Read Ebook: Four Bells: A Tale of the Caribbean by Paine Ralph Delahaye Schoonover Frank E Illustrator

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Ebook has 1415 lines and 105870 words, and 29 pages

"Mercy sakes, no! It's under the Bible on the parlor table where it has set for years. There's yellow fever and snakes down there, and how are you off for summer underwear?"

With his chin in his hand he pored over the map of the Caribbean and the sailing tracks across that storied sea. Jamaica and the Isthmus of Panama! Thence his finger moved along the coast to Cartagena and Santa Marta and La Guayra. His kindled fancy played around the words. They were like haunting melody. It was an emotion curiously novel. To find anything like it, he had to hark back to the fairy tales of childhood.

The feeling passed. His mother's anxious accents recalled him to himself.

"But is it necessary, Richard, for you to rush off and take a second officer's position? Why don't you wait for something better? It's not a mite like you to fly off at a tangent like this. Common sense was always your strongest point."

"This is just the berth I want, I tell you," said he. "It sounds new and interesting. Now if you will help me get my dunnage together--clean clothes and so on--where's Bill?"

"Gone to the village on an errand, Richard," was the meek answer. "He will be back in plenty of time to drive you to the train. Well, I've seen you wake up for once. Is this the way you boss men around on a ship?"

The details of departure arranged, he resumed his wonted humor, care-free and easy. His mother wept a little when the sound of sleigh-bells heralded the approach of William in the pung. There had been other partings like this, however, and she briskly waved a handkerchief from a window as he rode away. She still had her qualms about those outlandish ports, but he had solemnly sworn to shake the scorpions out of his shoes before putting them on, and this gave her some small comfort.

Young William fired a volley of questions on the road to the station, but his big brother had little to say. The spell of the Caribbean had faded. It was merely another job in a different ship. This lazy reticence irritated William who burst out:

"Sometimes you act as if you were dead from the neck up, Dick. You go to sleep in your tracks like a regular dumb-bell. Where's your pep and punch if you're such a blamed good officer? I'm entitled to talk plain, seeing as it's all in the family. Don't you ever get mad?"

"Quite peevish at times, Bill. There was a cabin steward last voyage who brought me cold water to shave with, two days running. I hated to do it, but I had to beat him to death with a hairbrush and throw his body overboard. He left a wife and seven children in Sweden and begged piteously for his life. Discipline, Bill! You have simply got to enforce it."

William snorted with disgust. He was off this big lump of a brother, he said to himself, who treated him like a silly kid. The train was late, and while they waited at the station a stray dog wandered along the platform. It was no vagrant cur, but a handsome collie which had somehow lost its master and was earnestly trying to find him. The plight was enough to inspire sympathy in the heart of any man that loved a good dog.

"Take him home and keep him until you can 'phone around and stick up a notice in the post-office, Bill," said Richard Cary.

Before William could catch the collie, the express train came thundering down. One of the loungers on the platform emitted a loud guffaw and tossed a bit of stick between the rails of the track. The collie rushed to retrieve it. Richard Cary cursed the man and yelled at the dog which bravely snatched the stick and fled to safety, escaping destruction by no more than the length of its plumed tail. It stood quivering in every nerve, nuzzling Richard's hand.

"Put my bags aboard, Bill," said the mariner. "I have a little business to attend to. It will take only a minute."

William concluded to hover within sight and sound. His brother's face was white as he moved closer to the man who had attempted to slay a dog in wanton sport. The offender was heavily built, with a truculent air, a stranger to the village. His coarse visage reflected alarm, but before he could fight or retreat his right arm was caught and twisted back in a grip that made him scream with pain.

A bone snapped. It would be some time before he could throw sticks with that right arm. Beside himself with rage and anguish, he bellowed foul abuse.

"Shut your dirty mouth," commanded Richard Cary. "You are getting off easy."

The tortured blackguard was given time to utter one more obscene insult. An open palm smote his face. It was a buffet so tremendous that the victim was fairly lifted from his feet. He pitched into the snow at the edge of the platform and lay huddled without motion.

"Good God-amighty, Dick, you busted that guy's neck," gasped William as he tugged at his brother's sleeve. "And all you did was slap him. If you want to hop this train, you'd better hustle."

"Broke his neck? No such luck," growled Richard. "If he wants to see me again, tell him to wait till I come back. All right, Bill. Let's go."

He stooped to pat the head of the affectionate collie and ran to swing on board of the moving train. William had a farewell glimpse of his face at the window. Again it was ruddy and good-humored. The smile was a little wistful, almost like that of a boy leaving home for the first time. The younger brother stood staring after the train. His thoughts were confused. Presently he said to himself:

THE SEA DOGS OF DEVON

His lazy indifference was provoking. When asked a question on deck he replied with a boyish smile and a courteous word or two, but could not be persuaded to linger. In his own opinion he was not hired to entertain the passengers. Leave that nonsense to the skipper. He had all the time in the world and seemed to enjoy making a favorite of himself.

His attitude was nicely paternal. He deluded himself into believing that onlookers accepted it as such. In this respect Captain Jordan Sterry was not unique.

Richard Cary had an observant eye and a sense of humor. When he appeared sluggish, it was merely the sensible avoidance of waste motion of mind and body. He read the philandering skipper through and through and felt a healthy contempt for the soft streak in him, harmless enough, perhaps, but proof that there is no fool like an old fool. The man had been young once. Presumably he had had his fling. Why try to clutch at something that was gone, that had vanished as utterly as the froth of a wave? It was more than absurd. To Richard Cary, secure in the splendid twenties, unable to imagine himself as ever growing old, the skipper's rebellion against the inevitable was almost grotesque.

The chief officer was a sun-dried, silent down-easter who had found it slow climbing the ladder of promotion. He was always hoping for a command, yet somehow missing it. Dependable, incredibly industrious, he lacked the spark of initiative, the essential quality of leadership. Disappointment had soured him. He nursed his grievances and wished he were fitted for a decent job ashore.

After trying in vain to break through his crust, Richard Cary sought companionship elsewhere. He found it in the chief engineer, an extraordinary Englishman named McClement whose cabin was filled with books: history, philosophy, poetry; fiction translated from the French and Russian. There he sat and read by the hour, shirt stripped off, electric fan purring, a cold bottle of beer at his elbow. Half a dozen assistant engineers stood their watches down where the oil burners roared in the furnaces and the huge piston rods whirled the gleaming crank shafts. If anything went wrong, the chief engineer appeared swiftly, clad in disreputable overalls, and his speech was rugged Anglo-Saxon, of a quality requiring expurgation.

Now and then he strolled on deck of an evening, a lean, abstracted figure in spotless white clothes, hands clasped behind him, eyeing the capers of frivolous humankind with a certain cynical tolerance. They were as God had made them, but it was a bungled job. He ate most of his meals in his room, a book propped behind the tray. In this manner he evaded the affliction of mingling with tired business men and vivacious ladies eager to visit the engine room.

Richard Cary drifted into this McClement's quarters by invitation, found a chair strong enough to hold him, and filled a blackened pipe from a jar on the desk. As usual he had not a great deal to say, but was amiability itself. He was content to sit and smoke and speak when spoken to. This pleased his host who read aloud choice bits of things and made pungent comments. The visitor borrowed a book and came again. They got on famously together because in temperament they were so curiously unlike.

On a clear day the ship sighted the lofty mountain range of Jamaica and steered to make her landfall for the harbor of Kingston. She drew near to the coast in the late afternoon. The breeze brought the heavy scents of the tropical verdure, of lush mountain vales, and the wet jungle. Richard Cary was on watch. Instead of standing at the bridge railing, with his calm and solid composure, he walked to and fro in a mood oddly restless. Intently he stared at the lofty slopes all clothed in living green, the tiny waterfalls bedecking them like flashes of silver lace.

McClement, the chief engineer, climbed to the boat deck and said, as he joined Richard Cary:

"Port Royal yonder! No more than a sandbank now. The old town was sunk by an earthquake long ago. If you poke about in a small boat, they say you can see the stone walls of the houses down under the clear water. It was a famous resort of pirates and such gentry in the roaring days of the Spanish Main. Rum and loot, women and sin! All that made life worth living."

"Port Royal?" exclaimed Cary. "I'm sure I have heard something about Port Royal. All gone, eh, Mac? Scuppered for their crimes. Served 'em right. A bad lot."

Second Officer Cary muttered something and walked to the edge of the deck to peer down into the bright green water as if expecting to see the flickering phantoms of the wild sea rovers of the lost Port Royal. His blue eyes were bright with an ardent interest. McClement remarked, with a quizzical grin:

"I haven't seen you really awake before now. What touched you off? Pirate yarns you read when you were a kid?"

"Perhaps so, Mac. I had this feeling once before. It was when I got word from a pal in New York, telling me about this job, that it was on the run to Cartagena. What is Cartagena like?"

"Wait and see it, my boy. Cartagena is a vision of vanished adventures, a gorgeous old Spanish treasure town preserved, by a sort of miracle, through three hundred years. Romance, color, tradition? It makes the days of the tall galleons and the bold sea dogs live again."

"Tell me more about it," demanded Richard Cary. His voice rolled out in a deep and masterful note.

"Come down to my room after the ship docks and I'll give you some books to read, Kingsley's 'Westward Ho,' Hakluyt's 'Voyages,' and Captain Burney's 'History of the Buccaneers of America.'"

He had leisure to saunter a little way from the wharf, but felt no desire to explore Kingston. It was quite common-place, the streets noisy with electric cars and automobiles, the brick and wooden buildings as cheap and unlovely as those of any American town. Several charming young passengers failed to persuade him to join a party at the hotel where an orchestra was jazzing it, and he also declined, with due caution, the hospitality of thirsty voyagers who were making a night of it.

Returning to the ship, he went to his room at midnight and picked up the chief engineer's books instead of turning in. Presently he found himself fascinated. For the sake of comfort he shifted into pajamas and lay stretched in the bunk. The ship's bell tolled one half-hour after another and he was still reading. These printed pages were a key that unlocked the gates of enchantment. Now and then he lost himself in absorbed reverie.

These chronicles of hazards and escapes and hard fighting in the waters that washed the Spanish Main had been derived from documents, from the robust memoirs of men whose bones had crumbled in a century now dim and dead. The rich ports whose walls they had stormed with a bravado that defied all odds were no more than fragments of ruined masonry submerged in the jungle growth, Nombre de Dios, Porto Bello, and old Panama, names that still re?cho like the brazen blare of trumpets.

All gone save Cartagena, reflected Richard Cary. Cartagena still basking by the sea to recall that day when Francis Drake and his Devon lads had stormed it with the naked sword.

In fancy he had been sailing, fighting, and carousing with those ferocious freebooters of the Caribbean. They seemed as real to him as the plodding, slow-spoken farmers of the New Hampshire soil on which he had been raised. Those clumsy, high-pooped ships with the bellying sails and gaudy pennants were as clearly etched in his mind as the stone walls, the square white houses, and the dark woodlands of his native countryside.

Confound the chief engineer's books, he said to himself. They had turned his brain all topsy-turvy.

Richard Cary enjoyed it. He was amazed that he had ever regarded going to sea as drudgery. This part of the voyage appealed to him with a peculiar zest. For the first time he loved the ocean. This boisterous wind that blew beneath a hard bright sky, a cool tang to it that tempered the tropic heat--he drew it deep into his lungs, standing with arms folded across his mighty chest.

The astute chief engineer found something to interest him in the behavior of his herculean young shipmate. They were walking the deck together when McClement said, with his dry chuckle:

"Until we sighted Jamaica, Dick, you were majestic and quiet, like the everlasting hills. I welcomed you as a benign influence in a world of guff and jazz and nervous twitters. Now you fairly talk my head off. It doesn't bore me, mind you, but I find myself perplexed to account for this flow of language. Were you bottled up all those years, and has the cork just blown out?"

"Something like that, Mac," rather sheepishly admitted Richard Cary. "I can't seem to help talking to you about the Spanish Main and the hard-boiled lads that put it on the map. You know all that stuff by heart, and I fairly eat it up."

"Aye, Dick, you lick your chops over it. You have read every bally book I could dig up. It is like a craving for strong drink."

Cary did not appear to be listening. The wind was blowing against his cheek. The deck was unsteady beneath his feet. Against the ship's side the crested waves crashed and broke.

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