Pirates' Hope

"You can ask Madge about that," was the surly rejoinder. And then: "Get a move: where have you hid that whiskey?"

"You shall have the whiskey presently, Ingerson; but first I'm going to give you something you've been needing a good bit worse for a long time. Put up your hands, if you know how!"

It was a very pretty fight, out there in the moonlit glade, with the camp far enough removed to make the privacy of it safe, and with no ring-side audience, so far as either of the combatants knew, to hiss or applaud. Ingerson was no coward, neither was he lacking in bull strength, nor in the skill to make fairly good use of it. Though he went in at the beginning with a handicap of blind rage, the first few passes steadied him and for a minute or so it looked as if Bonteck had taken on a full load.

But, as a very ordinary prophet might have foretold, Ingerson's late prolonged soak – for it was nothing less – presently got in its work. Twice Van Dyck landed swinging body blows; and though neither of these would have winded a sober man, the second left Ingerson gasping and with his jaw hanging. I thought that settled it, and it did, practically, though the bully was still game. Handling himself as coolly as if he were giving a boxing lesson on a gymnasium floor, Van Dyck landed again and again, and each blow was sent home with an impact that sounded like the kick of a mule.

Ingerson stood up to it as long as he could, and when his wind was gone he went into a clinch. Bonteck broke the clinch with a volley of short-arm jabs that was little less than murderous, and when he was hammered out of the clinch, Ingerson staggered and went down. I looked to see him stay down, but he didn't. After a moment of breath-catching he was up and at it again, and it took three more of the well-planted body blows to drive him into a second clinch. As before, he failed to pinion Van Dyck's right arm, and I made sure he tried to set his teeth in Van Dyck's shoulder.

At this, Bonteck shifted his short-arm jabs from the ribs and swung upon the unguarded jaw; whereupon Ingerson lost his grip and curled up on the ground like some huge worm that had been stepped on.

Van Dyck stood over him, breathing hard.

"Have you had enough?" he demanded; and when the vanquished one made some sort of grunting acknowledgment, Bonteck brought water from the near-by spring in a folded leaf of a giant begonia and held it while Ingerson struggled to his knees and bathed the battered jaw.

"Now I'll get you your whiskey," said Van Dyck shortly; and leaving Ingerson to dabble his hands in the cooling water, he went aside into the jungle, returning after a minute or so with a case-bottle. "Here you are," he said, giving the bottle to the beaten bully; "take it and make a brute of yourself, if that's what you want to do." And then I had to hurry to be before Bonteck in the camp clearing; to be in my place beside the handful of night fire before he should return and catch me out of it. For I had no notion of marring the perfect joy of victory which I knew must be filling his soul.

After this there were other days merging slowly into weeks; days of back-slippings into deeper depths of the primitive, a retrogradation in which we all participated more or less; days in which we stolidly maintained the signal fires at either extremity of the island and wore out the dragging hours as best we could, scanning the horizon for the coming sail of rescue, though each succeeding day with less hope of seeing it, I think.

More and more markedly the conventions withdrew into a past which was daily growing to seem more like life in a former avatar than a reality once ours to possess. From merely slipping aside now and again, the masks were carelessly dropped and suffered to remain where they fell. Seen in the new perspective, there were many surprising changes, and not all of them were disappointing. For example: Mrs. Eager Van Tromp, in her normal state a good lady driven to distraction by her efforts to hold her footing on the social ladder and so to marry her daughters adequately, became, en séquestre, the good-natured, plain-spoken mother of us all, and a past mistress in the fine art of camp cooking – a specialty in which she was ably seconded by all three of her daughters, also, when she would permit it, by Mrs. Sanford, Annette Grey and Conetta.

Courageous fortitude best describes the change that had come over Madeleine Barclay. With her irritable father to placate and wait upon, and with Ingerson's attitude toward her coming to be that of blunt possessorship, she was by turns the patient nurse to the malingerer and the cheerful heartener of the rest of us. Never, in all those depressing days of hope deferred, did I hear her complain; and always she had a steadying word for the despairing ones: if a ship didn't come for us to-day, it would come to-morrow, and into the most dejected she could put new life – for the moment, at least.

In John Grey and Annette, and in the professor and his wife, the changes were the least marked. For the newly married couple nothing much seemed to matter so long as they had each other. Once or twice, indeed, I surprised Grey with a look in his eyes that told of the dread undercurrent that must have been underlying his every thought of the future and what it might hold for Annette, but that was all. And as for the older couple – well, perhaps they had attained to a higher and serener plane than any to which we younger ones could climb. Day in and day out, when he was not doing his apportioned share of the common camp tasks, the professor was immersed to the eyes in a study of the lush flora of the island, thumbing a little pocket Botany until its leaves were worn and frayed with much turning. And where he wandered, his wife wandered with him.

In Miss Mehitable, too, a transformation of a sort was wrought. For many days she held sourly aloof and had bitter words for Van Dyck, and black looks for me when by any chance I was able to deprive her for a time, long or short, of Conetta's caretaking and coddling. But with the lapse of time I fancied that even this crabbed lady was beginning to lose her sense of the mere money distinctions, and I was rash enough to say as much to Conetta on a day when I was so fortunate as to secure her for a companion in the signal-fire watch which Bonteck still made us maintain.

"You shouldn't say such things about poor Aunt Mehitable," was the reproof I got. "This is a very terrible experience for her – as it would be for any woman of her age – and she is really more than half sick."

"Don't mistake me," I made haste to say. "I meant it wholly in a congratulatory sense."

"She has changed," Conetta admitted, adding: "But dear me! we have all changed."

"'All the world's queer, excepting thee and me, and sometimes even thee's a little queer'," I quoted. "What changes have you remarked – particularly?"

"For one, Major Terwilliger is just a selfish, peevish old man, utterly impossible to live with," she said calmly.

"Amen to that. Yet, one of these days you will probably have to reckon with him as a member of your household. Go on."

She went on, paying no attention to what I had said about householding the major.

"The professor is a dear, just as you'd expect him to be, and so is Mrs. Professor. Annette is as brave as brave, and the way she is keeping up is only equaled by Jack's adorable care of her, which is at the bottom of his constant breezy assurances that each day will be the last of our Crusoeing."

"And Billy?" I prompted.

"Billy is a dear, too. He has changed less than any one, I think. Yesterday, at supper-time, he nearly broke my heart. Perhaps you remember that he got up and went away while we were eating, saying that he'd forgotten something. A few minutes later I went back to the spring to get some fresh water for Aunt Mehitable and found him sharing his supper with Tige. He'd heard what Major Terwilliger had said about our wasting food on the dog when we'd probably need it ourselves. Wouldn't that make you weep?"

"The dog is much more worthy of his rations than the major is of what he consumes," I averred. "Tige is at least willing to do his best if anybody will show him how. Any more transmogrifications?"

"Lots of them. Possibly you've noticed that Mrs. Van Tromp no longer tries to shoo Billy away from Edie. That's a miracle in itself. Then there is Madeleine: I have always thought her rather – um – well, you know; rather stand-offish and maybe a bit self-centered. Dick, she is an angel! The way she devotes herself, body and soul, to that father of hers, and still finds time and the heart to chirk the rest of us up, is beyond all praise."

"You can't get a quarrel out of me on that score," I returned. "Madeleine is all that you say she is, and more. As for her father, I guess we can pass him up. Between us two, he is no more sick than I am. And I don't believe he has changed a particle; we are merely coming to know him better as he really is, and always has been."

"I have known him for a long time," Conetta said thoughtfully. Then she agreed with me: "We'll leave him out; he cancels himself on the minus side of the equation, as you used to say of certain people we knew in the old days at home."

I wasn't half sure enough of myself to be willing to have her drag in the old days, so I urged her to go on with her cataloguing of our fellow castaways, saying: "You haven't completed the list yet."

"There is one more to be omitted – Hobart Ingerson," she said soberly, with a shadow of deep disgust coming into her eyes.

"Will Madeleine omit him?" I asked quickly.

"If she doesn't – after what we've been compelled to see and feel and endure! Dick, it's dreadful; simply dreadful!"

"Yet she will marry him," I insisted – purely to hear what my companion would say to that.

"It is unbelievable. What possible motive could she have in doing such an unspeakable thing?"

"A few minutes ago you called her an angel; perhaps it will be the angelic motive. Her father needs money; needs a very considerable sum of money, and needs it badly. She knows of the need – though I think she doesn't know the immediate and exciting cause of it – and she also knows that Ingerson is willing to buy and pay."

"How perfectly horrible!" said my watchmate, with a shudder. And then: "What a pity it is that Madeleine's money was all swallowed up in that bank failure out West."

I smiled when she said that. Madeleine's fortune hadn't gone in any bank failure, neither out West nor back East. This was only another of Holly Barclay's plausible little fictions.

"You mean? – " I suggested.

"I mean that if she had money of her own she might buy her freedom. I imagine it is purely a financial matter with Mr. Holly Barclay. If she could only find some of the Spaniards' gold – find it for herself so that it would belong to her… Wouldn't that be splendid!"

This was something entirely new to me, and I said: "What gold is this you are talking about?"

She looked around at me with wide-open eyes.

"Why – haven't you heard?" Then: "Oh, I remember; Bonteck was telling us the story last evening, while you and the professor were out at the other signal fire." And thereupon she repeated the old tale of the siege and wreck of the Spanish galleon in Queen Elizabeth's reign, with the tradition of the hidden treasure whose hiding place the survivors had refused to betray – paying for their refusal with their lives.

"Of course, that is only a sea yarn – one of the many that are told about those old days and the doings in them," was my comment. "You knew that while you were listening to it, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes; I supposed it wasn't true. I kept telling myself that Bonteck was only trying to start some new interest that would keep us from going stark mad over this wretched imprisonment, and the watching and waiting that never amounts to anything. It's serving a purpose, too. Most of the young ones are turning treasure hunters – going in couples. Jerry Dupuyster was trying to persuade Beatrice to slip away just as we left the camp. I heard him."

That small reference to Jerry and his disloyalty – which was becoming daily more and more apparent, and which I may have omitted to mention – moved me as one of the Yellowstone Park geysers is said to be moved by the dropping into it of a bar of soap.

"One of these fine days I'm going to beat Jerry Dupuyster until his best friend wouldn't recognize him," I said savagely.

Conetta laughed; the silvery little laugh that I was once besotted enough to believe that she kept especially for me.

"There goes your temper again. That is one thing that hasn't changed," she said. And then: "Poor Jerry! You'd have to have one hand tied behind you, wouldn't you? – just to be reasonably fair, you know."

There had been a time when I should have admitted that her gibe hit the mark, but that was before the transformed – or transforming – Jerry had been revealed to me.

"Nothing like that," I said. "He may not have confided it to you, but Jerry is a man of his hands. Hasn't he ever shown you the medal he won in England?"