CHAPTER VIII
"THE FIGHT ON THE SANDS"
"Ho! ho! ho!" laughed a high, sneering voice "A pretty picture, upon my word—and the good, saintly Loyola, too! Where does hubby come in, I wonder?"
The pair sprang apart as if struck by a thunderbolt, and as Jack faced round the ruffian recognised him.
"Oh, it's you, is it? Big Harry's dandy mate spooning with my little wife! Well, I am surprised! What a shocking world it is, to be sure!"
"You devil!" hissed the rolling-stone furiously.
"Don't like being interrupted, eh? Well, that's not to be wondered at. Unfortunately"—and the scoundrel's tones took on an air of insolent importance—"I happen to be the husband of that lady who was hugging you so fondly."
Poor Loyola sank back upon the sand, and hiding her face in her hands, crouched down in an attitude of absolute hopelessness.
"Come on, you limb of Satan!" roared Jack, his voice shaking with passion. "She shan't be your wife for long, if I can help it. In less than five minutes she shall be your widow, if I swing for it."
"Not so fast, my valiant lover, not so fast. Tom Hawksley's too leery a bird to have salt put on his tail so easy. How do I know you haven't a gang of beachcombers waiting handy to pounce out on me? You didn't come here alone, did you?" and the cunning eyes leered round the beach uneasily.
"I tell you there's no one within hail," growled Jack; "and if there were they wouldn't interfere. I mean to kill you with these hands," he added, a very world of piled-up hate in his voice.
"Oh, ho! that's the time of day, is it? Feeling nasty, eh?" sneered the marooned ruffian coolly.
"Come on, you coward!" thundered the rover, furious with impatience and yet not daring to move on account of his blindness.
He knew that if Hawksley once realised that he was blind the game was up—he would be at his mercy; and he trusted entirely to the scoundrel venturing within his reach, knowing that once he got a grip the victory would be his.
"Come on yourself," cried Hawksley cunningly.
"I mean to fight on the open beach, and not in the scrub," said Jack coolly, with a sudden change of tactics. "I've got plenty of time. I'll wait till you are ready"; and he sat down.
Hawksley, for all his cool sneers, was as raging within as his enemy, and longed to wreak a terrible vengeance upon the hated stealer of his wife's love. Not that the man cared twopence about his wife. He had thought nothing of herding her into a crowded harem of native girls aboard the schooner; he missed no chance to insult her; he knocked her about, despised her, and yet inwardly feared her, such was the strange twist in his mean nature; but above everything he valued her as his possession, the prize of the South Seas, to play with and torture with a cruelty which he delighted in. Thus, to find her in another man's arms, as he supposed, seeking a sweet consolation for all his brutality and devilish treatment, was gall and wormwood to him.
He would have preferred a chance to accomplish his purpose by some mean treachery rather than by risking himself in a stand-up fight; but what could he do? He possessed no weapon. So, trusting in a knowledge of every low fighting trick known from the coasts of Japan to Sydney and from Hongkong to the San Francisco water-front, he decided to give battle.
Slowly the ruffian crept out from the protection of the trees and advanced upon the blind castaway.
Jack, with only his ears to trust to, listened with all his might at the approaching footsteps; but it is difficult to judge distance correctly by the ear, and he jumped to his feet, meaning to spring upon his opponent, thinking he was but a few feet away when in reality he was several yards.
Only just in time Loyola looked up, and, noticing the crouching attitude of the two men, in a moment divined what was going forward. "How could her lover, blind as he was and worn with privation, hope to overcome Hawksley?" she wondered fearfully. Yet she knew Jack too well to attempt to interfere, and she had implicit confidence in his powers. Once, long before, with one arm broken by a revolver bullet, she had seen him administer a terrible licking to a giant negro. Still, she racked her brain to know how she could help him. She saw him about to spring, and his object flashing upon her without a moment's hesitation, she cried sharply, "Too far, too far!"
Jack understood and waited, whilst Hawksley, puzzled by these tactics, came on still more slowly and cautiously. Then, gathering together all his over-tried strength, the rover sprang furiously like some wild beast in his blindness, his hands held out in front of him ready to seize whatever they touched.
But though the rapidity of his movement was such that Hawksley had no time to jump on one side, the direction was not so good, and only his left hand got a grip as he flew past the surprised scoundrel.
Instantly his fingers hooked themselves into Hawksley's coat-collar, and held on desperately; but the impetus of his spring carrying him forward, and the drag to it being all on one side, he spun round giddily, vainly striving to keep his balance by the aid of his loose right arm; then down he came on the sands, dragging the sorely puzzled Hawksley with him.
For a moment there was a wild mix-up of struggling limbs, and then Hawksley tore himself free from his antagonist, whose strength, overstrained by the late hardships, was to his dismay fast leaving him.
The still puzzled Hawksley, rolling out of Jack's reach, got on to his feet, and watched his opponent with amazement in his eyes.
Jack was on his knees with head cocked on one side, pawing round the sand as if he thought Hawksley was some sea-shell lying hidden somewhere close to him.
The sight of the blind man feeling around him with such cautiousness was almost uncanny to his opponent, who was fast coming to the conclusion that Jack was mad; but to poor Loyola, watching him with tear-stained eyes, the piteousness and horror of it was absolutely heartrending.
The very helplessness of his motions brought hot, scalding tears to her eyes, and her love surged within her to the exclusion of every other thought, except that somehow she must manage to protect her blind lover from the scoundrel who called himself her husband.
All the mother's feeling for her child welled up in the woman's heart as she watched, and unable to stand the bitter sight any longer, with a wild, choking cry, she sprang to Jack's side, and, falling on her knees, threw her weak right arm over his shoulders with an indescribable air of loving protection.
"Where is he, Lolie, where is he?" hissed the rover between his teeth; whilst Hawksley, infuriated afresh by her loving action, yelled venomously:
"Get away, you she-devil, get away, or I'll do for you as well," and he began to creep forward with that strange slinking motion of his.
"You coward!" cried the woman, in ringing tones of utter scorn. "You coward, to fight a blind man!"
Then, springing to her feet, she took a stand between her husband and her lover in a posture of splendid defiance, with head thrown back and flashing eyes. At the same moment she snatched a tiny stiletto from the bosom of her dress, a weapon which she had long kept ready for the moment, that moment which so often had nearly arrived, when a steady thrust of the sharp point would be her only escape from what was worse than death.
A sparkle of light glittered on the steel as she held it firm, point outwards and ready for action, with a deadly menace.
"Ho! ho! The little tiger!" sneered Hawksley, stopping in his advance and laughing sardonically.
The news that Jack was blind let a light upon his actions, which had been causing the suspicious scoundrel some uneasiness, and with a relieved mind the latter decided to take his time and play with his victims in that cat-and-mouse style which he delighted in, from the sheer cruelty of his nature.
"So the pretty boy is blind, is he? How sad, how very sad!"
But Jack was not the man to remain inactive whilst his opponent taunted him, however blind and weak he might be. In a moment he was on his feet again and rushing wildly upon the sneering voice, and if Loyola had not jumped nimbly to one side he would have bowled her over in his headlong gait.
Hawksley, chuckling like an amused fiend, stepped quickly out of the blind man's path, and stretching out a leg, tripped him up with an easy carelessness.
The latter fell heavily, but recovering himself with a desperate effort, whirled round on his knees in the sand and pounced upon the over-confident ruffian's foot, his hands falling upon their object by a bit of sheer good luck.
Down went the discomfited Hawksley on his back with a shrill cry of surprise, and there ensued a fearful struggle as the two bodies rolled over and over together, each man striving with all his strength to gain the upper hold.
But Jack's strength was nearly spent, and recognising this, Hawksley, by a sudden jerk, broke his hold and freed himself; then, scrambling quickly out of the blind man's reach, rose to his feet with a hoarse laugh of triumph.
Rousing himself from a growing lassitude, and with a strange giddiness in his head, Jack attempted to follow his example. Panting heavily in short, quick sobs, with gritted teeth, he vainly strove to rise, but with a fog creeping over his brain he had to sink back again, and it was only by sheer will-power that he saved himself from fainting.
Again Hawksley advanced upon him, deeming this the right moment to finish matters; but before he could reach him, Loyola, with a wild scream for help, rushed forward and flung herself with all her strength upon her husband's back, and clung there desperately, twining her arms round his neck in a heroic attempt to hold him off his prostrate enemy.
With a snarl of fury Hawksley tore off her grip and cast her from him, and with a moan of despair she fell on her face in the sand.
The sound drew a groan of helpless anguish from the rover, who again tried vainly to regain his feet. The next moment the ruffian was upon him and locked two sinewy hands round his throat. With a muffled gurgle Jack fell back, and, kneeling upon his prostrate body, Hawksley proceeded grimly to choke the life out of him.
Again the woman, a wild terror in her eyes, flung herself upon the demon and attempted vainly to pull him off her lover, sending forth scream after scream for help.
Jack, with a terrible knowledge of his absolute impotence, felt his senses leaving him as those horrible, muscular claws sank deeper and deeper into his neck and shut off his windpipe.
His face became suffused, the veins swelling in his temples to bursting point, and the purple tint of suffocation began to creep over his features.
Paying no heed to the hysterical attempts of the weak woman, Hawksley held on, chuckling to himself with satisfaction as he watched his victim weakening.
Seeing that her endeavours were absolutely without avail, the distracted woman rushed off for the stiletto, which she had dropped in the sand when surprised by Jack's wild rush past her. At the same moment, the castaways, headed by Broncho, burst through the clump of palms in a headlong charge, drawn to the rescue by Loyola's screams.
The cowboy, on perceiving the two struggling forms on the beach, without a second's hesitation stopped in his stride, and drawing his revolver, let go with unerring aim; much practice in a land where one's life depended on the quickness of one's draw and the sureness of one's aim had made him an expert in revolver-play.
The bullet pierced through the fleshy part of Hawksley's left arm, and with a cry of rage he let go of his victim's throat and sprang to his feet, facing round with his venomous snarl like a wild beast at bay.
"Hands up!" roared the cowpuncher, covering him with his weapon. "Hands up!"
The ruffian gave a rapid look round in vain search for a way of escape, and then, as his shifty eyes met Broncho's stern ones, full of a steely glitter of held-in anger, with a gesture of overdone indifference he brought his hands together over his head.
Whilst the cowboy covered his prisoner, Tari sped back to the boat for a length of rope, and Loyola and Jim knelt anxiously over the prostrate form of the rolling-stone.
"If he's killed him," began the boy hoarsely. "If he's killed him——" and there was murder in the small voice.
"No! no! no!" wailed the woman, as she chafed Jack's hands feverishly.
The thoughtful bluejacket, who had rushed to the water's edge after one glimpse of the purple face, reappeared with his cap full of water.
"We'll put life into him in less than no time," he exclaimed heartily, scattering the water over the rover's suffused countenance with a vigorous heave.
Tari made quick time to the boat and back, and he and Broncho between them trussed the discomfited Hawksley in a most scientific manner.
In vain his cunning tongue pleaded eloquently on his behalf. They paid no heed.
"I found that man kissing my wife," he began, a whole world of outraged justice in his oily tones.
"We found you stranglin' a blind man," replied Broncho sternly, as he clove-hitched the seizing on his prisoner's wrists.
"I swear to God I didn't know he was blind," declared Hawksley vehemently. "When I saw him hugging my wife I went for him, as any man would. I was only going to teach him."
"Teach Derringer Jack a lesson?" drawled Broncho. "Wall, I surmise he had to be blind an' starved an' near dead o' thirst, or the rope would have been round your horns, mister."
"I'm bleeding. Ain't you got the humanity to bind up my arm?" whined the wretch, seeing his first line of argument had no effect.
"I'm shore a whole lot sorry it was your arm an' not your black heart I put a bullet through," returned Broncho sourly, without any offer to doctor the wounded member.
"Loyola, you wench," cried the exasperated Hawksley, "ain't you got no sense of duty? Would you let your husband bleed to death?"
The woman rose slowly to her feet from Jack's side, and without a word tore a strip off her skirt; then, with a look of the most utter aversion in her face, deftly bound up her husband's wound.
"What are you going to do with me?" he asked again of the silent cowboy.
"Depends on my bunkie thar," replied the latter sternly. "Mebbe string you up to the nearest cocoanut palm."
"It'd be murder!" whined Hawksley, now thoroughly cowed and frightened. "I was within my rights."
"Thar ain't no rights for skunks," growled Broncho, his eyes watching the efforts to restore the senseless man with but ill-concealed anxiety.
At last Jack opened his eyes and gasped faintly, "Water! water!"
The half of a cocoanut, full of the creamy juice, was thrust to his lips.
He drained this with a sigh of satisfaction and a hoarse murmur of,
"I'll soon be all right, boys."
Then, stretching forth his shrunken, sun-browned hand, he whispered softly,
"Lolie! Lolie!"
The woman kneeling at his side seized the rover's fingers in hers, and with big tears of thankfulness in her eyes, pressed them reassuringly.
Little Jim, with a strange lump in his throat, turned his head away quickly, whilst the bosun's mate found a sudden interest in the contemplation of their captive.
For some minutes Jack lay quiet, fumbling the woman's small hands in his with a clumsy weakness. The very touch seemed to fill the spent man with renewed life. Tenderly he stroked them, lovingly he caressed them, whilst his brain slowly cleared.
Then he was picked up and carried into the shade of the palm-grove, close to where the whaleboat had been hauled up.
Here he lay through the long afternoon, slowly regaining his strength, with Loyola, Jim, and Tari by his side.
A few yards off sat Hawksley, securely bound to the trunk of the great palm, whilst up and down the beach paced the cowboy and Bill Benson, deliberating as to the fate to be meted out to their prisoner.
Broncho, recognising how things were between Jack and Loyola, wished to cut the Gordian knot by the short, decided methods of Arizona. A rope and a good tree was what he advocated for Hawksley.
But the bluejacket, used to the stern justice of a British man-of-war, wished to carry the ruffian before a court of law, knowing that he was wanted by every cruiser in the South Seas for illicit blackbirding, girl-stealing, pearl-poaching, and a host of other offences, which up till now had gone unpunished owing to his remarkable slimness and the sailing qualities of his schooner, the Black Adder.
"But your brass-buttoned British sheriff wouldn't hang him," objected the cowboy. "He'd round him up in some crazy calaboose, an' the next thing we'd hear that the varmint had gone an' jumped the track, an' mebbe come bulgin' in interferin' with my pard Jack's domestic affairs agin. No, siree; thar ain't a shade o' horse-sense in that bill o' fare."
"And if we swings the blighter off, it's two Roosians to a heathen Chinee that some fool-head will go an' blow the gaff——"
"As how?" demanded Broncho, half-angrily, not liking Benson's insinuation at all.
"No offence, governor, no offence," exclaimed the bluejacket; "but we most of us has a bust occasional-like, an' that's the time these here state secrets get blown; and then there's the Kanaka."
"Tari's white cl'ar through an' is Jack's dawg. I ain't frettin' he'll stampede our cattle none."
"Any'ow, I votes we pospones the execution o' justice till to-morrer," observed the bosun's mate cautiously. "Mebbe the gal oughter have a say."
"I guess nit! Gals is shore to make a wrong play when a lynchin' is the game. They're too soft-hearted an' mushy that-away."
"What erbout y'r mate?"
"Jack's an interested party, an' so is barred from the jury," declared Broncho uneasily.
The cowboy knew well enough that Jack would not countenance such downright methods of justice as a lynching. Everything depended on it being done without the rover's knowledge, and by hook or by crook Broncho was determined that this snake in Jack's path to happiness should be removed somehow; he relied greatly, however, on being able to bring the bluejacket round to his way of thinking.
Over and over again he bitterly reproached himself that he had not aimed to kill, when he let fly the bullet which creased Hawksley's arm.
Now that he knew Jack's secret and the reason of those long fits of melancholy, he was set upon removing the cause of them.
The man deserved death, he argued; he was a notorious scoundrel, and the fact that he had nearly succeeded in killing Jack was quite reason enough to satisfy the justice of the drop, in the cowboy's easy Western code of laws.
However, giving up the discussion for the time, the two agents of justice returned to the group under the trees.
"How are you makin' out, mister?" asked the bosun's mate of Jack, as he threw himself down lazily.
"First rate," replied the rover cheerily. "By the way, I seem to recall your voice. Were you on the China Station five years ago in the Diadem?"
"I was that."
"Coxswain to old Typhoon Blake?"
"Why, that's so."
"Remember rescuing a man from a sampan one day up the Shanghai River."
"Had a bag of dollars with him? The two Johns tried to lay him out, an' he up-ended one of 'em?"
"Yes, that's right. Remember me now?"
"W'y, blawst me but you 'as the cut of his jib; but—he weren't on the lower deck, mate. That blighted josser was a reg'lar copper-bottomed swell, an' took 'is chow with old Typhoon."
"Well, my name's Jack Derringer."
"That's so, that were the name right enuff. I 'eard number one speakin' about 'im. Well, it's a queer old giddy-go-round, this bloomin' world; you gives me ten dollars then, an' now I tips you a drink outer a bally cocoanut."
The afternoon passed slowly, Hawksley, scowling and gnawing his lips, lay apart, coining new words to his extensive vocabulary of oaths.
Jim and Tari went off on a tour of exploration round the island, whilst Broncho and the bosun's mate sat well out of earshot, a pair of conspirators arguing heatedly, with Hawksley's life hanging on the result.
Jack and Loyola under the palms talked fitfully in low tones, with long silences in which an uneasy melancholy and a deep mutual feeling of sad helplessness reigned.