Lavelle caught Emily by the arm as the island's heaving reeled her
against him and held her. The tense, startled expression which she saw
in his face drove the faint smile of embarrassment from hers. It
frightened her.
She followed his glance, which was sweeping their surroundings. They
were standing in what had evidently been the bed or course of a creek or
large brook. It gullied its way clear across the island from east to
west, following the base line of the hill.
"What is it?" Emily asked in dismay. "Something is wrong, captain."
Before Lavelle could form an answer the island gave another heave. The
shell of earth rippled as if it had been so much water.
With a cry of terror and warning Rowgowskii sprang away from the boat's
side and went scrambling up the hill. The two coolies, still a-tremble
with the fear which the sudden and mysterious death of their mate a
moment before had put in them, followed him shrieking.
Chang leaped to Lavelle's side, the spot where he had been standing
filling with water as his feet left it.
"Lun, master! Lun, lady!" shouted the giant.
"Come!" said Emily to Lavelle, starting toward the hill. She took but a
step. A sharp cry of anguish, which she tried hard to suppress, escaped
from her. Her limbs refused to carry her. They seemed to be breaking
with the pain born of the cramped life in the boat.
With a murmured word of understanding Lavelle snatched her into his arms
and carried her halfway up the hillside. Chang pushed him as he went.
When he put her down in a mat of grass and taro plant tops she still
clung to his hand as a child might have done.
On this higher ground the movement of the island was not less
terrifying.
"Was--is it an earthquake?" Emily whispered in awe.
Lavelle shook his head. His gaze went searching up to windward and then
darted across the island to leeward where the sun was tobogganing down a
bright yellow sky--such a sky as invariably presages wind. He turned to
windward again.
For an instant despair overwhelmed him. This islet was but a bit of waif
land--the bait of a cruel trap which the sea had set for him. Even as
he watched it the surf piled higher and higher against the sheer weather
shore. This was the fanged jaw of the trap; and it was closing. The
swiftly rising wind which whipped his face seemed to chuckle in glee.
To drive the heavy boat through that surf and back to sea was a task
which seemed to him to be beyond the force at his command. Nor could
that crew get it across the island to make a launching from the lee
side.
Despair enters the breasts of strong men only to refuel their fires of
determination. So it was with Paul Lavelle. Emily saw the gloom pass
from his face. A conquering light of resolution succeeded it. His jaw
set again in its familiar line of purpose. Thus she had beheld him on
the deck of the doomed _Cambodia_. Thus he had looked as he had come to
her that night.
"We must put to sea again," said he, facing her quickly and in his
tenseness pressing the hand with which she was clinging to him. He read
her apprehension. "Morning may see this bit of earth mixed with the
ocean. It is but a piece of waif land--a thing without an
anchorage--something torn from its mother mass by the ocean in anger.
For us it is a trap--one of the sea's countless treacheries." He
glanced over his shoulder at the surf. "There is no time to lose," he
added.
Emily met this revelation of new peril so calmly that Lavelle paused in
wonderment as he swung away from her.
"Can't I--do something to--help you?" she asked. She might have been
craving a boon.
"Just hold to your faith. We'll win through if you keep that, won----"
The wind snapped his words off there. She did not know that he had
hailed her as "wonder woman." Yet she glowed at the glance of frank
admiration which had accompanied his words.
Lavelle called Chang. The giant started up from his haunches a few feet
away, where he had been crouching and listening with eager ear to every
word which had fallen from his master's lips.
"Him clay-zee islan', master! No good!" avowed Chang.
"To sea!" was Lavelle's answer. He drove his purpose into the serang
with those two words and a gesture. The giant hesitated so long as it
took to look from Lavelle to the surf and back again. There was doubt in
his eyes.
"Jump! Night soon!" cried Lavelle. The command electrified the serang.
Chang faced up the hill, beckoning and calling Rowgowskii and the
coolies to descend. They were perched on its crest like banderlog
hypnotized by fear. They did not move.
"Come down out of that!" yelled Lavelle in anger at the white man and
instantly repeating the command to the coolies in their own tongue.
"It is unsafe! I will stay here!" Rowgowskii cried back.
The coolies, chattering to each other, settled again on their haunches
from which they had half started. They were taking their cue from the
black-bearded white man beside them. They would not trust themselves to
the earth below which trembled and swallowed things like the sea.
"Bring 'em down, Chang!" snapped Lavelle.
The giant sprang up the hill at the order, hurling at the coolies a
curse which consigned forty generations of their ancestors to an
additional century of grilling in the fires of eternity. It started
them, but Rowgowskii did not move. Then, out of Chang's belt flashed a
long knife. He raised it to hurl at the white man.
With uplifted hands and crying that he would obey, Rowgowskii stood up.
Chang lowered the knife and paused in his ascent. The leader of the
mutineers motioned to the coolies to precede him. They clambered along
the rocks, darting glances over their shoulders as if measuring to
descend as far from the reach of Chang as possible.
Whether it was Rowgowskii or one of the coolies who did it neither
Emily, Chang, nor Lavelle, watching from below, could tell, but a large
round boulder was dislodged by the feet of one of the three. It crashed
down the hillside with the ricochet of a spending shell, missed Emily by
a hair's-breadth, and plunged through the side of the boat.