The back wheel, p.9
The Back Wheel, page 9
“I wish I could believe you.” She shook her head and arose. “Open the door a crack and see whether anybody’s out in the alley, will you, please.”
There was no one in the alley. She hesitated at the threshold, thrust out her hand. “Anyway—you’re one to be trusted. And I myself heard that bell and the piping.”
She slipped away. I turned back to my cabin, considerably disturbed, and angry at myself. I am possibly one of the least imaginative of men; certainly I am of the least suspicious. But I had the feeling of a veil, a cobweb of superstition, meshing me. I definitely did not like it I went to the laboratory and tried to put the whole matter from my mind for a time at least in thoroughly practical work.
Busied thus, I forgot the passing of time, and was amazed to hear two strokes of the ship bell. I translated this, I never could get used to the bells, as one o’clock. I looked out the port, and saw that the boat was still brilliantly illuminated, and wondered why. I supposed it had something to do with the procedure on the morrow and turned back to my test tubes.
I heard the door open softly and saw McTeague. He closed it softly. He had on a loose white jacket “Big Jim is going back .. . come with us!” I got my jacket and followed quietly after McTeague to the boat deck, where Big Jim and Chadwick waited beside a dory. We got in and McTeague rowed us noiselessly over.
Big Jim went directly to the wheel—as though drawn by unseen hands—looked at the wheel; touched it. He turned to the others and said, shortly: “What is on your minds?”
Chadwick said: “Well, for one thing, I think that our crew is a pretty hard boiled lot. I think if we bring anybody over to take the wheel, they’re going to arrive at the same conclusions we have. I think they’re going to look this boat through thoroughly—and take what they can get. And I don’t think we can stop them. So—”
“So?” asked Benson, and I saw that his eyes were beginning again to be bloodshot, and the look of cunning creeping into them.
“So,” said Chadwick, “I think we might just as well look it over ourselves first, keep the crew away from poking into this hold, take what is worthwhile, and at the last moment, when the Susan Ann is as ship-shape as she can be made, lift out the wheel—if you still want it— Mike can do that all by himself, and explain where we found it as you please.”
CHAPTER VIII
In The Spiked Cabin (Continued)
Chadwick had given Benson his opinion as to what we should do—look the wreck over, seize its prizes, and have McTeague transfer the wheel to the Susan Ann.
“And that’s your thought?” Big Jim asked, smiling unctuously. I mean it literally—the smile which spread across his face darkened and blemished it, as heavy oil creeping over clear bright water smoothes its ripples. Very obviously Benson was in full accord with Chadwick’s counsel, yet it was difficult to decide if he were smiling in sympathy with him or—laughing at him.
“And you, Mike. What’s your angle?”
McTeague said bitterly: “So kind of you to inquire! However, since you’ve stuck your chin out, I hope you can take the wallop. I say—call the boys over from the Susan Aim. Let ’em poke and pry to their little heart’s content, until they’ve reduced this hulk to matchwood, it may be. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they burned the matches afterward.”
“But—the wheel?”
“Oh, the wheel,” McTeague answered casually as if he had all but forgotten it. “Let ’em play, hoop with it, or make it into a merry-go-round”—his jaw set and his voice hardened—“just as long as it’s kept clear of the Susan Ann!”
Benson’s teeth were still visible, but his mouth-comers sloped so low that they were bared in a soundless snarl. He must have known how McTeague would answer—yet the red-head had disappointed him sorely.
McTeague rapped out: “Cap’n, don’t look at me like that—as if I’d just kicked the family pooch! You’ve known all along how I’ve felt. And you wanted a straight answer.”
He flashed at Chadwick: “Hereafter, don’t be so damned generous with my services. The wheel may wind up on the Susan Ann, but you can lay odds on one thing—if it does,
I won’t have carried it there. And the transit won’t have been made with my blessing.”
He spoke now for the pair of them: “I’ve said I don’t like this island and this wreck, and it still goes. I’m here, yes—but not on my own. Under orders.”
He raised his voice as if his next words were not solely for us but for other ears on the wreck as well. “As far as I’m concerned, I want nothing to do with this hulk, nor with anything on her!”
Benson’s tone thrilled with resentment, meek as he sought to keep it. “Mike, you know we need the wheel. Maybe if you’d look at it a little closer, you’d see—”
McTeague said coldly: “Look, sir—I said I had no evidence to support my dislike of both island and wheel. Well, I recant. I have! It’s their effect on us. You and I have been together a long time, and we’ve laughed through thick and thin. But all of what we’ve gone through has been like one prolonged, carefree holiday. Now that we’ve stumbled on this island and hulk—the party’s over, and I’m seeing for the first time that side of you which never goes to parties. The hell of it is not merely that I’m discovering hitherto hidden facets of your character—but some of my own. And I don’t like them.”
He held out an imploring palm. “Cap’n—let’s vamoose from this hell-hole before we take on protective coloring and become devils! Forget we ever saw this wreck!”
Benson had listened pensively and with respect. I thought I had seen pity in his expression. He sighed, and it was blown away on the breath. “The past is the past, lad,” he said gruffly. “We can’t go back to it.”
McTeague turned away helplessly, his mouth twitching. We were too far from the lagoon to hear even the faintest whisper, should one have arisen, from its glassy water. There was no breeze, and had there been one, there was no bush on the dune, no shred of rigging on the wreck, within which it could have rustled.
Until this moment I had not realized the intensity of the silence. People contrast the city’s clangor with the country’s quiet, but it is only a comparative calm, filled as it is with the sough of wind, insect-murmurs, occasional barking of dogs or a night-bird’s cry. This was the utter silence of a sound-proofed vault; the silence—of death itself!
I saw Chadwick’s black eyes slide sidewise as if to intercept some quick, furtive movement amidships. Big Jim tipped his head, listening. All of us harkened to that silence.
A fragment of crusted sand broke from the top of the shorn dune and trickled down the slope toward the deck. The acute receptivity of our hearing amplified its faint hiss into the onrush of a glass avalanche! Big Jim jumped, sweeping his light in that direction. Chadwick swore faintly. I underwent something like instantaneous refrigeration, as if tiny ice-crystals formed in every pore.
“Christ!” Big Jim said, lowering his light. “That sounded like a pack of dinosaurs!”
The spell of the silence—its expectancy, its suspense —was broken. But Chadwick in twisting its effects to his own advantage saw to it that it was not truly broken at all. I was beginning to admire the man as a superb, if untutored, psychologist. I had no inkling then of what might be his purpose in forever directing Benson’s animosity against McTeague; at the most, I thought it was only that of an artist triumphantly coaxing music from an intractable instrument He said amusedly: “That was a good trick, Mike! It almost worked.”
McTeague braked whatever train of thought he was riding;-waited, it seemed while his mind reviewed Chadwick’s gibe. He asked sharply: “Trick? What trick? I won’t deny I’m as good as the next man, but I’m damned if I can see how I could have knocked down a fistful of sand at forty yards, and without moving a muscle! What do you think me, a remote-control magician?”
“I wasn’t meaning the sand,” Chadwick said.
He asked, apparently in all innocence, but harking back to Benson’s suspicions of the forenoon: “Is that the way you worked on Pen? A holdover from courtroom trickery, eh? Kidding the jury into a responsive mood so that when you’d drop a firecracker in their midst they’d think it a bomb! Great stuff, Mike.”
The black eyes flicked Benson as if to judge the impact of this taunt. McTeague shivered, restraining himself, I
knew, from brute vengeance. Big Jim’s lips tightened; his brows drew into a scowl; but whatever his feelings he did not vent it.
He broke the tension between McTeague and Chadwick by turning swiftly, bruskly, to me. He asked: “And you, Fenimore—what do you think we should do about the wheel?”
I said: “Don’t ask me, sir. I hold no opinion whatsoever. You’re the head of this expedition. What you say goes.”
He chuckled, then sobered. “Forget I’m the boss. I must have the honest response from all of you.”
“Nevertheless,” I replied, “I’ve nothing to say. Fm only a spectator.”
He chuckled again. “A witness, eh? Well, I guess it’ll do.”
And to all of us: ‘You’ve spoken your pieces; now I’D deliver mine. I want the wheel and whatever else this black sea-baby has to offer. And I’ve sensed the restiveness of the Susan Ann’s crew. If we make a few more trips of this sort, they’ll come nosing over here in spite of any precautions. So well deflower this pickaninny tonight. Pen’s asleep”—he glowered at McTeague—“and won’t know anything about it until it’s all over. And if you’re so afraid of the wheel, McTeague, you needn’t touch it. I can handle that detail myself. To begin with—let’s have a look into the cabin. I gather, Pride of Americanised Erin, you’re not averse to removing the spikes from the door7”
Without a word, McTeague started away. Benson barked: “Where are you going?”
McTeague stopped. “You don’t think I can draw the spikes out with my teeth, do you? I’m after tools.”
He crossed the deck to the heaped implements we had brought. He returned oddly weary—perhaps woefully resigned were the better term—than the mere weight of crowbar, shovel, chisels and mallet could possibly have entailed. He halted stiffly before Benson, awaiting orders. Big Jim’s light, swinging to the spiked portal, was a pointing finger.
McTeague tramped toward the door but paused before the drift of sand there. It was rounded like a grave. Chad-
wick sauntered leisurely after him, then I. Benson moved up until, like McTeague, he was toeing the sand.
Both stood staring down at it—with misgivings, I thought. The hard-packed grains sparkled silvern. The reflection they cast up to Benson’s face was—singular. He appeared thinner, the jowls quite gone, his cheekbones in sharp relief and the eye-wrinkles harshly etched.
I recognized that face—he had worn it during the height of the hurricane while I had tended him in his cabin; the face of the portrait above his bunk—that of the old Cap’n.
Atop the mound, as if carefully placed there, was a bosun’s call, with no drifting of sand to indicate that wind had uncovered it. The pipe had the look of having been carefully, recently laid. Awaiting our discovery.
Chadwick bent, took it up. Somberly Benson watched him; McTeague drew a little away. Chadwick did not blow into the call, but his fingers curved over it, closed and clinched—the signal summoning all hands. He offered the pipe to Benson, who made no move of acceptance. He eyed it a moment as though he did not quite like it himself, then dropped it into his pocket. His look at McTeague accused him of putting the pipe on the sand.
McTeague muttered: “There’s more there than that, I think. What? Well, maybe the bones of the man who drove those spikes in.”
It would have been another good opportunity for Chadwick to interpose some derogatory remark about superstition or McTeague’s setting the stage for future effects. Benson usurped it. He whispered, awestruck, as if realising the truth of something he had dreamed: “Slam Bang’s bones!”
The comment did not strike McTeague as it did Chadwick or me; he took it at its worth. I felt the sudden jar of Chadwick’s gaze. Big Jim’s remark was irrational, inasmuch as, in all likelihood at that particular moment, Slam Bang was sound asleep aboard the Susan Ann. Even if he were not, he could hardly have become mere osseous remains since the time we had last seen him.
Chadwick shook his head, significantly.
McTeague said tonelessly: “Slam Bang’s—I wouldn’t 75
know. And maybe they’re not there now, after all. They may have been washed away when—”
The implements clattered to the planking as he dropped them in a backward leap, galvanised by some inner spark. At the same time Benson uttered an incoherent exclamation, his light falling from his hand. There was an instant’s confusion; I danced aside, dodging the rebound of the clanking tools.
The tone of the crowbar was much like that of a deep bell. Its clang shocked both men out of whatever had gripped them. By the light of the fallen flash I saw Benson rigid with surprise, his mouth agape, one large, finely-moulded hand lifted in dismay. I caught only the tail-end of the look between him and the Irishman; it was one I could not fathom.
Then Benson and Chadwick both had bent to retrieve the light; McTeague and I reached for the fallen tools.
Benson asked wonderingly and eagerly, like a hopeful student questioning a teacher: “What happened, Mike?”
McTeague straightened, implements in hand. “I don’t know, sir. I seemed to—to remember something.”
“Yes?” Benson asked quickly, but McTeague had turned to me.
“Doc, you know the rule for what I mean. It was that feeling of something just about to happen that has happened already a long time before.”
But before I could explain the phenomenon of double-memory, he snapped to nobody in particular: “It’s this damned ship, that’s what! Take my advice, and let her rot—”
Chadwick interposed silkily: “Another bit of showmanship, Mike?”
McTeague’s knuckles paled on the shaft of the crowbar. He glared defiance at Chadwick, wrathfully strode around the mound and to the spiked door. He felt tentatively of one of the great pins; twisted it “Loose,” he said, lowering his tools. He worked the spike free. “It’s as if hands have been yanking on this for years.” Then, reassuring himself: “But then, they were driven in when she was afloat and the wood damp. While she was under the sand the wood dried out and shrunk, losing its grip”
Chadwick, a shade diffidently, aided him. Big Jim hesitated a moment, then set to work on the opposite jamb. I was pleased that the three took up all the doorway’s space. I was not superstitious, yet I would not have twisted willingly one of those long nails loose—though why, I did not know.
One after another they removed the spikes, and with curious ease.
“Seems like they want to come out of their own volition,” Big Jim observed, sounding both astonished and uneasy.
Chadwick could not resist the raillery: “Perhaps what’s locked inside is helping us by pushing outward—eh, Mike?”
McTeague vouchsafed no answer, not even so much as a glance, but his silence was inspired eloquence.
The last spike was out McTeague cleared his throat. “I feel as if this will prove either the end of the world, or the beginning—as if going inside will trip off a trap-gun. But if that’s the way you want it, Cap’n—” Benson was silent; his eyes glittered.
“Well,” sighed McTeague, “here we go!”
He pulled on the door and it opened. Chadwick snapped on his light. The two rays drove down a sanded companionway, first to another door, then to the pair flanking it. I sniffed a faint, indefinable odor and discerned a suspicion of mist. It reflected our lights greenishly, slightly diffusing them. It was as if the passage were illuminated by dying afterglow.
Benson raised one foot over the coaming, but did not proceed immediately down the companion. He looked from one of us to another. Then with a short grunt of a laugh, he entered. Close behind went Chadwick, I next. McTeague came slowly. I peeped to him. His head was craned toward that far door. He was sniffing as suspiciously as the dog which scents a danger too unreal for human perception.
I realised that his vanity drew him onward; that had Chadwick not been present, he would have turned tail. And how I have wished, ever since, that he had!
Chadwick paused at the door to the right. Benson said: “Give us the shovel, Mike.” Then: “Where the hell are you? Come for’ard, nothing’s going to bite you!”
He held both Chadwick’s light and his own while the dark man broke into the sand and turned it from the door. It was not very deep, but its crust was almost as firm as concrete. Once it was penetrated, however, the grains beneath were like powder.
Chadwick stood away from the door. Benson caught its handle and tugged, and it ripped from the top hinge. Chadwick’s shovel fell as he caught the panel and assisted Benson in swinging it. We looked on the first step of a ladder communicating between decks; the rest was under sand.
“Hell!” Benson spat in disgust. “The hold’s gut-full— we’d need a steam-scoop to clear it.”
He rammed the door forcefully shut; Chadwick cleared the one opposite. It opened on what must have been a private locker or slop-chest. From its sand Chadwick excavated felted fibers which once must have been fabric, and wooden boxes which disintegrated as his shovel struck them. They had contained brittle cindery fragments of what might have been preserved meat.
He cleaned the approach to the third portal, that one which the lights first had shown, and indubitably the opening into the cabin proper. Benson reached to pull on it—
A plank creaked underfoot, sharp as a shot. From the deck outside sounded other creakings as if to answer the first—the noises a settling building makes. Though Benson’s fingers scarcely made contact with the ring-catch of the door, it swung outward slowly, somehow ominously —as if, as Chadwick had suggested, what was sealed within were attempting to aid us, eager for its release.
