We made the tramp about two o'clock of the after-noon and were grappled to her side while the stores came over. Her crew were mostly unknown to me, but I recognized the skipper for a man I had seen with "Four Eyes" in Black's room in Paris some years gone. The others were just tarry sailors, chiefly Russian, I think, with lascars among them. But whatever they were, they worked willingly enough and loaded us up with incredible rapidity. All kinds of provisions and delicacies came to our holds during the next two hours. There were cases of wine and whiskey, fresh meat and poultry, fine cakes and biscuits and an amazing quantity of rare fruit—all necessary to a ship where the meanest fed as well as the Captain, and no distinctions of persons were recognized. When the provisions were stowed, the chemicals for our battery were put on board, and these were worth their weight in gold to us, for with-out them no coracle had been more helpless.
I suppose it would have been nearly eight o'clock at night before the work was done and we were cast loose from "Number 2." Black had spent the time in the chart-room of the tramp, conferring with the skipper; but he was preoccupied when he returned and I had no further talk with him. Osbart, on the other hand, who had also visited the steamer, remained on the platform to talk to me, and he told me very frankly what was in his mind.
"The story's out," he said, without preface, taking me by the arm and beginning to pace the steel deck with the restless step I knew so well; "of course, you didn't expect to hear anything else, but that's the truth. The man was mad when he sent the telegram. Every station is warned from the Nore to 'Frisco. There isn't a warship afloat which won't be looking for him before a week has run. And here he is talking of what he'll do in Paris; my God, he might as well talk of Portland for all the sense of it."
He pulled a London paper out of his pocket and showed me what had been written. Many who read this will remember the excitement and the wonder in England when it was known that Black lived and was afloat again. Fear and incredulity and anger were reflected in the impassioned articles with which the London papers were filled. Some blamed the Government; others fell to wild appeals for instant action—just as though the Admiralty was not wide awake enough and at its wits' end to boot. Never have I read such a tissue of mad alarm and impotent threat as this journal, which Osbart handed to me, served up for the pleasure of its readers. And I will confess that my heart was aflame with pride both in the man and his ship when I looked over the wide waters and said that he ruled and would rule them still.
"Black had read this, of course?" I observed to Osbart as I returned the screed to him. He admitted that it was so.
"He reads every line written about him—there's vanity behind what he does, though you might be slow to think it. He'll go to Paris and risk his neck just because he wants the world to know he's been there. What's more, if something the skipper of 'Number 2' hinted at is true, Black and every man aboard her will hang as high as Haman in less than a month's time. I wouldn't tell it him for a million sovereigns laid on that deck this very minute. It's rung in my head like a bell ever since I heard it. There'll be no sleep for me to-night, Strong, not if the devil himself closed my eyelids."
"Then it is very serious news, Osbart?"
He clutched my arm and pressed me against the steel taffrail.
"It's life or death to all of us," he cried, his eyes almost starting from his head; "life or death, the open sea or the gibbet. That's what it is, Strong."
"And I am to know nothing of it?"
"You—you who stand as you do to him? There's not a dog in the ship I wouldn't tell before you. Fire burn the paper on which it's written down. I was mad to speak of it at all."
He was greatly troubled, and I confess that his agitation alarmed me not a little. At what danger he hinted, what was the secret he had learned on board the tramp, I could not even hazard; but that it was of grave import no man might doubt. Standing there, with puckered brow and clenched fists, Osbart typified a true figure of the ship. Dante had imagined no such face as his when a searching beam of crimson light fell upon it, and showed the eyes staring into the very soul of the night.
I say that beams of crimson light enveloped us, and you must know of this more intimately.
There had been men working upon the platform while the Doctor and I talked, and I now saw that they opened a pair of iron shutters in the spine of the ship and so disclosed a cavity in which lay the identical launch we chased from Dolphin's Cove. This, truly, was a clever idea. The launch fitted into a cavity in the whale-like back of the Zero, and you had but to throw the shutters open and to send her sliding down an iron rail and she was in the water immediately.
When she was launched upon this occasion the men began to occupy themselves with a task which was without any meaning to me at all. First, they put into the boat the sections of what looked very much like a raft. Then they pushed off from the Zero, and at a distance of a cable's length, perhaps, they began to fit this raft together, and make of it a great square of steel, which floated buoyantly and must have been some ten feet across. Returning to the ship, they then carried away a large number of electric accumulators, and, having put these on board the raft, they made another journey and loaded the launch with cans of spirits and sacks of coal. This brought it to my memory that the Zero was driven by electricity and that her batteries were renewed by fire. My wonder at the cleverness of it all was still with me when a sheet of flame leaped up from the raft and the sea turned blood red as though fire were vomited from its heart.
"Great God!" I cried in my astonishment, "what a sight to see! What a picture, Osbart!"
He heard me indifferently—the secret still obsessed him and he could find little interest for any-thing else. When he spoke, it was to give the credit of the thing to Guichard—that genius of all we did and all we might hope to do upon the high seas.
"Fire's life to us," he said quietly; "while you are on the Zero you will know that man shall live by fire alone. We burn our batteries every week if we can; but they could run three weeks if we were pressed. Black says he could get across the Atlantic with them; he's mad enough to try it, and God help us if he does. Some day a ship will catch us like this, and that will be the end of the Zero and her crew. I've foreseen it from the start. We are helpless when the batteries are out of us. Any third-class cruiser could sink us then."
"How long does it take to finish the work?" I asked him. He said that five or six hours were necessary.
"Five or six hours—and an open sea; not the fairway of ships such as this. We are fools to be playing about in such a place. We shouldn't have been but for Black's sentimentalism. What business had he in the Humber when the treasure was aboard and every hour precious? I say he is not the man he was, and you know it, Strong—none better."
Well, I had my doubts about it; but I would not get to words with him. To me Black was still the great Captain, the master genius of the sea whose like I shall never know; whose match will never be found in the story of the world. Had I doubted it that very night would have answered me triumphantly.
The batteries were out of the ship, I say; the hither sea was aflame with the sheen of the beacon we ourselves had kindled—the "death beacon," as Osbart called it ironically. And this was how things went: our engines helpless, our hatches off, some of the men at their supper; dinner already prepared in the saloon; when the look-out cried, "Ship on the starboard bow!" and there across the sea I discerned the black hull of a steamer, and told myself in the same instant that the Zero was done for, and every man aboard her.
CHAPTER XVI
THE RED FLAME BEARS WITNESS
There had been a glow of the northern lights in the heavens