"Stop that!" he shouted.
There was an instant's pause. Their alert ears caught the sounds of a distant scuffle. Then a pistol shot jarred the peaceful drone of the ship.
"Sheer off, there!" roared Courtenay again. "Next time I shoot to kill!"—
With terror in their eyes, with blanched cheeks, they rushed to the door and peeped out. Courtenay was not to be seen, but the officer of the watch was swinging himself over the canvas shield of the bridge. He disappeared. Joey, barking furiously, trotted into view and ran back again. Creeping forward, they saw the stolid sailor within the chart-house squint at the compass and give the wheel a slight turn. That was reassuring. Yet another timorous pace, and through the curving window they could discern Courtenay, holding a revolver in his right hand, but behind his back.
Even in their alarm they realized that nothing very terrible would happen now. But why had the shot been fired, and what had given that tense ring to Courtenay's threat?
Venturing a little further, they gained the bridge. On the main deck, a long way beneath, near an open hatch, a half-caste Chilean was lying on his back. He had evidently been wounded. Blood was flowing from his leg; it smeared the white deck. The officer who had climbed down so speedily from the bridge was directing two other men how to lift him. Close by, the chief officer, Mr. Boyle, was stanching a deep cut on his chin with a handkerchief. At the same time he curtly ordered off such deck hands and stewards as came running forward, attracted by the disturbance.
The girls were gazing wide-eyed at this somewhat unnerving scene, when
Courtenay approached.
"Better go below," he said quietly. "I am sorry this trouble should have happened, at the beginning of the voyage, too. I hope it will not upset you. That rascally Chilean tried to knife Mr. Boyle, and those other blackguards were ready to side with him. I had to shoot quick and straight to show them I meant what I said."
"Is he dead?" asked Isobel, with a contemptuous coolness as to the fate of the mutineer which Courtenay found admirable.
"Not a bit of it. Fired at his legs. Only a flesh wound, I fancy."
"Poor wretch!" murmured Elsie. "Was there no other way?"
"There is only one way of dealing with that sort of skunk," was the gruff answer. The pity in her voice implied a condemnation of his act. He resented it. He knew he had done rightly, and she knew that she had given offence by her involuntary sympathy with the suffering Chilean, who, with the passing of the paralyzing shock of the bullet, was howling dolefully now as the sailors carried him towards the forecastle.
The man's groans tortured her. Her eyes filled with tears. Joey, yelping with frenzy, leaped up to invite her to lift him above the canvas screen so that he might see what was going on. But Elsie could only reach blindly for the rail of the companion-way, and Isobel, after a smiling word of farewell to Courtenay, followed her.
So it came to pass that neither Stevenson nor the moon had power to draw the captain of the Kansas to the promenade deck that night.
CHAPTER II
WHEREIN THE CAPTAIN KEEPS TO HIS OWN QUARTERS
Doctor Christobal brought some additional details to the dinner-table. He was not the ship's doctor. The Kansas, built for freight rather than passengers, did not carry a surgeon on her roll; Dr. Christobal's presence was due to Mr. Baring's solicitude in his daughter's behalf. It chanced that the courtly and gray-haired Spanish physician had relinquished his practise in Chile, and was about to pay a long-promised visit to a married daughter in Barcelona. Friendship, not unaided by a good fee, induced him to travel by the Kansas.
He had been called on to attend Mr. Boyle and the wounded Chilean, and he reported now that the chief officer's injury was trifling, but the Chilean's wound might incapacitate him during the remainder of the voyage.
"So far as I can gather," he said, "Mr. Boyle had a narrow escape. These half-breeds have a nice anatomical knowledge of the situation of the lung; they also know the easiest way to reach it with a sharp instrument. Captain Courtenay fired as the knife fell, otherwise our first mate would have attended his own funeral this evening."
"What was the cause of the affair?" Isobel asked.
"The man is not one of the ship's crew, I understand. His name is Frascuelo, and it appears that he was engaged to place some bunker coal aboard early this morning. He says that he was drugged, and his clothes stolen; that he came off to the ship at a late hour, and that some one flung him headlong into a hold which, luckily for him, was nearly full of cotton bales. He was stunned by the fall, and were it not for Captain Courtenay's custom of having all hatches taken off and a thorough examination of the cargo made before the holds are finally battened down for the voyage, Frascuelo might now be in a tight place in more than one sense."
Dr. Christobal was proud of his idiomatic English. He spoke the language with the careless freedom of a Londoner.
"Frascuelo seems to have passed an eventful day," said the little French Comte, who had been waiting anxiously for a chance to join in the conversation.
"But why should he want to kill poor Mr. Boyle?" inquired Isobel, after giving the Frenchman an encouraging glance. Incidentally, she smiled at Elsie. "Why puzzle one's brains over foreign tongues when all the world speaks English?" she telegraphed.
"Mr. Boyle is a peculiar person," said the doctor dryly. "I happen to have known him during some years. You and I might regard him as a man of few words, but he has acquired a wonderful vocabulary for the benefit of sailor-men. I believe he can swear in every known lingo. His accomplishment in that direction no doubt annoyed Frascuelo, who became frantic when he heard that the ship would not call at any South American port. I imagine, too, that the unfortunate fellow is still suffering from the drug which, he says, was administered to him. Anyhow, you know how the affair terminated."
"I, for one, think some consideration might have been shown him," said
Elsie.
"There is no time for argument when a Chilean draws a knife, Miss
Maxwell."
"But, if his story is true—"
"There never yet was a stowaway who did not invent a plausible yarn. Nevertheless, I believe, and Mr. Boyle agrees with me, that the man is not lying."
They felt the ship swing round on a new course, and the rays of the setting sun lit up the saloon table through the open starboard ports.
"Due south now, ladies!" cried Dr. Christobal cheerily. "We have rounded Cape Cardones. We practically follow the seventy-sixth degree until we approach Evangelistas Island. Thus far we are in the open sea. Then we pick our way through the Straits discovered by that daring Portuguese, Fernando de Magallanes, to whose memory I always drink heartily once we are clear of the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. I never pass through that gloomy defile without marveling at his courage, and thinking that he deserved a better fate than murder at the hands of some painted savage in the Philippines. Peace be to his ashes!"
And the doctor lifted his glass of red wine with a quasi-masonic ritual which lent solemnity to his discourse.
"You are a long way ahead of your toast," said Isobel.
"Just as Magellan was ahead of his times," was the rejoinder.
"Yet he was a man of leisurely habit," put in Elsie, who found Dr.
Christobal's old-world manners full of charm and repose.
"How so?" said he, puzzled, for the worthy Portuguese navigator was notoriously a swashbuckler.
"Otherwise he never could have christened any unhappy promontory by such a long-winded name,"