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

A great silence fell during the after moments of this tragedy—as though awe of it had compelled a mutual truce between the combatants. I do not know precisely at what moment Larry gave the order, but certain it is that the yacht began to steam slowly away from the ship when the dead man’s body fell into the sea; and having made a wide detour, we raced at some speed presently almost due south, as though pursuit of us had already begun. This was a course I could not protest against. Let the rogues agree, and our position were precarious indeed. Larry had perceived as much, and wisely stood away from them.

“They’ll be kissing each other if they spy us out,” said he. “I don’t believe they’ve any shell for the big guns, doctor, but they could do a power of mischief with the monkeys on the tops. We are as well off in the gallery as the stalls, especially in between times. Let us stand by where we shan’t amuse them so much.”

The wisdom of it forbade reply. We had pushed rashness to the last extremity, and had come to no hurt. The truce over yonder was unmistakable. When a steward reminded me that none of us had taken any breakfast. I heard him patiently.

“Bring it to the deck,” I rejoined.

And so four silent men—for Mr. Benson had joined us—sat about the table beneath the aft awning, and each, fearing to express the great hope which animated him, sipped his coffee methodically, and spoke of commonplace things.

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And Learns the Truth There.

Our surmise that the rogues would agree presently among themselves and fall upon us for their common satisfaction was not supported by the facts. We breakfasted at our leisure and smoked a full pipe upon it, still unmolested and apparently unobserved. It may be that they had become accustomed to our presence. For seven days and nights now we had harassed them unceasingly. By messages, by gunshots, by our searchlight, had we pursued that policy of persistence which, we believed, would most surely demoralise and defeat them. And they had been powerless to harm us; helpless before our attack, as I judged from the first that they would be.

They fired no shot at us, and the morning passed in patient waiting. Great as our hopes were—my own too great for any expression—the Diamond Ship had no further message for us, nor did the sea speak. Void from horizon to horizon, the southern ocean fretted to sleep beneath a torrid sun and left us with that sense of isolation from the world and from men which the great sea alone can inspire. Some among us, it may be, had fallen almost to despair when the rogues set to again. This would have been at three bells of the afternoon watch. A gunshot heard faintly across the waters appeared to be the signal for some new attack. I heard the rattling echoes of a volley, and upon that a second and a third. Our glasses showed us a great press of men, engaged almost hand to hand amidships. Then a haze of smoke settled down upon the ship, and for many minutes it hid her completely from our sight.

You may imagine with what beating hearts and almost breathless hopes we watched this second encounter and waited for its issue. Very wisely, Larry would not approach the scene a second time or risk again those perils we had so readily faced before. Whatever harvest we might reap, our garners would be as readily filled afar as by any mad concession to curiosity which should drive us within the danger zone. If the rogues were killing each other, as evidently they were, it could serve us not at all to witness the horrors of that tragedy or seek in some vague way to take part in it. As for its deeper meaning, I had from the first clenched my thoughts against that and refused to take cognisance of it. The knowledge that Joan Fordibras was the prisoner of such a crew, that other decent women might be aboard the Diamond Ship with her—that, I say, had I permitted it once to master me, would have brought me to such a state of frenzy that no sane act afterwards could have atoned for its follies. Earnestly, persistently, I strove to drive the truth away, and to blind my eyes to it. “She is not on the ship,” I would say—or again, “They will not harm her, for she alone stands between them and the gallows.” God knows how much of a pretence it was—and yet, I think, the very effect of will brought salvation to us. A mad attack upon them would have undone all. I realise to-day the good providence which saved me from that.

Now, we had been waiting all this time for the smoke to lift from the hull of the Leviathan, and permit us to see, as far as it might be seen at such a distance, that which happened upon those woeful decks. As for the curtain of the vapour, it was but a spur to the imagination, a terrible cloud interposed between our burning eyes and those scenes of horror and of bloodshed it hid from us. Rifle shots we heard incessantly—now in volleys, again by twos and threes, then once more in a general exchange which seemed to speak of the crisis of battle. Nor might we argue a good omen of the stillness which fell afterwards. For, surely, it could be nothing else than the silence of victory, the final triumph of one faction above the others. This I pointed out to Larry as we lifted our glasses for the twentieth time unavailingly.

“I take it that the men are up against the rogues, Larry. We could wish for nothing better than news of their success.”

“You think so, sir?”

“I trust a seaman before a landshark any day, whatever his ship or nationality. He is more likely to honour a woman, Larry—there will be some measure of honesty in him; and if it is put to the vote, he will haul down that flag the first time he is asked. Why should he not? He has nothing to fear ashore. The rogues keep him afloat. I’d wager a hundred guineas that homesickness began this fight, and will carry it to a conclusion—that is if the seamen win⁠——”

“And if they do not, sir?”

“Then God help the ship, Larry—she will not be afloat a week.”

McShanus interposed to say that they were between the devil and the deep sea, surely. I found him wonderfully serious. It is odd to think how many cheery fellows, who write gaily of life and death in the newspaper, have never seen a gun fired in earnest or looked unflinchingly upon the face of death.

“’Tis a coward I was,” said he, “and not ashamed of it. This very minute I tremble like a woman—though ’tis often of kindness a woman trembles and not of fear. Look yonder at the smoke lifting from off the face of the ship. What lies under it, my friends?—God Almighty, what are those feeling and thinking and suffering now that they are going to their Maker. ’Tis as though I, myself, had been called this instant to remember that I shall be as they—who knows when, who knows how? A cruel torment of a thought—God help me for it.”

Here was a McShanus mood to be laughed off, and that it would have been but for the panorama suddenly disclosed by the soaring smoke which gradually lifted from the face of the hidden ship. Nor was it clear in a twinkling that the seamen (as I supposed would be the case) had obtained the upper hand, and were become the masters of the vessel.

We could see them by our glasses running hither and thither, from the fo’castle to the poop, in and out of the companion hatch; now up, now down, sometimes in single combat with one or other of the vanquished; again slashing in a glut of mad desire at a prostrate figure or an enemy already dead. What weapons they had, I found it quite impossible to say. From time to time, it is true, a pistol was discharged as though it were at some lurking or hidden foe; but in the main, I believe they must just have used common marline-spikes or had gone to it with their clasp-knives in their hands. And their anger, however it had been provoked, defied all words to measure. As beasts to the carcase, so they returned again and again to the bodies of those whom they had destroyed. We espied victors in all the attitudes of bravado and defiance, dancing, leaping, even striking at each other. And this endured so great a while that I began to say the holocaust would go on to the end and hardly a man of them live to tell the tale.