The Indian Drum by William MacHarg (classic english novels txt) 📕

Alan ran aft along the starboard side, catching at the rail as the deck tilted; the sounds within the hull and the tremors following each sound came to him more distinctly as he advanced. Taking the shortest way to the car deck, he turned into the cabins to reach the passengers' companionway. The noises from the car deck, no longer muffled by the cabins, clanged and resounded in terrible tumult; with the clang and rumble of metal, rose shouts and roars of men.

To liberate and throw overboard heavily loaded cars from an endangered ship was so desperate an undertaking and so certain to cost life that men attempted it only in final extremities, when the ship must be lightened at any cost. Alan had never seen the effect of such an attempt, but he had heard of it as the fear which sat always on the hearts of the men who navigate the ferries—the cars loose on a rolling, lurching ship! He was going to that now. Two figures appeared before him, one half supporting, half dragging the other. Alan sprang and offered aid; but the injured man called to him to go on; others needed him. Alan went past them and down the steps to the car deck. Half-way down, the priest whom he had noticed among the passengers stood staring aft, a tense, black figure; beside him other passengers were clinging to the handrail and staring down in awestruck fascination. The lowest steps had been crushed back and half up-torn; some monstrous, inanimate thing was battering about below; but the space at the foot of the steps was clear at that moment. Alan leaped over the ruin of the steps and down upon the car deck.

A giant iron casting six feet high and yards across and tons in weight, tumbled and ground before him; it was this which had swept away the steps; he had seen it, with two others like it, upon a flat car which had been shunted upon one of the tracks on the starboard side of the ferry, one of the tracks on his left now as he faced the stern. He leaped upon and over the great casting, which turned and spun with the motion of the ship as he vaulted it. The car deck was a pitching, swaying slope; the cars nearest him were still upon their tracks, but they tilted and swayed uglily from side to side; the jacks were gone from under them; the next cars already were hurled from the rails, their wheels screaming on the steel deck, clanging and thudding together in their couplings.

Alan ran aft between them. All the crew who could be called from deck and engine room and firehold were struggling at the fantail, under the direction of the captain, to throw off the cars. The mate was working as one of the men, and with him was Benjamin Corvet. The crew already must have loosened and thrown over the stern three cars from the two tracks on the port side; for there was a space vacant; and as the train charged into that space and the men threw themselves upon it, Alan leaped with them.

The leading car—a box car, heavily laden—swayed and shrieked with the pitching of the ship. Corvet sprang between it and the car coupled behind; he drew out the pin from the coupling, and the men with pinch-bars attacked the car to isolate it and force it aft along the track. It moved slowly at first; then leaped its length; sharply with the lift of the deck, it stopped, toppled toward the men who, yelling to one another, scrambled away. The hundred-ton mass swung from side to side; the ship dropped swiftly to starboard, and the stern went down; the car charged, and its aftermost wheels left the deck; it swung about, slewed, and jammed across both port tracks. The men attacked it with dismay; Corvet's shout called them away and rallied them farther back; they ran with him to the car from which he had uncoupled it.

It was a flat car laden with steel beams. At Corvet's command, the crew ranged themselves beside it with bars. The bow of the ferry rose to some great wave and, with a cry to the men, Corvet pulled the pin. The others thrust with their bars, and the car slid down the sloping track; and Corvet, caught by some lashing of the beams, came with it. The car crashed into the box car, splintered it, turned it, shoved it, and thrust it over the fantail into the water; the flat car, telescoped into it, was dragged after. Alan leaped upon it and catching at Corvet, freed him and flung him down to the deck, and dropped with him. A cheer rose as the car cleared the fantail, dove, and disappeared.

Alan clambered to his feet. Corvet already was back among the cars again, shouting orders; the mate and the men who had followed him before leaped at his yells. The lurch which had cleared the two cars together had jumped others away from the rails. They hurtled from side to side, splintering against the stanchions which stayed them from crashing across the center line of the ship; rebounding, they battered against the cars on the outer tracks and crushed them against the side of the ship. The wedges, blocks, and chains which had secured them banged about on the deck, useless; the men who tried to control these cars, dodging as they charged, no longer made attempt to secure the wheels. Corvet called them to throw ropes and chains to bind the loads which were letting go; the heavier loads—steel beams, castings, machinery—snapped their lashings, tipped from their flat cars and thundered down the deck. The cars tipped farther, turned over; others balanced back; it was upon their wheels that they charged forward, half riding one another, crashing and demolishing, as the ferry pitched; it was upon their trucks that they tottered and battered from side to side as the deck swayed. Now the stern again descended; a line of cars swept for the fantail. Corvet's cry came to Alan through the screaming of steel and the clangor of destruction. Corvet's cry sent men with bars beside the cars as the fantail dipped into the water; Corvet, again leading his crew, cleared the leader of those madly charging cars and ran it over the stern.

The fore trucks fell and, before the rear trucks reached the edge, the stern lifted and caught the car in the middle; it balanced, half over the water, half over the deck. Corvet crouched under the car with a crowbar; Alan and two others went with him; they worked the car on until the weight of the end over the water tipped it down; the balance broke, and the car tumbled and dived. Corvet, having cleared another hundred tons, leaped back, calling to the crew.

They followed him again, unquestioning, obedient. Alan followed close to him. It was not pity which stirred him now for Benjamin Corvet; nor was it bitterness; but it certainly was not contempt. Of all the ways in which he had fancied finding Benjamin Corvet, he had never thought of seeing him like this!

It was, probably, only for a flash; but the great quality of leadership which he once had possessed, which Sherrill had described to Alan and which had been destroyed by the threat over him, had returned to him in this desperate emergency which he had created. How much or how little of his own condition Corvet understood, Alan could not tell; it was plain only that he comprehended that he had been the cause of the catastrophe, and in his fierce will to repair it he not only disregarded all risk to himself; he also had summoned up from within him and was spending the last strength of his spirit. But he was spending it in a losing fight.

He got off two more cars; yet the deck only dipped lower, and water washed farther and farther up over the fantail. New avalanches of iron descended as box cars above burst open; monstrous dynamo drums, broad-banded steel wheels and splintered crates of machinery battered about. Men, leaping from before the charging cars, got caught in the murderous melee of iron and steel and wheels; men's shrill cries came amid the scream of metal. Alan, tugging at a crate which had struck down a man, felt aid beside him and, turning, he saw the priest whom he had passed on the stairs. The priest was bruised and bloody; this was not his first effort to aid. Together they lifted an end of the crate; they bent—Alan stepped back, and the priest knelt alone, his lips repeating the prayer for absolution. Screams of men came from behind; and the priest rose and turned. He saw men caught between two wrecks of cars crushing together; there was no moment to reach them; he stood and raised his arms to them, his head thrown back, his voice calling to them, as they died, the words of absolution.

Three more cars at the cost of two more lives the crew cleared, while the sheathing of ice spread over the steel inboard, and dissolution of all the cargo became complete. Cut stone and motor parts, chasses and castings, furniture and beams, swept back and forth, while the cars, burst and splintered, became monstrous missiles hurtling forward, sidewise, aslant, recoiling. Yet men, though scattered singly, tried to stay them by ropes and chains while the water washed higher and higher. Dimly, far away, deafened out by the clangor, the steam whistle of Number 25 was blowing the four long blasts of distress; Alan heard the sound now and then with indifferent wonder. All destruction had come for him to be contained within this car deck; here the ship loosed on itself all elements of annihilation; who could aid it from without? Alan caught the end of a chain which Corvet flung him and, though he knew it was useless, he carried it across from one stanchion to the next. Something, sweeping across the deck, caught him and carried him with it; it brought him before the coupled line of trucks which hurtled back and forth where the rails of track three had been. He was hurled before them and rolled over; something cold and heavy pinned him down; and upon him, the car trucks came.

But, before them, something warm and living—a hand and bare arm catching him quickly and pulling at him, tugged him a little farther on. Alan, looking up, saw Corvet beside him; Corvet, unable to move him farther, was crouching down there with him. Alan yelled to him to leap, to twist aside and get out of the way; but Corvet only crouched closer and put his arms over Alan; then the wreckage came upon them, driving them apart. As the movement stopped, Alan still could see Corvet dimly by the glow of the incandescent lamps overhead; the truck separated them. It bore down upon Alan, holding him motionless and, on the other side, it crushed upon Corvet's legs.

He turned over, as far as he could, and spoke to Alan. "You have been saving me, so now I tried to save you," he said simply. "What reason did you have for doing that? Why have you been keeping by me?"

"I'm Alan Conrad of Blue Rapids, Kansas," Alan cried to him. "And you're Benjamin Corvet! You know me; you sent for me! Why did you do that?"

Corvet made no reply to this. Alan, peering at him underneath the truck, could see that his hands were pressed against his face and that his body shook. Whether this was from some new physical pain from the movement of the wreckage, Alan did not know till he lowered his hands after a moment; and now he did not heed Alan or seem even to be aware of