“Mates,” he said, “I’d be very obliged to know if you carry a doctor on this ship?”
Larry looked at me, but I made no response. We must hear much, I reflected, before we answered such a question as that.
“Is that your message, sir?” Larry asked a little severely.
Again the man thumbed his hat and continued parrot-like:—
“I’d be obliged to know if you carry a doctor on this ship. That’s first. We’re in a clove-hitch and no mistake. Some’s gone and that’s an end of them. The rest would be thankful for a doctor, and there’s no denying it. Mates, if you’re Christian men, you’ll come aboard and help poor seamen——”
His candour was really remarkable. I thought it quite time to take up his cross-examination myself.
“Come,” I said, “we must know more about it than that. What ship is yonder and who is in command of her? Answer my questions properly, and it is possible that we may help you. There has been a mutiny, and you have the upper hand. Why should we take any part in it?”
He looked up at me, a foxy look, I thought, and stumbled through as strange a narrative as I have ever heard.
“Old Salt-Horse went off in the relief,” he began, and I knew he meant Imroth thereby. “Captain Ross has been first since. He was for lying in this——hair-oil of a sea; we was for going ashore. That’s what the lady wanted, and d——n me, who was to stand agen it? Eight months have me and my mates been floating about this ocean like a flock of —— ducks. Did I ship with Salt-Horse for that? As true as God’s in heaven, I come from London Road, Plymouth, and Bill Evans is my name, same as my father and mother before me. You come aboard and do what you can for us, and we sail the ship to Rio. No harm comes to the young lady, but she stops aboard until we’re ashore, and that’s my last word if I swing for it.”
The man had become bolder as he went on, and now he threw his hat defiantly upon deck and looked at us all as though he had been an ambassador carrying a message to a king. Perchance he but little understood the significance of his words or the surpassing interest with which I heard them. Val Imroth escaped? All well with my little Joan—how could it be otherwise since they asked us aboard! Here were two facts which changed in an instant the whole complexion of our schemes and shattered them to the very base. I no longer thought of plan or prudence or any human consideration at all, but that of carrying Joan Fordibras the tidings of her safety, so far as that safety lay within our power to ensure. I must board the Diamond Ship. At any cost, I must speak with Joan.
“Larry,” I cried, shouting it out so that those in the boat below could hear every word of it—“Larry, I am going to help these men. Stand by for my signal. If there is any treachery, you will know what to do. Show this fellow what we carry—let there be no mistake about it. They sink or swim—no half measure, Larry! So help me Heaven, I will send them to the bottom in less than five minutes if they so much as think a word against me.”
Larry’s answer was to command our own crew to lower the launch and to stand by the guns. Delaying only to call Okyada to my side, I followed the strange ambassador down the gangway stairs and began my voyage to the great unknown.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE STRONG ROOM OF THE OCEAN.
Dr. Fabos Fails to Find Joan Fordibras.
The boat’s crew laid to their oars with a hearty will, directly I gave them the word; and we shot over the still waters almost with the speed of a steamer’s launch. It was a new experience for me to find myself afloat upon the Atlantic in a small boat, and I confess, even in such fair weather, not wholly a pleasant one. The long rollers, alternately lifting us to prodigious heights and plunging us as to a very abyss of the ocean, shut in turn both ships from my view and permitted me but a rare glimpse of them as we rose upon the crest of some rolling wave which seemed about to engulf us utterly. I realised, as all seamen realise from time to time, the meaning of man’s victory over the sea and the splendour of it. And excitement carried me without distress where I would have feared to go upon a common day.
I was about to see my little Joan again. Unless this man had lied to me, so much must be beyond question. I should find her on the great ship and take her, at last and finally, from this hive of ruffians into which the accidents of life had cast her from her very childhood. Much as she had suffered, it remained my hope that her own courage and the circumstances of her presence upon the ship had saved her from that nameless evil which might otherwise have been her fate. Imroth had kept the child from harm—that I firmly believed; and Imroth having fled, the terror of his name might still be powerful to save her. Herein lay the supreme consolation as our voyage drew to its end, and every rolling crest showed us more clearly the immense hull, standing up from the water like a very Castle Impregnable. I was the bearer of a message to Joan Fordibras, and she should be the first there to whom the story of succour must be told. There could be no purpose dearer to me or one I embarked upon so gladly.
The sun had been upon the point of setting when I quitted the yacht, and a chill of evening fell with an aftermath of drifting mist as the men drove the long-boat up to the ship. My first impression, for I had never before viewed a big steamer from a small boat on the open sea, was one of a vast towering immensity rising sheer above me as the wall of a fortress or the black precipice of a mountain. The ladder itself, by which I must gain the deck, swung fragile as a thread from a boom amidships—no steam came from the ship’s valves, although the bilge was flowing freely. I could detect no sound of movement or human activity; nothing but the appearance of three or four pale anxious faces at the gangway above allowed me to say that the ship had a crew at all. These men, however, waited for my coming with an expectancy which was almost pathetic, and scarcely had I climbed the ladder than they surrounded me immediately with such piteous entreaty to come to their comrades’ aid that my own imperious question sounded abrupt almost to the point of harshness.
“You have a lady upon this ship—where is she?”
“She has gone, sir.”
“Gone! good God, how can she be gone?”
“We knew what you would ask, and sent down to her cabin a quarter of an hour ago, sir. She was not there. Mr. Colin Ross, him that commands for Mr. Imroth, he says he knows nothing of it. It’s true as heaven, sir—the lady’s come to no harm by us, nor would have done if she had been aboard here twenty years. There wasn’t a man that wouldn’t have given his life for her. We don’t know where she is, sir, and that’s gospel truth.”
Imagine the scene. I stood upon the open deck of the strangest steamer I have yet set foot upon—a steamer so splendidly fitted and furnished, as one glance told me, that no Atlantic liner, whatever company floated her, could have claimed a greater elegance. The bridge above me had the neatness, the shining brass, the white ladders of a man-of-warsman. The guns were polished to the last possibility. Every cabin into which I looked appeared to boast the luxury and equipment of a state saloon on a Cunard or a White Star boat. I perceived an immense dining hall aft, and a companion-way not unsuited to a ten thousand ton steamer. There were boats abundantly, safety rafts—the usual equipment of an ocean-going vessel, and yet, in the strongest contrast, something which differentiated this ship from any other I had ever visited, and placed her at once in a category apart. This was nothing more nor less than a screen of solid steel bars, ten feet high, perhaps, and defended by forbidding spikes, sharp as swords and impossible to fend, a screen cutting the vessel into two clear divisions, and obviously the Jew’s protection against all others who sailed with him. I judged at once that the men lived forward of this screen; Imroth and his chosen company aft. A wicket gate, just large enough to admit the body of a man, permitted communication between the divisions; but the steelwork itself appeared to be carried cunningly over the bulwarks in a manner that must have rendered absolutely the aft cabins secure