"Good!" was the brief rejoinder. "Everything quiet up forward?"
"Why, yes—for all I know to the contrary," I answered in some little surprise. "Why shouldn't it be quiet?"
For a moment Van Dyck seemed embarrassed. And his explanation, when he made it, was half halting.
"There has been some little trouble with—er—thecrew, you know. Quite likely you haven't seen any signs of it. I—I've been trying to keep it under cover as well as I could."
"Trouble?—of what sort?" I demanded.
"Why—er—the only kind one ever has with a crew; something like a threatened mutiny, I believe."
I laughed aloud.
"A mutiny on a private yacht? Why, heavens and earth—your men don't have anything to do but to draw their pay and their breath!"
"I know; that is the way it would appear. But there is something behind—something you don't understand. If I should tell you that theAndromedaleft New York with a quarter of a million dollars in her hold——"
"What's that?" I ejaculated, shocked into sudden and lively attention.
"You must forgive me, Dick, if I don't go into the particulars," he went on hastily. "I might say, with a good degree of truth, that it isn't altogether my own secret. But—but the fact remains."
"A quarter of a mil—Great Caesar!" I gasped. Then the deductive part of my brain began to fit the fragmentary admissions into a probable whole. All summer there had been flying rumors in the West India ports of a revolution brewing in one of the South American republics; an upheaval which was to be financed—in the interests of a great importing corporation—by New York capital. Could it be possible that Van Dyck had foolishly allowed his yacht to be made use of as a money transport?
"You don't mean to say that we have that moneyon board now?" I protested, when the possible consequences began to make themselves manifest.
"As it happens, we haven't," he replied, quite calmly. "That is why it took theAndromedaso long to make the run from New York to Havana. I was getting rid of the impedimenta."
"But if you've gotten rid of it, why should your crew—"
"That is just the point," he explained patiently. "The thing had to be done quietly, and proper precautions were taken at both ends of the line to keep anybody and everybody from finding out that we were carrying a small fortune between-decks. Still, I am afraid it did leak out. That little black-mustached fellow who turned up at Havana, and again in New Orleans——"
"That reminds me of something that occurred to me no longer ago than this morning's breakfast-time," I broke in; "a thing that I've been meaning to ask you about ever since. Manuel, the mulatto boy who usually serves breakfast, was invisible this morning, and he had a substitute."
"Well?"
"I was going to say that, if I'm not greatly mistaken, you have that same mysterious little man—minus the mustaches—on your payroll at this moment, Bonteck. He is the under-steward who goes by the name of Lequat; he was the man who substituted for Manuel this morning, and he was the man who came to me just now to tell me that you wanted me."
It was now Van Dyck's turn to sit up and take notice and he did both, emphatically.
"That fellow?—In theAndromeda?" he exclaimed.
"As I say—if I'm not much mistaken. I had a pretty good chance to familiarize myself with his face that night in the hotel dining-room in New Orleans, and I have a fairly decent memory for faces."
Van Dyck fell into a muse, breaking the silence finally to say: "By Jove, Dick, that may prove to be a horse of another color, don't you know!"
Waiving the question as to what the color of the original horse might have been, I stuck to the point at issue.
"If, as you say, you have gotten rid of the money, the situation can't be very alarming. Including engineers, firemen and cabin servants, you can't have over thirty-five or forty men in the crew, all told. There are nine of us in the cabin, and Haskell and the Americans will all stand with us. If we get together and put up a good front——"
Van Dyck interrupted hastily—over-hastily, I thought, for a man of his inches and determination in other fields.
"It is not to be thought of, Dick; not for a single moment, with all these women aboard. Besides, we have no arms. We'd be shot down in cold blood if it should come to blows."
This was so singularly unlike the Bonteck Van Dyck I had known best in the college days that it fairly made me gasp.
"Why, Bonteck!" I exclaimed; "what has come over you? You don't mean to say that you would calmly hand the yacht over to those fellows if they should ask you for it?"
"It might easily be the only thing to do," he asserted, half mechanically. "Of course, as I say, we haven't the money, and they would have theirtrouble for their pains, after all. Still, it might be difficult to convince them that the gol—the money has been actually disposed of. If they learned in New York that we really took it on board, and didn't learn afterward that it was disembarked elsewhere . . . well, you see how it stacks up, don't you?"
"I see that you are making mountains out of molehills," I retorted. "What does Goff say about this potential mutiny?"
Van Dyck shook his head as if the mention of Goff merely added to the difficulties of the situation.
"That is another thing: Goff may be in it himself. He is an awful tough-looking old pirate. Don't you think so?"
"What I think is that you must have been completely off your head when you changed from your Atlantic-liner master and crew to this old fisherman and his Portuguese."
"Er—somebody recommended him; I forget just who it was," he went on to explain. "I needed a sailing-master who knew the Caribbean well, and who would do what he was told to do and ask no questions. You see the—er—shipping of the quarter million made some difference, and I couldn't afford to have too much intelligence aboard."
Again there was a pause, during which I was trying to persuade myself that this half-hearted young man across the stateroom table from me was really the same Bonteck Van Dyck who had coached crews, captained the 'Varsity football, and had otherwise proved himself a man and a leader of men—the sort of leader who fights to the final gasp, and even then doesn't know when he isbeaten. The inability to do it put a little unconscious scorn into my summing-up of the situation.
"It is up to you, of course," I said. "We are merely your guests, and what you say is what we shall do. At the same time, I think—in fact I know—that you could count upon practically every man in our much-mixed passenger list to help you put down a mutiny."
"That is it—that is just why I sent for you, Dick," he cut in eagerly. "I knew you would be all for making a fight, and that you would probably lead it. For the sake of the women there mustn't be any scrap, you know. It would scare them into hysterics, naturally. If it should come to a showdown we must just make up our minds to take it easy—take the line of the least resistance—if you get what I mean. At the very worst, the mutineers couldn't well do more than to put us ashore somewhere, so that they might have a chance to search the yacht for the money. I have had that in mind all along, and when you came in just now I was trying to figure out our present latitude and longitude. Have you any idea where we are?"
"Trying to figure out?" I echoed. "Do you mean to tell me calmly that you—a navigator yourself and the owner of this ship—don'tknowwhere we are?"
"I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know—precisely. Goff keeps the reckoning, you see, and I have thought that perhaps he wasn't giving me the correct figures."
If any additional evidence had been needed, here was another and still more startling proof of the devastating change which had somehow been wrought in the Bonteck Van Dyck I had beenthinking I knew. One of his hobbies in the past had been the study of practical navigation, and on more than one long cruise he had been his own sailing-master. That he should deliberately turn theAndromedaover to a man who had been merely "recommended" by some one whose name was already forgotten was little short of astounding.
"I truly hope there is nothing worse than an ordinary, every-day mutiny in store for us," I said grimly. "Judging from our course—which Goff may have changed every night, for all you seem to know—we ought to be somewhere in the southern half of the Caribbean. The steamer lanes are well charted, but there are a good many cays and islands outside of them—places where the bones of theAndromedamight lie until they rotted before anybody would ever discover them."
"And not all of the islands are inhabited, I take it," said Van Dyck, peering down at his chart as if he hoped to identify some of them.
"You know that as well as I do—or better," I snapped. And then: "What in the name of common sense has turned you into such a milk-blooded shuffler, Bonteck? You talk and act as if you weren't more than half——"
"Listen!" he said hastily, holding up a warning finger.
The stringy tinkle of Billy Grisdale's mandolin had stopped, and with it the singing. Above the murmuring diapason of the yacht's engines we both heard Edie Van Tromp's shrill cry of "Land-o-o-o!" As if the cry had been a pre-concerted signal, it was followed instantly by a confused trampling of feet on the deck over ourheads, a sudden slackening of the yacht's speed, and more cries and foot-tramplings.
I was upon my feet and was reaching for the door-knob when Mrs. Van Tromp's throaty scream came from the adjoining saloon where the bridge players were sitting. Before I could turn the knob the door was thrust open, and the under-steward, whose ship name was Lequat, backed by two evil-faced fore-deck men armed with rifles, stood in the doorway. At the appearance of this warlike demonstration I was glad to see that Van Dyck, for once in a way, seemed genuinely shocked.
"You?" he demanded. "How is this? Where is Mr. Goff?"
The little man's smile and bow were like those of a dancing master.
"Ze captaine is sand me to inform you zat you are both ze prisonaire,oui. You vill sit down in ze chair and wait patient', M'sieu' Van Dyck—and you, Mistaire Preb'. Zis ees w'at you call all cut-and-dry, and——"
I suppose I sprang at his throat; it was the only thing for a live man to do. But the little beggar was quicker than a cat, and he brought me up all standing, with a huge pistol thrust into my face.
"Aha! you vill choke me, ees it? By gar, Mistaire Preb', eet is possib' I make you—how you say it?—walk ze board—ze plank, yes? You vill sit down on ze chair and tek eet easy. Ze sheep ees belong to h-us, and your fran's 'ave all been lock' up in ze staterooms. You can do notting;moi, Alphonse Lequat, vill tek ze comman'."
It was not until after all of this had happened that Van Dyck found his voice.
"Is this—is this a mutiny, Lequat?" he asked, as mild as mush.
"Eet is vat you vill be please' to call heem, M'sieu' Van Dyck,certainement. For fifteen, twanty, feefty minute' you vill sit on ze chair, and Pedro, he is stay outside ze door and keel you eef you make noises. Bam-by,moi, Alphonse Lequat, s'all come back to tell you vat eet is you s'all do." And then to his men: "Allons, mes garçons!"
And with that he backed out of the owner's private cabin, and shut and locked the door.
Coincidentwith the taking over of the yacht by the mutineers, the engines stopped; but after Lequat had locked us in and left us, the trampling tune of the machinery began again, though it presently became apparent that we were proceeding at something less than half speed. At first I thought the creeping progress might be Haskell's way of showing his reluctance to obey his new masters; but after the engines had made a few of the slow revolutions we heard the sing-song cry of a seaman in the main chains taking soundings.
"Feeling for an anchorage," said Van Dyck, speaking for the first time since he had asked Lequat that mush-mild question as to whether or not the outbreak was a mutiny. "Wouldn't you put it up that way?"
His query seemed too trivial to merit an answer.
"I haven't any time to waste on the guesses," I said, and most likely the tone was as crabbed as the words. Then: "Are you fully awake at last? Do you realize that you've been held up and robbed of a five-hundred-thousand-dollar yacht?"
His shrug was perfectly spineless.
"'What can't be cured must be endured'," he quoted, handing me the time-worn maxim as if it sufficiently accounted for everything. "Ofcourse, as the person chiefly responsible, I'm all kinds of sorry for you and the others. It's a horribly rude interruption to our pleasure jaunt, and I take it there is no telling what these fellows may do to us." Then, with still more of the air of the completest detachment: "The nervy beggars! Who would ever have suspected it of them? And to carry it off so neatly, too."
"It was all plotted and planned beforehand, of course. Didn't this man Lequat say that it was cut-and-dried? Goff is the head and front of it, isn't he?"
"Heaven knows. You wouldn't imagine it of Goff—or would you?"
"I can easily imagine him breaking rock in a Federal prison—which is what he will do—if he succeeds in keeping his leathery old neck out of the hangman's noose!"
"Naturally," Van Dyck agreed easily. "But that is an after consideration. The present realities are what concern us just now. I'm wondering what their next move will be."
"You don't seem to be letting your wonderment disturb you very much." I was still warm, both over the bootless little tussle with Lequat, and because Van Dyck had so ignominiously failed to rise to the occasion—and was still continuing to fail.
"What's the use?" he queried. "We are like the harmless and inoffensive citizen who wakes up in the middle of the night to find a burglar's spot-light shining in his eyes and the burglar's gun shoved in his face. Discretion is always the better part of valor. Haven't you learned that invaluable lesson, knocking about in this harsh old world? Butgetting back to things present and pressing—there goes our anchor."
The brief roar of the cable running through its hawse-hole told us that theAndromedawas in comparatively shallow soundings. We could feel the snub of the anchor as the yacht's way was checked, and a little later the sounds overhead advertised the fact that the mutineers were lowering one of the boats.
Beyond the slap of the lowered boat as it took the water, the noises were less easily definable. There were bumpings and bangings which seemed to come from forward of the bridge, muffled sounds like those of a busy baggage-room at train-time, the shrilling of blocks and tackle, and a skirling chatter suggestive of a steam winch in action. Following these we could hear the low humming of the motor in the dropped electric launch; a murmur which gradually died away as we listened.
Somewhat farther along, after the buzzing motor murmur had come and gone often enough to tell us that the launch was plying industriously between the yacht and some other destination, Van Dyck said: "You'd say they were taking an entire cargo ashore, wouldn't you?—provided theAndromedacarried any cargo." Then: "I've cornered a guess, Dick—which you may have for what it is worth. I believe these fellows are meaning to take a leaf out of the book of the old buccaneers of the Spanish Main and maroon us."
"What makes you think that?" I demanded.
"Putting two and two together. That is the hoist winch making all the clatter up forward. They are unloading the forehold—of our dunnage and some part of the provisions, we'll say—and lighteringthe stuff ashore in the launch. Assuming that they expect to find a quarter of a million dollars hidden away somewhere in theAndromeda, they'll figure that they need to get rid of us, and run fast and far to make their get-away, won't they?"
"That sounds sufficiently barbarous to fit in with the rest of it," I fumed.
"Right-o. That being the case, they have only to stow us away in some safe place—where we won't be found and rescued too soon—and then up stick and away; put steam to the yacht and vanish. Once they get going, they'll be safe enough. TheAndromedawill outrun anything of her inches, short of the torpedo chasers and the hydroplanes, when she is pushed to it. What do you say?"
"I'm not saying anything," I returned crustily. "I'm too busy wondering what in Heaven's name has thinned your blood to the milk-and-water consistency, Bonteck. I've heard a few queer things about you during the past three years, but I wasn't told that you had gone completely dippy. Why, man alive! if your guess is right, you stand to lose a cool half-million in the value of the yacht—to say nothing of what may happen to the bunch of us if we are marooned on some lonesome island in the southern Caribbean!"
"Yes, there is the marooning to be considered, of course," he said coolly, filling his pipe and lighting it. "But we needn't cross that bridge until we come to it. As to the possible loss of the yacht, that is the least of my troubles, just now. She'll turn up again somewhere, I guess; if they don't smash or sink her."
It seemed utterly hopeless to try to arouse himto any adequate sense of the enormity of the thing that had befallen us, and I jumped up and began to pace the narrow limits of the little cabin. Van Dyck's attitude seemed explainable only upon the hypothesis that he had lost his mind, and I wondered if his brooding over the wretched dilemma into which his love for Madeleine Barclay had plunged him hadn't thrown him off his balance. It was certainly beginning to look that way.
While I was tramping back and forth in a fever of gloomy rage and helplessness, with Van Dyck sitting at the table and calmly smoking his pipe, the ship's noises took new forms. There was much tramping up and down the saloon stairs, a rattling of keys in locks, opening and shutting of doors, and the like. Again and again the motor launch repeated its short trips, and between two of them there were voices raised in the adjoining saloon; Ingerson's in savage and profane protest, and Mrs. Van Tromp's in tearful inquiry as to what had been done with Mr. Van Dyck. In due course of time our own turn came, and it was Lequat who unlocked and opened our door.
"Ze momment ees come," he announced, with a bow and a smirk. "Ze anchor ees—vat ees it you say?—hove short, and ze launch ees wait' for you zhentleman. You vill come peaceab'?—or ees it that ve have to asseest you?"
It was now or never, if we meant to try conclusions with this little scoundrel, and I looked to Van Dyck for the answer. He had put on his cap, slung a cased field-glass over his shoulder, and was closing and locking the drawers of the writing-table. As I have said, it was his final chance formaking some show of resistance, and he was weakly letting it go.
When we reached the deck, guarded closely by four or five of the mutineers, it became evident that we were the last of the ship's company to be summoned. The night was fine, with a sickle of a moon in its first quarter, and the sea undisturbed by so much as a ripple. TheAndromedawas at anchor a short distance from one of the many cays with which the southern Caribbean is dotted; a long, low-lying island plumed with palms and densely jungled with tropical undergrowth. The yacht lay within a stone's throw of an outer reef, and the reef enclosed a broad lagoon reflecting the shadows of the palms like a silver mirror under the shimmering moonlight; and the shadowy background of foliage was made blacker by contrast with a ribbon of white sand beach.
Though there was a passage through the reef just opposite theAndromeda'stemporary berth, the mutineers had apparently been too cautious to try to enter it with the yacht. They had merely felt their way with the sounding line to within bottoming distance on the outside of the reef, and dropped the anchor. There was little question now as to their intention. They were stopping only long enough to get rid of us.
In ominous silence Van Dyck and I were herded toward the accommodation ladder, at the foot of which lay the electric launch. Up to the final moment I was hoping to see Bonteck reassert himself, at least to the extent of protesting against the high-handed crime these scoundrels were committing. When it became apparent that he wasnot going to say anything, I took a chance for myself.
"I suppose you know what you are doing, Lequat," I barked, after we had taken our places in the launch. "This is piracy on the high seas, and you don't have to be much of a sailorman to know what that means."
"You vill not be trouble you'self 'bout me, Mistaire Preb'," he returned politely. Then, as the man at the ladder foot pushed us off: "Bon voyage, M'sieu' Van Dyck.Bon soir, and—how you say it?—G-o-o-d-by!"
The launch, manned by a crew numerous enough to have thrown us overboard if we had raised a hand in rebellion, sped silently across to the narrow inlet in the reef and entered the peaceful lagoon. Almost at once a sickening, terrifying conviction began to force itself upon me. From the first out-of-door glance at the surroundings there had been something familiar in the appearance of the reef, the pond-like lagoon, and the low-lying island. As we were passing through the inlet the moonbeams struck out the black and shattered remains of a wreck hanging upon the outer reef a short distance on our right, and then Iknew!
"The Lord have mercy!" I gasped; and Van Dyck looked up quickly.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The wreck of theMary Jane!" I whispered, pointing to the black skeleton on the rocks. "This is the island I told you about—the horrible place where we were shipwrecked a year ago last winter!"
"You don't say so!" he returned; and then, to make the reply still more trite: "What a remarkable coincidence!"
His indifference was maddening, and my temper—the temper that had once cost me any shadow of a chance that I might have had in persuading Miss Mehitable Gilmore that, money or no money, Conetta's happiness, as well as my own, was of more importance than any mere fortune lost or gained—this flyaway temper got the better of me and I said things for which I was sorry the moment they were said.
"Pile it on as thick as you please, old man," Van Dyck rejoined, meekly, after I had abused him like an angry fishwife. "It is coming to you—and to the others, as well. What they will do to me presently will doubtless be good and plenty, and you'll have your revenge."
Two minutes later the launch was nosing the white sand of the beach, and the man at the tiller made motions for us to get out. Van Dyck stepped ashore and I followed him. A few yards away, at the edge of the jungle thicketing, our cabin castaways were huddled around a great pile of luggage and ship's stores. Their greeting of Van Dyck when he joined them was all that his most vindictive accuser could have desired; cries and reproaches, eager questionings and sobbing protests from the women; and from the men a fierce storm of demandings led by the major and Holly Barclay. Since Jerry Dupuyster made no move to do it, I drew Conetta quickly out of the Babel and walked her beyond earshot. Major Terwilliger was so far forgetting himself as to swear savagely at his late host, and Ingerson's language was brutal.
"Tell me, reasonably and sanely, if you can, Dick, just what has been done to us," urged my companion, with a little shiver of fright or disgust—orpossibly of both; this when we paused to watch the retreating launch cleave its way across the lagoon to the waiting yacht.
"I don't know very much more about it than you do," I told her. "There is a mutiny, with a plot to steal theAndromeda, it seems, and it is quite evident the thing was carefully planned. I was below when it climaxed and so saw nothing of what was happening on deck. They didn't hurt anybody, did they?"
"I think not. It came so suddenly that they didn't need to use force. We were under the awning, just as you left us. Edie Van Tromp saw this island and called out 'Land-o,' and the next thing we knew a lot of men with guns had surrounded us and were ordering us to go to our staterooms and to be quick about it. That little dark-faced under-steward who talks so brokenly seemed to be the leader. He was polite enough about it, but when Jack Grey and Billy began to protest, he made four of his men grab them."
"Then you were hustled below?"
"Yes. When we got down to the saloon, more of the armed men were shoving the bridge players into the staterooms, and Hobart Ingerson was swearing awfully. So was the major when they dragged him out of the smoking-room."
"They are swearing yet," I said. "What did your aunt say?"
"She didn't say a single word; she just walked into our stateroom ahead of me, as stiff as a poker, and I couldn't get a word out of her. I don't know whether she was scared, or just too angry for words. She sat on the edge of her bed like a frozen statue until they came to take us ashore. What are thewretches going to do?—leave us here on this deserted little strip of an island?"
The answer to her question was at that very moment shaping itself before our eyes. While its propeller was still churning idly, the electric launch was hooked and hoisted to its davits, the anchor was broken out, and theAndromedabegan to forge slowly ahead, again with a man in the bow heaving the lead and calling out the soundings.
"We are marooned," I said soberly enough, I guess. "It may be for a day, a week, a month or a year. I happen to know this island only too well. I was shipwrecked upon it once. Those are the bones of our old schooner, theMary Jane, out yonder on the reef."
She gave a little gasp of shocked surprise.
"You shipwrecked?—and I never heard of it!" she exclaimed. "How long were you here, Dick?"
"Nearly a month. A tramp steamer, blown out of its course between Colon and La Guaira by a hurricane, saw our signals and took us off."
She glanced over her shoulder apprehensively.
"There are no—no savages, are there?" she shuddered.
I shook my head. "Hardly; not in the twentieth century. For that matter, I doubt if there ever were any. The place isn't big enough to support much of a population."
We were walking again now, keeping to the hard sands, and turning our backs resolutely upon the vanishing white phantom which was the ship that was deserting us.
"There are eighteen of us," Conetta said, aftera time. "Doesn't that mean starvation, sooner or later?"
"There were six of us who were washed ashore from theMary Jane," I said. "We lived on shell fish and cocoanuts—just barely, as you might say. There is a tradition that we were not the first, and that the others, the crew of a Spanish treasure ship marooned by the old English sea rovers, did starve."
"Heavens!" she breathed. "The place ought to be full of ghosts! But you don't believe those terrible old tales, do you?"
"They were true enough, doubtless; but we needn't go out of our way to localize them. In the present instance——" I was about to tell her of the remains of the ancient wreck farther down the beach, but I thought better of it and switched—"in the present instance we are not going to starve, for a while, at least. The mutineers have given us a fighting chance by dividing the ship's stores with us. Didn't you hear the launch going back and forth before you were taken off?"
"Yes, I heard it," she acknowledged. "That must have been part of the plan, too." Then she stopped and faced me suddenly. "Where was Bonteck while all the rest of us were being hustled out of the way?"
"He was a prisoner in his stateroom, locked in, and with a man on guard."
She looked me squarely in the eyes after a disconcerting fashion which might have been acquired from her downright aunt.
"Do you know that, Dick? Or is it only a friendly guess?"
"I know it because I was locked in with him.The mutineers had given us our orders—told us that we were down and out, you know."
"And you made no resistance—you two?"
I didn't say anything about my futile attempt to choke Lequat.
"Bonteck seemed to be afraid of a general massacre, or something of that sort, if we should put up a fight."
"I'm not satisfied," she returned promptly. "It is too absurd. Could a thing like this have been planned without some hint of it getting to Bonteck? And then there is Mr. Goff: you don't mean to tell me that that crabbed, sour, shrimmy old piece of New England honesty and prying curiosity could be kept from finding out."
"Bonteck hints that Goff may be heading the mutiny."
"That," said Conetta, with calm conviction, "is simply nonsense. I wouldn't believe it, not if Mr. Goff told me so himself." And then: "Shall we go back to the others now? The storm seems to have blown itself out: and we mustn't forget—you and I—that we have agreed to disagree."
Her use of Aunt Mehitable's phrase touched off that cursed temper of mine again, and if I had made any reply at all it would have been one that I should have repented of. So we walked back to the haphazard landing place in sober silence.
When we joined the main body of castaways it seemed that Van Dyck had contrived by some means to stem the storm of question and reproach and to quiet it, for the time, at least. The women were sitting apart on the boxes of canned things, and Grey and Grisdale, under Bonteck's directions, and with his help, were setting up the three tentswhich the mutineers' generosity, or chivalry, had included in our dunnage. Somebody had kindled a small fire on the beach, but the night was so warm that, apart from the cheer of it, the blaze served no purpose other than to light up the somber faces turned toward it.
After the tent-pegging—in which I hastened to share a part when I saw what was toward—we four made an attack upon the boxed stores. There were provisions in plenty; meats in canvas and meats in tins, vegetables fresh and vegetables in cans, ship's biscuit, and a variety of the other more ornamental—and less filling—kind; tea, coffee, sugar and evaporated cream; all of the calories to make a balanced ration. Last, but not least, there was a beaker of fresh water, though as to this, there were two good springs on the island, and a rill from one of them was trickling into the lagoon a few yards from our landing place.
Besides the necessary proteins, hydrocarbons and the like, there were a few of the luxuries; a case of liquors, a box of candles, another of cigars, cigarettes and tobacco, soap and towels, and even a couple of mirrors ravished from the bulkheads of theAndromeda—these last, I dare swear, a thought of the dancing-master Lequat's.
For beds there was a bale of canvas hammocks; and somebody's chivalric promptings—Lequat's or another's—had gone the length of including the baggage-hold-stored steamer trunks of the women, though we men had only the clothes we stood in.
Before our amateur camp was fully pitched the dark cloud of dismay and disheartenment began to show rifts here and there. After all was said, we were all alive and well, with plenty to eat anddrink, and with no immediate prospect of hardship. Perhaps it was no matter for surprise that Sanford, the absent-minded professor of mathematics, was the first to rise to the philosophical demands of the occasion.
"I dare say there isn't a civilized human being in the world who hasn't, at one time or another, wished to be situated just as we find ourselves at the present moment," he began, after Grey and Billy Grisdale and the Van Tromp girls had goaded him into his proper class-room-lecturer's attitude. "For the time being—which we may very properly hope will not be unduly extended beyond the pleasant and profitable limit—we shall be able to live in a little world of our own making. If we have any resources of our own to fall back upon—and I trust none of us is wholly lacking in that respect—we may prove and try them, and quite possibly we may discover that, after all, environment, the conventions, the social machinery with which our civilization has surrounded us, are by no means strictly necessary to the sane, normal human being. Let us, therefore, eat and drink, and be thankful that things are no worse with us than we are at present finding them."
As if he had been an after-dinner speaker rising to express his pleasure at being among us, the professor was heartily applauded, and, following his suggestion, we had a bed-time snack of biscuits and tea around the handful of camp-fire. And, such is the force of good example, by the time the second pannikin of water was boiling, the younger members were making a jest of the most serious adventure that had ever befallen any of them. Jerry Dupuyster was pouring tea for Beatrice Van Tromp;Conetta had deliberately left her aunt's side to come and sit on the sand between Annette Grey and me; and Madeleine Barclay, as fetchingly beautiful in her white yachting flannels as she had ever appeared in her richest dinner gown, was listening patiently—nay, sympathetically, I thought—to Bonteck's well-worn explanation (which did not explain) of how it had all come about.
To offset these cheerful ameliorations there were a sufficient number of death's heads at the feast, as a matter of course. Major Terwilliger, contemplating a prospect which promised little in the way of his cherished diversions, sat apart and grumbled peevishly because the tea tasted smoky. Holly Barclay, robbed at one sheer stroke of all the little refinements and luxuries which made the sum of his aimless and worthless life, was still in the bickering stage; and Ingerson, with the few restraints which he recognized stricken away, was a plain brute, taking no pains to conceal his angry disgust, and making snappish bids to be let alone when any one was charitable enough to speak to him.
As for the women, the three who would be the first to feel the pinch of any privations that might come upon us were behaving beautifully, putting the major's gloom and Barclay's pettishness and Ingerson's grumpy rage to shame. Mrs. Van Tromp—a most easy-going soul when she could forget for the moment that she had three marriageable, and as yet unmarried, daughters on her hands—had already forgotten her reproachful complainings. Conetta's Aunt Mehitable was arguing peacefully with the professor on the philosophical aspect of the situation, though quite without prejudice, Ifancied, to the sharp eye she was keeping upon Conetta in her new juxtaposition between Annette Grey and me. Mrs. Sanford, who, in spite of her motherliness, was a frail little body physically, was apparently regarding the hammock beds with some degree of trepidation; nevertheless, she went on sipping her tea with evident relish, and she found time and the spirit to smile understandingly across the circle at Billy Grisdale and Edie Van Tromp, and to stoop and pat Billy's bull pup, when the dog, finding that his master had no present use for him, wandered from one to another to stick his extremelyretroussénose into any hospitable palm that offered.
"Shall we be able to keep this up, do you suppose?" Conetta whispered to me, between the last two bites of her biscuit.
"I think the moonlight, what there is of it, is entrancingly beautiful, don't you?" I laughed. "'Sufficient unto the day (or night)——' You know the rest of it. I'm willing to let to-morrow take care of itself. Are you?"
"Maybe I am." Then, with a return to the old-time dartings aside: "What do you imagine Jerry is finding so alluring in Bee Van Tromp? He has never read a book in his life."
"Beatrice isn't all book," I retorted. "On this voyage which has come to such an abrupt halt I have been finding her a very charming young woman. Her eyes, now."
"Shush! Any woman can make eyes at a man. If you'll look around at me, I'll show you."
"Not any more," I said, and the saying was purely in self-defense.
"Wait," she teased. "The island is small—yousaid it was, didn't you?—and you can't always look the other way." Then: "Can't we even quarrel decently, Dickie Preble?"
Mrs. Van Tromp was rising stiffly and I was saved the necessity of replying.
"Time to go to bed, my dears," said the mother of three with great good-nature. And then to me: "Dick Preble, are you sure you fastened my hammock securely? Because, if you didn't—well, you know—I'm dreadfully heavy. There now! Wild horses wouldn't have dragged that admission out of me at home. Conetta, you rogue, you're laughing at me, but you're blushing, as well, and that's one of the conventions, too. Never mind. I'm afraid every second step will be on a crab, or a scorpion, or some other hideous thing. Good-night, all!"
Itwas I who told Edie Van Tromp that the name, or legendary name, of our island was "Pirates' Hope," and when she announced it at our first camp breakfast it was acclaimed with a cheerful unanimity which went far to show how, after a night's rest, we were able to make a jest out of what had figured, only a few hours earlier, as a crude calamity.
After breakfast, Van Dyck, throwing off the lethargy which had apparently bound him hand and foot when a little decision might have turned the tables upon the mutineers, took his place energetically and capably as the governor of our little colony. Under his directions a signal was set at the nearer, or western, end of the island, enough of the jungle was cleared to enable us to pitch the tents under the shade of the palms, a cooking camp was established, and a rude thatched shelter was built to protect the stores and luggage.
In these various industries there were only three idlers among the men—the major, Holly Barclay, and Hobart Ingerson; and Edie Van Tromp, volunteering to go with me to start a smoke fire at the signal cape, was furious.
"Wouldn't that set your back teeth on edge, seeing those three able-bodied gentlemen sunningthemselves on the beach while everybody else is getting blisters on their hands!" she flamed out, with a fine disregard for the little grammatical inaccuracies. "I'd be ashamed!"
"You shouldn't deny the gentlemen the privilege of smoking their after-breakfast cigars in comfort," I protested, grinning. "Perhaps, after the cigars are all gone, and we come down to just plain pipes and plebeian cut-plug tobacco——"
"I don't care! It's perfectly horrid of them,Ithink. Mother got us women together this morning while you men were fixing the tents, and we all agreed to do the cooking, taking turns at it. When it comes my turn, I shall tell those three loafing gentlemen that they can undertake to wash the dishes, or go hungry!"
"Good!" I applauded. "You are a real, honest-to-goodness human woman, under the skin, aren't you, Edie?"
She stuck out a pretty under lip at me.
"Did you ever, for one little fraction of a minute, doubt it, Mr. Richard Preble?"
"No; it is only fair to say that I have never doubted it. You and Billy are the real thing, whatever may be said for the remainder of us."
"Billy is a darling!" she declared enthusiastically. "Last night, when those pirates rushed us with their guns, you know, I wanted to cry; boo-hoo right out like a silly baby. It was just plain scare. A grown man would have tried to comfort me, I suppose, but Billy joshed me and made fun of me until I was too mad to be scared. Isn't it a thousand pities that he's so young, and so—so——"
"So poor?" I finished for her. "It is; a thousand pities. But there is hope on ahead, my dear child.Billy will outgrow his infancy some time; and you mustn't lose sight of the fact that, so far as poverty and riches are concerned, we all look very much alike, just now."
In such light-hearted banterings back and forth we put the quarter-mile of beach behind us and got busy with our smudge-fire building at the foot of the stripped palm-tree which carried one of Madeleine Barclay's knitted shoulder wraps for a distress signal. With a few palmetto leaves and bits of rotting wood to crisp and smoulder in the blaze we soon had our smoke column erected; and beyond this there was nothing much to do save to scan the horizon for the hoped-for sail.
"Do you really believe we shall be taken off before long, Dick Preble?" was Miss Edith's soberly put query, this after the fire was well established, and we were doing the horizon-sweeping stunt.
"Do you want the bald truth, or some nice little hopeful fiction?" I asked.
"You may save the fictions for Conetta and Madeleine and Annette, if you please. As you were kind enough to admit, a few minutes ago, I am a woman grown."
"Then I shall tell you plainly, Edie. I know this island. It is quite some distance from the nearest of the steamer lanes. It may be a long time before any one finds us."
She was silent for a little while, but the resolute, girlish eyes were quite unterrified. When she spoke again it was of a different matter.
"Dick," she began earnestly, "do you believe there is anything more than foolishness at the bottomof all the talk we hear about a woman's intuition?"
"All sober-minded people admit that there is, don't they?" I said.
"There is something behind all this that is happening to us," she asserted gravely; "something that I can feel, and can't grasp or understand. It is as real to me as the breeze in those palms, or this staring sunshine, and is as intangible as both."
"You have been talking with Conetta," I said shortly.
"About this? No, I haven't. What makes you say that?"
"No matter; go on with your intangibility."
"This sudden mutiny and the way it was hurled at us: it is all so strange and unaccountable. Who ever heard of the sailing-master of a private yacht turning pirate? And especially a dear, cross old Uncle Elijah, whose ancestors probably came over in theMayflower?"
"Is Bonteck saying that Goff headed the mutiny?" I asked.
"He is letting the others say it, which is just the same."
"As you say, it is fairly incredible. Yet the fact remains. We are here, and theAndromeda, with Goff on board, has vanished."
"I know; but the mystery isn't to be solved in any such easy way as that. What possible use can Uncle Elijah or his crew of Portuguese and mixed-bloods make of theAndromeda, which is probably known in every civilized harbor of the world as Mr. Bonteck Van Dyck's private yacht?"
I hesitated to tell her the story of the treasure-carrying.That was Van Dyck's secret, so long as he chose to make a secret of it.
"As to the object of the mutiny, we are all entitled to a guess," I said. Then I offered one which was plausible or not, as one chose to view it: "Suppose we suppose that some one of the Central or South American countries is on the edge of a revolution; that isn't very hard to imagine, is it?"
"No."
"Very well. The sharpest need of the rebels in any revolution is for arms and ammunition; next to this, a fast ship to carry the arms and ammunition. If there should happen to be money enough in the revolutionary war-chest, isn't it conceivable that even an Uncle Elijah might be tempted?"
She turned and looked me squarely in the eye.
"Is that your guess, Dick Preble?" she demanded.
"It is as good as any, isn't it?" I replied evasively.
When she said: "It doesn't satisfy me; it is too absurd," her repetition of Conetta's protest of the previous night was almost startling.
"There are times when you women are almost uncanny," I told her, but she merely laughed at that.
"The absurdity isn't my only hunch," she went on, after the frank-speaking manner of her kind. "This Robinson Crusoe experience is going to be a dreadful thing, in a way. There won't be any illusions left for any of us, I'm afraid—any more than there were for the people of the Stone Age."
That sage remark brought on more talk, and we speculated cheerfully on the death of the illusions and what might reasonably be expected as the resultsthereof. My chatty companion had a lively imagination, and her forecastings of the changes that would ensue in the different members of our colony were handsomely entertaining.
"And you," she said, when she had worked her way around to me in the prophesying; "I can just see what an unlivable person you will become."
"Why should I be so particularly unlivable?" I asked.
"That awful temper of yours," she went on baldly. "With all the civilized veneer cracked and peeling off—my-oh!"
Now it is one thing to be well assured, in one's own summings-up, of the possession of a violent temper, and quite another to be told bluntly that the possession is a commonly accepted fact among one's friends and acquaintances. Edie Van Tromp's assertion of the fact as one that had—or might have been—published in the newspapers came with a decided shock.
"Am I as bad as all that?" I protested.
"Everybody knows what a vile temper you have," she replied coolly. "Anybody who couldn't get along with Conetta Kincaide without quarreling with her———"
"Oh; so she has told you I have quarreled with her?"
"There you go," she gibed. "One has only to mention Conetta to you to touch off the powder train. What makes you quarrel with her, Uncle Dick?"
"What makes you think I am quarreling with her?"
"Hoo! I've got eyes, I guess. Of course, you've been decently polite to her, but a blind person couldsee that it was just put on. The veneer wasn't cracked then. I shudder to think what will happen when it gets all cracked and peelly."
I thought it was time for a diversion, so I turned the tables upon her.
"How will it be with you after the veneer glue lets go?"
"Oh, me?—I'm just a crude little brute, anyway. I don't just see how Icouldchange for the worse. I'm saying this because I know it is what you are thinking. But there's one comfort. Billy won't see any difference in me, no matter what I do. And Billy himself won't change; he's too obvious."
We prolonged our watch until nearly noon, when the professor and his wife came out to relieve us. It may say itself that during our two hours or more of horizon-searching we saw no signs of a rescue vessel. In the wide three-quarters of a circle visible from the western point of the island—a point where I had spent many weary hours after the shipwreck of theMary Jane—there had been only the calm expanse of sea and sky with nothing to break the monotony.
At the camp under the palms we found things settling into some sort of routine. A fire was going in the rude fire place built of rough chunks of the coral, and Mrs. Van Tromp and her athletic eldest were cooking dinner. The major and Holly Barclay were still loafing on the beach, both of them smoking as though we had a Tampa cigar factory to draw upon instead of a strictly limited supply of Van Dyck's "perfectos." Madeleine and Beatrice Van Tromp, working together, were trying to fashion a basket out of stripped palm fronds—thoughjust what purpose a basket would serve I couldn't imagine.
Billy Grisdale, suddenly become useful, was gathering bits of wood for the cooking fire. Jack Grey, who, besides being a rising young attorney, had a flair for building things, was adding to the thatch of the dunnage shelter, and Annette was helping him. Ingerson was invisible, and so was Van Dyck. Miss Mehitable, whose health may or may not have been all that it should be, was lying in her hammock, and Conetta, ever dutiful, was fanning her with a broad palmetto leaf. Among the workers it was Jerry Dupuyster who appeared in the most original rôle. In the nattiest of one-piece bathing suits—supplied, as I made no doubt, out of the luggage of one of the Van Tromp girls—he had swum the lagoon to the wreck of theMary Jane, where he now appeared, a symphony in cerise stripes and bare legs, hacking manfully at the wreck with a hand-axe to the end that we might increase our scanty stock of firewood.
After the noon meal, at which Van Dyck appeared just as we were sitting down to it, Jerry and I were told off to go on sentry duty at the eastern end of the island, where we were to establish another distress signal.
"Us for the sentry-go, old chappie," said Jerry cheerfully, and together we took the beach trail for our post.
Reaching the eastern extremity of things after a walk of perhaps three-quarters of a mile along the beach, we presently had an improvised flag flying from a lopped tree, and after we had lighted a smoke smudge there was nothing more to do butto watch for the sail which I, for one, did not expect to see.
"Jolly rum old go, what?" said Jerry, casting himself full length upon the sand when our labors were ended. "Shouldn't mind it so much, don't y' know, if we didn't have the women along. Smoke?" and he handed me his tobacco bag.
"The women, and one or two others," I qualified, filling my pipe.
"Haw, yes: Hob Ingerson, for one. Actin' like a bally cad, Ingerson is. Needs to have some chappie give him a wallop or so, what?"
"Yes; and when it comes to the show-down, I rather hope I'll be the 'chappie'," I said.
"Not if I see him first," Jerry cut in, and this, indeed, was a new development.
"You're under weight, Jerry; you wouldn't make two bites for Ingerson if you should try to mix it with him."
"Eh, what?" exclaimed the transformed—or transforming—one, sitting up suddenly. "If he doesn't stop his dashed swearin' before the women, I'll take him on; believe me, I will, old dear."
"What makes you think you'd last out the first half of the first round with a big bully like Ingerson?" I asked, grinning at him.
"Number of little things, old top; this, for one," and he opened his shirt to show me something that looked like a ten-dollar gold piece suspended by a silken cord around his neck.
"And what might that be?" I inquired, mildly curious.
He pulled the string off over his head and handed me the gold disk. It proved to be a medal, struck by some gentlemen's boxing club of London, testifyingto the facts that Mr. Gerald Dupuyster was a member in good standing, and that he had won the medal by reason of his being the top-notcher in the club's series of light-weight matches.
"I never would have suspected it of you, Jerry," I commented, returning the medal. "In fact, I should have said you were the last person on earth to go in for the manly art of self-defense. What made you?"
"Oh, I say!—all the chappies with any red blood in 'em go in for it over there, y' know. Jolly good sport, too; what?"
"Here's to you, if you conclude to try it on with Ingerson," I laughed. "I'll be your towel-holder. But Ingerson isn't the only one we could do without on this right little tight little island of ours, Jerry."
"You're dashed right. There's Barclay, for another."
"Yes; and——"
"Say it, old dear. Don't I know that the old uncle is cuttin' up rusty? Grousing because he can't sit in an easy-chair and swig toddies no end! Makes me jolly well ashamed, he does."
Here was another astonishing revelation. From what I had seen on shipboard—from what we had all seen—there had been ample grounds for the supposition that Jerry was a mere pawn in any game his uncle might choose to play. But now there seemed to be quite a different Jerry lying just under the cracking crust of the conventions. The discovery took a bit of the bitterness out of my soul. If I couldn't have Conetta for myself, it was a distinct comfort to know that she wasn't going to draw a complete blank in the great lottery.Under all of Jerry's Anglomaniacal fripperies there was apparently a man.
At the refilling of his pipe this changed, or changing, Jerry spoke of my former immurement on the island, saying that Conetta had told him a bit about it, and asking if I wouldn't tell him a bit more. So once again I told the story of the ill-fated voyage of theMary Janeand its near-tragic sequel for six poor castaways.
"Rummy old go, that," he commented, when the tale was told. "Dashed easy to see how a chap might lose out on all the little decencies when the belly-pinch takes hold. Are we likely to come a cropper into that ditch before some bally old tub turns up to take us off?"
"I'm hoping not," I said.
He was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say: "We've eighteen mouths to fill, old dear; how long can we fill 'em out of the blooming tins; eh? what?"
I shook my head. "Van Dyck and I checked the provisions over this morning while we were storing them. We shall do well enough for two or three weeks; maybe longer, if we're careful not to waste any of the food."
At this my fellow watcher swore roundly in good, plain American.
"Saw Holly Barclay turn up his damned nose and pitch his ship's biscuits into the lagoon this morning," he explained. "Said something about their not bein' fit for a human being to eat, by Jove!"
"He'll sing another tune if we have to come down to cocoanuts and sea worms," I prophesied. Even this early in the game it was plainly evident that Barclay, the major, and Hobart Ingerson were goingto be our sorest afflictions when the pinch should come.
In such fashion we wore out the afternoon, blinding our eyes, as I had many times blinded mine in other days, with fruitless searchings of the unresponsive waste of waters. At dusk we built up the signal fire to make it last as long as possible and returned to the camp at the other end of the island. When we came in sight of it, Mrs. Van Tromp and two of her girls were putting the supper for the eighteen of us on a clean tarpaulin spread upon the beach. Van Dyck met us just before we joined the others.
"Nothing?" he queried.
"Nothing," we answered.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Thatremark of Edith Van Tromp's, to the effect that the illusions would all be swept away, had its confirmation before we had tholed through the first week of our island captivity. Little by little the masks slipped aside, and some of the revealments of the true character hiding behind them—some of the revelations, but not all—were grimly illuminating.
Before the week's end I saw the major slyly slip the last box of the precious cigars under his coat when he thought no one was looking and go off to hide it in a shallow hole scooped in the dry sand of the beach edge at a safe distance from the camp. Later, I came upon him as he was burying a couple of bottles of the diminishing supply of liquor in the same place—and he lied to me and said he was digging for shell-fish.
Two or three days earlier than this, Holly Barclay had taken to his hammock bed in a fit of purely imaginary illness, exacting constant attendance and pampering in which he made a toiling slave of his pretty daughter. When the pampering began and continued with no sign of abatement in the querulous demands Barclay was making upon Madeleine, Van Dyck grew gloomy and snappish, and I knew that the day was only postponing itselfwhen Bonteck would flame out at the sham invalid and tell him exactly and precisely what a selfish malingerer he was.
Still lower in the unmasking scale came Ingerson—the real Ingerson—who had lapsed into a sullen barbarian; unshaven, unbathed, and with the coarse warp and woof of him showing at every threadbare seam. What time he had free access to the liquor, he drank himself ugly at least once in every twenty-four hours; and when Mrs. Van Tromp finally shamed him out of his daylight attacks upon the liquor chest, he took to raiding it after the camp was asleep, keeping this up until one night when he found that the remainder of the bottled stuff had disappeared. After this he became a morose threat to everybody, and even Mrs. Van Tromp ignored his millions and turned a cold shoulder upon him.
Three nights after his unsuccessful effort to turn up another bottle of whiskey in the stores, the drink maniac tried it again, and this time Van Dyck awoke and caught him at it.
"Looking for something you haven't lost, Ingerson?" he said, speaking quietly to keep from disturbing the others.
Ingerson backed out of the palmetto-thatched store shelter and whirled upon Van Dyck with a face which, as the firelight showed it to me, was that of a devil denied.
"Where have you hid it?" he demanded hoarsely. "Tell me, or I'll wring your damned neck!"
Van Dyck's smile was almost as devilish as Ingerson's teeth-baring snarl.
"You needn't make a racket and wake the camp," he said in the evenest of tones. "I did hide it,and it was partly to give you a decently fair chance. Come with me." And he got up and the pair of them disappeared among the palms.
Not trusting Ingerson any more than I would have trusted a snake, I rose silently and followed them into the shadows, coming in sight of them again as they entered a little open glade on the opposite side of the island. Ingerson had halted and was gesticulating angrily.
"I want to know here and now what you meant by that 'decent chance' break you made at me!" he was saying. "If you mean Madge Barclay, I can tell you right off the bat that you're a dead one!"
"We will leave Miss Barclay quite out of it, if you please," said Bonteck, still apparently as cool as Ingerson was hot. "You want liquor, and I've brought you here to give it to you."
"We'll settle that other little thing first," Ingerson broke in truculently. "You put up this winter cruise, that you've bungled and turned into a starvation picnic, with the notion that you were going to corner the market for yourself, I suppose. I'm here to tell you that you lose out. Barclay makes this deal without any brokers, and I hold an option on him."
"You will have to make that part of it a little plainer, I'm afraid," said Van Dyck; and now there was a dangerous softness in his voice.
"You can have it straight, if you want it that way. Barclay's in a hole for money; he's always in a hole. I've agreed to pay him out, once for all, and he's accepted the bid."
"And the price?" queried Bonteck gently—very gently.
"You can ask Madge about that," was the surly rejoinder. And then: "Get a move: where have you hid that whiskey?"
"You shall have the whiskey presently, Ingerson; but first I'm going to give you something you've been needing a good bit worse for a long time. Put up your hands, if you know how!"
It was a very pretty fight, out there in the moonlit glade, with the camp far enough removed to make the privacy of it safe, and with no ring-side audience, so far as either of the combatants knew, to hiss or applaud. Ingerson was no coward, neither was he lacking in bull strength, nor in the skill to make fairly good use of it. Though he went in at the beginning with a handicap of blind rage, the first few passes steadied him and for a minute or so it looked as if Bonteck had taken on a full load.
But, as a very ordinary prophet might have foretold, Ingerson's late prolonged soak—for it was nothing less—presently got in its work. Twice Van Dyck landed swinging body blows; and though neither of these would have winded a sober man, the second left Ingerson gasping and with his jaw hanging. I thought that settled it, and it did, practically, though the bully was still game. Handling himself as coolly as if he were giving a boxing lesson on a gymnasium floor, Van Dyck landed again and again, and each blow was sent home with an impact that sounded like the kick of a mule.
Ingerson stood up to it as long as he could, and when his wind was gone he went into a clinch. Bonteck broke the clinch with a volley of short-arm jabs that was little less than murderous, andwhen he was hammered out of the clinch, Ingerson staggered and went down. I looked to see him stay down, but he didn't. After a moment of breath-catching he was up and at it again, and it took three more of the well-planted body blows to drive him into a second clinch. As before, he failed to pinion Van Dyck's right arm, and I made sure he tried to set his teeth in Van Dyck's shoulder.
At this, Bonteck shifted his short-arm jabs from the ribs and swung upon the unguarded jaw; whereupon Ingerson lost his grip and curled up on the ground like some huge worm that had been stepped on.
Van Dyck stood over him, breathing hard.
"Have you had enough?" he demanded; and when the vanquished one made some sort of grunting acknowledgment, Bonteck brought water from the near-by spring in a folded leaf of a giant begonia and held it while Ingerson struggled to his knees and bathed the battered jaw.
"Now I'll get you your whiskey," said Van Dyck shortly; and leaving Ingerson to dabble his hands in the cooling water, he went aside into the jungle, returning after a minute or so with a case-bottle. "Here you are," he said, giving the bottle to the beaten bully; "take it and make a brute of yourself, if that's what you want to do." And then I had to hurry to be before Bonteck in the camp clearing; to be in my place beside the handful of night fire before he should return and catch me out of it. For I had no notion of marring the perfect joy of victory which I knew must be filling his soul.
After this there were other days merging slowly into weeks; days of back-slippings into deeper depths of the primitive, a retrogradation in whichwe all participated more or less; days in which we stolidly maintained the signal fires at either extremity of the island and wore out the dragging hours as best we could, scanning the horizon for the coming sail of rescue, though each succeeding day with less hope of seeing it, I think.
More and more markedly the conventions withdrew into a past which was daily growing to seem more like life in a former avatar than a reality once ours to possess. From merely slipping aside now and again, the masks were carelessly dropped and suffered to remain where they fell. Seen in the new perspective, there were many surprising changes, and not all of them were disappointing. For example: Mrs. Eager Van Tromp, in her normal state a good lady driven to distraction by her efforts to hold her footing on the social ladder and so to marry her daughters adequately, became,en séquestre, the good-natured, plain-spoken mother of us all, and a past mistress in the fine art of camp cooking—a specialty in which she was ably seconded by all three of her daughters, also, when she would permit it, by Mrs. Sanford, Annette Grey and Conetta.
Courageous fortitude best describes the change that had come over Madeleine Barclay. With her irritable father to placate and wait upon, and with Ingerson's attitude toward her coming to be that of blunt possessorship, she was by turns the patient nurse to the malingerer and the cheerful heartener of the rest of us. Never, in all those depressing days of hope deferred, did I hear her complain; and always she had a steadying word for the despairing ones: if a ship didn't come for us to-day, it would come to-morrow, and into the most dejectedshe could put new life—for the moment, at least.
In John Grey and Annette, and in the professor and his wife, the changes were the least marked. For the newly married couple nothing much seemed to matter so long as they had each other. Once or twice, indeed, I surprised Grey with a look in his eyes that told of the dread undercurrent that must have been underlying his every thought of the future and what it might hold for Annette, but that was all. And as for the older couple—well, perhaps they had attained to a higher and serener plane than any to which we younger ones could climb. Day in and day out, when he was not doing his apportioned share of the common camp tasks, the professor was immersed to the eyes in a study of the lush flora of the island, thumbing a little pocket Botany until its leaves were worn and frayed with much turning. And where he wandered, his wife wandered with him.
In Miss Mehitable, too, a transformation of a sort was wrought. For many days she held sourly aloof and had bitter words for Van Dyck, and black looks for me when by any chance I was able to deprive her for a time, long or short, of Conetta's caretaking and coddling. But with the lapse of time I fancied that even this crabbed lady was beginning to lose her sense of the mere money distinctions, and I was rash enough to say as much to Conetta on a day when I was so fortunate as to secure her for a companion in the signal-fire watch which Bonteck still made us maintain.
"You shouldn't say such things about poor Aunt Mehitable," was the reproof I got. "This is a very terrible experience for her—as it would be for anywoman of her age—and she is really more than half sick."