“We’ll fire it in the chartroom,” Ingram replied. “There’s no gasoline left at all?”
“No.”
“What does your galley stove burn? Bottled gas, or kerosene?”
“Kerosene. There should be several cans of it in the locker forward.”
“Right. What about paint stores—turpentine, linseed oil, thinner?”
“There should be some of each.”
“Good.” He began to issue terse orders. “Get your passports, money, and the logbook; you can’t take anything else. Wrap them in something waterproof. Dump the water out of that dinghy and stow ‘em in there, along with a couple of flashlights. Put on lifebelts, and then you can give me a hand.”
Without even waiting for a reply, he whirled and ran down into the chartroom. He grabbed a flashlight from its bracket and went on down the steps and through the main and forward cabins, where the debris-laden water washed around his thighs. Opposite the sail bin was another locker. He unlatched the doors and yanked them open but could see nothing in the thickening gloom here below. He switched on the flashlight and wedged it between two of the sailbags. In an upper compartment were some tools and paint brushes. He spied a small hand ax and stuck the handle of it in his belt. The bottom of the locker was filled with buckets and rectangular one-gallon cans submerged and bumping together in the water that surged back and forth.
The buckets would be paint. He ignored them and began fishing out the cans. There were a dozen of them, mostly unidentifiable, the labels long since washed off, but it didn’t matter. An armful at a time, he carried them up the ladder going on deck from the forward cabin and dumped them beside the hatch. As he made the last trip he saw that Bellew and Mrs. Warriner had returned to the deck, wearing lifebelts, and Bellew had the dinghy up on its side, pouring the water out of it.
The great flame in the west was dying now, and the brief twilight of the tropics had already begun. He grabbed up two of the cans and ran aft.
“What now?” Bellew asked.
“Let’s get the dinghy over.” With a swing of the hand ax he knocked out one of the windows of the deckhouse and tossed the two cans in on the chartroom table. Mrs. Warriner was holding two flashlights and a package wrapped in oilskins. As she stowed them in the dinghy he noticed the compass had fallen out when Bellew had dumped out the water. It wasn’t broken. He put it back in.
“Grab the bow,” he said to Bellew. They lifted it over the lifeline and, when
Whirling to Bellew, he said, “Bring up a couple of those spare sails from the locker. It doesn’t matter which ones. Dump ‘em there alongside the mainmast. And then bring all those cans aft, the ones around the forward hatch.”
“Where do you want ‘em?” Bellew asked.
“Just forward of the cockpit’s all right.” He turned and ran down the steps into the chartroom. Quick blows of the hand ax knocked out the rest of the windows. He began yanking drawers out of the chart table and smashing them with the ax after he had dumped out the charts. He tore charts into strips until he had a great armful of paper. He piled this on a corner of the table and threw the splintered drawers on top of it. With another blow of the ax he cut through one of the cans. As the liquid gushed out, he could tell by the smell of it that it was paint-thinner. He poured it over the paper and wood and cut open the other can. This one was kerosene. He swung it, splashing the bulkheads, the deck, and the table. Grabbing up another chart, he nicked his cigar lighter. The lighter was wet and required several attempts before it worked. He held it to the corner of the chart and, when it was burning, tossed it on the pile. With a great sucking sound it all burst into flame at once. He threw the rest of the charts on it and ran out.
Bellew had the two sailbags piled beside the mainmast now and was hurrying back and forth, carrying the cans aft. With his knife open, beginning at the end of the boom, Ingram went forward, slicing through the gaskets of the furled mainsail. When he reached the mast he unshackled the sling and made the halyard fast to the head of the sail again. Two more quick slashes split the sailbags. He hauled the sails out and stretched them along the deck, one atop the other. He grabbed up a line at random, cut off a length, made it fast around the two sails somewhere near the center, and hauled the whole cumbersome bundle over to the base of the mast. He made the line fast to the halyard above the shackle.
Bellew was passing then with the last of the cans. He grabbed two of them from his arms and swung the ax on them. The first was linseed oil. He poured it on the two sails. The other was kerosene. He dumped this on them also, and onto the mainsail, which was dangling in folds along the boom. He could hear the fire beginning to roar below him now, and smoke was pouring through the broken windows. “Give me a hand on this halyard,” he called out to Bellew.
They hoisted. The mainsail went up, and with it the great dangling mass of the two spare sails made fast to the head of it. Kerosene and linseed oil began to drip on them.
Bellew grunted. “For that real homey feeling, it ought to be gasoline.”
“If it breaks out of the chartroom,” Ingram said, “go right over the side;”
“Don’t give it a thought, sport. I just look stupid.”
It was up. Ingram threw the hitches on the pin, and they ran aft. Flame was beginning to lick through the broken windows. “Into the dinghy,” he ordered and nodded to Bellew. “You first. Take the oars.” Bellew stepped down into it and held it while he helped Mrs. Warriner in.
She protested. “Aren’t you going to get in?”
“It won’t take three; it’ll capsize.”
“But you haven’t even got a lifebelt—”
He cut her off. “I don’t need one. Pull clear and wait for me. I want this thing to go all at once, and go high— the higher the better. Get going.” He waved them off. Bellew shipped the oars and they began to draw away in the thickening dusk, heaving up and down on the swell.
There were eight of the rectangular cans on deck at the forward end of the cockpit. He set them up on end one at a time and began swinging the ax. The first was spar varnish. He picked it up and threw it forward. It landed just beyond the mainmast and slid, spilling its contents along the deck. The next was kerosene. It went up the other side of the deck. Turpentine. It followed the varnish. Paint-thinner. That was the trigger, the most volatile of them all. He set it aside, upright on the cockpit seat with his knee braced against it so it wouldn’t turn over and spill. Linseed oil. He threw it forward.
It bounced and slid, spraying along the deck. The whole interior of the chartroom was a roaring mass of flame now, and he could feel the heat on his face. The varnish on the underside of the main boom was beginning to bubble. He had to hurry. There were only seconds left before it broke out through the roof.
He swung the ax on another can, and another. Some of them had already slid overboard, but their contents had spilled, and the whole deck forward of him was crisscrossed with trails of varnish, linseed oil, turpentine, and kerosene, flowing across the planks and soaking into the seams. The final can was another of paint-thinner. He dropped the ax and picked it up, along with the other can, the one beside his knee.
He ran to the after end of the cockpit and jumped up onto the narrow strip of deck right on the stern. All right, honey, this is where we are. Wheeling, he threw the first can straight through a window into the inferno inside the chartroom, and while it was still in the air he threw the other and dived over the side.
Thirty yards away in the gathering night, Lillian Warriner turned and stared in wonder. My God, she thought, they shouldn’t match him against just one ocean at a time. Even while his body was still in the air, a great ball of flame burst out of the chartroom, taking the roof of the deckhouse with it and igniting the whole ketch forward of the cockpit in one mighty breath. Fire shot up the oil-soaked mainsail and ballooned in the two sails at the top of it to form—with the force of the explosion and the massive updraft from the heat below— a gigantic torch, a column of flame nearly a hundred feet high. It lit up the sea for a quarter-mile in every direction, and she could feel the heat of it on her skin.
Then he was alongside, with a hand on the gunwale. He dropped his sneakers into the dinghy. They rose as a swell passed under them. “You haven’t got much freeboard,” he said, “but I think it’ll ride if you don’t make any sudden moves. If it does swamp, the flashlights are more important than your passports and money. Try to keep at least one of them out of the water. There’s no use staying here; keep rowing west.”
