II
As if in sheer perversity, the weather changed early in the evening, and the night that followed was punctuated regularly by the blast of the fog-whistle. The next day broke thick and damp, with a wall of impenetrable mist shadowing the great vessel to half her length. Over the tall sides the greasy green of the water could just be seen moving by. The masts and funnels disappeared irregularly overhead. The fog clung to everything; it rimed the rugs and capes of the passengers who feared the close air of the 'tween-decks and lay recumbent in the steamer-chairs, and it clung in little pearls to Miss Marcia Dorn's curly front hair, that seemed to curl all the tighter for the wetting.
With Mr. Victor Masterson at her side, she was walking up and down the hurricane-deck. His appearance was not quite so spruce or so comical this morning; he looked as if he had been dipped overboard. He still disdained a hat, and his hair was plastered over his forehead in an uneven, scraggly bang. The weather seemed also to have dampened his spirits. Miss Dorn found it difficult to lead him away from serious subjects; his ideas on mental telepathy did not amuse her, nor the fact that he was a fatalist.
"Oh, I wish you'd do something to make me laugh," she broke in suddenly.
"Are you ticklish?" inquired the Silly Ass quite soberly.
Miss Dorn could not help but titter; she was not at all put out.
"There!" said Mr. Masterson. "Now, you see, I have done it! Please thank me. Now let me go on. You know, there is no doubt that the mind of one person when thinking of——"
"Oh, don't let's think!" Miss Dorn leaned back against the rail, half hidden from the gangway. "Isn't it dreary," she said, "this weather? And look at those people all stretched out. I wish we could do something to wake them up! The whole ship seems to have the glooms—even the captain; he wouldn't speak a word to me at breakfast."
"I could wake 'em up," said Mr. Masterson emphatically. "I could wake the whole ship up, and the captain too, and the lootenant, and the quartermaster, and the squingerneer, and the crew of the Nancy Brig, if I wanted to—and your Uncle Admiral Elephant here, asleep in the steamer-chair."
"Why, sure enough, there he is!" cried Miss Dorn. "He's got the glooms, too; he says he always gets 'em in foggy weather at sea." She turned and touched Mr. Masterson lightly on the arm. "Wake him up!" she said, her eyes twinkling.
"I hardly dare."
"Oh, go on! I don't believe you can. How would you do it?"
"How would I do it? Why, just this way." He crumpled his hands together and blew between the knuckles of his thumbs a low, resonant, gruffly humming note.
They were hidden now by the bow of the life-boat and were standing quite close together. They noticed that the figure in the steamer-chair nearest them had suddenly raised itself a little and then had sat bolt upright. The old admiral, the mist in his gray whiskers, turned one ear forward and listened attentively.
The gray wall had grown a little whiter, less opaque; they could see now the whole length of the ship, out to the lifting stern.
"Oh, go on," tempted the girl; "do it again—louder!"
"Oh, please do," she pleaded; "real loud. I dare you to!"
He slowly raised his hands, the thumb-knuckles to his lips again. There sounded two deep, long-drawn, half-roaring, thrilling notes, for all the world like steam in the cup of a great metal whistle.
Footsteps, hurried and quick, rushed overhead on the bridge. A hoarse voice shouted orders. The quartermaster spun the wheel. Now:
"Full speed ahead, the starboard engine! Full speed astern, port!"
"Ay, ay, sir!"
There was the clank-clank of the semaphores, and suddenly two bursting, answering blasts that hid the huge funnels in a cloud of feathery white.
The admiral in the steamer-chair threw off his wrappings and leaped to the rail.
A loud, anxious hail from above: "Lookout, there forward! Can you make out anything?"
"Oh, see what I've done!" faltered the Silly Ass in a frightened whisper.
Miss Dorn grasped his shoulder.
There had followed a sudden cry that rose in a diapason of mad fear:
"Vessel ahead! Starboard your helm, sir! Starboard your h-e-l-m!"
The helm was already over; the ship was swinging wide. Another quick order. The second officer leaped again to the semaphores. The huge fabric trembled, racking in every plate, as both engines reversed at full speed, the screws churning and thundering astern. And now a rift came in the encircling fog, as if it had been cut by a mighty sword.
Clear and distinct, not half a cable's length away, wallowed a great black shape. The mighty bow swept veering past her quarter, then her stern, and clear of it by no more than thirty yards!
Only those few on deck outside of the weather-cloth saw the sight, and then for but an instant. Never would they forget it!
Lying low in the water, all awash from the break of her topgallant-forecastle to the lift of her high poop-deck, the green seas running under her bridge and about her superstructure, swayed a great mass of iron and steel of full five thousand tons! Ship without a soul! A wisp of a flag, upside down, still floated in her slackened rigging; swinging falls dangled from her empty davits. Then the fog closed in, and, as a picture on a lantern-slide fades and disappears, she vanished and was gone!
A white-faced boy looked up into Miss Dorn's frightened eyes. His lips moved, but made no sound.
On the bridge, the captain had grasped the second officer by the arm. "My God! Fitzgerald, did you see that? It was the Drachenburg."
"Derelict and abandoned! But, by heaven, sir, she signaled us!"
The captain turned quickly. "Stop those engines!" he ordered hoarsely.
The tearing pulses down below ceased their beating; it was as if a great heart had stopped! The ship, breathless at her own escape, lay calm and quiet in the fog. The only sound was of the greasy waves lapping her high steel flanks. Yet——
Admiral Dorn, still standing beneath the bridge, with both hands grasping the rail, shivered and drew breath. What might have happened if—— He looked forward. He imagined he could hear the crash, see the great bow sinking; he could hear the splintering of the bulk-heads, the screams of the people tumbling up the companionways, the panic and pandemonium, the mad rush for the boats, the horrid, slow subsidence. But it was not to be; the danger had gone by!
Now he remembered having heard that first low whistle before the two that had signaled so plainly: "I have my helm to starboard—passing to starboard of you!" And yet, well did he know that no fires blazed in those dead furnaces, no steam was coming from that rusty, salt-incrusted funnel. It was as if the dead had spoken to warn the living! He shivered once more, and staggered to the bridge-ladder, holding on and listening.
Three, four, five times did the Caronia's siren wail out into the stillness. No reply. And then the throbbing pulses took up their beat again.
Down in the corner of the main saloon, filled with chattering people, romping children, and game-playing young folk, who knew not what had passed on deck, sat the Silly Ass, the girl close to him.
"I'll never tell," she whispered. "What is it you're thinking of?"
The round eyes gazed into hers. "It's a long time since I did," he said.
"Did what?"
"Prayed! God made me a fool just to do this some day, I guess." His face showed the expression of a grown-up, sobered man.
On the bridge, the captain and the other officers were talking in low, awe-struck tones.
WAR ON THE TIGER
BY W. G. FITZ-GERALD
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND FROM DRAWINGS BY FRANKLIN BOOTH
The patwari salaamed and laid a report on my desk—a thing of maps and figures that brought the sweat to my face. Fifty-seven killed, six hundred square miles of rich rice and sugar country demoralized, communications stopped, crops rotting on the ground, nine villages abandoned, and the shyest of jungle creatures grazing in the market-place! Tiger and tigress—a bad case.
When I told a man once that tigers and cobras, between them, made away with 25,000 human beings in India every year, he thought I was joking. "Why," said he, "surely one fifth of the human race—325,000,000, at any rate—is packed into that triangle! Where can the tigers live?" But I underestimated it; there were just 24,938 killed in 1906 by tigers alone. You can see it yourself in the government records.
Now, as District Officer, I'm the "father" of two million souls, and responsible for all things, from murder to measles. But this was beyond me. It was a Commissioner's job, backed by the Maharaja.
The man-eaters, now propitiated as gods, had taken toll of my villagers for two long years. The people were in abject terror, for none knew the day, hour, or place of the monsters' next leap. Many were already resigned to death. "It's written on our foreheads," they said, with gentle misery. Poor devils! Think of the two hundred millions of them in India oscillating between mere existence and positive starvation; not living, but just strong enough to crawl along on the edge of death!
I called the tahsildar: "Bring me the record of these tigers."
A bulky file of horrors, in truth! Here a goatherd was taken; there it was an old woman gathering sticks in the jungle, or children playing in the village street, or maybe girls going down to the river for water, laughing joyously, unaware of the great green eyes that watched them through the towering stalks of elephant-grass; and last among the victims came some desperate young men who had faced one of the creatures with fish-spears.
