“It’s the truth!”
“Of course it’s the truth!” cried Shannon. “But the law is a strange thing. Now, my advice is for you to plead self-defense.”
“That would be lying,” said Jan.
“Yes, perhaps,” said Shannon. And then he gave Green a look which plainly said that he had done what he could. “Very well, young fellow, I shall tell the court your story and ask that you be released on bail. Is that according to your wishes?”
“Certainly!” said Jan.
Green almost smiled but checked himself in time. He glanced at his watch. “I must be getting back. Come along, Miss Hall. Jan, if anything can be done, Mr. Shannon will do it. Don’t despair. We’re with you to the end.”
So saying, Green walked out, followed by the lawyer and Alice Hall, and the door was locked once more.
Diver came out of the corner and looked at the departing backs and then at Jan. “Geez, fellah, how do you do it?”
“Do what?” said Jan dully.
“The dame,” said Diver. “Boy, is she a looker! How do you do it, huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh boy, are you a deep one. Why, man, if I had a gal like that in love with me . . .”
“She’s not in love with me!”
“No?” and then Diver laughed. “No, sure not. Innocent, that’s you. No, sure she ain’t in love with you. Why, she was near cryin’ when she came in that door and she almost bawled while she was writin’ at the table there and you was spielin’ that awful lie of yours.”
“She despises me, I know she does.”
“Sure. Sure she does, or she thinks she does. But all you’d have to do, feller, is to square up your spine and act like a man and she’d fall in your lap. I’m telling you.”
“I’m sure,” said Jan with abrupt heat, “that I’m not interested in what you think of Miss Hall!”
Diver was taken aback, more with surprise than anything else. But presently he began to chuckle. “What a pack of wolves,” he said.
“Who?”
“Why, that short fellow and that lawyer.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“If you don’t you’re blind as a bat, buddy. Friends of yours?”
“Mr. Green is the head of my . . . that is, the Bering Sea Steamship Corporation.”
“Oh boy, I know why those longshoremen go on strike now! Pal, you got three strikes on you and don’t know it.”
“I fail—”
“You’re fanned, feller, fanned. How come you ever got yourself into such a spot, seein’ the way that Green wants to do you in?”
“I am sure—”
“So am I. I watched him lickin’ his chops all the time he was here. What’d you ever do to him?”
“He was my father’s best friend.”
“And your dearest enemy,” said Diver. “Oh, well, what’s done is done. But I sure wish I’d had your chance.”
“My chance!”
“The gal,” said Diver with a deep sigh, lying back on his bunk. “Man, I’d almost enjoy bein’ accused of murder if I had her feelin’ that way about me.” And he closed his eyes so languorously that Jan, contrary to all his regular emotions, wanted very badly to kick the guts out of him.
Lunch came and Jan ate a few mouthfuls without any relish. The hours began their slow march down the afternoon and still no word came from Shannon. Dinner time found Diver at the tail end of a long discussion with the counterfeiter over the looks of Alice Hall.
At about seven the cell block was brought to the bars again by an opening door. Ignoring all of them, Alice marched down the concrete to Jan’s cell but the jailer did not offer to open the door for her.
Jan stood up, blinking and suddenly tongue-tied.
She was very cool and efficient. “Mr. Green asked me to stop by on my way home and tell you that Shannon was unable to have bail set for you.”
“You mean,” said the jolted Jan, “that I’ve got to stay here?”
Slowly she nodded and then found sudden interest in a package she had under her arm. She thrust it through the bars. “It’s all right,” she told the officer. “They inspected it at the desk. Your Aunt Ethel . . . er . . . sent this to you.”
Jan took it mechanically, trying to think of something to say which might detain her a moment. But he thought of nothing and they stood in an awkward silence.
“I hope you aren’t too uncomfortable,” she said at last.
“I . . . I’m all right.”
“Well . . . I had better be going.”
“Th-thank you for the package from Aunt Ethel and th-thank you for coming.”
“I have to pass the jail to get home anyway,” said Alice. “Good night.”
She was gone and Jan stood staring at the place where she had been.
“Well!” said Diver. “Open it, you dummy.”
“What?”
“The package!”
“It’s probably flannel pajamas,” said Jan dolefully.
“You don’t know, do you? Open it.”
Jan opened it and, wonder of wonders, it appeared that Aunt Ethel had broken down for the first time in her life. Here was a box of tea biscuits, a box of candy, three of the latest books, a toothbrush and paste and razor and shaving cream, a new shirt, tobacco and, at the very bottom, Houdini’s textbook.
“Geez, cookies,” said Diver.
“Aunt Ethel?” said Jan. “But she would have sent one of my own shirts and some of my own books if she sent anything at all.”
“The dame!” cried Diver. “She done it but wouldn’t admit it. Your Aunt Ethel be damned, buddy. Boy, are these cookies good.”
Jan nibbled on one and looked at the books. For a while he thumbed through Houdini but, at last, gave it up as a bad job.
“If she’s just a steno, buddy, she must’ve spent a week’s pay on them things,” said Diver, looking at the price marks in the books. “Gosh, you can never tell about dames. A looker like her takin’ up for a scared rabbit like you . . . huh!” And so saying he began to read.
The night grew through its childhood and, suddenly, Jan remembered that there was a chance . . . the barest, barest chance . . . that he might be elsewhere the instant he closed his eyes. He might be deep down in the brig of a sailing ship plowing through an unknown sea, waiting with terror for what the port might bring. He shuddered as the thought became very real. He was revolted by the thought of becoming Tiger once again.
And yet he was tired. He had had no sleep for an age, it seemed. He was weary until he ached.
But, if the ifrit had spoken the truth, then . . .
Then . . .
And by midnight he lost the fight.
He went down into the abyss of sleep, awakened instantly by the howl of winches and the cannonading of sails and then the grinding roar of chain racing through a hawsepipe.
Chapter Five
The Queen!
Jan Palmer was afraid to open his eyes. When Diver had said that he had rolled and tossed the whole night through, he had been perfectly willing to believe that it had all been a nightmare brought about by his excessive mental perturbation. But right now it didn’t at all appear that he was rolling and tossing upon the sagging bunk in the jail. In fact it was quite plain that he was lying on blankets and that he had no bunk but floor under him.
Cautiously he pried open one eyelid and found that he looked through a grilled window upon the back of a marid. It was not the same marid at all, but another one who was much uglier—if such could be possible—than the first. This fellow had a ferocious cast to his single eye and he was girt about with a sword which must have weighed thirty pounds and he leaned upon a pike pole so sharp that it tapered to nothingness rather than a point.
“Now I’m for it,” moaned Jan.
And he startled himself.
“Now I’ll get the galleys.”
He blinked and said it over again. “Now I’ll get the galleys.”
<
br /> Well, what galleys? And how did he know that there would be any galleys in the neighborhood? Further, what reason did he have to think that galleys would be in use?
But, just the same, he was convinced and he sat up, already experiencing an ache in his back and sinewy arms.
“This is a hell of a note,” he uttered. “I’m damned if I’ll take it, so help me. Let’m flog. Let’m string me up by the thumbs. But I’ll see ’em all in hell before I’ll haul an oar.”
Plainly, he thought, such a speech showed that he was delirious. But no, his head wasn’t hot.
He stood up. “Hey, you one-eyed farmer, where are we?” Certainly, he shouldn’t take such a tone with this vicious-looking marid. He frightened himself.
The marid’s hoofs knocked sharply as he came around and playfully poked the pike straight at Jan’s eyes. Jan dodged back from the grille.
“So, what I hear is a lie,” said the marid. “You plenty smart, you Tiger. Lie, lie, lie. All the time lie. You get yours this time.”
“I . . . I haven’t lied about anything,” said Jan.
“We hear. Nobody talks but we hear just the same. Last night you put us on beach, or almost, which is just as bad. You take too much rum, I think. This time you get the galleys, I think. Now sit down before I shove this through your guts. They’ll come for you quick enough.”
Jan very tamely seated himself and the pike was withdrawn from the grille. Twice in the next half an hour sailors came by and were fain to linger about the grille but the marid poked them on their way.
“I do you a favor,” said the marid after a while. “Them men want to cut you up very bad. If you wasn’t too drunk last night, I think you would not have ever tried to put us up on that shoal.”
“I wasn’t drunk,” said Jan.
“Tiger not drunk! I think that’s a good one. I tell that one. You know what shoal that was?”
“No.”
“See, you drunk. Everybody know that shoal. The Isle of Fire just behind those shoals and you say you not know! Haw!”
“The Isle of Fire? Never heard of it.”
“Oh, no, you never heard of it. You never stood off and on in the ship here listening to Admiral Tyronin’s flagship people burn up every one. You never on boat that go in to pull off what men left. Haw! You fool, Tiger. Me, I was with you and you still got burns on your leg. Lie to me, I think, and I take pike to you.”
Jan thoughtfully lifted up his wide-bottomed pants and stared at his brawny leg. He was startled both by the strength which was obviously in it and by the white burn marks which were there. Then, too, there was a purple scar which ran from knee to ankle and which plainly bespoke a boarding ax. He examined it carefully as though it might vanish under his touch and the marid, glancing through the grille, laughed at what he thought was a joke in pantomime.
“Tiger’s memory come back fast enough in galleys,” said the marid. “Good you leave or the crew—”
He was interrupted by the clang of a door which opened and closed, admitting a party of men. They came briskly up to the brig and stopped, grounding their muskets with a large gesture. The captain opened the door of the brig and Jan came carefully out to instantly be thrust between two files of the most evil-looking marids imaginable.
They faced smartly about, their cloaks swirling, shouldered arms and marched Jan up a ladder to the deck. The captain made a motion toward the port gangway and the file halted there, tightly ringing Jan.
At some distance a knot of seamen stood, growling among themselves and looking toward the prisoner. But the marids stood very complacently, hairy hands wrapped about their gun barrels.
Jan blinked in the blazing sunlight which glanced hurtfully back from polished bitts and scoured deck and from the wide harbor. Wonderingly he looked about at the ship itself to find that it was not unlike a cromster of the Middle Ages though considerably larger. The sterncastle deck, however, was cut into by the after house and the helm was a large wheel. A conglomerate rig it was, with a lateen on the mizzen, fore and aft on the main, the peaks held up with sprits, with a large square topsail and a t’g’l’nt above that and with three huge staysails forward. A sprits’l was furled under the bowsprit, and long abandoned had such “water sails” been in modern usage. A dozen brass cannon, glittering and ferocious, thrust their snouts out from the quarterdeck rail. Two bow chasers loomed on the fo’c’s’le head. And all along each side, evidently manned from the deck below, were the muzzles of thirty demicannon. Aloft there floated from the now naked peak the strangest flag Jan had ever seen. It was a brilliant scarlet and upon it was emblazoned in gold a wheeling bird of prey. Other streamers there were in plenty but he could not make them out, so bright was the greenish sky.
In the harbor about them lay hundreds of other vessels, both large and small, ranging in style from a Greek corbita to a seventy-four. Small shore boats, not unlike sampans, scudded back and forth on a brisk breeze, carrying all sorts of passengers. Among these, by far, ifrits predominated, and it was strange indeed to see peaked caps between their pointed ears and massive rings upon their claw-tipped fingers. It was as though the animal kingdom had blended with the human race and that these men-beasts were mocking the ancient history of their human ancestors.
Such, however, could not be the case as Jan well knew. ifrits were ifrits. And if the jinn wished to conquer the sea with ships for war and cargo, eschewing other means of transportation (as far as he could see at the moment), then it was certainly being done.
But about the deck of the vessel on which he stood Jan saw far more human beings than he did ifrits. In fact, only the captain and the mate were of the jinn. The guard about him was made up of ugly little marids and there were two or three other one-eyed demons astroll. But the sailors who worked aloft to put harbor furls on the restive canvas were all human beings, seemingly not much different from any other men Jan had ever seen beyond their devil-may-care aspect.
“I suppose,” muttered Jan to himself, staring intently across the blinding way at a long, gilded vessel, obviously a galley, “that I’ll get the Pinchoti, damn her. She’s the worst puller of the lot.” And again he startled himself by finding that he knew the names of most of these vessels and, indeed, the names of most of the men about the deck. How he came to know them he was not at all sure.
A werewolf, in his human identity, must often feel the beast stirring uneasily within him, threatening to spring forth uncalled. More and more, as time went along, did Jan experience just that sensation, except that, in his case, it was more like that Malay demon, the weretiger. Scholar that he was, he knew considerable about lycanthropy but never in his life had he thought to experience such a thing, even in a reasonable way, but now, certainly, things were happening to him which he could not begin to discount. Weretiger was certainly the only name for it. He was vaguely conscious of latent wells of knowledge within him, of information which he could almost—but not quite—bring to the surface of his brain. It was as though he had always known these things but was suffering, at the moment, a slight lapse of memory.
He gazed critically at the work of a man working on the lateen sail, whom he knew as Lacy. Lacy was bungling the job as usual and it crossed Jan’s mind that he bet they could use Tiger’s help about the ship just then. Still, he had not the least idea of what he should have been doing.
Further, he found himself in the grip of a very alien impulse. Now, nobody in all his life on earth had ever dreamed that there was an ounce of facetiousness in one Jan Palmer. All jokes he had received with funereal mien, startled when others laughed at them. He had always read of pranks with wondering suspicion, puzzled that anyone could get pleasure out of such things. It must be confessed that Jan Palmer had missed much in the way of education due to the thorough isolation of his youth. Never had he felt the slightest desire to understand, much less commit, what might be called a practical joke.
It was with horror, then, that he found himself contemplating the most foolhardy adventure
imaginable. Here he was, packed tight by ten well-armed and doubtlessly zealous marids, all of them wholly humorless. Here he was, charged with God knew what crime and faced with the devil knew what sentence. And the Tiger in him stirred and laughed silently to see that one of the marids was carrying his musket on his shoulder, hand well away from the trigger which was, providentially or otherwise, within six inches of Jan’s face. And the barrel of that musket was pointed up in the general direction of the cantankerous Lacy, balanced precariously upon the whippy lateen yard.
“Marvelous,” chortled Tiger.
“No! My God, no!” gasped the appalled Jan.
There was the trigger and there was Lacy. The shot would go several feet below the seaman, certainly, but it would crack when it passed through the sail.
“Wonderful!” yearned the laughing Tiger.
Jan covered his face with his hands so that he couldn’t see the trigger or Lacy. In a moment the marid would move temptation far away from Tiger. In a moment Lacy would finish his clumsy furl and come scampering thankfully down from the dizzy heights. In a moment all would be well and Jan would have triumphed.
But the joke was too good. Nobody liked Lacy and Lacy was an avowed coward. Jan’s finger slipped and his eye fell upon the burnished trigger. It was too much for him.
Out went his finger quick as a blink. The trigger came back softly. Back came Jan’s hand to his innocent side. The match fell, the pan flared, the musket roared and leaped upwards to bang the marid in the head and knock him sprawling.
From aloft, close on the heels of the shot, came the returning crack of the bullet through canvas, and instantly after, the terrified scream of Lacy, who stared at the round hole not two feet under his hand. Lacy clung tight to the yard. The yard vibrated enough already in the wind without that; it began to sway and tip and the more it did, the more Lacy screamed bloody mayhem.
Malek came streaking down the waist bellowing, “Get him down before the fool shakes out that sail! Get him down, I say, before that canvas catches air and puts weigh on us! GET HIM DOWN!”