Dead Men Tell No Tales | Page 7

to make the sacred sign upon his breast. He was always
smoking one cigarette and making another; as he lit the new one the
glow fell upon a strange pin that he wore, a pin with a tiny crucifix
inlaid in mosaic. So the religious cast of Senhor Santos was brought
twice home to me in the same moment, though, to be sure, I had often
been struck by it before. And it depressed me to think that so sweet a
child as Eva Denison should have spoken harshly of so good a man as
her step-father, simply because he had breadth enough to sympathize
with a coarse old salt like Captain Harris.
I turned in, however, and I cannot say the matter kept me awake in the
separate state-room which was one luxury of our empty saloon. Alas? I
was a heavy sleeper then.
CHAPTER II
THE MYSTERIOUS CARGO
"Wake up, Cole! The ship's on fire!"
It was young Ready's hollow voice, as cool, however, as though he
were telling me I was late for breakfast. I started up and sought him
wildly in the darkness.

"You're joking," was my first thought and utterance; for now he was
lighting my candle, and blowing out the match with a care that seemed
in itself a contradiction.
"I wish I were," he answered. "Listen to that!"
He pointed to my cabin ceiling; it quivered and creaked; and all at once
I was as a deaf man healed.
One gets inured to noise at sea, but to this day it passes me how even I
could have slept an instant in the abnormal din which I now heard
raging above my head. Sea-boots stamped; bare feet pattered; men
bawled; women shrieked; shouts of terror drowned the roar of
command.
"Have we long to last?" I asked, as I leaped for my clothes.
"Long enough for you to dress comfortably. Steady, old man! It's only
just been discovered; they may get it under. The panic's the worst part
at present, and we're out of that."
But was Eva Denison? Breathlessly I put the question; his answer was
reassuring. Miss Denison was with her step-father on the poop. "And
both of 'em as cool as cucumbers," added Ready.
They could not have been cooler than this young man, with death at the
bottom of his bright and sunken eyes. He was of the type which is all
muscle and no constitution; athletes one year, dead men the next; but
until this moment the athlete had been to me a mere and incredible
tradition. In the afternoon I had seen his lean knees totter under the
captain's fire. Now, at midnight - the exact time by my watch - it was as
if his shrunken limbs had expanded in his clothes; he seemed hardly to
know his own flushed face, as he caught sight of it in my mirror.
"By Jove!" said he, "this has put me in a fine old fever; but I don't
know when I felt in better fettle. If only they get it under! I've not
looked like this all the voyage."

And he admired himself while I dressed in hot haste: a fine young
fellow; not at all the natural egotist, but cast for death by the doctors,
and keenly incredulous in his bag of skin. It revived one's confidence to
hear him talk. But he forgot himself in an instant, and gave me a lead
through the saloon with a boyish eagerness that made me actually
suspicious as I ran. We were nearing the Line. I recalled the excesses of
my last crossing, and I prepared for some vast hoax at the last moment.
It was only when we plunged upon the crowded quarter-deck, and my
own eyes read lust of life and dread of death in the starting eyes of
others, that such lust and such dread consumed me in my turn, so that
my veins seemed filled with fire and ice.
To be fair to those others, I think that the first wild panic was subsiding
even then; at least there was a lull, and even a reaction in the right
direction on the part of the males in the second class and steerage. A
huge Irishman at their head, they were passing buckets towards the
after-hold; the press of people hid the hatchway from us until we
gained the poop; but we heard the buckets spitting and a hose-pipe
hissing into the flames below; and we saw the column of white vapor
rising steadily from their midst.
At the break of the poop stood Captain Harris, his legs planted wide
apart, very vigorous, very decisive, very profane. And I must confess
that the shocking oaths which had brought us round the Horn inspired a
kind of confidence in