Eleven o'clock. It was very late...
Chapter 20
Shortly after noon the wind fell away to nothing, and the Susquehanna, now barely making steerageway, held in toward the rocky shore. Jean was hoping to pick up vagrant breezes out of the numerous ravines that slashed the mountains. Twice during the afternoon there were brief squalls accompanied by heavy rain, and each time the schooner gained ground.
All hands that could be spared were catching sleep against the long watches ahead, and when they turned to, every one of them was given a jolt of hot rum. It was almost dusk when the wind picked up. Moving at a bare four knots they rounded into Gedney Pass.
Both shores sloped steeply back to three thousand feet, with the shore steep-to.
Creeping along, the schooner made Shrimp Bay and dropped anchor until morning. During the night it rained hard. The man on watch was relieved every hour; Jean wanted to take no chance because of a sleepy watch. All hands slept in their clothing, ready to turn to at a moment's notice, and LaBarge bedded down under the bottom-up whaleboat.
Tired as he was, he could not sleep. The cold wind made him grateful for his heavy blankets. Once while lying awake he heard something crash far up the mountainside and then a sliding of rocks and timber. There was a faint following rattle of stones, then silence. The schooner was ghostly in the night, but toward morning the air warmed a little and the fog lifted, shrouding her rigging in cobwebs of mist. His cargo was worth at least eighty thousand dollars and depending on how the market stood at the moment, might be worth at least half again that much.
Sometime after that he must have fallen asleep for he was awakened to find the sky turning pale yellow and the watch standing beside him with a steaming cup of black coffee. By the time the sun was halfway up the sky they had rounded Curlew Point and entered the Narrows along Bell Island. Here, for approximately eight miles, the channel varied from three-tenths of a mile in width to more than a mile. By report the water was deep and the shores steep-to, but as the fog held they had no idea if they were pursued or not.
Like a ghost ship on a ghost sea they slid along through the fog. He was coming up from below when Kohl called him. The schooner faced a continuing channel ahead, but to their right lay another opening, a little wider. "What d' you think, Barney?"
Kohl rubbed his neck. "A man can only guess." Together they walked to the bow and looked at the water. Just beyond the entrances both passages were blocked off by fog. One might be an escape, the other a trap, but which was which? A decision had to be made, yet Jean delayed, hoping for some indication, some evidence on which to base a choice.
"What's the book say?" Kohl had noticed the black book LaBarge occasionally referred to.
"It doesn't say. The man who told me about this channel hadn't navigated it, he'd only crossed it at the Narrows with some Tlingits after him. He did get a taste of the water and it was salt."
He stiffened suddenly, lifting a hand. "Listen! I heard something then!
Something dropped on a deck!"
All ears strained into the silence and fog. Kohl grabbed his arm. "Cap'n ... look!"
It was a piece of shelf ice such as forms along a shore, and it had drifted from the opening that lay ahead. It was moving upon some strong, unseen current. "Put the helm over, Noble," Jean said. "We take the other opening." Suddenly from out of the fog there was a cry, "Sail, ho! Dead ahead!" And the words were in Russian.
As one man the crew sprang into action, getting sail on the schooner. Putting the helm over sent them into thick, blanketing fog, and like a gray ghost the Susquehanna gathered speed, while behind them they heard excited talk in Russian.
"Gant, Boyar, Turk!" LaBarge grabbed the three men. "Lay aft with your rifles.
Stand by to fire but not a shot until I give the word, understand?"
He turned on Kohl. "How did they see us before we saw them?"
"They must've had a man at the masthead."
Behind them a cannon boomed suddenly, and they heard the shell crash into the forest, some distance off.
"Shootin' up the other channel," Gant said. "They didn't see us duck out." A half hour later, sliding more swiftly through thinning fog, they heard another shot, far behind them. The patrol ship had obviously taken the other, more obvious channel. Yet they themselves were sailing into the unknown and from brief glimpses of the shore nobody could guess the position. Abruptly, they emerged from the fog and saw dead ahead of them a mighty shaft of rock towering over two hundred feet into the air! Kohl whooped. "Cap'n!" He grabbed Jean's arm. "We're okay! That's Eddystone Rock an' we're not more than twenty miles above Revillagigedo Channel! I've been this far a dozen times!"
Far behind them the patrol ship Lena captained by Alexi Boncharof, with Baron Zinnovy aboard, felt its way slowly up the unknown channel. Boncharof, knowing the temper of his passenger and superior, was growing more and more worried. There was a current flowing against them and he was positive it was no tidal current.
"I think," he began hesitantly, "there is a river at the end of this inlet. I do not believe they went this way."
"I heard them, I tell you!" Zinnovy's voice was coldly furious.
They proceeded another mile, two miles. Boncharof was thoroughly unhappy. Experience had taught him it was foolhardly to pursue poachers; one had to wait until opportunity offered rather than venture into narrow channels filled with dangers of all sorts. But who was he to advise his superior, an officer of the Imperial Navy?
Yet when the fog broke they saw two rivers flowing into a dead-end inlet, and no sign of the Susquehanna Baron Paul Zinnovy stared wide-eyed with anger at the shore and the rivers, then he turned abruptly and went below, nor would he appear on deck again until they reached Sitka.
Below deck he poured a glass of cognac. The American had escaped him again, yet he dismissed his failure as he dismissed all failure. One thing he had decided. He dare not let Rotcheff return to St. Petersburg, nor his wife, either, for that matter. He turned the glass in his hand, knowing he must move soon and swiftly. He wished to return to St. Petersburg a wealthy man, to establish himself in the capital. There was no better place for a man to be who had wealth, but without it, one was nothing.
LaBarge now: the man must have taken a small fortune in furs! That schooner was well down in the water; it would take a lot of fur to bring her down so far. If he could have captured the schooner with that fur ... ! Paul Zinnovy had come into the world as an only child in a country mansion remote from all others of his class, and on an estate where he ruled almost as a prince. His father's overseers had gotten work out of the peasants with the knout, and Paul had been taught to do likewise. Zinnovy recalled his mother as an inconsequential woman in black who had lived for twenty years in fear of her husband, and as he grew up she came to live in equal fear of her son. At school he was the only child from the gentry and tyrannized over the others, yet he was intelligent and his grades were good. Later, at the university his grades were even better, yet there for the first time he felt discontent. He was no longer first. He found many who were richer, stronger, students who lived on vaster estates, and knew more important people. A tall, handsome and somewhat cold young man, he repelled people rather than attracted them, and soon learned that his father, a tyrant on his estates, was only a provincial member of the petty nobility and of no consequence in St. Petersburg.