The Max Brand Megapack (9 page)

“McTee, are ye ready? There’s a weight gone off my soul!”

“Harrigan, I’ve been a driver of men, but this girl has put me under the whip. When I’m through with you, I’m coming back to her.”

“It’ll be your ghost that returns.”

Kate hesitated one instant as if to judge which was the greatest force toward evil. Then she dropped to her knees and caught the hands of McTee, those strong, cruel hands.

“If you will not fight, I’ll—I’ll be kind to you, I’ll be everything you ask of me—”

“You’re pleading for him?”

“No, no! For him and for you; for your two souls!”

“Bah! Mine was lost long ago, and I’ll answer that there’s a claim on Harrigan filed away in hell. He’s too strong to have lived clean.”

“Angus, we’re all alone here—on the rim of the world, you’ve said—and in places like this the eye of God is on you.”

He laughed brutally: “If He sees me, He’ll look the other way.”

“Have done with the chatter,” broke in Harrigan. “Ah-h, McTee, I see where my hands’ll fit on your throat.”

“Come,” McTee answered without raising his voice; “there’s a corner of the beach where a current stands in close by the shore. You’ve been a traveling man, Harrigan. When I’ve killed you, I’ll throw your body into the sea, and the tide will take you out to see the rest of the world.”

“Come,” said Harrigan; “I’d as soon finish you there as here, and when you’re dead, I’ll sit you up against a tree and come down every day to watch you rot.”

The girl fell to the ground between them with her face buried in her arms, silent. The two men lowered their eyes for a moment upon her, and then turned and walked down the hill, going shoulder to shoulder like friends. So they came out upon the beach and walked along it until they reached the point of which McTee had spoken.

It was a level, hard-packed stretch of sand which offered firm footing and no rocks over which one of the fighters might stumble at a critical moment.

“Tis a lovely spot,” sighed Harrigan. “Captain, you’re a jewel of a man to have thought of it.”

“Aye, this is no deck at sea that can heave and twist and spoil my work.”

“It is not; and the palms of my hands are almost healed. Had you thought of that, captain?”

“As you lie choking, Harrigan, think of the girl. The minute I’ve heaved you into the sea, I go back to her.”

The hard breathing of the Irishman filled up the interval.

“I see one thing clear. It’s that I’ll have to kill you slow. A man like you, McTee, ought to taste his death a while before it comes. Come to me ar-rms, captain, I’ve a little secret to whisper in your ear. Whisht! ’Twillnot be long in the tellin’!”

McTee replied with a snarl, and the two commenced to circle slowly, drawing nearer at every step. On the very edge of leaping forward, Harrigan was astonished to see McTee straighten from his crouch and point out to sea.

“The eye of God!” muttered the Scotchman. “She was right!”

Harrigan jumped back lest this should prove a maneuver to place him off his guard, and then looked in the indicated direction. It was true; a point of light, a white eye, peered at them from far across the water. Then the shout of McTee rang joyously: “A ship!”

“The fire!” answered Harrigan, and pointed back to the hill, for Kate had allowed the flames to fall in their absence.

All thought of the battle left them. They started back on the run to build high their signal light, and when they came to the top of the hill, they found Kate lying as they had left her. She started to her knees at the sound of their footsteps and stretched out her arms to them.

“God has sent you back to me!”

“A ship!” thundered McTee for answer, and he flung a great armful of wood upon the blaze. It rose with a rush, leaping and crackling, but all three kept at their work until the pile of wood was higher than their heads. Only when the supply of dry fuel was exhausted did they pause to look out to sea. In place of the one eye of white there were three lights, one of white, one of red, and one of green—the lights of a ship running in toward land.

In a moment the moon slipped up above the eastern waters, and right across that broad white circle moved a ship with the smoke streaming back from her funnel. Unquestionably the captain had seen the signal fire and understood its meaning.

They waited until the red light became fairly stationary, showing that the steamer had been laid-to. Then they ran for the beach and took up their position on the line between the glow of their fire and the position of the ship, guessing that in this way they would be on the spot where the ship’s boat would be most likely to touch the shore.

“McTee,” said Harrigan, “it may be half an hour before that boat reaches the beach. Is there any reason why both of us should go aboard it?”

“Harrigan, there is none! Stand up to me.”

“If you do this,” broke in Kate, “I will bring the sailors who come ashore to the spot where the dead man lies, and I’ll tell how he died.”

They looked at her, knowing that she could be trusted to fulfill that threat. The moon lay on the beauty of her face; never had she seemed so desirable. They looked to each other, and each seemed doubly hateful to the other.

“Kate, dear,” said Harrigan hastily, “I see the boat come tossin’ there over the water. Speak out like a brave girl. Neither of us will leave the other in peace as long as we have a hope of you. Choose between us before we put a foot in that boat, and if you choose McTee, I’ll give you God’s blessin’ an’ say no more nor ever raise my hand against ye. McTee, will ye do the like?”

“For the sake of the day of the fight and the wreck I will. If she chooses you now, I’ll raise no hand against you.”

A shout came faintly across the rush and ripple of the breakers.

“Speak out,” said Harrigan.

“Hallo!” she screamed in answer to the hail from the boat, and then turning to them: “I choose neither of you!”

“McTee,” growled Harrigan, “I’m thinkin’ we’ve both been fools.”

“Think what you will, I’ll have her; and if you cross me again, I’ll finish you, Harrigan.”

“McTee, ten of your like couldn’t finish me. But look! There’s the girl wadin’ out to the boat. Let’s steady her through the waves.”

They ran out and, catching her beneath the shoulders, bore her safe and high through the small rollers. When they were waist-deep, the boat swung near. A lantern was raised by the man in the bows, and under that light they saw the four men at the oars, now backing water to keep their boat from washing to the beach. The sailors cheered as the two men swung Kate over the gunwale and then clambered in after her. The man at the bows all this time had kept his lantern high above his head with a rigid arm, and now he bellowed: “Black McTee!”

“Right!” said McTee. “And you?”

“Salvain—put back for the ship, lads—Pietro Salvain. D’you mean to say you’ve forgotten me?”

“Shanghai!” said McTee, as light broke on his memory. “What a night that was.”

“But you—”

“The
Mary Rogers
took a header for Davy Jones’s locker; first mate drunk and ran her on a reef; all hands went under except the three of us; we drifted to this island.”

“Black McTee shipwrecked! By God, if we get to port with our old tramp, I’ll get a farm and stick to dry land.”

“Your ship?”

“The
Heron
, four thousand tons, White Henshaw, skipper.”

“White Henshaw?” cried McTee in almost reverent tones.

“The same. Old White still sticks to his wheel. He’s as hard a man as you, McTee, in his own way.”

They were pulling close to the freighter by this time, and Salvain gave quick orders to lay the boat alongside. In another moment they stood on the deck, where a tall man in white clothes advanced to meet them.

“Good fishing, sir,” said Salvain. “We’ve picked up three shipwrecked people, with Angus McTee among them.”

“Black McTee!” cried the other, and even in the dim light he picked out the towering form of the Scotchman.

“It took a wreck to bring us together, Captain Henshaw,” said McTee, “but here we are, I’ve combed the South Seas for ten years for the sake of meeting you.”

“H-m!” grunted Henshaw. “We’ll drink on the strength of that. Come into the cabin.”

They trooped after him, Salvain and the three rescued, and stood in the roomy cabin, the captain and the first mate dapper and cool in their white uniforms, the other three marvelously ragged. Barefooted, their hair falling in jags across their foreheads, their muscles bulging through the rents in their shirts, McTee and Harrigan looked battered but triumphant. Kate Malone might have been the prize which they had safely carried away. She was even more ragged than her companions, and now she withdrew into a shadowy corner of the cabin and shook the long, loose masses of her hair about her shoulders.

CHAPTER 16

The dark eye of Pietro Salvain was quick to note her condition. He was a rather small, lean-faced man with the skin drawn so tightly across his high cheekbones that it glistened. He was emaciated; his energy consumed him as hunger consumes other men.

“There is a berth for me below,” he said to Kate. “You must take my room. And I have a cap, some silk shirts, a loose coat which you might wear—so?”

“This is Miss Malone, Salvain,” said McTee before she could answer.

“You are very kind, Mr. Salvain,” she said.

He smiled and bowed very low, and then opened the door for her; but all the while his glance was upon McTee, who stared at him so significantly that before following Kate through the door, Salvain shrugged his shoulders and made a gesture of resignation.

The captain turned to Harrigan. Henshaw was very old. He was always so erect and carried his chin so high that the loose skin of his throat hung in two sharp ridges. In spite of the tight-lipped mouth, the beaklike nose, and the small, gleaming eyes, there was something about his face which intensified his age. Perhaps it was the yellow skin, dry as the parchment from an Egyptian tomb and criss-crossed by a myriad little wrinkles.

“And you, sir?” he said to the Irishman.

“One of my crew,” broke in McTee carelessly. “He’ll be quite contented in the forecastle. Eh, Harrigan?”

“Quite,” said Harrigan, and his glance acknowledged the state of war.

“Then if you’ll go forward, Harrigan,” said the captain, and his voice was dry and dead as his skin—“if you’ll go forward and report to the bos’n, he’ll see that you have a bunk.”

“Thank you, sir,” murmured Harrigan, and slipped from the room on his bare feet.

“That man,” stated Henshaw, “is as strong as you are, McTee, and yet they call you the huskiest sailor of the South Seas.”

“He is almost as strong,” answered McTee with a certain emphasis.

Something like a smile appeared in the eyes of Henshaw, but did not disturb the fixed lines of his mouth. For a moment Henshaw and McTee measured each other.

The Scotchman spoke first: “Captain, you’re as keen as the stories they tell of you.”

“And you’re as hard, McTee.”

The latter waved the somewhat dubious compliment away.

“I was breaking that fellow, and he held out longer than any man I’ve ever handled. The shipwreck interrupted me, or I would have finished what I started.”

“You’d like to have me finish what you began?”

“You read my mind.”

“Discipline is a great thing.”

“Absolutely necessary at sea.”

Henshaw answered coldly: “There’s no need for us to act the hypocrite, eh?”

McTee hesitated, and then grinned: “Not a bit. I know what you did twenty years ago in the Solomons.”

“And I know the story of you and the pearl divers.”

“That’s enough.”

“Quite.”

“And Harrigan?”

“As a favor to you, McTee, I’ll break him. Maybe you’ll be interested in my methods.”

“Try mine first. I made him scrub down the bridge with suds every morning, and while his hands were puffed and soft, I sent him down to the fireroom to pass coal.”

“He’ll kill you someday.”

“If he can.”

They smiled strangely at each other.

A knock came at the door, and Salvain entered, radiant.

“She is divine!” he cried. “Her hair is old copper with golden lights. McTee, if she is yours, you have found another Venus!”

“If she is not mine,” answered McTee, “at least she belongs to no other man.”

Salvain studied him, first with eagerness, then with doubt, and last of all with despair.

“If any other man said that I would question it—so!—with my life. But McTee? No, I love life too well!”

“Now,” Henshaw said to Salvain, “Captain McTee and I have business to talk.”

“Aye, sir,” said Salvain.

“One minute, Salvain,” broke in McTee. “I haven’t thanked you in the girl’s name for taking care of Miss Malone.”

The first mate paused at the door.

“I begin to wonder, captain,” he answered, “whether or not you have the right to thank me in her name!”

He disappeared through the door without waiting for an answer.

“Salvain has forgotten me,” muttered McTee, balling his fist, “but I’ll freshen his memory.”

He flushed as he became aware of the cold eye of Henshaw upon him.

“Even Samson fell,” said the old man. “But she hasn’t cut your hair yet, McTee?”

“What the devil do you mean?”

Henshaw silently poured another drink and passed it to the Scotchman. The latter gripped the glass hard and tossed off the drink with a single gesture. At once his eyes came back to Henshaw’s face with the fierce question. He was astonished to note kindliness in the answering gaze.

Old Henshaw said gently: “Tut, tut! You’re a proper man, McTee, and a proper man has always the thought of some woman tucked away in his heart. Look at me! For almost sixty years I’ve been the King of the South Seas!”

At the thought of his glories his face altered, as soldiers change when they receive the order to charge.

“You’re a rare man and a bold man, McTee, but you’ll never be what White Henshaw has been—the Shark of the Sea! Ha! Yet think of it! Ten years ago, after all my harvesting of the sea, I had not a dollar to show for it! Why? Because I was working for no woman. But here I am sailing home from my last voyage—rich! And why? Because for ten years I’ve been working for a woman. For ourselves we make and we spend. But for a woman we make and we save. Aye!”