The Fourth Man by John Russell (best free ebook reader .TXT) 📕

vacancy. Whenever they raised their eyes they saw him. He was the only thing to see.

“Here is one who appears to enjoy himself quite well,” remarked Dubosc.

“I was thinking so myself,” said Fenayrou.

“The animal!” rumbled Perroquet.

They observed him, and for the first time with direct interest, with thought of him as a fellow-being — with the beginning of envy.

“He does not seem to suffer.”

“What is going on in his brain? What does he dream of there? One would say he despises us.”

“The beast!”

“Perhaps he is waiting for us to die,” suggested Fenayrou with a harsh chuckle. “Perhaps he is waiting for the reward. He would not starve on the way home, at least. And he could deliver us — piecemeal.”

They studied him.

“How does he do it, doctor? Has he no feeling?”

“I have been wondering,” said Dubosc. “It may be that his fibres are tougher — his nerves.”

“Yes, we have had water and he none.”

“But look at his skin, fresh and moist.”

“And his belly, fat as a football!”

The Parrot hauled himself aboard.

“Don’t tell me this black beast knows thirst!” he cried with a strange excitement. “Is there any way he could steal our supplies?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then, name of a dog, what if he has supplies of his own hidden about?”

The same monstrous notion struck them all, and the others swarmed to help. They knocked the black aside. They searched the platform where he had sat, burrowing among the rushes, seeking some secret cache, another bottle or a gourd. They found nothing.

“We are mistaken,” said Dubosc.

But Perroquet had a different expression for disappointment. He turned on the Canaque and caught him by the kinky mop of hair and proceeded to give him what is known as gruel in the cobalt mines. This was a little speciality of The Parrot’s. He paused only when he himself was breathless and exhausted and threw the limp, unresisting body from him.

“There, lump of dirt! That will teach you. Maybe you’re not so chipper now, my boy — hein? Not quite so satisfied with your luck. Pig! That will make you feel…”

It was a ludicrous, a wanton, a witless thing. But the others said nothing. The learned Dubosc made no protest. Fenayrou had none of his usual jests at the garrotter’s stupidity. They looked on as at the satisfaction of a common grudge. The white trampled the black with or without cause, and that was natural. And the black crept away into his place with his hurts and his wrongs and made no sign and struck no blow. And that was natural, too.

The sun declined into a blazing furnace whereof the gates stood wide, and they prayed to hasten it and cursed because it hung enchanted. But when it was gone their blistered bodies still held the heat like things incandescent. The night closed down over them like a purple bow, glazed and impermeable. They would have divided the watches again, though none of them thought of sleep, but Fenayrou made a discovery.

“Idiots!” he rasped. “Why should we look and look? A whole navy of ships cannot help us now. If we are becalmed, why so are they!”

The Parrot was singularly put out.

“Is this true?” he asked Dubosc.

“Yes, we must hope for a breeze first.”

“Then, name of God, why didn’t you tell us so? Why did you keep on playing out the farce? You are wise, eh? You are very wise. You know things we do not and you keep them to yourself.” He leaned forward to peer into the doctor’s face. “Very good. But if you think you’re going to use that cursed smartness to get the best of us in any way — see here, my zig, I pull your gullet out like the string of an orange… Like that. What?”

Fenayrou gave a nervous giggle and Dubosc shrugged, but it was perhaps about this time that he began to regret his intervention in the knife play.

For there was no breeze and there was no ship.

By the third morning each had sunk within himself, away from the rest. The doctor was lost in a profound depression, Perroquet in dark suspicion, and Fenayrou in bodily suffering which he supported ill. Only two effective ties still bound their confederacy. One was the flask which Dubosc had slung at his side by a strip of the wickerwork. Every move he made with it, every drop he poured, was followed by burning eyes. And he knew, and he had no advantage of them in knowing, that the will to live was working its relentless formula aboard that raft. Under his careful saving there still remained nearly half of their original store.

The other bond, as it had come to be by strange mutation, was the presence of the black Canaque.

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There was no forgetting the fourth man now, no overlooking of him. He loomed upon their consciousness, more formidable, more mysterious, more exasperating with every hour. Their own powers were ebbing. The naked savage had yet to give the slightest sign of complaint or weakness.

During the night he had stretched himself out on the platform as before, and after a time he had slept. Through the hours of darkness and silence while each of the whites wrestled with despair, this black man had slept as placidly as a child, with easy, regular breathing. Since then he had resumed his place aft. And so he remained, unchanged, a fixed fact and a growing wonder.

The brutal rage of Perroquet, in which he had vented his distorted hate of the native, had been followed by superstitious doubts.

“Doctor,” he said at last, in awed huskiness, “is this a man or a fiend?”

“It is a man.”

“A miracle,” put in Fenayrou.

But the doctor lifted a finger in a way his pupils would have remembered:

“It is a man,” he repeated, “and a very poor and wretched example of a man. You will find no lower type anywhere. Observe his cranial angle, the high ears, the heavy bones of his skull. He is scarcely above the ape. There are educated apes more intelligent.”

“Ah! Then what?”

“He has a secret,” said the doctor.

That was a word to transfix them.

“A secret! But we see him — every move he makes, every instant. What a chance for a secret?”

The doctor rather forgot his audience, betrayed by chagrin and bitterness.

“How pitiful!” he mused. “Here are we three — children of the century, products of civilization — I fancy none would deny that, at least. And here is this man who belongs before the Stone Age. In a set trial of fitness, of wits, or resource, is he to win! Pitiful!”

“What kind of secret!” demanded Perroquet, fuming.

“I cannot say,” admitted Dubosc, with a baffled gesture. “Possibly some method of breathing, some peculiar posture that operates to cheat the sensations of the body. Such things are known among primitive peoples — known and carefully guarded — like the properties of certain drugs, the uses of hypnotism and complex natural laws. Then, again, it may be psychologic — a mental attitude persistently held. Who knows?

“To ask him? Useless. He will not tell. Why should he? We scorn him. We give him no share with us. We abuse him. He simply remains inscrutable — as he has always been and will always be. He never tells those innermost secrets. They are the means by which he has survived from the depth of time, by which he may yet survive when all our wisdom is dust.”

“I know several very excellent ways of learning secrets,” said Fenayrou as he passed his dry tongue over his lips. “Shall I begin?”

Dubosc came back with a start and looked at him.

“It would be useless. He could stand any torture you could invent. No, that is not the way.”

“Listen to mine,” said Perroquet, with sudden violence. “Me, I am wearied of the gab. You say he is a man? Very well. If he is a man, he must have blood in his veins. That would be, anyway, good to drink.”

“No,” returned Dubosc. “It would be hot. Also it would be salt. For food — perhaps. But we do not need food.”

“Kill the animal, then, and throw him over!”

“We gain nothing.”

“Well, sacred name, what do you want?”

“To beat him!” cried the doctor, curiously agitated. “To beat him at the game — that’s what I want! For our own sakes, for our racial pride, we must, we must. To outlast him, to prove ourselves his masters. By better brain, by better organization and control. Watch him, watch him, friends — that we may ensnare him, that we may detect and defeat him in the end!”

But the doctor was miles beyond them.

“Watch?” growled The Parrot. “I believe you, old windbag. It is all one watch. I sleep no more and leave any man alone with that bottle.”

To this the issue finally sharpened. Such craving among such men could not be stayed much longer by driblets. They watched. They watched the Canaque. They watched each other. And they watched the falling level in their flask — until the tension gave.

Another dawn upon the same dead calm, rising like a conflagration through the puddled air, cloudless, hopeless! Another day of blinding, slow-drawn agony to meet. And Dubosc announced that their allowance must be cut to half a thimbleful.

There remained perhaps a quarter of a litre — a miserable reprieve of bare life among the three of them, but one good swallow for a yearning throat.

At sight of the bottle, at the tinkle of its limpid contents, so cool and silvery green inside the glass, Fenayrou’s nerve snapped…

“More!” he begged, with pleading hands. “I die. More!”

When the doctor refused him he grovelled among the reeds, then rose suddenly to his knees and tossed his arms abroad with a hoarse cry:

“A ship! A ship!”

The others spun about. They saw the thin unbroken ring of this greater and more terrible prison to which they had exchanged: and that was all they saw, though they stared and stared. They turned back to Fenayrou and found him in the act of tilting the bottle. A cunning slash of his knife had loosed it from its sling at the doctor’s side… Even now he was sucking at the mouth, spilling the precious liquid –-

With the one sweep Perroquet caught up their paddle and flattened him, crushing him.

Springing across the prostrate man, Dubosc snatched the flask upright and put the width of the raft between himself and the big garrotter who stood wide-legged, his bloodshot eyes alight, rumbling in his chest.

“There is no ship,” said The Parrot. “There will be no ship. We are done. Because of you and your rotten promises that brought us here doctor, liar, ass!”

Dubosc stood firm.

“Come a step nearer and I break bottle and all over your head.”

They stood regarding each other, and Perroquet’s brows gathered in a slow effort of thought.

“Consider,” urged Dubosc with his quaint touch of pedantry. “Why should you and I fight? We are rational men. We can see this trouble through and win yet. Such weather cannot last for ever. Besides, here are only two of us to divide the water now.”

“That is true,” nodded The Parrot. “That is true, isn’t it? Fenayrou kindly leaves us his share. An inheritance — what? A famous idea. I’ll take mine now.”

Dubosc probed him keenly.

“My share, at once, if you please,” insisted Perroquet, with heavy docility. “Afterward, we shall see. Afterward.”

The doctor smiled his grim and wan little smile.

“So be it.”

Without relinquishing the flask he brought out his canvas wallet once more — the wallet which replaced the