We laughed at his earnestness, but the order was rung down nevertheless, and presently the yacht lay rolling to the swell and we could hear the stokers drawing a furnace below. Who is justly to blame for the accident which followed I do not dare to tell myself. Sometimes I have charged myself with it and complained bitterly of the opinions I had ventured. I can only tell you that the yacht had scarcely been slowed down when the rogues’ ship fired at us again, and the shot, crossing our forward decks at an angle of some fifty-five degrees, struck a fine young seaman of the name of Holland and almost annihilated him before our very eyes. The tragedy had a greater significance because of the very mirth with which we had but a moment before regarded the Jew’s gunners and their performance. Death stood there upon the heels of laughter; a cry in the night was the answer to an honest man’s defiance and my own bravado. As for poor Holland, the shot took him about the middle and cut him absolutely in two. He could have suffered no pain—so instantaneously was he hurled into eternity. One moment I saw him standing at the bulwarks watching the distant searchlight; at the next, there remained but a dreadful something upon the deck from which men turned their eyes in horror and dare not so much as speak about.
You are to imagine with what consternation and dismay this accident fell upon us. For many minutes together no man spoke a word to another. Such a deathly silence came upon the ship that our own act and judgment might have brought this awful disaster, and not the play of capricious change. To say that the men were afraid is to do them less than justice. In war time, it is the earliest casualties which affright the troops and send the blood from the bravest faces. Our good fellows had gone into this adventure with me thinking that they understood its risks, but in reality understanding them not at all. The truth appalled them, drove challenge from their lips and laughter from their eyes. They were new men thereafter, British seamen, handy-men who worked silently, methodically, stubbornly as such fellows ever will when duty calls them. Had I suggested that we should return immediately to Europe they would have broken into open mutiny on the spot. Henceforth no word of mine need advocate my work or ask of them true comradeship. I knew that they would follow me to the ends of the earth if thereby they might avenge their shipmate.
“Larry,” I said, “the blame of that is upon me. God forgive my rashness. I feel as though my folly had cost me the life of one of my own sons.”
“Sir,” was his answer, “you had no more to do with it than the King himself. I will not hear such talk. The chances are the same for all of us. It might have been yourself, sir.”
McShanus was no less insistent.
“’Tis to do our duty we are here,” he said. “If there is a man among us who is ashamed of his duty, let us be ashamed of him.”
I did not answer them. The seamen, awakened from their trance, ran to the help of a comrade long past all human help. Far away over the waters, the Diamond Ship still fired her impotent shells at us. Their very impotency convinced me how surely an accident had killed poor Holland. I said that it had been the will of God, indeed, that one should perish on the altar of our justice, and his life to be the first sacrifice to be asked of us. In my own cabin, alone and bitterly distressed, a greater depression fell upon me so that I could ask myself why I had been chosen for the part at all or how it befell that of the thousands who had been robbed of Valentine Imroth, the Jew, I, alone, must set out to discover him. Vain, indeed, did triumph appear now. We had defied the rogues and they had answered us—not with a final answer, truly, but with that hush and awe of death which is never so terrible as upon the lonely waste of the great silent ocean.
Nor was the hour to pass without further news of them. Impotent at the guns, they fell to words, rapped out by our receiver so plainly that a very child of telegraphy could have read them.
“The message of Valentine Imroth to the Englishman, Fabos.—I take up your challenge. Joan Fordibras shall pay your debt in full.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
DAWN.
And some Talk of a Ship that Passed in the Night.
I have it in my mind that it was just upon the stroke of one o’clock of the morning, or two bells in the middle watch, when this amazing message came to me. Larry and the Irishman were asleep at that time, the third officer keeping the bridge and sending down to summon me to the Marconi instrument. Indefatigable as my friends had been in their energies and zeal, there are limits to human endurance which no prudent master ignores; and to their bunks I sent them despite their indignation. For myself, I can never sleep in the hour of crisis or its developments. Physically, I am then incapable of sleep. A sense of fatigue is unknown to me. I seem to be as one apart from the normal life of men, untrammelled by human necessities and unconscious even of mental effort. Perhaps the subsequent collapse is the more absolute when it comes. I have slept for thirty hours upon a question finally answered. The end of my day is the end also of whatever task I have for the time being undertaken.
The men were sleeping, and why should I awake them? Fallin, the young officer, had but little news to report. The Diamond Ship no longer wasted her shells in angry impotence. Her searchlight had ceased to play upon the moonlit waters. Such tidings as came were of a steamer’s masthead light seen for an instant upon our port-bow and then vanishing.
“It’s an unusual course for tramps, sir,” the young officer said, “and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure enough about it at all to wake the Captain. If it were a ship out of Buenos Ayres, she’s keeping more south than usual, but I’ve altered the course for a star before now, and you don’t care to wake up such a seaman as Captain Larry to tell him you’ve done that. His orders to me were to go down and report anything unusual. Well, a glimpse of a ship’s light shouldn’t be unusual, and that’s a fact.”
I agreed with him, though, landsman that I was, I thought I could read the omen better than he. If he had seen the masthead light of a strange steamer, she could be no other than the second of the relief ships the Jew awaited.
Herein lay many and disquieting possibilities. Given coal and stores enough, what was there to prevent the rogues putting in to some South American port, landing there such plunder as they had, and dispersing to the cities wherein their friends would shelter them? I foresaw immediately a complete frustration of my own plans and a conclusion to my task humiliating beyond belief. Not improbably that great hulk of a ship sailed already under the colours of some irresponsible republic. She might, I judged, fly the Venezuelan flag or that of Honduras or Nicaragua. The ports of such governments would be ready enough to give her shelter if backsheesh enough were to hand. And what, then, of all our labours—above all, what, then, of little Joan?
This would be to say that the message still troubled me and that I had by no means come to a resolution upon it. Let it be admitted that it found me a little wanting in courage. If reason, the sober reason of one who has made it his life’s task to read the criminal mind, the principles which guide it and the limits within which it is logical, if reason such as this read the Jew’s ultimatum aright, then might it be derided utterly. The man would dare nothing against Joan Fordibras while an alternative remained to him. She was his last card. Should he harm her, henceforth he must become a fugitive, not from the justice of a state, but from a man’s vengeance. This I plainly perceived—nevertheless, the lonely watches of the night brought me an echo of her child’s voice, a word spoken as it were from a child’s heart; so that I could say that the little Joan, who had turned to me in her trouble, had looked into the very eyes of my soul, that she was a prisoner yonder, alone among them all, a hostage in the hands of ruffians, their first and last hope of ultimate salvation from the gallows and the cell. She suffered—she must suffer the tortures of doubt, of suspense, it might even be of insult. And I, who had spoken such fine words, I could but rage against her persecutors, threaten them idly or write down a message of their contumely. Such was the penalty of the hour of waiting.