Dangerous By Nature

Manning Coles

Description

It's the same Hambledon, but far from his usual European haunts. Plunked down in a Central American republic, Tommy finds himself trapped between hot Latin temperaments and cold "hostile powers". Full of page-turning suspense and intrigue, DANGEROUS BY NATURE is top-drawer Manning Coles to be sure!

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Thriller
• Fiction
• Espionage
• Thrillers

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774643303
• Langue: English

Extrait

Dangerous By Nature
by Manning Coles

First published in 1950
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.





















DANGEROUS BY NATURE




by MANNING COLES

Chapter I.

Trouble In The Bilges

The Central American Republic of Esmeralda looks towards the sunrise across the Caribbean Sea, There are nearly a hundred miles of Esmeraldan coast; a hundred miles of flat alluvial plain varying in depth from five to twenty miles of parrot-haunted forest intersected by muddy creeks which fill and fall with the tides and from which the landcrabs come out at night seeking what they may devour. Behind the plain the land rises steeply and breaks into scenery which is certainly beautiful but as violent as a storm, seamed with fantastic gorges which look from the sea like mere creases in the cloak of primeval forest but in actual fact may drop a thousand precipitous feet to a torrent among boulders white with foam. Behind and above the foothills rise the serrated peaks of the star-storming Cordilleras lifting their snow-clad summits halfway up the sky.

There are clearings in the forest on the plain; large clearings, some several miles long, where a cheerful but leisure-loving native peasantry does the minimum of labour necessary to produce bananas, pepper, spices, oranges, coconuts, rubber and coffee, but principally bananas. The clearings are gaining on the forest, but there are long stretches where the dense cloak of trees still comes down to meet the sea and the monkeys chatter and swing above the white sands of the foreshore. There are villages in these clearings, sometimes a mere handful of mud huts thatched with banana leaves, sometimes big enough to be called a small town with a few two-storey houses, a dusty hotel, a church, a jail and even some inhabitants who wear shoes and are such a pale coffee-colour as to be almost white.

San Martin is the capital of the Republic of Esmeralda and lies in the biggest clearing of all, a stretch of fifteen miles where the forest has been pushed back from the sea. San Martin looks well from the sea with a sufficiency of white houses among gardens, the white bulk of the Hotel of All Nations, and the grey cathedral with its squat tower and small deep windows. San Martin has by fits and starts, and depending upon the current administration, a certain amount of civic pride; no grass is allowed to grow in the Calle del Libertador—the Street of the Liberator—San Martin’s Piccadilly and Bond streets combined. Here the stone pavements are at least three feet wide, and no less than five of the shops have plate-glass windows. The police of the town have no uniform as Europe understands uniforms, but on their silver badges the good saint forever divides his cloak with a kneeling beggar, and the same device appears, enamelled upon tin, on the door of the post office, the gate of the municipal hospital and the panels of the horse-drawn steam-powered municipal fire engine. The Calle del Libertador runs for nearly three quarters of a mile from the beach to the cathedral and there subsides suddenly into an ordinary road of beaten earth, grass-grown and rutted. Take any turning off the Calle del Libertador and you shall find the same: narrow grass-grown alleys twisting round and between houses progressively deteriorating in size and quality with their distance from the centre, till the outskirts of the town are fringed with huts built of adobe mud, with glassless holes for windows and leaky roofs patched with flattened kerosene tins, where the native labourers live, half-caste Indians and Caribs as black as the kitchen stove.

Over all this scene there hangs the heavy curtain of the heat, so strong as to be almost visible, a burden from sudden sunrise to abrupt nightfall. Even at night there is but little relief, for Esmeralda lies within fifteen degrees of latitude from the Equator.

The auxiliary ketch Doramine came up the coast under sail on passage from Panama to Cedar Keys in Florida. She was hugging the coast for shopping facilities, since the owner and friends had plenty of time and the Doramine was only a fifty-tonner without such effeminate refinements as refrigeration. She had no need, as it happened, to put in to San Martin for food, but she passed by as close inshore as was consistent with avoiding certain reefs, for she was not without her troubles that day.

The United States consul on his comparatively cool verandah saw her coming up and set down his tall glass to turn on her the long telescope which was his heart’s solace. The United States Consulate stood upon a spur of high ground above the town, and the view from the consul’s verandah supplied him with many sources of entertainment.

His friend the British consul, becoming telepathically aware of his colleague’s sudden interest in something, opened one sleepy blue eye and said: “What is it?”

The American consul told him, adding: “By the look of things, there’s some sort of trouble aboard. They are pumping; I can see the water running down the side.”

“Ship been bitten by a shark,” suggested the British consul. He applied himself to his own glass, which contained liquid, not lenses, and strengthened him to sit up and look out to sea. “She’s not putting in here, apparently.”

“No,” said the American. “No. She’s just carrying right on, Seems like the trouble can’t be too bad.”

“Bilges,” said the British consul, settling down again. “You know what bilge water is anywhere, and in this climate it probably crawls out and makes faces at them.” He closed his eyes once more.

But the trouble on the Doramine did not arise from the bilges—at least not in origin. She had an auxiliary engine, as has been said, and this was cooled in the usual way by pumping sea water in through a pipe which pierced the hull below the water line, circulating the water round the engine water jacket and returning it overboard to the ocean through an outlet pipe at deck level. The seating of the intake pipe where it passed through the hull had become defective and the sea was entering at a rate at first negligible, then tiresome and now serious. The engine had to be run continuously to keep the bilge pump going; as the day wore on it became apparent that before long even continuous pumping would not be enough.

“She’s gaining on us,” said the engineer of the party, returning from inspection. “Not much, but we aren’t keeping up.”

“I don’t want to put into San Martin,” said the owner anxiously. “They’ll skin us with their charges till we have to sell the ship to pay for repairs. Four dollars per can per day for emptying garbage. Huh!”

“You aren’t the British Royal Navy,” said the steersman, leaning over the wheel to join the conference. “Nor this isn’t Cuba, either.”

“Near enough,” said the owner gloomily. “In these parts the sharks all crawl out of the sea, grow legs, and go into business.”

“No need for all that,” said the engineer. “No need at all. Why not do what the pirates used to do? Sail her up one of these creeks at high tide and careen her on the mud. There’s a fair kit of tools on board and I saw some copper sheet among the stores. If I could get at the job, I’d fix it between tides.”

“Brother,” said the owner with emotion, “more than brother. We want the best ideas—you have ’em. Let’s have the chart and find a nice creek. San Martin is now astern; here it is, and that’s the point there with the trees on it. Thank heaven the tide’s rising. Now then—”

They found their creek, entered it an hour before high water, and proceeded up it for more than two miles before the engineer found a spot that satisfied his desires. They edged the Doramine as near to the bank as possible until she ran aground with a soft shudder. The owner, the navigator, and the mate, who, with the engineer, constituted the ship’s company, made their way ashore and affixed to one of the trees a pulley block to which was led a rope from a point about six feet up the mainmast. This was to ensure that the Doramine , when she heeled over with the falling tide, would do so with the damaged side uppermost. There was, naturally, some time to wait; they occupied it by having a meal and looking at the scenery, which was what is meant by the word “lush.” Trees grew to the water’s edge and overhung it, gaudy creepers linked the trees, brilliant butterflies flapped aimlessly about pursued by screaming parrots themselves pursued by chattering monkeys, while the tree frogs provided an incessant obbligato with their metallic croaking.

“Curious,” said the mate. “One doesn’t, somehow, think of forests as being noisy. What a racket! Coney Island has nothing on this. What oily-looking water! Looks like if you dipped it out it ’ud streel off like molasses. Tide’s going out fast. See that log just showed up?”

“That’s no log,” said the owner. “Best not fall in, Bob, if you can reasonably avoid it. That’s an alligator.”

“Will you go ashore, Bill?” said the engineer, addressing the navigator. “I’d like somebody’s eye on that pulley block when she begins to heel,”

The navigator nodded and rowed himself across twelve feet of shadows in the dinghy. “Looks as though I shall have to stay here till the tide rises again,” he said, and hauled himself ashore.

“Got your gun?” said the owner. “Then you can shoot us a wild pig for supper. Are there any wild pigs? I wouldn’t know. Collect butterflies, then. Sorry