CHAPTER XXXII.

THE SHARK'S TOOTH REEF.

Meanwhile the night grew on, and with it there was that accompaniment which is so common in the tropics: the wind rising, and from blowing lightly soon sprang up into what the sailors call half a gale.

Now and again, far away to the east, flashes of rusty red lightning might be seen also, the almost sure heralds of a storm later.

The wind blew, too, over the dense masses of orange groves and other vegetation which go to form the tropical jungle that hereabout fringes the seashore; compact masses that, to many endeavouring to arrive at that shore, would offer an impenetrable, an impassable, barrier. Though not so to those acquainted with the vicinity and used to threading the jungle, nor to the Indians and half-castes whose huts and cabins bordered on that jungle, since they knew every spot where passage might be made, and the coast thereby reached at last.

Zara knew also each of those passages well, and threaded them now with the confidence born of familiarity; with, too, the stern determination to arrive at the end she had sworn to attain, if such attainment were possible.

She had left the room where Madame Carmaux had been confronted, not only by her but by all the others, in the manner described; had left it suddenly, though mysteriously, even as to her maddened brain a thought had sprung, dispelling for the moment all the agony and passion with which that brain was racked. The thought that, as she had sent the man she loved to his doom, so, also, it might not yet be too late to avert that doom--to save him.

The Indians who were bearing him to the old ramshackle sailing-boat he possessed (a thing half yawl and half lugger--a thing, too, which she supposed those men had been instructed to pierce and bore so that it would begin to fill from the first, and should, thereby, sink by the time it was in deep water) must necessarily go slowly, owing to the burden they had to carry, while she--well! she could progress almost as swiftly as the deer could themselves thread the thickets that bordered the coast.

Surely, surely, lithe, young, and active as she was she would overtake those men with their burden ere they could reach the yawl; she would be able to bid them stop, and could at once point out to them the fatal mistake that had been made. She could give them proof, by bidding them take one glance at the features of the senseless man they were transporting, of the nature of that mistake.

So she set out to overtake the Indians with their burden; set out, staying for nothing, and allowing nothing to hinder her. For, swiftly as she might go, every minute was still precious.

And now--now--as the night wind arose still more and the rusty red of the lightning turned to a more purple-violet hue--sure warning of the nearness of the coming storm--she was almost close to the beach where she knew Sebastian's crazy old craft was kept in common with one or two others; namely, a punt with a deep tank for fish, a scow, and a boat with oars. She was close to the beach, but with, at this time, her heart like lead in her bosom because of the fear she had that she was too late.

"No sound," she muttered to herself. "No voices to be heard. They are gone. They are gone. I _am_ too late!"

Then, redoubling her exertions, she ran swiftly the remainder of the distance to where she knew the boathouse--an erection of poles with planks laid across them--stood.

And in a moment she knew that she was, indeed, too late. Where the yawl usually floated there was now an empty space; there was nothing in the boathouse but the punt and the rowboat.

"Oh! what to do," she cried, "what to do!" and she beat her breast as she so cried. "They have carried him out to sea, even now the yawl is sinking--has sunk--they will be on their way back. He is dead! he is dead! he must be dead by now!"

While, overcome by the horror and misery of her thoughts, she sank down to the ground. But not for long, however, since at such a crisis as this her strong--if often ungovernable--heart became filled with greater courage and resource. To sink to the ground, she told herself, to lie there wailing and moaning over the impending fate of him she loved, was not the way to avert that fate. Instead, she must be prompt and resolute.

She sprang, therefore, once more to her feet and--dark as was all around her, except for the light of a young crescent moon peeping up over the sea's rim and forcing a glimmer now and again through the banks of deep, leaden clouds which the wind was bringing up from that sea--made her way into the boathouse, where, swiftly unloosing the painter of the rowboat, she pushed the latter out into the tumbling waves and began to scull it.

"They must have gone straight out," she thought, "straight out. And they would not go far. Only to where the water is deep enough for the yawl to sink, or to encounter one of the many reefs--those jagged crested reefs which would make a hole in her far worse than fifty awls could do."

Then still bending her supple frame over the oars, while her little hands clenched them tightly, she rowed and rowed for dear life--as in actual truth it was!--her breath coming faster and faster with her exertions, her bosom heaving, but her courage indomitable.

"I may not be too late," she whispered again and again; "the boat may not yet have filled. I may not be too late."

Suddenly she paused affrighted, startled; her heart seemed to cease to beat, her hands were idle as they clutched the oars. Startled, and despairing!

For out here the water was calmer, there being on it only the long Atlantic roll that is so common beneath the roughness of the winds; except for the slapping and crashing of those waves against the bows of the boat with each rise and fall it made, there was scarcely any noise; certainly none such as those waves had made, and would make against the boathouse and the long line of the shore. So little noise that what she had heard before she heard again now, as she sat listening and terrified in her place. She caught the beat of oars in another boat, a boat that was drawing nearer to her with each fresh stroke--that was, also, drawing nearer to the boathouse.

The Indians were returning. Their work was done!

"I am too late," she moaned. "I am too late. God help us both!"

Then, too, she heard something else.

Over the waters, over the rolling waves, there came to her ears the clear sounds of a man singing in a high tenor--it was almost a high treble--a man singing a song in Maya which she, who was of their race, knew was one that, in bygone days the Caribs and natives had sung in triumph over the downfall of their enemies. A song which, when it was concluded, was followed by a little bleating laugh, one which she knew well enough, a laugh which only one man in all that neighbourhood could give. Then she heard words called out in a half-chuckling, half-gloating tone, still in Maya.

"'Sink him beneath the sea forever,' she say, 'forever beneath the sea.' And Paz he never for get, oh, never, never! Now he sunk," and again she heard the bleating laugh, and again the beginning of that wild Carib song of triumph.

Springing up, dropping the oars heedlessly--her heart almost bursting--the girl rose from her seat, then shrieked aloud--sending her voice in the direction where now there loomed before her eyes a blur beneath the moon's glimmer which she knew to be a boat. "Paz," she cried, "Paz, it is not true, say it is not true. Oh! Paz, where is he?"

"Where you wish. Where you tell me put him," the other called back, while still beneath the brawny, muscular strokes of the Indians rowing it, the boat swept on toward the shore. "Beneath the waves or soon will be. Breaking to pieces on Shark's Tooth Reef. Paz never forget."

"Beast! devil!" the girl cried in her agony, forgetting, or recalling with redoubled horror, that what had been done was her own doing, was perpetrated at her suggestion. "Return and help me to save him. Oh! come back."

But the boat was gone, was but a speck now beneath the moon, and she was alone upon the sea, over which the wind howled as it lashed it to fury at last.

"The Shark's Tooth Reef," she murmured. "The Shark's Tooth Reef, The worst of all around. Yet--yet--if caught on that, the yawl may not sink. Oh! oh!" and she muttered to herself some wild unexpressed words that were doubtless a prayer. Then she grasped the oars once more, which, since they were fixed by loops on to thole pins instead of being loose in rowlocks, had not drifted away as might otherwise have been the case, and set the boat toward the spot where the Shark's Tooth Reef was as nearly as she could guess.

"If I can but reach it," she muttered to herself. "If I can but reach it."

But now her labours were more intense than before, her struggles more terrible. For, coming straight toward the bow of the boat, the Atlantic rollers beat it back with every stroke she took, while also they deluged it with water, so that she knew ere long it must sink beneath the waves. Already there were three or four inches in the bottom--nay, more, for the stretchers were half-covered--another three of four and it would go down like lead. And each fresh wave that broke over the bows added a further quantity.

"To see him once again; only to see him though if not to save," she moaned--weeping at last; "to see him, to be able to tell him that though I sent him to his doom I loved him," while roused by the thought, she still struggled on, buffeted and beaten by the waves; breathless, almost lifeless--but still unconquered and unconquerable.

Suddenly she gave a gasp, a shriek. Close by her, rising up some twenty feet from the sea, there was a cone-shaped rock, jagged and serrated at its summit; black, too, and glistening as, in the rays of the fast rising young moon, the water streaming from off it. It was the Shark's Tooth Reef, so called because, from its long length of some fifty yards (a length also serrated and jagged like the under jaw of a dog), there rose that cone-shaped thing which resembled what it was named from.

And again she shrieked as, looking beyond the base of the cone, peering through the hurtling waves and white filmy spume and spray, she saw upon the further edge of the base of the reef a black, indistinct mass being beaten to and fro. She heard, too, the grinding of that mass against the reef, as well as its thumps as it was flung on and dragged off it by the swirling of the sea; she heard, how each time, the force of the impact became louder and more deadly.

"To reach him at last," she cried, "to die with him! To die together."

Then it seemed that into that quivering, nervous frame there came a giant's strength; it seemed as though the cords and sinews of her arms had become steel and iron, as though the little hands were vises in the power of their grip. "To die together," she thought again, as, with superhuman efforts, she forced her boat toward the battered, broken yawl.

Now, she was close to it--now!--then, with a crash her own boat was dashed against the larger one, its bow crushed in, in a moment, its stem lifted into the air. But, catlike, desperate, too, fighting fate with the determination of despair, she had seized the top of the yawl's side; had clung to it one moment while the sea thundered and broke against her feet below, and had then drawn herself up onto the deck over the side.

And he was there, lying half-in, half-out the little forecastle cuddy, bound and corded--insensible.

"I have found you, Sebastian," she whispered, her lips to his cold ones. "I have found you."

With an awful lurch the yawl heeled over, the man's body rolling like a log as it did so, and then Zara knew that the end had come. Even though he lived, nothing could save him now; his arms were bound tightly to his sides, the cords passing over his chest from left to right. He was without sense or power.

"Nothing can save him now--nor me," she said. "Nothing."

Then she forced her own little hands beneath those cords so that, thereby, she was bound to him; whereby if ever they were found, they would be found locked together; she grasping tightly, too, the top ply, so that neither wave, nor roll of sea, nor any force could tear them apart again. And if they were never found--still--still, nothing could part them more.

"Together," she murmured, for the last time, her own strength ebbing fast, "together forever. Together at the end. Always together now--in death!"