“It is well that you swim as a man should, Big Brother,” Mauriri
whispered.
From the lava glen they had descended to the head of the bay and taken
to the water. They swam softly, without splash, Mauriri in the lead. The
black walls of the crater rose about them till it seemed they swam
on the bottom of a great bowl. Above was the sky of faintly luminous
star-dust. Ahead they could see the light which marked the Rattler, and
from her deck, softened by distance, came a gospel hymn played on the
phonograph intended for Pilsach.
The two swimmers bore to the left, away from the captured schooner.
Laughter and song followed on board after the hymn, then the phonograph
started again. Grief grinned to himself at the appositeness of it as
“Lead, Kindly Light,” floated out over the dark water.
“We must take the passage and land on the Big Rock,” Mauriri whispered.
“The devils are holding the low land. Listen!”
Half a dozen rifle shots, at irregular intervals, attested that Brown
still held the Rock and that the pirates had invested the narrow
peninsula.
At the end of another hour they swam under the frowning loom of the Big
Rock. Mauriri, feeling his way, led the landing in a crevice, up which
for a hundred feet they climbed to a narrow ledge.
“Stay here,” said Mauriri. “I go to Brown. In the morning I shall
return.”
“I will go with you, Brother,” Grief said.
Mauriri laughed in the darkness.
“Even you, Big Brother, cannot do this thing. I am the Goat Man, and
I only, of all Fuatino, can go over the Big Rock in the night.
Furthermore, it will be the first time that even I have done it. Put out
your hand. You feel it? That is where Pilsach's dynamite is kept. Lie
close beside the wall and you may sleep without falling. I go now.”
And high above the sounding surf, on a narrow shelf beside a ton of
dynamite, David Grief planned his campaign, then rested his cheek on his
arm and slept.
In the morning, when Mauriri led him over the summit of the Big Rock,
David Grief understood why he could not have done it in the night.
Despite the accustomed nerve of a sailor for height and precarious
clinging, he marvelled that he was able to do it in the broad light of
day. There were places, always under minute direction of Mauriri, that
he leaned forward, falling, across hundred-foot-deep crevices, until his
outstretched hands struck a grip on the opposing wall and his legs could
then be drawn across after. Once, there was a ten-foot leap, above half
a thousand feet of yawning emptiness and down a fathom's length to a
meagre foothold. And he, despite his cool head, lost it another time on
a shelf, a scant twelve inches wide, where all hand-holds seemed to fail
him. And Mauriri, seeing him sway, swung his own body far out and over
the gulf and passed him, at the same time striking him sharply on the
back to brace his reeling brain. Then it was, and forever after, that he
fully knew why Mauriri had been named the Goat Man.
V
The defence of the Big Rock had its good points and its defects.
Impregnable to assault, two men could hold it against ten thousand.
Also, it guarded the passage to open sea. The two schooners, Raoul Van
Asveld, and his cutthroat following were bottled up. Grief, with the ton
of dynamite, which he had removed higher up the rock, was master. This
he demonstrated, one morning, when the schooners attempted to put to
sea. The _Valetta_ led, the whaleboat towing her manned by captured
Fuatino men. Grief and the Goat Man peered straight down from a safe
rock-shelter, three hundred feet above. Their rifles were beside them,
also a glowing fire-stick and a big bundle of dynamite sticks with fuses
and decanators attached. As the whaleboat came beneath, Mauriri shook
his head.
“They are our brothers. We cannot shoot.”
For'ard, on the _Valetta_, were several of Grief's own Raiatea sailors.
Aft stood another at the wheel. The pirates were below, or on the other
schooner, with the exception of one who stood, rifle in hand, amidships.
For protection he held Naumoo, the Queen's daughter, close to him.
“That is the chief devil,” Mauriri whispered, “and his eyes are blue
like yours. He is a terrible man. See! He holds Naumoo that we may not
shoot him.”
A light air and a slight tide were making into the passage, and the
schooner's progress was slow.
“Do you speak English?” Grief called down.
The man startled, half lifted his rifle to the perpendicular, and looked
up. There was something quick and catlike in his movements, and in his
burned blond face a fighting eagerness. It was the face of a killer.
“Yes,” he answered. “What do you want?”
“Turn back, or I'll blow your schooner up,” Grief warned. He blew on the
fire-stick and whispered, “Tell Naumoo to break away from him and run
aft.”
From the _Rattler_, close astern, rifles cracked, and bullets spatted
against the rock. Van Asveld laughed defiantly, and Mauriri called
down in the native tongue to the woman. When directly beneath, Grief,
watching, saw her jerk away from the man. On the instant Grief touched
the fire-stick to the match-head in the split end of the short fuse,
sprang into view on the face of the rock, and dropped the dynamite. Van
Asveld had managed to catch the girl and was struggling with her. The
Goat Man held a rifle on him and waited a chance. The dynamite struck
the deck in a compact package, bounded, and rolled into the port
scupper. Van Asveld saw it and hesitated, then he and the girl ran aft
for their lives. The Goat Man fired, but splintered the corner of the
galley. The spattering of bullets from the _Rattler_ increased, and the
two on the rock crouched low for shelter and waited. Mauriri tried to
see what was happening below, but Grief held him back.
“The fuse was too long,” he said. “I'll know better next time.”
It was half a minute before the explosion came. What happened afterward,
for some little time, they could not tell, for the Rattler's marksmen
had got the range and were maintaining a steady fire. Once, fanned by a
couple of bullets, Grief risked a peep. The _Valetta_, her port deck
and rail torn away, was listing and sinking as she drifted back into the
harbour. Climbing on board the _Rattler_ were the men and the Huahine
women who had been hidden in the _Valetta's_ cabin and who had swum for
it under the protecting fire. The Fuatino men who had been towing in the
whaleboat had cast off the line, dashed back through the passage, and
were rowing wildly for the south shore.
From the shore of the peninsula the discharges of four rifles announced
that Brown and his men had worked through the jungle to the beach and
were taking a hand. The bullets ceased coming, and Grief and Mauriri
joined in with their rifles. But they could do no damage, for the men of
the _Rattler_ were firing from the shelter of the deck-houses, while the
wind and tide carried the schooner farther in.
There was no sign of the _Valetta_, which had sunk in the deep water of
the crater.
Two things Raoul Van Asveld did that showed his keenness and coolness
and that elicited Grief's admiration. Under the _Rattler's_ rifle fire
Raoul compelled the fleeing Fuatino men to come in and surrender. And at
the same time, dispatching half his cutthroats in the _Rattler's_ boat,
he threw them ashore and across the peninsula, preventing Brown from
getting away to the main part of the island. And for the rest of the
morning the intermittent shooting told to Grief how Brown was being
driven in to the other side of the Big Rock. The situation was
unchanged, with the exception of the loss of the _Valetta_.