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Forty Years Between
by
Mr. Francis nodded a silent assent.
“But we’ll save him!” cried the captain. “We won’t permit this ugly business to blast his life.”
“You may count, Captain Hadow, on our most loyal and hearty support,” said Mr. Francis.
“Thank you,” said the captain; “and you will pass the word along that the subject is one not to be discussed.”
“Quite so, sir,” said the first lieutenant.
“Not a word!” exclaimed the captain; “and of course you will cancel the reward before we sail. You might even coach old George a bit about the hill tribes. But, of course, not a whisper that we’re ever coming back.”
“No, sir,” said Mr. Francis.
“That must go no farther than you and me,” said Hadow.
“It shall not, sir,” returned the first lieutenant.
“We shall sail to-night at the turn of the tide,” said the captain.
“Very good, sir,” said Mr. Francis.
It was not nine months–it was fifteen, and some days to spare–before the Dauntless again raised the peak of Borabora and backed her mainyard off the settlement. In the course of that eventful year and a quarter she had zigzagged the whole chart of the eastern Pacific; and from French Frigate Shoals to Pitcairn, from Diamond Head to Little Rapa, she had sounded and plotted reefs innumerable, and had covered, with a searching persistency, vast areas of blue water dotted with e. d.’s and p. d.’s.[1] She had twice taken the ground, once so hard and fast that she had shifted her guns and lightered a hundred tons of stores among the gulls and mews of a half-sunken reef; she had had an affair with the unruly natives of the Walker Group, and had blown a village to fragments, and not a few of the Walkers themselves into a land as uncharted as their own; she had tried a beach-comber for murder, and had dangled him at the main yardarm, giving him later on a Church of England service, a hammock, and the use of a cannon ball at his feet; she had poked her nose into cannibal bays, where women of wild beauty and wilder license swam off to the ship in hundreds until the marines drove them back with muskets, and fired at their own comrades, who in their madness leaped into the water and were floated ashore in the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls, where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, and death always close aboard.
It was morning when Hadow raised the island, a fleecy speck of cloud against the sky line, and he shortened sail at once and lingered out the day so as to bring him up to it by dark. After supper every light on board was doused, and the great hull, gliding through the glass-smooth water, merged her steep sides and towering yards and canvas into the universal shadow. With whispering keel and a wind so fair and soft that one wondered to see the sails stiffen in the bolt ropes, the man-of-war stole steadily to leeward, with no sound but the occasional creak of cordage, or the hoarse murmur of voices from the lower deck. Hadow himself, pacing the quarter-deck in his boat cloak, was lost in reverie, while the wardroom and the steerage in unredeemed darkness held nothing but dozing men.
By ten the ship was hove to close ashore, and the lights of the little settlement glimmered through the palms. The warm night, laden with exotic fragrance and strangely exciting in the intensity of its stillness and beauty, hid beneath its far-reaching pall the various actors of an extraordinary drama. With pistols buckled to their hips, Brady, Winterslea, Hotham, and Stanbury-Jones, four officers of the ship, together with Hatch, a flinty-faced old seaman who could be trusted, all slipped down the ladder into the captain’s gig and pulled with muffled oars for the break in the reef. Picking their way through the pass, with the surf on either hand roaring in their ears, they slowly penetrated the lagoon and headed for the king’s house. The shelving beach brought them to a stop, and all jumping out to lighten the boat, they drew her over the shingle and made her painter fast to a pandanus tree. Then, acting in accordance with a preconcerted plan, Winterslea was sent forward to track down their prey, while the rest huddled together to await his return.