Aground

  Ingram nodded. “And you thought if you could catch up with him you might get some of the money back?”

  “No. It was four months ago, and the way he lives he’d have spent it all by now. I just wanted to try to get the schooner back, to salvage something out of the mess. I’d been kicked where it hurt—right in the pride—and I was pretty bitter about it. I think I even took some of it out on you, that first night. When you said you weren’t going to charge me anything for helping me find her, I didn’t believe you, frankly. I thought you had an angle too. Great little judge of character, this Osborne girl.”

  “Well, you couldn’t be blamed too much for believing him,” he said. “After all, he wasn’t a thief when you knew him before.”

  “Don’t be so modest, Ingram. I was talking about how wrong I was about you.”

  “Apparently there was an epidemic of it that night. I was wrong too. In fact, I was convinced I wasn’t going to like you, so I may have set a new record for being mistaken.”

  Her face was a pale blur across from him in the thickening dusk. “Thanks, Skipper.”

  He came alert then, suddenly aware it had been twenty minutes or more since they’d heard a shot from Morrison. Goofing off, he chided himself; they could get themselves killed. “We’d better get on the ball,” he said. “There are two ways Morrison can get aboard now—up the bobstay under the bowsprit, or up this anchor warp. Either way, though, he’ll make enough noise so we can hear him if we’re listening. I’ll be working back here, so you go forward. Lie down on the port side of the forward deckhouse and just listen. If you hear anything at all, sing out.”

  “Right.” She disappeared into the darkness forward.

  He sat still for a moment. The vast silence was unbroken except for another creak as the schooner lay over a little farther on the outgoing tide. He stood up and began taking down the awning. He rolled it up, deposited it on the deckhouse out of the way, and freed the main boom from its supporting gallows. The mainsail was jib-headed, so there was only one halyard; he unshackled it from the head of the sail, bent a piece of line to it, and hauled down on the fall at the base of the mast until he could reach the wire. He made the new nylon line fast at the thimble, hauled down on the other end again, carried it aft, and shackled it to the end of the boom. He also made two pieces of light line fast to the end of the boom for use as guys, since he was going to need the main sheet to hoist the ammunition boxes. He freed the lower end of the sheet.

  After raising the boom with the topping lift until it was well clear of the gallows, he secured it, and hauled on the halyard until—as well as he could tell in the dark by feel—the strain was evenly divided between the two. This was important, because if either one had to take the load by itself it might part, in which case the other would carry away too. He swung the boom over a little to port to get it away from the gallows, and secured it with the guys. He stopped then to listen, and to put a hand on the tackle holding the anchor warp. There was only silence, and no vibration of any kind on the line. “You all right?” he called out softly in the darkness.

  “Just fine, Skipper,” her answer came back.

  The worst of it, he thought, was that there was no way to guess what Morrison would do, or what he might be planning out there in the dark. He was dangerous, and would be as long as he was alive and anywhere near. Even if there were no longer any hope of escape, he’d still kill them if he got the chance, just as pointlessly as he had killed Ruiz for trying to cross him. The shots at his head while he was taking out the kedge anchor proved that; if Morrison couldn’t escape, nobody was going to.

  He muscled the five boxes of ammunition aft along the deck until they were under the outer end of the boom. Locating the rope slings he had cut, he put one about each box with a double wrap, crossing at right angles, and tied it off with a free end about eight feet long. He shackled the lower block of the main sheet to the sling where it crossed and hoisted away until the blocks were jammed and would go no farther, caught the free end of the sling, and made it fast about the boom and the furled sail several feet inboard from the end so as to have room to suspend all five of them. Then he slacked off with the tackle, and disengaged it. The second box went up, and the third. He stopped to listen for Morrison, and then cautiously hoisted the fourth. He was working right under the boom, and if anything carried away now he’d be crushed. Before he hoisted the fifth, he stood on it and reached up to push a hand against the twin wires of the topping lift and the halyard. It was all right; they appeared to be taking an equal strain. He hoisted the fifth box. Everything held. He sighed with relief and gently hauled the boom outboard just enough to suspend the boxes over the water a few feet off the port quarter. If it gave way now, at least they wouldn’t come crashing down on deck. He tied off the guy and secured the main sheet again to hold it in position. Ducking down into the cockpit, he flicked on the cigarette lighter and looked at his watch. It was 9:35. Low tide in about two hours, he thought; the deck was listing sharply to port now.

  He slipped forward along the port side and knelt beside her. She sat up. “We’re all set,” he said. “Nothing to do now until high tide.”

  “That’ll be about dawn, won’t it?”

  “Right around there.”

  “Do you think we’ll make it then?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “We’ll get off this time. But why don’t you go back to the cockpit and get some sleep? I’ll watch for Morrison.”

  “You can’t watch both places at once.”

  “Yes. I can sit here where I can keep a hand on this tackle holding the anchor warp. If he tries to climb it, I’ll feel the vibration.”

  “I’d rather stay up and talk,” she said. “We can talk, can’t we?”

  “Sure. As long as we keep a lookout.”

  They slid aft until they were beside the cleat holding the tackle, and sat down on the sloping deck with their backs against the deckhouse in the velvet night overlaid with the shining dust of stars. There was no breath of air stirring, and no sound anywhere, and they seemed to be caught up and suspended in some vast and cosmic hush outside of time and lost in space. They sat shoulder to shoulder, unspeaking, with Ingram’s left hand resting lightly on the taut and motionless nylon leading aft, and when he put the other hand down on deck it was on hers and she turned hers slightly so they met and clasped together. After a long time she stirred and said in a small voice, “This is a great conversation, isn’t it? I hope I didn’t promise anything brilliant.” He turned and looked at the soft gleam of tawny hair and the pale shape of her face in the starlight and then she was in his arms and he was holding her hungrily and almost roughly as he kissed her. There was a wild and wonderful sweetness about it with her arms tight around his neck and the strange, miraculous breaching of the walls of loneliness behind which he had lived so long, and then she was pushing back with her hands against his shoulders.

  “I think maybe we had better talk,” she said shakily.

  “I expect you’re right,” he agreed. “But you’d better get started.”

  “Two platoons of Morrisons in full pack and dragging a jeep could walk right over us and we wouldn’t even notice it.” She took a hurried breath, and went on. “And as to whether Morrison is the only hazard, I admit nothing. I plead the Fifth Amendment. But what do they do to these damn stars down here, anyway? Polish them? Now it’s your turn to say something, Ingram. You can’t expect me to carry on a conversation all by myself.”

  “I think you’re magnificent,” he said. “Does that help?”

  “Not a bit, and you know it. As a matter of fact, it can’t be much of a secret that I think you’re pretty wonderful yourself, but at least I told you so under perfectly ordinary, everyday circumstances, in bright sunlight with a man shooting at me with a rifle. I didn’t pull a sneaky trick like silhouetting my big square head against a bunch of cheap, flashy stars that anybody can see are phony. . . .” Her voice trailed off in a helpless gurgle of laughter, and she
said, “Oh, I’m not making any sense. Why don’t I just shut up?”

  When he raised his lips from hers she drew a finger tip along the side of his face and said softly, “You never have to hit Ingram twice with a cue. Not ol’ Cap Ingram. Do you think I’m pretty horrible?”

  “Hmmm. No-o. That’s not the exact word I’d use.”

  “I am, though. I’m as brazen as a Chinese gong and about as subtle as a mine cave-in. I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes wondering when in Heaven’s name you were going to accept the fact you had to kiss me. All escape was cut off, and there was no honorable way to retreat.” He touched his lips gently to the puffed and battered eye. “Shut up,” he said.

  “The only thing I didn’t realize was how fast it might start to get out of control. I should have, though. I worked so hard at trying to loathe you I was worn out to begin with. Did anybody ever tell you you’re a hard man to detest, Ingram? I mean, at a party or something, where there was one of those pauses in the conversation when everybody’s trying to think of something to say—”

  She gasped as a bullet struck something above their heads and screamed off into the night. On the heels of it came the whiplash sound of the gun from somewhere directly behind them. They slid down and lay flat on deck against the side of the house. The rifle cracked three more times in rapid succession, two of the bullets striking the hull on the other side. She lay pressed against him; he could feel her trembling.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered. “It’s gone on too long.”

  “We’ll be away from here in the morning. And we’re perfectly safe down here.”

  “You don’t think we ought to go back to the cockpit?”

  “No. This is fine. We’ve got so much list now he couldn’t hit us if we were sitting up.” He was thinking of those boxes of ammunition suspended back there and wondering what would happen if they were hit. They probably wouldn’t explode, but some of the cartridges might fire. There were five evenly spaced shots then. Two of them struck the schooner’s hull.

  “He’s nearer, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “Yes. The tide’s gone out, so he’s waded out on the flat south of the sand spit.”

  “How close can he get?”

  “Not under a hundred and fifty yards. That channel is still over his head, even at dead low tide.” I wonder how he’s carrying the ammunition, he thought. Probably made a pack of some sort out of the blanket.

  “How can he see to shoot in the dark?”

  “He can’t, very well. You’ll notice he’s missing a lot. But he’s right down on the surface, firing at the silhouette, and he probably has something white on the muzzle of the rifle. Maybe a strip of his shirt.”

  Another bullet struck the hull. Two apparently missed. Another hit. Subconsciously, he was counting. They would probably go through the planking from where he was firing now, and with the list the schooner had some of them would be below the water line, which was probably what Morrison had in mind. It wouldn’t matter, though, unless there were a great number of them; she had two bilge pumps, one power-driven, and could handle a lot of water.

  “I’m tired of being shot at,” she said. “And sick to death of being so stinking brave about it. I want to have hysterics, like anybody else.”

  He held her in his arms and spoke against her ear. “Go ahead.”

  “It was mostly just blackmail. But keep talking there.”

  “Do you know when it first dawned on me that I was probably crazy about you? It was when Ruiz came after you this morning, and I watched you wade out to the raft, torn pants, black eye—”

  “Well, it figures, Ingram. Who could resist a vision like that?”

  “No.” He groped for words to express what he had actually seen, the crazy honesty of her, the insouciance, the blithe and unquenchable spirit. “You were so—so damned undefeated.”

  “Let’s don’t talk about me. I want to hear about you.”

  The firing went on. They talked. He told her about Frances, and about the Canción, and Mexico, and the boatyard in San Juan. He mentioned the fire only briefly but she sensed there was more to it, and drew the rest of the story from him.

  “That’s why you limp sometimes, isn’t it?” she asked quietly. “And what you were dreaming about when you were beating at the sand.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Ingram, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right now.”

  The schooner’s list increased as the tide approached dead low, and it was difficult clinging to the sloping deck. The shooting stopped for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then started again. He had to go back after more ammunition, Ingram thought. If he’s going to swim out here, he’ll do it on the flood so if he doesn’t get aboard he can make it back. He wouldn’t tackle it on the ebb because he might get carried out to sea. Flicking on the lighter for an instant, he looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past midnight. The tide should have turned already. There was another shot. I’d better go below and check now, he thought, while I’m still sure where he is. He told her.

  “You think water’s coming in?” she asked.

  “Maybe a little. If there is, we’ll pump it out.”

  “You won’t be long?”

  “No.”

  “If anything happens to you—”

  He kissed her. “What could happen?” He crawled aft and dropped into the cockpit just as Morrison shot again. Somewhere in the blackness below there was the sound of running water. That didn’t make sense. It couldn’t run in, not that way. He started down the crazily slanting ladder and even before his head came below the level of the hatch he smelled it, and the old nightmare of terror reached up to engulf him. He lost his grip on the handrail and fell, and wound up against the port bulkhead under the radiotelephone, on his hands and knees in the cold lake of gasoline that extended up out of the bilge as the boat lay over on her side. He could hear it still running out of the punctured tanks in the darkness behind him as he fought against the whisperings of panic. If he lost his head completely and ran into something the fumes might kill him before he could get out. He pushed off the bulkhead and reached upward, groping for the ladder. His fingers brushed it. Then he was up in the cockpit, stretched out on the cushions on the port side, shaking all over and trying to keep from being sick. His hands and his legs from the knees down were very cool from the evaporation of the gasoline.

  11

  He thought of her, and hoped she hadn’t heard him come up. He needed a few minutes alone to pull himself together; he couldn’t face her this way. But still he was going to have to tell her; there was no way to avoid it. Their chances of escape were almost gone now, and until he got the last of that gasoline out of there they were living on a potential bomb. A pint of gasoline in the bilge could form an explosive mixture in the air inside a boat, and they had two hundred gallons of it. Just one spark from anything—static electricity, a light switch, even a short circuit in the electrical system from one of Morrison’s bullets—and the Dragoon would go up like a Roman candle.

  Using the engine was out of the question. Even if any fuel remained in the tanks when the schooner righted herself, trying to start it would be an act of madness when the slightest spark at the starter brushes or the generator could blow them out of the water. And even after he pumped the bilges dry, it wouldn’t be safe; not for days.

  They had to be washed out, and ventilated. But the mere consideration of these technical matters was beginning to have its calming effect; potentially ghastly as they might be, they were still technical, and fear receded as the professional mind took over. They didn’t need the damned engine to get back to Florida, if they could only get her afloat. And there was still a chance of that—a slight one, but a chance. Pumping the gasoline out would lighten her by another thousand to fifteen hundred pounds, and they might be able to pull her off with the kedge alone now that he had the gear rigged to haul her down on her side. At that moment another bullet slapped into the hull up for
ward and the sound of Morrison’s rifle came to him across the water. That completed the job. He had hated few people in his life, but right now he hated Morrison, and he thought of him with a cold and implacable anger. They wouldn’t be defeated by him. If it’s the last thing I ever do on earth, he thought, I’m going to beat him.

  He slipped forward along the deck. When he knelt beside her, she said, “I smell gasoline.”

  “It’s on me, a little on my trousers.” He told her about it. She took it well, as he should have known she would. “I don’t think it’s going to change things too much. We may still get off on this tide. Just remember, don’t smoke. Don’t turn on a light. Don’t even go below. And that means even after I get it pumped overboard.”

  “I understand. What shall I do?”

  The schooner creaked as she came up a little in the darkness. “Just listen for Morrison,” he said. “As long as he’s shooting, it’s all right, but the tide’s flooding now and it’ll drive him off that flat pretty soon. If he’s going to try to get aboard it’ll be within the next few hours. Go right up to the corner of the forward deckhouse so you’ll be sure to hear him. The gasoline going overboard will make some noise.”