Project Gutenberg's The Devil's Admiral, by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

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Title: The Devil's Admiral

Author: Frederick Ferdinand Moore

Release Date: February 8, 2004 [EBook #10988]

Language: English

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Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE DEVIL'S ADMIRAL

An Adventure Story

BY FREDERICK FERDINAND MOORE

1913

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

    I. Missionary and Red-Headed Beggar
   II. Red-Headed Beggar and Missionary
  III. The Spy and the Dead Boatswain
   IV. I Go Aboard the Kut Sang
    V. The Dead Man in the Passage
   VI. The Red-Headed Man Makes an Accusation
  VII. I Turn Spy Myself
 VIII. Mr. Harris Has a Few Ideas
   IX. A Fight in the Dark
    X. The Devil's Admiral
   XI. A Council of War
  XII. The Battle on the Bridge
 XIII. We Plan an Expedition
  XIV. The Pursuit Ashore
   XV. Two Thieves and a Fight
  XVI. The Gold and the Pirates
 XVII. The Art of Thirkle
XVIII. Big Stakes in a Big Game
  XIX. "One Man Less in the Forecastle Mess"
   XX. The Last

CHAPTER I

MISSIONARY AND RED-HEADED BEGGAR

Captain Riggs had a trunk full of old logbooks, and he said any of them would make a better story than the Kut Sang. The truth of it was, he didn't want me to write this story. There were things he didn't wish to see in type, perhaps because he feared to read about himself and what had happened in the old steamer in the China Sea.

"Folks don't care nothing about cargo-boats," he would say, taking his pipe out of his mouth and shaking his head gravely, whenever I hinted that I would like to tell of our adventure of the Kut Sang. "They want yarns of them floating hotels called liners, with palm-gardens in 'em and bands playing at their meals and games and so on going from eight bells to the bos'n's watch.

"It was mostly fighting in the Kut Sang, and the mess you and me and poor Harris and the black boy there got into wouldn't be just the quiet sort of reading folks want these days. It was all over in a night and a day, anyway—look at them Northern Spy apples, Mr. Trenholm!"

He wanted to forget the Kut Sang and the awful night we had in her. He imagined he didn't figure to advantage in the story, and he winced when I mentioned certain events, although I always insisted that he was the bravest man among us, having a better realization of the odds against us. Those who have faced danger know it takes a brave man to admit that he is beaten, and still keep up the fight.

We all have better memories for our brave moments than for the fear which threatened for a time to prove us cowards. The man who has faced death and says he was not afraid is either a fool or a liar; and, if only a liar, still a fool for telling himself that which he knows to be a lie. The bravery of the seaman is that he fears the sea and knows its ruthlessness and its ultimate victory, and accepts it as a part of his day's work. This is a sea-story.

Captain Riggs had log-book stories that were good, and they might have served him for a volume of marine memoirs. But I was with him when we freighted the Kut Sang with adventure and sailed out of Manila, so his musty records of rescues and wrecks lacked life for me. In the old logbooks I found no men to compare with the Rev. Luther Meeker; or Petrak, the little red-headed beggar; or Long Jim or Buckrow or Thirkle. I never found in their pages a cabin-boy like Rajah the Malay, strutting about with a long kris stuck in the folds of his scarlet sarong, or a mate whose truculence equalled the chronic ill-humour of Harris, who learned his seamanship as a fisherman on the Newfoundland Banks. And in all his log-books I never found another Devil's Admiral!

Riggs is dead, and I can tell the story in my own way; for tell it I must, and the manuscript will be a comfort to me when I am old and my memory and imagination begin to fail. Not that I ever expect to forget, because that would be a calamity; but I want to put down the events of the day and night in the Kut Sang while they are fresh in my mind.

How well I can see in a mental vision the whole murderous plot worked out! Certain parts of it flash on me at off moments, while I am reading a book or watching a play or talking with a friend, and every trivial detail comes out as clearly as if it were all being done over again in a motion picture. The night gloom in the hall brings back to me the 'tween-decks of the old tub of a boat; the green-plush seats of a sleeping-car remind me of the Kut Sang's dining-saloon, and even a bonfire in an adjacent yard recalls the odour of burned rice on the galley fire left by the panic-stricken Chinese cook.

I know the very smell of the Kut Sang. I caught it last week passing a ship-chandler's shop, and it set my veins throbbing again with the sense of conflict, and I caught myself tensing my muscles for a death grapple. To me the Kut Sang is a personality, a sentient being, with her own soul and moods and temper, audaciously tossing her bows at the threatening seas rising to meet her. She is my sea-ghost, and as much a character to me as Riggs or Thirkle or Dago Red.

The deep, bright red band on her funnel gave her a touch of coquetry, but she had the drabness of senility; she was worn out, and working, when she should have gone to the junk pile years before. But her very antiquity charmed me, for her scars and wrinkles told of hard service in the China Sea; and there was an air of comfort about her, such as one finds in an ancient house that has sheltered several generations.

Precious little comfort I had in her, though, which is why I remember her so well, and why I never shall forget her. If she had made Hong-Kong in five days, her name would be lost in the memory of countless other steamers, and there would be no tale to tell. But now she is the Kut Sang, and every time I whisper the two words to myself I live once more aboard her.

Rajah is with me—inherited, I might say, from Captain Riggs. Perhaps he keeps my memory keen on the old days, for how could I forget with the black boy stalking about the house—half the time in his bare feet and his native costume, which I rather encourage—for his sarong matches the curtains of my den and adds a bit of colour to my colourless surroundings.

I am quite sure that if Captain Riggs were still alive he would agree that the story should begin with my first sight of the missionary and the little red-headed man, so I will launch the narrative with an account of how I first met the Rev. Luther Meeker.

He was in the midst of a litter of nondescript baggage on the Manila mole when I came ashore from a rice-boat that had brought me across the China Sea from Saigon. The first glance marked