Pirates' Hope

Reaching the eastern extremity of things after a walk of perhaps three-quarters of a mile along the beach, we presently had an improvised flag flying from a lopped tree, and after we had lighted a smoke smudge there was nothing more to do but to watch for the sail which I, for one, did not expect to see.

"Jolly rum old go, what?" said Jerry, casting himself full length upon the sand when our labors were ended. "Shouldn't mind it so much, don't y' know, if we didn't have the women along. Smoke?" and he handed me his tobacco bag.

"The women, and one or two others," I qualified, filling my pipe.

"Haw, yes: Hob Ingerson, for one. Actin' like a bally cad, Ingerson is. Needs to have some chappie give him a wallop or so, what?"

"Yes; and when it comes to the show-down, I rather hope I'll be the 'chappie'," I said.

"Not if I see him first," Jerry cut in, and this, indeed, was a new development.

"You're under weight, Jerry; you wouldn't make two bites for Ingerson if you should try to mix it with him."

"Eh, what?" exclaimed the transformed – or transforming – one, sitting up suddenly. "If he doesn't stop his dashed swearin' before the women, I'll take him on; believe me, I will, old dear."

"What makes you think you'd last out the first half of the first round with a big bully like Ingerson?" I asked, grinning at him.

"Number of little things, old top; this, for one," and he opened his shirt to show me something that looked like a ten-dollar gold piece suspended by a silken cord around his neck.

"And what might that be?" I inquired, mildly curious.

He pulled the string off over his head and handed me the gold disk. It proved to be a medal, struck by some gentlemen's boxing club of London, testifying to the facts that Mr. Gerald Dupuyster was a member in good standing, and that he had won the medal by reason of his being the top-notcher in the club's series of light-weight matches.

"I never would have suspected it of you, Jerry," I commented, returning the medal. "In fact, I should have said you were the last person on earth to go in for the manly art of self-defense. What made you?"

"Oh, I say! – all the chappies with any red blood in 'em go in for it over there, y' know. Jolly good sport, too; what?"

"Here's to you, if you conclude to try it on with Ingerson," I laughed. "I'll be your towel-holder. But Ingerson isn't the only one we could do without on this right little tight little island of ours, Jerry."

"You're dashed right. There's Barclay, for another."

"Yes; and – "

"Say it, old dear. Don't I know that the old uncle is cuttin' up rusty? Grousing because he can't sit in an easy-chair and swig toddies no end! Makes me jolly well ashamed, he does."

Here was another astonishing revelation. From what I had seen on shipboard – from what we had all seen – there had been ample grounds for the supposition that Jerry was a mere pawn in any game his uncle might choose to play. But now there seemed to be quite a different Jerry lying just under the cracking crust of the conventions. The discovery took a bit of the bitterness out of my soul. If I couldn't have Conetta for myself, it was a distinct comfort to know that she wasn't going to draw a complete blank in the great lottery. Under all of Jerry's Anglomaniacal fripperies there was apparently a man.

At the refilling of his pipe this changed, or changing, Jerry spoke of my former immurement on the island, saying that Conetta had told him a bit about it, and asking if I wouldn't tell him a bit more. So once again I told the story of the ill-fated voyage of the Mary Jane and its near-tragic sequel for six poor castaways.

"Rummy old go, that," he commented, when the tale was told. "Dashed easy to see how a chap might lose out on all the little decencies when the belly-pinch takes hold. Are we likely to come a cropper into that ditch before some bally old tub turns up to take us off?"

"I'm hoping not," I said.

He was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say: "We've eighteen mouths to fill, old dear; how long can we fill 'em out of the blooming tins; eh? what?"

I shook my head. "Van Dyck and I checked the provisions over this morning while we were storing them. We shall do well enough for two or three weeks; maybe longer, if we're careful not to waste any of the food."

At this my fellow watcher swore roundly in good, plain American.

"Saw Holly Barclay turn up his damned nose and pitch his ship's biscuits into the lagoon this morning," he explained. "Said something about their not bein' fit for a human being to eat, by Jove!"

"He'll sing another tune if we have to come down to cocoanuts and sea worms," I prophesied. Even this early in the game it was plainly evident that Barclay, the major, and Hobart Ingerson were going to be our sorest afflictions when the pinch should come.

In such fashion we wore out the afternoon, blinding our eyes, as I had many times blinded mine in other days, with fruitless searchings of the unresponsive waste of waters. At dusk we built up the signal fire to make it last as long as possible and returned to the camp at the other end of the island. When we came in sight of it, Mrs. Van Tromp and two of her girls were putting the supper for the eighteen of us on a clean tarpaulin spread upon the beach. Van Dyck met us just before we joined the others.

"Nothing?" he queried.

"Nothing," we answered.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

IX

THE BULLY

That remark of Edith Van Tromp's, to the effect that the illusions would all be swept away, had its confirmation before we had tholed through the first week of our island captivity. Little by little the masks slipped aside, and some of the revealments of the true character hiding behind them – some of the revelations, but not all – were grimly illuminating.

Before the week's end I saw the major slyly slip the last box of the precious cigars under his coat when he thought no one was looking and go off to hide it in a shallow hole scooped in the dry sand of the beach edge at a safe distance from the camp. Later, I came upon him as he was burying a couple of bottles of the diminishing supply of liquor in the same place – and he lied to me and said he was digging for shell-fish.

Two or three days earlier than this, Holly Barclay had taken to his hammock bed in a fit of purely imaginary illness, exacting constant attendance and pampering in which he made a toiling slave of his pretty daughter. When the pampering began and continued with no sign of abatement in the querulous demands Barclay was making upon Madeleine, Van Dyck grew gloomy and snappish, and I knew that the day was only postponing itself when Bonteck would flame out at the sham invalid and tell him exactly and precisely what a selfish malingerer he was.

Still lower in the unmasking scale came Ingerson – the real Ingerson – who had lapsed into a sullen barbarian; unshaven, unbathed, and with the coarse warp and woof of him showing at every threadbare seam. What time he had free access to the liquor, he drank himself ugly at least once in every twenty-four hours; and when Mrs. Van Tromp finally shamed him out of his daylight attacks upon the liquor chest, he took to raiding it after the camp was asleep, keeping this up until one night when he found that the remainder of the bottled stuff had disappeared. After this he became a morose threat to everybody, and even Mrs. Van Tromp ignored his millions and turned a cold shoulder upon him.

Three nights after his unsuccessful effort to turn up another bottle of whiskey in the stores, the drink maniac tried it again, and this time Van Dyck awoke and caught him at it.

"Looking for something you haven't lost, Ingerson?" he said, speaking quietly to keep from disturbing the others.

Ingerson backed out of the palmetto-thatched store shelter and whirled upon Van Dyck with a face which, as the firelight showed it to me, was that of a devil denied.

"Where have you hid it?" he demanded hoarsely. "Tell me, or I'll wring your damned neck!"

Van Dyck's smile was almost as devilish as Ingerson's teeth-baring snarl.

"You needn't make a racket and wake the camp," he said in the evenest of tones. "I did hide it, and it was partly to give you a decently fair chance. Come with me." And he got up and the pair of them disappeared among the palms.

Not trusting Ingerson any more than I would have trusted a snake, I rose silently and followed them into the shadows, coming in sight of them again as they entered a little open glade on the opposite side of the island. Ingerson had halted and was gesticulating angrily.

"I want to know here and now what you meant by that 'decent chance' break you made at me!" he was saying. "If you mean Madge Barclay, I can tell you right off the bat that you're a dead one!"

"We will leave Miss Barclay quite out of it, if you please," said Bonteck, still apparently as cool as Ingerson was hot. "You want liquor, and I've brought you here to give it to you."

"We'll settle that other little thing first," Ingerson broke in truculently. "You put up this winter cruise, that you've bungled and turned into a starvation picnic, with the notion that you were going to corner the market for yourself, I suppose. I'm here to tell you that you lose out. Barclay makes this deal without any brokers, and I hold an option on him."

"You will have to make that part of it a little plainer, I'm afraid," said Van Dyck; and now there was a dangerous softness in his voice.

"You can have it straight, if you want it that way. Barclay's in a hole for money; he's always in a hole. I've agreed to pay him out, once for all, and he's accepted the bid."

"And the price?" queried Bonteck gently – very gently.