The Adventures of Captain Horn Read online

  CHAPTER V

  THE RACKBIRDS

  The new African was sitting on the ground, as far back from the edge ofthe ledge as he could get, shivering and shaking, for the water was cold.He had apparently reached the culmination and termination of his fright.After his tumble into the water, which had happened because he had beenunable to stop in his mad flight, he had not nerve enough left to doanything more, no matter what should appear to scare him, and there wasreally no reason why he should be afraid of this big white man, who didnot even look at him or give him a thought.

  Maka's tale, which he told so rapidly and incoherently that he wasfrequently obliged to repeat portions of it, was to the following effect:He had thought a great deal about the scarcity of water, and it hadtroubled him so that he could not sleep. What a dreadful thing it wouldbe for those poor ladies and the captain and the boy to die because theyhad no water! His recollections of experiences in his native land madehim well understand that streams of water are to be looked for betweenhigh ridges, and the idea forced itself upon him very strongly that onthe other side of the ridge to the south there might be a stream. Heknew the captain would not allow him to leave the camp if he askedpermission, and so he rose very early, even before it was light, andgoing down to the shore, made his way along the beach--on the same route,in fact, that the Englishman Davis had taken. He was a good dealfrightened sometimes, he said, by the waves, which dashed up as if theywould pull him into the water. When he reached the point of the rockyridge, he had no difficulty whatever in getting round it, as he couldeasily keep away from the water by climbing over the rocks.

  He found that the land on the other side began to recede from the ocean,and that there was a small sandy beach below him. This widened until itreached another and smaller point of rock, and beyond this Maka believedhe would find the stream for which he was searching. And while he wasconsidering whether he should climb over it or wade around it, suddenly aman jumped down from the rock, almost on top of him. This man fell downon his back, and was at first so frightened that he did not try to move.Maka's wits entirely deserted him, he said, and he did not know anything,except that most likely he was going to die.

  But on looking at the man on the ground, he saw that he was an Africanlike himself, and in a moment he recognized him as one of hisfellow-slaves, with whom he had worked in Guiana, and also for a shorttime on the Panama Canal. This made him think that perhaps he was notgoing to die, and he went up to the other man and spoke to him. Thenthe other man thought perhaps he was not going to die, and he sat upand spoke.

  When the other man told his tale, Maka agreed with him that it would befar better to die of thirst than to go on any farther to look for water,and, turning, he ran back, followed by the other, and they never stoppedto speak to each other until they had rounded the great bluff, and weremaking their way along the beach toward the camp. Then his fellow-Africantold Maka a great deal more, and Maka told everything to the captain.

  The substance of the tale was this: A mile farther up the bay than Makahad gone, there was a little stream that ran down the ravine. About aquarter of a mile up this stream there was a spot where, it appeared fromthe account, there must be a little level ground suitable forhabitations. Here were five or six huts, almost entirely surrounded byrocks, and in these lived a dozen of the most dreadful men in the wholeworld. This Maka assured the captain, his eyes wet with tears as hespoke. It must truly be so, because the other African had told him thingswhich proved it.

  A little farther up the stream, on the other side of the ravine, therewas a cave, a very small one, and so high up in the face of the rockthat it could only be reached by a ladder. In this lived five black men,members of the company of slaves who had gone from Guiana to theisthmus, and who had been brought down there about a year before by twowicked men, who had promised them well-paid work in a lovely country.They had, however, been made actual slaves in this barren and dolefulplace, and had since worked for the cruel men who had beguiled theminto a captivity worse than the slavery to which they had beenoriginally destined.

  Eight of them had come down from the isthmus, but, at various timessince, three of them had been killed by accident, or shot while trying torun away. The hardships of these poor fellows were very great, and Maka'svoice shook as he spoke of them. They were kept in the cave all the time,except when they were wanted for some sort of work, when a ladder was putup by the side of the rock, and such as were required were called to comedown. Without a ladder no one could get in or out of the cave. One manwho had tried to slip down at night fell and broke his neck.

  The Africans were employed in cooking and other rough domestic or menialservices, and sometimes all of them were taken down to the shore of thebay, where they saw small vessels, and they were employed in carryinggoods from one of these to another, and were also obliged to carryprovisions and heavy kegs up the ravine to the houses of the wicked men.The one whom he had brought with him, Maka said, had that day escapedfrom his captors. One of the Rackbirds, whom in some way the negro hadoffended, had sworn to kill him before night, and feeling sure that thisthreat would be carried out, the poor fellow had determined to run away,no matter what the consequences. He had chosen the way by the ocean, inorder that he might jump in and drown himself if he found that he waslikely to be overtaken, but apparently his escape had not yet beendiscovered.

  Maka was going on to tell something more about the wicked men, whenthe captain interrupted him. "Can this friend of yours speakEnglish?" he asked.

  "Only one, two words," replied Maka.

  "Ask him if he knows the name of that band of men."

  "Yes," said Maka, presently, "he know, but he no can speak it."

  "Are they called the Rackbirds?" asked Captain Horn.

  The shivering negro had been listening attentively, and now half rose andnodded his head violently, and then began to speak rapidly in African.

  "Yes," said Maka, "he says that is name they are called."

  At this moment Ralph appeared upon the scene, and the second African,whose name was something like Mok, sprang to his feet as if he were aboutto flee for his life. But as there was no place to flee to, except intothe water or into the arms of Ralph, he stood still, trembling. A fewfeet to the left the shelf ended in a precipitous rock, and on the right,as has been said, it gradually descended into the water, the space onwhich the party stood not being more than twenty feet long and five orsix feet wide. When he saw Ralph, the captain suddenly stopped thequestion he was about to ask, and said in an undertone to Maka:

  "Not a word to the boy. I will tell."

  "Oh," cried Ralph, "you do not know what a lively couple there is outthere. I found that my sister and Mrs. Cliff had made up their minds thatthey would perish in about two days, and Mrs. Cliff had been making herwill with a lead-pencil, and now they are just as high up as they werelow down before. They would not let me come to get them some water,though I kept telling them they never tasted anything like it in theirwhole lives, because they wanted to hear everything about everything. Mysister will be wild to come to this lake before long, even if Mrs. Cliffdoes not care to try it. And when you are ready to come to them, andbring Maka, they want to know who that other colored man is, and how Makahappened to find him. I truly believe their curiosity goes ahead of theirthirst." And so saying he went down to the lake to fill a pail he hadbrought with him.

  The captain told Ralph to hurry back to the ladies, and that he would bethere in a few minutes. Captain Horn knew a great deal about theRackbirds. They were a band of desperadoes, many of them outlaws andcriminals. They had all come down from the isthmus, to which they hadbeen attracted by the great canal works, and after committing variousoutrages and crimes, they had managed to get away without being shot orhung. Captain Horn had frequently heard of them in the past year or two,and it was generally supposed that they had some sort of rendezvous orrefuge on this coast, but there had been no effort made to seek them out.He had frequently heard of crimes committed by them at p
oints along thecoast, which showed that they had in their possession some sort ofvessel. At one time, when he had stopped at Lima, he had heard that therewas talk of the government's sending out a police or military expeditionagainst these outlaws, but he had never known of anything of the sortbeing done.

  Everything that, from time to time, had been told Captain Horn aboutthe Rackbirds showed that they surpassed in cruelty and utter vilenessany other bandits, or even savages, of whom he had ever heard. Amongother news, he had been told that the former leader of the band, whichwas supposed to be composed of men of many nationalities, was a FrenchCanadian, who had been murdered by his companions because, while robbinga plantation in the interior,--they had frequently been known to crossthe desert and the mountains,--he had forborne to kill an old manbecause as the trembling graybeard looked up at him he had reminded himof his father. Some of the leading demons of the band determined thatthey could not have such a fool as this for their leader, and he waskilled while asleep.

  Now the band was headed by a Spaniard, whose fiendishness was of asufficiently high order to satisfy the most exacting of his fellows.These and other bits of news about the Rackbirds had been told by one ofthe band who had escaped to Panama after the murder of the captain,fearing that his own talents for baseness did not reach the averagenecessary for a Rackbird.

  When he had made his landing from the wreck, Captain Horn never gave athought to the existence of this band of scoundrels. In fact, he hadsupposed, when he had thought of the matter, that their rendezvous mustbe far south of this point.

  But now, standing on that shelf of rock, with his eyes fixed on the waterwithout seeing it, he knew that the abode of this gang of wretches waswithin a comparatively short distance of this spot in which he and hiscompanions had taken refuge, and he knew, too, that there was everyreason to suppose that some of them would soon be in pursuit of the negrowho had run away.

  Suddenly another dreadful thought struck him. Wild beasts, indeed!

  He turned quickly to Maka. "Does that man know anything about Davis andthe two sailors? Were they killed?" he asked.

  Maka shook his head and said that he had already asked his companion thatquestion, but Mok had said that he did not know. All he knew was thatthose wicked men killed everybody they could kill.

  The captain shut his teeth tightly together. "That was it," he said. "Icould not see how it could be jaguars, although I could think of nothingelse. But these bloodthirsty human beasts! I see it now." He moved towardthe passage. "If that dirty wretch had not run away," he thought, "wemight have stayed undiscovered here until a vessel came. But they willtrack his footsteps upon the sand--they are bound to do that."