Part 2

“Aye. She was lit and warmed throughout with it,” said Big Jim, “and the sea has gradually eaten in among her carbide. Go and see how her waterline is behaving.”

But the releasing of the gas seemed to have produced no effect on the whaler’s buoyancy, and soon two powerful centrifugal pumps were sucking at the water in her hold.

“She’s rising fast, sir,” reported Davis, leaving the bulwarks and rejoining his chief.

“She must have been scuttled,” said Big Jim. “Served the same way as that lifeboat. You know, Davis”--his glance roved over the ruin--“this makes me sad--or savage; I am not sure which. There was not a finer ship afloat. Nor a finer sailor,” he added in an undertone. “Somehow I feel he is still aboard.... Let’s have a look into the saloon.”

They squelched aft towards the poop and climbed it by a ladder, weed-filled to its rail top. With difficulty their sea boots dug for foothold; their hands slipped on the slimy rails. On the poop itself the weed was knee deep. At nearly every step things wriggled from underneath their soles.

“She will never stand all this top-hamper when she lifts,” said Big Jim, gazing doubtfully from the overgrown poop to the overgrown masts. “Hey, MacArthur,” he called, “send the hands aloft to clear her upper rigging. She will turn turtle if we’re not careful.”

He stopped to watch the carrying out of his order; but Davis waded on, his curiosity too great to allow him to delay. He reached the saloon entrance and passed within. Yet with one foot still lingering on the threshold, he paused there, hesitating.

* * * * *

It was a great place, broad, long, and high, unusually so; fit skipper’s quarters for the great skipper who had lived there--probably died there! But the under-manager’s hesitation sprang from another cause. Outside, the weed had choked the broad decks, fouled the clean timbers, and made grotesques of the stately masts and spars. Here there was no weed. A fine mud overlay each object, making each line and surface more severely straight and plain.

From without sounded the voices of the salvagers, the crash and thud of the falling weed, the splash and gurgle of hold--human sounds. Slowly he began his inspection, treading softly, as though in fear of disturbing some silent sleeper.

But none such remained. The berths were empty, left just as their former occupants had left them when they took their departure, some to die perhaps in that scuttled lifeboat; or in one’s and two’s to those five. In the under-manager’s heart a new wonder had eclipsed the old wonder of those sunken submarines. Big Jim came in, followed by Stewart and MacArthur. Silently he waited for them to make the discovery that he had made.

They came from the berths and joined him, MacArthur last, hardest to convince of the three.

“D’ye ever see anything like it!” he exclaimed in an incredulous amazement. “He has had a harem aboard with him.”

It was true. Six of the berths had contained women--girls, rather; girls who had worn the fine dresses that Davis had seen hanging in the cupboards, and the shapely boots and shoes littered about the floors. And on a whaler, bound for the Greenland Seas!

“There was a woman in that lifeboat,” said Stewart. “The kind that would have worn these bits of things in there.”

He left them at once, and passed out of sight into an alleyway that led from the forward end of the saloon.

“We said nothing about it for the sake of old Johan,” Big Jim explained.

“A straighter man never sailed the seas,” murmured MacArthur. “There is a lot more in this than we can see at present.”

“It’s not a whaler, this, at all,” grunted Stewart abruptly, reappearing in the saloon. “Come here.”

They followed him through the alleyway and down a companion that descended to the ’tween decks, and thence straight on, apparently, to the depths of the ship. But it was onto the ’tween decks he led them, through a doorway that opened from the companion. They saw the great space of the upper main hold stretching before them, still flooded knee-deep, still reeking with the odor of acetylene and fouler gases, but little at first of what it contained, for the only light that lit the place was that streaming scantily through the breach in the hatches, whence the glinting pump pipes descended deep down into the lower hold. And what they did see, they could scarcely bring themselves to believe.

“It’s surely never a court?” whispered Davis at last.

“That’s what I was thinking myself,” grunted the old mate, not nearly so impressed as the others.

“It is,” said Big Jim soberly.

* * * * *

Against the further wall of the ship was a judge’s bench; on one side of it, a juryman’s enclosure, a prisoner’s dock on the other. Benches and desks, whose purpose was not so readily discernible, stood in between. But the general scheme was clear. Someone had planned to sit in judgment here. Who? And on whom?... And to what end?

“If they caught him trying this game,” Big Jim muttered, “it is easy to understand that scuttled lifeboat.”

He plunged boldly through the water in the direction of a door in the forward bulkhead, immediately in front of which point the dock had been set. He moved so quickly that the others could not overtake him. But he stopped of his own accord at the sound of a heavy crash on deck, a crash that was immediately followed by a chorus of shouts and cries from the crew.

“For the love of Mike, come on deck, sir,” a man called out, poking his head hastily through the breach in the hatches.

“Gad! I hope no one has fallen,” exclaimed Big Jim, turning immediately and splashing toward the companion.

But no one had fallen. The crash had come from a heavy mass of weed that had slithered down from the mainmast, clearing the lower yards as it fell. Beneath the main yard were grouped the crew, unhurt, staring up at something that swung above their heads; something still enmeshed and held together by the weed--the skeleton of a man; a man who had been hanged by the neck.

Stewart and MacArthur hurried forward. Davis started to follow, but seeing Big Jim lift an ax and dart below again, he turned and raced after him.

“Do you think it is Old Johan they have hung there?” he enquired, excitedly, catching up with him at the beginning of the ’tween decks.

“No, Davis,” he answered gravely. “It is someone who came out of this door to stand his trial here.... Stand clear.”

With a swing of the massive shoulders the ax came up and round and down. The whole bulkhead trembled and groaned beneath the blow: the door gave almost the width of its frame. They found themselves sprawling on the floor of the forehold, a place darker than the one whence they had stumbled. But not dark enough! Davis felt Big Jim grab him and drag him outside--out and away from that silent company into which they had intruded: men waiting to stand their trial like that other, thirty or forty of them, drowned in their chains.

“Young Johnny’s death must have made him mad,” said Big Jim, solemnly. “A kindlier man never sailed. Go and tell MacArthur to see the hands off the ship. They musn’t get to know. Get all gear back to the Seabird, and tow those cylinders clear.”

“And the pumps?”

“Leave them. We must find out what happened.”

* * * * *

Davis went on his mission. When he returned Big Jim had descended the companion again, and stood leaning against the side, gazing pensively down at the receding water.

“He is down here,” he said, and Davis did not venture to question him.

Quickly the pumps sucked the water away, and they heard the sound of the leak bursting in. Stewart and MacArthur had joined them by then--Davis had told them. Stewart came direct, but MacArthur from a stealthy visit to that door in the forward bulkhead.

“My God!” he whispered to Davis, shaking his head expressively.

They had brought flash lamps with them. Big Jim took one and pushed on.

“There he is,” he said, suddenly, stopping and holding the lamp steady.

A pace or two away was the end of the alleyway. Against a storeroom door, in the act of breaking it down, leaned a huge man.

“It’s Johan,” murmured Stewart.

Davis drew back, awed. But Big Jim gently took the body in his arms and set it upright away from the door. With his own strength he completed what the dead man had almost done. They looked within. In the light of the lamps three white spouts of water showed gushing from the vessel’s side. A large auger stuck out from a fourth uncompleted. But another sight it was that held their gaze.

In the far corner stood a dead German sailor and a dead girl, locked in each other’s arms....

“He was probably an old sweetheart. And she set him free. And he scuppered the lifeboats--the pumps also, very likely, and by night. Then the two went down there to sink the ship and to die together--Old Johan followed them--too late!”

* * * * *

Big Jim was speaking. They were up on deck raising the pumps out of the hold, quite unaided by any of the men.

“Women are wonderful,” he continued, speaking almost to himself. “The best and the worst. And the worst more wonderful than the best. That girl down there--a decoy--God knows what--.” He checked himself abruptly. “Stove in that forward hatch, Stewart,” he ordered. “We’ll just let her go down.”

... Davis stole aft and closed the saloon doors!

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 1922 issue of Wayside Tales magazine.]