PAGE 8
Salvage
by
And so the hours went by, with their captives waving caps ceaselessly, until the third day’s sun arose to show them an empty deck on the schooner, over a dozen specks far astern and to the southward, and an east-bound steamship on their port bow. The specks could be nothing but the dories, and they were evidently trying to intercept the steamship. Elisha yelled in delight.
“They’ve abandoned ship–just what I hoped for–in the dories. They’ve no case at all now.”
“But what for, Elisha?” asked Martin. “Mus’ be hungry, I t’ink.”
“Mebbe, or else they think that liner, who can stop only to save life,–carries the mails, you see,–will turn round and put ’em in charge here. Why, nothin’ but an English man-o’-war could do that now.”
They saw the steamship slow down, while the black specks flocked up to her, and then go on her way. And they went on theirs; but three days later they had reasoned out a better explanation of the Englishmen’s conduct. Martin came on deck with a worried face, and announced that, running short of salt meat in the harness-cask, he had broken out the barrels of beef, pork, and hard bread that he had counted upon, and found their contents absolutely uneatable, far gone in putrescence, alive with crawling things.
“Must ha’ thought he was fitting out a Yankee hell-ship when he bought this,” said Elisha, in disgust, as he looked into the ill-smelling barrels. “Overboard with it, boys!”
Overboard went the provisions, for starving animals could not eat of them, and the odor permeated the ship. They resigned themselves to a gloomy outlook–gloomier when Amos reported that the coal in the bunkers would last but two days longer. He had been mistaken, he said; he had calculated to run compound engines with Scotch boilers, not a full-powered blast-furnace with six inches of scale on the crown-sheets.
“And they knew this,” groaned Elisha. “That’s why they chucked the stuff overboard–to bring us to terms, and never thinkin’ they’d starve first. They were dead luny, but we’re lunier.”
They stopped the engines and visited the schooner in the dory. Not a scrap of food was there, and the fish-kettle was scraped bright. They returned and went on. With plenty of coal there was still six days’ run ahead to New York. How many with wood fuel, chopped on empty stomachs and burned in coal-furnaces, they could not guess. But they went to work. There were three axes, two top-mauls, and several handspikes and pinch-bars aboard, and with these they attacked bulkheads and spare woodwork, and fed the fires with the fragments; for a glance down the hatches had shown them nothing more combustible and detachable in the cargo than a few layers of railroad iron, which covered and blocked the openings to the lower hold.
With the tools at hand they could not supply the rapacious fires fast enough to keep up steam, and the engines slowed to a five-knot rate. As this would not maintain a sufficient tension on the dragging schooner to steer by, they were forced to sacrifice the best item in their claim for salvage: they spliced the tiller-ropes and steered from the pilot-house. They would have sacrificed the schooner, too, for Amos complained bitterly of the load on the engines; but Elisha would not hear of it. She was the last evidence in their favor now, their last connection with respectability.
“She and the pavement o’ h—-l,” he growled fiercely, “are all we’ve got to back us up. Without proof we’re pirates under the law.”
However, he made no entry in the log of the splicing, trusting that a chance would come in port to remove the section of wire rope with which they had joined the broken ends.
And, indeed, it seemed that their claim was dwindling. The chronometer which they were to use for the steamer’s benefit was lost; the tow-line which they were to furnish had been given back to them; the course to New York which they chalked out had not been accepted; the abandoning of their ship by the Englishmen was clearly enforced by the pressure of their own presence; and now they themselves had been forced to cancel from the claim the schooner’s value as a necessary drag behind the steamer, by substituting a three hours’ splicing-job, worth five dollars in a rigging-loft, and possibly fifty if bargained for at sea. Nothing was left them now but their good intentions, duly entered in the log-book.