up,Captain--Captain----"
"Jasper Begg," said I, "at one time master of Ruth Bellenden's yacht,the Manhattan."
"And Peter Bligh, his mate, who is a Christian man when the victualsare right."
Seth Barker said nothing, but I named him and spoke about Dolly Venn.We five, I think, began to know each other better from that time, andto fall together as comrades in a common misfortune. Parlous as ourplight was, we had food and drink and tobacco for our pipes afterwards;and a seaman needs little more than that to make him happy. Indeed, weshould have passed the night well enough, forgetting all that had gonebefore and must come after, but for a weird reminder at the hour ofmidnight, which compelled us to recollect our strange situation and allthat it betided.
Comfortable we were, I say, for Dr. Gray had found fine berths for usall: Dolly on the sofa, his skipper in an arm-chair, Peter Bligh andSeth Barker on rugs by the window, and he himself in a hammock slungacross the kitchen door. We had said "good-night" to one another andwere settling off to sleep, when there came a weird, wild calf from thegrounds without; and so dismal was it and so like the cries of men inagony that we all sprang to our feet and stood, with every facultywaking, to listen to the horrible outcry. For a moment no man moved, sofull of terror were those sounds; but the doctor, coming first to hissenses, strode towards the window and pulled the heavy curtain backfrom it. Then, in the dazzling light, that wonderful gold-blue lightwhich hovered in mist-clouds about the gardens of the bungalow, I saw aspectacle which froze my very blood. Twenty men and women, perhaps,some of them Europeans, some natives, some dressed in seamen's dress,some in rags, some quite naked, were dancing a wild, fantastic,maddening dance which no foaming Dervish could have surpassed, aye, orimitated, in his cruellest moments. Whirling round and round, extendingtheir arms to the sky, sometimes casting themselves headlong on theground, biting the earth with savage lips, tearing their flesh withknives, one or two falling stone-dead before our very eyes, these poorpeople in their delirium cried like animals, and filled the whole woodswith their melancholic wailing. For ten minutes, it may be, the fitendured; then one by one they sank to the earth in the most fearfulcontortions of limb and face and body, and, a great silence coming uponthe house, we saw them there in that cold, clear light, outposts of thedeath which Ken's Island harboured.
We saw the thing, we knew its dreadful truth, yet many minutes passedbefore one among us opened his lip. The spell was still on us--a spellof dread and fear I pray that few men may know.
"The laughing fever," exclaimed the doctor, at last, letting thecurtain fall back with trembling hand. "Yes, I have heard of thatsomewhere."
And then he said, pointing to the lamp upon the table:
"Three days, my friends, three days between us and that!"
CHAPTER XIII
THE STORM
You have been informed that Dr. Gray promised us three days' securityin the bungalow, and I will now tell you how it came about that wequitted the house next morning, and set out anew upon the strangesterrand of them all.
There's an old saying among seamen that the higher the storm the deeperthe sleep, and this, may-be, is true, if you speak of a ship and of anEnglish crew upon her. It takes something more than a capful of wind toblow sleep from a sailor's eyes; and though you were to tell him thatthe Judgment was for to-morrow, I do believe he would take his fourhours off all the same. But at Ken's Island things went differently;and two, at least, of our party knew little sleep that night. Again andagain I turned on my bed to see Dr. Gray busy before his furnace and tohear Peter Bligh snoring as though he'd crack the window-glass.Nevertheless, sleep came to me slowly, and when I slept I dreamed ofthe island and all the strange things which had happened there sincefirst we set foot upon it. Many sounds and shapes were present in mydream, and the sweet figure of Ruth Bellenden with them all. I saw herbrave and patient in the gardens of the bungalow; the words which shehad spoken, "For God's sake come back to me!" troubled my ears like themusic of the sea. Sometimes, as dreams will, the picture was but avague shadow, and would send me hither and thither, now to the highseas and an English port, again to the island and the bay wherein Ifirst landed. I remember, more than all, a dream which carried me tothe water's edge, with my hand in hers, and showed me a great storm andinky clouds looming above the reef and the lightning playing vividly,and a tide rising so swiftly that it threatened to engulf us and floodthe very land on which we stood. And then I awoke, and the dawn-lightwas in the room and Dr. Gray himself stood watching by the window.
"Yes," he said, as though answering some remark of mine, "we shall havea storm--and soon."
"You do not say so!" cried I; "why, that's my dream! I must have heardthe thunder in my sleep."
He drew the curtain back to show me the angry sky, which gave promiseof thunder and of a hurricane to follow; the air of the room seemedheavy as that of a prison-house. In the gardens outside a shimmer ofyellow light reminded me of a London fog as once I breathed it byTemple Bar. No longer could you distinguish the trees or the bushes oreven the mass of the woods beyond the gate. From time to time the loomof the cloud would lift, and a beam of sunlight strike through it,revealing a golden path and a bewitching vision of grass and roses alldrooping in the heat. Then the ray was lost again, and the yellowvapour steamed up anew.
"A storm undoubtedly," said the doctor, at last, "and a bad one, too.We should learn something from this, captain. Why, yes, it lookseasy--after the storm the wind."
"And the wind will clear Ken's Island of fog," cried I. "Ah, of course,it will. We shall breathe just now and go about like sane men. I amyounger for hearing it, doctor."
He said, "Yes, it was good news," and then put some sticks into thegrate and began to make a fire. The others still slept heavily. LittleDolly Venn muttered in his sleep a name I thought I had heard before,and, truth to tell, it was something like "Rosamunda." The doctorhimself was as busy as a housemaid.
"Yes," he continued, presently, "we should be pretty well through withthe sleep-time, and after that, waking. Does anything occur to you?"
I sat up in the chair and looked at him closely. His own manner ofspeech was catching.
"Why, yes," said I, "something does occur. For one thing, we may havecompany."
He lit a match and watched the wood blazing up the chimney. A bit offire is always a cheerful thing, and it did me good to see it thatmorning.
"Czerny has more than a hundred men," said he, after some reflection."We are four and one, which makes five; five exactly."
Now, this was the first time he had confessed to anything which mightlet a man know where his sympathies lay. Friend or enemy, yesterdaytaught me nothing about him. I learnt afterwards that he had once knownKenrick Bellenden in Philadelphia. I think he was glad to have fourcomrades with him on Ken's Island.
"If you mean thereby, doctor, that you'd join us," was my reply, "youcouldn't tell me better news. You know why I came here and you know whyI stay. It may mean much to Mme. Czerny to have such a friend as you.What can be done by five men on this cursed shore shall be done, Iswear; but I am glad that you are with us--very glad."
I really meant it, and spoke from my heart: but he was not ademonstrative man, and he rarely answered one directly as one mighthave wished. On this occasion, I remember, he went about his work for alittle while before he spoke again; and it was not until the coffee wasboiling on the hob that he came across to me and, seating himself onthe arm of my chair, asked, abruptly:
"Do you know what fool's errand brought me to this place?"
"I have imagined it," said I. "You wanted to know the truth about thesleep-time."
He laughed that queer little laugh which expressed so much when youheard it.
"No," said he, "I do not care a dime either way! I just came along toadvertise myself. Ken's Island and its secrets are my newspaper. When Igo back to New York people will say, 'That's the specialist, DuncanGray, who wrote about narcotics and their uses.' They'll come and seeme because the newspapers tell them t
o. We advertise or die, nowadays,captain, and the man who gets a foothold up above must take some risks.I took them when I shipped with Edmond Czerny."
It was an honest story, and I liked the man the better for it. No wordof mine intervened before he went on with it.
"Luck put me in the way of the thing," he continued, the mood being onhim now and my silence helping him; "I met Czerny's skipper in 'Frisco,and he was a talker. There's nothing more dangerous than a loosetongue. The man said that his master was the second human being to setfoot on Ken's Archipelago. I knew that it was not true. A hundred yearsago Jacob Hoyt, a Dutchman, was marooned on this place and lived totell the story of