The Pirate Story Megapack. R.M. Ballantyne

wish a hurricane would fling them ashore,” said Newton.

      “It’s going to be a bad rain, nothing worse. Look out there, coming round the point. See them! War canoes. Get back out of sight. There are hundreds of them!”

      They found a hillock up which they struggled through the vines and trees, peering from their point of vantage that gave them clear view across the tumultuous reef. The sun shone on first one, then another and another—five all told—great curving sails, double peaked, lifting above catamaran craft of lashed canoes with outriggers, each carrying a platform and a small deckhouse of thatched grass. They came sliding over the ocean at incredible speed to cut off the Shark. Lower canoes and decks were close packed with savages, some paddling furiously in the wash of the canoes, though they could not have aided progress. Others brandished weapons that glinted in the pale sunshine at spearhead and arrow tip. The canoes were high-prowed and pooped, carved and inlaid with shell that occasionally winked in the light. The bows were decked with streamers. The wind bore a faint sound of savage yells.

      “Fifty men, at least, to each canoe,” said Jim. “Three more coming. Must be a whole tribe. The Shark’s doomed.”

      Flashes of guns showed from the rail of the schooner as the canoes raced up, and the big sails came down while the paddlers dug in their blades. Flights of arrows answered the firing. Then came detonations. A canoe seemed to break in half in a sheet of flame. Swenson was tossing dynamite. They could see his men at the rail, flinging the explosive, firing pistols, then driven back by the horde that poured in upon them, twenty or thirty to one. Cries and shouts blended. With the helmsman clubbed, the Shark swung off and wallowed in the trough, the wind slanting her until it seemed she would capsize. Then the canvas flapped loose, the sheets cut, and the mainsail came down with a run. Over its folds men moved, fighting like frantic ants. The yells changed to cries of unmistakable triumph. The canoes formed on the lee of the stricken schooner, refilling with men. Bodies in white clothing were handed down. The canoes forged off; smoke rolled out of the hatch of the Shark, smoke shot with flame that licked at the sails and rigging, enveloping the ill-fated ship.

      The watchers had not noticed the increasing darkness in the horror of the massacre. They saw the canoes disappearing around the headland, stroked hard, the great sails still furled. The wind had suddenly ceased, and out of the swollen black cloud came down a deluge that blotted out everything and drenched them to the skin in a moment. They struggled back to the stranded hulk as if to an ark of refuge. The barricade over the skylight was some protection and over the apertures they hung scraps of old canvas and tarpaulin before they went below, listening to the torrent battering on the deck, seeing and hearing again the sudden horrors of the massacre.

      It was hard to hear speech. The lamp was a comfort.

      “They may come ashore?” asked Kitty. Jim shook his head.

      “I think not. Not unless they are wrecked. They came from the other island. They must have watched the schooners arrive and come over in the night.”

      “Then they would know there were two ships.”

      “They may have only noticed ours.

      “They may have seen the Seamew sunk, and thought no one but the survivors of a white man’s feud left. I believe there’s a tabu of some sort on this island. Or there would be natives living here. And I’m almost certain none are.”

      He spoke bravely. He did think that the island must be tabued, but the dread of a visitation from the cannibal canoes would be ever with them. With Walker raving, the lamp failing, the rain pelting down like lead, the intolerable heat and the memory of the flaming ship, their souls were blanched with despair.

      VIII

      Udanwaga

      It was long before the memory of the massacre dimmed sufficiently for them to go about without the dread of a landing overshadowing them. The cry of a parrot would seem the yell of a savage sighting them, the rustle of a wild pig in the bush the rush of a spear-flinging warrior. But time seemed to bear out Jim Lyman’s theory and they came to accept the idea that the island might be tabu.

      The five Fijians came back to the stranded hull the day after the rain with many protestations of fealty and proclamations that they “had been make walk-along but mighty soon make getaway and come back.” Through them Jim recovered the hawser from the Seamew. With their aid as expert surfmen he recovered a lot of tackle from the half burned remnant of the Shark, impaled on the reef. They got her foremast, also, and some provisions. But her boats were burned or smashed. So the long task of clearing the way for the launching of the Golden Dolphin commenced and slowly progressed. The bush was burned and cleared with infinite labor after an examination had shown the planking sound. A trench was dug beneath her keel and the accumulated soil removed. At last the hawser was attached, and the trial made. With much groaning of protest the pull of the hawser, half drenched by the rising tide, half soaked by a hand-chain of buckets, tautened; the hull creaked, moved a stubborn prow, stopped, moved on again, almost imperceptibly, but nevertheless moving, a full two feet to one tide.

      Jim delegated two kanakas to accompany Kitty, and Lynda in the untiring search over the island for some trace of habitation; some clue that her father might have lived there, and be in hiding, perhaps for fear of savages. Burnt as brown as a native, with limbs scratched and bruised from struggle through the bush, the girl preserved, and one day came back with tidings, though not of her father. She refused to think of him in the grim connection she had uncovered.

      There was a stone causeway half hidden in the bush, an ancient road with some of its mighty flags upheaved but still passable. It led straight up, with steps here and there to the summit of a flat hill where there stood a pyramid of faced stone, and on its top an altar of three stones, like those of Stonehenge. It seemed placed so as to receive the first rays of the rising sun and allow them to pass through an opening in the pillars. Beneath the flat top was a block of lava that in turn held a stone chalice. Whatever was placed in this cup must bathe in the sunbeams. The bottom of the pyramid was a charnel house of bones: ribs, pelvises, skulls, and leg- and arm-bones, flung pell-mell. The stone cup was black with sinister stain that had splashed and dripped all about.

      Some of the bones, most of them, were bleached and disarticulate. Others bore unmistakable signs of comparative recent dumping. They were unbleached, hair clinging to the scalps, grisly details of a not too thorough cleansing of tendon and sinew. That the flesh had been stripped by man and not decay, was hinted by the ground at the back of the pyramid showing plainly the signs of fires, of fire pits where sacrificial meats were wrapped in leaves, and steamed on hot stones, after the sacred portions had been offered to the gods.

      Yet nowhere could they find actual signs of very recent visitation. The land was fair, the sea full of fish, the bush of fruit and wild pigs. Here and there the girl came across crumbling stone platforms built on ledges, the foundations of grass houses long vanished; vanished long before some of those skeletons had been flung down by the priests, in Jim’s opinion. A pestilence, a hurricane, a tidal wave greater than that which flung the Golden Dolphin ashore might well have made the place tabu. There might be an occasional pilgrimage from the other island to placate the gods.

      He tried to turn the discovery into a certain sign of immunity, but it was hard to be convincing. From that day on someone stood watch on a high point that commanded the channel between their island and the next. They stored provisions in a cave where fresh water dripped, and where they might make a valiant stand, and prayed that they might get away before any canoes appeared in sight. There were days when the tortured cable threatened to break, when a sunken rock rose up beneath the keel and had to be dug away laboriously. But, foot by foot, and fathom by fathom, as Jim had predicted, the hull crept closer to the lagoon.

      They made numerous repairs. They worked with increasing vigor as the sick men mended. Sanders and Walker, his cracked pate sound again with the exception of violent, but decreasing, spells of headache, sewed on jury sails made from scraps of the Shark’s tattered canvas, or spliced ropes. The foremast was made ready for sloop rig, shears prepared to hoist it into place, the broken rudder repaired, with Jim Lyman hardest worker and foreman of them all, unceasing in vigor and determination to overcome all obstacles.