MOST naturally, the reappearance of the yacht, at a moment when we
had practically worked our way around to the conclusion that it was
extremely doubtful if we should ever see her again, quickly put the
reasoned deductions to flight. But a second glance threw all the
hopeful machinery violently into the reverse. The _Andromeda's_
stealthy approach with all lights hidden, and the evident intention
on the part of whoever was in command to make land on the side of the
island farthest removed from the place of our debarkation, gave no
promise of rescue.
"The gold!" I exclaimed; and the two words collided with Van Dyck's:
"They are coming back after it!"
"But hold on," I interjected. "_Your_ gold is gone, and they don't
know--can't know--anything about the Spanish treasure. If it's buried
treasure they're coming after, somebody on board the yacht has the
wrong tip, to a dead moral certainty."
Van Dyck made a gesture like a man groping in the dark.
"There were the sand-filled boxes," he offered. "They've opened them.
They know that the gold has been unshipped somewhere, and I suppose it
wasn't impossible for them to find out that the yacht made a flying
trip to this island after the greater part of the crew had been given
shore leave at Willemstadt."
"You needn't go so far afield for an explanation," I countered. "Goff
knew where the gold was unshipped; and, by the same token, he is
probably the only man aboard of the yacht who knows the latitude and
longitude of Pirates' Hope. None of the others could have found the way
back here."
"But a few minutes ago you were accusing Goff of making away with the
gold on the night of its burial," was the quick retort.
"Wait," I interposed. "I said he did one of two things: dug your gold
up and took it aboard after you were asleep, or else he came ashore and
moved that block of coral. Evidently the latter half of the guess was
the correct one."
At this, he began to give ground a little.
"You may be right. Still, I can't believe it of Goff. There is a chance
that, notwithstanding my thinning out of the crew at Willemstadt, we
still had a traitor aboard. In that case we may have been spied upon
when we landed the gold--Goff and I. I'm still hanging to the belief
that there was a real mutiny, and in that case Goff may have been given
a choice between steering them back here or walking the plank."
This purely academic discussion of the whys and wherefores went on
while the _Andromeda_ was edging nearer and nearer to the outer reef
barrier, still as silently as a ghost ship, and still without showing
a sign of life on deck or bridge, so far as we could make out. Within
a stone's throw of the reef she slowed to a stand, and not until then
did we hear the low rumbling of her engines as they were reversed to
check her headway.
Since the yacht's approach had been from the eastward, she lay
broadside on to the island. We could see the electric motor launch
hanging in its davit tackle on the starboard side, but there was no
move made to lower it.
"They are not using any steam winches to-night," was Van Dyck's
muttered comment upon this. "Too much noise. Listen!"
There was a splash, apparently on the port side of the vessel, faint
sounds as of oars feathering in muffled rowlocks, and a little later
the yacht's yawl crept out around the sharp stem of the _Andromeda_ and
headed for a narrow inlet through the reef. There were seven or eight
men in the small boat; four at the oars, one in the bow and either two
or three aft.
At sight of this landing party Bonteck came alive with gratifying
promptness.
"Whether your guess is the right one or not, Dick, there is one thing
certain: If we let those fellows go to digging around in our bullion
patch, they will find what we found, and Madeleine will lose out, after
all. We can't let it stand that way. What do you say?"
I had whipped out my pocket-knife and was cutting a club, or trying to,
though the sapling mahogany, or whatever it was I was hacking at, was
tougher than a leather whipstock.
"I'm not thinking so much about the gold," I said. "It's up to us
to capture this yawl crew first, and the _Andromeda_ afterward. Get
yourself a weapon of some sort--quick!"
"Of course," he agreed at once, feeling in his pocket for the big
clasp-knife which he had used for a digging tool a few hours earlier.
"Something of that kind is what I meant. Shall we rush 'em when they
beach the yawl? Or had we better wait a bit and see what they mean to
do?"
In our excitement I think neither of us saw the absurdity of two men
armed only with clubs proposing to attack seven or eight who were
probably provided with firearms.
"We'd better wait," I said; but we made good in the matter of time
saving by hurrying through the wood to post ourselves handily in a
palmetto thicket on the southward-fronting beach edge near the place
toward which the yawl, now entering the lagoon, was headed.
The dash through the wood from our observation point at the heel of
the eastern sandspit seemed to me the hottest sprint I had ever made.
Once more the breeze had died out, and with little or no air stirring
in the open, in the forest the atmosphere was absolutely lifeless. I
don't know how near the running dash came to winding Van Dyck, but when
we reached the palmetto thicket the perspiration was pouring out of me
in trickling streams, and I was fairly gasping for breath. There was
a half-paralyzing portent in the stillness and the terrible heat. It
was as if subterranean fires had been kindled under the island, and
that curious back-lighting of the haze by the rising moon seemed now to
have a faintly lurid glow as if it were catching the reflection of the
unseen fires.
"Heavens--but this is awful!" Van Dyck muttered under his breath--from
which I argued that he was suffering no whit less from the heat than I
was. "If we get the weather that this is promising to give us----"
"Hush!" I whispered.
The yawl, pulled strongly by its four oarsmen, was sweeping up to the
beach, skimming the surface of the lagoon like some gigantic water
bug. But a moment later we found that we had miscalculated the landing
place. After coming within a pebble's toss of the shore--to be the
better hidden by the palm shadows, as we supposed--the helmsman swung
the yawl parallel to the beach with a low-toned word to his oarsmen,
and the boat drifted slowly past our hiding place, as if its crew might
be scanning the forest fringe for some determining landmark.
"Seven of them," said Van Dyck, with his lips at my ear. "At least
one of them will stay by the yawl when they land. That will cut the
odds down a bit, though I shouldn't mind if they'd divide up a little
evener."
I did not reply. My eyes were smarting painfully from the sweat which
was running down into them, and I was trying to get clear vision enough
to enable me to distinguish between the figures in the slowly drifting
boat. Though I couldn't make sure, I thought that the man at the yawl's
tiller was the ex-steward, Lequat.
A landing was made a little way down the beach from us, in a small
indentation too shallow to be called a bay. Noiselessly the yawl's oars
were unshipped, and then we heard the gentle grating of the boat's keel
upon the sand. In the debarking it became apparent that Bonteck had
considerably underrated the caution of the invaders. Three of the men
stayed by the yawl, leaving only four for whatever landward expedition
was toward. Oddly enough, as we thought, the four did not make
directly for the glade where the gold had been hidden. Instead, they
moved off down the beach, marching silently in single file and keeping
well within the shadow of the wood.
It was Van Dyck who flung a guess at their intention.
"They are going to take a look-in at our camp, first--to get the lay of
the land and to make sure that they won't be interrupted," he hazarded,
adding: "Which simplifies matters somewhat. The farther they get away
from their boat and the yacht, the easier it will be for us to clap an
extinguisher upon them without giving the alarm. Let's run for it and
head them off!"
It seemed easy enough to make a quick detour through the forest to a
point at which we could lie in wait for the marching four, and it was
not until after we had begun it that we realized how dark it was under
the trees, and how much the darkness was going to cut our speed. A
few minutes of this woodland race proved enough for both of us. "Head
for the beach and we'll run them down in the open," was Van Dyck's
modifying order, after we had stumbled and fallen half a dozen times
and got ourselves well torn and stabbed by the little bayonet palms
that grew thickly among the larger trees; and this we did, issuing from
the wood a hundred yards or so beyond the beached yawl, and possibly a
like distance behind the men we were trying to overtake.
To chase the four men openly from that point was to give the alarm in
both directions at once; in other words, to invite a front and rear
attack that we couldn't hope to repel with our primitive weapons. So
we fell back into the wood, changing our plan again and deciding to
wait until the four were out of sight, when we could turn and fall upon
the three at the boat and stand some chance of overcoming them and
possessing ourselves of whatever arms they might have.
But even this alternative was to be denied us. While we halted,
breathing hard from the hot struggle with the impeding jungle, Van Dyck
said, "Listen!" again. Afar to the eastward there was a sound like the
flapping of a thousand wings; a low drumming that seemed to fill the
dead air with jarring vibrations and to play upon the senses with the
maddening insistence of a single musical note too long sustained.
Before we had time to realize what the ominous warning portended, a
pistol shot cracked from the _Andromeda's_ bridge, and for a brief
instant the blinding glare of the searchlight swept the island beach.
"Calling them in," I said. "Whatever they're minded to do, the storm
is going to beat them to it." And that the shot and flash were signals
summoning the boat's crew to come aboard was quickly made apparent. The
expeditionary four wheeled and came running back along the beach, while
the three boat guards were tumbling hastily into the yawl and shipping
the oars.
Van Dyck gripped his club. "We mustn't let them get away, or get
together again!" he rapped out. "Wait until I give the word!"--and as
the four runners were about to pass our hiding place--"Now!"
What I did had to be done on the spur of the moment. At the climaxing
instant, I flung my arms around him and dragged him down and held him
helpless; at which it was only natural that he should fall to cursing
me like a fishwife.
"You fool!" I panted, when I had the breath to spare. "Let them go!
They'll come back. Don't you hear that wind coming? The yacht will be
lost if she hangs on outside of that reef five minutes longer!"
As I let him get up, a hurtling volley of great raindrops tore through
the foliage over our heads, and a blast, carrying with it the dank,
unwholesome breath of an upheaved watery underworld, swept across the
surface of the lagoon. Like mad-men the racing four hurled themselves
into the waiting yawl, the boat shoved off, and with the men at the
oars pulling with much more energy than skill, a frantic dash was made
for the passage through the reef.
It bade fair to be a shrewd case of touch and go; an open question
as to whether or not the yawl could reach the yacht before the yacht
would have to claw off the island in sheer self-preservation. Dark as
it had grown, we could see the black smoke of freshly fueled fires
pouring from the _Andromeda's_ funnels to be caught up and whirled
away to leeward, and above the shrieking of the blast we could hear
the trampling chant of her powerful engines. Whoever was in command
was proving himself a daring captain. With a Caribbean hurricane
fairly upon him, and a jagged reef lying within a cable's length, he
was backing and filling and holding his ground stubbornly to give the
yawl, tossing now like a cockleshell on a heaving sea which was already
surging over the reef, time to reach him.
Van Dyck burst out in an ecstasy of rage.
"Damn him!" he yelled, apostrophizing the unknown manoeuverer on the
_Andromeda's_ bridge, "he'll put the yacht on the rocks, and that'll be
the end of all of us!"
It certainly looked that way. More rain was coming, not in huge drops,
as at first, but in a fine, mist-like spray, driving horizontally and
drenching instantly everything it touched. Though the rising moon was
completely blotted out by the rain and the high cloud wrack, there was
still light enough in the open to enable us to see the _Andromeda_ and
the yawl. The returning boat's crew seemed fully alive to the need for
haste; the men at the oars were splashing mightily and digging deep.
But enthusiasm, even the enthusiasm of fear, is but a poor substitute
for mariner skill. The little boat had safely negotiated the dangerous
reef passage and was half-way out to the yacht when an oar broke, and
it could have been only the cleverest dexterity on the part of the
helmsman that kept the yawl from falling into the trough of the rising
seas and capsizing when the man at the broken oar tumbled over backward
and so crippled for the moment the remainder of the yawl's motive power.
But the small accident settled matters definitely for the yacht's
captain, whoever he was. As if the snapping ash had been the signal for
which he was waiting--and a convincing proof that it was no use for him
to wait any longer--he called for full speed ahead, jammed his helm
hard down, and with a lurch to port so abrupt that it seemed as if it
must surely put her upon her beam ends, the _Andromeda_ fled, vanishing
like a white wraith in the spume and smother to leeward, and leaving
the luckless landing party to do what it pleased, or could, toward
saving itself.
What the boat's steersman did--most naturally--was to try to make land
again. By some means he got the disabled yawl around without swamping
it and headed it for the narrow reef passage which was now all but
hidden by the tumbling seas. Badly handicapped as he was by the loss of
one of the four oars, it still seemed as if he might make the inlet.
Steered as fine as a racing shell rounding the turning buoy, the light
little craft leaped for the opening. But at the balancing instant,
when another tug at the oars might have sent it through into the
comparatively calmer waters of the lagoon, the yawl was caught on the
lift of a billow, flung aside like a bit of driftwood, and dropped with
a crash of splintering timbers on the rocks.
Under the conditions--a tropical hurricane coming on apace, seas
dashing over a half-submerged coral reef, and their boat reduced to
kindling wood--all seven of the mutineers, pirates, gold-robbers, or
whatever they were, should have been swept away and drowned as we
looked. At first we thought that was what had happened--was necessarily
bound to happen. And it apparently did happen to two of the seven. For
a moment later, when we saw bobbing heads dotting the heaving swells in
the lagoon, we could count but five, and there were only five sodden
figures to come crawling out a bit later, one after another, upon the
beach. Van Dyck stooped and picked up his club, which he had dropped in
the excitement of watching the struggles of the swimmers.
"Dick, it's murder, and in cold blood ... but we can't let those men
run loose on the island. We'll be starving presently, and so will
they. Are you with me?"
I suppose he took my answer for granted, for he started to run toward
the group of wearied swimmers, and I ran with him. As he had said, it
was a good bit like murder. Two of the exhausted ones were too far gone
to make any attempt at resistance; they merely rolled over on their
faces on the sand, spreading their arms wide in token of surrender.
But the three others, with Lequat to head them, did their best. Pistols
cracked, and in the fray I got a kick, delivered after the best manner
of the French foot-boxer, that nearly knocked the breath out of me.
But we were fresh, and the three were practically in the last ditch of
exhaustion when we fell upon them. So long as the pistols were fired
without aim, there could be but one issue to the hand-to-hand battle.
When it was over, the three fighting men were groveling with the
others, two of them with cracked heads and the other with a crippled
wrist to his firing hand.
Van Dyck was as ruthless in victory as he had been in the attack.
"Search them!" he ordered, and like a pair of highwaymen we went
through the pockets of the vanquished boat's crew. Three pistols, two
of them modern automatics, and one an old-fashioned Navy weapon, a
couple of murderous knives, and a few cartridges comprised the loot;
these, and a coil of light line which one of the men had wound around
his body--for what object we didn't inquire. But the rope came in play
handily. With it, while the increasing gale tore savagely at us, we
bound the captives hand and foot, and dragged them one by one up into
the wood; and the transfer was not made any too quickly, at that, for
by now the great seas were leaping the barrier reef to come rushing
down the lagoon upon the unprotected beach.
It seemed horribly cruel to leave five men, three of them pretty sorely
wounded, to lie bound and helpless under the palms and wholly at the
mercy of the storm, but self-preservation knows no law. Van Dyck put
the constraining necessity tersely when he said, shouting to make
himself heard above the din and clamor of the elements: "That's all we
can do here, and we're needed at the other end of things. This gale
will be ripping our camp up by the roots."
Together we turned our backs upon the prisoners and started toward our
own end of the island. The beach was by this time quite impassable.
Huge seas were leaping the reef to hurl themselves in thunder
crashings far up into the fringing wood. So we were forced to strike
off diagonally inland, feeling our way blindly from tree to tree, and
judging the direction only by keeping the wind at our backs. Even so,
we were unable to hold anything like a straight course. Once we came
out upon the south beach, and were well battered and bruised and all
but drowned before we could claw back to the partial shelter of the
jungle. Farther on we were lost again, and this time we stumbled out
upon the north beach somewhere between the bay of the Spanish wreck
and our camp. Over this lagoon frontage, like that on the south shore,
the sea was running in huge billows, clearing the outer barrier as if
it were not there, and the pounding crashes seemed to shake the small
island to its foundations.
As was to be expected, we found a most pitiable state of affairs at
the camp when we finally won through. The fire had been drowned in
the first downpour of the rain, and the small clearing was in murky
darkness. Two of the tents had been blown down, and the third, into
which the women were crowded, was straining at the peg ropes. Worse
still, there was no longer any beach, with its stretch of sand, to
fence off the sea. The conditions as we had found them farther to the
eastward were repeated at the camp site, only they were worse, if
anything. The great seas, rolling down the lagoon at a sharp angle with
the shore line, were flinging their spray high over the small clearing,
each upsweeping surge giving us notice that its follower was likely to
engulf us.
It was in such a crisis as this that Van Dyck showed at his best as
a man and a leader. Before I had had time to wipe the salt spray out
of my eyes he had gathered the available men of the party and was
energetically at work moving the camp back into the most sheltered of
the inland glades. By heroic battlings, in which even Holly Barclay and
the major bore a part, we got the two dismantled tents set up in the
new location. It was in the transferring of the women that I became a
deserter. Miss Mehitable Gilmore, with the dragoness outer shell all
cracked and broken to reveal a very human and distracted old woman
beneath it, was calling piteously for Conetta.
"Oh, Richard Preble--find her--find her!" she gasped. "She's gone and
she'll be drowned--I know she'll be drowned!"
A hurried question or two elicited the alarming facts. Billy Grisdale
and Edith Van Tromp had not come in from their post at the western
signal point, and Conetta had flown to warn them. That was enough for
me. With a blunt word to Van Dyck, I deserted.
It was only a short quarter of a mile to the western extremity of the
island, and I covered it in a stumbling rush, with the wind knocking me
down and forcing me to scramble on hands and knees when it got a fair
sweep at me. Reaching the point where we had built our fire and flown
our distress signal from the lopped palm, nothing was recognizable in
the darkness, but as nearly as I could make out, the tree was gone and
the breakers were running man-head deep over the place where the fire
had been. I had a bad minute or two until I had shouted and groped
around and found the three missing ones crouching in the shelter of the
nearest jungle growth. It had been horribly easy to fancy them blown
into the sea from the bare sandspit.
Billy was doing his best, as any one who knew him would have predicted.
He had wattled the bushes together behind the two women, and had
stripped off his coat to add it to the shelter. Nevertheless, he made
no secret of his relief when he heard my shout at his ear.
"By Jove," he choked; "misery likes company, you know. Cuddle down
here, Uncle Dick, and tell us we're only dreaming when we think we're
soaked to the skin. A little more and I believe it would really make up
its mind to rain! What's the show for getting back to camp? I couldn't
do it with two of 'em--tried it and we all came near being washed away."
"No show at all at present; we'll have to wait a bit," I said; and then
I took my part in the sheltering. In the dash from the dismantled camp
I had caught up a square of canvas that had served as part of a tent
fly, and with Grisdale's help, it was rigged as a sort of rain break to
windward.
"I knew you'd come," said Conetta quite calmly, when there was nothing
more to do or to be done, and the four of us were cowering under the
canvas. And then, with the calmness somewhat shaken: "The others? Are
they all alive?"
"Alive and unhurt, so far as I could tell in the dark," I hastened to
say. "They are moving the camp back into the wood. Ingerson was the
only one who was missing."
"What has become of him?"
I didn't tell her that Van Dyck and I had left him asleep under the
trees on the north shore of the island some two hours earlier. It
didn't seem at all necessary to harrow her with the story of Ingerson's
miring in the drink demoniac's morass.
"I don't know just what has become of him," I said, which was strictly
true as to the bare fact. "He'll doubtless turn up all right in the
morning."
"You say they are moving the camp. Will it be safer in the wood?"
"There was no choice. The seas are breaking over the other place by
now."
"Poor Aunt Mehitable!" she said brokenly. "At the very first lull we
must go back to her, Dick."
"There is no special hurry," I offered. "She is all right, and she sent
me out to find you; begged me to go."
"She sent you?"
"Yes; me, and not Jerry Dupuyster."
There was silence for a little time; such silence as the shrieks of
the hurricane and the crashing of the seas permitted. Then she said
drearily: "We can't go back and begin all over again, you and I,
Richard. It's too late, now."
Most naturally, I could take this declaration only in one sense. She
had admitted that Jerry had asked her to marry him, and her saying that
it was too late was merely an indirect way of telling me that she was
promised to him. And that thought set me boiling inwardly again. For in
the hubbub of camp moving Jerry had been doing his impractical best to
shelter Beatrice Van Tromp; this when he must have known that Conetta
was somewhere out in the storm.
"I shall have a good-sized bone to pick with Jerry, if we ever get back
to normal again," I said, and because I didn't take the trouble to try
to whisper the threat, Edie Van Tromp cut in.
"Stop it, you two!" she commanded. "I can't hear what you're saying,
but I know you are quarreling."
Billy Grisdale groaned. "If I only had my mandolin!" he lamented. "Get
down, Tige"--this to the bull pup who was trying to climb into his
master's lap for better protection from the storm. And then to me: "How
long do these little summer sprinkles last, Uncle Dick?"
I declined to commit myself, It didn't strike me as a Christian thing
to do to make the women more miserable by telling them that the storm
might last for days, and that our best hope was for a cessation of the
pouring rain floods.
As it turned out, in this one respect we were favored. After about
an hour the rain was coming only in driving squalls and the thick
darkness was a little broken. Overhead the moon showed faintly through
the masses of cloud wrack hurling themselves westward on the high crest
of the gale, and there was a pallid promise of a clearing sky.
But with the ceasing of the downpour the wind increased to hurricane
fury, and the pounding of the seas upon the reef and upon the island
itself was like a succession of earthquake shocks. As far as our
limited range of vision could reach, the sea was heaving and tossing in
mountain-like billows with valleys between in which the tallest ship
would have been hidden, and it was plainly evident that a new danger
was threatening. Our island was low and flat; in its highest spots it
was scarcely more than eight or ten feet above the normal sea level. If
the gale should blow long enough and hard enough, it could be only a
question of time until the catapulting seas would break down the jungle
barriers and sweep the island from end to end.
"Time for us to move!" Grisdale sang out, as a particularly vicious
"seventh wave" broke just behind us and reached for our shelter spot in
its tumultuous torrenting across the sands; and we took the hint.
"You two fight for yourselves," I called back, and the battle with the
pouring gale was begun.
It was a battle royal. For every foot of the quarter mile we had to
fight desperately. Even in the wood it was impossible at times to stand
against the wind, and again and again we had to fling ourselves prone,
clinging to whatever hold offered itself. And at every step the palm
fronds above our heads were crackling and snapping like whips, and the
air was full of flying missiles.
We held together for the better part of the time, Grisdale and Edie
locking arms and facing the blasts in the fresh strength of youth and
health, and taking their buffetings with a laugh. So battling and
creeping by turns, we came at last to the breathless home stretch,
and I was unspeakably relieved to find the white tents still standing
intact in the glade which Van Dyck had chosen for their latest pitching
place.
"Keep your good nerve just a few minutes longer," I said to Conetta,
who was clinging to me with a grip that I think no hurricane blast
could have broken. "We are almost there."
I had a glimpse in the starlight of her face upturned to mine, and
saw her lips move as if in reply. But what she was saying I did not
hear. For at that moment one of the flying missiles--it was a broken
tree-top, they told me afterward--came between and blotted me out.