Cursed

Briggs exulted over her, helpless and panting in the clutch of the two foremast-hands. “To the rail with her!” he ordered.

“What you goin’ to do, sir?” asked one of the men, staring. “Heave her over?”

Briggs menaced him with clenched fist.

“None o’ your damned business!” he shouted. “To the rail with her! Jump, afore I teach you how!”

They dragged her, screeching, to the starboard rail. All the time they had to hold those cat-clawed hands of hers. From side to side she flung herself, fighting every foot of the way. Briggs put back his head and laughed at the rare spectacle. Twice or thrice the sailors slipped in blood and rum upon the planking, and once Kuala Pahang all but jerked free from them. At the capstan, only the pistols of the three white guards held her kinsmen back from making a stampede rush; and not even the pistols could silence among them a menacing hum of rage that seethed and bubbled.

“Here, you!” shouted Briggs. “Mahmud Baba, you yellow cur, come here!”

Mahmud loosed his hold on the capstan-bar and in great anguish approached.

“Yas, sar?” whined he. The lean, brown form was trembling. The face had gone a jaundiced color. “I come, sar.”

Briggs leveled his revolver at the Malay. Unmindful of the spattering bullets, he spoke with deliberation.

“Son of a saffron dog,” said he, “you’re going to tell this wench something for me!”

“Yas, sar. What piecee thing me tell?”

“You tell her that if the boats don’t go back to land I’ll heave her over the rail. I’ll feed her to the sharks, by God! Alive, to the sharks – sharks, down there! Savvy?”

“Me savvy.”

“And she’s got to shout that to the canoes! She’s got to shout it to ’em. Go on, now, tell her!”

Mahmud hesitated a moment, shuddered and grimaced. His eyes narrowed to slits. The captain poked the revolver into his ribs. Mahmud quivered. He fell into a sing-song patter of strange words with whining intonations. Suddenly he ceased.

The girl listened, her gleaming eyes fixed on Mahmud’s face. A sudden question issued from her bruised, cut lips.

“What’s she asking?” demanded Briggs.

“She ask where her mother, sar?”

“Tell her! Tell her I’ve shot the old she-devil to hell, and beyond! Tell her she’ll get worse if she don’t make the canoes stand off – worse, because the sharks will get her alive! Go on, you black scut o’ misery, tell her!”

Mahmud spoke again. He flung a hand at the enveloping half-circle of the war-fleet. The nearest boats now were moving hardly a quarter-mile away. The gleam of krises and of spears twinkled in the sun. Little smoke-puffs all along the battle-front kept pace with the popping of gunfire. In the proa, oily brown devils were laboring to reload the brass cannon.

Mahmud’s speech ended. The girl stiffened, with clenched hands. The sailors, holding her wrists, could feel the whipcord tension of her muscles.

“Tell her to shout to the proa there!” yelled the captain in white fury. “Either they stand off or over she goes – and you see for yourself there’s sharks enough!”

Again Mahmud spoke. The girl grunted a monosyllable.

“What’s that she says?” demanded Briggs.

“She say no, sar. She die, but she no tell her people.”

“The hell you say!” roared the captain. He seized her neck in a huge, hairy paw, tightened his fingers till they bit into the yellow skin, and shook her violently.

“I’ll break your damned, obstinate neck for you!” he cried, his face distorted. “Tell your people to go back! Tell ’em!”

Mahmud translated the order. The girl only laughed. Briggs knew himself beaten. In that sneering laugh of Kuala Pahang’s echoed a world of maddening defiance. He loosened his hold, trying to think how he should master her. Another man grunted, by the rail, and slid to the deck, where a chance bullet had given him the long sleep.

Briggs whirled on Mahmud, squeezed his lean shoulder till the bones bent.

“You tell ’em!” he bellowed. “If she won’t, you will!”

“Me, sar?” whined the Malay, shivering and fear-sick to the inner marrow. “Me tell so, they kill me!”

“If you don’t, I will! Up with you now – both o’ you, up, on the rail! Here, you men – up with ’em!”

They hoisted the girl, still impassive, to the rail, and held her there. The firing almost immediately died away. Mahmud tried to grovel at the captain’s feet, wailing to Allah and the Prophet. Briggs flung him up, neck and crop. Mahmud grappled the after backstays and clung there, quivering.

“Go on, now, out with it!” snarled Briggs, his pistol at the Malay’s back. “And make it loud, or the sharks will get you, too!”

Mahmud raised a bony arm, howled words that drifted out over the pearl-hued waters. Silence fell, along the ragged line of boats. In the bow of the proa a figure stood up, naked, gleaming with oil in the sunlight, which flicked a vivid, crimson spot of color from a nodding feather head-dress.

Back to the Silver Fleece floated a high-pitched question, fraught with a heavy toll of life and death. Mahmud answered. The figure waved a furious arm, and fire leaped from the brass cannon.

The shot went high, passing harmlessly over the clipper and ricochetting beyond. But at the same instant a carefully laid rifle, from a canoe, barked stridently. Mahmud coughed, crumpled and slid from the rail. He dropped plumb; and the shoal waters, clear-green over the bar, received him.

As he fell, Briggs struck the girl with a full drive of his trip-hammer fist. The blow broke the sailors’ hold. It called no scream from Kuala Pahang. She fell, writhing, plunged in foam, rose, and with splendid energy struck out for the canoes.

Briggs leaned across the rail, as if no war-fleet had been lying in easy shot; and with hard fingers tugging at his big, black beard, watched the swimming girl, her lithe, yellow body gleaming through the water. Watched, too, the swift cutting of the sharks’ fins toward her – the darting, black forms – the grim tragedy in that sudden, reddening whip of brine. Then he laughed, his teeth gleaming like wolves’ teeth, as he heard her scream.

“Broke her silence at last, eh?” he sneered. “They got a yell out of the she-dog, the sharks did, even if I couldn’t – eh?”

Along the rail, hard-bitten as the clipper’s men were, oaths broke out, and mutterings. Work slackened at the capstan, and for the moment the guards forgot to drive their lathering slaves there.

“Great God, captain!” sounded the doctor’s voice, as he looked up from a wounded man. “You’ve murdered us all!”

Briggs only laughed again and looked to his pistol.

“They’re coming now, men,” said he coolly. To his ears the high and rising tumult from the flotilla made music. The lust of war was in him. For a moment he peered intently at the paddlemen once more bending to their work; the brandished krises and long spears; the spattering of bullets all along the water.

“Let ’em come!” he cried, laughing once more. “With hot lead and boiling water and cold steel, I reckon we’re ready for ’em. Steady’s the word, boys! They’re coming – give ’em hell!”

CHAPTER XI

HOME BOUND

Noon witnessed a strange scene in the Straits of Motomolo, a scene of agony and death.

Over the surface of the strait, inborne by the tide, extended a broad field of débris, of shattered planks, bamboos, platted sails.

In mid-scene, sunk on Ulu Salama bar only a few fathoms from where the Silver Fleece had lain, rested the dismantled wreck of the proa. The unpitying sun flooded that wreck – what was left of it after a powder-cask, fitted with fuse, had been hurled aboard by Captain Briggs himself. No living man remained aboard. On the high stern still projecting from the sea – the stern whence a thin waft of smoke still rose against the sky – a few broken, yellow bodies lay half consumed by fire, twisted and hideous.