The Burning Bridge by Philip Verrill Mighels (the best novels to read TXT) 📕

a portion of the slanted deck that seemed to be utterly deserted. A gust of wind blew out the candle. The sky was clear. An uneven fragment of the aging moon shone dully on the broken ship, whence fearful sounds continued to arise.

Only one of the boats had been dropped to the tide—to be instantly whirled inside the parting steamer, on the torrent filling her mighty belly, where the latest lurch had laid her widely open.

Grenville ran to the starboard rail for a glance towards the struggle farther forward. There, about the impotent crew, laboring hotly with people, boats and davits no longer adjusted to normal working order, the wildest confusion existed.

A boat that hung out above the sea was filled with screaming beings. Some madman arose and slashed with maniacal fury at the rope of the blocks, to hasten the craft's descent. Of a sudden its bow shot perpendicularly downward, its stern still high in the air. Its cargo dropped out like leaden weights, while the empty shell, like a pendulum, swayed to and fro above the smothered cries.

To join such a throng would be but to choose a larger company in which to perish. Grenville saw that the steamer must presently drop from her rock and sound illimitable depths. This could hardly be delayed for more than ten minutes longer.

A sickening qualm assailed his vitals at the thought of Elaine, doomed to drown thus helplessly, along with himself and the others. He knew that not only were the boats insufficient, but there was no time left to load and launch them!

Then, at length, he remembered the life-raft on the roof. Once more, with his arm supporting Elaine, he clambered up a tilted stairway. The place was deserted. The raft was there—but securely fastened to the planking, fore and aft and at the sides! The ropes that bound it down were thick and doubled!

With his knife the man attacked them desperately. The blade broke out of the handle when one strand only had been severed. His second blade was small and useless for such a labor.

He groaned, for a ghastly tremor was seizing the "Inca" as she hung above some crumbling abyss for a final plunge to the bottom. Then the moonlight gleamed on the carpenter's adze, which had slid down the deck to the railing. He darted upon it like an animal, and, hastening back, swung it with swift and savage blows that severed the ropes like cheese.

"Quick! Quick!" he shouted to Elaine, as he flung the implement from him; and, catching her roughly about the waist, he bore her face downward beside himself, full length upon the raft.

It was already slightly in motion, where the ship was toppling to her grave!

CHAPTER IV THE NIGHT—AND MORNING

With a rattle and scraping along the deck, the device with the two prone figures desperately clinging to its surface, was halted and tilted nearly level as it struck a spar and partially mounted upon it.

A sudden glare lit up the scene where the fire had burst through shattered windows. Screams yet more appalling than those already piercing the gale arose with the movement of the vessel. A picture grotesque and monstrous was for one awful moment presented. The huge iron entrails of the vessel heaved up into sight with her breaking. Her funnels, masts, and superstructure pointed outward, strangely horizontal. Innumerable loose things rattled down the decks. She belched forth flame and clouds of steam, against which one huge iron rib, rudely torn on its end to the semblance of a giant finger, seemed pointing the way to inscrutable eternity.

The lantern, up at the "Inca's" masthead, describing an arc as it swept across the heavens, was the last thing Grenville noted. He thought how insignificantly it would sizzle in the sea! Then he and Elaine, with raft and all, were flung far out, by the suddenly accelerated velocity of the doomed leviathan, turning keel upwards as it sank. When they struck, their puny float dived under like a crockery platter, shied from some Titanic hand.

With all his strength the man clung fast to Elaine and the lattice-like planking of their deck. It seemed to Grenville, still submerged, he could never resist the force of the waves to wash them backwards to death. It appeared, moreover, the raft would never return to the top. A million bubbles broke about his ears. He felt they were diving to deeps illimitable.

With a rush of waters drumming on their senses, it shot precipitately upward at last, till air and spray greeted them together. Then, sucked deep under, anew, and backward, by the gurgling vortex where the ship had gone, and swirling about, pivoting wildly, as the raft now threatened to plunge edge downward to the nethermost caverns of the hungry sea, they met a counter-violence that forced it once more towards the surface.

The boilers had burst in the steamer's hold, with confusion to all those tides of suction. Erratically diving here and there, a helpless prey to chaotic cross currents in all directions, the float swung giddily in the mid abyss, while the water walls baffled one another.

Elaine, even more than Grenville, was bursting with explosive breath when, at length, the raft came twisting once more to the chill, sweet region of the gale. And even then strong currents drew it fiercely in their wake before it rode freely on the waters.

Dripping and gasping, Grenville half rose to scan the troubled billows for companions in distress. Not a sound could he hear, save the swash of the waves. Not a light appeared in all that void, save the distant, indifferent stars.

Elaine, too, stirred, and raised herself up to a posture half sitting. She was hatless. Her hair was streaming down across her face and shoulders in strands too wet for the wind to ravel. Her eyes were blazing wildly.

"The ship?" she said. "What happened?"

"Sunk." He stood up. Their platform was steadying buoyantly as it drifted in the breeze. "I can't even see the spot," he added, presently. "We couldn't propel this raft to the place, no matter who might be floating."

"It's terrible!" she whispered, faintly, as one afraid to accuse the Fates aloud. "Couldn't we even—— You think they are all—all gone?"

"I'll shout," said Grenville, merely to humor the pity in her breast. His long, loud "Halloo" rolled weirdly out across the wolf-like pack of waves, three—four—a half dozen times.

There was not the feeblest murmur of response. Yet he felt that, perhaps, one boatload at least might have sped away in safety.

"God help them!" he said, when the silence became once more insupportable. "He only knows where any of us are!"

"After all we'd been through!" she shivered in awe. "If only we two were really saved—— Oh, there must be land, somewhere about, if the Captain was trying to reach a port! But, of course, this isn't even a boat, and, perhaps, it will finally sink!"

He tried to summon an accent of hope to his voice.

"Oh, no; it will float indefinitely. It's sure to turn up somewhere in the end."

"We haven't food—or even water," she answered him, understandingly. "What shall we do to-morrow?"

"We are drifting rapidly northward. We may arrive somewhere by to-morrow.... You'd better sit down. It taxes your strength to stand."

"God help us all!" she suddenly prayed in a broken voice, and, sinking lower where she sat, was shaken by one convulsion of sobbing, in pity for all she had seen. She had no thoughts left for their earlier, personal encounter.

For a time Grenville stood there, braced to take the motion of the raft. The wind continued brisk and undiminished. Aided by tides, which had turned an hour earlier, to flow in its general direction, it drove the raft steadily onward over miles of gray, unresting sea.

The water slopped up between the slats whereon Elaine was sitting. She was cold, despite the tropic latitude. She was hopeful, only because she wished to contribute no unnecessary worry to the man.

Grenville at length sat down at her side, but they made no effort to converse. Elaine was exhausted by the sickening strain and the shock of that tragic end. For an hour or more she sat there limply, being constantly wet by the waves. She attempted, finally, to curl herself down and make a pillow of her arm, and there she sank into something akin to sleep.

Gently Grenville thrust out his foot and lifted her head upon the cushion of flesh above his ankle. The night wore slowly on. Three o'clock came grayly over the world-edge, where the waves made a scalloped horizon.

Slowly the watery universe expanded, as the dawn-light palely increased. By four Grenville's gaze could search all the round of the ocean, but nothing broke either sky or sea.

Five o'clock developed merely color on the water, but no sign of a sail or a funnel. Elaine still slept, while Grenville, cramped almost beyond endurance, refused to move, and thereby disturb her slumber.

But at six, as he turned for the fiftieth time to scan the limited horizon, he started so unwittingly, at sight of a tree and headland, flatly erected, like a bit of sawed-out stage scenery, above the waste of billows, that Elaine sat up at once.

"It's land!" he said. "We're drifting to some sort of land!"

She was still too hazy in her mind, and puzzled by their surroundings, to grasp the situation promptly.

"Land?" she repeated. "Oh!" and a rush of hideous memories swept confusedly upon her till she shivered, gazing at the water.

Grenville had risen to his feet, and Elaine now rose beside him. Somewhat more of the flat, wide protrusion from the sea became thus visible to both. It still appeared of insignificant extent, a blue and featureless patch against the sky, with one half-stripped tree upon its summit.

"I should say it's an island," Grenville added, quietly, restraining an exultation that might prove premature. "It is still some miles away."

"There must be someone there," Elaine replied, with an eagerness that betrayed her anxious state of mind. "Almost anyone would certainly help us a little."

What doubts he entertained of some of the island inhabitants in this particular section of the world, Sidney chose to keep to himself.

"It's land!" he said, as he had before. "That means everything!"

"Do you know of any island that ought to be in this locality?"

"I haven't the remotest notion where we are—except we are somewhere, broadly speaking, in the neighborhood of the Malay peninsula. The steamer must have drifted tremendously out of her course after we lost our rudder."

"Have you been awake for long?"

"I haven't slept."

"Have you seen or heard anything of any of the others?"

"Not a sign.... We may find some of them, landed on this island."

He had no such hope, and this she felt. She summoned a heart full of courage to meet the situation, however, and gazed off afar at the misty terra incognita enlarging imperceptibly as they drifted deliberately onward.

"It's fortunate," she said, "the steamers pass this way."

"Yes," he said, unwilling to shake this solitary hope that brightened her uncertain prospect, but he knew they were leagues from the nearest track that the ocean steamers plowed. "And I trust we'll find it entirely comfortable while we're waiting," he added. "We're sure to get dry and find something fit to eat."

She was silent for a moment. A sense of constraint was returning at last for their scene of the previous day. "It seems to be rather far away," was all she said.

"About another hour—if the breeze and tide continue favorable."

It was nearer an hour and a half, however, before they were finally abreast the headland with the tree, and swinging and turning slowly by the island's coast on the surface of a complicated tide.

The features of the land had developed practically everything usual to this latitude except habitations of men. That it was entirely surrounded by water was convincingly established. Indeed, it was not an extensive outcrop of some ocean-buried range, and, despite the luxuriance of its various patches of greenery and