“Pembroke,” I said, “I’m outdone with confinement on this island of
yours. I’m irritated past endurance. If you don’t promptly speed me on
my way elsewhere the tension inside me is going to get too much for me.
Something inside me is going to snap and I’ll do something desperate,
something you’ll regret.”
He looked me straight in the eyes, handsome in his fantastic toggery;
calm and cool, to all appearance.
“Are you, by any chance,” he drawled, “threatening to shoot me?”
“I haven’t made any threats,” I retorted, hotly, “and I have no
intentions of shooting you or anybody. I realize that this island of
yours is part of the British Empire and that in no part of it are
homicides or murderous assaults condoned or left unpunished. But,
since you use the word ‘threat,’ I am ready to make a threat. If you
don’t soon set me free of my present captivity, if you don’t soon put
me in the way of getting home, I’ll not shoot you or any human being,
but I will shoot that devilish gander; and, I promise you, if I shoot
at him I’ll hit him and if I hit him I’ll kill him. I fancy those are
plain words and I conjecture that you understand me fully, with all the
implications of what I say.”
Pembroke’s expression of face appeared to me to indicate not only
amazement and surprise, but the emotions of a man at a loss and
momentarily helpless in the face of wholly unexpected circumstances.
“You come with me!” he snapped.
I followed him along the beach to the village, and, as we went,
wondered to see him apparently comfortable in his tight-fitting suit
and bare headed beneath the fierce radiance of the merciless sun rays,
while I rejoiced in my flimsy garments and at being sheltered under the
very adequate Panama I had chosen from the headgear Fong had offered me.
We passed the end of the steel picket fence, the two beach guards
saluting Pembroke, and, I thought, suppressing a tendency to grin at
me. Just around the point was a wide aviation field with a long row of
hangars opposite the beach. I marveled, for I had caught no glimpse of
any avion in the air over or about the island.
A half dozen Asiatics, apparently Annamites, rose as we approached and
stood respectfully, eyes on Pembroke. He uttered some sort of order in
a tongue unknown to me and two of them set wide open the doors of one
of the hangars. In it, to my amazement, I saw a Visconti biplane, one
of the fastest and most powerful single-seaters ever built.
“What do you think of that?” Pembroke queried.
“I am astonished,” I answered. “I was certain that no specimen of this
type of machine had ever been on this side of the Atlantic.”
“This is the first and only Visconti to be set up on this side of the
ocean,” he replied. “The point is; could you fly it?”
“I think I could,” I said, “and I am sure I could try.”
“Try then,” Pembroke snapped. “I make you a present of it. The sooner
you’re off and away the better I’ll be pleased.”
He spoke at some length, apparently in the same unknown tongue, and
strode off towards his palace.
I spent that day and most of the next going over that Visconti biplane,
with the deft, quick assistance of the docile Annamites. If there was
anything about it defective, untrustworthy or out of order I could not
find it. On the third morning (I had dined at Radnor’s both evenings),
equipped admirably by Fong, who instantly provided me with whatever I
asked for, I rose in that Visconti biplane, and, contrary to my fears,
reached Miami in safety. But I was so overstrained by anxiety that it
required six weeks in a sanitarium to make me myself again. During
those, apparently, endless hours in the air I had been expecting every
moment that something cunningly arranged beforehand and undiscoverable
to my scrutiny in my inspections and reinspections, was going to go
wrong with my conveyance and instantaneously annihilate me. The strain
all but finished me. However, all’s well that ends well.
1922