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."
"They'd come back for their men if it were humanly possible," I ventured, "and they might have good hopes of being able to find them alive. The wreck of the yawl happened after the yacht had disappeared, you remember. But if they did come back, how about the treasure trove? Would they go away again without digging up your plantation? But perhaps they did dig it up?"
He shook his head.
"No; that is the first thing I thought of when the five men turned up missing. The block of coral is just where we left it. Nothing has been disturbed."
"But if that is what the landing party came for last night – "
"I know; it's a mystery, but in the heart of it lies our best hope, I believe. They meant to dig when they made that landing last night. I found a shovel this morning. In their hurry to get away, the yawl crew left it on the beach and the seas had washed it up under the trees."
"Whereabouts is the hope?" I inquired.
"It is all guess-work," he admitted. "Assuming that they came last night to dig – and didn't dig – and assuming again that they came back in the dark hour before dawn, and still didn't dig, it is a fair inference that we haven't seen the last of the Andromeda– or isn't it?"
"I don't know," I said. "The plot has grown much too complicated for me. Meanwhile, I suppose we ought to be thankful that we haven't five additional mouths to fill – with nothing to fill them with. You wouldn't have let those five pirates starve, would you, Bonteck?"
The look that came into his eyes was handsomely gloomy.
"I meant to come just as near doing it as I could, and get by without serving a sentence for manslaughter." And with that, he pulled his cap over his eyes and walked away, coming back presently with a still gloomier look in his eyes.
"It's hell, Dick," he broke out grittingly. "I've got to tell these people of ours what's been done to them. It is the least I can do now. There is starvation just ahead of us; and from what we saw last night, it is perfectly plain that if the Andromeda comes back, it won't be for the purpose of taking us off."
"Not to take us off, perhaps, but the other motive – the motive that brought her here last night – still exists. If she came to dig up your buried 'ammunition' which has so mysteriously disappeared, she will come again. You may depend upon that."
"Just the same, I've got to tell them," he said doggedly, going back to the conscientious part of it; adding: "And I'd much rather be shot. It was such an asinine thing, even as I had it shaped up in the beginning. How can I ever make it appear to them as it appeared to me? – as a harmless little practical joke, with no particular sting in its tail? In the light of what has happened, I can never hope to make it look that way; not even to you or to Madeleine, I'm afraid."
I rose upon an elbow.
"Why not wait a little longer?" I argued. "The Andromeda will surely turn up again, and when she does, it will be up to us to recapture her at all hazards. When that is done, you can tell the others, if you still think it necessary."
"But I owe it to you, at least, to tell them now."
"Why to me, especially?"
"For Conetta's sake."
"I'll answer for Conetta."
He sat down on the biscuit box, where he had been sitting when I came awake, and put his back against a tree.
"I'm a wholesale murderer, Dick; that is about what it comes to!" he groaned. "I have brought the woman I'd die for down into this devil's sea to starve her to death. I know you'll say that I meant it all the other way about, and so I did. But in this world it is only results that count. I'm a bloody assassin."
I tried sitting up in the hammock, and found that it could be done. Then I tried standing, and found that this, too, was possible.
"Supposing we go and join the breakfast chase," I suggested, meaning to interpose a saving distraction; and we did it.
This was the beginning of the fourth act – the most disheartening fourth act – in our gladsome little Caribbean comedy which was turning out so tragically. For a day or two we were able to make light of the sudden change of diet, and even of its scantiness, and to extract some sort of forced fun out of the oyster dredging and the crabbing; also, out of our not too successful attempts to vary the menu by fishing, with bent hat-pins for hooks, in the crystal-clear waters of the lagoon. But in a short while the laugh came less readily, and the eyes of some – of the younger women, at least – grew strained from much staring at dazzling, but empty, horizons, and filled easily with tears.
Yet, on the whole, the revelation of inner egos brought about by this face-to-face fronting of a desperate extremity was not disappointing. Stripped now of all the maskings of make-believe, we saw one another as we were, and much that had been hidden was found to be heart-mellowing and even inspiring when it was dragged out into the unsparing light of a common disaster.
The courage of the women, in particular, was the finest thing imaginable. There were nine of them starving heroically with us, and they were doing it with a measure of cheer that was beyond all praise. Even Miss Mehitable refused to figure as an exception. "We must be good losers," she said to Conetta and me one evening when we were trying to tempt her with a bit of broiled fish without seasoning. And she did not resent it when Alicia Van Tromp, thrusting a laughing face in at the open tent flap, called her "a dear, dead-game old sport."
For the men there is less to be said; partly because it is a man's job to endure hardness anyway, and partly because three of our nine were not living up to their privileges. Ingerson was doing a little better, to be sure; for one thing, he was no longer thrusting himself upon Madeleine. During the night of the hurricane he had lain out in all the fury of it, and possibly the pouring deluge had washed some of the brute out of him. At all events, he was less obnoxious, holding himself aloof in a half-surly way, and seeming – or so we hoped – to be fighting a morose battle with his appetite. Once, when I spoke of his changed attitude to Conetta, she quoted Scripture at me: "'This kind goeth not out but by fasting and prayer.' I doubt if he is praying much, but he is certainly fasting."
Major Terwilliger, on the other hand, grew even more contemptible as the pinch nipped the harder. Ranging the island for edible things, as we all did, he discovered a wild mango in bearing, and though the fruit would have been a grateful boon to all as a change, he kept the discovery to himself for two whole days before Billy Grisdale, who was trailing him, made him give up and share what was left on the tree. Holly Barclay had given up his pretense of illness and was less exacting than before; but he was still utterly useless in any practical way.
During this interval, in which we were maintaining night and day watches and patrolling the beaches, Bonteck was still holding his peace as I had counseled him to, though I could see that his load was growing heavier day by day. As to the events of the hurricane night, it was by agreement that no mention of the Andromeda's visit had been made to the others. This was Bonteck's idea. Since nothing had come of the yacht's return and our adventure with the five men who had so mysteriously disappeared, he argued that no good could result from spreading the news; that the news couldn't well be spread without adding explanations which I, myself, had advised him to withhold.
It was a week, or perhaps a day or so more than that, after the night of alarms that Van Dyck took me aside and showed me a piece of light rope such as is used for signal halliards on board ship; a piece, I said, but I should have said two short pieces tied together in a hard knot.
"Do you recognize it?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"Of course, I couldn't swear to it," he said, "but it looks like a bit of the flag halliards from the yacht. In other words, a bit of the rope with which we tied the five pirates."
"Well?" I queried.
"I forgot to say that when I went to look for those fellows the next morning, I didn't find any of these rope lashings. They didn't leave even that much of a trace of themselves when they made off."
"Well?" I said again.
"I suppose you are pretty well convinced by this time that the Andromeda came back and took them off, and so am I. Taking that view of it, you'll know what it means when I tell you that I found this piece of knotted rope in the bushes a few yards from our camp – lost out of somebody's pocket, for a guess."
Truly, I did know. It meant that the Andromeda had come a second time, and that, in addition to rescuing the survivors of the yawl's crew, the rescuing party had crept up upon us; had been near enough to massacre the lot of us as we slept after the strenuous exertions of the forepart of the night.
"Um," said I; "why didn't they kill us all off while the killing was good? Perhaps you can answer me that."
"There may have been reasons. Possibly the landing party – the second one – wasn't big enough to attempt it with safety. Besides, what was the use of their troubling themselves when the lapse of a little time would take the job off their hands?"
Here was a ready explanation for all that had happened, or hadn't happened, since the night of the storm. The mutineers were merely giving us time to starve to death. Their spying expedition had doubtless shown them that our stores were gone, and they could easily argue that in a few days we, too, would be gone – at least gone past the point at which we could interfere with anything they wished to do on the island.
It was on a crabbing expedition when, as it chanced, I was paired with the youngest of the Van Tromp trio, that Edith asked a question which I knew must be trembling continually upon the lips of every woman in our forlorn company.
"How long can it last, Uncle Dick? How long can we live on just cocoanuts and hope, after the horrid great oysters are all gone, and these creepy, leggy crabs have grown too cunning to let us catch them?"
"We must try not to dwell upon that," I told her. "Our problem is to live from day to day."
"But there will come a day," she asserted. "I can see it in Billy's eyes, when I can get him to look at me."
"Ouch!" I said, purposely letting a crab nip my finger for the sake of making a diversion. But the tribe to which Miss Edith belongs rejoices in its ability to cling, limpet-like, to a matter in hand.
"The Caribs were cannibals, weren't they? – in the long ago?" she went on. "Are we coming to that, Richard Preble? If we should, Billy and I will draw straws. We're both young and tender, you know."
"Hush!" I commanded; "that isn't a pretty joke." And later that same day, when I was able to get hold of Billy Grisdale, I read the riot act to him.
"You want to rub the O-Lord-pity-us look out of your eyes, young man, and put a little more ginger into your conversation with Edie," I suggested. "She is beginning to see things in the back part of your brain, and that isn't good for little girl Crusoes."
"Take it to yourself!" he retorted spitefully. "I saw you looking at Conetta not fifteen minutes ago with a scare in your eyes big enough to set an innocent bystander's teeth on edge."
"I'll reform," I promised, "and so must you, Billy. Take Bonteck for your model; not me."
"Bonteck's got something up his sleeve," he said morosely. "He's been going through the bunch for weapons. Think of it – nine men of us here three thousand miles out of reach of a policeman, and not so much as one poor little potato-popgun among us."
This was a mistake on Billy's part, of course. We still had the three pistols taken from the men we had waylaid on the night of the storm, but of these no mention had been made to Billy or any of the others, since to speak of them would have called for the story of the night's adventures – a story which Van Dyck and I were still keeping to ourselves.
But Billy's remark about the inquiry for weapons was news of a sort. Had Van Dyck caught a fresh glimpse of the Andromeda's smoke plume on the horizon he was always sweeping with the field-glass?
"Bonteck wasn't trying to disarm anybody, was he?" I asked.
"Oh, no. He talked sort of vaguely about a scrap of some kind, and being prepared for it; wanted to know if the professor and Grey and Dupuyster and I would put ourselves under orders, and do what he might tell us to, sight unseen. Said maybe he'd be able to explain more fully a little later on."
I thought I saw what was in Van Dyck's mind. His secret was gnawing the life out of him, and, sooner or later, it would have to come out. I knew well enough that he was not hesitating from any cowardly motive; it was rather because I had urged him to wait, holding out the hope that a more auspicious time for the telling of the plot would come – or at least that a less auspicious time than this starvation period could hardly come.
In the waiting interval, and as in some sense still our host and leader, he had been obliged to busy himself with something, and apart from the daily effort to make the hardships less grinding upon all of us, and the women in particular, he had organized the six of us men who were willing into four-hour watches of two men each to patrol the two beaches, urging our daily decreasing food supply as a reason for the increased vigilance, and insisting that we must not allow the smallest chance of discovery to escape us. If a ship were sighted in the night, the two watchers making the discovery were to arouse the other four instantly, and without giving a general alarm.
Though he had not confided it to me in detail, his plan was obvious enough. He was still expecting another return of the Andromeda, and was determined to make a desperate effort to regain possession of the yacht when the chance should offer. For this attempt, hazardous as it would surely prove to be, he could count definitely upon only six of our nine. Barclay was certainly out of it, and the major's age exempted him. Ingerson was a doubtful quantity – very doubtful from my point of view – and I questioned if Van Dyck would call upon him or make him a party to any plan that might be determined upon when the time for action should arrive. Still, outnumbered as we must be, a recapture of the yacht appeared to be our only hope. We might all starve a thousand times over before any chance ship should sight our isolated island; sight it and approach near enough to make out our distress signals.
Just how much or how little Van Dyck would confess to the others, if a time should come when he would no longer be able to keep silence, was a question that was puzzling me. To tell the assembled castaways that there had probably been a real mutiny where only a sham one was intended would cut no figure as news, since sixteen of our eighteen already believed it to have been real. That being the case, the only encouraging thing to be revealed was the burial of the golden hoard, and the reasonable hope it gave us that the Andromeda would come back, sooner or later, in order to search for it.
As to this, however, I was quite confident that Bonteck would never go so far as to tell the others about the gold planting. That he would publish the bald truth about his generous and lover-like little plot, the object of which was to enable Madeleine Barclay to buy her freedom of choice in matters matrimonial, was simply unthinkable. And if the gold-burying episode were to be left out of his confession, in what other manner could he account to the others for his belief that the yacht would eventually return?
As it came about, the answers to all these questioning reflections were already marshaling themselves for a descent upon us at the moment when I was undertaking to show Billy Grisdale that a man's eyes should be kept decently shuttered when his brain is conjuring up pictures of the terrible things that may happen to the loved one.
On this same evening Professor Sanford and I were paired to take the first watch for the patrolling of the beach, and at eight o'clock we set out from the camp in the glade, leaving the other members of our Crusoe company sitting around the dying embers of the cooking fire. Following the regular sentry-go routine, Sanford and I parted at the camp; he was to take the south beach and I the north, and we were to meet at the sandspit in which the island terminated to the eastward. As I tramped along upon my solitary watch round I was sorrier than ever for Van Dyck. All that day he had been going about like a man with a dozen murders on his conscience, and it was plain to be seen that each added day – days in which he was obliged to see some of us actually going hungry because we hadn't been able to gather enough to satisfy eighteen normal and healthy appetites – was crowding him nearer to the brink of the humiliating confession chasm. From advising him not to tell, I was coming around to the opposite point of view and wishing that I hadn't tried to stop him. As matters stood, he was like a man facing a deferred surgical operation. It was true, the operation might prove fatal; but there were opportunities for the dying of any number of anticipatory deaths during the interval of suspense.
Skirting the northern edge of the island without seeing anything to mar the mirror-like surface of the starlit sea, I was first at the sandspit rendezvous by a good half-hour. Since there was no reason for haste, and the sandy cape commanded a wide view of the watery waste in all directions save one, I filled my pipe with the final shakings of my last sack of tobacco, and after poking in the ashes of the neglected signal fire and finding no live coals among them, I lighted the pipe with one of the few precious matches we were hoarding, and sat down on the sands to wait. In due course of time the professor appeared, a dark figure trudging along aimlessly; and when he came nearer I saw that he had his hands clasped behind him and was walking with his head down like a person buried in the deepest thought – the very antitype of an alert coast guardsman on the watch for a sail. When he descried me he came over and sat down beside me, still thoughtfully abstracted.
"I was beginning to wonder what had become of you, Professor," I said, merely to start things going.
"Yes; I was detained. Mr. Van Dyck called me back shortly after you left," he explained half-absently. Then he opened up: "Mr. Preble, I have been listening to a most astounding – er – confession, I suppose you might call it. I wonder if you know what it is?"
"I do," I answered shortly. "Van Dyck has been telling you that a harmless little comedy planned by him to break the monotony of our cruise has turned into a potential tragedy, with all the attendant hardships and horrors."
"You are quite right. He was very manly about it, and he blames himself unsparingly. It was an exceedingly difficult thing for him to do – to tell us of it. He realized fully that the present conditions must make any explanation seem wretchedly inadequate."
"They do," I agreed, and then I asked the one burning question: "The others, Professor Sanford? How did they take it?"
"A-a-hem-hem – h'm; each after his or her kind, Mr. Preble. The women are pretty generally sympathetic. They see only the immense responsibility which Mr. Van Dyck freely acknowledges, and are very humanly and generously sorry for him. I wish I might say as much for the men. Grey and young Grisdale are both loyal, though it was plainly evident that Grey had to fight for his loyalty, since the unhappy outcome involves his wife. Ingerson talked and acted like a surly ruffian, as you would imagine; and Major Terwilliger's language was scarcely less reprehensible. Dupuyster played the man. He rebuked his uncle quite sharply and went across to grip Van Dyck's hand and to say what a manly fellow might say in the circumstances. And Miss Van Tromp – the second Miss Van Tromp – went with him."
"Of course," I said crustily – and made another mark on the score that I meant to settle with one Gerald Dupuyster if we should ever attain to a time when personal scores could be audited and settled. Then I reminded the professor that he had omitted Mr. Holly Barclay.
"I wish to continue omitting him," was the reply, and the professor's tone was a measure of his disgust. "Let it be sufficient to say that he made his daughter blush for very shame with his puerile accusations. He even went so far as to intimate that Mr. Van Dyck was not telling the truth; that the entire affair was a deep-laid plot designed to involve Miss Madeleine in some way."
"That was to be expected – from Holly Barclay," I said. "But you are omitting one more: Professor Abner Sanford, Ph. D."
I was relighting my pipe with another of the precious matches, and in the momentary flare the professor's plain-song face revealed itself. There was a half-quizzical smile wrinkling at the corners of the quiet gray eyes.
"Mrs. Sanford and I are Mr. Van Dyck's guests," he qualified. "But, apart from that, I was content to wait and hear what might develop further. As it appears, Mr. Van Dyck has not entirely lost hope. If there were a real mutiny – and, indeed, there seems little doubt of that – Van Dyck still has confidence in the resourcefulness of Goff, the sailing-master. He insists that, sooner or later, the Andromeda will return."
In the little interval of silence that followed I was turning the professor's story over thoughtfully in my mind. There had evidently been no mention made of the gold-burying episode. Van Dyck had dodged it very cleverly, it seemed, letting it be understood that his hope of the yacht's return was based upon the loyalty, in the last resort, of Elijah Goff. It was better that way. So long as the hope had been definitely held out to the others, there was no need of terrifying the women by telling them that if we should be lucky enough to regain our ship it would be by hard knocks and a rather forlorn-hope fight against overwhelming odds as to numbers and arms.
"There is still one vote outstanding, Mr. Preble – your own," said the professor, breaking into my reverie.
"You have already taken that for granted," I returned. "If Bonteck had confided in me before the fact – which I assure you he did not – I should certainly have vetoed his plan for a fortnight's picnic on this God-forsaken bit of coral in the middle of nowhere. Yet, as his nearest friend, I can understand, perhaps better than any one else, why he was impelled to do it. Also, I can understand that he had no reason whatever to foresee the remotest possibility of any such tragic turn as things have taken."
"Of course, of course; I think we shall all understand that after we have duly weighed and considered." The professor had locked his fingers over his knees and was regarding me thoughtfully. "Do you know," he went on, quite as if the main problems had been worked out and definitely wiped from the blackboard, "do you know, I am sometimes a little regretful that I didn't learn to smoke tobacco in my younger days? You gentlemen of the pipe and cigar seem to get so much comfort out of it."
"It is never too late to mend – or mar," I told him; and with that we got up to resume our respective sentry beats by which, under the established routine, each of us would return to the camp end of the island by the route over which the other had come.