"So?"
Bryant grunted. "So am I. How is it you're not competing, too?"
"Maybe because up until now I've been a little worried."
"It appears our worries about pepper are over," Bryant said cheerfully. He paused, critically eying a couple of nubile, brown-skinned girls with firm, proudly outthrust breasts. "Time was when I'd've been satisfied with a girl like one of those."
Scott grinned. "I've thought about 'em, too. Only I don't like the way they're always chewing and spitting, and I don't like the odor of that rancid coconut oil they use on their hair. In time, though, I will probably get over my objections, particularly if things keep going as they are now."
"Stay out here long enough and they'll look real white and smell like roses," Bryant said. "At least, that's the way it used to be. There won't be any native girls for me this trip."
"You sound like a gone gosling?"
"I am. You probably haven't noticed Scott, but Miss Dorcas has plenty of sense and a lot more book learning than either of us. She's got guts, too, I'll bet. A man could be proud of a wife like her."
Despite the new aura of friendliness in Stallapoo, Scott did not drop his guard, keeping the armed watch around the clock, but he permitted liberty to the crew. He also began studying Malay with a teacher sent to the ship each morning by Pa' Mahmud. Russell always joined him, and once Dorcas sat in on a session. Usually, though, she was on deck with Fox or ashore with Bryant during the school period.
"I think my daughter is rather pleased we didn't have an uninterrupted voyage from Manila," Russell observed to Scott one morning.
"Why?"
"In Manila she had to live a rather sheltered life. We had to conform to the conventions, and the Spaniards are behind everybody else in freedoms of any sort. It would be unthinkable for her to go around unchaperoned in Manila, say, or anywhere in Spain... Well, her mother, God rest her soul, was a rebel, too. If she hadn't been, she wouldn't have married me."
Scott and Russell were in the cabin with their instructor one day when a sudden squall blew up. They paid no attention until a shout of alarm was raised topside. Scott rushed out into pelting rain. Fox, the officer of the watch, was frantically summoning men to man a boat.
"What is it?" Scott shouted.
"That fool Bryant!" Fox yelled back in fear and anger, pointing on the starboard quarter. "He took Dorcas sailing in a proa, and now it's capsized!"
Then Scott saw the tipped-over craft, which was little larger than an Indian canoe, floating some two hundred yards away. He couldn't see the couple who had been in it. On impulse he leaped into the boat, himself taking the tiller while Fox went into the bow with a boat hook.
"Pull!" he rasped to the crew. "Pull, damn you—pull!"
"Bear to starb'd, captain," the mate called. "I see 'em!"
Scott saw them, too. Dorcas was clinging to the boat with one hand and supporting Bryant with the other.
"Damn' fool!" Fox shouted agitatedly. "He was just trying to show off in that little proa."
When they were ten yards from the overturned boat, the rain ceased as suddenly as it had started. A minute later Scott laid the boat alongside the capsized craft. Fox reached eagerly for the girl.
"Take him first, Mr. Fox," she directed calmly. "The boom hit him."
"Shark!" a sailor cried.
Scott looked, seeing the fin cutting the water fifty feet away.
Fox and a seaman hauled the unconscious Bryant over the gunwale, dumping him in the bottom of the boat, then reached again for Dorcas. They yanked her aboard as the shark rolled in the sea, opening a huge mouth set with formidable teeth.
Scott blew out his breath explosively. The monstrous fish was fully twelve feet long. Then he looked at Dorcas. Her eyes were feverishly bright and her cheeks flushed with exertion and excitement. Soaked clothing was molded to her body and there was no escaping the knowledge that physically she was equal, if not superior, to the exquisitely formed native girls.
Without thought of self she bent over the inert skipper of the Sally Culbreath. He stirred and opened his eyes when her cool, wet hand touched his bruised head.
"All right?" she asked solicitously.
He managed a grin. "Just a bump on the head." Then he frowned thoughtfully. "You must have grabbed me."
"You were unconscious."
He blinked. "But for you, I would have drowned. Even conscious I would have. I can't swim."
Suddenly she thought of her appearance and looked about for something to cover herself. Scott gravely handed her a square of sailcloth which had been stowed in the stem. Fox hastened to help her wrap herself in it.
Bryant sat up and rubbed his head. "I'm not the small-boat sailor I fancied I was. Sorry, Dorcas."
Scott gave the order to row, then steered for the Caroline. "Wind tip you over?"
The Salem shipmaster nodded. "I'm afraid I wasn't watching what I was about."
"Well, you're a damned poor sailor, then!" Fox exploded wrathfully. "You might have drowned her!"
Dorcas spoke up mildly. "I'm a good swimmer. There wasn't any danger."
"What about that shark?"
"Shark?"
She paled as he told her about the big fish; but she tried to smile. "Now I'm afraid," she said shakily.
"My God!" Bryant exclaimed. He faced Dorcas. "Forgive me. And—well—thanks for grabbing me."
The tropical sun was blazing again, heating them all, but suddenly she felt cold. Thinking of the shark, she shivered violently, as if in the grip of ague, and pulled the coarse sailcloth closer about her slender figure. Fox leaned anxiously toward her. "You're all right? You're all right, Dorcas?"
Touched by his concern, she laid a small hand on his arm for a moment. "Of course I am, thanks to you"—she paused, lifting her face to speak also to Scott and every man at the oars—"thanks to all of you."
Bryant held in until she was helped into the Caroline by her father. Then he threw up the salt water he had swallowed.
17
TOWARD the end of June the two trading vessels took aboard the last of Pa' Mahmud's pepper and made sail against head winds for Quallah Battoo—Rocky River—a short distance farther up the coast. Fox proposed stopping at Soo Soo, which was nearer Stallapoo, but Scott steered for the principal mouth of the shallow stream which gave the coastal town its name. From the anchorage in the roadstead a mile and a half offshore it could be seen that Quallah Battoo was split unevenly by a twenty-foot-wide flow of water, an inland offshoot of the river, which entered the sea just north of the settlement of stilted houses. The main branch of the river was shallow and no more than a hundred feet in width.
By messenger the inland rajah, Darus, whose hilly domain began twenty-odd miles upriver, had promised to fill the holds of both the Caroline and the Sally Culbreath with peppercorns. Darus himself came out to meet them soon after the brigs anchored early in the afternoon. He was a short, moon-faced fellow of merry disposition whom Scott couldn't help liking. Moreover, he had fifteen piculs of pepper in as many small proas in the river's mouth and he appeared pleased to get the same price paid Pa' Mahmud.
"We're lucky, I think," Bryant said enthusiastically after the first meeting with Darus. "Trading with this fellow is going to be a lot easier than dealing with the five rajahs in Qual-lah Battoo. Of course, we're going to have to keep an eye on the lot of them all the time we're in these waters."
Scott nodded agreement. They had learned that the town's various rulers normally got most of their pepper for trading purposes from the high country controlled by Dainis, who this year had decided to deal without benefit of middlemen. It was a situation which could breed trouble, especially if the inland rajah were not strong enough to check the natural greed of of the coastal rajahs he was depriving of business in the first year that American ships had returned to the Pepper Coast.