Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

“She is a sailing ship, Larry,” I said, “and yet not a sailing ship.”

“Far from it, sir. Yon’s no sailing ship.”

“You are thinking that she is fitted with auxiliary steam?”

“I am thinking that she has enough arms on board to serve a cruiser of the line. Machine guns fore and aft and big stuff amidships. The masts are all blarney, sir, or I’m a Dutchman. That vessel’s heavily engined, and we may thank God we’re the fastest yacht afloat. If there were less sea running they would have fired at us already.”

“You mean it, Larry?”

“As true as there’s blue sky above, sir, yonder ship will sink us if we stand by. I’m telling you what I see with an old sailor’s eyes. Ten minutes ago, we came on her suddenly out of the mists. She had fifty men on her poop then, and one dead man she put overboard. The sound of a gun they were firing called my attention to her. I saw a group of hands on the quarter-deck, and one shot down in cold blood. They put him overboard and then discovered us. What happens then? The men go out of sight like so many spiders to their webs. The ship is navigated, heaven knows how. She keeps by us, and wants to know our business. I signal to them and no man answers. What shall I make of that, sir?”

I answered him without a moment’s hesitation.

“You will make full speed ahead, Larry—now, this instant, let the yacht do what she can.”

He rang the order down to the engineers, and White Wings began to race as a human thing over the great seas which swept upward toward the equator. The words were not spoken a moment too soon. Even as the bells rang out, a shell came hurtling after us from the great gun Larry’s clever eyes had discerned upon the deck of the unknown vessel. It fell far ahead of us—a reckless, unmeaning threat, and yet one which Fate ironically might have turned to our destruction. A second and a third followed it. We stood as though spell-bound, the spindrift half blinding us, the monster seas surging upon our decks in cataracts of clear water. Would they hit us, or should we be lost in the curtain of the storm? I claim no better courage in that moment of the ordeal than the good fellows who closed about me were so ready to display. We raced from death together, and numbered the minutes which stood between us and our salvation. No thought or deed of our own could help us. The good yacht alone would answer for our lives.

Now, this strange pursuit lasted, I suppose, a full ten minutes. That it came to a premature end must be set down to the immense speed of which the White Wings was capable, and the force of the gale which still raged about us. We had, indeed, now caught the tail end of the hurricane, the outer edge of the storm cycle; and immediately it enveloped us, a darkness as of intensest night came down upon the waters. Turbulent waves, foaming and angry at their crests, deeply hollowed and black below, rolled northward in monster seas of towering grandeur, each threatening us with the menace of disaster, but passing impotently as we rose at its approach and were hurled onward to the depths. The sound of the rushing wind became terrible to hear. Unseen armies of the ether clashed and thundered above our heads. The rain of the spindrift cut our faces as with a whip. We held a course with difficulty, and must instantly have been lost to the view of those upon the pursuing ship.

A full hour elapsed, I suppose, before the storm spent itself. Swiftly as it had come upon us, so swiftly it passed, leaving an aftermath of glorious sunshine and sweet, clear air, and a sea deliciously green and fresh. Not a trace of any other ship could we now espy upon the horizon. We steamed the hither ocean alone, and the memory of the night was as that of a vision moribund, of sights and sounds of sleep to be mocked and forgotten at the dawn. So reason would have had it, but reason is rarely a sailor’s friend. If my men had made nothing of the unknown ships, of the shell they had fired, and the deeper mysteries they spoke of, none the less I knew that the fo’castle would resound presently with the talk of it, and that even my officers would recount that strange experience by many a fireside yet unbuilt. For myself, my duty had become plain to me. Until I had set foot upon the deck of the Diamond Ship (for this I called her henceforth) I had no place ashore, nor must think of my leisure at all. A man apart, I did not shrink from that lonely vigil. The mystery of it beckoned me, the excitement challenged my intellect to such a combat as the mind must love. I would go on to the end, and no man should turn me from my purpose.

* * * * *

Now, our course had been Northward during these exciting hours; but as the day wore on, we set it full N.N.W. Captain Larry alone upon the ship knew my determination to sail from the African coast to Santa Maria in the Azores. I gave him no reason, nor did he ask one. He understood that my purpose was worthy of him and the yacht, and obeyed me unquestioningly. As for the men, they had been engaged for a service which they knew to have some measure of risk in it. A scale of pay beyond anything expected from the master of a yacht tempered their criticism and rewarded their fidelity. This I will say for them, that they were seamen, brave beyond the common, from the burly boatswain Balaam to the beef-faced cabin boy we had christened Nimbles. If they called my ship “a police boat,” I did not resent the term. I think that they had come to have some affection and respect for me; and I would have wagered my fortune upon their loyalty. To such men it mattered little whether our head lay to the North or to the South. The mystery held their interest; they admitted that they had never known brighter days at sea.

There remained my poor Timothy McShanus. Good soul, how his heart warmed to the sunshine! And who would have hailed the Timothy of storm and of tempest when upon the second night of our Northward voyage he dressed himself to dine with me in the exquisite little saloon my builders had designed for the White Wings? The sea had ebbed down by this time to the stillness of a great inland lake. The moonbeams upon the sleeping water shone with an ethereal radiance of light filtered as it were in a mesh of mirrors. Scarce a breath of wind stirred the awnings of the deck or was caught by the gaping cowls. The yacht moved with that odd gliding motion a turbine engine ensures. We appeared to be running over the unctuous swell as a car upon well-laid rails. The sounds of the night were of steam hissing and valves at a suction and shafts swiftly revolving. The decks trembled at the voice of speed; the movement of the vessel was that of a living, breathing entity, pitted against the majesty of spaces and conquering them.

Be sure that Timothy McShanus came in to dinner on such a night as this. He had found his sea-legs and his appetite, and soup, fish, and bird disappeared like one o’clock. To watch him drink ’89 Bollinger from a Venetian tumbler might have inspired even the gods to thirst. Groomed to the last hair upon a time-worn scalp, Timothy would have served well for the model of an Englishman of the ’sixties as Paris used to see him.

“By the holy soul of Christopher Columbus, ’tis a rare seaman I am,” he said, as we went up above to take our coffee and cigars under the shelter of the awning. “Ask me to point out the terrestrial paradise, and the yacht White Wings will I name to ye. Ah, don’t talk to me of yesterday. ’Twas a bit of the touch of neuralgia I had, and keeping to me bed for security.”

“You wanted them to throw you overboard, Timothy.”

“The divil I did—and phwat for, if not to lighten the ship in the storm? ’Tis a Jonah I would be, and three days in the belly of the whale. Man, ’twould make a taytotaler of Bacchus himself.”

He lighted a cigar of prodigious length, and fell for a while to practical observations upon the sea and sky and the ship which were of interest to none but himself. By-and-bye they would appear in the columns of the Daily Shuffler. I begged of him to be less Dantesque and more practical, and presently, becoming quite serious, he spoke of the Diamond Ship.