"Yes," he returned gloomily, "that is what it is coming to." Then: "What ought I to do, Dick? – go and tell the others what I have told you and let them burn me at the stake? It's about what I deserve."
His manner of saying this carried me swiftly back to an older time, reincarnating for me the Bonteck Van Dyck who had been my college chum; generous, large-hearted, always quick to admit himself in the wrong when he was in the wrong. Even with the knowledge that Conetta must suffer with the rest of us, I could not flay him as he deserved.
"You are not all bad, Bonteck," I remarked. "Billy Grisdale and Edie owe you something, and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not in your debt, too. You had a purpose in including Conetta and her aunt, and Jerry Dupuyster, didn't you?"
"Of course I had. It seemed a thousand pities that you and Conetta couldn't get together on some sort of a living basis."
"It happens to be too late to do me any good; Dupuyster has already asked her," I said. "Just the same, I'm grateful for the intention; so grateful that I'm not going to be the one to tie you to the stake when the others pass sentence upon you. But all this is dodging the main question. What are we going to do? We men, or at least the six of us who call ourselves men, can't stand by and let the other twelve simply curl up and die when the food is gone."
"I haven't any plan," he replied. "As I said a while back, I've just been hanging on and hoping against hope. There is still a chance, you know. The yacht's engines may have broken down. Goff may have had to put in somewhere – at some one of the European-owned islands – and is having difficulty in getting permission to sail. That might easily happen, since he is only a sailing-master and has no written authority to show. Taking that view of it, any one of a dozen things might have got in the way to keep him from reaching us at the appointed time."
"True enough. But that hope is based upon the supposition that your original plan is still in the saddle. It ignores the other alternative – that the mutiny may have been a real one. Also, it ignores the disappearance of the quarter million – your quarter million – which, taken by itself, has a pretty dubious look. I know you don't care anything about the money part of it, now that Madeleine has been provided for by a miracle; but the evanishment of your gold bars would seem to have a very pointed bearing upon our present situation. I can't take your trust in Goff at par. If he didn't come back here and get that gold an hour or so after it was buried, he did the next best thing – which was to come ashore and move the landmark."
"Yes; but, man alive! don't you see what that presupposes? You are assuming that in moving the chunk of coral he placed it exactly over the other mess of gold bars. I grant you that such a thing might happen, but you know well enough that it wouldn't happen – that there are a thousand chances to one against its happening."
I had to admit that my second hypothesis was too lame to have a leg to stand on, though it was the more hopeful one of the two. If Goff hadn't resurrected the lately buried quarter million – if he had only moved the marking stone – with due and careful measurements so that he could find the place again – there was some chance of his coming back to the island – after we were all safely starved to death. But these speculations weren't getting us anywhere, and I said so.
"We're talking in circles," I complained. "All the gold there is lying under that nubbin of coral, added to the truck-load you've lost and can't find, wouldn't buy a single meal for this crowd of ours after the provisions are gone. Let's get to work and do something. There is enough timber left in the wreck of the Mary Jane to build a raft, and we have an axe – if Jerry hasn't lost it while he was chopping firewood. You have the latitude and longitude of this prison of ours. How far is it to somewhere – anywhere?"
Van Dyck did not reply at once. The wind was coming in little catspaws now, and the curious haze, which was by this time obscuring the entire heavens, was shot through with a sort of ghostly half light that was neither lightning nor a reflection from the darkling sea. When Van Dyck spoke, it was not in answer to my question about the latitude and longitude.
"Hurricane conditions, I should say; wouldn't you?" he said, getting upon his feet. "If they are, we'd better be hiking back to the other end of the island. Our camp is too near the beach to be safe, even if the wind should come straight out of the east. What do you think about it? You know more about tropical storms than I do."
I was about to reply that a man might live half a life-time in the tropics and still have much to learn about weather conditions, when he suddenly reached down and gripped my arm.
"Look!" he jerked out. "No, not there – right here – close in – just outside of the reef!"
I looked and saw what he saw. A short quarter of a mile to the southeastward, with no lights showing and with her slowly turning engines making no sound that we could hear, a ship, ghostly white and shadowy in the curious light, was creeping, phantom-like, toward the south shore of the island. It was the Andromeda.
XIII
THE WIND AND THE WAVES ROARING
Most naturally, the reappearance of the yacht, at a moment when we had practically worked our way around to the conclusion that it was extremely doubtful if we should ever see her again, quickly put the reasoned deductions to flight. But a second glance threw all the hopeful machinery violently into the reverse. The Andromeda's stealthy approach with all lights hidden, and the evident intention on the part of whoever was in command to make land on the side of the island farthest removed from the place of our debarkation, gave no promise of rescue.
"The gold!" I exclaimed; and the two words collided with Van Dyck's: "They are coming back after it!"
"But hold on," I interjected. "Your gold is gone, and they don't know – can't know – anything about the Spanish treasure. If it's buried treasure they're coming after, somebody on board the yacht has the wrong tip, to a dead moral certainty."
Van Dyck made a gesture like a man groping in the dark.
"There were the sand-filled boxes," he offered. "They've opened them. They know that the gold has been unshipped somewhere, and I suppose it wasn't impossible for them to find out that the yacht made a flying trip to this island after the greater part of the crew had been given shore leave at Willemstadt."
"You needn't go so far afield for an explanation," I countered. "Goff knew where the gold was unshipped; and, by the same token, he is probably the only man aboard of the yacht who knows the latitude and longitude of Pirates' Hope. None of the others could have found the way back here."
"But a few minutes ago you were accusing Goff of making away with the gold on the night of its burial," was the quick retort.
"Wait," I interposed. "I said he did one of two things: dug your gold up and took it aboard after you were asleep, or else he came ashore and moved that block of coral. Evidently the latter half of the guess was the correct one."
At this, he began to give ground a little.
"You may be right. Still, I can't believe it of Goff. There is a chance that, notwithstanding my thinning out of the crew at Willemstadt, we still had a traitor aboard. In that case we may have been spied upon when we landed the gold – Goff and I. I'm still hanging to the belief that there was a real mutiny, and in that case Goff may have been given a choice between steering them back here or walking the plank."
This purely academic discussion of the whys and wherefores went on while the Andromeda was edging nearer and nearer to the outer reef barrier, still as silently as a ghost ship, and still without showing a sign of life on deck or bridge, so far as we could make out. Within a stone's throw of the reef she slowed to a stand, and not until then did we hear the low rumbling of her engines as they were reversed to check her headway.
Since the yacht's approach had been from the eastward, she lay broadside on to the island. We could see the electric motor launch hanging in its davit tackle on the starboard side, but there was no move made to lower it.
"They are not using any steam winches to-night," was Van Dyck's muttered comment upon this. "Too much noise. Listen!"
There was a splash, apparently on the port side of the vessel, faint sounds as of oars feathering in muffled rowlocks, and a little later the yacht's yawl crept out around the sharp stem of the Andromeda and headed for a narrow inlet through the reef. There were seven or eight men in the small boat; four at the oars, one in the bow and either two or three aft.
At sight of this landing party Bonteck came alive with gratifying promptness.
"Whether your guess is the right one or not, Dick, there is one thing certain: If we let those fellows go to digging around in our bullion patch, they will find what we found, and Madeleine will lose out, after all. We can't let it stand that way. What do you say?"
I had whipped out my pocket-knife and was cutting a club, or trying to, though the sapling mahogany, or whatever it was I was hacking at, was tougher than a leather whipstock.
"I'm not thinking so much about the gold," I said. "It's up to us to capture this yawl crew first, and the Andromeda afterward. Get yourself a weapon of some sort – quick!"
"Of course," he agreed at once, feeling in his pocket for the big clasp-knife which he had used for a digging tool a few hours earlier. "Something of that kind is what I meant. Shall we rush 'em when they beach the yawl? Or had we better wait a bit and see what they mean to do?"
In our excitement I think neither of us saw the absurdity of two men armed only with clubs proposing to attack seven or eight who were probably provided with firearms.
"We'd better wait," I said; but we made good in the matter of time saving by hurrying through the wood to post ourselves handily in a palmetto thicket on the southward-fronting beach edge near the place toward which the yawl, now entering the lagoon, was headed.
The dash through the wood from our observation point at the heel of the eastern sandspit seemed to me the hottest sprint I had ever made. Once more the breeze had died out, and with little or no air stirring in the open, in the forest the atmosphere was absolutely lifeless. I don't know how near the running dash came to winding Van Dyck, but when we reached the palmetto thicket the perspiration was pouring out of me in trickling streams, and I was fairly gasping for breath. There was a half-paralyzing portent in the stillness and the terrible heat. It was as if subterranean fires had been kindled under the island, and that curious back-lighting of the haze by the rising moon seemed now to have a faintly lurid glow as if it were catching the reflection of the unseen fires.
"Heavens – but this is awful!" Van Dyck muttered under his breath – from which I argued that he was suffering no whit less from the heat than I was. "If we get the weather that this is promising to give us – "
"Hush!" I whispered.
The yawl, pulled strongly by its four oarsmen, was sweeping up to the beach, skimming the surface of the lagoon like some gigantic water bug. But a moment later we found that we had miscalculated the landing place. After coming within a pebble's toss of the shore – to be the better hidden by the palm shadows, as we supposed – the helmsman swung the yawl parallel to the beach with a low-toned word to his oarsmen, and the boat drifted slowly past our hiding place, as if its crew might be scanning the forest fringe for some determining landmark.
"Seven of them," said Van Dyck, with his lips at my ear. "At least one of them will stay by the yawl when they land. That will cut the odds down a bit, though I shouldn't mind if they'd divide up a little evener."
I did not reply. My eyes were smarting painfully from the sweat which was running down into them, and I was trying to get clear vision enough to enable me to distinguish between the figures in the slowly drifting boat. Though I couldn't make sure, I thought that the man at the yawl's tiller was the ex-steward, Lequat.
A landing was made a little way down the beach from us, in a small indentation too shallow to be called a bay. Noiselessly the yawl's oars were unshipped, and then we heard the gentle grating of the boat's keel upon the sand. In the debarking it became apparent that Bonteck had considerably underrated the caution of the invaders. Three of the men stayed by the yawl, leaving only four for whatever landward expedition was toward. Oddly enough, as we thought, the four did not make directly for the glade where the gold had been hidden. Instead, they moved off down the beach, marching silently in single file and keeping well within the shadow of the wood.
It was Van Dyck who flung a guess at their intention.
"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.