Darkness and Dawn (49 page)

All at once a tug, different from all others, yielding, yet firm, set
his pulses hammering again.

"Got it!" he shouted, for he knew the truth. "Hold fast, there—
she's
hooked!
"

"You've got it, Allan? Really got it?" cried the girl, starting up.
"Oh—"

"Feel this!" he answered. "Grab hold and pull!"

She obeyed, trembling with eagerness.

"It's caught through one of the ailerons, or some yielding part, I
think," he said. "Here, help me hold it tight, now; we mustn't let the
hook slip out again!" To the patriarch he added: "Tell 'em to back up,
there—easy—easy!"

The canoe backed, while Stern took up the slack again. When the pull
from below was vertical he ordered the boat stopped.

"Now get nine other boats close in here," commanded he.

The old man gave the order. And presently nine canoes stood in near at
hand, while all the rest lay irregularly grouped about them.

Now Stern's plan of the tenfold cable developed itself. Already he was
untwisting the thick rope. One by one he passed the separate cords to
men in the other boats. And in a few minutes he and nine other men
held the ropes, which, all attached to the big iron ring below, spread
upward like the ribs of an inverted umbrella.

The engineer's scheme was working to perfection. Well he had realized
that no one boat could have sufficed to lift the great weight of the
machine. Even the largest canoe would have been capsized and sunk long
before a single portion of the Pauillac and its engine had been so
much as stirred from the sandy bottom.

But with the buoyant power of ten canoes and twenty or thirty men all
applied simultaneously, Stern figured he had a reasonable chance of
raising the sunken aeroplane. The fact that it was submerged, together
with the diminished gravitation of the Abyss, also worked in his
favor. And as he saw the Folk-men grip the cords with muscular hands,
awaiting his command, he thrilled with pride and with the sense of
real achievement.

"Come, now, boys!" he cried. "Pull! Heave-ho, there! Altogether, lift
her!
Pull!
"

He strained at the rope which he and two others held; the rest—each
rope now held by three or four men—bent their back to the labor. As
the ropes drew tense, the canoes crowded and jostled together. Those
men who were not at the ropes, worked with the paddles to keep the
boats apart, so that the ropes should not foul or bind. And in an
irregular ring, all round the active canoes, the others drew. Lighted
by so many torches, the misty waters glittered as broken waves, thrown
out by the agitation of the canoes, radiated in all directions.

"Pull, boys, pull!" shouted the engineer again. "Up she comes! Now,
all together!"

Came a jerk, a long and dragging resistance, then a terrific straining
on the many cords. The score and a half of men breathed hard; on their
naked arms the veins and muscles swelled; the torchlight gleamed blue
on their sweating faces and bodies.

And spontaneously, as at all times of great endeavor among the Folk, a
wailing song arose; it echoed through the gloom; it grew, taken up by
the outlying boats; and in the eternal dark of the Abyss it rose,
uncanny, soul-shaking, weird beyond all telling.

Stern felt the shuddering chills chase each other up and down his
spine, playing a nervous accompaniment to their chant.

"Gad!" he muttered, shivering, "what a situation for a hard-headed,
practical man like me! It's more like a scene from some weird
pipe-dream magazine story of the remote past than solid reality!"

Again the Folk strained at the ropes, Stern with them; and now the
great weight below was surely rising, inch by inch, up, up, toward the
black and gleaming surface of the abysmal sea.

Stern's heart was pounding wildly. If only—incredible as it
seemed—the Pauillac really were there at the end of the converging
ropes; and if it were still in condition to be repaired again! If only
the hook and the hard-taxed ropes held!

"Up, boys! Heave 'er!" he shouted, pulling till his muscles hardened
like steel, and the canoe—balanced, though it was by five oarsmen and
the patriarch all at the other gunwale—tipped crazily. "Pull!
Pull!
"

Beatrice sprang to the rope. Unable to restrain herself, she, too,
laid hold on the taut, dripping cord; and her white hands, firm,
muscular, shapely, gripped with a strength one could never have
guessed lay in them.

And now the ropes were sliding up out of the water, faster, ever
faster; and higher rose the song of all those laboring Folk and all
who watched from the outlying ring of boats.

"Up with it, men!
Up!
" panted the engineer.

Even as he spoke the waters beneath them began to boil and bubble
strangely, as though with the rising of a monstrous fish; and all at
once, with a heave, a sloshing splatter, a huge, weed-covered,
winglike object, sluicing brine, wallowed sharply out into the
torchlight.

A great triumphal howl rose from the waiting Folk—a howl that drowned
Stern's cheer and that of Beatrice, and for a moment all was
confusion. The wing rose, fell, slid back; into the water and again
dipped upward. The canoes canted; some took water; all were thrown
against each other in the central group; and cries, shouts, orders and
a wild fencing off with paddles followed.

Stern yelled in vain orders that the old man could not even hear to
translate; orders which would not, even though heard, have been
obeyed. But after a moment or two comparative order was restored, and
the engineer, veins standing out on his temples, eyes ablaze,
bellowed:

"Hold fast, you! No more, nor more—don't pull up any more, damn you!
Hey, stop that—you'll rip the hook clean out and lose it again!

"You, father—here—tell 'em to let it down a little, now—about six
feet, so. Easy—does it—
easy!
"

Now the Pauillac, sodden with water, hanging thickly with the
luxuriant weed clusters which even in a fortnight had grown in that
warm sea, was suspended at the end of the ten cords about six or eight
feet below the keels of the canoes.

"Tell 'em to let it stay that way now," continued the engineer. "Tell
'em all to hold fast, those that have the ropes. The others paddle for
the shore as fast as they can—and damn the man that loafs
now!
"

The patriarch conveyed the essence of these instructions to the
oarsmen, and now, convoyed by the outlying boats, the ten canoes moved
very slowly toward the village.

Retarded by the vast, birdlike bulk that trailed below, they seemed
hardly to make any progress at all. Stern ordered the free boats to
hitch on and help by towing. Lines were passed, and after a while all
twenty-five canoes, driven by the power of two hundred and fifty pairs
of sinewy arms, were dragging the Pauillac shoreward.

Stern's excitement—now that the machine was really almost in his
grasp again—far from diminishing, was every minute growing keener.

The delay until he could examine it and see its condition and its
chances of repair, seemed interminable. Continually he urged the
patriarch—himself profoundly moved—to force the rowers to still
greater exertion. At a paddle he labored, throwing every ounce of
strength into the toil. Each moment seemed an hour.

"Gad! If it's only possible to make it fly again!" thought he.

Half an hour passed, and now at length the dim and clustered lights of
the village began to show vaguely through the mist.

"Come on, boys; now for it!" shouted Stern. "Land her for me and I'll
show you wonders you never even dreamed of!"

They drew near the shore. Already Stern was formulating his plans for
landing the machine without injuring it, when out from the beach a
long and swift canoe put rapidly, driven by twenty men.

At sight of it the rowing in Stern's boats weakened, then stopped.
Confused cries arose, altercations and strange shouts; then a hush of
expectancy, of fear, seemed to possess the boat crews.

And ever nearer, larger, drew the long canoe, a two-pronged, blazing
cresset at its bows.

Across the waters drifted a word.

"Go on, you! Row!" cried Stern. "Land the machine, I tell you! Say,
father, what's the matter
now?
What are my men on strike for all of
a sudden? Why don't they finish the job?"

The old man, perplexed, listened intently.

Between the group of canoes and the shore the single boat had stopped.
A man was standing upright in it. Now came a clear hail, and now two
or three sentences, peremptory, angry, harsh.

At sound of them consternation seized certain of the men. A number
dropped the ropes, while others reached for the slings and spears that
always lay in the bottoms of the canoes.

"What the devil
now?
" shouted Stern. "You all gone crazy, or what?"

He turned appealingly to the old man.

"For Heaven's sake, what's up?" he cried. "Tell me, can't you, before
the idiots drop my machine and ruin the whole thing? What—"

"Misfortune, O my son!" cried the patriarch in a strange, trembling
voice. "The worst that could befall! In our absence
he
has come
back—
he
, Kamrou! And under pain of death he bids all men abandon
every task and haste to homage.
Kamrou the Terrible is here!
"

For a moment Stern stared, speechless with amazement, at the
old man, as though to determine whether or not he had gone mad. But
the commotion, the mingled fear and anger of the boat crews convinced
him the danger, though unknown, was very real.

And, flaring into sudden rage at this untimely interruption just in
the very moment of success, he jerked his pistol from its holster, and
stood up in the boat.

"I'll have no butting in here!" he cried in a loud, harsh voice. "Who
the devil is Kamrou, I'd like to know? Go on,
on, to shore!
"

"My son—"

"You order these men to grab those ropes again and go ashore or I warn
you there's going to be a whole big heap of trouble!"

Over the waters drifted another hail, and the strange long boat, under
the urge of vigorous arms, now began to move toward Stern's fleet. At
the same time, mingled cries arose on shore. Stern could see lights
moving back and forth; some confusion was under way there, though
what, he could not imagine.

"Well," he cried, "are you going to order these men to go forward? Or
shall I—with
this?
"

And menacingly he raised the grim and ugly gun.

"Oh my son!" exclaimed the patriarch, his lips twitching, his hands
outstretched—while in the boats a babel of conflicting voices
rose—"O my son, if I have sinned in keeping this from you, now let me
die! I hid it from your knowledge, verily, to save my people—to keep
you with us till this thing should be accomplished! My reckoning was
that Kamrou and his men would stay beyond the Great Vortex, at their
labor, until after—"

"
Kamrou?
" shouted Stern again. "What the deuce do I care about him?
Who
is
he, anyhow? A Lanskaarn, or—"

The girl seized Allan's hand.

"Oh, listen, listen!" she implored. "I—"

"Did you know about this? And never told me?"

"Allan, he said our work could all be done before they—"

"So you
did
know, eh?"

"He said I must not tell you. Otherwise—"

"Oh, hang that! See here, Beatrice, what's the matter, anyhow? These
people have all gone crazy, just in a second, the old man and all! If
you know anything about it, for God's sake tell me! I can't stand much
more!

"I've got to get this machine to land before they go entirely nutty
and drop it, and we lose all our work for nothing. What's up? Who's
this Kamrou they're talking about? For Heaven's sake, tell me!"

"He's their chief. Allan—their chief! He's been gone a long time, he
and his men. And—"

"Well, what do we care for
him?
We're running this village now,
aren't we?"

"Listen. The old man says—"

"He's a hard nut, eh? And won't stand for us—is that it?" He turned
to the patriarch. "This Kamrou you're talking about doesn't want us,
or our new ideas, or anything? Well, see here. There's no use beating
around the bush, now.
This thing's going through, this plan of ours!
And if Kamrou or anybody else gets in the way of it—
good-by for
him!
"

"You mean war?"

"
War!
And I know who'll win, at that! And now, father, you get these
men here to work again, or there'll be some sudden deaths round here!"

"Hearken, O my son! Already the feast of welcome to Kamrou is
beginning, around the flame. See now, the boat of his messenger is
close at hand, bidding all those in this party to hasten in, for
homage. Kamrou will not endure divided power. Trust me now and I can
save you yet. For the present, yield to him, or seem to, and—"

"
Yield nothing!
" fairly roared the engineer, angrier than he had
ever been in his whole life. "This is my affair now! Nobody else butts
in on it at all! To shore with these boats, you hear? or I begin
shooting again! And if I do—"

"Allan!" cried the girl.

"Not a word! Only get your gun ready, that's all. We've got to handle
this situation sharp, or it's all off! Come, father," he delivered his
ultimatum to the patriarch; "come, order them ashore!"

The old man, anguished and tremulous, spoke a few words. Answers
arose, here, there. He called something to the standing figure in the
despatch-boat, which slackened stopped, turned and headed for the
distant beach.

With some confusion the oarsmen of the fleet took up their task again.
And now, in a grim silence, more disconcerting even than the previous
uproar, the boats made way toward land.