-dwelling from which depended a vine-stem ladder, steadied by pegs driven into the ground at the base of the trunk. And, peering over the rim of the platform, like a sailor looking over the edge of a ship's spreading top, he saw Miss Sheldon, displeasure clouding her face. Another face was at the Mission girl's shoulder, and impatience was the most prominent emotion on it. Barry had time to recognize Mrs. Goring in that second apparition; then swift and silent as a cobra's attack he was taken from behind.

No word was spoken. Arms like steel bands smothered his limbs; his pistol hand was s.n.a.t.c.hed back irresistibly, yet, he noticed even then, with no violence, and the weapon was taken from his powerless fingers. A piece of coa.r.s.e cloth was flung over his head; vicelike hands gripped his ankles; he was borne with no apparent effort from the spot.

After a brief initial struggle, Barry resigned himself to his captors perforce. Where he was bound for was beyond conjecture; he only heard, faintly through his hood, the cheeping and rustling of the canes; bush tendrils swept along his body and told him that he was being carried through the trackless part of the jungle. His journey was short. In ten minutes he was laid on the ground, still with no word from his captors, and in two long breaths no sound remained near him except the voices of the foliage. He lay still a moment, wondering what his fate was to be; then, involuntarily, he moved in his bonds, and found they were loose; he was unfettered.

Hurling aside the m.u.f.fling cloth, he started to his feet, and the gra.s.s bands fell from his arms and legs. He was in a dense grove, and his first thought was to hurl himself headlong into the bush in the frenzied hope of overtaking the men who had left him there. His foot struck a hard object, and he looked down. There was his automatic pistol, intact, but the precaution had been taken of slipping out the cartridge clip. He picked both up, reloaded the weapon, and pondered.

"Sure thing they don't want me around there!" was the whimsical thought foremost in his mind. "Don't want to damage me, either. But they leave me in a blind alley of the jungle to dig my own way out!"

As he cooled off, his senses resumed their normal alertness, and the ripple of running water regaled his ears. He tore through the jungle in that direction and burst out upon the river bank. Looking up and down stream, he stifled an exclamation of surprise; for, not a hundred yards away, down stream, stood the rickety old wharf, and alongside lay his ship, while at his feet a dugout canoe squatted nose-up on the muddy foresh.o.r.e of the river. Just astern of his own ship the _Padang_ had hauled in, and a knot of excited men, white and native, were milling about the _Barang's_ gangway.

"Time you got aboard, Barry!" he muttered and shoved the canoe off.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Barry reached the wharf, tied his canoe to a pile, and arrived at his own gangway to find Leyden at bay. Rolfe's st.u.r.dy figure barred the ladder; Bill Blunt grinned happily over the rail, tapping the wood playfully with the biggest iron belaying pin the ship afforded; while natives on deck and on the wharf looked on full of curiosity considerably tempered with apprehension.

Leyden's face was deathly white with rage, and his right hand had gone to a hip pocket; but it remained there under the persuasion of a little round hole in the end of a cold blue tube displayed carelessly by the mate. Leyden caught sight of Barry as he came up and started violently, then forced a smile.

"Why, are you Captain Barry?" he stammered. Whatever his knowledge of Houten's plans might be, it apparently had not included the a.s.sociation of the _Barang's_ skipper with the rude sailor who had upset him on the hotel veranda in Surabaya. If he harbored resentment for that affair, he concealed it now and tried to a.s.sume an expression of relief.

"I'm glad you've come," he explained, with a sour smile that was meant to be pleasant. "Your mate is oversuspicious. He refuses to allow me on board."

"Quite right, too," growled Barry, openly glaring his dislike for Leyden. "My orders. I expect them to be carried out. You can have no business with my ship, anyhow."

"You're not very cordial, are you?" Leyden smiled back. "I wanted to inquire about one of my men who ran from me in Surabaya. I believe he joined you. My skipper said a brigantine came in for an hour or so about the time the man disappeared, and this is the only brigantine that's been in the port in months."

Barry's keen eyes bored into Leyden so coldly and fixedly that, studied as he was in worldly encounters, that gentleman shifted uneasily on his feet. The _Barang's_ skipper knew well enough about that missing man, and also where he had gone to. He knew, also, that it was not in Surabaya that he entered the brigantine, but in far subtler manner, as a legitimate, signed-on seaman in Batavia. There was still a patch in the mainsail, a little more than man-high, to recall the man; somewhere near the stockade gate the insects and ground vermin were at that moment industriously engaged in stripping a skeleton which might have interested Leyden. But the blunt sailor, simple and straightforward though he was, was endowed with sufficient elementary cunning to cope with Leyden in that worthy's present state of irritation.

"No strangers in my ship, Mr. Leyden," he said. "Try another tack.

Sorry I can't stay to talk with you; I'm busy." He mounted the gangway without a further glance at Leyden, leaving that gentleman staring up after him with tight lips drawn back from grinning teeth and a quivering of the arm which was bent back to the hip pocket.

"Don't try it!" warned Rolfe, edging aside as Barry pa.s.sed him.

"Shove orf, me son," added Bill Blunt and squinted along his belaying pin straight at Leyden.

"Oh, leave the man alone!" growled Barry angrily. "You weren't put here to start something. So long as he stays off the ship, I don't expect you to stir him up."

"Barry, just one moment," cried Leyden, and his face had a.s.sumed a smirk of contempt. Barry turned without replying. "I'd be thankful if you'd tell your pirates to leave this theatrical stuff until it's called for,"

Leyden laughed. "I've been trying for five minutes to get my tobacco pouch out of my pocket, and every time I move a finger one of your bold desperadoes wiggles a gun at me, and the other buccaneer draws a bead on my unoffending head with that ferocious pin."

Barry stared hard at the fellow, and as he saw the utter change that had come over Leyden, a tiny shiver ran rippling up his spine. All Leyden's anger and irritation had gone; the crafty, calculating man of the world peered out through glittering eyes; if Barry had entertained any foolish notions of the man's mettle before, they were dissipated now.

Yes, there was no doubt of it. Leyden was laughing at him.

"n.o.body's stopping you getting your pouch," Barry blurted hotly. He preferred taking a beating at any time, if necessary, to being laughed at. "The whole wharf is open to you. But I advise you to move along a bit before pulling that pouch. My men don't like the smell of Dutch tobacco."

To Rolfe he said: "Leave Blunt here and come below. I want to speak to you. Wait though," he suggested, "Blunt hasn't signed on yet. How does he suit you?"

Bill Blunt's ears twitched with anxiety until the mate replied: "Good man, sir! Darn glad to have him. Coolest hand I ever saw--and a sailor."

"Good. Stay here. I'll bring up the Articles and sign him on here. Then he can stand gangway watch with you. I don't want to leave the gangway without a white man on it so long as that craft lies ahead of us."

Bill Blunt entered into the company of the _Barang_ and took up his post at the gangway with a roaring sea-song rumbling in his mossy throat.

Some of his stout, devil-may-care spirit had gone into the native crew, and there was less of furtiveness and more of confident satisfaction with their job as the little brown men listened to the jovial harmony of their new white shipmate.

Rolfe followed the skipper below, and at the table Barry told him as much of the day's events as seemed vital. Regarding the Mission, it was merely mentioned as being in some manner connected with Leyden's obvious familiarity in the trading station.