Hawtrey's Deputy

by Harold Bindloss

THE LAST EFFORT.

It was after a long and arduous journey which had left its mark on all of them that Wyllard and his companions lay among the boulders beside a sheltered inlet waiting for the dusk to fall one lowering evening. They were cramped and aching, for they had scarcely moved during the last hour; their garments were badly tattered, and their half-covered feet were bleeding. They were, as they recognised, a pitiful company to seize a vessel, with three knives and one rifle between them, but there was resolution in their haggard faces.

Close in front of them the green water lapped softly among the stones. The breeze was light off shore, and the tide, which was just running ebb, rippled against the bows of a little schooner lying some thirty yards from the bank. She had been seized for illegal sealing some years earlier, and it was evident that she had been very little used since then. The paint was peeling from her cracked and weathered side, her gear was frayed and bleached with frost and rain, and only very hard-pressed men would have faced the thought of going to sea in her. Wyllard and his companions were, however, very hard-pressed indeed, and they preferred the hazards of a voyage in the crazy vessel to falling into the Russians' hands. It was also clear that they had no choice. It must be either one thing or the other.

Some little distance up-stream a low rise cut against the dingy sky. It shut off all view of the upper part of the inlet, which wound in behind it, but Wyllard and his companions had cautiously climbed the slope earlier in the afternoon, and lying flat upon the summit had looked down upon the little wooden houses that clustered above the beach. He had then decided that this part of the inlet would dry out at about half-ebb, and as the schooner's boat, which he meant to seize, lay upon the shingle it was evident that he must carry out his plans within the next three hours.

These were very simple. There was nobody on board the schooner, which lay in deeper water, and he fancied that it would be possible to swim off to her and slip the cable; but they must have provisions, and there was, so far as he could see, only one way of obtaining them. A building which stood by itself close beside the beach was evidently a store, for he had seen two men carrying bags and cases out of it under the superintendence of a third in some kind of uniform, and it appeared to be unguarded. Wyllard, who had reasons for surmising that the few settlements on the coast were under strict official control, fancied that the store contained Government supplies, and had arranged that Charly and Lewson should break into it as soon as darkness fell, and pull off to the schooner with anything they could find inside. Whether they would succeed in doing this he did not know, and he admitted to himself that it scarcely seemed probable, but he could think of no other plan, and the attempt must be made.

In the meanwhile a thin haze drove across the crest of the rise, the breeze freshened slightly, and the little ripples lapped more noisily along the shingle. There was evidently a good deal of fresh water coming down the inlet, and it was in a fever of impatience he watched the schooner strain at her cable. That evening had already seemed the longest he had ever spent in his life. By and bye it commenced to rain, and little streams of chilly water trickled about the weary men, but they lay still, with lips tight set, in tense suspense. What Lewson had had to face in the awful icy wastes to the north of them Wyllard could scarcely imagine, and Lewson could not tell, but he and his two other comrades had borne things almost beyond endurance since he commenced his search, and now there was far too much at stake for him to increase the odds against them by any undue precipitancy. He was then in a dangerous mood, but he had laid his plans with grim, cold-blooded caution, and he meant to adhere to them.

At length, and very slowly, the light faded, until the beach grew shadowy, and the schooner's spars and rigging showed dim and blurred against a dusky background. The rise that shut off the settlement was lost in drifting haze, and the dull rumble of the surf on the outer beach came up more sharply through the gathering darkness. The measured beat of its deep pulsations almost maddened Wyllard as he lay and listened, for if all went right he would be sliding out over the long heave with every sail piled on to the crazy schooner in another hour or two.

At length, when there was only a faint gleam of water sliding by below, he rose stiffly to his feet, and Lewson stretched out a hand for the rifle that lay among the stones. There was a sharp click as he jerked the lever, and then he laughed, a little jarring laugh, as the magazine snapped back.

"They'll treat us as pirates if they get hands on us—and I've been lashed in the face—with a sled-dog-whip," he said.

Charly said nothing as he loosened the long seaman's knife in his belt, and Wyllard made no remonstrance, for there is, as he recognised, a point beyond which prudence does not count. After what Overweg had once or twice told him, it was unthinkable that they should fall into Smirnoff's hands.