PUTTING the unlighted match carefully away in my pocket, I made a quick
dash down the north beach to overtake the professor.
I told him what I had seen, and he exclaimed, "Dear me--you don't say
so!" much as if I had rushed up to assure him that the exact value of
_pi_ in the circle-squaring problem had finally been ascertained. And
then, quite placidly: "What do we do next, Mr. Preble?"
I didn't want to tell him that, in all probability, the _Andromeda_
mutineers were merely coming back to dig for gold. That was still Van
Dyck's personal secret. But it was not difficult to convince him that
the yacht's errand was not friendly to us.
"They are creeping up quietly, at the wrong end of the island, and
with no lights showing," I pointed out. "Which means that they are not
coming to take us off. If you will stay here and keep in touch with
them while I run back to camp and give the alarm----"
"Certainly," he agreed. Then: "I'm not to show myself?"
"By no manner of means. Don't let them see you or hear you, but keep
them in sight if you can do it without exposing yourself. I shan't be
gone any longer than I can help."
It was the better part of a mile down the beach to a point opposite
the glade where our camp was pitched, and the night was warm; but I
took small thought for either the distance or the heat. At the camp
everybody but Van Dyck had turned in; at least, none of the others was
in sight. Bonteck was sitting beside the expiring embers of the bit of
cooking fire, with his head in his hands and his gaze fixed upon the
patch of white ashes with its center spot of red coals.
I came up behind him, touched his shoulder, and hastily whispered the
news: "The _Andromeda_ is clawing up to the other end of the island
just as she did before--at half speed, and with no lights showing."
"Thank God she is back at last!" he muttered, starting up quickly. "It
falls in at the right minute, Dick. I was just saying to myself that
I'd go dippy if I couldn't fight somebody or something. Turn out the
squad, as quietly as you can."
Moving cautiously so as not to awaken any of the non-combatants, I
aroused Grey, Dupuyster and Billy Grisdale and told them what was
to the fore. Van Dyck herded us quickly out of the camp circle, and
on the beach he groped under the palmettos and uncovered our scanty
arsenal; the three pistols and the two knives we had taken from our
former captives. If our lately awakened recruits were surprised at the
appearance of the weapons they said nothing, nor was there any comment
made when, out of the same hiding place, Bonteck drew a half-dozen
stout, serviceable clubs and distributed them as he had the more modern
weapons.
"Now then, if you are all ready," he said, giving the word. "Set the
pace, Dick, and we'll try to keep up with you." And a moment later we
were running silently in single file along the north beach toward the
eastern-point lookout where I had posted Sanford.
In making me the pace-setter, Bonteck builded more wisely than he
knew--more wisely than any of us knew at the time. Having just
completed a mile dash at the best speed I could compass, I was fain to
set an easy dog-trot for the return, so we were all comparatively fresh
when we reached the scene of action and found the professor.
Our lookout's report was brief and to the point. The _Andromeda_ had
steamed up silently and was lying off the south shore at no great
distance from us, and as yet there was no movement aboard; at least,
the professor said he hadn't been able to see anything stirring on her
decks. But Van Dyck, making a hasty reconnaissance, came back with
better information.
"They are lowering the electric launch by hand," he announced. Then
he outlined the situation for us in a few brittle words. "You all
understand, I take it, that they have not come back--secretly, this
way--to rescue us. We may ignore their real object for the present and
come to the immediate necessities. If we get possession of the yacht,
we shall doubtless have to fight for it."
"Just say when and how," Billy Grisdale cut in tersely, trying the
strength of his club over his knee.
Van Dyck sketched his plan rapidly, and it was evident that he had
worked out the details in advance, basing his conclusions upon what he
and I had seen on the night of the storm.
"They will land a party in the launch, and our first move will be to
capture every man of that landing party, dead or alive, and without
making any noise. So don't use the firearms. If their boat's crew
doesn't return within a reasonable time, they'll send again to find out
what has become of it. When they do that, we'll repeat, and by eating
them up a little at a time--but you get the idea, I'm sure." And to me:
"Dick, will you take the command? You are better qualified than any of
the rest of us."
"You are doing very well, yourself," I told him. "Show us the way and
we'll stay with you."
"All right," he agreed briefly. "I think we all understand that this
is likely to be our last chance, so far as the yacht is concerned.
There are nine women up at the other end of the island who will, in all
human probability, starve to death if we bungle this thing and let the
_Andromeda_ get away from us. Keep that in mind when you hit, and hit
hard!"
Since the choice of position was one of the few advantages we should
have in the coming struggle, we picked our way silently across the
point to the wood fringe from which Van Dyck and I had witnessed the
earlier landing. Judging from the little we could see in the starlight,
the mutineers were making hard work of the job of clearing away the
electric launch without the aid of the steam winch. In spite of Mr.
Edison's continued and most ingenious efforts to find a substitute for
the lead in them, storage batteries are still heavy contrivances; and
at the end of it the weighty little tender got away from the men at
the davit tackles and dropped into the sea with a resounding slap that
might have been heard half-way around the island.
For a minute or two the small boat lay chafing against the side of the
yacht, and there was no attempt made to man it; from which we inferred
that the mutineers were waiting to ascertain if the crash of the sudden
launching had given the alarm. In view of the fact that the invaders
had every reason to believe that we were all either dead or dying
from starvation by this time, it struck me that they were excessively
cautious, and I spoke of this to Van Dyck.
"That is the 'spiggotty' of it," he commented in low tones. "Lequat's
name is French, but I'd be willing to bet that he and his backers
are of the mongrel breed--dock-rats who will fight only when they're
cornered."
"Will they be well armed, do you think?" I asked.
"Heaven knows. Every man that Goff picked up in New York may have been
a walking arsenal, for all I know to the contrary. As for the yacht
itself, there were only a few sport guns in the cabins, as you saw for
yourself."
Whether they were over-cautious, or only prudently careful, the
intending invaders waited fully ten minutes, I should say, before
making another move. But at last, silhouetting themselves as black
shadows against the white paint of the _Andromeda's_ side, a boat's
crew came over the rail, dropping man by man into the launch. We
counted the shadowy figures slipping over the yacht's side. As in the
yawl's crew, there were seven; a man apiece for us, and one extra, for
good measure.
"I'll take that odd man," Billy Grisdale whispered in my ear. "I can't
go back to Edie with less than two scalps at my belt, you know."
"Shut up!" I hissed. "They'll hear you, and then you won't get even
one."
The launch got under way at once and presently came skimming through
the gap in the reef, the narrowness of which had proved the undoing of
the yawl on the night of the hurricane. The electrically driven boat
made no sound other than the purring murmur of its motor and the soft,
ripping sheer of the sharp cutwater as it turned a tiny bow wave. Once
within the lagoon, the launch was steered straight for the beach. This
time, as it appeared, there was to be no shilly-shallying.
A landing was made within a few yards of our covert. Six of the men
got out when the tender's prow slid up on the sand, and the remaining
man rummaged under the thwarts and heaved a pick and a shovel ashore.
Then a curious thing happened. Without a word uttered, the six men on
the sands became suddenly involved in a fierce and mysterious struggle.
Twice one of the six broke away, only to be instantly caught and
dragged back by the others; and it was not until the brief battle was
over, and five of the men were shoving the sixth ahead of them into the
wood, that Van Dyck found the answer and passed the word to the rest of
us.
"That's Goff, and they're making him show them the way! Come on!"
We followed, and there was no need for any great amount of caution
on our part. The men ahead of us were trampling through the jungle
undergrowth with little heed for the noise they made, and we were
close upon them when they halted in the small open space marked by the
lump of coral. Since it was well-nigh pitch dark in the tree-shadowed
glade, a light of some sort was a necessity, and one of the men knelt
to kindle the wick of a ship's lantern. The sputtering flare of the
match illuminated a striking tableau for us. Lequat, hatless, and with
a red bandanna bound around his head in true buccaneer fashion, stood
aside, leaning upon the bared blade of a huge weapon, half sabre and
half machete. Two of the others held Goff pinioned by his arms, and the
odd man had the pick and shovel.
Van Dyck held us back until the lantern was fairly alight and the
kneeling man was about to rise. Then, at his whispered "_Now!_" we
rushed the silent group.
It is a worn saying that a man knows no more of a battle than that
small portion of it which may fall to his share. My share in the
sharp struggle which followed was simple enough. Out of the confused
tangle of legs and arms and writhing bodies I dragged my man, one
of Goff's pinioners whom I had picked out in the brief flare of the
lantern-lighting match. That, and a quieting tap from the butt of the
big Navy pistol which had fallen to me in the distribution of weapons,
was all there was to it. Before I could get in again, the fight was
over, and Van Dyck was stooping to put a match to the wick of the
ship's lantern which had been kicked aside and had gone out in the
scuffling battle.
The scene revealed by the renewed lantern light was not without its
element of grim humor. Our victory had been sweepingly complete,
and the small open space was strewn with the prone figures of the
vanquished. Van Dyck had been thoughtful enough to bring a coil of
light tent rope with him from our camp, and Grey and Grisdale were
already at work like trained thief-takers binding and gagging the
captives. Over in the edge of the glade the professor was trying
mercifully to replace the dislocated shoulder of a small man who was
groaning and squirming under him, and begging in broken English to be
spared; the patient pleading while the amateur surgeon was assuring him
blandly that the disabled arm would be pulled out by the roots if he
raised his voice above a whisper.
It was Elijah Goff, fully reinstated now as a victim of circumstances
like ourselves, who went to the professor's assistance.
"Lemme sit on his head while you yank, Professor," he said with dry
humor. "I'm owin' that tarnation little rat suthin' f'r the way he's
been keelhaulin' me." And thereupon we saw that the professor's capture
was the ex-steward, Lequat, whose formidable weapon the mild-mannered
old scholar had actually broken off short at the hilt with the same
shrewd bludgeon stroke that had crippled the ex-steward's sword arm.
After our five prisoners were safely trussed up and silenced with
primitive gags made of knotted rope, we wasted no more time upon them.
The man left with the boat remained to be secured, and his removal
from the scene was a bit of routine. He had come ashore to stand by
the bow of the beached launch, and apparently he mistook us for his
own people returning. Anyway, he made scarcely a show of resistance
when we surrounded him, and Billy Grisdale garroted him with the bit of
knotted rope which was presently forced between his teeth to keep him
quiet while we bound and dragged him back into the wood to the general
rendezvous.
The launch's manning thus disposed of, we held a sober council of
war, with Goff on the witness stand. The old skipper told his story
briefly, and in the main it accorded fairly well with Van Dyck's
prefigurings. The mutiny and seizure of the yacht had been real enough,
and the conspirators had chosen the moment when the sham uprising
was to have been staged; namely, the evening when Edie Van Tromp's
cry of "Land-o-o-o!" had announced the _Andromeda's_ approach to the
island. Goff had been overpowered on the bridge, and the Americans,
Haskell, Quinby and the others, had been imprisoned in the engine-room
and fire hold, where, so Goff told us, they were still confined. The
skipper could not say how many members of the crew proper were in the
conspiracy, but those who were not had doubtless been overawed by
threats of violence; given the choice between obedience and submission,
and walking the plank.
"All I know is it ain't a sailormen's crowd," said the grizzled old
Gloucesterman in summing up. "It's mostly cooks and cabin stewards, and
that kind of riff-raff, with that fat Frenchman, Bassinette, at the
head of 'em. Near as I could figger, they're revolutionaries o' some
sort. They got an idee there was big money some'ere's aboard, and I
cal'late they've dum near tore the insides out o' the yacht lookin' for
it."
"Bassinette, the _chef_?" Van Dyck queried. "Then this fellow Lequat
wasn't the ringleader?"
"No more 'n I be," said Goff. "He's nothin' but an understrapper,
carryin' out orders. But he's a navigator--of a sort."
"Where has the yacht been all this time?" It was Grey who wanted to
know.
"Been mostly standin' off and on over to the Central American coast,
unloadin' a cargo of guns and ammynition that was picked up off the
Isle o' Pines," was the calm reply. "When they got through with that,
Bassinette told me he was comin' back here to take you folks off. I
mistrusted he was lyin' like a whitehead about what he was comin' for,
but it looked 's if any chance was better 'n none, so I give him his
bearin's, which I suspicion Lequat wa'n't sailorman enough to figger
out f'r himself. There was bad weather brewin' when we got here, and
they had to cut and run f'r it afore a gale o' wind."
"Did they try to land at all?" Billy Grisdale asked.
"Couldn't prove nothin' by me," said Goff, and I got the idea he was
trying to fight off from the question. "They had me locked up in one o'
the cabins."
At this, Grey broke in again.
"You say you mistrusted that these fellows were not coming back to take
us off, Captain Goff: what were they coming for, then? And what were
they planning to do back here in the wood with a pick and shovel just
now when we closed in on them?"
I saw Van Dyck's hand shoot out to grip the sailing-master's arm. If it
were a warning, the old skipper was quick to act upon it.
"There's an old yarn about a buried gold-mine some'res in these
waters," he drawled. "I guess putty near everybody's heard it, fust 'r
last. Shouldn't wonder if Bassinette and his crowd think they've got a
pointer on it. Maybe they thought that was what we was headin' here
for. Wouldn't supprise me a mite."
The explanation was certainly an ingenious one, and it fully proved
the justice of Van Dyck's trust in the old fisherman skipper. But the
questioner was still unsatisfied. In his proper environment, as I have
said, Mr. John Grey figured as an able young lawyer, and when he could
forget Annette and his new-found happiness long enough, the lawyer
gifts came easily to the front.
"What made them bring you ashore, Captain Goff?" he asked shrewdly.
But Goff proved to be far too old a bird to be caught napping.
"Maybe they was cal'latin' to have me do the diggin'," he returned with
a sly chuckle. "Wouldn't put it a mite beyond 'em."
It was Van Dyck who brought the talk back to things present and
pressing.
"We know definitely now what we are up against," he said. "How many of
the men are in this with Bassinette, Captain 'Lige?"
"They kep' me too close to tell. Maybe half of 'em, 'r maybe more. And
another thing--they've got guns and pistols, plenty of 'em."
Some earnest of this we had had in the taking of the prisoners in the
glade. They were all armed, but the weapons were for the most part
out of date; pistols and knives, one repeating rifle of an old model,
a pair of brass knuckles, a wicked looking "life-preserver"--a short
leather club, lead-loaded in the striking end. But we found only a
scattering score or so of cartridges for the firearms.
These weapons we now shared impartially among ourselves, and when the
professor volunteered to go back in the wood and stand guard over
the prisoners, Van Dyck suggested that it was time we were making a
reconnaissance in force in the enemy's direction, the war council
having been held at a point about half-way between the glade and the
beach. Nobody could say certainly what move the mutineers on the yacht
would make next, and in spite of Goff's assurances to the contrary, Van
Dyck was afraid they might take the alarm and run away, abandoning the
launch's crew to whatever fate had befallen it.
"Not much danger o' that," Goff insisted; and after Grisdale, Grey and
Dupuyster had been posted in the forest fringe with instructions to
keep a sharp lookout for renewed activities upon the _Andromeda_, Van
Dyck drew Goff and me aside and went straight to the heart of things.
"Mr. Preble and I were here on the beach that night when the yacht came
up and then had to make a run for it, Captain 'Lige," he began. "Didn't
you know they sent a boat's crew ashore that night?"
Goff nodded. "Didn't know how much 'r how little you wanted t'other
folks to know. Had me locked up in a cabin on the starb'd side and I
saw the yawl get off--and saw that it didn't get back. Maybe you can
tell me what happened to that boat-load o' scamps?"
Van Dyck told our part in the happenings briefly, and the old Banksman
chuckled delightedly.
"Good stroke o' business--catchin' 'em that way when they was all
fagged out with swimmin',"--adding vindictively: "only you ought to 've
knocked every single one on 'em in the head, when you had 'em. As it
was----"
"Yes," said Van Dyck; "as it was?----"
"As it was, we clawed back here just afore day the next mornin', and
with the seas putty near rollin' the yacht's rail under, Bassinette
made out to get ashore with the gasoline launch when it was just about
as much as any man's life was worth to try it. He fetched back five o'
the seven men that went ashore in the yawl. You said two of 'em was
drowned, didn't you?"
"They were," said I.
"This man Bassinette," Van Dyck broke in. "He is the cook you picked up
in New York. Did you know anything about him when you shipped him?"
Goff shook his head. "Somethin' kind o' queer about that big lummux,"
he averred. "If I didn't know better, I'd 'most be willin' to go into
court and swear he isn't the man I shipped in New York. Looks as much
like him as two peas, but that's all. If we'd been anywheres to get rid
o' him and pick up his double----"
"Wait," I interposed. "We laid up for a day at Gracias á Dios with a
disabled propeller shaft. Didn't some of the men have shore leave that
day?"
"By gravy, I b'lieve you've hit it, Mr. Preble!" Goff exclaimed. "It
was after we left Gracias that I took to noticin' that Bassinette
seemed sort o' different, somehow; didn't grin same as he used to when
I'd stick my head into his galley. And he was consider'ble thick with a
bunch o' them outlandishmen we picked up in New York ha'bor. Look 's if
we'd all ought to be bored f'r the hollow-horn, Mr. Van Dyck!"
It was beginning to look that way to me, too, but Van Dyck didn't push
the inquiry any further.
"We can let that part of it rest for the present," he said, and at his
suggestion we joined the other three in the ambush at the beach edge.
Up to this time there had been no further sign of life on board the
yacht. Though there were no premonitory symptoms of a storm brewing,
the night was oppressively warm and there was hardly a breath of air
stirring. Nevertheless, there is always some little movement in the
sea, and during the interval which had elapsed since the launch party
had left her, the _Andromeda_ had drifted a bit nearer in and was
now fairly opposite the narrow reef inlet, and not more than a short
cable's length outside of it.
"If we could only contrive some means of making them come to anchor,"
Van Dyck muttered. "A bit of breeze would turn the trick, but there is
no promise of that."
"He'd be too foxy to anchor, even if 'twas blowin' half a gale," was
Goff's reply to this. "What I say is to take the launch and board
him. There's six of us, and we've got the tools, such as they are. I
cal'late if we could fight our way to the engine-room hatch and let
Haskell and his gang out----"
"I am afraid to risk the boarding," Van Dyck admitted. "Not for
ourselves, but for the women who will be left if we shouldn't succeed.
There are good glasses on board, and those fellows probably know how
to use them. If it were only a little darker, so that we might stand
some chance of getting out to them before they could recognize us--but
they'd be sure to, and put steam to the yacht."
I guess the suspense was getting on our nerves. I am sure it was on
mine. The very silence was oppressive, and it seemed as if the lapping
of the little waves on the sands and the rise and fall of the gentle
swell on the reef were hushed. Then, too, the white yacht in the near
offing grew more and more like a ghost ship as we strained our eyes
watching her for some sign of life. It was Dupuyster who broke the
spell.
"I say, Bonteck, old dear, don't you know, I'm the only original human
fish, when it comes to swimmin'," he whispered. "Toss me the sharpest
knife in the lot, and I'll toddle out there and anchor the _Andromeda_
for you--dashed if I don't."
Of course, there was a low-toned chorus of protest. Sharks occasionally
came into the lagoon, as we all knew, and since ships usually have a
following of them in tropical waters, there would certainly be one
or more of the man-eaters in the deeper water beyond the reef. Also,
admitting that a swimmer could reach the _Andromeda_ without having a
leg or an arm bitten off on the way, there were mechanical difficulties
to be overcome. The anchors were catted at the bows of the yacht, with
the slack of the cables taken in, and the anchor flukes themselves
triced up in heavy hempen slings in man-o'-war style. It would be a
man's job to cut the slings with anything short of a sharp axe.
Our arguments nugatory were hurried but thorough. If Dupuyster should
live to reach the yacht and climb aboard, he would certainly be
discovered from the bridge before he could cut the lashings to free
an anchor. And, admitting that the thing could be done, what would be
gained? What was to prevent the mutineers from throwing the steam
winch into gear and heaving the anchor up again?
While we were expostulating, Jerry--not the carefully Anglicized
clubman we had known, but a most surprisingly red-blooded reincarnation
of him--was calmly preparing to get himself shark-bitten.
"I say, by Jove, you chappies had better hedge on some of those bets
you're making," he drawled. "If Uncle Jimmie were here, he'd take you,
don't you know. Find me that knife, and a couple of the biggest pistol
cartridges. That's all I want."
Provided with his simple armament, Jerry, stripped to the buff, and
with the knife and the cartridges secured in an impromptu belt made of
his discarded undershirt, wormed his way down to the beach and took the
water under the bilge of the stranded launch as silently as a fish.
When he came up from the long dive we could trace him by the faint
phosphorescence showing now and then in the ripples of his wake.
It was a horrible strain, watching him as he worked his way across the
lagoon to the inlet through the reef. Every instant we were expecting
to see the disturbance which would mark the lunge and back-roll of
an attacking man-eater, and I could not help wondering which of the
two women, Conetta or Beatrice Van Tromp, would reproach us the more
bitterly for letting him go to his death.
We lost trace of him after his faintly luminous trail disappeared at
the gap in the reef. Just then the windless calm was broken by a mere
breath of air stirring out of the southeast, and the _Andromeda_, still
a dead hulk swinging gently to the slow heave and dip of the scarcely
perceptible swell, was now drifting landward by more than the measured
inchings; she had decreased her earliest distance by considerably more
than half. It could be only a matter of minutes before whoever was in
command would have to give her sternway with the engines to keep her
from going on the reef, in which case Dupuyster would have taken his
life in his hand for nothing. A half-dozen backward turns of the big
twin screws would take the yacht out of his reach, and would probably
take her out of soundings so that a dropped anchor would find no bottom.
Van Dyck whispered all this to me while we were holding our breath
and making our eyes water in the effort to get another glimpse of the
swimmer's trail.
"He'll never make it--never in this world!" Van Dyck concluded in the
stifled whisper. "We were criminal fools for letting him try it. It's
sheer suicide, and we all knew it!"
"I have forgiven him," I said grimly.
"Forgiven him? For what?"
"For playing fast and loose with Conetta. He has asked her, you know,
and she has said 'Yes.' And in spite of that, he has been making open
love to Beatrice Van Tromp ever since we were put ashore here."
"Don't make a damned jealous idiot of yourself!" was the hot retort.
"If you weren't bat-blind in both eyes----"
The interruption was the thunderous racket we had by this time given
up all hope of hearing. With a mighty splash and a deafening clamor
from the paying-out cable, the _Andromeda's_ starboard anchor let go,
and from the shortness of the uproar we knew that it had taken ground
upon the outer ledges of the reef. Following the rattling clamor, we
heard the pad-pad of running men, and were able to guess that the slack
discipline of the mutineers had been responsible for a deserted forward
deck. There was a barked-out order in a foreign tongue from the bridge,
a hissing of steam, and the power capstan was promptly set in motion to
break the anchor out of its hold.
At the second or third turn of the capstan something happened; a
snapping explosion up forward, and a prolonged hammering and grinding,
as if the steam hoisting machinery were patiently and painstakingly
wrecking itself. In the midst of this new turmoil we saw a slender
white figure shoot over the yacht's bow in a headlong dive, and heard
the crackling spatter of a pistol fusillade opened upon the diver from
the bridge.
"We'll hang the last living man of them if they got him!" Van Dyck
declared vindictively, when the velvety silence of the tropical night
had settled down again, and we had looked earnestly but in vain for
some sign of the diver from the yacht's bows. Then he turned to Grey:
"Jack, you'd better drop out and run back to camp. It is hardly
possible that the women are sleeping through all this war noise. You'll
know what to say. Tell them to keep together and to make no noise.
They're out of the danger zone, and we'll make it our business to try
to prevent the scrapping from drifting down to that end of the island.
Don't say anything about Jerry. We won't give him up until we have to.
That's all; but hurry back. We'll probably be needing you by the time
you've made the round trip."
Grey slipped off silently, doubling the sandspit point of the island in
order to have the unmenaced north beach for his speedway. After he was
gone there was a terrible wait for the four of us left crouching in the
shadow of the palms. For what seemed like an age there was no sign of
our forlorn-hope swimmer. As nearly as we could judge from the noises
on board the yacht, the mutineers were trying to repair the disabled
capstan. Apparently it didn't suit them to be tied by the leg and
unable to run away.
"Let me have that old rifle, Billy," said Van Dyck; this after the
capstan noises had been located. Lying flat, Bonteck aimed as well as
he could in the uncertain light, and we distinctly heard the clang of
the bullet as it penetrated the metal bulwarks of the yacht's stem. The
single shot did the business, and we heard no more hammerings at the
crippled machinery.
Beyond this, we waited again while the minutes dragged on,
leaden-winged, slowly but surely extinguishing the hope that Dupuyster
had escaped. But, after hope was quite dead in the four hearts of us,
and a hot thirst for vengeance was beginning to take its place, we saw
Jerry in our own edge of the lagoon, swimming slowly and rolling from
side to side with his stroke, like a man utterly spent.
I think all four of us dashed wildly into the shallows to drag him out
and rush him to cover in the jungle edge. He was gasping for breath,
and even in the poor light we could see a long red splash on one thigh;
a cut from which the blood was still oozing. Van Dyck stripped his
own shirt to bandage the wound, and the reincarnated one protested
manfully.
"Bally lot of trouble you're takin' over a scratch," he gurgled.
"Bleedin' will stop of its own accord when it gets ready. But if any
gentleman should--er--happen to have a drop of cognac about him----"
Grisdale hadn't, and I hadn't, and I was pretty sure Van Dyck hadn't.
But at a three-handed chorus of "Sorry, old man," Elijah Goff, the one
dyed-in-the-wool teetotaller of the _Andromeda's_ company, produced a
pocket flask, and Dupuyster took a single swallow from it; swallowed,
choked a bit over whatever fiery liquor it was, and then told us his
story while we were giving him a rough-handed rub-down and helping him
into his clothes.
"No, the swim wasn't anything, but I had a perishin' lot of trouble
climbin' aboard the old tub. After that, it was easy; all I had to do
was to cut a lot of the rope things you told me about and stand clear,
what?"
"But the capstan?" Billy Grisdale wanted to know. "How the dickens did
you contrive to put that out of commission?"
"Dynamited it, old dear; stuck the two bally pistol cartridges into
the cogwheels, don't you know, and hoped they'd do their bit when the
wheels began to turn. If you'll believe me, the shop was fairly dizzy
with bits of iron and things when they put the steam on. I didn't wait
to see the third act. His Jaglets was waitin' for me, and I took a
header to get a fair start of him, don't you see."
"A shark!" gasped Billy.
"You've named him. The perishin' beggar had followed me all the way
out to the yacht and couldn't quite make up his mind to try it on. But
comin' back he got his nerve screwed up, by Jove. It was under the edge
of the reef, and when he turned for the snap I stuck the bloomin' knife
into him and left it there."
"But--but he bit you in the leg!" said Billy, and I knew he was
swelling up like the frog in the fable with a huge access of
hero-worship.
"Chuck it, Billy," said the shark fighter good-naturedly, and for once
in a way the British accent was lacking. "Let's say that I scratched
the leg climbin' over the reef. It'll sound better."
Just then Grey came back, having cut across the island from the north
beach by way of the glade where the prisoners had been left. His report
was reassuring. The women, and two of the men, the major and Holly
Barclay, had been awakened by the firing, but there was no panic--proof
positive that we had finally vanquished the greater part of the
civilized conventions. Ingerson was still asleep, and Grey suspected
that he had found the last of the brandy bottles, the one which Van
Dyck had been jealously hoarding against an emergency. Grey admitted
that he had lied freely to the non-combatants, particularly in assuring
his wife and Conetta, Madeleine and Beatrice Van Tromp and Edie, that
none of us was taking any chance of getting hurt. He had repeated Van
Dyck's instructions, and they had promised not to scatter, and to stay
under cover--such cover as the wood afforded. Finishing up, Grey spoke
of the professor and his guard-mounting over the six pirates.
"He has the lantern between his knees, and I found him dissecting some
leaves he had picked up, and poring over that little pocket Botany of
his," he chuckled. "He didn't see me at all until I came up and said
'Scat!' to him."
This part of the report was rather disconcerting. With the professor
engrossed in his favorite study, anything might happen in the way of a
jail delivery, and I said as much.
"Go and see about it, Dick," was Van Dyck's order, and I was about to
obey when Billy Grisdale gripped my arm and pointed toward the yacht.
On the deck of the _Andromeda_, where everything had been quiet since
the firing of the shot which had driven the capstan repairers from
their job, a dimly defined group of toilers were hoisting some heavy
object to the roof of the raised deck house. I couldn't make out what
they were doing, but Bonteck's eyes were better than mine.
"Duck and scatter!" he commanded sharply. "It's the little signal gun,
and they're training it on us!"
We had dodged and run nimbly to right and left before the little brass
signal piece belched fire and sent a volley of nondescript missiles
hurtling into the scrub palmettos under which we had been crouching.
What the desperate chief cook of the _Andromeda_ hoped to accomplish
by this haphazard bombardment of the jungle which, so far as he knew,
sheltered a half-dozen of his own men as well as whatever enemy he
thought he was firing at, was a mystery unexplained until after our
scattered force was reassembled safely out of range.
But we were made to understand quickly enough. Under cover of the
cannon fire, the electric launch slid out from its landing place upon
the placid waters of the lagoon, cut a swift half-circle and headed
for the open sea and the yacht. While we were watching and waiting,
some one of the mutineers had emulated Dupuyster's daring example, and
had swum ashore to steal the launch, thus putting an end to any notion
we may have had of fighting the little war to a conclusion on the
_Andromeda's_ deck.