His two lifebelts still lay in their cactus clump, and he picked them out and buckled them round himself and his rifle as on the preceding night. Then he lowered himself into the water and set out across the lagoon. The sea-water added intensely to the pain of his cuts and scratches.
The Germans had acted in disagreement with one of Napoleon’s best-known maxims of war—one should only manoeuvre about a fixed point; to have done so he needed to be held, pinned to his position by a menace from the front. With the coming of darkness he was free to move about as much as physical conditions would allow, and that, as long as the lagoon was open to him, was a considerable amount. All the German turning movements, all their advances upon his rear and his flanks were useless. Their blows were blows in the air as long as Brown could evade them.
Brown paddled steadily round the lagoon fifty yards from shore, keeping away from the ship. Far behind him, on the unseen face of the island, the wretched German sailors were labouring and toiling as they pursued their stumbling way over the lava. Cut feet and sprained ankles and broken wrists occurred regularly. The island was alive with the clash and clatter of dropped rifles and stumbling feet. No one knows who fired the first shot. Most probably it was an accident, the result of a stumble by some fool (there are always fools to be found among two hundred men) who had slipped a cartridge into his rifle. The noise of the shot echoed through the darkness. Brown, paddling across the lagoon, heard it and wondered. The example was infectious. Bewildered men all along the straggling line began to load their rifles, and it was only a matter of seconds before the rifles went off. The scared iguanas, nocturnal creatures, scurrying over rocks and round bushes, gave frights to various people, and there was quite a respectable bubble of musketry round the island before the whistles of the officers and the shouted orders brought about a cessation of fire. The fact that no one was hit by the hundreds of bullets which went whistling in all directions is simply astonishing. On board Ziethen the sound was accepted as a welcome proof that the murderous fugitive had met his fate, the while Brown steadily made his way across the lagoon to a point on the shore broad on Ziethen’s starboard beam. Here, with some difficulty, he found a place where he could land, and once more he let drop his lifebelts into a cluster of cactus. Then he set his teeth and began to climb the steep cliff.
But his cuts and bruises and his stiffness and the awful rawness of his feet reduced his activity to a pitifully small minimum. Climb he must if he were to maintain for another day his annoyance of Ziethen. He must be high enough to be able to beat off attacks from the shore and to dominate Ziethen’s deck. Also he must be close in to the foot of an overhanging bit of cliff if he was to have any security against fire from above, and it would be as well if he had cover to his left and right in addition, seeing that there were. scores of riflemen at large upon the island seeking his death. What he needed was something like a cave halfway up the cliff, and for this, in the light of the late-rising moon, he peered about anxiously between his convulsive, agonized efforts to scale the successive precipices of the cliff.
His rifle and ammunition, too, were serious hindrances to his progress, and the sweat poured off him and his face was distorted with strain at each heartbreaking struggle. Both his feet and his hands left bloody imprints upon the rock where they touched it. Yet he struggled on, upwards and sideways, to where in the faint light he thought he could make out a shallow vertical cleft in the cliff face which might be suitable for his purpose. It was long past midnight before he reached it, passed judgement upon it, and roused himself to one further struggle, despite the stubborn reluctance of nerves and sinews, to climb yet a little higher to a better place still. There he fell half-fainting upon the harsh lava.
Even then, after half an hour’s rest, he fought his way back to consciousness again and raised his head and eyed Ziethen, whose malignant bulk, black in the faint light, swam on the magical water of the lagoon. On her starboard side, square to his front, hung a faint patch of light, and the noise of riveters came to his ears over the water. The hole in the ship’s side, screened forward and aft, and partly screened in front, had been lit by electric lights dangled over the side, and there the repairing crews were toiling to replace the damaged plates and striving to make up for the six hours’ delay Brown had imposed upon them. Through the gaps in the outer screen Brown could just see on occasions human figures moving back and forth, and with a snarl of fainting determination he slid his rifle forward. But he checked himself even as his finger reached the trigger. He was too shaky after his exertions to be sure of hitting hard and often without too many misses. Besides, a rifleman, however invisible by daylight, shows up all too plainly by night by reason of the flash of his weapon. With enemies possibly within close range he dared not (for the love of his duty, not of his life) expose himself to this danger without adequate chance of return. Brown’s fighting brain weighed all these considerations even while every fibre of his body shrieked with agony, and he reached a sound conclusion. He laid his rifle down, and then, before even he could settle himself comfortably, he collapsed on to the rifle butt. No one knows whether he fainted or slept, or both. And meanwhile the two hundred men of the landing party stumbled and swore as they endeavoured to sweep across the island, and still fired a stray shot or two when the strain became too much for their nerves.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BROWN WOKE, OR regained consciousness, just as dawn was climbing brilliantly up the sky. His first action was to drink temperately from the dwindling supply in his second water-bottle. His cracked lips and lava-impregnated mouth and throat permitted of no choice of action. Then, doggedly, he began to make sure of his position and situation. Looking out of his notch in the cliff face, hoisting himself cautiously on his knees to do so, he saw a dozen white figures creeping slowly on the very crest of the island a quarter of a mile from him. On the inner face of the island, round about his previous position, he saw about a dozen others perched precariously here and there, still endeavouring to carry out their fantastic orders to sweep the island. from one sea to another. Of the rest of the landing party Brown could see nothing, but he could guess shrewdly enough. They were scattered hither and thither over the outer face of Resolution, perhaps still struggling on, perhaps nursing cut feet or broken ankles, perhaps sleeping or dodging duty in the way unsupervised men will. Brown shrank down into his notch again, he was safe enough from observation, and out of sight, indeed, of nearly every point of the island.
In front, however, Ziethen was in full view. The gay screens hung out over the damaged part were like a box—applied to the ship’s side—a box defective down one edge, however. Through the gap Brown could see occasionally a white figure appear and disappear, although for the moment the noise of the hammers had ceased. Actually, with the removal of the damaged plates, the operation now in progress was the lowering down of the new plates to be riveted into position. It was in consequence of the demands of the tackle for this business that the booms of the screen had been shifted to leave the small gap Brown noted; and as Brown had not fired at the ship for fifteen hours a certain carelessness had been engendered, to say nothing of the fact that Ziethen believed, and could hardly help believing, that the landing party had killed Brown hours ago.
Brown pulled the oily rag through his rifle barrel; he oiled the breech, which was beginning to stick badly, and then he sighted carefully for the gap in the screen. He awaited the most favourable moment and then fired twice, quickly, and he killed the two men he could see. Then, to make the most of his surprise, he fired again and again through the screen scattering his shots here and there across it and up and down it. He actually, although he did not know it, hit one or two men, and his misses were quite efficacious also, in that they scared into jumpiness the men they did not hit. The moment when a ten-ton steel plate is swinging in tackles is a bad moment to be shot at.
The killings and the wounds and the interruption roused Ziethen to a pitch of fury previously unreached. Those on board were
maddened by the deaths of their friends and they were furiously angry with the landing party, who had so absurdly failed in its mission. Captain von Lutz, in a flaming rage, set the bridge semaphore into staccato action, and the wretched Lieutenant in command on shore, staggering bleary-eyed along the crest after a sleepless night of fevered action, read the messages he sent with a sick feeling at his heart. The vivid sentences poured out by a gesticulating semaphore as Captain von Lutz vehemently demanded what on earth the Lieutenant and landing party were about stung the wretched officer to the quick. A Japanese lieutenant would have committed suicide; a German one merely called out his last reserves of energy and tried to gather a body of the less faint-hearted and push on round the island to where Brown lay hidden.
On board Ziethen work was suspended temporarily—another triumph to Brown’s credit. Too many skilled ratings had been lost already for the Captain to order his remaining ones to take the chance of the bullets which Brown was sending at intervals through the screen. Instead he decided to turn Ziethen away from the point of attack, and to turn an unwieldy armoured cruiser, with her five hundred feet of length, and listing badly at that, in a lagoon wherein the tide was swirling in a whirlpool, was an operation calling for care and consuming much time. The two anchors had to be raised, the propellers set in motion, and Ziethen gently nursed into position, one anchor dropped, the set of the current combated, and then the other anchor dropped—and good holding ground was scarce in that fathomless crater. Altogether it was an hour before the delicate operation of mooring was completed and the delicate operation of lowering the new plates into position was resumed. Brown heard at length the clatter of the riveting, and he knew that the delays he had imposed upon Ziethen were ending at last.
But the labours of the landing party were still in full blast. The Lieutenant found it hard to move any sort of force along the island. His two hundred men were scattered over a mile of almost impossible country, and the problem of supplies suddenly leaped into prominence and added another burden to the Lieutenant’s overloaded shoulders. Every man had landed with a day’s water; they had been violently exerting themselves for nearly twenty-four hours, and nine men out of ten had consumed the last drop of their water several hours back. The Equatorial sun, mounting steadily higher, called the attention of everyone to his overwhelming thirst. The unhappy Lieutenant signalled to his captain that he could not hope to move without water. Captain von Lutz signalled back in blistering fashion, but the Lieutenant, under the spur of most dire and urgent necessity, held to his contention. The Captain, raging, sent off water to him round the island, and his Commander as well, to take over control, under strict orders not to return without bringing back Brown, dead or alive.
For the moral situation was serious. No captain could dream of setting out on a long and arduous cruise with a crew in such a temper as Ziethen’s was. Thirty-four men killed and wounded (their loss alone would be a serious nuisance with prize crews to be thought of) and two ignominious reverses had upset discipline to a tiresome extent. If Ziethen were to sail away without taking vengeance on Brown the crew would lose all respect for their officers. And discipline would be under severe strain on a raiding voyage, with its necessary accompaniments of coaling at sea, and loot, and imminent prospects of a fight. Captain von Lutz, weighing all factors in the situation, decided that Brown must die, even though killing him meant prolonging their dangerous sojourn in the vicinity of land and postponing their ravening onslaught upon British shipping.
So the water was sent, and the Kapitan-Leutnant took over the command; and he did not find it an easy burden. To distribute water among his scattered, weary command, each individual of whom was stuck where he was nearly as effectively as a fly upon a flypaper, consumed hours of time and much of the strength of the twenty men he brought as reinforcements. It was afternoon before he was ready to make his first move, and by that time the riveting on Ziethen was completed and she was a whole ship again, ready to steam out of Resolution. Brown could now credit himself with further delays to her—all the length of time, in fact, which he occupied in dying.
The Commander acted with energy. He sent his casualties—heat-stroke, broken ankles, cut feet—down the cliff to where the first landing had been made. There the men Brown had wounded the day before at last received attention and water: the dead and wounded were sent back to the ship for attention or burial, but all this was in rear of the Commander’s headquarters and main line of assault. Having purged his force of its weaker elements, the Commander proceeded to make his way along the crest of the island, while a boat with full crew lay ready to dash to any point to which it might be signalled, and another one landed more men across the opening of the lagoon to cut off any attempt Brown might make to evade attack again. The Commander, thrusting aside with contempt the expostulations of the Lieutenant he had superseded, still did not realize the hopelessness of movement on the land, or, if he did, he did not care how much time the business consumed as long as it was done thoroughly. From Ziethen’s bridge he had watched the failure of the first frontal assault, and he was not going to throw away another dozen lives in that fashion. These long, weary flanking movements were the alternative, and he accepted it stoically. All the same, a day of little water and a night of no rest had taken most of the heart out of his men, and it was woefully slow progress that he made. Night came down and found his men still tangled utterly in the crevasses of Resolution. It found Brown, too, lodged in his cleft in the cliff, tormented with thirst, running a dry tongue round his cracked lips, agonized by the pain in his hands and feet, bitten in every part of his body by the vicious flies, but all the same without a thought of surrender. That simply did not occur to him. It was not consonant with his heredity nor with his childhood training.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HERR HANS SCHMIDT lay sleeping peacefully and noisily in his porch in Panama. He lay on his back; when he went to sleep his hands had been crossed upon his stomach, but with the passage of time they had slid down the incline until now they lay on his chest, so that his attitude was entirely one of peace and resignation. Beside him Frau Schmidt slumbered just as peacefully and not quite as noisily; for the Schmidts believed in maintaining the good old tradition of the family double bed despite the heat of the tropics.
Verily was Herr Schmidt entitled to the blissful sleep which comes of a sense of completed duty. He was head of the German unofficial representatives on the Pacific coast, and all his work so far had been thorough and successful. He had gleaned from stray references the strength of Admiral Craddock’s squadron and he had reported it to Admiral von Spee, and the result had been obvious at Coronel. At Guayaquil and Callao he had colliers ready to sail on the instant—one of them, thanks to lavish expenditure of funds and jugglery with papers, actually under the British flag. Should von Spee decide to return northwards from Coronel he would find abundance of best Welsh steam coal awaiting him, or if Ziethen turned up unexpectedly, there would be the same kindly reception ready for her. Everywhere German agents were seeking bits of news to report to him, so that he could piece them together and pass them on. He knew all about the British battle cruiser in the West Indies, and he could name the ships which were watching lest German commerce destroyers should push out of American Atlantic ports; he did not know, all the same, about Admiral Sturdee’s fleet which was fitting out in England, but for that he bears no blame. The discovery of the object of this squadron was the business of the central organization, which failed lamentably. No, Schmidt had done everything that could be expected of him, and he was fully entitled to the blissful sleep which encompassed him and which was about to be so rudely interrupted.
The telephone at the bedside rang sharply, and Schmidt started up, blinking himself into rapid wakefulness. Beside him his wife muttered heavily, humped over on her side, and clawed her tangled hair out of her eyes. She switched on the light while Schmidt pulled back the mosquito net and reached for the telephone instrument.
The first
sounds to reach his ear were apparently meaningless gibberish, but it seemingly did not disconcert him. He uttered gibberish in reply, and with password and countersign thus exchanged his agent could safely pour forth his news into Herr Schmidt’s receptive ear. This torrent of rapid German was of an import which made Herr Schmidt start in surprise.
“What?” he demanded. “Where are they now?”
“They were going through Gatun when I tried telephone first, sir,” came the answer. “They must be almost at the Cut now.”
“But why did I not hear of this at once?” demanded Herr Schmidt savagely.
The voice at the receiver fell away into a placatory whine.
“I couldn’t, sir. Really, sir. Those two Englishmen here were too closely after us. They’ve taken Schulz. I’m sure they have. I’ve told you about them often before. I simply couldn’t get a line to Panama before this. They were all too busy, sir.”
“Rubbish!” exploded Herr Schmidt. “You Gatun set are a gang of cowards and worse. You say you don’t even know the battle cruiser’s name?”
“No, sir. Couldn’t get it anyway. But it’s a battle cruiser for certain. Twenty thousand tons. And the light cruiser’s the Penzance. ”
“Bah!” said Schmidt. “Get her name at once. And all about her—where she comes from and what she’s doing. If you can’t do that in Gatun you’re not on my pay list any more. Report again in two hours’ time.”
Schmidt slammed down the receiver and heaved himself out of bed. His hairy legs protruded beneath his brief nightshirt, and there was a hint of hairy chest at its open throat. He put on his thick round glasses with one hand and reached for his trousers with the other. While pulling on his trousers he thrust his bare feet anyhow into his shoes. Then, with a growl at his wife, he went clattering out of the house to the garage. Three minutes later, in the growing light of dawn, his car was roaring out of Panama with its headlights blazing, while Schmidt, thick body bent, grasped the wheel in his big hairy hands. Out of Panama he went, with his car leaping madly over the fantastic bumps and hollows of the country road. He tore through the ruins of Old Panama and onward where the road degenerated into a mere track at the spot where the Canal Zone adjoined the Republic of Panama. A steady hand and powerful wrists were necessary to hold the car to the track, but burly Hans Schmidt was a brilliant driver. He swung aside on to an even narrower path where the undergrowth crashed beneath his wheels and tore at the body. Uphill he went, his foot steady on the accelerator, until the path ran into a small clearing beyond which stood a tall half-ruined building which, nevertheless, by its patching and by the condition of its courtyard, showed signs of recent occupation. Here Schmidt stopped the car, and with an agility unexpected in one of his bulk he scrambled out and rushed into the building and up the rotten stone stairs.