The Saint ebook

Contents

I. INTRODUCING THE SAINT

II. SPOILS OF SPAIN

III. "BOARDERS AWAY!"

IV. QUARRY

V. BOOTY FOR ENGLAND

I. INTRODUCING THE SAINT

HE was smiling continually, with such an air of removal above the concerns of ordinary mortals, with such an upward lifting of the head, that his fellows in the boat had called him, from the first day of labor and thirst, “The Saint.”

By the second day they used the name rather in irony than in praise, for they observed that the smile of The Saint–or “Saint George” as some called him–was merely the veiling of a nature bright and hard and cold and edged like Spanish steel.

He was far from a handsome man, for he had a long face, strong in the cheekbones and the jaw like some pharaoh of early Egypt whose portrait comes to us by a sculptor who knew his ruler was a god and therefore endowed him with the greatest strength of flesh and bone, together with the quiet cruelty of an immortal. At a glance, he seemed an old man, for his blond, sun-faded hair made a silver contrast with the ingrained and weathered darkness of his skin. He was not above middle height, but seated on the rowing bench, with only the weight of his shoulders and the flowing power of his long arms visible, his bearing still made him seem loftier than his fellows.

Except for a single rag of cloth, he was as naked now as he had been three days before when he left the piece of wreckage and climbed like an active sea-beast over the side of the canoa. Whatever his ship’s name–and he was silent about it–he was the sole survivor. No doubt the vessel had been flying before the same hurricane that had whipped and staggered the Mary Burton across the Gulf of Mexico; no doubt it had smashed on the same reef that ruined the Bristol ship; but the light canoa, sliding over the teeth of the rocks that sank the Mary Burton, had picked up thirty of the crew of the big merchantman and then, ten leagues beyond as the storm died, the sea gave them this single relic of a dead ship.

He had with him only one item from the wreck, and that was his rapier, which lay now on the floor of the canoa between his feet. For three days the long arms and the hard hands of The Saint swayed an oar, while thirst whitened his lips and fixed the smile upon them, for the sea had spoiled the water which the canoa carried. In the three days he did not speak three words, but his silence and his labor and that sword between his feet had won the respect of his rescuers.

Even Captain Harry Dane, who commanded the canoa and to whom men were merely so many hands to level guns or to hold cutlasses, looked upon The Saint with a considering eye, and so did Harry Dane’s crew. There were twenty of them and hardly two of one nationality, but all were strong, all were lean and fit for trouble as hungry cats.

If they were cats, one could imagine what mice they expected to catch at sea. In the reign of jolly Charles II, even the merest landlubber would have known what to think if he had seen, slipping among the islands or along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, a fifty-foot boat hollowed by fire from the trunk of one enormous tree, manned by a nondescript crew, with a single light cannon in the bow, and plentifully supplied with long-barreled muskets, pistols, knives, cutlasses, and axes. He would have said: “Here is a precious group of those sea-devils and man-quellers, the buccaneers–and God have mercy on my soul!”

These fellows had looked with wonderful scorn on the human driftage which they had picked from the waves. More than once, during the three terrible days of sun and thirst, they had seemed about to pitch the rescued back into the sea from which they had come; but now all the men in the boat, from the Mosquito Indian in the bows to the least of the men of the Mary Burton, were on their feet agape and staring. Some rubbed their dry throats, and some held out their hands as though to invite the mercy of heaven, and into the reddened eyes of all came a bright glimmer of hope. For over the edge of the horizon, blue as the sky but glinting with white like a cloud, loomed a big three-master, hull down, and laying a course well south and east of the canoa.

“Down, down!” shouted Captain Harry Dane. “And spring on the oars, every man of you. Maybe she means silks and wine for all of us and pieces of eight in every man’s purse. Maybe she means that our voyage is made, but at the least she means a cask of water!”

Now their lives lay in the grip of their hands and the strain of their own backs. They bent the oars and set them groaning. They pulled with their heads dropped on their shoulders, their eyes blind, their lips stretched until they cracked to the blood, and the light canoa began to leap on the waves like a fish.

“Steady and easy!” roared Harry Dane. “She sights us! She turns to us! She changes her course! Elia, what do you make of her?”

The Italian left the sweep at which he was working and stood up to peer from beneath his hands.

“She don’t sit down in the sea like an Englishman,” he said. “Her sails are cut too loose and full to be a Frenchman. She’s a Spaniard, signore.”

FROM fifty throats came a groan of misery. The rowing fell away to a futile splashing of the water. And The Saint, as he looked toward the blue-white sails of the stranger, leaned and gathered his rapier into his hand.

After that, he sat up again with his head lifted and the usual faint smile on his lips. A grown man might not have seen a difference in his look, but a child would have known enough to be afraid. The groan of the seamen, in the meantime, turned into a pitiful babbling of complaint. Only the buccaneers, those sea-cats, were silent, sharpening their eyes to study the stranger. For these were the days of Sir Henry Morgan, when a hundred years of hatred between England and Spain had come into a fine and poisonous flowering, with special detestation blooming in the West Indies and along the Spanish Main. On sea or dry land, it was English dog to Spanish cat, and if the stranger made out that a majority of the men in the canoa were blond Englishmen, he was apt to give them bullets instead.

“Can we take her?” ran the murmur through the canoa. “Could we rush her and take her?”

For the Spaniard was not a fighting sailor. Spanish pikemen were the best infantry in Europe, but they were out of place on the swaying deck of a ship. They might fight with the greatest individual courage, but usually in a blind confusion. Mighty odds of Spaniards had been conquered by savage handfuls of sea-rovers.

But now as the stranger approached nearer, with a freshening wind to harden her sails, the men of the canoa saw long rows of gun-ports, and the masts climbed higher and higher into the sky. She was a great-bellied galleon with a crew of hundreds aboard her, no doubt, and massive ordnance behind those ports. She was of the style as dear to the Castilians as their mountain castles, with huge fore and afterworks towering above the deck. The portholes began to open along the near wall of the ship; a moment later a huge flag unrolled from the head of the mizzen, showing the colors of Spain.

“She’s getting her teeth ready for us,” said Captain Harry Dane. “Down with all the blondheads on board us. Down with ’em. Fall on your faces and stay there. Up, Juan Martinez, and talk for us.”

A tall Spaniard rose in the canoa and stepped forward into the bows. Harry Dane, dark as a Latin himself and too handsome for any wench in a seaport to resist, remained beside the Spanish buccaneer.

“If there’s a man on board who knows my face, I’ll get a noose of rope instead of a swallow of water,” said Juan Martinez. “But I’ll try her. Haloo-o-o!”

A swarm of sailors had gone up into the rigging, and in the lower shrouds stood various gentry to look at the little vagabond of the sea which was rowing near them. As the hail of Martinez rang over the water a big, gray-headed man by the port bulwark of the galleon called in answer: “What ship are you?”

“The Santa Elena from Cartagena!” shouted Juan Martinez. “Eight days out and three without water or the mercy of God on the high seas.”

The side of the ship rose like the wall of a house, sloping well back because the Spanish shipwrights believed in plenty of tumble-home. Their vessels rode high, answering their helms slowly and never making a point close to the wind, but though they tossed like corks, they were almost as unsinkable. Witness the great Armada, where the Spanish ships died on the rocks, but not under English guns.

The gray-headed captain bellowed back: “This is the Santa Teresa, of Cadiz, bound home, Captain Juan Xi-menon–” He changed from Spanish to English, calling: “What is it you will have from me, my friends?”

The sound of that friendly language brought not one, but half a dozen hidden blondheads above the side of the canoa, shouting as with one English voice: “Water! Water, for God’s sake!”

Captain Harry Dane turned on the fools with his cutlass like a bit of trembling white flame in his hand, but the harm was done already.

The Saint clearly heard Captain Xi-menon say to the officers about him: “I thought I could smell English rats on our clean Spanish sea. Kindly sink that boat for me, Don Jose.”

“Back water! Back water!” shouted The Saint, speaking almost for the first time in three days.

The men sprang back on the oars, cursing and wild with fear, for they could see grinning Spanish faces inside the lower port-holes, and the busy aiming of the guns.

The Saint heard the word to fire, and the roar of the heavy guns was enough in itself he felt, to knock the little canoa out of the sea. But a lucky wave at the right moment put its heaving shoulder under the side of the Spaniard and rolled up the muzzle of his guns, so that the shot merely tore overhead with a sound like rending sheets of canvas. Only one gun struck home.

The ball, smashing through the canoa from side to side, knocked one headless corpse overboard and left two other good men writhing in a red smother of blood. But now the way of the great ship carried her ahead and left the canoa wallowing under her stern, where only two cannon looked through the square portholes.

THEY had the helmsman in view, high above, pulling at the spokes of the wheel as the great ship commenced to wear, leaning with the wind, eager to pour in the second broadside. The Saint picked up one of the long barreled muskets which lay under the gunwales and shot the helmsman through the head.

“Well shot, by God!” roared Captain Harry Dane, as the strain of the rudder-chains spun the wheel back and let the ship straighten before the wind again. “Now get the gunners at those stern chasers. Joe Hatch–Gonzales–Johann-sen–Mirza–some of you sharp eyes begin drawing beads and keep the hands off that wheel. If we can’t fight her side to side, at least we may be able to hold her by the heels. Fight or die, damn you! Up hearts and down with the Dons. Watch the rigging. Help me tilt up the cannon!”

The men from the Mary Burton took little part in the fighting that had started, but the buccaneers fell to work–not with a cheer but with a frantic and savage yelling like a pack with the fox in sight. Chance had placed them, in fact, in exactly the strategic position. More than one great Spanish ship had been worried to death in just this fashion when there was not enough wind to let her maneuver out of the jaws of a small boat that hung on her traces and picked off the helmsmen as fast as they offered themselves at the wheel.

The buccaneers, men who had learned that it was either straight shooting or death in more than one battle, now steadied their fire through the portholes of the stern chasers until The Saint could see shadowy figures leap or fall beside the guns. And the helm itself could not be manned.

More danger came from the mizzen rigging, where a crowd of musketeers had climbed up to the fighting tops, and to the yards, from which they commenced to open a furious fire on the canoa. Five men died in the small boat almost at the first discharge, but Captain Harry Dane had already prepared an answer. For he had elevated the muzzle of the short, wide-throated cannon at the bow of the canoa and filled it to the mouth with a heavy charge of powder and musket-balls. Now the master-gunner, that Mohammedan renegade, Mirza, lay flat to sight the cannon. Now it fired. The recoil ducked the nose of the canoa almost under water, but a stinging shower of death whipped the entire mizzen. Men fell from their places like apples from a wind-shaken tree; and some hung helplessly in the rigging, screaming, while huge red stains dripped down across the sails.

Even the men of the Mary Burton, by this time, had learned the game. Battle was bred in their English blood and bone, for one thing, and after all, the trick seemed simple.

Now two men appeared high on the poop, dragging a sea-chest which they placed behind the wheel before the musket fire from the canoa dropped them. Two more brought a second chest.

“Watch them! Watch them!” shouted The Saint. “They’re building a barricade for their helmsman!”

After the first shot he fired, he had reloaded his long gun and remained leaning on it, at wait for another emergency. It had come now; quickly leveling the musket, he brought down one of the two Spaniards and the second sea-chest was left on the deck. In that emergency, the captain himself, now equipped in a heavy steel helmet and body armor, ran up and laid hold on one end of the chest. The other end was grasped by a second man in armor, a magnificent youth with long, dark, curling hair that blew aslant in the wind. Between them, they swayed the sea-chest into place, and in this manner a barrier was raised behind which a helmsman could stand in safety. From every throat on the canoa went up a tingling screech of fear as the Santa Teresa swung with the wind, answering her helm.

The Saint stood by Captain Harry Dane.

This is a free sample. Please purchase full version of the book to continue.

This is a free sample. Please purchase full version of the book to continue.

This is a free sample. Please purchase full version of the book to continue.

This is a free sample. Please purchase full version of the book to continue.

This is a free sample. Please purchase full version of the book to continue.

This is a free sample. Please purchase full version of the book to continue.