Part 12

"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.

XIV

HAND TO MOUTH

THE blow from the broken tree-top must have been a fairly forceful one. When I began to get acquainted with current affairs again, I was lying in a hammock swung between two trees, the gale had blown itself out, and the sun was shining.

At a little distance I could see the tents of the new camp, but there seemed to be nobody stirring. Overhead the bedraggled fronds of the palms were waving in a gentle breeze aftermath of the great storm, and the thunder of the surf on the reef told me that the sea had not yet fully subsided.

I moved a bit and put a leg over the hammock's edge, meaning to get up, but at that, Van Dyck materialized from somewhere and put the leg back again.

"No hurry about turning out, old man," he said gently. "How are you feeling by now?"

I took stock of myself and answered accordingly.

"Head feeling as big as a bushel basket, but I'm otherwise normal, I guess. What happened to me?"

He told me about the crack on the head from the falling tree-top. "You were knocked out by the blow, and when you came to, you were wandering a bit in your mind and talked too much. It was making it rather awkward for Conetta--the things you were saying--so I took the liberty of giving you a small sleeping-shot with the emergency needle."

"Thanks," I yawned. "The next thing to being able to do a good turn for yourself is to have a kind friend at your elbow to do it for you. I feel as though I had slept the clock around. What makes it so quiet?"

"Nobody at home," he answered evasively. "Professor Sanford has formed a class in natural science, and it is out doing field stunts."

"Otherwise?" I queried.

"Otherwise foraging for breakfast. It has come, Dick. We didn't get action swiftly enough last night to save the few provisions there were left in the commissary, and the seas made a clean sweep. Tell me a few of the natural-history things that you and the other survivors of the _Mary Jane_ must have learned while you were trying to keep from starving to death after your shipwreck."

I closed my eyes and took the needful plunge into the dismal memories.

"There were always the cocoanuts, of course--and I've never been able to abide the taste of one since. Then there is, or was, a kind of oyster, too big to be eatable unless you were powerfully hungry. We got them by wading in the lagoon shallows. There are plenty of crabs, as you know; they would probably be good if they were cooked. But we of the _Mary Jane_ had no fire. The lagoon is full of fish; some good for food, and some deadly. You try them and if you survive they are all right. If you don't survive, they are poisonous."

"How did you catch the fish?" Van Dyck wanted to know.

"We didn't catch many of them. A diet of raw fish doesn't appeal very strongly unless one is nearer starvation than we could be while the cocoanuts lasted."

"No edible roots?"

"None that we ever discovered; and, anyway, they wouldn't have been edible raw. But, say; we're missing something. How about those trussed-up pirates? Won't the professor's natural-science class stumble upon them and have a shock?"

At this question Van Dyck looked a trifle foolish.

"I thought we tied those fellows securely enough last night," he offered. "Didn't you?"

"I did, indeed. Are you trying to tell me that they've picked the locks?"

"They are not where we left them; that is one sure thing. I went out there early this morning, meaning to make them talk and tell me what's what on the _Andromeda_. They had disappeared."

"They are loose on the island?" I gasped.

"That would be the natural inference, you'd say. But I couldn't find any trace of them--haven't yet found any."

"Then the _Andromeda_ must have come back to take them off."

Van Dyck's eyes narrowed.

"I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is impossible. But the seas are still running pretty high, and if the yacht's people were able to make a landing with either of the power launches before dawn, they are better sailormen than I've been giving them credit for being."